73* POETRY 



(c.) But the word is also used not of moral, but of intellectual 

 sympathy; a power of appreciating, by an act of intuition, the char- 

 acteristic qualities of things and people, so as to be able to set out a 

 train of consequences. A celebrated novelist was once congratulated 

 upon the admirable drawing in one of her books of a particular 

 school of Dissenters, and she was asked what opportunities she had 

 enjoyed of studying them. Her reply was that she had once caught 

 sight of a group of them through a half-opened door as she mounted a 

 staircase. That is no doubt an extreme case, but it is all the more 

 useful as an illustration. It helps us to realize how potent a faculty 

 is the endowment of the dramatist, which can pierce through human 

 appearance to its essential qualities, can conceive by a sure instinct 

 how, in given circumstances, the given character must act, and can 

 represent it to us, because it is vivid to him, in all the versimilitude 

 of essential detail. Such imagination is plainly one large and special 

 side of the faculty of seeing things out of their commonplace associa- 

 tions. As a branch of the same head would rank the still rarer power 

 of conceiving types of character, that for certain reasons have no 

 actual existence in the world we know, such types as Shakespeare's 

 Ariel and Caliban and Puck. 



((/.) The word imagination is also used of a faculty which may at 

 first sight seem the opposite of this a faculty of seeing people and 

 objects not as they arc in themselves, but colored by the atmosphere of 

 joy or gloom through which they are seen. The truth, however, prob- 

 ably is that nothing at all is, or ever can be, seen out of some atmos- 

 phere, a thing in itself being merely an abstraction; but the greater 

 a poet is, the more various are his moods, while with lesser men a 

 particular mood inay cover all the objects in their poetical world. 



(c.) Again, the word has a narrower and more technical sense; 

 namely, the power of detecting resemblances in nature for the purpose 

 of poetical illustration. This use of the term is not merely freakish, 

 but connects with that broader and more fundamental sense to which 

 I have so many times referred, the power and habit of seeing the 

 " common things that round us lie '" out of their commonplace associa- 

 tion-, of seeing them in more subtle and original associations. For it 

 is the power of bringing together two objects or events that the ordi- 

 nary person would ne\vr dream of connecting, but in which the poet's 

 eve has detected similarity, and which lie therefore places side by side 

 so that one may throw light upon the other. Our thinking, it will be 

 admitted, is largely associational : one thing recalls another; but it is 

 lho prerogative of poets that the tracks between idea and idea in their 

 mind- are nor tlio-o of common trade. Recur for a moment to 

 Wither"- reference to a daisy. We know beforehand what a daisy will 

 surrrrr^t to a child, what to a gardener, what to a botanist: we do not 



