life. It is therefore the most indefinite of the arts. Its effect is indescribable. It seems all but born into this tangible world of ours and not wholly incarnated until its union with poetry be accomplished.

Now if poetry advanced not a stage beyond painting it could never substitute description for delineation. To speak in terms of logic, painting gives us the premise, whilst poetry gives us the inference. The former is the combination, and the latter the permutation, of artistic thought. Still if poetry gains in freedom, it loses in exactitude. Thus portraiture proper is impossible in poetry since this art is denied pictorial fidelity. The expression also of visible creation is alone possible to that art which lays claim to anything like accurate representation. So the meanest poetry is that which merely catalogues nature. It is landscapepainting without its charm of synchronal visualisation. And this because the transitional moments of poetry are destructive of the unity and simultaneity of material beauty. Poetry, indeed, was born for a higher purpose. It must deliver itself of the inner meaning of nature, and not fail in the endeavour to reproduce her. Painting transcribes, but poetry translates. The poet alone can read off for us the mind of the universe. And for the very same reason that poetry is capable of giving us mentality is it powerless to give us adequately the mould of life. Here the painter excels beyond the most ravishing dreams of the poet. When the latter attempts to draw for us form or feature, he ceases to conquer and becomes only chimerical. It is only some tenuous ghost that gathers round the bones of death. Figuration in poetry becomes at once amorphous and indistinct. In music, again, configuration reaches its vanishing point. Here we have little if any material aspect of esthetic truth. Lessing in his "Laokoon" labours this point. He writes:-" The poetsince he can only exhibit in succession its component partsentirely abstains from the description of material beauty as beauty." Poetry then is weak in the portrayal of physical beauty. Being a continuous sequence, we lose the totality in the mere procession of parts and description of details. The likeness which the poet gives us is, therefore, that of the mental, and not that of the material, man. Painting limns the individual, but poetry, by means of language, delineates the hidden humanity. And the mind is more indefinite than the visage, and the feelings,

again, which music embodies, are still more intangible. So, with the progression of the arts, we notice a loss of outline and distinctness in drawing, but find a concomitant accumulation of intensity and fervour. It is- -as we have already seen-the gradual self-assertion of the soul. We realise now that, in poetry, we are deeper than appearance. We get beneath pictorial presentation. Here facts are transformed into fancy. We paint internally on the canvas of the imagination. We are behind the phenomenal universe and no longer employed on the surface. Poetry does not, therefore, reflect the cosmos in her natural arrangement, but readjusts her parts with a view to ulterior beauty of thought rather than the apparent beauty of objects. She expounds rather than expresses. And, by delving beneath the visible, the poet strikes at the heart of things and arrives at the ideas secreted within. With the inner vision awakened, he contemplates the glories of the hyperphysical world. He gives us qualities and essences in place of colour and form. His is the beauty of the supernatural cosmos and the glory of spiritual types that eternally persist. So in poetry we enjoy the true supremacy of mind. We dwell, for the time being, in the real kingdom of ideas. Poetry is spiritual sanity, and poetic thoughts are flashing jewels in reason's royal crown. Each art, then, becomes in turn more inward than the one previous. And this is true in the realm of reality. For as man's mind develops, body becomes more amenable to mind. The seat of authority is transferred from the physical to the mental. Under the stress of untutored passion, the savage has but little control over physical expression. Thus on the ideal plane music comes to represent that higher authority of soul where emotional stress is ennobled and interiorised by being divorced from corporeal contortion. So art, by a process of dematerialisation, acquires greater creative power, and with music attains complete spiritual freedom.

But to return. Now while painting is limited to a section of space and a momentary duration in time, poetry is co-extensive with mind itself. This latter art, therefore, being thought, and not thought rendered visible, is released from the process of external coagulation. The art of the painter, on the other hand, compels us to project our ideas, whilst that of the poet permits them to remain in their native territory. Thought in poetry,

not being expelled from the mental sphere, acquires thereby a facility that is alien to painting. Poetry is practically dimensionless. Here past, present, and future may occupy the same canvas; essence may co-exist with matter, and spirit may be described in terms of substance. And the poetic element creeps in with the delicate adjustment of thought. And with such a wealth of subject-material, artistic selection becomes at once a question of infinite subtlety. In point of fact, the poet can qualify thought by drawing on the entire cosmos. His art is illimitability itself. He can roll up the thunder, place it in the heart of a man, and call it rage; or clench the hurtling fork of heaven and make it flash from human eyes. With poetry the world becomes at once volatilised; and without this process of etherealisation, the poet could neither substantiate qualities nor subtilise the concrete. Yet along with this increase of artistic refinement comes an added sense of responsibility; for beauty is valuable alone in so far as it accentuates the true, and recommends it to the soul.

H

CHAPTER XVI

PAINTING AND POETRY:-continued

BUT let us pass on and consider the relation of poetry and painting in their respective treatment of things specifically mental. Now from the foregoing it will be readily seen that, in the realm of mind, poetry is paramount. For while painting is mind in terms of matter, the poet, by means of symbolism or personification, can give us matter in terms of mind. The one art materialises the principle of vitality, whilst the other is capable of vitalising the material. In other words the painter clothes ideas with form, the poet invests form with ideas, whilst the musician, discarding both, gives us pure, spiritual beauty. In painting, then, mind must incarnate itself, whilst in poetry it can remain discarnate. And, for this latter reason, the poet permits us to view all mental qualities in their natural mode of existence. There is, again, no incongruity possible in the art of the poet, when he sets the tangible and intangible in close juxtaposition. For in poetry, the animate and inanimate become convertible terms, and subsist conformably together. Poetry may either materialise the mental or mentalise the material. Here physical and human nature may be interwoven with delicate intricacy, quite irrespective of the scale of being each may occupy in its original state of reality. But in painting, the treatment of the abstract results too often in a confusion of planes. The wealth of mental suggestion is too heavily weighted with its material mode of expression. Painting cannot really express essential ideas, it can only portray their temporal manifestation. We do not, for instance, see love— only feel it; and here, even the musician gains an ascendancy over the poet, since he, in turn, is excused the inward configuration of thought. For though poetry may sing about love, music alone calls forth the soul of love. But it may be argued that, by means of symbols, emblems, or allegorical attributes, the painter, too, is capable of expressing the most psychical moods of mind.

When, however, he does so, it is by concreting the abstract— by materialising the spiritual. And though in these higher flights of pictural beauty wherein we approximate poetry and the arts tend to overlap, it is only too often but a futile attempt to flee the canvas. On the other hand, the most ideal flights of painting become the average wont of poetry. For what really happens in their respective treatment of-let us say-the abstract conception of justice? According to the poet Samuel Daniel:

Clear-eyed Astrea

Comes with her balance and her sword, to show
That first her judgment weighs before it strikes.

Here

And here, not only have we the personification of a mental quality pictured for us with suitable emblems, but we are also fully informed as to its behaviour in the region of moral activity. Indeed, if anywhere, poetry lays the note of accent on the more moral aspect in all such cases of symbolism. At all events, here the physical and psychical co-exist in mutual congruity. But be it the imagination of a Watts or a Blake, the limitations and disabilities of the pictorial art, in this connection, become at times oppressive and prohibitive in so far as the very genius of the subject is concerned. For here we have, as it were, two terms of an equation, something likened to something else. On the one side the figural personification; on the other the moral attribute itself. But in painting, the emphasis, unlike the sister art, is inevitably laid on the side of material embodiment. quality and quantity cannot live on equal terms. We have in reality the manifestation of only one side of this said equation— that of physical configuration. Thus, as we have already seen, painting is superior in physicality, but inferior in mentality. In painting we have a perfect synthesis of material minutiæ and objective details which, in poetry, being progressive and fluxional, become ill-defined and illusive. And this because, in the language of philosophy, Painting is immediate and presentative, whilst Poetry is mediate and representative. In respect of allegorical beauty, then, the constitutional impotence of the former art is obvious. Poetry alone can be properly figurative. To take a simple illustration. If the poet likens time to a river, the simile, when submitted to pictorial treatment, remains lastingly simply a landscape.