Truth? This is truth; this is the truth of Agincourt, the English patriotism, the warrior-kingship, the brotherhood begotten of the common peril. Poetry is truer than The poets, as Mrs. Browning

the facts.

sang, are

'The only truth-tellers now left to God,
The only speakers of essential truth
Opposed to relative, comparative
And temporal truths.'

Poetry, according to the often quoted sentence of Aristotle, is not only nobler but more philosophical than history. Hegel taught that in art were to be found the deepest interests of humanity, the most comprehensive truths of the mind. The truths of poetry he held to be the more genuine reality, the mere facts of experience the crueller deception. About a certain drawing by Prout of a well at Nuremberg, Mr. Ruskin has written: 'All the projecting windows and all the dormers in this square are of wood. But Prout could not stand the inconsistency and deliberately petrified all the wood. Very naughty of him! I have nothing to say in extenuation of this offence; and

alas! secondly, the houses have, in reality, only three stories, and he has put a fourth on, out of his inner consciousness! I never knew him do such a thing before or since: but the end of it is, that this drawing of Nuremberg is immensely more Nurembergy than the town itself, and a quite glorious piece of mediæval character.' And if Aristotle and Hegel, and Mrs. Browning and Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Froude be witnesses all suspect to the scientific, let me call Thucydides. Scientific as was his method, Thucydides too in his famous speeches dared to be truer than the facts, set himself avowedly 'to consider principally what might be pertinently said upon every occasion to the points in debate.' The actual speakers of Corcyra or Platæa never, we may be sure, grasped the import of the situation with the grip of the great historian; had not the philosophic insight with which he endows them. Yet nowhere shall you find truer Greek history than in those speeches. Poetry and romance and art distil the spirit of truth out of the facts. To them we owe the most vital and fruitful ideas of history. Never in

this work-a-day world was there an historical Age of Chivalry; never on this sinful earth an historical Age of Faith. Be sure that these too are but an 'added gleam,' a 'light that never was on sea or land,' that here too we have 'the consecration and, the poet's dream.' The Catholic Church of devout imaginations is historically as unreal as Arthur's Round Table. But in another sense both Round Table and Church are real with the highest kind of reality. Such ideals, and such ideals alone, it is which give any permanent reality to the fleeting generations of men, who, save in so far as they embody them in their lives, are but as the beasts that perish. The real spirit of an age only comes at last to its proper expression in its secular poet. Shakespeare is the highest truth of feudal England, as Dante was the truth of Catholic Italy or Homer of heroic Greece. Shakespeare's England is what England had aspired to be, had striven to be, had attained to being in certain moments and in certain

men:

'This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.'

All honour then to the scientific investigator; but honour likewise to the 'delightfulhistorians,' and glory in the highest to Shakespeare and the poets. For, as Wordsworth finely said: Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge-it is as immortal as the heart of man.'

THE GREAT WORK

A WRITER in the Daily News, for reasons of his own, entered a protest lately against what he called the Magnum Opus theory. A man's friends and acquaintance, he complained, were continually urging him to write a Great Work. It was in vain that the victim protested that he did not want to write a Great Work; or that he had written a Great Work which nobody ever heard of; or that he could not live (in this mortal state) by a Great Work, and must produce things which would yield him his daily bread. He might have added that if he did write one, the very last to read it would be these same monitors.

That a man's female relations should hug the delusion that he was born for some high emprise and should persist in exhortation is, no doubt, in the order of nature. But