e subject, his own chin,[49] suppose, for the organ of a new
music: he does not select it as being naturally allied to music, but
for the very opposite reason--as being eminently alien from music, that
his own art will have the greater triumph in taming this reluctancy into
any sort of obedience to a musical purpose. It is a wrestle with all but
physical impossibility. Many arts and mechanic processes in human life
present intermitting aspects of beauty, scattered amongst others that
are utterly without interest of that sort. For instance, in husbandry,
where many essential processes are too mean to allow of any poetic
treatment or transfiguration, others are picturesque, and recommended by
remembrances of childhood to most hearts. How beautiful, for instance,
taken in all its variety of circumstances, the gorgeous summer, the gay
noontide repast, the hiding of children in the hay, the little toy of a
rake in the hands of infancy, is the hay-harvest from first to last!
Such cases wear a Janus aspect, one face connecting them with gross uses
of necessity, another connecting them with the gay or tender sentiments
that accidents of association, or some purpose of Providence, may have
thrown about them as a robe of beauty. Selecting therefore what meets
his own purpose, the poet proceeds by _resisting_ and rejecting all
those parts of the subject which would tend to defeat it. But at least,
it will be said, he does not resist those parts of the subject which he
selects. Yes, he _does_; even those parts he resists utterly in their
real and primary character, viz., as uses indispensable to the machinery
of man's animal life; and adopts them only for a collateral beauty
attached to the accidents of their evolution; a beauty oftentimes not
even guessed by those who are most familiar with them as practical
operations. It is as if a man, having a learned eye, should follow the
track of armies--careless of the political changes which they created,
or of the interests (all neutral as regarded any opinion of _his_) which
they disturbed--but alive to every form of beauty connected with these
else unmeaning hostilities--alive to the beauty of their battle-array,
to the pomp of their manoeuvres, to the awning of smoke-wreaths
surging above the artilleries, to the gleaming of sabres and bayonets at
intervals through loopholes in these gathering smoky masses. This man
would abstract from the politics and doctrines of the hostile armies, as