impressions made upon himself, and thus frequently the objects are distorted by being viewed through him as a medium. The one is nature seen with the clear unblemished eye; the other the same nature seen through a glass darkly." 66 To state extreme cases, the annalist or statistician is objective; the man of genius usually more subjective. To obtain pure truth in a pleasing form, we look for a combination of the objective and subjective. Shakspeare has been instanced as remarkable for the happy counterbalance of the two: his characters, -men and women;-his portraitures of virtue and vice, "holding the mirror up to nature," are splendidly objective; and show to all ages "our fathers in their habits as they lived." And yet, on the other hand, what writer has ever more perfectly stamped everything he wrote with the signet of his own genius; making everything Shaksperean and subjective? So too has Milton, "of imagination all compact," peopled the world of that imagination with the finest objective creations, and yet every line of the Paradise Lost, or of Comus is so truly Milton's that we could recognise it by a comparison with his life and his other works. A purely objective view, while it informs or instructs, gives us no pleasing or grateful thought of the instructor; a purely subjective view shows us the instructor, but we learn him rather than the truths he professes to teach. But to return to the province of Taste in rhetorical discourse. (17.) Of the pleasures of Taste. It has been stated, at the beginning of this volume, that Rhetoric, as the Art of Discourse, consists in the invention, arrangement, and style, or expression, of discourse. We have shown that in the invention and arrangement of the discourse the development of thought is the proper province of Rhetoric; we now come to consider the fact that in the thought and language of discourse there is an inherent relation to Taste; thus, not only may we clearly invent and distinctly express our thought, but the thought itself and the dress it wears, may, besides simply informing our hearer, awaken in him an emotion of pleasure, incident to the beauty, grandeur, or sublimity which they contain. To illustrate :—It may be our desire to inform a person, before ignorant of the fact, that God made everything, and that he only said that they should be made, and that they were so made. If, now, we look beyond the mere instruction to be conveyed, we find the thought expanding in the effort of utterance; we observe that our mind dwells beforehand upon the dignity of approach to such a thought, that an elevated and serious tone becomes natural to our expression, and so we rise at once to the language of the Psalmist: By the word of the Lord were the Heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth; He gathereth the waters of the sea together as an heap; he layeth up the depth in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast." Here, besides the mere instruction conveyed, there is great beauty in the invention and arrangement; that is, the development of the thought. First, the fact of creation; then the ennobling consideration of the Great Omnipotent Being, who could thus create; his mighty unseen hands in the ocean depths-the storehouses of his munificence; the vastness of his visible universe; the transition of the mind from primitive chaos to order, from darkness to light; the potent reasoning that such a God should be had in awe and holy fear by all the inhabitants of the world; and the grandeur of the final and splendid epitome: "For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast." Is not an emotion of great pleasure, merging into awe, excited by this development of thought and fitness of expression? If we had no other volume than the Bible, from which to illustrate a chapter on Rhetorical Asthetics, we should have a storehouse full of treasures of thought and diction. With these preliminary remarks, we proceed to the consideration of the scope, subjects, and instruments of Esthetics in the consideration of Rhetoric. It must be observed, that the pleasures derived from such thoughts and such language are pleasures produced by the Imagination and discerned by Taste; and, lest we may be misunderstood, before going farther, let us explain the meaning of these terms, Imagination and Taste. (18.) Imagination. Perhaps there is no term which has been more difficult to explain, or of which more conflicting explanations have been given, than the word imagination. It is derived from the Latin word imago, which means an image, and therefore, in its etymological sense, it is the conjuring or bringing before the mind certain images; but, in its secondary sense, it may be called the power of endowing substances with qualities which they do not possess; and making these qualities inhere in a lively and natural manner. It is mainly in its conflict with another word, Fancy, which has frequently been used as synonymous with it, i. e., having nearly the same meaning, that it has been found necessary to define Imagination more clearly than before, and yet it is difficult to find an agreement among those writers who have attempted to state this distinction. Fancy, from the Greek (parraon), may be called the power of combining ideas already known, in such a manner as to produce new and pleasant scenes to our mental sight. Imagination is a creative power, often originating ideas; or, if not making the ideas themselves, creating such a connection between the most simple and insignificant things as to render them new objects of human sympathy. Thus we have in Milton's Comus: Wrapped in a pleasing fit of melancholy, But it is -Imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, and presents them to the poet, until his pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Imagination is a quality of the mind by which these images are evoked according to an invariable |