When we imagine, therefore, we hold an image in the mind, grasping it with spiritual fingers, just as by our corporeal fingers a physical substance is grasped. Now the poetic mind in handling the image tosses it with what might be called a sportive earnest delight, and through this power and freedom of play elicits by sympathetic fervor, from its very core, electric rays, wherein the subject glows like the sculpture on an inwardly illuminated urn; rare insights being thus vouchsafed to clearest imaginative vision,—insights gained never but through sensibilities elevated and purified by aspirations after, and gleaming glimpses of, the absolute and ideal, the intellect being used as an obedient cheerful servant.
The sensibility that is so finely strung as to have these glimpses, revels in them as its fullest happiness, and with its whole might seeks and courts them. Hence the mind thus privileged to live nearer than others to the absolutely true, the spiritual ideal, is ever plying its privilege: conceiving, heightening, spiritualizing, according to the vision vouchsafed it; through this vision beholding everywhere a better and fairer than outwardly appears; painting nature and humanity, not in colors fictitious or fanciful, but in those richer, more lucent ones which such minds, through the penetrating insight of the higher imagination, see more truly as they are than minds less creatively endowed.
Thus is imagination a power inherent in, essential to, all intellectual action that ranges above simple perception and memory; a power without which the daily business of life even could not go on, being that power whereby the mind manipulates, so to speak, its materials. In its higher phasis it may be defined as the intellect stimulated by feeling to multiply its efforts for the ends of feeling; and in its highest it may be said to be intellect winged by emotion to go forth and gather honey from the bloom of creation.
Imagination, then, being intellect in keenest chase, and the intellectual part of the mind being, when moved in concert with the effective part, but a tool of this, what are the feelings or conditions of feeling of which intellect becomes the instrument in the production of poetry?
Cast your look on a page filled with the titles of Shakespeare’s plays. What worlds of throbbing life lie behind that roll! Then run over the persons of a single drama: that one bounded inclosure, how rich in variety and intensity, and truth of feeling! And when you shall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic, comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought, accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wide provinces of human sorrow and joy. Why are these pictures of passion so uniquely prized, passed on from generation to generation, the most precious heir-loom of the English tongue, to-day as fresh as on the morning when the paper was moist with the ink wherewith they were first written? Because they have in them more fullness and fineness and fidelity than any others. The poet has more life in him than other men, and Shakespeare has in him more life than any other poet, life manifested through power of intellect exalted through union with power of sympathy, the embodiments whereof are rounded, enlarged, refined, made translucent by that gift of sensibility to the fair and perfect[3] whereby, according to its degree, we are put in more loving relation to the work of God, and gain the clearest insights into his doings and purposes; a gift without which in richest measure Shakespeare might have been a notable historian or novelist or philosopher, but never the supreme poet he is.
When Coriolanus, having led the Volscians to Rome, encamps under its walls, and the Romans, in their peril and terror, send to him a deputation to move him from his vengeful purpose, the deputies,—the foremost citizens of Rome and the relations and former friends of Coriolanus,—having “declared their business in a very modest and humble manner,” he is described by Plutarch as stern and austere, answering them with “much bitterness and high resentment of the injuries done him.” What was the temper as well as the power of Coriolanus, we learn distinctly enough from these few words of Plutarch. But the task of the poet is more than this. To our imagination, that is, to the abstracting intellect roused by sympathy to a semi-creative state, he must present the haughty Roman so as to fill us with an image of him that shall in itself embody that momentous hour in the being of the young republic. He must dilate us to the dimensions of the man and the moment; he must so enlarge and warm our feeling that it shall take in, and delight in, the grandeur of the time and the actors. The life of Rome, of Rome yet to be so mighty, is threatened by one of her own sons. This vast history, to be for future centuries that of the world, a Roman seemed about to quench, about to rase the walls that were to embrace the imperial metropolis of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Of what gigantic dimensions must he be, this Roman! Now hear Menenius, a former friend and admirer of Coriolanus, depict him. Having described, in those compressed sinewy phrases which Shakespeare has at command, the change in his nature, he adds, “When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a corselet with his eye; he talks like a knell, and his hum is a battery. He sits in his state, as a thing made for Alexander. What he bids be done is finished with his bidding: he wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.”
Hear how a mother’s heart, about to break, from the loss of her son, utters its grief when it has the privilege of using a voice quivering with poetic fervor. The French king bids Lady Constance be comforted: she answers,—
“No, I defy all counsel, all redress,
But that which ends all counsel, true redress,
Death, death. O amiable lovely death!