Essays Æsthetical. George Henry Calvert
it makes prolific; it is the mental generator. It helps to unveil, and then welds, the link between the visible and the invisible. It inspires feeling (which is ever the source of deepest insight) to discover excellence; it quickens the mind to creative activity; it is forever striving upward. Without the spiritual fervor of the beautiful, your religion is narrow and superstitious, your science cramped and mortal, your life unripened. In the mind it kindles a flame that discloses the divinity there is in all things. Lightning bares to the awed vision the night-shrouded earth; more vivid than lightning, the flash of the beautiful reveals to the soul the presence of God.
II.
What Is Poetry?
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The better to meet the question, What is poetry? we begin by putting before it another, and ask, Where is poetry? Poetry is in the mind. Landscapes, rainbows, sunsets, constellations, these exist not to the stag, the hare, the elephant. To them nature has no aspects, no appearances modified by feeling. Furnished with neither combining intellect nor transmuting sensibility, they have no vision for aught but the proximate and immediate and the animally necessary. Corporeal life is all their life. Within the life of mind poetry is born, and in the best and deepest part of that life.
The whole world outside of man, and, added to this, the wider world of his inward motions, whether these motions interact on one another or be started and modified by what is without them, all this—that is, all human life, in its endless forms, varieties, degrees, all that can come within the scope of man—is the domain of poetry; only, to enjoy, to behold, to move about in, even to enter this domain, the individual man must bear within him a light that shall transfigure whatever it falls on, a light of such subtle quality, of such spiritual virtue, that wherever it strikes it reveals something of the very mystery of being.
In many men, in whole tribes, this light is so feebly nourished that it gives no illumination. To them the two vast worlds, the inner and the outer, are made up of opaque facts, cognizable, available, by the understanding, and by it handled grossly and directly. Things, conditions, impressions, feelings, are not taken lovingly into the mind, to be made there prolific through higher contacts. They are not dandled joyfully in the arms of the imagination. Imagination! Before proceeding a step further—nay, in order that we be able to proceed safely—we must make clear to ourselves what means this great word, imagination.
The simplest intellectual work is to perceive physical objects. Having perceived an object several times, the intellect lifts itself to a higher process, and knows it when it sees it again, remembers it. Perception is the first, the simplest, the initiatory intellectual process, memory is the second. Higher than they, and rising out of them, is a third process, the one whereby are modified and transmuted the mental impressions of what is perceived or remembered. A mother, just parted from her child, recalls his form and face, summons before her mind’s eye an image of him; and this image is modified by her feelings, she seeing him in attitudes and relations in which she had never seen him before, cheerful or sad according to her mood. This she could not do by aid of memory alone; she could not vary the impress of her boy left on the brain; she could not vividly reproduce it in shifting, rapidly successive conditions; she could not modify and diversify that impress; in a word, she could not liberate it. Memory could only re-give her, with single, passive fidelity, what she had seen, unmodified, motionless, unenlivened, like a picture of her boy on canvas. Urge intellectual activity to the phase above memory, and the mental image steps out from its immobility, becomes a changeful, elastic figure, brightened or darkened by the lights and shadows cast by the feelings; the intellect, quick now with plastic power, varying the image in position and expression, obedient to the demands of the feelings, of which it is ever the ready instrument. This third process is imagination.
Through this mode of intellectual action the materials gathered in the mind are endlessly combined and modified. In all intellectual activity, beyond bare perception and memory, imagination in some degree is and must be present. It is in fact the mind handling its materials, and in no sphere, above the simplest, can the mind move without this power of firmly holding and molding facts and relations, phenomena and interior promptings and suggestions. To the forensic reasoner, to the practical master-worker in whatever sphere, such a power is essential not less than to the ideal artist or to the weaver of fictions. Imagination is thus the abstract action, that is, the most intense action, of the intellect.
When I run over in my mind, and in the order of their service, the first seven presidents of the United States, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson, I exert only memory. The moment I begin to compare or contrast one with another, or to give the character of any of them, I put into play the higher, the imaginative action; for, to draw an historical character, the facts collected by memory must be shaped and colored and organized, the details gathered must be combined into a whole by the intellect, which being a mere tool, the success of the result (the tool being of a temper to do the work laid on it) will depend on the quality of the powers that handle it, that is, on the writer’s gifts of sympathy.
The degree and fullness wherewith the imaginative power shall be called upon depending thus on faculties of feeling, thence it is that the word imagination has come to be appropriated to the highest exercise of the power, that, namely, which is accomplished by those few who, having more than usual emotive capacity in combination with sensibility to the beautiful, are hereby stimulated to mold and shape into fresh forms the stores gathered by perception and memory, or the material originated within the mind through its creative fruitfulness. In strictness, this exaltation of intellectual action should be called poetic imagination.
To imagine is, etymologically speaking, with the mind to form in the mind an image; that is, by inward power to produce an interior form, a something substantial made out of what we term the unsubstantial. To imagine is thus always, in a certain sense, to create; and even men of dullest mentality have this power in kind. The degree in which men have it makes one of the chief differences among them. The power is inherent, is implied in the very existence of the human mind. When it is most lively the mind creates out of all it feels and hears and sees, taking a simple sight or hint or impression or incident, and working out images, making much out of little, a world out of an atom. Akin herein to the supreme creative might, the man of highest imagination, the poet, unrolls out of his brain, through vivid energy, new worlds, peopled with thought, throbbing with humanity.
When we imagine, therefore, we hold an image in the mind, grasping it with spiritual fingers, just as by our corporeal fingers a physical substance is grasped. Now the poetic mind in handling the image tosses it with what might be called a sportive earnest delight, and through this power and freedom of play elicits by sympathetic fervor, from its very core, electric rays, wherein the subject glows like the sculpture on an inwardly illuminated urn; rare insights being thus vouchsafed to clearest imaginative vision—insights gained never but through sensibilities elevated and purified by aspirations after, and gleaming glimpses of, the absolute and ideal, the intellect being used as an obedient cheerful servant.
The sensibility that is so finely strung as to have these glimpses, revels in them as its fullest happiness, and with its whole might seeks and courts them. Hence the mind thus privileged to live nearer than others to the absolutely true, the spiritual ideal, is ever plying its privilege: conceiving, heightening, spiritualizing, according to the vision vouchsafed it; through this vision beholding everywhere a better and fairer than outwardly appears; painting nature and humanity, not in colors fictitious or fanciful, but in those richer, more lucent ones which such minds, through the penetrating insight of the higher imagination, see more truly as they are than minds less creatively endowed.
Thus is imagination a power inherent in, essential to, all intellectual action that ranges above simple perception and memory; a power