combination with a kindly and sympathetic attitude towards men and things, we have already indicated its power of harmonizing with genuine sentiment, and even of intensifying it.

It is mainly under this special aspect that humor enters into poetry of the first rank, poetry so exquisite in its balance that it is no longer fitly labelled with the name of any one tendency. Here, as we have seen, it is brought through the element of sympathy, into relation with imagination; and, in the greatest poetry, not with imagination tamed and shac kled, but free and of infinite possibilities, yet controlled and directed by laws which it recog nizes as beneficent.

CONCLUSION

THE topics enumerated in the program laid down in the first chapter have now been discussed; none of them has been exhausted. The central position, that the essential nature of poetry is complex, not simple, has, it is hoped, been made clear, since it is difficult to see how any of the fundamental factors we have examined can be denied a place in its constitution. Even if the definitions of these factors which have been proposed, and the illustrations of their manifestations which have been offered, may not always have carried conviction, the discussion need not have been futile, for we can be agreed upon the existence and the distinctness of two adjacent territories without being completely in harmony as to where at all points the boundary should run.

In accordance with the view stated at the outset, no attempt at a final definition of poetry has been made. The formula presented is only one of many ways that might be suggested of approaching the problems, practical and theoretical, which offer themselves for solution to the serious student of poetry. If

this formula is sound as far as it goes, it has some evident advantages. It gives an intelligible and consistent content to those hardworked counters of the critical game,-romantic, classic, realistic, sentimental. This is done at the inevitable cost of narrowing here and there the field over which common usage has applied these terms; but such narrowing is justified if, as I think, nothing has been excluded which has not been shown to belong more appropriately elsewhere; and if the remaining content is a unified conception.

It makes it possible to use these terms impartially as describing a prevailing tendency, without implying that any of the tendencies, when properly balanced and restrained, is a symptom of decadence, or is in itself artistically vicious. It explains why, as one ascends in the scale of poetry, one is more and more reluctant to apply to the greatest achievements the names of any school or any movement, by showing that in this field, as in so many others, supreme excellence lies in perfection of bal

ance.

Finally, it affords a point of view sufficiently elevated to enable the critic to survey all periods and all tendencies, to appreciate the enthusi

asms and the preferences of each, as well as to recognize their excesses and their limitations.

Apart, however, from the finality, and even from the complete logical validity of such a view as I have been trying to expound, it may find a pragmatic defence, if I may use the slang of the hour, in its power of shedding illumination upon the poetry we read. Critical theory may be regarded either as an attempt to contribute to æsthetics as a branch of philosophy or psychology, as the laying of one stone in a theoretical construction of the universe; or as a means of clearing our vision and sharpening our sensibilities with a view to a more intense enjoyment of art. My interest has been chiefly in the latter. In the application of these theories to the work of the English poets, I have myself found my eyes opened not only to causes but to effects which had before been obscure or only half-consciously perceived; and in the abundant illustrations with which I have sought to water the dry places of the argument, it is hoped that the reader may find, not merely refreshment for the moment, but an increased and abiding sense of beauty.

A question naturally arises as to how, under

the definitions which have been proposed, we are to label the poetry of our own day; and a glance at this question may appropriately close the discussion.

The dominant intellectual interest of our time is, of course, scientific; and this fact would lead us naturally to look for the prominence in contemporary art of the element of truth to fact. In some fields, notably in fiction and the drama, this expectation is fulfilled. The names of Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola, Ibsen, and Tolstoi, on the continent of Europe, of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy in England, of Howells and James in America, suggest how widely and under what a variety of phases, naturalistic, psychological, and sociological, has appeared the tendency to emphasize truth to actual experience in the artist's picture of life. Traces of the same influence are to be found in poetry, as, for instance, in some aspects of the work of Kipling; yet it can hardly be said that as yet this art has entered on a predominatingly realistic period. For in poetry, whether we regard the practice of the writers or the tastes of the readers, we are still in the romantic age. We have been trying in these discussions to main