320 IS POETRY AT BOTTOM 



His intelligence of what is noble and enduring, his expression 

 of a full harmonious personality, is enough to moralise his 

 work. It is even better that he should not turn aside to com- 

 ment. That is the function of the homilist. We must learn 

 how to live from him less by his precepts, than by his 

 examples and by being in his company. It would no doubt 

 be misunderstanding Mr. Arnold to suppose that he estimates 

 poetry by the gnomic sentences conveyed in it, or that he 

 intends to say that the greatest poets have deliberately used 

 their art as the vehicle of moral teaching. Yet there is a 

 double danger in the wording of his definitions. On the one 

 hand, if we accept them too literally, we run the risk of 

 encouraging that false view of poetry which led the Byzantines 

 to prefer Euripides to Sophocles, because he contained a 

 greater number of quotable maxims ; which brought the 

 humanists of the sixteenth century to the incomprehensible 

 conclusion that Seneca had improved upon the Greek drama 

 by infusing more of sententious gravity into his speeches ; 

 which caused Tasso to invent an ex post facto allegory for the 

 Gerusalemme, and Spenser to describe Ariosto's mad Orlando, 

 the triumphant climax of that poet's irony, as ' a good 

 governor and a virtuous man.' On the other hand, there is 

 the peril of forgetting that the prime aim of all art is at 

 bottom only presentation. That, and that alone, distinguishes 

 the arts, including poetry, from every other operation of the 

 intellect, and justifies Hegel's general definition of artistic 

 beauty as 'Die sinnliche Erscheinung der Idee.' Poetry is 

 not so much a criticism of life as a revelation of life, a pre- 

 sentment of life according to the poet's capacity for observing 

 and displaying it in forms that reproduce it for his readers. 

 The poet is less a judge than a seer and reporter. If he 

 judges, it is as light falling upon an object, showing its 

 inequalities, discovering its loveliness, may be said to judge. 

 The greatest poet is not the poet who has said the best things 

 about life, but he whose work most fully and faithfully reflects 

 life in its breadth and largeness, eliminating what is accidental, 

 trivial, temporary, local, or transmuting simple motives into 

 symbols of the universal by his treatment. He teaches less 



