English Critical Essays Part 15

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 circ.u.mstance 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 circ.u.mstances; as King Alfred 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 and _Macbeth_, 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 G.o.ds, and Shakespeare's witches, enchanted horses and spears, Ariosto's hippogriff, &c.;--Fifth, that which, in order to ill.u.s.trate 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 that _people_ the 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 their _murder'd_ man Rode towards fair Florence;--

sometimes in the attribution of a certain representative quality which makes one circ.u.mstance stand for others; as in Milton's grey-fly winding its '_sultry_ horn', which epithet contains the heat of a summer's day;--Sixth, that which reverses this process, and makes a variety of circ.u.mstances take colour from one, like nature seen with jaundiced or glad eyes, or under the influence of storm or sunshine; as when in _Lycidas_, or the Greek pastoral 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 ragiona.s.se 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 of _Macbeth_ and the May-day night of _Faust_;--Seventh, and last, that which by a single expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but surpa.s.ses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular description; as in that exquisite pa.s.sage of Coleridge's _Christabel_, 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 letter _l's_.

I am aware of nothing of the kind surpa.s.sing 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 cla.s.s 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 into the _Friar 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 showers Will 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 Sh.e.l.ley's in the _Adonais_:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured gla.s.s, 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 const.i.tuent 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 of _Peter Wilkins_; and in point of treatment, the Mammon and Jealousy of Spenser, some of the monsters in Dante, particularly his Nimrod, his interchangements of creatures into one another, and (if I am not presumptuous in antic.i.p.ating what I think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge's _Christabel_, 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 h.e.l.l, 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 h.e.l.l, 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'd In 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 height Montereggione 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 still Are threaten'd when he thunders. As we near'd The 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 shouted After us, in the words of some strange tongue, Rafel ma-ee amech zabee almee!-- 'Dull wretch!' my leader cried, 'keep to thine horn, And so vent better whatsoever rage Or other pa.s.sion stuff thee. Feel thy throat And find the chain upon thee, thou confusion!

Lo! what a hoop is clench'd about thy gorge.'

Then turning to myself, he said, 'His howl Is its own mockery. This is Nimrod, he Through whose ill thought it was that humankind Were tongue-confounded. Pa.s.s him, and say nought: For as he speaketh language known of none, So none can speak save jargon to himself.'

_Inferno_, Canto x.x.xi, ver. 34.

a.s.suredly 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 himself is 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 says _he_ did) 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 of _Gondibert_, 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 Spenser and 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 the _Faerie Queene_; and let the reader of Italian open the _Orlando Furioso_ at 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 bra.s.s, 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 p.r.o.nouncing 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 a.s.sumed 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 sh.o.r.e 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 the _Rape 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 c.o.xcomb's nose. In the _Orlando 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 hair in 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 G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses 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 t.i.tian'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 imagine _beyond_ imagination, 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 pa.s.sages;--one exemplifying the imagination which brings supernatural things to bear on earthly, without confounding them; the other, that which paints events and circ.u.mstances 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 heaven bidding 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-sh.o.r.e; and the G.o.ddess Iris has just delivered her message, and disappeared.

But up Achilles rose, the lov'd of heaven; And Pallas on his mighty shoulders cast The shield of Jove; and round about his head She 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 martialness Have pour'd from their own town; soon as the sun Has set, thick lifted fires are visible, Which, rushing upward, make a light in the sky, And let the neighbours know, who may perhaps Bring help across the sea; so from the head Of great Achilles went up an effulgence.

Upon the trench he stood, without the wall, But mix'd not with the Greeks, for he rever'd His mother's word; and so, thus standing there, He shouted; and Minerva, to his shout, Added a dreadful cry; and there arose Among the Trojans an unspeakable tumult.

And as the clear voice of a trumpet, blown Against a town by spirit-withering foes, So sprang the clear voice of Aeacides.

And when they heard the brazen cry, their hearts All leap'd within them; and the proud-maned horses Ran with the chariots round, for they foresaw Calamity; and the charioteers were smitten, When they beheld the ever-active fire Upon the dreadful head of the great-minded one Burning; for bright-eyed Pallas made it burn.

Thrice o'er the trench divine Achilles shouted; And thrice the Trojans and their great allies Roll'd back; and twelve of all their n.o.blest men Then 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 pa.s.sage 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 n.o.ble honesty of the pa.s.sions 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 grey _chin_'. 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'd Holding the mules and horses; and the old man Went straight indoors, where the belov'd of Jove Achilles sat, and found him. In the room Were others, but apart; and two alone, The hero Automedon, and Alcimus, A branch of Mars, stood by him. They had been At 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 heavily For having slain another, flies away To foreign lands, and comes into the house Of 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:-- 'G.o.d-like Achilles, think of thine own father!

To the same age have we both come, the same Weak pa.s.s; and though the neighbouring chiefs may vex Him also, and his borders find no help, Yet when he hears that thou art still alive, He gladdens inwardly, and daily hopes To see his dear son coming back from Troy.

But I, bereav'd old Priam! I had once Brave sons in Troy, and now I cannot say That 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 here To ransom him, bringing a countless ransom.

But thou, Achilles, fear the G.o.ds, and think Of thine own father, and have mercy on me: For I am much more wretched, and have borne What never mortal bore, I think on earth, To lift unto my lips the hand of him Who slew my boys.'

He ceased; and there arose Sharp longing in Achilles for his father; And taking Priam by the hand, he gently Put him away; for both shed tears to think Of other times; the one most bitter ones For Hector, and with wilful wretchedness Lay 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'd His soul with tears, and sharp desire had left His heart and limbs, he got up from his throne, And rais'd the old man by the hand, and took Pity 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 pa.s.sages 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 enc.u.mbered 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 pa.s.sion 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's _Cato_ is full of them.

Pa.s.sion unpitied and successless love _Plant daggers in my breast._

I've sounded my Numidians, man by man, And find them _ripe for a revolt_.

The virtuous Marcia _towers above her s.e.x_.

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--the _Mariamne_ of Fenton: