understood.

CHAPTER IV.

OF IDEAS OF IMITATION.

Sec. 1. False use of the term "imitation" by many writers of art.

Fuseli, in his lectures, and many other persons of equally just and
accurate habits of thought, (among others, S. T. Coleridge,) make a
distinction between imitation and copying, representing the first as the
legitimate function of art--the latter as its corruption; but as such a
distinction is by no means warranted, or explained by the common meaning
of the words themselves, it is not easy to comprehend exactly in what
sense they are used by those writers. And though, reasoning from the
context, I can understand what ideas those words stand for in their
minds, I cannot allow the terms to be properly used as symbols of those
ideas, which (especially in the case of the word Imitation) are
exceedingly complex, and totally different from what most people would
understand by the term. And by men of less accurate thought, the word is
used still more vaguely or falsely. For instance, Burke (Treatise on the
Sublime, part i. sect. 16) says, "When the object represented in poetry
or painting is such as we could have no desire of seeing in the reality,
then we may be sure that its power in poetry or painting is owing to the
power of _imitation_." In which case the real pleasure may be in what we
have been just speaking of, the dexterity of the artist's hand; or it
may be in a beautiful or singular arrangement of colors, or a thoughtful
chiaroscuro, or in the pure beauty of certain forms which art forces on
our notice, though we should not have observed them in the reality; and
I conceive that none of these sources of pleasure are in any way
expressed or intimated by the term "imitation."

But there is one source of pleasure in works of art totally different
from all these, which I conceive to be properly and accurately expressed
by the word "imitation:" one which, though constantly confused in
reasoning, because it is always associated in fact, with other means of
pleasure, is totally separated from them in its nature, and is the real
basis of whatever complicated or various meaning may be afterwards
attached to the word in the minds of men.

Sec. 2. Real meaning of the term.

Sec. 3. What is requisite to the sense of imitation.

I wish to point out this distinct source of pleasure clearly at once,
and only to use the word "imitation