onal
absurdities of plot and diction, ennobles his stage with actual history,
with life painted to the quick, with genuine human characters, politics,
and wisdom; and surely these are not the elements that do least credit
to his genius. In every poet, indeed, there is some fidelity to nature,
mixed with that irrelevant false fancy with which poetry is sometimes
identified; and the degree in which a poet's imagination dominates
reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

[Sidenote: Volume can be found in scope better than in suggestion.]

Before prosaic objects are descried, the volume and richness needful for
poetry lie in a blurred and undigested chaos; but after the common world
has emerged and has called on prose to describe it, the same volume and
richness may be recovered; and a new and clarified poetry may arise
through synthesis. Scope is a better thing than suggestion, and more
truly poetical. It has expressed what suggestion pointed to and felt in
the bulk: it possesses what was yearned for. A real thing, when all its
pertinent natural associates are discerned, touches wonder, pathos, and
beauty on every side; the rational poet is one who, without feigning
anything unreal, perceives these momentous ties, and presents his
subject loaded with its whole fate, missing no source of worth which is
in it, no ideal influence which it may have. Homer remains, perhaps, the
greatest master in this art. The world he glorified by showing in how
many ways it could serve reason and beauty was but a simple world, and
an equal genius in these days might be distracted by the Babel about
him, and be driven, as poets now are, into incidental dreams. Yet the
ideal of mastery and idealisation remains the same, if any one could
only attain it: mastery, to see things as they are and dare to describe
them ingenuously; idealisation, to select from this reality what is
pertinent to ultimate interests and can speak eloquently to the soul.

CHAPTER VII

PLASTIC CONSTRUCTION

[Sidenote: Automatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world.]

We have seen how arts founded on exercise and automatic self-expression
develop into music, poetry, and prose. By an indirect approach they come
to represent outer conditions, till they are interwoven in a life which
has in some measure gone out to meet its opportunities and learned to
turn them to an ideal use. We have now to see how man's reactive habi