s angle or that, according
to the whim of the tracer, but by those mountain-ranges of human nature
which divide man from man and temperament from temperament. And as the
imagination of the reader must reinforce that of the poet, reducing the
generic again to the specific, and defining it into sharper
individuality by a comparison with the experiences of actual life, so,
on the other hand, the popular imagination is always poetic, investing
each new figure that comes before it with all the qualities that belong
to the genus; Thus Hamlet, in some one or other of his characteristics
has been the familiar of us all, and so from an ideal and remote figure
is reduced to the standard of real and contemporary existence; while
Bismarck, who, if we knew him, would probably turn out to be a
comparatively simple character, is invested with all the qualities which
have ever been attributed to the typical statesman, and is clearly as
imaginative a personage as the Marquis of Posa, in Schiller's "Don
Carlos." We are ready to accept any _coup de theatre_ of him. Now, this
prepossession is precisely that for which the imagination of the poet
makes us ready by working on our own.

But there are also lower levels on which this idealization plays its
tricks upon our fancy. The Greek, who had studied profoundly what may be
called the machinery of art, made use even of mechanical contrivances to
delude the imagination of the spectator, and to entice him away from the
associations of everyday life. The cothurnus lifted the actor to heroic
stature, the mask prevented the ludicrous recognition of a familiar face
in "Oedipus" and "Agamemnon"; it precluded grimace, and left the
countenance as passionless as that of a god; it gave a more awful
reverberation to the voice, and it was by the voice, that most
penetrating and sympathetic, one might almost say incorporeal, organ of
expression, that the great effects of the poet and tragic actor were
wrought. Everything, you will observe, was, if not lifted above, at any
rate removed, however much or little, from the plane of the actual and
trivial. Their stage showed nothing that could be met in the streets. We
barbarians, on the other hand, take delight precisely in that. We admire
the novels of Trollope and the groups of Rogers because, as we say, they
are so _real_, while it is only because they are so matter-of-fact, so
exactly on the level with our own trivial and prosaic apprehensions.
When Dante