Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

An Essay on Genius

London and Edinburgh

Printed for W. Strahan, T.Cadell, and W. Creech

1774

"As a rich soil produces not only the largest quantity of grain, but also the greatest profusion of such weeds as tend to choak it; so a fertile imagination, along with just and useful ideas, produces many trifling, false, and improper thoughts, which, if they be not immediately examined by reason, and speedily rejected, will over-run and obstruct the truth or the beauty which the others might have produced."

In a man of genius, imagination can scarce take a single step, but judgment should attend it. The most luxuriant fancy stands most in need of being checked by judgment. As a rich soil produces not only the largest quantity of grain, but also the greatest profusion of such weeds as tend to choak it; so a fertile imagination, along with just and useful ideas, produces many trifling, false, and improper thoughts, which, if they be not immediately examined by reason, and speedily rejected, will over-run and obstruct the truth or the beauty which the others might have produced. Judgment cannot collect ideas, but it revises those which fancy has collected, and either adopts or rejects them, as it finds cause. Though a bright and comprehensive fancy be the principal ingredient in genius, yet nothing is so dangerous as to affect to display it constantly, or to indulge it without any control from reflection; nothing is productive of greater faults. This leads philosophers to construct whimsical hypotheses, instead of inventing just theories. This leads poets to describe improbable events and unnatural characters, and to search for unseasonable wit and ill-timed splendour, when judgment would have directed them to imitate nature with exactness, and to study simplicity of expression. This leads painters capriciously to create imaginary decorations, instead of inventing natural and consistent embeilishments. Imagination must set all the ideas and all the analogies of things, which it collects, before the discerning eye of reason, and submit them absolutely to its sovereign decision. It is justly observed by Quintilian, that every fiction of the human fancy is approved in the moment of its production. The exertion of the mind which is requisite in forming it, is agreeable; and the face of novelty which infant conceptions wear, fails not to recommend them promiscuously, till reason has had time to survey and examine them. Were reason never to scrutinize them, all our ideas would be retained indiscriminately, and the productions of fancy would be perfectly monstrous. While a man is engaged in composition or investigation, he often seems to himself to be fired with his subject, and to teem with ideas; but on revising the work, finds that his judgment is offended, and his time lost. An idea that sparkled in the eye of fancy, is often condemned by judgment as false and unsubstantial. A more rigid exercise of this latter faculty, would have preserved Tasso from introducing sentiments which have show without justness, and figures which surprise and dazzle, but are unsuitable to the purpose to which they ought to have been subservient; and would have enabled him to escape the censure of having overspread his work with tinsel, and thus sullied the lustre of the pure gold which it contains.
(I.iv, pp. 75-8)

Plant::Soil Plant::Grain Plant::Weeds

Reading in C-H Lion

Only 1 entry in ESTC (1774).

An Essay on Genius. By Alexander Gerard, D.D. Professor of Divinity in King's College, Aberdeen. (London: Printed for W. Strahan; T. Cadell, and W. Creech at Edinburgh 1774). <Link to ECCO>

06/27/2013