Text: N. P. Willis (?), Review of Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy, Evening Mirror (New York), January 18, 1845, vol. 1, no. 15, pp. 228-229

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LEIGH HUNT’S IMAGINATION AND FANCY.*

This volume consists of a selection of specimens from Spenser, Marlowe, Shakspeare and his principal dramatic contemporaries or successors, Milton, Colridege [[Coleridge]], Shelley end Keats; the selection, affording examples where “Imagination and Fancy” predominate over what may be termed reflection or passion, as well as over all the lighter qualities of the poetical art. The vissages [[visages]] which, in the estimation it Mr. Hunt, more strikingly illustrate his object of presenting “poetry in its essence” are marked with Italics, often really giving, as he designed, the effect of emphasis in reading. A general notice of each author's genius is prefixed to the selections, with annotations upon particular passages; and the whole is introduced by an Essay in answer to the question “What is Poetry?”

The volume will be found much more interesting and assuredly of a far higher range of intellect, than this account of it might induce one to suppose. The unity of purpose in Mr. Hunt's object gives a unity to the specimens rarely attained in collections. They have also very often a completeness in themselves, which is still more rarely compassed; the scenes from the Tempest, the Midsummer Night Dream, Macbeth, and almost all the larger extracts, forming a whole which is not only surprising, but a curious instance of the completeness with which great genius endows its parts.

It may indeed be objected to the longer extracts from Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, and even Coleridge, that, strictly speaking, they do not illustrate the avowed purpose of the critic — “to show, throughout the greater part of the volume, what sort of poetry is to be considered as poetry of the most poetic kind, or such as exhibits the imagination and fancy in a state of predominance, undisputed by interests of anther sort. Poetry, therefore, is not here in its compound state, great or otherwise, but in its element, like an essence distilled. All the greatest poetry includes that essence, but the essence does not present itself in combination with the greatest form of poetry.” In other words, Mr. Hunt's object appears to have been to carry out the idea of Francis Jeffrey touching poetry, as something apart from “the interest of the stories poets tell — the vivacity of

the characters they delineate — the weight and force of the maxims and sentiments in which they abound — the very pathos and wit and humor they display;” but he has not contrived to establish either his own view (if we understand it rightly) or the theory of Jeffrey. The three scenes from Shakspeare exhibit imagination of a most wonderful if not of a most unexampled kind. But they possess, even in their amputated shape, the interest of a story; they are distinguished by the vivacity of the characters they delineate, (and by more qualities than vivacity;) if they do not “abound” in maxims of “weight and force,” they possess wit and humor; and the incantation-scene of Macbeth rises to the very highest passion of tragedy — terror. Throughout the three ‘wonderful specimens quoted by Mr. Hunt, though man is shown under circumstances physically impossible, and beings are presented that have no existence whatever, there is nothing exaggerated, nothing fine, nothing dreamy of mystical, nothing invented. The Fairies, the Witches, even the brutish and malignant Caliban, have their prototypes, not in nature, but in the popular mind.

They are supernatural not unnatural; not human, often not even akin to humanity, but beings endowed with some qualities of man; the creations of a lively and an intense, but a believing superstition. And they are presented by the poet with more truth, perhaps with more of matter-of-fact truth, than in works expressly devoted to the subjects. But it is truth animated and exalted by the highest poetry, and connected by the profoundest art with the sympathy of human creatures, or, as in the case of Oberon and Titania, with human feelings. Without wandering from the incantation scene, (all that is contained in the volume before us,) let the reader analyse the following invocation of Macbeth. All the must terrible effects of their powers are condensed into the address, but nothing more. The witches could injure or destroy individuals by dint of charms; but their power over large general results seemed to be limited to the elements in the old sense of the weather. Excepting the comprehensiveness of the closing passage, there is nothing but what any humble believer might, in substance, have addressed to hags.

In the passages from Paradise Lost, though the poet's imagination carries us “beyond the visible diurnal sphere,” and sustains us there by a sublimity and dignity before which all other human efforts fade away, yet action, purpose, character, and passion, are the predominating traits, and the means of interest. The allegories of Spenser have a story, and vivacity of character; his allegorical beings are not mere abstractions, but very often living creatures. Even Coleridge, though he fell rather into German diablerie than represented popular superstition, still has story and character.

These objections are of a speculative kind, applying only to Mr. Hunt's notion, without any diminishing effect upon the selections, but the reverse. The volume would have had much less value in our eyes, had it really consisted of what Jeffrey, in his idea of poetry, calls “a number of bright pictures presented to the imagination, and a fine feeling expressed of those mysterious relations by which visible external things are assimilated with inward thoughts and emotions.”

There is no pervading mistake of this kind in the general Essay on the question, “What is Poetry?” or in the preliminary notices of each poet: They are agreeable in their style, pleasantly convincing in their instances, generally sound and catholic in view, and animated by a kindly feeling, which often is and always intends to be as wide as humanity itself.

The Essay, in particular, is one of the most complete, acuminated, and agreeable pieces of criticism that has appeared for many a day; alike distinguished for its easy strength of dictum, its comprehension without vagueness, and its refinement without minuteness. There is much less, too, of the writer's peculiar faults — of his affectation of nature and simplicity, and of that manners in which gave rise to the term Leigh Hunt-ish. At the same time there are maculæ to be discovered by the critic eye, that microscope of wit.” Some of his definitions may be objected to as partial, or incomplete, or as if he mistook the true meaning of the thing; which, however, may arise, as he intimates in the case of Imagination, from it the word not exactly expressing the idea criticism requires or intends. Sometimes objection might be raised to his opinions; and we think his old fault peeps out in the incidental specimens, which often seem insufficient to support the instance, and unworthy of the praise he bestows. Personal predilections, the halo of the tomb, and some bias of the school, have inclined him to exaggerate the powers of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, especially the last. These kind if things, however, are mere specks, not at all affecting the main character; and even these a little pruning could altogether remove.

Truth, of any great kind whatsoever, makes great writing. This is the reason why such poets as Ariosto, though not writing with a constant detail of thought and feeling like Dante, are justly considered great as well as delightful. Their greatness proves itself by the same truth of nature, and sustained power, though in a different way. Their action is not so crowded and weighty ; their sphere has more territories less fertile; but it has enchantments of its own, which excess of thought would spoil, — luxuries, laughing graces, animal spirits; and not to recognize the beauty and greatness of those, treated as they treat them, is simply to be defective in sympathy. Every planet is not Mars or Saturn. There is also Venus and Mercury. There is one genius of the south, and another of the north, and others uniting both. The reader who is too thoughtless or too sensitive to like intensity of any sort, and he who is too thoughtful or too dull to like anything but the greatest possible stimulus of reflection or passion, are equally wanting in complexional fitness for a thorough enjoyment of books. Ariosto occasionally says as fine things as Dante, and Spenser as Shakspeare; but the business of both is to enjoy; and in order to partake their enjoyment to its full extent, you must feel what poetry is in the general as well as the particular, must be aware that there are different songs of the spheres, some fuller of notes, and others of a sustained delight; and as the former keep you perpetually alive to thought or passion, so from the latter you receive a constant harmonious sense of truth and beauty, more agreeable perhaps on the whole, though less exciting. Ariosto, for instance, does not tell a story with the brevity and concentrated passion of Dante; every sentence is not so full of matter, nor the style so removed from the indifierence of prose; yet you are charmed with a truth of another sort, equally characteristic of the writer, equally drawn from nature, and substituting a healthy sense of enjoyment for intenser emotion. Exclusiveness of liking for this or that mode of truth, only shows, either that a reader's perceptions are limited, or that he would ‘sacrifice truth itself to his favorite form of it. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was as tranchant with his pen as his sword, hailed the Faerie Queene of his friend Spenser in verses in which he said that “Petrareh” was thenceforward to be no more heard of; and that in all English poetry, there was nothing he counted “ of any price” but the efi-usions of the new author. Yet Petrareh is still living; Chaucer was not abolished by Sir Walter; and Shakspeare is thought somewhat valuable. A botanist might as well have said, that myrtlcs and oaks were to disappear, because acacias had come up. It is with the poet's creations, as with nature's, great or small. Wherever truth and beauty, whatever their amount, can be worthily shaped into verse, and answer to some demand for it in our hearts, there poetry is to be found; whether in productions grand and beautiful as some great event, or some mighty, leafy solitude, or no bigger and more pretending than a sweet face or a bunch of violets; whether in Homer's epic or Gray's Elegy, in the enchanted gardens of Ariosto and Spenser, or the very pot-herbs of the Schoolmistress of Shenstone, the balms of the simplicity of a cottage. Not to know and feel this, is to be deficient in the universality of Nature herself, who is a poetess on the smallest as well as the largest scale, and who calls upon us to admire all her productions: not indeed with the same degree of admiration, but with no refusal of it, except to defect.

I cannot draw this essay towards its conclusion better than with three memorable words of Milton; who has said, that poetry, in comparison with science, is “simple, sensuous, and passionate.” By simple, he means unperplexed and self-evident; by sensuous, genial and full of imagery; by passionate, excited and enthusiastic. I am. aware that different constructions have been put on some of these words; but the context seems to me to necessitate those before us. I quote, however, not from the original, but from an extract in the Remarks on Paradise Lost by Richardson.

What the poet has to cultivate above all things is love and truth; what he has to avoid, like poison, is the fleeting and the false. He will get no good by proposing to be “in earnest at the moment.” His earnestness must be innate and habitual; born with him, and felt to be his most precious inheritance. “I expect neither profit or general fame by my writings,” says Coleridge, in the Preface to his Poems; “and I consider myself as having been amply repaid without either. Poetry has been to me its ‘own exceeding great reward;’ it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.” — Pickering's edition, p. 10.

“Poetry,” says Shelley, “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. It reproduces all that it represents; and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thence forward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it co-exists. The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another, and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.” — Essays and Letters, vol. i. p. 16.

I would not willingly say anything after perorations like these; but as treatises on poetry may chance to have auditors who think themselves called upon to vindicate the superiority of what is called useful knowledge, it may be as well to add that, if the poet may be allowed to pique himself on any one thing more than another, compared with those who undervalue him, it is on that power of undervaluing nobody, and no attainments different from his own, which is given him by the very faculty of imagination they despise. The greater includes the less. They do not see that their inability to comprehend him argues the smaller capacity.

No man recognizes the worth of utility more than the poet: he only desires that the meaning of the term may not come short of its greatness, and exclude the noblest necessities of his fellowcreatures. He is quite as much pleased, for instance, with the facilities for rapid conveyance aSorded him by the railroad, as the dullest confiner of its advantages to that single idea, or as the greatest two-idead man who varies that single idea by hugging himself on his “buttons” or his good dinner. But he sees also the beauty of the country through which he passes, of the towns, of the heavens, of the steam-engine itself, thundering and fuming like a magic horse, of the affections that are carrying, perhaps, half the passengers on their journey, nay, of those of the great two-ideaed man; and, beyond all this, he discerns the incalculable amount of good, and knowledge, and refinement and mutual consideration, which this wonderful invention is fitted to circulate over the globe, perhaps to the displacement of war itself, and certainly to the diffusion of millions of enjoyments.

“And a button-maker, after all, invented it!” cries our friend. Pardon me — it was a nobleman. A button-maker may be a very excellent, and a very poetical man, too, and yet not have been the first man visited by a sense of the gigantic powers of the combination of water and fire. It was a nobleman who first thought of this most poetical bit of science. It was a nobleman who first thought of it, a captain who first tried it, and a button-maker who perfected it. And he who put the nobleman on such thoughts was the great philosopher Bacon, who said that poetry had “something divine in it,” and was necessary to the satisfaction of the human mind.

[[Footnotes]]

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* Imagination and Fancy; or Selections from the English Poets, illustrative of those first principles of their art: with Markings of the best. Passages, Criticism, Notices of the Writers, and an Essay in answer to the Question “What is Poetry? — NOW IN PRESS BY THE APPLETONS.