lectual stability, of informing it, as it were, not only with sensitiveness but also with the proportions of lucid thought. It is a common error to think of the intellect as being cold and dry, an energy with which poetry should have as little to do as possible. The fact is, however, that while poetry may achieve durable charm without this quality, which is in effect what Rossetti called fundamental brain-work, no poetry of the highest order does exist without it.

It often happens that a young poet, in the first flush of his poetic sensibility, enchants us by the very rapture of imaginative experience through which he is passing, but it is not until he has been working for some years that we are able to tell whether he has the profounder gift of transforming intellectual power into passion. If he does not develop this faculty the result is inevitably a barren maturity following upon a rapidly exhausted flight of early song. Wagner spoke wisely when he said that before he could tell whether a man was truly a poet he must know whether he could sing when he was forty. We have known instances in our time of poets who have thus disappointed enthusiastic and reasonable hope. The reaction that has followed upon the excited applause that greeted the work of such a poet as Stephen Phillips has been bitter in proportion to the exaggeration of the welcome. But the one is unjustified and cruel as the

other was unjustified and hysterical. Phillips's early work had, and will always retain, an undeniable charm. That it clearly echoed the work of other poets is no condemnation, since as much may be said of the early work of any of the masters. Here was a poetic sensitiveness, ardent, sufficiently personal to make its own ventures, provoking in the poet an acute sense of a certain stiff verbal beauty, and communicating delight to any ungrudging reader. But there was behind its sensitiveness no intellectual staying power, and, once the charming energy of youth had spent itself, there was no more durable faculty waiting to exercise the poet's gift.

Perhaps the most notable instance in our own time of a poet who has, on the other hand, shown this development from the poetry of enchanting sensibility to that of intellectual passion is to be found in Mr. W. B. Yeats. It is instructive, as showing the relative inability of readers who respond readily enough to the slighter graces of poetry to appreciate the profounder beauty of this passion, to hear it said, as it often is, that this poet's later work lacks the enchantment of his earlier. To a right understanding, Mr. Yeats's work has grown steadily in significance from the first, and this because of its surely maturing brain work. In Wordsworth's poem, simple in occasion as it is, we have this quality working with steady incandescence. Down to the second line of the third

stanza we have a perfectly shaped statement and elaboration of the image, growing in intensity to the marvellous figure of the flowers outdoing the sparkling waves in glee. So far we have, created by a consummate master, that essential part of poetry which is so championed by certain writers in these later days who, while they do well enough to remind us of an eternal necessity, seem, by their assumption of the title imagiste, to forget that their aim has been part of the aim of every poet of consequence since the beginning. But it is at this point that Wordsworth shows us that the poet's business does not end with the creation of an image, but that he must go beyond this to the application of his image to requirements of profound and governing thought. It is here that perhaps the poet's greatest danger lies, and his greatest glories for the winning. Merely to make his creation the occasion for some trite moral reflection is to debase his art and waste our time. What he has to do is so to focus his intellect upon the image that he has created as to be able not only to make us realize the image itself, but also to perceive with passionate understanding the significance of that image in the whole texture of our lives. We may observe then with what exquisite precision Wordsworth achieves this end. First he tells us that he could not but be gay such a jocund company, then that he was receiving some virtue without knowing what it was:

in

'I gazed and gazed — but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.'

Then, in the last stanza, with that lucidity to which the whole difficult world of the brain is touched in rare moments at the great artist's bidding, we have the philosophical application of the poetic conception made, and made, in Milton's full use of the word, passionately:

'For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.'

This is a perfect example of Coleridge's ‘informing all with the spirit of the mind.' Its value to us as readers cannot be set too highly. Poetry which freely complies with this demand rescues the artist's office finely from the last possible designs of the dilettante mind which, at the risk of falling away altogether from life, supposes that the creation of an image is a sufficient end in itself. To be dilettante in the arts is, indeed, more admirable than to be pedestrian, but the artist who has any understanding of his responsibility refuses one course no less than the other.

We have finally to consider the quality of simplicity which Milton places first among his conditions of poetry. The fundamental obligation of the

poet to translate the formlessness of life into intelligible form for our understanding must not be confused, as it often is, with the banal statement in lifeless terms of generalizations with which we are already familiar. For example, we all know as a matter of workaday experience that a charge to goodness, at the expense if need be of cleverness, is sound enough in itself. But when Kingsley 1 says,

'Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever,'

he is not being simple in any real poetic sense, but merely playing up to the platitude that is already established in our minds, and relying upon that for his effect and not upon any creative perception of his own.

He is, profoundly, not being simple at all in the way that Milton means. He is, rather, setting down an obvious and widely current conclusion of an extremely complex and difficult psychological question, the obscure nature of which he leaves untouched. The simplicity by which the poet gains distinction is that which seizes some illusive operation of the mind upon natural objects and so expresses it that what was incomprehensible to us before becomes suddenly defined. In other words, the poet must make a simple statement, but it must be a statement of something that without his vision

1 My use of Kingsley as an example in this connection does not lessen my admiration for the poet of The Sands of Dee.