Chapter XI: Imagination

_Art._ _Fiction._ _Creative._ _Genius._ _Romantic._ _Fancy._ _Imagination._ _Dream._

Early Christianity, with its delighted recognition of the soul’s reality, its awful consciousness of inner depths unplumbed, had produced, as we saw, many words describing human emotions by their _effects_, and especially by their effects on the soul’s relation to the Divine. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the increase of self-consciousness among the leisured classes, a more sympathetic, “introspective”[67] attitude to the emotions grew up, and this we traced to its development in the romantic _sensibility_ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. How did it fare, then, with this tender nursling in the years that followed? Was it crushed and dissected into a neatly labelled little corpse, or was it suffered to grow up unchecked, uneducated, into the middle-aged and well-fed _sentimentalism_ of our Victorian ancestors? Fortunately it avoided both these fates. Carefully tended by small groups of earnest men, now in this academy and now in that, it had escaped the dissection of Nature because it had learned not to draw its nourishment from Nature and the God of Nature, but from man himself. And on this diet it had thriven and waxed until it was a veritable young giant, able to stand up and confront Nature as her equal. But we must retrace our steps a little.

Attentive readers of Jane Austen’s novels will have noticed the slightly unfamiliar way in which she employs the two words _romantic_ and _picturesque_. A closer examination reveals the fact that in her time they still bore traces of their origin. These adjectives are taken from the arts, _romantic_ meaning in the first instance ‘like the old Romances’, and _picturesque_ ‘like a picture’ or ‘reminding one of a picture.’ They are thus members of a quite considerable group of words and phrases, _attitude_, _comic_, _dramatic_, _lyrical_, _melodramatic_, _point of view_, and the like, in which terms taken in the first place from the arts are subsequently applied to life. Nowadays we sometimes go farther and use the name of a particular artist, speaking, for instance, of a _Turneresque_ sunset, a _Praxitelean_ shape; or we even call to our aid a writer’s fictitious creatures, as in “_Falstaffian_ morality”, “the _Pickwickian_ sense”,... Such a figure of speech looks at first sight like any other kind of imagery, and we perhaps imagine it in use since the beginnings of art. In point of fact, however, it is probable that it was not known before the time of the Renaissance, when men’s notions of art changed so suddenly, when, indeed, their very consciousness of it as a separate, unrelated activity, something which can be distinguished in thought from a “craft”, a “trade”, or a religious ceremony, seems to have first sprung into being. Moreover, the ancient word _art_ used to include in its purview not only these meanings, but also most of those which we now group under the heading _science_. In the Middle Ages the Seven Liberal Arts[68]—_Grammar_, _Logic_, _Rhetoric_, _Arithmetic_, _Geometry_, _Music_, and _Astronomy_—were contrasted with the “servile” or “mechanical” arts—that is, handicrafts involving manual labour. And thus, though _art_ in this wide sense is old, _artist_ first occurs in Sir Philip Sidney’s _Apologie for Poetry_. _Artisan_ appeared at about the same time, and was not then, as now, confined to mechanical and manual labourers.

O, what a world of profit and delight

wrote the poet, Marlowe,

Is promis’d to the studious artisan.

In the light of two or three familiar words let us try and trace the development, from Sidney’s time onwards, of some of our modern notions of “art”, and in particular of poetry. Criticism—the branch of literature or journalism with which our daily and weekly reviews make us so familiar—does not date very far back into the past. Its parents were the medieval arts of grammar and philology, which, among the commentators on classical texts, had already sometimes blossomed into the rudiments of aesthetic. The actual words _critic_ and _critical_, however, have been traced no farther back than Shakespeare; _critic_ in its aesthetic sense is first found in Bacon; and _criticism_ and _criticize_ are neither of them earlier than the seventeenth century. Based for the most part on Aristotle’s _Poetics_, serious criticism began to take shape in England at the Renaissance. From Elizabethan critical essays, such as Sidney’s _Apologie for Poetry_, we can get an idea of the light in which poetry and the other arts had begun to be viewed at that time. To Sidney, for example, the distinguishing mark of poetry was, not metre, but a certain “feigning.” The first philosophers and historians, he affirmed, were also poets, not indeed because of what we should magnificently call their “creative imagination”, but simply because they “invented” certain fictitious persons and events. We should not now regard this as a virtue in an historian. Sidney, however, points out the derivation of _poetry_ from the Greek ‘poiein’, ‘to make’,[69] and shows how this distinguishes it from all the other arts and sciences, which in the last analysis merely “follow Nature”, while only the poet,

disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted with the
vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in
making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite
anew, forms such as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods,
Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in
hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her
gifts, but freely ranging only within the Zodiac of his own wit.

And Sidney adds that this fact is not to be made light of merely because the works of Nature are “essential” while the poet’s are only “in imitation or fiction”. The poet has contemplated the “Ideas” behind Nature, and it is those which he “delivers forth, as he hath imagined them”. With ten or twenty new novels appearing on the bookstalls every week it is not so easy for us to realize the dignity and glory which were once felt to distinguish this great human achievement of _fiction_—that is, of ‘making’ or ‘making up’ (from the Latin ‘fingere’, to ‘form’ or ‘make’) purely imaginary forms, instead of merely copying Nature.

Now the presence of a made-up element, especially when it comprised supernatural beings such as giants and fairies, was held to be one of the distinguishing marks of a _romance_. The old medieval romances, as their name suggests, had been nursed to life in that curious period of contact between Roman and Celtic myth which also gave us such words as _fairy_ and _sorcery_.[70] They were so called because they were written or recited in the _romance_ vernacular[71] instead of in literary Latin, and they seem to have developed out of an increasing tendency among the medieval bards to embroider, on their own responsibility, the traditional accounts of historical and mythical events. This tendency, wherever it had hitherto been detected among the western Aryans, had been strenuously opposed in the interests of learning and morality. It was one of the reasons why Plato decided to expel poets from his Republic, and it is remarkable that the earlier uses of a word like _fable_ in twelfth- and thirteenth-century French and fourteenth-century English should have been all condemnatory. Now by the time the Renaissance dawned on England this word had come to be applied, in one instance at least, not merely to the embroidery, but to the garment itself, so that, for example, the whole prodigious fabric of classical mythology might be implicit in the disparaging phrase “fables of poets”. And after the Revival of Learning, when the most able men began to have a very different feeling towards the myths of Greece and Rome, such a phrase became the very opposite of disparaging. _Fiction_ and _romance_ were gradually recognized as a legitimate and noble expression of the human spirit.

Gradually: to Sidney, poetry was still, after Aristotle’s definition, “an art of imitation”; only poets must “to imitate, borrow nothing of what is, hath been, or shall be, but range ... into the divine consideration of what may be and should be”. And during the seventeenth century all art continued to be regarded as imitation, of which, however, there were two kinds—the imitation of other arts and the imitation of Nature herself. The second kind, by analogy from picture-dealing, was called _original_, and the faculty which achieved it was named _invention_ (Latin, ‘invenire’, ‘to find’), a word implying that something had been found in Nature which had not _yet_ been imitated by man. Early in the eighteenth century the substantive _originality_ was formed from _original_, and an increasing importance began to be attached to the element of novelty in experiences of all kinds, Addison placing it on a level with greatness and beauty as a source of pleasure to the imagination.

At the same time another word appeared in the vocabulary of aesthetic criticism. An Elizabethan critic had already pointed out that, if poets could indeed spin their poetry entirely out of themselves they were as “_creating_ gods”, and Dryden soon used the same verb of Shakespeare, because, in Caliban, he had _invented_ “a person not in Nature”. So also Addison:

... this Talent of affecting the Imagination ... has something in
it like Creation: It bestows a kind of Existence, and draws up to
the Reader’s View several Objects which are not to be found in
Being. It makes Additions to Nature, and gives greater Variety to
God’s Works.

This word, too, with its derivative _creative_, is used far too often and too lightly[72] now to allow us to easily perceive its importance. ‘Creare’ was one of those old Latin words which had been impregnated through the Septuagint and the Vulgate with Hebraic and Christian associations; its constant use in ecclesiastical Latin had saturated it with the special meaning of _creating_, in divine fashion, out of nothing, as opposed to the merely human _making_, which signified the rearrangement of matter already created, or the imitation of “creatures”. The application of such a word to human activities seems to mark a pronounced change in our attitude towards ourselves, and it is not surprising that, in the course of its career, the new use should have met with some opposition on the grounds of blasphemy.

Once established, however, the conception evidently reacted on other terms embodying theories of art, such, for example, as _original_ and _originality_ (already mentioned), _art_, _artist_, _genius_, _imagination_, _inspiration_, _poesy_, _poetry_, and others. The meaning which _inspiration_ possessed up to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries carries us right back to the old mythical outlook in Greece and elsewhere, when poets and prophets were understood to be the direct mouthpieces of superior beings—beings such as the Muses, who inspired or “breathed into” them the divine afflatus. Through Plato and Aristotle this conception came to England at the Renaissance and lasted as an element of aesthetic theory well on into the eighteenth century, if it can be said to have died out altogether even now. But, like so many other words, this one began in the seventeenth century to suffer that process which we have called “internalization”. Hobbes poured etymologically neat scorn on the senseless convention “by which a man, enabled to speak wisely from the principles of Nature and his own meditation, loves rather to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a Bagpipe”. And we may suppose that from about this time _inspiration_, like some of the “character” words which we traced in a previous chapter, began to lose its old literal meaning and to acquire its modern and metaphorical one. Like _instinct_, it was now felt, whatever its real nature, to be something arising from within the human being rather than something instilled from without.

Such a revised notion of the immediate source of human activities inevitably concentrated attention on the individual artist—a fact which may perhaps be reflected in the use from the seventeenth century onwards of the word _genius_ to describe not merely the “creative” faculty, but its possessor. For we can speak now of such and such a man being “a _genius_”. This little word, on which a whole chapter might be written, comes from the Latin ‘genius’[73] (from ‘gign-o’, ‘to bring into being’, a stem appearing also in _ingenious_, _engine_, ...), which in Roman mythology meant a person’s tutelary spirit, or special angel attending him everywhere and influencing his thoughts and actions. Its early meaning in English was much the same as that of _talent_,[74] which, of course, takes its meaning from the New Testament parable. That is to say, _genius_ signified an ability implanted in a man by God at his birth. But from about the seventeenth century this meaning began to ferment and expand in the most extraordinary way; it was distinguished from, and even opposed to, _talent_, and in the following century its force and suggestiveness were much enhanced by the use which was made of it to translate the Arabic ‘Djinn’, a powerful supernatural being. Although nowadays we generally distinguish this particular sense by the spelling _Genie_, the temporary fusion of meanings certainly deepened the strength and mystery of the older word, and may even have procreated the later Byronic tradition of mighty, lonely _poets_ with open necks and long hair and a plethora of mistresses and photographs.

Before, however, these words could acquire the potent meanings which they bear to-day, they had to run the gauntlet of the Age of Reason, with its hatred of all enthusiasm and fanaticism. And it was out of the ridicule and distrust which they encountered at its hands that the important new epithet _romantic_, together with some obsolete terms like _romancy_, _romancical_, _romantical_, ... was born. With its meaning of ‘like the old romances’ (and therefore barbarous, fantastic), _romantic_ was one of those adjectives, like _enthusiastic_, _extravagant_, _Gothic_, by which the later seventeenth, and the eighteenth century expressed their disapproval of everything which did not bear the stamp of reason and polite society. It was soon applied to people whose heads were stuffed out with the ballooning extravagancies of the old romances, just as _enthusiastic_ was employed to describe superstitious people who believed themselves distended with a special variety of divine inspiration. Above all, it had the sense of fabulous, unreal, unnatural. “Can anything,” asked Bishop South, “be imagined more profane and impious, absurd, and indeed romantic?” But at the beginning of the eighteenth century this meaning developed a little farther. _Romantic_ was now used of places, or aspects of Nature, of the kind among which the old Romances had been set. It was noticed that “romantic” people displayed a preference for wild landscapes and ruined castles, and would even “fancy” these things, where more rational people could see nothing more exciting than a tumbledown barn and a dirty ditch. And it is this particular shade of meaning, together with a strong suggestion of absurdity and unreality, which the word seems still to have conveyed to Jane Austen, who preferred to use _picturesque_ in contexts where we should now employ _romantic_ in its approving or non-committal sense.

Had one of her heroines, however, succeeded in emerging from that endless round of incredibly dull activities which she contrives to make so incredibly interesting, and had this enterprising young woman then attempted to breast the intellectual currents of the age, she would have been startled to find that that sarcastic consciousness of a war between sense and sensibility, which was her creator’s inspiration, was a spent stream flowing from the remote past. For while echoes of the original thinking of men like Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke continued to rumble and reverberate on in the disparaging implications carried by a word like _romantic_, a new note had already become audible beneath them as long ago as the beginning of the century. It was an undertone of reluctant approval. These “romantic” notions might be absurd, but they were at least pleasant. “We do not care for seeing through the falsehood,” wrote Addison, “and willingly give ourselves up to so agreeable an imposture.”

It was in the second half of the eighteenth century that this aesthetic[75] vocabulary—_genius_, _original_, _romantic_, ...—whose meanings had up to the present been developed largely by the English, began to make a stir on the Continent. The words were talked of in France; they were taken up by the critics, poets, and philosophers of Germany; and after much handling by men like Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Goethe, and others, the further and partly popularized meanings which they thus acquired were, in a sense, again inserted into their English forms by one or two Englishmen who, towards the close of the century, felt a strong affinity between their own impulses and the _Sturm und Drang_ which had been agitating Germany. The most influential of these was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and just before the turn of the century there burst, with his help, upon England that strange explosion which received, naturally enough, the name of the Romantic Movement. At first it took the form of a sort of cult of the Middle Ages. _Ballad_ is another word which added several cubits to its stature by travelling in France and Germany, where it also gave birth to the musical _ballade_; and we find medieval words like _bard_, _foray_, _gramarye_[76] (and its Scotch derivative, _glamour_), and _raid_, revived by Walter Scott after having fallen out of use for two or three hundred years. _Derring-do_—another of these revivals—is interesting because it originates in a mistake made by Spenser about Chaucer. He had described how Troilus was second to nobody in “daring do that belongeth to a knight”—that is to say, “in daring to do that which belongs to a knight”—or, in Cornish idiom, “that which a knight ‘belongs to do’”. It is easy to see the nature of Spenser’s error. The mysterious substantive _derring-do_ (desperate courage), which he created and used several times, is not found again until Scott’s _Ivanhoe_.

Very soon the Romantic Movement was resuscitating the Elizabethan world as well as the “Gothic”—a word, by the way, which now, for the first time in its history, began to connote approval. It was Coleridge himself who invented the word _Elizabethan_, and his magnificent lectures on Shakespeare must be very largely responsible for that renewed and deepened interest in the great dramatist in which Germany once more set us the example. It is also noteworthy that the word _fitful_, which Shakespeare had probably coined in the famous line from _Macbeth_, was never used again until the close of the eighteenth century; and another word which expired when the Elizabethan spirit expired in Milton, to be resurrected in the nineteenth century, is _faery_, with that spelling, and with the meaning, not so much of an individual sprite as of a magic realm or state of being—almost “the whole supernatural element in romance”.

This supernatural element—as we saw in the history of the words _creative_ and _genius_—is connected very intimately indeed with the origin of the Romantic Movement. And we shall see the connection even more clearly in the semantic development of two more words—the last to be examined in this book—_fancy_ and _imagination_. The various Greek words which the Latin ‘imago’ was used to translate acquired their special meanings among the Stoics, where, as we saw in