Fancy & Imagination

R. L. Brett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351631136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

First published in 1969, this book provides a concise and helpful introduction to the terms 'fancy' and 'imagination'. Although they are generally associated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the work begins with a discussion the history of these concepts which were also known to Aristotle, the Elizabethans, Hobbes, Locke and Blake. It then goes on to examine Coleridge's theory of imagination and the distinction he drew between fancy and imagination.

This work will be of particular interest to those studying Coleridge and the Romantic Movement.

1

Imagination and the Association of Ideas

The terms ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’ are generally associated with the name of Coleridge, especially when they are distinguished from or contrasted with each other. But, of course, they were both used before Coleridge and to understand the precise meanings he attached to them and the distinction he drew between them, it is necessary to look at the history of critical theory. The two terms belong to the various attempts which have been made to explain a work of art by reference to the mental processes involved in artistic creation and, when applied to works of literature, are related to what we call composition. Some critics have held that such accounts of how a work is produced cannot help us to judge its literary merit; or to put their point in more philosophical language, a genetic account has no reference to value. Coleridge believed otherwise, but we must leave this question for later discussion.

It is often said that Aristotle, the first great thinker to concern himself with literary criticism, was not interested in the psychology of composition. There is some truth in this, for Aristotle approached literature from the viewpoint of someone trained in the sciences: with an interest in the object before him rather than in the author. He looked at Greek tragedy as a biologist might look at an organism; something subject to growth and decay, but seen in essence at its maturest, when its growth had fully developed and decay had not yet started. This is why he chose to examine the tragedies of the great classical period of Greek drama and the work of writers such as Sophocles and Euripides. Here, if anywhere, would be found the real nature of tragedy, its structure and its organizing principles. His concern was with tragedy as a species, not with the author’s struggle to express himself.

But Aristotle did give some account of the origin of art and as a biologist he described this in scientific terms. Earlier writers such as Homer had associated art with mythology; the poet was inspired by the Muse, who was, significantly, the daughter of memory. This enshrined the belief not only that the imagination was nourished by the images stored in a poet’s memory, but also that the poet embodied the tribal memory, that he kept alive in the hearts and minds of his contemporaries the feats of valour, the achievements and tribulations of the past, and transmitted these to future generations. Centuries later, Plato had compared the poetic inspiration to magnetism. As a magnet holds iron rings together by an invisible force, so the Muse binds together the poet and his audience by some mysterious attraction. Poetry, for Plato, was not an art or craft which could be learned; it was a kind of divine ecstasy. ‘The poet’, he writes in his Ion,

is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.

(Trans. B. Jowett.)

But the scientific mind of Aristotle was not satisfied with such mythological or metaphorical descriptions of what he thought could be explained in more natural terms. Imitation or representation (mimesis) was for man instinctive. As children, we first learn by imitating and we derive pleasure from this process. Here, he maintained in his Poetics, is the source of art and the explanation of why we take pleasure in creating and contemplating works of art.

Although Aristotle took a great step forward, he did comparatively little to advance our understanding of the psychology of poetic composition. Indeed, this kind of understanding had to wait until psychology itself began to develop as an independent science. But this was not until the seventeenth century. Throughout the Middle Ages poetic discourse became swallowed up in rhetoric or was seen as an inferior kind of logic; little attention was given to psychological questions concerning its genesis. But if medieval thought on the subject was dominated by Aristotle, Renaissance speculation was based on Plato, or on the attempt to marry Aristotelianism to a Christianized form of Platonism. Shakespeare’s famous description of the imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which places the poet alongside the lunatic and the lover (and is not love a kind of madness?), is little different from Plato’s:

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,

Are of imagination all compact;

................................

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

(V.i.)

The Elizabethans went further than Plato in their belief that poetry gave one access to truth beyond the scope of reason, for this was a product of a Christian neo-Platonism that saw the imagination as divine, a means of bridging the gulf between Heaven and the world of Nature which had been occasioned by the Fall. Bacon expresses this belief as succinctly as anyone in The Advancement of Learning, where he tells us that poetry

… was ever thought to have some participation of divinesse, because it doth raise and erect the Minde, by submitting the shewes of things to the desires of the Mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bowe the Mind unto the Nature of things.

(Bk. II.)

Sir Philip Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie contains the fullest and most representative account of Elizabethan literary theory. In the Apologie Sidney attempts a synthesis of Aristotle and Plato. Poetry, he declares,

… is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth; to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture, with this end, – to teach and delight.

But he speaks in more neo-Platonic tones when he contrasts the world of art and the world of Nature. Only the poet, he writes,

… lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature…. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done, … her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.

It was not until the seventeenth century and the arrival of Thomas Hobbes upon the scene that this amalgam of Greek philosophy and Christian doctrine was disturbed. Hobbes more than any other thinker was the first to give a psychological direction to the development of literary theory. He elaborated a conception of the human mind that was to remain the dominant one in English thought for more than a century. Hobbes was a strict empiricist who believed that all our knowledge derives from sense experience. He declares in the opening chapter of his most famous work, Leviathan (1651), that ‘… there is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense’. The objects we perceive impinge on our sense organs and produce images in the mind; these images remain stored in the memory when the objects themselves are no longer present, and in one place Hobbes calls the memory simply ‘decaying sense’ (Leviathan, 1, ii). It is from this store of images that the judgement and fancy (or imagination, for Hobbes does not distinguish between them) develop. He elaborates this account of the poetic imagination in a famous passage of his Answer to D’Avenant (1650):

Time and Education begets experience; Experience begets memory; Memory begets Judgement and Fancy; Judgement begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the Ornaments of a Poem. The Ancients therefore fabled not absurdly in making memory the Mother of the Muses. For memory is the World (though not really, yet so as in a looking glass) in which the Judgement, the severer Sister, busieth her self in a grave and rigid examination of all the parts of Nature, and in registring by Letters their order, causes, uses, differences, and resemblances; Whereby the Fancy, when any work of Art is to be performed findes her materials at hand and prepared for use.

(Critical Essays of the Seventeenth
Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn (Oxford,
1908), II, p. 56.)

Fancy, he tells us in Leviathan, is the faculty which discerns likenesses whereas the judgement distinguishes differences. Of the two, ‘… fancy, without the help of judgment, is not commended as a virtue: but … judgment … is commended for itself, without the help of fancy’ (I, viii). Indeed, he writes,

… without steadiness, and direction to some end, a great fancy is one kind of madness; such as they have, that entering into any discourse, are snatched from their purpose, by every thing that comes in their thoughts.

(I, viii.)

One can see that, for Hobbes, the fancy or imagination needs to be held in strict check by the judgement. It is a faculty which helps a writer put his thought in fresh and persuasive terms, but is not in itself a rational activity. When it is controlled and guided by the judgement it is a very powerful instrument in moving the hearts and minds of men.

But so far forth as the Fancy of man has traced the ways of true Philosophy, so far it hath produced very marvellous effects to the benefit of mankinde. All that is beautiful or defensible in building, or marvellous in Engines and Instruments of motion, whatsoever commodity men receive from the observations of the Heavens, from the description of the Earth, from the account of Time, from walking on the Sea, and whatsoever distinguisheth the civility of Europe from the Barbarity of the American savages, is the Workmanship of Fancy but guided by the Precepts of true Philosophy.

Furthermore, when the moral philosopher fails to induce men to lead virtuous lives because his teaching is too abstract and his precepts too austere, the poet may find a more willing audience because he provides concrete examples of the beauty of holiness. For, Hobbes continues,

… where these precepts fail, as they have hitherto failed in the doctrine [i.e. teaching] of Moral vertue, there the Architect, Fancy, must take the Philosophers part upon her self.

(The Answer to D’Avenant, ed. cit., II,
pp. 59–60.)

It is clear that Hobbes sees the imagination as serving a rhetorical and not a logical purpose; its function is to clothe thought in attractive language, but it has no place in strictly logical discourse itself.

In demonstration, in counsel, and all rigorous search of truth, judgement does all, except sometimes the understanding have need to be opened by some apt similitude; and then there is so much use of fancy. But for metaphors, they are in this case utterly excluded. For seeing they openly profess deceit; to admit them into counsel, or reasoning, were manifest folly.

(Leviathan, I, viii.)

This account by Hobbes of the role of the imagination combines orthodox Renaissance theory with a new psychological approach. He follows the Renaissance writers in regarding the imagination as the servant of the philosopher and the moralist; its function being to provide an attractive dress for the wisdom and virtue they wish to expound. In this Hobbes is a traditionalist. But he breaks new ground in the psychological description he gives of the mental processes involved in composition. The imagination need no longer be a kind of madness or ecstasy, though in dreams and uncontrolled fantasies it amounts to this. It is fundamentally a form of memory, but a memory freed to some degree from the restrictions of actual experience. It can ransack the storehouse of sense images laid up in the memory and, when controlled by an artistic purpose, can associate them in new and pleasing patterns. It cannot, of course, invent something entirely new for its material all comes from sense experience, but it can transcend the limitations of historical fact. Like Aristotle, Hobbes regards the poet as superior to the historian, but not superior to the philosopher.

Dryden, who was a disciple of Hobbes in political theory, adopted also his account of poetic composition and gave it a wide currency. Hobbes, as we have seen, more or less identified memory and imagination. ‘Imagination and memory’, he writes in Leviathan, ‘are but one thing, which for divers considerations hath divers names’ (I, ii). The act of composition involves turning over the images stored in the memory, as one might turn over the cards in a filing system; or, in Hobbes’s own words, ‘as one would sweep a room, to find a jewel; or as a spaniel ranges the field till he find a scent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• 1 Imagination and the Association of Ideas
• 2 Coleridge’s Distinction between Fancy and Imagination
• 3 Symbol and Concept
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX