Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more
offensively, Wieland has done; instead of degrading and deforming
passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of
concupiscence, Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse
itself so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the
reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful,
now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery;
or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent
witty or profound reflections which the poet's ever active mind has
deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The
reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely
passive of our nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened
be brooded on by mean and instinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can
creep upon the surface of a lake while a strong gale is driving it
onward in waves and billows.
3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though
faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words,
do not of themselves characterize the poet.
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