318 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM 



perdition by vulgarity, perversity, obliquity of vision. But 

 the carving of cherry-stones in verse, the turning of triolets 

 and rondeaux, the seeking after sound or colour without heed 

 for sense, is all foredoomed to final failure. The absolute 

 neglect which has fallen on the melodious Italian sonnet- 

 writers of the sixteenth century is due to their cult of art 

 for art's sake, and their indifference to the realities of life. 

 If we ask why Machiavelli's Mandragora is inferior to 

 Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, in spite of its 

 profound knowledge of human nature, its brilliant wit, its 

 irresistible humour, its biting satire, and its incomparably 

 closer workmanship, we can only answer that Shakespeare's 

 conception of life was healthy, natural, exhilarating, while 

 Machiavelli's, without displaying the earnestness of revolt, 

 was artificial, morbid, and depressing. The sympathies 

 which every great work of art stimulates tend in the case 

 of Shakespeare's play to foster, in the case of Machiavelli's 

 to stunt, the all-essential elements of social happiness and 

 vigour. In point of form, the Mandragora has better right 

 to be a classic comedy than the Merry Wives of Windsor. 

 But the application of ideas to life in it is so unsound and 

 so perverse that common sense rejects it; we tire of living 

 in so false a world. 



Without multiplying instances, it can be affirmed, with no 

 dread of opposition, that all art, to be truly great art, to 

 be permanent and fresh and satisfying through a hundred 

 generations, to yield the bread and wine of daily sustenance 

 for men and women in successive ages, must be moralised 

 must be in harmony with those principles of conduct, that 

 tone of feeling, which it is the self-preservative instinct of 

 civilised humanity to strengthen. This does not mean that 

 the artist should be consciously didactic or obtrusively 

 ethical. The objects of ethics and of art are distinct. The 

 one analyses and instructs ; the other embodies and delights. 

 But since all the arts give form to thought and feeling, it 

 follows that the greatest art is that which includes in its 

 synthesis the fullest complex of thoughts and feelings. The 

 more complete the poet's grasp of human nature as a whole, 



