“Then why not witness, calmly gazing,
  If earth holds aught—­speak truth—­above her? 
  Above this tress, and this, I touch
  But cannot praise, I love so much!"[A]

[Footnote A:  Song (Dramatic Lyrics).]

This characteristic of the work of art brings with it an important practical consequence, because being complete, it appeals to the whole man.

“Poetry,” it has been well said, is “the idealized and monumental utterance of the deepest feelings.”  And poetic feelings, it must not be forgotten, are deepest; that is, they are the afterglow of the fullest activity of a complete soul, and not shallow titillations, or surface pleasures, such as the palate knows.  Led by poetry, the intellect so sees truth that it glows with it, and the will is stirred to deeds of heroism.  For there is hardly any fact so mean, but that when intensified by emotion, it grows poetic; as there is hardly any man so unimaginative, but that when struck with a great sorrow, or moved by a great passion, he is endowed for a moment with the poet’s speech.  A poetic fact, one may almost say, is just any fact at its best.  Art, it is true, looks at its object through a medium, but it always seems its inmost meaning.  In Lear, Othello, Hamlet, in Falstaff and Touchstone, there is a revelation of the inner truth of human life beyond the power of moral science to bestow.  We do well to seek philosophy in the poets, for though they teach only by hints and parables, they nevertheless reflect the concrete truth of life, as it is half revealed and half concealed in facts.  On the other hand, the reflective process of philosophy may help poetry; for, as we shall show, there is a near kinship between them.  Even the critical analyst, while severing element from element, may help art and serve the poet’s ends, provided he does not in his analysis of parts forget the whole.  His function, though humble and merely preliminary to full poetic enjoyment, is not unimportant.  To appreciate the grandeur of the unity of the work of art, there must be knowledge of the parts combined.  It is quite true that the guide in the gallery is prone to be too talkative, and there are many who can afford to turn the commentator out of doors, especially if he moralizes.  But, after all, man is not pure sensibility, any more than he is pure reason.  And the aesthete will not lose if he occasionally allows those whom he may think less sensitive than himself to the charm of rhythmic phrase, to direct sober attention to the principles which lie embedded in all great poetry.  At the worst, to seek for truth in poetry is a protest against the constant tendency to read it for the sake of the emotions which it stirs, the tendency to make it a refined amusement and nothing more.  That is a deeper wrong to art than any which the theoretical moralist can inflict.  Of the two, it is better to read poetry for ethical doctrines than for fine sensations; for poetry purifies the passions only when it lifts the reader into the sphere of truths that are universal.