From sea to land, from land to sea,
A chain of deepest action forging
Round all, in wrathful energy.
There flames a desolation, blazing
Before the Thunder’s crashing way;
Yet, Lord, thy messengers are praising
The gentle movement of thy Day.”[[5]]
[5]. The original German lies open before me, but I prefer to give the quotation in a language which will not fail to be understood by all American readers. It is Bayard Taylor’s translation, and so far as the imaginative conception is concerned it reproduces the original fairly well.
Here is the imagination presenting us with a great cosmic picture that in sublimity I venture to think has no superior in either poetry or painting; yet it cannot be doubted that it was built up thought by thought, line upon line; torn down perhaps a dozen times to be modelled anew with something added or omitted. In other words it has been composed, not flashed together by intuition.
The combining imagination in painting does not work differently from this. The picture is built up; and memories often play a prominent part in the process. One may mingle lines from Greece with colors from Japan and an atmosphere from Holland if he will. The result might be something heterogeneous and incongruous, but it would nevertheless be a true enough display of the imagination. But such a gathering from hither and yon, such a mingling of many foreign elements, would not be necessary or essential or even usual in art. Pictures are made in simpler ways. Here, for example, is a sea-piece from the “Ancient Mariner,” imagined and composed again, but brought together as a homogeneous whole.