esteemed. The public never yet found out fine work for itself. Every true artist, on achieving some chance measure of applause, immediately trembles and takes himself to task for having probably written something unworthy of his high calling. For if indeed a medley of persons, the majority of whom have never studied imagination or nobility, possesses a mysterious sense of what is noble and imaginative, of what use would be the critics?

Critics-those, at least, who have a commission on the staff are assumed to be well qualified; to have studied Criticism, as assiduously as the poet studies Poetry. That being so, they will be bad or good critics exactly in the ratio of their subservience to public opinion or the reverse. For the critic to follow or give expression to public opinion is to abdicate his critical function.

It must not be supposed that in this view there is any inconsiderate scorn of general or average opinion. Opinion in the individual is rightly disregarded. What men look for is knowledge and trained discrimi

nation. Nevertheless, opinion in the mass gathers a certain momentum, that, however intrinsically fictitious, is irresistibly impressive. All that I wish to combat is that Literature and Art are so enormously different from other human affairs that therefore common opinion is especially competent to estimate them; that the Poet has a kind of sixth sense, and that the Public has a corresponding one, exactly adapted for discerning whether a writer possesses that idiosyncrasy or not. Let us rather reduce Poetry to the level of other expressions of Mind, and also reduce the Public to their proper relative position thereto,—namely, that in as far as they have studied it, and no farther, they are entitled to pronounce judgment.

I am not unaware that Poetry is supposed to give expression to human emotion, and that consequently human emotion may be accepted as a measure and test of Poetry. But I hold that common human emotion is a very worthless influence; that it is a wild, blind, furious passion, the parent of a large part of the world's misery, and that it is the

most sacred function of Poetry to pass this emotion through the alembic of Mind and to transmute it into passionate Thought. It is no wonder that Max Nordau suffers from such an obsession of the idea of degeneration, since he states, as if it were unanswerable, that the task of Art is to excite emotion.1 It is impossible for me to express within the limits of this book how false I hold that statement to be; for not only do I believe that every form of Art is inferior or superior according to the degree in which it translates human emotion into Thought, and therefore that Poetry is the highest Art of all, but I believe that the mere artistic reproduction of common human emotion is a debauchery, and that it is of the very essence of true Art that it should reflect emotion in the form of Imagination.

1 Degeneration, p. 83.

CHAPTER V

THROUGH WANT OF ENCOURAGEMENT

We have seen how Poetry fails of its chief purpose in the world, namely, to stimulate and guide the human Imagination (which is the true source of Love and Joy, and the condition of all just understanding) by reason of the burden of Commercialism under which it labours, by reason of the common loss of the sense of Relation and Proportion, by reason of the popular false idea of Genius, and by reason of the false value attached to popular opinion.

There is, however, yet another reason, more mundane, no doubt, but also potent -the want of encouragement among the highest and most educated classes.

I have heard a great deal of folly talked among literary men concerning the satisfaction of writing for writing's sake. In the

first place, this is very far from the publisher's view of the matter; and in the next place, men will not climb mountains only to arrive in a fog. Some sunshine of appreciation is as necessary to the artistic frailty as to the commercial heroism.

To my mind, poets ought always to be of the courage of Socrates, who, when his countrymen had found him guilty of perverting the laws of his country, by striving to teach them Intellectual Joy, instead of acceding to the expectation of his judges by pleading in mitigation of the prescribed penalty of death, invited them to apportion him a lodging in the Prytaneum or Public Alms-house, in recompense for his great toil on their behalf.

The insolent neglect, not to say, intolerance, of persons in high places, towards poets and their works, is not, as they fondly imagine, a sign of manliness, but of want of education.

Instances, no doubt, may be alleged to the contrary, and the subject is too controversial for present treatment; but a general