A Dish of Orts Part 1

A Dish Of Orts.

by George MacDonald.

PREFACE.

Since printing throughout the t.i.tle _Orts_, a doubt has arisen in my mind as to its fitting the nature of the volume. It could hardly, however, be imagined that I a.s.sociate the idea of _worthlessness_ with the work contained in it. No one would insult his readers by offering them what he counted valueless sc.r.a.ps, and telling them they were such.

These papers, those two even which were caught in the net of the ready-writer from extempore utterance, whatever their merits in themselves; are the results of by no means trifling labour. So much a man _ought_ to be able to say for his work. And hence I might defend, if not quite justify my t.i.tle--for they are but fragmentary presentments of larger meditation. My friends at least will accept them as such, whether they like their collective t.i.tle or not.

The t.i.tle of the last is not quite suitable. It is that of the religious newspaper which reported the sermon. I noted the fact too late for correction. It ought to be _True Greatness_.

The paper on _The Fantastic Imagination_ had its origin in the repeated request of readers for an explanation of things in certain shorter stories I had written. It forms the preface to an American edition of my so-called Fairy Tales.

GEORGE MACDONALD.

EDENBRIDGE, KENT. _August 5, 1893._

THE IMAGINATION: ITS FUNCTIONS AND ITS CULTURE.

[Footnote: 1867.]

There are in whose notion education would seem to consist in the production of a certain repose through the development of this and that faculty, and the depression, if not eradication, of this and that other faculty. But if mere repose were the end in view, an unsparing depression of all the faculties would be the surest means of approaching it, provided always the animal instincts could be depressed likewise, or, better still, kept in a state of constant repletion. Happily, however, for the human race, it possesses in the pa.s.sion of hunger even, a more immediate saviour than in the wisest selection and treatment of its faculties. For repose is not the end of education; its end is a n.o.ble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than r.e.t.a.r.ded into lethargy.

By those who consider a balanced repose the end of culture, the imagination must necessarily be regarded as the one faculty before all others to be suppressed. "Are there not facts?" say they. "Why forsake them for fancies? Is there not that which, may be _known_? Why forsake it for inventions? What G.o.d hath made, into that let man inquire."

We answer: To inquire into what G.o.d has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery.

We must begin with a definition of the word _imagination_, or rather some description of the faculty to which we give the name.

The word itself means an _imaging_ or a making of likenesses. The imagination is that faculty which gives form to thought--not necessarily uttered form, but form capable of being uttered in shape or in sound, or in any mode upon which the senses can lay hold. It is, therefore, that faculty in man which is likest to the prime operation of the power of G.o.d, and has, therefore, been called the _creative_ faculty, and its exercise _creation_. _Poet_ means _maker_. We must not forget, however, that between creator and poet lies the one unpa.s.sable gulf which distinguishes--far be it from us to say _divides_--all that is G.o.d's from all that is man's; a gulf teeming with infinite revelations, but a gulf over which no man can pa.s.s to find out G.o.d, although G.o.d needs not to pa.s.s over it to find man; the gulf between that which calls, and that which is thus called into being; between that which makes in its own image and that which is made in that image. It is better to keep the word _creation_ for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination of G.o.d; except it be as an occasional symbolic expression, whose daring is fully recognized, of the likeness of man's work to the work of his maker. The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker.

When therefore, refusing to employ the word _creation_ of the work of man, we yet use the word _imagination_ of the work of G.o.d, we cannot be said to dare at all. It is only to give the name of man's faculty to that power after which and by which it was fas.h.i.+oned. The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of G.o.d. Everything of man must have been of G.o.d first; and it will help much towards our understanding of the imagination and its functions in man if we first succeed in regarding aright the imagination of G.o.d, in which the imagination of man lives and moves and has its being.

As to _what_ thought is in the mind of G.o.d ere it takes form, or what the form is to him ere he utters it; in a word, what the consciousness of G.o.d is in either case, all we can say is, that our consciousness in the resembling conditions must, afar off, resemble his. But when we come to consider the acts embodying the Divine thought (if indeed thought and act be not with him one and the same), then we enter a region of large difference. We discover at once, for instance, that where a man would make a machine, or a picture, or a book, G.o.d makes the man that makes the book, or the picture, or the machine. Would G.o.d give us a drama? He makes a Shakespere. Or would he construct a drama more immediately his own? He begins with the building of the stage itself, and that stage is a world--a universe of worlds. He makes the actors, and they do not act,--they _are_ their part. He utters them into the visible to work out their life--his drama. When he would have an epic, he sends a thinking hero into his drama, and the epic is the soliloquy of his Hamlet.

Instead of writing his lyrics, he sets his birds and his maidens a-singing. All the processes of the ages are G.o.d's science; all the flow of history is his poetry. His sculpture is not in marble, but in living and speech-giving forms, which pa.s.s away, not to yield place to those that come after, but to be perfected in a n.o.bler studio. What he has done remains, although it vanishes; and he never either forgets what he has once done, or does it even once again. As the thoughts move in the mind of a man, so move the worlds of men and women in the mind of G.o.d, and make no confusion there, for there they had their birth, the offspring of his imagination. Man is but a thought of G.o.d.

If we now consider the so-called creative faculty in man, we shall find that in no _primary_ sense is this faculty creative. Indeed, a man is rather _being thought_ than _thinking_, when a new thought arises in his mind. He knew it not till he found it there, therefore he could not even have sent for it. He did not create it, else how could it be the surprise that it was when it arose? He may, indeed, in rare instances foresee that something is coming, and make ready the place for its birth; but that is the utmost relation of consciousness and will he can bear to the dawning idea. Leaving this aside, however, and turning to the _embodiment_ or revelation of thought, we shall find that a man no more _creates_ the forms by which he would reveal his thoughts, than he creates those thoughts themselves.

For what are the forms by means of which a man may reveal his thoughts?

Are they not those of nature? But although he is created in the closest sympathy with these forms, yet even these forms are not born in his mind. What springs there is the perception that this or that form is already an expression of this or that phase of thought or of feeling.

For the world around him is an outward figuration of the condition of his mind; an inexhaustible storehouse of forms whence he may choose exponents--the crystal pitchers that shall protect his thought and not need to be broken that the light may break forth. The meanings are in those forms already, else they could be no garment of unveiling. G.o.d has made the world that it should thus serve his creature, developing in the service that imagination whose necessity it meets. The man has but to light the lamp within the form: his imagination is the light, it is not the form. Straightway the s.h.i.+ning thought makes the form visible, and becomes itself visible through the form. [Footnote: We would not be understood to say that the man works consciously even in this.

Oftentimes, if not always, the vision arises in the mind, thought and form together.]

In ill.u.s.tration of what we mean, take a pa.s.sage from the poet Sh.e.l.ley.

In his poem _Adonais_, written upon the death of Keats, representing death as the revealer of secrets, he says:--

"The one remains; the many change and pa.s.s; Heaven's light for ever s.h.i.+nes; earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many coloured gla.s.s, Stains the white radiance of eternity, Until death tramples it to fragments."

This is a new embodiment, certainly, whence he who gains not, for the moment at least, a loftier feeling of death, must be dull either of heart or of understanding. But has Sh.e.l.ley created this figure, or only put together its parts according to the harmony of truths already embodied in each of the parts? For first he takes the inventions of his fellow-men, in gla.s.s, in colour, in dome: with these he represents life as finite though elevated, and as an a.n.a.lysis although a lovely one.

Next he presents eternity as the dome of the sky above this dome of coloured gla.s.s--the sky having ever been regarded as the true symbol of eternity. This portion of the figure he enriches by the attribution of whiteness, or unity and radiance. And last, he shows us Death as the destroying revealer, walking aloft through, the upper region, treading out this life-bubble of colours, that the man may look beyond it and behold the true, the uncoloured, the all-coloured.

But although the human imagination has no choice but to make use of the forms already prepared for it, its operation is the same as that of the divine inasmuch as it does put thought into form. And if it be to man what creation is to G.o.d, we must expect to find it operative in every sphere of human activity. Such is, indeed, the fact, and that to a far greater extent than is commonly supposed.

The sovereignty of the imagination, for instance, over the region of poetry will hardly, in the present day at least, be questioned; but not every one is prepared to be told that the imagination has had nearly as much to do with the making of our language as with "Macbeth" or the "Paradise Lost." The half of our language is the work of the imagination.

For how shall two agree together what name they shall give to a thought or a feeling. How shall the one show the other that which is invisible?

True, he can unveil the mind's construction in the face--that living eternally changeful symbol which G.o.d has hung in front of the unseen spirit--but that without words reaches only to the expression of present feeling. To attempt to employ it alone for the conveyance of the intellectual or the historical would constantly mislead; while the expression of feeling itself would be misinterpreted, especially with regard to cause and object: the dumb show would be worse than dumb.

But let a man become aware of some new movement within him. Loneliness comes with it, for he would share his mind with his friend, and he cannot; he is shut up in speechlessness. Thus

He _may_ live a man forbid Weary seven nights nine times nine,

or the first moment of his perplexity may be that of his release. Gazing about him in pain, he suddenly beholds the material form of his immaterial condition. There stands his thought! G.o.d thought it before him, and put its picture there ready for him when he wanted it. Or, to express the thing more prosaically, the man cannot look around him long without perceiving some form, aspect, or movement of nature, some relation between its forms, or between such and himself which resembles the state or motion within him. This he seizes as the symbol, as the garment or body of his invisible thought, presents it to his friend, and his friend understands him. Every word so employed with a new meaning is henceforth, in its new character, born of the spirit and not of the flesh, born of the imagination and not of the understanding, and is henceforth submitted to new laws of growth and modification.

"Thinkest thou," says Carlyle in "Past and Present," "there were no poets till Dan Chaucer? No heart burning with a thought which it could not hold, and had no word for; and needed to shape and coin a word for--what thou callest a metaphor, trope, or the like? For every word we have there was such a man and poet. The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor and bold questionable originality. Thy very ATTENTION, does it not mean an _attentio_, a STRETCHING-TO? Fancy that act of the mind, which all were conscious of, which none had yet named,--when this new poet first felt bound and driven to name it. His questionable originality and new glowing metaphor was found adoptable, intelligible, and remains our name for it to this day."

All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words. The better, however, any such word is fitted for the needs of humanity, the sooner it loses its poetic aspect by commonness of use. It ceases to be heard as a symbol, and appears only as a sign. Thus thousands of words which were originally poetic words owing their existence to the imagination, lose their vitality, and harden into mummies of prose. Not merely in literature does poetry come first, and prose afterwards, but poetry is the source of all the language that belongs to the inner world, whether it be of pa.s.sion or of metaphysics, of psychology or of aspiration. No poetry comes by the elevation of prose; but the half of prose comes by the "ma.s.sing into the common clay" of thousands of winged words, whence, like the lovely sh.e.l.ls of by-gone ages, one is occasionally disinterred by some lover of speech, and held up to the light to show the play of colour in its manifold laminations.

For the world is--allow us the homely figure--the human being turned inside out. All that moves in the mind is symbolized in Nature. Or, to use another more philosophical, and certainly not less poetic figure, the world is a sensuous a.n.a.lysis of humanity, and hence an inexhaustible wardrobe for the clothing of human thought. Take any word expressive of emotion--take the word _emotion_ itself--and you will find that its primary meaning is of the outer world. In the swaying of the woods, in the unrest of the "wavy plain," the imagination saw the picture of a well-known condition of the human mind; and hence the word _emotion_.

[Footnote: This pa.s.sage contains only a repet.i.tion of what is far better said in the preceding extract from Carlyle, but it was written before we had read (if reviewers may be allowed to confess such ignorance) the book from which that extract is taken.]

But while the imagination of man has thus the divine function of putting thought into form, it has a duty altogether human, which is paramount to that function--the duty, namely, which springs from his immediate relation to the Father, that of following and finding out the divine imagination in whose image it was made. To do this, the man must watch its signs, its manifestations. He must contemplate what the Hebrew poets call the works of His hands.

"But to follow those is the province of the intellect, not of the imagination."--We will leave out of the question at present that poetic interpretation of the works of Nature with which the intellect has almost nothing, and the imagination almost everything, to do. It is unnecessary to insist that the higher being of a flower even is dependent for its reception upon the human imagination; that science may pull the snowdrop to shreds, but cannot find out the idea of suffering hope and pale confident submission, for the sake of which that darling of the spring looks out of heaven, namely, G.o.d's heart, upon us his wiser and more sinful children; for if there be any truth in this region of things acknowledged at all, it will be at the same time acknowledged that that region belongs to the imagination. We confine ourselves to that questioning of the works of G.o.d which is called the province of science.

"Shall, then, the human intellect," we ask, "come into readier contact with the divine imagination than that human imagination?" The work of the Higher must be discovered by the search of the Lower in degree which is yet similar in kind. Let us not be supposed to exclude the intellect from a share in every highest office. Man is not divided when the manifestations of his life are distinguished. The intellect "is all in every part." There were no imagination without intellect, however much it may appear that intellect can exist without imagination. What we mean to insist upon is, that in finding out the works of G.o.d, the Intellect must labour, workman-like, under the direction of the architect, Imagination. Herein, too, we proceed in the hope to show how much more than is commonly supposed the imagination has to do with human endeavour; how large a share it has in the work that is done under the sun.

"But how can the imagination have anything to do with science? That region, at least, is governed by fixed laws."

"True," we answer. "But how much do we know of these laws? How much of science already belongs to the region of the ascertained--in other words, has been conquered by the intellect? We will not now dispute, your vindication of the _ascertained_ from the intrusion of the imagination; but we do claim for it all the undiscovered, all the unexplored." "Ah, well! There it can do little harm. There let it run riot if you will." "No," we reply. "Licence is not what we claim when we a.s.sert the duty of the imagination to be that of following and finding out the work that G.o.d maketh. Her part is to understand G.o.d ere she attempts to utter man. Where is the room for being fanciful or riotous here? It is only the ill-bred, that is, the uncultivated imagination that will amuse itself where it ought to wors.h.i.+p and work."

"But the facts of Nature are to be discovered only by observation and experiment." True. But how does the man of science come to think of his experiments? Does observation reach to the non-present, the possible, the yet unconceived? Even if it showed you the experiments which _ought_ to be made, will observation reveal to you the experiments which _might_ be made? And who can tell of which kind is the one that carries in its bosom the secret of the law you seek? We yield you your facts. The laws we claim for the prophetic imagination. "He hath set the world _in_ man's heart," not in his understanding. And the heart must open the door to the understanding. It is the far-seeing imagination which beholds what might be a form of things, and says to the intellect: "Try whether that may not be the form of these things;" which beholds or invents _a_ harmonious relation of parts and operations, and sends the intellect to find out whether that be not _the_ harmonious relation of them--that is, the law of the phenomenon it contemplates. Nay, the poetic relations themselves in the phenomenon may suggest to the imagination the law that rules its scientific life. Yea, more than this: we dare to claim for the true, childlike, humble imagination, such an inward oneness with the laws of the universe that it possesses in itself an insight into the very nature of things.

Lord Bacon tells us that a prudent question is the half of knowledge.

Whence comes this prudent question? we repeat. And we answer, From the imagination. It is the imagination that suggests in what direction to make the new inquiry--which, should it cast no immediate light on the answer sought, can yet hardly fail to be a step towards final discovery.

Every experiment has its origin in hypothesis; without the scaffolding of hypothesis, the house of science could never arise. And the construction of any hypothesis whatever is the work of the imagination.

The man who cannot invent will never discover. The imagination often gets a glimpse of the law itself long before it is or can be _ascertained_ to be a law. [Footnote: This paper was already written when, happening to mention the present subject to a mathematical friend, a lecturer at one of the universities, he gave us a corroborative instance. He had lately _guessed_ that a certain algebraic process could be shortened exceedingly if the method which his imagination suggested should prove to be a true one--that is, an algebraic law. He put it to the test of experiment--committed the verification, that is, into the hands of his intellect--and found the method true. It has since been accepted by the Royal Society.

Noteworthy ill.u.s.tration we have lately found in the record of the experiences of an Edinburgh detective, an Irishman of the name of McLevy. That the service of the imagination in the solution of the problems peculiar to his calling is well known to him, we could adduce many proofs. He recognizes its function in the construction of the theory which shall unite this and that hint into an organic whole, and he expressly sets forth the need of a theory before facts can be serviceable:--

"I would wait for my 'idea'.... I never did any good without mine....

Chance never smiled on me unless I poked her some way; so that my 'notion,' after all, has been in the getting of it my own work only perfected by a higher hand."

"On leaving the shop I went direct to Prince's Street,--of course with an idea in my mind; and somehow I have always been contented with one idea when I could not get another; and the advantage of sticking by one is, that the other don't jostle it and turn you about in a circle when you should go in a straight line." (Footnote: Since quoting the above I have learned that the book referred to is unworthy of confidence. But let it stand as ill.u.s.tration where it cannot be proof.)]

The region belonging to the pure intellect is straitened: the imagination labours to extend its territories, to give it room. She sweeps across the borders, searching out new lands into which she may guide her plodding brother. The imagination is the light which redeems from the darkness for the eyes of the understanding. Novalis says, "The imagination is the stuff of the intellect"--affords, that is, the material upon which the intellect works. And Bacon, in his "Advancement of Learning," fully recognizes this its office, corresponding to the foresight of G.o.d in this, that it beholds afar off. And he says: "Imagination is much akin to miracle-working faith." [Footnote: We are sorry we cannot verify this quotation, for which we are indebted to Mr.

Oldbuck the Antiquary, in the novel of that ilk. There is, however, little room for doubt that it is sufficiently correct.]