Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/303

Rh ready to slip the leash. These are constantly utilized by Browning; they characterize the Reserved power. Puritan repression in Hawthorne's romances and Mrs. Stoddard's novels, and the weird power of Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights." In the drama, above all, none but a robustious periwigpated fellow is expected to "tear a passion to tatters." Nor can dramatic heights be of frequent occurrence: they must rise like mountains from a plain to produce their effect, and even then be capped with clouds—must have something left untold. A poem at concert-pitch from first to last is ineffective. See with what relief of commonplace or humor Shakespeare sets off his supreme crises: the banter with Osric before the death of Hamlet; the potter and babble of the peasant who brings the aspic to Cleopatra. In the silent arts, as in nature, the prevailing mood is equable, and must be caught. The picture on your walls that displays nature in her ordinary mien, and not in a vehement and exceptional phase, is the one which does not weary you. But poetry, with its time-extension, has True naturalism. the freedom of dramatic contrasts—of tranquillity and passion according to nature's own allotment. With this brave advantage, naturalism is ignoble which restricts itself to the ordinary, and is indeed grossly untrue to our life, at times so concentrated and electric.

The ideal of dramatic intensity—that is, of imagined feeling—is reached when the expression is as