s in the grouping of the images. Let any one try to "copy" the
wife or brother he knows so well,--to make a human image which shall
speak and act so as to impress strangers with a belief in its
truth,--and he will then see that the much-despised reliance on actual
experience is not the mechanical procedure it is believed to be. When
Scott drew Saladin and Ceaur de Lion he did not really display more
imaginative power than when he drew the Mucklebackits, although the
majority of readers would suppose that the one demanded a great effort
of imagination, whereas the other formed part of his familiar
experiences of Scottish life. The mistake here lies in confounding the
sources from which the materials were derived with the plastic power of
forming these materials into images. More conscious effort may have
been devoted to the collection of the materials in the one case than in
the other, but that this has nothing to do with the imaginative power
employed may readily be proved by an analysis of the intellectual
processes of composition. Scott had often been in fishermen's cottages
and heard them talk; from the registered experience of a thousand
details relating to the life of the poor, their feelings and their
thoughts, he gained that material upon which his imagination could
work; in the case of Saladin and Ceaur de Lion he had to gain these
principally through books and his general experience of life; and the
images he formed--the vision he had of Mucklebackit and Saladin--must
be set down to his artistic faculty, not to his experience or erudition.

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 fai