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After reviewing, as we have done in the preceding pages, the facts which are stated by the evangelists respecting the life of the mother of Jesus, the reader perhaps will not be displeased if he be presented with some of the fictions with which the fancy and the folly of the human race have combined to embellish her history.
This narrative may be inadvertently classed with those ephemeral fictions in which the reader is constantly conscious that the dialogue and the incidents are veritable creations. It may here be asked how could I recall with any literalness the conversations and events of a time so long past. I do not pretend or wish it to be thought that these interviews with my father are here literally related.
Obscure and false in its principles, mixed with fictions and fables, and made only to dazzle the imagination, the progress of this philosophy was precarious, and its theories unintelligible; instead of enlightening, it blighted the mind, and diverted it from objects truly useful.
And so has the firmament of all knowledge been cleared of its vapors and fictions, and been revealed in its solid and shining facts. Here, then, lies the great distinction of the time: the accumulation of Truth, and the growing appetite for the true and the real.
This affair made a great deal of talk in Venice, where the common stock of leisure is so great that each person may without self- reproach devote a much larger share of attention to the interests of the others than could be given elsewhere. The decorous fictions in which Mrs.
Even at the time of his death, the Duke of Buckingham was generally reputed to have sixty thousand per annum, and chiefly from land; an income at that period absolutely without precedent or parallel in Europe. In this there might be some exaggeration, as usually there is in such cases. But the 'Fairfax Papers' have recently made it manifest that Pope's tale was the wildest of fictions.
The tale is one of those fictions which the dramatic sense of humanity is wont to impose upon history, but, like most such fictions, it expresses the spirit if not the letter of truth; for just as no one believes that Galileo's lips uttered the phrase, so no one doubts that the rebellious words were in his mind.
He was secretary of the expedition, drew careful maps, and made voluminous daily entries in a journal, which was afterward found to be a marvel of painstaking both in the facts and fictions which it contained.
When imagination does this, it gives pleasure; its fictions are approved, it embellishes Nature, it is a proof of the soundness of the mind, it aids truth: when on the contrary, it combines ideas, not formed to associate themselves with each other when it paints nothing but disagreeable phantoms, it disgusts, its fictions are censured, it distorts Nature, it advocates falsehood, it is the proof of a disordered, of a deranged mind: thus poetry, calculated to render Nature more pathetic, more touching, pleases when it creates ideal beings, but which move us agreeably: we, therefore, forgive the illusions it has held forth, on account of the pleasure we have reaped from them.
Till now the world believed in the heroism of Lucretia and of Mucius Scævola, and allowed itself thus to be stimulated and inspired. But now comes historical criticism, and says that those persons never lived, but are to be regarded as fables and fictions, imagined by the great mind of the Romans. What are we to do with so pitiful a truth?
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