while the laws of thought have been fathomed to the bottom; such as that the Thinker will have little imagination, and therefore little knowledge of its doings, while the Dreamer, having much, will be unable to wield the scalpel-knife of the former; but the main cause must evidently be the self-blindness occasioned by imaginative activity, and necessary to a sense of pleasure; a deficiency which can be entirely overcome only by a manysided mind of great reach, with great powers of memory; in short, by such a mind as never yet has appeared, and perhaps never will,-a dreamy Aristotle. PART FIRST. THE KINDS OF POESY. CHAPTER I. GENERAL. In a letter to Sir William Davenant, Hobbes makes the remark, that as philosophers have divided the universe into three regions, celestial, aerial and terrestrial, so poets have divided the world into three correspondent regions, court, city and country,-whence have proceeded three kinds of poesy, heroic, scommatic, and pastoral. This division will be better understood, if it is remembered that, about the same time, he published in his Leviathan a table of the sciences, amongst which he reckons poesy—the Gaya Sciencia of the Spaniards, and, by his account, the science "of magnifying, vilifying, &c." The above division therefore will stand thus: heroic or magnifying poesy, pastoral or contented F poesy, and scommatic or vilifying poesy; like an insect, divided into three parts, with a sting in the tail. Like an insect also, he gives poesy six legs to go upon, a narrative and a dramatic leg for each division; so that magnifying poesy has the Epos and Tragedy, contented poesy has the Bucolic and the Pastoral Drama, while vilifying poesy has the Satire and the Comedy. Paulo majora canamus. Of poesy there are at bottom three kinds, Dramatic, Narrative and Lyrical; Play, Tale and Song. Seldom indeed shall we meet with specimens of any one kind that are quite pure. One is ever mingling with another; whence for instance comes the ballad, a cross between tale and song; whence too the pastoral, in which all three combine. Even the purest Epic will very often take a dramatic form; the speeches being delivered not in a narrative style, that is, obliquely (He said that he did it), but directly as in the drama, (He said, I did it). Yet the division is very manifest. It is not so manifest, however, although equally true, that these three kinds go to form a trinity, the second begotten of the first, and the third flowing from both. For the Epic poet and we his readers or his hearers stand in the very relation of dramatis personæ, his narrative being a long and the only remaining speech of a play that is otherwise lost; while again the Lyrical bard is an epic of a particular cast-one who sings the Epos of his own soul. |