hat Poetry's chief function is to
reconcile the inner harmony of Man (his Soul, as we call it) with the
outer harmony of the Universe. With this conception of "peerless Poesie"
in our minds, we turn to Aristotle's _Poetics_, and it gives us a
sensible shock to read on the first page, that "Epic Poetry and Tragedy,
Comedy also and dithyrambic Poetry, and the greater part of the music of
the flute and of the lyre are all, generally speaking, modes of
imitation" ([Greek: _pasai tynchhanoysin ohysai mimheseis to hynolon_]).
"What?" we say--"Nothing better than _that_?"--for "imitation" has a bad
name among men and is apt to suggest the ape. But, first bearing in mind
that there are imitations and imitations (the _Imitatio Christi_ among
them), let us go on to see what it is that in Aristotle's opinion Poetry
imitates or copies. It is "the Universal" ([Greek: _tho chathholoy_]):
and as soon as we realise this we know ourselves to be on the same track
as Aristotle, after all. "Imitation," as he uses it, is not an apish or
a slavish imitation; it is no mere transcribing or copying of phenomena
as they pass (he even allows that the poet may "imitate" men as "better
than they are"): it is an expressing, in fiction and harmonious speech,
intelligible to his fellow-men, of what truth, order, harmony, and "law"
the poet's mind has apprehended in the outer Universe. No fair-minded
reader of the _Poetics_, as he lays down the treatise, will doubt that
this, or something like this, was Aristotle's meaning, nor is it
probable that he will find any essential difference (or any difference
that seriously disturbs agreement) between Aristotle's "Universal" and
the Platonic "Idea" or pattern of things "laid up somewhere in the
heavens."

* * * * *

Now the Poet's way of apprehending the Universal is (as I have
indicated) by keeping true to himself, attending to his soul's inner
harmony, and listening, waiting, brooding with a "wise passiveness"
until the moment when his and the larger harmony fall into tune
together. The Psalmist describes the process accurately: "While I was
thus musing the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue."
"Poetry," writes Shelley, "is not, like reasoning, a power to be exerted
according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, _I will
compose poetry_. The greatest poet, even, cannot say it: for the mind in
creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible i