For instance, the fight between the Prince of Wales and Hotspur, in Henry the Fourth, corresponds closely, in the character of the event itself, to the fight of Fitz-James with Roderick, in the Lady of the Lake. But Shakespeare’s treatment of his subject is strictly dramatic; Scott’s, strictly epic.
Shakespeare gives you no account whatever of any blow or wound: his stage direction is, briefly, “Hotspur is wounded, and falls.” Scott gives you accurate account of every external circumstance, and the finishing touch of botanical accuracy,—
“Down came the blow; but in the heath
The erring blade found bloodless sheath,”—
makes his work perfect, as epic poetry. And Scott’s work is always epic, and it is contrary to his very nature to treat any subject dramatically.
That is the technical distinction, then, between the three modes of work. But the gradation of power in all three depends on the degree of imagination with which the writer can enter into the feelings of other people. Whether in expressing their’s or his own, and whether in expressing their feelings only, or also the circumstances surrounding them, his power depends on his being able to feel as they do; in other words, on his being able to conceive character. And the literature which is not poetry at all, which is essentially unsentimental, or anti-poetic, is that which is produced by persons who have no imagination; and whose merit (for of course I am not speaking of bad literature) is in their wit or sense, instead of their imagination.
The most prosaic, in this sense, piece I have ever myself examined, in the literature of any nation, is the Henriade of Voltaire. You may take that as a work of a man whose head was as destitute of imaginative power as it is possible for the healthy cerebral organization of a highly developed mammalian animal to be. The description of the storm which carries Henry to Jersey, and of the hermit in Jersey “que Dieu lui fit connaitre,” and who, on that occasion, “au bord d’une onde pure, offre un festin champêtre,” cannot be rivalled, for stupor in conceptive power, among printed books of reputation. On the other hand, Voltaire’s wit, and reasoning faculties, are nearly as strong as his imagination is weak. His natural disposition is kind; his sympathy therefore is sincere with any sorrow that he can conceive; and his indignation great against injustices of which he cannot comprehend the pathetic motives. Now notice further this, which is very curious, and to me inexplicable, but not on that account less certain as a fact.
The imaginative power always purifies; the want of it therefore as essentially defiles; and as the wit-power is apt to develope itself through absence of imagination, it seems as if wit itself had a defiling tendency. In Pindar, Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Scott, the colossal powers of imagination result in absolute virginal purity of thought. The defect of imagination and the splendid rational power in Pope and Horace associate themselves—it is difficult to say in what decided measures—with foulness of thought. The Candide of Voltaire, in its gratuitous filth, its acute reasoning, and its entire vacuity of imagination, is a standard of what may perhaps be generally and fitly termed ‘fimetic literature,’ still capable, by its wit, and partial truth, of a certain service in its way. But lower forms of modern literature and art—Gustave Doré’s paintings, for instance,—are the corruption, in national decrepitude, of this pessimist method of thought; and of these, the final condemnation is true—they are neither fit for the land, nor yet for the dunghill.
It is one of the most curious problems respecting mental government to determine how far this fimetic taint must necessarily affect intellects in which the reasoning and imaginative powers are equally balanced, and both of them at high level,—as in Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Molière, Cervantes, and Fielding; but it always indicates the side of character which is unsympathetic, and therefore unkind; (thus Shakespeare makes Iago the foulest in thought, as cruelest in design, of all his villains,) but which, in men of noble nature, is their safeguard against weak enthusiasms and ideals. It is impossible, however, that the highest conditions of tenderness in affectionate conception can be reached except by the absolutely virginal intellect. Shakespeare and Chaucer throw off, at noble work, the lower part of their natures as they would a rough dress; and you may also notice this, that the power of conceiving personal, as opposed to general, character, depends on this purity of heart and sentiment. The men who cannot quit themselves of the impure taint, never invent character, properly so called; they only invent symbols of common humanity. Even Fielding’s Allworthy is not a character, but a type of a simple English gentleman; and Squire Western is not a character, but a type of the rude English squire. But Sir Roger de Coverley is a character, as well as a type; there is no one else like him; and the masters of Tullyveolan, Ellangowan, Monkbarns, and Osbaldistone Hall, are all, whether slightly or completely drawn, portraits, not mere symbols.
The little piece which I shall to-day further translate for you from my Swiss novel is interesting chiefly in showing the power with which affectionate and sentimental imagination may attach itself even to inanimate objects, and give them personality. But the works of its writer generally show the most wholesome balance of the sentimental and rational faculty I have ever met with in literature;—the part of Gotthelf’s nature which is in sympathy with Pope and Fielding enables him to touch, to just the necessary point, the lower grotesqueness of peasant nature, while his own conception of ideal virtue is as pure as Wordsworth’s.