nce and
intensity. In Victorian times the average citizen thought of poetry as
a somewhat weak-minded, effeminate pursuit--as very often it was. The
poet who might be persuaded of the sublimity of his calling had
necessarily to steel himself against the abuse of the matter-of-fact
persons who have no traffic in poetry; and in so doing he lost the
advantage of that bracing though insufficient criticism by which the
sane, practical man influences many of the arts; that is to say, the
readers and upholders of poetry everywhere agreed to put the poet
beyond the reach of a criticism from which prose can never be wholly
exempt. The matter-of-fact view being put out of court in the
judgment of poetry, the poet was encouraged to believe that he was not
concerned with the same universe as that of common fact. I have heard
literary critics speak of romantic or highly imaginative novels,
saying: "It is all delicate fancy and imagination; it is not concerned
with realities; it is sheer poetry"--as if poetry were not concerned
with realities! I have heard people criticise the prose works of Mr.
A.C. Benson: "This is all too musical, and sentimental, and
self-centred; this sort of thing cannot be done in prose; it should be
done in poetry"--as if nonsense becomes less nonsensical by means of
metre or rhyme! This easy-going view of the function of the poetic art
has borne an ample harvest of nonsense. I could, were it worth while,
name many living bards who consider that any sort of fancy or feeling
is good enough for poetry so long as it be prettily or gracefully
handled, who would thus degrade poetry to the position of the easiest,
as it has for long been the least prized, of the fine arts. This havoc
has been wrought, in part, by what I may call the doctrine of the
sensitive soul. Keats is the classic example of the poet who lived and
died through sensitiveness. It was a weakness inherent in the romantic
movement which, though it had so much that was enchantingly strange
and beautiful to give to the world, bequeathed to it also a
consciousness of its nerves and a pride in its very defects. When
Coleridge had taught his successors to glorify the poetic perception
and vision, to give to the secret feelings a new warrant and value,
they came to think it boorish to conceal their fine feelings, and
they acquired the habit of expressing feelings which the common man
scarcely experiences without a sense of shame. The poet came to be
essen