THE WHISPERING GALLERY

I

BY ROSSITER JOHNSON

Some truths may be proclaimed upon the housetop;
Others may be spoken by the fireside;

Still others must be whispered in the ear of a friend.

F my friend Elacott liked to hear himself talk-and sometimes it seemed as if he did-he had one of his best opportunities on a certain Saturday afternoon in leafy June. I don't at all object to any person's liking to hear himself talk when he has anything interesting to say and can say it reasonably well. In fact, with the same proviso, he ought to like to hear himself talk, for confidence is a necessary element in almost every success. To assert that one likes to hear himself talk is a common sarcasm-all the more common because it is so cheap. Any dunce may say it of any philosopher, and it is seldom or never contradicted, because the attention is directed to the premise that rests on individual opinion or impression. If I say, “ A. B. likes to hear himself talk," the evident meaning is, that is the impression, or one of the impressions, which his conversation produces on me. Of course no one can dispute this proposition; and even when the extreme of politeness does not check the counter declaration, "It seems not so to me," the impression apparently remains. No doubt there are persons who like to hear themselves talk, irrespective of anything they may have to say; and they are chiefly those whose talk is an unremittent stream, poured out on the assumption that nobody else can by any possibility have anything to offer. This is a kind of disease, and generally it is incurable. But many times when I have heard the sneer, "He likes to hear himself talk," the true answer has lain in an attack on the suppressed premise. I should have replied, if I did not, " He ought to like to hear himself talk, for the same reason that a man ought to like to pay his debts. He has an abundance of information and ideas at least on some subjects and fair powers of expression; and if he maintained a studied reticence he would deprive us all of something to which we are entitled. If we do our part toward making the world go, and rendering life pleasant, we have a right to expect those around us to do likewise." To say "Excuse me from talking, but I am a good listener," is equivalent to saying "I don't wish to give anything, but I am excellent at receiving.” That, perhaps, is rather an over-statement, because talking itself, when it meets intelligent listening, always gives a certain advantage as well as pleasure to the talker. Yet I never hear the admiring expression, "He does n't say much, but he keeps up a constant thinking," without making the mental comment, "If he thinks so much, and thinks to any purpose, he ought to say more." A larger part of the happiness of mankind comes from words,—or at least is conveyed in them,—than from any other single element. The man that finds pleasure in listening is bound to give pleasure by talking; and if he is defective in the art of expression, he should set himself at work to cultivate it It is no more praiseworthy to be a miser in conversation than in coppers.

Our conversational wallets are not all furnished alike. I have friends who appear almost like dunces when the conversation is running glibly on trifles, but who, when the occasion arises, can pay out a large, substantial idea in a way that indicates no lack of others behind it; and again I have friends who deal freely with the nimble sixpences of conversation and seem to be almost unconscious that language ever has anything of larger denomination.

I thought all this while Elacott was talking that day-or at least when he had finished talking, but I did not say it, for the reason that just then it might be interpreted in two ways. When we say every possibility of language is permitted in the Arbor, we except ambiguity.

We had been considering that oft-discussed question, "What is genius?" and Elacott maintained that a superlative gift of imagination, in any direction, constituted genius.

"I say in any direction,'" he added, "because imagination, or the exercise of it, is possible to almost every calling and in almost any contingency of life. Not to the painter and the poet alone; but to the lawyer, the mechanic, the farmer, the inventor, the general, the speculator, and even the servant in the kitchen, is it a useful faculty, some measure of which is necessary to success.'

"If that is what you think," said Miss Ravaline, "you must have a very broad definition for the word 'imagination."

"I have heard or read many attempts to define it," said Elacott, "but none that satisfied me. The brightest of our professors in college tried to make us understand what it was, but not successfully, I think. He recognized it, unerringly, wherever he met it, and every example of it that he cited was correct; but as a child knows a horse when he sees it, but could not define a horse as distinct from any other quadruped, so the professor, it seemed to me, hardly succeeded in defining imagination."

"I have generally heard it discussed in connection with fancy," said Mrs. Trenfield. "Are they not the same thing, only differently applied, one to lighter subjects and the other to more important ones?"

"Not at all," said Elacott-" at least, not if I understand them. Fancy may be applied to the most serious or massive subjects, and imagination to the most trivial. There is a certain long and serious poem which has somehow attained a conventional reputation as one of the greatest in our language, if not in any language. I say 'conventional' because I think very few actually read it, though everybody thinks it neces sary to own a copy. And the teachers of rhetoric always call the pupil's attention to it as a wonderful exhibition of imagination. But, if my definition of that quality is cor rect, this great poem, while it abounds in clumsy fancies, is almost devoid of imagi nation.

"Perhaps that is so much the worse for your definition," said Miss Ravaline. "Please tell us what poem it is," said Mrs. Trenfield.

"I don't like to do that," said Elacott, "because you would be horrified at my literary heresy, and would dispute me, and as we have no copy of the poem at hand th dispute could not be made definite enough to have a satisfactory conclusion. Bu some day I will put my ideas of that poem into writing, with copious citations t prove my thesis, and will read the screed to you in this Arbor. In fact, this is th only place where it could be read with safety to myself."

"We shall remember the promise," said Mrs. Trenfield, "but at least you might give us your definition to-day."

"I am not sure that I can put it into a few words," said Elacott, "but I will try to make it clear to you. The idea with which the rhetoricians always set out, of discussing fancy and imagination together, comparing and contrasting them, is correct. But after that they appear to be at sea. At least, their definitions do not satisfy me to the extent of enabling me to say of any work, or any passage, 'this is fancy,' or 'this is imagination.' If I were to attempt a brief statement of the difference between the two faculties, I think I should say, fancy is conjurative, while imagination is constructive. Fancy is the faculty that can call up or represent images or conditions that do not exist, no matter whether they are possible or impossible. They may be prosaic or commonplace, or they may be fantastic or grotesque. Imagination is the faculty that, from given facts or conditions (whether these are real or only the product of fancy) infers or constructs other facts or conditions that must result from them or co-exist with them, according to the known laws of nature. Let me first illustrate it with the simplest possible example. I may say, 'I think I will plant an orchard of a thousand trees.' That is fancy. I might have said five hundred trees, or any other number, as well as a thousand; or I might have said a vineyard instead of an orchard. You remark, That will require four acres of ground, and in a few years you will have an abundance of fruit.' That is imagination. Take another-I read, I saw a beast with ten horns.' That is mere fancy; the number of horns might have been seven, or seventeen, or a hundred, as well as ten. But if this suggests the thought, 'That beast could toss ten dogs at once,' that is imagination."

"You may be right," said Miss Ravaline; "but I have always had a lofty, not to say reverent, idea of imagination; and when you harness it to such things as that, bringing it down from the clouds to the clods, you go far toward destroying my interest in it."

"That need not be," said Elacott. There are many powers that deal with both lofty and lowly things; and it appears to me that the universality of their application increases their dignity and beauty. The attraction of gravitation, which keeps the planets in their orbits, is not made ridiculous when it determines the weight of a codfish or takes part in a game of football."

"No power in the universe could add to the silliness of football, or escape degradation if concerned in the game," said Mrs. Trenfield, aside.

"But," resumed Elacott, "as we have now reduced imagination to its lowest terms, so to speak, and indicated its least poetic applications, let us consider some of the more important and romantic ones. We will begin with its most familiar province (though I doubt if it is the most important), that of poetry. Let us look at Miss Ingelow's well-known 'High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire,' which is so much admired and is undoubtedly her best piece of work. She puts the whole story into the mouth of an old woman who is supposed to have witnessed the phenomenon and been bereaved by the disaster. There could not be a better form for it; but in the excution there is both fancy and imagination. When she describes the great wave that rushed up the river, she says:

'It swept with thunderous noises loud,
Shaped like a curling, snow-white cloud,
Or like a demon in a shroud.'

These two similes are fancies. Instead of a snow-white cloud, she might have likened it to anything else to which it bore a physical resemblance. That simile is neither fine nor faulty. The other is positively bad. It is doubtful if an old woman like that would think of likening anything to a demon in a shroud, nor would a demon in a shroud produce a different shape from anything else that wears a shroud; nor can anything in a shroud be supposed to be producing a great noise-shrouds are signs of silence. That stanza could hardly have a worse termination. But if we read a little farther, we come to a fine example of imagination:

'So farre, so fast the eygre drave,

The heart had hardly time to beat
Before a shallow seething wave
Sobbed in the grasses at oure feet:
The feet had hardly time to flee
Before it brake against the knee,
And all the world was in the sea.'

If Miss Ingelow never had seen this phenomenon, it was her imagination that told her the level of the river would be raised somewhat before the approaching wavewhich is poetically expressed by the shallow wave moving through the grasses and then the rapidly increasing depth of the water where it had overflowed the bank, submerging the footpath and the meadow. Perhaps the clearest stroke of imagination is in the last line of the stanza. Of course, 1 was not true that all the world was in the sea; only an infinitesimal portion of it had been inundated. But in the narrow life of the old peasant woman who is speaking, this little portion seems like all the world—it is all of her world; and it was imagination that told Miss Ingelow this is what she would be likely to say. The literal picture that it conveys to the reader presents a submergence of all the territory that could be seen from the spot where the woman stood. There is an analogous bit of imagination in Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming,' which has been curiously criticised. It is in the Indian's deathsong with which the poem closes. He says:

'Seek we thy once-loved home?

The hand is gone that cropped its flowers,
Unheard their clock repeats its hours,
Cold is the hearth within their bowers;
And should we thither roam

Its echoes and its empty tread

Would sound like voices from the dead.'

Some critics have laughed at Campbell for the line

'Unheard the clock repeats its hours,'

because the narrative shows that the home had been deserted so long that the clock must have run down. They forget that it is not the poet speaking in his own person; it is the Indian chief. He had been in the settler's house, and had observed the clock and heard it strike; but he might not know that it had to be wound up every day or every week. Hence it was perfectly natural for him to think it was still running."

"But," said Miss Ravaline, "if we are to look at the niceties-and this appears to be a discussion of niceties-should we not go a step farther and say that, although this mistake of the Indian's was perfectly natural, or probable, yet the reader is likely to detect it as an error, and, before he can justify it by going through the necessary

course of reasoning, it has marred for him a fine, pathetic passage? It was not necessary to mention the clock at all; the poet could have supplied some other indication

of desolateness, on which the Indian would not have made any mistake."

As to that," said Elacott, "I think you are right. Another poetical application of imagination is in the statement of truths that become obvious when pointed out but were unnoticed before, as in Byron's lines:

'The Past is nothing, and at last

The Future can but be the Past.'

It is this kind of imagination that has created the best and most powerful proverbs and aphorisms."

"I suppose," said Mrs. Trenfield, "you have dwelt upon these minor examples to help out your definition and make it clear. I think I understand it perfectly. Of course the grander applications are to be found in such passages as the famous one from The Tempest '

'Like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,' etc."

"Yes and no," said Elacott. "The very highest application of the faculty is not in any particular passage, (though here it may rise very high), but in the whole conception and execution of a poem, a play, a novel, or a history."

"A history!" Mrs. Trenfield exclaimed.

"Certainly!" he answered. "The mere chronicler is one man, the historian is another, and the difference lies in the possession of imagination. The chronicler furnishes pigments and canvas only; the historian produces a picture. The chronicler will tell you what the king said, what the headsman did, and how ran the text of the law. The historian will show you why the king said it, what force framed the law, and what were the far-reaching effects of the headsman's blow."

"I should think," said Miss Ravaline, "that what you call the highest application of imagination would be almost the only one available to the sculptor, and that in sculpture it might have its most perfect development.”

"So it would seem," said Elacott; "but it appears to me that, as a matter of fact, the actual sculpture that exists exhibits but a very small percentage of imagination. I think this may be proved by the circumstance that so much of it has to be labeled. You see a marble figure of a sleeping or sleepy lion, and beside it a woman standing with her hand resting on its head. Who would ever know, without reading the label, that this was to represent brute force overcome by intellect? In the first place, the picture is impossible, because there is no lion that would sit thus meekly at the feet of a woman, unless she first gave him a tremendous blow with a club or fired a pistol in his face, and there is no woman that would try the experiment. I see neither beauty nor propriety in attempting to illustrate a great truth by a monstrous and evident fiction. In the next place, I think it is a fair question whether it is worth while to expend all that labor on three tons of stone, for the purpose of setting forth a simple proposition which could be expressed more clearly and forcibly with a few strokes of a pen."

"I am afraid you hardly appreciate the sculptor's art, with its peculiarities and limitations," said I.