here was a certain discipline in the old antithetical
couplet of Pope and his followers. If it did not permit of the great
liberty of wisdom used by the minority of great geniuses, neither did it
permit of the great liberty of folly which is used by the majority of
small writers. A prophet could not be a poet in those days, perhaps, but
at least a fool could not be a poet. If we take, for the sake of
example, such a line as Pope's

'Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,'

the test is comparatively simple. A great poet would not have written
such a line, perhaps. But a minor poet could not.

Supposing that a lyric poet of the new school really had to deal with
such an idea as that expressed in Pope's line about Man:

'A being darkly wise and rudely great.'

Is it really so certain that he would go deeper into the matter than
that old antithetical jingle goes? I venture to doubt whether he would
really be any wiser or weirder or more imaginative or more profound. The
one thing that he would really be, would be longer. Instead of writing

'A being darkly wise and rudely great,'

the contemporary poet, in his elaborately ornamented book of verses,
would produce something like the following:--

'A creature
Of feature
More dark, more dark, more dark than skies,
Yea, darkly wise, yea, darkly wise:
Darkly wise as a formless fate
And if he be great
If he be great, then rudely great,
Rudely great as a plough that plies,
And darkly wise, and darkly wise.'

Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learnt to
spread our thoughts thinner? I have a dark suspicion that a modern poet
might manufacture an admirable lyric out of almost every line of Pope.

There is, of course, an idea in our time that the very antithesis of
the typical line of Pope is a mark of artificiality. I shall have
occasion more than once to point out that nothing in the world has ever
been artificial. But certainly antithesis is not artificial. An element
of paradox runs through the whole of existence itself. It begins in the
realm of ultimate physics and metaphysics, in the two facts that we
cannot imagine a space that is infinite, and that we cannot imagine a
space that is finite. It runs through the inmost complications of
divinity, in that we cannot conceive that Christ in the wilderness was
truly pure, unless we also conceive that he desired to sin. It runs, in
the sam