92 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 



of the spirit. What poetry lacks of sensuous fulness, it 

 more than balances by intellectual intensity. Its significance 

 is unmistakable, because it employs the very material men 

 use in their exchange of thoughts and correspondence of 

 emotions. To the bounds of its empire there is no end. It 

 embraces in its own more abstract being all the arts. By 

 words it does the work in turn of architecture, sculpture, 

 painting, music. It is the metaphysic of the fine arts. 

 Philosophy finds place in poetry ; and life itself, refined to 

 its last utterance, hangs trembling on this thread which joins 

 our earth to heaven, this bridge between experience and the 

 realms where unattainable and imperceptible will have no 

 meaning. 



If we are right in defining art as the manifestation of the 

 human spirit to man by man in beautiful form, poetry, more 

 incontestably than any other art, fulfils this definition and 

 enables us to gauge its accuracy. For words are the spirit, 

 manifested to itself in symbols with no sensual alloy. Poetry 

 is therefore the presentation, through words, of life and all 

 that life implies. Perception, emotion, thought, action, find 

 in descriptive, lyrical, reflective, dramatic, and epical poetry 

 their immediate apocalypse. In poetry we are no longer 

 puzzled with problems as to whether art has or has not of 

 necessity a spiritual content. There cannot be any poetry 

 whatsoever without a spiritual meaning of some sort : good 

 or bad, moral, immoral, or non-moral, obscure or lucid, 

 noble or ignoble, slight or weighty such distinctions do 

 not signify. In poetry we are not met by questions whether 

 the poet intended to convey a meaning when he made it. 

 Quite meaningless poetry (as some critics would fain find 

 melody quite meaningless, or a statue meaningless, or a 

 Venetian picture meaningless) is a contradiction in terms. 

 In poetry, life, or a portion of life, lives again, resus- 

 citated and presented to our mental faculty through art. 

 The best poetry is that which reproduces the most of life, 

 or its intensest moments. Therefore the extensive species 

 of the drama and the epic, the intensive species of the 

 lyric, have been ever held in highest esteem. Only a para- 



