in the hive, and the transference of this feeling to the vision of the fiends (with its objectifying effect on the vision), are both encouraged by the terms of the simile: the simile is to compare fiends with bees, but the bees in the simile are themselves described in metaphors of human city life. The result is, of course, a moment of extraordinarily enriched consciousness; fiends suggest bees, bees suggest men, and so back to fiends, with a new range of suggestion brought in at each stage.

So, too, Shelley, bringing mood and sensation before us in a metaphor, straightway proceeds to expound the metaphor by inserting a simile:

My soul is an enchanted boat

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing.

Modern taste has developed unnecessary scruples about this kind of thing; scruples derived no doubt from the too narrow notion that the function of simile and metaphor is only to intensify and clarify imagery, usually visual. Such complexity as Shelley gives us leads rather, it has been complained, to confusion than to precision of imagery. And it is often regarded as selfevident that mixed metaphors (that is, an incongruous mixture of comparisons) must be poetically faulty. Ancient taste, however, seems to have been less disposed to cavil at such things; and I should suppose that, so long as ludicrous incongruity be avoided, the mixture of likenesses in one complex expression is still eminently defensible, since it has the virtue of enlarging

the significance of the moment and enriching our consciousness of it.

Now, though it has taken some argument to make out the exact nature of significance in poetry, it is clearly not a significance which requires any argument to make it effective there. We have not gone beyond experience taken at its face-value. On the contrary, the significance I have been describing is automatically the property of experience whenever we are completely conscious of it; when we have it, for example, brought before us by means of such a many-sided instrument as poetic language. For just as each item of the experience is valued immediately and intuitively, so the interrelatedness of the items is valued; and this latter inclusive value (inclusive, but equally immediate) is our sense of the significance of the experience-a sense of face-value significance which, just because it is immediate, is much more satisfying than any intellectual construction of significance.

So far, however, we have not been considering the significance of an experience as a whole, but simply as it proceeds piece by piece. We have been referring to poetry, not to poems. Of poetry, we may indeed now venture to give a definition: It is the expression of imaginative experience, valued simply as such and significant simply as such, in the communicable state given by language which employs every available and appropriate device.

But if this is the nature of poetry, we must go on now to study the perfection of its nature; when, that

NB.

is, it is made completely self-sufficient, and isolated in the single purpose of achieving the fullest possibility of its nature: when poetry exists as an individual poem. We must extend our notion of poetic significance. We have not yet accounted for such a crucial instance as the significance of Iago's villainy. As it is revealed to us moment by moment, the argument so far will certainly apply to it. But this piecemeal significance is slight compared with the final impression it makes on us when we have in our minds the poem as a whole.

It is, however, very easy to give the required extension to the notion of poetic significance which we already have. For it is only an extension; the notion is exactly similar, and may be arrived at in an exactly similar way. We formed our notion of the significance of things as they appear in the texture of poetry, by following up the indications given by the technique of its texture: by, that is to say, the technique of diction. But in order to enable poetry to exist in individual self-sufficiency, the poet, as we have already seen, must add to the technique of diction the technique of form. Now this simply means that, however complex and diverse the things may be which make up the substance of a poem, the meaning of the language which exhibits these things has been so exactly organised that, seconded by the rhythmical continuity of the language, the final impression is one of a harmonious unity of all the parts. For the form of the poem is the means whereby the imagination in it is at last fused into a unity, or rather expresses itself as a unity, similar to

and unadulterated? But what is pure poetry? What but the poetry which expresses pure experience? And that simply means-experience itself: experience valued merely as such, in and for itself, without having to rely on any external judgement of truth or morality or utility. The flowering of a cherry-tree, the dancing of a child, the attitude of a mountain, the sound and motion of waves, the sense of youth and love and mortality-we all know how these, and the like of these, dispense with any ulterior judgement, and give us the momentary, unconsidered rapture of pure experience. But where are its boundaries? There are none. Nothing whatever which the human spirit is capable of receiving, is incapable of being received simply as a pure experience, valued without needing any verdict of an ulterior judgement, appreciable simply as a particle of active life. And the really characteristic thing about the art of poetry is its power to present the whole conceivable world the world not merely of sense and fantasy, but of severest intellectual effort, of subtlest psychological understanding, of the highest ardours of mutinous or consenting passion-to present anything which any faculty of ours can achieve or accept, as a moment of mere delighted living, of self-sufficient experience.

So now, after these preliminaries, I begin my attempt to build up roughly, but as substantially as I can, the idea of great poetry. I mean to imitate in my building the most elementary of architectural forms, the pyramid. I shall take first, as the broad foundation, squar

ing them to the purpose of the whole design, those obvious and necessary qualities which all poetry must have; and successively impose on these the qualities which, in this particular valuation of greatness, raise poetry higher and higher-but which occur more and more rarely-until at last we reach the narrow apex, the qualities of supreme greatness.

Of course, when we discuss poetry quality by quality, we are proceeding more in accordance with convenience than with truth. Poetry does not consist of separable qualities; if it exists at all, it exists as an indivisible whole. Unless, however, we were to allow ourselves, here as elsewhere in life, the liberty of analysing, criticism could never get much farther than exclamations of "well done!" and "ill done!" The disadvantage is, however, that when we come to the superstructure of our argument, we may seem to be ignoring the fundamental qualities on which it necessarily rests. I hope it will be allowed, during the later stages of our discussion, that nothing which is there said to make for greatness has been admitted except under the conditions which make it poetry, though these conditions may not be expressly mentioned: for they will, in fact, have been mentioned once and for all as the foundations of everything else.

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What, then, is the first thing which we require of all poetry-not merely in order to be great, but to exist