to the exclusion of his duty as a creative idealist; his business as a revealer of things as they are is more often quoted than his distinction as a creator of things as they ought to be. The true poet is philosopher, psychologist and moralist, but all to an absolute degree; above all he is a man spurred on by high passions, championing the deepest and truest values in the face of society and circumstance, and all the grinding logic of the world. His example should serve both to call men back to nature and speed them on to truth. He is no literary manikin tasting the pleasures of cultivated emotions or paddling in the stream of private sensations. is one with the creative spirit of life, and the world that is and that is to be mingle in his utterance. He is at his highest "the prophetic soul of the world dreaming on things to come "; for the end of the world too is surely beauty.

He

Poetry, then, is an intenser and more purified revelation of nature by the genius of man. Yet though the idealist's aim be no more than absolute expression, and though at first many find the poet's creation no more enlightening than they find nature's own landscape, those who will discipline themselves to the experience will discover great poetry to be what few religions have ever been-true both to life and to thought, delightful, and in an absolute sense moral in so far as it images truth and refines a temperament by advertising both the energy of life

and the wisdom of its right directions. Above all, true poetry is a discloser of the eternal in time.

All great art is indirectly both didactic and religious, for it teaches men by its influence and example how to live truly and how to die with hope. We are bettered by our intercourse with it, as we are by an intimacy with a man of high intelligence and refined sensibility. We are brought by it into a condition of true liberty, our emotions are purged, our passions chastened, our reason advances beyond logic to essential perception, our whole being is translated into a world rich, measured, calm and majestic, a world in which neither meanness nor incontinence, feebleness nor shame, discord nor languor, perversity nor narrow-mindedness exist.

The heaven of great art is then the offspring of creative idealism, and if because of his passionate nature the artist, when his passion lacks governance, may prove the subtlest and most compelling aid to depravity and excess, in his truth he is the most completely, the most alluringly true of all men. His ethics are absolute, for they are one with the pure air of heaven, the mounting sun, the budding hedgerows, the noblest achievements of man.

CHAPTER II

THE EMERGENCE OF MORALITY

Wherever he stands, at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to his passions, or his passions to his gods. That is the problem, great enough, in all truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and knowledge.-JOSEPH CONRAD.

I

WE have said that absolute poetry represents a marriage of the senses and the mind, a marriage so perfect in its harmony that the fact of its dualism serves only to produce a high and comprehensive unity, in which the cold formality of reason, and the impulsive energy, the sympathetic tenderness of emotion unite. "Nature has kissed art," as Mr. Bridges has worded it, and the child of these nuptials is poetry.

Poetry cannot do without either of its parents, and in its attempts to deny one of them has often enough courted either the death of physical nature or the lifelessness of mental conceit. So far as we can see, we cannot even be exclusively spiritual on this earth without courting sickness and at last death. If spirituality entails a progressive starving of the body, a surrender of the will to abstract

ideals, a resting upon consoling sentiments-it quickly becomes a pestilence-stricken miasma, clouding the brain, thinning the blood, withering the senses. Lust itself, we are driven to admit, is preferable to spiritual anaemia, since it contains at least the potentialities of life. The senses are the instrument upon which the spirit must play. The instrument may be more and more finely strung, but it must never be broken or thrown aside. An analogy therefore must always exist between the activity of nature and of the poet. Human intelligence cannot define the creative force manifest in nature's evervariant imagery: philosophers have indeed denied to such phenomena material existence; they have made all things not only the measure, but the substance of human mind. But the poet who, like Dr. Johnson kicking a stone to refute Berkeley, is convinced of the existence of a natural world external to himself, discovers nature's methods to be kindred to his own. She, in her affluence, in her joyous energy, in her destructiveness, in her triumph of form over reckless confusion, would seem to reveal both a creative and critical intelligence at work in physical matter. In the soft colour of deepening twilight, in the brilliance of a frosty morning, in the involved tracery of a soaring tree, in the agreed company of the stars, we seem to detect the expression alike of a cosmic energy and a great master mind. Yet nature's material is physical, and her criterion of

value is force. Her harmony is the balance of forces, her discord their battle. The life-energy contains in itself an equal tendency towards order and towards chaos, and order triumphs only by the extermination of the superfluous. Nature is both divine and satanic: divine at the expense of numberless organisms which she is compelled to destroy, because her creative desire outruns her formative discretion. Her life only persists within the vicious circle of thriftless creation and destruction. She lives in a perpetual whirl and without it she would perish terribly. She is like a vast crowd in a narrow lane, that must keep moving; in her, love and hate are indistinguishable, for they are both the exultant expression of a self-absorbed life-force.

Yet man himself is the proof that within her creative principle the germ of reason lurks. Man is nature made conscious of intelligence, and it is thus that he has risen slowly above the natural economy into which he was born. His distinctive humanity is comprised in this alone, that while still loyal to nature's creative principle, her joy and passion for life, he, by the harmonious exercise of his faculties, under the direction, at first conscious and then habitual, of reason, may enthrone the mind's values over the body's, the spiritual over the physical, the idea over the fact. In short he realises nature on a higher plane. Thus, to take a particular example, the poet in his creative activity is as pro