214 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



appropriate form, but verse has no necessary nor 

 absolute relation to the essence of poetry ; verse of 

 a high order may be, and frequently is, quite void of 

 true poetry, and poetry is often independent of verse. 



Thus we must either add to our list of fine arts 

 three others, namely, novel-writing, play-writing, and 

 writing such as De Quincey's pieces and the other 

 works just mentioned with them, or else we must 

 take poetry as including them. But in its proper 

 character of creative embodiment it surely does 

 include them. It is clear that poetry, in the only 

 sense in which it belongs to our discussion, is 

 not contrasted with prose in the sense of unversi- 

 fied writing, but with prose in the sense of writing 

 that is not creative, and not its own end ; with prose 

 as prosaic — writing used only as a means, to the end 

 of instruction, conviction, excitation, or edification. 

 Now, in this sense, the only sense pertinent to our 

 inquiry, it is manifest that prose is not a fine art, 

 simply because it does not pretend to be a self- 

 motived art of creation. Its aim is not an imagina- 

 tive whole, produced for imagination's sake. 



But this adverse settlement of the pretensions of 

 prose writing to a place among the fine arts has its 

 chief interest in the light it throws upon the real 

 cause of the frequent impression, not only that prose, 

 particularly in the form of oratory, is a fine art, but 

 that, since it is, the doctrine that fine art must be its 



