As the imagination of a great mathematician must possess extreme precision, so must that of a great poet be exceedingly correct and chaste. He must never present images that are incompatible with each other, incoherent, highly exaggerated, or unsuitable to the nature of the subject.
The great fault of some writers who have appeared since the age of Louis XIV. is attempting a constant display of imagination, and fatiguing the reader by the profuse abundance of far-fetched images and double rhymes, one-half of which may be pronounced absolutely useless. It is this which at length brought into neglect and obscurity a number of small poems, such as "Ver Vert," "The Chartreuse," and "The Shades," which at one period possessed considerable celebrity. Mere sounding superfluity soon finds oblivion.
Omne supervacuum pleno depectore manat.
—HORACE, Art of Poetry, 837.
The active and the passive imagination have been distinguished in the "Encyclopædia." The active is that of which we have treated. It is the talent of forming new pictures out of all those contained in our memory.
The passive is scarcely anything beyond memory itself, even in a brain under strong emotion. A man of an active and fervid imagination, a preacher of the League in France, or a Puritan in England, harangues the populace with a voice of thunder, with an eye of fire, and the gesture of a demoniac, and represents Jesus Christ as demanding justice of the Eternal Father for the new wounds he has received from the royalists, for the nails which have been driven for the second time through his feet and hands by these impious miscreants. Avenge, O God the Father, avenge the blood of God the Son; march under the banner of the Holy Spirit; it was formerly a dove, but is now an eagle bearing thunder! The passive imaginations, roused and stimulated by these images, by the voice, by the action of those sanguinary empirics, urge the maddened hearers to rush with fury from the chapel or meeting house, to kill their opponents and get themselves hanged.
Persons of passive imaginations, for the sake of high and violent excitement, go sometimes to the sermon and sometimes to the play; sometimes to the place of execution; and sometimes even to what they suppose to be the midnight and appalling meetings of presumed sorcerers.
IMPIOUS.
Who is the impious man? It is he who exhibits the Being of Beings, the great former of the world, the eternal intelligence by whom all nature is governed, with a long white beard, and having hands and feet. However, he is pardonable for his impiety—a weak and ignorant creature, the sight or conduct of whom we ought not to allow to provoke or to vex us.
If he should even paint that great and incomprehensible Being as carried on a cloud, which can carry nothing; if he is so stupid as to place God in a mist, in rain, or on a mountain, and to surround him with little round, chubby, painted faces, accompanied by two wings, I can smile and pardon him with all my heart.