ABSTRACT
At least six distinct senses of the word ‘imagination’ are still current in critical discussion. It is convenient to separate them before passing on to consider the one which is most important.
The production of vivid images, usually visual images, already sufficiently discussed, is the commonest and the least interesting thing which is referred to by ‘imagination’.
The use of figurative language is frequently all that is meant. People who naturally employ metaphor and simile, especially when it is of an unusual kind, are said to have imagination. This may or may not be accompanied by imagination in the other senses. It should not be overlooked that metaphor and simile – the two may be considered together – have a great variety of functions in speech. A metaphor may be illustrative or diagrammatical, providing a concrete instance of a relation which would otherwise have to be stated in abstract terms. This is the most common scientific or prose use of metaphor. It is rare in emotive language and in poetry; Shelley’s ‘Dome of many-coloured glass’ is almost the only example which springs to mind. More usually the elucidation is a mere pretence; some attitude of the speaker to his subject or to his audience is using the metaphor as a means of expression. ‘The freedom of my writings has indeed provoked an implacable tribe’, said Gibbon, ‘but as I was safe from the stings, I was soon accustomed to the buzzing of the hornets’. But metaphor has yet further uses. It is the supreme agent by which disparate and hitherto unconnected things are brought together in poetry for the sake of the effects upon attitude and impulse which spring from their collocation and from the combinations which the mind then establishes between them. There are few metaphors whose effect, if carefully examined, can be traced to the logical relations involved. Metaphor is a semi-surreptitious method by which a greater variety of elements can be wrought into the fabric of the experience. Not that there is any virtue in variety by itself, though the list of critics who seem to have thought so would be lengthy; a page of the dictionary can show more variety than any page of poetry. But what is needed for the wholeness of an experience is not always naturally present, and metaphor supplies an excuse by which what is needed may be smuggled in. This is an instance of a very strange phenomenon constantly appearing in the arts. What is most essential often seems to be done as it were inadvertently, to be a by-product, an accidental concomitant. Those who look only to the ostensible purposes for the explanation of the effects, who make prose analyses of poems, must inevitably find them a mystery. But why overt and evident intention should so often destroy the effect is certainly a difficult problem.[240] {189} [241]
A narrower sense is that in which sympathetic reproducing of other people’s states of mind, particularly their emotional states, is what is meant. ‘You haven’t enough imagination’, the dramatist says to the critic who thinks that his persons behave unnaturally. This kind of imagination is plainly a necessity for communication, and is covered by what has already been said in Chapter Twenty-four. It has no necessary connection with senses of imagination which imply value. Bad plays, to be successful, require it as much as good.
Inventiveness, the bringing together of elements which are not ordinarily connected, is another sense. According to this Edison is said to have possessed imagination, and any fantastic romance will show it in excelsis. Although this comes nearer to a sense in which value is implied, it is still too general. The lunatic will beat any of us at combining odd ideas: Dr Cook outstrips Peary, and Bottomley outshines Sir John Bradbury.[190]
Next we have that kind of relevant connection of things ordinarily thought of as disparate which is exemplified in scientific imagination. This is an ordering of experience in definite ways and for a definite end or purpose, not necessarily deliberate and conscious, but limited to a given field of phenomena. The technical triumphs of the arts are instances of this kind of imagination. As with all ordering, value considerations are very likely to be implied, but the value may be limited or conditional.[242]
Finally we come to the sense of imagination with which we are here most concerned. The original formulation 1 was Coleridge’s greatest contribution to critical theory, and except in the way of interpretation, it is hard to add anything to what he has said, though, as we have already noted in Chapter Twenty-four, some things might be taken away from it with advantage:
That synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination… reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities… the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement….
The sense of musical delight… with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling. 2 {191}
These are gifts of the imagination. It was natural, we shall shortly see why, for Coleridge to carry his further speculations upon Imagination into the realms of Transcendentalism, but setting this aside, there is enough in this description and in the many applications and elucidations scattered through the Biographia and the Lectures to justify Coleridge’s claim to have put his finger more nearly than anyone else upon the essential characteristic of poetic as of all valuable experience.
[239] {188}