Chapter 11

The plant and flower oflight,

says Ben Jonson; and poetry then shows us the beauty of the flower in all its mystery and splendour.

If it be asked, how we know perceptions like these to be true, the answer is, by the fact of their existence—by the consent and delight of poetic readers. And as feeling is the earliest teacher, and perception the only final proof, of things the most demonstrable by science, so the remotest imaginations of the poets may often be found to have the closest connexion with matter of fact; perhaps might always be so, if the subtlety of our perceptions were a match for the causes of them. Consider this image of Ben Jonson’s—of a lily being the flower of light. Light, undecomposed, is white; and as the lily is white, and light is white, and whiteness itself is nothingbutlight, the two things, so far, are not merely similar, but identical. A poet might add, by an analogy drawn from the connexion of light and colour, that there is a ‘golden dawn’ issuing out of the white lily, in the rich yellow of the stamens. I have no desire to push this similarity farther than it may be worth. Enough has been stated to show that, in poetical as in other analogies, ‘the same feet of Nature’, as Bacon says, may be seen ‘treading in different paths’; and that the most scornful, that is to say, dullest disciple of fact, should be cautious how he betrays the shallowness of his philosophy by discerning no poetry in its depths.

But the poet is far from dealing only with these subtle and analogical truths. Truth of every kind belongs to him, provided it can bud into any kind of beauty, or is capable of being illustrated and impressed by the poetic faculty. Nay, the simplest truth is often so beautiful and impressive of itself, that one of the greatest proofs of his genius consists in his leaving it to stand alone, illustrated bynothing but the light of its own tears or smiles, its own wonder, might, or playfulness. Hence the complete effect of many a simple passage in our old English ballads and romances, and of the passionate sincerity in general of the greatest early poets, such as Homer and Chaucer, who flourished before the existence of a ‘literary world’, and were not perplexed by a heap of notions and opinions, or by doubts how emotion ought to be expressed. The greatest of their successors never write equally to the purpose, except when they can dismiss everything from their minds but the like simple truth. In the beautiful poem ofSir Eger, Sir Graham and Sir Gray-Steel(see it in Ellis’sSpecimens, or Laing’sEarly Metrical Tales), a knight thinks himself disgraced in the eyes of his mistress:—

Sir Eger said, ‘If it be so,Then wot I well I must forgoLove-liking, and manhood, all clean!’The water rush’d out of his een!

Sir Gray-Steel is killed:

Gray-Steel into his death thus thraws[26]Hewalters[27]and the grass up draws;*******A little while then lay he still(Friends that him saw, liked full ill)And bled into his armour bright.

Gray-Steel into his death thus thraws[26]Hewalters[27]and the grass up draws;

*******

A little while then lay he still(Friends that him saw, liked full ill)And bled into his armour bright.

The abode of Chaucer’sReeve, or Steward, in theCanterbury Tales, is painted in two lines, which nobody ever wished longer:

His wonning[28]was full fair upon an heath,With greeny trees yshadowed was his place.

Every one knows the words of Lear, ‘mostmatter-of-fact, most melancholy.’

Pray, do not mock me;I am a very foolish fond old man,Fourscore and upwards:Not an hour more, nor less; and, to deal plainlyI fear I am not in my perfect mind.

It is thus, by exquisite pertinence, melody, and the implied power of writing with exuberance, if need be, that beauty and truth become identical in poetry, and that pleasure, or at the very worst, a balm in our tears, is drawn out of pain.

It is a great and rare thing, and shows a lovely imagination, when the poet can write a commentary, as it were, of his own, on such sufficing passages of nature, and be thanked for the addition. There is an instance of this kind in Warner, an old Elizabethan poet, than which I know nothing sweeter in the world. He is speaking of Fair Rosamond, and of a blow given her by Queen Eleanor.

With that she dash’d her on the lips,So dyèd double red:Hard was the heart that gave the blow,Soft were those lips that bled.

There are different kinds and degrees of imagination, some of them necessary to the formation of every true poet, and all of them possessed by the greatest. Perhaps they may be enumerated as follows:—First, that which presents to the mind any object or circumstance in every-day life; as when we imagine a man holding a sword, or looking out of a window;—Second, that which presents real, but not every-day circumstances; as KingAlfred tending the loaves, or Sir Philip Sidney giving up the water to the dying soldier;—Third, that which combines character and events directly imitated from real life, with imitative realities of its own invention; as the probable parts of the histories of Priam andMacbeth, or what may be called natural fiction as distinguished from supernatural;—Fourth, that which conjures up things and events not to be found in nature; as Homer’s gods, and Shakespeare’s witches, enchanted horses and spears, Ariosto’s hippogriff, &c.;—Fifth, that which, in order to illustrate or aggravate one image, introduces another; sometimes in simile, as when Homer compares Apollo descending in his wrath at noon-day to the coming of night-time: sometimes in metaphor, or simile comprised in a word, as in Milton’s ‘motes thatpeoplethe sunbeams’; sometimes in concentrating into a word the main history of any person or thing, past or even future, as in the ‘starry Galileo’ of Byron, and that ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet ‘murdered’ applied to the yet living victim in Keats’s story from Boccaccio,—

So the two brothers and theirmurder’dmanRode towards fair Florence;—

sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality which makes one circumstance stand for others; as in Milton’s grey-fly winding its ‘sultryhorn’, which epithet contains the heat of a summer’s day;—Sixth, that which reverses this process, and makes a variety of circumstances take colour from one, like nature seen with jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm or sunshine; as when inLycidas, or the Greekpastoral poets, the flowers and the flocks are made to sympathize with a man’s death; or, in the Italian poet, the river flowing by the sleeping Angelica seems talking of love—

Parea che l’erba le fiorisse intorno,E d’amor ragionasse quella riva!Orlando Innamorato, Canto iii.

or in the voluptuous homage paid to the sleeping Imogen by the very light in the chamber, and the reaction of her own beauty upon itself; or in the ‘witch element’ of the tragedy ofMacbethand the May-day night ofFaust;—Seventh, and last, that which by a single expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but surpasses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular description; as in that exquisite passage of Coleridge’sChristabel, where the unsuspecting object of the witch’s malignity is bidden to go to bed:

Quoth Christabel, So let it be!And as the lady bade, did she.Her gentle limbs did she undress,And lay down in her loveliness;—

a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. The very smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the letterl’s.

I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing that most lovely inclusion of physical beauty in moral, neither can I call to mind any instances of the imagination that turns accompaniments into accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. Of the class of comparison, one of the most touching (many a tear must it have drawn from parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has been copied intotheFriar of Orders Grey, out of Beaumont and Fletcher:

Weep no more, lady, weep no more,Thy sorrow is in vain;For violets pluck’d the sweetest showersWill ne’er make grow again.

And Shakespeare and Milton abound in the very grandest; such as Antony’s likening his changing fortunes to the cloud-rack; Lear’s appeal to the old age of the heavens; Satan’s appearance in the horizon, like a fleet ‘hanging in the clouds’; and the comparisons of him with the comet and the eclipse. Nor unworthy of this glorious company, for its extraordinary combination of delicacy and vastness, is that enchanting one of Shelley’s in theAdonais:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,Stains the white radiance of eternity.

I multiply these particulars in order to impress upon the reader’s mind the great importance of imagination in all its phases, as a constituent part of the highest poetic faculty.

The happiest instance I remember of imaginative metaphor, is Shakespeare’s moonlight ‘sleeping’ on a bank; but half his poetry may be said to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common coin of discourse. Of imaginary creatures, none out of the pale of mythology and the East are equal, perhaps, in point of invention, to Shakespeare’s Ariel and Caliban; though poetry may grudge to prose the discovery of a Winged Woman, especially such as she has been described by her inventor in the story ofPeter Wilkins; and in point of treatment, the Mammon and Jealousy ofSpenser, some of the monsters in Dante, particularly his Nimrod, his interchangements of creatures into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous in anticipating what I think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge’sChristabel, may rank even with the creations of Shakespeare. It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare had bile and nightmare enough in him to have thought of such detestable horrors as those of the interchanging adversaries (now serpent, now man), or even of the huge, half-blockish enormity of Nimrod,—in Scripture, the ‘mighty hunter’ and builder of the tower of Babel,—in Dante, a tower of a man in his own person, standing with some of his brother giants up to the middle in a pit in hell, blowing a horn to which a thunderclap is a whisper, and hallooing after Dante and his guide in the jargon of a lost tongue! The transformations are too odious to quote: but of the towering giant we cannot refuse ourselves the ‘fearful joy’ of a specimen. It was twilight, Dante tells us, and he and his guide Virgil were silently pacing through one of the dreariest regions of hell, when the sound of a tremendous horn made him turn all his attention to the spot from which it came. He there discovered through the dusk, what seemed to be the towers of a city. Those are no towers, said his guide; they are giants, standing up to the middle in one of these circular pits.

I look’d again; and as the eye makes out,By little and little, what the mist conceal’dIn which, till clearing up, the sky was steep’d;So, looming through the gross and darksome air,As we drew nigh, those mighty bulks grew plain,And error quitted me, and terror join’d:For in like manner as all round its heightMontereggione crowns itself with towers,So tower’d above the circuit of that pit,Though but half out of it, and half within,The horrible giants that fought Jove, and stillAre threaten’d when he thunders. As we near’dThe foremost, I discern’d his mighty face,His shoulders, breast, and more than half his trunk,With both the arms down hanging by the sides.His face appear’d to me, in length and breadth,Huge as St. Peter’s pinnacle at Rome,And of a like proportion all his bones.He open’d, as we went, his dreadful mouth,Fit for no sweeter psalmody; and shoutedAfter us, in the words of some strange tongue,Ràfel ma-èe amech zabèe almee!—‘Dull wretch!’ my leader cried, ‘keep to thine horn,And so vent better whatsoever rageOr other passion stuff thee. Feel thy throatAnd find the chain upon thee, thou confusion!Lo! what a hoop is clench’d about thy gorge.’Then turning to myself, he said, ‘His howlIs its own mockery. This is Nimrod, heThrough whose ill thought it was that humankindWere tongue-confounded. Pass him, and say nought:For as he speaketh language known of none,So none can speak save jargon to himself.’Inferno, Canto xxxi, ver. 34.

Assuredly it could not have been easy to find a fiction so uncouthly terrible as this in the hypochondria of Hamlet. Even his father had evidently seen no such ghost in the other world. All his phantoms were in the world he had left. Timon, Lear, Richard, Brutus, Prospero, Macbeth himself, none of Shakespeare’s men had, in fact, any thought but of the earth they lived on, whatever supernatural fancy crossed them. The thing fancied was still a thing of this world, ‘in its habit as it lived,’ or no remoter acquaintance than a witch or a fairy. Its lowest depths (unless Dante suggested them) were the cellars under the stage. Caliban himselfis a cross-breed between a witch and a clown. No offence to Shakespeare; who was not bound to be the greatest of healthy poets, and to have every morbid inspiration besides. What he might have done, had he set his wits to compete with Dante, I know not: all I know is, that in the infernal line he did nothing like him; and it is not to be wished he had. It is far better that, as a higher, more universal, and more beneficent variety of the genus Poet, he should have been the happier man he was, and left us the plump cheeks on his monument, instead of the carking visage of the great, but over-serious, and comparatively one-sided Florentine. Even the imagination of Spenser, whom we take to have been a ‘nervous gentleman’ compared with Shakespeare, was visited with no such dreams as Dante. Or, if it was, he did not choose to make himself thinner (as Dante sayshedid) with dwelling upon them. He had twenty visions of nymphs and bowers, to one of the mud of Tartarus. Chaucer, for all he was ‘a man of this world’ as well as the poets’ world, and as great, perhaps a greater enemy of oppression than Dante, besides being one of the profoundest masters of pathos that ever lived, had not the heart to conclude the story of the famished father and his children, as finished by the inexorable anti-Pisan. But enough of Dante in this place. Hobbes, in order to daunt the reader from objecting to his friend Davenant’s want of invention, says of these fabulous creations in general, in his letter prefixed to the poem ofGondibert, that ‘impenetrable armours, enchanted castles, invulnerable bodies, iron men, flying horses, and a thousand other such things, are easily feigned by them that dare’. These are girds at Spenserand Ariosto. But, with leave of Hobbes (who translated Homer as if on purpose to show what execrable verses could be written by a philosopher), enchanted castles and flying horses are not easily feigned as Ariosto and Spenser feigned them; and that just makes all the difference. For proof, see the accounts of Spenser’s enchanted castle in Book the Third, Canto Twelfth, of theFaerie Queene; and let the reader of Italian open theOrlando Furiosoat its first introduction of the Hippogriff (Canto iii, st. 4), where Bradamante, coming to an inn, hears a great noise, and sees all the people looking up at something in the air; upon which, looking up herself, she sees a knight in shining armour riding towards the sunset upon a creature with variegated wings, and then dipping and disappearing among the hills. Chaucer’s steed of brass, that was

So horsly and so quick of eye,

is copied from the life. You might pat him and feel his brazen muscles. Hobbes, in objecting to what he thought childish, made a childish mistake. His criticism is just such as a boy might pique himself upon, who was educated on mechanical principles, and thought he had outgrown his Goody Two-shoes. With a wonderful dimness of discernment in poetic matters, considering his acuteness in others, he fancies he has settled the question by pronouncing such creations ‘impossible’! To the brazier they are impossible, no doubt; but not to the poet. Their possibility, if the poet wills it, is to be conceded; the problem is, the creature being given, how to square its actions with probability, according to the nature assumed of it.Hobbes did not see, that the skill and beauty of these fictions lay in bringing them within those very regions of truth and likelihood in which he thought they could not exist. Hence the serpent Python of Chaucer,

Sleeping against the sun upon a day,

when Apollo slew him. Hence the chariot-drawing dolphins of Spenser, softly swimming along the shore lest they should hurt themselves against the stones and gravel. Hence Shakespeare’s Ariel, living under blossoms, and riding at evening on the bat; and his domestic namesake in theRape of the Lock(the imagination of the drawing-room) saving a lady’s petticoat from the coffee with his plumes, and directing atoms of snuff into a coxcomb’s nose. In theOrlando Furioso(Canto xv, st. 65) is a wild story of a cannibal necromancer, who laughs at being cut to pieces, coming together again like quicksilver, and picking up his head when it is cut off, sometimes by the hair, sometimes by the nose! This, which would be purely childish and ridiculous in the hands of an inferior poet, becomes interesting, nay grand, in Ariosto’s, from the beauties of his style, and its conditional truth to nature. The monster has a fated hair on his head,—a single hair,—which must be taken from it before he can be killed. Decapitation itself is of no consequence, without that proviso. The Paladin Astolfo, who has fought this phenomenon on horseback, and succeeded in getting the head and galloping off with it, is therefore still at a loss what to be at. How is he to discover such a needle in such a bottle of hay? The trunk is spurring after him to recover it, and he seeks for some evidence of the hairin vain. At length he bethinks him of scalping the head. He does so; and the moment the operation arrives at the place of the hair,the face of the head becomes pale, the eyes turn in their sockets, and the lifeless pursuer tumbles from his horse.

Then grew the visage pale, and deadly wet;The eyes turn’d in their sockets, drearily;And all things show’d the villain’s sun was set.His trunk that was in chase, fell from its horse,And giving the last shudder, was a corse.

It is thus, and thus only, by making Nature his companion wherever he goes, even in the most supernatural region, that the poet, in the words of a very instructive phrase, takes the world along with him. It is true, he must not (as the Platonists would say) humanize weakly or mistakenly in that region; otherwise he runs the chance of forgetting to be true to the supernatural itself, and so betraying a want of imagination from that quarter. His nymphs will have no taste of their woods and waters; his gods and goddesses be only so many fair or frowning ladies and gentlemen, such as we see in ordinary paintings; he will be in no danger of having his angels likened to a sort of wild-fowl, as Rembrandt has made them in his Jacob’s Dream. His Bacchuses will never remind us, like Titian’s, of the force and fury, as well as of the graces, of wine. His Jupiter will reduce no females to ashes; his fairies be nothing fantastical; his gnomes not ‘of the earth, earthy’. And this again will be wanting to Nature; for it will be wanting to the supernatural, as Nature would have made it, working in a supernatural direction. Nevertheless, the poet, even for imagination’s sake, must not become a bigot to imaginative truth,dragging it down into the region of the mechanical and the limited, and losing sight of its paramount privilege, which is to make beauty, in a human sense, the lady and queen of the universe. He would gain nothing by making his ocean-nymphs mere fishy creatures, upon the plea that such only could live in the water: his wood-nymphs with faces of knotted oak; his angels without breath and song, because no lungs could exist between the earth’s atmosphere and the empyrean. The Grecian tendency in this respect is safer than the Gothic; nay, more imaginative; for it enables us to imaginebeyondimagination, and to bring all things healthily round to their only present final ground of sympathy,—the human. When we go to heaven, we may idealize in a superhuman mode, and have altogether different notions of the beautiful; but till then we must be content with the loveliest capabilities of earth. The sea-nymphs of Greece were still beautiful women, though they lived in the water. The gills and fins of the ocean’s natural inhabitants were confined to their lowest semi-human attendants; or if Triton himself was not quite human, it was because be represented the fiercer part of the vitality of the seas, as they did the fairer.

To conclude this part of my subject, I will quote from the greatest of all narrative writers two passages;—one exemplifying the imagination which brings supernatural things to bear on earthly, without confounding them; the other, that which paints events and circumstances after real life. The first is where Achilles, who has long absented himself from the conflict between his countrymen and the Trojans, has had a message from heavenbidding him reappear in the enemy’s sight, standing outside the camp-wall upon the trench, but doing nothing more; that is to say, taking no part in the fight. He is simply to be seen. The two armies down by the sea-side are contending which shall possess the body of Patroclus; and the mere sight of the dreadful Grecian chief—supernaturally indeed impressed upon them, in order that nothing may be wanting to the full effect of his courage and conduct upon courageous men—is to determine the question. We are to imagine a slope of ground towards the sea, in order to elevate the trench; the camp is solitary; the battle (‘a dreadful roar of men,’ as Homer calls it) is raging on the sea-shore; and the goddess Iris has just delivered her message, and disappeared.

But up Achilles rose, the lov’d of heaven;And Pallas on his mighty shoulders castThe shield of Jove; and round about his headShe put the glory of a golden mist,From which there burnt a fiery-flaming light.And as, when smoke goes heavenward from a town,In some far island which its foes besiege,Who all day long with dreadful martialnessHave pour’d from their own town; soon as the sunHas set, thick lifted fires are visible,Which, rushing upward, make a light in the sky,And let the neighbours know, who may perhapsBring help across the sea; so from the headOf great Achilles went up an effulgence.Upon the trench he stood, without the wall,But mix’d not with the Greeks, for he rever’dHis mother’s word; and so, thus standing there,He shouted; and Minerva, to his shout,Added a dreadful cry; and there aroseAmong the Trojans an unspeakable tumult.And as the clear voice of a trumpet, blownAgainst a town by spirit-withering foes,So sprang the clear voice of Aeacides.And when they heard the brazen cry, their heartsAll leap’d within them; and the proud-maned horsesRan with the chariots round, for they foresawCalamity; and the charioteers were smitten,When they beheld the ever-active fireUpon the dreadful head of the great-minded oneBurning; for bright-eyed Pallas made it burn.Thrice o’er the trench divine Achilles shouted;And thrice the Trojans and their great alliesRoll’d back; and twelve of all their noblest menThen perish’d, crush’d by their own arms and chariots.Iliad, xviii. 203.

Upon the trench he stood, without the wall,But mix’d not with the Greeks, for he rever’dHis mother’s word; and so, thus standing there,He shouted; and Minerva, to his shout,Added a dreadful cry; and there aroseAmong the Trojans an unspeakable tumult.And as the clear voice of a trumpet, blownAgainst a town by spirit-withering foes,So sprang the clear voice of Aeacides.And when they heard the brazen cry, their heartsAll leap’d within them; and the proud-maned horsesRan with the chariots round, for they foresawCalamity; and the charioteers were smitten,When they beheld the ever-active fireUpon the dreadful head of the great-minded oneBurning; for bright-eyed Pallas made it burn.Thrice o’er the trench divine Achilles shouted;And thrice the Trojans and their great alliesRoll’d back; and twelve of all their noblest menThen perish’d, crush’d by their own arms and chariots.Iliad, xviii. 203.

Of course there is no further question about the body of Patroclus. It is drawn out of the press, and received by the awful hero with tears.

The other passage is where Priam, kneeling before Achilles, and imploring him to give up the dead body of Hector, reminds him of his own father; who, whatever (says the poor old king) may be his troubles with his enemies, has the blessing of knowing that his son is still alive, and may daily hope to see him return. Achilles, in accordance with the strength and noble honesty of the passions in those times, weeps aloud himself at this appeal, feeling, says Homer, ‘desire’ for his father in his very ‘limbs’. He joins in grief with the venerable sufferer, and can no longer withstand the look of ‘his grey head and his greychin’. Observe the exquisite introduction of this last word. It paints the touching fact of the chin’s being imploringly thrown upward by the kneeling old man, and the very motion of his beard as he speaks.

So saying, Mercury vanished up to heaven:And Priam then alighted from his chariot,Leaving Idaeus with it, who remain’dHolding the mules and horses; and the old manWent straight indoors, where the belov’d of JoveAchilles sat, and found him. In the roomWere others, but apart; and two alone,The hero Automedon, and Alcimus,A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had beenAt meals, and had not yet remov’d the board.Great Priam came, without their seeing him,And kneeling down, he clasp’d Achilles’ knees,And kiss’d those terrible, homicidal hands,Which had deprived him of so many sons.And as a man who is press’d heavilyFor having slain another, flies awayTo foreign lands, and comes into the houseOf some great man, and is beheld with wonder,So did Achilles wonder to see Priam;And the rest wonder’d, looking at each other.But Priam, praying to him, spoke these words:—‘God-like Achilles, think of thine own father!To the same age have we both come, the sameWeak pass; and though the neighbouring chiefs may vexHim also, and his borders find no help,Yet when he hears that thou art still alive,He gladdens inwardly, and daily hopesTo see his dear son coming back from Troy.But I, bereav’d old Priam! I had onceBrave sons in Troy, and now I cannot sayThat one is left me. Fifty children had I,When the Greeks came; nineteen were of one womb;The rest my women bore me in my house.The knees of many of these fierce Mars has loosen’d;And he who had no peer, Troy’s prop and theirs,Him hast thou kill’d now, fighting for his country,Hector; and for his sake am I come hereTo ransom him, bringing a countless ransom.But thou, Achilles, fear the gods, and thinkOf thine own father, and have mercy on me:For I am much more wretched, and have borneWhat never mortal bore, I think on earth,To lift unto my lips the hand of himWho slew my boys.’He ceased; and there aroseSharp longing in Achilles for his father;And taking Priam by the hand, he gentlyPut him away; for both shed tears to thinkOf other times; the one most bitter onesFor Hector, and with wilful wretchednessLay right before Achilles: and the other,For his own father now, and now his friend;And the whole house might hear them as they moan’d.But when divine Achilles had refresh’dHis soul with tears, and sharp desire had leftHis heart and limbs, he got up from his throne,And rais’d the old man by the hand, and tookPity on his grey head and his grey chin.Iliad, xxiv. 468.

He ceased; and there aroseSharp longing in Achilles for his father;And taking Priam by the hand, he gentlyPut him away; for both shed tears to thinkOf other times; the one most bitter onesFor Hector, and with wilful wretchednessLay right before Achilles: and the other,For his own father now, and now his friend;And the whole house might hear them as they moan’d.But when divine Achilles had refresh’dHis soul with tears, and sharp desire had leftHis heart and limbs, he got up from his throne,And rais’d the old man by the hand, and tookPity on his grey head and his grey chin.Iliad, xxiv. 468.

O lovely and immortal privilege of genius! that can stretch its hand out of the wastes of time, thousands of years back, and touch our eyelids with tears. In these passages there is not a word which a man of the most matter-of-fact understanding might not have written,if he had thought of it. But in poetry, feeling and imagination are necessary to the perception and presentation even of matters of fact. They, and they only, see what is proper to be told, and what to be kept back; what is pertinent, affecting, and essential. Without feeling, there is a want of delicacy and distinction; without imagination, there is no true embodiment. In poets, even good of their kind, but without a genius for narration, the action would have been encumbered or diverted with ingenious mistakes. The over-contemplative would have given us too many remarks; the over-lyrical, a style too much carried away; the over-fanciful, conceits and too many similes; the unimaginative, the facts without the feeling, and not even those. We should have been told nothing of the ‘grey chin’, of the house hearing them as they moaned, or of Achilles gently putting the old man aside;much less of that yearning for his father, which made the hero tremble in every limb. Writers without the greatest passion and power do not feel in this way, nor are capable of expressing the feeling; though there is enough sensibility and imagination all over the world to enable mankind to be moved by it, when the poet strikes his truth into their hearts.

The reverse of imagination is exhibited in pure absence of ideas, in commonplaces, and, above all, in conventional metaphor, or such images and their phraseology as have become the common property of discourse and writing. Addison’sCatois full of them.

Passion unpitied and successless lovePlant daggers in my breast.I’ve sounded my Numidians, man by man,And find themripe for a revolt.The virtuous Marciatowers above her sex.

Passion unpitied and successless lovePlant daggers in my breast.

I’ve sounded my Numidians, man by man,And find themripe for a revolt.

The virtuous Marciatowers above her sex.

Of the same kind is his ‘courting the yoke’—‘distracting my very heart’—‘calling up all’ one’s ‘father’ in one’s soul—‘working every nerve’—‘copying a bright example’; in short, the whole play, relieved now and then with a smart sentence or turn of words. The following is a pregnant example of plagiarism and weak writing. It is from another tragedy of Addison’s time—theMariamneof Fenton:

Mariamne,with superior charms,Triumphs o’er reason: in her look shebearsA paradise of ever-blooming sweets;Fair as the first idea beautyprintsIn the young lover’s soul; a winning graceGuides every gesture, and obsequious loveAttendson all her steps.

‘Triumphing o’er reason’ is an old acquaintance of everybody’s. ‘Paradise in her look’ is from the Italian poets through Dryden. ‘Fair as the first idea’, &c., is from Milton, spoilt;—‘winning grace’ and ‘steps’ from Milton and Tibullus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt: just as when a great writer borrows, he improves.

To come now to Fancy,—she is a younger sister of Imagination, without the other’s weight of thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, purely so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the subtlest and most affecting analogies; the perception of sympathies in the natures of things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is a sporting with their resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and fantastical creations.

—Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton CupidShall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,And, like a dew-drop from the lion’s mane,Be shook to air.Troilus and Cressida, Act iii, sc. 3.

That is imagination;—the strong mind sympathizing with the strong beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dew-drop.

Oh!—and I forsoothIn love! I that have been love’s whip IA very beadle to a humorous sigh!—A domineering pedant o’er the boy,—This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, &c.Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act iii, sc. 1.

That is fancy;—a combination of images not in their nature connected, or brought together by thefeeling, but by the will and pleasure; and having just enough hold of analogy to betray it into the hands of its smiling subjector.

Silent iciclesQuietly shining to the quiet moon.Coleridge’sFrost at Midnight.

That, again, is imagination;—analogical sympathy; and exquisite of its kind it is.

‘You are now sailedinto the north of my lady’s opinion; where you will hanglike an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard, unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.’Twelfth Night, Act iii, sc. 2.

‘You are now sailedinto the north of my lady’s opinion; where you will hanglike an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard, unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.’

Twelfth Night, Act iii, sc. 2.

And that is fancy;—one image capriciously suggested by another, and but half connected with the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to it; for in the gaiety of the speaker’s animal spirits, the ‘Dutchman’s beard’ is made to represent the lady!

Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the comic.Macbeth,Lear,Paradise Lost, the poem of Dante, are full of imagination: theMidsummer Night’s Dreamand theRape of the Lock, of fancy:Romeo and Juliet, theTempest, theFaerie Queene, and theOrlando Furioso, of both. The terms were formerly identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It presents too invariably the idea of a solid body;—of ‘images’ in the sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition (Φαντασμα, appearance,phantom), has rarely that freedom from visibility which is one of the highest privileges ofimagination. Viola, inTwelfth Night, speaking of some beautiful music, says:

It gives a very echo to the seatWhere Love is throned.

In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are combined; yet the fancy, the assumption of Love’s sitting on a throne, is the image of a solid body; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy between the passion of love and impassioned music, presents us no image at all. Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies of what is called Imagination.

One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy; and like Melancholy, as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe. Fancy turns her sister’s wizard instruments into toys. She takes a telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings to the images of wit; and delights as much to people nature with smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together, and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her company; always, in the case of the greatest poets; often in that of less, though with them she is the greater favourite. Spenser has great imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton bothalso, the very greatest, but with imagination predominant; Chaucer, the strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, and in comic painting inferior to none; Pope has hardly any imagination, but he has a great deal of fancy; Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakespeare alone, of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing [the Oberon-Titania scenes from theMidsummer-Night’s Dream] will be found in the present volume.[29]See also his famous description of Queen Mab and her equipage, inRomeo and Juliet:

Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs;The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers:Her traces of the smallest spider’s web;Her collars of the moonshine’s watery beams, &c.

That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace from Drayton’sNymphidia:

This palace standeth in the air,By necromancy placèd there,That it no tempest needs to fear,Which way soe’er it blow it:And somewhat southward tow’rd the noon,Whence lies a way up to the moon,And thence the fairy can as soonPass to the earth below it.The walls of spiders’ legs are made,Well morticèd and finely laid:He was the master of his tradeIt curiously that builded:The windows of the eyes of cats:

(because they see best at night)

And for the roof instead of slatsIs cover’d with the skins of bats,With moonshine that are gilded.

Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the same poet’sMuse’s Elysium:

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