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SOURCES OF PATHOS,-.

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touching themes of religion, the inspiration of the tragic poet, the soul-engrossing actuality.

It is a strong testimony to the power of this emotion, not merely to tranquillize, but to cause delight, that for the sake of it we can bear with tales and pictures of distress. Even death can yield a powerful fascination. Bear witness Gray's Elegy and Bryant's Thanatopsis.

(5.) Though it appears a contradiction, the tender feeling is awakened by pleasure as well as by pain; particularly by the gentle pleasures, as opposed to the fiery and exciting by such as are compatible with repose. The example most relevant to our present object is the Beautiful in the narrow sense, as opposed to the Sublime. The characteristic elements of beauty, as will be seen, are certain sensuous pleasures of the sight and hearing, coupled with harmonies, and extended by These incline to, and adopt, tenderness as a kin

associations.

dred quality.

Any very intense pleasure will dispose to tender feeling. Even the elation of power may show itself in affectionate condescension; and the sentiment of the sublime may be mingled with what pertains to beauty.

The vocabulary of Tenderness corresponds to these various sources of emotion.

(1.) Mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter, child, lover, husband, wife, home, hearth, friend, country, God, Saviour. (2, 3.) Good, kind, benevolent, protecting, generous, humane, love, the heart, fond, devoted, sacrifice, affection, sympathy, pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, disinterestedness. (4.) Pain, agony, torment, awe, sadness, tears, distress, misery, adversity, calamity, disaster, trouble, trial, affliction, bitterness, sinking, desolation, bereavement, fatherless, widow, orphan, wretchedness, tribulation, sorrow, grief, inconsolable, tragic, pathetic, despairing, doomed, devoted, accursed, death, the grave, the tomb, the departed. (5.) Pleasure, joy, rejoicing, delight, charm, happiness, felicity, bliss, transport, glad, grateful, cordial, genial, heart-felt.

105. With allowance for difference of subject, the conditions of the employment of language to raise pathetic emotion are the same as for strength. (See p. 89.)

A mere profusion of the phraseology and images of pathos,

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without originality, keeping, or alternation and relief, will fail to accomplish the end in view. When the language exceeds the occasion, we have the maudlin and the sentimental, as in Sterne's episode on the Ass, and not unfrequently in the speeches of both Sheridan and Burke.

"In

The maudlin is reached by Burke in the following sentence on the British constitution, a subject which people in general are unable to regard as an object of affectionate fondness:— this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars."

In Extract VI., pathos is shown in contrast to tragic strength on the one hand, and to unredeemed horrors on the other. The misery that inspires tender feeling must neither repel nor overwhelm our sympathies.

106. The interest of natural objects is, in many instances, due to their suggesting the tender emotion.

The vastness of the world inspires us with a sense of the sublime, but there are many objects and situations that touch us in other ways. The fragile stem indicates weakness; the flower on the rock is an image of protection. See, among numberless instances, Wordsworth's odes to the Daisy.

"Thou unassuming common place
Of Nature, with that homely face,
And yet with something of a grace,
Which love makes for thee!"

107. The following are additional examples of Pathos.
"Ye shall seek me in the morning, but I shall not be."

Wolsey's Farewell need only be referred to.

The Clerk's Tale of Griselda in Chaucer, with its incredible picture of meekness and submission, is replete with pathos. Griselda's speech to her husband, when about to be cast off, contains these touching lines:—

EXAMPLES OF PATHOS.

"O goodè God! how gentle and how kind
Ye seemed by your speech and your visage,
The day that maked was our marriage!"

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Compassion for the oppressed, and for the victims of injustice, is a common form of tenderness.

There is deep pathos in the sense of loneliness, illustrating the alliance of tender emotion with weakness.

"How can I live without thee! How forego

Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly join'd,
To live in these wild woods forlorn 1"

The decline of strength with advancing years disposes to the melting mood.

The circumstances and arts of pathos may be well studied in Thackeray's picture of Esmond at his mother's grave:—

"Esmond came to this spot in one sunny evening of spring, and saw, amid a thousand black crosses, casting their shadows across the grassy mounds, that particular one which marked his mother's resting-place. Many more of those poor creatures that lay there had adopted that same name with which sorrow had re-baptized her, and which fondly seemed to hint their individual story of love and grief. He fancied her, in tears and darkness, kneeling at the foot of her cross, under which her cares were buried. Surely he knelt down, and said his own prayer there, not in sorrow so much as in awe (for even his memory had no recollection of her) and in pity for the pangs which the gentle soul in life had been made to suffer. To this cross she brought them; for this heavenly bridegroom she exchanged the husband who had wooed her, the traitor who had left her. A thousand such hillocks lay round about, the gentle daisies springing out of the grass over them, and each bearing its cross and requieseat. A nun, veiled in black, was kneeling hard by, at a sleeping sister's bed-side (so fresh made, that the spring had scarce had time to spin a coverlid for it); beyond the cemetery walls you had glimpses of life and the world, and the spires and gables of the city. A bird came down from a roof opposite, and lit first on a cross, and then on the grass below it, whence it flew away presently with a leaf in its mouth; then came a sound as of chanting from the chapel of the sisters hard by; others had long since filled the place which poor Mary Madeleine once had there, were kneeling at the same stall and hearing the same hymns and prayers in which her stricken heart had found consolation. Might she sleep in peace—might she sleep in peace; and we, too, when our struggles and pains are over! But the earth is the Lord's, as the heaven is; we are alike his creatures here and yonder. I took a little flower off the hillock and kissed it, and went my way like the bird that had just lighted on the cross by me,

back into the world again. Silent receptacle of death! tranquil depth of calm, out of reach of tempest and trouble. I felt as one who had been walking below the sea, and treading amidst the bones of shipwrecks."

From the nature of the subject, the Bible abounds with examples of Pathos, greatly aided by the Saxon style of our translation.

Every great poetic genius has been able to produce strokes of pathos; but in some it is a marked feature. John Paul Richter is probably unsurpassed. Shakespeare's tenderness is equal to his sublimity. Chaucer occasionally touches the tender chords; Spenser still oftener. In recent times Cowper, Goethe, Burns, Scott, Wilson, Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Shelley, have given many examples. It is essential alike to the novel and to the drama to produce scenes of love and pathos.

THE LUDICROUS—HUMOR—WIT.

108. The Ludicrous and the Laughable are names for what excites laughter.

Among the causes of laughter we may name abundance of animal spirits, any sudden accession of pleasure, the special elation of power and superiority, or an unexpected diversion of the mind when under excitement.

109. The Ludicrous in composition is for the most part based on the degradation, direct or indirect, of some person or interest—something associated with power, dignity, or gravity. It is farther requisite that the circumstances of this degradation should not be such as to produce any other strong emotion, as pity, anger, or fear.

Comedy took its rise from the jeering and personal vituperation indulged in during the processions in honor of the god Dionysus, or Bacchus. In the regular comedy, and in every kind of composition aiming at the laughable, the essential in

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gredient is the vilifying and degrading of men or institutions. commanding some degree of veneration or respect.

The pleasure thus afforded is very great, and has a strong affinity with that feeling of exalted energy entering into the sublime. To throw down anything from a height is a signal manifestation of power, and, as such, gratifies the agent and those that enter into his feelings. Even where the prostration is not designed by a conscious agent, as when any one tumbles in the mud, or takes fright at an unexpected appearance, we experience a degree of enjoyment corresponding to the greatness of the effect. When our sympathy is with the object thrown down, the tendency to laughter is arrested, and some other feeling takes its place.

When

The following are examples of this degradation. Moliere introduces the celestial messenger of the gods, sitting tired on a cloud, and complaining of the number of Jupiter's errands, Night expresses surprise that a god should be weary; whereupon Mercury indignantly asks, "Are the gods made of iron?" This degradation of divine personages is ludicrous and delightful to unbelievers. Accordingly, in the decline of Paganism, the gods came to be a subject of mirth in such compositions as the Dialogues of Lucian.

A Frenchman, disappointed with English cookery, exclaimed, "Behold a land with sixty religions, and only one sauce." The putting of religion and sauce upon a level partly degrades religion, but still more degrades the speaker; and there is a complex effect of the ludicrous.

The lines of Hudibras,

66 And, like a lobster boiled, the morn

From black to red began to turn,"

contain an obvious degradation of a dignified subject, although belonging to the inanimate world. Whatever inspires us with lofty feelings of admiration or awe can be a subject of ludicrous prostration, if we are disposed to exult over the fall. We usually enjoy the laugh at something that we observe other people respecting, but do not ourselves respect.

The incident of Queen Sophie Charlotte's taking a pinch of

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