The Sun of Poetic Truth 237the strongly felt movement and the living outcome, the vision
and life and inner experience, the spirit and power and body of
sweetness and beauty and delight. The tracing of close and too
meticulous bounds round the steps of poetic truth or turning
of its wide continental spheres into some limiting magic circle
seems therefore to have no real foundation. One may almost
though not quite say that there is nothing in infinite Truth that
the poet cannot make his material, even if it seems to belong
to other provinces of the mind, because all forms of human
experience approach each other on their sides of intuition and
inner life and vision and all meet in the spirit. The condition,
the limitation is only in the way and manner, — but that means
enormously much, — the necessity of the purely poetic way of
seeing and the subjection of the thing seen to the law of poetic
harmony and moved delight and beauty.
The real distinction therefore is in the primary or essential
aim of poetry and in the imperative condition which that aim
lays upon the art. Its function is not to teach truth of any partic-
ular kind, nor indeed to teach at all, nor to pursue knowledge
nor to serve any religious or ethical aim, but to embody beauty
in the word and give delight. But at the same time it is at any rate
part of its highest function to serve the spirit and to illumine and
lead through beauty and build by a high informing and revealing
delight the soul of man. And its field is all soul experience, its
appeal is to the aesthetic response of the soul to all that touches
it in self or world; it is one of the high and beautiful powers
of our inner and may be a power of our inmost life. All of the
infinite Truth of being that can be made part of that life, all that
can be made true and beautiful and living to that experience,
is poetic truth and a fit subject matter of poetry. But there are
always three things which we find present in the utterance and
which may be taken as the tests of its measure of power. First
there is a force of inspired seeing which gives us the appeal of
some reality of self or mind or world, whether in this material
field or the other planes of universal existence or of our own
being to which imagination is one of the gates, a seeing which
brings to us the power of its truth and the beauty of its image