Then it is properly dyspepsia,
liver-complaint--what you will, but certainly not imagination as the
handmaid of art. In that service she has two duties laid upon her: one
as the _plastic_ or _shaping_ faculty, which gives form and proportion,
and reduces the several parts of any work to an organic unity
foreordained in that idea which is its germ of life; and the other as
the _realizing_ energy of thought which conceives clearly all the parts,
not only in relation to the whole, but each in its several integrity and
coherence.
We call the imagination the creative faculty. Assuming it to be so, in
the one case it acts by deliberate forethought, in the other by intense
sympathy--a sympathy which enables it to realize an Iago as happily as a
Cordelia, a Caliban as a Prospero. There is a passage in Chaucer's
"House of Fame" which very prettily illustrates this latter function:
Whan any speche yeomen ys
Up to the paleys, anon ryght
Hyt wexeth lyke the same wight,
Which that the worde in erthe spak,
Be hyt clothed rede or blak;
And so were hys lykenesse,
And spake the word, that thou wilt gesse
That it the same body be,
Man or woman, he or she.
We have the highest, and indeed an almost unique, example of this kind
of sympathetic imagination in Shakespeare, who becomes so sensitive,
sometimes, to the thought, the feeling, nay, the mere whim or habit of
body of his characters, that we feel, to use his own words, as if "the
dull substance of his flesh were thought.
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