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Page 39
'It encompasseth the heavens about with the circle of its glory;
the hands of the Most High have displayed it.'
As creation is symbolic, and the province of the poet is humbly to
imitate the works of the Great Artist, we must expect to find him also
make use of symbolic language, imagery.
Metaphor (metapher�) is the application of a physical fact to the moral
order; the association of an external material fact to one internal and
intellectual. As this association is not reflective, but spontaneous,
and is found pervading the infancy of languages; as it is intuitively
and generally understood; it must take place in accordance with a mental
law which establishes natural relations of analogy between the moral
world and the physical. To become perceptible, thought must be imaged,
reflected upon a sensuous form; the definition by an image is generally
the most clear and complete. We may have clear enough ideas of some
invisible truth in our own minds, but if we would convey our conception
to another, we cannot give it to him by a pure idea, for then we would
still be in the internal world of intellect; we must go out from this
internal world, we must seek a sign in the physical world that he can
see and contemplate; we select some phenomenon which can be easily
observed, and in accordance with the law of analogy of which we have
just spoken, we associate our thought with it, and in this manner we can
clearly communicate the thought we have conceived.
Almost all the ideas we have of the moral world are expressed through
metaphors: thus we say the _movements_ or _emotions_ of the soul; the
_clearness_ or _coloring_ of a style; the _heat_ or _warmth_ of a
discourse; the _hardness_ or _softness_ of the heart, &c., &c. Language
_expresses_ the invisible thought of the soul; in accordance with the
etymology of the word (exprimere) it _presses_ them from the soul, from
the realm of internal thought, to transport them to the visible sphere.
But the etymology itself is nothing but a metaphor, for the immaterial
facts of the soul always remain in their own region inaccessible to the
senses, and the instinctive facts of the organism always remain in the
visible world, so that there can be no actual passage from one to the
other, for an immaterial fact cannot be changed into a material
one:--association, simultaneousness, correlation may obtain between
them, but nothing more.
Saint Thomas Aquinas asserts 'that in our present state of degradation
the intellect comprehends nothing without an image.' Language is in
reality the association of material facts to facts of the will, heart,
and intellect. Apparently insufficient to give a full idea of material
things alone, it would seem almost impossible that it should ever be
able to express the facts of the invisible world; but the human spirit,
in accordance with the mental law impressed upon it by the Hand Divine,
seizes the analogies of the _moral_ phenomena with the phenomena of
_nature_, and, seeing physical facts used as symbols by the Creator to
convey ethical, also instinctively uses them to express the facts of the
moral world; and thus is born the _human Word_ which, invisibly
ploughing the waves of the unseen air, can convey the most subtile
thought, the most evanescent shade of feeling, the wildest, darkest, and
deepest emotion. Language is man's expression of the finite, with its
infinite meanings modified by the extent of his intelligence and his
power of expression. It is truly a universal possession, but every man
gifts it with his own individualities, his own idiosyncrasies. The
style, one might almost say, is the man.
Thus the imagery of language finds its base in the very essence of our
being. The poet is one gifted to seize upon these hidden analogies, to
read these mystic symbols, and, through the force of his own
imagination, to reveal them to his brethren in truth and love.
The imagination has two distinct functions. It combines, and by
combination creates new forms; it penetrates, analyzes, and realizes
truths _discoverable by no other faculty_.
An imagination of high power of combination seizes and associates at the
_same moment all_ the important ideas of its work or poem, so that while
it is working with any one of them, it is at the same instant working
with and modifying them all in their several relations to it. It never
once loses sight of their bearings upon each other--as the volition
moves through every part of the body of a snake at the same moment,
uncoiling some of its involute rings at the very instant it is coiling
others. This faculty is inconceivable, admirable, almost divine; yet no
less an operation is necessary for the production of any great work, for
by the definition of unity of membership above given, not only certain
couples or groups of parts, but _all_ the parts of a noble work must be
separately imperfect; each must imply and ask for all the rest; the
glory of every one of them must consist in its relation to the rest;
neither while so much as _one_ is wanting can _any_ be right. This
faculty is indeed something that looks as if its possessor were made in
the Divine image!
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