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"If we lose sight altogether of the beaten road of memory, we shall be in danger of missing our way in the winding paths of imagination. So bold an adventurer will come at last to regions inhabited only by monsters."

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Author

An Essay on Genius

Place of Publication

London and Edinburgh

Publisher

Printed for W. Strahan, T.Cadell, and W. Creech

Date

1774

Metaphor

"If we lose sight altogether of the beaten road of memory, we shall be in danger of missing our way in the winding paths of imagination. So bold an adventurer will come at last to regions inhabited only by monsters."

Metaphor in Context

Memory assists genius in another respect. To recollect instead of inventing, shows a defect of genius; but it were faulty to be so intent upon invention, as studiously to avoid recollection on all occasions. If we lose sight altogether of the beaten road of memory, we shall be in danger of missing our way in the winding paths of imagination. So bold an adventurer will come at last to regions inhabited only by monsters. It is not sufficient for rendering a production natural, that its separate parts be copied from real things; the order and connexions of the real things must likewise be in some measure imitated. If the parts of a work be put in a situation totally unlike to that which corresponding objects in nature possess, it will give the same kind of disgust as if the parts themselves had been perfectly fantastical. If a philosopher should deduce any phenomenon from a known cause, by a process opposite to what we have observed in similar cases, we would suspect for this very reason, that his explication were rather a whimsical hypothesis, than a legitimate investigation, and we would readily pronounce that his imagination might have been corrected by his memory, and led into a much juster train of thinking. If a number of events natural in themselves, were combined in the action of a poem so as to succeed one another in an order and by relations perfectly dissimilar to every series which history or our own observation had exhibited, we could not but be disgusted with this deviation from what memory informs us is the reality of things. The course of nature is so steddy and regular, that a certain analogy runs thro' all the parts of it. Whenever any series of events is exhibited to the mind, memory recollects some other part of the course of nature; and if the ordinary analogy be wanting, that series is pronounced unnatural and improbable. On this account, even in cases where the greatest latitude is allowed to invention, care must be taken that the offspring of genius bear some resemblance to the portrait of nature, which memory retains: and this resemblance cannot be produced unless memory is consulted while genius exerts itself, and this latter faculty in this manner vouchsafes to take its model from the former. [...]
(I.v, pp. 104-5)