y seldom find utterance in the
printed word. But criticism of poetic method has, by hypothesis, no
perspective and no horizons; it is concerned with a unique thing under
the aspect, of its uniqueness. It may, and happily most often does,
assume that poetry is the highest expression of the spiritual life of
man; but it makes no endeavour to assess it according to the standards
that are implicit in such an assumption. That is the function of
philosophical criticism. If philosophical criticism can be combined with
criticism of method--and there is no reason why they should not coexist
in a single person; the only two English critics of the nineteenth
century, Coleridge and Arnold, were of this kind--so much the better;
but it is philosophical criticism of which we stand in desperate need
at this moment.

A good friend of ours, who happens to be one of the few real poets we
possess, once wittily summed up a general objection to criticism of the
kind we advocate as 'always asking people to do what they can't.' But to
point out, as the philosophical critic would, that poetry itself must
inevitably languish if the more comprehensive kinds are neglected, or if
a non-poetic age is allowed complacently to call itself lyrical, is not
to urge the real masters in the less comprehensive kinds to desert their
work. Who but a fool would ask Mr De la Mare to write an epic or Miss
Mansfield to give us a novel? But he might be a wise man who called upon
Mr Eliot to set himself to the composition of a poetic drama; and
without a doubt he would deserve well of the commonwealth who should
summon the popular imitators of Mr De la Mare, Mr Davies, or Mr Eliot to
begin by trying to express something that they did comprehend or desired
to comprehend, even though it should take them into thousands of
unprintable pages. It is infinitely preferable that those who have so
far given evidence of nothing better than a fatal fluency in insipid
imitation of true lyric poets should fall down a precipice in the
attempt to scale the very pinnacles of Parnassus. There is something
heroic about the most unmitigated disaster at such an altitude.

Moreover, the most marked characteristic of the present age is a
continual disintegration of the consciousness; more or less deliberately
in every province of man's spiritual life the reins are being thrown on
to the horse's neck. The power which controls and disciplines
sensational experience is, in modern literatur