We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Dryden's place as theorist and exponent of the imagination has never been appropriately determined, and the reason may be as much in the difficulty of the problem as in the temptation to settle out of court for Hobbesian influence. Certainly there is much in Dryden to plague his interpreters: the obliqueness with which he insists upon approaching the subject, the transitional and hence shifting vocabulary with which he works, and the rhetorical density within which he almost invariably transacts his critical discourse. These things make analysis and interpretation difficult and precarious. But of one thing the Dryden scholar need not despair—the lack of evidence. For Dryden had a nagging curiosity about the imagination and a tireless impulse to talk about it.
1 The more relevant studies are the following: George Williamson, “The Restoration Revolt Against Enthusiasm,” SP, xxx (Oct. 1933), 571–603; D. F. Bond, “ ‘Distrust’ of Imagination in English Neo-Classicism,” PQ, xiv (Jan. 1935), 54–69, and “The Neo-Classical Psychology of the Imagination,” ELU, iv (Dec. 1937), 245–264; C. D. Thorpe, “The Psychological Approach in Dryden,” in The Aesthetic Theory of Thomas Hobbes, Univ. of Mich. Pubs, in Lang, and Lit., xviii (Ann Arbor, 1940); John Bullitt and W. J. Bate, “Distinctions Between Fancy and Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Criticism,” MLN, LX (Jan. 1945), 8–15; Scott Elledge, “Cowley's Ode of Wit and Longinus On the Sublime: A Study in One Definition of the Word Wit,” MLQ, ix (June 1948), 185–198; G. G. Watson, “Contributions to a Dictionary of Critical Terms: Imagination and Fancy,” Essays in Criticism, iii (April 1953), 201–214.
2 I should remark here that it is the article, not the study, which is limited to the first phase. In pursuing the subject through the whole range of Dryden's criticism, I hope to publish subsequent articles carrying the account through the remainder of Dryden's career.
3 Editions used herein are as follows: Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1926); Works of John Dryden, ed. Sir Walter Scott and George Saintsbury, 18 vols. (Edinburgh, 1882–93); English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (1839–45); Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1908). In quoting from Dryden, I keep citation to a minimum consistent with clarity.
4 This definition is frequently repeated. See dedication of The Spanish Friar (Ker, I, 248; cf. 247), preface to Sylvae (Ker, i, 256), preface to Albion and Albanius (Ker, I, 270), preface to Don Sebastian (Scott-Saintsbury, vii, 308), dedication of Examen Poeticum (Ker, ii, 9), Life of Lucian (Scott-Saintsbury, XVIII, 75). Cf. also dedication of the Aeneis (Ker, ii, 214, 230) and preface to the Fables (Ker, ii, 251, 256).
5 Cf. the commonplace of “words and things.” See Almonte C. Howell, “Res et Verba: Words and things,” ELH, xiii (June 1946), 131–142.
6 See Murray W. Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought, Univ. of Ill. Stud. in Lang. and Lit., xii (Urbana, 1927), pp. 11–12 (on and E), p. 275 (on M), and pp. 276–280 (on the emergence of an aesthetic of imagination).
7 See Bundy, pp. 265 ff. My version is eclectic; there is not a little variation among the actual accounts. Sometimes the judgment is held to act prior to the deposit of image in the memory.
8 See Bundy, pp. 257–258, 260. Cf. Sidney's Eikastike and Phantaslike (Defence of Poesie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, Oxford, 1904, i, 186), and Puttenham's phantastici, euphantasioti (Smith, ii, 20). See also the articles by Williamson and Bond (above, n. 1).
9 Plato's reasons were, of course, other than this, being based primarily on his notion of reality as transcendental.
10 See the “Time and Education” passage in the Answer to Davenant (Spingarn, ii, 59–60).
11 Cf., however, the preface to An Evening's Love (Ker, I, 138, 147). It is important to recognize, though, that judgment is here given positional and functional priority only in the creation of humors, which, it is Dryden's interest to show, are inferior to the creations of wit or fancy.
12 Italics mine; one could, incidentally, just as relevantly italicize work.
13 This can be appreciated only in context. It is a conceit, but it implies copy. See Ker, i, 3–4.
14 On the emergence of distinctions between fancy and imagination, see Bundy, pp. 277–278, Bullitt and Bate, and Watson (above, n. 1). As designating the creative faculty of the mind, imagination is cited in OED only 3 times before Dryden's first essay.
15 See in this connection Watson, pp. 203–204, 209; Bullitt and Bate, pp. 9–10. My own “statistics” show that, even in Dryden, imagination never achieves equivalence of frequency with fancy, but it does gain increasing use in the early period, and in the long run has a respectable (and probably unique) rate of use. Over the whole span of his critical writing (I omit everything else), fancy occurs 75 times, imagination 38+ times, wit 149+ times, and invention 49 times.
16 I take the Essay of Dramatic Poesy next as composed before the earlier published preface to Annus Mirabilis. See Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1956), I, 260; and Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden: A Bibliography (Oxford, 1939), p. 13.
17 It is not true, of course, that Dryden had just discovered the term, but he had made very little use of it, especially critical, before Dramatic Poesy. Between his first publication in 1649 (the Hastings elegy) and the composition of Dramatic Poesy (mid-1666), a period of 17 years, Dryden employed the word, exclusive of designating a person, only 17 times. He used it to designate a person or persons only 4 times. In the nonpersonal use, the term was applied predominantly in the generalized sense of intelligence or literary ability. The loci are as follows: Astrea Redux (vv. 200, 202), To Howard (vv. 34, 45), To My Lord Chancellor (v. 18), prologue to The Wild Gallant (vv. 47, 58), epilogue to The Wild Gallant (v. 10), prologue to The Rival Ladies (vv. 4, 10, 20, 36), prologue to The Indian Emperor (vv. 14, 18), epilogue to The Indian Emperor (vv. 5, 21, 27). In the Essay of Dramatic Poesy Dryden uses the term 32 times, more than twice as much as he had used it in all his previous writings together.
18 For the principle of idealized imitation, see esp. Ker, I, 54, 64, 68 (on the imaging of the mind), 79 (on “masculine” fancy), 80 (on the dimension of Shakespearean imagery), 100–103.
19 In specialized critical use the term is, of course, not itself old. Perhaps it was begun on this career no earlier than Hobbes.
20 Thirty-two times to 14 lor fancy, 9 for imagination.
21 Ker, i, 32 (2 instances), 80 (3), 81 (2), 86, 99.
22 Cf. the definition in OED s.v. sb., ii, 5, 5b. In Dryden, see Ker, I, 28, 37, 38, 47, 51, 72, 81 (where it is associated with repartee), 82 (as a person possessed of genius), 84.
23 Ker, i, 42 (re Menander et al.), 56, 88; i, 29; i, 42 (wit and custom); I, 92 (cf. OED, s.v. sb., 2; I, 51, 52, 53, 99.
24 Ker, i, 32, 79, 93 (3 instances), 105, 106 (2), 107 (2); i, 32, 76, 93, 101, 107 (2).
25 Ker, i, 93, 105, 106, 107.
26 Only twice: Ker, I, 93, 107. In both instances, fancy had been used beforehand, so that the use of imagination may have been a substitution device rather than an indiscrimination in the licentious application of either term.
27 Ker, i, 63, 74, 92; i, 32, 76, 93, 101, 107 (2 instances).
28 See, in order, Ker, I, 40, 86, 91. Cf. a similar association of fancy with thought in the preface to Annus Mirabilis. (See below, n. 38.)
29 Note the use of wit in connection with repartee (Ker, i, 72, 81—2 instances), with phrasing (“a thing well said will be wit in all languages,” Ker, I, 51; “wit is best conveyed to us in the most easy language,” Ker, I, 52; “This is wit in all languages…,” Ker, I, 53), with Falstaff's wit (“those things which he says praeter expectatum,” Ker. I, 84), and with puns (Ker, i, 80). Cf. also the reference to Cleveland, “in some places his wit is independent of his words…” (Ker, i, 52). Of course, Dryden often distinguishes wit and language. See also Ker, I, 53, 81, 100.
30 From Ker, i, 90, to the end of the Essay, wit occurs only 3 times, imagination 5, fancy 9. Up to that point, wit predominated by 29 to 4 to 5.
31 See Watson, pp. 203–204; Bullitt and Bate, pp. 9–10.
32 Spingarn, ii, 20. Hobbes seems to have felt that Davenant overestimated the fancy. In the “Time and Education” passage of his Answer (Spingarn, ii, 59–60) he depreciates the celerity idea.
33 Spingarn, ii, 21–22. Dryden is sometimes given to this sort of definition, for which he may owe something to Davenant's example. See Ker, i, 14–15, 51, 256, 263; ii, 95, 223, 256 f.; Scott-Saintsbury, v, 189.
34 Hobbes cannot be given priority in this identification. His “good wit; by which, in this occasion, is meant a good fancy” (Leviathan, i, viii) has reference to the powers of apprehension, or “The Virtues Commonly called Intellectual.” Dryden places the matter squarely in the artistic framework, to say nothing of his use of imagination instead of Hobbes's fancy.
Further evidence that Dryden is identifying wit with imagination (not vice versa, as some have claimed; see below, n. 35), appears in the positive and negative definitions he gives of the “proper wit of an Heroic or Historical Poem.” Such wit consists, on the positive side, “in the delightful imagining of persons, actions, passions, or things.” Negatively, it does not consist in epigram, antithesis, paronomasia, or sentence. It is (again positively) “some lively and apt description, dressed in such colours of speech, that it sets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly, and more delightfully than nature” (Ker, I, 14–15). Now, it cannot well be argued that this is only the wit of a heroic poem as distinct from the “general notion” of wit expressed earlier, for, with the exception of “descriptions,” there is no difference in the two notions as Dryden has stated them. The “lively and apt” of heroic wit is the same as the “well defined” and “happy” of the general notion of wit; and the “absent object” of heroic wit is no different from the “quarry” of the general notion.
35 I must disagree with the wit-imagination relationship advanced by C. D. Thorpe and George G. Watson. According to Thorpe (p. 194), Dryden “is using ‘wit’ in an inclusive sense embracing imagination, fancy, judgment, and elocution, even as Hobbes had made it equivalent to fancy and judgment.” Watson (pp. 203–204) remarks, “Notice with what boldness Dryden has identified imagination, a newcomer in the vocabulary of criticism, with the most widely accepted literary dogma of the age: I mean the dogma that poetry is a matter of ‘wit,‘ good composition.” Both these authorities recognize the significance of the merging of these two terms in Dryden's critical thought, but both seem willing to ignore Dryden's express wording of the merger: “wit… is no other than the faculty of imagination….” The distinction is not a quibble: put their way, Dryden's theory of the imagination looks backward to Hobbes; put Dryden's way, his theory looks ahead to Coleridge.
36 Thorpe, p. 195. The Dryden quotation appears in Ker, I, 14. Cf. also “as perfectly, and more delightfully than nature” (Ker, i, 15). In connection with the idea of labor, cf. the phrase “to confess as well the labour as the force of his imagination” (Ker, i, 16); also Davenant's definition of wit cited above, and Leviathan, I, iii, x.
37 On the transfer of invention to the vocabulary of poetic, see Bundy, “‘Invention’ and ‘Imagination’ in the Renaissance,” JEGP, xxix (Oct. 1930), 535–545.
38 Thought(s) is here almost certainly the equivalent of image(s), but it is also used as an equivalent of the imagination itself. Cf. “the happy result of thought, or product of imagination” (Ker, i, 14). The same equivalence is given thought and fancy: cf. the parallel phrases “height of fancy,” “height of thought” (Ker, i, 18, 19). (See above, n. 28.)
39 The synthesis is only momentary, however. After this, Dryden normally treats imagination and expression as essentially separate entities. For Dante's fusion of conception and expression in his view of imagination, see Bundy, Theory of Imagination, p. 269.
40 George Williamson (p. 580) interprets the modes-of-imagination passage as illustrating the influence of Hobbes's doctrine of control. The point may be conceded without granting it too much weight. Actually, if one considers the list of attributes and the order in which they are advanced, one concludes that control, as it is represented in “accuracy” and “judgment,” is hardly Dryden's objective in this statement of the structure of the imagination. It is preceded and outweighed (2 to 1) by “quickness” and “fertility”; and elocution, to which “accuracy” is applied, clothes and adorns the thought “in apt, significant, and sounding words…” (italics mine). Admittedly, the formulation includes the idea of control, but that does not warrant the inference that the passage is motivated by the idea. Just as important in the conception is the spirit which informs Dryden's later remarks on Virgil's power of evoking images: “We see the objects he presents us with in their native figures, in their proper motions; but so we see them, as our own eyes could never have beheld them so beautiful in themselves. We see the soul of the poet, like that universal one of which he speaks, informing and moving through all his pictures—” (Ker, i, 16). Dryden is as much committed to the life as he is to the law of the imagination.
41 Wit still predominates in frequency (6 occurrences, plus 2 in compounds), but imagination gains in relative use, appearing 5 times to 4 for the fancy and 2 for invention.
43 Cf. Hobbes's “—judgment begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a poem” (Answer to Davenant, Spingarn, II, 59). Cf. also, in Dryden, the strictures on fancy made in the postscript to Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco, echoing Leviathan, I, viii.
43 I base the inference of haste on two factors: the extreme brevity of the preface and the indisputably muddled exposition of the subject in the passage quoted. Dryden will usually write at some length if he has half a chance, and he will certainly write with better control than he displays here.
44 This distinction has been overlooked by no less an authority than Thorpe, who quotes from a description of the responsive faculty to illustrate a principle of the creative faculty (p. 191). Imagination is employed 6 times in the Defence, in every case designating the perceptive faculty. Fancy occurs 4 times, once as the perceptive faculty, 3 times in the familiar sense of creative faculty—each of these, it is worth noting, in contrast to the “ornament of writing,” or elocution. See Ker, I, 119 (plural), 121, 122. Invention does not occur, nor does wit; but wit's appears once in a quotation (Ker, i, 122).
45 Judgment occurs only once (Ker, I, 119).
46 Cf. “In variety of fancy, and sweetness of expression, you see Ovid far above him; for Virgil rejected many of those things which Ovid wrote. A great wit's great work is to refuse, as… Sir John Berkenhead has… expressed it” (Ker, I, 122).
47 Scott-Saintsbury, iii, 107. Both imagination and fancy reflect the “celerity” notion of Davenant: “a man of quick and piercing imagination” (p. 106); “of so quick a fancy” (p. 107). Cf. Davenant's definition of wit as “dexterity of thought,” etc.
48 Invention does not really come into much currency until late in Dryden's career. After the preface to All for Love (1678), it begins a course of gradual increase in use until, in Dryden's last two essays, it becomes the dominant term.
49 This in spite of the fact that neither fancy nor imagination appears; only wit and invention (once each), which are used, however, in the sense of the other two terms. See Scott-Saintsbury, iii, 381.
50 Cf. “For, to write humour in comedy (which is the theft of poets from mankind), little of fancy is required; the poet observes only what is ridiculous and pleasant folly, and by judging exactly what is so, he pleases in the representation of it” (Ker, I, 147). I cannot agree with Thorpe that Dryden “is obviously speaking of Jonson's judgment as the result of observation in the Hobbian sense of aptness in discerning dissimilitudes” (p. 198; see also p. 199). I believe Thorpe sees too much Hobbes in this whole essay. On one point of fact, he is manifestly mistaken: the term imagination is not, as he states, omitted from the preface. See Thorpe, pp. 195–196.
51 Quoted in Ker, i, 309 (italics mine).
52 See Ker, i, 139 (beginning with the borrowing from Quintilian) to p. 143.
53 See Ker, i, 81, 84, 86 (italics mine).
54 It will be observed that this interpretation differs from that of Thorpe (p. 199), who regards fancy in this passage as referring only to the sentence in which it appears, and hence concludes that fancy is now being assigned the functions of elocution in the preface to Annus Mirabilis. I regard fancy as referring to the substance of the sentence preceding as well. In view of the reflection which the whole passage gives of the formulation in the preface to Annus Mirabilis, this seems more likely. If, also, one bears in mind the distinction Dryden is drawing between a merely representational method (humor) and its opposite, fancy (wit), he will perceive that Dryden does not intend any such limited association as elocution or the expressional at all, but that he is rather denning the fancy as that which surpasses copy and identifying it with that which creates: “for so much the word implies.”
55 This is one of the rare instances where fancy supersedes imagination as the term for the creative faculty pure and simple.
56 Fancy occurs 3 times, imagination twice.
57 See Ker, i, 148, 151, 152–153.
58 Thus, “the precipitation of the soul… the fury of a prophet” (“praecipitandus… liber spiritus… furentis animi vaticinatio…” [Ker, i, 152]).
59 This does not apply to the one use of fancy as the artistic-perceptive (not the creative) faculty (Ker, i, 155). There Dryden speaks of the fancy of the audience contributing to “its own deceit,” but even then in an approving mood, for he urges that, even so, “a writer ought to help its operation.”
60 Leviathan, I, iii. Cf. also, “there is no conception in a man's mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense” (Leviathan, i, i). I am not suggesting that Dryden would disagree with this. In fact, he resorts to the same principle in The Author's Apology (Ker, i, 187), only he cites Lucretius and not Hobbes as authority. What I am suggesting is that the emphasis is significantly different in Dryden and in Hobbes.
61 In dealing with the responsive imagination Dryden is equally daring. It is the poet's office, he declares, by whatever means, “to raise the imagination of the audience, and to persuade them, for the time, that what they behold in the theatre is really performed. The poet is then to endeavour an absolute dominion over the minds of the spectators; for, though our fancy will contribute to its own deceit, yet an author ought to help its operation…” (Ker, i, 154–155).
