734 RENAISSANCES

New York; gives himself a good night's rest at the inn or the tavern;
raises his temper to the requisite pitch by meditating for five minutes
on the last demand-note served on him by the Bureau of Internal
Revenue; rushes out in a thoroughly Tamerlanian rage into the quiet
unsuspecting streets; and has not bagged more than half a dozen heads
towards his target of five thousand before he finds himself in the police
court being asked by the magistrate what he means by it. When he
explains that he has not been committing a crime passionel but has been
simply taking seriously his professional duties as Tamerlane's historian
under Collingwood's marching orders, an enlightened Department of
Justice sends him, not to the electric chair, but to the asylum. What
a theme for Edward Lear!

In the eyes of an outraged society, the homicidal maniac has got off
lightly; yet, even as it is, this professionally scrupulous historian's fate
is sad enough from the victim's personal standpoint. Is there any way
out of such an awkward dilemma ? Can our devoted historian find some
means of doing his professional duty by Tamerlane without making all
that havoc of his own life, not to speak of his neighbours'? Yes, it is
open to him to participate in Tamerlane's experience without 're-
enacting' it in real life if he can bring himself to use his imagination.
This alternative course likewise has its price. The historian who does
his job by using his imagination is exposing himself to the censure
meted out by Plato to painters and poets who have brought this sly
faculty into play in their own professional activities. Yet to be castigated
by Plato is, after all, a lesser evil than to be certified insane.

'Your painter,' Plato half-seriously complains, 'will paint for you a shoe-
maker, carpenter, and every other kind of artisan without ever having been
initiated into the technique of any of these trades; yet, all the same, if he
is a good artist, he will be able to take in a child or a feeble-minded adult
by painting him a carpenter that he will mistake for a real carpenter if he
is given a distant view of the picture.... [In fact,] when someone tells us,
about someone else, that in him he has met a man who is a master of all
trades and actually has a more accurate knowledge of each single one of
them than can be claimed by any of that particular trade's professional
practitioners, our conclusion will be that our interlocutor is a simpleton
and that he must have come across a cheat who took his victim in so com-
pletely by tricks of mimicry that he succeeded in giving him the impres-
sion that he was a universal genius—owing to the victim's inability to
distinguish between mimicry and knowledge and ignorance. . . .

*Well, this calls for an inquiry into "high-brow" poetry (rpaytpStav) and
its presiding genius Homer, because there are people who tell us that
these poets are masters of all the arts and of all the problems of ethics and
of theology. A good poet, the argument runs, must ex hypothesi be a con-
noisseur of his subject if he is to write about it properly—if he were not
a connoisseur, he would not be able to write at all. The question for
inquiry is whether the poets may not be adepts at mimicry who have taken
in these sponsors of theirs by a confidence trick which has been so well
played that the victims of it, when they see the poets* works, do not
tumble to it that these products are at three removes' distance from reality
and are easy for an ignoramus to fabricate because these works of the
poets' are not realities at all but are mere phantasms. . . .