Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
Plato had said before him (in his "Ion") that the poet is possessed by a
spirit not his own, and that he cannot poetize while he has a particle
of understanding left. Again he says that the bacchantes, possessed by
the god, drink milk and honey from the rivers, and cannot believe, _till
they recover their senses_, that they have been drinking mere water.
Empedocles said that "the mind could only conceive of fire by being
fire."
All these definitions imply in the imaginative faculty the capabilities
of ecstasy and possession, that is, of projecting itself into the very
consciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly possessed by
the emotion of its object that in expression it takes unconsciously the
tone, the color, and the temperature thereof. Shakespeare is the highest
example of this--for example, the parting of Romeo and Juliet. There the
poet is so possessed by the situation, has so mingled his own
consciousness with that of the lovers, that all nature is infected too,
and is full of partings:
Look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the _severing_ clouds in yonder east.
In Shelley's "Cenci," on the other hand, we have an instance of the
poet's imagination giving away its own consciousness to the object
contemplated, in this case an inanimate one.
Two miles on this side of the fort, the road
Crosses a deep ravine; 't is rough and narrow,
And winds with short turns down the precipice;
And in its depth there is a mighty rock
Which has, from unimaginable years,
Sustained itself with terror and with toil
Over a gulf, and with the agony
With which it clings seems slowly coming down;
Even as a wretched soul hour after hour
Clings to the mass of life; yet clinging, leans;
And leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss
In which it fears to fall: beneath this crag,
Huge as despair, as if in weariness,
The melancholy mountain yawns.
The hint of this Shelley took from a passage in the second act of
Calderon's "Purgatorio de San Patricio."
No ves ese peñasco que parece
Que se esta sustentando con trabajo,
Y con el ansia misma que padece
Ha tantos siglos que se viene abajo?
which, retaining the measure of the original, may be thus paraphrased:
Do you not see that rock there which appeareth
To hold itself up with a throe appalling,
And, through the very pang of what it feareth,
So many ages hath been falling, falling?
You will observe that in the last instance quoted the poet substitutes
his own _impression_ of the thing for the thing itself; he forces his
own consciousness upon it, and herein is the very root of all
sentimentalism. Herein lies the fault of that subjective tendency whose
excess is so lamented by Goethe and Schiller, and which is one of the
main distinctions between ancient and modern poetry. I say in its
excess, for there are moods of mind of which it is the natural and
healthy expression. Thus Shakespeare in his ninety-seventh sonnet:
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov'd was summer's time.
It is only when it becomes a habit, instead of a mood of the mind, that
it is a token of disease. Then it is properly dyspepsia,
liver-complaint--what you will, but certainly not imagination as the
handmaid of art. In that service she has two duties laid upon her: one
as the _plastic_ or _shaping_ faculty, which gives form and proportion,
and reduces the several parts of any work to an organic unity
foreordained in that idea which is its germ of life; and the other as
the _realizing_ energy of thought which conceives clearly all the parts,
not only in relation to the whole, but each in its several integrity and
coherence.
We call the imagination the creative faculty. Assuming it to be so, in
the one case it acts by deliberate forethought, in the other by intense
sympathy--a sympathy which enables it to realize an Iago as happily as a
Cordelia, a Caliban as a Prospero. There is a passage in Chaucer's
"House of Fame" which very prettily illustrates this latter function:
Whan any speche yeomen ys
Up to the paleys, anon ryght
Hyt wexeth lyke the same wight,
Which that the worde in erthe spak,
Be hyt clothed rede or blak;
And so were hys lykenesse,
And spake the word, that thou wilt gesse
That it the same body be,
Man or woman, he or she.
We have the highest, and indeed an almost unique, example of this kind
of sympathetic imagination in Shakespeare, who becomes so sensitive,
sometimes, to the thought, the feeling, nay, the mere whim or habit of
body of his characters, that we feel, to use his own words, as if "the
dull substance of his flesh were thought." It is not in mere intensity
of phrase, but in the fitness of it to the feeling, the character, or
the situation, that this phase of the imaginative faculty gives witness
of itself in expression. I know nothing more profoundly imaginative
therefore in its bald simplicity than a line in Webster's "Duchess of
Malfy." Ferdinand has procured the murder of his sister the duchess.
When her dead body is shown to him he stammers out:
Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.
The difference between subjective and objective in poetry would seem to
be that the aim of the former is to express a mood of the mind, often
something in itself accidental and transitory, while that of the latter
is to convey the impression made upon the mind by something outside of
it, but taken up into the mind and idealized (that is, stripped of all
unessential particulars) by it. The one would fain set forth your view
of the thing (modified, perhaps, by your breakfast), the other would set
forth the very thing itself in its most concise individuality.
Subjective poetry may be profound and imaginative if it deal with the
primary emotions of our nature, with the soul's inquiries into its own
being and doing, as was true of Wordsworth; but in the very proportion
that it is profound, its range is limited. Great poetry should have
breadth as well as height and depth; it should meet men everywhere on
the open levels of their common humanity, and not merely on their
occasional excursions to the heights of speculation or their exploring
expeditions among the crypts of metaphysics.
But however we divide poetry, the office of imagination is to disengage
what is essential from the crowd of accessories which is apt to confuse
the vision of ordinary minds. For our perceptions of things are
gregarious, and are wont to huddle together and jostle one another. It
is only those who have been long trained to shepherd their thoughts that
can at once single out each member of the flock by something peculiar to
itself. That the power of abstraction has something to do with the
imagination is clear, I think, from the fact that everybody is a
dramatic poet (so far as the conception of character goes) in his sleep.
His acquaintances walk and talk before him on the stage of dream
precisely as in life. When he wakes, his genius has flown away with his
sleep. It was indeed nothing more than that his mind was not distracted
by the multiplicity of details which the senses force upon it by day. He
thinks of Smith, and it is no longer a mere name on a doorplate or in a
directory; but Smith himself is there, with those marvellous
commonplaces of his which, could you only hit them off when you were
awake, you would have created Justice Shallow. Nay, is not there, too,
that offensively supercilious creak of the boots with which he enforced
his remarks on the war in Europe, when he last caught you at the corner
of the street and decanted into your ears the stale settlings of a week
of newspapers? Now, did not Shakespeare tell us that the imagination
_bodies forth_? It is indeed the _verbum caro factum_--the word made
flesh and blood.
I said that the imagination always idealizes, that in its highest
exercise, for example, as in the representation of character, it goes
behind the species to the genus, presenting us with everlasting types of
human nature, as in Don Quixote and Hamlet, Antigone and Cordelia,
Alcestis and Amelia. By this I mean that those features are most
constantly insisted upon, not in which they differ from other men but
from other kinds of men. For example, Don Quixote is never set before us
as a mere madman, but as the victim of a monomania, and that, when you
analyze it, of a very noble kind--nothing less, indeed, than devotion to
an unattainable ideal, to an anachronism, as the ideals of imaginative
men for the most part are. Amid all his ludicrous defeats and
disillusions, this poetical side of him is brought to our notice at
intervals, just as a certain theme recurs again and again in one of
Beethoven's symphonies, a kind of clue to guide us through those
intricacies of harmony. So in Lear, one of Shakespeare's profoundest
psychological studies, the weakness of the man is emphasized, as it
were, and forced upon our attention by his outbreaks of impotent
violence; so in Macbeth, that imaginative bias which lays him open to
the temptation of the weird sisters is suggested from time to time
through the whole tragedy, and at last unmans him, and brings about his
catastrophe in his combat with Macduff. This is what I call ideal and
imaginative representation, which marks the outlines and boundaries of
character, not by arbitrary lines drawn at this angle or that, according
to the whim of the tracer, but by those mountain-ranges of human nature
which divide man from man and temperament from temperament. And as the
imagination of the reader must reinforce that of the poet, reducing the
generic again to the specific, and defining it into sharper
individuality by a comparison with the experiences of actual life, so,
on the other hand, the popular imagination is always poetic, investing
each new figure that comes before it with all the qualities that belong
to the genus; Thus Hamlet, in some one or other of his characteristics
has been the familiar of us all, and so from an ideal and remote figure
is reduced to the standard of real and contemporary existence; while
Bismarck, who, if we knew him, would probably turn out to be a
comparatively simple character, is invested with all the qualities which
have ever been attributed to the typical statesman, and is clearly as
imaginative a personage as the Marquis of Posa, in Schiller's "Don
Carlos." We are ready to accept any _coup de théâtre_ of him. Now, this
prepossession is precisely that for which the imagination of the poet
makes us ready by working on our own.
But there are also lower levels on which this idealization plays its
tricks upon our fancy. The Greek, who had studied profoundly what may be
called the machinery of art, made use even of mechanical contrivances to
delude the imagination of the spectator, and to entice him away from the
associations of everyday life. The cothurnus lifted the actor to heroic
stature, the mask prevented the ludicrous recognition of a familiar face
in "Oedipus" and "Agamemnon"; it precluded grimace, and left the
countenance as passionless as that of a god; it gave a more awful
reverberation to the voice, and it was by the voice, that most
penetrating and sympathetic, one might almost say incorporeal, organ of
expression, that the great effects of the poet and tragic actor were
wrought. Everything, you will observe, was, if not lifted above, at any
rate removed, however much or little, from the plane of the actual and
trivial. Their stage showed nothing that could be met in the streets. We
barbarians, on the other hand, take delight precisely in that. We admire
the novels of Trollope and the groups of Rogers because, as we say, they
are so _real_, while it is only because they are so matter-of-fact, so
exactly on the level with our own trivial and prosaic apprehensions.
When Dante lingers to hear the dispute between Sinon and Master Adam,
Virgil, type of the higher reason and the ideal poet, rebukes him, and
even angrily.
E fa ragion ch'io ti sia sempre allato
Si più avvien che fortuna t' accoglia
Ove sien genti in simigliante piato;
Chè voler ciò udire è bassa voglia.
Remember, _I_ am always at thy side,
If ever fortune bring thee once again
Where there are people in dispute like this,
For wishing to hear that is vulgar wish.
Verse is another of these expedients for producing that frame of mind,
that prepossession, on the part of hearer or reader which is essential
to the purpose of the poet, who has lost much of his advantage by the
invention of printing, which obliges him to appeal to the eye rather
than the ear. The rhythm is no arbitrary and artificial contrivance. It
was suggested by an instinct natural to man. It is taught him by the
beating of his heart, by his breathing, hastened or retarded by the
emotion of the moment. Nay, it may be detected by what seems the most
monotonous of motions, the flow of water, in which, if you listen
intently, you will discover a beat as regular as that of the metronome.
With the natural presumption of all self-taught men, I thought I had
made a discovery in this secret confided to me by Beaver Brook, till
Professor Peirce told me it was always allowed for in the building of
dams. Nay, for my own part, I would venture to affirm that not only
metre but even rhyme itself was not without suggestion in outward
nature. Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray
out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to
spray in order, strophe, and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands
an embodied ode, Nature's triumphant vindication of proportion, number,
and harmony. Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme who has seen the
blue river repeat the blue o'erhead; who has been ravished by the
visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and
downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched
how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo
flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary
vault below? At least there can be no doubt that metre, by its
systematic and regular occurrence, gradually subjugates and tunes the
senses of the hearer, as the wood of the violin arranges itself in
sympathy with the vibration of the strings, and thus that predisposition
to the proper emotion is accomplished which is essential to the purpose
of the pest. You must not only expect, but you must expect in the right
way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fibre by your own
sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought. The right
reception of whatever is ideally represented demands as a preliminary
condition an exalted, or, if not that, then an excited, frame of mind
both in poet and hearer. The imagination must be sensitized ere it will
take the impression of those airy nothings whose image is traced and
fixed by appliances as delicate as the golden pencils of the sun. Then
that becomes a visible reality which before was but a phantom of the
brain. Your own passion must penetrate and mingle with that of the
artist that you may interpret him aright. You must, I say, be
prepossessed, for it is the mind which shapes and colors the reports of
the senses. Suppose you were expecting the bell to toll for the burial
of some beloved person and the church-clock should begin to strike. The
first lingering blow of the hammer would beat upon your very heart, and
thence the shock would run to all the senses at once; but after a few
strokes you would be undeceived, and the sound would become commonplace
again. On the other hand, suppose that at a certain hour you knew that a
criminal was to be executed; then the ordinary striking of the clock
would have the sullen clang of a funeral bell. So in Shakespeare's
instance of the lover, does he not suddenly find himself sensible of a
beauty in the world about him before undreamed of, because his passion
has somehow got into whatever he sees and hears? Will not the rustle of
silk across a counter stop his pulse because it brings back to his sense
the odorous whisper of Parthenissa's robe? Is not the beat of the
horse's hoofs as rapid to Angelica pursued as the throbs of her own
heart huddling upon one another in terror, while it is slow to Sister
Anne, as the pulse that pauses between hope and fear, as she listens on
the tower for rescue, and would have the rider "spur, though mounted on
the wind"?
Dr. Johnson tells us that that only is good poetry which may be
translated into sensible prose. I greatly doubt whether any very
profound emotion can be so rendered. Man is a metrical animal, and it is
not in prose but in nonsense verses that the young mother croons her joy
over the new centre of hope and terror that is sucking life from her
breast. Translate passion into sensible prose and it becomes absurd,
because subdued to workaday associations, to that level of common sense
and convention where to betray intense feeling is ridiculous and
unmannerly. Shall I ask Shakespeare to translate me his love "still
climbing trees in the Hesperides"? Shall I ask Marlowe how Helen could
"make him immortal with a kiss," or how, in the name of all the Monsieur
Jourdains, at once her face could "launch a thousand ships and burn the
topless towers of Ilion"? Could Aeschylus, if put upon the stand, defend
his making Prometheus cry out,
O divine ether and swift-winged winds,
Ye springs of rivers, and of ocean waves
The innumerable smile, all mother Earth,
And Helios' all-beholding round, I call:
Behold what I, a god, from gods endure!