Nor does our Poet, unless he be a charlatan, pretend to bring home some
hieratic message above the understanding of his fellows: for he is an
interpreter, and the interpreter's success depends upon hitting his
hearer's intelligence. Failing that, he misses everything and is null.
To put it in another way--at the base of all Literature, of all Poetry,
as of all Theology, stands one rock: _the very highest Universe Truth is
something so absolutely simple that a child can understand it._ This is
what Emerson means when he tells us that the great writers never _seem
to condescend_; that yonder slip of a boy who has carried off
Shakespeare to the window-seat, can feel with King Harry or Hamlet or
Coriolanus, with Rosalind or Desdemona or Miranda. For the moment he
_is_ any given one of these, because any human soul contains them all.
And some such thought we must believe to have been in Our Lord's mind
when He said, "I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that
Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast
revealed them unto babes." For as the Universe is one, so the individual
human souls that apprehend it have no varying values intrinsically, but
one equal value. They differ only in power to apprehend, and this may be
more easily hindered than helped by the conceit begotten of finite
knowledge. I would even dare to quote of this Universal Truth the words
I once hardily put into the mouth of John Wesley concerning divine Love:
"I see now that if God's love reaches up to every star and down to every
poor soul on Earth, it must be something vastly simple, so simple that
all dwellers on earth may be assured of it--as all who have eyes may be
assured of the planet shining yonder at the end of the street--and so
vast that all bargaining is below it, and they may inherit it without
considering their deserts." The message, then, which one Poet brings
home, is no esoteric one: as Johnson said of Gray's _Elegy_, "it abounds
with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to
which every bosom returns an echo." It exalts us through the best in us,