sculptor's model, we find it interesting to relate Barchester Towers
to the state of the Church of England in the nineteenth century
and we enjoy the awareness that we know somebody just like a
character in a play. It often seems that an artist is trying to
provoke such a reaction of recognition in us and so make us inter-
ested in the work. Considerations like these have led a number of
thinkers to the view that art is essentially imitative or representa-
tional, that in imitation lies the characteristic common to all
works of art which defines them and gives them their value.

The view that art is imitation has a long history, for it is one of
the earliest theoretical views to be held about art. Plato presents a
celebrated and influential version of it in the tenth book of the
Republic. Although Plato's main concern there is literature, he
uses an illustration drawn from painting. He relates the illustra-
tion to his theory that there exist ideal Forms of many qualities,
Forms of which the instances in the world of sense-experience are
only copies. Thus the Form of Justice, for Plato, is the ideal
which is imitated but never perfectly reproduced by particular
just acts or just people. Plato speaks of particulars imitating
Forms so as at the same time to convey two related but con-
trasting points: the particular is like the Form, for example in
being just, but it is not the same as the Form; just as a copy of
something is never quite as good as its model because it does not
reproduce it exactly, so a particular never quite attains the ideal
standard of the Form, a particular just act or just person is never
perfectly just. Normally when Plato gives examples of Forms he
offers Forms of qualities such as Justice or Beauty but in Republic
X he rather unusually introduces a Form of a thing. The thing in
question is a bed and he describes three levels of making and
imitating. First there is the perfect Form of a Bed, made by God,
then there is the bed made by the carpenter, the one which we can
touch, measure, and sleep on, and finally there is the copy of a
bed produced by the painter. The carpenter's bed is not only
inferior to the Form of a Bed; it is even, according to Plato, less
real than the Form. Correspondingly the painted bed is still more
inferior, still less real. In a telling passage he says it would be easy
to make everything in the world, to make it, that is, in the way the
artist does: 'The quickest way is to carry a mirror with you every-
where; you will then quickly make the sun and things in the
heavens, the earth as quickly, yourself and other living creatures,

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