is fatal. A
singer who is so little capable of singing that he can give a prose
analysis of his own song while it is coming to him and before he sings
it, can hardly be expected to extemporise an inspired analysis of
another man's song after reading it. If a man cannot apply inspired
analysis to a little common passion in a song he has of his own, he is
placed in a hopeless position when he tries to give an inspired analysis
of a passion that only another man could have and that only a great man
would forget himself long enough to have.

An inspired analysis may be defined as the kind of analysis that the
real poet in his creatively critical mood is able to give to his work--a
low-singing or humming analysis in which all the elements of the song
are active and all the faculties and all the senses work on the subject
at once. The proportions and relations of a living thing are all kept
perfect in an inspired analysis, and the song is made perfect at last,
not by being taken apart, but by being made to pass its delight more
deeply and more slowly through the singer's utmost self to its
fulfilment.

What is ordinarily taught as analysis is very different from this. It
consists in the deliberate and triumphant separation of the faculties
from one another and from the thing they have produced--the dull, bare,
pitiless process of passing a living and beautiful thing before one
vacant, staring faculty at a time. This faculty, being left in the
stupor of being all by itself, sits in complacent judgment upon a work
of art, the very essence of the life and beauty of which is its
appealing to all of the faculties and senses at once, in their true
proportion, glowing them together into a unit--namely, several things
made into one thing, that is--several things occupying the same time and
the same place, that is--synthesis. An inspired analysis is the
rehearsal of a synthesis. An analysis is not inspired unless it comes as
a flash of light and a burst of music and a breath of fragrance all in
one. Such an analysis cannot be secured with painstaking and slowness,
unless the painstaking and slowness are the rehearsal of a synthesis,
and all the elements in it are laboured on and delighted in at once. It
must be a low-singing or humming analysis.

The expert student or teacher of poetry who makes "a dispassionate
criticism" of a passion, who makes it his special boast that he is able
to apply his intellect severely by itself to a gr