is the finer passage of the two, but I know which is most like the nightingale.'1 In fact, Shelley's But this is the Meredith enthusiast. passage is more like; not sharing the confusing power of Meredith's over-definiteness, it is more nightingaley. Poetry is not description, it is sympathetic emotion.2 One does not want a line drawing of the nightingale's 1 The choice of passages is Mr. Trevelyan's. Had he been anxious to bring out my point and not his own he would have chosen a passage about the nightingale from the poet of the nightingale : 'Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, 2 Cp. Tolstoy's definition of Art. Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.'-Tolstoy's What is Art? Mr. Aylmer Maude's translation. By 'consciously' Tolstoy means that a scream of agony, however heartrending, is not Art, there must be an Art purpose; and by 'hands on to others' he means that the mere expression of emotion is not Art, since emotion may be expressed so badly as not to excite a contagious emotion. Thus a wretched bombastic tragedy may excite us to laughter, not tears. Tolstoy is not discussing the standpoint of these Essays, that the highest Art is largely unconscious. He does not deny, he explicitly states that in the deepest poetry or art the poet is chiefly thinking not of affecting others, but of expressing himself. Tolstoy's purpose, however, is not to distinguish between spontaneous and oratorical art. He is speaking of all Art, and trying to define the human activity broadly understood. No doubt there must be a contact between the emotion of the artist and that of the audience. This is necessary to Art, and since it is so the artist may be said, however subconsciously, always in some degree to intend it. The mere act of publication proves this. Yet there are very important distinctions in the degree of intention, and these Tolstoy does not discuss. song; what one wants, and what the poet alone can give, is the effect produced by it : 'And this is the soul's heaven, to have felt.'1 Description,' says Mill, 'is not poetry because there is descriptive poetry. But an object which admits of being described may also furnish an occasion for the generation of poetry, which we thereupon choose to call descriptive. The poetry is not in the object itself, but in the state of mind in which it may be contemplated.' 2 Of those descriptions of Milton's that come home to us we can say the same : 'Anon they move From mortal or immortal minds.' 13 and pain, As Milton thinks of the troubles music softens, he thinks of all the troubles of man 'Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow, and pain,'— and, so thinking, his heart is bowed beneath the sense of mortal calamity, bowed and shaken and filled by it as is his noble line. His host moves humanly before us; 1 Sonnet, Winter Heavens, Meredith. 2 Mill, Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties. In the original passage there are also references to didactic poetry, but as tending both to confusion and controversy I leave them out. 3 Paradise Lost, i. 549. it is described to the life because his description has ended on an emotional chord. 1 The effect of a long poem, of which it is so difficult to speak, is also similar. It has as a whole impressed our feeling. Sometimes its effect is single and indivisible, as is the case with Morris's Sigurd, the Eneid, or Longfellow's Evangeline :— 'Told she the tale of the fair Lilianu who was wooed by a phantom.' Sometimes the impression left is the impression of a 7 series of emotional effects, as in Tennyson's Idylls, or, in lesser degree, the Odyssey, or still less, because the separate effects are so like, The Faery Queen or The Prelude. In those last cases, though one does not quite get a single impression, the separate impressions are so similar as to produce cumulatively almost the effect of unity. Sometimes, though the impression is the impression of a whole, that impression is not poetical, as with The Ring and the Book, and this is → because the whole, allowing for surprising spurts of emotion, is the result of an intellectual process. It is not easy to define poetry—a dream, a sigh, an exhalation : 'This lady of the luting tongue, The flash in darkness, billow's grace.' Mr. Meredith has indeed attempted it : 'That was the chirp of Ariel You heard, as overhead it flew, And wing our green to wed our blue; 1 And such is the effect sometimes even of prose dramas, e.g. Tourgenieff's most beautiful play The Bread of Others. There are few poetical passages in it, but the effect of the whole is the effect of a poem. But whether note of joy or knell, Save only how it shivers through ; The blood of us a lighted dew.' That was poetry, that which we seemed to hear just now; and the more faint, the more the sound seemed to die off into an illimitable vague and to be lost in the infinite, the more it haunts us and helps to uplift our grosser part into communion with our spirit, which itself is part of the spirit of all. But whether this ecstasy derived from poetry is in a strict sense pleasurable no one can tell, not even the chief of poetrymakers, Shakespeare, himself. Our eyes are 'wet with most delicious tears.' We cannot say much more than that, except that a real poetical experience makes our being vibrate as nothing else can. We seem, for the moment, ourselves to be participant in the making of this heavenly harmony; seem to emit, like the dewdrop touched with the sun, a light which is our own.1 For this paraphrase of a difficult little poem, I am greatly indebted to Mr. Trevelyan's detailed explanation, The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith, pp. 72-74. GRAY If we understood anything perfectly, we should understand everything. It is equally true that to understand anything perfectly, we must understand everything. Yet one must make shift to deal with the eighteenth century in England without attempting an analysis of the precedent civilisations of Greece and Rome; civilisations in which the art of living had been cultivated to a high degree, but ultimately destroyed, partly by the incursion of barbarians, partly by the growth of Christianity, a religion which made war against the pride of the world. There arose, in what we call the Dark Ages, what we know as the Monastic Ideal, a mode of thought which drew the finer spirits away 7 from life and absorbed them in the contemplation of death and a life to come, leaving meanwhile the earth itself, denuded of ideals, a prey to the strong and violent man. The true Salamanca University was then the cloister, and outside the loud-roaring hailstorms' fell. What remains to us from those ages of quietism and riot is the memory of bloody deeds, often of high tragic value, and of a selected existence solacing itself in seclusion. The first signs of the serious re-emergence of the human spirit synchronise roughly with the Latin Empire of Constantinople, when interest in Roman learning and Roman culture, never wholly forgotten L |