tioned, in fact, to its definiteness, and also to the stress of its continuance-of the memory which prolongs it for utilization. Every one has more or less of this ideal faculty. The naturalness of children enables us to judge of their respective allotments. A mother knows which of her brood is the imaginative one. She realizes that it has a rare endowment, yet one as perilous as "the fatal gift of beauty." Her pride, her solicitude, are equally centered in that child. Now the clearer and more self-retentive this faculty, the more decided the ability of one in whom it reaches the grade at which he may be a designer, an artist, or a poet. Let us see. Most of us have a sense of music. Tunes of our own "beat time to nothing" in the head. We can retain the theme, or opening phrase, at least, of a new composition that pleases us. But the musician, the man of genius, is haunted with unbidden harmonies; besides, after hearing a difficult and prolonged piece he holds it in memory, perhaps can repeat it, as when a Von Bülow repeats offhand an entire composition by Liszt. Moreover, his mind definitely hears its own imaginings; otherwise the sonata, the opera, will be confused and inferior. Again: most of us, especially when nervous or half asleep, find the "eyes make pictures when they are shut." Faces come and go, or change with startling vividness. The face that comes to a born painter does not instantly go; that of an angel is not capriciously transformed to something imp-like. He sees it in such wise that he retains it and can put it on his canvas. He has the clear-seeing, the sure-holding, gift which alone is creative. It is the same with the landscape-painter, the sculptor, the architect. Artistic ability is coördinate with the clearness and staying-power of the imagination. More than one painter has declared that when a sitter was no longer before him, he could still lift his eyes, and see the sitter's image, and go on copying it as before. Often, too, the great painter copies better from some conception of his own brain than from actual nature. His mind's eye is surer than his body's. Blake wrote: "Men think they can copy Nature as correctly as I copy imagination. This they will find impossible." And again, " Why are copies of Nature incorrect, while copies of imagination are correct? This is manifest to all." Of course this statement is debatable; but for its philosophy, and for illustrations alike of the definite and the sublime, there is nothing later than Michelangelo to which one refers more profitably than to the life and letters, and to the titanic yet clear and beautiful designs, of the inspired draftsman William Blake. Did he see his visions? Undeniably. Did he call them into absolute existence? Sometimes I think he did; that all soul is endowed with the divine power of creation in the concrete. If so, man will realize it in due time. The poetry of Blake, prophetic and otherwise, must be read with discrimination, for his linguistic execution was less assured than that of his brush and graver; his imagination as a painter, and his art-maxims, were of the high order, but his work as a poet was usually rhapsodical and ill-defined. But, as I have said, the strength and beauty of any man's poetry depend chiefly upon the definiteness of his mental vision. I once knew a poet of genuine gifts who did not always "beat his music out." When I objected to a feeble, indistinct conception in one of his idyls, "Look you," said he, "I see that just as clearly as you do; it takes hold of me, but I have n't" (he chose to say) " your knack of definite expression." To which I rejoined: "Not so. If you saw it clearly you would express it, for you have a better vocabulary at your command than I possess. Look out of the window, at that building across the street. Now let us sit down, and see who can make the best picture of it in fifteen lines of blank verse I." After a while our trial was completed. His verse, as I had expected, was more faithful and expressive than mine, was apter in word and outline. It reinforced my claim. "There,” said I, "if you saw the conception of your other poem as plainly as you see that ordinary building, you would convey it definitely. You would not be confused and obscure, for you have the power to express what your mind really pictures." - you or The true poet, said Joubert, "has a mind full of very clear images, while ours is only filled with confused descriptions." Now, vagueness of impression engenders a kind of excitement. in which a neophyte fancies that his gift is particularly active. He mistakes the wish to create for the creative power. Hence much spasmodic poetry, full of rhetoric and ejaculations, sound and empty fury; hence the gasps which indicate that vision and utterance are impeded, the contortions without the inspiration. Hence, also, the "fatal facility," the babble of those who write with ease and magnify their office. The impassioned artist also dashes off his work, but his need for absolute expression makes the final execution as difficult as it is noble. Another class, equipped with taste and judgment, but lacking imagination, proffer as a substitute beautiful and recondite materials gathered here and there. Southey's work is an example of this process, and that of the popular and scholarly author of "The Light of Asia" is not free from it; indeed, you see it everywhere in the . verse of the minor art-school, and even in Tennyson's and Longfellow's early poems. But the chief vice of many writers is obscure expression. Their seeming depth is often mere turbidness, though it is true that thought may be tot confined dor superence' sake, the ur anthologies consist wholly restrites, aps justly e of the Anss than imaGet a piece, for No one knows e Housemore of the geaches, such must be novel belonging completely to the present." But Come through waste, ective, than old and various. as the most and construc, are indeed But the epic owth, not a sudve plots of the x for example and arlized, rather Sess" "Aurora ot the only sucpencal tale-inveney novels in verse. give imagination former, as Goeceing it "as belongand the latter" as The poet often conveys a whole picture by a single imaginative touch. A desert scene by Gérôme would give us little more than we conceive from Landor's suggestive detail— And hoofless camels in long single line Stalk slow, with foreheads level to the sky. This force of suggestion is nevertheless highly effective in painting: as where the shadow of the cross implies the crucifixion, or where the cloudphantoms seen by Doré's "Wandering Jew" exhibit it; and as when, in the same artist's designs for Don Quixote, we see visions with the mad knight's eyes. Of a kindred nature is the prevision, the event forestalled, of a single word or phrase. Leigh Hunt cited the line from Keats's "Isabella," "So the two brothers and their murdered man,”—the victim, then journeying with his future slayers, being already dead in their intention. A striking instance of the swift-flashing imagination is in a stanza from Stoddard's Horatian ode upon the funeral of Lincoln: The time, the place, the stealing shape, The wife, the widow's scream. What I may call the constant, the habitual, imagination of a true poet is shown by his instinct for words-those keys which all may clatter, and which yield their music to so few. He finds the inevitable word or phrase, unfound before, and it becomes classical in a moment. The power of words and the gift of their selection are uncomprehended by writers who have all trite and hackneyed phrases at the pen's end. The imagination begets original diction, suggestive epithets, verbs implying extended scenes and events, phrases which are a delight and which, as we say, speak volumes, single notes which establish the dominant tone. 97 66 This kind of felicity makes an excerpt from Shakspere unmistakable. Milton's diction rivals that of Eschylus, though nothing can outrank the Grecian's ανήριθμον γέλασμα - the innumerous laughter of his ocean waves. But recall Milton's" wandering moon" (borrowed, haply, from the Latin), and his "wilderness of sweets"; and such phrases as "dim, religious light," "fatal and perfidious bark," "hide their diminished heads," "the least-erected spirit that fell," "barbaric pearl and gold," "imparadised in one another's arms," rose like an exhalation," "such sweet compulsion doth in music lie"; and his fancies of the daisies' “quaint enameled eyes," and of "dancing in the chequered shade"; and numberless similar beauties that we term Miltonic. After Shakspere and Milton, Keats stands first in respect of imaginative diction. His appellatives of the Grecian Urn, "Cold pastoral," and "Thou foster-child of silence and slow time," are in evidence. "The music yearning like a god in pain," and Music's golden tongue Flattered to tears this aged man and poor, excel even Milton's "forget thyself to marble." What a charm in his "darkling I listen," and his thought of Ruth "in tears amid the alien corn"! Shelley's diction is less sure and eclectic, yet sometimes his expression, like his own skylark, is "an embodied joy." Byron's imaginative language is more rhetorical, but none will forget his "haunted, holy ground," VOL. XLIV.-87. "Death's prophetic ear," "the quiet of a loving eye" (which is like Wordsworth, and again like Landor's phrase on Milton-" the Sabbath of his mind "). None would forego "the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone," or "the dead but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule our spirits from their urns," or such a combination of imagination and feeling as this: I turned from all she brought to those she could not bring. Coleridge's "myriad-minded Shakspere" is enough to show his mastery of words. A conjuring quality like that of the voices heard by Kubla Khan, Ancestral voices prophesying war, lurks in the imaginative lines of our Southern lyrist, Boner, upon the cottage at Fordham, which aver of Poe, that Here in the sobbing showers Shriek through the stormy wood. Tennyson's words often seem too laboriously and exquisitely chosen. But that was a good moment when, in his early poem of " Enone," he pictured her as wandering Forlorn of Paris, once her playmate on the hills. Amongst Americans, Emerson has been the chief master of words and phrases. Who save he could enveil us in "the tumultuous privacy" of the snow-storm? Lowell has great verbal felicity. It was manifest even in the early period when he apostrophized the dandelion,"Dear common flower," "Thou art my tropics and mine Italy," -and told us of its "harmless gold." But I have cited a sufficient number of these well-wonted instances. Entering the amazing treasure-house of English song, one must remember the fate of the trespasser within the enchanted grotto of the "Gesta Romanorum," where rubies, sapphires, diamonds, lay in flashing heaps on every side. When he essayed to fill his wallet with them, the spell was broken, the arrow whizzed, and he met the doom allotted to pickers and stealers. WITH respect to configuration, the antique genius, in literature as in art, was clear and assured. It imagined plainly, and drew firm outlines. But the Acts and Scenes of our English dramatists were often shapeless; their schemes were full of by-play and plot within plot; in fine, their constructive faculty showed the caprice of rich imaginations that disdained control. Shakspere, alone of all, never fails to justify Leigh Hunt's maxim that, in treating super with an unearthly voice of menace warns the Ger- voyagers back. I have said that the grandest the classic of English supernatural creations is Milton's A the Satan. No other personage has at once such beside the magnitude and definiteness of outline as that compared sublime, defiant archangel, whether in action ca Christen- or in repose. Milton, like Dante, has to do But whether with the unknown world. The Florentine bard maturalism of soars at last within the effulgence of "the eteras a more awe- nal, coeternal beam." Milton's imagination a sunlit Italy and broods "in the wide womb of uncreated night.” ongs in the classic We enter that " palpable obscure," where there sand Furies are less is "no light, but rather darkness visible," and and the prophetic where lurk many a "grisly terror" and "exeC. Een in the medie- crable shape." But the genii of wonder and Pie, ne damned and their terror are the familiars of a long succession of Sardially and materially pre- our English poets. Coleridge, who so had them copdons, like the lovers at his own call, knew well their signs and work; as when he pointed a sure finger to Drayton's etching of the trees which happy pair pon the excellence No mortality. www.ed on man: Science drives specter after specter from its path, but the rule still holds — omne ignotum pro magnifico, and a vaster unknown, a more impressive vague, still deepens and looms before. A peculiarly imaginative sense of the beautiful, also, is conveyed at times by an exquisite formlessness of outline. I asked the late Mr. Grant White what he thought of a certain picgita from ture by Inness, and he replied that it seemed e polar spaces to be "painted by a blind poet." But no Ine barriers, can ness, Fuller, Corot, Rousseau, not even Turextension,im- ner, nor the broad, luminous spaces of Homer t. The early Martin, ever excelled the magic of the changewill never ful blending conceptions of Shelley, so aptly veculminating termed the poet of Cloudland. The feeling of hold of us as his lyrical passages is all his own. How does the Book of it justify itself and so hold us in thrall? Yield upon him in to it, and if there is anything sensitive in your mold you are hypnotized, as if in truth gazing heavenward and fixing your eyes upon a beauteous and protean cloud; fascinated by its silvery shapelessness, its depth, its vistas, its iridescence and gloom. Listen, and the cloud is vocal with a music not to be defined. There is no appeal to the intellect; the mind seeks not for a meaning; the cloud floats ever on; the music is changeful, ceaseless, and uncloying. Their plumed invoker has become our type of the pure spirit of song, almost sexless, quite removed at times from earth and the carnal passions. Such a poet could never be a sensualist. "Brave translunary things" are to him the true realities; he is, indeed, a creature of air and light. "The Witch of Atlas," an artistic caprice, is a work of imagination, though as transparent as the moonbeams and as unconscious of warmth and cold. Mary Shelley objected to it on the score that it had no human interest. It cer Nove any five; the hair MAX X., but I could amage was beand I heard a ass be more just sve pere than his x the sublimity g its Gothic Cages more lusiad," a perfunctory - are strugof Africa into of the Cape *, & sesc of cloud, girt viss rowers skyward anal, vague, and tainly is a kind of aër potabilis, a wine that lacks body; it violates Goethe's dictum, to wit: "Two things are required of the poet and the artist, that he should rise above reality and yet remain within the sphere of the sensuous." But there is always a law above law for genius, and all things are possible to it - even the entrance to a realm not ordered in life and emotion according to the conditions of this palpable warm planet to which our feet are bound. As in nature, so in art, that which relatively to ourselves is large and imposing has a corresponding effect upon the mind. Magnitude is not to be disdained as an imaginative factor. An heroic masterpiece of Angelo's has this advantage at the start over some elaborate carving by Cellini. Landor says that "a throne is not built of birds'-nests, nor do a thousand reeds make a trumpet." Of course, if dimension is to be the essential test, we are lost. Every one feels himself to be greater than a mountain, than the ocean, even than Chaos; yet an imaginative observer views the measureless nebula with awe, conceiving a universe of systems, of worlds tenanted by conscious beings, which is to be evolved from that lambent, ambient star-dust. 66 Certain it is that when we seek the other extreme, the province of the microscopic, Fancy, the elf-child of Imagination, sports within her own minute and capricious realm. Her land is that of whims and conceits, of mock associations, of Midsummer Nights' Dreams. She has her own epithets for its denizens, for the green little vaulter," the "yellow-breeched philosopher," the "animated torrid zone," of her dainty minstrelsy. Poets of imagination are poets of fancy when they choose. Hester Prynne was ever attended by her tricksy Pearl. But many is the poet of fancy who never enters the courts of imagination—a joyous faun indeed, and wanting nothing but a soul. A large utterance, such as that which Keats bestowed upon the early gods, is the instinctive voice of the imagination nobly roused and concerned with an heroic theme. There are few better illustrations of this than the cadences and diction of "Hyperion," a torso equal to the finished work of any other English poet after Shakspere and Milton; perhaps even greater because a torso, for the construction of its fable is not significant, and when Keats produced his effect, he ended the poem as Coleridge ended "Christabel." All qualities which I have thus far termed imaginative contribute to the majesty of its overture: Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Forest on forest hung about his head At the outset of English poetry, Chaucer's imagination is sane, clear-sighted, wholesome with open-air feeling and truth to life. Spenser is the poet's poet chiefly as an artist. The allegory of "The Faerie Queene" is not like that of Dante, forged at white heat, but the symbolism of a courtier and euphuist who felt its unreality. But all in all, the Elizabethan period displays the English imagination at full height. Marlowe and Webster, for example, give out fitful but imaginative light which at times is of kindred splendor with Shakspere's steadfast beam. Webster's " Duchess of Malfi" teaches both the triumphs and the dangers of the dramatic fury. The construction runs riot; certain characters are powerfully conceived, others are wild figments of the brain. It is full of most fantastic speech and action; yet the tragedy, the passion, the felicitous language and imagery of various scenes, are nothing less than Shaksperean. To comprehend rightly the good and bad qualities of this play is to have gained a liberal education in poetic criticism. Now take a collection of English verseand there is no poetry more various and inclusive-take, let us say, Ward's "English Poets," and you will find that the generations after Shakspere are not over-imaginative until you approach the nineteenth century. From Jonson to the Georgian School there is no general efflux of visionary power. The lofty Milton and a few minor lights - Dryden, Collins, Chatterton-shine at intervals between. Precisely the most unimaginative period is that covered by Volume III and entitled “From Addison to Blake." We have tender feeling and true in Goldsmith and Gray. There is no passion, no illumination, until you reach Burns and his immediate successors. Then imagination leaped again to life, springing chiefly from subjective emotion, as among the Elizabethans it sprang from young adventure, from discovery and renown of arms, above all from the objective study of the types and conduct of mankind. If another century shall add a third imaginative luster to the poetry of our tongue,- enkindled, perchance, by the flame of a more splendid order of discovery, even now so exalting,—it will have done its equal share. THE Mercury and Iris of this heavenly power are comparison and association, whos |
