In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a
variety of subject almost unlimited. The range of characters or
persons open to them is as various as life itself; no character,
however trivial, misshapen, or unlovely, can resist their magic.
That is because those arts can accomplish their function in the
choice and development of some special situation, which lifts or
glorifies a character, in itself not poetical. To realise this
situation, to define, in a chill and empty atmosphere, the focus
where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to
burn, the artist may have, indeed, to employ the most cunning
detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and passion a
thousand-fold. Let us take a brilliant example from the poems of
Robert Browning. His poetry is pre-eminently the poetry of
situations. The characters themselves are always of secondary
importance; often they are characters in themselves of little
interest; they seem to come to him by strange accidents from the
ends of the world. His gift is shown by the way in which he
accepts such a character, throws it into some situation, or
apprehends it in some delicate pause of life, in which for a
moment it becomes ideal. In the poem entitled Le Byron de nos
Jours, in his Dramatis Personae, we have a single moment of
passion thrown into relief after this exquisite fashion. Those two
jaded Parisians are not intrinsically interesting: they begin to
interest us only [215] when thrown into a choice situation.
Pages:
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221