THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 21 5 



own end is groundless. The impression has its source 

 in a confusion of ideas : first, in a failure to discrimi- 

 nate between a delicate mechanical art (which prose 

 certainly is, and so may justly be called "fine " in that 

 sense) and a fine art in the only sense in which aesthe- 

 tics recognises the term ; and then in a further failure 

 to avoid the double sense in which we constantly 

 employ the words "prose" and "poetry." This is an 

 additional reason for discontinuing the name " fine 

 arts" and substituting for it Schelling's phrase "es- 

 emplastic arts " ; and it would be well if we always 

 said "verse" and "unversified writing" when we 

 meant them, and kept the words "poetry" and "prose" 

 to mark the deeper difference regarding art. 



Moreover, of this prevalent error there is a further 

 explanation in the overlooking of the whole series 

 of decorative arts. These form between the mechani- 

 cal and the strictly fine or esemplastic arts an inter- 

 mediary group — a sort of ascending series of "arts 

 striving to become." Architecture is properly their 

 "upper limit," the point at which they vanish into 

 esemplastic art, so that some recent writers on the 

 theory of architecture have taken the ground that 

 architecture is merely a decorative art ; though surely 

 it should be plain that architecture involves creation 

 in a degree amounting to a difference in kind from 

 any mere scheme of decoration. Now, prose in its 

 strict sense, as the antithesis of poetry proper, is an 



