tury, suggests that this period was even more than most periods an age of sophistry. Every age has had its false teachers, but possibly no age ever had so many dubious moralists as this, an incomparable series of false prophets from Rousseau himself down to Nietzsche and Tolstoy. It remains to sum up in a closing chapter the results of my whole inquiry and at the same time to discuss somewhat more specifically the bearing of my whole point of view, especially the idea of work according to the human law, upon the present situation.

CHAPTER X

THE PRESENT OUTLOOK

It has been my endeavor throughout this book to show that classic and romantic art, though both at their best highly imaginative, differ in the quality of the imagination. I pointed out in my first chapter that in his recoil from the intellectual romanticism of the Renaissance and the mediæval romanticism of actual adventure the neoclassicist came to rest his literary faith on "reason" (by which he meant either ordinary good sense or abstract reasoning), and then opposed this reason or judgment to imagination. This supposed opposition between reason and imagination was accepted by the romantic rebels against neo-classicism and has been an endless source of confusion to the present day. Though both neo-classicists and romanticists achieved much admirable work, work which is likely to have a permanent appeal, it is surely no small matter that they both failed on the whole to deal adequately with the imagination and its rôle whether in literature or life. Thus Dryden attributes the immortality of the Eneid to its being "a well-weighed judicious poem. Whereas poems which are produced by the vigor of imagination only have a gloss" upon them at the first which time wears off, the works of judgment are like the diamond; the more they are polished, the more lustre they receive." 1 Read on and you will find that Dryden thus stresses judgment by way of protest against the Cavalier Marini and the imaginative unre

1

1 Dedication of the Eneis (1697).

straint that he and other intellectual romanticists display. Dryden thus obscures the fact that what gives the immortalizing touch to the Æneid is not mere judgment but imagination a certain quality of imagination. Even the reader who is to enter properly into the spirit of Virgil needs more than judgment -he needs to possess in some measure the same quality of imagination. The romantic answer to the neo-classic distrust of the imagination was the apotheosis of the imagination, but without sufficient discrimination as to its quality, and this led only too often to an anarchy of the imagination - an anarchy associated, as we have seen, in the case of the Rousseauist, with emotion rather than with thought or action.

The modern world has thus tended to oscillate between extremes in its attitude towards the imagination, so that we still have to turn to ancient Greece for the best examples of works in which the imagination is at once disciplined and supreme. Aristotle, I pointed out, is doing little more than give an account of this Greek practice when he says that the poet ranks higher than the historian because he achieves a more general truth, but that he can achieve this more general truth only by being a master of illusion. Art in which the illusion is not disciplined to the higher reality counts at best on the recreative side of life. "Imagination," says Poe, "feeling herself for once unshackled, roamed at will among the ever-changing wonders of a shadowy and unstable land." To take seriously the creations of this type of imagination is to be on the way towards madness. Every madhouse, indeed, has inmates who are very imagina1 Adventure of one Hans Pfaal.

tive in the fashion Poe here describes. We must not confuse the concentric or ethical with the eccentric imagination if we are to define rightly the terms classic and romantic or indeed to attain to sound criticism at all. My whole aim has been to show that a main stream of emotional sophistry that takes its rise in the eighteenth century and flows down through the nineteenth involves just such a confusion.

The general distinction between the two types of imagination would seem sufficiently clear. To apply the distinction concretely is, it must be admitted, a task infinitely difficult and delicate, a task that calls for the utmost degree of the esprit de finesse. In any particular case there enters an element of vital novelty. The relation of this vital novelty to the ethical or permanent element in life is something that cannot be determined by any process of abstract reasoning or by any rule of thumb; it is a matter of immediate perception. The art of the critic is thus hedged about with peculiar difficulties. It does not follow that Aristotle himself because he has laid down sound principles in his Poetics, would always have been right in applying them. Our evidence on this point is as a matter of fact somewhat scanty.

Having thus admitted the difficulty of the undertaking we may ourselves attempt a few concrete illustrations of how sound critical standards tended to suffer in connection with the romantic movement. Leaving aside for the moment certain larger aspects of the ethical imagination that I am going to discuss presently, let us confine ourselves to poetry. Inasmuch as the ethical imagination does not in itself give poetry but wisdom, various cases may evidently arise: a man may be wise without being

poetical; he may be poetical without being wise; he may be both wise and poetical.

We may take as an example of the person who was wise without being poetical Dr. Johnson. Though most persons would grant that Dr. Johnson was not poetical, it is well to remember that this generalization has only the approximate truth that a literary generalization can have. The lines on Levet have been inserted and rightly in anthologies. If not on the whole poetical, Johnson was, as Boswell says, eminently fitted to be a "majestic teacher of moral and religious wisdom." Few men have had a firmer grasp on the moral law or been freer from the various forms of sophistry that tend to obscure it. Unlike Socrates, however, of whom he reminds us at times by his ethical realism, Johnson rests his insight not on a positive but on a traditional basis. To say that Johnson was truly religious is only another way of saying that he was truly humble, and one of the reasons for his humility was his perception of the ease with which illusion in man passes over into delusion, and even into madness. His chapter on the "Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination" in "Rasselas" not only gives the key to that work but to much else in his writings. What he opposes to this dangerous prevalence of imagination is not a different type of imagination but the usual neoclassical reason or judgment or "sober probability." His defence of wisdom against the gathering naturalistic sophistries of his time is therefore somewhat lacking in imaginative prestige. He seemed to be opposing innovation on purely formalistic and traditional grounds in an age which was more and more resolutely untraditional and which was determined above all to emancipate the