The description
of Paradise may be a glittering farrago; the description of the
landscape may be full of sweet rural images: the one having a glare of
gaslight and Vauxhall splendour; the other having the scent of new-mown
hay.
A work is imaginative in virtue of the power of its images over our
emotions; not in virtue of any rarity or surprisingness in the images
themselves. A Madonna and Child by Fra Angelico is more powerful over
our emotions than a Crucifixion by a vulgar artist; a beggar-boy by
Murillo is more imaginative than an Assumption by the same painter; but
the Assumption by Titian displays far greater imagination than elther.
We must guard against the natural tendency to attribute to the artist
what is entirely due to accidental conditions. A tropical scene,
luxuriant with tangled overgrowth and impressive in the grandeur of its
phenomena, may more decisively arrest our attention than an English
landscape with its green corn lands and plenteous homesteads. But this
superiority of interest is no proof of the artist's superior
imagination; and by a spectator familiar with the tropics, greater
interest may be felt in the English landscape, because its images may
more forcibly arrest his attentlon by their novelty.
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