authoritative sentence of criticism of literature, a sentence that should
save the world the trouble of some of its futile, violent, and weak
experiments: "Law, the rectitude of humanity," says Mr Coventry Patmore,
"should be the poet's only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has been
the subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse's
will and knew it not. As all the music of verse arises, not from
infraction but from inflection of the law of the set metre; so the
greatest poets have been those the _modulus_ of whose verse has been most
variously and delicately inflected, in correspondence with feelings and
passions which are the inflections of moral law in their theme. Law puts
a strain upon feeling, and feeling responds with a strain upon law.
Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality of poetic language is a
continual _slight_ novelty. In the highest poetry, like that of Milton,
these three modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, all
chime together in praise of the truer order of life."

And like that order is the order of the figure of man, an order most
beautiful and most secure when it is put to the proof. That perpetual
proof by perpetual inflection is the very condition of life. Symmetry is
a profound, if disregarded because perpetually inflected, condition of
human life.

The nimble art of Japan is unessential; it may come and go, may settle or
be fanned away. It has life and it is not without law; it has an obvious
life, and a less obvious law. But with Greece abides the obvious law and
the less obvious life: symmetry as apparent as the symmetry of the form
of man, and life occult like his unequal heart. And this seems to be the
nobler and the more perdurable relation.