“Do you mean, then, that whatever is poetical is useless?” I asked.

“Do you assert that whatever is useful is beautiful?” he retorted.

“A full reply to your question would need a ream of paper and a quarter of quills,” I answered; “but I think I may venture so far as to say that whatever subserves a noble end must in itself be beautiful.”

“Then a gallows must be beautiful because it subserves the noble end of ridding the world of malefactors?” he returned, promptly.

I had to think for a moment before I could reply.

“I do not see anything noble in the end,” I answered.

“If the machine got rid of malefaction, it would, indeed, have a noble end.  But if it only compels it to move on, as a constable does—­from this world into another—­I do not, I say, see anything so noble in that end.  The gallows cannot be beautiful.”

“Ah, I see.  You don’t approve of capital punishments.”

“I do not say that.  An inevitable necessity is something very different from a noble end.  To cure the diseased mind is the noblest of ends; to make the sinner forsake his ways, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, the loftiest of designs; but to punish him for being wrong, however necessary it may be for others, cannot, if dissociated from the object of bringing good out of evil, be called in any sense a noble end.  I think now, however, it would be but fair in you to give me some answer to my question.  Do you think the poetic useless?”

“I think it is very like my machine.  It may exercise the faculties without subserving any immediate progress.”

“It is so difficult to get out of the region of the poetic, that I cannot think it other than useful:  it is so widespread.  The useless could hardly be so nearly universal.  But I should like to ask you another question:  What is the immediate effect of anything poetic upon your mind?”

“Pleasure,” he answered.

“And is pleasure good or bad?”

“Sometimes the one, sometimes the other.”

“In itself?”

“I should say so.”

“I should not.”

“Are you not, then, by your very profession, more or less an enemy of pleasure?”

“On the contrary, I believe that pleasure is good, and does good, and urges to good.  Care is the evil thing.”

“Strange doctrine for a clergyman.”

“Now, do not misunderstand me, Mr Stoddart.  That might not hurt you, but it would distress me.  Pleasure, obtained by wrong, is poison and horror.  But it is not the pleasure that hurts, it is the wrong that is in it that hurts; the pleasure hurts only as it leads to more wrong.  I almost think myself, that if you could make everybody happy, half the evil would vanish from the earth.”

“But you believe in God?”

“I hope in God I do.”

“How can you then think that He would not destroy evil at such a cheap and pleasant rate.”