THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 93 



doxical critic maintains the thesis that poetry is excellent 

 in so far as it assimilates the vagueness of music, or esti- 

 mates a poet by his power of translating sense upon the 

 border-land of nonsense into melodious words. Where poetry 

 falls short in the comparison with other arts, is in the 

 quality of form-giving, in the quality of sensuous concrete - 

 ness. Poetry can only present forms to the mental eye 

 and to the intellectual sense, stimulate the physical senses 

 by indirect suggestion. Therefore dramatic poetry, the most 

 complicated kind of poetry, relies upon the actor ; and lyrical 

 poetry, the intensest kind of poetry, seeks the aid of music. 

 But these comparative deficiencies are overbalanced, for all 

 the highest purposes of art, by the width and depth, the 

 intelligibility and power, the flexibility and multitudinous 

 associations of language. The other arts are limited in what 

 they utter. There is nothing which has entered into the life 

 of man which poetry cannot express. Poetry says everything 

 in man's own language to the mind. The other arts appeal 

 imperatively, each in its own region, to man's senses ; and 

 the mind receives art's message by the help of symbols from 

 the world of sense. Poetry lacks this immediate appeal 

 to sense. But the elixir which it offers to the mind, its 

 quintessence extracted from all things of sense, reacts through 

 intellectual perception upon all the faculties that make men 

 what they are. 



I used a metaphor in one of the foregoing paragraphs to 

 indicate the presence of the vital spirit, the essential element 

 of thought or feeling, in the work of art. I said it radiated 

 through the form, as lamplight through an alabaster vase. 

 Now the skill of the artist is displayed in modelling that 

 vase, in giving it shape, rich and rare, and fashioning its 

 curves with subtlest workmanship. In so far as he is a 

 craftsman, the artist's pains must be bestowed upon this 

 precious vessel of the animating theme. In so far as he has 

 power over beauty, he must exert it in this plastic act. It 

 is here that he displays dexterity ; here that he creates ; here 



