gination, make real unto yourself the disaster at Messina; but when you
see your little daughter's face, you at once and easily imagine woe.
Similarly, on the largest scale, we go through life realising only a very
little part of all that is presented to our minds. Yet, finally, we know of
life only so much as we have realised. To use the other word for the same
idea,--we know of life only so much as we have imagined. Now, whatever of
life we make real unto ourselves by the action of imagination is for us
fresh and instant and, in a deep sense, new,--even though the same
materials have been realised by millions of human beings before us. It is
new because we have made it, and we are different from all our
predecessors. Landor imagined Italy, realised it, made it instant and
afresh. In the subjective sense, he created Italy, an Italy that had never
existed before,--Landor's Italy. Later Browning came, with a new
imagination, a new realisation, a new creation,--Browning's Italy. The
materials had existed through immemorable centuries; Landor, by
imagination, made of them something real; Browning imagined them again and
made of them something new. But a Cook's tourist hurrying through Italy is
likely, through deficiency of imagination, not to realise an Italy at all.
He reviews the same materials that were presented to Landor and to
Browning, but he makes nothing out of them. Italy for him is tedious, like
a twice-told tale. The trouble is not that the materials are old, but that
he lacks the faculty for realising them and thereby making of them
something new.

A great many of our contemporary playwrights travel like Cook's tourists
through the traditional subject-matter of the theatre. They stop off here
and there, at this or that eternal situation; but they do not, by
imagination, make it real. Thereby they miss the proper function of the
dramatist, which is to imagine some aspect of the perennial struggle
between human wills so forcibly as to make us realise it, in the full sense
of the word,--realise it as we daily fail to realise the countless
struggles we ourselves engage in. The theatre, rightly considered, is not a
place in which to escape from the realities of life, but a place in which
to seek refuge from the unrealities of actual living in the contemplation
of life realised,--life made real by imagination.

The trouble with most ineffective plays is that the fabricated life they
set before us is less real than s