Rousseau’s New Heloise (1761) which was so popular that libraries lent it out by the
hour, and then Goethe’s Werther (1774), a story of love and suicide, was thought to
be responsible in its influence for an epidemic of suicides, and the hero of Balzac’s
mystical novel, Louis Lambert (1832), possessed an imagination so forceful, that
when he read a book he was transported to the places and scenes that it portrayed.
Thus, within fifty years of its publication Pamela had been responsible for
transforming the European mind whereby it now developed the free use of
imagination (Wilson, 2006:256). The development of mythopoeic literature as a
result of the Romantic Movement was one of the most remarkable in the story of
the narrative psyche.
I n his novel, The Serapion Brothers (1886), a story about a group of poets
and musicians, E.T.A. Hoffman created the supreme symbol of the Romantic
imagination, the monk Serapion, noted for the power of his imagination and who
understands:
... the duality which is the essential condition of our earthly
existence ... There is an inner world and a spiritual faculty for
discerning it with absolute clearness – yes, with the most minute
and brilliant distinctness. But it is part of our earthly lot that it is
the outer world, in which we are entrapped, that triggers this
spiritual faculty ... you forget that it is the outer world that causes
the spirit to use its powers of perception (in Wilson, 2006:258).
Those writers of the Romantic Movement, as I pointed out in Chapter 2, in a
sense, rediscovered I magination. I t was not as a way of escaping reality, to revolt
against the boredom of the mundane world, as was the way with predecessors
Homer, Malory and Chaucer, but as a way of (re) creating reality. I n the words of
the anti-novel English Puritan, Nathaniel I ngelo:
As soon as we have fiction of almost any kind, there is too much
of the feminine in play ... the reading of novels insidiously occupies
the soul and disables its functions. Fictional narratives make a
deep impression upon the affectionate part (in Doody, 1998:267).
I ndeed, so powerful was this release of the imaginal, feminine and creative
right hemisphere energy, of this new spirit on daily life, that it has been attributed
as being the motivating factor behind the great advances in Western civilization; the
I ndustrial Revolution, the creation of the great colonial empires and perhaps even
the wars of the twentieth century (Wilson, 2006: 259). Certainly, that notion of the
I magination being a direct solution to the boredom of mundane world, the longing
to transcend, identified by Aldous Huxley and of which I wrote in my introduction,