History in English words

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.

wrote the poet, Marlowe,

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,

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 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 Chapter VI, that teasing sense of a contrast, a lack of connection, between the “objective” and “subjective” worlds appears first to have developed. One of these words was ‘phantasia’, from which we have taken indirectly the divergent forms fantasy, phantasy, and fancy. By the third century A.D. the Greek ‘phantasia’ was predominantly used, so we are told, “in cases where, carried away by enthusiasm and passion, you think you see what you describe, and you place it before the eyes of your hearers”.[77] ‘Phantasia’ and ‘imaginatio’ were in use among the Schoolmen, and fantasy and imagination are both found in Chaucer in the sense of ‘a mental image or reflection’, or more particularly ‘an image of something which either has no real existence or does not yet exist’. After the Renaissance Shakespeare suddenly transfigured one of the two words in one of those extraordinary passages which make us feel that genius is indeed something more than earthly:

In such a passage we seem to behold him standing up, a figure of colossal stature, gazing at us over the heads of the intervening generations. He transcends the flight of time and the laborious building up of meanings, and, picking up a part of the outlook of an age which is to succeed his by nearly two hundred years, gives it momentary expression before he lets it drop again. That mystical conception which the word embodies in these lines—a conception which would make imagination the interpreter and part creator of a whole unseen world—is not found again until the Romantic Movement has begun.

And then it had to be reached slowly. Seventy years after Shakespeare wrote we find the philosopher, Henry More, cautiously distinguishing from other kinds of imagination “that Imagination which is most free, such as we use in Romantick Inventions”. “Imagining”, wrote Dryden “is in itself the very height and life of poetry”; and in 1712 Addison published in the Spectator his papers on “The Pleasures of the Imagination”, in which he used the two words fancy and imagination synonymously, describing in one of the essays how, because of the faculty of which they are the names,

The tendency among critics to use this sort of imagery, or words suggestive of it, when writing of the fancy and the imagination, rapidly increased. Dryden had already distinguished the “fairy” way of writing, and from Addison’s time we constantly hear writers and their art referred to in terms of fairyland, enchantments, magic, spells, wands,... Shakespeare, we are told by one writer, is “a more powerful magician than his own Prospero”. “The world is worn out to us,” wrote Young. “Where are its formerly sweet delusions, its airy castles, and glittering spires?” And five years later he assured us that “the pen of an original writer, like Armida’s wand, out of a barren waste calls a blooming spring”.

But as the Romantic impulse grew older and crystallized into a philosophy—when the child which had germinated, as feeling, among the ignorant many who spoke the Romance languages, after passing through its Elizabethan adolescence, achieved self-conscious maturity, as thought, among the learned few who were familiar with the complicated literary languages of modern Europe—the need was felt for some way of distinguishing what were merely “sweet delusions” from the more eternal productions of the Romantic spirit. And this Coleridge achieved by his famous distinction between fancy and imagination. Fancy, since his day, has meant rather the power of inventing illustrative imagery—the playful adornment, as it were, of Nature; but imagination is the power of creating from within forms which themselves become a part of Nature—“Forms”, as Shelley put it,

The next step in the meaning of this word was really taken on the day upon which Coleridge, with his head full of ancient witchery, was introduced to another poet with his heart full of mountains. Under their joint influence we can behold that despised habit of looking at life through the spectacles of the old Romances, the mysterious faculty of superimposing on Nature a magical colour or mood created in the observer by the fictions of genius or the myths of bygone ages, expanding until it includes the contemplation of Nature impassioned by any effluence arising from within—it may be emotion or it may be the individual memory. It was the philosophy of the Lake School that the perception of Nature—that is to say of all in Nature that is not purely mechanical—depends upon what is brought to it by the observer. Deep must call unto deep. To a creation apprehended as automatic by the senses and the reason, only imagination could

for imagination was “essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead”.[78]

Imagination was, in fact, organic; and the application of this adjective to the inner world has not been traced farther back than Coleridge, who, in his lectures on Shakespeare’s plays, emphasized the mistake of confounding “mechanical regularity with organic form”. But perhaps the most brilliant, even epigrammatic, expression which has ever been given to the everlasting war between the unconscious, because creative, vital principle and the conscious, because destructive, calculating principle, is contained in four lines from a little poem of Wordsworth’s called The Tables Turned:

And so it is in the philosophy and poetry of Romanticism that we first feel a true understanding, not indeed of the process itself, but of the results of that process, which has been traced in this book under the name of “internalization”. Slowly the divers of the Romantic expedition brought up to the surface of consciousness that vast new cosmos which had so long been blindly forming in the depths. It was a cosmos in which the spirit and spontaneity of life had moved out of Nature and into man. The magic of Persia, the Muses of Greece, the witches and fairies and charms and enchantments of Romance—all these had been locked safely in man’s bosom, there to sleep until the trump of Romanticism sounded its call to imagination to give back their teeming life to Nature. “O Lady”, wrote Coleridge in that most heartrending of all poems, wherein, like the disconsolate knight awaking on the barren heath, he reports the decay in himself of this very power:

And this re-animation of Nature was possible because the imagination was felt as creative in the full religious sense of the word. It had itself assisted in creating the natural forms which the senses were now contemplating. It had moved upon the face of the waters. For it was “the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation”—the Word made human.

In tracing the semantic history of important words like these, we must not forget that nine-tenths of the words comprising the vocabulary of a civilized nation are never used by more than about one-tenth of the population; while of the remaining tithe nine-tenths of those who use them are commonly aware of about one-tenth of their meanings. Nevertheless it is just by following those meanings up to the high-water mark which they have reached in a few eager minds that we can observe what may fairly be called changes in the general consciousness. It is true that the new meanings must filter through a graduated hierarchy of imaginative literature, literary journalism, reviews, sermons, journalism, popular novels, advertisements, and cinema captions before what is left of them reaches the general public; but the amount that is left, and the spell which is accordingly exerted on the many, depends on how far they have first been carried by the few.

Thus, to take one example, the extraordinary load of meaning often borne by the word dream, in phrases like dreamland, my dreams, the land of my dreams, ... is no doubt traceable ultimately to the use of this word by the great Romantics. When Shelley wrote:

and

he was also, we might say, writing the greater part of a good many twentieth-century drawing-room ballads. But to feel the full weight of the semantic burden which this little word can be made to bear in our time we must turn to a modern philosopher, Mr. Santayana, who has brought the use of it to a fine art. “The Divine Comedy,” he writes, “marks high noon in that long day-dream of which Plato’s Dialogues mark the beginning....”

Others to-day are fascinated by their dreams, because they regard them as messengers from that mysterious inner world in which, like the Christians of old, they are beginning to divine depths hitherto unimagined. They feel “forces” at work there which they are tempted to personify in terms of ancient myth—Ahriman, Lucifer, Oedipus, Psyche, and the like. But outside the significant adjective sub-conscious, which has almost certainly come to stay, the effect which such tendencies may have on the English language remains a tale to be told a hundred years hence. The numerous secondary implications unfolding within dream, however, its popularity, and its obvious power of suggesting images, must interest us as further symptoms of a now almost universal consciousness of at any rate the existence of such an “inner” world. In some lines written as a preface to the Recluse—the long, unfinished philosophical poem of which the Prelude and the Excursion were to form parts—Wordsworth has described the holy awe which he, for one, entertained as he realized that he must now set out to explore this world: