There is an obscurity of mist rising from the
undrained shallows of the mind, and there is the darkness of
thunder-cloud gathering its electric masses with passionate intensity
from the clear element of the imagination, not at random or wilfully, but
by the natural processes of the creative faculty, to brood those flashes
of expression that transcend rhetoric, and are only to be apprehended by
the poetic instinct.
In that secondary office of imagination, where it serves the artist, not
as the reason that shapes, but as the interpreter of his conceptions into
words, there is a distinction to be noticed between the higher and lower
mode in which it performs its function. It may be either creative or
pictorial, may body forth the thought or merely image it forth. With
Shakespeare, for example, imagination seems immanent in his very
consciousness; with Milton, in his memory. In the one it sends, as if
without knowing it, a fiery life into the verse,
"Sei die Braut das Wort,
Braeutigam der Geist";
in the other it elaborates a certain pomp and elevation. Accordingly, the
bias of the former is toward over-intensity, of the latter toward
over-diffuseness. Shakespeare's temptation is to push a willing metaphor
beyond its strength, to make a passion over-inform its tenement of words;
Milton cannot resist running a simile on into a fugue.
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