s on the riverside, across the grass, half
sere, half renovated by spring; not the scent of first raindrops on the
upturned mould of the fields; not the sentence read at random in a book
opened by accident; not the sudden, never-recurring look in the eyes of
one beloved; not the base appetite which he has hidden away, trampled
back out of sight of his own consciousness; not the preposterous ideal
which his vanity may have shown him for one second; not anything,
however small or however large, however common or however rare, not
anything inanimate or feeling, not anything in life or in death, not
anything which can be seen, or heard, or felt, or understood, which may
not be moulded by the poet into some form which will have meaning and
charm, and eternal value for all men. The poet is the man who receives a
greater number of more intense impressions than any other man; he is, of
all creatures, the most sensitive in the whole of his being; for the
whole of his being is at once the raw material, and the forming
mechanism of the work of art. This is the ideal, the universal poet, the
type: of him every individual poet represents a limited portion, and is
a fresh repartition of faculties, a fresh combination and proportion of
material and mechanism, due to the accident of race, of time, of birth,
of education. The typical poet assimilates and reproduces everything;
and each fragment of this type, each individual, differs from every
other individual in that which is assimilated and reproduced by him: the
one feels more, the other sees more, the third imagines more; and each
feels, sees, and imagines, according to what external things have been
put within reach of his feelings, his sight, his fancy. As, therefore,
the typical poet is the whole type of humanity affording material and
acting as manipulative apparatus to produce the work of art, so also
the individual poet is the individual man, moulding into shape all the
qualities which are strongest in his nature. All the qualities, let us
however mark, which are indisputedly dominant; often, therefore, only
the better, and in only the lowest tempers the worst. For, remembering
what we noticed about moral faculties of will which protect the artistic
workings from the interference of other parts of our nature, we may see
that it must often happen that a noble spirit may be able to keep out
of his mere abstract creations those baser instincts (which though
recognized with shame) h