too,
with all analogous experience of human nature. The sort of persons
whom not merely in books but in their lives, we find perpetually
engaged in hunting for excitement from without, are invariably those
who do not possess, either in the vigour of their intellectual powers
or in the depth of their sensibilities, that which would enable them
to find ample excitement nearer home. The most idle and frivolous
persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative; the excitement
it affords is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are
rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so, because
they relish novels in verse. But poetry, which is the delineation of
the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion, is interesting
only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose
imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they
might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been
different.

Poetry, when it is really such, is truth; and fiction also, if it is
good for anything, is truth: but they are different truths. The truth
of poetry is to paint the human soul truly: the truth of fiction is to
give a true picture of life. The two kinds of knowledge are different,
and come by different ways, come mostly to different persons. Great
poets are often proverbially ignorant of life. What they know has come
by observation of themselves; they have found within them one highly
delicate and sensitive specimen of human nature, on which the laws of
emotion are written in large characters, such as can be read off
without much study. Other knowledge of mankind, such as comes to men
of the world by outward experience, is not indispensable to them as
poets: but to the novelist such knowledge is all in all; he has to
describe outward things, not the inward man; actions and events, not
feelings; and it will not do for him to be numbered among those who,
as Madame Roland said of Brissot, know man but not _men_.

All this is no bar to the possibility of combining both elements,
poetry and narrative or incident, in the same work, and calling it
either a novel or a poem; but so may red and white combine on the same
human features, or on the same canvas. There is one order of
composition which requires the union of poetry and incident, each in
its highest kind--the dramatic. Even there the two elements are
perfectly distinguishable, and may exist of unequal quality, and i