At any rate, theory of this kind-theory which, without pretending to legislate for poetry, tries to understand the nature of its power-has had many devotees, and not only among the philosophers. Some of the greatest minds in the history of thought have, indeed, had their say in the theory of poetry-Aristotle, Plato, Kant. Bacon summed up one aspect of it in a few profound and majestic sentences. But the poets themselves have certainly not been unwilling to theorise their art. We have such considered treatises as those of Dante, Sidney, du Bellay, Wordsworth, Shelley; we have contributions scarcely less valuable in such flashes of lightning penetration as Coleridge's distinction between Milton's genius and Shakespeare's, or Sophocles' distinction between himself and Euripides: "My kind of poetry represents men as they should be, Euripides' kind men as they are." The poets even introduce sometimes a thread of poetic theory into the texture of their art. Shakespeare's speech about the poet's eye "in a fine frenzy rolling" is perhaps so familiar that we do not always realise what a sound piece of theory it is. The image, the shaped and concrete thing that is what poetry deals in; the abstract of thought and the intangible of fantasy, poetry translates into forms, into vividly actual definition-what Shakespeare, practising his theory while he enounces it, calls "a local habitation and a name." Landor even made poetic use of the pangs of composition. The intimacies of technique are curiously revealed in his account of the youthful queen's difficulties with the

unruly energy of words, when she was drawing up a diplomatic speech:

She formed them, and reformed them, with regret
That there was somewhat lost in every change:
She could replace them-what would that avail?-
Moved from their order they have lost their charm.

There you have strikingly expressed the fact, common to all usages of language, but of supreme importance in poetry, that the meaning of a word depends not simply on the word itself, but on the other words round about it.

It would be easy to go on enumerating casual or deliberate contributions to the theory of poetry. And yet, in spite of their plenty, the whole ground has never been mapped out; still less has anything like a consistent and accepted body of doctrine resulted. I am not now proposing to supply that deficiency; but so long as the deficiency exists, it may excuse any attempt at a broad and connected account of the main facts of poetry.

I begin by limiting my subject. This is clearly required. The nature of poetry, thoroughly searched out, would take me through all the departments of human knowledge and illusion. It would be like that heaven-high, hell-deep journey Wordsworth describes as his exploration of the secrets of man's mind:

For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep-and aloft ascending breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.

All strength-all terror, single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form,
Jehovah, with His thunder, and the choir
Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones-
I pass them unalarmed. Not chaos, not
The darkest pit of lowest Erebus

Nor aught of blinder vacancy scooped out

By help of dreams-can breed such fear and awe
As fall upon us often when we look

Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man.

Yes, and all the Mind of Man comes, or may come, within the scope of poetry; and,

Had we but world enough and time,

all of it might, under one colour or another, be ransacked for our theory of poetry.

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near.

Limitation is decidedly required. I shall not, as the great philosopher did, start by asking, is there such a thing as my subject? And if there is, by what possibility and by what right does it exist?—I shall assume that poetry exists. I shall assume that it is, on the whole, desirable. I shall not reach out into the psychology of that; and I shall not be daunted by the apparition of the man who says: "But honestly, I don't like poetry." I shall not trace his affliction back to its source in some obscure mental deformity. I leave him. to the alienists.

Besides, there are laws of trespass in this region as

in others. Psychology, for instance, is a great landowner hereabouts. I have no permit which would excuse my rambling over his property; and I fear the noise of my floundering in the watery soil he cultivates would unpleasantly attract his notice. Metaphysics, too, has some thorny preserves marching with our pleasant grasslands; and metaphysics is a notoriously litigious creature. We shall find we have range enough without such risks as these.

But there is another neighbouring science, of whom we must be even more careful. This is the science of Esthetics; and now it is not resentment we must avoid, but friendliness. For Esthetics, not being quite sure of his dignity, is only too anxious to do the neighbourly thing and put his whole property at our disposal. The danger is, that if we accept his invitation, he assumes the right to walk about our estate and to have some say in its management; and several previous cultivators of our ground have been quite taken in by his specious advice. In order then that we may keep safely to our own ground, and be able to warn off the officious friendship of this busybody, we must be sure of our boundary.

We are to study the art of poetry. Now art, if it is successful, is judged to be beautiful; and æsthetics can certainly be described as the science of everything that may be brought up for judgment as beautiful or the reverse: it is too narrow a description, but it will do for the present. This apparently gives æsthetics a claim to be considered as the landlord of our territory;

but we have just as good a claim to an absolute autonomy, if not independence.

If I contemplate Nature with delight, I am certainly providing material for the science of æsthetics, and I may consider myself to be in a poetical state of mind; but what is to be noted now is, that the experience is wholly my own. If, however, I contemplate with delight a work of art-a poem, say-the experience is not wholly my own: another man's experience is involved with mine: namely, the poet's. This may not seem a very great difference; but in fact it is crucial: it is the vitally characteristic thing in poetry: for it is this that makes poetry one of the Arts. The theory of poetry, then, must take account not only of the quality of certain remarkable kinds of experience, but also of the no less remarkable Art by which the poet has communicated his experience and enabled it to become ours as well. However nicely we examine into poetical states of mind, their study will never give us what is characteristic of poetry-namely, the conveying of these states of mind, whatever they may be, by the methodical use of language. Poetry must be studied as a deliberately designed activity leading up to a foreordained end; and solely because it is this is it capable of its peculiar spiritual function.

And this is the reason why the theory of poetry should be kept decisively apart from the general science of æsthetics. For outside poetry anything like the art to which poetry owes its existence is utterly unknownthe art or system of contrivances whereby experience