The often mooted question, What is Imagination? thus receives a very clear and definite answer.  It is the power of forming images; it reinstates, in a visible group, those objects which are invisible, either from absence or from imperfection of our senses.  That is its generic character.  Its specific character, which marks it off from Memory, and which is derived from the powers of selection and recombination, will be expounded further on.  Here I only touch upon its chief characteristic, in order to disengage the term from that mysteriousness which writers have usually assigned to it, thereby rendering philosophic criticism impossible.  Thus disengaged it may be used with more certainty in an attempt to estimate the imaginative power of various works.

Hitherto the amount of that power has been too frequently estimated according to the extent of departure from ordinary experience in the images selected.  Nineteen out of twenty would unhesitatingly declare that a hippogriff was a greater effort of imagination than a well-conceived human character; a Peri than a woman; Puck or Titania than Falstaff or Imogen.  A description of Paradise extremely unlike any known garden must, it is thought, necessarily be more imaginative than the description of a quiet rural nook.  It may be more imaginative; it may be less so.  All depends upon the mind of the poet.  To suppose that it must, because of its departure from ordinary experience, is a serious error.  The muscular effort required to draw a cheque for a thousand pounds might as reasonably be thought greater than that required for a cheque of five pounds; and much as the one cheque seems to surpass the other in value, the result of presenting both to the bankers may show that the more modest cheque is worth its full five pounds, whereas the other is only so much waste paper.  The description of Paradise may be a glittering farrago; the description of the landscape may be full of sweet rural images:  the one having a glare of gaslight and Vauxhall splendour; the other having the scent of new-mown hay.

A work is imaginative in virtue of the power of its images over our emotions; not in virtue of any rarity or surprisingness in the images themselves.  A Madonna and Child by Fra Angelico is more powerful over our emotions than a Crucifixion by a vulgar artist; a beggar-boy by Murillo is more imaginative than an Assumption by the same painter; but the Assumption by Titian displays far greater imagination than elther.  We must guard against the natural tendency to attribute to the artist what is entirely due to accidental conditions.  A tropical scene, luxuriant with tangled overgrowth and impressive in the grandeur of its phenomena, may more decisively arrest our attention than an English landscape with its green corn lands and plenteous homesteads.  But this superiority of interest is no proof of the artist’s superior imagination; and by a spectator familiar with the tropics, greater interest may be