theoryofliteratu00inwell

206 Theory of Literature
of imaginative activity," is asserted to have no direct bearing on
the evaluation of them. His seven types of imagery, arranged in
his own order, are: the Decorative, the Sunken, the Violent Cor
Fustian), the Radical, the Intensive, the Expansive, and the Ex-
uberant. They may advantageously be rearranged according to
historical and evaluative hints offered by Wells.
The crudest forms, aesthetically, are the Violent and the
Decorative, or the "metaphor of the masses" and the metaphor
of artifice. The Decorative image, abundant in Sidney's Arcadia,
is judged "typically Elizabethan." The Violent image, illustrated
out of Kyd and other early Elizabethans, is characteristic of an
early period of culture ; but, since most men stay at a subliterary
level, it belongs, in subliterary forms, to "any period" ; sociologically,
"Fustian" constitutes "a large and socially important body
of metaphor." The evaluative judgment of both types is that
they are "deficient in the requisite subjective element," that
they too often link one physical image to another (as in cata-
chresis) instead of relating the "outer world of nature to the
inner world of man." Again, in both Decorative and Violent
metaphors, the terms of the relationship remain disjunct, fixed,
uninvaded by each other. But in the highest forms of metaphor,
Wells believes, each term acts upon, alters, the other, so that a
third term, a new apprehension, is created by the relationship.
Next, as we go up the scale, come the Exuberant image and
the Intensive, the former a subtler version of the Violent, the
latter a subtler version of the Decorative. We have left behind
obvious forms of display, whether of energy or ingenuity. In the
Exuberant image, we have, historically, reached Marlowe, the
first of the greater Elizabethans, and Burns and Smart, the Pre-
Romantics; this image is, says Wells, "especially prominent in
much early poetry." It juxtaposes "two broad and imaginatively
valuable terms," two broad, smooth surfaces in face-to-face con-
tact. Otherwise put, this category covers loose comparisons, rela-
tionships based on simple evaluative categories. Burns writes:
My love is like a red, red rose . . .
My love is like a melody
That's sweetly flayed in tune.