THE PATHETIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE.
THAT the Literature of our own day is deficient in Pathos must have been an observation often made by the critic; probably it has appeared before in these columns. We do not imagine that in the whole history of Fiction so much wealth in every other kind of excellence has been ever before combined with so much poverty in this one. The works of George Eliot, for instance, present us with specimens of wit, humour, imagina- tion, tragic power, poetry, and the most subtle and delicate observation. The one literary beauty which we should remark as lacking to them is pathos. Perhaps the exclusion may appear to imply some peculiar use of the word ; and words are used so vaguely, that the attempt to confine it to its specific meaning may possibly be peculiar. We understand by it that slight, delicate touch which, reaching below the region of idiosyncrasies, and penetrating to the depths of purely human emotion, sur- prises the spring of tears; not, perhaps, bidding them flow— that depends on temperament—but rousing in every one the peculiar blending of emotion and sensation which tears mani- fest and relieve. It must be transient. The feeling it evokes is swallowed up immediately in something that is not itself. It
hovers on the edge of pity, but as passes into pity it ceases to be pathos. It is entangled with the web of memory, but when we take up that thread, the pathetic touch has ceased to vibrate. All that is strongly individual is without it; it must be simple, it must be human, or indeed something wider than human, for it seems to us especially connected with the animal world, and one reason why we find none on the page of our great novelist is that the influence of a peculiar individuality is felt there too strongly. It is gone at the first approach of anything of the nature of analysis, and we question whether a certain sense of inadequacy be not inseparable from it. The feeling represented, at all events, must be always associated with a certain dumbness ; it is the appeal that is made to us, whether in life, or in some representation of life, by a sorrow that reveals itself uncon- sciously. We mean of course unconsciously to the sufferer; it is not necessary that the creator of a pathetic work should be ignorant of what he does, though he often is so; as far as he stands outside the feelings he expresses, it is not necessary that this note should be sounded unconsciously more than any other; the indispens- able condition is only that the reader should look at the sorrow from afar. As we try to describe the feeling, we are closely reminded of the etymological connection between dimness and dumbness. What we mean by pathos brings home to the mind of the person who feels it the sense of both these things ;—the clear daylight, the distinct utterance, effectually dispels it. Where eloquence begins, it ends.
Pathos, if we have rightly described it, is not pm-eminently the characteristic of any first-rate genius. To find a writer whose productions it characterises, we must turn to some shy, reserved nature, with whom it is not merely a dramatic effect, brit, what is a very different thing, an actual outcome of the character. And we do not, accordingly, find much of it in Shakespeare, in proportion to the wealth of every kind which we find in his works. But we may take from him specimens of the wealth in which he is poorest, and one scene from King John, which will occur to every reader as an apparent refutation of the limitations we have given to the scope of Pathos, affords, in fact, a good illustration of our meaning. The lament of Constance for Arthur is the specimen of pathos, perhaps, most universally appreciated, and it is undeniable that she cannot be called dumb ; we have known her lament in dramatic representation made extremely clamorous, and though such a conception seemed to us very injurious to the beauty of the situation, it certainly did not destroy its tear-compelling power. But no small part of the wonderful power of the picture seems to us to consist of the dumbness of Arthur,—the slightness and faintness of the sketch, the truth, in a certain sense, of his own words,—
" Good, my mother, peace !
I am not worth this coil that's made for me."
And in the case of Constance herself, our sympathy is solely with the mother. It is the purely hunsim feeling—nay, it is the one emotion we share with the creatures below humanity—that is made interesting. If the reader imagines how an artist of lesser genius would have treated the grief of a bereaved mother, he will see that it is touched with wonderful temperance, though with such great impressiveness. The few lines beginning, " Grief fills the place up of my absent child," touch on the anguish of every bereaved heart; they open a vista for every reader to some remembered longing, they put before us the sorrow that belongs not to rich or poor, high or low, wise or foolish, but to all. And yet how few they are, how soon we turn to other things, how little is Shakespeare engrossed with. that pathetic image ! He gives us an indirect glance at it, and hurries on to the interests of a nation. It is interesting, in the case of the only dramatist who can be named on the same page with Shakespeare, to observe how the pathos of this indirect glance fades away, when it becomes direct. Antigone seems to us the grandest female figure in dramatic literature, but the only time she is brought forward in a pathetic light is in her first appearance as an unconscious child. Pathos cannot combine with the full diapason of tragic power; those flutelike notes are lost in any flood of harmony, their melody is soon over, but for the moment it must be heard alone.
The age which we should choose as richest in accessible specimens of Pathos, the eighteenth century, is of itself a good illustration of the power that lies in this indirectness of attention. This period has of late been much rehabilitated, but its poetic claims have not yet been brought forward ; and its best friends will confess that it was, on the whole, an age of prose. But the poetry of a prosaic age is exactly that which is most likely to be pathetic. It supplies the inevitable element of reserve—of
dumbness, we would rather say—without which pathos is swallowed up in something beyond itself. And to take Gray as the type of this kind of poetry, the few words of one of his friends quoted by Matthew Arnold, and recurrent in his essay on Gray as a sort of refrain—" he never spoke out "—express with wonderful happiness and simplicity not only the charac- teristic of a particular poet, but the characteristic of all to whom we should apply the epithet " pathetic." Hackneyed as they are
(and it is a peculiar disadvantage to all pathetic poetry to be hack- neyed), his "Elegy" and the "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" keep for all readers that dim sense of far-off troubles and sorrows which seems to bring "some painless sympathy with pain." No poetry is more purely, abstractedly human ; the dim vision of the cottage-door gladdened by the father's return, of the playing-fields alive with schoolboys, touching as they do on the two extremes of society, contain nothing that is individual, nothing that is not absolutely common to humanity. Where Gray does diverge into individuality, he seems to us most unfortun- ate; and the picture of the indolent day-dreamer of whom we learn that " large was his bounty, and his soul sincere," while yet " he gave to misery all he had, a tear," exchanges poetry for something that, if we could forget its beauty of language, we should perceive to be twaddle. The whole interest of the poem is that common life is here, as it were, set to music. The dim, obscure lives of toil and privation are brought before us, not in their painful sordidness, and not in their arduous effort and meritorious success either, but in their broad human interest, as the lives of those bound together by strong affections, rejoicing in the daily meeting, busied with each other's needs, seeking on the bed of death a last glance from the eyes fullest of love. It takes nothing from the sim- plicity of this broad human interest that the words which call it up are essentially those of a scholar, and that we might re- store some of its gems to their original setting on the page of Lucretius or Tacitus. On the contrary, it adds much to it. It gives that indirectness of attention which is what we want. Turn from Gray to Wordsworth, concentrate your attention on the lives of the poor,—you may gain much, but the pathetic touch is gone. If, for instance, any one fresh from the passage to which we have alluded should read Wordsworth's " Michael," which is nothing more than the hint at peasant life expanded into a little biography, and assert that he found as much pathos in the portrait as the sketch, all we could say would be that he and we mean different things by the word. When we are invited to contemplate a specimen of humanity at that nearness in which we discern such special facts as that the parents were advanced in life when the son was born, and- that they lost their money through the treachery of an acquaint- ance, we are apt to feel that the picture, being as individual as this, is not individual enough. The present writer, at least, confesses to feeling very. often that Wordsworth has lost one excellence, and not fully gained the other.
The contrast between the two, at any rate, is an instructive one for our purpose. Wordsworth and Gray, from this point of view, may be considered as representing the nineteenth century and its predecessor. That Wordsworth was the greater poet (though that is at least not a disqualifying circumstance for this representation), we leave out of the question; we consider them only with regard to their contribution to this particular kind of literature. Wordsworth represents what is best in modern democracy. He looks at the poor not as the picturesque re- tainers, the grateful dependents of their social superiors ; he sees in them specimens of humanity interesting on their own account, but he often fails to render his picture of them interest- ing, because he specialises what is characteristic of the class with- out specialising what is characteristic of the individual. Where he aims a t pathos, he sometimes drops into prosaic triviality. We should have expected most of his readers to agree with us in thus describing his "Alice Fell," if Mr. Arnold had not included the verses in his selection from the poet. The attempt to describe in poetry such an incident as a child having her cloak caught in a coach wheel and replaced by a benevolent pas- senger seems to us, we must say, in spite of this formidable vote on the opposite side, a very good illustration of what pathos is not. It might almost be set by the side of the caricature of Wordsworth in the "Rejected Addresses" as a specimen of what is puerile when it should be childlike. This incident is too trivial for the most passing allusion, but the homely, every-day sorrows of the poor may be most pathetic when shown us by the light of a far-off sympathy, transient as the gleam that fringes a flying shower, while yet if hammered at through six or seven verses they become simply tedious. Describe the in- cidents of village life at which the " Elegy" glances from afar, and you have your choice between being tedious, and exchanging the broad, human view for one that takes cognisance of idiosyn- cracies ; and Wordsworth seems to us so much afraid of the last alternative, that he has constantly chosen the first. If you ex- pand the fitting subject for the allusion of half a line into a theme of a poem, you will in either case eliminate the pathetic element from it.
The contrast between the two poets brings out the explana- tion of our poverty in this direction, and its connection with the democratic spirit of our age. It is a twofold connection. In the first place, all literature feels the direct influence of the political spirit of the age. It is true that we should not ex- pect the influence of democracy to be hostile to pathos ; an attention to the needs of the poor and the obscure would appear, at first sight, its moral correlate, and this attention will be allowed to be a part of democracy by its bitterest enemies. Its very excellence is that it attends only to what is human in each of us, and demands no special claim of character and position before it will devote itself to remove grievances and mitigate suffering. Of course, this means attending more to the needs of the lowly than the exalted, for they are greater, and also they are the needs of the majority. This is a gain worth paying any price to secure. But, as a. matter of fact, we do pay a price to secure all excellence; and the price we pay for a complete recognition of every need is, that we have somewhat lost the subtle power of emotion which belongs to an indirect expression of all dumb need. Gray repre- sents the eighteenth-century glance at the life of the poor, —a glance full of sympathy, but essentially a glance from afar. They are still the dumb masses. They are certainly " our own flesh and blood," in the sense that they feel those sorrows and hopes which their poet feels also. " On some fond breast the parting soul relies," in the palace as well as the cottage. But they are hardly our own flesh and blood in Mr. Gladstone's sense. They are not beings whom we have any notion of calling into council as to the sanitary or educational arrangements which affect their welfare. From this point of view, the notion of helping them out of their dumbness, and endowing them with the franchise, must be allowed to strike the reader with horror. A neat, slated roof does not more disadvantageously replace what Gray carelessly calls a straw-built shed, than the new view of the agricultural labourer replaces the old, with regard to his place in poetry. Wordsworth does not regard him from this point of view exactly, but he is not so far from it as he is from the view of the predecessor with whom we contrast him. We feel that the Bastille has fallen, that the " Rights of Man" are in the air, that America has set an example of successful rebellion, that the first Reform Bill is on its way,— that Democracy, in short, is a growing power. The poor are dumb no longer ; they can occasionally be very tedious. We cannot look at a thing at the same time from at hand and from afar. The "humane century," as Mr. Frederic. Harrison has called the eighteenth century, was just in time for its educated men to look at the poor with sympathy, and from afar. Earlier ages were too soon for the first; our own, and apparently all following ages, are too late for the last. The transition age supplies the elements of pathos.
It may seem to be putting a strain upon the theory of poli- tical life thus to connect it with literature, and that homely, every-day life which supplies literature with its subjects. But those who care least for politics are moulded by politics. That perennial life in which each one of us partakes, makes up in permanence what it lacks in vividness; its hopes and fears be- come our hopes and fears to. some extent, and even they who turn away from all political interest and try to lose themselves in the past, discover in the echoes to which they cannot deafen their ears something that by its very continuity forces them to fear it or admire it,—somehow or other, to wish that this or that may come of it. However, it is not so much the direct influence of democratic feeling on literature that we would trace, as its influence on literature through the medium of the social life. The tendency of our age to leave nothing unsaid is impressed on our attention by every newspaper and almost every book we open, and is forced on our belief by its record on contemporary legislation. Why was Obstruction never a part of the tactics of Opposition until our own day P Not because people have suddenly discovered, as a truth of which their fore- fathers were ignorant, thit while you insist on discussing a measure it cannot pass into a law, nor because Members of Parliament are less high-minded than they were, but simply because the whole tone of general taste was in former days against such a method of procedure, and in our days is with it. The change is a part of that democratic influence on the social code to which we have so often ad verted,—a change which it seems to. us those equally misinterpret who insist on labelling it as either good or bad. This particular side of it seems to us to be regretted, but it is inseparably associated with so much that is a cause of satisfaction, that we would rather speak of its dan- gers than its evils. It is intimately associated with what Car- lyle meant by veracity. People are always mistaking unreserve for truthfulness, and if there were no connection between the two, they could not be confused. Our contemporary literature as marked by instances of this unreserve that would have been inconceivable to our grandfathers ; an allusion to the legend of Godiva with which we remember a specimen of it being greeted many years ago, would have lost all its point by this time, so anany have followed Godiva's example. And the fashion is reflected in fiction. Our greatest writer of fiction ex- presses all she means. Hers is not the art that calls up a train of suggestion with half a word, we never feel in closing the volume' that she has roused a set of recollections in which the original note is drowned ; her words linger in the memory with all the strong characteristics of their own individuality ; hut they stir no hidden spring, surprising the reader with the revelation of depths of emotion within, perhaps forgotten, per- haps never fully known. And the words which convey the writer's whole meaning, though they may convey it perfectly and admirably, can hardly, according to our understanding of the word, convey what we mean by pathos.
The loss of the pathetic element iu literature is great. With 'it, we lock the door of escape from unendurable compassion, we forbid ourselves ever to contemplate pain without actually staring it. We lose the medicine for many a sick mind, the spell that recalls without its bitterness many a bitter memory, the mediator that teaches us compassion for many a hated foe. We lose that refuge from the pressure of individual sorrow -which is so little the discovery of a civilised age, that the singer whose words most recall it is the earliest known to our race, telling us how the obsequies of a hero released the tears they did mot cause. " His loss the plea, the griefs they mourned their .own." Nor let it be thought that we speak of a merely senti- mental loss ; the thing we describe is, after all, the literary reflection of a view of the sorrows of life needed by all. What we can never forget, we must at times put far from us, and contemplate through the softening medium of thoughts that blend sorrow with hope. What pathos is in literature -that resignation is in life, and if a democratic age fail to recognise the excellence of this virtue, it is because men forget that apart from it, no manly effort is possible, and for the majority of lives, no sustained cheerfulness. They know it little who think it the foe of energy ; the truth is, that energy loses half its efficacy in a nature that knows nothing of resignation. Do we mean to urge that the literary quality thus nobly related shonld be made a conscious effort!) All we have said shows that we hold such an attempt to be self-defeating; at the first -effort to attain pathos, it takes its inexorable flight. But we do not think that the endeavour to avoid its foes is equally vain, and the most deadly among them, that love of the ridiculous which is quite equally the foe of all humour, is what, for our own part, we feel among the most serious dangers of a democratic age. While the inquest over a heart- rending calamity is interrupted with laughter at every grotesque or absurd expression in the awount of the disaster, while the
pages of Punch are the chief study of the young in their leisure
hours, and while the bracketed "laughter " in our Parliamentary reports call the attention of the reader to statements in which there is no wit or pleasantry, or any possible source of them, we shall lose the pathetic element in literature, and a great many other good things also. Against this vulgarising tendency of our time we would gladly see a strong and conscious effort, being certain that it would encourage not only those faculties which make literature pathetic, but also that it would reinforce the sources of all true humour, as much the friend to true pathos, as it is the foe of its vulgar and libelous caricature.
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