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Page 23
LECTURE IV.
(_NOV. 8, 1884._)
THE PLEASURES OF FANCY.
_COEUR DE LION TO ELIZABETH_
(1189 TO 1558).
In using the word "Fancy," for the mental faculties of which I am to
speak to-day, I trust you, at your leisure, to read the Introductory
Note to the second volume of 'Modern Painters' in the small new
edition, which gives sufficient reason for practically including
under the single term Fancy, or Fantasy, all the energies of the
Imagination,--in the terms of the last sentence of that preface,--"the
healthy, voluntary, and necessary,[22] action of the highest powers
of the human mind, on subjects properly demanding and justifying their
exertion."
[Footnote 22: Meaning that all healthy minds possess imagination, and
use it at will, under fixed laws of truthful perception and memory.]
I must farther ask you to read, in the same volume, the close of the
chapter 'Of Imagination Penetrative,' pp. 120 to 130, of which the
gist, which I must give as the first principle from which we start in
our to-day's inquiry, is that "Imagination, rightly so called, has no
food, no delight, no care, no perception, except of truth; it is for
ever looking under masks, and burning up mists; no fairness of form,
no majesty of seeming, will satisfy it; the first condition of its
existence is incapability of being deceived."[23] In that sentence,
which is a part, and a very valuable part, of the original book, I
still adopted and used unnecessarily the ordinary distinction between
Fancy and Imagination--Fancy concerned with lighter things, creating
fairies or centaurs, and Imagination creating men; and I was in
the habit always of implying by the meaner word Fancy, a voluntary
Fallacy, as Wordsworth does in those lines to his wife, making of her
a mere lay figure for the drapery of his fancy--
Such if thou wert, in all men's view
An universal show,
What would my Fancy have to do,
My feelings to bestow.
But you will at once understand the higher and more universal power
which I now wish you to understand by the Fancy, including all
imaginative energy, correcting these lines of Wordsworth's to a more
worthy description of a true lover's happiness. When a boy falls in
love with a girl, you say he has taken a fancy for her; but if he love
her rightly, that is to say for her noble qualities, you ought to say
he has taken an imagination for her; for then he is endued with the
new light of love which sees and tells of the mind in her,--and this
neither falsely nor vainly. His love does not bestow, it discovers,
what is indeed most precious in his mistress, and most needful for
his own life and happiness. Day by day, as he loves her better, he
discerns her more truly; and it is only the truth of his love that
does so. Falsehood to her, would at once disenchant and blind him.
[Footnote 23: Vide pp. 124-5.]
In my first lecture of this year, I pointed out to you with what
extreme simplicity and reality the Christian faith must have presented
itself to the Northern Pagan's mind, in its distinction from
his former confused and monstrous mythology. It was also in that
simplicity and tangible reality of conception, that this Faith became
to them, and to the other savage nations of Europe, Tutress of the
real power of their imagination and it became so, only in so far as
it indeed conveyed to them statements which, however in some respects
mysterious, were yet most literally and brightly _true_, as compared
with their former conceptions. So that while the blind cunning of
the savage had produced only misshapen logs or scrawls; the _seeing_
imagination of the Christian painters created, for them and for all
the world, the perfect types of the Virgin and of her Son; which
became, indeed, Divine, by being, with the most affectionate truth,
human.
And the association of this truth in loving conception, with the
general honesty and truth of the character, is again conclusively
shown in the feelings of the lover to his mistress; which we recognize
as first reaching their height in the days of chivalry. The truth and
faith of the lover, and his piety to Heaven, are the foundation, in
his character, of all the joy in imagination which he can receive
from the conception of his lady's--now no more mortal--beauty. She is
indeed transfigured before him; but the truth of the transfiguration
is greater than that of the lightless aspect she bears to others. When
therefore, in my next lecture, I speak of the Pleasures of Truth,
as distinct from those of the Imagination,--if either the limits
or clearness of brief title had permitted me, I should have said,
_untransfigured_ truth;--meaning on the one side, truth which we have
not heart enough to transfigure, and on the other, truth of the lower
kind which is incapable of transfiguration. One may look at a girl
till one believes she is an angel; because, in the best of her, she
_is_ one; but one can't look at a cockchafer till one believes it is a
girl.
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