I do not in the least press your acceptance of such a tradition, nor for the rest, do I care myself whence any method of ornament is derived, if only, as a stranger, you bid it reverent welcome. But much probability is added to the conjecture by the indisputable transition of the Greek egg and arrow moulding into the floral cornices of Saxon and other twelfth century cathedrals in Central France. These and other such transitions and exaltations I will give you the materials to study at your leisure, after illustrating in my next lecture the forces of religious imagination by which all that was most beautiful in them was inspired.
LECTURE IV.
(Nov. 8, 1884.)
THE PLEASURES OF FANCY.
Cœur 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."
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—