- A narrower sense is that in which sympathetic reproducing of other people's states of mind, particularly their emotional states, is what is meant. 'You haven't enough imagination,' the dramatist says to the critic who thinks that his persons behave unnaturally. This kind of imagination is plainly a necessity for communication, and is covered by what has already been said in Article Twenty-four. It has no necessary connection with senses of imagination which imply value. Bad plays to be successful require it as much as good.

- Inventiveness, the bringing together of elements which are not ordinarily connected, is another sense. According to this Edison is said to have possessed imagination, and any fantastic romance will show it in excelsis. Although this comes nearer to a sense in which value is implied, it is still too general. The lunatic will beat any of us at combining odd ideas: Dr. Cook outstrips Peary, and Bottomley outshines Sir John Bradbury.

- Next we have that kind of relevant connection of things ordinarily thought of as disparate which is exemplified in scientific imagination. This is an ordering of experience in definite ways and for a definite end or purpose, not necessarily deliberate and conscious, but limited to a given field of phenomena. The technical triumphs of the arts are instances of this kind of imagination. As with all ordering, value considerations are very likely to be implied, but the value may be limited or conditional.

-Finally we come to the sense of imagination with which we are here most concerned. The original formulation  was

Coleridge's debt here to Schelling has been over-estimated. Such borrowings as he made were more hampering to him than helpful. Coleridge's greatest contribution to critical theory, and except in the way of interpretation, it is hard to add anything to what he has said, though, as we have already noted in Article Twenty-four, some things might be taken away from it with advantage.

At least six distinct senses of the word 'imagination' are still current in critical discussion. It is convenient to separate them before passing on to consider the one which is most important.            (i) The production of vivid images, usually visual images, already sufficiently discussed, is the commonest and the least interesting thing which is referred to by imagination.
            (ii) The use of figurative language is frequently all that is meant. People who naturally employ metaphor and simile, especially when it is of an unusual kind, are said to have imagination. This may or may not be accompanied by imagination in the other senses. It should not be overlooked that metaphor and simile - the two may be considered together - have a great variety of functions in speech. A metaphor may be illustrative or diagrammatical, providing a concrete instance of a relation which would otherwise have to be stated in abstract terms. This is the most common scientific or prose use of metaphor. It is rare in emotive language and in poetry; Shelley's 'Dome of many-coloured glass' is almost the only example which springs to mind. More usually the elucidation is a mere pretence; some attitude of the speaker to his subject or to his audience is using the metaphor as a means of expression. 'The freedom of my writings has indeed provoked an implacable tribe,' said Gibbon, 'but as I was safe from the stings, I was soon accustomed to the buzzing of the hornets'. But metaphor has yet further uses. It is the supreme agent by which disparate and hitherto unconnected things are brought together in poetry for the sake of the effects upon attitude and impulse which spring from their collocation and from the combinations which the mind then establishes between them. There are few metaphors whose effect, if carefully examined, can be traced to the logical relations involved. Metaphor is a semi-surreptitious method by which a greater variety of elements can be wrought into the fabric of the experience. Not that there is any virtue in variety by itself, though the list of critics who seem to have thought so would be lengthy; a  of the dictionary can show more variety than any  of poetry. But what is needed for the wholeness of an experience is not always naturally present, and metaphor supplies an excuse by which what is needed may be smuggled in. This is an instance of a very strange phenomenon constantly appearing in the arts. What is most essential often seems to be done as it were inadvertently, to be a by-product, an accidental concomitant. Those who look only to the ostensible purposes for the explanation of the effects, who make prose analyses of poems, must inevitably find them a mystery. But why overt and evident intention should so often destroy the effect is certainly a difficult problem.

Neither the subject nor the closeness of correspondence between the experience and the reader's own situation has any bearing upon the effects. But indeed, to anyone who realizes what kind of a thing an experience is, and through what means it comes about, the old antithesis between subject and treatment ceases to be of interest. They are not separable or distinct things and the division is of no service. In this case the effects we are considering depend only upon the kind and degree of organization which is given to the experiences. If it is at the level of our own best attempts or above it (but not so far above as to be out of reach) we are refreshed. But if our own organization is broken down, forced to a cruder, a more wasteful level, we are depressed and temporarily incapacitated, not only locally but generally. It is when what we are offered, and inveigled into accepting, is only slightly inferior to our own developed capacity, so that it is no easy matter to see what is wrong, that the effect is greatest. Stuff of an evident and extreme badness is exhilarating rather than depressing when taken from a discriminating standpoint; and there need be nothing snobbish or self-congratulatory in such reading. What is really discomposing and damaging to the critical reader is the mediocre, the work which falls just below his own standards of response. Hence the rage which some feel at the productions of Sir James Barrie, Mr. Locke, or Sir Hall Caine, a rage which work comparatively devoid of merits fails to excite.
 
These effects are not merely momentary or evanescent; if we would understand the place of the arts in civilization we must consider them more closely. An improvement of response is the only benefit which anyone can receive, and the degradation, the lowering of a response, is the only calamity. When we take into account not merely the impulses actually concerned in the experience but all the allied groups which thrive or suffer with it, and all the far-reaching effects of success or failure upon activities which may seem to be independent, the fact that some people feel so keenly about the arts is no longer surprising.

The objection to the Play Theory, unless very carefully stated, lies in its suggestion that the experiences of Art are in some way incomplete, that they are substitutes, meagre copies of the real thing, well enough for those who cannot obtain better. 'The moralizing force of Art lies, not in its capacity to present a timid imitation of our experiences, but in its power to go beyond our experience, satisfying and harmonizing the unfilled activities of our nature.'  The Copy View, with the antithesis between Life and Literature which so often accompanies it, is a devastating misconception. Coupled with the suggestion involved by the word 'Play', that such things are for the young rather than for the mature, and that Art is something one grows out of, it has a large share of the responsibility for the present state of the Arts and of Criticism. Its only rival in obscuring the issues is its close cousin the Amusement or Relaxation Theory.

The experiences which the arts offer are not obtainable, or but rarely, elsewhere. Would that they were! They are not incomplete; they might better be described as ordinary experiences completed. They are not such that the most adequately equipped person can dispense with them and suffer no loss, and this loss is not momentary, but recurrent and permanent; the best equipped are precisely the people who most value these experiences. Nor is Art, as by way of corollary is sometimes maintained, a thing which had its function in the youth of the world, but with the development of Science becomes obsolete. It may very possibly decline and even disappear, but if it does a biological calamity of the first order will have occurred. Nor again is it something which may be postponed while premillennial man grapples with more immediate problems. The raising of the standard of response is as immediate a problem as any, and the arts are the chief instrument by which it may be raised or lowered.

Hitherto we have been concerned chiefly with more or less specific effects of the experiences of the arts, with the effects, upon single definite groups or system of impulses, of their exercise in these experiences. The Play Theory tends to limit us to these consequences. Important though they are, we must not overlook the more general effects which any well-organized experience produces. They may in certain cases be extraordinarily widespread. Such an apparently irrelevant test as the ability to stand upon one foot without unsteadiness has recently been employed, by Mr. Burt, as an index to mental and especially to emotional organization. All our activities react upon one another to a prodigious extent in ways which we can only as yet conjecture.

The danger lies not in the fact that school-girls are sometimes incited to poke revolvers at taximen, but in much subtler and more insinuating influences. Most films indeed are much more suited to children than to adults, and it is the adults who really suffer from them. No one can intensely and wholeheartedly enjoy and enter into experiences whose fabric is as crude as that of the average super-film without a disorganization which has its effects in everyday life. The extent to which second-hand experience of a crass and inchoate type is replacing ordinary life offers a threat which has not yet been realized. If a false theory of the severance and disconnection between 'aesthetic' and ordinary experience has prevented the value of the arts from being understood, it has also preserved their dangers from recognition.

Those who have attempted to find a place in the whole structure of life for the arts have often made use of the conception of Play; and Groos and Herbert Spencer are famous exponents of the theory. As with so many other Aesthetic Doctrines the opinion that Art is a form of Play may indicate either a very shallow or a very penetrating view. All depends upon the conception of Play which is entertained. Originally the view arose in connection with survival values. Art, it was thought, had little practical value of the obvious kinds, so some indirect means must be found by which it could be thought to be of service. Perhaps, like play, it was a means of harmlessly expending superfluous energy. A more useful contribution was made when the problem of the value of play itself was seriously attacked. The immense practical utility of most forms of play then became evident. Characteristically play is the preparatory organization and development of impulses. It may easily become too narrowly specialized, and the impulses active may be such as never to receive 'serious' exercise. None the less with our present understanding of the amazingly recondite interactions between what appear to be totally different activities of the nervous system, the importance of play is not likely to need much insistence.

In subtler ways the educational influence of the arts is all-pervasive. We must not overlook bad art in estimating it. 'I should be said to insist absurdly on the power of my own confraternity' wrote a novelist of the 19th century 'if I were to declare that the bulk of the young people in the upper and middle classes receive their moral teaching chiefly from the novels that they read. Mothers would no doubt think of their own sweet teaching; fathers of the examples which they set; and schoolmasters of the excellence of their instructions. Happy is the country which has such mothers, fathers and schoolmasters! But the novelist creeps in closer than the father, closer than the schoolmaster, closer almost than the mother. He is the chosen guide, the tutor whom the young pupil chooses for herself. She retires with him, suspecting no lesson %u2026 and there she is taught how she shall learn to love; how she shall receive the lover when he comes; how far she should advance to meet the joy; why she should be reticent and not throw herself at once into this new delight.'   The influence is also exerted in more indirect ways. There need be, we must remember, no discernible connection or resemblance whatever between the experience due to the work of art and the later behaviour and experience which is modified through it. Without such resemblance the influence may easily be overlooked or denied, but not by anyone who has a sufficient conception of the ways in which attitudes develop. No one who has repeatedly lived through experiences at the level of discrimination and coordination presupposed by the greater writers, can ever, when fully 'vigilant', be contented with ordinary crudities, though a touch of liver may of course suspend these superior responses. And conversely, keen and vigilant enjoyment of Miss Dell, Mr. Burroughs, Mrs. Wilcox or Mr. Hutchinson, when untouched by doubts or the joys of ironic contemplation, is likely to have as a consequence not only an acceptance of the mediocre in ordinary life, but a blurring and confusion of impulses and a very widespread loss of value.   These remarks apply even more evidently to the Cinema People do not much imitate what they see upon the screen or what they read of in best-sellers. It would matter little if they did. Such effects would show themselves clearly and the evil would be of a manageable kind. They tend instead to develop stock attitudes and stereotyped ideas, the attitudes and ideas of producers: attitudes and ideas which can be 'put across' quickly through a medium that lends itself to crude rather than to sensitive handling. Even a good dramatist's work will tend to be coarser than that of a novelist of equal ability. He has to make his effects more quickly and in a more obvious way. The Cinema suffers still more than the stage from this disability. It has its compensating advantages in the greater demands which it makes of the audience, but hitherto very few producers have been able to turn them to account.