on a smaller canvas he aims to make himself completely expressive of
himself. That, also, is the aim of the greater artist who expresses
himself through the medium of a world of characters of his own creation.
He needs that machinery, if a coarse and non-organic metaphor may be
tolerated, for the explication of his own intuitions of the ideal, which
are so various that the attempt to express them through the _persona_ of
himself would inevitably end in confusion. That is why the great poetic
genius is never purely lyrical, and why the greatest lyrics are as often
as not the work of poets who are only seldom lyrical.

Moreover, every act of intuition or divination of the ideal in act in
the world of men must be set, implicitly or explicitly, in relation to
the absolute ideal. In subordinating its particular intuitions to the
absolute ideal art is, therefore, merely asserting its own sovereign
autonomy. True criticism is itself an organic part of the whole activity
of art; it is the exercise of sovereignty by art upon itself, and not
the imposition of an alien. To use our previous metaphor, as art is the
consciousness of life, criticism is the consciousness of art. The
essential activity of true criticism is the harmonious control of art by
art. This is at the root of a confusion in the thought of Mr. Eliot,
who, in his just anxiety to assert the full autonomy of art, pronounces
that the true critic of poetry is the poet and has to smuggle the
anomalous Aristotle in on the hardly convincing ground that 'he wrote
well about everything,' and has, moreover, to elevate Dryden to a purple
which he is quite unfitted to wear. No, what distinguishes the true
critic of poetry is a truly æsthetic philosophy. In the present state
of society it is extremely probable that only the poet or the artist
will possess this, for art and poetry were never more profoundly
divorced from the ordinary life of society than they are at the present
day. But the poet who would be a critic has to make his æsthetic