PASSIOX AND IMAGINATION IX POETRY ?3'1 



whether about the universe or man's heart, and it is only the best 

 that must determine the genus will admit that, so far as he has 

 trusted himself to it, it has convinced him of its entire veracity. It is 

 idealized only in the sense that a landscape is idealized by the removal 

 of the accidental and commonplace details, which sufficed to blind 

 others to the beauty that the painter distinguished. The artist, poet 

 or painter, sees the light that never was on sea or land until he saw 

 it; but when he has once seen it and shown it us, we can all see that 

 it is there, and is not merely a figment of his fancy. This mode of 

 viewing things, which by its freshness reveals, or interprets, or ideal- 

 izes, is what is meant by Poetical Imagination. 



But now that that most terrifying of technical terms has been men- 

 tioned, it may be well to make a short summary of the various senses 

 in which the word is habitually employed, in order to observe what all, 

 or any, of them have in common, and how they connect one with 

 another. 



(a.) When a psychologist speaks of imagination he is not thinking 

 of poetry; he means by the word the power of summoning again 

 before the mind's eye vivid images of what has been once seen. He 

 bids us look carefully at our breakfast-table, and then, closing our 

 eyes, notice how much of it we can recall, how clear or dim an image. 

 Whether skill in this memory-picturing has any link with poetical 

 imagination it would be hard to say; certainly to no one would a 

 power of vividly recalling images be of greater service. The faculty 

 seems to be entirely distinct from the power of attention and close 

 observation. 



(b.) A more familiar usage of the word is that which makes it 

 almost a synonym for sympathy the power of projecting self into 

 the circumstances of others. We know to our cost that many men and 

 women are sadly to seek in this faculty, and it seems to be no especial 

 prerogative of poets, though Shelley thought so. He speaks of the 

 poet as 



A nerve o'er which do creep 

 The else unfelt oppressions of the earth. 



And in his prose essay he says: '"A 711 an to be greatly good must 

 imagine intensely and comprehensively : he must put himself in the 

 place of another, and of inany others; the pains and pleasures of his 

 species must become his own: " and he continues, "The great instru- 

 ment of moral good is imagination, and poetry administers to the 

 effect by acting upon the cause." (Essays, i, 16.) 



Shelley in this passage is no doubt theorizing too much from his 

 own personal feelings ; for it has often been remarked that poets have 

 been singularly lacking in imagination of this moral sort, and have- 

 been conspicuous for an intense selfishness in their domestic relation. 



