English Critical Essays Part 16

Mariamne, _with superior charms_, _Triumphs o'er reason_: in her look she _bears_ A paradise of ever-blooming sweets; Fair as the first idea beauty _prints_ In the young lover's soul; a winning grace Guides every gesture, and obsequious love _Attends_ on all her steps.

'Triumphing o'er reason' is an old acquaintance of everybody's.

'Paradise in her look' is from the Italian poets through Dryden. 'Fair as the first idea', &c., is from Milton, spoilt;--'winning grace' and 'steps' from Milton and Tibullus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt: just as when a great writer borrows, he improves.

To come now to Fancy,--she is a younger sister of Imagination, without the other's weight of thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, purely so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the subtlest and most affecting a.n.a.logies; the perception of sympathies in the natures of things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is a sporting with their resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and fantastical creations.

--Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, _And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane, Be shook to air._

_Troilus and Cressida_, Act iii, sc. 3.

That is imagination;--the strong mind sympathizing with the strong beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dew-drop.

Oh!--and I forsooth In love! I that have been love's whip I _A very beadle to a humorous sigh!--_ A domineering pedant o'er the boy,-- This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid, _Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms, The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans_, &c.

_Love's Labour's Lost_, Act iii, sc. 1.

That is fancy;--a combination of images not in their nature connected, or brought together by the feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and having just enough hold of a.n.a.logy to betray it into the hands of its smiling subjector.

Silent icicles _Quietly shining to the quiet moon._

Coleridge's _Frost at Midnight_.

That, again, is imagination;--a.n.a.logical sympathy; and exquisite of its kind it is.

'You are now sailed _into the north of my lady's opinion_; where you will hang _like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard_, unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.'

_Twelfth Night_, Act iii, sc. 2.

And that is fancy;--one image capriciously suggested by another, and but half connected with the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to it; for in the gaiety of the speaker's animal spirits, the 'Dutchman's beard' is made to represent the lady!

Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the comic. _Macbeth_, _Lear_, _Paradise Lost_, the poem of Dante, are full of imagination: the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ and the _Rape of the Lock_, of fancy: _Romeo and Juliet_, the _Tempest_, the _Faerie Queene_, and the _Orlando Furioso_, of both. The terms were formerly identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It presents too invariably the idea of a solid body;--of 'images' in the sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition (Fa?tasa, appearance, _phantom_), has rarely that freedom from visibility which is one of the highest privileges of imagination.

Viola, in _Twelfth Night_, speaking of some beautiful music, says:

It gives a very echo to the seat Where Love is throned.

In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are combined; yet the fancy, the a.s.sumption of Love's sitting on a throne, is the image of a solid body; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy between the pa.s.sion of love and impa.s.sioned music, presents us no image at all.

Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies of what is called Imagination.

One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy; and like Melancholy, as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe.

Fancy turns her sister's wizard instruments into toys. She takes a telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the child-like and sportive. She chases b.u.t.terflies, while her sister takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings to the images of wit; and delights as much to people nature with smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together, and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her company; always, in the case of the greatest poets; often in that of less, though with them she is the greater favourite. Spenser has great imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both also, the very greatest, but with imagination predominant; Chaucer, the strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, and in comic painting inferior to none; Pope has hardly any imagination, but he has a great deal of fancy; Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakespeare alone, of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing [the Oberon-t.i.tania scenes from the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_] will be found in the present volume.[29] See also his famous description of Queen Mab and her equipage, in _Romeo and Juliet_:

Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs; The cover, of the wings of gra.s.shoppers: Her traces of the smallest spider's web; Her collars of the moonshine's watery beams, &c.

[29] Leigh Hunt's _Imagination and Fancy, or Selections from the English Poets_, 1844.

That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace from Drayton's _Nymphidia_:

This palace standeth in the air, By necromancy placed there, That it no tempest needs to fear, Which way soe'er it blow it: And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon, Whence lies a way up to the moon, And thence the fairy can as soon Pa.s.s to the earth below it.

The walls of spiders' legs are made, Well morticed and finely laid: He was the master of his trade It curiously that builded: _The windows of the eyes of cats:_

(because they see best at night)

And for the roof instead of slats Is cover'd with the skins of bats, _With moonshine that are gilded._

Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the same poet's _Muse's Elysium_:

Of leaves of roses, _white and red_, Shall be the covering of the bed; The curtains, vallens, tester all, Shall be the flower imperial; And for the fringe it all along _With azure hare-bells shall be hung.

Of lilies shall the pillows be, With down stuft of the b.u.t.terfly._

Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination, Sir John Suckling, in his _Ballad on a Wedding_, has given some of the most playful and charming specimens in the language. They glance like twinkles of the eye, or cherries bedewed:

_Her feet beneath her petticoat, Like little mice stole in and out, As if they fear'd the light:_ But oh! she dances such a way!

_No sun upon an Easter day_ Is half so fine a sight.

It is very daring, and has a sort of playful grandeur, to compare a lady's dancing with the sun. But as the sun has it all to himself in the heavens, so she, in the blaze of her beauty, on earth. This is imagination fairly displacing fancy. The following has enchanted everybody:

Her lips were red, _and one was thin_ _Compared with that was next her chin, Some bee had stung it newly._

Every reader has stolen a kiss at that lip, gay or grave.

With regard to the principle of Variety in Uniformity by which verse ought to be modulated, and oneness of impression diversely produced, it has been contended by some, that Poetry need not be written in verse at all; that prose is as good a medium, provided poetry be conveyed through it; and that to think otherwise is to confound letter with spirit, or form with essence. But the opinion is a prosaical mistake. Fitness and unfitness for _song_, or metrical excitement, just make all the difference between a poetical and prosaical subject; and the reason why verse is necessary to the form of poetry, is, that the perfection of poetical spirit demands it;--that the circle of its enthusiasm, beauty and power, is incomplete without it. I do not mean to say that a poet can never show himself a poet in prose; but that, being one, his desire and necessity will be to write in verse; and that, if he were unable to do so, he would not, and could not, deserve his t.i.tle. Verse to the true poet is no clog. It is idly called a trammel and a difficulty. It is a help. It springs from the same enthusiasm as the rest of his impulses, and is necessary to their satisfaction and effect. Verse is no more a clog than the condition of rushing upward is a clog to fire, or than the roundness and order of the globe we live on is a clog to the freedom and variety that abound within its sphere. Verse is no dominator over the poet, except inasmuch as the bond is reciprocal, and the poet dominates over the verse. They are lovers, playfully challenging each other's rule, and delighted equally to rule and to obey. Verse is the final proof to the poet that his mastery over his art is complete. It is the shutting up of his powers in '_measureful_ content'; the answer of form to his spirit; of strength and ease to his guidance. It is the willing action, the proud and fiery happiness, of the winged steed on whose back he has vaulted,

To witch the world with wondrous horsemanship.

Verse, in short, is that finishing, and rounding, and 'tuneful planetting' of the poet's creations, which is produced of necessity by the smooth tendencies of their energy or inward working, and the harmonious dance into which they are attracted round the orb of the beautiful. Poetry, in its complete sympathy with beauty, must, of necessity, leave no sense of the beautiful, and no power over its forms, unmanifested; and verse flows as inevitably from this condition of its integrity, as other laws of proportion do from any other kind of embodiment of beauty (say that of the human figure), however free and various the movements may be that play within their limits. What great poet ever wrote his poems in prose? or where is a good prose poem, of any length, to be found? The poetry of the Bible is understood to be in verse, in the original. Mr. Hazlitt has said a good word for those prose enlargements of some fine old song, which are known by the name of Ossian; and in pa.s.sages they deserve what he said; but he judiciously abstained from saying anything about the form. Is Gesner's _Death of Abel_ a poem? or Hervey's _Meditations_?

The _Pilgrim's Progress_ has been called one; and, undoubtedly, Bunyan had a genius which tended to make him a poet, and one of no mean order: and yet it was of as ungenerous and low a sort as was compatible with so lofty an affinity; and this is the reason why it stopped where it did. He had a craving after the beautiful, but not enough of it in himself to echo to its music. On the other hand, the possession of the beautiful will not be sufficient without force to utter it. The author of _Telemachus_ had a soul full of beauty and tenderness. He was not a man who, if he had had a wife and children, would have run away from them, as Bunyan's hero did, to get a place by himself in heaven. He was 'a little lower than the angels', like our own Bishop Jewells and Berkeleys; and yet he was no poet. He was too delicately, not to say feebly, absorbed in his devotions, to join in the energies of the seraphic choir.

Every poet, then, is a versifier; every fine poet an excellent one; and he is the best whose verse exhibits the greatest amount of strength, sweetness, straightforwardness, unsuperfluousness, _variety_, and _oneness_;--oneness, that is to say, consistency, in the general impression, metrical and moral; and variety, or every pertinent diversity of tone and rhythm, in the process. _Strength_ is the muscle of verse, and shows itself in the number and force of the marked syllables; as,

Sonrous metal blwing martial sunds.

_Paradise Lost._

Behemoth, bggest born of earth, upheav'd His vastness.

_Id._

Blw wnds and crack your cheeks! rage! blw!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, sput, Till you have drench'd our steeples, drwn'd the ccks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fres, Vaunt couriers of ak-cleaving thunderblts, Snge my whte head! and thu, all-shaking thunder, Strke flat the thck rotundity o' the wrld!

_Lear._

Unexpected locations of the accent double this force, and render it characteristic of pa.s.sion and abruptness. And here comes into play the reader's corresponding fineness of ear, and his r.e.t.a.r.dations and accelerations in accordance with those of the poet:

Then in the keyhole turns The ntricate wards, and every bolt and bar Unfastens.--On a sudden pen fly With impetuous recoil and jarring sound The infernal doors, and on their hinges grate Harsh thunder.

_Paradise Lost_, Book II.