what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of
the soul," and this, though like most definitions of art, incomplete, is
true in so far as it reminds us that art at its greatest is the statement
of a personal and ideal vision. That is why the reverence of rules in the
arts is so dangerous. It puts the standards of poetry not in the hands of
the poet, but in the hands of the grammarians. It is a Procrustes' bed
which mutilates the poet's vision. Luckily, England has always been a
rather lawless country, and we find even Pope insisting that "to judge ...
of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rules is like trying a man by the laws of
one country who acted under those of another." Dennis might cry: "Poetry
is either an art or whimsy and fanaticism.... The great design of the arts
is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the fall, by
restoring order." But, on the whole, the English poets and critics have
realized the truth that it is not an order imposed from without, but an
order imposed from within at which the poet must aim. He aims at bringing
order into chaos, but that does not mean that he aims at bringing
Aristotle into chaos. He is, in a sense, "beyond good and evil," so far as
the orthodoxies of form are concerned. Coleridge put the matter in a
nutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics who
condemned Shakespeare as "a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful
monsters," lay "in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic
form." And he states the whole duty of poets as regards form in another
sentence in the same lecture:

As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is
even this that constitutes its genius--the power of acting
creatively under laws of its own origination.

Mr. Cowl enables us to follow, as in no other book we know, the endless
quarrel between romance and the rules, between the spirit and the letter,
among the English authorities on poetry. It is a quarrel which will
obviously never be finally settled in any country. The mechanical theory
is a necessary reaction against romance that has decayed into windiness,
extravagance, and incoherence. It brings the poets back to literature
again. The romantic theory, on the other hand, is necessary as a reminder
that the poet must offer to the world, not a formula, but a vision. It
brings the poets back to nature again. No one but a Dennis will hesitate
an instant in deciding which of the theorie