worthy purpose," even though that purpose was not consciously in the writer's mind when he began the act of composition. Now for the sentence to which I just referred:

Our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and as, by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature, and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified. (Works, Globe ed., p. 851.)

In other words, rightly trained feelings are the source of sound thinking; and sound thinking generates feeling which spontaneously communicates itself, through poetry, to others, thereby again setting up the formation of both fine feelings and right ideas. This process is certainly, in large measure, moral in character. I need not pause to point out how significant is such a piece of reasoning as this, both of Wordsworth himself and of the period when the socalled "organic" character of the poetic process was a new and vital conception.1

'It was De Quincey, years afterward, who set forth most explicitly this aspect of Wordsworth's doctrine, doubtless in good part because of his inveterate admiration of the poet's work: I refer to the account of "the literature of power" in the essay on Pope (1848). For De Quincey "the literature of power" means, of course, substantially the same as the "poetry" of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, that is, literature of the imagination, without special reference to the question of prose or verse form. Note especially these passages:

"It is in relation to these great moral capacities of man that the literature of power, as contradistinguished from that of knowledge, lives and has its field of action. . . . Tragedy, romance, fairy tale, or epopee, all alike restore to man's mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of mercy, of retribution, which else (left to the support of daily life in its realities) would languish for want of sufficient illustration. . . . Hence the preëminency over all authors that merely teach, of the meanest that moves, or that teaches, if at all, indirectly by moving."

"The combinations into which the poetry of this planet has thrown our human passions of love and hatred, of admiration and contempt, exercise a power for bad or good over human life that cannot be contemplated, when stretching through many generations, without a sentiment allied to awe. And of this let every one be assured that he owes to the impassioned books which he has read many a thousand more of emotions than he can consciously trace back to them. Dim by their origination, these emotions yet arise in him, and mould him through life, like forgotten incidents of his childhood."

Beside the passage just quoted let me also put a sentence from a letter of Wordsworth's written some time later. The destiny of his poems, he wrote to Lady Beaumont, is "to console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; to teach the young, and the gracious of every age, to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous." (May 21, 1807; Knight's Life, ii, 88.) Again we see the poet's view of the natural moral effect of his art: perception, feeling, reflection, are to be stimulated, with both pleasure and virtue as the result.1

When we pass to Shelley, we find him rather more concerned to discuss our subject than either Coleridge or Wordsworth, though perhaps not so consistent in his theory and practice. He shared, in general, the views of his fellow poets of the romantic group, respecting the non-didactic nature of poetry, and at the same time was more disposed than any of them to make his poetry a specific instrument in behalf of social morality as he viewed it. (In this comparison I do not include the later poetry of Wordsworth, written when his method had become specifically didactic.) In the Preface to the comparatively early Revolt of Islam Shelley wrote:

I have sought to enlist the harmony of metrical language, the ethereal combinations of the fancy, the rapid and subtle transitions of human passion, all those elements which essentially compose a poem, in the cause of a liberal and comprehensive morality, and in the view of kindling within the bosoms of my readers a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence nor misrepresentation nor prejudice can ever totally extinguish among mankind. (Works, Globe ed., p. 95.)

This is frank and clear, and the whole poem bears out the intention: the hero and heroine of the tale preach, from the beginning to the end of their careers, but depend on emotional stimulus"the kindling of a virtuous enthusiasm"-for the conversion of their hearers. A year later Shelley published a drama, The Cenci, in which there was no preaching at all, and in his preface disclaimed any attempt to make the exhibition of tragic suffering and crime

'One might find some analogous emphasis on the element of feeling in Coleridge too; as where, in "The Statesman's Manual" again, he observes that Shakespeare "has placed the greater number of his profoundest maxims and general truths, both political and moral, not in the mouths of men at ease, but of men under the influence of passion." (Bohn ed., p. 314.)

"subservient to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose." Yet he felt impelled to raise the question of the ethical end of such an exhibition, and added: "The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself; in proportion to the possession of which knowledge, every human being is wise, just, sincere, tolerant and kind." (Ibid., p. 298.) ously we are here very close to the Wordsworthian doctrine.

Obvi

Again, a year later, in introducing the drama of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley recurred to the subject, with an increased emphasis on the distinction between direct and indirect moral aims.

It is a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life. Didactic poetry is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse. My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust. (Ibid., p. 247.)

The phrase "beautiful idealisms of moral excellence" reminds us of the Renaissance critics, and in particular of the Platonists; and these, as we shall see presently, Shelley was studying at this period (1820). The same reminder becomes still more impressive when we turn to his chief discussion of our subject, the Defence of Poetry (written 1821).

This piece of passionate criticism, it will be recalled, was intended as a reply to an essay of Thomas Love Peacock's ("The Four Ages of Poetry"), in which the writer's attack upon poetry was not based primarily-if at all-on moral grounds. But in the course of his argument Shelley took up the traditional objection, which went back to Plato and the Christian fathers, that a great part of the characters and manners of poetry are "remote from moral perfection." His first answer to this is to the effect that poets clothe their characters in the admittedly ephemeral manners of whatever age is represented, "which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty." Following this he comes to

the gist of the matter, in a highly characteristic and important passage:

...

The whole objection, however, of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another. But poetry acts in another and diviner manner. [Here Shelley clearly echoes Sidney, whose Defense he had been re-reading to fortify himself for the present argument.] It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. . . . The great secret of morals is love, or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. . . . Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. (Works, ed. Forman, vii, 111.)

Two distinguishable claims, here made for the moral utility of poetry, must be noted, as summed up in two striking affirmations. "The great secret of morals is love;" and "The great instrument of moral good is the imagination." The latter point, the same which had already been made in the Preface to The Cenci, is substantially -as I have already remarked-the doctrine of Wordsworth. The former is more characteristically Shelleyan; it was not, of course, a wholly new invention, but was his special contribution to the poetics of his time. And as the great part of Wordsworth's early poetry is a commentary on his doctrine of the moral functions of the feelings, so the great part of Shelley's poetry is a commentary on his conception that the love of the beautiful is the fulfilling of the moral law.

Though I am confining myself, in this discussion, to the literary theories of the poets concerned, and not to their poetic practice, it seems well to pause for a moment to remark the further implications, with respect to the doctrines of Shelley just noticed, of two of the most important of his autobiographic poems. I refer to the dedication of The Revolt of Islam and the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. In the former, it will be recalled, he describes the early

impression made upon his nature when the voices heard from a schoolroom seemed to him

but one echo from a world of woes

The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

This moment he now thinks of as "the hour which burst my spirit's sleep." With streaming eyes (like those of Rousseau when there first occurred to him his notion of natural liberty in contrast with the tyrannies of civilization), he cried:

I will be wise,

And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannise.

Clearly this is just such a complex of imaginative feeling and moral impulse as he came to consider to be the supreme product of poetry. In like manner, in the "Hymn to Beauty," he recalls the moment when its shadow fell upon him:

I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine-have I not kept the vow?

But the notable point is, that in the following lines he abruptly connects this dedication with the hope that the Beauty, the "awful Loveliness," to which his allegiance was pledged, would "free this world from its dark slavery," binding its votary

To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Again we see Shelley's conception of the inseparable nature of beauty and moral goodness.

So much for a very brief survey of the doctrines of the chief romantic poets on the subject in hand. Before passing to a note or two regarding the sources of their doctrines, let me pause to call attention to a dissenting voice. As all theories are profitably studied through their opposites, the romantic theory of poetry is made to stand out the more clearly by contrasting it with the traditional view as it survived in the new age; and for this survival we do not need to go to some hard-hearted reviewer of the Edinburgh or the Quarterly, but find it most strikingly set forth in