ries 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."

There is nothing very grand or impressive in this passage, and
therefore it is a better illustration for my purpose. Note how happily
the one image, out of a thousand possible images by which November
might be characterised, is chosen to call up in us the feeling of the
lonely scene; and with what delicate selection the calm of summer
nights, the "trembling lake" (an image i