of eternity and the shame of a sordid street. To others than he, earth seemed then only a graveyard awaiting the moment of some glorious resurrection. Blake's revolt against dead formalism, his hatred of passivity was more purely artistic, more imaginatively absolute even than Shelley's, and so when his imagination failed of an absolute vision of reality, he fell, not into revolutionary rhetoric or egotistic sentiment, as others did, but into pure nonsense. These moments of visionary chaos, when facts are not completely transmuted into spiritual symbols, but all is blurred, are of no value to anyone. Pre-eminently modern, however, Blake is, as the first consciously to distinguish man's position in the economy of life; and unlike many later Romantics he never for a moment sentimentalised or moralised over Nature." Nature," he said, "is the work of the devil... the devil is in us, as far as we are Nature." But for him this " devil" was potentially divine. He looked forward to the time when divided man should win a higher unity, conscious and creative, in which love and reason and life should be one, and energy an eternal delight. His aim was to refashion the broken harmony of the present by bidding men be more pitying than Puritanism, to cultivate an ever active vision and live positively at peace.

CHAPTER VII

WORDSWORTH

To lie in the name of poetry is an offence for which a man may not be forgiven. Experience must do the work of innocence as soon as conscience begins to take the place of instinct.-SWINBURNE.

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THE extent of mankind's indebtedness to different poets can never be calculated, but we may claim with confidence that Wordsworth has exercised a profound influence over many to whom poetry otherwise meant very little. No man on his own confession was less sensitive to emotion than John Stuart Mill. His whole education had emphasised analysis at the expense of sympathy, the drillsergeant had mechanised a shrewd individuality, and had certainly upset that balance among the faculties by which the ardours of life continue to break down the barriers which logic would set up. His tendency was ever to be more a machine than a man. Yet when life took its revenge upon him for a too persistent attitude of criticism, and left him to his calculations, unblessed by any sense of pleasure or necessity, and unsupported by those vital impulses which make a merely intellectual journey a thing of

exciting incident, it was Wordsworth's poems which proved a medicine to his mind, and saved him from becoming a chronic prey to colourless depression.

They seemed [he writes] to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed.

Yet of the poet who could inspire such a sense of joy and admiration, he also wrote, "There have certainly been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth "; and, Compared with the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures."

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Such limited strictures have often been repeated by smaller men who lacked the judgment or the sincerity to recognise the majesty that was Wordsworth's as well as the platitude, and we think it profitable even after so many have already trodden the path, to examine afresh both the qualities of which the greatest poetry truly consists and the extent to which Wordsworth exemplified them. For although the failure of rationalists to appreciate poetry may often be imputed to the limitations of minds trained to logic, to withered sensibilities, and a hearing deaf to music, yet it has been at least

partly due to defects in the poetry which such men have first approached, either by mischance or misled by the uncritical voice of popular applause; and to those distortions of truth enshrined in picturesque phraseology which they have been quick to discover, because by nature they respond less readily to any merely sentimental appeal. Such indeed was the misfortune of Mill himself, who found in Byron only a passionate expression of the discontent from which his own mind was temporarily suffering. Yet no poetry, however attractive its imagery or alluring its music, is of the first order which can be proved to transgress reason in the widest application of the term. The greatest poetry is the most beautiful, but also the most profoundly true, and the rationalist deserves our gratitude when he refuses to accept a poem, however magnetic its language or its form, the substance of which he realises to be false. The veritable music of Apollo is only degraded and forgotten if it be confused with the seductive song of the Sirens.

But it is said that poetry is independent of truth, that the poet is concerned only with his personal feeling, that it is enough if the feeling, whatever its quality, be intense, for it will then find impassioned and rhythmic expression and convince others of its reality. It will thus be true to nature in so far as it is vital in its impulse, and to man in so far as it represents a possible human experience. Much

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lyrical poetry is personal sensationalism of this kind. Yet that alone has achieved any permanency which, if true to the poet's momentary impulse, has also proved true to some deeper and more constant law. For, creatively original as a poet must be, neither his feeling nor his thought are independent of the phenomenal world, or the general consciousness. It may be that he can create imaginatively a more beautiful world than that he sees about him, as Spenser does, or Shakespeare in Prospero's isle, but even this, if it is to be more than a work of pure fantasy, must imply a criticism of actuality, and can invariably be proved to represent an intensification and a reshuffling of the elements of life to produce a higher harmony. If a poet, through being true as he thinks to himself, prove false to nature, he satisfies no personality but his own, and life, which is pitiless to those who slight her, expels him from the circle of human interests. Even lyrical poetry, therefore, which aims at the direct expression of human emotion, must prove true to more than arbitrary impulse if it is to excite human sympathy. It is possible, for example, that a man in a peculiar condition of health, or stimulated by a drug, may experience unusual sensations because his perception of life at the moment is distorted, yet a record of such sensation, however intimate and picturesque, is at best a bizarre or morbid entertainment. It falls short of the truth and dignity of great art. The