Hearts of Controversy

								

example, suppose that Ibsen sat in a room surrounded by a repeating
pattern of his hair and whiskers on the wallpaper, but it makes us most
exceedingly mirthful and joyous to see him thus seated in Mr. Max
Beerbohm's drawing; and perhaps no girl ever went through life without
harbouring a thought of self, but it is very good for us all to know that
such a girl was thought of by Dickens, that he loved his thought, and
that she is ultimately to be traced, through Dickens, to God.
But exaggeration establishes no good understanding between the reader and
the author.  It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and we are right to
resent it.  It is the violence of a weakling hand--the worst manner of
violence.  Exaggeration is conspicuous in the newer poetry, and is so
far, therefore, successful, conspicuousness being its aim.  But it was
also the vice of Swinburne, and was the bad example he set to the
generation that thought his tunings to be the finest "music."  For
instance, in an early poem he intends to tell us how a man who loved a
woman welcomed the sentence that condemned him to drown with her, bound,
his impassioned breast against hers, abhorring.  He might have convinced
us of that welcome by one phrase of the profound exactitude of genius.
But he makes his man cry out for the greatest bliss and the greatest
imaginable glory to be bestowed upon the judge who pronounces the
sentence.  And this is merely exaggeration.  One takes pleasure in
rebuking the false ecstasy by a word thus prim and prosaic.  The poet
intended to impose upon us, and he fails; we "withdraw our attention," as
Dr. Johnson did when the conversation became foolish.  In truth we do
more, for we resent exaggeration if we care for our English language.  For
exaggeration writes relaxed, and not elastic, words and verses; and it is
possible that the language suffers something, at least temporarily--during
the life of a couple of generations, let us say--from the loss of
elasticity and rebound brought about by such strain.  Moreover,
exaggeration has always to outdo itself progressively.  There should have
been a Durdles to tell this Swinburne that the habit of exaggerating,
like that of boasting, "grows upon you."
It may be added that later poetry shows us an instance of exaggeration in
the work of that major poet, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie.  His violence and
vehemence, his extremity, are generally signs not of weakness but of
power; and yet once he reaches a breaking-point that power should never
know.  This is where his Judith holds herself to be so smirched and
degraded by the proffer of a reverent love (she being devoted to one
only, a dead man who had her heart) that thenceforth no bar is left to
her entire self-sacrifice to the loathed enemy Holofernes.  To this, too,
the prim rebuke is the just one, a word for the mouth of governesses: "My
dear, you exaggerate."
It may be briefly said that exaggeration takes for granted some degree of