were even occasions when, after posting the
Proofs, my father would remember some particular words next day and
correct them by telegraph.

There, better than in a thousand generalizations, you see what the
artistic conscience is. In a world in which authors, like solicitors, must
live, it is, of course, seldom possible to take pains in this measure.
Dostoevsky used to groan that his poverty left him no time or chance to
write his best as Tolstoy and Turgenev could write theirs. But he at least
laboured all that he could. Novel-writing has since his time become as
painless as dentistry, and the result may be seen in a host of books that,
while affecting to be fine literature, have no price except as
merchandise.

XXII.--THE THEORY OF POETRY

Matthew Arnold once advised people who wanted to know what was good poetry
not to trouble themselves with definitions of poetry, but to learn by
heart passages, or even single lines, from the works of the great poets,
and to apply these as touchstones. Certainly a book like Mr. Cowl's
_Theory of Poetry in England_, which aims at giving us a representative
selection of the theoretical things which were said in England about
poetry between the time of Elizabeth and the time of Victoria, makes one
wonder at the barrenness of men's thoughts about so fruitful a world as
that of the poets. Mr. Cowl's book is not intended to be read as an
anthology of fine things. Its value is not that of a book of golden
thoughts. It is an ordered selection of documents chosen, not for their
beauty, but simply for their use as milestones in the progress of English
poetic theory. It is a work, not of literature, but of literary history;
and students of literary history are under a deep debt of gratitude to the
author for bringing together and arranging the documents of the subject in
so convenient and lucid a form. The arrangement is under subjects, and
chronological. There are forty-one pages on the theory of poetic creation,
beginning with George Gascoigne and ending with Matthew Arnold. These are
followed by a few pages of representative passages about poetry as an
imitative art, the first of the authors quoted being Roger Ascham and the
last F.W.H. Myers. The hook is divided into twelve sections of this kind,
some of which have a tendency to overlap. Thus, in addition to the section
on poetry as an imitative art, we have a section on imitation of nature,
another on external nature, a