has, in fact, assumed the right to label a distinct faculty. Now, the faculty of fancy does not exist: it is one of Coleridge's chimeras, of which he kept a whole stable. Fancy is nothing but a degree of imagination: and the degree of it concerns, not the quality of the imagery, but the quality and force of the emotion symbolised by the imagery. Poe's poem is a masterpiece; but the triumph of death in it has neither the force nor the quality of, say, Petrarch's Trionfo, not to mention Othello. Just as fanciful as The City in the Sea, and deserving the epithet for precisely similar reasons, are, for example, many passages in The Divine Comedy: such as the quarrelling demons in the Inferno, or the Earthly Paradise at end of the Purgatorio. There is no'radical change from the process of imagination in such passages; but there is a certain limitation and agreeable specialisation of emotion in them. And that is what we refer to-but it is only that we refer towhen we call such poetry the work of fancy.

LECTURE II

GREATNESS OF FORM. REFUGE AND
INTERPRETATION

§ 1

So far I have been mainly engaged in examining, for the signs of greatness, poetry in its momentary existence. For that is how we take it in-moment by moment: in poetry, as in everything else, we live first of all in the immediate now; and in order to build up our idea of great poetry, we must begin with its momentary condition. If we have succeeded in accounting for our sense of greatness in some signal moments of poetry, still we have done no more than make a beginning. So long as we are concerned with poetry as we take it in, moment by moment, we cannot expect to get anything more than the accent or manner of greatness: the suggestion of what we may look to have when the accumulating sequence of moments is complete. If we are to lay our hands anywhere on greatness itself, it will not be in the effect of poetry while we are reading it; but in the effect it may have on us when we have read it: when the orderly series of poetic experiences has been collected into one final and inclusive imagination which is the compact summation of the whole: that is to say, when not merely

poetry has come into existence in our minds, but a poem. The greatness we are looking for is, therefore, strictly a property of poems rather than of poetry. The distinction might be put in a more emphatic and perhaps more familiar way, which we may find useful. For this is nothing but the distinction, so common in discussions of this kind, between Substance and Form. It is sometimes misconceived. If we regard form as something added to substance, a mould arbitrarily imposed on the stuff of poetry from without, it would be unintelligible to say that greatness is a property of form. But if we take form to be simply the fore-ordained and finally resulting whole impression which sums up and includes an orderly sequence of contributory impressions, then clearly it is here, if anywhere, that the quality of greatness will reside. What we have while we are still reading a poem is its substance; but a substance which only exists for the sake of its eventual form. For the moments of a poem are only there in the interest of its design and whole intention; we read a poem for what we are to feel when we have read it. But if a poem has any effect as a whole at all, that must be because the recollection of the series of its moments impresses us as something complete in itself and self-contained, in boundaries effected by its own coherence; the recollection, that is to say, is of something which has form.

But, though we may agree that greatness in poetry strictly belongs to form, we must make out more exactly what this means. In any noticeable moment of

poetry, we see that there is a certain set of words responsible for it. But when, at the end of a poem, we receive its final impression as a whole, there is no set of words that is directly responsible for that. It certainly comes to us as the result of all the words in the poem; but not directly. It is the organised accumulation of the whole series of momentary impressions: the impression made by all the other impressions united together. Often enough the series of impressions is so short, and accumulates into a self-sufficient whole so rapidly and simply, that the process is not noticed at all. The whole poem seems to form a single moment, and may legitimately be so described; and we seem to take its completed impression directly from the words. Here is a poem of Allingham's which is perhaps as simple an instance of the art of poetry as we could have:

Four ducks on a pond,
A grass bank beyond,
A blue sky of Spring,
White clouds on the wing:
What a little thing

To remember for years

To remember with tears.

We are scarcely conscious of organising these impressions into a whole. But how does, for example, Othello come to exist in our minds as a whole? Not so much by a unification as by a whole series of unifications. We take first from its enchanted language a procession of imagined experiences, and these we con

dense into an impression of character, and of the interaction of character; and this interaction we then condense into an impression of plot; and the plot compacts itself into the sense of a single complex event moving inexorably onward: and our sense of this movement we condense still further, when the play is at an end, into a final summation of impression-some sense of life corresponding (so far as we are capable of corresponding) with that piercing sense of the pitiable irony of things which, stirred by an old story he was reading, gave Shakespeare the motive of his tragedy. It is nowhere directly given; it could not be expressed at all, except as the organic inclusive impression of everything that has happened in the play. For the play was designed for no other end than to express this: and this final impression is the form which the accumulating substance has been forced to assume in our minds by the art of the poet. In order to tell us what his original intuition was, the poet has to expand it and disintegrate it, and put it forth piece by piece in the moments of his language; but he also had to be providing, all the while, for its eventual reintegration into just the right harmony of total unified impression. If he could have conveyed his original intuition instantaneously from his mind into ours, there would have been no need for form, for unity would never have been lost. When St. Lewis visited Frate Egidio, they found it more satisfactory to converse directly, in a silent ecstasy of communication, mind to mind, than to discourse aloud; for that would have been, we are told,