rains, such as may be needed before our hairs are gray. The
"poetry of doubt," however pretty, would stand us in little stead if
we were threatened with a second Armada. It will conduce little to
the valour, "virtus," manhood of any Englishman to be informed by any
poet, even in the most melodious verse, illustrated by the most
startling and pan cosmic metaphors. "See what a highly-organised and
peculiar stomach-ache I have had! Does it not prove indisputably
that I am not as other men are?" What gospel there can be in such a
message to any honest man who has either to till the earth, plan a
railroad, colonise Australia, or fight his country's enemies, is hard
to discover. Hard indeed to discover how this most practical, and
therefore most poetical, of ages, is to be "set to music," when all
those who talk about so doing persist obstinately in poring, with
introverted eyes, over the state of their own digestion--or creed.

What man wants, what art wants, perhaps what the Maker of them both
wants, is a poet who shall begin by confessing that he is as other
men are, and sing about things which concern all men, in language
which all men can understand. This is the only road to that gift of
prophecy which most young poets are nowadays in such a hurry to
arrogate to themselves. We can only tell what man will be by fair
induction, by knowing what he is, what he has been.

And it is most noteworthy that in this age, in which there is more
knowledge than there ever was of what man has been, and more
knowledge, through innumerable novelists, and those most subtle and
finished ones, of what man is, that poetry should so carefully avoid
drawing from this fresh stock of information in her so-confident
horoscopes of what man will be.

There is just now as wide a divorce between poetry and the common-
sense of all time, as there is between poetry and modern knowledge.
Our poets are not merely vague and confused, they are altogether
fragmentary--disjecta membra poetarum; they need some uniting idea.
And what idea?

Our answer will probably be greeted with a laugh. Nevertheless we
answer simply, What our poets want is faith.

There is little or no faith nowadays. And without faith there can be
no real art, for art is the outward expression of firm coherent
belief. And a poetry of doubt, even a sceptical poetry, in its true
sense, can never possess clear and sound form, even organic form at
all. How can you put into fo