PASSION AXD IMAGINATION IX POETRY 735 



And then comes tins criticism: 



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 paper-staining, would have been the most precious to us of 

 all. " There is pansies, that's for thoughts." 



I do not know whether this comparison has ever been the subject of 

 -adverse comment: I have often heard it praised. To me, I confess 

 it seems a compendium of all the faults that a critic of poetry 

 should avoid: waywardness, preciosity, inattention, and the uncritical 

 use of critical labels. In the first place the critic has ignored what is 

 of the first consequence, the motive of the two pieces, and has treated 

 them as parallel flower-passages from a volume of elegant extracts; 

 whereas no criticism can be to the point that does not recognize that 

 Milton's flowers are being gathered for a funeral, and Shakespeare's 

 are not to be gathered at all; they are visionary spring flowers, seen 

 in glory through the autumn haze. Without going at length through 

 each passage it is worth noticing that Shakespeare's lines about the 

 primrose are open to precisely the same censure, no more and no 

 less, as Mr. Ruskin accords to Milton's pansy. The epithet " pale " is 

 very far from " going into the very inmost soul '' of the primrose, 

 which is a hardy flower, and not in the least anaemic; it '' sticks in the 

 stains" upon the surface as much as the "'freaked with jet;" and 

 this, again, so far from being " unhappy/' gives the reason why the 

 pansy was chosen for the hearse among the flowers that " sad em- 

 broidery wear.'' A second point to notice concerns the lines that are 

 marked "nugatory.'' l>oth Shakespeare and Milton had the instinct 

 to see that just as, on the one hand, a llo\ver passage must not be a 

 mere catalogue, so, on the other, each item must not be unduly empha- 

 sized. And so we find that, while Milton has his "tufted crow-toe 

 and pale jessamine,'' and his " wcll-att ir'd woodbine" to make up 

 the bunch. Shakespeare also has his 



Bold oxlip>. and 



The crown-imperial, lilies of all kinds, 

 The flower-de-luce being one ! 



a "nugatory" pa~-age whirh Mr. Ruskin omits from his quotation. 

 So much. then, for ihe contrast of Imagination and Fancy. 



In resuming what has been said about the two great character- 

 istics of the poetical mind, its passion and its imagination, it may be 

 useful to illustrate from the picture that our great dramatist lias 

 drawn of the poetical character in the person of Macbeth. Macbeth. 



