onless,
imagination saturated with the results of "real" experience, but still
contemplative. Thus, no doubt, one main reason why poetry has poetic
value for us is that it presents to us in its own way something which we
meet in another form in nature or life; and yet the test of its poetic
value for us lies simply in the question whether it satisfies our
imagination; the rest of us, our knowledge or conscience, for example,
judging it only so far as they appear transmuted in our imagination. So
also Shakespeare's knowledge or his moral insight, Milton's greatness of
soul, Shelley's "hate of hate" and "love of love", and that desire to
help men or make them happier which may have influenced a poet in hours
of meditation--all these have, as such, no poetical worth: they have
that worth only when, passing through the unity of the poet's being,
they reappear as qualities of imagination, and then are indeed mighty
powers in the world of poetry.

I come to a third misapprehension, and so to my main subject. This
formula, it is said, empties poetry of its meaning: it is really a
doctrine of form for form's sake. "It is of no consequence what a poet
says, so long as he says the thing well. The _what_ is poetically
indifferent: it is the _how_ that counts. Matter, subject, content,
substance, determines nothing; there is no subject with which poetry may
not deal: the form, the treatment, is everything. Nay, more: not only is
the matter indifferent, but it is the secret of Art to 'eradicate the
matter by means of the form,'"--phrases and statements like these meet
us everywhere in current criticism of literature and the other arts.
They are the stock-in-trade of writers who understand of them little
more than the fact that somehow or other they are not "bourgeois." But
we find them also seriously used by writers whom we must respect,
whether they are anonymous or not; something like one or another of them
might be quoted, for example, from Professor Saintsbury, the late R.A.M.
Stevenson, Schiller, Goethe himself; and they are the watchwords of a
school in the one country where Aesthetics has flourished. They come, as
a rule, from men who either practise one of the arts, or, from study of
it, are interested in its methods. The general reader--a being so
general that I may say what I will of him--is outraged by them. He feels
that he is being robbed of almost all that he cares for in a work of
art. "You are asking me," he says, "t