But for all kinds of poetry alike there was one point on which they were rigidly exacting; the adaptability of the subject to the kind of poetry selected, and the careful construction of the poem.

How different a way of thinking from this is ours!  We can hardly at the present day understand what Menander[13] meant, when he told a man who enquired as to the progress of his comedy that he had finished it, not having yet written a single line, because he had constructed the action of it in his mind.  A modern critic would have assured him that the merit of his piece depended on the brilliant things which arose under his pen as he went along.  We have poems which seem to exist merely for the sake of single lines and passages; not for the sake of producing any total-impression.  We have critics who seem to direct their attention merely to detached expressions, to the language about the action, not to the action itself.  I verily think that the majority of them do not in their hearts believe that there is such a thing as a total-impression to be derived from a poem at all, or to be demanded from a poet; they think the term a commonplace of metaphysical criticism.  They will permit the poet to select any action he pleases, and to suffer that action to go as it will, provided he gratifies them with occasional bursts of fine writing, and with a shower of isolated thoughts and images.  That is, they permit him to leave their poetical sense ungratified, provided that he gratifies their rhetorical sense and their curiosity.  Of his neglecting to gratify these, there is little danger; he needs rather to be warned against the danger of attempting to gratify these alone; he needs rather to be perpetually reminded to prefer his action to everything else; so to treat this, as to permit its inherent excellences to develop themselves, without interruption from the intrusion of his personal peculiarities:  most fortunate when he most entirely succeeds in effacing himself, and in enabling a noble action to subsist as it did in nature.

But the modern critic not only permits a false practice:  he absolutely prescribes false aims.  “A true allegory of the state of one’s own mind in a representative history,” the poet is told, “is perhaps the highest thing that one can attempt in the way of poetry.”  And accordingly he attempts it.  An allegory of the state of one’s own mind, the highest problem of an art which imitates actions!  No assuredly, it is not, it never can be so:  no great poetical work has ever been produced with such an aim. Faust itself, in which something of the kind is attempted, wonderful passages as it contains, and in spite of the unsurpassed beauty of the scenes which relate to Margaret, Faust itself, judged as a whole, and judged strictly as a poetical work, is defective:  its illustrious author, the greatest poet of modern times, the greatest critic of all times, would have been the first to acknowledge it; he only defended his work, indeed, by asserting it to be “something incommensurable.”