Thus, for instance, in _Alton Locke_,--
They rowed her in across the rolling foam--
The cruel, crawling foam.[54]
The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which
attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which
the reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same
effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of
external things, which I would generally characterize as the "pathetic
fallacy."
Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently a
character of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which we
allow it, as one eminently poetical, because passionate. But I
believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the
greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness,--that it is
only the second order of poets who much delight in it.[55]
Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of
Acheron "as dead leaves flutter from a bough,"[56] he gives the most
perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness,
passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an
instant losing his own clear perception that _these_ are souls, and
_those_ are leaves; he makes no confusion of one with the other. But
when Coleridge speaks of
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,[57]
he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf;
he fancies a life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its
powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment, and the
wind that shakes it with music.
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