Horace, who was
(what every literary critic is not) a man of the world and an observer
of human nature, did not, of course, mean that this capacity for
feeling was all, or even the chief part, of the poetic faculty. He
must have seen many an "intense" young Roman make that pathetic
error of the young in all countries and of all periods--the error of
mistaking the capacity of emotion for the gift of expression. He did,
however, undoubtedly mean that a poet's power of affecting others
presupposes passion in himself; and, as regards the poet, he was
right. But his criticism takes no account whatever of one form of
appeal to the emotions which has been brought by later art to a high
pitch of perfection, but with which the personal feeling of the artist
has not much more to do than the "passions" of an auctioneer's clerk
have to do with the compilation of his inventory. A poet himself,
Horace wrote for poets; to him the pathetic implied the ideal, the
imaginative, the rhetorical; he lived before the age of Realism and
the Realists, and would scarcely have comprehended either the men or
the method if he could have come across them.
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