button to main menu  Gents Mag 1842 part 1 p.11
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Gentleman's Magazine 1842 part 1 p.11
to the phraseology of the different writers, whose creeds we are canvassing, as to ascribe a fancy to the fancy, and an imagination to the imagination; thus reducing the discussion to some palpable form, inasmuch as we have now to determine, what is a fancy, and what is an imagination; or what is that to which fancy may distinctively be applied, and what that to which imagination: for the whole dispute is about the imposition of a name.
If we resort to Bacon, and it is rarely that we can do so in vain, he will supply us with a clue. Speaking of imagination, by which, as he is then considering it, he understands, "the representation of a particular thought," he says, that it is, inter alia, "of things present, or as if they were present; for," he adds, "I comprehend in this, imagination feigned, and at pleasure; as if one should imagine such a man to be in the vestments of the Pope, or to have wings."
Now, instead of saying, we imagine a man to have wings, or the imagination presents to us a man having wings, the appropriate distinctive expression seems to be, we fancy a man to have wings, or the fancy presents to us a man having wings. The imagination presents the man and the wings separately: the fancy presents them combined in the same impersonation. And this we shall contend to be the peculair province of fancy; and we shall do so from a conviction, that we are thus led to a distinction, which may be always clearly preserved in poetical imagery.
It is an observation of a great historian of Nature (Buffon), that whatever it was possible for his goddess to produce had been produced.
Suppose then an enthusiastic admirer of her works, giving free play to his speculations, should present to his mind - in one conformation - the constituent parts, some of a bird and some of a beast; that he should engraft the beak of a duck on the head of a quadruped; that he should give to it webbed feet, and clothe its body with a thick, soft, beaver-like fur; and, in many minuter particulars, should unite in one animal the features of more, of bird and beast: this presentation to the mind, a creature and creation of its own, seems properly to deserve the denomination of a fancy; and the creative power, since it is to be ascribed to a monarchic power, the fancy.
But suppose such an animal should actually be detected in existence, (and such we are told is the fact),* should be seen and described; then the representation of it, whether to him who had seen, or to him who had only read the description, would be an imagination; and the representing faculty, the imagination.
On the first supposition, the existence of an animal with such a conformation of parts is the work of fancy; but yet imagination must supply every one of those parts. Every fancied whole must be constructed of imagined parts. Imagination, exclusive of her own domain, is thus a subsidiary potentate in that of fancy.
So in the famous conceit of Horace, that a painter should unite in one picture the neck of a horse to the head of a man; and that he should cover the limbs, collected from animals of divers kinds, with variegated feathers. The existence of a creature, conformed of parts so alien to each other, would be the painter's fancy; and the creation of his fancy. But when the finished picture should be exposed to beholders, then the subsequent representation of the painted monster to the mind of a beholder would be an imagination, and the representing faculty the imagination.
To the fancy we ascribe the visions of the Greek Madman, the Greek
* Shaw's General Zoology, Art. Platypus.
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