The Sun of Poetic Truth 229and can be given by a powerful writer a wide appeal demanding
no effort of taste or understanding from the average man who
makes the multitude. A robust muscular and masculine poetry
suitable to the Anglo-Saxon genius can no doubt be the result
of this kind of aesthesis.
Then again there is the old academic conception, truth of the
cultivated intelligence, truth of reason, philosophic and scientific
truth, or, more pertinent to the matter, truth of a certain selective
imagination and taste consonant with reason and strong to give
a tempered beauty to just presentation and idea, the classical
or in its more formal shape the pseudo-classical aesthetic rule.
And in this connection we have many familiar notions chasing
each other across the field, such as on one side the compatibility
or incompatibility of philosophy and poetry or on the other the
definition of poetry as substantially a criticism of life though set
in an artistic form and a high and serious tone. And associated
with this view also we find very commonly a dislike of free
imagination and rich colour and the audacities of the fancy
and the far-off and shrouded voices and things visionary, subtle
and remote. The aesthetic mind varies, follows its own bent,
fashions its idea of poetic truth according to its own standard
of satisfaction and sets up as a canon and law its own manner
of response; there is a multitude of counsels, and each has this
common characteristic that it overstresses one side of the norm
of poetic creation. For the spirit of poetry is many-sided and
flexible in its processes, but firm and invariable in the central
law of its nature.
The poetic Truth of which I am speaking has nothing to
do with any of these limitations. Truth, as she is seen by us
in the end, is an infinite goddess, the very front and face of
Infinity and Aditi herself, the illimitable mother of all the gods.
This infinite, eternal and eternally creative Truth is no enemy of
imagination or even of free fancy, for they too are godheads and
can wear one of her faces or one of her expressive masks, while
imagination is perhaps the very colour of her creative process,
her births and movements are innumerable, her walk supple
and many-pathed, and through all divine powers and universal