English Critical Essays: Nineteenth Century

by Unknown

In this charming thought, fancy and imagination are combined; yet the fancy, the assumption of Love’s sitting on a throne, is the image of a solid body; while the imagination, the sense of sympathy between the passion of love and impassioned music, presents us no image at all. Some new term is wanting to express the more spiritual sympathies of what is called Imagination.

One of the teachers of Imagination is Melancholy; and like Melancholy, as Albert Durer has painted her, she looks out among the stars, and is busied with spiritual affinities and the mysteries of the universe. Fancy turns her sister’s wizard instruments into toys. She takes a telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings to the images of wit; and delights as much to people nature with smiling ideal sympathies, as wit does to bring antipathies together, and make them strike light on absurdity. Fancy, however, is not incapable of sympathy with Imagination. She is often found in her company; always, in the case of the greatest poets; often in that of less, though with them she is the greater favourite. Spenser has great imagination and fancy too, but more of the latter; Milton both also, the very greatest, but with imagination predominant; Chaucer, the strongest imagination of real life, beyond any writers but Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, and in comic painting inferior to none; Pope has hardly any imagination, but he has a great deal of fancy; Coleridge little fancy, but imagination exquisite. Shakespeare alone, of all poets that ever lived, enjoyed the regard of both in equal perfection. A whole fairy poem of his writing [the Oberon-Titania scenes from the Midsummer-Night’s Dream] will be found in the present volume.[29] See also his famous description of Queen Mab and her equipage, in Romeo and Juliet:

Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners’ legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers:
Her traces of the smallest spider’s web;
Her collars of the moonshine’s watery beams, &c.

That is Fancy, in its playful creativeness. As a small but pretty rival specimen, less known, take the description of a fairy palace from Drayton’s Nymphidia:

This palace standeth in the air,
By necromancy placèd there,
That it no tempest needs to fear,
Which way soe’er it blow it:
And somewhat southward tow’rd the noon,
Whence lies a way up to the moon,
And thence the fairy can as soon
Pass to the earth below it.
The walls of spiders’ legs are made,
Well morticèd and finely laid:
He was the master of his trade
It curiously that builded:
The windows of the eyes of cats:

(because they see best at night)

And for the roof instead of slats
Is cover’d with the skins of bats,
With moonshine that are gilded.

Here also is a fairy bed, very delicate, from the same poet’s Muse’s Elysium:

Of leaves of roses, white and red,
Shall be the covering of the bed;
The curtains, vallens, tester all,
Shall be the flower imperial;
And for the fringe it all along
With azure hare-bells shall be hung.
Of lilies shall the pillows be,
With down stuft of the butterfly.

Of fancy, so full of gusto as to border on imagination, Sir John Suckling, in his Ballad on a Wedding, has given some of the most playful and charming specimens in the language. They glance like twinkles of the eye, or cherries bedewed: