Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/273

Rh in literature as in art, was clear and assured. It imagined plainly, and drew firm outlines. But Configuration and outline. the Acts and Scenes of our English dramatists were often shapeless; their schemes were full of by-play and plot within plot; in fine, their constructive faculty showed the caprice of rich imaginations that disdained control. Shakespeare, alone of all, never fails to justify Leigh Hunt's maxim that, in treating of the unusual, "one must be true to the supernatural itself." When the French and German romanticists broke loose from the classic unities, they, too, at first went wild. Again, the antique conceptions are as sensuous, beside the modern, as the Olympian hierarchy compared with the spiritual godhood to which Christendom has consecrated its ideals. But whether pagan The supernatural. or Christian, all the supernaturalism of the dark and mystic North has a more awe-inspiring quality than that of sunlit Italy and Greece. There are weird beings in the classic mythology, but its Fates and Furies are less spectral than the Valkyriës and the prophetic Sisters of the blasted heath. Even in the mediæval under-world of Dante, the damned and their tormentors are substantially and materially presented, with a few exceptions, like the lovers of Rimini,—the

Having, then, laid stress upon the excellence of clear