ot do certain things; or, in other
words, we should come to understand that the beryl stone was enchanted by
our fathers that it might unfold the pictures in its heart, and not to
mirror our own excited faces, or the boughs waving outside the window.
With this change of substance, this return to imagination, this
understanding that the laws of art, which are the hidden laws of the
world, can alone bind the imagination, would come a change of style, and
we would cast out of serious poetry those energetic rhythms, as of a man
running, which are the invention of the will with its eyes always on
something to be done or undone; and we would seek out those wavering,
meditative, organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of the imagination,
that neither desires nor hates, because it has done with time, and only
wishes to gaze upon some reality, some beauty; nor would it be any longer
possible for anybody to deny the importance of form, in all its kinds, for
although you can expound an opinion, or describe a thing when your words
are not quite well chosen, you cannot give a body to something that moves
beyond the senses, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of
mysterious life, as the body of a flower or of a woman. The form of
sincere poetry, unlike the form of the popular poetry, may indeed be
sometimes obscure, or ungrammatical as in some of the best of the Songs of
Innocence and Experience, but it must have the perfections that escape
analysis, the subtleties that have a new meaning every day, and it must
have all this whether it be but a little song made out of a moment of
dreamy indolence, or some great epic made out of the dreams of one poet
and of a hundred generations whose hands were never weary of the sword.

1900.

THE THEATRE

I

I remember, some years ago, advising a distinguished, though too little
recognized, writer of poetical plays to write a play as unlike ordinary
plays as possible, that it might be judged with a fresh mind, and to put
it on the stage in some small suburban theatre, where a small audience
would pay its expenses. I said that he should follow it the year after, at
the same time of the year, with another play, and so on from year to year;
and that the people who read books, and do not go to the theatre, would
gradually find out about him. I suggested that he should begin with a
pastoral play, because nobody would expect from a pastoral play the
succession of nervous tr