Aspects of Literature Part 11

The humorous exactness and detachment of the description are remarkable, and we feel that there was more than the supersession of a small by a great idol in this second phase. By April he is at Jena, 'only 15 miles from Goethe's grave, whose inhabitant has taken the place of Thomas Hardy (successor to Masefield) as my favourite prophet.'

'I hope (if nothing else) before I leave Germany to get a thorough hang of _Faust_.... The worst of a piece like _Faust_ is that it completely dries up any creative instincts or attempts in oneself.

There is nothing that I have ever thought or ever read that is not somewhere contained in it, and (what is worse) explained in it.'

He had a sublime contempt for any one with whom he was not drunk. He lumped together 'nasty old Lyttons, Carlyles, and d.i.c.kenses.' And the intoxication itself was swift and fleeting. There was something wrong with Goethe by July; it is his 'entirely intellectual' life.

'If Goethe really died saying "more light," it was very silly of him: what _he_ wanted was more warmth.'

And he writes home for Richard Jefferies, the man of his own county--for through Marlborough he had made himself the adopted son of the Wiltshire Downs.

'In the midst of my setting up and smashing of deities--Masefield, Hardy, Goethe--I always fall back on Richard Jefferies wandering about in the background. I have at least the tie of locality with him.'

A day or two after we incidentally discover that Meredith is up (though not on Olympus) from a denunciation of Browning on the queer non- (or super-) aesthetic grounds of which we have spoken:--

'There is much in B. I like. But my feeling towards him has (ever since I read his life) been that of his to the "Lost Leader." I cannot understand him consenting to live a purely literary life in Italy, or (worse still) consenting to be lionised by fashionable London society. And then I always feel that if less people read Browning, more would read Meredith (his poetry, I mean.)'

Then, while he was walking in the Moselle Valley, came the war. He had loved Germany, and the force of his love kept him strangely free from illusions; he was not the stuff that "our modern Elizabethans" are made of. The keen candour of spiritual innocence is in what he wrote while training at Shorncliffe:--

'For the joke of seeing an obviously just cause defeated, I hope Germany will win. It would do the world good, and show that real faith is not that which says "we _must_ win for our cause is just,"

but that which says "our cause is just: therefore we can disregard defeat."'...

'England--I am sick of the sound of the word. In training to fight for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy, that terrible middle-cla.s.s sloth of outlook and appalling "imaginative indolence" that has marked us out from generation to generation.... And yet we have the impudence to write down Germany (who with all their bigotry are at least seekers) as "Huns," because they are doing what every brave man ought to do and making experiments in morality. Not that I approve of the experiment in this particular case. Indeed I think that after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth. "For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country." But all these convictions are useless for me to state since I have not had the courage of them.

What a worm one is under the cart-wheels--big, clumsy, careless, lumbering cart-wheels--of public opinion. I might have been giving my mind to fight against Sloth and Stupidity: instead, I am giving my body (by a refinement of cowardice) to fight against the most enterprising nation in the world.'

The wise arm-chair patriots will shake their heads; but there is more wisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaders written throughout the war. Sorley was fighting for more than he said; he was fighting for his Wiltshire Downs as well. But he fought in complete and utter detachment. He died too soon (in October, 1915), to suffer the c.u.mulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of 1917. There is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the last always the crystal clarity of the vision of the unbroken.

His intellectual evolution went on to the end. No wonder that he found Rupert Brooke's sonnets overpraised:--

'He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice.... It was not that "they" gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but that the essence of these things had been endangered by circ.u.mstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them. He has clothed his att.i.tude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental att.i.tude.'

Remember that a boy of nineteen is writing, and think how keen is this criticism of Brooke's war sonnets; the seeker condemns without pity one who has given up the search. 'There is no such thing as a just war,'

writes this boy. 'What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan.' From this position Sorley never flinched. Never for a moment was he renegade to his generation by taking 'the sentimental att.i.tude.' Neither had he in him an atom of the narrowness of the straiter sect.

Though s.p.a.ce forbids, we will follow out his progress to the last. We do not receive many such gifts as this book; the authentic voice of those lost legions is seldom heard. We can afford, surely, to listen to it to the end. In November, 1914, Sorley turns back to the Hardy of the poems.

After rejecting 'the actual "Satires of Circ.u.mstance"' as bad poetry, and pa.s.sing an incisive criticism on 'Men who March away,' he continues:--

'I cannot help thinking that Hardy is the greatest artist of the English character since Shakespeare; and much of _The Dynasts_ (except its historical fidelity) might be Shakespeare. But I value his lyrics as presenting himself (the self he does not obtrude into the comprehensiveness of his novels and _The Dynasts_) as truly, and with faults as well as strength visible in it, as any character in his novels. His lyrics have not the spontaneity of Shakespeare's or Sh.e.l.ley's; they are rough-hewn and jagged: but I like them and they stick.'

A little later, having finished _The Egoist_,--

'I see now that Meredith belongs to that cla.s.s of novelists with whom I do not usually get on so well (_e.g._ d.i.c.kens), who create and people worlds of their own so that one approaches the characters with amus.e.m.e.nt, admiration, or contempt, not with liking or pity, as with Hardy's people, into whom the author does not inject his own exaggerated characteristics.'

The great Russians were unknown to Sorley when he died. What would he not have found in those mighty seekers, with whom Hardy alone stands equal? But whatever might have been his vicissitudes in that strange company, we feel that Hardy could never have been dethroned in his heart, for other reasons than that the love of the Wess.e.x hills had crept into his blood. He was killed on October 13, 1915, shot in the head by a sniper as he led his company at the 'hair-pin' trench near Hulluch.

[JANUARY, 1920.

_The Cry in the Wilderness_

We have in Mr Irving Babbitt's _Rousseau and Romanticism_ to deal with a closely argued and copiously doc.u.mented indictment of the modern mind.

We gather that this book is but the latest of several books in which the author has gradually developed his theme, and we regret exceedingly that the preceding volumes have not fallen into our hands, because whatever may be our final att.i.tude towards the author's conclusions, we cannot but regard _Rousseau and Romanticism_ as masterly. Its style is, we admit, at times rather harsh and crabbed, but the critical thought which animates it is of a kind so rare that we are almost impelled to declare that it is the only book of modern criticism which can be compared for clarity and depth of thought with Mr Santayana's _Three Philosophical Poets_.

By endeavouring to explain the justice of that verdict we shall more easily give an indication of the nature and scope of Professor Babbitt's achievement. We think that it would be easy to show that in the last generation--we will go no further back for the moment, though our author's arraignment reaches at least a century earlier--criticism has imperceptibly given way to a different activity which we may call appreciation. The emphasis has been laid upon the uniqueness of the individual, and the unconscious or avowed aim of the modern 'critic' has been to persuade us to understand, to sympathise with and in the last resort to enter into the whole psychological process which culminated in the artistic creation of the author examined. And there modern criticism has stopped. There has been no indication that it was aware of the necessity of going further. Many influences went to shape the general conviction that mere presentation was the final function of criticism, but perhaps the chief of these was the curious contagion of a scientific terminology. The word 'objectivity' had a great vogue; it was felt that the spiritual world was a.n.a.logous to the physical; the critic was faced, like the man of science, with a ma.s.s of hard, irreducible facts, and his function was, like the scientist's, that of recording them as compendiously as possible and without prejudice. The unconscious programme was, indeed, impossible of fulfilment. All facts may be of equal interest to the scientist, but they are not to the literary critic. He chose those which interested him most for the exercise of his talent for demonstration. But that choice was, as a general rule, the only specifically critical act which he performed, and, since it was usually unmotived, it was difficult to attach even to that more than a 'scientific' importance. Reasoned judgments of value were rigorously eschewed, and even though we may presume that the modern critic is at times vexed by the problem why (or whether) one work of art is better than another, when each seems perfectly expressive of the artist's intention, the preoccupation is seldom betrayed in the language of his appreciation. Tacitly and insensibly we have reached a point at which all works of art are equally good if they are equally expressive. What every artist seeks to express is his own unique consciousness. As between things unique there is no possibility of subordination or comparison.

That does not seem to us an unduly severe diagnosis of modern criticism, although it needs perhaps to be balanced by an acknowledgment that the impulse towards the penetration of an artist's consciousness is in itself salutary, as a valuable adjunct to the methods of criticism, provided that it is definitely subordinated to the final critical judgment, before which uniqueness is an impossible plea. Such a diagnosis will no doubt be welcomed by those who belong to an older generation than that to which it is applied. But they should not rejoice prematurely. We require of them an answer to the question whether they were really in better case--whether they were not the fathers whose sins are visited upon the children. Professor Babbitt, at least, has no doubt of their responsibility. From his angle of approach we might rake their ranks with a cross-fire of questions such as these: When you invoked the sanction of criticism were you more than merely destructive? When you riddled religion with your scientific objections, did you not forget that religion is something more, far more than a nexus of historical facts or a cosmogony? When you questioned everything in the name of truth and science, why did you not dream of asking whether those creations of men's minds were _capax imperii_ in man's universe? What right had you to suppose that a man disarmed of tradition is stronger for his nakedness? Why did you not examine in the name of that same truth and science the moral nature of man, and see whether it was fit to bear the burden of intolerable knowledge which you put upon it? Why did you, the truth-seekers and the scientists, indulge yourselves in the most romantic dream of a natural man who followed instinctively the greatest good of the greatest number, which you yourselves never for one moment pursued? What hypocrisy or self-deception enabled you to clothe your statements of fact in a moral aura, and to blind yourselves and the world to the truth that you were killing a domesticated dragon who guarded the cave of a devouring hydra, whom you benevolently loosed? Why did you not see that the end of all your devotion was to shift man's responsibility for himself from his shoulders? Do you, because you clothed yourselves in the shreds of a moral respectability which you had not the time (or was it the courage?) to a.n.a.lyse, dare to denounce us because our teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes which you enjoyed?

But this indictment, it may be said by a modern critic, deals with morals, and we are discussing art and criticism. That the objection is conceivable is precisely the measure of our decadence. For the vital centre of our ethics is also the vital centre of our art. Moral nihilism inevitably involves an aesthetic nihilism, which can be obscured only temporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two.

The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised, and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last resort moral. The sense that they should be more moral than morality affords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so. Literature should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty prevails--where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics of the society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing a deeper insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far as he is man and not a beast, inevitably tends. Never, we suppose, was an age in which art stood in greater need of the true law of decorum than this. Its philosophy has played it false. It has pa.s.sed from the nebulous Hegelian adulation of the accomplished fact (though one would have thought that to a generation with even a vague memory of Aristotle's _Poetics_, the mere t.i.tle, _The Philosophy of History_ would have been an evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and of instinct. From one side comes the cry, 'Man _is_ a beast'; from the other, 'Trust your instincts.' The sole manifest employment of reason is to overthrow itself. Yet it should be, in conjunction with the imagination, the vital principle of control.

Professor Babbitt would have us back to Aristotle, or back to our senses, which is roughly the same thing. At all events, it is certain that in Aristotle the present generation would find the beginnings of a remedy for that fatal confusion of categories which has overcome the world. It is the confusion between existence and value. That strange malady of the mind by which in the nineteenth century material progress was supposed to create, _ipso facto_, a concomitant moral progress, and which so plunged the world into catastrophe, has its counterpart in a literature of objective realism. One of the most admired of contemporary works of fiction opens with an infant's memory of a mackintosh sheet, pleasantly warmed with its own water; another, of almost equal popularity among the cultivated, abounds with such reminiscences of the heroine as the paste of bread with which she filled her decaying teeth while she ate her breakfast. Yet the young writers who abuse their talents so unspeakably have right on their side when they refuse to listen to the condemnation p.r.o.nounced by an older generation. What right, indeed, have these to condemn the logical outcome of an anarchic individualism which they themselves so jealously cherished? They may not like the b.a.s.t.a.r.d progeny of the various mistresses they adored--of a Science which they enthroned above instead of subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which the so-called Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane devotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which appears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute indolence--but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it.

Let those who are so eager to cast the first stone at the aesthetic and moral anarchy of the present day consider Professor Babbitt's indictment of themselves and decide whether they have no sin:--

'"If I am to judge by myself," said an eighteenth-century Frenchman, "man is a stupid animal." Man is not only a stupid animal, in spite of his conceit of his own cleverness, but we are here at the source of his stupidity. The source is the moral indolence that Buddha, with his almost infallible sagacity, defined long ago. In spite of the fact that his spiritual and, in the long run, his material success, hinge on his ethical effort, man persists in dodging this effort, in seeking to follow the line of least or lesser resistance.

An energetic material working does not mend, but aggravate the failure to work ethically, and is therefore especially stupid. Just this combination has in fact led to the crowning stupidity of the ages--the Great War. No more delirious spectacle has ever been witnessed than that of hundreds of millions of human beings using a vast machinery of scientific efficiency to turn life into a h.e.l.l for one another. It is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a world which has gone wrong on first principles, a world that, in spite of all the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be caught once more in the terrible naturalistic trap. The dissolution of civilisation with which we are threatened is likely to be worse in some respects than that of Greece or Rome, in view of the success that has been obtained in 'perfecting the mystery of murder.'

Various traditional agencies are indeed still doing much to chain up the beast in man. Of these the chief is no doubt the Church. But the leadership of the Occident is no longer here. The leaders have succ.u.mbed in greater or less degree to naturalism, and so have been tampering with the moral law. That the brutal imperialist who brooks no obstacle to his l.u.s.t for domination has been tampering with this law goes without saying, but the humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way, for the very reason that it is less obvious. This tampering with the moral law, or, what amounts to the same thing, this overriding of the veto power in man, has been largely a result, though not a necessary result, of the rupture with the traditional forms of wisdom. The Baconian naturalist repudiated the past because he wished to be more positive and critical, to plant himself on the facts. But the veto power is itself a fact--the weightiest with which man has to reckon. The Rousseauistic naturalist threw off traditional control because he wished to be more imaginative. Yet without the veto power imagination falls into sheer anarchy. Both Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions. Yet the veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on hearsay, but is very immediate. The naturalistic leaders may be proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilisation.'

We find it impossible to refuse our a.s.sent to the main counts of this indictment. The deanthropocentrised universe of science is not the universe in which man has to live. That universe is at once smaller and larger than the universe of science: smaller in material extent, larger in spiritual possibility. Therefore to allow the perspective of science seriously to influence, much less control, our human values, is an invitation to disaster. Humanism must rea.s.sert itself, for even we can see that Shakespeares are better than Hamlets. The rea.s.sertion of humanism involves the re-creation of a practical ideal of human life and conduct, and a strict subordination of the impulses of the individual to this ideal. There must now be a period of critical and humanistic positivism in regard to ethics and to art. We may say frankly that it is not to our elders that we think of applying for its rudiments. We regard them as no less misguided and a good deal less honest than ourselves, It is among our anarchists that we shall look most hopefully for our new traditionalists, if only because, in literature at least, they are more keenly aware of the nature of the abyss on the brink of which they are trembling.

[FEBRUARY, 1920.

_Poetry and Criticism_

Nowadays we are all vexed by this question of poetry, and in ways peculiar to ourselves. Fifty years ago the dispute was whether Browning was a greater poet than Tennyson or Swinburne; to-day it is apparently more fundamental, and perhaps substantially more threadbare. We are in a curious half-conscious way incessantly debating what poetry is, impelled by a sense that, although we have been living at a time of extraordinarily prolific poetic production, not very much good has come out of it. Having thus pa.s.sed the stage at which the theory that poetry is an end in itself will suffice us, we vaguely cast about in our minds for some fuller justification of the poetic activity. A presentiment that our poetic values are chaotic is widespread; we are uncomfortable with it, and there is, we believe, a genuine desire that a standard should be once more created and applied.

What shall we require of poetry? Delight, music, subtlety of thought, a world of the heart's desire, fidelity to comprehensible experience, a glimpse through magic cas.e.m.e.nts, profound wisdom? All these things--all different, yet not all contradictory--have been required of poetry. What shall we require of her? The answer comes, it seems, as quick and as vague as the question. We require the highest. All that can be demanded of any spiritual activity of man we must demand of poetry. It must be adequate to all our experience; it must be not a diversion from, but a culmination of life; it must be working steadily towards a more complete universality.

Suddenly we may turn upon ourselves and ask what right we have to demand these things of poetry; or others will turn upon us and say: 'This is a lyrical age.' To ourselves and to the others we are bound to reply that poetry must be maintained in the proud position where it has always been, the sovereign language of the human spirit, the sublimation of all experience. In the past there has never been a lyrical age, though there have been ages of minor poetry, when poetry was no longer deliberately made the vehicle of man's profoundest thought and most searching experience. Nor was it the ages of minor poetry which produced great lyrical poetry. Great lyrical poetry has always been an incidental achievement, a parergon, of great poets, and great poets have always been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest argument of which the soul of man is capable.

Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and not merely the prose which can most easily be a.s.similated to the condition of poetry, such as Plato's _Republic_ or Milton's _Areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the colloquial prose of Tchehov's _Cherry Orchard_ has as good a claim to be called poetry as _The Essay on Man_, _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ as _The Ring and the Book_, _The Possessed_ as _Phedre_? Where are we to call a halt in the inevitable process by which the kinds of literary art merge into one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon what will prove to be in the last a.n.a.lysis a merely formal difference.

The difference we seek must be substantial and essential.

The very striking merit of Sir Henry Newbolt's _New Study of English Poetry_ is that he faces the ultimate problem of poetry with courage, sincerity, and an obvious and pa.s.sionate devotion to the highest spiritual activity of man. It has seldom been our good fortune to read a book of criticism in which we were so impressed by what we can only call a purity of intention; we feel throughout that the author's aim is single, to set before us the results of his own sincere thinking on a matter of infinite moment. Perhaps better, because subtler, books of literary criticism have appeared in England during the last ten years--if so, we have not read them; but there has been none more truly tolerant, more evidently free from malice, more certainly the product of a soul in which no lie remains. Whether it is that Sir Henry has like Plato's Cephalus lived his literary life blamelessly, we do not know, but certainly he produces upon us an effect akin to that of Cephalus's peaceful smile when he went on his way to sacrifice duly to the G.o.ds and left the younger men to the intricacies of their infinite debate.

Now it seems to us of importance that a writer like Sir Henry Newbolt should declare roundly that creative poetry and creative prose belong to the same kind. It is important not because there is anything very novel in the contention, but because it is opportune; and it is opportune because at the present moment we need to have emphasis laid on the vital element that is common both to creative poetry and creative prose. The general mind loves confusion, blest mother of haze and happiness; it loves to be able to conclude that this is an age of poetry from the fact that the books of words cut up into lines or sprinkled with rhymes are legion. An age of fiddlesticks! Whatever the present age is--and it is an age of many interesting characteristics--it is not an age of poetry.

It would indeed have a better chance of being one if fifty instead of five hundred books of verse were produced every month; and if all the impresarios were shouting that it was an age of prose. The differentia of verse is a merely trivial accident; what is essential in poetry, or literature if you will, is an act of intuitive comprehension. Where you have the evidence of that act, the sovereign aesthetic process, there you have poetry. What remains for you, whether you are a critic or a poet or both together, is to settle for yourself a system of values by which those various acts of intuitive comprehension may be judged. It does not suffice at any time, much less does it suffice at the present day, to be content with the uniqueness of the pleasure which you derive from each single act of comprehension made vocal. That contentment is the comfortable privilege of the amateur and the dilettante. It is not sufficient to get a unique pleasure from Mr De la Mare's _Arabia_ or Mr Davies's _Lovely Dames_ or Miss Katherine Mansfield's _Prelude_ or Mr Eliot's _Portrait of a Lady_, in each of which the vital act of intuitive comprehension is made manifest. One must establish a hierarchy, and decide which act of comprehension is the more truly comprehensive, which poem has the completer universality. One must be prepared not only to relate each poetic expression to the finest of its kind in the past, or to recognise a new kind if a new kind has been created, but to relate the kind to the finest kind.

That, as it seems to us, is the specifically critical activity, and one which is in peril of death from desuetude. The other important type of criticism which is a.n.a.lysis of poetic method, an investigation and appreciation of the means by which the poet communicates his intuitive comprehension to an audience, is in a less perilous condition. Where there are real poets--and only a bigot will deny that there are real poets among us now: we have just named four--there will always be true criticism of poetic method, though it may seldom find utterance in the printed word. But criticism of poetic method has, by hypothesis, no perspective and no horizons; it is concerned with a unique thing under the aspect, of its uniqueness. It may, and happily most often does, a.s.sume that poetry is the highest expression of the spiritual life of man; but it makes no endeavour to a.s.sess it according to the standards that are implicit in such an a.s.sumption. That is the function of philosophical criticism. If philosophical criticism can be combined with criticism of method--and there is no reason why they should not coexist in a single person; the only two English critics of the nineteenth century, Coleridge and Arnold, were of this kind--so much the better; but it is philosophical criticism of which we stand in desperate need at this moment.

A good friend of ours, who happens to be one of the few real poets we possess, once wittily summed up a general objection to criticism of the kind we advocate as 'always asking people to do what they can't.' But to point out, as the philosophical critic would, that poetry itself must inevitably languish if the more comprehensive kinds are neglected, or if a non-poetic age is allowed complacently to call itself lyrical, is not to urge the real masters in the less comprehensive kinds to desert their work. Who but a fool would ask Mr De la Mare to write an epic or Miss Mansfield to give us a novel? But he might be a wise man who called upon Mr Eliot to set himself to the composition of a poetic drama; and without a doubt he would deserve well of the commonwealth who should summon the popular imitators of Mr De la Mare, Mr Davies, or Mr Eliot to begin by trying to express something that they did comprehend or desired to comprehend, even though it should take them into thousands of unprintable pages. It is infinitely preferable that those who have so far given evidence of nothing better than a fatal fluency in insipid imitation of true lyric poets should fall down a precipice in the attempt to scale the very pinnacles of Parna.s.sus. There is something heroic about the most unmitigated disaster at such an alt.i.tude.

Moreover, the most marked characteristic of the present age is a continual disintegration of the consciousness; more or less deliberately in every province of man's spiritual life the reins are being thrown on to the horse's neck. The power which controls and disciplines sensational experience is, in modern literature, daily denied; the counterpart of this power which envisages the ideal in the conduct of one's own or the nation's affairs and unfalteringly pursues it is held up to ridicule. Opportunism in politics has its complement in opportunism in poetry. Mr Lloyd George's moods are reflected in Mr ----'s. And, beneath these heights, we have the queer spectacle of a whole race of very young poets who somehow expect to attain poetic intensity by the physical intensity with which they look at any disagreeable object that happens to come under their eye. Perhaps they will find some satisfaction in being reckoned among the curiosities of literature a hundred years hence; it is certainly the only satisfaction they will have. They, at any rate, have a great deal to gain from the acid of philosophical criticism. If a reaction to life has in itself the seeds of an intuitive comprehension it will stand explication. If a young poet's nausea at the sight of a toothbrush is significant of anything at all except bad upbringing, then it is capable of being refined into a vision of life and of being expressed by means of the appropriate mechanism or myth. But to register the mere facts of consciousness, undigested by the being, without a.s.sessment or reinforcement by the mind is, for all the connection it has with poetry, no better than to copy down the numbers of one's bus-tickets.