has created. As the eye is trained to
discover the line of beauty by companionship with the works in which
it is revealed with the greatest clearness and power, so is the
imagination developed by intimacy with the books which disclose its
depth, its reality, and its method. The reader of Shakespeare cannot
follow the leadings of his masterly imagination without feeling a
liberation of his own faculty of seeing things as parts of a vast
order of life. He does not gain the poet's creative power, but he is
enlarged and enriched to the point where his own imagination plays
directly on the material about it; he receives it into himself, and in
the exact measure in which he learns the secret of absorbing what he
sees, feels, and knows, becomes master and interpreter of the world of
his time, and restorer of the world of other times and men. For the
imagination, playing upon fact and experience, divines their meaning
and puts us in possession of the truth and life that are in them. To
possess this magical power is to live the whole of life and to enter
into the heritage of history.

Chapter XIII.

Breadth of Life.

One of the prime characteristics of the man of culture is freedom from
provincialism, complete deliverance from rigidity of temper,
narrowness of interest, uncertainty of taste, and general unripeness.
The villager, or pagan in the old sense, is always a provincial; his
horizon is narrow, his outlook upon the world restricted, his
knowledge of life limited. He may know a few things thoroughly; he
cannot know them in true relation to one another or to the larger
order of which they are part. He may know a few persons intimately; he
cannot know the representative persons of his time or of his race. The
essence of provincialism is the substitution of a part for the whole;
the acceptance of the local experience, knowledge, and standards as
possessing the authority of the universal experience, knowledge, and
standards. The local experience is entirely true in its own sphere; it
becomes misleading when it is accepted as the experience of all time
and all men. It is this mistake which breeds that narrowness and
uncertainty of taste and opinion from which culture furnishes the only
escape. A small community, isolated from other communities by the
accidents of position, often comes to believe that its way of doing
things is the way of the world; a small body of religious people,
devoutly attentive to their own ob