OR MEASURE OF ALL ART ? 339 



definite meaning almost expires, or reaches us through ways 

 not distinctly traceable by the understanding.' 1 



This is ingenious ; and it cannot be denied that the theory 

 has a plausible appearance. Yet, were we to carry Mr. 

 Pater's principles to their logical extremity, we should have 

 to prefer Pope's ' Verses by a Person of Quality ' to the 

 peroration of the ' Dunciad,' and a noble specimen of 

 Japanese screen-painting to Turner's Temeraire or Raphael's 

 School of Athens. 



So far as the art of poetry goes, he seems to overstate a 

 truth which is finely and exactly expressed by Mr. Myers in 

 the essay on Virgil from which I have already quoted. The 

 passage is long ; but it puts so well the point which Mr. 

 Pater has perhaps exaggerated, regarding the importance of 

 the sensuous and suggestive elements in poetry, that I venture 

 to think my readers will be glad to be reminded of it : 2 



The range of human thoughts and emotions greatly transcends the 

 range of such symbols as man has invented to express them; and it 

 becomes, therefore, the business of Art to use these symbols in a double 

 way. They must be used for the direct representation of thought and 

 feeling ; but they must also be combined by so subtle an imagination as 

 to suggest much which there is no means of directly expressing. And 

 this can be done ; for experience shows that it is possible so to arrange 

 forms, colours, and sounds as to stimulate the imagination in a new and 

 inexplicable way. This power makes the painter's art an imaginative 

 as well as an imitative one ; and gives birth to the art of the musician, 

 whose symbols are hardly imitative at all, but express emotions which, 

 till music suggests them, have been not only unknown, but unimaginable. 

 Poetry is both an imitative and an imaginative art. As a choice and 

 condensed form of emotional speech, it possesses the reality which 

 depends on its directly recalling our previous thoughts and feelings. 

 But as a system of rhythmical and melodious effects not indebted for 

 their potency to their associated ideas alone it appeals also to that 

 mysterious power by which mere arrangements of sound can convey an 

 emotion which no one could have predicted beforehand, and which no 

 known laws can explain. 



And, indeed, in poetry of the first order, almost every word (to use 



1 Fortnightly Review, p. 529. Here the italics are not Mr. Pater's, 

 but mine. 



2 'Essays, Classical,' pp. 113-115. 



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