[Footnote 1: A small portion of this lecture appeared at the time of its
delivery, in January, 1855, in a report printed in the _Boston Daily
Advertiser_.]
Imagination is the wings of the mind; the understanding, its feet. With
these it may climb high, but can never soar into that ampler ether and
diviner air whence the eye dominates so uncontrolled a prospect on every
hand. Through imagination alone is something like a creative power
possible to man. It is the same in Aeschylus as in Shakespeare, though
the form of its manifestation varies in some outward respects from age
to age. Being the faculty of vision, it is the essential part of
expression also, which is the office of all art.
But in comparing ancient with modern imaginative literature, certain
changes especially strike us, and chief among them a stronger infusion
of sentiment and what we call the picturesque. I shall endeavor to
illustrate this by a few examples. But first let us discuss imagination
itself, and give some instances of its working.
"Art," says Lord Verulam, "is man added to Nature" (_homo additus
naturae_); and we may modernize his statement, and adapt it to the
demands of aesthetics, if we define art to be Nature infused with and
shaped by the imaginative faculty of man; thus, as Bacon says elsewhere,
"conforming the shows of things to the desires of the mind." Art always
platonizes: it results from a certain finer instinct for form, order,
proportion, a certain keener sense of the rhythm there is in the eternal
flow of the world about us, and its products take shape around some idea
preëxistent in the mind, are quickened into life by it, and strive
always (cramped and hampered as they are by the limitations and
conditions of human nature, of individual temperament, and outward
circumstances) toward ideal perfection--toward what Michelangelo called
Ideal form, the universal mould.
Shakespeare, whose careless generalizations have often the exactness of
scientific definitions, tells us that
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact;
that
as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.