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 felt in the English landscape, because its images may
more forcibly arrest his attentlon by their novelty. And were this not
so, were the inalienable impressiveness of tropical scenery always to
give the poet who described it a superiority in effect, this would not
prove the superiority of his imagination. For either he has been
familiar with such scenes, and imagines them just as the other poet
imagines his English landscape---by an effort of mental vision, calling
up the absent objects; or he has merely read the descriptions of
others, and from these makes up his picture. It is the same with his
rival, who also recalls and recombines. Foolish critics often betray
their ignorance by saying that a painter or a writer "only copies what
he has seen, or puts down what he has known." They forget that no man
imagines what he has not seen or known, and that it is in the SELECTION
OF THE CHARACTERISTIC DETAILS that the artistic power is manifested.
Those who suppose that familiarity with scenes or characters enables a
painter or a novelist to "copy" them with artistic effect, forget the
well-known fact that the vast majority of men are painfully incompetent