appeals to possible sensation; whereas in
poetry the agreement, where it exists, is vague and massive; there is an
initial fusion of minds under hypnotic musical influences, from which
each listener, as he awakes, passes into his own thoughts and
interpretations. In prose the vehicle for communication is a
conventional sign, standing in the last analysis for some demonstrable
object or controllable feeling. By marshalling specific details a
certain indirect suasion is exercised on the mind, as nature herself, by
continual checks and denials, gradually tames the human will. The
elements of prose are always practical, if we run back and reconstruct
their primitive essence, for at bottom every experience is an original
and not a copy, a nucleus for ideation rather than an object to which
ideas may refer. It is when these stimulations are shaken together and
become a system of mutual checks that they begin to take on ideally a
rhythm borrowed from the order in which they actually recurred. Then a
prophetic or representative movement arises in thought. Before this
comes about, experience remains a constantly renovated dream, as poetry
to the end conspires to keep it. For poetry, while truly poetical, never
loses sight of initial feelings and underlying appeals; it is
incorrigibly transcendental, and takes every present passion and every
private dream in turn for the core of the universe. By creating new
signs, or by recasting and crossing those which have become
conventional, it keeps communication massive and instinctive, immersed
in music, and inexhaustible by clear thought.

[Sidenote: It is more advanced and responsible than poetry.]

Lying is a privilege of poets because they have not yet reached the
level on which truth and error are discernible. Veracity and
significance are not ideals for a primitive mind; we learn to value them
as we learn to live, when we discover that the spirit cannot be wholly
free and solipsistic. To have to distinguish fact from fancy is so great
a violence to the inner man that not only poets, but theologians and
philosophers, still protest against such a distinction. They urge (what
is perfectly true for a rudimentary creature) that facts are mere
conceptions and conceptions full-fledged facts; but this interesting
embryonic lore they apply, in their intellectual weakness, to retracting
or undermining those human categories which, though alone fruitful or
applicable in life, are not cong