[59] Plato, /Laws/, 959.

[60] Anth. Pal. vii. 670.

[61] Ibid. vii. 378, {agallomenoi kai taphon os thalamon}.


XV

Criticism, to be made effectively, must be made from beyond and
outside the thing criticised. But as regards life itself, such an
effort of abstraction is more than human. For the most part poetry
looks on life from a point inside it, and the total view differs, or
may even be reversed, with the position of the observer. The shifting
of perspective makes things appear variously both in themselves and in
their proportion to other things. What lies behind one person is
before another; the less object, if nearer, may eclipse the greater;
where there is no fixed standard of reference, how can it be
determined what is real and what apparent, or whether there be any
absolute fact at all? To some few among men it has been granted to
look on life as it were from without, with vision unaffected by the
limit of view and the rapid shifting of place. These, the poets who
see life steadily and whole, in Matthew Arnold's celebrated phrase,
are for the rest of mankind almost divine. We recognise them as such
through a sort of instinct awakened by theirs and responding to it,
through the inarticulate divinity of which we are all in some degree
partakers.

These are the great poets; and we do not look, in any Anthology of