In England's green and pleasant land.
It may be suggested that, for their purpose, Ruskin's words are perfectly chosen, that as a direct social charge they achieve their purpose better than any others that could have been shaped. Even if we allow this and do not press, as we very reasonably might, the reply that merely in this direction Blake's poem working, as is the manner of all great art, with tremendous but secret vigour upon the imagination of the people, has a deeper and more permanent effect than Ruskin's prose, we still remember that the sole purpose of poetry is to produce the virile spiritual activity that we call æsthetic delight and that to do this is the highest achievement to which the faculties of man can attain. If by "the best words" we mean anything, we must mean the best words for the highest possible purpose. To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government—the realisation of the will of the people. But it is also a function of government to organise the people and—although, just as we may think that Blake's poem finally beats Ruskin's prose on Ruskin's own ground, we may think, too, that the government that best represents the people will finally best organise the people—it may quite plausibly be said that in this business an aristocratic or militant government will, in an imperfectly conditioned civilisation (such as that of the world to-day), excel a democratic government. Nevertheless, we still say with an easy mind that a democratic government is the best government, without qualification, since it excels in the highest purpose of government. Clearly Coleridge implies, and reasonably enough, an elaboration such as this in his definition—the best words in the best order. To say that Blake and Ruskin, in those passages, were giving expression to dissimilar experiences is but to emphasise the distinction between prose and poetry. The closest analysis discovers no difference between the essential thought of the one and the other. But Blake projected the thought through a mood of higher intensity, and, where Ruskin perfectly ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered the best words. It is the controlling mood that differs, not the material controlled. Hence it is that still another mind, starting from the same radical perception, might transfigure it through a mood as urgent as Blake's and produce yet another poem of which it could strictly be said that here again were the best words in the best order. We should then have three men moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginative shaping of the thought would fail to reach the point at which the record and communication of ecstasy become the chief intention, and the expression would be prose; in each of the other cases the shaping would pass beyond that point, and there would be two separate moods expressed, each in the terms of poetry.
One further qualification remains to be made. By words we must mean, as Coleridge must have meant, words used for a purpose which they alone can serve. Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way. If you ask me the time, and I say—it is six o'clock, it may be said that I am using the best words in the best order, and that, although the thought in my mind is incapable of being refined into the higher æsthetic experience of which we have spoken, my answer is, if Coleridge was right, poetry. But these are not, in our present sense, words at all. They have no power which is peculiar to themselves. If I show you my watch you are answered just as effectively.
That there is no absolute standard for reference does not matter. All æsthetic appreciation and opinion can but depend upon our judgment, fortified by knowledge of what is, by cumulative consent, the best that has been done. There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so. And the conviction is, exactly, the conviction that the mood to which the matter has been subjected has been of such a kind as to achieve an intensity beyond which we cannot conceive the mind as passing, and it follows that there may be—as indeed there are—many poems dealing with the same subject each of which fulfills the obligations of poetry as defined by Coleridge. For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts. If six masters paint the same landscape and under the same conditions, there will be one subject but six visions, and consequently six different interpretations, each one of which may, given the mastery, satisfy us as being perfect; perfect, that is, not as the expression of a subject which has no independent artistic existence, but as the expression of the mood in which the subject is realised. So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
THE DEGREES OF POETRY
The question that necessarily follows these reflections is—Are there degrees in poetry? Since a short lyric may completely satisfy the requirements of poetry as here set down, announcing itself to have been created in a poetic or supremely intensified mood, can poetry be said at any time to go beyond this? If we accept these conclusions, can a thing so slight, yet so exquisite, so obviously authentic in source as:
When I a verse shall make,
Know I have pray'd thee,
For old religion's sake,
Saint Ben, to aid me.