It also explains to us that it was the good friar's unconscious affection for Juliet, the pure sympathies of a lonely but loving heart, which so imprudently induced him to unite the unfortunate young lovers. The men and women of Shakspeare live and love, and we cannot think of them without at the same time thinking of those with whom they lived and whom they loved. Indeed, when we can wrest any character in a drama from those which surround it, and study it apart, the unity of the whole is but apparent, never vital. Simplicity, harmony, life, power, truth, and love, are all to be found in any high work of the associative imagination.
We now proceed to characterize the penetrative imagination, 'which analyzes and realizes truths discoverable by no other faculty.' Of this faculty Shakspeare is also master. Ruskin, from whom we continue to quote, says: It never stops at crusts or ashes, or outward images of any kind, but ploughing them all aside, plunges at once into the very central fiery heart; its function and gift are the getting at the root; its nature and dignity depend on its holding things always by the heart. Take its hand from off the beating of that, and it will prophesy no longer; it looks not into the eyes, it judges not by the voice, it describes not by outward features; all that it affirms, judges, or describes, it affirms from within. There is no reasoning in it; it works not by algebra nor by integral calculus; it is a piercing Pholas-like mind's tongue that works and tastes into the very rock-heart; no matter what be the subject submitted to it, substance or spirit, all is alike divided asunder, joint and marrow; whatever utmost truth, life, principle it has laid bare, and that which has no truth, life, nor principle, is dissipated into its original smoke at a touch. The whispers at men's ears it lifts into visible angels. Vials that have lain sealed in the sea a thousand years it unseals, and brings out of them genii.
Every great conception of Art is held and treated by this faculty. Every character touched by men like Æschylus, Homer, Dante, or Shakspeare, is by them held by the heart; and every circumstance or sentence of their being, speaking, or seeming, is seized by a process from within, and is referred to that inner secret spring of which the hold is never lost for a moment; so that every sentence, as it has been thought out from the heart, opens a way down to the heart, and leads us to the very centre of life. Hence there is in every word set down by the Imagination an awful undercurrent of meaning—an evidence and shadow upon it of the deep places out of which it has come.
In this it utterly differs from the Fancy, with which it is often confounded.
Fancy sees the outside, and is able to give a portrait of the outside, clear, brilliant, and full of detail. The Imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes them felt; but in the clear seeing of things beneath, is often impatient of detailed interpretation, being sometimes obscure, mysterious, and abrupt. Fancy, as she stays at the externals, never feels. She is one of the hardest hearted of the intellectual faculties; or, rather, one of the most purely and simply intellectual. She cannot be made serious; no edge tools but she will play with; while the Imagination cannot but be serious—she sees too far, too darkly, too solemnly, too earnestly, to smile often! There is something in the heart of everything, if we can reach it, at which we shall not be inclined to laugh. Those who have the deepest sympathies are those who pierce deepest, and those who have so pierced and seen the melancholy deeps of things, are filled with the most intense passion and gentleness of sympathy. The power of an imagination may almost be tested by its accompanying degree of tenderness; thus there is no tenderness like Dante's, nor any seriousness like his—such seriousness that he is quite incapable of perceiving that which is commonplace or ridiculous.
Imagination, being at the heart of things, poises herself there, and is still, calm, and brooding; but Fancy, remaining on the outside of things, cannot see them all at once, but runs hither and thither, and round about, to see more and more, bounding merrily from point to point, glittering here and there, but necessarily always settling, if she settle at all, on a point only, and never embracing the whole. From these simple points she can strike out analogies and catch resemblances, which are true so far as the point from which she looks is concerned, but would be false, could she see through to the other side. This, however, she does not care to do—the point of contact is enough for, her; and even if there be a great gap between two things, she will spring from one to the other like an electric spark, and glitter the most brightly in her leaping. Fancy loves to follow long chains of circumstance from link to link; but the Imagination grasps a link in the middle that implies all the rest, and settles there.
'Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
[Imagination.
The tufted crowtoe and pale jessamine,
[Nugatory.
The white pink and the pansy streaked with jet,
[Fancy.
The glowing violet,
[Imagination.
The musk rose and the well attired woodbine,
[Fancy, vulgar.
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
[Imagination.
And every flower that sad embroidery wears.
[Mixed.
Milton.
'Oh, Proserpina,
For the flowers now that frighted thou lett'st fall
From Dis's wagon. Daffodils
That come before the swallow dare, and take
The winds of March with beauty. Violets, dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady
Most incident to maids.'
Here the Imagination goes into the inmost soul of every flower, after having touched them all with that heavenly timidness, the shadow of Proserpine's; and, gilding them all with celestial gathering, never stops on their spots or their bodily shape; while Milton sticks in the stains upon them, and puts us off with that unhappy streak of jet in the very flower that without this bit of paper staining would have been the most precious to us of all.