The very striking merit of Sir Henry Newbolt’s New Study of English Poetry is that he faces the ultimate problem of poetry with courage, sincerity, and an obvious and passionate devotion to the highest spiritual activity of man.  It has seldom been our good fortune to read a book of criticism in which we were so impressed by what we can only call a purity of intention; we feel throughout that the author’s aim is single, to set before us the results of his own sincere thinking on a matter of infinite moment.  Perhaps better, because subtler, books of literary criticism have appeared in England during the last ten years—­if so, we have not read them; but there has been none more truly tolerant, more evidently free from malice, more certainly the product of a soul in which no lie remains.  Whether it is that Sir Henry has like Plato’s Cephalus lived his literary life blamelessly, we do not know, but certainly he produces upon us an effect akin to that of Cephalus’s peaceful smile when he went on his way to sacrifice duly to the gods and left the younger men to the intricacies of their infinite debate.

Now it seems to us of importance that a writer like Sir Henry Newbolt should declare roundly that creative poetry and creative prose belong to the same kind.  It is important not because there is anything very novel in the contention, but because it is opportune; and it is opportune because at the present moment we need to have emphasis laid on the vital element that is common both to creative poetry and creative prose.  The general mind loves confusion, blest mother of haze and happiness; it loves to be able to conclude that this is an age of poetry from the fact that the books of words cut up into lines or sprinkled with rhymes are legion.  An age of fiddlesticks!  Whatever the present age is—­and it is an age of many interesting characteristics—­it is not an age of poetry.  It would indeed have a better chance of being one if fifty instead of five hundred books of verse were produced every month; and if all the impresarios were shouting that it was an age of prose.  The differentia of verse is a merely trivial accident; what is essential in poetry, or literature if you will, is an act of intuitive comprehension.  Where you have the evidence of that act, the sovereign aesthetic process, there you have poetry.  What remains for you, whether you are a critic or a poet or both together, is to settle for yourself a system of values by which those various acts of intuitive comprehension may be judged.  It does not suffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the present day, to be content with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you derive from each single act of comprehension made vocal.  That contentment is the comfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante.  It is not sufficient to get a unique pleasure from Mr De la Mare’s Arabia or Mr Davies’s Lovely Dames or Miss Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude or Mr Eliot’s Portrait of