formed and expressible ideals then put to shame the others, which have
remained vague for want of practical expression. Mature interests centre
on soluble problems and tasks capable of execution; it is at such points
that the ideal can be really served. The individual's dream straightens
and reassures itself by merging with the dream of humanity. To dwell, as
irrational poets do, on some private experience, on some emotion without
representative or ulterior value, then seems a waste of time. Fiction
becomes less interesting than affairs, and poetry turns into a sort of
incompetent whimper, a childish fore-shortening of the outspread world.

[Sidenote: Pure prose would tend to efface itself.]

On the other hand, prose has a great defect, which is abstractness. It
drops the volume of experience in finding bodiless algebraic symbols by
which to express it. The verbal form, instead of transmitting an image,
seems to constitute it, in so far as there is an image suggested at
all; and the ulterior situation is described only in the sense that a
change is induced in the hearer which prepares him to meet that
situation. Prose seems to be a use of language in the service of
material life. It would tend, in that case, to undermine its own basis;
for in proportion as signals for action are quick and efficacious they
diminish their sensuous stimulus and fade from consciousness. Were
language such a set of signals it would be something merely
instrumental, which if made perfect ought to be automatic and
unconscious. It would be a buzzing in the ears, not a music native to
the mind. Such a theory of language would treat it as a necessary evil
and would look forward hopefully to the extinction of literature, in
which it would recognise nothing ideal. There is of course no reason to
deprecate the use of vocables, or of any other material agency, to
expedite affairs; but an art of speech, if it is to add any ultimate
charm to life, has to supervene upon a mere code of signals. Prose,
could it be purely representative, would be ideally superfluous. A
literary prose accordingly owns a double allegiance, and its life is
amphibious. It must convey intelligence, but intelligence clothed in a
language that lends the message an intrinsic value, and makes it
delightful to apprehend apart from its importance in ultimate theory or
practice. Prose is in that measure a fine art. It might be called poetry
that had become pervasively representative,