ng than
is the poet. Plato's reasoning is, of course, that the plain man at
least does not tamper with the objects of sense, through which the
philosopher may discern gleams of the spiritual world, whereas the poet
distorts them till their real significance is obscured. The poet
pretends that he is giving their real meaning, even as the philosopher,
but his interpretation is false. He is like a man who, by an ingenious
system of cross-lights and reflections, creates a wraithlike image of
himself in the mirror, and alleges that it is his soul, though it is
really only a misleading and worthless imitation of his body.

Will not Plato's accusation of the poet's inferiority to the practical
man be made clearest if we stay by Plato's own humble illustration of
the three beds? One, he says, is made by God, one by the carpenter, and
one by the poet. [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, 596 B ff.] Now
the bed which a certain poet, James Thomson, B. V., made, is fairly well
known. It speaks, in "ponderous bass," to the other furniture in the
room:

"I know what is and what has been;
Not anything to me comes strange,
Who in so many years have seen
And lived through every kind of change.
I know when men are bad or good,
When well or ill," he slowly said,
"When sad or glad, when sane or mad
And when they sleep alive or dead."
[Footnote: _In the Room_]

Plato would say of this majestic four-poster, with its multifarious
memories "of births and deaths and marriage nights," that it does not
come so near the essential idea of bedness as does the most non-descript
product of the carpenters' tools. James Thomson's poem, he would say, is
on precisely the same plane as the reflection of one's bed in the mirror
across the room. Therefore he inquires, "Now do you suppose that if a
person were able to make the original as well as the image, he would
seriously devote himself to the image-making branch? Would he allow
imitation to be the ruling principle of his life, as if he had nothing
higher in him? ... Imitation is only a kind of play or sport."
[Footnote: _Republic_ X, 599 A.]

It has long been the fashion for those who care for poetry to shake
their heads over Plato's aberration at this point. It seems absurd
enough to us to hear the utility of a thing determined by its number of
dimensions. What virtue is there in merely filling space? We all feel
the fallacy in such an adaptation of Plato's argument as Longfellow
as