Poetry.

Combining these two instincts, with him, we arrive at _harmonious
imitation._ Well and good. But what is it we imitate in poetry?--
noble things or mean things? After considering this, putting mean
things aside as unworthy, and voting for the nobler--which must
at the same time be true, since without truth there can be no
real nobility--Aristotle has to ask `In what way true? True to
ordinary life, with its observed defeats of the right by the
wrong? or true, as again instinct tells good men it should be,
_universally_?' So he arrives at his conclusion that a true thing
is not necessarily truth of fact in a world where truth in fact
is so often belied or made meaningless--not the record that
Alcibiades went somewhere and suffered something--but truth to
the Universal, the superior demand of our conscience. In such a
way only we know that "The Tempest" or "Paradise Lost" or "The
Ancient Mariner" or "Prometheus Unbound" can be truer than any
police report. Yet we know that they are truer in essence, and in
significance, since they appeal to eternal verities--since they
imitate the Universal--whereas the police report chronicles
(faithfully, as in duty bound, even usefully in its way) events
which may, nay must, be significant somehow but cannot at best be
better to us than phenomena, broken ends and shards.

VI

I return to the child. Clearly in obeying the instinct which I
have tried to illustrate, he is searching to realise himself;
and, as educators, we ought to help this effort--or, at least,
not to hinder it.

Further, if we agree with Aristotle, in this searching to realise
himself through imitation, what will the child most nobly and
naturally imitate? He will imitate what Aristotle calls 'the
Universal,' the superior demand. And does not this bring us back
to consent with what I have been preaching from the start in this
course--that to realise ourselves in _What Is_ not only in degree
transcends mere knowledge and activity, _What Knows_ and _What
Does,_ but transcends it in kind? It is not only what the child
unconsciously longs for: it is that for which (in St Paul's
words) 'the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain
together until now'; craving for this (I make you the admission)
as emotionally, as the heart may be thrilled, the breast surge,
the eyes swell with tears, at a note drawn from the violin:
feeling that somewhere, beyond reach, we have a lost sister, and
she speaks to our so