This is what I call ideal and
imaginative representation, which marks the outlines and boundaries of
character, not by arbitrary lines drawn at this 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.
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