y the
English dramatist.

Imagination in its fullest meaning must be held to include invention;
but invention is only one of the less important elements of imagination;
and it is the element which seems to be more or less negligible when the
other elements are amply developed. La Fontaine, one of the most
individual of French poets, devised only a few--and not the best--of the
delightful fables he related with unfailing felicity. Calderon, who was
the most imaginative of the dramatists of Spain, was perhaps the least
inventive of them all, contentedly availing himself of the situations,
and even of the complete plots of his more fertile fellow-playwrights;
and two of his most characteristic dramas, for example, two in which he
has most adequately exprest himself, the 'Alcalde of Zalamea' and the
'Physician of His Own Honor,' are borrowed almost bodily from his fecund
contemporary Lope de Vega. Racine seems to have found a special pleasure
in treating anew the themes Euripides had already dealt with almost a
score of centuries earlier. Tennyson, to take another example, displayed
not a little of this "sluggish avoidance of needless invention," often
preferring to apply his imagination to the transfiguring of what Malory
or Miss Mitford, Froude or Freeman had made ready for his hand. This
eschewing of overt originality fitted him all the more to be spokesman
of his time, and to voice the ideals of his race and of his day.
Tennyson, so Sir Leslie Stephen told us, "could express what occurred to
everybody in language that could be approached by nobody." Browning, on
the other hand, made his own plots, and on the whole made them none too
well, especially in his dramatic poems, in the structure of which he was
entirely neglectful of the accepted forms of the theater of his own
time--accepted forms of which Shakspere and Moliere would have availed
themselves instinctively. It was not Browning, but Whitman--and Whitman
in 1855, when the bard of Manhattan had not yet shown the stuff that
was in him--that Lowell had in mind in the letter where he says "when a
man aims at originality he acknowledges himself consciously
unoriginal.... The great fellows have always let the stream of their
activity flow quietly."

What is true of the poets is true also of the painters; and Lowell, who
did not lose his Yankee shrewdness in the galleries of Italy, saw this
also and phrased it happily in another of his letters. "The great merit,
it se