He laughed at this, and said: 

“I think that’s rather a mid-Victorian view; I will confute you out of the Tennyson legend.  When Tennyson called Swinburne’s verse ‘poisonous honey, brought from France,’ Swinburne retorted by speaking of the laureate’s domestic treacle.  You can’t have both.  If you like treacle, you must not clamour for honey.”

“Yes, I prefer honey,” I said, “but you seem to me to be in search of what I called literary poetry.  That is what I am afraid of.  I don’t want the work of a mind fed on words, and valuing ideas the more that they are uncommon.  I hate what is called ‘strong’ poetry; that seems to me to be generally the coarsest kind of romanticism—­ melodrama in fact.  I want to have in poetry what we are getting in fiction—­the best sort of realism.  Realism is now abjuring the heroic theory; it has thrown over the old conventions, the felicitous coincidences, life arranged on ideal lines; and it has gone straight to life itself, strong, full-blooded, eager life, full of mistakes and blunders and failures and sharp disasters and fears.  Life goes shambling along like a big dog, but it has got its nose on the scent of something.  It is a much more mysterious and prodigious affair than life rearranged upon romantic lines.  It means something very vast indeed, though it splashes through mud and scrambles through hedges.  You may laugh at what you call ethics, but that is only a name for one of many kinds of collisions.  It is the fact that we are always colliding with something, always coming unpleasant croppers, that is the exciting thing.  I want the poet to tell me what the obscure winged thing is that we are following; and if he can’t explain it to me, I want to be made to feel that it is worth while following.  I don’t say that all life is poetical material.  I don’t think that it is; but there is a thing called beauty which seems to me the most maddeningly perfect thing in the world.  I see it everywhere, in the dawn, in the far-off landscape, with all its rolling lines of wood and field, in the faces and gestures of people, in their words and deeds.  That is a clue, a golden thread, a line of scent, and I shall be more than content if I am encouraged to follow that.”

“Ah,” he said, “now I partly agree with you.  It is precisely that which the new men are after; they take the pure gold of life and just coin it into word and phrase, and it is that which I discern in them.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I want something a great deal bigger than that.  I want to see it everywhere and in everything.  I don’t want to have to wall in a little space and make it silent and beautiful, and forget what is happening outside.  I want a poet to tell me what it is that leaps in the eyes and beckons in the smiles of people whom I meet—­people whom often enough I could not live with,—­the more’s the pity,—­but whom I want to be friends with, all the same.  I want the common joys and hopes and visions to be put into music.  And when I find a man, like Walt Whitman, who does show me the beauty and wonder and the strong affections and joys of simple hearts, so that I feel sure that we are all desiring the same thing, though we cannot tell each other what it is, then I feel I am in the presence of a poet indeed.”