COLLINGWOOD'S VIEW OF HISTORY	735
'Let us now be generous to Homer or any confrere of his whom we may
choose to interrogate. Let us confine our interrogation to a single ques-
tion. We will not ask him: "If you are really a doctor and not just a mimic
of the medical profession's patter, what evidence can you produce, master
poet, ancient or modern, of cures performed by yourself?" . . . But we
are justified in questioning Homer about the greatest and the noblest of
the activities on which he has the assurance to hold forth—I mean, War
and Generalship and Government and Education. "Well now, Homer,"
we may justifiably say to the poet, "If you are really not at three removes*
distance from the truth in the relation in which you stand to human con-
duct at its best (operas1 Trepc)—if you are not one of those fabricators of
simulacra whom we have labelled mimics—if you are really at no more
than two removes' distance from the truth and are really an expert in the
science of ethics, private and public, give us an instance of a state whose
government has shown an improvement thanks to you". .. . Name a war,
fought in Homer's lifetime, that is recorded to have been efficiently con-
ducted thanks to Homer's leadership or counsel. ... Is there any sugges-
tion that Homer ever gathered round him in his own lifetime a school of
disciples who felt it a privilege to be in personal touch with him and who
handed down to Posterity the tradition of an Homeric way of life ? . . .
'Well, [on this showing,] must not our verdict on Homer and all his
successors in the poetic line be that they are mimics of simulacra of human
conduct at its best and of any other subject that they may elect to adorn ?
I think we must conclude that they are quite out of touch with the truth,
and must therefore place them in the same category as the painter, whom
we were considering just now, who, without himself having been initiated
into the technique of shoemaking, will make for you what will look like
a shoemaker to eyes that judge merely by colours and shapes because their
owners are no better initiated than the painter who has thus imposed on
them.... On this analogy, we shall describe what the poet does by putting
it that, without himself having been initiated into any technique except
the art of mimicry, he tints his nouns and verbs with colours stolen from
the divers trades and thereby makes, on birds of his feather who judge
merely by words, an invariable impression of talking admirably about
anything that he elects to talk about—shoemaking or generalship or what
you will—so long as he does his business in metre and rhythm and har-
mony. It is these stage properties of his that do the trick for him in
virtue of the extraordinary fascination that they exercise. If you strip off
the literary colouring from a poet's ideas and make him express them in
naked prose—well, I do not need to tell you what the impression then
will be. ... You have seen what happens to a face that is in the flush of
youth without possessing any intrinsic beauty. You know what that face
comes to look like when the bloom has faded.'1
If Plato means his readers to take this passage at all seriously, he
has committed himself to approving our over-scrupulous historian's
legendary escapade. If Plato had heard the news of our mythical
'incident' at Princeton, New Jersey, and had had the courage of his
own professed convictions, he would have appeared in court to testify
on behalf of the defence that the prisoner in the dock would have been
committing a cold-blooded fraud on the public if he had undertaken to
produce and publish a work purporting to be a history of Tamerlane
without attempting bona fide to make Tamerlane's experience 'an
* Plato: Respubtica, 5983-601 b.