Yet I think all this is too far detailed, and deals too much with externals: we feel rather the form of the fire-waves than their fury; we walk upon them too securely; and the fuel, sublimation, smoke, and singeing seem to me images only of partial combustion; they vary and extend the conception, but they lower the thermometer. Look back, if you will, and add to the description the glimmering of the livid flames; the sulphurous hail and red lightning; yet all together, however they overwhelm us with horror, fail of making us thoroughly, unendurably hot. The essence of intense flame has not been given. Now hear Dante: "Feriami 'l Sole in su l' omero destro, Che già raggiando tutto l' Occidente That is a slight touch; he has not gone to Ætna or Pelorus for fuel; but we shall not soon recover from it, he has taken our breath away, and leaves us gasping. No smoke nor cinders there. Pure white, hurtling, formless flame; very fire-crystal, we cannot make spires nor waves of it, nor divide it, nor walk on it; there is no question about singeing soles of feet. It is lambent annihilation. nation seizes always by the innermost Such is always the mode in which the highest imagina§ 3. The Imagi- tive faculty seizes its materials. It never stops at crusts or ashes, or outward images of any kind; it ploughs them all aside, and plunges into the very central fiery heart; nothing else will content its spirituality; whatever semblances and various outward shows and phases its subject may possess go for nothing; it gets within all fence, cuts down to the root, and drinks point. * Another exemplary course of hissing. [1883.] 1 "The sun Now all the western clime irradiate changed the very vital sap of that it deals with: once therein, it is at liberty to throw up what new shoots it will, so always that the true juice and sap be in them, and to prune and twist them at its pleasure, and bring them to fairer fruit than grew on the old tree; but all this pruning and twisting is work that it likes not, and often does ill; 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 in 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.* It may seem to the reader that I am incorrect in calling this penetrating possession-taking faculty Imagination. Be it so; the name is of little conse- tuitively and § 4. It acts inquence; the faculty itself, called by what name we without reasonwill, I insist upon as the highest intellectual power ing. of man. There is no reasoning in it; it works not by algebra, nor by integral calculus; it is a piercing pholas-like1 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, 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 deep sea a thousand years it unseals, and brings out of them Genii.2 Every great conception of poet or painter is held and treated by this faculty. Every character that is so much as * The reader will find in the 86th paper of the Guardian some interesting passages confirmatory of the view above given of the Imagination.3 1 [Pholas, a sea-animal of the molluscous kind that makes holes in stone.] 2 The Arabian Nights, ch. ii. (Lane's edition).] 3 [Note first added in ed. 2. Johnson there cites the verses in the Book of Job, beginning "Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder," and says: "Whereas the classical poets chiefly endeavour to paint the outward figure, lineaments and motions; the sacred poet makes all the beauties to flow from an inward principle in the creature he describes."] touched by men like Eschylus, 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 process from within, and is referred to that inner secret spring of which the hold is never lost for an instant; so that every sentence, as it has been thought out from the heart, opens for us a way down to the heart, leads us to the centre, and then leaves us to gather what more we may. It is the Open Sesame of a huge, obscure, endless cave, with inexhaustible treasure of pure gold scattered in it; the wandering about and gathering the pieces may be left to any of us, all can accomplish that; but the first opening of that invisible door in the rock is of the imagination only. 1 Hence there is in every word set down by the imaginative mind an awful under-current of meaning, and evidence and § 5. Signs of it shadow upon it of the deep places out of which in language. it has come. It is often obscure, often half-told; for he who wrote it, in his clear seeing of the things beneath, may have been impatient of detailed interpretation: but, if we choose to dwell upon it and trace it, it will lead us always securely back to that metropolis of the soul's dominion from which we may follow out all the ways and tracks to its farthest coasts. I think the "Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante of Francesca di Rimini, and the "He has no children" of Macduff, are as fine instances as can be given; but the sign and mark of it are visible on every line of the four great men above instanced. The unimaginative writer, on the other hand, as he has § 6. Absence of never pierced to the heart, so he can never touch Imagination, it. If he has to paint a passion, he remembers how shown. the external signs of it, he collects expressions of it from other writers, he searches for similes, he composes, exaggerates, heaps term on term, figure on figure, till we groan beneath the cold disjointed heap: but it is all faggot 1 [Cf. Sesame and Lilies, § 50.] "["That day we read no farther," Inferno, v. 138; Macheth, Act iv. sc. iii.] and no fire; the life breath is not in it; his passion has the form of the leviathan, but it never makes the deep boil; he fastens us all at anchor in the scaly rind of it; our sympathies remain as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.1 And that virtue of originality that men so strain after is not newness, as they vainly think (there is nothing new), it is only genuineness ; * it all depends on this single glorious faculty of getting to the spring of things and working out from that; it is the coolness, and clearness, and deliciousness of the water fresh from the fountain head, opposed to the thick, hot, unrefreshing drainage from other men's meadows. This freshness, however, is not to be taken for an infallible sign of imagination, inasmuch as it results also from a vivid operation of fancy, whose parallel between Imagi § 7. Distinction function to this division of the imaginative faculty nation and it is here necessary to distinguish. Fancy. I believe it will be found that the entirely unimaginative mind sees nothing of the object it has to dwell upon or describe, and is therefore utterly unable, as it is blind itself, to set anything before the eyes of the reader.† The 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 is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted, in its giving of outer detail. Take an instance. A writer with neither imagination nor fancy, describing a fair lip, does not see it, but thinks about it, and about what is said of it, and calls it well turned, or * Some sense in this bit at last! The six pages of metaphor which we have just gone through mean, in all, little more than that the best authors express the mind, more than the person or manners, of men or heroes. I often wish, now, they were a little more communicative. It is pleasant to know that Pallas had blue eyes; but I think Homer might have also told us something about her lips and chin. [1883.] + Compare Arist. Rhet, iii. 11. For the distinction between fancy and simple conception, see Chap. IV. § 3. [P. 290.] [The Ancient Mariner; the words are quoted also in the preceding volume, p. 524.] rosy, or delicate, or lovely, or quenching and chilling epithet. afflicts us with some other Now hear Fancy speak: "Her lips were red, and one was thin, 1 The real, red, bright being of the lip is there in a moment. But it is all outside; no expression yet, no mind. Let us go a step farther with Warner, of Fair Rosamond struck by Eleanor: "With that she dashed her on the lips, So dyed double red; Hard was the heart that gave the blow, Soft were those lips that bled." 2 The tenderness of mind begins to mingle with the outside colour, the Imagination is seen in its awakening. Next Shelley : "Lamp of life, thy lips are burning Through the veil that seems to hide them, Through thin clouds ere they divide them." 3 I take this and the next instance from Leigh Hunt's admirable piece of criticism, "Imagination and Fancy," which ought to be read with care, and to which, though somewhat loosely arranged, I may refer for all the filling up and illustration that the subject requires. With respect to what has just been said respecting want of imagination, compare his criticism of Addison's Cato, p. 28. I cannot, however, confirm his judgment, nor admit his selection of instances, among painters: he has looked to their manner only and habitual choice of subject, without feeling their power; and has given work to the coarseness, mindlessness, and eclecticism of Guido and the Carracci, which, in its poetical demand of tenderness, might have foiled Pinturicchio, of dignity Leonardo, and of colour Giorgione.4 1 [Quoted from Sir John Suckling at p. 35 of Leigh Hunt.] 2 [Quoted from William Warner at p. 7 of Leigh Hunt.] 3 [Quoted from memory from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, act ii. sc. 5:— "Child of light, thy limbs are burning Through the vest that seems to hide them," etc. Mrs. Shelley's (1839) edition reads "lips" for "limbs," but "Lamp of life" is a confusion of the first lines of the first and last verses of the song.] [The book referred to is Imagination and Fancy; or Selections from the English Poets, illustrative of those First Requisites of their Art. By Leigh Hunt. (Smith, Elder & Co., 1844.) Of Addison's Cato he remarks that it is full of those commonplaces, |