and private memoranda of more than one great modern poet.

At the same time the critic, in trying to assess the truth and value of experiences which poetry images, or in tracing the advance of genius from fancy or affectation to imaginative power, is as bound to use some of the broad definitions of philosophy as he is to consult the data of modern psychology. Certainly, except for those happy few whose intrinsic taste can be relied upon to distinguish the tones of imagination from those of fancy, unreal ornament from living form, ecstasy and insight from pleasure and charm, some degree of philosophical reasoning must enter into the serious critic's method of exposition.

To reflect upon life and upon oneself, and so to master both and direct them aright, I take to be the tendency most generally significant of progress in our era. The modern world, in its very perversities and crudities, has begun consciously to substitute Reason for Necessity, and to assert higher values than the physical. Reason, which always, if we look carefully enough, will be found irradiating unconsciously and imperfectly the darkness of primitive genius, though for long submerged in the physical, has become, for the artist of our own time in candid daylight, the "headstone of the corner." Reason must ever draw upon instinct for inspiration and experience; for unless it has its roots in Nature it must wither up and die, as for example it did in

the eighteenth century. But it yields itself no longer blindly to the forces of Nature. It has learnt to rebel as a prelude to learning to discriminate. It will go to Nature for the sublime, but it will not surrender its dignity to her wantonness.

The hope of the future of that civilisation which seems sometimes to totter so dangerously near the abyss is that the inspired Reason, the sympathetic Imagination revealed by the true poet, artist or seer, may yet emerge from and impose itself upon the new inventiveness, the self-interested mental cunning of which the last century witnessed so marvellous a development. For it is this enlightened Reason, and not any negative and dogmatic moral code, which alone can prevent the creative energy of the life-force from degenerating, as it so invariably has done throughout the history of the western world, into a fatal destructiveness. It must be our aim, as Renan wrote half a century ago, to correct and better creation," not to surrender blindly to a life-force which lacks all fine discretion save on a physical plane. The Gothic structure of the old world in all its grandeur and disproportion has fallen in ruins about us. Our efforts must be directed towards the conscious construction of a surer and better-balanced edifice, in which all humanity may live at peace and realise their differing geniuses in a common harmony.

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In the straining of individual genius after deeper truth, no less than in the history of literature sur

veyed broadly in its progressive fluctuations, we see the soul of man feeling out towards this purer and more harmonious ideal of life. And in the following essays it is upon this aspect alone that I have fastened, rejecting, often against my will, more particular and alluring prospects. In short, I have viewed certain epochs of poetry for the light they throw upon the growth of the human mind, emerging gradually as the directing power among the faculties. To some it may seem that poetry should not be made to serve such dreary purposes, or beauty be dragged at the chariot wheel of truth. Yet I can conceive no higher service for either poetry or man to pay than that of asserting and guarding humanity's prerogative. The beauty of the natural world survives only in that of the spiritual; without truth art degenerates quickly into an idle entertainment or a cultivated affectation. In so saying I have no desire to enforce a barren Absolute, to imprison within a system and methodise Nature's infinite variety, to drain life of colour in a passion to have it clean. Embracing our faith in Reason must be a passionate devotion to human nature, to life itself and its transcending of a rational mechanism by creative beauty. Life without reason degenerates into luxury, waste and effeminacy: reason without life into impoverished dogma. The one is the sin of Naturalism, the other of Puritanism. A passive acceptance of life must be balanced by an active direction of it. The masculine and feminine principles

must blend in the joy of vital equilibrium. Thence only can spring beauty, ordered but electric, an art of life that is both urgent and at peace. As in social ideals the true aim must always be to achieve a world in which there is enough system to prevent waste without encroaching upon liberty, in which there is justice, but not the justice of the automaton, so in æsthetic ideals we must beware of fettering the potentialities of life, we must welcome the interaction of the forces of the ideal and real, of the aspiring and the acquiescent upon which the vitality of art depends, and through which it rises to those entranced moments when the dualism is resolved and in a perfect reconciliation of elements we touch the heart of the eternal mystery.

But the pain of the world has in recent years unfitted many of us for the enjoyment of minor graces and elegant pleasures. Our manhood protests that we should take our small part in trying to lessen that pain for the future. Reason in its amplest exercise alone can do that service, and as science can conquer physical pain, and philosophy mental, so poetry, rightly conceived, can triumph over the agony of spiritual sickness and admit mankind to the absolute liberty, to the radiant health of life lived according to love.

NEWTOWN, NEWBURY.

H. I'A. F.