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 passages 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 encumbered 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 passion 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.
Passion 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 sex.
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:
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 analogies; 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.