But however we divide poetry, the office of imagination is to disengage
what is essential from the crowd of accessories which is apt to confuse
the vision of ordinary minds. For our perceptions of things are
gregarious, and are wont to huddle together and jostle one another. It
is only those who have been long trained to shepherd their thoughts that
can at once single out each member of the flock by something peculiar to
itself. That the power of abstraction has something to do with the
imagination is clear, I think, from the fact that everybody is a
dramatic poet (so far as the conception of character goes) in his sleep.
His acquaintances walk and 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.
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