element in imaginative art. The visibleaspect of modern life

disturbs him not; rather is it for him to render eternal all that
is beautiful in Greek, Italian, and Celtic legend. To Morris we

owe poetry whose perfect precision and clearness of word and vision
has not been excelled in the literature of our country, and by the

revival of the decorative arts he has given to our individualised
romanticmovement the social idea and the social factor also.

But the revolutionaccomplished by this clique of young men, with
Ruskin's faultless and ferventeloquence to help them, was not one

of ideas merely but of execution, not one of conceptions but of
creations.

For the great eras in the history of the development of all the
arts have been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in

feeling for art, but of new technical improvements primarily and
specially. The discovery of marble quarries in the purple ravines

of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of
Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified

vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to
which the Egyptian sculptorworking laboriously in the hard

porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain.
The splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of

the new oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music has
been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no

way to an increased consciousness on the part of the musician of
any wider social aim. The critic may try and trace the deferred

resolutions of Beethoven to some sense of the incompleteness of the
modern intellectual spirit, but the artist would have answered, as

one of them did afterwards, 'Let them pick out the fifths and leave
us at peace.'

And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French
metres like the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this

increased value laid on elaborate alliterations, and on curious
words and refrains, such as you will find in Dante Rossetti and

Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and
trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the

poet may blow the music of their many messages.
And so it has been with this romanticmovement of ours: it is a

reaction against the empty conventionalworkmanship, the lax
execution of previouspoetry and painting, showing itself in the

work of such men as Rossetti and Burne-Jones by a far greater
splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder of design than

English imaginative art has shown before. In Rossetti's poetry and
the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision

and choice of language, a style flawless and fearless, a seeking
for all sweet and precious melodies and a sustaining consciousness

of the musical value of each word are opposed to that value which
is merely intellectual. In this respect they are one with the

romanticmovement of France of which not the least characteristic
note was struck by Theophile Gautier's advice to the young poet to

read his dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a
poet's reading.

While, then, the material of workmanship is being thus elaborated
and discovered to have in itself incommunicable and eternal

qualities of its own, qualities entirely satisfying to the poetic
sense and not needing for their aesthetic effect any lofty

intellectualvision, any deep criticism of life or even any
passionate human emotion at all, the spirit and the method of the

poet's working - what people call his inspiration - have not
escaped the controlling influence of the artistic spirit. Not that

the imagination has lost its wings, but we have accustomed
ourselves to count their innumerable pulsations, to estimate their

limitless strength, to govern their ungovernable freedom.
To the Greeks this problem of the conditions of poetic production,

and the places occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness
in any artistic work, had a peculiarfascination. We find it in

the mysticism of Plato and in the rationalism of Aristotle. We
find it later in the Italian Renaissance agitating the minds of

such men as Leonardo da Vinci. Schiller tried to adjust the
balance between form and feeling, and Goethe to estimate the

position of self-consciousness in art. Wordsworth's definition of
poetry as 'emotion remembered in tranquillity' may be taken as an

analysis of one of the stages through which all imaginative work
has to pass; and in Keats's longing to be 'able to compose without

this fever' (I quote from one of his letters), his desire to
substitute for poeticardour 'a more thoughtful and quiet power,'

we may discern the most important moment in the evolution of that
artistic life. The question made an early and strange appearance

in your literature too; and I need not remind you how deeply the
young poets of the French romanticmovement were excited and

stirred by Edgar Allan Poe's analysis of the workings of his own
imagination in the creating of that supremeimaginative work which

we know by the name of THE RAVEN.
In the last century, when the intellectual and didactic element had

intruded to such an extent into the kingdom which belongs to
poetry, it was against the claims of the understanding that an

artist like Goethe had to protest. 'The more incomprehensible to
the understanding a poem is the better for it,' he said once,

asserting the complete supremacy of the imagination in poetry as of
reason in prose. But in this century it is rather against the

claims of the emotional faculties, the claims of mere sentiment and
feeling, that the artist must react. The simple utterance of joy

is not poetry any more than a mere personal cry of pain, and the
real experiences of the artist are always those which do not find

their direct expression but are gathered up and absorbed into some
artistic form which seems, from such real experiences, to be the

farthest removed and the most alien.
'The heart contains passion but the imagination alone contains

poetry,' says Charles Baudelaire. This too was the lesson that
Theophile Gautier, most subtle of all modern critics, most

fascinating of all modern poets, was never tired of teaching -
'Everybody is affected by a sunrise or a sunset.' The absolute

distinction of the artist is not his capacity to feel nature so
much as his power of rendering it. The entire subordination of all

intellectual and emotional faculties to the vital and informing
poetic principle is the surest sign of the strength of our

Renaissance.
We have seen the artistic spirit working, first in the delightful

and technicalsphere of language, the sphere of expression as
opposed to subject, then controlling the imagination of the poet in

dealing with his subject. And now I would point out to you its
operation in the choice of subject. The recognition of a separate

realm for the artist, a consciousness of the absolute difference
between the world of art and the world of real fact, between

classic grace and absolutereality, forms not merely the essential
element of any aesthetic charm but is the characteristic of all

great imaginative work and of all great eras of artisticcreation -
of the age of Phidias as of the age of Michael Angelo, of the age

of Sophocles as of the age of Goethe.
Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of

the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us
that which we desire. For to most of us the real life is the life

we do not lead, and thus, remaining more true to the essence of its
own perfection, more jealous of its own unattainable beauty, is

less likely to forget form in feeling or to accept the passion of
creation as any substitute for the beauty of the created thing.

The artist is indeed the child of his own age, but the present will
not be to him a whit more real than the past; for, like the

philosopher of the Platonic vision, the poet is the spectator of
all time and of all existence. For him no form is obsolete, no

subject out of date; rather, whatever of life and passion the world
has known, in desert of Judaea or in Arcadian valley, by the rivers

of Troy or the rivers of Damascus, in the crowded and hideous
streets of a modern city or by the pleasant ways of Camelot - all

lies before him like an open scroll, all is still instinct with
beautiful life. He will take of it what is salutary for his own

spirit, no more; choosing some facts and rejecting others with the
calm artistic control of one who is in possession of the secret of

beauty.
There is indeed a poetical attitude to be adopted towards all

things, but all things are not fit subjects for poetry. Into the
secure and sacred house of Beauty the true artist will admit

nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives pain,
nothing that is debatable, nothing about which men argue. He can

steep himself, if he wishes, in the discussion of all the social