How far is the human mind capable of acquiring a knowledge of essential truth, of things as they really are? We must be content to waive such questions. They are of fascinating interest, but their discussion belongs to the sphere of philosophy, and answers to them are fortunately not indispensable, just as for the practical purposes of life they are not indispensable.

We shall gain more that nearly concerns us by seeking to find how best the last question propounded by Aristotle may be answered. What is the end attained by poetry, or what are its offices? 'Let the defenders of poetry show' (to revert to Plato's saying) 'not only that she is pleasant, but also useful to states and to human life, and we will gladly listen, for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers—I mean if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight.' We might fairly begin by saying that there is nothing more useful than delight itself, wholesome delight, that is, and that there is a profound educative influence in it. This will be granted by all who have mature knowledge of human nature and of life. And surely if we are really anxious to preserve poetry as an unassailable thing, we must be prepared to give up any of it that ministers to emotional pleasure alone, without conducting the emotions that it excites into healthy channels, that does not, in the words of the great critic of antiquity already quoted, purify or refine the passions' which it raises. stimulate the feelings with no further or nobler object than the pleasure arising from stimulation, is enervating and degrading. The honourable aim of poetry is the refinement and purification of the native passions of the soul, and the bringing of them into harmony with the divine reason. We must then be prepared to give up all poetry which leaves

the intellect and the will out of account, and addresses man as if he were of emotion all compact. We must be prepared to retain only that poetry which is conducive to the health of the soul, rhythms that are the expressions of a courageous and harmonious life.' There are certain powers belonging to man which he recognises as higher than others, of nobler lineage, as Milton says,—

*

In the soul

Are many lesser faculties that serve

Reason as chief.'

To live according to the dictates of this chief faculty, to take its part against the lower impulses, is, most of us are agreed, the most serious, for it is the only real business of life. And here poetry can help us here it is of instant and enduring worth. True poetry does not set itself the impossible task of ennobling the lower faculties to the rank of the higher, or of elevating impulses that tend downwards.

The great poets, as Principal Shairp said, 'would not have been content with any result short of this—the assurance that their work would live to awaken those high sympathies in men, in the exercise of which they themselves found their best satisfaction, and which, they well knew, ennoble everyone who partakes of them.' And he goes

on to say that 'poetry makes common cause with all high things with right reason and true philosophy, with man's moral intuitions and his religious aspirations. It combines its influence with all those benign tendencies which are working in the world for the melioration of man and the manifestation of the kingdom of God.'

Here, then, will be a completely satisfactory answer to give to Plato, and one, we may well believe, that would

* Plato.

give him pause before excluding the poets from his Republic. For, if in dealing with the things that, by common consent, by the witness of the whole human race, are highest and noblest, if poetry makes the cause of these things its own, what more serious than that it should not be universally welcome? To treat it slightingly or with indifference will be to show little solicitude or regard for the best causes. Poetry may be said to be on the winning side, for we have great confidence in the eventual triumph of the best causes. And in the meantime, while the struggle between the powers of light and the powers of darkness is being waged, poetry is welcome, and more than welcome, as a source of the most indispensable, the most precious, inspiring, sustaining, and consoling influences that can touch mankind.

A great poet will be at once a man of wider and deeper experience, of finer susceptibility, and of riper wisdom than his fellows; and more than other men he will assist us in developing in ourselves a wider range of sympathy, a purer life of the feelings, and higher moods of thought. In poetry we draw upon the experience of the world to enrich our own. The world in which we ourselves daily live and move is but a small world, a very minute portion of the world of men and women in existence, and when we think of the generations that have come and gone, our own lives and actions become almost insignificant in comparison. But those who learnt the world before us have left us a memorial-their treasured wisdom of heart and mind and soul - enshrined for the most part in the works of the poets, who are the chief speakers of the race. To make acquaintance with these works is to profit by the thoughtharvests of the world; to make, as nearly as possible, our own experience identical with the universal.

Besides the misapprehension regarding the nature and the value of poetry, there is another cause which militates, and must continue to militate, against its universal acceptance. Aristotle said, 'My books are published, and they are not published.' It is so with all great books. The thoughtless or insincere person cannot learn in the school of Shakespere, Wordsworth will not whisper to him of the revelation of Nature, nor Browning tutor him in the grammar of psychology. The great authors have published, and they have not published. When we see the truth of this, we mark that it is a warning and a stimulus. These noble friends of ours are intolerant of the vulgar and the shallow, but their conversation with those who love their company is the wittiest, the most invigorating, the most brilliantly suggestive, the most consummate we shall ever know.

'Literature,' it has been finely said, 'is more than interpretation of external nature and human life; it is a revelation of the widening possibilities of human life, of finer modes of feeling, dawning hopes, new horizons of thought, a broadening faith and unimagined ideals.'* But in effect literature, and poetry which is the highest department of literature, are engaged upon the interpretation of Nature and of man. What a vast work is undertaken here ! What patience, what reverence, what perseverance, what insight, what rightness of heart, what clearness of brain, what powers of reflection and of imagination, what intellectual grip is required for the task! It is hopeless to expect that we shall easily become masters of all that is to be learnt from the interpreters. And they will be the first to tell us how little they themselves know. * Professor Dowden.

A complete revelation or interpretation is impossible, they say; and this, indeed, we know of ourselves. But the seizure of each new truth makes easier the apprehension of another. There is nothing isolated or self-existent in the universe, nothing independent, nothing to be understood outside its relation to what remains. The poet, the philosopher, and the scientist are not engaged upon different tasks they are brother labourers in the same field. Their parts indeed are different, all have not the same gifts; and to the poet it is given to be most highly favoured, for the facts which the scientist discovers the poet interprets, and with a certain inspired instinct reveals their beauty and harmony and their worth in the spiritual life.

'Poetry,' it has been said, 'sprang from ease, and was dedicated to pleasure.' Had it been so, the generations since Plato would have acquiesced in his decision regarding it, and poetry would now rank as least among the arts. But poetry sprang from the human soul and from man's desire to gain a true knowledge of the universe and his own place in it, and his relation to the Supreme Power behind all phenomena, and it was consecrated to the service of his higher nature. As we have seen, it lives and moves among, and makes common cause with all high things, with right reason and true philosophy, with man's moral intuitions and his religious aspirations. And without these things, of which poetry espouses the cause, what would human life conceivably be? We cannot part with so powerful and so noble an ally of our higher and better selves. The rhythms expressive of courageous and harmonious life must remain with us.

There is a warning necessary for those anxious to enter upon the study of literature, and it is this-one much