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.
In my first lecture of this year, I pointed out to you with what extreme simplicity and reality the Christian faith must have presented itself to the Northern Pagan's mind, in its distinction from his former confused and monstrous mythology. It was also in that simplicity and tangible reality of conception, that this Faith became to them, and to the other savage nations of Europe, Tutress of the real power of their imagination and it became so, only in so far as it indeed conveyed to them statements which, however in some respects mysterious, were yet most literally and brightly true, as compared with their former conceptions. So that while the blind cunning of the savage had produced only misshapen logs or scrawls; the seeing imagination of the Christian painters created, for them and for all the world, the perfect types of the Virgin and of her Son; which became, indeed, Divine, by being, with the most affectionate truth, human.
And the association of this truth in loving conception, with the general honesty and truth of the character, is again conclusively shown in the feelings of the lover to his mistress; which we recognize as first reaching their height in the days of chivalry. The truth and faith of the lover, and his piety to Heaven, are the foundation, in his character, of all the joy in imagination which he can receive from the conception of his lady's—now no more mortal—beauty. She is indeed transfigured before him; but the truth of the transfiguration is greater than that of the lightless aspect she bears to others. When therefore, in my next lecture, I speak of the Pleasures of Truth, as distinct from those of the Imagination,—if either the limits or clearness of brief title had permitted me, I should have said, untransfigured truth;—meaning on the one side, truth which we have not heart enough to transfigure, and on the other, truth of the lower kind which is incapable of transfiguration. One may look at a girl till one believes she is an angel; because, in the best of her, she is one; but one can't look at a cockchafer till one believes it is a girl.
With this warning of the connection which exists between the honest intellect and the healthy imagination; and using henceforward the shorter word 'Fancy' for all inventive vision, I proceed to consider with you the meaning and consequences of the frank and eager exertion of the fancy on Religious subjects, between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.
Its first, and admittedly most questionable action, the promotion of the group of martyr saints of the third century to thrones of uncontested dominion in heaven, had better be distinctly understood, before we debate of it, either with the Iconoclast or the Rationalist. This apotheosis by the Imagination is the subject of my present lecture. To-day I only describe it,—in my next lecture I will discuss it.
Observe, however, that in giving such a history of the mental constitution of nascent Christianity, we have to deal with, and carefully to distinguish, two entirely different orders in its accepted hierarchy:—one, scarcely founded at all on personal characters or acts, but mythic or symbolic; often merely the revival, the baptized resuscitation of a Pagan deity, or the personified omnipresence of a Christian virtue;—the other, a senate of Patres Conscripti of real persons, great in genius, and perfect, humanly speaking, in holiness; who by their personal force and inspired wisdom, wrought the plastic body of the Church into such noble form as in each of their epochs it was able to receive; and on the right understanding of whose lives, nor less of the affectionate traditions which magnified and illumined their memories, must absolutely depend the value of every estimate we form, whether of the nature of the Christian Church herself, or of the directness of spiritual agency by which she was guided.[24]