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:
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.
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,
... our Souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing Delusion, and we walk about like the inchanted Hero of a Romance, who sees beautiful Castles, Woods and Meadows; and at the same time hears the warbling of Birds, and the purling of Streams; but upon the finishing of some secret Spell, the fantastic Scene breaks up, and the disconsolate Knight finds himself on a barren Heath, or in a solitary Desart.
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,