Imagination’s world of air,
And our own world.
Halleck.
The world is of such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is bounded by a sleep.
Shakspeare.
S’ai che lá corre il mondo ove piu versi
Di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso
E che ’l vero condito in molli versi,
I piu schivi allentando ha persuaso.
Tasso.
People seem to have an idea that facts are every thing in the business
of the world—the only considerations in the philosophy of human
progress. Opposed to what is merely imaginary, facts are allowed to have
much dignity. Your practical reasoners look for facts; facts “are the
jockies for them”—such as they can see, hear, handle, or demonstrate;
while the imaginations are mostly held synonymous with the worthless,
the unsubstantial and the ridiculous. They seem to say in the spirit of
one of Congreve’s characters—we forget which—“fiddle-faddle, don’t
tell me of this and that and every thing in the world; but give me
mathematical demonstration.” Now we do not go so far as the philosopher
Bayle, who, on the other hand, affected to laugh at mathematical
demonstration; but we think, “under leave of Brutus and the rest,” that
facts do not seem, and have not seemed to be so exclusively essential to
“the cosmogony of the world,” to the history and progress of mind and
the general business of things, as some solid authorities think. Without
troubling our heads, in this gossiping paper, with the subtleties of
Berkley and others, who knock all creation into the compass of a man’s
perceptions—establish the column of the unsubstantial universe on the
pentagonal base of the senses—we have an idea that a vast amount of the
fictitious and imaginary is blended with our regular business of being,
doing and suffering. Human nature has, in all times, contrived a little
gilding, to make the bitter pill of life go down. Tasso truly says—in
his Invocation to the Virgin Mary for a muse—at the opening of his
“Gerusalemme Liberata”—
For well thou knowest, the world more fondly turns
To old Parnassus’ consecrated spot;
And truths which graceful poetry adorns
Win while they please us; and a spell is wrought
For the most subtle and reluctant thought.
Thus, for the sickly child, by friendly wile,
The cup’s deceptive edge, with sweetness fraught,
Lures to the bitter potion—he the while
Drinks life and health from the judicious guile.
Not alone have the edges of the cup of life been touched in this way,
but the contents of it have always been dashed with large doses of the
same emollient. Reality is not such a delightful thing, after all. The
false and the phantasmal have ever been considered the necessary
complements, as it were, of our condition here.
If we take away from the amount of what the world possesses that which
belongs and is due to the imagination merely—what is not authentic, and
could not be sworn to in a court of justice—what will be left? Let us
take it away—and what then? There is a sudden solitude in the world.
The beautiful is vanished, and the hard, blank remnant of things is full
of gaps, and desert places, disastrous flaws and a strange silence.
There is nothing now, but facts in this macrocosm. But, believe us, ’tis
a very rude, cold place to live in—much worse than ever it was before;
and that—in the opinion of the pale pessimist over the way there—was
bad enough in all conscience. They who first found out this world, and
roamed about on it, had scarcely called it very good when they began to
make it better, by peopling its too extensive solitudes—creating
phantasms and imaginations for it, where there were none before. The
unclothed reality of things was too bare and blank, beautiful as it was,
for the first human beings that walked the earth. They looked to the
elements, and the infinite host of heaven, and following their
unanswerable instincts, they began to make mysteries, airy fabrics and
visions. They imagined a god for the cope and the clouds of the
firmament, and he wielded the thunderbolts from a high mountain;
another, shaped after the most perfectly formed of men, resided in the
sun,
“The lord of life and poesy and light:”