The Imagination
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded.
_The Phœnix and the Turtle._
At least six distinct senses of the word ‘imagination’ are still
current in critical discussion. It is convenient to separate
them before passing on to consider the one which is most important.
(i) The production of vivid images, usually visual images,
already sufficiently discussed, is the commonest and the
least interesting thing which is referred to by imagination.
(ii) The use of figurative language is frequently all that is
meant. People who naturally employ metaphor and simile,
especially when it is of an unusual kind, are said to
have imagination. This may or may not be accompanied
by imagination in the other senses. It should not be
overlooked that metaphor and simile—the two may be
considered together—have a great variety of functions in
speech. A metaphor may be illustrative or diagrammatical,
providing a concrete instance of a relation which would
otherwise have to be stated in abstract terms. This is the
most common scientific or prose use of metaphor. It is
rare in emotive language and in poetry; Shelley’s “Dome
of many-coloured glass” is almost the only example which
springs to mind. More usually the elucidation is a mere
pretence; some attitude of the speaker to his subject
or to his audience is using the metaphor as a means of
expression. “The freedom of my writings has indeed provoked
an implacable tribe” said Gibbon, “but as I was safe from
the stings, I was soon accustomed to the buzzing of the
hornets”. But metaphor has yet further uses. It is the
supreme agent by which disparate and hitherto unconnected
things are brought together in poetry for the sake of the
effects upon attitude and impulse which spring from their
collocation and from the combinations which the mind then
establishes between them. There are few metaphors whose
effect, if carefully examined, can be traced to the logical
relations involved. Metaphor is a semi-surreptitious method
by which a greater variety of elements can be wrought
into the fabric of the experience. Not that there is any
virtue in variety by itself, though the list of critics who
seem to have thought so would be lengthy; a page of the
dictionary can show more variety than any page of poetry.
But what is needed for the wholeness of an experience is
not always naturally present, and metaphor supplies an
excuse by which what is needed may be smuggled in. This
is an instance of a very strange phenomenon constantly
appearing in the arts. What is most essential often seems
to be done as it were inadvertently, to be a by-product,
an accidental concomitant. Those who look only to the
ostensible purposes for the explanation of the effects, who
make prose analyses of poems, must inevitably find them
a mystery. But why overt and evident intention should so
often destroy the effect is certainly a difficult problem.
(iii) A narrower sense is that in which sympathetic reproducing
of other people’s states of mind, particularly their
emotional states, is what is meant. “You haven’t enough
imagination,” the dramatist says to the critic who
thinks that his persons behave unnaturally. This kind of
imagination is plainly a necessity for communication, and
is covered by what has already been said in Chapter XXIV.
It has no necessary connection with senses of imagination
which imply value. Bad plays to be successful require it as
much as good.
(iv) Inventiveness, the bringing together of elements which are
not ordinarily connected, is another sense. According to
this Edison is said to have possessed imagination, and any
fantastic romance will show it _in excelsis_. Although
this comes nearer to a sense in which value is implied, it
is still too general. The lunatic will beat any of us at
combining odd ideas: Dr Cook outstrips Peary, and Bottomley
outshines Sir John Bradbury.
(v) Next we have that kind of relevant connection of things
ordinarily thought of as disparate which is exemplified in
scientific imagination. This is an ordering of experience
in definite ways and for a definite end or purpose, not
necessarily deliberate and conscious, but limited to a
given field of phenomena. The _technical_ triumphs of the
arts are instances of this kind of imagination. As with
all ordering, value considerations are very likely to be
implied, but the value may be limited or conditional.
(vi) Finally we come to the sense of imagination with which we
are here most concerned. The original formulation[79] was
Coleridge’s greatest contribution to critical theory, and
except in the way of interpretation, it is hard to add
anything to what he has said, though, as we have already
noted in Chapter XXIV, some things might be taken away from
it with advantage.
“That synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively
appropriated the name of imagination . . . reveals itself
in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant
qualities . . . the sense of novelty and freshness, with
old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of
emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake
and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling
profound or vehement.” “The sense of musical delight . . .
with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect,
and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant
thought or feeling[80]” these are gifts of the imagination.
It was natural, we shall shortly see why, for Coleridge to
carry his further speculations upon Imagination into the
realms of Transcendentalism, but setting this aside, there
is enough in this description and in the many applications
and elucidations scattered through the _Biographia_ and
the _Lectures_ to justify Coleridge’s claim to have put
his finger more nearly than anyone else upon the essential
characteristic of poetic as of all valuable experience.
In describing the poet we laid stress upon the availability of
his experience, upon the width of the field of stimulation which
he can accept, and the completeness of the response which he
can make. Compared with him the ordinary man suppresses nine-tenths
of his impulses, because he is incapable of managing them without
confusion. He goes about in blinkers because what he would otherwise
see would upset him. But the poet through his superior power
of ordering experience is freed from this necessity. Impulses
which commonly interfere with one another and are conflicting,
independent, and mutually distractive, in him combine into a
stable poise. He selects, of course, but the range of suppression
which is necessary for him is diminished, and for this very reason
such suppressions as he makes are more rigorously carried out.
Hence the curious local callousness of the artist which so often
strikes the observer.
But these impulses active in the artist become mutually modified
and thereby ordered to an extent which only occurs in the ordinary
man at rare moments, under the shock of, for example, a great
bereavement or an undreamt-of happiness; at instants when the
“film of familiarity and selfish solicitude”, which commonly
hides nine-tenths of life from him, seems to be lifted and he
feels strangely alive and aware of the actuality of existence.
In these moments his myriad inhibitions are weakened; his responses,
canalised—to use an inappropriate metaphor—by routine and by
practical but restricted convenience, break loose and make up
a new order with one another; he feels as though everything were
beginning anew. But for most men after their early years such
experiences are infrequent; a time comes when they are incapable
of them unaided, and they receive them only through the arts.
For great art has this effect, and owes thereto its supreme place
in human life.
The poet makes unconsciously a selection which outwits the force
of habit; the impulses he awakens are freed, through the very
means by which they are aroused, from the inhibitions that ordinary
circumstances encourage; the irrelevant and the extraneous is
excluded; and upon the resulting simplified but widened field
of impulses he imposes an order which their greater plasticity
allows them to accept. Almost always too the chief part of his
work is done through those impulses which we have seen to be
most uniform and regular, those which are aroused by what are
called the ‘formal elements’. They are also the most primitive,
and for that reason commonly among those which are most inhibited,
most curtailed and subordinated to superimposed purposes. We
rarely let a colour affect us purely as a colour, we use it as
a sign by which we recognise some coloured object. Thus our responses
to colours in themselves become so abbreviated that many people
come to think that the pigments painters use are in some way
more colourful than Nature. What happens is that inhibitions
are released, and at the same time mutual interactions between
impulses take place which only sunsets seem to evoke in everyday
experience. We have seen in discussing communication one reason
for the pre-eminence of ‘formal elements’ in art, the uniformity
of the responses which they can be depended upon to produce.
In their primitiveness we find another. The sense that the accidental
and adventitious aspect of life has receded, that we are beginning
again, that our contact with actuality is increased, is largely
due to this restoration of their full natural powers to sensations.
But this restoration is not enough; merely looking at a landscape
in a mirror, or standing on one’s head will do it. What is much
more essential is the increased organisation, the heightened
power of combining all the several effects of formal elements
into a single response, which the poet bestows. To point out
that “the sense of musical delight is a gift of the imagination”
was’ one of Coleridge’s most brilliant feats. It is in such resolution
of a welter of disconnected impulses into a single ordered response
that in all the arts imagination is most shown, but for the reason
that here its operation is most intricate and most inaccessible
to observation, we shall study it more profitably in its other
manifestations.
We have suggested, but only by accident, that imagination
characteristically produces effects similar to those which accompany
great and sudden crises in experience. This would be misleading. What
is true is that those imaginative syntheses which most nearly approach
to these climaxes, Tragedy for example, are the most easy to analyse.
What clearer instance of the “balance or reconciliation of opposite and
discordant qualities” can be found than Tragedy. Pity, the impulse to
approach, and Terror, the impulse to retreat, are brought in Tragedy to
a reconciliation which they find nowhere else, and with them who knows
what other allied groups of equally discordant impulses. Their union
in an ordered single response is the _catharsis_ by which Tragedy is
recognised, whether Aristotle meant anything of this kind or not. This
is the explanation of that sense of release, of repose in the midst of
stress, of balance and composure, given by Tragedy, for there is no
other way in which such impulses, once awakened, can be set at rest
without suppression.
It is essential to recognise that in the full tragic experience
there is no suppression. The mind does not shy away from anything,
it does not protect itself with any illusion, it stands uncomforted,
unintimidated, alone and self-reliant. The test of its success
is whether it can face what is before it and respond to it without
any of the innumerable subterfuges by which it ordinarily dodges
the full development of experience. Suppressions and sublimations
alike are devices by which we endeavour to avoid issues which
might bewilder us. The essence of Tragedy is that it forces us
to live for a moment without them. When we succeed we find, as
usual, that there is no difficulty; the difficulty came from
the suppressions and sublimations. The joy which is so strangely
the heart of the experience is not an indication that ‘all’s
right with the world’ or that ‘somewhere, somehow, there is Justice’;
it is an indication that all is right here and now in the nervous
system. Because Tragedy is the experience which most invites
these subterfuges, it is the greatest and the rarest thing in
literature, for the vast majority of works which pass by that
name are of a different order. Tragedy is only possible to a
mind which is for the moment agnostic or Manichean. The least
touch of any theology which has a compensating Heaven to offer
the tragic hero is fatal. That is why _Romeo and Juliet_
is not a Tragedy in the sense in which _King Lear_ is.
But there is more in Tragedy than unmitigated experience. Besides
Terror there is Pity, and if there is substituted for either
something a little different—Horror or Dread, say, for Terror;
Regret or Shame for Pity; or that kind of Pity which yields the
adjective ‘Pitiable’ in place of that which yields ‘Piteous’—the
whole effect is altered. It is the relation between the two sets
of impulses, Pity and Terror, which gives its specific character
to Tragedy, and from that relation the peculiar poise of the
Tragic experience springs.
The metaphor of a balance or poise will bear consideration. For
Pity and Terror are opposites in a sense in which Pity and Dread
are not. Dread or Horror are nearer than Terror to Pity, for
they contain attraction as well as repulsion. As in colour, tones
just not in harmonic relation are peculiarly unmanageable and
jarring, so it is with these more easily describable responses.
The extraordinarily stable experience of Tragedy, which is capable
of admitting almost any other impulses so long as the relation
of the main components is exactly right, changes at once if these
are altered. Even if it keeps its coherence it becomes at once
a far narrower, more limited, and exclusive thing, a much more
partial, restricted and specialised response. Tragedy is perhaps
the most general, all-accepting, all-ordering experience known.
It can take anything into its organisation, modifying it so that
it finds a place. It is invulnerable; there is nothing which
does not present to the tragic attitude _when fully developed_
a fitting aspect and only a fitting aspect. Its sole rivals in
this respect are the attitudes of Falstaff and of the Voltaire
of _Candide_. But pseudo-tragedy—the greater part of Greek
Tragedy as well as almost all Elizabethan Tragedy outside Shakespeare’s
six masterpieces comes under this head—is one of the most fragile
and precarious of attitudes. Parody easily overthrows it, the
ironic addition paralyses it; even a mediocre joke may make it
look lopsided and extravagant.
This balanced poise, stable through its power of inclusion, not
through the force of its exclusions, is not peculiar to Tragedy.
It is a general characteristic of all the most valuable experiences
of the arts. It can be given by a carpet or a pot or by a gesture
as unmistakably as by the Parthenon, it may come about through
an epigram as clearly as through a Sonata. We must resist the
temptation to analyse its cause into sets of opposed characters
in the object. As a rule no such analysis can be made. The balance
is not in the structure of the stimulating object, it is in the
response. By remembering this we escape the danger of supposing
that we have found a formula for Beauty.
Although for most people these experiences are infrequent apart
from the arts, almost any occasion may give rise to them. The
most important general condition is mental health, a high state
of ‘vigilance’; the next is the frequent occurrence of such experiences
in the recent past. None of the effects of art is more transferable
than this balance or equilibrium.
Despite all differences in the impulses concerned, a certain
general similarity can be observed in all these cases of supremely
fine and complete organisation. It is this similarity which has
led to the legends of the ‘æsthetic state’, the ‘æsthetic emotion’
and the single quality Beauty, the same in all its manifestations.
We had occasion in Chapter II to suggest that the characteristics
by which æsthetic experience is usually defined—that impersonality,
disinterestedness and detachment so much stressed and so little
discussed by æstheticians—are really two sets of quite different
characters.
One set we have seen (Chapters X and XXIV) to be merely conditions
of communication having nothing essentially to do with value,
conditions involved in valueless and valuable communications
alike. We have suggested above, however, that this kind of detachment
and severance from ordinary circumstances and accidental personal
interests may be of special service in these supremely valuable[81]
communications, since it makes the breaking down of inhibitions
more easy. This same facilitation of response is also, it should
be added, the explanation of the peculiarly pernicious effect
of bad but competent art.
We may now turn to consider that other set of characters which have
been confused with these communicative conditions, and which may
justifiably be taken as defining a special field for those interested
in the values of experience. There are two ways in which impulses
may be organised; by exclusion and by inclusion, by synthesis and by
elimination. Although every coherent state of mind depends upon both,
it is permissible to contrast experiences which win stability and
order through a narrowing of the response with those which widen it.
A very great deal of poetry and art is content with the full, ordered
development of comparatively special and limited experiences, with
a definite emotion, for example, Sorrow, Joy, Pride, or a definite
attitude, Love, Indignation, Admiration, Hope, or with a specific mood,
Melancholy, Optimism or Longing. And such art has its own value and
its place in human affairs. No one will quarrel with ‘Break, break,
break,’ or with the _Coronach_ or with _Rose Aylmer_ or with _Love’s
Philosophy_,[82] although clearly they are limited and exclusive. But
they are not the greatest kind of poetry; we do not expect from them
what we find in the _Ode to the Nightingale_, in _Proud Maisie_, in
_Sir Patrick Spens_, in _The Definition of Love_ or in the _Nocturnall
upon S. Lucie’s Day_.
The structures of these two kinds of experiences are different,
and the difference is not one of subject but of the relations
_inter se_ of the several impulses active in the experience.
A poem of the first group is built out of sets of impulses which
run parallel, which have the same direction. In a poem of the
second group the most obvious feature is the extraordinarily
heterogeneity of the distinguishable impulses. But they are more
than heterogeneous, they are opposed. They are such that in ordinary,
non-poetic, non-imaginative experience, one or other set would
be suppressed to give as it might appear freer development to
the others.
The difference comes out clearly if we consider how comparatively
unstable poems of the first kind are. They will not bear an ironical
contemplation. We have only to read _The War Song of Dinas Vawr_ in
close conjunction with the _Coronach_, or to remember that unfortunate
phrase ‘Those lips, O slippery blisses’! from _Endymion_, while reading
_Love’s Philosophy_, to notice this. Irony in this sense consists in
the bringing in of the opposite, the complementary impulses; that is
why poetry which is exposed to it is not of the highest order, and why
irony itself is so constantly a characteristic of poetry which is.
These opposed impulses from the resolution of which such experiences
spring cannot usually be analysed. When, as is most often the
case, they are aroused through formal means, it is evidently
impossible to do so. But sometimes, as in the above cited cases,
they can, and through this accident literary criticism is able
to go a step further than the criticism of the other arts.
We can only conjecture dimly what difference holds between a
balance and reconciliation of impulses and a mere rivalry or
conflict. One difference is that a balance sustains one state
of mind, but a conflict two alternating states. This, however,
does not take us very far. The chief misconception which prevents
progress here is the switchboard view of the mind. What conception
should be put in its place is still doubtful, but we have already
(Chapters XIV and XX) discussed the reasons which make a more
adequate conception imperative. The rest of the difficulty is
due merely to ignorance; we do not yet know enough about the
central nervous system.
With this preliminary disavowal of undue certainty we may proceed.
The equilibrium[83] of opposed impulses, which we suspect to be
the ground-plan of the most valuable æsthetic responses, brings
into play far more of our personality than is possible in experiences
of a more defined emotion. We cease to be orientated in one definite
direction; more facets of the mind are exposed and, what is the
same thing, more aspects of things are able to affect us. To
respond, not through one narrow channel of interest, but simultaneously
and coherently through many, is to be _disinterested_ in
the only sense of the word which concerns us here. A state of
mind which is not disinterested is one which sees things only
from one standpoint or under one aspect. At the same time since
more of our personality is engaged the independence and individuality
of other things becomes greater. We seem to see ‘all round’ them,
to see them as they really are; we see them apart from any one
particular interest which they may have for us. Of course without
some interest we should not see them at all, but the less any
one particular interest is indispensable, the more _detached_
our attitude becomes. And to say that we are _impersonal_
is merely a curious way of saying that our personality is more
_completely_ involved.
These characters of æsthetic experiences can thus be shown to
be very natural consequences of the diversity, of their components.
But that so many different impulses should enter in is only what
may be expected in an experience whose ground-plan is a balance
of opposites. For every impulse which does not complete itself
in isolation tends to bring in allied systems. The state of irresolution
shows this clearly. The difference between any such welter of
vacillating impulses and the states of composure we are considering
may well be a matter of mediating relations between the supporting
systems brought in from either side. One thing only perhaps is
certain; what happens is the exact opposite to a deadlock, for
compared to the experience of great poetry every other state
of mind is one of bafflement.
The consciousness which arises in these moments of completed
being lends itself inevitably to transcendental descriptions.
“This Exstasie doth unperplex”, we seem to see things as they
really are, and because we are freed from the bewilderment which
our own maladjustment brings with it,
The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.
Wordsworth’s Pantheistic interpretation of the imaginative experience
in _Tintern Abbey_[84] is one which in varying forms has
been given by many poets and critics. The reconciliation of it
with the account here presented raises a point of extreme importance,
the demarcation of the two main uses of language.
[79] Coleridge’s debt here to Schelling has been over-estimated.
Such borrowings as he made were more hampering to him than helpful.
[80] _Biographia Literaria_, II, pp. 12, 14.
[81] It may perhaps be desirable to point out that this description
of the effects of art follows from the theory of value outlined
in Chapter VII. They are the most valuable experiences because
they are the least wasteful. Thus the place assigned to them
is not a mere personal expression of preference.
[82] May I assume that references here will not distress the reader?
Tennyson, Scott, Landor, Shelley, Keats, Scott, Anon; Marvell,
Donne, Peacock. I am anxious to facilitate the actual detailed
comparison of these poems.
[83] This topic is discussed from a slightly different angle in
_The Foundations of Æsthetics_ (Allen and Unwin, 1922).
[84] I will quote the familiar passage for the reader’s convenience:
I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things.
Not itself an instance of imaginative utterance, although some
instances _can_ be found in the poem.