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.