We cannot in outward experience know how a great and generous heart must
feel, broken by ingratitude and unfaith, deceived and tortured through
its noblest qualities, outraged in its highest love. The poet says to
us: "Come with me; and through the power of the imagination, talisman
more potent than the ring of Solomon, we will enter the heart of
Othello, and with him suffer this agony. We will endure the torture,
since behind it is the exquisite delight of appeasing that insatiable
thirst for a share in human emotions. Or would you taste the passion of
young and ardent hearts, their woe at parting, and their resolved
devotion which death itself cannot abate? We will be one with Romeo and
one with Juliet." Thus, if we will, we may go with him through the
entire range of mortal joys and sorrows. We live with a fullness of
living beside which, it may be, our ordinary existence is flat and pale.
We find the real life, the life of the imagination; and we recognize
that this is after all more vital than our concern over the price of
stocks, our petty bother about the invitation to the Hightops' ball on
the twenty-fourth, or the silly pang of brief jealousy which we
experienced when we heard that Jack Scribbler's sonnet was to appear in
the next number of the magazine which had just returned our own poem
"with thanks." The littlenesses of the daily round slip out of sight
before the nobility of the life possible in the imagination.
It is not necessary to multiply examples of the pleasures possible
through the imagination. Every reader knows how varied and how
enchanting they are. To enter into them is in so far to fulfill the
possibilities of life. The knowledge which is obtained through books is
not the same, it is true, as that which comes from actual doing and
enduring. Perhaps if the imagination were sufficiently developed there
would be little difference. There have been men who have been hardly
able to distinguish between what they experienced in outward life and
what belonged solely to the inner existence. Coleridge and Wordsworth
and Keats made no great or sharply defined distinction between the
things which were true in fact and those that were true in imagination.
To Blake the events of life were those which he knew through
imagination, while what happened in ordinary, every-day existence he
regarded as the accidental and the non-essential.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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