_Lepidus_: What color is it of?
_Antony_: Of its own color, too.
_Lepidus_ [_meditatively_]: 'T is a strange serpent.
The ideal in expression, then, deals also with the generic, and evades
embarrassing particulars in a generalization. We say Tragedy with the
dagger and bowl, and it means something very different to the aesthetic
sense from Tragedy with the case-knife and the phial of laudanum, though
these would be as effectual for murder. It was a misconception of this
that led poetry into that slough of poetic diction where everything was
supposed to be made poetical by being called something else, and
something longer. A boot became "the shining leather that the leg
encased"; coffee, "the fragrant juice of Mocha's berry brown," whereas
the imaginative way is the most condensed and shortest, conveying to the
mind a feeling of the thing, and not a paraphrase of it. Akin to this
was a confounding of the pictorial with the imaginative, and
personification with that typical expression which is the true function
of poetry. Compare, for example, Collins's Revenge with Chaucer's.
Revenge impatient rose;
He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,
And, with a withering look,
The war-denouncing trumpet took,
And blew a blast so loud and dread,
Were ne'er prophetic sound so full of woe!
And ever and anon he beat
The doubling drum with furious heat.
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