ings is not obscuring them, but is doing us a
service by simplifying them, and so making their ideality clearer. All
that the most idealistic poet need do is to imitate; as Mrs. Browning
says,

Paint a body well,
You paint a soul by implication.
[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.]

This firm faith that the sensual is the dwelling-place of the spiritual
accounts for the poet's impatience with the contention that his art is
useless unless he points a lesson, by manipulating his materials toward
a conscious moral end. The poet refuses to turn objects this way and
that, until they catch a reflection from a separate moral world. If he
tries to write with two distinct purposes, hoping to "suffice the eye
and save the soul beside," [Footnote: _The Ring and the Book_.] as
Browning puts it, he is apt to hide the intrinsic spirituality of things
under a cloak of ready-made moral conceptions. In his moments of deepest
insight the poet is sure that his one duty is to reveal beauty clearly,
without troubling himself about moralizing, and he assures his readers,

If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents.
[Footnote: _Fra, Lippo Lippi_.]

Probably poets have always felt, in their hearts, what the radicals of
the present day are saying so vehemently, that the poet should not be
expected to sermonize: "I wish to state my firm belief," says Amy
Lowell, "that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist
simply because it is created beauty." [Footnote: Preface to _Sword
Blades and Poppy Seed_. See also Joyce Kilmer, Letter to Howard W.
Cook, June 28, 1918.]

Even conceding that the ideal lives within the sensual, it may seem that
the poet is too sanguine in his claim that he is able to catch the ideal
and significant feature of a thing rather than its accidents. Why should
this be? Apparently because his thirst is for balance, proportion,
harmony--what you will--leading him to see life as a unity.

The artist's eyes are able to see life in focus, as it were, though it
has appeared to men of less harmonious spirit as

A many-sided mirror,
Which could distort to many a shape of error
This true, fair world of things.
[Footnote: Shelley, _Prometheus Unbound_.]

It is as if the world were a jumbled picture puzzle, which only the
artist is capable of putting together, and the fact that the essence of
things, as he conceives of them, thus forms a harmonious whole is to him
irrefu