My reason for asking the reader to give so much of his time to the examination of the pathetic fallacy was, that, whether in literature or in art, he will find it eminently characteristic of the modern mind; and in the landscape, whether of literature or art, he will also find the modern painter endeavouring to express something which he, as a living creature imagines in the lifeless object, while the classical and mediaeval painters were content with expressing the unimaginary and actual qualities of the object itself.  It will be observed that, according to the principle stated long ago, I use the words painter and poet quite indifferently, including in our inquiry the landscape of literature, as well as that of painting; and this the more because the spirit of classical landscape has hardly been expressed in any other way than by words.

Taking, therefore, this wide field, it is surely a very notable circumstance, to begin with, that this pathetic fallacy is eminently characteristic of modern painting.  For instance, Keats, describing a wave breaking out at sea, says of it:—­

    Down whose green back the short-lived foam, all hoar,
    Bursts gradual, with a wayward indolence.[74]

That is quite perfect, as an example of the modern manner.  The idea of the peculiar action with which foam rolls down a long, large wave could not have been given by any other words so well as by this “wayward indolence.”  But Homer would never have written, never thought of, such words.  He could not by any possibility have lost sight of the great fact that the wave, from the beginning to the end of it, do what it might, was still nothing else than salt water; and that salt water could not be either wayward or indolent.  He will call the waves “over-roofed,” “full-charged,” “monstrous,” “compact-black,” “dark-clear,” “violet-coloured,” “wine-coloured,” and so on.  But every one of these epithets is descriptive of pure physical nature.  “Over-roofed” is the term he invariably uses of anything—­rock, house, or wave—­that nods over at the brow; the other terms need no explanation; they are as accurate and intense in truth as words can be, but they never show the slightest feeling of anything animated in the ocean.  Black or clear, monstrous or violet-coloured, cold salt water it is always, and nothing but that.

“Well, but the modern writer, by his admission of the tinge of fallacy, has given an idea of something in the action of the wave which Homer could not, and surely, therefore, has made a step in advance?  Also there appears to be a degree of sympathy and feeling in the one writer, which there is not in the other; and as it has been received for a first principle that writers are great in, proportion to the intensity of their feelings, and Homer seems to have no feelings about the sea but that it is black and deep, surely in this respect also the modern writer is the greater?”

Stay a moment.  Homer had some feeling about the sea; a faith in the animation of it much stronger than Keats’s.  But all this sense of something living in it, he separates in his mind into a great abstract image of a Sea Power.  He never says the waves rage, or the waves are idle.  But he says there is somewhat in, and greater than, the waves, which rages, and is idle, and that he calls a god.