than the extent and sweep of the poetic power, the rapidity and success of its accomplishment. Just as a person in the stress of great excitement or danger, will see in a momentary flash a whole plan of action which, in the ordinary condition of mind, would require long processes of mental elaboration, so the creative imagination of the poet will accomplish in a few moments the work of weeks or months. It is true that this superiority of accomplishment may be only apparent; it may be that the inspired moment, the crisis, is merely the last and only visible stage in an operation which has been proceeding, perhaps for weeks or months, unconsciously-and we shall find reason to believe that this is so. But at last the inspiration comes suddenly and all together, like water from a pent-up source. "A true work of art," Carlyle says, "requires to be fused in the mind of its creator, and, as it were, poured forth (from his imagination, though not from his pen) in one simultaneous gush.” 1

The following account, however, given by Mozart of his musical composition will give a better idea of the imaginative power. "When I am feeling well," he writes, "and in good humor, perhaps when I am traveling by carriage, or taking a walk after a good dinner, or at night when I cannot sleep, my thoughts come in swarms and with marvelous ease. Whence and how do they come? I do not know; I have no share in it. Those that please me I hold in mind and I hum them, at least so others have told me. Once I catch my air, another soon comes to join the first, according to the requirements of the whole composition, counterpoint, the play of the various instruments, etc., etc.; and all these morsels combine to form the whole.

1 Shelley expresses the same thought: "The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments and an artificial connection of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture of conventional expressions—a necessity only imposed by the limitedness [transitoriness] of the poetical faculty itself; for Milton conceived the Paradise Lost as a whole before he executed it in portions."-Defense of Poetry, p. 39.

Then my mind kindles, if nothing happens to interrupt me. The work grows, I keep hearing it, and bring it out more and more clearly, and the composition ends by being completely executed in my mind, however long it may be. I then comprehend the whole at one glance, as I should a beautiful picture, or a handsome boy; and my imagination makes me hear it not in its parts successively as I shall come to hear it later, but as a whole in its ensemble. What a delight it is for me! It all, the inspiration and the execution, takes place in me as if it were a beautiful and very distinct dream. What I get in this way I do not forget any more easily, and this is perhaps the most precious gift our Lord has given me. If I then sit down to write I have only to draw from this store in my mind what has already accumulated there in the way I have described. Moreover the whole is not difficult to fix on paper. The whole is perfectly determined, and rarely ever does my score differ much from what I have had already in my mind." 1

This seems a typical experience the favorable conditions. necessary, the inspiration, the vision of the whole, the dreamlike character of it, its delightfulness, its recording-though a very fortunate one.

II

We must now note another difference between the two modes of thought, for our purposes so fundamentally important that it cannot be overemphasized. The ordinary thought is analytical` and abstract; the poetic thought purely imaginative and concrete. The first breaks up the presented images for its own purposes; the second uses the images as they come. In spontaneous reverie, according to William James, "the terms which fall together are empirical concretes, not abstractions. . . . If habitual contiguities predominate we have the prosaic mind; if rare contiguities, or similarities, have free play, we call the person fanciful, poetic, or witty. But the thought as a rule is of

1 P. Chabaneix, Le Subconscient, p. 94, quoting Mozart by Jahn, vol. iii, pp. 424, 425.

no!

matters taken in their entirety." Reverie, then, joins concretes
or wholes. Reasoning on the other hand is essentially analysis
and abstraction.1 It breaks up the concrete whole and sub-
stitutes for it an abstracted property or attribute; it purposely
divides it and uses the parts as tools for a practical end. The
first is the method of poetry, for poetry deals always with con-
cretes. I do not mean of course that an abstraction is never to
be found in what we call a poem, but only that poetry is essen-
tially concrete, and the poetic vision which in its source is
practically always so. In other words pure poetry uses the
method of mere imagination throughout, and deals entirely
with images. "Imaging," as Dryden declares, "is in itself the
very height and life of poetry.'

We may turn first to the dream which is clearly concrete. The dream represents not ideas, but persons, actions, scenes. In a dream we take part in an action or see a situation before our eyes with its appropriate background. A dream is a kind of dramatic representation, a series of scenes in that theatre of the mind of which Stevenson speaks. It may of course include: sounds, and other sensations, that is, the images of these. But it is properly a vision.

Poetry is strictly analogous; it is correctly defined by David
Masson as "the art of producing a fictitious concrete." 3 "With
abstractions," says Theodore Watts, "the poet has nothing to
do, save to take them and turn them into concretions.'
» 4 This
in fact provides the most readily applicable test of the presence
of poetry. When the poet uses abstraction he is giving us
reflection, philosophy in verse, not poetry proper. When, as
so often Carlyle, the prose writer sees his idea before him as a
picture he becomes a poet. "The quality of mercy is not
strained," at least by itself, is not poetry, though it is Shake-
speare's. But take the following of Teufelsdröckh: "His look is

1 Psychology, vol. ii, pp. 325, 330.

2 "The Author's Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic License."

3 Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Other Essays, p. 201.

4

Encyclopedia Britannica, "Poetry."

probably the gravest ever seen: yet it is not of that cast-iron gravity frequent enough among our own Chancery suitors; but rather the gravity as of some silent, high-encircled mountainpool, perhaps the crater of an extinct volcano." The whole method, especially in the "cast-iron" and the "mountainpool," is poetic. So one evidence of Goethe's poetic mastery, according to Carlyle, was his "singularly emblematic intellect; his perpetual never-failing tendency to transform into shape, into life, the opinion, the feeling that may dwell within him, which in its widest sense we reckon to be essentially the grand problem of the poet. .. Everything has form, everything has visual existence. The poet's imagination bodies forth the forms of things unseen, his pen turns them to shape." Working with his conscious mind the poet may mingle the abstract with the concrete, but as a poet, in his involuntary inspiration, he sees nothing but images. In recording his vision in the poem he uses every device to make the reader see as he does; he employs the epithet like Homer; or the apostrophe and historical present like Carlyle; or like Byron

I see before me the Gladiator lie

he uses the figure the rhetoricians call "vision."

"Poetic creation," Carlyle exclaims, "what is this too, but seeing the thing sufficiently?" And he adds, "The word that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such clear intense sight of the thing." "2 It is true that the mere vividness of the poet's vision is favorable to its description. This matter, however, must be examined carefully. Voluntary thought is objec

1 Essays, "Goethe." With this Aristotle's theory agrees: "A work of art reproduces its original, not as it is in itself, but as it appears to the senses. It addresses itself not to the abstract reason, but to the sensibility; . . . it is concerned with outward appearances; it employs illusions; its world is not that which is revealed by pure [voluntary] thought; it sees truth, but in its concrete manifestations, not as an abstract idea."-Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry, pp. 127, 153.

2 On Heroes, III.

tive, it is closely in touch with outward reality; it is directed toward action, and toward utterance, which is a form of action. It readily finds expression in language or otherwise. We think and then naturally we speak; and even if we do not actually speak to others, yet expression is so natural that in intensive thought, in the solution of a difficult problem, we begin to talk to ourselves, or attempt, as an aid, to note our thoughts on paper. It is even doubted whether such thought is possible without words. At least the connection between the two is so close that we seem to think in words. Visionary thought, on the other hand, is subjective, it is turned inwards, it for the time being gives up action. I believe the psychologists say that there is "no thought without expression," that "thought is a word or an act in a nascent state." I have no doubt that all thought is accompanied by physical manifestations; and that it looks ultimately toward action. But a man is evidently in one relation to action when he plans to do a thing, and in another when he dreams of doing it. In the latter case the external action is largely replaced by an imagined internal action, with gratification; the consummation of the thought is, for the time being, within the mind itself. The visionary is in less need of expression or communication; and he finds communication more difficult.

Language does not seem to be proper to vision as it is to ordinary thought. According to Freud there is no true speech in dream, everything that appears as a speech being mere reproduction of what has been spoken by the dreamer in waking, or heard or read by him. An auditory or visual image of waking hours is reproduced, and felt as heard or seen; but obviously this is not true language. In waking vision also words may be merely images. Belshazzar saw the handwriting on the wall, but he may not have seen it thus for the first time. Savonarola saw the heavens opened and the appearance of a sword with the inscription "Gladius Domini super terram"; but this may not

1 Ribot, Psychology of Attention, p. 12.