al.

We shall not find any actual artist completely satisfying the demand.
For the difficulties of form are endless, and sounds, colours, words
are obstinate materials when they are to be made the vehicle of ideas;
and even the artist in the full tide of the creative impulse must
always find that he has expressed something less than his intention
and has strayed into the pathless wastes of the inessential. But it is
the business of the critic to give him credit for all that is
attempted in the sincere spirit of the imagination, and at the same
time, in sympathy with the actualities of nature; for on the union of
these two depends the truth which is the beauty of art.

But the artist himself is not necessarily concerned with these
theories. His main business is intercourse with life, and also the
envisaging of life rather "by meditation" as Coleridge says, "than by
observation." He has to beware of the facts which overcame Coleridge
himself, when he sacrificed the divinity of his art to that philosophy
which banished the god. "Well were it for me," he exclaims, "if I had
continued to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the
cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver
mines of metaphysic depths." The "shaping spirit of imagination" which
impelled him to unrivalled poetry in his youth was starved in him, not
only because of his ill-health, his poverty, his drugs and laziness,
but equally because he denied expression to "fancy, and the love of
nature and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." For him perhaps
it was a poor compensation that through this denial he was able to
leave us a unique interpretation of his aesthetic and creative
experience.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The word "flavour" in this connection was constantly used by the
late Canon Ainger.

III

PASSIONS SPIN THE PLOT

If the reader has borne with my audacity in generalising about the
main functions of imaginative literature, he will be willing to pursue
a further and plainer question concerning its subject-matter. It is
time to discuss a little more fully what I mean by that "energetic
experience" which a work of art can give us. For the sake of
simplicity I will confine myself to a single issue--to that kind of
energetic experience invariably afforded by that small body of
imaginative literature which the world has agreed to regard as
supreme. If we can understand how literature in its greatest examples
provide