Lectures on the English Poets | Page 6

be concealed,
however, that the progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency
to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of
poetry. The province of the imagination is principally visionary, the
unknown and undefined: the understanding restores things to their
natural boundaries, and strips them of their fanciful pretensions. Hence

the history of religious and poetical enthusiasm is much the same; and
both have received a sensible shock from the progress of experimental
philosophy. It is the undefined and uncommon that gives birth and
scope to the imagination; we can only fancy what we do not know. As
in looking into the mazes of a tangled wood we fill them with what
shapes we please, with ravenous beasts, with caverns vast, and drear
enchantments, so in our ignorance of the world about us, we make gods
or devils of the first object we see, and set no bounds to the wilful
suggestions of our hopes and fears.
"And visions, as poetic eyes avow,
Hang on each leaf and cling to
every bough."
There can never be another Jacob's dream. Since that time, the heavens
have gone farther off, and grown astronomical. They have become
averse to the imagination, nor will they return to us on the squares of
the distances, or on Doctor Chalmers's Discourses. Rembrandt's picture
brings the matter nearer to us.--It
is not only the progress of mechanical
knowledge, but the necessary advances of civilization that are
unfavourable to the spirit of poetry. We not only stand in less awe of
the preternatural world, but we can calculate more surely, and look with
more indifference, upon the regular routine of this. The heroes of the
fabulous ages rid the world of monsters and giants. At present we are
less exposed to the vicissitudes of good or evil, to the incursions of
wild beasts or "bandit fierce," or to the unmitigated fury of the elements.
The time has been that "our fell of hair would at a dismal treatise rouse
and stir as life were in it." But the police spoils all; and we now hardly
so much as dream of a midnight murder. Macbeth is only tolerated in
this country for the sake of the music; and in the United States of
America, where the philosophical principles of government are carried
still farther in theory and practice, we find that the Beggar's Opera is
hooted from the stage. Society, by degrees, is constructed into a
machine that carries us safely and insipidly from one end of life to the
other, in a very comfortable prose style.
"Obscurity her curtain round them drew,
And siren Sloth a dull
quietus sung."

The remarks which have been here made, would, in some measure, lead
to a solution of the question of the comparative merits of painting and
poetry. I do not mean to give any preference, but it should seem that the
argument which has been sometimes set up, that painting must affect
the imagination more strongly, because it represents the image more
distinctly, is not well founded. We may assume without much temerity,
that poetry is more poetical than painting. When artists or connoisseurs
talk on stilts about the poetry of painting, they shew that they know
little about poetry, and have little love for the art. Painting gives the
object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing
contains in itself: poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner
connected with it. But this last is the proper province of the imagination.
Again, as it relates to passion, painting gives the event, poetry the
progress of events: but it is during the progress, in the interval of
expectation and suspense, while our hopes and fears are strained to the
highest pitch of breathless agony, that the pinch of the interest lies.
"Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the
interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.
The mortal
instruments are then in council;
And the state of man, like to a little
kingdom,
Suffers then the nature of an insurrection."
But by the time that the picture is painted, all is over. Faces are the best
part of a picture; but even faces are not what we chiefly remember in
what interests us most.--But it may be asked then, Is there anything
better than Claude Lorraine's landscapes, than Titian's portraits, than
Raphael's cartoons, or the Greek statues? Of the two first I shall say
nothing, as they are evidently picturesque, rather than imaginative.
Raphael's cartoons are certainly the finest comments that ever were
made on the Scriptures. Would their effect be the same if we were not
acquainted with the text? But the New Testament existed before the
cartoons. There is one subject of which there is no cartoon, Christ
washing the