Captain. I have but one thing more to hint-the world say you will run yourself out. Author. The world say true; and what then? When they dance no longer, I will no longer pipe; and I shall not want flappers enough to remind me of the apoplexy. Captain. And what will become of us then, your poor family? We shall fall into contempt and oblivion. Author. Like many a poor fellow, already overwhelmed with the number of his family, I cannot help going on to increase it ""Tis my vocation, Hal." 15 Such of you as deserve oblivion-perhaps the whole of you-may be consigned to it. At any rate, you have been read in your day, which is more than can be said of some of your contemporaries, of less fortune and more merit. They cannot say but that you had the crown. It is always something to have engaged the public attention for seven years. Had I only written Waverley, I should have long since been, according to the established phrase, "the ingenious author of a novel much admired at the time." I believe, on my soul, that the reputation of Waverley is sustained very much by the praises of those who may be inclined to prefer that tale to its successors. Captain. You are willing, then, to barter future reputation for present popularity? Author. Meliora spero.16 Horace himself expected not to survive in all his works. I may hope to live in some of mine-non omnis moriar.17 It is some consolation to reflect that the best authors in all countries have been the most voluminous; and it has often happened that those who have been best received in their own time have also continued to be acceptable to posterity. I do not think so ill of the present generation as to suppose that its present favor necessarily infers future condemnation. Captain. Were all to act on such principles, the public would be inundated. Author. Once more, my dear son, beware of cant. You speak as if the public were obliged to read books merely because they are printed. Your friends the book 15 See 1 Henry IV, I, ii, 116. 16 "I hope for better things"; the motto of the house of Stormont. 17 "I shall not wholly die" (Horace, Odes, III, 30). sellers would thank you to make the proposition good. The most serious grievance attending such inundations as you talk of, is that they make rags dear. The multiplicity of publications does the present age no harm, and may greatly advantage that which is to succeed us. Captain. I do not see how that is to happen. Author. The complaints in the time of Elizabeth and James,, of the alarming fertility of the press, were as loud as they are at present; yet look at the shore over which the inundation of that age flowed, and it resembles now the Rich Strand of the Faerie Queene— Bestrew'd all with rich array, Of pearl and precious stones of great assay; Believe me that even in the most neglected works of the present age the next may discover treasures. Captain. Some books will defy all alchemy. Author. They will be but few in number, since, as for writers who are possessed of no merit at all, unless indeed they publish their works at their own expense, like Sir Richard Blackmore,19 their power of annoying the public will be soon limited by the difficulty of finding undertaking booksellers. Captain. You are incorrigible. Are there no bounds to your audacity? Author. There are the sacred and eternal boundaries of honor and virtue. My course is like the enchanted chamber of Britomart Where, as she look'd about, she did behold Captain. Well, you must take the risk of proceeding on your own principles. 18 Faerie Queene, III, iv, stanza 18. 10 Author of a number of unsuccessful poems; died 1729. 20 Faerie Queene, III, xi, stanza 54. 39041B Author. Do you act on yours; and take care you do not stay idling here till the dinner hour is over. I will add this work to your patrimony, valeat quantum.21 IMAGINATION AND FANCY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE [This, like the two following selections, is an extract from the miscellany called Biographia Literaria, published 1817. Coleridge viewed his distinction between Imagination and Fancy as an original contribution of the first importance (see the Introduction, page xi), but after repeated approaches to it in various chapters of the Biographia, he abandoned the effort to expound it fully. The selection is made up from the passages dealing with the subject in chapters 4, 12, and 13.] Repeated meditations led me first to suspect (and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects, matured my conjecture into full conviction) that fancy and imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I own, easy to conceive a more opposite translation of the Greek phantasia than the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects had supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as the Greek and German, and which the same cause, joined with accidents of translation from original works of different countries, occasion in mixed languages like our own. The first and most important point to be proved is that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under one and the same word, and (this done) to appropriate that word exclusively to one meaning, and the synonym-should there be one to the other. But if (as will be often the case 21 "Whatever it may be worth." in the arts and sciences) no synonym exists, we must either invent or borrow a word. In the present instance the appropriation has already begun, and been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If, therefore, I should succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties generally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the term imagination; while the other would be contra-distinguished as fancy. Now were it once fully ascertained that this division is no less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's Lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber, from Shakespeare's What! have his daughters brought him to this pass?' or from the preceding apostrophe to the elements,-the theory of the fine arts, and of poetry in particular, could not, I thought, but derive some additional and important light. It would in its immediate effects furnish a torch of guidance to the philosophical critic, and ultimately to the poet himself. In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power, and, from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, becomes influencive in the production. To admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. It has been already hinted that metaphysics and psychology have long been my hobby-horse. But to have a hobbyhorse, and to be vain of it, are so commonly found together that they pass almost for the same. I trust, therefore, that there will be more good humor than contempt in the smile with which the reader chastises my selfcomplacency, if I confess myself uncertain whether the satisfaction from the perception of a truth new to myself 1 From a speech of the mad Belvidera, in Otway's Venice Preserved, V, ii (where the original, however, reads "laurels" in place of "lobsters"); and from King Lear, III, iv, 65. may not have been rendered more poignant by the conceit that it would be equally so to the public. There was a time, certainly, in which I took some little credit to myself in the belief that I had been the first of my countrymen who had pointed out the diverse meaning of which the two terms were capable, and analyzed the faculties to which they should be appropriated. Mr. W. Taylor's recent volume of Synonyms I have not yet seen; but his specification of the terms in question has been clearly shown to be both insufficient and erroneous by Mr. Wordsworth in the Preface added to the late collection of his Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems.2 The explanation which Mr. Wordsworth has himself given will be found to differ from mine, chiefly, perhaps, as our objects are different. It could scarcely, indeed, happen otherwise, from the advantage I have enjoyed of frequent conversation with him on a subject to which a poem of his own first directed my attention, and my conclusions concerning which he had made more lucid to myself by many happy instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the mind. But it was Mr. Wordsworth's purpose to consider the influences of fancy and imagination as they are manifested in poetry, and from the different effects to conclude their diversity in kind; while it is my object to investigate the seminal principle, and then from the kind to deduce the degree. My friend has drawn a masterly sketch of the branches with their poetic fruitage. I wish to add the trunk, and even the roots as far as they lift themselves above ground and are visible to the naked eye of our common consciousness. I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the imagination; but I must first take leave to notice that, after a more accurate perusal of Mr. Wordsworth's remarks on the imagination, in his Preface to the new edition of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so consentient with his as, I confess, I had taken for granted. In an article contributed by me to Mr. Southey's Omniana, on the soul and its organs of sense, are the following sentences. "These [the human faculties] I would 2 See page 35. A miscellany published in 1812; Coleridge's essay is No. 174. |