AND IMAGINATION^ 



526 



sounds and prefers that of numbers ; and we behold a boy of twelve years 

 old solving, almost instantaneously, arithmetical questions which would 

 cost an expert practitioner in the common way, a labour of many hours. 

 Sometimes we find it enamoured of the beauty of colours or the charms 

 of eloquence ; and we are struck with the precocity of perfection which it 

 evinces in either case. 



In other instances, we see it descending to the arts and labours of com- 

 mon life, and diffusing intuitive knowledge among the multitude. Go to 

 the busy 'Change, and you will find some individuals, allowed by general 

 consent to have a peculiar genius, or talent, as it is often called, for com- 

 merce ; in other words, who are capable of caUing forth and combining 

 commercial ideas with great speed and vivacity, and with that intuitive 

 perception of their agreement or disagreement which leads them to the 

 ipost judicious results — results which the surrounding crowd would only 

 be able to obtain by a long catenation or process of inquiry. Go into the 

 country, and you will find the same difference among our husbandmen and 

 agriculturists ; while some among them have no more imagination than the 

 clods they cleave with their ploughshares, others seem to penetrate intui- 

 tively the nice order of vegetation, and never suffer a season to roll over 

 them without wringing from it some important secret ; as Aristaeus in the 

 Georgics from the pinioned form of old Proteus. Go to our manufacturing 

 and mechanical towns ; to Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield ; and 

 you will, in hke manner, meet with artisans and handicrafts who discover 

 the same acuteness of intelligence, the same rapid combination of consent- 

 ing ideas, the same superiority of genius or talent in their respective 

 callings beyond that which is possessed by their fellows, as in the cases 

 to which I have alluded already. 



Genius, then, wherever it is found, and to whatever purpose directed, is 

 mental power ; it acts by an invisible impulse, and appears to act miracu- 

 lously. And hence, indeed^ its name — a name common to all the world 

 — derived from the Hebrew, copied thence into the Sanscrit, Arabic, and 

 Chinese ; from the eastern tongues into the Latin, and from the Latin into 

 our own, and almost every other language of modern Europe, and im- 

 porting, in every instance, in its radical signification, a tutelary, a guiding 

 or inspiring divinity. 



It is genius, then, that must control the imagination, if the pictures it 

 paints be of any value, if the ideas it combines be combined skilfully or 

 accordantly, if the feelings it excites be pleasurable, or the result it pro- 

 duces be beneficial. 



To give full efficacy, however, to the daring flights of the imagination, 

 there is another power of the mind which must associate with the attri- 

 bute of genius, and that is taste ; which I have already defined to be that 

 mental faculty which selects and relishes such combinations of ideas as 

 produce genuine beauty, and rejects the contrary. 



Imagination, therefore, is as necessary to the existence of taste as of 

 genius ; since each equally depends upon this active and vivacious power 

 for the materials with which it is to work. For the most part, taste and 

 genius are united in the same mind, but not necessarily or always so ; and 

 hence they are by no means the same thing. 



W e see evident proofs of this in many of the subjects selected by the 

 lower class of the Dutch painters, and by several of the most eminent 

 caricature draughtsmen of the present day. The broad laughter or other 

 distortion of the features, which they so frequently present to us, often dis- 



