V. of invention; and my argument is, that if in CHAPTER this heaven is the birthplace of art, and if from this heaven it comes, its home is heavenly, its ways are heavenly, to a heaven it returns, for a heaven it lives. ment of the to criticism, deficiency. This, then, may be described as the English Re-stategift to the definition of art-that it comes of ima- English gination, and that it creates a pleasure coloured contribution by the same faculty. All pleasure, obviously, is and its not poetical it becomes poetical when the ima: gination touches it with fire. It must be repeated, however, that when we ask for distinct information as to what this means, it is not easy, it is indeed impossible, to get it; and I make bold to claim for the next few chapters this praise at least, that they are the first and only attempt which has been made to give an exhaustive analysis of imagination—to give an account of it that shall at once comprise and explain all the known facts. Those writers who give us a rounded theory of imagination ignore half the facts; those who recognise nearly all the facts are driven, either like Mr. Ruskin, to confess that they are a mystery inscrutable, or like Coleridge, to throw down their pens with a sigh, not because the mystery is inscrutable, but because their explanations would be unintelligible to a stiff-necked and thickheaded generation of beef-eating, shop-keeping Britons. Although The result of this backward state of criticism imagination and every where asserted, it is, nowhere CHAPTER is, that when we come to ask the first of all V. questions, what is art? we discover to our is magnified chagrin that we are answered by statements that keep on running in a vicious circle. Thus, if however, poetry is defined by reference to imagination ; on explained. the other hand, imagination is defined by reference to poetry. If we are told that poetry must be imaginative, we are also told that imagination must be poetical-for there is an imagination. which is not poetical. Thus, when we inquire into the nature of poetry, we are first pushed forward to search for it in imagination, and then when we examine into the imagination, we are thrown back on the original question-what is poetical? Few things, however, are more remarkable in the world than the faculty which the human mind has of seizing, enforcing, and brooding over ideas which it but dimly compreImagination hends; and although in English criticism, indeed in all criticism that makes much of it, imagination is, as it were x, an unknown incalculable quantity, still the constant recognition of that something unknown is a preserving salt which But the con- gives a flavour to writings that would often cognition of taste flat from the want of precision and clear outcome. Rightly understood, also, there is no something critical doctrine to be compared for importance importance. with that of the sovereignty of imagination in an unknown tinual re that un known of immense art, and in art pleasure, which the English school of critics has ever maintained. Let me add, though at the present stage of the discussion I V. cannot make it clear that the leading doctrine CHAPTER of English criticism is in effect but an anticipation of the prime doctrine of the Germans. The English and the Germans, nearly allied in race, are so far also allied in their thinking, that the views of art upon which they mainly insist are virtually the same. The German expression of these views is the more precise. On the other hand, the English expression of them is, in point of time, the earlier, and in point of meaning will be to most minds the more suggestive. may of this If the foregoing statement be rather lengthy, Summary and have inevitably been loaded with the repeti- chapter. tions of a multitude of authorities, the upshot of all be stated very shortly. All the schools of criticism, without exception, describe art as the minister of pleasure, while the more advanced schools go further, and describe it also as the offspring of pleasure. Each may have a different way of regarding this pleasure. The Greek dwells on the truth of it; the Italian on its profit. The Spaniard says it is pleasure of the many; the Frenchman says it is of the few. The German says that it comes of play; the Englishman that it comes of imagination. But all with one voice declare for pleasure as the end of art. The inference is obvious-the inference is the truism which is not yet even recognised as a truth; that criticism, if it is |