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CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 3 1924 072 666 765 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924072666765 
 
FELLOWSHIP BOOKS 
 
 E£tE(CSiiJMani$imam 
 
 POETRY 
 
 COPYRIGHT 1914 
 
 By E. p. DUTTON & CO. 
 
POETRY 
 
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 AS the tale is told by Plato, in the tenth 
 book of his Republic, one Er the son 
 of Arminius, a Pamphylian, was slain 
 in battle; and ten days afterwards, when they 
 collected the bodies for burial, his body alone 
 showed no taint of corruption. His relatives, 
 however, bore it off to the funeral pile; and 
 on the twelfth day, lying there, he returned to 
 life and told them what he had seen in the 
 other world. Many wonders he related con- 
 cerning the dead, for example, with their re- 
 wards and punishments: but most wonderful 
 of all was the great Spindle of Necessity 
 which he saw Teaching up into heaven with 
 the planets revolving around it in whorls of 
 
 I ^& graduated 
 
graduated width and speed, yet all concentric 
 and so timed that all complete the full circle 
 punctually together. — "The Spindle turns on 
 the knees of Necessity: and on the rim of each 
 whorl sits perched a Siren, who goes round 
 with it, hymning a single note ; the eight notes 
 together forming one harmony." 
 
 % The fable is a pretty one: but Er the 
 Pamphylian comes back to report no more 
 than the one thing Man already grasps for a 
 certainty amid his welter of guesswork about 
 the Universe — that its stability rests on or- 
 dered motion — that the "firmament" stands 
 firm on a balance of active and tremendous 
 forces somehow harmoniously composed. 
 Theology asks "By whom?"'. Philosophy in- 
 clines rather to guess "How?" Natural Sci- 
 ence, allowing that these questions are prob- 
 ably unanswerable, contents itself with map- 
 ping and measuring what it can of the various 
 forces. But all agree about the harmony: 
 and when a Newton discovers a single rule of 
 it for us, he but makes our assurance surer. 
 
For uncounted centuries before ever hearing 
 of "Gravitation" men knew of the sun that 
 he rose and set at hours which, though mys- 
 teriously appointed, could be accurately pre- 
 dicted ; of the moon that she regularly waxed 
 and waned, drawing the waters of the earth 
 in a flow and ebb, the gauge of which and the 
 time-table could be advertised beforehand in 
 the almanack; of the stars, that they swung as 
 by clockwork around the pole. Says the son 
 of Sirach concerning them — 
 
 At the word of the Holy one they will stand 
 
 in due order, 
 And they will not faint in their watcnes. 
 
 So evident is this celestial harmony that men, 
 seeking to account for it by what was most 
 harmonious in themselves or in their experi- 
 ence, supposed an actual Music of the Spheres 
 inaudible to mortals; Plato (who learned of 
 Pythagoras) inventing his Octave of Sirens, 
 spinning in the whorls of the great planets 
 and intoning as they spin; Chaucer (who 
 learned of Dante and makes the spheres nine) 
 3 ^in 
 
in his Parlement of Foules telling, out of 
 Cicero's Somnium Scipionis, how the great 
 Scipio Africanus visited his descendant in a 
 dream and — 
 
 Shewed he him the litel erthe, that heer is. 
 In regard of the hevenes quantite: 
 And after shewed he him the nyne speres, 
 And after that the melodye herde he 
 That cometh of thilke speres thryes-three 
 That welle is of musicke and melodye 
 In this world heer, and cause of armonye. 
 
 While Shakespeare in the last Act of The 
 Merchant of Venice makes all the stars vocal, 
 and not the planets only: 
 
 There's not the smallest orb which thou be- 
 
 holdest 
 But in his motion like an angel sings. 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims . . . 
 
 And Milton in Arcades goes straight back to 
 Plato (save that his spheres are nine, as with 
 Chaucer) : 
 
 4 
 
then listen I 
 To the celestial Sirens' harmony 
 That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres 
 And sing to those that hold the vital shears 
 And turn the adamantine spindle round 
 Of which the fate of gods and men is wound. 
 Such sweet compulsion doth in nfiusic lie 
 To lull the daughters of Necessity, 
 And keep unsteady Nature to her law, 
 And the low w^rld in measured motion draw 
 After the heavenly tune. 
 
 From the greater poets let us turn to a lesser 
 one, whom we shall have occasion to quote 
 again by and by: to the Orchestra of Sir John 
 Davies (1596), who sees this whole Universe 
 treading the harmonious measures of a dance ; 
 and let us select one stanza, of the tides: 
 
 For lo, the sea that fleets about the land, 
 And like a girdle clips her solid waist. 
 Music and Measure both doth understand; 
 For his great Crystal Eye is always cast 
 Up to the Moon, and on her fixed fast; 
 5 ^And 
 
And as she daunceth in her pallid sphere, 
 So daunceth he about the centre here. 
 
 This may be fantastic. As the late Professor 
 Skeat informed the world solemnly in a foot- 
 note, "Modern astronomy has exploded the 
 singular notion of revolving hollow concen- 
 tric spheres. . . ." (The Professor wrote 
 "singular" when he meant "curious." — ^The 
 notion was never "singular.") "These 
 'spheres,' " he adds, "have disappeared, and 
 their music with them, except in poetry." 
 Nevertheless the fable presents a truth, and 
 one of the two most important truths in the 
 world. This Universe is not a Chaos. (If 
 it were, by the way, we should be unable to 
 reason about it at all.) It stands and is con- 
 tinually renewed upon an ascertained har- 
 mony: and what Plato called "Necessity" is 
 the duty in all things of obedience to that 
 harmony, the Duty of which Wordsworth 
 sings in his noble Ode, 
 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
 6 
 
And his most ancient heavens, through thee, 
 are fresh and strong. 
 
 % Now the other and only equally impor- 
 tant truth in the world is that this macrocosm 
 of the Universe, with its harmony, cannot be 
 apprehended at all except as it is focussed 
 upon the eye and intellect of Man, the micro- 
 cosm. All "transcendental" philosophy, — 
 all discussions of the "Absolute," of mind 
 and matter, of "subjective" and "objective" 
 knowledge, of "ideas" and "phenomena," 
 "flux" and "permanence" — all "systems" and 
 "schools," down from the earliest to be found 
 in "Ritter and Preller," through Plato, Aris- 
 totle, Zeno, Epicurus, on to Aquinas, to 
 Abelard, to the great scholastic disputants be- 
 tween Realism and Nominalism; again on to 
 Bacon, Spinoza, Locke, Comte, Hegel, and 
 yet again on to James and Bergson — all in- 
 evitably work out to this, that the Universal 
 Harmony is meaningless and nothing to Man 
 save in so far as he apprehends it, and that he 
 can only apprehend it by reference to some 
 7 % corresponding 
 
corresponding harmony within himself. 
 Lacking him, the harmony (so far as he 
 knows) would utterly lack the compliment of 
 an audience : by his own faulty instrument he 
 must seek to interpret it, if it is to be inter- 
 preted at all : and so, like the man at the piano, 
 he goes on "doing his best." 
 
 % "God created Man in His image," says the 
 Scripture: "and," adds Heine, "Man made 
 haste to return the compliment." It sounds 
 wicked, but is one of the truest things ever 
 said. After all, and without vanity, it is the 
 best compliment Man can pay, poor fellow! — 
 and he goes on striving to pay it, though often 
 enough rebuked for his zeal. "Canst thou" 
 demands the divine Interlocutor in the Book 
 o-f Job — 
 
 S| "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of 
 Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst 
 thou bring forth Mazaroth in his season? Or 
 canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?" 
 
 % To this, fallen and arraigned man, using his 
 8 
 
best jargon, responds that "the answer is in 
 the negative. I never pretended to do these 
 things, only to guess, in my small way, how 
 they are done." 
 
 %. Nor is there any real irreverence in answer- 
 ing thus : for of course it is not the Almighty 
 who puts the questions, but someone auda- 
 ciously personating Him. And some of us 
 find this pretension irritating; as Douglas 
 Jerrold meeting a pompous stranger on the 
 pavement was moved to accost him- with, "I 
 beg your pardon. Sir, but would you mind in- 
 forming me — Are you anybody in particular?" 
 ^ Again, in the sixth chapter of the Second 
 Book of Esdras, someone usurping the voice 
 of the Almighty and using (be it said to his 
 credit) excellent prose, declares: 
 
 ^s "In the beginning, when the earth was 
 made, before the waters of the world stood, 
 or ever the wind blew, 
 
 ^ Before it thundered or lightened, or ever 
 the foundations of paradise were laid, 
 ^ Before the fair flowers were seen, or ever 
 9 %ithe 
 
the moveable powers were established; before 
 
 the innumerable multitude of angels were 
 
 gathered together, 
 
 %. Or ever the heights of the air were lifted 
 
 up, before the measures of the firmament were 
 
 named, or ever the chimneys of Zion were 
 
 hot. 
 
 ^& Then did I consider these things, and they 
 all were made through Me alone, and through 
 none other: by Me also they shall be ended, 
 and by none other." 
 
 % It is all very beautiful: but (for aught that 
 appears) no one was denying it. It has been 
 shrewdly objected against the arguments of 
 the "affable Archangel" in the later books of 
 Paradise Lost that argument by its nature ad- 
 mits of being answered: and the fatal fallacy 
 of putting human speech into a divine mouth, 
 as in the above passage, is that it invites retort. 
 
 %. A sensible man does not aspire to bind the 
 sweet influences of Pleiades : but he may, and 
 does, aspire to understand something of the 
 universal harmony in which he and they bear 
 
 lO 
 
a part, if only that he may render it a more 
 perfect obedience. "Let me know," he 
 craves, "that I may accept my fate intelli- 
 gently, even though it prove that under the 
 iron rule of Necessity I have no more freedom 
 of will than the dead, 
 
 Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course 
 With rocks, and stones, and trees. 
 
 The claim (as Man must think) is a just one— 
 for why was he given intelligence if not to use 
 it? And even though disallowed as presump- 
 tuous, it is an instinctive one, Man is, after 
 all, a part of the Universe, and just as surely 
 as the Pleiades or Arcturus : and moreover he 
 feels in himself a harmony correspondent with 
 the greater harmony of his quest. His heart 
 beats to a rhythm: his blood pulses through 
 steady circuits ; like the plants by which he is 
 fed, he comes to birth, grows, begets his kind, 
 dies, and returns to earth; like the tides, his 
 days of gestation obey the moon and can be 
 reckoned by her; in the sweat of his body he 
 tills the ground, and by the seasons, summer 
 1 1 % and 
 
and winter, seedtime and harvest, his life while 
 it lasts is regulated. But above all he is the 
 microcosm, the tiny percipient centre upon 
 which the immense cosmic circle focusses it- 
 self as the sun upon a burning-glass — and he 
 is not shrivelled up by the miracle! Other 
 creatures (he notes) share his sensations; but, 
 so far as he can discover, not his intelligence — 
 or, if at all, in no degree worth measuring. 
 So far as he can detect, he is not only an actor 
 in the grand cosmic pageant, but the sole in- 
 telligent spectator. As a poor Welsh parson, 
 Thomas Traherne, wrote of the small town of 
 his childhood: — 
 
 ^ The streets were mine, the temple was mine, 
 the people were mine, their clothes and gold 
 and silver were mine, as much as their spark- 
 ling eyes, their skins and ruddy faces. The 
 skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon 
 and stars; and all the world was mine, and I 
 the only spectator and enjoyer of it. . . . 
 
 But little did the infant dream 
 That all the treasures of the world were by; 
 
 12 
 
And that himself was so the cream 
 And crown of all which round about did lie. 
 Yet thus it was: the Gem, 
 The Diadem, 
 The ring enclosing all 
 That stood upon this earthly ball, 
 The heavenly Eye, 
 Much wider than the sky 
 
 Wherein they all included were. 
 The glorious soul that was the King, 
 Made to possess them, did appear 
 A small and little thing! 
 
 % We may safely go some way even beyond 
 this, and lay it down for unchallengeable truth 
 that over and above Man's consciousness of 
 being the eye of the Universe and receptacle, 
 however imperfect, of its great harmony, he 
 has a native impulse to merge himself in that 
 harmony and be one with it: a spirit in his 
 heart (as the Scripture puts it) "of adoption, 
 whereby we cry, Abba, Father" — And because 
 ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of 
 His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, 
 Father. In his daily life he is for ever seek- 
 13 %ing 
 
ing after harmony in avoidance of chaos, cul- 
 tivating personal habits after the clock ; in his 
 civic life forming governments, attempting 
 hierarchies, laws, constitutions, by which (as 
 he hopes) a system of society will work in 
 tune, almost automatically. When he fights 
 he has learnt that his fighting men shall march 
 in rhythm and deploy rhythmically, and they 
 do so to regimental music. If he haul rope 
 or weigh anchor, setting out to sea, or haul up 
 his ship on a beach, he has proved by experi- 
 ment that these operations are performed more 
 than twice as easily when done to a tune. But 
 these are dull, less than half-conscious, imita- 
 tions of the great harmony for which, when 
 he starts out to understand and interpret it 
 consciously, he must use the most godlike of 
 all his gifts. Now the most godlike of all 
 human gifts — the singular gift separating Man 
 from the brutes — is speech. If he can har- 
 monise speech he has taught his first and pe- 
 culiar faculty to obey the great rhythm: "I 
 will sing and give praise," says the Psalmist, 
 "with the best member that I have." Thus by 
 
harmonising speech (in a fashion we will dis- 
 cuss by and by) , he arrives at Poetry. 
 
 ^ But an objection may be raised. "Is the 
 tongue, rather than the brain, the best mem- 
 ber that I have ?"^ or (to put it in another way) , 
 "Surely a man's thoughts about the Universe 
 have more value than his words about it?" 
 % The answer is, that we cannot separate 
 them: and Newman has put this so cogently 
 that I must quote him, making no attempt to 
 water down his argument with words of my 
 own. "Thought and speech are inseparable 
 from one another. Matter and expression are 
 parts of one: style is a thinking out into lan- 
 guage. This is literature ; not things, but the 
 verbal symbols of things ; not on the other hand 
 mere words, but thoughts expressed in lan- 
 guage. Call to mind the meaning of the Greek 
 word which expresses this special prerogative 
 of Man over the feeble intelligence of the lower 
 animals. It is called Logos. What does 
 Logos mean? It stands both for reason and 
 for speech, and it is difficult to say which 
 15 % means 
 
means more properly. It means both at once : 
 why? Because really they cannot be di- 
 vided. . . . When we can separate light and 
 illumination, life and motion, the convex and 
 the concave of a curve, then will it be possible 
 for thought to tread speech under foot and to 
 hope to do without it — then will it be con- 
 ceivable that the vigorous and fertile intellect 
 should renounce its own double, its instrument 
 of expression and the channel of its specula- 
 tions and emotions." Words, in short, are the 
 outward and visible signs of thought: that, and 
 something more — since you may prove by ex- 
 periment that the shortest and simplest train of 
 thought cannot be followed unless at every 
 step the mind silently casts it into the mould of 
 words. 
 
 % As an instrument for reconciling Man's 
 inward harmony with the great outer har- 
 mony of the Universe, Poetry is notoriously 
 imperfect. Men have tried others there- 
 fore — others that appeared at first sight more 
 promising, such as Music and Mathematics 
 i6 
 
— yet on the whole to their disappointment. 
 S| Take Mathematics. Numbers inhere in 
 all harmony. By numbers harmony can be 
 expressed far more severely than by Poetry, 
 and so successfully up to a point, that poets 
 have borrowed the very word to dignify their 
 poor efforts. They "lisp in numbers" — or so 
 they say: and the curious may turn to the 
 Parmenides, to Book vii. of The Republic and 
 others of the Dialogues and note how Plato, 
 hunting on the trail of many distinguished 
 predecessors, pursues Mathematics up to the 
 point where, as a means of interpreting to 
 Man the Universal harmony, Mathematics, 
 like Philosophy, inevitably breaks down. 
 Mathematics, an abstract science, breaks 
 down just because it is abstract and in no way 
 personal: because though it may calculate 
 and time and even weigh parts of the greater 
 Universe, it cannot, by defect of its nature, 
 bring its discoveries back to bear on the other 
 harmony of Man. It is impersonal and there- 
 fore nescient of his need. Though by such a 
 science he gain the whole world, it shall not 
 17 % profit 
 
profit a man who misses from it his own soul. 
 % Philosophy, too, fails us over this same crux 
 of "personality"; not by ignoring it, but by 
 clinging with obstinacy to the wrong end of 
 the stick. The quarrel between Philosophy 
 and Poetry is notorious and inveterate: and 
 at ninety-nine points in the hundred Philoso- 
 phy has the better of the dispute ; as the Fox 
 in the fable had ninety-nine ways of evading 
 the hounds, against the Cat's solitary one. But 
 the Cat could climb a tree. 
 % So Philosophy has almost all the say in this 
 matter, until Poetry interjects the fatal ques- 
 tion, "I beg your pardon. Madam, but do you 
 happen to be the Almighty, or are you playing 
 Egeria to his Numa? You are constructing 
 admirably comprehensive schemes and systems 
 for His guidance, if your hints will but be 
 taken. But if you address yourself to Man, 
 you will find that his business is not at all to 
 comprehend the Universe; for this, if he could 
 achieve it, would make him equal with God. 
 What he more humbly aspires to, is to appre- 
 hend; to pierce by flashes of insight to some 
 i8 
 
inch or so of the secret, to some star to which 
 he can hitch his waggon. Now there are," 
 Poetry goes on, "certain men, granted to dwell 
 among us, of more delicate mental fibre than 
 their fellows; men whose minds have as it 
 were exquisite filaments which they throw out 
 to intercept, apprehend and conduct home to 
 Man stray messages between the outer mystery 
 of the Universe and the inner mystery of his 
 soul ; even as modern telegraphy has learnt to 
 search out, snatch and gather home messages 
 wandering astray over waste waters of Ocean. 
 Such men are the poets, my servants." 
 % "Moreover," Poetry will continue, "these 
 men do not collect their messages as your 
 philosophers do, by vigorous striving and 
 learning; nor, as the priests of Baal did, by 
 cutting themselves and crying; but by school- 
 ing their souls to harmony and awaiting the 
 moment of apprehension with what one of 
 them has called 'a wise passiveness.' For it 
 is not their method to wrestle with God, like 
 Jacob, or to hold Him up with a 'Stand and 
 deliver.' It is enough for them to be recep- 
 19 Stacks 
 
tacles of His passing breath, as the harps aban- 
 doned and hung on willow-trees by the waters 
 of Babylon may have caught, at evening, and 
 hummed the wind whispering from Israel. 
 And for this, while they hang and wait, they 
 will be despised by the commonalty for in- 
 dolent fellows, as indeed they are; as when 
 the wind inspires and sets them hymning, they 
 will be accused of insobriety. Yet always they 
 excel your philosophers, insomuch as they ac- 
 cept the transcendental as really transcendental 
 and do not profess to instruct the Almighty in 
 it; and chiefly, perhaps, they excel your phi- 
 losophers by opposing a creativeness, potential 
 at any rate, against a certain and foredoomed 
 barrenness. For the philosophers would get 
 at the secret by reason, contemning emotion; 
 whereas the poet knows that creation implies 
 fatherhood, and fatherhood implies emotion, 
 even passionate emotion. It is (take it as a 
 cold fact) only on the impulse of yearning, on 
 the cry of Abba, that the creature can leap to 
 any real understanding of the Creator." 
 % Yet the philosopher will go on to the end 
 20 
 
of time despising the poet, who grasps at mys- 
 teries per saltum, neglecting the military road 
 of logic. 
 
 ^ Shall we then, by a violent recoil, abandon 
 Mathematics and Philosophy and commit our 
 faith to Music? Music is, above all things, 
 harmonious : Music has the emotion in which 
 Mathematics and Philosophy have been found 
 wanting. Music can be "personal"; Music, 
 since the invention of counterpoint, is capable 
 of harmonies deeper and more intricate than 
 any within the range of human speech. In 
 short, against Poetry, Music can set up a very 
 strong claim. 
 
 % But first we note that — securus judicat orbis 
 terrarum — in the beginning Poetry and Music 
 did their business together (with the Dance 
 conjoined as third partner) ; and that, by prac- 
 tice, men have tended to trust Poetry, for an 
 interpreter, more and more above Music, 
 while Dancing has dropped out of the com- 
 petition. The ballad, the sonnet, have grown 
 to stand on their merits as verse, though their 
 names — ballata, sonata — imply that they 
 21 ^started 
 
started in dependence upon dance and or- 
 chestra. This supersession of music by verse, 
 whether as ally or competitor, is a historical 
 fact, if a startling one, which Mr. Watts- 
 Dunton, in his famous article on Poetry in the 
 Encyclopedia Britannica, has been at pains to 
 examine. He starts by admitting a little more 
 than I should grant. "There is one great 
 point of superiority," says he, "that musical art 
 exhibits over metrical art. This consists, not 
 in the capacity for melody, but in the capacity 
 for harmony in the musician's sense. . . ." 
 "Why, of course," is my comment upon this: 
 "every art can easily claim excellence, if it 
 take that excellence in its own sense." Mr. 
 Watts-Dunton proceeds : "The finest music of 
 JEschylus, of Pindar, of Shakespeare, of Mil- 
 ton, is after all, only a succession of melodious 
 notes, and in endeavouring to catch the har- 
 monic intent of strophe, antistrophe and epode 
 in the Greek chorus and in the true ode (that 
 of Pindar) , we can only succeed by pressing 
 memory into our service." But I, for one, 
 should not seek counterpoint in these any more 
 
 22 
 
than in the recurrent themes of a sonata. I 
 should seek it rather in the running line which 
 he pronounces (mistakenly, as I think) to be 
 "after all, only a succession of melodious 
 notes." C sharp, B, A, A, A, E, A are a suc- 
 cession of melodious notes and spell the open- 
 ing phrase of "The Death of Nelson" : as the 
 vowels E, O, U, U, O, O, E, E, U are a suc- 
 cession of melodious notes, and, if notes alone 
 counted, would spell a phrase of Milton's 
 great Invocation to Light. But when we con- 
 sider the consonantal value, the interplay and 
 the exquisite repetition of — 
 
 Seasons return; but not to me returns 
 Day, . . . 
 
 or note the vowel-peals throughout the pas- 
 sage, now shut and anon opened by the scheme 
 of consonants; now continuous, anon modu- 
 lated by delicate pauses; always chiming 
 obediently to the strain of thought; then I 
 hold that if we have not actual counterpoint 
 here, we have something remarkably like it, — 
 as we certainly have harmony — 
 
 23 ^ thoughts 
 
thoughts that move 
 Harmonious numbers, 
 
 or I know not what harmony is. In truth, if 
 counterpoint be (as the dictionary defines it), 
 "a blending of related but independent mel- 
 odies," then Poetry achieves it by mating a 
 process of sound to a process of thought: and 
 Mr. Watts-Dunton disposes of his own first 
 contention for music when he goes on to say 
 (very rightly), "But if Poetry falls behind 
 Music in rhythmic scope, it is capable of ren- 
 dering emotion after emotion has become dis- 
 integrated into thoughts." Yet I should still 
 object to the word "disintegrated" as applied 
 to thought, unless it be allowed that emotion 
 undergoes the same process at the same time 
 and both meet in one solution. To speak more 
 plainly. Music is inferior to Poetry because, 
 of any two melodies in its counterpoint, both 
 may be (and in practice are) emotional and 
 vague: while of any two melodies in the 
 counterpoint of Poetry one must convey 
 thought and therefore be intelligible. And, 
 24 
 
to speak summarily, Poetry surpasses Music 
 because it carries its explanation, whereas the 
 meaning of a concerto has to be interpreted 
 into dull words on a programme. 
 % We have arrived at this, then ; that Poetry's 
 chief function is to reconcile the inner har- 
 mony of Man (his Soul, as we call it) with 
 the outer harmony of the Universe. With 
 this conception of "peerless Poesie" in our 
 minds, we turn to Aristotle's Poetics, and it 
 gives us a sensible shock to read on the first 
 page, that "Epic Poetry and Tragedy, Com- 
 edy also and dithyrambic Poetry, and the 
 greater part of the music of the flute and of 
 the lyre are all, generally speaking, modes of 
 
 imitation" (naaac zuy^dvouaev ohaae fitfa^aec^ zb 
 
 auuoHou). "What?" we say— "Nothing bet- 
 ter than that?" — for "imitation" has a bad 
 name among men and is apt to suggest the ape. 
 But, first bearing in mind that there are imita- 
 tions and imitations (the Imitafio Christi 
 among them), let us go on to see what it 
 is that in Aristotle's opinion Poetry imitates 
 or copies. It is "the Universal" (t6 xaOdXou): 
 25 % and 
 
and as soon as we realise this we know our- 
 selves to be on the same track as Aristotle, 
 after all. "Imitation," as he uses it, is not an 
 apish or a slavish imitation; it is no mere 
 transcribing or copying of phenomena as they 
 pass (he even allows that the poet may "imi- 
 tate" men as "better than they are") : it is an 
 expressing, in fiction and harmonious speech, 
 intelligible to his fellow-men, of what truth, 
 order, harmony, and "law" the poet's mind has 
 apprehended in the outer Universe. No fair- 
 minded reader of the Poetics, as he lays down 
 the treatise, will doubt that this, or something 
 like this, was Aristotle's meaning, nor is it 
 probable that he will find any essential differ- 
 ence (or any difference that seriously disturbs 
 agreement) between Aristotle's "Universal" 
 and the Platonic "Idea" or pattern of things 
 "laid up somewhere in the heavens." 
 
 % Now the Poet's way of apprehending the 
 Universal is (as I have indicated) by keeping 
 true to himself, attending to his soul's inner 
 harmony, and listening, waiting, brooding 
 26 
 
with a "wise passiveness" until the moment 
 when his and the larger harmony fall into tune 
 together. The Psalmist describes the process 
 accurately: "While I was thus musing the 
 fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my 
 tongue." "Poetry," writes Shelley, "is not, 
 like reasoning, a power to be exerted accord- 
 ing to the determination of the will. A man 
 cannot say, I will compose poetry. The 
 greatest poet, even, cannot say it: for the mind 
 in creation is as a fading coal, which some in- 
 visible influence, like an inconstant wind, 
 awakens to transitory brightness." But the 
 Poet's way of reporting these apprehensions 
 to his fellows, since he deals with Universals 
 or ideas, is by "universalising" or "idealising" 
 his story: and upon these two terms, which 
 properly mean much the same thing, we must 
 pause for a moment. 
 
 %. The word "idealise," which is the more 
 commonly used, has unfortunately two mean- 
 ings, a true and a false; and, again unfor- 
 tunately, the false prevails in vulgar use. To 
 "idealise" in the true sense is to disengage an 
 27 % "idea" 
 
"idea" of all that is trivial or impertinent or 
 transient or disturbing, and present it to men 
 in its clearest outline, so that its own proper 
 form shines in on the intelligence, as you 
 would wipe away from a discovered statue 
 all stains or accretions of mud or moss or 
 fungus, to release and reveal its true beauty. 
 False "idealising," on the other hand, means 
 that, instead of trusting to this naked mani- 
 festation, we add to it some graces of our in- 
 vention, some touches by which we think to 
 improve it; that we "paint the lily," in short. 
 But the true "idealisation" and the first busi- 
 ness of the poet is a denuding not an investing 
 of the Goddess, whether her name be "Life," 
 "Truth," "Beauty," or what you will : a reveal- 
 ing, not a coverture of embroidered words, 
 however pretty and fantastic; as has been ex- 
 cellently said by Shelley: "A poem is the 
 very image of life expressed in its external 
 truth. There is this difference between a 
 story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue 
 of detached facts, which have no other con- 
 nection than time, place, circumstance, cause 
 28 
 
and effect; the other is the erection of actions 
 according to the unchangeable forms of hu- 
 man nature, as existing in the mind of the 
 Creator, which is itself the image of all other 
 minds." Let us enforce this account of the 
 true idealisation by a verse or two of our old 
 friend Sir John Davies (quoted by Coleridge 
 in his Biographia Literaria). "What an un- 
 worldly mass of impressions the mind would 
 be," says Sir John in effect, "did not the soul 
 come to the rescue and reduce these crowding 
 bodies by 'sublimation strange.' " — 
 
 From their gross Matter she abstracts the 
 
 Forms, 
 And draws a kind of Quintessence from things, 
 Which to her proper nature she transforms 
 To bear them, light on her celestial wings. 
 This doth She when from things particular 
 She doth abstract the Universal kinds. . . . 
 
 % But it is time to descend from these heights 
 (such as they are) of philosophising, and illus- 
 trate the difference between true and false 
 "idealising" in Poetry by concrete example: 
 29 % and 
 
and no two better examples occur to me, for 
 drawing this contrast, than Webster's Duchess 
 of Malfy and Shakespeare's Macbeth. Each 
 of these plays excites horror and is calculated 
 to excite horror; both have outlived three hun- 
 dred years, there or thereabouts ; both may be 
 taken as having established an indefinitely long 
 lease on men's admiration — but to any critical 
 mind, how dijfferent an admiration! Webster 
 is an expert, a virtuoso in horrifies; in flesh- 
 creeping effects lies his skill; and, indulging 
 that skill, he not only paints the lily, but re- 
 paints it and daubs it yet a third time. There 
 is no reason on earth — she has offended against 
 no moral law on earth or in the heavens — that 
 could possibly condemn the Duchess to the 
 hellish tortures she is made to endure. At the 
 worst she has married a man beneath her in 
 station. To punish her in Webster's extrava- 
 gant fashion every other character, with the 
 whole story of the play, has to be dehumanised. 
 To me — as I penetrate the Fourth Act — the 
 whole business becomes ludicrous: not sanely 
 comic, or even quite sanely absurd: but bi- 
 30 
 
zarre, and ridiculously bizarre at ihrat. It has 
 no "idea" at all, no relation to the Universal 
 in the shape of any moral order, "law," fate, 
 doom, destiny. It is just a box of tricks, of 
 raw heads and bloody bones, left with the lid 
 open. That is false "idealising"; Webster 
 choosing his effect and "improving" it for all 
 he was worth — ^which (let it be added) was a 
 great deal. 
 
 % Turn from The Duchess of Malfy to Mac- 
 beth, and you find an English poet as sensitive 
 of fate, doom, destiny, "law," the moral order, 
 as ever was ^schylus ; nay, interpreting it per- 
 haps more effectively than ever did iEschylus. 
 In the First Act we see it suggested to Mac- 
 beth by witchcraft (which is the personified 
 foe of moral order) that he can achieve an am- 
 bition by an unlawful path, the ambition it- 
 self being suggested along with the way to it 
 and growing as the way opens. We see them 
 both communicated to a feminine mind, nar- 
 rower, more intent and practical; because nar- 
 rower, because more intent and practical, for the 
 3 1 % moment 
 
moment more courageous. (It was Eve that 
 the Serpent, wily enough, selected to tempt.) 
 Both Macbeth and his lady move to the deed 
 under a law which — for a while — has usurped 
 the true moral order and reversed it, he not 
 without misgivings: the spectators all the 
 while knowing the true order, yet held silent, 
 watching the event. Outside the castle an owl 
 hoots as Duncan is slain. The guilty man and 
 woman creep back, whispering ; and thereupon 
 — what happens? A knocking on the door — a 
 knocking followed by the growls of a drowsy 
 if not drunken porter: "Here's a knocking 
 indeed 1 If a man were porter of hell-gate, he 
 should have old turning the key. ( Knocking 
 again.) Knock, knock, knock I Who's there, 
 i' the name of Beelzebub?" The stage direc- 
 tion admits Macduff, who in due course is to 
 prove the avenger of blood: but the hand that 
 knocks, the step on the threshold, are in truth 
 those of the moral order returning pede 
 claudo, demanding to be readmitted. From 
 the instant of that first knock the ambitions of 
 the pair roll back toward their doom as the 
 32 
 
law they have offended reasserts itself, and the 
 witches' palindrome In girum imus noctu, 
 ecce! steadily spells itself backward, letter by 
 letter, to the awful sentence, Ecce ut con- 
 sumimur ignif 
 
 S| This is to "idealise" in the right sense of 
 the word. Fixing his mind on the Idea of 
 two human beings, a man and a woman who 
 trespass from the law of the great moral 
 powers ordering the Universe (Man along 
 with it) and are overtaken in that trespass and 
 punished, Shakespeare disencumbers it of all 
 that is trivial, irrelevant, non-essential. He 
 takes the wickedest crime of which man can 
 be guilty; not a mere naked murder, nor even 
 a murder for profit, but the murder of a king 
 by his sworn soldier, of a guest by his host, of 
 a sleeping guest by the hand on which he has 
 just bestowed a diamond. Can criminality be 
 laid barer? He illustrates it again in two per- 
 sons lifted above the common station; and he 
 does this not (as I think) for the practical 
 reason for which Aristotle seems to commend 
 33 %it 
 
it to tragic writers — that the disasters of great 
 persons are more striking than those of the 
 small fry of mankind — that, as the height is, 
 so will be the fall — or not for that reason 
 alone; but, still in the process of "idealising," 
 because such persons, exalted above the ob- 
 scuring petty cares of life, may reasonably be 
 expected to see the Universe with a clearer 
 vision than ours, to have more delicate ears for 
 its harmonies. Who but a King should know 
 most concerning moral law? Why is he with 
 our consent lifted up so that he may hear the 
 divine commandments better than we, and dic- 
 tate them down to us? He is greater, but yet 
 — and this is the point — a man like ourselves 
 (ofjLoeoi;). He cannot for purposes of tragedy 
 be wholly good : for not only is this extremely 
 rare in real life, and almost inconceivable, but 
 the ruin of a wholly good man would merely 
 shock, without teaching us anything. The dis- 
 aster of a tragic figure must come, and be seen 
 to come, through some fault — or, at least, some 
 mistake — of his own. But again he must not 
 be wholly bad, for the disasters of the wholly 
 
 34 
 
bad do not afifect us save with disgust. Such 
 men, we know, are not like ourselves. What 
 happens to them may serve for The Police 
 News. Tragedy does not deal with the worth- 
 less. How then are Macbeth and Lady Mac- 
 beth, beings like ourselves, to fall into crime 
 so heinous? Again Shakespeare strips the 
 Idea bare: their trespass comes through ambi- 
 tion, "last infirmity of noble minds," under the 
 blinding persuasion of witchcraft, which (an 
 actual belief in Shakespeare's time) is a direct 
 negation of the moral law, and puts Satan in 
 place of God. 
 
 %. It is curious that, some thirty-odd years 
 after Shakespeare had handled this tre- 
 mendous theme, another attempt on it was 
 being meditated, and by the man whom the 
 most of us rank next after Shakespeare in the 
 hierarchy of English poets. Among the treas- 
 ures in the library at Trinity College, Cam- 
 bridge, lies a manuscript, the hand-writing un- 
 doubtedly Milton's, containing a list compiled 
 by him of promising subjects for the great 
 35 % poem 
 
poem for which, between his leaving the Uni- 
 versity and the outbreak of the Civil War, all 
 his life was a deliberate preparation. The list 
 is long; the subjects proposed run to no fewer 
 than ninety-nine. Of these, fifty-three are de- 
 rived from Old Testament history (with a re- 
 curring inclination for the theme of Paradise 
 Lost), eight from the New Testament; thirty- 
 three from the history of Britain (with a lean- 
 ing towards the Arthurian legend) ; while five 
 of them are legendary tales of Scotland or 
 North Britain, the last being headed "Mac- 
 beth. Beginning at the arrival of Malcolm 
 at Macduff. The matter of Duncan may be 
 expressed by the arrival of his ghost." Now 
 that Milton (an adorer of Shakespeare's 
 genius, as everyone knows) should have taken 
 so deep an impression from the play that its 
 theme possessed him and he longed to transfer 
 it to Epic, is credible enough. That he, with 
 his classical bent, should choose to attempt in 
 Drama an improvement upon the most "clas- 
 sical" of all Shakespeare's tragedies seems to 
 me scarcely credible. But if the credibility of 
 36 
 
this be granted, then I can only conceive Mil- 
 ton's designing to improve the play by making 
 it yet more "classical," i.e. by writing it (after 
 the fashion he followed in Samson Agonistes) 
 closely upon the model of Athenian Tragedy. 
 % For my part I always consider Milton's 
 Macbeth the most fascinating poem — cer- 
 tainly, if play it were, the most fascinating 
 play — ever unwritten. But of this any man 
 may be sure; that (since they were both great 
 poets) one made, as the other would have 
 made, a story of far more value to us than 
 Shakespeare or Milton or any man before or 
 after could have made by a strict biography of 
 Macbeth, the man as he lived. For any such 
 biography would clog the lesson for us with 
 details which were more the less irrelevant be- 
 cause they really happened. Here I must 
 quote Aristotle again, and for the last time in 
 this little book: but no sentences in his treatise 
 hold a deeper import than these : — 
 % "It is not the function of the Poet to relate 
 what has happened, but what may happen of 
 likelihood or must happen of necessity. The 
 37 %, Poet 
 
Poet and the Historian are not different be- 
 cause one writes in verse and the other in prose. 
 Turn what Herodotus tells into verse, and 
 none the less it will be a sort of history; the 
 metre makes no difiference. The real differ- 
 ence lies in the Historian's telling what has 
 happened, the Poet's telling what may hap- 
 pen. Thus Poetry is a more philosophical 
 thing, and a more serious, than History: for 
 Poetry tells of the Universal, History of the 
 Particular. Now the business of the Univer- 
 sal is to tell us how it will fall to such and such 
 a person to speak or act in such or such circum- 
 stances according to likelihood or necessity: 
 and it is at this that Poetry aims in giving char- 
 acters names of its own : whereas the Particu- 
 lar narrates what Alcibiades did or what 
 happened to him." 
 
 % This may seem a hard saying, even after 
 what has been said. So let us pause and digest 
 it in Sir Philip Sidney's comment: ". . . Thus 
 farre Aristotle, which reason of his (as all his) 
 is most full of reason. For indeed, if the ques- 
 38 
 
tion were whether it were better to have a 
 particular acte truly or falsely set down, there 
 is no doubt which is to be chosen, no more 
 than whether you had rather have Vespasian's 
 picture right as hee was or at the Painter's 
 pleasure nothing resembling. But if the ques- 
 tion be for your owne use and learning, 
 whether it be better to have it set downe as it 
 should be, or as it was, then certainly is more 
 doctrinable the fayned Cyrus of Xenophon 
 than the true Cyrus in Justine, and the fayned 
 Mneas in Virgil than the true Mneas in Dares 
 Phrygius." 
 
 %. But now, having drawn breath, let us fol- 
 low our Poet from the lowest up to the highest 
 of his claim. And be it observed, to start 
 with, that in clearing and cleansing the Idea 
 for us (in the manner described) he does but 
 employ a process of Selection which all men 
 are employing, all day long and every day of 
 their lives, upon more trivial matters; a proc- 
 ess indeed which every man is constantly 
 obliged to employ. Life would be a night- 
 39 % mare 
 
mare for him, soon over, if he had to take ac- 
 count, for example, of every object flashed on 
 the retina of his eye during a country walk. 
 How many millions of leaves, stones, blades 
 of grass, must he not see without seeing? Say 
 it be the shortest of rambles on an afternoon 
 in early November. The light fades early: 
 but before he reaches home in the dark, how 
 many of the myriad falling leaves has he 
 counted? — a dozen at most. Of the myriad 
 leaves changing colour does he preserve, un- 
 less by chance, the separate image of one? 
 Rather from the mass over which his eyes have 
 travelled he has abstracted an "idea" of 
 autumnal colouring — yellow, red, brown — 
 and with that he carries home a sentimental, 
 perhaps even a profound, sense of the falling 
 leaf, the falling close of the year. So — 
 and just so, save more deftly — the Poet ab- 
 stracts : — 
 
 Where is the prime of Summer — the green 
 
 prime — 
 The many, many leaves all twinkling? — Three 
 40 
 
On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime 
 Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree! 
 
 (As a matter of fact, oak leaves are singularly 
 tenacious, and the autumnal oak will show a 
 thousand for the elm's one. Hood, being a 
 Cockney, took his seven leaves at random. 
 But what does it matter? He was a poet, and 
 seven leaves sufficed him to convey the idea.) 
 
 % Nor does our Poet, unless he be a charlatan, 
 pretend to bring home some hieratic message 
 above the understanding of his fellows : for he 
 is an interpreter, and the interpreter's success 
 depends upon hitting his hearer's intelligence. 
 Failing that, he misses everything and is null. 
 To put it in another way — at the base of all 
 Literature, of all Poetry, as of all Theology, 
 stands one rock: the very highest Universe 
 Truth is something so absolutely simple that a 
 child can understand it. This is what Emer- 
 son means when he tells us that the great 
 writers never seem to condescend; that yonder 
 slip of a boy who has carried oflf Shakespeare 
 41 ^to 
 
to the window-seat, can feel with King Harry 
 or Hamlet or Coriolanus, with Rosalind or 
 Desdemona or Miranda. For the moment he 
 is any given one of these, because any human 
 soul contains them all. And some such 
 thought we must believe to have been in Our 
 Lord's mind when He said, "I thank Thee, O 
 Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou 
 hast hidden these things from the wise and 
 prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." 
 For as the Universe is one, so the individual 
 human souls that apprehend it have no vary- 
 ing values intrinsically, but one equal value. 
 They differ only in power to apprehend, and 
 this may be more easily hindered than helped 
 by the conceit begotten of finite knowledge. 
 I would even dare to quote of this Universal 
 Truth the words I once hardily put into the 
 mouth of John Wesley concerning divine 
 Love: "I see now that if God's love reaches 
 up to every star and down to every poor soul 
 on Earth, it must be something vastly simple, 
 so simple that all dwellers on earth may be 
 assured of it — as all who have eyes may be 
 42 
 
assured of the planet shining yonder at the 
 end of the street — and so vast that all bargain- 
 ing is below it, and they may inherit it with- 
 out considering their deserts." The message, 
 then, which one Poet brings home, is no 
 esoteric one: as Johnson said of Gray's Elegy, 
 "it abounds with images which find a mirror 
 in every mind, and with sentiments to which 
 every bosom returns an echo." It exalts us 
 through the best in us, by telling it, not as any- 
 thing new or strange, but so as we recognise it. 
 
 % And here let us dwell a moment on John- 
 son's phrase, "to which every bosom returns an 
 echo" ; for it recalls us to a point, which we 
 noted indeed on p. 22, but have left (I fear) 
 somewhat under-emphasised — the emotion 
 that enters into poetical truth, which only by 
 the help of emotion is apprehended; as 
 through emotion it is conveyed, and to an emo- 
 tional understanding in the hearer addresses its 
 appeal. For the desire of man's soul after 
 the Universal, to be in harmony with it, is 
 (as a matter of fact, and when all pulpit elo- 
 43 % quence 
 
quence has been discounted) something more 
 than a mere intellectual attraction: a aropyi^ 
 rather ; a yearning felt in its veins to know its 
 fatherhood. Saint Paul goes farther and as- 
 sures us that "the earnest expectation of the 
 creature waiteth for the manifestation," so that 
 "the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in 
 pain together until now." "And not only 
 they," he goes on, "but ourselves also" : while 
 the pagan poet has tears that reach the heart 
 of the transitory show: Sunt lacrimas rerum, 
 et mentem mortalia tangunt — "Tears are for 
 Life, mortal things pierce the soul." 
 ^8 And why not? For the complete man — 
 totus homo — has feelings as well as reason, and 
 should have both active, in fine training, to 
 realise the best of him. Shelley obviously 
 meant this when he defined Poetry as "the 
 record of the best and happiest moments of the 
 happiest and best minds." He did not mean 
 that they are happy only in the sense of being 
 "fortunate," felices, in such moments, but that 
 they were happy in the sense of being 
 "blessed," beati; and this feeling of blessedness 
 
 44 
 
they communicate. "We are aware," he goes 
 on, "of evanescent visitations of thought and 
 feeling sometimes associated with place or per- 
 son, sometimes requiring our own mind alone, 
 and always arising unforeseen and departing 
 unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond 
 all expression ... so that even in the desire 
 and the regret they leave, there cannot but he 
 pleasure, participating as it does in the nature 
 of its object. It is as it were the interpene- 
 tration of a divine nature through our own, 
 . . . and the state of mind produced is at war 
 with every base desire. The enthusiasm of 
 virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is es- 
 sentially linked with such emotions ; and whilst 
 they last, self appears as what it is — an atom 
 in the universe." Every word italicised above 
 by me carries Shelley's witness that Poetry 
 and joyous emotion are inseparable, 
 "Poetry," he winds up, "redeems from decay 
 the visitations of the Divinity in Man." How 
 can we dissociate from joy the news of such 
 visitations either on the lips that carry or in 
 the ears that receive? 
 45 %Yet, 
 
% Yet, as has been hinted, the very simplic- 
 ity of it puzzles the ordinary man, and not 
 only puzzles the philosopher but exasperates 
 him. It annoys the philosopher, first, that 
 the poet apparently takes so little trouble. 
 (As a fact he takes endless trouble; but, to be 
 sure, he saves an immense deal by going 
 the right way to work.) All knowledge is 
 notoriously painful (that is to say, to philo- 
 sophers). Moreover, the fellow mixes it up 
 with emotion (an integral part of man which 
 philosophy ignores, and stultifies itself, as a 
 rule, by ignoring). He is one with the 
 Oracles, a suspected tribe. He idles like an 
 Oracle, attending on inspiration, and when he 
 has received the alleged afflatus, the fellow — 
 so different from us — is neither to hold nor to 
 bind. The easiest way with him seems to be 
 a pitying contempt. "For all good poets," 
 says Socrates sagely in the Ion, "epic as well 
 as lyric, compose their lovely strains, not by 
 art, but because they are inspired and 
 possessed. And as the Corybantian dances are 
 not quite 'rational,' so the lyric poets are, so 
 
to speak, not quite 'all there,' . . . They tell 
 us," he goes on condescendingly, "that they 
 bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling 
 them from the gardens and dells of the Muses ; 
 that, like the bees, they wing from one flower 
 to another. Yes of a truth : the Poet is a light 
 and a winged and a holy thing, without in- 
 vention in him until he is inspired and out of 
 his senses, and out of his own wit; until he has 
 attained to this he is but a feeble thing, un- 
 able to utter his oracles." I can imagine all 
 this reported to Homer in the Shades and 
 Homer answering with a smile: "Well, and 
 who in the world is denying it? I certainly 
 did not, while I lived and sang upon earth. 
 Nay, I never even sang, but invited the Muse 
 to sing to me and through me. M^viv deeds ded 
 . . . " Avd pa fioe invent, Mdbaa. — Surely the dear 
 fellow might remember the first line of my 
 immortal works! And if he does remember, 
 and is only bringing it up against me that 
 in the intervals of doing my work in life I 
 was a feeble fellow, go back and tell him 
 that it is likely enough, yet I fail to see how 
 47 ^it 
 
it can be any business of his, since it was only 
 my work that I ever asked for recognition. 
 They say that I used to go about begging a 
 dinner on the strength of it. Did I? ... I 
 cannot remember. Anyhow, that nuisance is 
 over sometime ago, and his kitchen is safe!" 
 
 % To you, who have followed the argument 
 of this little book, the theory of poetic "in- 
 spiration" will be intelligible enough. It 
 earned a living in its day and, if revived in 
 ours, might happily supersede much modern 
 chatter about art and technique. For it con- 
 tains much truth : — 
 
 When the flicker of London sun falls faint on 
 
 the Club-room's green and gold, 
 The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch 
 
 with their pens in the mould — 
 They scratch ivith their pens in the mould of 
 
 their graves, and the ink and the anguish 
 
 start, 
 For the Devil mutters behind the leaves, "It's 
 
 pretty, but is it Art?" 
 
 ^& The philosophers did poetry no great harm 
 48 
 
by being angry with it as an "inspired" thing: 
 for that, in a measure, it happens to be. They 
 did it far more harm when they took it seri- 
 ously and made it out to be a form of teaching. 
 For by the nature of things there happens to 
 be something of the pedant in every philoso- 
 pher and the incurable propensity of the ped- 
 ant is to remove everything — but Literature 
 especially — out of the category to which it 
 belongs and consider it in another with which 
 it has but a remote concern. (Thus a man will 
 talk of Chaucer as though his inflexions were 
 the most important thing about him.) Now 
 to acclaim Homer as a great teacher, and use 
 him in the schools, was right enough so long 
 as the Athenians remembered (and is right 
 enough for us, so long as we remember) how 
 he teaches us, or rather educates. What we 
 have described the Poet as doing for men — 
 drawing forth the inner harmonies of the soul 
 and attuning them to the Universal — is educa- 
 tive in the truest sense as in the highest degree. 
 So long as we remember this, the old dispute 
 whether the aim of Poetry be to teach or to 
 49 is delight 
 
delight is seen to be futile : for she does both, 
 and she does the one by means of the other. 
 On the other hand, you cannot leave a delicate 
 instrument such as Poetry lying within reach 
 of the professional teacher; he will certainly, 
 at any risk of marring or mutilating, seize on 
 it and use it as a hammer to knock things into 
 heads ; if rebuked for this, plaintively remon- 
 strating, "But I thought you told me it was 
 useful to teach with 1" ( So Gideon taught the 
 men of Succoth. ) And therefore, we need not 
 be astonished, coming down to Strabo, to find 
 him asserting that "the ancients held poetry 
 to be a kind of elementary philosophy, intro- 
 ducing us from childhood to life and pleasure- 
 ably instructing us in character, behaviour and 
 action." The Greeks, he tells us, chose poetry 
 for their children's first lessons. Surely (he 
 argues) they never did that for the sake of 
 sweetly influencing the soul, but rather for the 
 correction of morals! Strabo's mental at- 
 titude is absurd, of course, and preposter- 
 ous: for this same influencing of the soul — 
 ^o^aymYta, (a beautiful word) — is, as we have 
 
 50 
 
seen, Poetry's main business : but the mischief 
 of the notion did not end with making the 
 schooldays of children unhappy: it took hold 
 of the poets themselves, and by turning them 
 into prigs dried up the children's well of con- 
 solation. The Fathers of the Church lent a 
 hand too, and a vigorous one ; and for centuries 
 the face of the Muse was sicklied o'er with a 
 pale determination to combine amusement 
 with instruction. Even our noble Sidney al- 
 lowed his modesty to be overawed by the 
 pedantic tradition, though as a man of the 
 world he tactfully gave it the slip. "For sup- 
 pose it be granted," he says, "(that which I 
 suppose with great reason may be denied) that 
 the Philosopher in respect of his methodical 
 proceeding doth teach more perfectly than the 
 Poet : yet do I thinke that no man is so much 
 Philosophus as to compare the Philosopher, 
 in mooving, with the Poet. And that mooving 
 is of a higher degree than teaching, it may by 
 this appeare : that it is welnigh the cause and 
 the effect of teaching. For who will be 
 taught, if hee bee not mooved with desire to 
 51 %be 
 
be taught?" Then, after a page devoted to 
 showing "which constant desire whosoever 
 hath in him hath already past halfe the hard- 
 ness of the way," Sidney goes on: "Now 
 therein of all Sciences (I speak still of human, 
 and according to the human conceit) is our 
 Poet the Monarch. For he dooth not only 
 show the way, but giveth so sweete a prospect 
 into the way, as will intice any man to enter 
 into it. Nay he dooth as if your journey 
 should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the 
 first give you a cluster of Grapes, that full of 
 that taste you may long to passe further. He 
 beginneth not with obscure definitions, which 
 must blur the margent with interpretations and 
 load the memory with doubtf ulnesse : but hee 
 commeth to you with words set in delightful 
 proportion, either accompanied with, or pre- 
 pared for, the well-inchaunting skill of Mu- 
 sicke ; and with a tale forsooth he commeth unto 
 you : with a tale which holdeth children from 
 play and old men from the chimney-corner." 
 
 % "And with a tale, forsooth, he commeth 
 
 52 
 
to you." — For having stripped the Idea bare, 
 he has to reclothe it again and in such shape 
 as will strike forcibly on his hearer's senses. 
 A while back we broke off midway in a stanza 
 of Sir John Davies. Let us here complete it. 
 There are two versions. As first Davies 
 wrote : — 
 
 This doth She when from things particular, 
 She doth abstract the Universal kinds, 
 
 Which bodiless and immaterial are. 
 And can be lodged but only in our minds. 
 
 — the last two lines of which are weak and un- 
 necessary. Revising the stanza, he wrote: — 
 
 This does She, when from individual states 
 She doth abstract the Universal kinds. 
 
 Which then reclothed in divers names 
 and fates 
 Steal access through our senses to our minds, 
 
 — which exactly describes the whole process. 
 Having laid bare the Idea, our Poet, turning 
 from analysis to synthesis, proceeds to reclothe 
 it in new particulars of his own inventing, 
 53 % carefully 
 
carefully chosen that^ they may strike home 
 hardest upon the hearer's perceptions. Now 
 that which strikes home hardest on a man is 
 a tale which he can grasp by the concretest 
 images conveyed in the concretest language. 
 'Labor improbus omnia vincit' tells him not 
 half so much as a tale of the labours of Her- 
 cules ; so he will learn more of patience from 
 Job or Griselda; more of chivalrous courage 
 from Hector or Roland or Launcelot or the 
 tale of Palamon and Arcite; more of 
 patriotism from the figures in history — 
 Leonidas, Horatius, Regulus, Joan of Arc, 
 William Tell, Garibaldi, Gordon — that have 
 translated the Idea back into their own lives 
 with the noblest simplicity, so that we say of 
 them that they are "epical figures" or "figures 
 worthy of romance," thereby paying them the 
 highest compliment in our power: yes and 
 more of Christian simplicity from my Uncle 
 Toby, Colonel Newcome, even Mr. Pickwick; 
 than from a hundred copybook maxims con- 
 cerning these virtues : all these figures indeed 
 illustrating the tritest copybook maxim of all 
 54 
 
— that "Example is better than Precept." 
 Thus Charles Lamb praises the Plays of 
 Shakespeare as "enrichers of the fancy, 
 strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from 
 all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of 
 all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, 
 to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, hu- 
 manity: for," say he, "of examples, teaching 
 those virtues, his pages are full." 
 
 ^ The Poet then, having seized on the Idea 
 and purged it of what is trivial or accidental, 
 reclothes it in a concrete dress and so repre- 
 sents it to us. And you will generally remark 
 in the very greatest poets that not only are the 
 images they represent to us extraordinarily 
 definite and concrete and therefore vivid — as 
 Dante, for example, will describe a Scene in 
 Hell or in Paradise with as much particular- 
 ity as though he were writing a newspaper re- 
 port; but this concreteness of vision translates 
 itself into a remarkable concreteness of speech. 
 I suppose there was never a more concrete 
 writer than Shakespeare, and his practice of 
 55 % translating 
 
translating all his idea into things which you 
 can touch or see grew steadily stronger 
 throughout his career, so that any competent 
 critic can in a moment distinguish his later 
 writing from his earlier by its compression of 
 images in words, its forcible concretion of the 
 various "parts of speech," its masterful corvee 
 of nouns substantive to do the work of verbs, 
 and so on. Even in very early work such as 
 Venus and Adonis we cannot but note this 
 gift of vision,^ how quick and particular it 
 is. . . . 
 
 Upon this promise did he raise his chin, 
 Like a dive-dipper, peering through a wave, 
 Who, being look'd on, ducks as quickly 
 in. . . . 
 
 But in his later plays — so fast the images 
 teem — he has to reach out among nouns, verbs, 
 adverbs, with both strong hands, grasping 
 what comes and packing it ere it can protest. 
 Take for example: — 
 
 Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care. 
 56 
 
Or— 
 
 The multitudinous sea incarnadine, 
 Making the green one red. 
 
 Or— 
 
 In the dark backward and abysm of time. 
 
 Or this from Lear: — 
 
 My face I'll grime with filth, 
 Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots 
 And with presented nakedness outface 
 The winds and persecutions of the sky. 
 
 Or (for vividness) this, from Antony and 
 Cleopatra, when Cleopatra cries out and faints 
 over Antony's body: — 
 
 O! withered is the garland of the war. 
 
 The soldier's pole is fall'n: young boys and 
 
 girls 
 Are level now with men; the odds is gone. 
 And there is nothing left remarkable 
 Beneath the visiting moon . . . 
 
 "Madam! Madam!" "Royal Egypt!" "Em- 
 
 57 ^ press!" 
 
press!" cry the waiting-maids as she swoons. 
 She revives and rebukes them: — 
 
 No more, but e'en a woman, and commanded 
 By such poor passion as the maid that milks 
 And does the meanest chares. It were for me 
 To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods; 
 To tell them that this world did equal theirs 
 Till they had stolen my jewel. 
 
 % When a poet can, as Shakespeare does here, 
 seize upon a Universal truth and lay it bare ; 
 when, apprehending passion in this instance, 
 he can show it naked, the master of gods and 
 levelling queens with milkmaids — totus est in 
 armis idem quando nudus est Amor; when he 
 can reclothe it in the sensuous body of Cleo- 
 patra, "Royal Egypt," and, rending the robe 
 over that bosom, reveal the Idea again in a 
 wound so vividly that almost we see the nature 
 of woman spirting, like blood, against the 
 heaven it defies ; then we who have followed 
 the Poet's ascending claims arrive at his last 
 and highest, yet at one which has lain implicit 
 58 
 
all along in his title. He is a Poet — a 
 "Maker." By that name, "Maker," he used 
 to be known in English, and he deserves no 
 lesser one. 
 
 % I have refrained in these pages, and pur- 
 posely, from technical talk and from defining 
 the differences between Epic, Dramatic, Lyric 
 Poetry: between the Ode and the Sonnet, the 
 Satire and the Epigram. To use the formula 
 of a famous Headmaster of Winchester, "de- 
 tails can be arranged," when once we have a 
 clear notion of what Poetry is, and of what by 
 nature it aims to do. My sole intent has been 
 to clarify that notion, which (if the reader has 
 been patient to follow me) reveals the Poet as 
 a helper of man's most insistent spiritual need 
 and therefore as a member most honourable 
 in any commonwealth: since, as Ben Jonson 
 says: "Every beggarly corporation afifords 
 the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly; but 
 solus rex, aut poeta, non quotannis nascitur" 
 — these two only, a King and a Poet, are not 
 born every year. The Poet "makes" — that iS 
 59 ^to 
 
to say, creates — which is a part of the divine 
 function ; and he makes — using man's highest 
 instruments, thought and speech — harmonious 
 inventions that answ^er the harmony we hum- 
 bly trace in the firmament fashioned, con- 
 trolled, upheld, by divine wisdom. "Non 
 c'e' in mondo," said Torquato Tasso proudly, 
 "chi merita name di creatore, se non Iddio ed 
 ilPoeta" — "Two beings only deserve the name 
 of Creator: God and the Poet." 
 
 THE END 
 
 60