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To you, who have followed the argument of this little book, the theory of poetic “inspiration” will be intelligible enough. It earned a living in its day and, if revived in ours, might happily supersede much modern chatter about art and technique. For it contains much truth:–

When the flicker of London sun falls faint on the Club-room’s green and gold,
The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mould–
They scratch with their pens in the mould of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start,
For the Devil mutters behind the leaves, “It’s pretty, but is it Art?”

The philosophers did poetry no great harm by being angry with it as an “inspired” thing: for that, in a measure, it happens to be. They did it far more harm when they took it seriously and made it out to be a form of teaching. For by the nature of things there happens to be something of the pedant in every philosopher and the incurable propensity of the pedant is to remove everything–but Literature especially–out of the category to which it belongs and consider it in another with which it has but a remote concern. (Thus a man will talk of Chaucer as though his inflexions were the most important thing about him.) Now to acclaim Homer as a great teacher, and use him in the schools, was right enough so long as the Athenians remembered (and is right enough for us, so long as we remember) how he teaches us, or rather educates. What we have described the Poet as doing for men–drawing forth the inner harmonies of the soul and attuning them to the Universal–is educative in the truest sense as in the highest degree. So long as we remember this, the old dispute whether the aim of Poetry be to teach or to delight is seen to be futile: for she does both, and she does the one by means of the other. On the other hand, you cannot leave a delicate instrument such as Poetry lying within reach of the professional teacher; he will certainly, at any risk of marring or mutilating, seize on it and use it as a hammer to knock things into heads; if rebuked for this, plaintively remonstrating, “But I thought you told me it was useful to teach with!” (So Gideon taught the men of Succoth.) And therefore, we need not be astonished: coming dawn to Strabo, to find him asserting that “the ancients held poetry to be a kind of elementary philosophy, introducing us from childhood to life and pleasureably instructing us in character, behaviour and action.” The Greeks, he tells us, chose poetry for their children’s first lessons. Surely (he argues) they never did that for the sake of sweetly influencing the soul, but rather for the correction of morals! Strabo’s mental attitude is absurd, of course, and preposterous: for this same influencing of the soul–[Greek: phychagoghia] (a beautiful word)–is, as we have seen, Poetry’s main business: but the mischief of the notion did not end with making the schooldays of children unhappy: it took hold of the poets themselves, and by turning them into prigs dried up the children’s well of consolation. The Fathers of the Church lent a hand too, and a vigorous one; and for centuries the face of the Muse was sicklied o’er with a pale determination to combine amusement with instruction. Even our noble Sidney allowed his modesty to be overawed by the pedantic tradition, though as a man of the world he tactfully gave it the slip. “For suppose it be granted,” he says, “(that which I suppose with great reason may be denied) that the Philosopher in respect of his methodical proceeding doth teach more perfectly than the Poet: yet do I thinke that no man is so much Philosophus as to compare the Philosopher, in mooving, with the Poet. And that mooving is of a higher degree than teaching, it may by this appeare: that it is welnigh the cause and the effect of teaching. For who will be taught, if hee bee not mooved with desire to be taught?” Then, after a page devoted to showing “which constant desire whosoever hath in him hath already past halfe the hardness of the way,” Sidney goes on: “Now therein of all Sciences (I speak still of human, and according to the human conceit) is our Poet the Monarch. For he dooth not only show the way, but giveth so sweete a prospect into the way, as will intice any man to enter into it. Nay he dooth as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of Grapes, that full of that taste you may long to passe further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations and load the memory with doubtfulnesse: but hee commeth to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-inchaunting skill of Musicke; and with a tale forsooth he commeth unto you: with a tale which holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney-corner.”