THE NECESSITY 
 OF POETRY 
 
 An Address given to the 
 
 Tredegar & District Co-operative Society 
 
 Nov. 22, 1917 
 
 by 
 
 ROBERT BRIDGES 
 
 Poet Laureate 
 
 Price Two Shillings net 
 
 Oxford 
 
 At the Clarendon Press 
 1918 
 
THE NECESSITY 
 OF POETRY 
 
 An Address given to the 
 
 Tredegar & District Co-operative Society 
 
 Nov. 22, 1917 
 
 by 
 
 ROBERT BRIDGES 
 
 Poet Laureate 
 
 Oxford 
 At the Clarendon Press 
 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK 
 TOBONTO MELBOUBNE BOMBAY 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 PUBLISBTEB TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
THE NECESSITY OF POETRY 
 
 PART I 
 
 I AM here to talk about Poetry, and you little 
 think how surprised you ought to be. I have 
 refused many invitations to lecture on Poetry : 
 but most of us now-a-days are doing what we 
 most dislike, and it has come about that I have 
 myself chosen the subject. 
 
 Let me explain why an artist is unwilling to 
 discourse on his own art. The fact is that in 
 every art it is only the formal side which can be 
 formulated ; and that is not what people congre- 
 gate to hear about, when they call for Art-lec- 
 tures. The grammar of any art is dry and un- 
 intelligible to the layman : it seems unrelated to 
 the magic of its delight. In Poetry it is even 
 deemed beneath the dignity of a poet to betray 
 any consciousness of such detail. But, if you 
 bid the artist leave this dull and solid ground to 
 expatiate on Beauty, you invite him on to a field V 
 where speculations appear to him fanciiul and 
 unsound : and the venture cannot rashly be in- 
 dulged in. 
 
 However here I am ; and I hope to give such a 
 
' ; - T-HE' N E c E s s i T Y 
 
 theoretic view of the fundamental basis of Poetry 
 as may interest us both, and justify the claim of 
 Poetry to that high place which is and always has 
 been granted to it by almost universal consent 
 in all countries and languages. 
 
 In a little house which I rented for a month 
 of last summer a volume of Macaulay's Essays 
 stood on the shelves an inscription in it re- 
 corded how it had been won by its owner in 
 a whist-drive and I took it up, and read the 
 greater part of it. I fear that I risk losing 
 either your esteem or your complete confidence, 
 when I say that this classical work was almost 
 new to me. But, if I had never read much in 
 it before, I now made up for past indolence or 
 prejudice ; and I was taken aback when I found 
 Macaulay praising Shelley in these terms : 
 
 We doubt (he says) whether any modern poet 
 has possessed in an equal degree some of the 
 highest qualities of the greatest ancient masters. 
 The words Bard and Inspiration, which seem so 
 cold and affected when applied to other modern 
 writers, have a perfect propriety when applied to 
 him. He was not an author but a bard. His 
 poetry seems not to have been an art but an 
 inspiration. 
 
 It is this magic of language, which won the 
 wide-ranging but somewhat uncongenial mind 
 
OF POETRY 5 
 
 of Macaulay, that I intend to explore; and I 
 shall avoid philosophical terms and questionable 
 assumptions. 
 
 Words the medium of Poetmj 
 
 Poetry is an Art, that is, it is one of the Fine 
 Arts, and, using the word in this recognised 
 sense, all Art is the expression of Ideas in some 
 sensuous material or medium. And the Ideas, 
 in taking material forms of beauty, make a direct 
 appeal to the emotions through the senses. 
 
 Thus the material or medium, as it is called, 
 of Sculpture is stone or marble, and so on ; the 
 medium of Painting is colours ; the medium of 
 Music is sound ; and the medium of Poetry is 
 words. 
 
 Now while it would be manifestly preposterous 
 to begin the study of Sculpture by an examina- 
 tion of stones, you will admit that in Painting 
 a knowledge of Colours is less remote, and is 
 even a necessary equipment of the artist : and 
 you will further grant that in Music the study 
 of the Sounds i. e. the notes of the scale and 
 their mutual relations is an indispensable pre- 
 liminary. So that in these three Arts, if they 
 are taken in this order, Sculpture, Painting, 
 Music, we see the medium in its relation to the 
 Art rising step by step in significance : and I 
 

 6 THE NECESSITY 
 
 think it is evident that in Poetry the importance 
 of the material is even greater than it is in Music ; 
 and the reason is very plain. 
 
 All Art, we said, was the expression of Ideas 
 in a sensuous medium. Now Words, the medium 
 of Poetry, actually are Ideas ; whereas neither 
 Stone nor Colour nor mere Sound can be called 
 Ideas, though they seem in this order to make 
 a gradual approach towards them. 
 
 I hope this may reconcile you to the method 
 of inquiring into Poetry by the examination of 
 Words. I propose to consider Words, first as 
 Ideas, secondly as Vocal Sounds. 
 
 WORDS AS IDEAS 
 
 Whether or no the first step of human lan- 
 guage was to recognise certain vocal sounds as 
 signs or symbols of objects perceived by the 
 senses, we must now in our perfected speech admit 
 the nouns or names of objects to be the simplest 
 elements. 
 
 But the name of an object must have a dif- 
 ferent meaning to different persons, according 
 ^ as they know more or less about it ; and it must 
 convey a different emotion as they are differently 
 affected towards it. And since knowledge con- 
 cerning any one thing is really of an infinite 
 character, for complete knowledge of any one 
 
OFPOETRY 7 
 
 thing would include its relations to everything 
 else, which is more knowledge than any man may 
 possess these words, which appear so simple as 
 mere names of objects, are, each one of them, of 
 wide capacity of signification ; and pass from 
 being names of definite objects to being names 
 of various and indefinite ideas or conceptions of 
 things. 
 
 It is impossible to prevent a name from being 
 the name of an idea ; and (unless we make the 
 doubtful exception of certain abstract ideas) it 
 is impossible to keep the idea always similar and 
 definite. 
 
 It is really a matter for wonder how rational 
 intercourse through the medium of language can 
 be so complete and easy as it is, when the ideas 
 conveyed by the words are so different in each 
 person. And yet in common talk and the ordi- 
 nary business of life we find little inconvenience 
 from the discrepancy of our ideas, and usually 
 disregard it. A man who wants to go from 
 London to Manchester, and is informed that his 
 train will leave Euston at 10 a.m., and arrive at 
 Manchester about 3 p.m., has no occasion to 
 trouble himself because his informant's idea of 
 Manchester is totally dissimilar to his own. We 
 need not labour this point. All our practical 
 life is carried on in this way, and whether a man 
 
8 THE NECESSITY 
 
 speak or write, we say that he speaks or writes 
 well, according as his meaning is plain, his ideas 
 clear, and his language unambiguous. And this 
 current speech, which is a most elaborate instru- 
 ment, for it has symbols not only for all the 
 objects of the senses, but for actions and emotions, 
 and the subtlest notions of our intellect, and no 
 less for their relations to each other is accom- 
 modated by delicate self-adjustment to the prac- 
 tical needs of life, and has been further elaborated 
 by Reason to become the sufficient apparatus for 
 all our business, politics, science, history, and 
 law, and whatever else is concerned with human 
 affairs ; and through printing it has become the 
 indestructible storehouse of human knowledge. 
 So that one may well inquire what more could 
 be desired or expected of it ; and it is common 
 to find that practical folk call Poetry 'tosh 1 , and 
 maintain that if you have anything to say, it is 
 best to say it as simply as possible. 
 
 Sir Isaac Newton, of blessed memory, wrote 
 a book on the Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms : 
 and the first words of his introduction are 
 these : 
 
 The Greek Antiquities are full of Poetical 
 fictions, because the Greeks wrote nothing in 
 prose before the conquest of Asia by Cyrus the 
 Persian. Then Pherecydes Scyrius and Cadmus 
 Milesius introduced the writing in prose. 
 
OF POETRY 9 
 
 Now whatever appreciation or respect Newton 
 may have had for the Iliad, he is complaining 
 that it was of no use to him as a scientific his- 
 torian, and I imagine him asking why those old 
 poets could not tell us plainly what they really 
 knew, instead of inventing ' irrelevant false fan- 
 cies ' about the Gods, and things that never 
 were ? 
 
 The opposition which he implies between 
 Poetry and Prose cannot be absolutely insisted 
 on : but we may take him to witness that Poetry 
 has a field of its own, which is repudiated by 
 Science as well as by Common-sense. The dis- 
 tinction is very real. The claim of prose is 
 obviously high, and I could say more to exalt 
 it : what I have to say will come later. 
 
 Insufficiency of Philosophy and Science 
 
 And here I would remind you of something 
 which amid the routine and practical concerns of 
 life we are apt to lose sight of, and that is the 
 incomplete and insufficient character of our best 
 knowledge. I do not mean those individual 
 differences that I have spoken of, nor that limita- 
 tion which each one of us must feel if we compare 
 ourselves with the wisest : but, take the wisest 
 man on earth, or all the wisest that have ever 
 
 1124 A 3 
 
10 THE NECESSITY 
 
 lived, the one thing that they agree about is that 
 the human intellect is incapable of solving the 
 profounder problems of life, with which we are 
 faced when we begin to think. 1 
 
 I am saying nothing derogatory of science and 
 philosophy, nor need one be in any sense a sceptic 
 in affirming that our highest efforts of intellect 
 do not inform us even on that primary interest 
 of all, namely for what purpose mankind exists 
 on the earth, nor whether there be any such pur- 
 pose. The so-called Laws of Nature, which we 
 imagine to rule us, are but the latest improve- 
 v ments of our own most satisfactory guesses con- 
 I ^erning the physical order of the universe : and 
 when we ask how it is that our material bodies 
 are able to be conscious of themselves, and to 
 ! [think, not only have we no answer, but we cannot 
 v imagine any kind of possible explanation. 
 '( Man does not know, and maybe never will 
 know what he is. Let me quote the utterance of 
 the good- hearted atheist in Anatole France's 
 recent novel. He speaks frankly and typically 
 as a convinced scientist, thus : 
 
 Nature, my only mistress and my sole teacher, 
 
 has never given me any sign that she would have 
 
 me think the life of a man to be of any value : 
 
 <on the contrary she informs me by all manner 
 
 1 See note on p. 48. 
 
OF POETRY 11 
 
 of indications that it is of no account whatever. 
 The one final cause of all living creatures seems 
 N^ to be that they should be the food of other liv- 
 ing creatures, who are themselves destined to 
 the same end. Murder has her sanction. . . . 
 And yet I must confess that there is something 
 rebellious in my instinct ; for I do not like to 
 see blood flow : and that is a weakness from 
 which all my philosophy has never been able to 
 wean me. 
 
 He cannot reconcile his better human feelings 
 with his Epicurean science. 
 
 How does the brag of scientific learning, the 
 vaunt of its scrupulous well-informed prose look 
 now ? Does it not seem that in trying to make 
 our ideas definite we are confining ourselves to 
 a method which refuses to deal with the mysteries 
 of life ? and is driven to that refusal not because 
 it can deny the mysteries, but only because 
 it can make nothing of them ? Are we not 
 building up our language into something of a 
 prison house? And is it not just because they 
 have never done this, that untaught men are 
 often more contented and at home in the world, 
 x far more like the ideal ' wise man ' than the best 
 instructed men of science ? 
 
 Charles Darwin in his early book on the voy- 
 age of the Beagle quotes from Shelley's meta- 
 physical poem Mont Blanc : and in his autobio- 
 graphy he writes : 
 
 A 4 
 
12 THE NECESSITY 
 
 Up to the age of thirty or beyond it, Poetry 
 of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, 
 Gray, Byron, Wordsworth and Shelley gave 
 me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I 
 took intense delight in Shakespeare. . . . But 
 now for many years I cannot endure to read a 
 line of Poetry. I have tried lately to read Shake- 
 \ speare, and found it so intolerably dull that it 
 nauseated me. . . . My mind seems to have be- 
 come a kind of machine for grinding general 
 laws out of a large collection of facts. 
 
 He regretted this, and said that if he had to 
 live his life again, he would try to keep the 
 poetic side of his mind alive. 
 
 Why did Darwin lose his interest in poetry ? 
 And why was he right in judging that his mental 
 life had become poorer by the loss ? His almost 
 bitterly scornful description of his state shows 
 that he meant (even if not quite consciously) 
 something more than that he had lost what his 
 memory told him was a source of keen pleasure. 
 It is difficult to quiet a suspicion that the 
 \ natural indefinite quality of our ideas may be a 
 v healthy condition ; and that the key to the mys- 
 teries of life, which is withheld from philosophi- 
 ' cal exactitudes, may lie in that very condition of 
 'i our thought which Reason rejects as unseizable 
 ! and delusive. 
 
OF POETRY 13 
 
 Account of Concepts 
 
 Suppose we look into our minds, and try to see 
 these ideas at home, and picture to ourselves the 
 manner of their behaviour. This may seem a 
 difficult task. I will read a passage from a liv- 
 ing writer which I think illuminating. It must of 
 course be a visual picture, and therefore a clumsy 
 translation into solids, but that is unavoidable. 
 
 It needs some introduction. Consider then 
 
 by what gradual stages an idea is formed in the 
 
 mind. There is a familiar example in the word 
 
 \ father^ which is very commonly misapplied by 
 
 children to all grown-up men. 1 This mistake is 
 
 1 The first arisings of the identification of the parent 
 with a special sound or name are very hazy, and I should 
 
 "* mistrust any general statement. The mere bubblings and 
 babblings of the infant mouth, ma-ma and pa-pa, are taken 
 up and with varying success appropriated by the parents, 
 who may often be deceived. The word father comes later, 
 when the child may be supposed to have labels for objects. 
 But the identification of the father is no doubt very different 
 in different children, not only from the great difference in 
 their actual contact and experience, but also because (as I 
 know from observation) children come at mental profi- 
 
 ciency in quite different ways 'some are born thinking, 
 
 ^ some have difficulty in learningTo think) 
 
 The name for the father must in all cases come to the 
 child only in connexion with his father. If he had no 
 father living he would not hear the name : if his father 
 were a white, and all other men that he saw were blacks, 
 then he would probably not extend its application. 
 
14 THE NECESSITY 
 
 corrected, and the conception of father gradu- 
 ally clears itself, but cannot be completed until 
 the child is himself grown up to manhood, and 
 \ has himself become a father. For though as a 
 bachelor he may have a very true conception of 
 fatherhood, it must yet be imperfect, because emo- 
 tions only imagined are not the same as emotions 
 actually felt, and these, when they come, will add 
 a new experience. And you must note that all, 
 or almost all our natural ideas are coloured or 
 warmed with emotion. It was absence of this 
 indefinite blur in Peter Bell's understanding that 
 Wordsworth so deplored when he wrote the 
 famous lines, 
 
 A primrose by a river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more. 
 
 I will strengthen our illustration with another 
 example, a child on first hearing a church organ. 
 Contrast the vague wonder in his mind with 
 \ his ideas and feelings when he has become an 
 accomplished organist or organ-builder. 
 
 These ideas in the mind, of which words are 
 the symbols, are called CONCEPTS. We may use 
 that name. 
 
 Now my author compares a CONCEPT in the 
 Mnind to a precious stone, say a diamond, and 
 
OFPOETRY 15 
 
 the first state of the CONCEPT father or % organ in 
 ^ the child's mind will be like the rough diamond, 
 "as it comes from the pit. He compares its 
 growth to the change which comes over the dia- 
 mond under the hand of the expert gem-cutter; 
 who transforms it into a brilliant jewel with 
 many structural facets, which reflect and refract 
 all the light that falls on them. 
 I can now give you his picture. 
 
 Let us suppose (he writes) that our minds 
 contain large numbers of such myriad-sided 
 and many-coloured jewels, grouped together in 
 various ways and forms; and then that light 
 flashes through this grouped mass, darting into 
 an d through and between the several j e wels. An d 
 further let us imagine that simultaneously with 
 this flashing movement of the light through and 
 between these myriad-sided jewels, there is also 
 a stir and reshaping of the jewels themselves ; 
 a change of form by which they acquire new 
 facets and a movement which brings them ever 
 into new relations with one another, but again 
 fitting closely together, joining themselves into 
 new combinations of form and colour, linking 
 themselves into new and ever-changing clusters. 
 The movement of the light into and through 
 and between the jewels, and the simulta- 
 neous change and remodelling and regrouping 
 of the jewels themselves, the two latter move- 
 ments often caused by the former, may serve 
 
16 T H E N E C E S S I T Y 
 
 us for an image of what we call Thought, the 
 miracle or alchemy of Thought. And the jewels, 
 which tumble apart and reform themselves into 
 new and ever-changing harmonious combina- 
 tions and clusters, are Concepts, and the light 
 which flashes through and between them, and is 
 often the cause of their movement and change 
 of grouping, is the stream of new percepts (or 
 perceptions), which the mind is unceasingly 
 acquiring from the sense-data furnished by the 
 nerves and sense organs. 1 
 
 I think this image of great value, and we may 
 use its definite terms as a common basis of 
 phraseology in this difficult subject, so that we 
 can talk of it with the confidence of mutual 
 understanding. 
 
 There are several remarks to make. 
 
 First, You see that the flashing light, which 
 disturbs the jewels and causes their growth and 
 regrouping, is the fresh experience of our senses. 
 Our senses, while we are awake, are continuously 
 supplying us with fresh material: and it is 
 chiefly in this way that we learn, correcting our 
 concepts by new experience. 
 
 1 This quotation is shortened and simplified from the 
 original to adapt it to oral communication. The author, 
 Mr. Campion, had sent me the proofs of an essay not yet 
 published. 
 
OFPOETRY 17 
 
 Secondly, That these concepts, lying stored in 
 our minds, are not all of them in that part of the 
 mind which we can get at when we choose. The 
 place where they are supposed to dwell is very 
 deep, and the depths of it are almost altogether 
 out of our reach. The strange tricks that Memory 
 plays us show that there are many things in our 
 minds which we cannot call up at will : and it is 
 certain that there are many which we never 
 bring into consciousness at all. 
 
 Thirdly, That the fresh experience of the 
 senses, which we suppose to be the main agent in 
 stimulating the concepts, need not be a conscious 
 experience. A sight or sound may pass from the 
 eye or ear into the brain, and do its work in the 
 mind, without our observing (i.e. being con- 
 scious) that any virtue has passed into us. 
 
 Fourthly, That these concepts have a spon- 
 taneous life and growth of their own ; and in this 
 respect are more like a crowd of men in a market- 
 place, talking together in twos and threes, shift- 
 ing about at will, and grouping themselves differ- 
 ently for different purposes ; gathering informa- 
 tion, hailing and calling to each other, as one 
 man sees a creditor to whom he has promised 
 payment, another an acquaintance to whom he 
 would sell something : a scene of confusion where 
 every one is active and intent on his own affairs, 
 
 2184 A 5 
 
18 THE NECESSITY 
 
 yet busily working out the common industry of 
 the market. 
 
 Markets differ much in different parts of the 
 country: and people differ in nothing more than 
 in respect both of the quality and activity of 
 the concepts in the subconscious region of their 
 minds. 
 
 A genius is a man whose mind has most of a 
 right spontaneous activity of the concepts among 
 themselves. 
 
 This spontaneous activity within the mind is a 
 definite fact of life : and it seems to me to be the 
 best evidence that we have of the Reality of 
 Truth. 
 
 Poetic use of Concepts 
 
 Now Poetry, when it is performing its essential 
 function, and thereby provoking censure from 
 Newton, and nausea in Darwin, uses our concep- 
 tions in their natural condition. It neither trims 
 them nor rationalises them. Its art is to repre- 
 sent these spontaneous conjunctions of concepts, 
 as they affect the imagination. And it was no 
 doubt this that aroused the admiration of 
 Macaulay. Perhaps he had been reading, 
 
 On a poet's lips I slept 
 Dreaming like a love-adept 
 In the sound his breathing kept ; 
 Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, 
 
OFPOETRY 19 
 
 But feeds on the aereal kisses 
 
 Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. 
 
 He will watch from dawn till gloom 
 
 The lake-reflected sun illume 
 
 The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, 
 
 Nor heed nor see what things they be ; 
 
 But from these create he can 
 
 Forms more real than living man, 
 
 Nurselings of immortality. 
 
 The value of this spontaneous imagination varies 
 much. In William Blake it often seems like 
 insanity : and true insanity is now attributed by 
 experts to subconscious aberration, to a sort of 
 mutiny of the concepts, on a theory that would 
 imply that the men in the market-place combine 
 together in secret associations for evil purposes. 
 
 On the other hand this inspiration is some- 
 times wholly expended in making vivid emo- 
 tional pictures of scientific or rational ideas, and 
 its magic then lies in the imagery which satisfies 
 even without interpretation. It goes home, as 
 we say ; and is accepted as easily and naturally 
 as it was created. 
 
 Thus, when Keats is speaking of the riddle of 
 our life, his lines are : 
 
 Stop and consider ! Life is but a day ; 
 A fragile dewdrop on its perilous way 
 From a tree's summit ; a poor Indian's sleep 
 While his boat hastens to the monstrous steep 
 
 A6 
 
20 THE NECESSITY 
 
 Of Montmorenci. Why so sad a moan ? 
 Life is the rose's hope while yet unblown ; 
 The reading of an ever-changing tale ; 
 The light uplifting of a maiden's veil ; 
 A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air ; 
 A laughing schoolboy, without grief or care, 
 Riding the springy branches of an elm. 
 
 Here are six different views of life, which 
 translated into prose would be : first an atomic 
 movement in a general flux ; then a dream on 
 the brink of destruction ; then a budding hope ; 
 then an intellectual distraction ; then an ecstatic 
 glimpse of beauty ; and lastly an instinctive 
 animal pleasure. 
 
 Different ways of using the Concepts 
 
 At this point I imagine an objector saying to 
 me, ' You have proved too much. If you have 
 * truly described the behaviour of Ideas in the 
 ' mind, then there can be no escape from it. All 
 6 our thought must be more or less subject to this 
 ' shifty and uncertain quality of our ideas, and 
 4 to their spontaneous uncontrollable behaviour.' 
 
 And this is no doubt true. No absolute line 
 can be drawn. You will remember that I said 
 a genius was a man whose mind was unusually 
 rich and active in spontaneous thought : and 
 that is as true in science as in art. A new 
 law in mathematics or physics is just as much 
 
OF POETRY 21 
 
 a bit of subconscious insight as is a composition 
 in music by Mozart. 
 
 Lines of distinction may however be drawn ; 
 thus These concepts as we have pictured them 
 can be regarded either in their definite or in 
 their indefinite aspects: that is, we may take 
 them with all their multiple facets or confused 
 i iridescent fringes, varying in different minds ; 
 or we may shear them, and pay attention only 
 to that part of them that we think we best 
 understand and mostly agree about. And there 
 seem to be mainly three ways of using them. 
 
 To take a simple example, the Concept MAN. 
 We agreed that no one definitely and sufficiently 
 knows what man is ; but that does not in any 
 way hamper our conversation, although we may 
 be aware that we are talking with a person who 
 has a very different conception of MAN from 
 our own ; as in the French story that I quoted, 
 where the old atheist converses with the priest. 
 They both fully recognise and even compare 
 their differences : and in daily intercourse such 
 differences are assumed and allowed for. And 
 this is our way in the common conversation of 
 social life. 
 
 But in Science MAN has a definite meaning ; 
 and although he is recognised to be a thinking 
 animal, who is liable to very unscientific opinions 
 
22 T H E N E C E S S I T Y 
 
 concerning himself, and is subject to their effects 
 on his conduct, which may even justify a 
 branch of philosophy being devoted to their 
 manifestations yet in no other way is science 
 concerned with these ideas at all. 
 
 But Poetry, on the other hand, though it em- 
 braces all possible aspects, and the scientific 
 among these, builds its temple preferably with 
 the untrimmed stone, or to take Shelley's meta- 
 phor it is in ' thought's wildernesses ' that the 
 poet finds the home of his imagination. And 
 thus he can write of MAN : 
 
 Man one harmonious soul of many a soul, 
 
 Whose nature is its own divine control, 
 Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea ; 
 
 Familiar acts are beautiful through love ; 
 
 Labour, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove 
 Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they 
 could be ! 
 
 His will, with all mean passions, bad delights, 
 And selfish cares, its trembling satellites, 
 
 A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey, 
 Is as a tempest-winged ship, whose helm 
 Love rules, thro' waves which dare not overwhelm, 
 
 Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway. 
 
 All things confess his strength. Thro' the cold mass 
 Of marble and of colour his dreams pass ; 
 
 Bright threads whence mothers weave the robes their 
 
 children wear ; 
 
 Language is a perpetual Orphic song, 
 Which rules with Dsedal harmony a throng 
 
 Ofthoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were . 
 
OF POETRY 
 
 This wild passage incidentaiHInforces a good 
 many of my previous remarks^ But now hear 
 a scientist ' seeking to disclose the bleak anatomy 
 of existence ' : 
 
 The powers, or faculties of all kinds of living 
 matter diverse as they may be in degree, are 
 all substantially similar in kind. . . . Either they 
 are immediately directed towards the main- 
 tenance and development of the body, or they 
 effect transitory changes in the relative posi- 
 tion of parts of the body, or they tend towards 
 the continuance of the species. . . . But the 
 difference between the powers of the lowest 
 animal, and those of the highest, is one of 
 degree, not of kind, and depends (as Milne- 
 Edwards long ago so well pointed out) upon 
 the extent to which the principle of the divi- 
 sion of labour is carried out in the living 
 economy. 
 
 These illustrations must suffice to exhibit the 
 extremely different effects of the extreme me- 
 thods : but Huxley would no doubt reassure us 
 that it was ' a difference of degree and not of 
 kind as Milne-Edwards long ago so well pointed 
 out ', and we must not be surprised to find the 
 poetic quality of imagination constantly en- 
 livening our conversation, and making the 
 beauties of the best prose. 
 
24 THE NECESSITY 
 
 So much then for the poetic treatment of 
 words as ideas : and now if we come to consider 
 words as vocal sounds, we shall be engaged in 
 even more formal questions, of the dullness of 
 which I have warned you. But I will take only 
 such fundamental principles as I may expect to 
 interest you, and satisfy at the same time my 
 object in showing that the form of poetry is no 
 more arbitrary than the sense. 
 
 WORDS AS VOCAL SOUNDS 
 
 It is somewhat of an artificial break that I am 
 making here by thus separating the treatment 
 of words as ideas from their treatment as sounds, 
 for there is a very close and real connexion. 
 The same impulse which prompts us to express 
 our delight in the beauty of certain emotions, 
 and of the images in which we clothe them, 
 also prompts us to make the expression beautiful 
 in sound. Even when there is no conscious art, 
 the very sense of the beauty of the thought will 
 tend to produce a sympathetic corresponding 
 beauty in the language. And immediately that 
 any consciousness of this arises, we find ourselves \ 
 consciously inventing beautiful forms : and this \ 
 is conscious ART. Man is by Nature an artist. 
 The earliest relics of his draftsmanship date back 
 
OFPOETRY 25 
 
 to a time when he probably had but the first 
 rudiments of speech ; and, as his speech deve- 
 loped, he was bound to take an aesthetic view 
 of it, that is, to be more pleased with some sounds 
 than with others. 
 
 Among all the means of beautifying speech, 
 Rhythm stands out apart : and the first ques- 
 tion that an inquirer will ask about poetic form 
 will be this : Why is poetry written in metres ? 
 Is metre natural to it, or is it a mere convention 
 and dispensable ? 
 
 Rhythm of words 
 
 Rhythm is a difficult subject, and we must be 
 content to let it pass. The basis of our feeling 
 for rhythm is probably the comfortable satisfac- 
 tion of easy and graceful muscular motion ; and 
 if you wish for an idea of rhythm you should 
 train your feelings to follow the movements of 
 a fine skater or a good dancer. 
 
 Speech-rhythm is infinite. Well- written prose 
 is as rhythmical as verse, and in both prose and 
 verse the rhythms should be congenial to the 
 sense. The difference between the rhythms of 
 prose and verse is this, that poetry selects cer- 
 tain rhythms and makes systems of them, and 
 these repeat themselves: and this is metre. 
 Whereas the rule for rhythm in well-constructed 
 
26 THE NECESSITY 
 
 prose is to avoid appearance of artifice ; so that 
 the rhythms must not appear to repeat them- 
 selves ; or if they are repeated for any emotional 
 or logical effect, they should not appear to make 
 verses. This condition may be most simply 
 stated by saying that metrical verse is forbidden 
 in prose. With this one exception the rhythms 
 of prose are quite free : and this freedom from 
 constraint causes the best prose to be, in its 
 rhythmic quality, superior to a poorly con- 
 structed poem, where the repetition of the metre 
 has often enough no relation to the meaning, 
 and only serves to hamper the diction ; as you 
 can see by comparing the metrical version of a 
 Psalm even though Milton wrote it with the 
 prose in the Prayer-book. 
 
 There is a fine hymn by Isaac Watts, ' O God, 
 our help in ages past,' frequently sung in our 
 churches, which in ears familiar with Coverdale's 
 prose version of the original Psalm xc sounds 
 futile and feeble, and almost insincere in its 
 decadent artificiality. 
 
 When words are merely strung together so 
 as to fit into a poetic metre, much more of the 
 possible beauty of rhythmic speech is sacrificed 
 than can be gained by the rhyme and prescribed 
 cadences that please a common ear. 
 
 But the poets of the world, in their purpose 
 
OFPOETRY 27 
 
 of making speech beautiful, chose to set it out 
 in metres : why then did they so ? why should 
 poetry have confined itself to metres ? 
 
 This very natural inquiry may be honestly 
 satisfied by an appeal to the stupendous results 
 attained by the great poetic metres. The ex- 
 amination of these being out of the question, I 
 will read three examples of English blank verse. 
 
 First Shakespeare ; this is how the somewhat 
 footy little artist in the Merchant of Venice can 
 talk: 
 
 How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this 
 
 bank! 
 
 Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music 
 Creep in our ears : soft stillness and the night 
 Become the touches of sweet harmony. 
 Sit, Jessica : look, how the floor of heaven 
 Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. 
 There 's not the smallest orb which thou be- 
 
 holdest 
 
 But in his motion like an angel sings, 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins. 
 Such harmony is in immortal souls : 
 But whilst this muddy vesture of decay 
 Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. 
 
 Now Milton ; the Attendant Spirit in Comus 
 introduces himself. 
 
 Before the starry threshold of Jove's Court 
 My mansion is, where those immortal shapes 
 
28 THE NECESSITY 
 
 Of bright aereal spirits live insphear'd 
 In Regions mild of calm and serene Air, 
 Above the smoke and stirr of this dim spot, 
 Which men call Earth, and with low- 
 
 thoughted care 
 
 Confined, and pestered in this pin-fold here, 
 Strive to keep up a frail, and feverish being 
 Unmindful of the crown that Vertue gives 
 After this mortal change, to her true Servants 
 Amongst the enthron'd Gods on Sainted 
 
 seats. 
 
 Yet some there be that by due steps aspire 
 To lay their just hands on that Golden Key 
 That opes the Palace of Eternity : 
 To such my errand is, and but for such, 
 I would not soil these pure Ambrosial weeds, 
 With the rank vapours of this Sin -worn 
 
 mould. 
 
 Now Shelley, where the Spirit of the Earth 
 talks with Prometheus. 
 
 Ere Babylon was dust, 
 The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, 
 Met his own image walking in the garden. 
 That apparition, sole of men, he saw. 
 For know there are two worlds of life and 
 
 death : 
 
 One, that which thou beholdest ; but the other 
 Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit 
 The shadows of all forms that think and live 
 Till death unite them, and they part no more : 
 Dreams and the light imaginings of men, 
 
OFPOETRY 29 
 
 And all that faith creates or love desires, 
 Terrible, strange, sublime and beauteous shapes. 
 There thou art, and dost hang, a writhing shade, 
 'Mid whirlwind-peopled mountains : all the gods 
 Are there, and all the powers of nameless worlds, 
 Vast, sceptred phantoms : heroes, men and beasts ; 
 And Demogorgon, a tremendous gloom. 
 
 These passages are in the most prosaic of all 
 our English metres, and though it has no rhyme 
 to mark its periods, yet the metrical unit is so 
 effective and convincing that one cannot imagine 
 it to be wrong in principle. 
 
 /The common explanation of the metrical 
 charm is, I believe, the love of patterns, and it 
 is true that metrical poems can all be well con- 
 sidered as word-patterns; there are certain 
 stanza-forms in which the pattern is very ob- 
 trusive : yet I prefer to take a somewhat wider 
 principle for basis. 
 
 First, all artistic beauty exhibits a mastery, 
 a triumph of grace : and this implies a difficulty 
 overcome, for no mastery of grace can appear 
 in the doing of whatever you suppose any man 
 could do with equal ease if he chose. And since 
 in a perfect work (music perhaps provides the 
 best examples) all difficulty is so mastered that 
 it entirely disappears, and would not be thence 
 inferred, it is necessary that for general appre- 
 
30 THE NECESSITY 
 
 elation there should be some recognition or con- 
 sciousness of the formal conditions, in which 
 the difficulty is implicit. And thus one of the 
 uses of second-rate works of art is that they 
 reveal and remind us of the material obstacles. 
 
 Now the limitation of metre is of a kind which 
 particularly satisfies the conditions just de- 
 scribed: because it offers a form which the 
 hearers recognise and desire, and by its recur- 
 rence keeps it steadily in view. Its practical 
 working may be seen in the unpopularity of 
 poems that are written in unrecognised metres, 
 and the favour shown to well-established forms 
 by the average reader. His pleasure is in some 
 proportion to his appreciation of the problem. 
 
 Secondly, a great deal of our pleasure in 
 beauty, whether natural or artistic, depends on 
 slight variations of a definite form. Fancy if 
 all roses were as similar in shape as all equi- 
 lateral triangles ! The fundamental motive of 
 this pleasure may be described as a balance be- 
 tween the expected and the unexpected the 
 expected being a sedative soothing lulling prin- 
 ciple, and the unexpected a stimulating awaken- 
 ing principle. Too much of the type would 
 be tedious, too much of the unexpected would 
 worry. The unexpected stimulates the con- 
 sciousness, but you must also be conscious of 
 
OFPOETRY 31 
 
 the type. Or this balance may be regarded as 
 a strife between two things, the fixed type and 
 the freedom of the variations : and metre gives 
 the best possible opportunity for this kind of 
 play, which is really comparable to Nature's, 
 for no two lines of a poem are exactly alike : 
 they differ much as do the leaves of a tree : and 
 a pleasure arises from our knowledge of the 
 normal rhythm (the type) beneath the varieties 
 which the poet delights to extend and elabo- 
 rate : his skill in this sort of embroidery being 
 to push its disguises as far as he dare without 
 breaking away from the type. 
 
 The ancient Greeks were as pre-eminent in 
 scientific thought as they were in art, and since 
 their early poetry still maintains its pre-emi- 
 nence we are scarcely in a position to question the 
 propriety of the metrical principles which we have 
 inherited from them. If any man should ever 
 invent a form superior to metre, the world would 
 be much indebted to him ; but we can hardly 
 imagine it, and may therefore take metre as a ne- 
 cessity of the conditions and justified by results. 
 
 DICTION 
 
 I hope by such considerations to have demon- 
 strated the propriety and almost the necessity of 
 
32 THE NECESSITY 
 
 the metrical form of poetry. The other beauties 
 of speech can be grouped under Diction. 
 
 However spontaneously the perfect poem may 
 spring up in the poet's mind, like a melody in 
 the mind of Mozart, the conditions to be ful- 
 filled over and above the elaboration of the 
 mejj*e are 
 
 \XFirst, the right words : secondly, those words 
 in the right order : thirdly, the agreeable sound 
 of them in sequence. 
 
 And these three Tightnesses are the factors of 
 style, that supreme gift which immortalises the 
 utterance of such different minds as Blaise Pas- 
 cal and Robert Burns : for the laws are very 
 similar in prose and in poetry. I shall pass 
 them over, because such a brief account of them 
 as we should have time for would be dull. 1 
 
 1 If any one should be curious to see how dull, he may 
 read to the end of this note, which I append for the sake 
 of completeness. ,, 
 
 First as to the choice of words : What words are the 
 right words in poetic diction? Plainly their sound must 
 be one ruling consideration as may be proved by the ill 
 effect of extreme dissonance : yet their chief power lies 
 either in their absolute correctness, or in what is called 
 their suggestiveness, and this, which is the greater poetic 
 beauty, lurks commonly in the fringes of the concepts, as 
 was explained when we spoke of words as ideas. When 
 correctness and suggestiveness coincide their power can 
 be so great that quality of sound is sometimes outclassed ; 
 
OF POETRY 
 
 On order of words 
 
 But I think I may venture a short account of 
 order. What is meant by a right ORDER of 
 words? The principle is important and very 
 
 and harshness is unheeded. This we willingly concede to 
 the imperfection of language, which is not so constituted 
 as to combine all excellencies, whence the lesser must give 
 way. Our English words especially have been shamefully 
 and shabbily degraded, and are daily worsening, so as to 
 be often very ill-adapted for poetic use. And the swarm- 
 ing homophones need special treatment. 
 
 As to the sound of words in sequence. Pure Euphony, 
 i. e. the agreeable sound of a sequence of syllables, is as 
 difficult a subject as rhythm : and it is like rhythm in 
 this, that the ultimate judge is the expert ear, which de- 
 pends on a natural gift : and again, as in rhythm, there 
 are certain conditions which almost all men would agree 
 to call pleasant, and others which they would deem un- 
 pleasant : but there is no universal principle that can be 
 adduced to check the vagaries of taste or false fancy, since 
 what theories have been proposed are themselves ex- 
 amples of false fancy : Either, for instance, that the vowels 
 correspond respectively to the primary colours, and should 
 be grouped as those colours should be : or that euphony 
 is actually a musical melody made by the inherent pitch 
 of the vowels, the sequences of which must be determined 
 exactly as if we were composing a musical air of those in- 
 herent notes. The great indefinable complication is that 
 this euphony, especially in poetry, is fused with the mean- 
 ing : and this fusion of sound and sense is the magic of the 
 greatest poetry. But even where the poet's success is 
 most conspicuous and convincing, we are often quite 
 
34 THE NECESSITY 
 
 simple, but in application so subtle that it is 
 seldom recognised. You may easily come at it 
 by imagining the talk of savages in a language 
 that has no grammar. In such a language a 
 speaker could not make himself understood 
 
 t 
 
 unable to determine on what it actually depends : it is 
 known only by its effects. 
 
 In English we find, strangely enough, that the eye comes 
 meddling in with the business of the ear, and causes delu- 
 sion. Our words are so commonly spelt so differently 
 from their pronunciation that few writers know what 
 sounds they are dictating ; the word is a visible thing, 
 ' pleasant to the eye and desirable to make one wise ', it is 
 perhaps of ancient and high descent, with a heroic history, 
 it comes * trailing clouds of glory ' : but that it has been 
 phonetically degraded into an unworthy or ugly sound is 
 overlooked. 
 
 I might give as an example the word Dxdal in the quota- 
 tion from Shelley on p. 22. The original Greek word had 
 a pleasant sound and a rich familiar signification : in 
 English it has no meaning for most men,and is pronounced 
 deedle (like needle), and if it were so spelt I doubt if any 
 poet would use it. Shakespeare might have made fun of 
 it in Peter Quince's play, and have set diddle alongside of 
 Phibbus and Ninny for the use of that immortal actor, 
 bully Bottom. 
 
 Euphony must also include the purely musical effects of 
 a metre, when this is in delicate agreement with the mood 
 of the poem : it so enhances the emotional effect of a 
 harmonious sequence of words as to overrule common 
 proprieties of order, and the melody will require that the 
 sonorous words shall respect its intention and fall into the 
 positions that it prescribes. 
 
OF POETRY 35 
 
 except by putting his words in a certain order. 
 If, for instance, he wished to tell you that he 
 went from one place to another, from A to B, 
 and had no prepositions like our to and from, he 
 would have to put A first and B second ; that 
 is, he would have to set his nouns in the order in 
 which he wished the idea of his movement to 
 enter your mind. And this principle remains 
 the primary law of order in good speech, whether 
 prose or poetry: the words should be in the 
 order of the ideas ; and poetry differs from prose 
 only in its more aesthetic and subtler conception 
 of the proper sequence, and in the greater arti- 
 fices that it is able to employ, and the greater 
 difficulties that it has to overcome. 
 
 There are all manner of exceptions to this 
 rule ; but the most apparent inconsistencies are 
 manifestly dependent on the primary value of 
 the rule : for instance, an idea in an unexpected 
 position in the sentence is often most effective : 
 but the surprise is due to its being either gram- 
 matically or conceptually out of order. 
 
 The commonest cause of ineffective expression 
 in bad writers of verse is that they choose their 
 grammar so as to set the words that they wish 
 to use in the order most convenient to the metre. 
 The born writer or speaker is the man whose 
 ideas flow spontaneously in a simple grammar 
 
36 THE NECESSITY 
 
 which preserves the right order of ideas. A fixed 
 poetic metre must of course increase the diffi- 
 culty of right order, and thus heighten the 
 beauty and triumph and rarity of full success. 
 
 PART II 
 
 Art for the working man 
 ' i '%'"," 
 
 You must very well know, and I should not 
 wish to disguise from you, my intention in speak- 
 ing to you of Poetry. 
 
 One main purpose of your society is to obtain 
 and assure for the working men in England more 
 leisure, in order that they may enjoy the fuller 
 spiritual privileges which imply a higher educa- 
 tion ; and I am, as you know, in sympathy with 
 you, and we are all agreed that apart from your 
 just and honourable aspirations to individual 
 development a democracy that is to flourish 
 must be an educated democracy. 
 
 I do not wish to talk politics, nor to theorise 
 on the enormous practical difficulties of demo- 
 cracy ; I speak only of your desire to be better 
 acquainted with the fine arts, and I deal with 
 that art which I am best fitted to describe. 
 
OF POETRY 37 
 
 As for your personal development. 
 
 The reason why the working man's work does 
 not satisfy him, and is therefore provocative of 
 social disorganisation, is that it is generally con- 
 cerned with the allocation or adaptation of some 
 special object for some remote purpose, which 
 purpose is itself only imperceptibly related to 
 the life of the spirit, if indeed it is so fortunate 
 as to be related to it at all. 
 
 For instance, it is possible to be convinced 
 that railroads may subserve to human perfec- 
 tion ; certainly they can be used for that pur- 
 pose ; but it is evident that they are very com- 
 monly the purveyors of man's wasteful and need- 
 less luxury, and that they have added greatly to 
 the vain feverish turmoil, which is the worst foe 
 to spiritual life. 
 
 Now this being so, it is difficult for a man, 
 whose occupation is the straightening of rails, to 
 feel any enthusiasm for his work beyond what 
 he may get from the straightness of the rail and 
 his skill in straightening it. There is no actual 
 beauty, no field for the play of his mind, and no 
 spiritual contact. 
 
 This is a fair example of how the laborious 
 conditions of modern civilisation are urtworthy 
 of man's faculties. The best that can be made 
 of such work is to regard it as a useful applica- 
 
38 THE NECESSITY 
 
 tion of the necessary and healthy exercise of the 
 muscles, and to accept what satisfaction can be 
 got from doing the job well, and remembering 
 that it is of service to others and required for 
 their physical convenience. This utilitarian as- 
 pect is wholesome and good ; but it does not 
 satisfy man's nature, and it is your experience 
 that has rightly led you to look for escape. 
 
 Now, if you are to have intelligent communion 
 with the fine arts, it is necessary that your con- 
 tact with them should not be mere casual diver- 
 sion and amusement ; the fanciful pleasure which 
 that might afford could be no permanent satis- 
 faction. This sort of external contact is inevit- 
 able and pleasant, but your desire for these 
 things is within you, and (unless it be only a 
 superficial curiosity or vanity or mistaken envy) 
 it is an emotion which must grow by natural 
 development through personal education and 
 purification. 
 
 Some sort of guidance as to what you should 
 be looking for, if not absolutely essential, may 
 be of good service : especially because the objects 
 which will present themselves to you as works of 
 fine art are most miscellaneous in kind, and 
 often ingenious fakes and shams, commercial 
 wares. In art, as in everything, there is more 
 bad than good, more false than true. The 
 
OF POETRY 39 
 
 greatest number of serious art-products are 
 mostly imitations of art, and if I say that 
 nothing is less like a work of art than its imita- 
 tion (even though it should deceive), you will 
 understand what is meant by such a paradox, 
 if you allow poetry to be (as I contend) spon- 
 taneous ; for it is plain that a conscious imitatipn 
 of such a spontaneous process must be almost its 
 opposite. 1 
 
 As a matter of fact the two activities are com- 
 monly mixed together in varying proportions. 
 
 When I was a small child, music excited in 
 me the deepest wonder ; and a military band, 
 that used to play in the open air where I could 
 get at it, was the best thing I knew. I would 
 
 1 By spontaneous I do not of course mean instan- 
 taneous : only that the natural impulse must arise of itself 
 and be strong enough to suggest and develop its own form. 
 It may come to perfection only after long conscious toil 
 and difficulty and the sort of toil is different in the differ- 
 ent arts. In all of them the Reason is a most active help- 
 mate, but always the servant of the emotion. It is a note 
 of the consummate artist that the more he works on his 
 production, the more he * touches it up ', the more ' spon- 
 taneous ' it will appear. That is the object of his toil in 
 the mastery of his material : and his conscious Reason 
 works humbly for him in the field of aesthetics, having 
 become, so to speak, the conscious activity of his instinct. 
 But a lesser artist when he seeks to better his original 
 sketch will ruin it by the irrelevant additions or substitu- 
 tions of another mood. 
 
40 THE NECESSITY 
 
 escape from the nursery-maid and steal between 
 the legs of the performers into the magic circle, 
 where I could stand close under the instruments 
 and drink in their peculiar sonorities to my 
 heart's content. The spectacle of my innocent 
 delight must have amused the bandsmen and 
 lightened the monotony of their routine: but 
 I fancy that the bassoon-player may have been 
 annoyingly rallied by his comrades for the special 
 attention that his particular performance won 
 from me ; for the low notes of his register amazed 
 me as much as anything of the kind ever has 
 since, and I do not know that I have now quite 
 lost my original feeling towards them. 
 
 Well, one day when I was exploring the cellars 
 beneath my father's house, I suddenly beheld all 
 my favourite instruments lying in a heap in front 
 of me ; basshorns, trombones, saxhorns, and all 
 the rest of them, dusty indeed and tarnished by 
 years of neglect, but there they were, of full size, 
 the real things. 
 
 The account of their presence was that my 
 father had once provided this orchestral appa- 
 ratus for the use of himself and his friends : but 
 that was in Oxford, and in his country house 
 there had been no use for them, and they were 
 thrown aside. 
 
 I thought that the time of my life had come ; 
 
OFPOETRY 41 
 
 and one by one I took them up and blew into 
 them, expecting to evoke the marvellous tones 
 that I so loved. Of course I blew in vain : but, 
 supposing that the instruments had got out of 
 working order, I persisted in the hope that at 
 least one of them might have its virtue still left 
 in it. My disappointment was intense. 
 
 Why this old memory should have been 
 awaked in me just at this juncture I cannot say. 
 It is a genuine example of the spontaneous move- 
 ment of the concepts, and though it does not seem 
 to me wholly applicable I accept it as it came. 
 One association, I suppose, may be that I should 
 have been very glad if somebody had told me 
 about those horns, and how their sound was pro- 
 duced. And since it is probable that many of 
 you will soon be writing poetry indeed I should 
 do you wrong to suppose that you have not 
 already begun it may be just as well that you 
 should know how the horn is blown. 
 
 Relation of Poetry to Morals and Religion 
 
 The view of Poetry which I have presented to 
 you suggests two enormous questions, namely, 
 the relation of Poetry to Morals and to Religion : 
 for it is evident that the basis of all three must 
 be the same, that is, they all spring from those 
 universal primary emotions of Man's Spirit, which 
 
42 THE NECESSITY 
 
 lead us naturally towards Beauty and Truth. 
 Indeed the difficulty here is not in relating Poetry 
 with Morals and Religion, but in discriminating 
 between them : for we might almost contend that 
 Morals is that part of Poetry which deals with 
 conduct, and Religion that part of it which deals 
 with the idea of God. 
 
 Morals 
 
 As for Morals. If you read the moral philo- 
 sophers much you will find a very dry corpus of 
 irreconcilable doctrines, which bear no compari- 
 son with what the poets can give you. The 
 Sermon on the Mount you will recognise to be 
 an inspired moral poem, which is rejected by the 
 philosophers. 
 
 On this vast subject I shall offer only one 
 practical remark, which is this : 
 
 You will often hear it asserted, as an en- 
 lightened doctrine, that Art has nothing to do 
 with Morality: Art, you will be assured, is 
 non-moral. 
 
 Now this is true only in so far as we take 
 Morals to mean the conventional code of conduct 
 recognised by the society to which we happen to 
 belong. Art, it is true, has little to do with 
 that. But pure Ethics is man's moral beauty, 
 and can no more be dissociated from Art than 
 
OFPOETRY 43 
 
 any other kind of beauty, and, being man's highest 
 beauty, it has the very first claim to recognition. 
 
 Morals can be excluded from Art only by the 
 school which maintains that Art is nothing but 
 competent Expression, and that, since what I call 
 ugly can be as competently expressed as what 
 I call beautiful, Art can make no distinction. 
 It must be admitted that no strict line of distinc- 
 tion can be drawn, and that the average man's 
 conception of beauty is absurdly limited and con- 
 ventional ; also that as much admirable skill may 
 be used in the expression of crime as of virtue 
 and so on : the portrait of a man suffering from 
 confluent small-pox might thus be a masterpiece ; 
 but if theorists assert that all these things are 
 equally beautiful because equally capable of 
 competent expression, and that such expression 
 (which expression after all produces different 
 impressions on different minds) makes all things 
 equally beautiful, to this I reply that we live 
 in a free country where every one may think and 
 say what he pleases. 
 
 The championship of ugliness seems to be but 
 a part of the general denial of the ordinary dis- 
 tinctions between good and bad of all kinds. 
 The argument is this. It is pointed out that 
 the distinction which is commonly drawn between 
 beautiful and ugly or good and bad is merely 
 
44 THE NECESSITY 
 
 due to mankind seeing all things from a human 
 point of view. But this is the only possible 
 point of view for mankind to take: his pre- 
 tended universal standpoint is really only one 
 particular attitude of his mind : for it is in- 
 conceivable that the * universality ' which he 
 imagines can be a complete universality, or any- 
 thing like it : and if it was so, then the object of 
 introducing it into art could only be to make art 
 inhuman ; which is absurd. 
 
 At least that is how the case appears to me ; 
 but this summary way of disposing of it neglects 
 many side issues, on which agreement is not to 
 be expected nor wholly to be desired. 
 
 Religion 
 
 As to the relation of Poetry to religion. True 
 Religion, the conviction and habit of a personal 
 communion between the soul and God, is of too 
 unique and jealous a temper to allow of any 
 artistic predominance : and yet we find the best 
 expression of it in Poetry : indeed the poetic 
 expression of the spiritual life is of such force 
 that its beauty may hold the mind in slavery to 
 false ideals. 
 
 I believe it to be greatly due to this that the 
 English people are still mentally enslaved to a 
 conception of God altogether unworthy and 
 
O F P O E T R Y 45 
 
 incompatible with our better notions : and, if it is 
 the old Hebrew poetry which is greatly respon- 
 sible for this delusion, then it seems reasonable 
 to look to our own poets for our release. 
 
 On this general question of religion I shall 
 take only that one poiut. We have spiritually 
 outgrown the theology of the Reformation, and 
 our churches, in endeavouring to make their 
 obsolete ideals work, find their most effective 
 agent in the beauty of our English translation 
 of the Old Testament which, while secular art 
 was in decay, captured the artistic susceptibility 
 of the people. 
 
 Art was discouraged by the Reformers, it was 
 uncongenial to their furious and somewhat gross 
 minds ; and it was at the cost of the destruction 
 of a priceless heritage of mediaeval art that they 
 got rid of their mental servitude to Papistry, 
 which its beauty embellished and sanctified. 
 That alliance of art with the monstrous eccle- 
 siastical system which Rome had built on the, 
 Gospels drove art into disrepute : but since man ! 
 cannot live in the absence of all ideals of beauty, 1 
 the people satisfied their craving for it by the ' 
 beauty of the religious literature, when the Bible ; 
 was put into every man's hands. Art was thus j 
 diverted, and its place appropriated by the 
 religious ideals of the Reformation ; but these 
 
46 THE NECESSITY 
 
 being archaic and harsh, and in some respects a 
 real defection from Christian law to the Mosaic, 
 and from one point of view a political compro- 
 mise, the substitute daily grew less convincing 
 and satisfying, and now, when its ideal, if ever 
 it had one, is practically dead, our people have 
 neither one thing nor the other. Religion and 
 art have equally suffered. 
 
 The Christian churches will not leave the 
 old ruts. The Pope still hankers after tem- 
 poral power, and to get it would crown Tiglath- 
 Pileser in St. Peter's, while our Protestant church 
 still begins its morning devotions by singing of 
 'God swearing in his wrath that his people 
 should not enter into his rest '. 
 
 Now in the religion of Christ, which, whether 
 we will it or not, whether we know it or not, is 
 deeply ingrained in our heart's reverence and 
 the life of our souls, and is ever rebuking and 
 overruling our conduct in this world-conquer- 
 ing Christianity the essentials are love and unity 
 and brotherhood. But look at the Protestant 
 sects, all quarrelling about crude absurdities and 
 ridiculous unessentials. And ask yourselves how 
 the Church shall be purified and edified when 
 those who should compose it remain outside 
 of it. 
 
OFPOETRY 47 
 
 Collaboration of Democracy in Art ami Religion 
 
 And in Art also I believe that your collabora- 
 tion is all-important: but the conditions are 
 more difficult. In both Art and Religion it is 
 true that one would wish every man to be effec- 
 tive, in so far as that is possible. In Art, as in 
 Religion, we look for salvation in individual 
 emotion : but Art is nothing if not creative, and 
 on that side of the subject William Morris spoke 
 freely and well, I guess that much of your 
 enthusiasm may be inspired by his exhortations. 
 
 The aesthetic gospel of William Morris is easy 
 to preach, and it would not be so difficult to act 
 on if you had been brought up in a good tradi- 
 tion. In the absence of that you must serve a 
 long apprenticeship in studying the works of the 
 great masters. Not that we are to be enslaved 
 to those old models; but until we understand 
 them we shall not understand either the limit of 
 our faculties or the conditions of success. 
 
48 NOTES 
 
 p. 10, line 4. A friend warns me that this sentence 
 needs qualification, indeed my utterance provoked the 
 protest of a gnostic at the time ; and it is an axiom with 
 some philosophers that there is no problem concerning 
 man which his intellect or Reason is incapable of solving. 
 But I suppose that such gnostics would associate Instinct 
 with Reason, nor did I dogmatise against the * may be ', 
 but asserted the * has not been '. 
 
 Throughout my address the antagonism of Reason and 
 Instinct must appear exaggerated, because it is their 
 differentiation and opposition that is being attended to. 
 Where they mingle it is impossible to dissociate them, 
 and difficult to consider them apart ; and yet the sense 
 of my general contention is plain enough, and may be 
 well illustrated and sustained by the common accepta- 
 tion of the gnome that it is easier for a man to act 
 rightly than to give a true and reasonable account of his 
 motives : and so I think that most sensible people, when 
 they are faced with a perplexing problem of conduct, 
 trust much less to deliberation and Reason than to a 
 ' growing conviction ' which they allow to mature without 
 conscious interference. So, too, the advantage which 
 religious people find in prayer, when they seek inward 
 light to guide them, implies a definite rejection of logical 
 deliberation in favour of instinct and feeling ; for they 
 accept that as the channel if not the source of their 
 guidance. So, again, the respect for 'revelation' and 
 ' inspiration ', when these are freed from the husks which 
 theologians are so intent to shape and carve, is merely 
 the recognition of genius (as I have defined it) in things 
 spiritual. Certainly, also, any artist who has got into 
 trouble with his work will put it aside, and wait for 
 a subconscious solution. 
 
 p. 20. The analysis of Keats's lines is from my Essay 
 on Keats, published 1895. 
 
 p. 23. The quotation from Huxley is from Lay Ser- 
 mons, Macmillan, pp. 122-5. 
 
 On pp. 9 and 23 the phrases in inverted commas are 
 from my friend George Santayana's book, Reason in Art, 
 Constable, 1905. 
 
 Printed in England at the Oxford University Press 
 
Already issued 
 
 An ADDRESS to the Swindon Branch of 
 the Workers' Educational Association, Oct. 18, 
 1916, by ROBERT BRIDGES, Poet Laureate. 
 Fcap 8vo, pp. 38. Paper cover, pd. net; or 
 on thick paper, cloth with paper sides, is. net. 
 

 14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 MOI/1 5 '64.3PM 
 
 5 
 
 LD 21A-60m-4,'64 
 (E4555slO)476B 
 
 General Library 
 University of California