ure in that procession, whereas a modern
poet would shoulder himself ahead of the knight, steal the hearts of all
the ladies, from Madame Eglantine to the Wife of Bath, and change the
destinies of each of his rivals ere Canterbury was reached.

We return to our strongest argument for the invisible poet. What of
Shakespeare? we reiterate. Well, the poets might remind us that
criticism of late years has been laying more and more stress upon the
personality of Shakespeare, in the spirit of Hartley Coleridge's lines,

Great poet, 'twas thy art,
To know thyself, and in thyself to be
Whate'er love, hate, ambition, destiny,
Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart
Can make of man.
[Footnote: _Shakespeare_.]

If this trend of criticism is in the right direction, then the apparent
objectivity of the poet must be pure camouflage, and it is his own
personality that he is giving us all the time, in the guise of one
character and another. In this case, not his frank confession of his
presence in his poetry, but his self-concealment, falsifies his
representation of life. Since we have quoted Browning's apparent
criticism of the self-revealing poet, it is only fair to quote some of
his unquestionably sincere utterances on the other side of the question.
"You speak out, you," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett; [Footnote: January
13, 1845.] "I only make men and women speak--give you truth broken into
prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light." Again he wrote, "I never
have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end,--'R.B.', a
poem." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 3, 1845.] And
Mrs. Browning, usually a better spokesman for the typical English poet
than is Browning himself, likewise conceives it the artist's duty to
show us his own nature, to be "greatly _himself always_, which is
the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps." [Footnote: Letter to Robert
Browning, September 9, 1845.]

"Art," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of life." "_L'art, mes
enfants_," says the modern poet, speaking through the lips of
Verlaine, "_c'est d'etre absolument soi-meme_." Of course if one
concedes that the poet is the only thing in life worth bothering about,
the two statements become practically identical. It may be true that the
poet's universal sympathies make him the most complex type that
civilization has produced, and consequently the most economical figure
to present as a sample of humanity. But Taine has of