736 RENAISSANCES

integral part of his own ... by re-enacting* it 'for himself'. If our his-
torian has any sense, however, he will be less grateful to Plato for this
courageous defence of his conscientious head-hunting expedition than
for his disclosure of a trick for doing an historian's professional business
without having to go to these embarrassing extremes. Plato, if he likes,
may give this trick the bad name of 'confidence trick', and may stig-
matize as 'mimicry* something that the historian, the poet, or the painter,
for their part, might prefer to call 'imagination'. But the philosopher's
magisterial censure is a cheap price to pay for the benefits of the same
philosopher's unintentional 'tip*—as will be evident if we come to our
hard-pressed historian's rescue with Lewis Carroll's benevolent 'time-
machine'.1

Let us make sure that our historian has taken Plato's back-handed
hint to give his imagination free play, and then let us see him off again
on his journey from New York to Princeton. He buys his ticket, catches
his train, registers at his hotel, and works up his feelings by thinking
of a recent income-tax demand-note, all just as before; but at this
critical point, instead of rushing out into the streets, yataghan in hand,
and decapitating the first foot-passengers that he meets, like a Spartiate
Cleornenes in the streets of a Ptolemaic Alexandria,3 he stalks out into
the garden, walking-stick in hand, and decapitates the first dandelions
that catch his eye—and, if the useful occupation of weed-killing fails
to strike in him the requisite Tamerlanian spark, he can proceed to
make a glorious massacre of the sun-flowers and handsomely indemnify
the hotel management for their pecuniary loss without any risk of
finding himself on the wrong side of the Law. If he then goes back
indoors, sits down at his writing-desk, and indites his history of Tamer-
lane's life and works, his ingenuous reader (teste Platone) will never
know that the heads which the historian duly cut off, in order to put
himself in the proper mood for doing his job, were not human, but
only floral. We can be reasonably confident of the plausibility of the
impression that Timur Lenk's unscrupulously unhomicidal imaginative
historiographer will contrive to make, since we have no evidence that
Christopher Marlowe ever took any more drastic steps than those sug-
gested here when he was working himself up to write his Tamburlaine
the Great.

But what is this faculty of Imagination which makes it possible, after
all, for an historian to participate in Timur Lenk's experience without
his having to re-experience it in real life ? Are the historian, the painter,
and the poet really practising on the public the fraud of which Plato
accuses them half in earnest? Are they really palming off appearance
as reality, and getting something for nothing out of their professional
activities at the price of sacrificing their moral integrity ? The truth is
that the exercise of the Imagination is something that is quite as familiar
as it is mysterious. It is not just a professional trick of a literary and
artistic trade; it is an indispensable means of social intercourse between
ordinary people in every-day life; and, since Sub-Man had to become
a. social animal before he could become fully human,3 it is no exaggera-

* See V. vi. 214, « See V. vi. 391. 3 See I, i. 173,