4. Invention and Creation, Fancy and Imagination,
Spontaneity and Inspiration. Blake may be the most
violent exponent of spontaneity and divine inspiration
but his ideas are less his own than is sometimes be-
lieved. He enthroned originality and called it imagina-
tion. The terms heading this paragraph have their own
complex history and, at the same time, they are all
closely interwoven with the growth of the concept of
genius.
“Invention,” a term of classical rhetoric, one of the
pillars of Renaissance literary and art theory (Zilsel,
1926), was, it might be said, demoted in the course
of the eighteenth century and increasingly replaced by
“creative” and “creation,” terms more indicative of the
spontaneity of genius. It has been suggested (L. Pearsall
Smith) that this changeover began with the critical
study of Shakespeare. Dryden, discussing the character
of Caliban, said: “Shakespeare seems there to have
created a person which was not in Nature, a boldness
which, at first sight, would appear intolerable.” Yet
Alexander Gerard in his Essay on Taste (1759) still
stated: “The first and leading quality of genius is in-
vention...,” and he returned to this in his Essay on
Genius (1774): while “Genius is properly the faculty
of invention,” he wrote, “it is imagination that pro-
duces genius....” The new concise terminology ap-
peared in the Essay on Original Genius (1767) of
William Duff, who found that “creative Imagination
[was] the distinguishing characteristic of true Genius.”
Thereafter the concept “creative imagination” was
assimilated by the German Storm and Stress movement
and became a catchword during the romantic era. Kant
in the Critique of Judgment (1790) propounded au-
thoritatively: “Creative imagination is the true source
of genius and the basis of originality.”
German criticism also hammered out the distinction
between fancy (Einbildungskraft) and imagination
(Phantasie), the former referring to human awareness
and the latter, the higher power, to “divine infusion.”
Coleridge, steeped in German aesthetic speculations,
likewise distinguished genius and imagination from the
lower faculties, talent and fancy (Wellek [1955], II).
And Ruskin still accepted these distinctions.
It was also in eighteenth-century criticism that the
vital function of spontaneity and inspiration was con-
stantly reiterated. William Sharpe in his Dissertation
on Genius (1755), the first book on the subject, re-
marked on the natural untrained powers of genius.
Edward Young (1759) laid down that genius creates
“spontaneously from the vital root” of our individual
natures. George Colman in his papers on Genius pub-
lished in The St. James Chronicle (1761-62), claimed
that “A Genius is a character purely modern, and of
so late an origin that it has never yet been described
or defined....” He recognized egotistical reliance on
untutored spontaneity as a hallmark of genius
(Kaufman, 1926). William Duff (1767) singled out irre-
sistible spontaneity. This list could be endlessly pro-
longed, for next to the emphasis on originality and
creative imagination, spontaneity and inspiration were
basic to the cult of genius. No more need be said here
since a great deal of ingenuity has been devoted by
modern scholars to an epistemological exploration of
these terms. But a few comments on other charac-
teristics of genius are in place.
