The Pleasures of England: Lectures given in OxfordRuskin, John
General
The Pleasures of England: Lectures given in Oxford
Ruskin, John
England -- Civilization
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."
[Footnote 22: Meaning that all healthy minds possess imagination, and
use it at will, under fixed laws of truthful perception and memory.]
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--
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.
[Footnote 23: Vide pp. 124-5.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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