thought. There is
something of an old wives' tale in fine literature. The makers of it are
like an old peasant telling stories of the great famine or the hangings
of '98 or his own memories. He has felt something in the depth of his
mind and he wants to make it as visible and powerful to our senses as
possible. He will use the most extravagant words or illustrations if
they suit his purpose. Or he will invent a wild parable and the more his
mind is on fire or the more creative it is the less will he look at the
outer world or value it for its own sake. It gives him metaphors and
examples and that is all. He is even a little scornful of it, for it
seems to him while the fit is on that the fire has gone out of it and
left it but white ashes. I cannot explain it, but I am certain that
every high thing was invented in this way, between sleeping and waking,
as it were, and that peering and peeping persons are but hawkers of
stolen goods. How else could their noses have grown so ravenous or their
eyes so sharp?

WHY THE BLIND MAN IN ANCIENT TIMES WAS MADE A POET

A description in the Iliad or the Odyssey, unlike one in the AEneid or in
most modern writers, is the swift and natural observation of a man as he
is shaped by life. It is a refinement of the primary hungers and has the
least possible of what is merely scholarly or exceptional. It is, above
all, never too observant, too professional, and when the book is closed
we have had our energies enriched, for we have been in the mid-current.
We have never seen anything Odysseus could not have seen while his
thought was of the Cyclops, or Achilles when Briseis moved him to
desire. In the art of the greatest periods there is something careless
and sudden in all habitual moods though not in their expression, because
these moods are a conflagration of all the energies of active life. In
primitive times the blind man became a poet as he becomes a fiddler in
our villages, because he had to be driven out of activities all his
nature cried for, before he could be contented with the praise of life.
And often it is Villon or Verlaine with impediments plain to all, who
sings of life with the ancient simplicity. Poets of coming days when
once more it will be possible to write as in the great epochs will
recognise that their sacrifice shall be to refuse what blindness and
evil name, or imprisonment at the outsetting, denied to men who missed
thereby the sting of a deliberate refu