in the observer by the fictions of genius or the myths of bygone ages, expanding until it includes the contemplation of Nature impassioned by any effluence arising from within-it may be emotion or it may be the individual memory. It was the philosophy of the Lake School that the perception of Nature-that is to say of all in Nature that is not purely mechanical-depends upon what is brought to it by the observer. Deep must call unto deep. To a creation apprehended as automatic by the senses and the reason, only imagination could Add the gleam, The light that never was on sea or land; for imagination was essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead". I Imagination was, in fact, organic; and the application of this adjective to the inner world has not been traced farther back than Coleridge, who, in his lectures on Shakespeare's plays, emphasized the mistake of confounding "mechanical regularity with organic form". But perhaps the most brilliant, even epigrammatic, expression which has ever been given to the everlasting war between the unconscious, because creative, vital principle and the conscious, because destructive, calculating principle, is contained in four lines from a little poem of Wordsworth's called The Tables Turned: Sweet is the lore which nature brings : Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things- And so it is in the philosophy and poetry of Romanti 1 Coleridge: Biographia Literaria. cism that we first feel a true understanding, not indeed of the process itself, but of the results of that process, which has been traced in this book under the name of "internalization". Slowly the divers of the Romantic expedition brought up to the surface of consciousness that vast new cosmos which had so long been blindly forming in the depths. It was a cosmos in which the spirit and spontaneity of life had moved out of Nature and into man. The magic of Persia, the Muses of Greece, the witches and fairies and charms and enchantments of Romance-all these had been locked safely in man's bosom, there to sleep until the trump of Romanticism sounded its call to imagination to give back their teeming life to Nature. "O Lady", wrote Coleridge in that most heartrending of all poems, wherein, like the disconsolate knight awaking on the barren heath, he reports the decay in himself of this very power: O Lady! we receive but what we give, And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, And this re-animation of Nature was possible because the imagination was felt as creative in the full religious sense of the word. It had itself assisted in creating the natural forms which the senses were now contemplating. It had moved upon the face of the waters. For it was "the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation "—the Word made human. In tracing the semantic history of important words like these, we must not forget that nine-tenths of the words comprising the vocabulary of a civilized nation are never used by more than about one-tenth of the population; while of the remaining tithe nine-tenths of those who use them are commonly aware of about one-tenth of their meanings. Nevertheless it is just by following those meanings up to the high-water mark which they have reached in a few eager minds that we can observe what may fairly be called changes in the general consciousness. It is true that the new meanings must filter through a graduated hierarchy of imaginative literature, literary journalism, reviews, sermons, journalism, popular novels, advertisements, and cinema captions before what is left of them reaches the general public; but the amount that is left, and the spell which is accordingly exerted on the many, depends on how far they have first been carried by the few. Thus, to take one example, the extraordinary load of meaning often borne by the word dream, in phrases like dreamland, my dreams, the land of my dreams, is no doubt traceable ultimately to the use of this word by the great Romantics. When Shelley wrote: Through the cold mass Of marble and of colour his dreams pass. and He hath awakened from the dream of life he was also, we might say, writing the greater part I.e. man's; the allusion is, of course, to plastic and visual art. of a good many twentieth-century drawing-room ballads. But to feel the full weight of the semantic burden which this little word can be made to bear in our time we must turn to a modern philosopher, Mr. Santayana, who has brought the use of it to a fine art. "The Divine Comedy," he writes, “marks high noon in that long day-dream of which Plato's Dialogues mark the beginning. Others to-day are fascinated by their dreams, because they regard them as messengers from that mysterious inner world in which, like the Christians of old, they are beginning to divine depths hitherto unimagined. They feel "forces" at work there which they are tempted to personify in terms of ancient myth-Ahriman, Lucifer, Oedipus, Psyche, and the like. But outside the significant adjective sub-conscious, which has almost certainly come to stay, the effect which such tendencies may have on the English language remains a tale to be told a hundred years hence. The numerous secondary implications unfolding within dream, however, its popularity, and its obvious power of suggesting images, must interest us as further symptoms of a now almost universal consciousness of at any rate the existence of such an "inner" world. In some lines written as a preface to the Recluse-the long, unfinished philosophical poem of which the Prelude and the Excursion were to form parts-Wordsworth has described the holy awe which he, for one, entertained as he realized that he must now set out to explore this world: Urania. I shall need All strength-all terror, single or in bands, I The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out By help of dreams-can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man My haunt, and the main region of my song. |