It is not to be imagined that any hard Southern mind could ever have
played in poetry with such a fancy; or that Petrarch, for example, could
so have foregone the manifestation of intelligence and intelligible
sentiment. And as to Dante, who put the two eternities into the
momentary balance of the human will, cold would be his disregard of this
northern dream of innocence. If the mad maid was an alien upon earth,
what were she in the Inferno? What word can express her strangeness
there, her vagrancy there? And with what eyes would they see this dewy
face glancing in at the windows of that City?




PATHOS


A fugitive writer wrote not long ago on the fugitive page of a magazine:
"For our part, the drunken tinker [Christopher Sly] is the most real
personage of the piece, and not without some hints of the pathos that is
worked out more fully, though by different ways, in Bottom and Malvolio."
Has it indeed come to this? Have the Zeitgeist and the Weltschmerz or
their yet later equivalents, compared with which "le spleen" of the
French Byronic age was gay, done so much for us? Is there to be no
laughter left in literature free from the preoccupation of a sham real-
life? So it would seem. Even what the great master has not shown us in
his work, that your critic convinced of pathos is resolved to see in it.
By the penetration of his intrusive sympathy he will come at it. It is
of little use now to explain Snug the joiner to the audience: why, it is
precisely Snug who stirs their emotions so painfully. Not the lion; they