Literary and General Lectures and Essays. Charles Kingsley

both are analogies, the image is founded on an analogy between the essential properties of two things—the conceit on an analogy between its accidents.  Images, therefore, whether metaphors or similes, deal with laws; conceits with private judgments.  Images belong to the imagination, the power which sees things according to their real essence and inward life, and conceits to the fancy or phantasy, which only see things as they appear.

      To give an example or two from the “Life Drama:”

      His heart holds a deep hope,

      As holds the wretched West the sunset’s corse—

      Spit on, insulted by the brutal rains.

      The passion-panting sea

      Watches the unveiled beauty of the stars

      Like a great hungry soul.

      Great spirits,

      Who left upon the mountain-tops of Death

      A light that made them lovely.

      The moon,

      Arising from dark waves which plucked at her.

      And hundreds, nay, thousands more in this book, whereof it must be said, that beautiful or not, in the eyes of the present generation—and many of them are put into very beautiful language, and refer to very beautiful natural objects—they are not beautiful really and in themselves, because they are mere conceits; the analogies in them are fortuitous, depending not on the nature of the things themselves, but on the private fancy of the writer, having no more real and logical coherence than a conundrum or a pun; in plain English, untrue, only allowable to Juliets or Othellos; while their self-possession, almost their reason, is in temporary abeyance under the influence of joy or sorrow.  Every one must feel the exquisite fitness of Juliet’s “Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds,” etc., for one of her character, in her circumstances: every one, we trust, and Mr. Smith among the number, will some day feel the exquisite unfitness of using such conceits as we have just quoted, or any other, page after page, for all characters and chances.  For the West is not wretched; the rains never were brutal yet, and do not insult the sun’s corpse, being some millions of miles nearer us than the sun, but only have happened once to seem to do so in the poet’s eyes.  The sea does not pant with passion, does not hunger after the beauty of the stars; Death has no mountain-tops, or any property which can be compared thereto; and “the dark waves”—in that most beautiful conceit which follows, and which Mr. Smith has borrowed from Mr. Bailey, improving it marvellously nevertheless—do not “pluck at the moon,” but only seem to do so.  And what constitutes the beauty of this very conceit—far the best of those we have chosen—but that it looks so very like an image, so very like a law, from being so very common and customary an ocular deception to one standing on a low shore at night?

      1

      This Lecture was given at Harrow in 1873, and in America in 1874.

      2

      Fraser’s Magazine, November, 1853.

      3

      “Poems,” by Alexander Smith.  London: Bogue.  1853.  Fraser’s Magazine, October, 1853.