230 The Future Poetry
means she can find her way to her own riches, and even error is
her illegitimate child and serves, though wantonly, rebelliously
and through many a giddy turn, her mother’s many-formed self-
adaptive world-wide aim. Now it is something of this infinite
Truth which poetry succeeds in giving us with a high power, in
its own way of beauty, by its own opulent appointed means. The
channel is different from those of her other activities because the
power is of another kind. Infinite Truth has her many distinct
ways of expressing and finding herself and each way must be
kept distinct and the law of one must not be applied to the law
of another form of her self-expression; and yet that does not
mean that the material of one cannot be used as the material
of another, though it must be cast by a different power into a
different mould, or that all do not meet on their tops. Truth of
poetry is not truth of philosophy or truth of science or truth
of religion only, because it is another way of self-expression of
infinite Truth so distinct that it appears to give quite another face
of things and reveal quite another side of experience. A poet may
have a religious creed or subscribe to a system of philosophy or
take rank himself like Lucretius or certain Indian poets as a
considerable philosophical thinker or succeed like Goethe as a
scientist as well as a poetic creator, but the moment he begins
to argue out his system intellectually in verse or puts a dressed-
up science straight into metre or else inflicts like Wordsworth or
Dryden rhymed sermons or theological disputations on us, he is
breaking the law. And even if he does not move so far astray,
yet the farther he goes in that direction even within the bounds
of his art, he is, though it has often been done with a tolerable,
sometimes a considerable or total success, treading on unfirm
or at any rate on lower ground. It is difficult for him there to
maintain the authentic poetic spirit and pure inspiration.
For this is another cult and worship and the moment he
stands before the altar of the Muse, he has to change his robes
of mind and serve the rites of a different consecration. He has
to bring out into the front that other personality in him who
looks with a more richly irised seeing eye and speaks with a
more rapturous voice. The others have not normally the same