PATHETIC FALLACIES.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 818, 16 May 1910, Page 5

PATHETIC FALLACIES.

i MOtJRNINC WEATHER. trarOEE'S MAJESTIC RITUAL. (By J.QX) It. must have been noticed by many besides myself that the weather during the last few days has been remarkably appropriate to the public sentiment. Last Saturday week, ,when we heard of the death of King Edward, the first result upon.our feelings was a sort of numbness. We did not know what to do, or say, or think. Wβ could not realise tho event, nor our own selves. And it was one of those dull gray afternoons —rare in this climate—neither fair nor foul, but heavy and meaningless, as if the very weather were stunned. The sky seemed like the face of one bereaved, in the dreadful hour before tho tears come. They came next day, Sunday; from morning to night, tho air was close, dim and dripping. On Monday it still rained, bnt the gusty winds suited the complaining stage of grief, which is the beginning of life's triumph over loss. On Tuesday—Proclamation Day—tho weather was still mournful. The flags were hoisted to masthead for a few hours, but loyal subjects could not rejoice to order. Yet the effort, like every effort to turn from regret to action, seemed to be not without reward. At the next noon came the first gleam of sunshine—dim, misty, and fleeting, but real sunshine. The future might yet have some good thing in store for the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and' the Dominions beyond the Seas.

But Thursday was the wonderful day. During a few precious hours, the sunshine and the soft translucent mist; the sky, where clouds that held no threat melted into the veiled blue; the beautiful and steadfast hills; the wide, still waters, bearing friendly reflections, and weaving their own colours with those of sky, cloud, and mist, into robes of a purple more delicate than lilac blooms—all these together were as the majestic ritual of such a grief as men might worthily desire to feel.

"Grief should bo like joy, majestic, equablo, sedate; Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free; Strong to consume small troubles; to commend Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thought* lasting to tho end."

That tho weather attends upon the fates of princes is a thought one does not willingly let go. Tho once-familiar phrase, "Queen's weather," expressed the popular notion that when King Edward's mother appeared in public the sun was. apt to shine. We do not—like our ancestors and Eomo even of our contemporary fellowsubjects—connect' eclipses and comets with human events, and we know well enough that when we think of clouds, winds, waves, and trees as tho orchestra and stage apparatus of the drama of history, we are but dallying with vain surmise. It is a popular form of; what Ituskin has called the "pathetic fallacy"—the falseness which feelings (real or fancied) produce in our impressions of external things. I cannot so much as summarise here that fine chapter of "Modern Painters" in which he makes it clear that the pathetic fallacy is noble or base according to tho measure of sincerity or justness in tho feeling which it comes from and expresses. "So long as wo see that the feeling is true we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces." In the caso of moiirniug weather, the fallacy, of course, is one of thought rather than' of sight. The sky is really as gray aa we see it, and when wo call it mournful, we arc indulging a fancy as to the cause of its grayness, or attributing to it a human feeling of which wo do not really suppose it capable. It may be that, after Ruskin, there is nothing more to be said about tho pathetic fallacy, but I should like to add to tho examples given by him two or three which suit tlio present occasion. I am aware that two of .my readers, and I suspect that many more, have frequently, during the last few days, had these splendid and solemn words running in their minds— "Earth could not answer; nor the Seas that mourn In flowing Purple, of their Lord forlorn." These are the first two lines of the thirty-third quatrain of Fitzgerald's Omar (fourth edition).' They come in the midst of the passage in which Omar bolls of his attempts to solve the problem of Whence and Whither, to unravel "the Master-knot of Human Fate." ■ No poetical contemplation, no scientific study, of nature could furnish him with the answer to the great question, aud when, thinking of the older,' simpler faith which he had lost, and feeling as one forsaken, he looked at tho sea, its blue waves seemed to take on. the colour of royal mourning, ns if. they also wero "of their Lord forlorn." 1 do not know a more magnificent instance of the pathetic fallacy. Turning to .Shelley's "Adonais," we are reminded that Nature may well be supposed to weep more for poets than ■ for monarchs. The poets aro, in a sort, her kings. "All he had loved and moulded into thought . . . lamented Adonais." .In another poem—"Tho Sensitive: Plant" —Shelley has left us a remarkablo exercise in the pathetic fallacy. In the mood of melancholy playfulness which pervades the whole composition, he tells the story of the garden in terms of natural cause and effect, and at the same time, though quite distinctly, in terms of imaginative cause and effect. The fallacy is confessed,, ■ but cherished. Spring, summer and careful tendance make the garden more and more beautiful; neglect, autumn, and winter make it foul and rank. Thoso aro the facts; and the poet has ■ conscientiously set them down. But the garden was not in charge of a mere' labourer, or merest expert, but "a Lady, tho wonder of her kind." . "I doubt not the flowers of that garden sweet Rejoiced in the sound of her gentle ■ feet; . I doubt not they felt the spirit that came From her glowing fingers through all their frame. "Tliis fairest creature from earliest spring Thus moved through the garden mime-

tering All the sweet season of summer tide, \nd ere the first leaf looked brown—she died!"

Tho flowers wept, sickened, and perished, and the garden became as a corpse. And when all is told the poet's conclusion is that he cannot say whether tho garden ever really felt delight and sadness. But, if one half of tho story was but a tissue of fancy, how much of all that seems so solid may not be equally insubstantial? And if things we lovo are unreal, why not" also things we fear? If Nature does but seem to mourn, may not death itself be merely, an illusion of our senses?.. And so the poet declares: "It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must.be,' Liko all the rest, a mockery."