But with such gard'ning tools as art, yet rude,
Guiltless of fire had form'd, or angels brought.

-Paradise Lost, 9: Milton.

Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy walls: or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous'd,

Or Neptune's ire or Juno's, that so long
Perplex'd the Greek and Cytherea's son.

-Idem, 9.

Sometimes, too, such allusions in the best poetry, are explained or rendered picturesque, as in the following:

Do you believe me yet, or shall I call
Antiquity from the old schools of Greece
To testify the arms of chastity?

Hence had the huntress Dian her dread bow,
Fair silver-shafted queen, for ever chaste,
Wherewith she tamed the brinded lioness
And spotted mountain pard, but set at nought
The frivolous bolt of Cupid; gods and men

Fear'd her stern frown, and she was queen o' th' woods.

What was that snaky-headed Gorgon shield,

That wise Minerva wore, unconquer'd virgin,

Wherewith she freezed her foes to congeal'd stone,

But rigid looks of chaste austerity,

And noble grace that dash'd brute violence

With sudden adoration and blank awe?

-Comus: Milton.

It is not merely in historical or mythological allusions, however, that the main thought of a passage can be so mixed with the illustrating figures as to destroy their representative character. The same tendency will be recognized in the following:

Yes, the pine is the mother of legends; what food

For their grim roots is left when the thousand-yeared wood-
The dim-aisled cathedral, whose tall arches spring

Light, sinewy, graceful, firm-set as the wing

From Michael's white shoulder-is hewn and defaced
By iconoclast axes in desperate waste,

And its wrecks seek the ocean it prophesied long,
Cassandra-like, crooning its mystical song?

Then the legends go with them-even yet on the sea
A wild virtue is left in the touch of the tree,

And the sailor's night watches are thrilled to the core
With the lineal offspring of Odin and Thor.

-The Growth of the Legend: Lowell.

In contrast with this, notice how clearly both thoughts and figures, and the thoughts by means of the figures, stand out in poetry that is truly representative:

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
-The Present Crisis : Lowell.

Virtue? a fig! 't is in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are gardens to the which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles, or sew lettuce; set hyssop, and weed up thyme; supply it with one gender of herbs, or distract it with many; either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry; why the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.

-Othello, i., 3: Shakespear.

You have seen

Sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears
Were like a better May; those happy smilets,
That played on her ripe lips seemed not to know
What guests were in her eyes.

-Lear, iv., 3: Idem.

Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear;
Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it..

And like a scurvy politician seem
To see the things thou dost not.

.. Get thee glass eyes;

-Idem, iv., 6.

CHAPTER XXVI.

ORNAMENTAL ALLOY IN REPRESENTATION.

Poetic Development of the far-fetched Simile in the Illustrating of Illustrations-Examples of this from several Modern Writers-Whose Representation or Illustration fails to represent or illustrate-Poetic Development of the Mixed Metaphor-Examples from Modern Poets-In what will this result-More Examples-How the Tendency leads the Poet from his Main Thought to pursue Suggestions made even by Sounds-Representing thus a Lack of Sanity or of Discipline, neither of which is what Art should represent.

UR examination of the effects upon poetry of the didactic tendency, in which considerations of thought overbalance those of form, have led us to trace certain phases of failure to a lack of representation. We have now to examine the effects of the ornate tendency, in which considerations of form overbalance those of thought, and in which therefore there is failure because of an excess of representation.

It is simply natural for one who has obtained facility in illustrating his ideas to overdo the matter, at times, and to carry his art so far as to re-illustrate that which has been sufficiently illustrated or is itself illustrative. The first form that we need to notice, in which this tendency shows itself, is a poetic development and extension of what rhetoricians term the "far-fetched" simile, a simile in which minor points of resemblance are sought out and dwelt upon in minute detail and at unnecessary length. Attention has been directed in another place to the way

in which the exclusively allegorical treatment in Spenser's Faerie Queene causes us to lose sight of the main subject of the poem. An allegory, as has been said, is mainly an extended simile. The poetic fault of which I am to speak is sometimes found in similes, sometimes in allegories, and sometimes in episodes filled with metaphorical language, partaking partly of the distinctive nature of both. These passages seem to be suggested as illustrations of the main subject, but they are so extended and elaborated that they really obscure it. As the reader goes on to peruse them, he either forgets altogether what the subject to be illustrated is, or he finds himself unable to separate that which belongs only to it, from that which belongs only to the illustration.

It is largely owing to passages manifesting this characteristic that Robert Browning's writings seem obscure to so many. Most persons would be obliged to read the following, for example, two or three times before understanding it, and this because of the difficulty they experience in separating the particulars of the passage that go with the main thought from those that go with the illustrating thought; in other words, the excess of representation in the form interferes with its clearness.

The man is witless of the size, the sum,
The value, in proportion of all things,

*

Should his child sicken unto death,-why, look

For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness,

Or pretermission of his daily craft—

While a word, gesture, glance, from that same child
At play, or in school, or laid asleep,

Will start him to an agony of fear,
Exasperation, just as like! demand

The reason why-"'t is but a word," object

"A gesture"-he regards thee as our lord

Who lived there in the pyramid alone,

Looked at us, dost thou mind, when being young
We both would unadvisedly recite

Some charm's beginning, from that book of his,
Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst
All into stars, as suns grown old are wont.
Thou and the child have each a veil alike

Thrown o'er your heads from under which ye both
Stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match
Over a mine of Greek fire, did ye know!
He holds on firmly to some thread of life—
(It is the life to lead perforcedly)

Which runs across some vast distracting orb
Of glory on either side that meagre thread,
Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet-
The spiritual life around the earthly life!
The law of that is known to him as this-
His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.
So is the man perplexed with impulses
Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,
Proclaiming what is Right and Wrong across―
And not along, this black thread through the blaze—
"It should be "balked by "here it cannot be."

-An Epistle.

It must be confessed, however, that these episodes of Browning are often very charming to those who have come to understand them, e. g. :

And hereupon they bade me daub away.

Thank you! my head being crammed, their walls a blank,

Never was such prompt disemburdening.

First, every sort of monk, the black and white,

I drew them, fat and lean: then, folks at church,
From good old gossips waiting to confess
Their cribs of barrel-droppings, candle-ends,—
To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot
Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there
With the little children round him in a row
Of admiration, half for his beard and half
For that white anger of his victim's son