Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

who before looked upon the doctrine as merely a matter of abstract right, now cherishes it as a sublime and most ennobling sentiment, and not only justifies, but honors and venerates the man who promulgates it.

It is obvious that the same means may be successfully used to arouse indignation against a person or an opinion. The same great orator, wishing to discredit the testimony of a government witness, presents before us an image which can awaken no emotion but those of loathsomeness and detestation. Referring to the confinement of this person in the castle before the trial, he styles him "the wretch that is buried a man, who lies till his heart has time to fester and rot, and is then dug up a witness." He asks, "Have you not seen him, after his resurrection from that tomb, after having been dug out of the regions of death and corruption, make his appearance upon the table, the living image of life and death, and the supreme arbiter of both? Have you not marked, when he entered, how the stormy wave of the multitude retired at his approach? Have you not marked how the human heart bowed to the supremacy of his power, in the undissembled homage of deferential horror? how his glance, like the lightning of heaven, seemed to rive the body of the accused and mark it for the grave, while his voice warned the devoted wretch of woe and death,— a death which no innocence can escape, no art elude, no force resist, no antidote prevent? There was an antidote,a juror's oath; but even this adamantine chain, which bound the integrity of man to the throne of eternal justice, is solved and melted in the breath that issues from the informer's mouth. Conscience swings from her moorings, and the appalled and affrighted juror consults his own safety in the surrender of the victim."

From such instances as these it is easy to perceive the manner in which the orator may make even the imagination

to aid in the work of persuasion. He may bring the past, the present, and the future, before the mind of the hearer, and awaken, by means of it, any train of sympathy that he desires. The pages of ancient and modern eloquence are studded with gems of this kind, illustrating the power of the consummate orator to wield the passions of men at his will, and too frequently, I must confess, to make the worse appear the better reason.

SECTION III. ON THE IMPROVEMENT OF POETIC IMAG

INATION.

IMAGINATION, as we have before said, is the power of combination, the faculty by which, out of materials already existing in the mind, we form new and original images. Of course, our power of combination must be limited by the amount of the materials on which it may be exerted. Knowledge of all kinds is the treasury from which our power of combination must be supplied. The works of the classical poets of all languages furnish us with a great variety of beautiful imagery. But these poets themselves derived their images from nature. The same book is open to us, and we must study it for ourselves if we would attain to freshness and vigor of imaginative power. He, therefore, who would cultivate this faculty with success, must observe nature in all her infinite variety of phases, by day and by night, in sunshine and in storm, in summer and in winter, on the prairie and by the seaside, and delight himself in the beautiful and the grand wherever they may exist in every aspect of creation around him. Says Imlac, in Rasselas, "I ranged mountains and deserts for images and resemblances, and pictured on my mind every tree of the forest and flower of

the valley. I observed with equal care the crags of the rock, and the pinnacles of the palace. Sometimes I wandered along the mazes of the rivulet, and sometimes watched the changes of the summer cloud. To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful and whatever is dreadful must be familiar to his imagination; he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little. The plants of the garden and the animals of the wood, the minerals of the earth and the meteors of the sky, must all concur to store his mind with inexhaustible variety; for every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of moral or religious truths, and he who knows most will have most power of gratifying his reader with remote allusions and unexpected instruction."-- Rasselas, chap. 10.

The habits of those who have been most distinguished for richness of imagination will, I believe, confirm the truth of - these remarks. The poetry of Homer, Shakspeare and Milton, is replete with images which could only have been derived from close observation of nature, as she presented herself to them in their dissimilar walks of life. But we may recur to more recent instances. It is recorded of the distinguished American, whose exquisite portraits of nature have rendered classic the banks of the Hudson, that he once invited a friend to visit his "studies." He led him to some of the mountains that overlook his favorite river, and remarked that he was accustomed to spend whole days, from sunrise to sunset, in those majestic solitudes, observing the never-ceasing changes wrought upon the scenery around him in every hour of the day, and that thus he labored to acquire a familiarity with every appearance of natural beauty. The boundless range of the imagination of Sir Walter Scott has been long acknowledged. Until, however, his memoirs were published, no one would have believed that he depended on minute observation for the

materials of his fancy. Before he wrote Rokeby, he visited his friend Mr. Morritt, in whose grounds the scene of the poem was to be laid. "The Monday after his arrival, he said, 'You have often given me the materials for a romance, now I want a good robber's cave and an old church of the right sort.' We rode out and found what he wanted in the ancient slate quarry of Bignal, and the ruined abbey of Eglinstone. I observed him noting down even the peculiar little wild flowers and herbs that accidentally grew around and on the side of a bold crag near his intended cave of Guy Denzil, and could not help saying, that, as he was not to be on his oath in this work, daisies, violets and primroses, would be as poetic as any of the humble plants he was examining. I laughed, in short, at his scrupulousness; but I understood him when he replied that in nature herself no two scenes were exactly alike, and that whoever copied truly what was before his eyes, would possess the same variety in his descriptions, and exhibit, apparently, an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes which he describes; but whoever trusted to imagination, would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few favorite images, and the repetition of these would soon produce that monotony and barrenness which have always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshipper of truth. 'Besides,' said he, 'local names and peculiarities make a fictitious story look so much better in the face.' In fact, he was but half satisfied with the most beautiful scenery which he could not connect with some local legend."- Lockhart's Life of Scott, vol. 1, page 426.

Nor was Sir Walter Scott a close observer of nature merely in the forms of inanimate creation. His amazing power of delineating every variety of human character may be traced to the same source. When "The Pirate" appeared,

every one wondered at the fertile fancy of the Great Unknown, and his power of conceiving so accurately the manners, and even the modes of conversation of the people of the Hebrides. Those, however, who had accompanied the author in his visit to these regions, recognized in many of the most striking passages of the novel an almost literal record of the events which had transpired under their own eyes. We thus perceive that the exhaustless richness of the imagination of the great novelist was derived from a remarkably exact observation of nature and mankind, aided by a memory from which nothing seems to have escaped that could minister to the success of his literary labors.

[ocr errors]

It is related of Stothard, an eminent English artist, that nothing could exceed the care with which he was in the habit of copying the minutest object in nature, in which he detected any special beauty. "He was beginning to paint the figure of a reclining sylph, when a difficulty arose in his mind how best to represent such a being of fancy. A friend present said, 'Give the sylph a butterfly-wing, and then you have it.' That I will,' said Stothard, and, to be correct, I will paint the wing from the butterfly itself.' He instantly sallied forth into the fields, caught one of these beautiful insects, and sketched it immediately. * * He became a hunter of butterflies. The more he caught, the greater beauty did he trace in their infinite variety, and he would often say that no one knew what he owed to these insects,— they had taught him the finest combinations in that difficult branch of art, coloring. * * Whenever he was in the fields, the sketch-book and the color-box were brought forth from his pocket, and many a wild plant, with its delicate formation of leaf and flower, was carefully copied on the spot. The springing of the tendrils from the stem, and every elegant bend and turn of the leaves, or the drooping

« ElőzőTovább »