claims of
mere sentiment and feeling, that the artist must react. The simple
utterance of joy is not poetry any more than a mere personal cry of pain,
and the real experiences of the artist are always those which do not find
their direct expression but are gathered up and absorbed into some
artistic form which seems, from such real experiences, to be the farthest
removed and the most alien.

'The heart contains passion but the imagination alone contains poetry,'
says Charles Baudelaire. This too was the lesson that Theophile Gautier,
most subtle of all modern critics, most fascinating of all modern poets,
was never tired of teaching--'Everybody is affected by a sunrise or a
sunset.' The absolute distinction of the artist is not his capacity to
feel nature so much as his power of rendering it. The entire
subordination of all intellectual and emotional faculties to the vital
and informing poetic principle is the surest sign of the strength of our
Renaissance.

We have seen the artistic spirit working, first in the delightful and
technical sphere of language, the sphere of expression as opposed to
subject, then controlling the imagination of the poet in dealing with his
subject. And now I would point out to you its operation in the choice of
subject. The recognition of a separate realm for the artist, a
consciousness of the absolute difference between the world of art and the
world of real fact, between classic grace and absolute reality, forms not
merely the essential element of any aesthetic charm but is the
characteristic of all great imaginative work and of all great eras of
artistic creation--of the age of Phidias as of the age of Michael Angelo,
of the age of Sophocles as of the age of Goethe.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the
day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which
we desire. For to most of us the real life is the life we do not lead,
and thus, remaining more true to the essence of its own perfection, more
jealous of its own unattainable beauty, is less likely to forget form in
feeling or to accept the passion of creation as any substitute for the
beauty of the created thing.

The artist is indeed the child of his own age, but the present will not
be to him a whit more real than the past; for, like the philosopher of
the Platonic vision, the poet is the spectator of all time and of all
existence. For him no form is obsolete, no subje