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.

$6. Absence of imagination, how shown.

The imaginative writer, on the other hand, as he has never pierced to the heart, so he can never touch it if he has to paint a passion, he remembers 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 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.

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 between imagina from a vivid operation of fancy, whose parallel function to this division of the imaginative faculty

$7. Distinction

tion and fancy.

it is here necessary to distinguish.

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 * Compare Arist. Rhet. III. 11.

For the distinction between fancy and simple conception; see Chap. IV. § 3.

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 rosy, or delicate, or lovely, or afflicts us with some other quenching and chilling epithet. Now hear fancy speak,

Her lips were red, and one was thin,
Compared with that was next her chin,
Some bee had stung it newly." *

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."

The tenderness of mind begins to mingle with the outside color, the imagination is seen in its awakening. Next Shelley,

"Lamp of life, thy lips are burning

Through the veil that seems to hide them,

As the radiant lines of morning

Through thin clouds, ere they divide them."

There dawns the entire soul in that morning; yet we may stop if we choose at the image still external, at the crimson clouds. The imagination is contemplative rather than penetrative. Last, hear Hamlet,

66

Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?"

* 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 color, Giorgione.

There is the essence of lip, and the full power of the imagination.

Again, compare Milton's flowers in Lycidas with Perdita's. In Milton it happens, I think, generally, and in the case before us most certainly, that the imagination is mixed and broken with fancy, and so the strength of the imagery is part of iron and part of clay.

Bring the rathe primrose, that forsaken dies
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,

(Imagination) (Nugatory)

The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,- (Fancy)
The glowing violet,

The musk rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears.”

Then hear Perdita :—

"O, Proserpina,

(Imagination)
(Fancy, vulgar)
(Imagination)
(Mixed)

That come before the swallow dares, 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."

Observe how the imagination in these last lines goes into the very inmost soul of every flower, after having touched them all at first with that heavenly timidness, the shadow of Proserpine's; and gilded them with celestial gathering, and never stops on their spots, or their bodily shape, while Milton sticks in the stains upon them, and puts us off with that unhappy freak of jet in the very flower that without this bit of paperstaining would have been the most precious to us of all. "There is pansies, that's for thoughts."

So I believe it will be found throughout the operation of the fancy, that it has to do with the outsides of things, and is content therewith of this there can be no doubt in such passages as that description of Mab, so often given as an $8. Fancy how involved with illustration of it, and many other instances will be imagination. found in Leigh Hunt's work already referred to.

Only some embarrassment is caused by passages in which fancy is seizing the outward signs of emotion, understanding them as such, and yet, in pursuance of her proper function, taking for her share, and for that which she chooses to dwell upon, the outside sign rather than the emotion. Note in Macbeth that brilliant instance.

"Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky

And fan our people cold."

The outward shiver and coldness of fear is seized on, and irregularly but admirably attributed by the fancy to the drift of the banners. Compare Solomon's Song where the imagination stays not at the outside, but dwells on the fearful emotion itself?

"Who is she that looketh forth as the morning; fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?"

§ 9 Fancy is never serious.

Now, if this be the prevailing characteristic of the two faculties, it is evident that certain other collateral differences will result from it. Fancy, as she stays at the externals, can never feel. 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; whereas the imagination is in all things the reverse. She cannot be but serious; she sees too far, too darkly, too solemnly, too earnestly, ever to smile. There is something in the heart of everything, if we can reach it, that we shall not be inclined to laugh at. The ἀνήριθμον yéλaoua of the sea is on its surface, not in the deep.

§ 10. Want of seriousness the bar

And thus there is reciprocal action between the intensity of moral feeling and the power of imagination; for, on the one hand, those who have keenest sympathy are those who look closest and pierce deepest, and hold securest ; to high art at the and, on the other, those who have so pierced and present time. seen the melancholy deeps of things, are filled with the most intense passion and gentleness of sympathy. Hence, I suppose that the powers of the imagination may always

*Fancy, in her third function may, however, become serious, and gradually rise into imagination in doing so. Compare Chap. IV. § 5.

be tested by accompanying tenderness of emotion, and thus, (as Byron said,) there is no tenderness like Dante's, neither any intensity nor seriousness like his, such seriousness that it is incapable of perceiving that which is commonplace or ridiculous, but fuses all down into its white-hot fire; and, on the other hand, I suppose the chief bar to the action of imagination, and stop to all greatness in this present age of ours, is its mean and shallow love of jest and jeer, so that if there be in any good and lofty work a flaw or failing, or undipped vulnerable part where sarcasm may stick or stay, it is caught at, and pointed at, and buzzed about, and fixed upon, and stung into, as a recent wound is by flies, and nothing is ever taken seriously nor as it was meant, but always, if it may be, turned the wrong way, and misunderstood; and while this is so, there is not, nor cannot be any hope of achievement of high things; men dare not open their hearts to us, if we are to broil them on a thornfire.

This, then, is one essential difference between imagination. and fancy, and another is like it and resultant from it, that the imagination being at the heart of things, poises herself there, and is still, quiet, and brooding; comprehending $ 11. Imagination is quiet; fancy, all around her with her fixed look, but the fancy restless. staying at the outside of things, cannot see them all at once, but runs hither and thither, and round and about to see more and more, bounding merrily from point to point, and glittering here and there, but necessarily always settling, if she settle at all, on a point only, never embracing the whole. And from these single points she can strike out analogies and catch resemblances, which, so far as the point she looks at is concerned, are true, but would be false, if she could see through to the other side. This, however, she cares not to do, the point of contact is enough for her, and even if there be a gap left between the two things and they do not quite touch, she will spring from one to the other like an electric spark, and be seen brightest in her leaping.

12. The detail

Now these differences between the imagination and the fancy hold, not only in the way they lay hold of separate Ing operation of conceptions, but even in the points they occupy of time, for the fancy loves to run hither and thither

fancy,