e is unable to subdue in practice; his works
show him as he would desire himself to be, as he, alas! has not the
strength to be in reality; let us not, therefore, complain of those who
are unable to live up to their conceptions, for they have given to us
their better part, and kept for themselves, with bitterness and shame,
their worse.

The poet, therefore, is the artist into whose work there enters the
greatest proportion of his individual nature; if he be flippant in
temper his works cannot be earnest; if he be impure his writings cannot
be actively pure; the distinctive features of his nature must be
reflected in his work, since his work is made out of and by his nature.
Now let us proceed. We had constructed a sort of typical giant,
promising all the powers and qualities of all humanity; and this, by
the gradually stripping away of some of these human powers, we had
reduced to the condition of typical poet. Now let us continue our
work. Of course there are kinds of poetry which form links with other
intellectual work; and to obtain these we must remove such faculties as
do not enter into them: separate from the artist those qualities which
belong only to the man. There is first of all that great poetical
anomaly the drama, for which, it would seem, that less of the writer's
own personality is required than for any other form; for the dramatist
stands half way between the artist and the psychologist; he can obtain
innumerable varieties of character and feeling merely by his reasoning
powers, not by any personal experience. He is a sort of synthetic
metaphysician, who can construct the saint, the villain, the simpleton,
the knave, not out of anything within himself, but out of the very
elements of these characters which he has obtained by analysis; hence
it is that, while we can from their works reconstruct the character of
poets like Milton, or Wordsworth, or Leopardi, or Musset, we remain
wholly ignorant of the personality of Shakespeare; he cannot be all that
he shows us, and in the doubt he remains none of it at all. Let us put
aside therefore this anomalous artist, and continue stripping away some
of the purely emotional characters of our typical colossus. We shall
soon meet the last and simplest form of poet--the mere describer; of his
aspirations and emotions we know but little; we know only of his tastes,
his preferences for certain sights and sounds. He cares for the sea, or
the woods, or the fields, or the