button to main menu  Gents Mag 1842 part 1 p.9
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Gentleman's Magazine 1842 part 1 p.9
objects. Imagination is the power of depicting; - fancy, of evoking and combining. The imagination is formed by patient observation: the fancy by a voluntary activity in shifting the scenery of the mind. The more accurate the imagination, the more safely may a painter or a poet undertake a delineation or description, without the presence of the objects to be characterised. The more versatile the fancy, the more original and striking will be the decorations produced." Syn. 242.
Fancy, it is said, evokes - imagination depicts - consequently imagination is inert; she has nothing to depict, until fancy has evoked the images which are to be depicted. Imagination is a portrait painter, with her pencil and palette in her hand, her canvas on her easel, awaiting the arrival of her sitter. A result surely never contemplated by this very ingenious writer; but one as assuredly inevitable from his mode of expressing himself.
Before we proceed to state the sentiments of the POET upon the matters at issue, we are induced to communicate our own; and, at the outset, we beg our more learned readers to call to remembrance, that the two most eminent critics of the Roman empire, Longinus and Quintillian, the one as remarkable for the ardour of his genius as the other for his taste and judgment, never thought of this distribution of the mind into separate critic and poetic powers. They do not talk of the fancy or the imagination, but of fancies and images. And to these names, the one of phantasiai, and the other of visiones, they give pretty closely the same explanation. "We," says Quintillian, "give the name of visio to that which the Greeks call φαντασια, by which the images of absent things are so represented to the mind that we seem to discern them with our eyes, and have them before us."* The Grecian, "by all the Nine inspired," produces the appeal of Orestes to the mother whom he had murdered; - And the pitiful and affectionate reply of his sister deserves to be added.

"ORESTES. Oh! mother, I implore thee, goad not against me the blood-eyed and snake-haired Virgins. They themselves are leaping close against me.
"ELECTRA. Stay, O wretched one! stay quiet in thy bed! For thou seest nothing of those things which thou seemest to see."
"Here," exclaims the critic, "the Poet himself saw the Furies; and what he fancied he compelled also the auditors also to see." Another example of poetical imagery, given by Longinus, is from a lost drama of Euripedes, in which Phoebus is described giving his last instructions to his ambitious son. Σειριου νωτα, and with warning voice exclaims, 'Drive that way, now this, turn your chariot. Here!'"
"May you not say," observes Longinus, "that the mind" (not the fancy, not the imagination, but the whole mind) "of the writer ascends the chariot with Phaeton, and that, sharing his danger, he flies along with the horses."
Plutarch had before referred to the scene in Orestes, in illustration of the distinction drawn by himself between phantasy and phantasm; and for the same purposes he refers to the vision of Theoclymenus, when the Seer perceives the suitors moved to unspontaneous laughter; and altogether dementated by Pallas Minervae.
* Has imagines quisque bene conceperit, is erit in affectibus potentissimus. Hinc quidam dicunt έυφαντασιωτον, qui sibi res, voces, actus, secundum verum optime finget. Lib. vi. c. 2.
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