st' appears to be right. But he goes too far, I
think, if he maintains that the subject is indifferent and that all
subjects are the same to poetry. And he does not prove his point by
observing that a good poem might be written on a pin's head, and a bad
one on the Fall of Man. That shows that the subject _settles_ nothing,
but not that it counts for nothing. The Fall of Man is really a more
favourable subject than a pin's head. The Fall of Man, that is to say,
offers opportunities of poetic effects wider in range and more
penetrating in appeal. And the truth is that such a subject, as it
exists in the general imagination, has some aesthetic value before the
poet touches it. It is, as you may choose to call it, an inchoate poem
or the debris of a poem. It is not an abstract idea or a bare isolated
fact, but an assemblage of figures, scenes, actions, and events, which
already appeal to emotional imagination; and it is already in some
degree organized and formed. In spite of this a bad poet would make a
bad poem on it; but then we should say he was unworthy of the subject.
And we should not say this if he wrote a bad poem on a pin's head.
Conversely, a good poem on a pin's head would almost certainly
revolutionize its subject far more than a good poem on the Fall of Man.
It might transform its subject so completely that we should say, 'The
subject may be a pin's head, but the substance of the poem has very
little to do with it.'

This brings us to another and different antithesis. Those figures,
scenes, events, that form part of the subject called the Fall of Man,
are not the substance of _Paradise Lost_; but in _Paradise Lost_ there
are figures, scenes, and events resembling them in some degree. These,
with much more of the same kind, may be described as its substance, and
may then be contrasted with the measured language of the poem, which
will be called its form. Subject is the opposite not of form but of the
whole poem. Substance is within the poem, and its opposite, form, is
also within the poem. I am not criticizing this antithesis at present,
but evidently it is quite different from the other. It is practically
the distinction used in the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama,
and it flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison, for example,
in examining _Paradise Lost_ considers in order the fable, the
characters, and the sentiments; these will be the substance: then he
considers the language, that is, t