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.]