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"The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must he a university of knowledges.... We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant.
Oregon and Van Diemen's Land produce no literature: they are too busy living. The first attempts at literature of any country, as of our own, are apt to be unreal and imitative and transitory, because life has not yet accumulated and presented itself in forms which recommend themselves to literature.
"So did the artists, who made the bronzelamps of Pompeii. Would you hang one of those in your hall? To say that a man is an artist and copies nature is not enough. There are two great schools of art; the imitative and the imaginative. The latter is the most noble, and most enduring; and Goethe belonged rather to the former. Have you read Menzel's attack upon him?" "It is truly ferocious.
The sentiments are honest, elevated, and manly, and the political doctrine is sound. Mr. Webster was then a boy of eighteen, and he therefore took his politics from his father and his father's friends. For the same reason he was imitative in style and mode of thought. All boys of that age, whether geniuses or not, are imitative, and Mr.
The doctrine of development means this, that in unavoidable changes men like the new doctrine which is most of a 'preservative addition' to their old doctrines. The imitative and the persecuting tendencies make all change in early nations a kind of selective conservatism, for the most part keeping what is old, but annexing some new but like practice an additional turret in the old style.
In the following passage from "The Masque of the Red Death," notice how much of the effect is due to imitative movement in the narrative:
He appeared to be a man of no ambition other than to get through life as easily as might be of no personal dignity, no ruling habits, but possessed of imitative talent that enabled him, without the slightest trouble, to adopt the very gait and gesture of the emperor whom he impersonated.
I was doubtless not in a mood to enjoy them, for they seemed to me peculiarly cynical and vulgar. Their imitative felicity was revolting. As I looked askance at the complacent little artist, brandishing them between finger and thumb and caressing them with an amorous eye, he seemed to me himself little more than an exceptionally intelligent ape.
The Lake Superior and Huron Red Indians are particularly noted for the beauty of their embroidery on skins, silk, birch bark, and cloth, in beads, porcupine quills, or silk. Their imitative genius is so great that the squaws can copy anything, and I know people who have had their crests and coats-of-arms embroidered upon their tobacco-pouches and belts, from an impression on paper or sealing-wax.
"It brings one in contact with such low, imitative creatures; one really is safe nowhere nowadays unless under glass at the Louvre or South Kensington." "And they get even there," sighed the gres de Flandre.
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