reedom that she vaunted in relation to the old heap of stones. Her
supposed imaginativeness is simply a very usual lack of discriminating
perception, accompanied with a less usual activity of misrepresentation,
which, if it had been a little more intense, or had been stimulated by
circumstance, might have made her a profuse writer unchecked by the
troublesome need of veracity.

These characteristics are the very opposite of such as yield a fine
imagination, which is always based on a keen vision, a keen
consciousness of what _is_, and carries the store of definite knowledge
as material for the construction of its inward visions. Witness Dante,
who is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction of actual
objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginative
combinations. On a much lower level we distinguish the hyperbole and
rapid development in descriptions of persons and events which are lit up
by humorous intention in the speaker--we distinguish this charming play
of intelligence which resembles musical improvisation on a given motive,
where the farthest sweep of curve is looped into relevancy by an
instinctive method, from the florid inaccuracy or helpless exaggeration
which is really something commoner than the correct simplicity often
depreciated as prosaic.

Even if high imagination were to be identified with illusion, there
would be the same sort of difference between the imperial wealth of
illusion which is informed by industrious submissive observation and the
trumpery stage-property illusion which depends on the ill-defined
impressions gathered by capricious inclination, as there is between a
good and a bad picture of the Last Judgment. In both these the subject
is a combination never actually witnessed, and in the good picture the
general combination may be of surpassing boldness; but on examination it
is seen that the separate elements have been closely studied from real
objects. And even where we find the charm of ideal elevation with wrong
drawing and fantastic colour, the charm is dependent on the selective
sensibility of the painter to certain real delicacies of form which
confer the expression he longed to render; for apart from this basis of
an effect perceived in common, there could be no conveyance of aesthetic
meaning by the painter to the beholder. In this sense it is as true to
say of Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, that it has a strain of
reality, as to say so of a por