dances are not quite ‘rational,’ so the lyric poets are, so to speak, not quite ‘all there.’ ...  They tell us,” he goes on condescendingly, “that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them from the gardens and dells of the Muses; that, like the bees, they wing from one flower to another.  Yes of a truth:  the Poet is a light and a winged and a holy thing, without invention in him until he is inspired and out of his senses, and out of his own wit; until he has attained to this he is but a feeble thing, unable to utter his oracles.”  I can imagine all this reported to Homer in the Shades and Homer answering with a smile:  “Well, and who in the world is denying it?  I certainly did not, while I lived and sang upon earth.  Nay, I never even sang, but invited the Muse to sing to me and through me. [Greek:  Menin haeide theha ...  Handra moi hennepe, Moysa.]—­Surely the dear fellow might remember the first line of my immortal works!  And if he does remember, and is only bringing it up against me that in the intervals of doing my work in life I was a feeble fellow, go back and tell him that it is likely enough, yet I fail to see how it can be any business of his, since it was only my work that I ever asked for recognition.  They say that I used to go about begging a dinner on the strength of it.  Did I?...  I cannot remember.  Anyhow, that nuisance is over sometime ago, and his kitchen is safe!”

To you, who have followed the argument of this little book, the theory of poetic “inspiration” will be intelligible enough.  It earned a living in its day and, if revived in ours, might happily supersede much modern chatter about art and technique.  For it contains much truth:—­

  When the flicker of London sun falls faint on the Club-room’s green
          and gold,
  The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mould—­
  They scratch with their pens in the mould of their graves, and the ink
          and the anguish start,
  For the Devil mutters behind the leaves, “It’s pretty, but is it Art?"

The philosophers did poetry no great harm by being angry with it as an “inspired” thing:  for that, in a measure, it happens to be.  They did it far more harm when they took it seriously and made it out to be a form of teaching.  For by the nature of things there happens to be something of the pedant in every philosopher and the incurable propensity of the pedant is to remove everything—­but Literature especially—­out of the category to which it belongs and consider it in another with which it has but a remote concern. (Thus a man will talk of Chaucer as though his inflexions were the most important thing about him.) Now to acclaim Homer as a great teacher, and use him in the schools, was right enough so long as the Athenians remembered (and is right enough for us, so long as we remember) how he teaches us, or rather educates.  What we have described the Poet as doing for men—­drawing