Poetry, when it is really such, is truth; and fiction, if it is good for anything, is truth: but they are different truths The truth of poetry is to paint the human soul truly: the truth of fiction is to give a true picture of life. The two kinds of knowledge are different, and come by different ways, come mostly to different persons. Great poets are often proverbially ignorant of life. What they know has come by observation of themselves: they have found within them one, highly, delicate and sensitive specimen of human nature, on which the laws of emotion are written in large characters, such as can be read off without much study. Other knowledge of mankind, such as comes to men of the world by outward experience, is not indispensable to them as poets: but, to the novelist, such, knowledge is all in all; he bas to describe outward things, not the inward man; actions and events, not feelings; and it will not do for him to be numbered among those, who, as Madame Roland said of Brissot, know man, but not men.
All this is no bar to the possibility of combining both elements, poetry and narrative or incident, in the same work, and calling it either a novel or a poem; but so may red and white combine on the same human features or on the same canvas. There is one order of composition which requires the union of poetry and incident, each in its highest kind, the dramatic. Even there, the two elements are perfectly distinguishable, and may exist of unequal quality and in the most various proportion. The incidents of a dramatic poem may be scanty and ineffective, though the delineation of passion and character may be of the highest order, as in Goethes admirable ``Torquato Tasso or, again, the story as a mere story may be well got up for effect, as is the case with some of the most trashy productions of the Minerva press: it may even be, what those are not, a coherent and probable series of events, though there be scarcely a feeling exhibited which is not represented falsely, or in a manner absolutely commonplace. The combination of the two excellences is what renders Shakespeare so generally acceptable, each sort of readers finding in him what is suitable to their faculties. To the many, he is great as a story-teller; to the few, as a poet.
In limiting poetry to the delineation of states of feeling, and denying the name where nothing is delineated but outward objects, we may be thought to have done what we promised to avoid,---to have not found, but made, a definition in opposition to the usage of language, since it is established by common consent that there is a poetry called descriptive. We deny the charge. Description is not poetry because there is descriptive poetry, no more than science is poetry because there is such a thing as a didactic poem. But an object which admits of being described, or a truth which may fill a place in a scientific treatise, may also furnish an occasion for the generation of poetry, which we thereupon choose to call descriptive or didactic. The poetry is not in the object itself, nor in the scientific truth itself, but in the state of mind in which the one and the other may be contemplated. The mere delineation of the dimensions and colors of external objects is not poetry, no more than a geometrical ground-plan of St. Peters or Westminster Abbey is painting. Descriptive poetry consists, no doubt, in description, but in description of things as they appear, not as they are; and it paints them, not in their bare and natural lineaments, but seen through the medium and arrayed in the colors of the imagination set in action by the feelings. If a poet describes a lion, be does not describe him as a naturalist would, nor even as a traveller would, who was intent upon stating the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He describes him by imagery, that is, by suggesting the most striking likenesses and contrasts which might occur to a mind contemplating a lion, in the state of awe, wonder, or terror, which the spectacle naturally excites, or is, on the occasion, supposed to excite. Now, this is describing the lion professedly, but the state of excitement of the spectator really. The lion may be described falsely, or with exaggeration, and the poetry be all the better: but, if the human emotion be not painted with scrupulous truth, the poetry is bad poetry; i.e., is not poetry at all, but a failure.
雅思阅读必备词汇表:habitat-hypothesis
详解把握雅思阅读的五个方面
雅思阅读必备词汇表:badge-buzzword
八个在雅思阅读中常见的话题
雅思阅读题型分析汇总
雅思阅读必备词汇表:vanish-vulnerable
雅思阅读关键词:表顺序或过程
详解雅思阅读中容易出现的定位词
雅思阅读必备词汇表:gather-gullibly
雅思阅读关键词:表递进关键词
身体是雅思阅读高分的第一步
雅思阅读题型分析:配对题题型
雅思阅读高分经验分享:好好读文章
攻克词汇难句制胜雅思阅读
雅思阅读必备词汇表:obvious-oxygen
雅思阅读解题步骤五步走
雅思阅读:多选题之同题异做解析
雅思阅读关键词:表类比关键词
雅思阅读解答规则和步骤详解
雅思阅读题型分析:摘要、填空题型
雅思阅读失分点分析
雅思阅读必备词汇表:radiation-rotate
适合中学生的雅思阅读备考攻略
雅思阅读必备词汇表:pace-put together
基本的雅思阅读解题步骤
雅思阅读必备词汇表:qualification-quest
雅思阅读必备词汇表:idealistic-kidney
专家支招:雅思阅读的三种方法
雅思阅读题材解析之租房子
雅思阅读:三点相符原则检查答案
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