It is an important question.  For, throughout our past reasonings about art, we have always found that nothing could be good or useful, or ultimately pleasurable, which was untrue.  But here is something pleasurable in written poetry which is nevertheless untrue.  And what is more, if we think over our favourite poetry, we shall find it full of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it all the more for being so.

It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this fallacy is of two principal kinds.  Either, as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed; or else it is a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational.  Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the other error, that which the mind admits when affected strongly by emotion.  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.  Here, however, there is some beauty, even in the morbid passage; but take an instance in Homer and Pope.  Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his youngest follower, has fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace, and has been left dead, unmissed by his leader or companions, in the haste of their departure.  They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses summons the shades from Tartarus.  The first which appears is that of the lost Elpenor.  Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter and terrified lightness which is seen in Hamlet,[58] addresses the spirit with the simple, startled words:—­