Now what we have called absolute vision operates in a very different way. So vividly is the poet's mere creative instinct at work that the ego sinks into passivity—becomes insensitive to all impressions other than those dictated by the vision—by the "divinity" which has "seized the soul." Shakespeare is full of examples. Take the scene in the first act of Hamlet, where Hamlet hears for the first time, from Horatio, that his father's ghost haunts the castle. Having by short sharp questions elicited the salient facts attending the apparition, Hamlet says, "I would I had been there." To this Horatio makes the very common place reply, "It would have much amazed you." Note the mar vellously dramatic reply of Hamlet—"Very like, very like ! Stayed it long?" Suppose that this dialogue had been attempted by any other poet than a true dramatist, or by a true dramatist in any other mood than his very highest, Hamlet, on hearing Horatio's commonplace remarks upon phenomena which to Ham let were more subversive of the very order of the universe than if a dozen stars had fallen from their courses, would have burst out with : "Amazed me!" and then would have followed an elo quent declamation about the "amazing" nature of the phenomena and their effect upon him. But so entirely has the poet become Hamlet, so completely has "the divinity seized his soul," that all language seems equally weak for expressing the turbulence within the soul of the character, and Hamlet exclaims in a sort of meditative irony, "Very like, very like!" It is exactly this one man Hamlet, and no other man, who in this situation would have so expressed himself.
While all other forms of poetic art can be vitalized by rela tive vision, there are two forms (and these the greatest) in which absolute vision is demanded, viz., the drama, and in a lesser degree the Greek epic, especially the Iliad. This will be seen more plainly perhaps if we now vary our definitions and call relative vision egoistic imagination; absolute vision dramatic imagination.
The nature of this absolute vision or true dramatic imagination is easily seen if we compare the dramatic work of writers without absolute vision, such as Calderon, Goethe, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and others, with the dramatic work of Aeschylus and of Shakes peare. While of the former group it may be said that each poet skilfully works his imagination, of Aeschylus and Shakespeare it must be said that each in his highest dramatic mood does not work, but is worked by his imagination. Note, for instance, how the character of Clytaemnestra grows and glows under the hand of Aeschylus. The poet of the Odyssey had distinctly said that Aegisthus, her paramour, had struck the blow, but the dramatist having imagined the greatest tragic female in all poetry, finds it impossible to let a man like Aegisthus assist such a woman in a homicide so daring and so momentous. And when in that terrible speech of hers she justifies her crime (ostensibly to the outer world, but really to her own conscience), the way in which, by sheer magnetism of irresistible personality, she draws our sym pathy to herself and her crime is unrivalled out of Shakespeare and not surpassed even there.
right that we should hear, as we sometimes do hear, the voice of the poet himself as chorus bidding us contrast the present picture with other pictures afar off, in order to enforce its teaching and illustrate its pathos? This is a favourite method with modern poets and a still more favourite one with prose narrators. Does it not give an air of self-consciousness to poetry? Does it not dis turb the intensity of the poetic vision? Yet it has the sanction of Homer; and who shall dare to challenge the methods of the great father of epic? An instance occurs in Iliad v. 158, where, in the midst of all the stress of fight, the poet leaves the dramatic action to tell us what became of the inheritance of Phaenops, after his two sons had been slain by Diomedes. Another instance occurs in iii. 243-244, where the poet, after Helen's pathetic mention of her brothers, comments on the cause of their absence, "criticizes life" in the approved modern way, generalizes upon the impotence of human intelligence—the impotence even of human love—to pierce the darkness in which the web of human fate is woven. Thus she spoke (the poet tells us) ; but the life-giving earth al ready possessed them, there in Lacedaemon, in their dear native land :— This, of course, is "beautiful exceedingly," but, inasmuch as the imagination at work is egoistic or lyrical, not dramatic ; inasmuch as the vision is relative, not absolute, it does not represent that epic strength which we call specially "Homeric." The deepest of all the distinctions between dramatic and epic methods has relation, however, to the nature of the dialogue. Aristotle failed to point it out, and this is remarkable until we remember that his work is but a fragment of a great system of criticism. In epic poetry, and in all poetry that narrates, whether the poet be Homer, Chaucer, Thomas the Rhymer, Gottfried von Strassburg, or Turoldus, the action, of course, is moved partly by aid of narrative and partly by aid of dialogue, but in drama the dialogue has a quality of suggestiveness and subtle inference which we do not expect to find in any other poetic form save perhaps that of the purely dramatic ballad. In ancient drama this quality of suggestiveness and subtle inference is seen not only in the dialogue but in the choral odes. The third ode of the Agamemnon is an extreme case in point, where by a kind of double entendre the relations of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus are darkly alluded to under the cover of allusions to Paris and Helen. Of this dramatic subtlety Sophocles is perhaps the greatest master; and certain critics have been led to speak as though irony were the heart-thought of Sophoclean drama. But the suggestiveness of Sophocles is pathetic (as Professor Lewis Camp bell well pointed out), not ironical. This is one reason why drama more than epic seems to satisfy the mere intellect of the reader, though this may be counterbalanced by the hardness of mechani cal structure which sometimes disturbs the reader's imagination in tragedy.