independent beings; and poetry and art had but little to add in order to give them personality." 1

Lord Kames shows that metaphors and allegories should be short. But it would be a safe rule never to allegorise at all unless by so doing the allegorist can give vitality, clarity, and point to his doctrine.

NOTE C.

IMAGINATION. (P. 133.)

There is much vague talk about the Imagination. Hobbes had a funny notion of it. It is, says he, "nothing else but sense decaying or weakened by the absence of the object," 3 with much elaborated nonsense on the subject. Hume had quite a crude conception of its functions. Dugald Stewart wrote: "The province of imagination is to select qualities and circumstances from a variety of different objects, and by combining and disposing these to form a new creation of its own. In this appropriated sense of the word it coincides with what some authors have called a creative or poetical imagination," ,"5 all very crude and inadequate. What has this process to do, say, with the imagination manifested in Dante's 'Inferno'? Hamilton and others fail to disentangle the Imagination from the other faculties, and confuse the whole subject. The Imagination, he declares, produces and creates nothing; that "it only rearranges parts-it only builds up old materials into new forms"; and that in reference to this act it ought to be called not the productive or creative, but the plastic." What old materials was Dunbar building up into new forms when he wrote his great poem, The Dance of the Seven Deidly Synnis'? According to Spencer Baynes, "Imagination is the faculty which retains, gathers up, and realises our experiences." What experiences did Burns gather up and realise when he wrote his "Address to the Deil," or

1 Burckhardt, The Renaissance in Italy,' pp. 408-9.

2 Elements of Criticism,' Vol. ii. p. 285.

English Works,' Vol. i. p. 396.

Essays Moral and Literary,' Vol. ii. p. 42.

5 Collected Works,' Vol. ii. p. 26.

See Lectures on Metaphysics,' Vol. ii. pp. 265-6, 500.

Y

described the dance of warlocks and witches in Alloway Kirk, and detailed the gruesome setting of it? Like Hamilton, Poe asserts that Imagination is not creative, that "all novel conceptions are merely unusual combinations." His own poem The Raven " was, for instance, an "unusual combination" of-what? Imagination and Invention are discussed in The Athenæum,' 1886, Vol. ii. p. 197.

NOTE D.

LUCIDITY. (P. 202.)

A recent critic incidentally speaks of "the whorls of fluted sound,' the subtle cadences, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling in 'The House of Life ' "speaks of it, in short, as if it were something very exquisitely fine and altogether magical. I must confess that this kind of talk is sheer jargon to me. I hold, for my part, that all great poets and philosophers are great mainly in so far as they are capable of making a great appeal to Smith and Brown, because they have so much of those gentlemen in them, not because they have so little, as some of the critics seem to suggest; not because they have so little of common humanity in them, or that they are so vapourish, but because they are vitalised with the best elements of humanity. Thus I am of opinion that when a writer is very vague, or very cryptic, or very subtle, he ceases to the extent of his vagueness, crypticism, or subtlety to be either a poet or a philosopher, but contrariwise, becomes an egotist or vain person; perhaps an oddity, simply; perhaps a humbug or a charlatan; perhaps a bore. Further, in so far as a man can only make his appeal to specialists, I should say that either as poet or philosopher his claims must be small.

At his best no great literary genius needs commentators and elucidators. In so far as a great genius even needs elucidation, I doubt if he is a great genius. He is at his worst when he is obscure-he is a babbler and a barbarian unto me. It is always the first function of genius to elucidate a subject, to show it in its fulness as far as possible.

It should be considered that Emotion can only spring from that which is clearly known and strongly felt, and that in no case can it spring from the obscure and perplexed. All obscurity and perplexity in thought and utterance absolutely defeat any rational purpose the writer may have in view. Thus it happens that so many poets and philosophers are constantly defeating themselves and harassing their readers. If a gentleman talking in the bad Browningesque manner were to buttonhole me in Eternity, I should make a very sincere effort either to reform him or to break away from him. In order to excite emotion, which is the first and most precious function of Poetry, your meaning, I repeat, must be clear; and the clearer your meaning, the more effective will your power be. Let all poets mark, learn, and inwardly digest this great truth, and be admonished to hate obscurity.

INDEX.