LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 WHAT IS POETRY?
 
 In preparation, uniform -with this -volume and with THE 
 SILENCE OF LOVE, a new volume of Poems, by the same author, 
 entitkd WITHOUT AND WITHIN.
 
 / WHAT RY? 
 
 EDMOND HOLMES 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 \ THE SILENCE OF LOVE 
 
 JOHN' LANE 
 LONDON AND NEW YORK. 
 
 1900.
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 
 
 " Poetic creation, what is this but seeing the thing 
 sufficiently ? The word that will describe the thing follows 
 of itself from such intense clear sight of it. 
 
 T. Carlyle.
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 
 
 PART I. 
 FEELING. 
 
 WHAT is poetry ? There are as many answers 
 to this question as there are minds that take an 
 interest in it ; for in the attempt to answer it 
 each of us is perforce thrown back upon that 
 unformulated philosophy which is an essential 
 aspect of his inmost self, a philosophy which 
 emancipates him from the control of all schools 
 and sects, and in expounding which (so far 
 as it admits of exposition) he tells the story 
 of his heart and makes confession of his faith. 
 When I ask myself, What is poetry ? I am 
 setting myself a task which far " exceeds man's 
 might." I am inviting myself to solve, by 
 implication, all the master problems of human
 
 thought. And if I take my own answer 
 seriously, I do so not because I think that the 
 question can be answered, but because I know 
 well that it cannot ; not because I flatter myself 
 that I have succeeded where others have failed, 
 but because I see in the failure which awaits us 
 all, convincing proof that the problem is worthy 
 of our highest endeavours, and that each 
 answer in turn is as real and true as the 
 individual life which it summarizes and the 
 personality which it expresses and reflects. 
 
 Cardinal Newman has somewhere said 
 that without assumptions no one can prove 
 anything about anything. To prove that 
 poetry is what I believe it to be is beyond my 
 power and beyond my aim. But the scope of 
 Newman's aphorism may surely be extended. 
 Without assumptions no one can begin to think 
 about anything. For every enterprise of 
 thought one needs what soldiers call a base 
 of operations. I am about to set out on one 
 of the most desperate of all enterprises ; and 
 in order to provide myself with a base, I must 
 ask to be allowed to make two initial assump- 
 tions : 
 
 (1) that poetry is the expression of 
 strong and deep feeling ; 
 
 (2) that wherever there is feeling, 
 there is something to be felt.
 
 Let us consider each assumption in turn. 
 
 Poetry is the expression of strong and deep 
 feeling. 
 
 By strong feeling I mean feeling that is 
 vehement,. passionate, intense; feeling that burns 
 rather than broods. By deep feeling I mean 
 feeling that is subtle, delicate, mystical ; feeling 
 that broods rather than burns. Is it possible 
 for feeling to be strong without being deep, 
 or deep without being strong? Yes and No. 
 Strength can exist apart from depth ; and 
 depth can exist apart from strength. But 
 neither can develop itself freely or fully ex- 
 cept it be modified by the other. Feeling 
 that is strong without being deep is violent ; 
 in other words, it is not really strong. Feeling 
 that is deep without being strong is dreamy 
 and fantastic ; in other words, it is not really 
 deep. It needs the red light of passion to 
 pierce the darkness of the inner life ; but if 
 the fire of passion burns too furiously, it will 
 speedily burn itself away. It must be under- 
 stood then that in poetic emotion, as I con- 
 ceive of it, strength is inseparable from depth ; 
 and, therefore, that whenever I apply the term 
 passionate to poetry or the poet's heart, I take 
 for granted that the passion is not all flame 
 and fury, but is strong enough to control itself. 
 
 That poetry is the expression of strong
 
 and deep emotion, that, in Wordsworth's well- 
 known words, it is the " spontaneous overflow 
 of powerful feelings" will, I think, be generally 
 admitted. When I use the word poetry, I 
 am of course thinking of the higher kinds 
 of poetry. I am thinking of the pius vates, 
 the inspired bard. In ordinary parlance the 
 word poetry is used as loosely as the word 
 music. But just as there is an impassable 
 abyss between the music-hall song of the hour 
 and the symphony of a great master, so there 
 are many kinds of verse which are not in the 
 slightest degree poetical. To try to prove an 
 assumption is to undermine the very founda- 
 tions of one's thought ; but if proof were 
 needed of the truth of my thesis that poetry is 
 the expression of strong and deep feeling, it 
 would surely be found in the indisputable fact 
 that whenever one of the lower kinds of poetic 
 composition rises for a while to the level of 
 true poetry, it is lifted above itself by a passing 
 wave of genuine emotion. Satire, for example, 
 becomes poetical when, and only when, it is 
 inspired by saeva indignatio ; and even vers de 
 societe, as they are called, become worthy of 
 the sacred name of poetry when, but only 
 when, they are pervaded by that subtle humour 
 which is near of kin to one of the deepest and 
 most delicate of all feelings, pathos.
 
 There is one significant point of view from 
 which it may be profitable for us to consider 
 the connection between poetry and feeling. 
 The poet is commonly regarded as the typical 
 embodiment of genius, as the representative of 
 those who owe their best work to a constrain- 
 ing power which they cannot control. In 
 ancient days he was supposed to be divinely 
 inspired ; and we still speak, not wholly in jest, 
 of the divine afflatus, of seasons of inspiration, 
 of the presence of the Muse, and so forth. 
 Now when we say that true poetry is the 
 outcome of genius, we imply that the true poet 
 has an essentially passionate nature. For one 
 of the leading characteristics of genius, and the 
 one which more than any other has led men to 
 regard it as divinely inspired, is its tyranny \ the 
 irresistible nature of its influence, the inevitable 
 character of its work. On this point the 
 evidence of those who have felt the storm and 
 stress of genius must carry special weight. 
 
 " I do but sing because I must " 
 
 is the cry the boast shall I call it, or the 
 apology ? of every true poet. And there is 
 no true poet who has not again and again been 
 mastered by that strange feeling of helplessness 
 in the hands of an inward and spiritual power, 
 to which the Hebrew prophet gave memorable
 
 expression : " Then I said, I will not make 
 mention of Him, nor speak any more in His 
 Name. But His Word was in mine heart as a 
 burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was 
 weary with forbearing and I could not stay." 
 The belief in inspiration has not wholly died 
 out ; and I, for one, see no reason why it 
 should ever die. The doctrine needs but a 
 change of notation to become entirely true 
 to fact The poet is indeed stirred and swayed 
 by a power which is so far not his own, that he 
 cannot control its movements or consciously 
 realize either its origin or its goal. But that 
 power, though certainly supernormal, is not 
 supernatural. Nay it is Nature herself, to use 
 a word whose very comprehensiveness enables 
 one to use it in safety, it is Nature herself that 
 inspires the poet, moving him to her own ends 
 and for her own purposes through the medium 
 of an inborn bent of his inner being, a per- 
 sistent pressure which she never relaxes until 
 he has yielded himself to her will and begun to 
 follow her guidance. Not that his submission, 
 however complete it may be, can bring him 
 lasting relief. For one of the most vital cha- 
 racteristics of poetic genius is that its claims 
 upon its victim are infinite ; that as it punishes 
 his rebellion by blasting his life with the curse 
 of a clinging sense of failure, the curse of having
 
 missed his destiny and been treasonably false 
 to his higher self, so it rewards his obedience, 
 not with peace of mind, but with new unrest, 
 by filling his heart with new desires, and show- 
 ing him from each new height that he wins 
 a higher sky-line and a wider world. The 
 pressure put upon the poet by this bent of his 
 nature a pressure which is now strong and 
 steady, now sudden and violent is realized by 
 him as feeling, so deep and so intense as to 
 deserve the name of passion. Passion means 
 suffering. The passionate heart is one that 
 suffers much. What the poet suffers is not 
 trouble or sorrow, though even to these he is 
 perhaps more than ordinarily sensitive, but the 
 stress of Nature's influence, the despotic might 
 of his own inborn genius. In fine, the poet's is 
 a " passionate heart " for this, if for no other 
 reason, that it is his doom to be constrained 
 and mastered by forces which are not his own, 
 as being for ever beyond the control of his 
 consciousness, and yet again intimately his own, 
 as coming from his inner nature, as being in 
 fact part of his buried self. 
 
 Perhaps I am dwelling too much on the 
 emotional side of poetry. Even Wordsworth, 
 who almost revered passion, remembered that 
 the poet must think as well as feel. Having 
 told us that " all good poetry is the spontane-
 
 ous overflow of powerful feelings,'* he goes on 
 to say, "though this be true, Poems to which 
 any value can be attached were never produced 
 on any variety of subjects but by a man who, 
 being possessed of more than usual organic 
 sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. 
 For our continued influxes of feeling are 
 modified and directed by our thoughts, which 
 are indeed the representatives of all our past 
 feelings." I admit that the poet must have a 
 reflective as well as a passionate nature, and 
 that, if he is to do good work, his thought must 
 interpret and co-ordinate his feelings, and so 
 deepen, widen, and finally exalt and intensify 
 them. But I hold that in the poet's mind 
 thought must operate continuously and half- 
 unconsciously, and that at the time of inspira- 
 tion, though its influence must be apparent, it 
 must itself be in the background ; just as in 
 the work of poetic composition artistic study 
 and experience must make themselves felt, but 
 must not betray their presence. Moreover, 
 though it is doubtless true that " our thoughts 
 are the representatives of all our past feelings," 
 it is not less true that our feelings, which are 
 being continually " modified and directed by 
 our thoughts," are at any given moment repre- 
 sentative of all our past thoughts ; and per- 
 haps it is even more essential for the poet's 
 
 8
 
 thoughts to be "steeped in feeling" than for 
 his feelings to be controlled by thought. Then 
 again, the end and aim of thought is to 
 lead us, by more or less circuitous routes, to 
 truth. But the moments of exalted feeling are 
 also moments of " passionate intuition," and, 
 therefore, of clear and unerring insight ; 
 moments in which we seek truth no longer, 
 but embrace it and make it our own. To 
 quote Wordsworth once more, " the adamantine 
 holds of truth" are built, not merely by 
 "reason," but also by 
 
 " passion, which itself 
 Is highest reason in a soul sublime." 
 
 Even brooding, which may be defined as the 
 reverie of passion, and which is the kind of 
 reflection that is most congenial to the poetic 
 temperament, is, I think, a higher form of 
 meditation than thinking (in the strict and 
 narrow sense of the word) ; for in the former 
 state the mind lies open to the profound and 
 subtle influences of Nature, whereas in the 
 latter consciousness, that transparent medium 
 which is opaque to the higher rays of spiritual 
 light, interposes itself between the soul and 
 truth ; and whereas the brooding mind, in the 
 course of its aimless wanderings, may some- 
 times come in contact with hidden truth, the
 
 mind of the systematic thinker is led astray by 
 its very desire for accurate knowledge, and fails 
 in proportion to the completeness of its success. 
 In any case, it must, I think, be admitted that 
 the reflective side of the poet's nature is 
 always subordinated to the emotional, and that 
 it is the latter, not the former, which differen- 
 tiates him from other men. 
 
 To what extent, we must now ask our- 
 selves, is the poet differentiated from other 
 men ? When we say that he differs from them 
 in having a stronger and subtler sensibility, 
 do we mean that the feelings which it is his 
 mission to express, are peculiarly his own ? 
 Do we mean, in other words, that poetic 
 genius is an accidental departure from what is 
 real and central in the nature of man ? Surely 
 not. If poetic genius were a mere freak of 
 Nature, the poet would sing to himself alone. 
 In other words, he would not sing at all. 
 Language always expresses a common mea- 
 sure of experience. Were the poet's feelings 
 exclusively his own, he could not possibly com- 
 municate them to others, for there would be no 
 common ground on which he could meet his 
 fellow-men. To give expression to monstrous 
 or eccentric feelings is not the function of the 
 poet. The feelings that inspire him belong to 
 " the general heart of man." Nay, they are of 
 
 10
 
 the inmost essence of human nature. The 
 difference between the feelings of the poet and 
 those of ordinary men is, to use the most 
 pregnant and suggestive of antitheses, the 
 difference between what is actual and what is 
 potential. Feelings which are actual in the 
 poet, in the sense of being vividly realized and 
 brought near to the light of consciousness,, 
 have but a potential existence in the hearts 
 of ordinary men. But they are there, in the 
 darkness of the " buried life," waiting to be 
 actualized ; and it is because they are there 
 that the message of the poet goes home to the 
 hearts of his listeners. When we are moved 
 by poetry there is no transfusion of feeling. 
 What happens is, that expression is given to 
 emotions which are ours and which we know to 
 be ours, though we had not actually experi- 
 enced them till we listened to the poet's words. 
 The terms potential and actual are of course 
 always used comparatively. What is actual 
 from one point of view is potential from 
 another. I sometimes think that every feeling 
 is the embryo of another and a deeper feeling, 
 and this of another, and so on ad infimtum. 
 Thus the sense of outward beauty is implicit in 
 the sense of sight : the sense of inward and 
 spiritual beauty is implicit in the sense of 
 outward beauty ; and in the sense of inward 
 
 ii
 
 and spiritual beauty there is endless gradation, 
 depth beneath depth, dream within dream, 
 glory beyond glory. It follows from this con- 
 ception that, in the act of consciously realizing 
 a given feeling, we are unconsciously coming 
 into contact with another and a deeper feeling ; 
 and, further, that the more clearly conscious 
 we are of what goes on in the more accessible 
 part of our inner life, the deeper we are able to 
 go into its darker mysteries. It is in this 
 respect, I think, that the poet differs most from 
 ordinary men. The profounder side of human 
 nature is nearer to the light of consciousness in 
 him than in them ; and so he is always con- 
 versant with deeper feelings than they are, 
 conscious of feelings of which they are but 
 dimly conscious, dimly conscious of feelings of 
 which they are wholly unconscious. The 
 movement from consciousness to unconscious- 
 ness is, I need hardly say, as continuous as the 
 change in our northern latitudes from light to 
 darkness ; but to express the continuity of 
 Nature's processes is, unhappily, beyond the 
 power of human speech. 
 
 It would seem, then, that the deep and 
 strong feelings which poetry expresses are 
 potentially common to all men, and that they 
 belong to that deeper side of human nature 
 which is for most of us an unknown land. 
 
 12
 
 This unknown land is at last beginning to 
 interest human thought We hear much 
 nowadays of the self that lies below the level 
 of consciousness, the "subliminal self " of the 
 psychical inquirer, the " buried life " of 
 Matthew Arnold's beautiful poem, the "vie 
 profonde" the " dme," the " contree lointaine" 
 of the Belgian mystic. Systematic attempts 
 are being made to explore this shadowy region, 
 in the hope of discovering what I may perhaps 
 venture to call the magnetic pole of existence. 
 Whatever may be the remoter issue of these 
 daring enterprises, there is one thing at least 
 which the explorers will not fail to report to us, 
 namely, that the "buried life " is the home of 
 those inward and spiritual feelings which it is 
 the mission of poetry to express and reveal. 
 
 Let us now consider the second of my 
 initial assumptions. 
 
 Wherever there is feeling, there is some- 
 thing to be felt. 
 
 This proposition is, I think, "as true as 
 truth's simplicity." Feeling must have its 
 object, for it is always the product, direct or 
 indirect, of experience ; and experience means 
 contact with fact. We may, if we please, 
 define feeling as the line or surface of contact 
 between one's self and one's environment. It is
 
 only through the medium of our feelings that 
 " things," as we call them, are revealed to us : 
 and though we find it convenient to assume 
 that things exist apart from the feelings that 
 they generate, this distinction always breaks 
 down when onr thought leans heavily on it ; 
 and in the last resort we find ourselves com- 
 pelled to confess that feelings and things are 
 inseparable. The apparent exceptions to the 
 rule that I have formulated, the cases of (so- 
 called) illusion, need not detain us long. For, 
 in the first place, there may well be more in the 
 phenomenon of mental illusion than is dreamed 
 of in our philosophy ; and, in the second place, 
 the rule which these abnormal occurrences 
 seem to violate does not pretend to be, and 
 for my purpose need not be, more than 
 approximately correct. 
 
 Feelings then are generated by experience 
 of things ; and as there are different kinds of 
 feelings, so we may assume that, corresponding 
 to these, there are different orders of things, 
 different aspects of existence, different strata of 
 reality. In some respects the different feelings 
 are incommensurable with one another ; but 
 there is at least one point of view from which 
 it seems to be possible to classify them, to 
 arrange them, one might almost say, in order 
 of merit. Some feelings announce themselves 
 
 14
 
 to us as being higher, purer and nobler than 
 others, and also (the one announcement being 
 implicit in the other) as having been generated 
 by higher realities. For example, the sense 
 of beauty announces itself to us as being a 
 higher sense than the sense of sight ; and in 
 and through this announcement it tells us that 
 beauty is a more real property of things than 
 either colour or form. So, again, the pleasure 
 which we derive from hearing one of 
 Beethoven's symphonies announces itself to us 
 as being far higher and purer than the pleasure 
 which we derive from eating a well-seasoned 
 dish ; and we feel instinctively that the things, 
 whatever they may be, which generate the 
 former kind of pleasure are immeasurably 
 higher in the scale of reality than the things 
 which gratify the sense of taste. Here, then, 
 we seem to be provided with an inward 
 criterion and standard of reality, a scale of 
 dignity in our feelings which corresponds with 
 a scale of reality in the things that surround us. 
 Are we to accept this criterion, this standard 
 of worth with which Nature has equipped us ? 
 Well, in the first place, we must accept it ; for, 
 speaking generally, it may be said that each 
 feeling in turn constrains us to take it at its 
 own valuation. And, in the second place, it 
 may fairly be urged that apart from this inward 
 
 15
 
 standard we have no criterion of reality. It is 
 indeed sometimes contended that the objects 
 of our bodily senses are real things, and that 
 the objects of all our other senses are illusions 
 and dreams. But surely to say that this little 
 animal which calls itself Man, crawling about 
 on the surface of one of the lesser satellites of 
 one of the least of the innumerable stars, is 
 able by means of his bodily senses, the senses 
 which he shares with other animals, to see the 
 Universe as it really is, is to make the most 
 audacious and arrogant of all anthropocentric 
 assumptions. Dismissing this hypothesis as 
 gratuitous and absurd, we must either say that 
 there is no standard of reality, or accept the 
 inward standard and allow it to control our 
 notions of what is real and true, and through 
 this to determine our ideals and regulate our 
 lives. 
 
 Now the strong and deep feelings which 
 poetry expresses unquestionably belong to that 
 higher side of one's being which has reality, in 
 the deeper sense of the word, for its objective 
 counterpart Once the validity of the inward 
 standard has been established, it becomes clear 
 that the objects of the poet's feelings are as 
 much more real than the superficial aspects of 
 Nature and of life, as the feelings themselves 
 are deeper and stronger than the surface feel- 
 
 16
 
 ing of the average man ; for all who have ever 
 experienced poetic emotion, whether in its 
 creative or its responsive mood, will acknow- 
 ledge that it sets a high value on itself, that it 
 is imperiously self-assertive, that its very 
 presence is a summons to us to accept its 
 valuation not of itself alone but of all the 
 feelings that sway us, and through these of all 
 the things that we seek or shun. As there 
 is a buried or subliminal self behind and be- 
 yond the ordinary self, so there is (we must 
 believe) a buried world behind and beyond the 
 ordinary world, an order of things which far 
 transcends in grandeur and reality that ap- 
 parent order of things which, for the average 
 man in his average moods, is the all-in-all of 
 existence. To discern this buried world 
 through the medium of his abnormal sensibility, 
 and to reveal it to other men through the 
 medium of kindled emotion, is the true function 
 of the poet. In opposing the real to the ap- 
 parent order of things I am using dualistic 
 language, which I cannot justify except by 
 pleading that human speech is unable to mea- 
 sure the infinite subtlety of Nature. I know 
 well that there are not two orders of things 
 only, but many orders, and that the movement 
 from the pole of appearance to the pole of 
 reality is as continuous as any other natural
 
 movement ; and I can even amuse myself by 
 imagining that, as we have feeling behind 
 feeling, carrying us deeper and deeper into 
 the darkness of the buried self, so we have 
 world behind world, carrying us deeper and 
 deeper into the vie profonde of the Universe.* 
 Nevertheless, the exigencies of speech being 
 what they are, I must continue to oppose the 
 real to the apparent order, trusting that my 
 readers will interpret the words in the sense 
 in which I use them. 
 
 The poet then sees the real order of things, 
 and his vision kindles profound emotion in his 
 heart. That this view of poetry, though 
 seldom consciously taken, is in substantial 
 agreement with what I may call the accepted 
 view, seems to be proved by two significant 
 facts. In the first place it has ever been held 
 that in the poet's nature passion has its counter- 
 part in vision. In bygone days men believed 
 that the poet was divinely inspired, in other 
 words that hidden truth was supernaturally 
 revealed to him ; and this belief has its modern 
 equivalent in the idea that insight, the power of 
 
 * This thought is not wholly fantastic. It means no more 
 than this, that Reality the inmost soul of things reveals itself 
 under different aspects to the different orders of our perceptive 
 faculties, from the simplest and most sensuous to the obscurest 
 and most spiritual, and that each aspect in turn constitutes a 
 new " world." 
 
 18
 
 seeing into the heart of a thing and discerning 
 its hidden properties, is of the very essence of 
 the poetic faculty. In the second place, it is a 
 commonplace of criticism that in the higher 
 forms of poetic creation, such as the Drama, 
 fidelity to Nature is the first thing needful, and 
 its absence the worst of defects. We are apt 
 to talk about the poet as if he were a mere 
 dreamer of idle dreams ; but we know in our 
 hearts that he is a seer and revealer of hidden 
 truth. Even the worldling's earnest conviction 
 that poetry is all moonshine is but a back eddy 
 on the surface of an irresistible stream. 
 
 We must now ask ourselves, where is the 
 real order of things to be found ? Is it in our 
 hearts or in the Universe that lies around us ? 
 The poet is no metaphysician, but (perhaps for 
 that very reason) he is the best of philo- 
 sophers. He resolutely refuses to separate the 
 inward from the outward, the subjective from 
 the objective aspects of existence. The real 
 order of things is in Nature, and Nature is 
 a living and indivisible whole. That is the 
 whole of his philosophy, and it has the twofold 
 merit of being a simple and comprehensive 
 conception. He may never have heard of 
 what metaphysical writers call the "ego" but if 
 you were to talk to him about it, he, or rather 
 his "subliminal self," would probably tell you
 
 that the ego belongs to the outward world 
 quite as much as the outward world belongs 
 to the ego; or, again, that mind volatilizes 
 matter in the act of perception quite as much 
 by diffusing itself through material things and 
 entering into quasi-chemical combination with 
 them as by absorbing them into itself. The 
 dualism of the common-sense philosopher is 
 profoundly repugnant to the poet : so is the 
 one-sided monism of the materialist or the 
 " ego "-maniac. Hence it is that, when he deals 
 with outward nature, he is no mere word- 
 painter. He leaves it to the second-rate 
 novelist to describe scenery, as we call it, for 
 its own sake. It is the spiritual significance of 
 outward things which appeals to him, and to 
 which he strives to give expression in his verse. 
 The intense sympathy which he feels for 
 outward things is thrown back, like reflected 
 light, upon the inner life of man ; and the all- 
 pervading unity of Nature makes the outward 
 order symbolical at every turn of the inward. 
 More than that, the feelings which outward 
 things awake in him are ever transforming 
 themselves into feelings about inward things. 
 Thus for him the violence of the autumnal 
 tempest sweeps through the voids of the 
 human heart; and when he watches the "long 
 moon-silvered roll" of the sea, the "peace that 
 
 20
 
 passeth all understanding " a peace which is 
 half passion, half repose seems to shed a 
 pathway of light on the mystic depths of the 
 "buried life." And if he spiritualizes the 
 outward world, he gives form and substance to 
 the inward. The soul for him is no abstrac- 
 tion, but a reality whose life is inextricably 
 bound up with that of " inanimate Nature," 
 expresses itself in outward action and can be 
 depicted only by the aid of material images. 
 
 An illustration will help me to explain 
 what I mean. The summer dawn is, I think, 
 one of the most beautiful of all physical 
 phenomena. The purity and freshness of the 
 air, the speaking stillness, the ever-changing 
 colours and ever-growing glories of the eastern 
 sky, all minister to our senses and fill us with 
 delight. But for some of us this deep emotion 
 transforms itself into a larger and profounder 
 feeling. The triumph of day over night has 
 ever been symbolical of the triumph in the 
 Universe of spiritual light over darkness ; but 
 when we witness the dawn and receive its 
 message into our hearts, we are not content 
 merely to recognize the fitness of this simile. 
 In and through the feelings that the beauty 
 and wonder of the dawn have generated, 
 another feeling, at once more subtle and more 
 intense, begins to live and work in our hearts ; 
 
 21
 
 a feeling of inexpugnable certitude ; a sense of 
 partnership in a world-wide and eternal victory ; 
 an overmastering conviction that the problems 
 which baffle us, the riddles which mock us, 
 have no real existence, the whole course of 
 Nature being in very truth as sure, as clear, 
 and as glorious as the dawn of day. And as 
 this feeling takes possession of us, we seem at 
 last to become one with the " pure eternal 
 course of things," to share in its transcendent 
 serenity, in its absolute immunity from fear and 
 bewilderment and doubt. It is the function of 
 the poet who describes the dawn to experience 
 this incommunicable feeling and awake it in us. 
 He can do this by so painting the dawn as to 
 ravish our bodily senses through the medium of 
 memory and imagination, and then leaving it to 
 us to discover, behind and beyond the more 
 sensuous feeling, that deeper emotion which I 
 have vainly tried to describe. We are all 
 familiar with Shakspeare's two immortal 
 couplets : 
 
 " Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day 
 Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops '' 
 
 and 
 
 " But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, 
 Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill. 
 
 For me all the magic of the dawn is in these 
 
 22
 
 lines. All my past experiences of the early 
 summer morning live again as I repeat to 
 myself their simple words, and once more, in 
 and through my half-sensuous delight, I read 
 for a moment the innermost secret of the 
 Universe. But sometimes the poet leads us 
 nearer to the spiritual feeling and half suggests 
 it to us. When Tennyson tells us that the 
 breeze which heralds the dawn 
 
 " died away ; 
 " And East and West, without a breath, 
 
 Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, 
 To broaden into boundless day." 
 
 he reveals the feeling of triumphant convic- 
 tion even to those who had never been con- 
 scious of its existence, he shows them that it 
 belongs to them and has ever belonged to 
 them, and he makes it live and work in their 
 hearts. 
 
 I am trying to prove that in the poet's 
 philosophy the inward and outward aspects of 
 existence are ever tending to lose themselves 
 in a higher unity. In the lines from " In 
 Memoriam," which I have just quoted, we 
 surely find an apt illustration of this tendency. 
 The dawn of hope in the poet's heart after a 
 long night of sorrow, sends him for sympathy 
 to earth and sky at the mystic hour of their 
 dawn ; and then and there, in the very heart of 
 
 23
 
 inanimate Nature, he finds himself face to face 
 with the most inward and spiritual of all 
 experiences. His individual hope loses itself 
 in a mighty hope for the whole Universe : nay, 
 hope itself passes beyond itself into an all- 
 embracing and all-conquering certitude, as 
 before his gazing eyes the "dim lights" of 
 " East and West," of " life and death " 
 
 " broaden into boundless day." 
 
 It has been well said that the poet always sees 
 the universal in the particular. The reason of 
 this is that he goes so deep into himself (and, 
 therefore, into outward things) by the force of 
 his emotion and insight, that he at last reaches 
 a level of existence below that (perhaps I 
 ought to say above that) at which Nature 
 seems, for the individual consciousness, to 
 bifurcate into the subjective and objective 
 worlds ; a level which is, comparatively speak- 
 ing, near to that universal, world-deep life in 
 which all things inward and outward, animate 
 and inanimate live and move and have their 
 being. He is thus able to free the individual 
 ego from the bonds of subjectivity, and to send 
 it forth into the outward world, whence, after 
 diffusing itself through all material things, it 
 returns to him as the universal ego, from one 
 point of view the inner life of the Cosmos, 
 
 24
 
 from another his own true self. In other words, 
 he both spiritualizes the outward and visible 
 world, and universalizes the inward and 
 spiritual life. I sometimes think that the very 
 mainspring of poetry is a desire a dim and 
 instinctive, but profound and passionate desire 
 to escape from self (in the narrow sense of 
 the word), to expand the soul till it shall 
 transcend all wonted limits, and at once lose 
 and find itself in the larger life of the living 
 Whole. If this be so, then the old-world ideas 
 of poetic ecstasy, rapture, inspiration, of the 
 poet being carried out of himself, transported 
 beyond himself, may after all have some 
 foundation in sober fact. The desire to escape 
 from self may be in some sort its own cause 
 and its own fulfilment. 
 
 We shall do well, then, to follow the 
 guidance of the poet, and say that the hidden 
 realities which kindle poetic emotion belong 
 neither to the inward nor to the outward order, 
 but to the cosmic order, to Nature as such, 
 the buried life of the poet's heart being 
 strangely akin to, and perhaps in the last resort 
 identical with, the buried life of the world 
 that lies around him. Reality, such reality as 
 Man is competent to discover, reality, wherever 
 or whatever it may be, is the object of the 
 poet's vision, and the source of those large and 
 
 25 E
 
 exalted feelings to which he seeks to give 
 expression. 
 
 That I may the more clearly explain my 
 conception of poetry, I will now try by its aid 
 to solve certain insoluble problems, with which 
 every lover of poetry is fated to torment 
 himself. 
 
 In what relation does poetry stand to 
 science ? The question is often asked, seldom 
 answered. Both poetry and science " find the 
 real in the unapparent." Both go below the 
 surface of things. Both go behind and beyond 
 what is palpable. The difference between 
 them is that from the same starting point they 
 go off in diametrically opposite directions,* 
 
 * It will be asked, How can poetry and science both go 
 below the surface of things and yet go off in diametrically 
 opposite directions ? In answer to this question, I can but say 
 that it is never wise to lean heavily on a metaphor. I have 
 said much about the buried life, the deeper feelings, the life 
 below the surface of consciousness and so forth ; but I have 
 never allowed my thought to become enslaved to this metaphor, 
 for such it is, of depth. We all know from experience that we 
 have two kinds of sub-conscious life, one material and the other 
 spiritual. Nearly all the processes of our animal life processes 
 of digestion, secretion, disintegration, re- integration of tissue, 
 &c. go on without our being in the least aware of what is 
 happening. But this sub-conscious life of the body has nothing 
 in common with the inner life of the soul. If the former life 
 may fitly be spoken of as sub-conscious ; the term super-con- 
 scious ought in strictness to be applied to the latter, conscious- 
 ness itself being likened to the surface of the sea, which is also 
 
 26
 
 science in the direction of analysis, poetry 
 of higher synthesis. I have tried to show how 
 poetry deals with the phenomenon of the 
 dawn. We speak of the dawn as a physical 
 phenomenon. It is really a synthesis of an 
 infinite number of physical phenomena. 
 Science is ready, if we ask it, to take each of 
 these and analyse it into its constituent 
 elements and underlying laws. In this way it 
 carries us beyond and behind the apparent, but 
 in doing so it disintegrates the objects of our 
 
 the surface of the atmosphere, and which is balanced, as it were, 
 between the two infinities of water and air. This simile may 
 serve to throw light on the antithetical relation in which poetry 
 stands to science. If the conscious life of body and soul, 
 which seems to us in our ordinary moods to be the whole of 
 life, has as its objective counterpart that superficial aspect of 
 existence which seems to us in our ordinary moods to be the 
 whole world, may it not be that the sub-conscious life of 
 the body has as its objective counterpart that material base of 
 existence towards which science is ever tending to work its 
 way by analysing things into their parts and elements, while 
 the sub-conscious life of the soul has as its objective counter- 
 part that supreme synthesis towards which poetry is ever tend- 
 ing to work its way by building things up, in and through the 
 act of perception, into indivisible wholes. (It is worthy of note 
 that both in the sub-conscious and in the super-conscious life 
 the distinction between subject and object, which is clearly 
 marked in the light of consciousness, is ever tending to vanish). 
 But though this simile is useful and suggestive, I propose, 
 when dealing with the sub conscious life of the soul, to adhere 
 to the time-honoured metaphor of depth s I propose to say, in 
 accordance with established usage, that poetry expresses deep 
 emotions which have their home in the buritd life.
 
 emotions and disenchants our hearts. One by 
 one, the various qualities of things, from the 
 most spiritual down to the most material, 
 vanish at the probing touch of science, until 
 at last we begin to see looming in the dim 
 background, the phantom shadows, the pale 
 abstractions of Mathematics, the science that 
 underlies all other sciences, the Goddess of the 
 dead, 
 
 " Who gathers all things mortal 
 With cold immortal hands." 
 
 We are not deeply moved when the physicist 
 talks to us about the rotation of the earth on 
 its axis, the declination of the sun below the 
 horizon, and the reflection of its light by the 
 air and the clouds and vapour suspended in it : 
 but we are deeply moved when the poet tells 
 us (the words are so beautiful that I must ask 
 permission to repeat them once more) that 
 
 " East and West, without a breath, 
 Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, 
 To broaden into boundless day." 
 
 The physicist disintegrates the various pheno- 
 mena of the dawn. The poet fuses them by 
 the force of his emotion into the glorious and 
 wonderful whole which generates his emotion, 
 poetic emotion being essentially a synoptic 
 faculty, whose very receptivity makes it crea- 
 
 28
 
 tive and whose fire is both lit and reflected 
 by the objects of its vision. And as the 
 emotion deepens, even this synthesis no longer 
 contents him. The whole panorama of the 
 dawn becomes a transient aspect of a higher 
 and yet more spiritual synthesis, and he seems 
 at last to be feeling his way towards the 
 highest of all syntheses, the One in the Many, 
 " the only source of all our life and light." It 
 is true that science too seeks for unity in 
 multiplicity ; but it is unity of relation that it 
 seeks, not unity of substance the unity of an 
 all-controlling law, not the unity of an all- 
 sustaining life. The difference between them 
 may be looked at from another point of view. 
 Both aim at knowledge ; but whereas science 
 desires to know all about things, poetry desires 
 to know them as one knows the heart of a 
 familiar friend. The physicist entirely detaches 
 himself from the objects of his investigation : 
 the poet identifies himself as closely as possible 
 with the objects of his emotion. If we could 
 imagine a physicist, pure and simple, and a 
 poet, pure and simple, standing side by side 
 and watching a glorious sunset, the one would 
 be wondering how the given colours got into 
 the sky and trying to solve the corresponding 
 problem or problems, whereas the other would 
 be striving to lift the veil that hangs between 
 
 29
 
 what he feels and what he sees, to merge his 
 being in the splendour of the western sky, 
 to absorb its life into his own. Science and 
 poetry may be said to derive their respective 
 titles to existence from charters which Nature 
 herself has conferred upon them. Science is 
 bound by its charter to be cold, impersonal, 
 unemotional. Poetry is bound by its charter 
 to be warm, personal, passionate. If we would 
 realize how far apart from one another the 
 two can be carried in the pursuit of their re- 
 spective ideals, let us first read, or try to 
 read, a scientific masterpiece a profound 
 mathematical treatise, let us say and then 
 turn from it to a poetical masterpiece, to the 
 "Agamemnon," let us say, or to " King Lear." 
 I can well believe that, just as "too far East 
 is West," so poetry and science starting from 
 the actual and going off in opposite directions 
 will meet at last. I can well believe that what 
 is ultimate in analysis will be found in the last 
 resort to coincide with what is ultimate in 
 synthesis, matter resolving itself into force, and 
 force, which after all is the expression of an 
 inward experience, being traced up to the only 
 fountains of force of which we have personal 
 experience, namely, will and love. Mean- 
 while, however, we must face the fact that, 
 though poetry and science both seek for the 
 
 30
 
 real in the apparent, their search for reality 
 carries them in diametrically opposite direc- 
 tions, that they are therefore antithetical 
 though not really antagonistic to one another, 
 and that they have widely different functions 
 to fulfil. 
 
 What is imagination, and what part does 
 it play in poetry ? It is commonly regarded as 
 the most poetic of poetic gifts ; and yet for 
 many persons, including some who profess to 
 admire poetry, it is a mendacious faculty, a 
 faculty by means of which we amuse ourselves 
 with delusions and dreams. If this were so, 
 the poet would be a mere weaver of fantastic 
 fairy tales, and we should be at a loss to 
 account for his authority and influence, and for 
 the high honour which has ever been paid to 
 him. If we would know what imagination 
 really is, let us first study it in its more homely 
 and familiar forms. Its work may be said to 
 begin where that of perception and memory 
 ends. Perception deals with what one sees. 
 Memory with what one has seen. Imagination 
 is the power of picturing the unseen : or, to be 
 more precise, of realizing familiar things in new 
 combinations, in combinations which go beyond 
 the limits of our actual experience. Such a 
 power evidently depends for its effective
 
 existence on a just and true perception of what 
 is within our experience. For example, it is 
 by means of imagination that we can in some 
 measure realize scenes in other countries and 
 other ages. But it would be impossible for us 
 to realize such scenes if we had no feeling for 
 or insight into the scenes with which we are 
 familiar. You are told one or two facts about 
 the meeting of two persons whom you know, 
 and then left to imagine the whole scene. You 
 will be able to imagine it, to realize what 
 actually happened, just so far as you really 
 know the persons, or in other words have 
 a sympathetic insight into their characters and, 
 therefore, an instinctive appreciation of what 
 they would say and do in the given circum- 
 stances. This is imagination in its more 
 everyday form. Yet even here one sees how 
 great is its power and how vast are its 
 capacities. And even here one sees that 
 reality is its object, and sympathy its proximate 
 source. 
 
 What makes imagination possible is the 
 unity and self-identity of Nature. Nature is 
 one with itself, in spite of its infinite variety, 
 from pole to pole of its being ; and, therefore, 
 to know any given portion of it is to have a 
 partial or rather a potential knowledge of the 
 rest. But in order to go far beyond the 
 
 32
 
 horizon of experience, we must have something 
 more than a superficial knowledge of Nature : 
 we must have a knowledge of it so true and 
 deep as to enable us to penetrate to the heart 
 of the universe, to that centre of things which 
 may be reached from all parts, and is the same 
 for all parts, of the ensphering surface. We 
 must have, as it were, a clue to Nature as a 
 whole, a clue which is vouchsafed only to those 
 who have got to what is vital and essential in 
 their own experience, if we are to go boldly, as 
 the greatest of us have done, into every winding 
 of its labyrinth. In other words, imagination 
 of a high order implies insight which is un- 
 usually penetrative and clear. 
 
 It is this high order of imagination which 
 is characteristic of the poet. If it requires 
 imagination to make mental pictures of scenes 
 which are presented to us in words, it requires 
 imagination of a far higher order to call such 
 scenes into being. The imagination of the 
 poet is active where ours is passive. It creates 
 new combinations of things where ours does 
 but attempt to realize them. 
 
 Now in such creations truth to Nature is 
 the first thing demanded. The poet must have 
 analysed the objects of his experience into their 
 essential parts before attempting to reconstruct 
 them, or his structures will fall to pieces at the 
 
 33
 
 first probing touch. It is in virtue of high 
 imagination that the Drama is possible ; and it 
 is a truism to say that in the Drama to depart 
 from Nature is to go far astray. When a 
 dramatist depicts things as they ought not to 
 be, when he combines in the same person in- 
 compatible powers and purposes, when he 
 carries out tendencies into inappropriate action, 
 we say at once that his work is bad ; and we 
 account for this by attributing to him either a 
 defective imagination or an imperfect insight 
 into character. This again shows that imagina- 
 tion is the other self of insight, and that reality 
 is the object of both. 
 
 That daring form of imagination in which, 
 after a faultlessly correct analysis, the essential 
 elements of things are re-combined into wholes 
 which are not only beyond actual but even 
 beyond possible experience, is very rare and is 
 a mark of exceptional genius. It might indeed 
 seem as if here, at its highest point, imagination 
 deliberately departed from Nature. But no : 
 even here the great poet is true to essential 
 reality. No one was ever more daringly 
 imaginative than the creator of the " Tempest " 
 and the " Midsummer's Night's Dream," and it 
 is of him that Lamb says, in language which is 
 as true as it is paradoxical, " Where he seems 
 most to recede from humanity he will be found 
 
 34
 
 the truest to it. From beyond the scope of 
 Nature if he summon possible existences, he 
 subjugates them to the law of her consistency. 
 He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign direct- 
 ness even when he seems most to betray and 
 desert her. Caliban, the Witches are as true 
 to the laws of their own nature (ours with a 
 difference) as Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth." 
 
 These examples show that the essence of 
 imagination is perception of hidden truth. 
 That its source is vivid emotion seems to be 
 generally allowed and is certainly in keeping 
 with the conception which we have formed of 
 it. We have seen that the one thing needed 
 to generate imagination is this, to know one's 
 own sample of N ature so truly and so well, that 
 one gets as it were the key to the whole and so 
 can picture and even construct the rest. Now 
 there is one sample of Nature which is 
 intimately and for all time one's own, and that 
 is one's own self. Know your own self well, 
 and you will be able to imagine how others 
 think and feel, to anticipate their desires and 
 impulses, to forecast their aims and purposes, 
 and so to construct in any given case their 
 probable courses of action. But self-knowledge 
 depends not upon introspection, not upon 
 psychological study, but upon the vividness of 
 one's own inner life. You are yourself at once 
 
 35
 
 subject and object. Your very existence is 
 potential self-knowledge. Realize yourself 
 live strongly and vividly and your self-know- 
 ledge will become actual, and through it you 
 will gain that insight into human nature, that 
 wide and subtle sympathy which is imagina- 
 tion's other self. 
 
 Not that even this is the whole of ima- 
 gination. That Protean faculty has another 
 and a yet wider self. The poet's imagina- 
 tion does more than give him insight into 
 human nature. It gives him insight into the 
 heart of cosmic nature, into the very " soul of 
 things." The subtle and indefinable atmo- 
 sphere of beauty with which he invests his 
 creations, and which we rightly regard as one 
 of the highest products of his imagination, is no 
 mere mirage of an overheated brain. Expe- 
 rience, as genuine as it is obscure, has generated 
 it ; and reality, as profound as it is impalpable, 
 is its counterpart. The ether waves of spiritual 
 charm that vibrate through the poet's work, 
 vibrate eternally through all the realms of 
 existence. When poetry enchants us, they 
 flash, for a fleeting instant, on our sight. 
 
 " The light that never was on sea or land," 
 
 a light which ever was, and is, and shall be, 
 though most eyes are blind to it, is seen by 
 
 36
 
 the poet, seen with that " inward eye " which is 
 the true organ of imagination, and revealed to 
 us through the medium of the emotion which 
 his voice kindles in our hearts. And it is 
 because he is intensely emotional and, there- 
 fore, abnormally sensitive and impressionable, 
 that he is able to perceive rays of light to which 
 the rest of us are blind. In other words, the 
 imagination that enables him to discover and 
 reproduce Nature's obscurer aspects, is the out- 
 come of the sensibility that enables him to re- 
 spond to Nature's more occult influences. In 
 fine, the very qualities of his work which we are 
 most ready to attribute to his perfervid imagi- 
 nation, the rarer and more volatile essences to 
 which his poetry owes its special charm, have 
 been distilled by his passionate sympathy, not 
 from the dreams of a disordered mind, but from 
 some of the most real, though doubtless least 
 palpable, of Nature's environing realities. On 
 no other hypothesis can we account for their 
 presence and their attractive force. 
 
 Perhaps the highest achievement of which 
 imagination is capable is that of realizing that 
 the true order of things in the universe is in 
 the last resort unimaginable. Ordinary men in 
 their ordinary moods are disposed to rest in the 
 evidence of their bodily senses, and regard it as 
 adequate and conclusive; and so, when they 
 
 37
 
 "exercise themselves in great matters" they are 
 content to think, or rather to have their thinking 
 done for them, in signs and symbols, in pictures 
 and images. But the poet, born artist though 
 he be, is also a born iconoclast. When we say 
 that he is emotional along the whole range of 
 his nature, we imply that his sub-conscious and 
 supersensual perceptive faculties are abnormally 
 developed ; and, thanks to these faculties, he is 
 able to feel his way through those unimagi- 
 nable regions which for most men are a land 
 of dreams and shadows, but for him are alone 
 substantial and real. Moreover, though he is 
 keenly sensitive to the charm of outward form, 
 he never, even for a passing moment, mistakes 
 the symbol for the thing symbolized. Nay, 
 it is because beauty, the beauty of outward 
 form, has a special fascination for him, because 
 it inflames his thirst even while it seems to 
 quench it, that he is ever tending to pass 
 beyond it in quest of that ideal beauty which 
 is veiled from his eyes by the very symbols 
 that profess to reveal it. His quest, as he 
 knows well, is endless. 
 
 " For though his soul sail leagues and leagues beyond, 
 Still leagues beyond those leagues there is more sea." 
 
 The poet climbs the " hills of Time," not 
 in order that he may rest on their summits or 
 
 38
 
 look down from them into the "vale of Time," 
 but in order that he may discover from their 
 watch-towers the cloudlike outlines of the 
 "mountains of Eternity." As the unattainable 
 is the only adequate object of his heart's desire, 
 so it is only in the sphere of the unimaginable 
 that his imagination can find its appointed 
 home. Nor is this negative form of imagina- 
 tion, this faith in and thirst for the unimagi- 
 nable, as barren and inoperative as it might 
 seem to be to the careless observer. On the 
 contrary, it is active and even creative on the 
 largest scale and in the highest degree. For it 
 is within the illimitable limits which it assigns 
 to man's latent capacity for desire and wonder, 
 that all the more familiar forms of imagination, 
 fostered by freedom and quickened by the stimu- 
 lus of an unattainable ideal, live and move and 
 have their being. 
 
 Deep feeling, then, is the source of imagi- 
 nation. Insight into the heart of Nature is of 
 its essence. Reality is its end and aim. We 
 sometimes speak of it as if it were one among 
 many faculties ; or rather as if it were the 
 peculiar endowment of a few exceptional men. 
 It is not. It is the true life of each of us. If 
 it does not initiate all or even many of us into 
 Nature's diviner mysteries, it does one work 
 in which, and in the fruition of which, even the 
 
 39
 
 least of us may share ; it " makes the whole 
 world kin." To be entirely without it is to be 
 less than a man. In its highest form it 
 
 Is but another name for absolute power 
 And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, 
 And Reason in her most exalted mood. 
 
 I have said that the imagination of the 
 poet is active and creative where ours is passive 
 and receptive. Creation and imitation have 
 often been contrasted, and it is still in dispute 
 which of the two elements ought to pre- 
 dominate in art. I know little of any art but 
 poetry, but I feel sure that there the creative 
 and imitative tendencies are neither enemies 
 nor rivals, but fellow-labourers and friends. 
 Poetry is creative just so far as it is truly 
 imitative, and it is truly imitative just so far as 
 it is creative. To create without imitating is 
 to weave tissues of gossamer. To imitate 
 without creating is to twist ropes of sand. 
 The poet does not invent a new order of 
 things. He sees the real order. The world is 
 what it is. To see it as it really is, to interpret 
 it and represent it to us who cannot see so 
 clearly or so well, this is the highest aim of 
 poetry, and fidelity to Nature is its crowning 
 triumph. So far the poet is imitative. On the 
 other hand, his interpretation of Nature is 
 deeply different from that of the botanist or 
 
 40
 
 the geologist. He is not faithful to Nature as 
 these would conceive of fidelity. His sense is 
 for general effects, which exist only for those 
 who are able to see them. Astronomy knows 
 nothing of "the silence that is in the starry 
 skies." Geology knows nothing of " the sleep 
 that is among the lonely hills." These are 
 aspects of Nature that live only in the poetic 
 heart : but they are real aspects and not fictions. 
 He who feels them and brings them home to 
 our feelings deals with realities. He reproduces 
 what is actually existent. He does not invent. 
 But this real order of things which it is his pri- 
 vilege to discern and his mission to reveal, is 
 presumably a hidden order. For ordinary men 
 in their ordinary moods the objects of the poet's 
 insight can scarcely be said to exist. In seeing 
 and revealing them he brings them, as it were, 
 to the birth : he produces rather than repro- 
 duces : he creates rather than imitates. 
 
 For example. It is as correct to speak of 
 the " creations " of a great dramatist as it is to 
 say, with Aristotle, that the function of the Drama 
 is to " imitate " action. In the Drama indeed it is 
 obviously essential that the poet should be both 
 imitative and creative ; but there is no branch 
 of poetry in which the co-operation of the two 
 tendencies is not indispensable to success. 
 Look at Keats's " Ode to Autumn," a poem 
 
 41
 
 which, though perhaps too non-human to be 
 really great, is yet within its limits well-nigh 
 perfect. It will be found, if the poem be 
 analysed, that it is as accurate* as it is imagina- 
 tive, as faithful to the actual as it is to the ideal. 
 Read it line by line. Each detail comes from 
 Nature. The poet does not invent it. He 
 opens his eyes and sees what is there for any- 
 one to see. He accepts what he is given. So 
 far as he does this, he is imitative, passively 
 imitative and nothing more. But the poem is 
 far more than a mere list of natural phenomena. 
 It is in a sense a revelation. It enables us, 
 perhaps for the first time, to realize in all its 
 strength and subtlety the influence of Autumn. 
 That overflowing wealth, evidence of a perfec- 
 tion which is itself the first beginning of decay ; 
 that melancholy beauty, melancholy because 
 the beauty of perfection must needs lack the 
 radiant freshness of hope and promise ; these 
 we feel as we never felt them before. The 
 poet has the secret of Autumn. He under- 
 stands it and helps us to understand it. To 
 do this is to reveal, and to reveal is to create. 
 Let us ask ourselves what the poet has 
 
 * The personification of Autumn in the second stanza is of 
 course a mere matter of " notation," which in no way detracts 
 from the accuracy, the fidelity to material fact, of the whole 
 poem. 
 
 42
 
 done. In any scene of outward nature there is 
 an infinite host of details, the mere enumeration 
 of which would overtask the resources of the 
 most conscientious of naturalists. The poet 
 discards ninety-nine out of every hundred of 
 these and lets the hundredth remain. The 
 author of the " Ode to Autumn " has seen by 
 a miracle of insight which of the details of 
 autumnal scenery are essential to autumnal 
 beauty, or at any rate to the particular aspect 
 of autumnal beauty which he wishes to repre- 
 sent These he has brought together, invested 
 with the subtle charm of poetic diction and 
 rhythm, grouped according to their power over 
 our hearts, and built up into a perfect whole, 
 the exquisite picture of the poem. The faculty 
 that enables him to do this is active rather 
 than passive. Passive imitation, though indis- 
 pensable, is in itself nothing. To string 
 together twenty or thirty details,, faultlessly 
 correct though each may be, no more makes a 
 picture than to string together twenty or thirty 
 words makes a sentence or a stanza. Say, if 
 you will, that to represent beauty is to repre- 
 sent what belongs to Nature, and that therefore 
 the poet even in his highest flights is still imita- 
 tive. In a sense he is. But there is a differ- 
 ence, not merely of degree but of kind, between 
 the power of imitating what is palpable and the 
 
 43
 
 power of imitating, if we are still to use the 
 word, what is hidden. The former furnishes 
 the ftX| or "matter" of poetry. The latter 
 gives it its " form." To imitate what is palpa- 
 ble is indispensable to poetic creation. To 
 imitate what is hidden is itself to create. 
 
 True poetry, then, is both imitative and 
 creative. The two tendencies are in perfect 
 harmony with one another, and the feud 
 between them is a mere figment of the critic's 
 brain. The kindred feud between realism 
 and idealism in art is equally hollow and 
 futile. If the realist is one who strives to 
 represent reality, then all true artists are 
 realists, and the idealist is of all realists the 
 most uncompromisingly realistic. For what is 
 the idealist? Is he not one who seeks to 
 realize an ideal, to give outward form to an 
 inward vision, in fine to express feelings which 
 are large and deep and which seem to him to 
 be supremely true and beautiful ? Such a man 
 may fairly claim to have taken service under 
 the banner of reality ; for the feelings that 
 haunt him are inexplicable (so he unconsciously 
 argues) except on the assumption that they 
 have reality of a high order for their counter- 
 part. In the light of his inward vision he sees 
 that our (so-called) realities are in very truth 
 
 44
 
 " such stuff as dreams are made of" ; and so 
 his quest of the ideal is the outcome of a pro- 
 found discontent with the actual and of a 
 passionate desire to discover the real. It is 
 true that in his attempt to interpret his far-off 
 feelings he is liable, perhaps more liable than 
 ordinary men, to quit the high road of experi- 
 ence and lose himself in fantastic byways. 
 But that is an accident with which I need not 
 concern myself. In aim, at any rate, the 
 idealist is a whole-hearted realist. The real 
 feud is not between idealism and realism, but 
 between realism and that conception of art 
 which has recently usurped the name of real- 
 ism, but which ought, I think, to be called 
 actualism. The poet, like every other true 
 artist, knows that the real order of things is 
 deeply different from the apparent order, and 
 from this he instinctively argues that if he is to 
 be faithful to reality, he must represent things, 
 not as they are in all their material detail,* but 
 as they seem to be when he sees them through 
 the medium of the emotion which they them- 
 selves kindle in his heart : he argues, in other 
 
 * To represent things as they are in themselves (if these 
 words have any meaning) is of course impossible. What things 
 may be in themselves is no concern of ours. Our choice lies 
 between representing things as they seem to be to our ordinary 
 senses, and as they seem to be to those deeper and rarer per- 
 ceptive faculties which are yet potentially common to all men. 
 
 45
 
 words, that true realism is based on fidelity to 
 feeling rather than to apparent fact. But realism, 
 in the modern sense of the word, pseudo-realism 
 as I prefer to call it, holds that fidelity to ma- 
 terial detail is of the essence of true art To 
 call such a conception of art realistic is to beg 
 the question that is in dispute. If our bodily 
 senses are competent to see the world as it 
 really is, then it is certain that fidelity to the 
 actual is the highest of artistic virtues ; and it is 
 equally certain, to go a step further, that art in 
 general and poetry in particular have no busi- 
 ness to exist. For art in general and poetry in 
 particular exist in order to protest against that 
 superficial conception of truth which is based 
 on the average man's uncritical prejudice in 
 favour of the actual, a prejudice which, owing 
 to the undue influence of physical science on 
 contemporary thought, has recently been raised 
 to the dignity of an artistic principle. From 
 first to last the poet is inspired and sustained 
 by an undying faith in the essential loveliness 
 of Nature ; and so when he finds, as he too 
 often does, that truth, or what passes for truth, 
 is sordid and repulsive, he instinctively assumes 
 that he is not in contact with the vraie verite 
 of things ; and in the strength of this conviction 
 he passes behind the apparent and beyond the 
 actual in quest of that hidden reality which is 
 
 46
 
 (he must needs believe) both beautiful and true. 
 I do not forget that the greatest poets have 
 again and again made dreadful tragedies, ending 
 apparently in irremediable misery, the themes 
 of immortal verse. But what does this mean ? 
 This, I think, that the poet sees not only that 
 there is beauty in failure and suffering, but that 
 beauty is fairer to our mortal eyes when it burns 
 through the veil of failure and suffering than 
 when it shines in a cloudless sky ; just as the 
 light of the sun is loveliest when it gilds the 
 edges of dark and disastrous clouds.* Misery, 
 in the inventions of the pseudo-realist, is what it 
 seems to be to the superficial observer, hideous 
 and hopeless and hateful. Misery, in the crea- 
 tions of the master-poet, is, as in Nature, fringed, 
 where it is darkest, with the lustre of a hidden 
 light. 
 
 It is in the name of science and in the 
 supposed interest of truth that the pseudo- 
 realist photographs the actual. He forgets, 
 when he calls himself a realist, that the ten- 
 
 * Tragedy has, of course, another meaning. There are 
 certain rare and heroic qualities of human nature, and certain 
 deep and obscure feelings of the human heart, which cannot 
 unfold themselves except in the atmosphere of adversity, and 
 which cannot fully unfold themselves except in response to the 
 demand made upon them by some dire extremity of danger or 
 distress. Perhaps it is from these rarer qualities and deeper 
 feelings that the light comes which at last redeems misery from 
 despair. 
 
 47
 
 dency of science is to subordinate reality to 
 truth.* And perhaps he would serve truth 
 better if he were less jealous in its cause. For 
 poetry, which subordinates truth first to beauty 
 and then (through beauty) to reality, has, I think, 
 a more genuine concern for truth than science 
 itself. 
 
 I will now summarize the contents of 
 this chapter in a few final sentences. Poetry 
 is the expression of deep and strong feeling. 
 Wherever there is feeling, there is something 
 to be felt. Deep and strong feeling is gene- 
 rated by contact with, and implies perception of, 
 hidden reality. In other words, poetic feeling 
 has clear insight for its counterpart. The re- 
 lation between emotion and insight is one of 
 action and reaction. The emotionalness of the 
 poet his sensitive and sympathetic nature 
 enables him to see his way into the heart of 
 things and to apprehend their deeper and truer 
 properties. If these deeper and truer proper- 
 ties are to be apprehended at all, they must be 
 
 * The scientific mind desires to know the truth about things 
 as fully and accurately as possible ; and a quasi-professional 
 bias in favour of its own subject-matter is ever tempting it to 
 assume that what is most knowable is also most real, an assump- 
 tion which probably inverts the true order of things, for if the 
 inward standard of reality may be trusted, what is most real is 
 least knowable. 
 
 48
 
 apprehended emotionally, for they are so great 
 and real that they must needs kindle emotion 
 in all who are permitted to discern them. In 
 this way insight is ever tending to generate 
 emotion, just as emotion is ever tending to 
 generate insight. 
 
 In virtue of his emotional insight, the poet's 
 mind is synthetic rather than analytic ; creative 
 as well as imitative ; imaginative without being 
 merely fanciful ; idealistic, and therefore realistic, 
 in the true sense of that much-abused word. 
 
 So much as to what the poet is in him- 
 self. But he cannot keep himself to himself. 
 Strong feeling can never rest till it has found 
 an outlet, and sooner or later the poet's emo- 
 tional insight will have to express itself in some 
 outward form. 
 
 In fine, then, and in brief, the poet is one 
 who sees the real order of things in the uni- 
 verse, and who is so inspired by his vision that 
 he is constrained to tell us what he has seen.. 
 How does he do this? 
 
 49
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 
 
 PART II.
 
 PART II. 
 
 EXPRESSION 
 
 How does the poet make us feel what he feels, 
 and so see what he has seen ? To this ques- 
 tion I answer, without hesitation, " By letting 
 his feeling find its own voice." 
 
 If the writings of the master poets be 
 carefully studied, it will, I think, be found that 
 there are two features which their work, at any 
 rate at its highest level, never lacks : 
 
 (1) Spontaneity. True poetry is the natural 
 
 and inevitable expression of strong 
 feeling ; the expression which the 
 feeling has, as it were, found for itself. 
 
 (2) The power of communicating feeling. 
 
 True poetry makes others feel what 
 the poet himself has felt. 
 These are different aspects of the same 
 essential quality. Let us consider each in turn. 
 True poetry is the language which feeling 
 finds for itself. 
 
 53
 
 In the first place, strong feeling must 
 " wreak " itself " upon expression." When 
 the fire is genuinely kindled, it cannot do less 
 than break into a flame. " Une pensee ferme 
 et vive" says a great critic, " emporte neces- 
 sairement avec elle son expression." If this 
 be true, as it surely is, it is still truer that in- 
 tense emotion tends to give eloquence to the 
 man whom it inspires. It is notorious that 
 simple and uncultured natures find in moments 
 of passion the exact word for what they feel, 
 " le mot juste et souvent unique" And as is 
 the feeling, so will be the expression. A single 
 jet of passion may find relief in a single word 
 or sentence; but when emotion wells up in a 
 perennial fountain, it needs an ampler and more 
 permanent outlet for its flood. This it will find, 
 if language be its normal medium of expression, 
 in one channel only, that of poetry. It is pos- 
 sible that there are genuinely poetic souls who 
 lack the poetic utterance. But, speaking gene- 
 rally, it is only in gaining its voice that strong 
 emotion reaches its full strength. Feeling and 
 expression act and react on one another. In 
 the poetic nature there are innumerable feelings 
 and shades of feeling, " qui veulent naitre" It 
 is only in the poet that they are strong enough 
 to come to the birth. Sometimes, though this 
 is very rare, they come to the birth, but there 
 
 54
 
 is not strength to bring forth. When, for ex- 
 ample, I read Walt Whitman's formless "poems," 
 I feel that I am witnessing the ineffectual birth- 
 throes of feelings which are too large and too 
 deep to find adequate utterance in human speech. 
 I have already quoted Wordsworth's well- 
 known definition of poetry as " the spontaneous 
 overflow of powerful feelings." That the over- 
 flow should be spontaneous is as essential as 
 that the feelings should be powerful. Indeed 
 it is because (as we have just seen) powerful 
 feelings do and must overflow, that poetry is 
 possible and, under certain conditions, inevi- 
 table; and, therefore, if the poet's verse lack 
 spontaneity, we may rest assured that it has not 
 been genuinely inspired. That the flow of poetic 
 feeling should not be consciously regulated, that 
 the current should be able to take and should be 
 allowed to take its own course, is one of the first 
 canons of poetic art. In poetry true feeling 
 finds a voice. It is all important that it should 
 find a true voice, find its own voice in fact, 
 speak in its own language. This it will not do 
 if the poet deliberately sets himself to observe, 
 interpret, and express it. It is impossible for a 
 man both to be swayed by strong emotion and 
 to observe with intellectual interest the workings 
 of his heart. The feeling that has begun to be 
 analysed has ceased to exist. Or rather, if it is 
 
 55
 
 a really deep feeling, it has found a refuge from 
 the prying eye of consciousness in the darkness 
 of the buried life. It follows that poets who 
 write with clear consciousness write without 
 inspiration ; in other words, that they do not 
 write poetry. 
 
 When I say this, I do not mean that the 
 poet should work without intelligence and with- 
 out a purpose, that he should simply wait for 
 the afflatus and resign himself passively to its 
 influence. I only mean that in his moods or 
 seasons of creativeness, intelligence should be 
 subordinated to inspiration, that the "divine 
 madness " of passion should be supreme. Nor 
 do I wish to suggest that the poet should hold 
 himself absolved from obedience to the rules 
 and principles of his art. But just as in the 
 ferment of his feelings he is unconsciously 
 brought into contact with large ideas and pro- 
 found truths, so, in expressing his feelings, he 
 must follow the canons of true art, but not of 
 set purpose or with deliberate forethought. 
 Rather he must follow them because he cannot 
 help doing so, because they are part of his very 
 self. It may indeed be the business of his life 
 to instruct himself in his art, and to study its 
 principles with a view to applying them. But 
 at the time of composition, or at any rate in the 
 moment of inspiration, his study must show 
 
 56
 
 itself as instinct. His artistic instinct, his sense 
 of the beautiful, trained and developed perhaps, 
 but still an instinct, still a sense, must be his 
 guide. He cannot lay down laws for himself 
 beforehand. "His discretion must be his 
 tutor." A poet might be a master of metre, 
 but one would not expect him to write a scien- 
 tific treatise on metrical form. One would 
 scarcely be surprised if he failed to analyse his 
 own metres, and proved unable to name or even 
 describe the feet of which his lines are composed. 
 Yet who knows what is beautiful in metre, or 
 what forms of verse best lend themselves to 
 what feelings, so truly and so sympathetically 
 as the poet? He knows it so well, because the 
 knowledge is part of himself; part, one might 
 say, of the very feeling which forces expression 
 for itself in his verse. What I say of metrical 
 form holds good of every other aspect of poetical 
 composition. Speaking generally, the poet is 
 as little conscious in dealing with the principles 
 of his art as in dealing with the ideas which his 
 feeling reveals. A wise instinct leads him to 
 follow a poet's advice, 
 
 "Trust the spirit, 
 
 As sovran Nature does, to make the form, 
 For otherwise we only imprison spirit 
 And not embody. Inward evermore 
 To outward, so in life, and so in art, 
 Which still is life." 
 
 57
 
 Given a deep and subtle sensibility ; given 
 a love of what is beautiful in language, in rhythm, 
 and in melody ; given a wide experience and a 
 long course of training ; given that one has 
 breathed as an atmosphere beauty of outward 
 and inward nature ; given all these, one has 
 the promise and potency of a poet. But these 
 avail nothing if the inspiration is wanting. 
 They are the channels of poetic feeling. The 
 flood which shall fill the channels, and flow 
 through them in purity and strength, must be 
 given by passion. Or, again, passion is a wind 
 which finds in the poet an ^Eolian harp from 
 which, as it passes, it awakes responsive music. 
 The channels of the river, the strings of the 
 harp, are given by nature, and prepared for use 
 by culture and experience. They are always 
 there, ready and expectant. But the poet must 
 wait for the rising of the flood, or the river will 
 not flow ; he must wait for the blowing of the 
 wind, or the harp will be silent. Both stream 
 and wind must come in their own good time, 
 and of their own inherent strength and tendency. 
 We cannot do without them. Still less can we 
 create them, or summon them into life. 
 
 When the work of composition has begun, 
 it may perhaps proceed somewhat as follows. 
 The first words that the feeling finds for itself 
 call up others in harmony with themselves, and 
 
 58
 
 these react upon and shape the feeling. The 
 central idea demands a certain swing and flow 
 in the verse ; and the swing and flow of the 
 verse demand certain words and phrases, which 
 in their turn carry with them new shades of 
 feeling new aspects, as it seems, of the central 
 idea, though not contemplated when the poet 
 began to commune with the latter and strive to, 
 express it. So the poet works ; feeling and 
 form acting and reacting on one another,, the 
 form suiting itself to the feeling, and the feeling 
 discovering in itself new depths and new sub- 
 tleties in obedience to the demands and sug- 
 gestions of the form. And all the while the 
 poet is blind and unconscious. He knows 
 neither the nature of his work, nor its object,, 
 nor its method. 
 
 Yet one hears of the " poetic pains," and 
 one knows that the greatest poets have spent 
 days over a single stanza, and years over a 
 single poem. What does this mean ? Not, I 
 think, that the poet is working intelligently and 
 with full consciousness, labouring in vain or 
 with extreme difficulty to follow certain clearly 
 defined rules, and bring his work into harmony 
 with certain fully-apprehended principles ; but 
 rather that he is working gropingly and tenta- 
 tively to satisfy a delicate and imperious instinct 
 for what is true and beautiful. He will tell you 
 
 59
 
 that there is something amiss with a certain 
 word in a certain line, but he can give you no 
 scientific explanation of its defect. It is enough 
 for him that the word offends his ear. So far 
 as he is concerned, this one fact suffices to con- 
 demn it. It is his ear, again, that must find the 
 right word. Rules and principles are powerless 
 to help him. 
 
 It is true that admirable poetry has been 
 written, in which there is " not a line," to quote 
 Goethe's words about himself, " but its author 
 knew well enough how it got there "; but it is 
 truer still that in the best passages of the greatest 
 poems the lines read as if they had come there 
 of their own accord. And, speaking generally, 
 it may be said that in his seasons of inspiration 
 the inspired poet is swayed by forces of which 
 he can give no account, and which he cannot 
 consciously control ; that spontaneity, inevita- 
 bleness, is one of the most vital characteristics 
 of his work ; that his verse is what it is because 
 his deepest feelings have constrained him to 
 express them thus and not otherwise, because, if 
 he had not expressed them thus, they would not 
 have gained the wished-for outlet of utterance. 
 
 So much as to my first thesis, that poetry 
 is the spontaneous expression of strong feeling. 
 My second thesis is that poetry communicates 
 
 60
 
 feeling, in the sense of making others feel what 
 tke poet himself has felt. 
 
 When I say that poetry makes others feel, 
 I mean that just as it expresses ideas and truths 
 which are felt rather than consciously realised, 
 so it brings home those ideas and truths, if at 
 aH, then to our feelings rather than to our 
 reasoning faculties. It makes us give them a 
 "real" rather than a "notional" assent. It 
 makes us welcome and love them rather than 
 accept them as demonstrably true. I mean 
 also that to do this is no accident of its nature, 
 but a vital and necessary function. 
 
 Poetry kindles feeling. Let it be studied 
 under each of its many aspects, and it will be 
 found that this law holds good. 
 
 To begin with, its outward form its dress, 
 if I may so call it is beautiful ; and beauty 
 kindles emotion. That is why poetry falls as 
 a rule into a metrical form. The charms of 
 rhythm and melody arrest us, attract us, soothe 
 us, stir us. We are led away for a moment 
 from the average, every-day surface life, led 
 away as we are by beautiful music or a beauti- 
 ful scene. Larger, profounder, subtler feelings 
 begin to flow. We begin to breathe the atmo- 
 sphere that is breathed by the poet himself. We 
 reach for a moment a height which is more habi- 
 tually his. We are already prepared to hear 
 
 61
 
 him speak to us, soul to soul. Indeed it may 
 almost be said that in appreciating the beauti- 
 ful form we are already embracing the idea that 
 is embodied in it, embracing it and making it 
 our own. I do not say that it is essential to 
 poetry that it should be in verse. Now and 
 again one meets with prose which, in point of 
 outward attractiveness, is unsurpassed by the 
 loveliest verse, prose which approaches the most 
 successful forms of metre in rhythm and music, 
 while more than rivalling them in delicacy of 
 structure and exquisiteness of detail. But such 
 prose is quite exceptional. As a rule, verse 
 has what prose has not, or has in a less degree, 
 that beauty of outward form, that half-sen- 
 suous charm, to which all hearts are in some 
 measure susceptible. So again, though blank 
 verse occasionally rises to heights of stately 
 and sonorous grandeur which are perhaps un- 
 attainable by rhymed metre of any sort or kind, 
 still as a rule the latter has more charm than 
 the former, and is therefore more quick, if not 
 more potent, to awaken feeling. Hence it is 
 that poems which express strong personal emo- 
 tion fall naturally and almost inevitably into 
 rhyme. We need not go far into the details 
 of the metrist's art. It is enough for us to 
 know that what he aims at is the production of 
 beautiful effects. What the scientific writer is 
 
 62
 
 altogether careless about is to him of supreme 
 importance. His nature is pre-eminently ar- 
 tistic : the style, the external form of his work, 
 is a matter of deep concern to him ; and the 
 meaning of this is that beauty,* the object of 
 every artist's devotion, wakens the heart, makes 
 it live. Yet the poet, as we shall presently see, 
 is no mere artist in words. He values the out- 
 ward form of his poetry not for its own sake, but 
 for the sake of the thoughts and passions which 
 it helps him to transmit to other hearts. Fide- 
 lity to feeling is his first and last concern. It 
 will be an evil day for poetry when the poet 
 loses himself in the craftsman, and his students 
 and critics think less of what he says than of 
 his manner of saying it. 
 
 So far, in my study of poetic expression, I 
 have avoided burning questions. When I pass 
 from metre to language I begin to tread on dan- 
 gerous ground. The problem of poetic diction 
 is a particular application of a larger and more 
 vital problem which must be carefully considered 
 before the solution of the lesser problem can be 
 attempted. It is the fashion nowadays to de- 
 mand individuality in poetry ; and to such lengths 
 
 * This is one explanation of the beauty, the sensuous beauty, 
 of poetry. Another is that it is the outward and visible sign of 
 an inward and spiritual grace. A beautiful thought must needs 
 embody itself in a beautiful form. 
 
 63
 
 is this demand carried, that the poet is actually 
 expected to have a vocabulary, not to say a dia- 
 lect, of his own. Is this demand reasonable, 
 and if so, within what limits ought it to be re- 
 stricted ? The advocates of individuality habi- 
 tually use the word as if it and personality were 
 interchangeable terms. This initial mistake 
 for a mistake it surely is vitiates the whole of 
 their criticism. The difference between indivi- 
 duality and personality is the difference between 
 the surface self and the true self, between what 
 a man seems to be and what he is in the depths 
 of his buried life. It is possible for an inani- 
 mate thing to have an individuality of its own; 
 but the term personality cannot be applied 
 to anything below the level of Humanity. 
 That God is personal is one of the cardinal 
 articles of our faith ; but the inner meaning 
 of this doctrine discloses itself only to those 
 who realize that it is the entire absence of 
 individuality which differentiates the Divine 
 personality from ours. Under the head of in- 
 dividuality we sum up all those peculiarities 
 of physique, of intellect, of disposition, of cha- 
 racter, which differentiate each man in turn 
 from all his fellows. The personality of a man 
 is constituted by three great attributes which 
 differentiate him not from his kind but from 
 the rest of Nature, thought, will, love. In 
 
 64
 
 fine, it is by means of his individuality that 
 a man separates himself from his fellow men, 
 whereas it is by means of his personality that 
 he becomes one with them. 
 
 Now, if it be true that poetry is the inter- 
 pretation and expression of man's deeper life, 
 and that his deeper life is the seat of his per- 
 sonality, then it is certain that poetry, true 
 poetry, is personal in the fullest sense of the 
 word, and in the highest possible degree. But 
 just because it is personal, and just so far as it 
 is personal, it is free from the taint of indivi- 
 duality. For the deeper we go into the buried 
 life, and the nearer we get to the springs of 
 poetry, the nearer also do we get to those 
 dormant passions and unformulated thoughts 
 which seem to be potentially common to all 
 men, and which constitute a secret bond of 
 sympathy between man and man. And so it 
 comes to pass that universality, not indivi- 
 duality, is of the essence of the poet's genius ; 
 that he belongs to mankind even more than to 
 himself ; that he is in secret sympathy with the 
 hidden lives of his fellow men; and that his 
 poetry, the voice of his personality, wakes a 
 response in the hearts of others, not only in his 
 own time, but also in far distant ages. The 
 poet has ever, and rightly, been regarded as 
 the mouthpiece of mighty and mysterious forces
 
 which live and work beyond the horizon of his 
 consciousness. To these he is accountable, not 
 to his petty self. Poetry of the highest order 
 will never be written by one whose individuality 
 is aggressive, for the simple reason that the 
 Muses can make no use of the man whose 
 self-love is stronger than his devotion to their 
 service. The attempt of individuality to divert 
 into its own narrow conduit the stream of inspi- 
 ration which is flowing through the channel of 
 a great personality is as rash as it is impious, 
 and is seldom permitted to succeed. Indeed, if 
 the inspiration be genuine and the personality 
 really great, the attempt cannot possibly suc- 
 ceed, or rather it cannot possibly be made. I 
 do not say that the poet is to try to forget his 
 surface self. Consciously to strive to liberate 
 oneself from the "false control" of conscious- 
 ness is to cast out devils in the name of Beel- 
 zebub. The whole-hearted servant of the 
 Muses is well content to leave himself in their 
 hands. Self-loss is of the essence of passion, 
 and egotism is as antagonistic to enthusiasm 
 as is centripetal to centrifugal force. The 
 great actor cannot put his individuality into 
 his acting, for he inevitably loses himself in 
 his part. In like manner, when poetry is 
 genuinely inspired, the personality of the poet 
 spontaneously subdues and suppresses his in- 
 
 66
 
 dividuality; and instead of trying to speak, as 
 a lesser man might do, in his own puny per- 
 son, he fulfils his high destiny by becoming 
 "a docile echo of the eternal voice." On the 
 other hand, when the individuality of the poet 
 is prominent, his personality is necessarily kept 
 in the background ; and, however ingenious may 
 be his workmanship, what he writes is not true 
 poetry but uninspired and therefore perishable 
 verse. 
 
 When theory conflicts with theory, it is well, 
 if possible, to appeal to experience. Read the 
 works of a really great poet of a Sophocles, 
 let us say, or a Shakspeare and you will feel 
 that you are in the presence of a grand per- 
 sonality, but that the individuality of the poet 
 has been entirely effaced. The language of 
 such a poet, the material that he uses, is clear 
 in spite of its richness, simple in spite of its 
 grandeur, and wholly free from eccentricity and 
 affectation. In giving form to this material 
 his personality expresses itself, a personality so 
 strong and so vivid that it seems almost to 
 absorb us into itself, and we doubt at last (so 
 complete is the triumph of personality over 
 individuality in us as well as in him) whether 
 the voice that enthralls us comes from his heart 
 or from ours. I shall be reminded by the stu- 
 dent of literature that the individuality of the 
 
 67
 
 writer asserts itself (to take notable examples) 
 in the poetry of Browning and in the prose of 
 Carlyle. Yes, it does; and just so far as it does, 
 the work of these great writers falls short 
 of supreme greatness. The individuality of 
 Browning shows itself in his grotesqueness and 
 obscurity. The individuality of Carlyle in his 
 ruggedness, dogmatism and violence. Such 
 qualities as these may interest a writer's con- 
 temporaries, for they gratify that desire for 
 excitement and novelty which makes us find a 
 fascination in sensational crimes and startling 
 catastrophes ; but even while they interest us, 
 they repel us, and when, as taste changes, they 
 cease to be interesting, they become wholly 
 repellent, and the w r ritings in which they are 
 strongly marked begin to fall into disesteem. 
 Nothing in literature is so perishable as eccen- 
 tricity, with regard to which each generation 
 has its own requirements and its own standard 
 of taste ; and the critic who urges contemporary 
 poets to make their work as individual as pos- 
 sible is deliberately inviting them to build their 
 structures on sand instead of rock. 
 
 The truth is that the modern craze for 
 individuality is a grave symptom of a graver 
 malady. The individualistic critic cares as 
 little for the " roll of the ages " as for the 
 chorus of sympathetic applause which some- 
 
 68
 
 times rewards successful work during the life- 
 time of the worker. The poet, as he conceives 
 of him, is not a seer charged with a spiritual 
 message to the "general heart of man," but a 
 clever craftsman, whose ingenuity is the delight 
 of a select circle of fastidious connoisseurs. 
 Viewed from this standpoint, individuality is 
 of course the one thing needful in poetry; for 
 the work that is highly charged with indivi- 
 duality is sure to abound in peculiarities of one 
 sort or another mannerisms of style, novelties 
 of metre, eccentricities of diction, and the like ; 
 and each peculiarity in turn affords an agree- 
 able change to men whose jaded palates are ever 
 craving new sensations. The worst of this 
 esoteric view of poetry is that it wholly subordi- 
 nates matter to manner. The tendency of the 
 literary gourmet is to become more and more 
 indifferent to the burden of the poet's verse, to 
 the thought that controls and the passion that 
 inspires it, and to rate his work as good or bad 
 according as its outward form pleases or dis- 
 pleases his own morbidly exacting taste. It is 
 difficult to say whether this conception of the 
 poet's meaning and function offers the deeper 
 insult to poetry or to human nature. As well 
 might it be said that Art exists in order to 
 exercise the critical acumen of the bric-a-brac 
 hunter, or that Religion exists in order to mini- 
 
 69
 
 ster to the dialectical subtlety of the professional 
 theologian. 
 
 Let us now test the worth of the indivi- 
 dualistic doctrine by applying it to the practical 
 problem of poetic diction. A strange theory 
 has lately been started, or rather revived (for 
 it is probably as old as the hills*) that the 
 vocabulary of poetry must not only be gradually 
 enlarged, but periodically renewed. That it 
 should be gradually enlarged is no doubt de- 
 sirable ; in fact, such a process is always going 
 on, though it is the outcome not of self-conscious 
 versifiers working at the bidding of a clique of 
 literary dilettantists, but of inspired poets work- 
 ing in blind obedience to their own trained 
 tastes and intuitive judgments. But the advo- 
 cates of euphuistic eccentricity in diction are not 
 content that poetry should enlarge its vocabu- 
 lary : they insist that the words and phrases 
 which gain currency in poetry are apt to get 
 worn out by much use, and therefore that the 
 language of poetry needs perpetual renewal. 
 For example : no colour-epithet in the English 
 
 * Euphuism was the expression of a kindred theory. When 
 Armado, in "Love's Labour's Lost," speaks of the "posteriors of 
 the days, which the rude multitude call the afternoon" and 
 when Holofornes answers that " posterior of the day " is 
 "liable, congruent, and measurable for the afternoon," these 
 worthies are evidently doing their best to renew the worn-out 
 and vulgarized vocabulary of their time. 
 
 70
 
 language describes sunlight so well as golden, 
 and therefore from time immemorial the word 
 has been applied to the sun in its various phases, 
 and to the things which the sun symbolizes, 
 the dawning splendour of hope and the noontide 
 splendour of human excellence and glory. But 
 the epithet, having by this time been worn 
 threadbare, must no longer be used ; and amber, 
 saffron, and other equivalents for yellow (there 
 is no equivalent for golden) are to take its place. 
 One practical objection to this theory is that if 
 it were acted upon, the English language would 
 soon come to the end of its resources. It is not 
 seriously suggested that the poet is to coin new 
 words the meanings of which are known only to 
 himself. He may indeed, if he have no sense of 
 humour, build up strange compound words, such 
 as bone-wanly or weed-lit fiely, or disinter obsolete 
 words, such as roynish or verayment. But such 
 attempts to enrich the language of poetry are 
 sure to be ineffective ; for it is only in despair 
 of attracting attention by the artistic merits of 
 their work that poets resort to these desperate 
 devices; and verses which have nothing to com- 
 mend them but occasional flashes of linguistic 
 fatuity are doomed to early oblivion. The poet 
 who has artistic gifts, and who, though influ- 
 enced by the teaching of the New Criticism, re- 
 tains some measure of sanity and some regard for
 
 the canons of his craft, will content himself with 
 taking current words that have not yet gained 
 currency in poetry and introducing them into his 
 verse. Or he will use epithets which, though 
 permissible in poetry, are seldom met with, in 
 place of those which have seen much service. 
 But if he succeeds, if the new words really gain 
 currency, if the rarer epithets displace the more 
 familiar, how long will it be before they too are 
 found wanting and thrown aside. If saffron and 
 amber came into use as substitutes for golden 
 (of course they are not substitutes for golden, for 
 they do not suggest splendour), how long would 
 it be before the ear of the fastidious critic, with 
 its restless craving for change, grew weary of 
 them also, and demanded that they should be 
 pensioned off ? Saffron and amber might last 
 for a few years, if used sparingly ; but there 
 are other words, the very words which the 
 individualist rates most highly, which become 
 superannuated before they have begun to win 
 acceptance. For the more striking a word is 
 on account of its piquancy or poignancy, the 
 more difficult it is for the feat of introducing it 
 into poetry to be repeated. Incarnadine has 
 been used once and for all time, and no one 
 could use it now without feeling that he was 
 guilty of something akin to plagiarism ; and 
 though Keats managed to find a place for the 
 
 72
 
 ugly heraldic term gules in an otherwise beau- 
 tiful stanza, the word will never be admitted 
 into the vocabulary of poetry, and it will seldom 
 if ever be used again. As for such words as 
 bone-wanly or roynish, their inventors (or dis- 
 coverers) have proprietary rights in them which 
 ought to be, and no doubt will always be, re- 
 spected. 
 
 The theory which I am considering, though 
 significant as a symptom, for it shows that the 
 dilettantist demand for individuality in art tends 
 at last towards sheer individualism and there- 
 fore towards anarchy and chaos, does not 
 deserve serious criticism for its own sake. The 
 logic of experience has ever refuted, and will 
 ever refute it. It is against stop-gap, not against 
 well-worn, epithets that the critic has a right to 
 protest. The use of the latter is permissible so 
 long and so far as they are really needed. Such 
 an epithet as golden is as immortal as the names 
 which it qualifies and as the things which these 
 names denote. 
 
 In point of fact the language of poetry, far 
 from being charged with the individuality of the 
 poet, is the part of his work in which even his 
 personality expresses itself least. If we may 
 regard language as the material in which and 
 with which he works, then we may surely say 
 that his vocabulary no more expresses his per- 
 
 73 L
 
 sonality than an unwrought block of marble 
 expresses the personality of its future sculptor. 
 It is in his sculpture, in the form that he gives 
 to his marble, that the personality of the sculp- 
 tor reveals itself ; and in like manner it is in his 
 poetry, in the form that he gives to his language, 
 that the personality of the poet makes itself felt. 
 But just as the sculptor prefers marble for his 
 work to granite or chalk, and selects his marble 
 with the utmost care, so does the poet (though 
 the selection is made for him rather than by 
 him) choose some words and some classes of 
 words as suitable for his purpose, and reject 
 others. It is no doubt due to the half-uncon- 
 scious operation of a selective faculty which is 
 a vital part of poetic genius, that the vocabulary 
 of lyrical poetry has a very narrow range, 
 whereas that of epic and of dramatic poetry is 
 by comparison varied and comprehensive, while 
 in the lighter and less poetical forms of verse 
 the poet is almost entirely unrestricted in his 
 choice of words. And just as in art the selec- 
 tion and preliminary arrangement of the ma- 
 terials should show that the artist was in 
 sympathy with his subject, and had some 
 insight into its essential nature, so in poetry 
 the style of the poet's diction should adapt 
 itself in some measure to the character of the 
 feeling which he wishes to express. Thus an 
 
 74
 
 elaborate and ornate diction is more in keeping 
 with the subsidiary than with the central move- 
 ments of thought and feeling ; whereas when 
 very strong personal emotion is seeking utter- 
 ance, sincerity on the part of the poet becomes 
 a matter of sovereign importance, and a trans- 
 parent medium of expression in other words, 
 a clear and simple diction is imperatively de- 
 manded. Nay r there are thoughts and feelings 
 to which recondite images and far-fetched epi- 
 thets are as inappropriate as a scarlet robe to a 
 vestal virgin. 
 
 The individualist thinks that, as regards 
 language, each poet should be a law unto him- 
 self; but the history of literature lends no coun- 
 tenance to his theory. The student of poetry 
 will not fail to observe that there are certain 
 marks, certain characteristic features, by which 
 poetic may be distinguished from non-poetic 
 diction. To begin with, the words that the 
 poet uses are such as to command feeling. 
 Thus on the one hand he instinctively avoids 
 the use of scientific terms,, of words that are 
 in any degree abstruse, specific, technical. He 
 may be unable to account for his repugnance 
 to such terms, but he knows that if he were to 
 use one, it would jar on his ear like a false note 
 in music, and he rightly argues from this that 
 there is no place for it in his verse. One ob- 
 
 75
 
 vious reason why such words are to be avoided 
 is that they do not appeal to our emotions. In 
 the first place, they are quite unintelligible to 
 ordinary persons. In the second place, our ap- 
 prehension of them, if we do apprehend them 
 at all, is purely intellectual. On the other hand, 
 the poet instinctively avoids all words that are 
 irredeemably commonplace. For such words, 
 being exclusively connected with the common 
 everyday experiences of the lower and more 
 material side of our lives, become at last in- 
 separably associated with what I may call vul- 
 gar feeling, feeling with which, since it is 
 wholly unemotional, poetry has no concern. 
 
 Here then are two extremes which poetry 
 instinctively avoids, the extreme of technicality 
 on the one hand and of vulgarity on the other. 
 There are, however, two opposite errors into 
 which, in his anxiety to avoid these objection- 
 able extremes, he may possibly fall. He may 
 confound what is vulgar with what is simple, 
 a fatal confusion which is apt to generate a 
 pedantic diction and an inflated style. As a 
 matter of fact, simplicity, whether in feeling or 
 language, is diametrically opposed to vulgarity, 
 the former being as large and comprehensive 
 as the latter is narrow and definite. Or he 
 may imagine that because technical terms, 
 which are generally polysyllabic, are to be 
 
 76
 
 avoided, therefore all polysyllabic words are 
 out of place. But here again the difference 
 between what is poetical and what is non- 
 poetical in diction is the difference between 
 what is vague and what is precise. It is not 
 the length of a technical term that disqualifies 
 it for use in poetry, but its extreme accuracy 
 and definiteness. Immemorial is a long word, 
 but it is as poetical as antisepalous is the re- 
 verse, for it has the two-fold charm of vastness 
 and vagueness, whereas antisepalous is rigidly 
 precise. The truth is that poetry, which is the 
 expression of large, obscure, and indefinable 
 feelings, find its appropriate material in vague 
 words words of large import and with many 
 meanings and shades of meaning. Here we 
 have an almost unfailing test for determining 
 the poetic fitness of words, a test which every 
 true poet unconsciously, but withal unerringly, 
 applies. Precision, whether in the direction of 
 what is commonplace or of what is technical, is 
 always unpoetical. To introduce such common- 
 place words as waistcoat or mustard-pot into a 
 poem would be scarcely less difficult than to 
 introduce such scientific terms as coleoptera or 
 foraminiferous; and the obstacle in each case 
 would be the definiteness of the term employed. 
 Even the narrower, and, as it seems, more de- 
 finite terms of poetry are vague. They express 
 
 77
 
 flashes of light rather than constituent rays, 
 aspects rather than properties or relations. 
 Or, if they do stand for properties, then it is 
 for such as are large and in a sense obvious, 
 not minute and recondite ; for those properties 
 which are rich in association, which give a thing 
 its beauty and eloquence, which find it a place 
 in the living whole of an idealized picture, not 
 for those which are rich only in scientific mean- 
 ing, which give a thing its exact place in the 
 material economy of Nature, and which enable 
 us to label and ticket it, and assign it its own 
 particular cupboard, shelf and pigeon-hole in the 
 museum of the savant and specialist Vague- 
 ness in the word, with the corresponding vague- 
 ness in the thing, gives free scope to that play 
 of the imagination through which emotion is 
 kindled, or rather which is itself but one as- 
 pect of the kindling of emotion, gives it free 
 scope, and in so doing stimulates and quickens 
 it. For the imagination is a natural faculty, 
 sure to energize if it have but free access to 
 a wide and open field of action. And so to 
 allow it to play is in a manner to excite it to 
 play. When Keats tells us of 
 
 " magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn"; 
 
 when Wordsworth's Highland Reaper sings of 
 
 78
 
 " old, unhappy, far-oflf things, 
 And battles long ago"; 
 
 when Virgil condenses all the pathos of life 
 into one immortal line, 
 
 " Sunt lacrymae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt " ; 
 
 we feel the infinite power and charm of vague- 
 ness. An almost boundless prospect opens 
 out before the imagination, and the emotions 
 are proportionately exalted and quickened. 
 Precision, on the other hand, since it leaves 
 nothing to the imagination, tends to starve 
 and stifle our emotions, taking away from 
 them not merely the distant prospects that 
 delight them, but even the atmosphere that 
 they breathe. 
 
 Vague words, then, stir emotion; exact 
 terms repress it. The former are as con- 
 genial to poetry as the latter are repugnant. 
 Here is one more proof that the main function 
 of the poet is to make our deeper feelings awake 
 from sleep. 
 
 As are words in their isolation, so will they 
 be when combined. Poetry in its phrases as 
 in its words avoids precision. Pedantry and 
 vulgarity are alike offensive to it. It is need- 
 less for me to support this proposition with 
 argument or illustration. Its correctness will 
 
 79
 
 scarcely be denied, and the inference to be 
 drawn from it is the same as that which has 
 just been stated. 
 
 So far we have been considering the out- 
 ward form of poetic expression. And now as 
 to the expression itself. What are its leading 
 features ? 
 
 All poetry is, in a sense, descriptive. 
 Mtfw/o-t?, imitation, to use Aristotle's favourite 
 word, is of the essence not of tragedy only but 
 of almost every kind of poetry. The poet 
 describes things as they appear to him, that is 
 to say, as transformed and in a manner created 
 anew by the feelings which they awake in him. 
 How and on what principles does he set to work 
 at this task ? 
 
 In denning what I conceive to be the poet's 
 task, I have perhaps unwittingly answered this 
 question. We have seen that the sound of the 
 poet's verse, the words that he uses, the flow of 
 his language, have all one thing in common: 
 they awake emotional feeling. It is the same, 
 I must believe, with his general manner of 
 describing things, though here of course the 
 awakened feeling begins to be directed into 
 a definite channel. He must quicken our emo- 
 tions by faithfully rendering his own. When 
 I speak of the manner of describing, I refer 
 mainly to the details and incidents into which 
 
 80
 
 any scene, whether of external nature or of 
 human life, can be analysed. The poet wishes 
 to describe something which has impressed him 
 a sunset, let us say, or a spring morning, a 
 battle-field or a love-story. Which of the con- 
 stituent phenomena, which of the details is he 
 to select, and on what principle is he to group 
 them ? Which are to be prominent and which 
 subordinate ? I answer briefly, he must select 
 those which command emotion, which impress 
 us, and he must group them according to their 
 power of impressing us. Those which impress 
 us most should be prominent and central. Those 
 which impress us least should be kept in the 
 background. 
 
 This answer will not be received without 
 a protest. Exception will certainly be taken 
 to it so far as it applies to the description of 
 what we call scenery. I hold that the busi- 
 ness of the poet, when describing outward 
 nature, is to render his own feelings, and so 
 awaken ours. He must paint things as they 
 reveal themselves to him. If, for example, a 
 fleet of approaching ships seems to him, at 
 a moment when its appearance is singularly 
 impressive, to " hang in the clouds," he must 
 say that it "hangs in the clouds." He knows 
 well enough that ships do not and cannot 
 " hang in the clouds," but if he is to be faith- 
 Si M
 
 ful to his artistic feeling, he must say that 
 they do. The critic of the " realistic " school 
 will contend, in opposition to this theory, that 
 the poet must paint things, not as they seem 
 to be, but as they actually are ; that he must 
 be faithful, not to his own emotions, but to the 
 scene that he describes. 
 
 Here the eternal controversy between 
 realism (falsely so called) and idealism breaks 
 out anew. I have already had occasion to 
 dissent from the " realist " on general grounds. 
 I will now endeavour to show, by reference 
 to this concrete problem, that, apart from its 
 theoretical merits or demerits, his conception 
 of art works badly, breaks down in practice. 
 In self-defence I must do this, for his concep- 
 tion of art in general and of poetry in particular 
 is at open war with mine. 
 
 The pseudo-realistic school had its origin 
 in a just protest against the artificiality of the 
 last century. In the days of rhyming heroics, 
 Nature was described by the use of rhetorical 
 phrases, which apparently served no higher 
 purpose than that of making the couplets to 
 which they belonged run smoothly and balance 
 well. Language of this sort has, of course, 
 no counterpart in personal emotion, and it is, 
 as often as not, inaccurate in its material details. 
 In other words, it is false both to the ideal and 
 
 82
 
 to the actual, both to feeling and to fact. When 
 it begins to be criticized, its inaccuracy, its 
 disloyalty to material fact, is the first thing 
 that strikes the critic ; and he not unnaturally 
 assumes that the remedy for artificiality with 
 all its attendant evils, is close observation of 
 the thing described. And so a new school of 
 poetry arises. Its professors say, "Observe 
 things carefully ; study them in and for them- 
 selves ; notice all their details ; and then em- 
 body the results of your labour in your verse." 
 In these scientific days this advice falls on 
 willing ears ; and at last one has the strange 
 spectacle of poets going out, note-book in hand 
 one might almost say, to observe deliberately 
 and with clear consciousness what lies around 
 them, and to write poetry in the strength of 
 their observations. 
 
 But one cannot help asking these poets 
 whether their object is to reproduce every 
 detail in Nature, however minute or recon- 
 dite. To describe a scene as it is in all its 
 material detail is the work, not of poetry but 
 of science, or rather of all the sciences, and 
 of all the sciences working for ever. If that 
 be a task beyond the power and outside the 
 scope of poetry, then one must ask, what 
 details are to be selected to the exclusion 
 of all others? Till this question has been 
 
 83
 
 answered, the whole difficulty remains un- 
 solved. Description, as poetry or even as 
 literature conceives of it, may be defined as 
 the art of omitting ; and it is an art which 
 taxes our powers to the utmost. Anyone 
 can go out into the fields and amass details. 
 Few, very few, can select and omit. " How 
 a man of some wide thing that he has wit- 
 nessed will construct a narrative, what kind 
 of picture and delineation he will give of it, 
 is the best measure you could get of what 
 intellect is in the man. Which circumstance 
 is vital, and shall stand prominent, which 
 unessential, fit to be suppressed ; where is the 
 true beginning, the true sequence and ending? 
 To find out this, you tax the whole force of 
 insight that is in the man. He must under- 
 stand the thing ; according to the depth of his 
 understanding will the fitness of his answer 
 be." So says Carlyle ; and if he is right, the 
 pseudo-realist is wrong. The work of the 
 poet is to select details and combine them 
 into a picture. He must select those which 
 are really essential to the picture. He must 
 know the ideal worth of each as it comes 
 under his hand. Now this knowledge cannot 
 be given by observation. It is instinctive and 
 works intuitively. It belongs to the incommu- 
 nicable part of one, to one's genius. Realists 
 
 84
 
 of the modern school lose sight of this alto- 
 gether. They seem to think that one detail 
 is as good as another, so long as it is accurate, 
 true to fact. Hence they would substitute close- 
 ness of observation for genius, and scientific 
 study for emotional insight. But they forget 
 that, putting genius and insight out of the 
 question, memory, a faculty which is common 
 to all of us, omits far more than it retains, that 
 it refuses to overburden itself with details, that 
 its normal tendency is to sift things, to keep 
 what is best worth keeping and keep most care- 
 fully what has impressed itself with most force 
 and vividness. And so, when they counsel us 
 to supplement memory with a note-book, they 
 seem to urge us to do exactly what Nature 
 intended us not to do. 
 
 But Nature avenges herself on those who 
 disobey her. It is impossible to bring into a 
 description all the details of a scene. Selection 
 of some kind or other there must be. If we 
 will not select in the way that Nature points 
 out to us, we must select in some false and 
 unnatural way. Hence it is that modern poets 
 who begin by telling us that all details are 
 equally valuable, end by preferring those which 
 are minute and recondite, and which therefore 
 have least charm for us, least power over the 
 emotions, least "ideal worth." The student's 
 
 85
 
 note-book cannot be placed on a level with the 
 poet's insight. One of the two must yield to 
 the other. If we will not make the note-book 
 and its contents subordinate, we have no choice 
 but to make them supreme.* 
 
 It is nothing to the purpose to say that 
 specialists observe and perhaps dwell with de- 
 light on phenomena which other men fail to 
 notice. Poetry should appeal to mankind at 
 large, not to the specialist. It is dangerous to 
 go far into detail, for this if for no other reason, 
 that one is apt to mistake individual for univer- 
 sal experiences, even if one does not go so far 
 as to hold that the business of the poet is to 
 study and record those very phenomena which 
 escape the ordinary untrained observation. 
 " The business of a poet," says Imlac in Rasse- 
 las, " is to examine not the individual but the 
 
 * Even Tennyson, great and true poet though he was, 
 trusted too much to his note-book. When Mr. Holbrook, in 
 " Cranford," praises that overrated line 
 
 " More black than ash-buds in the front of March," 
 
 because it added to his knowledge of Nature, he really pro- 
 nounces its condemnation. The dull, lack-lustre black of the 
 ash-bud has failed to attract general attention, for the very good 
 reason that it happens to be entirely unattractive. So far is it 
 from suggesting the glossy darkness of a woman's hair, that 
 nothing but the poet's desire to pose as an observant naturalist 
 can account for its introduction into his verse. The line ought 
 to communicate to us the poet's imaginative delight in his 
 heroine's beauty. In point of fact, it communicates nothing but 
 a somewhat uninteresting piece of information. 
 
 86
 
 species; to remark general and large expe- 
 riences. . . . He is to exhibit in his portraits 
 of Nature such prominent and striking features 
 as recall the original to every mind ; and must 
 neglect the minuter discriminations which one 
 may have remarked and another rejected for 
 those characteristics which are alike obvious to 
 vigilance and carelessness." The word "care- 
 lessness " is perhaps too strong. I do not for 
 a moment say that a poet should be deliberately 
 careless of fact. No one can set a higher value 
 than I do on truthfulness in description. I differ 
 from the pseudo-realist only in holding that de- 
 scription should as a rule be so simple as to 
 exclude all possibility of error. Nor do I wish 
 to say a word against habits of attention and 
 observation.* Let the poet cultivate such habits 
 if he will ; not that there will be much need for 
 him to do so, for his sympathy with outward 
 Nature, combined with his artistic love of the 
 beautiful, will compel him to notice many things 
 to which other eyes are indifferent if not actually 
 
 * The function of the poet, as a " seer," is to discover the 
 ideal, that is, the real, in the actual ; the function of the poet, as a 
 " maker," is, by idealizing the actual, to transform it into the real. 
 So long as he remains faithful to this conception of his duty, there 
 is no reason why he should not, by observation and study, con- 
 tinuously enlarge his sphere of the actual. But he must ever bear 
 in mind that cataloguing the actual is a very different thing from 
 representing the real, and that, for the purposes of poetry, one 
 line of the latter is worth a thousand pages of the former. 
 
 87
 
 blind.* Only in his seasons of inspiration let 
 him observe unconsciously and without reflec- 
 ting on what he does. If we turn back upon 
 our emotions and attempt to analyse them, they 
 will vanish under our hands. Apart from this, 
 one who observes consciously will infallibly no- 
 tice what is minute and curious rather than what 
 is broad and striking. What is worth repro- 
 ducing forces itself upon us, or at any rate upon 
 those among us who are gifted with poetic 
 feeling and insight: we cannot help observing 
 it. What does not impress itself upon the 
 heart has no place in poetry. It is waste 
 labour to turn aside and search for it. The 
 function of the poet is, by force of high in- 
 stinct, to analyse an ideal whole into its essen- 
 tial elements, essential that is on the side of 
 ideality and beauty, not to note and record 
 
 * When a poet depicts a phenomenon which his love of the 
 beautiful has compelled him to observe, the chances are that 
 other persons have seen and even admired the same phenome- 
 non, yet without consciously noticing it. For example, when 
 we read Tennyson's beautiful couplet 
 
 "The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, 
 With shadow-streaks of rain," 
 
 we at once remember that the thunder cloud sometimes has 
 " ragged rims," and that distant rain sometimes presents the 
 appearance of " shadow-streaks." Perhaps we had never con- 
 sciously noticed either phenomenon ; but when the poet sets them 
 before us in his verse, we realize that they are in a manner fami- 
 liar to us, and that somehow or other we cannot say when or 
 where our hearts have held intercourse with their beauty. 
 
 88
 
 physical facts. If I am wrong, then let 
 botanists be the poets of flowers, geologists 
 of mountains, astronomers of the stars. 
 
 This straining after fidelity to the minuter 
 details of Nature is as superfluous, even from 
 its own point of view, as it is inartistic. From 
 every point of view, and not least from that of 
 accuracy, the broad strokes will be found to 
 answer best. In the first place, they move us 
 most. They keep entirely within the lines of 
 our normal experience, and therefore have a 
 wealth of suggestiveness which is wanting in 
 the more refined touches. The very words 
 that correspond to them, the names that 
 stand for large and simple phenomena, make 
 their way at once to our hearts. The narrower, 
 subtler words need to be interpreted by the 
 general sense and rhythm of the passage. 
 These do not. Each of them has its own 
 message. 
 
 " The silence that is in the starry sky, 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills." 
 
 What simple, every-day words are these 
 silence, starry, sky, sleep, lonely, hills! But how 
 deeply, how vividly, how directly they move 
 us ! More than that. The broader strokes 
 carry with them, by the power of association, the 
 more delicate touches, each in its own place 
 and with its proper force and meaning ; and in 
 
 89 N
 
 this way they so describe things as to combine 
 the maximum of accuracy with the maximum 
 of impressiveness. They quicken the imagi- 
 nation by leaving much for it to do. They 
 re-kindle the emotions of the lover of Nature. 
 His feelings, such is the power of a few simple 
 words, feelings which a thousand scenes of 
 beauty have stirred and deepened, resume their 
 play ; and out of those remembered scenes such 
 features arise before him as are needed to form 
 the poet's picture, the picture which the poet 
 has felt and would have others feel. Without 
 an effort on his part these features glide together 
 harmoniously into one perfect whole. This un- 
 conscious part of him feeling, imagination, call 
 it what you will first set in motion and then 
 guided by the words of the poet, fashions itself 
 for itself a far more perfect picture than the 
 subtlest skill of the most accomplished word- 
 painter could ever place before it.* By a true 
 
 * I have recently read an able and interesting novel called 
 " Children of the Mist." The scene of the story is laid in 
 Dartmoor, and the writer evidently knows and loves the country 
 which he describes. The book contains several passages of 
 quasi-poetical word-painting. Here is one of them. 
 
 " Above Teign's shrunken current extended oak and ash, 
 while her banks bore splendid concourse of the wild water- 
 loving dwellers in that happy valley. Meadowsweet nodded 
 creamy crests ; hemlock and fool's parsley and seeding willow- 
 herb crowded together beneath far-scattered filigree of honey- 
 suckles and brambles with berries, some ripe, some red ; while 
 the scarlet cords of briar and white bryony gemmed every 
 
 90
 
 instinct the great masters have felt that their 
 work was to call feeling into play, and just to 
 indicate the directions, the main channels, in 
 which it was to flow, and then leave the rest to 
 the feeling's own inherent powers working in 
 obedience to its own natural laws. The picture 
 that is so placed before us is true at once to 
 the poet's feelings and to our own. The leading 
 features are such as he has felt and indicated, 
 but in calling up minuter and less essential 
 points they work in each of us according to 
 the laws of the individual's being. The poet 
 brings us to his point of view, but it is we, 
 
 riotous trailing thicket, dene and dingle along the river's brink ; 
 and in the grassy spaces between rose little chrysoprase steeples 
 of woodsage all set in shining fern. Upon the boulders in mid- 
 stream subaqueous mosses, now revealed and starved by the 
 drought, died hard, and the seeds of grasses, fig-worts and 
 persicarias thrust up flower and foliage, flourishing in unwonted 
 spots from which the next freshet would rudely tear them. 
 Insect life did not abundantly manifest itself, for the day was 
 sunless ; but now and again, with crisp rattle of his gauzy 
 wings, a dragon-fly flashed along the river. Through these 
 scenes the Teign rolled drowsily and with feeble pulses. Upon 
 one bank rose the confines of Whiddon ; on the other, abrupt 
 and interspersed with gulleys of shattered shale, ascended huge 
 slopes whereon a whole summer of sunshine had scorched the 
 heather to dry death. But fading purple still gleamed here and 
 there in points and splashes, and the lesser fungi mingling 
 therewith, scattered gold upon the tremendous acclivities even 
 to the crown of the trees that towered remote and very blue 
 upon the uplifted sky-line. Swallows, with white breasts flashing, 
 circled over the river, and while their elevation above the water 
 appeared at times tremendous, the abrupt steepness of the
 
 such as we are, who see. We see with his eyes 
 and yet with our own. The picture, while 
 centrally true to his experience and his con- 
 ception, is yet in detail adapted, or rather adapts 
 itself, to the feelings of each of his readers. 
 Thus nothing is lost. When the poet himself 
 goes into details, some of his minor touches 
 may lie outside the range of our observation, 
 and so fail to "find us." But here neither 
 feeling is sacrificed to accuracy, nor accuracy 
 to feeling. 
 
 It would seem, then, that the highest order 
 of descriptive poetry is that which aims first 
 
 gorge was such that the birds almost brushed the hillside with 
 their wings." 
 
 An admirable passage this, full of strong and subtle sym- 
 pathy with "Nature," felicitously worded and (I doubt not) 
 unimpeachably accurate ! And yet, as compared with a few 
 lines of genuine poetry, how utterly ineffective ! The strain on 
 the attention is so great, that emotional response on the part of 
 the reader is impossible ; each detail in turn cancels the effect 
 produced by its predecessor; and when one has come to the 
 end of the passage, the general impression left upon the mind 
 is that one has been unable to " see the wood for the trees." 
 Read the passage with the care which it deserves : then read 
 these lines, 
 
 "He hearkens not! light comer, he is flown! 
 What matters it? next year he will return, 
 
 And we shall have him in the sweet spring-days. 
 With whitening hedges, and uncrumpling fern, 
 And blue-bells trembling by the forest ways, 
 And scent of hay new-mown," 
 
 and you will realize how impassable is the gulf which separates 
 fidelity to poetic feeling from fidelity to material fact. 
 
 92
 
 and foremost at fidelity to feeling, and makes 
 fidelity to fact of secondary and derivative im- 
 portance. And so we are once more led to 
 conclude that the function of the poet is to feel 
 strongly and deeply, to tell us what he feels, 
 and to make us feel it. 
 
 I have gone at some length into the ques- 
 tion of word-painting because I wished to show 
 that my conception of the place and purpose of 
 the poet holds good even in that province of 
 poetry, the description of outward Nature, in 
 which at first sight it might seem to break 
 down, and in which at the present day it some- 
 times finds itself at variance both with the doc- 
 trine of critics and with the practice of poets. 
 It will be a comparatively easy task to show 
 that the conception holds good when poetry 
 comes to deal with the phenomena of human 
 life. I need not take pains to prove that the 
 intimate knowledge of human nature which is 
 indispensable to the dramatist, springs from 
 sympathy at once wide and deep, and that the 
 one unfailing source of such sympathy is a strong 
 and subtle play of feeling. As the Drama is in 
 its origin, so it is in its effect. It is not the func- 
 tion of the dramatist to paint the phenomena of 
 human life precisely as they are, to represent all 
 the details of our existence, high and low, noble
 
 and sordid, spiritual and material, vital and 
 unessential, one with another. The poet of 
 outward nature would as little think of being 
 minutely faithful to every blade and leaf, to 
 every tint and shade. Both poets must be 
 faithful to Nature; but in neither case does fide- 
 lity to Nature mean servile accuracy or imply 
 scientific analysis. It is fidelity to what I may 
 call the ideal nature of things. Just as the 
 poet who has a real insight into outward Nature 
 combines into a whole such physical pheno- 
 mena as command our deeper feelings, and 
 gives them prominence in proportion to their 
 ideal worth, so does the great dramatist bring 
 together into one picture such manifestations of 
 human nature as will affect us most, making 
 prominent those that are of larger import, and 
 keeping in the background those whose in- 
 fluence is weaker and less direct. In other 
 words, his object is to appeal to our hearts, to 
 move us, to melt us ; and his ulterior object is 
 to make us see things, through the medium of 
 kindled emotion, as he sees them ; in other 
 words, to idealize them, to see them as they 
 really are. We know, each for himself, what 
 effect moments of great and unselfish sorrow, 
 or great and unselfish joy, have upon us. -They 
 seem, as it were, to lift a veil from our eyes ; to 
 show, as by a lightning flash, things that were
 
 hidden from us ; to explain, if only for an in- 
 stant, things that bewildered us. They solve 
 a riddle. They whisper a secret. They recon- 
 cile us to destiny. They put us in harmony 
 with the laws under which we live. They give 
 to each phenomenon and circumstance of life 
 its true value, dwarfing such as are unduly pro- 
 minent, exalting and transfiguring such as are 
 undeservedly lost to sight. In fine, they give 
 us a new view of life a higher view, can it be 
 doubted? an ideal view, if I may be allowed to 
 call it so. Such moments are rare and fleeting. 
 In actual life the ideal element is hidden be- 
 neath a superincumbent mass of clogging de- 
 tails, which fill up our lives from moment to 
 moment, and occupy our minds from day to 
 day. If these are ever to be rolled away, even 
 for an instant, it can only be by a flash of 
 intense emotion. In the drama, on the other 
 hand, as in the poetry of outward nature, details 
 are cleared away, and the ideal element is 
 allowed to stand forth unembarrassed and un- 
 obscured, the consequence being that our feel- 
 ings, loosed for a while from the " hourly false 
 control," are free to respond to every influence 
 that impresses them. Then again in the drama, 
 the play of forces, which in actual life need 
 months and years for their development, is 
 brought within the compass of a few pages, and 
 
 95
 
 therefore, as we read or listen, of a few hours 
 or even minutes ; and its effect upon us, being 
 thus concentrated, is proportionately intensified. 
 It is to these facts that the drama owes its right 
 to exist. The drama of actual life is not enough 
 for us. We must supplement it with and inter- 
 pret it through the creations of poetry. 
 
 The moments that liberate us from our 
 lower selves are rare and fleeting ; but anyone 
 who has ever lived through one of them will 
 understand what I mean when I speak of an 
 ideal view of things. To such a view the great 
 poet is proner than most of us ; to some extent 
 it colours the whole of his life. And the im- 
 perishable worth of his poems lies in this, that 
 we who listen to him are able, however faintly, 
 to idealize life, to see it through that mist of 
 sunlit tears which in actual life so seldom rises, 
 so seldom and too often at so bitter a cost. 
 
 I have been trying to prove that in poetry 
 feeling finds its own voice, and in doing so 
 wakens responsive feeling in other hearts. In 
 my former chapter I sought to show that the 
 poet's feeling is true in virtue of its intensity, 
 that the strength of his emotion is measured 
 by the clearness of his insight. These two 
 characteristics of poetry must now be brought 
 together. Poetry is the true expression of true 
 
 96
 
 feeling ; in other words, it is the very voice of 
 truth not of truth as science understands the 
 word, truth about phenomena, but of ideal truth, 
 truth which has reality for its counterpart. The 
 poet differs from the rest of us in having a 
 clearer insight into the hidden heart of Nature. 
 If we are ever to be initiated into Nature's 
 deeper mysteries, it must be through him. His 
 poetry is the channel through which his heart 
 opens and maintains intercourse with ours, 
 the medium through which he makes us feel 
 what he has felt and see what he has seen. What 
 he does for us is to touch our hearts, and so lift 
 a veil from our eyes. Whenever, therefore, 
 we find ourselves deeply moved by poetry, we 
 may feel sure that we are coming in contact 
 with hidden truth. Nature reveals her most 
 sacred truths only to the poet and will not 
 suffer her oracles to be spoken in any lan- 
 guage but his. I distrust one who pretends 
 to tell me of the inmost secrets of Nature, and 
 yet does not "utter them in song." He who 
 really reaches the heart of things has no choice 
 but to be a poet.* The central realities of the 
 
 * Not necessarily a word-poet. Language is not the only 
 medium of poetic expression. There are sound-poets, colour- 
 poets, and form-poets, as well as poets proper or word-poets. 
 Poetry proper is of course the theme of this essay ; and, though 
 much of what I said about poetic feeling is applicable to ' art " 
 as well as to "poetry," I was careful to begin my study of poetic 
 
 97 o
 
 universe are so great, that if we are to appre- 
 hend or even approach them, we can do so only 
 through the medium of profound emotion. If 
 they impress us at all, they must impress us 
 deeply ; and the feelings which are so awakened 
 can have no outlet but that of poetry. We have 
 a right to demand music and melody of some 
 sort or other from one who has felt the music 
 and melody which are at the centre of things, 
 and which he must have found there if he ever 
 really reached it. " A musical thought," says 
 Carlyle, " is one spoken by a man that has 
 penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing ; 
 detected the inmost mystery of it, namely, the 
 melody that lies hidden in it ; the inward har- 
 mony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it 
 exists and has a right to be here in the world. 
 All inward things, we may say, are melodious ; 
 naturally utter themselves in song. See deep 
 enough, and you see music everywhere ; the 
 heart of nature being everywhere music if you 
 can only reach it." 
 
 expression with the assumption that the poet's normal medium 
 of expression is language. What I am now trying to say is that, 
 if the inner truth of things is to express itself in human speech^ 
 it must come to us as poetry and in no other form.
 
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