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"In this manner, as a master-builder has his materials prepared by inferiour workmen, or as a history painter is provided with his colours by the labour of others, so the faculty of invention often receives the entire ideas which it exhibits, from the inferiour faculties, and employs itself only in applying and arrangeing them."

— Gerard, Alexander (1728-1795)

Author

An Essay on Genius

Place of Publication

London and Edinburgh

Publisher

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

Date

1774

Metaphor

"In this manner, as a master-builder has his materials prepared by inferiour workmen, or as a history painter is provided with his colours by the labour of others, so the faculty of invention often receives the entire ideas which it exhibits, from the inferiour faculties, and employs itself only in applying and arrangeing them."

Metaphor in Context

The brightest imagination can suggest no idea which is not originally derived from sense and memory. In many cases, even in such as very much display its power, it does no more but call in seasonably the very conceptions which sense has conveyed, and which memory retains. A philosopher is often led to an important conclusion, by recollecting in its proper place a phenomenon which he remembers to have very commonly observed. A great part of poetry consists in descriptions properly introduced, of those external objects which the poet has actually observed, or in the expression on suitable occasions, of the sentiments and passions which he has himself been conscious of, or which he has discovered in other men on similar occasions. It is no reproach to genius to receive its materials thus wholly prepared, from sense and memory. Its force appears sufficiently in its laying hold on them at the proper time, and arranging them in regular order. Homer's comparisons have ever been and will always be admired as indications of surprising genius: the immense variety of them, the facility with which they appear to occur, the perfect correspondence of the images with the subject for the illustration of which they are produced, and the majestic simplicity with which they are expressed, leave no room to doubt of the poet's genius. But the images themselves are generally drawn from such objects as he well remembered to have seen. The fragments of true history which the same poet has related, are to be referred wholly to memory; imagination was employed only in the introduction and application of them. In this manner, as a master-builder has his materials prepared by inferiour workmen, or as a history painter is provided with his colours by the labour of others, so the faculty of invention often receives the entire ideas which it exhibits, from the inferiour faculties, and employs itself only in applying and arrangeing them. Hence it proceeds that poets of original genius always express the manners of their own age, and the natural appearances which have occurred to themselves. It was Homer's extensive observation of men and things that supplied him with so immense a field of thought. The customs of the age directed Spenser, at least in part, to form his plan on allegorical adventures of chivalry, and induced Tasso to found his poem on a holy war. Ossian's imagery is so different from what would be suggested by the present state of things, that a modern writer could scarce bring himself to run into it, much less to preserve it uniformly, by the utmost efforts of study, or even by designed imitation; but it is perfectly agreeable to all that we can conceive of the face of nature and the state of society in the times when that author is supposed to have lived.
(I.v, pp. 98-100)