nd talk before him on the stage of dream
precisely as in life. When he wakes, his genius has flown away with his
sleep. It was indeed nothing more than that his mind was not distracted
by the multiplicity of details which the senses force upon it by day. He
thinks of Smith, and it is no longer a mere name on a doorplate or in a
directory; but Smith himself is there, with those marvellous
commonplaces of his which, could you only hit them off when you were
awake, you would have created Justice Shallow. Nay, is not there, too,
that offensively supercilious creak of the boots with which he enforced
his remarks on the war in Europe, when he last caught you at the corner
of the street and decanted into your ears the stale settlings of a week
of newspapers? Now, did not Shakespeare tell us that the imagination
_bodies forth_? It is indeed the _verbum caro factum_--the word made
flesh and blood.

I said that the imagination always idealizes, that in its highest
exercise, for example, as in the representation of character, it goes
behind the species to the genus, presenting us with everlasting types of
human nature, as in Don Quixote and Hamlet, Antigone and Cordelia,
Alcestis and Amelia. By this I mean that those features are most
constantly insisted upon, not in which they differ from other men but
from other kinds of men. For example, Don Quixote is never set before us
as a mere madman, but as the victim of a monomania, and that, when you
analyze it, of a very noble kind--nothing less, indeed, than devotion to
an unattainable ideal, to an anachronism, as the ideals of imaginative
men for the most part are. Amid all his ludicrous defeats and
disillusions, this poetical side of him is brought to our notice at
intervals, just as a certain theme recurs again and again in one of
Beethoven's symphonies, a kind of clue to guide us through those
intricacies of harmony. So in Lear, one of Shakespeare's profoundest
psychological studies, the weakness of the man is emphasized, as it
were, and forced upon our attention by his outbreaks of impotent
violence; so in Macbeth, that imaginative bias which lays him open to
the temptation of the weird sisters is suggested from time to time
through the whole tragedy, and at last unmans him, and brings about his
catastrophe in his combat with Macduff. This is what I call ideal and
imaginative representation, which marks the outlines and boundaries of
character, not by arbitrary lines drawn at thi