with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction
that unless you are suffused -- soul and body, one might say --
with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in love
-- that is, the love of all things in their proper relation --
unless you are suffused with this love, do not dare to meddle with beauty;
unless you are suffused with beauty, do not meddle with love;
unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness; --
in a word, unless you are suffused with beauty, truth, wisdom, goodness,
AND love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist."**

--
* `The English Novel', p. 272 f.
** `The English Novel', p. 280. Of the numerous discussions of this thesis,
the student should consult at least those by Matthew Arnold
(`Preface' to his edition of `Wordsworth's Poems'),
John Ruskin (`Stones of Venice', vol. iii., chap. iv.),
and Victor Hugo (`William Shakespeare', Book VI.).
--




VI. Conclusion



Milton has somewhere said that in order to be a great poet
one must himself be a true poem, a dictum none the less trustworthy
because of its inapplicability to its author along with
several other great poets. Now of all English poets,