It is
something which has nothing to do with the measure of their intellectual
powers or of their moral insight, but is the one quality which
essentially distinguishes the artist from the mere man of genius. Among
the English poets of the last generation, Keats is the only one who
early showed unmistakable signs of it, and developed it more and more
fully until his untimely death. Wordsworth, though in most respects a
far profounder man, attained it only now and then, indeed only once
perfectly,--in his "Laodamia." Now, though it be undoubtedly true from
one point of view that what a man has to say is of more importance than
how he says it, and that modern criticism especially is more apt to be
guided by its moral and even political sympathies than by aesthetic
principles, it remains as true as ever that only those things have been
said finally which have been said perfectly, and that this finished
utterance is peculiarly the office of poetry, or of what, for want of
some word as comprehensive as the German _Dichtung_, we are forced to
call imaginative literature. Indeed, it may be said that, in whatever
kind of writing, it is style alone that is able to hold the attention of
the world long. Let a man be never so rich in thought, if he is clumsy
in the expression of it, his sinking, like that of an old Spanish
treasureship, will be hastened by the very weight of his bullion, and
perhaps, after the lapse of a century, some lucky diver fishes up his
ingots and makes a fortune out of him.
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