We have arrived at this, then; that Poetry's chief function is to reconcile the inner harmony of Man (his Soul, as we call it) with the outer harmony of the Universe. With this conception of "peerless Poesie" in our minds, we turn to Aristotle's Poetics, and it gives us a sensible shock to read on the first page, that "Epic Poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and dithyrambic Poetry, and the greater part of the music of the flute and of the lyre are all, generally speaking, modes of imitation" (πασαι τυγχανουσιν ουσαι μιμησεις το συνολον[1]). "What?" we say—"Nothing better than that?"—for "imitation" has a bad name among men and is apt to suggest the ape. But, first bearing in mind that there are imitations and imitations (the Imitatio Christi among them), let us go on to see what it is that in Aristotle's opinion Poetry imitates or copies. It is "the Universal" (το χαθολου[2]): and as soon as we realise this we know ourselves to be on the same track as Aristotle, after all. "Imitation," as he uses it, is not an apish or a slavish imitation; it is no mere transcribing or copying of phenomena as they pass (he even allows that the poet may "imitate" men as "better than they are"): it is an expressing, in fiction and harmonious speech, intelligible to his fellow-men, of what truth, order, harmony, and "law" the poet's mind has apprehended in the outer Universe. No fair-minded reader of the Poetics, as he lays down the treatise, will doubt that this, or something like this, was Aristotle's meaning, nor is it probable that he will find any essential difference (or any difference that seriously disturbs agreement) between Aristotle's "Universal" and the Platonic "Idea" or pattern of things "laid up somewhere in the heavens."
Now the Poet's way of apprehending the Universal is (as I have indicated) by keeping true to himself, attending to his soul's inner harmony, and listening, waiting, brooding with a "wise passiveness" until the moment when his and the larger harmony fall into tune together. The Psalmist describes the process accurately: "While I was thus musing the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue." "Poetry," writes Shelley, "is not, like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, I will compose poetry. The greatest poet, even, cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness." But the Poet's way of reporting these apprehensions to his fellows, since he deals with Universals or ideas, is by "universalising" or "idealising" his story: and upon these two terms, which properly mean much the same thing, we must pause for a moment.
The word "idealise," which is the more commonly used, has unfortunately two meanings, a true and a false; and, again unfortunately, the false prevails in vulgar use. To "idealise" in the true sense is to disengage an "idea" of all that is trivial or impertinent or transient or disturbing, and present it to men in its clearest outline, so that its own proper form shines in on the intelligence, as you would wipe away from a discovered statue all stains or accretions of mud or moss or fungus, to release and reveal its true beauty. False "idealising," on the other hand, means that, instead of trusting to this naked manifestation, we add to it some graces of our invention, some touches by which we think to improve it; that we "paint the lily," in short. But the true "idealisation" and the first business of the poet is a denuding not an investing of the Goddess, whether her name be "Life," "Truth," "Beauty," or what you will: a revealing, not a coverture of embroidered words, however pretty and fantastic; as has been excellently said by Shelley: "A poem is the very image of life expressed in its external truth. There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the erection of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds." Let us enforce this account of the true idealisation by a verse or two of our old friend Sir John Davies (quoted by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria). "What an unworldly mass of impressions the mind would be," says Sir John in effect, "did not the soul come to the rescue and reduce these crowding bodies by 'sublimation strange.' "—
From their gross Matter she abstracts the Forms,
And draws a kind of Quintessence from things,
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings.
This doth She when from things particular
She doth abstract the Universal kinds....
But it is time to descend from these heights (such as they are) of philosophising, and illustrate the difference between true and false "idealising" in Poetry by concrete example: and no two better examples occur to me, for drawing this contrast, than Webster's Duchess of Malfy and Shakespeare's Macbeth. Each of these plays excites horror and is calculated to excite horror; both have outlived three hundred years, there or thereabouts; both may be taken as having established an indefinitely long lease on men's admiration—but to any critical mind, how different an admiration! Webster is an expert, a virtuoso in horrifics; in flesh-creeping effects lies his skill; and, indulging that skill, he not only paints the lily, but repaints it and daubs it yet a third time. There is no reason on earth—she has offended against no moral law on earth or in the heavens—that could possibly condemn the Duchess to the hellish tortures she is made to endure. At the worst she has married a man beneath her in station. To punish her in Webster's extravagant fashion every other character, with the whole story of the play, has to be dehumanised. To me—as I penetrate the Fourth Act—the whole business becomes ludicrous: not sanely comic, or even quite sanely absurd: but bizarre, and ridiculously bizarre at that. It has no "idea" at all, no relation to the Universal in the shape of any moral order, "law," fate, doom, destiny. It is just a box of tricks, of raw heads and bloody bones, left with the lid open. That is false "idealising"; Webster choosing his effect and "improving" it for all he was worth—which (let it be added) was a great deal.