Part 16 (1/2)

Mariamne, _with superior charms_, _Triumphs o'er reason_: in her look she _bears_ A paradise of ever-blooming sweets; Fair as the first idea beauty _prints_ In the young lover's soul; a winning grace Guides every gesture, and obsequious love _Attends_ on all her steps.

'Triumphing o'er reason' is an old acquaintance of everybody's.

'Paradise in her look' is from the Italian poets through Dryden. 'Fair as the first idea', &c., is from Milton, spoilt;--'winning grace' and 'steps' from Milton and Tibullus, both spoilt. Whenever beauties are stolen by such a writer, they are sure to be spoilt: just as when a great writer borrows, he improves.

To come now to Fancy,--she is a younger sister of Imagination, without the other's weight of thought and feeling. Imagination indeed, purely so called, is all feeling; the feeling of the subtlest and most affecting a.n.a.logies; the perception of sympathies in the natures of things, or in their popular attributes. Fancy is a sporting with their resemblance, real or supposed, and with airy and fantastical creations.

--Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, _And, like a dew-drop from the lion's mane, Be shook to air._

_Troilus and Cressida_, Act iii, sc. 3.

That is imagination;--the strong mind sympathizing with the strong beast, and the weak love identified with the weak dew-drop.

Oh!--and I forsooth In love! I that have been love's whip I _A very beadle to a humorous sigh!--_ A domineering pedant o'er the boy,-- This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid, _Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms, The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans_, &c.

_Love's Labour's Lost_, Act iii, sc. 1.

That is fancy;--a combination of images not in their nature connected, or brought together by the feeling, but by the will and pleasure; and having just enough hold of a.n.a.logy to betray it into the hands of its smiling subjector.

Silent icicles _Quietly s.h.i.+ning to the quiet moon._

Coleridge's _Frost at Midnight_.

That, again, is imagination;--a.n.a.logical sympathy; and exquisite of its kind it is.

'You are now sailed _into the north of my lady's opinion_; where you will hang _like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard_, unless you do redeem it by some laudable attempt.'

_Twelfth Night_, Act iii, sc. 2.

And that is fancy;--one image capriciously suggested by another, and but half connected with the subject of discourse; nay, half opposed to it; for in the gaiety of the speaker's animal spirits, the 'Dutchman's beard' is made to represent the lady!

Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the comic. _Macbeth_, _Lear_, _Paradise Lost_, the poem of Dante, are full of imagination: the _Midsummer Night's Dream_ and the _Rape of the Lock_, of fancy: _Romeo and Juliet_, the _Tempest_, the _Faerie Queene_, and the _Orlando Furioso_, of both. The terms were formerly identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It presents too invariably the idea of a solid body;--of 'images' in the sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. Fancy, on the other hand, while it means nothing but a spiritual image or apparition (Fa?tasa, appearance, _phantom_), has rarely that freedom from visibility which is one of the highest privileges of imagination.

Viola, in _Twelfth Night_, speaking of some beautiful music, says:

It gives a very echo to the seat Where Love is throned.

In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are combined; yet the fancy, the a.s.sumption of Love's sitting on a throne, is the image of a solid body; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy between the pa.s.sion of love and impa.s.sioned music, presents us no image at all.

Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies of what is called Imagination.

One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy; and like Melancholy, as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe.

Fancy turns her sister's wizard instruments into toys. She takes a telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the child-like and sportive. She chases b.u.t.terflies, while her sister takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of gallantries, of fas.h.i.+ons; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings to the images of wit; and delights as much to people nature with smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together, and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her company; always, in the case of the greatest poets; often in that of less, though with them she is the greater favourite. Spenser has great imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both also, the very greatest, but with imagination predominant; Chaucer, the strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, and in comic painting inferior to none; Pope has hardly any imagination, but he has a great deal of fancy; Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakespeare alone, of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing [the Oberon-t.i.tania scenes from the _Midsummer-Night's Dream_] will be found in the present volume.[29] See also his famous description of Queen Mab and her equipage, in _Romeo and Juliet_:

Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs; The cover, of the wings of gra.s.shoppers: Her traces of the smallest spider's web; Her collars of the moons.h.i.+ne's watery beams, &c.

[29] Leigh Hunt's _Imagination and Fancy, or Selections from the English Poets_, 1844.

That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace from Drayton's _Nymphidia_:

This palace standeth in the air, By necromancy placed there, That it no tempest needs to fear, Which way soe'er it blow it: And somewhat southward tow'rd the noon, Whence lies a way up to the moon, And thence the fairy can as soon Pa.s.s to the earth below it.

The walls of spiders' legs are made, Well morticed and finely laid: He was the master of his trade It curiously that builded: _The windows of the eyes of cats:_