kindled, we gratefully avail ourselves, for they are of use. But our admiration is reserved not for what is serviceable, but for what expands and thrills our souls,—for the stupendous phenomena of nature, for the overwhelming magnificence of mighty rivers and of ocean, for the great luminaries of heaven, though so often overshadowed, for the awe-compelling splendours of the rock-belching desolating Etna.1

And so he goes on to say, that what constitutes the superiority of a writer who possesses sublimity to a writer who has every gift and accomplishment without sublimity,-in other words, what measures the distance between Homer and Apollonius, between Demosthenes and Hyperides, between Plato and Lysias-is in no way affected by the absence or presence of errors and blemishes. When sublimity is present, they are mere spots on the sun. When sublimity is absent, of what concern in the absence of the sun is the absence of the spots? All other qualities, he continues in his enthusiasm, prove their possessors to be men, but sublimity raises them near the majesty of God. Immunity from errors relieves from censure, but sublimity alone excites admiration."

There is much more in this most suggestive and we may truly say inspiring Treatise over which every critic would gladly linger. It would have been a pleasure to dwell on the many other admirable critical canons which it has laid down, and on its equally admirable illustrations of them; on the judgements passed in it on the great classics, at once so 1 Sect. xxxv. 2 Sect. xxxiii.

discriminating and so eloquent; on the parallels between Demosthenes and Hyperides, and Demosthenes and Cicero; on the magnificent criticism of the Iliad, and the sublime comparison of Homer to the sun and to the sea; and above all, on the general characteristics of one who may be described as an almost ideal critic alike in aim, in method, in culture, in temper. But it would be superfluous to comment on what must be obvious to every student of this noble Treatise.

That a work which has been so influential, and which has had so many authoritative testimonies to its great value as a text-book in criticism should not only have no place in the curricula of our Universities, but be practically unknown in their schools, is surely matter for very great surprise. Let the hope be indulged that Professor Rhys Roberts's edition, which, with all its deficiencies, has at least the merit of being sound and helpful, will have the effect of removing this reproach: for a reproach it is.

THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF

BESSE

POETRY

ESSERN sollen uns alle Gattungen der Poesie: es ist kläglich, wenn man dieses erst beweisen muss; noch kläglicher ist es wenn es Dichter giebt die selbst daran zweilfeln.-"Every kind of poetry ought to improve us; it is deplorable if this has to be demonstrated, it is still more deplorable if there are poets who themselves doubt it." So wrote Lessing. Matthew Arnold also was never weary of telling us that we ought to conceive of poetry worthily, to conceive of it, that is to say, as capable of higher uses and called to higher destinies than those which in general men have, at least in modern times, hitherto assigned to it; and that to this end we must in conceiving of poetry accustom ourselves to a high standard and a strict judgement. Let us not forget that the distinction between poets of the first order and poets of the secondary order is not a distinction in degree but a distinction in essence. As Browning expresses it," "In the hierarchy of creative minds it is the presence of the highest faculty that gives first rank, in virtue of its kind, not degree; no pretension of a lower nature, whatever the completeness of development or variety of effect, impeding the precedency of the

1

1 Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Jan. 26, 1768.

2

Essay on Shelley, printed in Furnivall's Bibliography of Robert Browning, p. 18.

rarer endowment though only in the germ." Let us then in conceiving of poetry conceive of it as represented by those whose title to pre-eminence no one would dispute, the authors, say, of the Psalms, Isaiah, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth. Let us ask ourselves what ends poetry, as represented by them, is designed to serve, what gospel it delivers to us, what truths it opens out to us, what lessons it teaches us. And in this inquiry we have the good fortune to be assisted by excellent guides. If the poet is the interpreter of God to mankind, the critic is the interpreter of the poet to individual men. For what Bacon observes of studies is, in a great measure, true also of poetry, "it teacheth not its own use," and especially at that time in our life when it may be of most use to us. To how many of us did the study of such works as Sidney's Defence of Poesie and Wordsworth's two prefaces come as a revelation. How inadequately and imperfectly was Shakespeare's message to mankind understood till it found an interpreter in Coleridge, and in those who have since lighted their torches from his! How dim in the eclipsing radiance or under the mighty shadow of Christianity, as we choose to express it, had grown that gospel, it, too, divine, which finds its embodiment in the Odyssey, in Pindar, in Aeschylus, in Sophocles, till in our own time Matthew Arnold and others, re-interpreting, re-illumined it. Who of us can forget the hour when Carlyle's burning words made the Divine Comedy become articulate to us, and revealed to us what solace, sustainment, and inspiration might be found in its stern gospel?

These, surely, are the poets, these the critics who will teach us best the true functions of poetry, teach us to understand that the chief office of poetry is not merely to give amusement, not merely to be the expression of the feelings, good or bad, of mankind, or to increase our knowledge of human nature and of human life, but that, if it includes this mission, it includes also a mission far higher, the revelation, namely, of ideal truth, the revelation of that world of which this world is but the shadow or drossy copy, the revelation of the eternal, the unchanging and the typical which underlies the unsubstantial and ever-dissolving phenomena of earth's empire of matter and time. It was this function of poetry which was indicated by Matthew Arnold when, with so much subtle truth, he defined it as "the application of ideas to life," and it was with this conception of it that he pronounced its future to be immense, and prophesied that, as time went on, mankind would find an ever surer and surer stay in it.

Here then let us, for a while, take our stand; let us say of poetry that it is "the application of ideas to life." But, as in thus describing it, we are really using technical language, I must ask you to bear with me while I explain a little more fully what we mean by "ideas," and what also was meant by "that world of which this world is the shadow or drossy copy." It was the habit of the ancients to clothe and convey truths in symbolic fictions, and pre-eminent among those who have chosen such media stands Plato. Plato, speaking in the person of Socrates, fables, as we all know, that there are two worlds, the material world, the world of matter,