There is just now as wide a divorce between poetry and the common-sense of all time, as there is between poetry and modern knowledge.  Our poets are not merely vague and confused, they are altogether fragmentary—­disjecta membra poetarum; they need some uniting idea.  And what idea?

Our answer will probably be greeted with a laugh.  Nevertheless we answer simply, What our poets want is faith.

There is little or no faith nowadays.  And without faith there can be no real art, for art is the outward expression of firm coherent belief.  And a poetry of doubt, even a sceptical poetry, in its true sense, can never possess clear and sound form, even organic form at all.  How can you put into form that thought which is by its very nature formless?  How can you group words round a central idea when you do not possess a central idea?  Shakespeare in his one sceptic tragedy has to desert the pure tragic form, and Hamlet remains the beau-ideal of “the poetry of doubt.”  But what would a tragedy be in which the actors were all Hamlets, or rather scraps of Hamlets?  A drama of Hamlet is only possible because the one sceptic is surrounded by characters who have some positive faith, who do their work for good or evil undoubtingly while he is speculating about his.  And both Ophelia, and Laertes, Fortinbras, the king, yea the very grave-digger, know well enough what they want, whether Hamlet does or not.  The whole play is, in fact, Shakespeare’s subtle reductio ad absurdum of that very diseased type of mind which has been for the last forty years identified with “genius”—­with one difference, namely, that Shakespeare, with his usual clearness of conception, exhibits the said intellectual type pure and simple, while modern poets degrade and confuse it, and all the questions dependent on it, by mixing it up unnecessarily with all manner of moral weaknesses, and very often moral crimes.

But the poet is to have a faith nowadays of course—­a “faith in nature.”  This article of Wordsworth’s poetical creed is to be assumed as the only necessary one, and we are to ignore altogether the somewhat important fact that he had faith in a great deal besides nature, and to make that faith in nature his sole differentia and source of inspiration.  Now we beg leave to express not merely our want of faith in this same “faith in nature,” but even our ignorance of what it means.  Nature is certain phenomena, appearances.  Faith in them is simply to believe that a red thing is red, and a square thing square; a sine qua non doubtless in poetry, as in carpentry, but which will produce no poetry, but only Dutch painting and gardeners’ catalogues—­in a word, that lowest form of art, the merely descriptive; and into this very style the modern naturalist poets, from the times of Southey and Wordsworth, have been continually falling, and falling therefore into baldness and vulgarity.  For mere description cannot represent even the outlines