a hideous, meaningless thing, as they insinuate, it is not clear
what merit can abide in a faithful reflection of it. Let us take the
case of Robert Service, who prided himself upon the realism of his war
poetry. [Footnote: See _Rhymes of a Red Cross Man_.] Perhaps his
defense depends, more truly than he realized, upon the implication
contained in his two lines,

If there's good in war and crime,
There may be in my bits of rhyme.
[Footnote: See _Ibid_.]

Yet the realist may find a sort of justification for himself; at least
James Thomson, B.V., thinks he has found one for him. The most
thoroughly hopeless exposition of the world's meaninglessness, in
English poetry, is doubtless Thomson's _City of Dreadful Night_.
Why does the author give such a ghastly thing to the world? In order, he
says, that some other clear-eyed spectator of the nightmare of existence
may gain a forlorn comfort from it, since he will know that a comrade
before him has likewise seen things at their blackest and worst. But
would Plato accept this as a justification for realistic poetry? It is
doubtful. No one could be comforted by a merely literal rendering of
life. The comfort must derive from the personal equation, which is the
despair engendered in the author by dreams of something better than
reality; therefore whatever merit resides in such poetry comes not from
its realism, but from the idealism of the writer.

We must not think that all poets who regard their poetry as a reflection
of this world alone, agree in praising glaring realism as a virtue.
Rather, some of them say, the value of their reflection lies in its
misty indistinctness. Life may be sordid and ugly at first hand, but let
the artist's reflection only be remote enough, and the jagged edges and
dissonances of color which mar daily living will be lost in the purple
haze of distance. Gazing at such a reflection, men may perhaps forget,
for a space, how dreary a thing existence really is.

And they shall be accounted poet-kings
Who simply tell the most heart-easing things,
[Footnote: _Sleep and Poetry_.]

said Keats in his youth. Such a statement of the artist's purpose
inevitably calls up William Morris:

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beats with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale, not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region