It has been well said by a very imaginative writer, that “when a poet floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird’s-eye view of the earth, some people accept the mere fact of his soaring for sublimity, and mistake his dim vision of earth for proximity to heaven.”  And in like manner, when a thinker frees himself from all the trammels of fact, and propounds a “bold hypothesis,” people mistake the vagabond erratic flights of guessing for a higher range of philosophic power.  In truth, the imagination is most tasked when it has to paint pictures which shall withstand the silent criticism of general experience, and to frame hypotheses which shall withstand the confrontation with facts.  I cannot here enter into the interesting question of Realism and Idealism in Art, which must be debated in a future chapter; but I wish to call special attention to the psychological fact, that fairies and demons, remote as they are from experience, are not created by a more vigorous effort of imagination than milk maids and poachers.  The intensity of vision in the artist and of vividness in his creations are the sole tests of his imaginative power.

II.

If this brief exposition has carried the reader’s assent, he will readily apply the principle, and recognise that an artist produces an effect in virtue of the distinctness with which he sees the objects he represents, seeing them not vaguely as in vanishing apparitions, but steadily, and in their most characteristic relations.  To this Vision he adds artistic skill with which to make us see.  He may have clear conceptions, yet fail to make them clear to us:  in this case he has imagination, but is not an artist.  Without clear Vision no skill can avail.  Imperfect Vision necessitates imperfect representation; words take the place of ideas.

In Young’s “Night Thoughts” there are many examples of the pseudo-imaginative, betraying an utter want of steady Vision.  Here is one:—­

“His hand the good man fixes on the skies, And bids earth roll, nor feels the idle whirl.”

“Pause for a moment,” remarks a critic, “to realise the image, and the monstrous absurdity of a man’s grasping the skies and hanging habitually suspended there, while he contemptuously bids earth roll, warns you that no genuine feeling could have suggested so unnatural a conception.” [Westminster review, No. cxxxi., p. 27].  It is obvious that if Young had imagined the position he assigned to the good man he would have seen its absurdity; instead of imagining, he allowed the vague transient suggestion of half-nascent images to shape themselves in verse.

Now compare with this a passage in which imagination is really active.  Wordsworth recalls how—­

" In November days
When vapours rolling down the valleys made
A lonely scene more lonesome; among the woods
At noon; and mid the calm of summer nights,
When by the margin of the trembling lake
Beneath the gloomy hills homeward I went
In solitude, such intercourse was mine.”