of literature
written in verse or in rhythms akin to verse. Sir Thomas Browne may have
been more poetic than Erasmus Darwin, but in his best work he did not
write poetry. Erasmus Darwin may have been more prosaic than Sir Thomas
Browne, but in his most famous work he did not write prose. Sir Henry
Newbolt will not permit a classification of this kind. For him poetry is
an expression of intuitions--an emotional transfiguration of life--while
prose is the expression of a scientific fact or a judgment. I doubt if
this division is defensible. Everything that is literature is, in a sense,
poetry as opposed to science; but both prose and poetry contain a great
deal of work that is preponderantly the result of observation and
judgment, as well as a great deal that is preponderantly imaginative.
Poetry is a house of many mansions. It includes fine poetry and foolish
poetry, noble poetry and base poetry. The chief duty of criticism is the
praise--the infectious praise--of the greatest poetry. The critic has the
right to demand not only a transfiguration of life, but a noble
transfiguration of life. Swinburne transfigures life in _Anactoria_ no
less than Shakespeare transfigures it in _King Lear_. But Swinburne's is
an ignoble, Shakespeare's a noble transfiguration. Poetry may be divine or
devilish, just as religion may be. Literary criticism is so timid of being
accused of Puritanism that it is chary of admitting that there may be a
Heaven and a Hell of poetic genius as well as of religious genius. The
moralists go too far on the other side and are tempted to judge literature
by its morality rather than by its genius. It seems more reasonable to
conclude that it is possible to have a poet of genius who is nevertheless
a false poet, just as it is possible to have a prophet of genius who is
nevertheless a false prophet. The lover of literature will be interested
in them all, but he will not finally be deceived into blindness to the
fact that the greatest poets are spiritually and morally, as well as
aesthetically, great. If Shakespeare is infinitely the greatest of the
Elizabethans, it is not merely because he is imaginatively the greatest;
it is also because he had a soul incomparably noble and generous. Sir
Henry Newbolt deals in an interesting way with this ennoblement of life
that is the mark of great poetry. He does not demand of poetry an orthodox
code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the
path tha