Drydcn and the Critical Canons of the Eighteenth Century 37 



and panoramic aspects. But as compared with theirs our sense 

 of Hterature is weak and insecure. At least they read, and they 

 knew the difference between Hterature and journaUsm, that close 

 transcription of actuality which forms almost exclusively the pres- 

 ent conception of literature. If they imitated anything, it was 

 rather the spectacle of life as it is mirrored in the consciousness 

 of the reflective moral being; and it was the illusion of a moral 

 order so acquired which they tried to reproduce. This illusion — 

 the illusion, in Goethe's words, of a higher reality — is not to be 

 produced by copying our sensations, but by selecting and group- 

 ing certain of them into a complete and satisfactory whole in ac- 

 cordance with some idea that the poet has made for himself of 

 their significance and meaning. To be sure, these elements should 

 resemble in some measurable way the materials of experience, 

 though it is a matter of indifference whether they are fact or not. 

 But if he merely reproduce his observations, he will in like man- 

 ner reproduce only the sensations proper to them, the strained, 

 bewildered sense of actuality ; he will produce no illusion at all. 

 His work is valueless ; it is true neither in a higher nor a lower 

 sense ; it is neither fact nor illusion. A matter is worth saying for 

 either of two reasons : either because it is so or because it is sig- 

 nificant. But as the data of a poem are fictitious, the poem itself 

 can not be of value for the former reason. It must, then, depend 

 for its value upon its significance. But it is evident that the only 

 significance which literature can possess must be due to the gen- 

 eral conception of life which it embodies ; that is, to an idea. Even 

 its verisimilitude, its measurable resemblance to reality, depends 

 rather upon conformity with the idea than upon conformity with 

 fact; "it is a false tendency," says Goethe, "to push the resem- 

 "blance so far that nothing but a vulgar reality remains."^ The 

 sense of reality proper to poetry is due mainly to the consistency 

 of the detail with the principle of the poem; that is, it is in part 

 a reflection of the illusion itself and of the general significance of 

 the poem as a whole, for what is intelligible is likely to be mis- 

 taken for real. And at the same time and what amounts to much 

 the same thing in the end, it results in part from the self-con- 



' Goethe. Wahrhcit uitd Dichiung, Teil iii, Buch 11. 



37 



