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purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he,
    A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him (as it most certainly is) with which he has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independant — moving at will from one thing to another — as he pleases, unbound — complete
    and the unique proof of this is the work of the imagination not “like” anything but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth — at least one small part of them.
    Nature is the hint to composition not because it is familiar to us and therefore the terms we apply to it have a least common denominator quality which gives them currency — but because it possesses the quality of independant existance, of reality which we feel in ourselves. It is not opposed to art but apposed to it.
    I suppose Shakespeare’s familiar aphorism about holding the mirror up to nature has done moreharm in stabilizing the copyist tendency of the arts among us than —
    the mistake in it (though we forget that it is not S. speaking but an imaginative character of his) is to have believed that the reflection of nature is nature. It is not. It is only a sham nature, a “lie”.
    Of course S. is the most conspicuous example desirable of the falseness of this very thing.
    He holds no mirror up to nature but with his imagination rivals nature’s composition with his own.
    He himself become “nature” — continuing “its” marvels — if you will
    I am often diverted with a recital which I have made for myself concerning Shakespeare: he was a comparatively uninformed man, quite according to the orthodox tradition, who lived from first to last a life of amusing regularity and simplicity, a house and wife in the suburbs, delightful children, a girl at court (whom he really never confused with his writing) and a café life which gave him with the freshness of discovery, the information upon which his imagination fed. London was full of the concentrates of science and adventure. He saw at “TheMermaid” everything he knew. He was not conspicuous there except for his spirits.
    His form was presented to him by Marlow, his stories were the common talk of his associates or else some compiler set them before him. His types were particularly quickened with life about him.
    Feeling the force of life, in his peculiar intelligence, the great dome of his head, he had no need of anything but writing material to relieve himself of his thoughts. His very lack of scientific training loosened his power. He was unencumbered.
    For S. to pretend to knowledge would have been ridiculous — no escape there — but that he possessed knowledge, and extraordinary knowledge, of the affairs which concerned him, as they concerned the others about him, was self-apparent to him. It was not apparent to the others.
    His actual power was PURELY of the imagination. Not permitted to speak as W.S., in fact peculiarly barred from speaking so because of his lack of information, learning, not being able to rival his fellows in scientific training or adventure and at the same time being keen enough, imaginative enough, to know that there is no escape except in perfection, in excellence, in technical excellence — his buoyancyof imagination raised him NOT TO COPY them, not to holding the mirror up to them but to equal, to surpass them as a creator of knowledge, as a vigorous, living force above their heads.
    His escape was not simulated but real. Hamlet no doubt was written about at the middle of his life.
    He speaks authoritatively through invention, through characters, through design. The objects of his world were real to him because he could use them and use them with understanding to make his inventions —
    The imagination is a —
    The vermiculations of modern criticism