POETRY

By

_Arthur Quiller-Couch_

 "Trust in good verses then: They only shall aspire, When pyramids, as men Are lost i'the funeral fire. "

As the tale is told by Plato, in the tenth book of his _Republic_, oneEr the son of Arminius, a Pamphylian, was slain in battle; and ten daysafterwards, when they collected the bodies for burial, his body aloneshowed no taint of corruption. His relatives, however, bore it off tothe funeral pile; and on the twelfth day, lying there, he returned tolife and told them what he had seen in the other world. Many wonders herelated concerning the dead, for example, with their rewards andpunishments: but most wonderful of all was the great Spindle ofNecessity which he saw reaching up into heaven with the planetsrevolving around it in whorls of graduated width and speed, yet allconcentric and so timed that all complete the full circle punctuallytogether. --"The Spindle turns on the knees of Necessity: and on the rimof each whorl sits perched a Siren, who goes round with it, hymning asingle note; the eight notes together forming one harmony. "

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The fable is a pretty one: but Er the Pamphylian comes back to report nomore than the one thing Man already grasps for a certainty amid hiswelter of guesswork about the Universe--that its stability rests onordered motion--that the "firmament" stands firm on a balance of activeand tremendous forces somehow harmoniously composed. Theology asks "By_whom_?": Philosophy inclines rather to guess "_How?_" Natural Science, allowing that these questions are probably unanswerable, contents itselfwith mapping and measuring what it can of the various forces. But allagree about the harmony: and when a Newton discovers a single rule of itfor us, he but makes our assurance surer. 

For uncounted centuries before ever hearing of "Gravitation" men knewof the sun that he rose and set at hours which, though mysteriouslyappointed, could be accurately predicted; of the moon that she regularlywaxed and waned, drawing the waters of the earth in a flow and ebb, thegauge of which and the time-table could be advertised beforehand in thealmanack; of the stars, that they swung as by clockwork around the pole. Says the son of Sirach concerning them--

 _At the word of the Holy one they will stand in due order, And they will not faint in their watches. _

So evident is this celestial harmony that men, seeking to account for itby what was most harmonious in themselves or in their experience, supposed an actual Music of the Spheres inaudible to mortals; Plato (wholearned of Pythagoras) inventing his Octave of Sirens, spinning in thewhorls of the great planets and intoning as they spin; Chaucer (wholearned of Dante and makes the spheres nine) in his _Parliament ofFoules_ telling, out of Cicero's _Somnium Scipionis_, how the greatScipio Africanus visited his descendant in a dream and--

 _Shewed he him the litel erthe, that heer is, In regard of the hevenes quantit�: And after shewed he him the nyn� sper�s, And after that the melodye herde he That cometh of thilke sper�s thry�s-three That welle is of musicke and melodye In this world heer, and cause of armonye. _

While Shakespeare in the last Act of _The Merchant of Venice_ makes allthe stars vocal, and not the planets only:

 _There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims. .. _

And Milton in _Arcades_ goes straight back to Plato (save that hisspheres are nine, as with Chaucer):

 _then listen I To the celestial Sirens' harmony That sit upon the nine enfolded spheres And sing to those that hold the vital shears And turn the adamantine spindle round Of which the fate of gods and men is wound. Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie To lull the daughters of Necessity, And keep unsteady Nature to her law, And the low world in measured motion draw After the heavenly tune. _

From the greater poets let us turn to a lesser one, whom we shall haveoccasion to quote again by and by: to the _Orchestra_ of Sir John Davies(1596), who sees this whole Universe treading the harmonious measures ofa dance; and let us select one stanza, of the tides:

 _For lo, the sea that fleets about the land, And like a girdle clips her solid waist, Music and Measure both doth understand; For his great Crystal Eye is always cast Up to the Moon, and on her fix�d fast; And as she daunceth in her pallid sphere, So daunceth he about the centre here. _

This may be fantastic. As the late Professor Skeat informed the worldsolemnly in a footnote, "Modern astronomy has exploded the singularnotion of revolving hollow concentric spheres. .. . " (The Professor wrote"singular" when he meant "curious. "--The notion was never "singular. ")"These 'spheres, '" he adds, "have disappeared, and their music withthem, except in poetry. " Nevertheless the fable presents a truth, andone of the two most important truths in the world. This Universe is nota Chaos. (If it were, by the way, we should be unable to reason about itat all. ) It stands and is continually renewed upon an ascertainedharmony: and what Plato called "Necessity" is the duty in all things ofobedience to that harmony, the Duty of which Wordsworth sings in hisnoble Ode, _Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And his most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong. _

Now the other and only equally important truth in the world is that thismacrocosm of the Universe, with its harmony, cannot be apprehended atall except as it is focussed upon the eye and intellect of Man, themicrocosm. All "transcendental" philosophy, --all discussions of the"Absolute, " of mind and matter, of "subjective" and "objective"knowledge, of "ideas" and "phenomena, " "flux" and "permanence"--all"systems" and "schools, " down from the earliest to be found in "Ritterand Preller, " through Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, on to Aquinas, to Abelard, to the great scholastic disputants between Realism andNominalism; again on to Bacon, Spinoza, Locke, Comte, Hegel, and yetagain on to James and Bergson--all inevitably work out to this, that theUniversal Harmony is meaningless and nothing to Man save in so far as heapprehends it, and that he can only apprehend it by reference to somecorresponding harmony within himself. Lacking him, the harmony (so faras he knows) would utterly lack the compliment of an audience: by hisown faulty instrument he must seek to interpret it, if it is to beinterpreted at all: and so, like the man at the piano, he goes on "doinghis best. "

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"God created Man in His image, " says the Scripture: "and, " adds Heine, "Man made haste to return the compliment. " It sounds wicked, but is oneof the truest things ever said. After all, and without vanity, it is thebest compliment Man can pay, poor fellow!--and he goes on striving topay it, though often enough rebuked for his zeal. "Canst _thou_, "demands the divine Interlocutor in the _Book of Job_--

_"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bandsof Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazaroth in his season? Or canst thouguide Arcturus with his sons?"_

To this, fallen and arraigned man, using his best jargon, responds that"the answer is in the negative. I never pretended to _do_ these things, only to guess, in my small way, how they are done. "

Nor is there any real irreverence in answering thus: for of course it isnot the Almighty who puts the questions, but someone audaciouslypersonating Him. And some of us find this pretension irritating; asDouglas Jerrold meeting a pompous stranger on the pavement was moved toaccost him with, "I beg your pardon, Sir, but would you mind informingme--Are you anybody in particular?"

Again, in the sixth chapter of the Second Book of Esdras, someoneusurping the voice of the Almighty and using (be it said to his credit)excellent prose, declares:

 _"In the beginning, when the earth was made, before the waters of the world stood, or ever the wind blew, Before it thundered or lightened, or ever the foundations of paradise were laid, Before the fair flowers were seen, or ever_ _the moveable powers were established; before the innumerable multitude of angels were gathered together, Or ever the heights of the air were lifted up, before the measures of the firmament were named, or ever the chimneys of Zion were hot. _

 Then _did I consider these things, and they all were made through Me alone, and through none other: by Me also they shall be ended, and by none other. "_

It is all very beautiful: but (for aught that appears) no one wasdenying it. It has been shrewdly objected against the arguments of the"affable Archangel" in the later books of _Paradise Lost_ that argumentby its nature admits of being answered: and the fatal fallacy of puttinghuman speech into a divine mouth, as in the above passage, is that itinvites retort. 

A sensible man does not aspire to bind the sweet influences of Pleiades:but he may, and does, aspire to understand something of the universalharmony in which he and they bear a part, if only that he may render ita more perfect obedience. "Let me know, " he craves, "that I may acceptmy fate intelligently, even though it prove that under the iron rule ofNecessity I have no more freedom of will than the dead, _Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees. _"

The claim (as Man must think) is a just one--for why was he givenintelligence if not to use it? And even though disallowed aspresumptuous, it is an instinctive one. Man is, after all, a part of theUniverse, and just as surely as the Pleiades or Arcturus: and moreoverhe _feels_ in himself a harmony correspondent with the greater harmonyof his quest. His heart beats to a rhythm: his blood pulses throughsteady circuits; like the plants by which he is fed, he comes to birth, grows, begets his kind, dies, and returns to earth; like the tides, hisdays of gestation obey the moon and can be reckoned by her; in the sweatof his body he tills the ground, and by the seasons, summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, his life while it lasts is regulated. But aboveall he is the microcosm, the tiny percipient centre upon which theimmense cosmic circle focusses itself as the sun upon aburning-glass--and he is not shrivelled up by the miracle! Othercreatures (he notes) share his sensations; but, so far as he candiscover, not his intelligence--or, if at all, in no degree worthmeasuring. So far as he can detect, he is not only an actor in the grandcosmic pageant, but the sole intelligent spectator. As a poor Welshparson, Thomas Traherne, wrote of the small town of his childhood:--

_The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, theirclothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, their skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sunand moon and stars; and all the world was mine, and I the only spectatorand enjoyer of it. .. . _

 _But little did the infant dream That all the treasures of the world were by; And that himself was so the cream And crown of all which round about did lie. Yet thus it was: the Gem, The Diadem, The ring enclosing all That stood upon this earthly ball, The heavenly Eye, Much wider than the sky Wherein they all included were, The glorious soul that was the King, Made to possess them, did appear A small and little thing!_

We may safely go some way even beyond this, and lay it down forunchallengeable truth that over and above Man's consciousness of beingthe eye of the Universe and receptacle, however imperfect, of its greatharmony, he has a native impulse to merge himself in that harmony and beone with it: a spirit in his heart (as the Scripture puts it) "ofadoption, whereby we cry, _Abba, Father_"--_And because ye are sons, Godhath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. _ In his daily life he is for ever seeking after harmony inavoidance of chaos, cultivating personal habits after the clock; in hiscivic life forming governments, attempting hierarchies, laws, constitutions, by which (as he hopes) a system of society will work intune, almost automatically. When he fights he has learnt that hisfighting men shall march in rhythm and deploy rhythmically, and they doso to regimental music. If he haul rope or weigh anchor, setting out tosea, or haul up his ship on a beach, he has proved by experiment thatthese operations are performed more than twice as easily when done to atune. But these are dull, less than half-conscious, imitations of thegreat harmony for which, when he starts out to understand and interpretit consciously, he must use the most godlike of all his gifts. Now themost godlike of all human gifts--the singular gift separating Man fromthe brutes--is speech. If he can harmonise speech he has taught hisfirst and peculiar faculty to obey the great rhythm: "I will sing andgive praise, " says the Psalmist, "with the best member that I have. "Thus by harmonising speech (in a fashion we will discuss by and by), hearrives at _Poetry_. 

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But an objection may be raised. "_Is_ the tongue, rather than the brain, the best member that I have?" or (to put it in another way), "Surely aman's _thoughts_ about the Universe have more value than his words aboutit?"

The answer is, that we cannot separate them: and Newman has put this socogently that I must quote him, making no attempt to water down hisargument with words of my own. "Thought and speech are inseparable fromone another. Matter and expression are parts of one: style is a thinkingout into language. This is literature; not _things_, but the verbalsymbols of things; not on the other hand mere _words_, but thoughtsexpressed in language. Call to mind the meaning of the Greek word whichexpresses this special prerogative of Man over the feeble intelligenceof the lower animals. It is called Logos. What does Logos mean? Itstands both for _reason_ and for _speech_, and it is difficult to saywhich means more properly. It means both at once: why? Because reallythey cannot be divided. .. . When we can separate light and illumination, life and motion, the convex and the concave of a curve, then will it bepossible for thought to tread speech under foot and to hope to dowithout it--then will it be conceivable that the vigorous and fertileintellect should renounce its own double, its instrument of expressionand the channel of its speculations and emotions. " Words, in short, arethe outward and visible signs of thought: that, and somethingmore--since you may prove by experiment that the shortest and simplesttrain of thought cannot be followed unless at every step the mindsilently casts it into the mould of words. 

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As an instrument for reconciling Man's inward harmony with the greatouter harmony of the Universe, Poetry is notoriously imperfect. Men havetried others therefore--others that appeared at first sight morepromising, such as Music and Mathematics--yet on the whole to theirdisappointment. 

Take Mathematics. Numbers inhere in all harmony. By numbers harmony canbe expressed far more severely than by Poetry, and so successfully up toa point, that poets have borrowed the very word to dignify their poorefforts. They "lisp in numbers"--or so they say: and the curious mayturn to the _Parmenides_, to Book vii. Of _The Republic_ and others ofthe _Dialogues_ and note how Plato, hunting on the trail of manydistinguished predecessors, pursues Mathematics up to the point where, as a means of interpreting to Man the Universal harmony, Mathematics, like Philosophy, inevitably breaks down. Mathematics, an abstractscience, breaks down just because it is abstract and in no way personal:because though it may calculate and time and even weigh parts of thegreater Universe, it cannot, by defect of its nature, bring itsdiscoveries back to bear on the other harmony of Man. It is impersonaland therefore nescient of his need. Though by such a science he gain thewhole world, it shall not profit a man who misses from it his own soul. 

Philosophy, too, fails us over this same crux of "personality"; not byignoring it, but by clinging with obstinacy to the wrong end of thestick. The quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry is notorious andinveterate: and at ninety-nine points in the hundred Philosophy has thebetter of the dispute; as the Fox in the fable had ninety-nine ways ofevading the hounds, against the Cat's solitary one. But the Cat couldclimb a tree. 

So Philosophy has almost all the say in this matter, until Poetryinterjects the fatal question, "I beg your pardon, Madam, but do youhappen to be the Almighty, or are you playing Egeria to his Numa? Youare constructing admirably comprehensive schemes and systems for _His_guidance, if your hints will but be taken. But if you address yourselfto Man, you will find that his business is not at all to _comprehend_the Universe; for this, if he could achieve it, would make him equalwith God. What he more humbly aspires to, is to _apprehend_; to pierceby flashes of insight to some inch or so of the secret, to some star towhich he can hitch his waggon. Now there are, " Poetry goes on, "certainmen, granted to dwell among us, of more delicate mental fibre than theirfellows; men whose minds have as it were exquisite filaments which theythrow out to intercept, _apprehend_ and conduct home to Man straymessages between the outer mystery of the Universe and the inner mysteryof his soul; even as modern telegraphy has learnt to search out, snatchand gather home messages wandering astray over waste waters of Ocean. Such men are the poets, my servants. "

"Moreover, " Poetry will continue, "these men do not collect theirmessages as your philosophers do, by vigorous striving and learning;nor, as the priests of Baal did, by cutting themselves and crying; butby schooling their souls to harmony and awaiting the moment ofapprehension with what one of them has called 'a wise passiveness. ' Forit is not their method to wrestle with God, like Jacob, or to hold Himup with a 'Stand and deliver. ' It is enough for them to be receptaclesof His passing breath, as the harps abandoned and hung on willow-treesby the waters of Babylon may have caught, at evening, and hummed thewind whispering from Israel. And for this, while they hang and wait, they will be despised by the commonalty for indolent fellows, as indeedthey are; as when the wind inspires and sets them hymning, they will beaccused of insobriety. Yet always they excel your philosophers, insomuchas they accept the transcendental as really transcendental and do notprofess to instruct the Almighty in it; and chiefly, perhaps, they excelyour philosophers by opposing a creativeness, potential at any rate, against a certain and foredoomed barrenness. For the philosophers wouldget at the secret by reason, contemning emotion; whereas the poet knowsthat creation implies fatherhood, and fatherhood implies emotion, evenpassionate emotion. It is (take it as a cold fact) only on the impulseof yearning, on the cry of Abba, that the creature can leap to any realunderstanding of the Creator. "

Yet the philosopher will go on to the end of time despising the poet, who grasps at mysteries _per saltum_, neglecting the military road oflogic. 

Shall we then, by a violent recoil, abandon Mathematics and Philosophyand commit our faith to Music? Music is, above all things, harmonious:Music has the emotion in which Mathematics and Philosophy have beenfound wanting. Music can be "personal"; Music, since the invention ofcounterpoint, is capable of harmonies deeper and more intricate than anywithin the range of human speech. In short, against Poetry, Music canset up a very strong claim. 

But first we note that--_securus judicat orbis terrarum_--in thebeginning Poetry and Music did their business together (with the Danceconjoined as third partner); and that, by practice, men have tended totrust Poetry, for an interpreter, more and more above Music, whileDancing has dropped out of the competition. The ballad, the sonnet, havegrown to stand on their merits as verse, though their names--_ballata, sonata_--imply that they started in dependence upon dance andorchestra. This supersession of music by verse, whether as ally orcompetitor, is a historical fact, if a startling one, which Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his famous article on Poetry in the _Encyclop�diaBritannica_, has been at pains to examine. He starts by admitting alittle more than I should grant. "There is one great point ofsuperiority, " says he, "that musical art exhibits over metrical art. This consists, not in the capacity for melody, but in the capacity forharmony in the musician's sense. .. . " "Why, of course, " is my commentupon this: "every art can easily claim excellence, if it take thatexcellence in its own sense. " Mr. Watts-Dunton proceeds: "The finestmusic of �schylus, of Pindar, of Shakespeare, of Milton, is after all, only a succession of melodious notes, and in endeavouring to catch theharmonic intent of strophe, antistrophe and epode in the Greek chorusand in the true ode (that of Pindar), we can only succeed by pressingmemory into our service. " But I, for one, should not seek counterpointin these any more than in the recurrent themes of a sonata. I shouldseek it rather in the running line which he pronounces (mistakenly, as Ithink) to be "after all, only a succession of melodious notes. " C sharp, B, A, A, A, E, A are a succession of melodious notes and spell theopening phrase of "The Death of Nelson": as the vowels E, O, U, U, O, O, E, E, U are a succession of melodious notes, and, if notes alonecounted, would spell a phrase of Milton's great Invocation to Light. Butwhen we consider the consonantal value, the interplay and the exquisiterepetition of--

 _Seasons return; but not to me returns Day, . .. _

or note the vowel-peals throughout the passage, now shut and anon openedby the scheme of consonants; now continuous, anon modulated by delicatepauses; always chiming obediently to the strain of thought; then I holdthat if we have not actual counterpoint here, we have somethingremarkably like it, --as we certainly have harmony--

 _thoughts that moveHarmonious numbers, _

or I know not what harmony is. In truth, if counterpoint be (as thedictionary defines it), "a blending of related but independentmelodies, " then Poetry achieves it by mating a process of sound to aprocess of thought: and Mr. Watts-Dunton disposes of his own firstcontention for music when he goes on to say (very rightly), "But ifPoetry falls behind Music in rhythmic scope, it is capable of renderingemotion after emotion has become disintegrated into thoughts. " Yet Ishould still object to the word "disintegrated" as applied to thought, unless it be allowed that emotion undergoes the same process at the sametime and both meet in one solution. To speak more plainly, Music isinferior to Poetry because, of any two melodies in its counterpoint, both may be (and in practice are) emotional and vague: while of any twomelodies in the counterpoint of Poetry one must convey thought andtherefore be intelligible. And, to speak summarily, Poetry surpassesMusic because it carries its explanation, whereas the meaning of a_concerto_ has to be interpreted into dull words on a programme. 

We have arrived at this, then; that Poetry's chief function is toreconcile the inner harmony of Man (his Soul, as we call it) with theouter harmony of the Universe. With this conception of "peerless Poesie"in our minds, we turn to Aristotle's _Poetics_, and it gives us asensible shock to read on the first page, that "Epic Poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and dithyrambic Poetry, and the greater part of the music ofthe flute and of the lyre are all, generally speaking, modes ofimitation" (_πα̂σαι τυγχάνουσιν οὖσαι μιμήσεις τὸ σύνολον_). "What?" wesay--"Nothing better than _that_?"--for "imitation" has a bad name amongmen and is apt to suggest the ape. But, first bearing in mind that thereare imitations and imitations (the _Imitatio Christi_ among them), letus go on to see what it is that in Aristotle's opinion Poetry imitatesor copies. It is "the Universal" (_τό καθόλου_): and as soon as werealise this we know ourselves to be on the same track as Aristotle, after all. "Imitation, " as he uses it, is not an apish or a slavishimitation; it is no mere transcribing or copying of phenomena as theypass (he even allows that the poet may "imitate" men as "better thanthey are"): it is an expressing, in fiction and harmonious speech, intelligible to his fellow-men, of what truth, order, harmony, and "law"the poet's mind has apprehended in the outer Universe. No fair-mindedreader of the _Poetics_, as he lays down the treatise, will doubt thatthis, or something like this, was Aristotle's meaning, nor is itprobable that he will find any essential difference (or any differencethat seriously disturbs agreement) between Aristotle's "Universal" andthe Platonic "Idea" or pattern of things "laid up somewhere in theheavens. "

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Now the Poet's way of apprehending the Universal is (as I haveindicated) by keeping true to himself, attending to his soul's innerharmony, and listening, waiting, brooding with a "wise passiveness"until the moment when his and the larger harmony fall into tunetogether. The Psalmist describes the process accurately: "While I wasthus musing the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue. ""Poetry, " writes Shelley, "is not, like reasoning, a power to be exertedaccording to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, _I willcompose poetry_. The greatest poet, even, cannot say it: for the mind increation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like aninconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness. " But the Poet's wayof reporting these apprehensions to his fellows, since he deals withUniversals or ideas, is by "universalising" or "idealising" his story:and upon these two terms, which properly mean much the same thing, wemust pause for a moment. 

The word "idealise, " which is the more commonly used, has unfortunatelytwo meanings, a true and a false; and, again unfortunately, the falseprevails in vulgar use. To "idealise" in the true sense is to disengagean "idea" of all that is trivial or impertinent or transient ordisturbing, and present it to men in its clearest outline, so that itsown proper form shines in on the intelligence, as you would wipe awayfrom a discovered statue all stains or accretions of mud or moss orfungus, to release and reveal its true beauty. False "idealising, " onthe other hand, means that, instead of trusting to this nakedmanifestation, we add to it some graces of our invention, some touchesby which we think to improve it; that we "paint the lily, " in short. Butthe true "idealisation" and the first business of the poet is a_denuding_ not an _investing_ of the Goddess, whether her name be"Life, " "Truth, " "Beauty, " or what you will: a revealing, not acoverture of embroidered words, however pretty and fantastic; as hasbeen excellently said by Shelley: "A poem _is the very image of lifeexpressed in its external truth_. There is this difference between astory and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, whichhave no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause andeffect; the other is the erection of actions according to theunchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of theCreator, which is itself the image of all other minds. " Let us enforcethis account of the true idealisation by a verse or two of our oldfriend Sir John Davies (quoted by Coleridge in his _BiographiaLiteraria_). "What an unworldly mass of impressions the mind would be, "says Sir John in effect, "did not the soul come to the rescue and reducethese crowding bodies by 'sublimation strange. '"--

 _From their gross Matter she abstracts the Forms, And draws a kind of Quintessence from things, Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings. This doth She when from things particular She doth abstract the Universal kinds. .. . _

But it is time to descend from these heights (such as they are) ofphilosophising, and illustrate the difference between true and false"idealising" in Poetry by concrete example: and no two better examplesoccur to me, for drawing this contrast, than Webster's _Duchess ofMalfy_ and Shakespeare's _Macbeth_. Each of these plays excites horrorand is calculated to excite horror; both have outlived three hundredyears, there or thereabouts; both may be taken as having established anindefinitely long lease on men's admiration--but to any critical mind, how different an admiration! Webster is an expert, a _virtuoso_ inhorrifics; in flesh-creeping effects lies his skill; and, indulging thatskill, he not only paints the lily, but repaints it and daubs it yet athird time. There is no reason on earth--she has offended against nomoral law on earth or in the heavens--that could possibly condemn theDuchess to the hellish tortures she is made to endure. At the worst shehas married a man beneath her in station. To punish her in Webster'sextravagant fashion every other character, with the whole story of theplay, has to be dehumanised. To me--as I penetrate the Fourth Act--thewhole business becomes ludicrous: not sanely comic, or even quite sanelyabsurd: but bizarre, and ridiculously bizarre at that. It has no "idea"at all, no relation to the Universal in the shape of any moral order, "law, " fate, doom, destiny. It is just a box of tricks, of raw heads andbloody bones, left with the lid open. That is false "idealising";Webster choosing his effect and "improving" it for all he wasworth--which (let it be added) was a great deal. 

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Turn from _The Duchess of Malfy_ to _Macbeth_, and you find an Englishpoet as sensitive of fate, doom, destiny, "law, " the moral order, asever was Aeschylus; nay, interpreting it perhaps more effectively thanever did Aeschylus. In the First Act we see it suggested to Macbeth bywitchcraft (which is the personified foe of moral order) that he canachieve an ambition by an unlawful path, the ambition itself beingsuggested along with the way to it and growing as the way opens. We seethem both communicated to a feminine mind, narrower, more intent andpractical; because narrower, because more intent and practical, for themoment more courageous. (It was Eve that the Serpent, wily enough, selected to tempt. ) Both Macbeth and his lady move to the deed under alaw which--for a while--has usurped the true moral order and reversedit, he not without misgivings: the spectators all the while knowing thetrue order, yet held silent, watching the event. Outside the castle anowl hoots as Duncan is slain. The guilty man and woman creep back, whispering; and thereupon--what happens? A knocking on the door--aknocking followed by the growls of a drowsy if not drunken porter:"Here's a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he shouldhave old turning the key. (Knocking again. ) Knock, knock, knock! Who'sthere, i' the name of Be�lzebub?" The stage direction admits Macduff, who in due course is to prove the avenger of blood: but the hand thatknocks, the step on the threshold, are in truth those of the moral orderreturning _pede claudo_, demanding to be readmitted. From the instant ofthat first knock the ambitions of the pair roll back toward their doomas the law they have offended reasserts itself, and the witches'palindrome _In girum imus noctu, ecce!_ steadily spells itself backward, letter by letter, to the awful sentence, _Ecce ut consumimur igni!_

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This is to "idealise" in the right sense of the word. Fixing his mind onthe Idea of two human beings, a man and a woman who trespass from thelaw of the great moral powers ordering the Universe (Man along with it)and are overtaken in that trespass and punished, Shakespearedisencumbers it of all that is trivial, irrelevant, non-essential. Hetakes the wickedest crime of which man can be guilty; not a mere nakedmurder, nor even a murder for profit, but the murder of a king by hissworn soldier, of a guest by his host, of a sleeping guest by the handon which he has just bestowed a diamond. Can criminality be laid barer?He illustrates it again in two persons lifted above the common station;and he does this not (as I think) for the practical reason for whichAristotle seems to commend it to tragic writers--that the disasters ofgreat persons are more striking than those of the small fry ofmankind--that, as the height is, so will be the fall--or not for thatreason alone; but, still in the process of "idealising, " because suchpersons, exalted above the obscuring petty cares of life, may reasonablybe expected to see the Universe with a clearer vision than ours, to havemore delicate ears for its harmonies. Who but a King should know mostconcerning moral law? Why is he with our consent lifted up so that hemay hear the divine commandments better than we, and dictate them downto us? He is greater, but yet--and this is the point--_a man likeourselves_ (_ομοιος_). He cannot for purposes of tragedy bewholly good: for not only is this extremely rare in real life, andalmost inconceivable, but the ruin of a wholly good man would merelyshock, without teaching us anything. The disaster of a tragic figuremust come, and be seen to come, through some fault--or, at least, somemistake--of his own. But again he must not be wholly bad, for thedisasters of the wholly bad do not affect us save with disgust. Suchmen, we know, are not _like ourselves_. What happens to them may servefor _The Police News_. Tragedy does not deal with the worthless. Howthen are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, beings like ourselves, to fall intocrime so heinous? Again Shakespeare strips the Idea bare: their trespasscomes through ambition, "last infirmity of noble minds, " under theblinding persuasion of witchcraft, which (an actual belief inShakespeare's time) is a direct negation of the moral law, and putsSatan in place of God. 

 * * * * *

It is curious that, some thirty-odd years after Shakespeare had handledthis tremendous theme, another attempt on it was being meditated, and bythe man whom the most of us rank next after Shakespeare in the hierarchyof English poets. Among the treasures in the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, lies a manuscript, the hand-writing undoubtedly Milton's, containing a list compiled by him of promising subjects for the greatpoem for which, between his leaving the University and the outbreak ofthe Civil War, all his life was a deliberate preparation. The list islong; the subjects proposed run to no fewer than ninety-nine. Of these, fifty-three are derived from Old Testament history (with a recurringinclination for the theme of _Paradise Lost_), eight from the NewTestament; thirty-three from the history of Britain (with a leaningtowards the Arthurian legend); while five of them are legendary tales ofScotland or North Britain, the last being headed "Macbeth. Beginning atthe arrival of Malcolm at Macduff. The matter of Duncan may be expressedby the arrival of his ghost. " Now that Milton (an adorer ofShakespeare's genius, as everyone knows) should have taken so deep animpression from the play that its theme possessed him and he longed totransfer it to _Epic_, is credible enough. That he, with his classicalbent, should choose to attempt in Drama an improvement upon the most"classical" of all Shakespeare's tragedies seems to me scarcelycredible. But if the credibility of this be granted, then I can onlyconceive Milton's designing to improve the play by making it yet more"classical, " _i. E. _ by writing it (after the fashion he followed in_Samson Agonistes_) closely upon the model of Athenian Tragedy. 

For my part I always consider Milton's _Macbeth_ the most fascinatingpoem--certainly, if play it were, the most fascinating play--everunwritten. But of this any man may be sure; that (since they were bothgreat poets) one made, as the other would have made, a story of far morevalue to us than Shakespeare or Milton or any man before or after couldhave made by a strict biography of Macbeth, the man as he lived. For anysuch biography would clog the lesson for us with details which were morethe less irrelevant because they really happened. Here I must quoteAristotle again, and for the last time in this little book: but nosentences in his treatise hold a deeper import than these:--

"It is not the function of the Poet to relate what has happened, butwhat may happen of likelihood or must happen of necessity. The Poet andthe Historian are not different because one writes in verse and theother in prose. Turn what Herodotus tells into verse, and none the lessit will be a sort of history; the metre makes no difference. The realdifference lies in the Historian's telling what has happened, the Poet'stelling what may happen. _Thus Poetry is a more philosophical thing, anda more serious, than History: for Poetry tells of the Universal, Historyof the Particular_. Now the business of the Universal is to tell us howit will fall to such and such a person to speak or act in such or suchcircumstances according to likelihood or necessity: and it is at thisthat Poetry aims in giving characters names of its own: whereas theParticular narrates what Alcibiades did or what happened to him. "

 * * * * *

This may seem a hard saying, even after what has been said. So let uspause and digest it in Sir Philip Sidney's comment: ". .. Thus farreAristotle, which reason of his (as all his) is most full of reason. Forindeed, if the question were whether it were better to have aparticular acte truly or falsely set down, there is no doubt which is tobe chosen, no more than whether you had rather have _Vespasian's_picture right as hee was or at the Painter's pleasure nothingresembling. But if the question be for your owne use and learning, whether it be better to have it set downe as it should be, or as it was, then certainly is more doctrinable the fayned _Cyrus of Xenophon_ thanthe true _Cyrus in Justine_, and the fayned _�neas in Virgil_ than thetrue _�neas_ in _Dares Phrygius. _"

 * * * * *

But now, having drawn breath, let us follow our Poet from the lowest upto the highest of his claim. And be it observed, to start with, that inclearing and cleansing the Idea for us (in the manner described) he doesbut employ a process of Selection which all men are employing, all daylong and every day of their lives, upon more trivial matters; a processindeed which every man is constantly obliged to employ. Life would be anight-mare for him, soon over, if he had to take account, for example, of every object flashed on the retina of his eye during a country walk. How many millions of leaves, stones, blades of grass, must he not seewithout seeing? Say it be the shortest of rambles on an afternoon inearly November. The light fades early: but before he reaches home in thedark, how many of the myriad falling leaves has he counted?--a dozen atmost. Of the myriad leaves changing colour does he preserve, unless bychance, the separate image of one? Rather from the mass over which hiseyes have travelled he has abstracted an "idea" of autumnalcolouring--yellow, red, brown--and with that he carries home asentimental, perhaps even a profound, sense of the falling leaf, thefalling close of the year. So--and just so, save more deftly--the Poetabstracts:--

 _Where is the prime of Summer--the green prime-- The many, many leaves all twinkling?--Three On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime Trembling; and one upon the old oak tree!_

(As a matter of fact, oak leaves are singularly tenacious, and theautumnal oak will show a thousand for the elm's one. Hood, being aCockney, took his seven leaves at random. But what does it matter? Hewas a poet, and seven leaves sufficed him to convey the idea. )

 * * * * *

Nor does our Poet, unless he be a charlatan, pretend to bring home somehieratic message above the understanding of his fellows: for he is aninterpreter, and the interpreter's success depends upon hitting hishearer's intelligence. Failing that, he misses everything and is null. To put it in another way--at the base of all Literature, of all Poetry, as of all Theology, stands one rock: _the very highest Universe Truth issomething so absolutely simple that a child can understand it. _ This iswhat Emerson means when he tells us that the great writers never _seemto condescend_; that yonder slip of a boy who has carried offShakespeare to the window-seat, can feel with King Harry or Hamlet orCoriolanus, with Rosalind or Desdemona or Miranda. For the moment he_is_ any given one of these, because any human soul contains them all. And some such thought we must believe to have been in Our Lord's mindwhen He said, "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, thatThou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hastrevealed them unto babes. " For as the Universe is one, so the individualhuman souls that apprehend it have no varying values intrinsically, butone equal value. They differ only in power to apprehend, and this may bemore easily hindered than helped by the conceit begotten of finiteknowledge. I would even dare to quote of this Universal Truth the wordsI once hardily put into the mouth of John Wesley concerning divine Love:"I see now that if God's love reaches up to every star and down to everypoor soul on Earth, it must be something vastly simple, so simple thatall dwellers on earth may be assured of it--as all who have eyes may beassured of the planet shining yonder at the end of the street--and sovast that all bargaining is below it, and they may inherit it withoutconsidering their deserts. " The message, then, which one Poet bringshome, is no esoteric one: as Johnson said of Gray's _Elegy_, "it aboundswith images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments towhich every bosom returns an echo. " It exalts us through the best in us, by telling it, not as anything new or strange, _but so as we recogniseit_. 

 * * * * *

And here let us dwell a moment on Johnson's phrase, "to which everybosom returns an echo": for it recalls us to a point, which we notedindeed on p. 22, but have left (I fear) somewhat under-emphasised--theemotion that enters into poetical truth, which only by the help ofemotion is apprehended; as through emotion it is conveyed, and to anemotional understanding in the hearer addresses its appeal. For thedesire of man's soul after the Universal, to be in harmony with it, is(as a matter of fact, and when all pulpit eloquence has beendiscounted) something more than a mere intellectual attraction: a_στοργή_ rather; a yearning felt in its veins to know its fatherhood. Saint Paul goes farther and assures us that "the earnest expectation ofthe creature waiteth for the manifestation, " so that "the whole creationgroaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. " "And not onlythey, " he goes on, "but ourselves also": while the pagan poet has tearsthat reach the heart of the transitory show: _Sunt lacrim� rerum, etmentem mortalia tangunt_--"Tears are for Life, mortal things pierce thesoul. "

And why not? For the complete man--_totus homo_--has feelings as well asreason, and should have both active, in fine training, to realise thebest of him. Shelley obviously meant this when he defined Poetry as "therecord of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. "He did not mean that they are happy only in the sense of being"fortunate, " _felices_, in such moments, but that they were happy in thesense of being "blessed, " _beati_; and this feeling of blessedness theycommunicate. "We are aware, " he goes on, "of evanescent visitations ofthought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimesrequiring our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen anddeparting unbidden, but elevating _and delightful_ beyond all expression. .. So that even in the desire and the regret they leave, _there cannotbut be pleasure_, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a divine nature through ourown, . .. And the state of mind produced is at war with every basedesire. The _enthusiasm_ of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship isessentially linked with such emotions; and whilst they last, selfappears as what it is--an atom in the universe. " Every word italicisedabove by me carries Shelley's witness that Poetry and joyous emotion areinseparable. "Poetry, " he winds up, "redeems from decay the visitationsof the Divinity in Man. " How can we dissociate from joy the news of suchvisitations either on the lips that carry or in the ears that receive?

Yet, as has been hinted, the very simplicity of it puzzles the ordinaryman, and not only puzzles the philosopher but exasperates him. It annoysthe philosopher, first, that the poet apparently takes so littletrouble. (As a fact he takes endless trouble; but, to be sure, he savesan immense deal by going the right way to work. ) All knowledge isnotoriously painful (that is to say, to philosophers). Moreover, thefellow mixes it up with emotion (an integral part of man whichphilosophy ignores, and stultifies itself, as a rule, by ignoring). Heis one with the Oracles, a suspected tribe. He idles like an Oracle, attending on inspiration, and when he has received the alleged afflatus, the fellow--so different from us--is neither to hold nor to bind. Theeasiest way with him seems to be a pitying contempt. "For all goodpoets, " says Socrates sagely in the Ion, "epic as well as lyric, composetheir lovely strains, not by art, but because they are inspired andpossessed. And as the Corybantian dances are not quite 'rational, ' sothe lyric poets are, so to speak, not quite '_all there_. ' . .. They tellus, " he goes on condescendingly, "that they bring songs from honeyedfountains, culling them from the gardens and dells of the Muses; that, like the bees, they wing from one flower to another. Yes of a truth: thePoet is a light and a winged and a holy thing, without invention in himuntil he is inspired and out of his senses, and out of his own wit;until he has attained to this he is but a feeble thing, unable to utterhis oracles. " I can imagine all this reported to Homer in the Shades andHomer answering with a smile: "Well, and who in the world is denying it?I certainly did not, while I lived and sang upon earth. Nay, I nevereven sang, but invited the Muse to sing to me and through me. _Μη̂νινἄειδε θεά . .. Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μου̂σα_. --Surely the dear fellow mightremember the first line of my immortal works! And if he does remember, and is only bringing it up against me that in the intervals of doing mywork in life I was a feeble fellow, go back and tell him that it islikely enough, yet I fail to see how it can be any business of his, since it was only my work that I ever asked for recognition. They saythat I used to go about begging a dinner on the strength of it. DidI?. .. I cannot remember. Anyhow, that nuisance is over sometime ago, and_his_ kitchen is safe!"

To you, who have followed the argument of this little book, the theoryof poetic "inspiration" will be intelligible enough. It earned a livingin its day and, if revived in ours, might happily supersede much modernchatter about art and technique. For it contains much truth:--

 _When the flicker of London sun falls faint on the Club-room's green and gold, The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mould-- They scratch with their pens in the mould of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start, For the Devil mutters behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it Art?"_

The philosophers did poetry no great harm by being angry with it as an"inspired" thing: for that, in a measure, it happens to be. They did itfar more harm when they took it seriously and made it out to be a formof _teaching_. For by the nature of things there happens to be somethingof the pedant in every philosopher and the incurable propensity of thepedant is to remove everything--but Literature especially--out of thecategory to which it belongs and consider it in another with which ithas but a remote concern. (Thus a man will talk of Chaucer as though hisinflexions were the most important thing about him. ) Now to acclaimHomer as a great teacher, and use him in the schools, was right enoughso long as the Athenians remembered (and is right enough for us, so longas we remember) _how_ he teaches us, or rather _educates_. What we havedescribed the Poet as doing for men--drawing forth the inner harmoniesof the soul and attuning them to the Universal--is _educative_ in thetruest sense as in the highest degree. So long as we remember this, theold dispute whether the aim of Poetry be to teach or to delight is seento be futile: for she does both, and she does the one by means of theother. On the other hand, you cannot leave a delicate instrument such asPoetry lying within reach of the professional teacher; he willcertainly, at any risk of marring or mutilating, seize on it and use itas a hammer to knock things into heads; if rebuked for this, plaintivelyremonstrating, "But I thought you told me it was useful to teach with!"(So Gideon taught the men of Succoth. ) And therefore, we need not beastonished: coming dawn to Strabo, to find him asserting that "theancients held poetry to be a kind of elementary philosophy, introducingus from childhood to life and pleasureably instructing us in character, behaviour and action. " The Greeks, he tells us, chose poetry for theirchildren's first lessons. Surely (he argues) they never did that for thesake of sweetly influencing the soul, but rather for the correction ofmorals! Strabo's mental attitude is absurd, of course, and preposterous:for this same influencing of the soul--_φυχαγωγία_ (a beautifulword)--is, as we have seen, Poetry's main business: but the mischief ofthe notion did not end with making the schooldays of children unhappy:it took hold of the poets themselves, and by turning them into prigsdried up the children's well of consolation. The Fathers of the Churchlent a hand too, and a vigorous one; and for centuries the face of theMuse was sicklied o'er with a pale determination to combine amusementwith instruction. Even our noble Sidney allowed his modesty to beoverawed by the pedantic tradition, though as a man of the world hetactfully gave it the slip. "For suppose it be granted, " he says, "(thatwhich I suppose with great reason may be denied) that the Philosopher inrespect of his methodical proceeding doth teach more perfectly than thePoet: yet do I thinke that no man is so much _Philosophus_ as to comparethe Philosopher, in _mooving_, with the Poet. And that mooving is of ahigher degree than teaching, it may by this appeare: that it is welnighthe cause and the effect of teaching. For who will be taught, if hee beenot mooved with desire to be taught?" Then, after a page devoted toshowing "which constant desire whosoever hath in him hath already pasthalfe the hardness of the way, " Sidney goes on: "Now therein of allSciences (I speak still of human, and according to the human conceit) isour Poet the Monarch. For he dooth not only show the way, but giveth sosweete a prospect into the way, as will intice any man to enter into it. Nay he dooth as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, atthe first give you a cluster of Grapes, that full of that taste you maylong to passe further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, whichmust blur the margent with interpretations and load the memory withdoubtfulnesse: but hee commeth to you with words set in delightfulproportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, thewell-inchaunting skill of Musicke; and with a tale forsooth he commethunto you: with a tale which holdeth children from play and old men fromthe chimney-corner. "

 * * * * *

"And with a tale, forsooth, he commeth to you. "--For having strippedthe Idea bare, he has to reclothe it again and in such shape as willstrike forcibly on his hearer's senses. A while back we broke off midwayin a stanza of Sir John Davies. Let us here complete it. There are twoversions. As first Davies wrote:--

 _This doth She when from things particular, She doth abstract the Universal kinds, Which bodiless and immaterial are, And can be lodged but only in our minds. _

--the last two lines of which are weak and unnecessary. Revising thestanza, he wrote:--

 _This does She, when from individual states She doth abstract the Universal kinds, Which then reclothed in divers names and fates Steal access through our senses to our minds, _

--which exactly describes the whole process. Having laid bare the Idea, our Poet, turning from analysis to synthesis, proceeds to reclothe it innew particulars of his own inventing, carefully chosen that they maystrike home hardest upon the hearer's perceptions. Now that whichstrikes home hardest on a man is a tale which he can grasp by theconcretest images conveyed in the concretest language. '_Labor improbusomnia vincit_' tells him not half so much as a tale of the labours ofHercules; so he will learn more of patience from Job or Griselda; moreof chivalrous courage from Hector or Roland or Launcelot or the tale ofPalamon and Arcite; more of patriotism from the figures inhistory--Leonidas, Horatius, Regulus, Joan of Arc, William Tell, Garibaldi, Gordon--that have translated the Idea back into their ownlives with the noblest simplicity, so that we say of them that they are"epical figures" or "figures worthy of romance, " thereby paying them thehighest compliment in our power: yes and more of Christian simplicityfrom my Uncle Toby, Colonel Newcome, even Mr. Pickwick; than from ahundred copybook maxims concerning these virtues: all these figuresindeed illustrating the tritest copybook maxim of all--that "Exampleis better than Precept. " Thus Charles Lamb praises the Plays ofShakespeare as "enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, awithdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of allsweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, humanity: for, " say he, "of _examples_, teaching thosevirtues, his pages are full. "

 * * * * *

The Poet then, having seized on the Idea and purged it of what istrivial or accidental, reclothes it in a concrete dress and sorepresents it to us. And you will generally remark in the very greatestpoets that not only are the images they represent to us extraordinarilydefinite and concrete and therefore vivid--as Dante, for example, willdescribe a Scene in Hell or in Paradise with as much particularity asthough he were writing a newspaper report; but this concreteness ofvision translates itself into a remarkable concreteness of speech. Isuppose there was never a more concrete writer than Shakespeare, and hispractice of translating all his idea into things which you can touch orsee grew steadily stronger throughout his career, so that any competentcritic can in a moment distinguish his later writing from his earlier byits compression of images in words, its forcible concretion of thevarious "parts of speech, " its masterful _corv�e_ of nouns substantiveto do the work of verbs, and so on. Even in very early work such as_Venus and Adonis_ we cannot but note this gift of vision, how quick andparticular it is. .. . 

 _Upon this promise did he raise his chin, Like a dive-dipper, peering through a wave, Who, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in. .. . _

But in his later plays--so fast the images teem--he has to reach outamong nouns, verbs, adverbs, with both strong hands, grasping what comesand packing it ere it can protest. Take for example:--

_Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care. _

Or--

 _The multitudinous sea incarnadine, Making the green one red. _

Or--

_In the dark backward and abysm of time. _

Or this from Lear:--

 _My face I'll grime with filth, Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots And with presented nakedness outface The winds and persecutions of the sky. _

Or (for vividness) this, from _Antony and Cleopatra_, when Cleopatracries out and faints over Antony's body:--

 _O! withered is the garland of the war, The soldier's pole is fall'n: young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon . .. _

"Madam! Madam!" "Royal Egypt!" "Empress!" cry the waiting-maids as sheswoons. She revives and rebukes them:--

 _No more, but e'en a woman, and commanded By such poor passion as the maid that milks And does the meanest chares. It were for me To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods; To tell them that this world did equal theirs Till they had stolen my jewel. _

When a poet can, as Shakespeare does here, seize upon a Universal truthand lay it bare; when, apprehending _passion_ in this instance, he canshow it naked, the master of gods and levelling queens withmilkmaids--_totus est in armis idem quando nudus est Amor;_ when he canreclothe it in the sensuous body of Cleopatra, "Royal Egypt, " and, rending the robe over that bosom, reveal the Idea again in a wound sovividly that almost we see the nature of woman spirting, like brood, against the heaven it defies; then we who have followed the Poet'sascending claims arrive at his last and highest, yet at one which haslain implicit all along in his title. He is a Poet--a "Maker. " By thatname, "Maker, " he used to be known in English, and he deserves no lesserone. 

 * * * * *

I have refrained in these pages, and purposely, from technical talk andfrom defining the differences between Epic, Dramatic, Lyric Poetry:between the Ode and the Sonnet, the Satire and the Epigram. To use theformula of a famous Headmaster of Winchester, "details can be arranged, "when once we have a clear notion of what Poetry is, and of what bynature it aims to do. My sole intent has been to clarify that notion, which (if the reader has been patient to follow me) reveals the Poet asa helper of man's most insistent spiritual need and therefore as amember most honourable in any commonwealth: since, as Ben Jonson says:"Every beggarly corporation affords the State a mayor or two bailiffsyearly; but _solus rex, aut poeta, non quotannis nascitur_"--these twoonly, a King and a Poet, are not born every year. The Poet "makes"--thatis to say, creates--which is a part of the divine function; and hemakes--using man's highest instruments, thought and speech--harmoniousinventions that answer the harmony we humbly trace in the firmamentfashioned, controlled, upheld, by divine wisdom. _"Non c'e' in mondo, _"said Torquato Tasso proudly, _"chi merita nome di creatore, se non Iddioed il Poeta"_--"Two beings only deserve the name of Creator: God and thePoet. "

THE END