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harm 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 cafe 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 "The
