imaginative.  Poetry is a house of many mansions.  It includes fine poetry and foolish poetry, noble poetry and base poetry.  The chief duty of criticism is the praise—­the infectious praise—­of the greatest poetry.  The critic has the right to demand not only a transfiguration of life, but a noble transfiguration of life.  Swinburne transfigures life in Anactoria no less than Shakespeare transfigures it in King Lear.  But Swinburne’s is an ignoble, Shakespeare’s a noble transfiguration.  Poetry may be divine or devilish, just as religion may be.  Literary criticism is so timid of being accused of Puritanism that it is chary of admitting that there may be a Heaven and a Hell of poetic genius as well as of religious genius.  The moralists go too far on the other side and are tempted to judge literature by its morality rather than by its genius.  It seems more reasonable to conclude that it is possible to have a poet of genius who is nevertheless a false poet, just as it is possible to have a prophet of genius who is nevertheless a false prophet.  The lover of literature will be interested in them all, but he will not finally be deceived into blindness to the fact that the greatest poets are spiritually and morally, as well as aesthetically, great.  If Shakespeare is infinitely the greatest of the Elizabethans, it is not merely because he is imaginatively the greatest; it is also because he had a soul incomparably noble and generous.  Sir Henry Newbolt deals in an interesting way with this ennoblement of life that is the mark of great poetry.  He does not demand of poetry an orthodox code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism.

The greatest value of his book, however, lies in the fact that he treats poetry as a natural human activity, and that he sees that poetry must be able to meet the challenge to its right to exist.  The extreme moralist would deny that it had a right to exist unless it could be proved to make men more moral.  The hedonist is content if it only gives him pleasure.  The greatest poets, however, do not accept the point of view either of the extreme moralist or of the hedonist.  Poetry exists for the purpose of delivering us neither to good conduct nor to pleasure.  It exists for the purpose of releasing the human spirit to sing, like a lark, above this scene of wonder, beauty and terror.  It is consonant both with the world of good conduct and the world of pleasure, but its song is a voice and an enrichment of the earth, uttered on wings half-way between earth and heaven.  Sir Henry Newbolt suggests that the reason why hymns almost always fail as poetry is that the writers of hymns turn their eyes away so resolutely from the earth we know to the world that is only a formula.  Poetry, in his view, is a transfiguration of life heightened by the home-sickness of the spirit from a perfect world.  But it must always use the life we live as the material of its joyous vision.  It is born of our double attachment to Earth and to Paradise.  There is no formula for absolute beauty, but the poet can praise the echo and reflection of it in the songs of the birds and the colours of the flowers.  It is open to question whether