Less imagination is admissible in eloquence than in poetry. The reason is obvious—ordinary discourse should be less remote from common ideas. The orator speaks the language of all; the foundation of the poet's performance is fiction. Accordingly, imagination is the essence of his art; to the orator it is only an accessory.
Particular traits or touches of imagination have, it is observed, added great beauties to painting. That artifice especially is often cited, by which the artist covers with a veil the head of Agamemnon at the sacrifice of Iphigenia; an expedient, nevertheless, far less beautiful than if the painter had possessed the secret of exhibiting in the countenance of Agamemnon the conflict between the grief of a father, the majesty of a monarch, and the resignation of a good man to the will of heaven; as Rubens had the skill to paint in the looks and attitude of Mary de Medici the pain of childbirth, the joy of being delivered of a son, and the maternal affection with which she looks upon her child.
In general, the imaginations of painters when they are merely ingenious, contribute more to exhibit the learning in the artist than to increase the beauty of the art. All the allegorical compositions in the world are not worth the masterly execution and fine finish which constitute the true value of paintings.
In all the arts, the most beautiful imagination is always the most natural. The false is that which brings together objects incompatible; the extravagant paints objects which have no analogy, allegory, or resemblance. A strong imagination explores everything to the bottom; a weak one skims over the surface; the placid one reposes in agreeable pictures; the ardent one piles images upon images. The judicious or sage imagination is that which employs with discrimination all these different characters, but which rarely admits the extravagant and always rejects the false.
If memory nourished and exercised be the source of all imagination, that same faculty of memory, when overcharged, becomes the extinction of it. Accordingly, the man whose head is full of names and dates does not possess that storehouse of materials from which he can derive compound images. Men occupied in calculation, or with intricate matters of business, have generally a very barren imagination.
When imagination is remarkably stirring and ardent, it may easily degenerate into madness; but it has been observed that this morbid affection of the organs of the brain more frequently attaches to those passive imaginations which are limited to receiving strong impressions of objects than to those fervid and active ones which collect and combine ideas; for this active imagination always requires the association of judgment, the other is independent of it.
It is not perhaps useless to add to this essay, that by the words perception, memory, imagination, and judgment, we do not mean distinct and separate organs, one of which has the gift of perceiving, another of recollecting, the third of imagining, and the last of judging. Men are more inclined, than some are aware, to consider these as completely distinct and separate faculties. It is, however, one and the same being that performs all these operations, which we know only by their effects, without being able to know anything of that being itself.
SECTION II.
Brutes possess imagination as well as ourselves; your dog, for example, hunts in his dreams. "Objects are painted in the fancy," says Descartes, as others have also said. Certainly they are; but what is the fancy, and how are objects painted in it? Is it with "the subtle matter"? "How can I tell" is the appropriate answer to all questions thus affecting the first principles of human organization.
Nothing enters the understanding without an image. It was necessary, in order to our obtaining the confused idea we possess of infinite space, that we should have an idea of a space of a few feet. It is necessary, in order to our having the idea of God, that the image of something more powerful than ourselves should have long dwelt upon our minds.