Or these lines in which Wordsworth compares the "sweet and virtuous" maid, not to "seasoned timber," but to A violet by a mossy stone Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. Compare also the beautiful, but merely external description of the golden bough in the Æneid, which is an exercise of fancy, with the intensely real and piercing description of the souls in Hades, yearning to cross to "the farther shore." quale solet silvis brumali frigore viscum fronde virere nova, quod non sua seminat arbos, et croceo fetu teretes circumdare truncos; stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum, - VI. 205 ff. - VI. 313 f. These lines from Thomson's "Winter" are unimpressive because the writer is thinking of little more than a faithful account of external details : Prone from the dripping cave and dumb cascade The following, on the other hand, is possessed of some strange magical power over the feelings, a weird, almost painful impression. Silent icicles Quietly shining to the quiet moon. -COLERIDGE, "Frost at Midnight." Note the intermingling of fancy and imagination in these richly imaged lines from Aubrey de Vere's "Ode to the Daffodil." Ere yet the blossomed sycamore With golden surf is curdled o'er; Thou comest while, meteor-like 'mid fens, the weed Swims wan in light; while sleet-showers whitening glare; Weeks ere, by river brims, new-furred the reed Leans its green javelin level in the air. Writ large on woods and lawns to-day that Law Which back remands thy race and thee To hero-haunted shades of dark Persephone. NOTE. The extraordinary imagery of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" (for instance the comparison of the loose clouds in the sky to the earth's decaying leaves), which in a less intense poem would seem far-fetched and unnatural, is perfectly in harmony with the tumultuous passion of the ode, and therefore is not fanciful, but profoundly imaginative. This principle has a wide application. It is also to be noted that the adjective "fanciful" usually has a disparaging connotation which is not always attributable to the word "fancy." Fancy, though inferior to imagination, is not always a blemish. It is so only when it proceeds from an imperfect realization of a serious subject, as in the examples from Shakespeare and Herbert quoted above. But the poet may choose to play lightly with his theme, and when to do so is not incongruous, what we call fancy cannot be considered a defect. Fancy and imagination often are found in the same poem, as in Wordsworth's "Daisy," Milton's "L'Allegro," and many others. Yet the work of each poet is apt to be distinguished by a prevailing use of one of these rather than the 66 other. Thus Cowley, Donne, Crashaw, and the so-called Metaphysical" poets generally, are extravagantly fanciful; Coleridge, Wordsworth, and the so-called "Romanticists," chiefly imaginative. Shakespeare's earlier work and his "euphuistic" compositions, as "King John," show excellent examples of fancy; his later work is characterized by imagination. So, too, Horace deals in fancy; Vergil more often than Horace in imagination. And among the Greek poets, Sophocles we should call an imaginative poet, Aristophanes fanciful, while Euripides would seem to combine the two in more nearly equal proportion. (b) The Creative Power of the Imaginative Faculty. — In poetry the imaginative faculty not only forms images, but combines many images so as to form one composite imaginative impression. As intimated above, it is not an act of the imaginative faculty alone; the imagination coöperates with the judgment and other mental powers. We attribute it to the imagination because of the important part played by this power in visualizing the subject as a whole, whereas in composing and arranging the parts or details of a prose treatise the logical faculties of the mind are uppermost. The imagination proper is the really effective workman here. It, and not fancy, does the distinctive work of creation. The imagination proper in the act of composing puts together details from many sources, not by an act of logic but by intuitive insight. The poet, stimulated by his emotional mood, conceives his whole subject imaginatively within one comprehensive view, all its parts transfused with the dominating significance of the piece, part growing out of part naturally and organically and contributing 1" He who conceives a tragedy puts into a crucible a great quantity, so to say, of impressions; the expressions themselves, conceived on other occasions, are fused together with the new in a single mass, in the same way as we cast into a smelting furnace formless pieces of bronze and most precious statuettes."-B. CROCE, "Esthetic," p. 34. its due share to the whole, and the complete effect proceeding, as indeed it can only proceed, not from deliberate calculation, but from the intensity of the writer's realization of it as one conception. Fancy, on the other hand, does not properly create. It composes piecemeal, part by part. Its eye is fastened exclusively on the details. These details in themselves may be of a high order of imagination in its proper sense; but the fancy flits from one to another and fails to fuse them into a homogeneous unit. We have as a resultant a series of poetical passages, rather than a great poem. The reader is not left at the end with one unified, imaginative impression. 99 66 The best examples of the creative imagination are the "Iliad," the Edipus Tyrannus," the "Inferno, King Lear," and in a lesser degree "Paradise Lost. The greatness of these poems does not reside in brilliant passages scattered through them, but in the whole conception adequately expressed. Sophocles was able, by virtue of his imaginative grasp, to realize and body forth with intense fidelity the image of a great and good man pursued to ruin by destiny, and thus to create a new personality for our imaginative experience. The "Idylls of the King," on the other hand, represent what we may call a fanciful creation. The characters are not adequately realized, but are a more or less incongruous combination of the medieval knight and the modern gentleman, and the value of the poems consists in the details elaborately executed and not in the powerful representation of the whole conception. In a narrower scope compare the vivid imaginative unity of "The Ancient Mariner," with the feeble agglutination of incidents and reflection in some of Wordsworth's narrative pieces, as "Ruth." III. THE IMAGINATIVE TREATMENT OF POETIC SUBJECTS The preceding section regarded the imaginative faculty in poetry under its general aspects; we shall now turn to its particular manifestations in various kinds of poetry. This will serve to present the same operations from a different point of view. - 1. The Imaginative Faculty in the Treatment of Narrative and Description. (a) Vivid Imagery.-In studying the imaginative value of a poem containing description or narration, the first thing to consider is the vividness of the imagery. This is the lowest form in which the imagination appears. Details that are not vivid do not fall within the range of poetry at all. The poet, indeed, must be also true to nature, but fidelity to nature is not of itself poetical. Vividness must be added to truth, and vividness implies a degree of intensity; that is, an intense realization of the object described and an intense presentation of it which forces it upon the imagination of the reader. Thus if I write "the lily is a large white flower" I am not poetically imaginative, though I am true to nature. When the poet writes: Large, white lilies of love, sceptral and tall, lovely for eyes to see -SWINBURNE, "Choriambics." he is imaginative, because vivid. Other examples of vividness are: The many-knotted waterflags That whistled stiff and dry about the marge. I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, "Midsummer Night's Dream," Act II, Sc. 1, 11. 249 ff. When the image has no other poetic value beyond this first quality of vividness, it is an example of what we have called fancy. Thomson's "Seasons" is defective in poetic power, because it is largely confined to imagery, without going further. (b) Emotional Effect. - Description and narration pass into a higher imaginative sphere when the images or details em |