composition held the original unity of conception steadily before his mind, and has expressed every part of it in its exact proportion and right relation to the whole, then the sense of his words will build up an intellectual harmony, and the sound of them will build up an instrumental harmony: both sense and sound being, in poetry, equally required for expression. Diction, that is to say, will have become form: poetry will have become a poem. When the art of poetry is perfect, we have not only such texture of language as can perfectly imitate momentary imagination, but language which can draw imagination into wholeness of self-sufficing harmony: and that not by any imposition, but simply by the natural accumulation of the precisely right expressions, moment by moment. Poetic form means simply this: that by provision made for the whole through every part of the texture of a poem, what had to be disintegrated into language cannot but finally re-integrate itself into a single imaginative experience. For, once more, an imaginative experience which has been so distinctly known that it has urged the poet to express it, has not properly been expressed at all if it has not been expressed as a unity.

IV

DICTION: THE MEANING OF WORDS

A

GOOD deal of the theory of poetry has now been broadly outlined; and after noticing one or two fallacies which it exposes, I had better summarise its main results, in order to show how the outlines must now be filled in. The art of poetry consists both of having something to say and of saying it. Speechless poets-mute inglorious Miltons and so on-do not concern us: indeed, they are not usually invoked as creatures at all, but rather as harmless tropes, like wise fools and men who achieve the impossible. But sometimes the dumb poet is offered more seriously to our notice. He signifies now not pathetic failure to be a poet, but on the contrary a triumphant soaring beyond the reach of language. There may be these spiritual triumphs; but so long as we are merely told about them, we have to take them on trust; they have nothing, at any rate, to do with poetry, unless they at least try to make themselves communicable. And when we remember what Dante and Shakespeare did manage to communicate, we may suspect that these unspeakable exaltations are only, after all, another kind of poetic failure: the art was lacking. So, when Samuel Butler says, "The greatest poets never write poetry-for the

highest poetry is ineffable," we recognise it as a case of what Hobbes calls "the frequency of insignificant speech." This ineffable poetry is as good as a square circle. It has no function but to enable Butler to seem profound when he is only talking sentimental nonsense -which is usually what he does talk when art is the topic.

Let me, for a moment, touch on two other popular figments: the poet whose work has more matter than art, and his companion in misfortune, who has more art than matter. How can poetry have more matter than art? As far as we are concerned, the poet has just as much matter as he has art to convey it; if there is matter in him for which he has no art, how do we know anything about it? We may sometimes feel that a poet is trying to say something and is not succeeding; but in that case we do not know what he wants to say, we only hope there is some reason for his exasperated fumbling. This is to give us neither matter nor art; for if the matter does not arrive, there is no art. When we do gather what he wants to say, then obviously, somehow or other he has said it. He may not have said it well; he may be deficient in art. But the result of that will be not too much matter, but too little. Whether that was due to poverty of inspiration or of art, we cannot tell; for we can only know his inspiration by his art. Browning was both blamed and praised for loading his poetry with matter while disdaining art. This was simply a formula for avoiding criticism; it repressed inquiry into the unusual character of his

art, and into the fact that its oddity sometimes succeeds, sometimes fails. But it fails precisely when it conveys to us only dead matter-intellectual stuff that will not come to life: it fails, that is, because its matter, far from being excessive, is deficient-there are only the bones of it, not the breathing flesh.

Swinburne, on the other hand, is still quoted as the type of poet who exhibits art without matter. Again, a phrase takes the place of criticism. Why is Swinburne's work sometimes so thrilling, sometimes so dull? He had found out certain devices which in his earlier work had done such wonders that he went on using them whether they were appropriate or not. Was this excessive art? It was a woeful lack of art. Art without matter can only be, in poetry, language without meaning: which is as much as to say, language that is not language. Swinburne may have come near to that; but the nearer he came, the less art he showed, for the art of poetry is simply the art of electrifying language with extraordinary meaning. Art without matter is not art at all.

When therefore we come across language which is instinct with an exceptional degree of meaning; when it not only conveys ideas or the way things happened, but can make those ideas enact themselves in our imagination as sensuous and emotional experiences, or can turn the way things happened into the very sense of their happening: when language does this, we recognise that we have poetry before us. The detailed theory of poetry must therefore proceed to examine into the

means available for this; and these, as we have seen, will resolve themselves into special uses of the dual nature of language-its nature as sound which is also meaning. Sound of words will have a meaning of its own in poetry, not to be given in any other way; and the meaning that is ordinarily conveyed in the sound of words will prove capable of a subtle expansive reverberation, which seems to detach itself from the sound and go summoning images and feelings from remote regions of the mind to come and share its life. These are the two aspects of language which the learned call phonetic and semantic; they are not properly separable, but their effects can be discriminated.

By noting these effects (which we shall now do more minutely in this and the following lecture), we may collect some notion of what it is that poetry peculiarly has to say. But this, whatever it is, we cannot help but note also, does not come to finality of expression unless the poetry has also become a poem: unless, that is, it has achieved a certain self-sufficient and complete coherence of independent existence. And this independence is due to the fact that there is a further meaning to be got out of the sense and sound of language: the meaning we indicate by the word form. This is the final and resultant success of all those serial qualities we shall have considered as diction, and is not therefore to be discussed as though it were a separable imposition; but when we come to it, we shall also have come to considering what it is that poetry finally exists to say to us. We may therefore content ourselves, in