In the last century, when the intellectual and didactic element had intruded to such an extent into the kingdom which belongs to poetry, it was against the claims of the understanding that an artist like Goethe had to protest.  ’The more incomprehensible to the understanding a poem is the better for it,’ he said once, asserting the complete supremacy of the imagination in poetry as of reason in prose.  But in this century it is rather against the claims of the emotional faculties, the claims of mere sentiment and feeling, that the artist must react.  The simple utterance of joy is not poetry any more than a mere personal cry of pain, and the real experiences of the artist are always those which do not find their direct expression but are gathered up and absorbed into some artistic form which seems, from such real experiences, to be the farthest removed and the most alien.

‘The heart contains passion but the imagination alone contains poetry,’ says Charles Baudelaire.  This too was the lesson that Theophile Gautier, most subtle of all modern critics, most fascinating of all modern poets, was never tired of teaching—­’Everybody is affected by a sunrise or a sunset.’  The absolute distinction of the artist is not his capacity to feel nature so much as his power of rendering it.  The entire subordination of all intellectual and emotional faculties to the vital and informing poetic principle is the surest sign of the strength of our Renaissance.

We have seen the artistic spirit working, first in the delightful and technical sphere of language, the sphere of expression as opposed to subject, then controlling the imagination of the poet in dealing with his subject.  And now I would point out to you its operation in the choice of subject.  The recognition of a separate realm for the artist, a consciousness of the absolute difference between the world of art and the world of real fact, between classic grace and absolute reality, forms not merely the essential element of any aesthetic charm but is the characteristic of all great imaginative work and of all great eras of artistic creation—­of the age of Phidias as of the age of Michael Angelo, of the age of Sophocles as of the age of Goethe.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day:  rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.  For to most of us the real life is the life we do not lead, and thus, remaining more true to the essence of its own perfection, more jealous of its own unattainable beauty, is less likely to forget form in feeling or to accept the passion of creation as any substitute for the beauty of the created thing.