fully built fuel without a kindling They are impatient of enclosures. produce heat. Their horizon stretches beyond the walls of any system. The best words that can be spoken express for them but a fringe of the truth; the whole is unspoken and unspeakable. They are free from the illusion of finality and it is but its cloudy border which truth Besides the absence from the poet's mind of didactic purpose, the fact that he writes from the sole impulse of selfexpression, by reason of the proof it furnishes of spontaneousness and sincerity gives his words a power of persuasive-completeness. They are conscious that ness such as the professing teacher can never reach. A simple lyric will move the heart more than whole tomes of the soundest divinity. The writer who, in revealing the moods of his own soul, in admitting us to his spiritual experiences in any of its critical moments, puts into words our own unspoken thoughts and feelings, not only gives us the delight of self-expression but also that feeling of community with our kind which is so essential a part of religion. Poetry and religion are alike in admitting us to a larger life than our own in lifting us out of the narrow thoughts of the private spirit, in inspiring us with generous affections, in inciting us to put the highest price on those things in life which we can most share with others, in which everyone is the richer, the more others possess them, the more, as Dante expresses it, one can say of them, they are yours as well as mine. III Poetry and religion are alike in their sense of the mystery of the universe. They have the same feeling of reverent wonder in the contemplation of the world and of man a feeling which is habitual, which never loses its freshness, which even what is most common and familiar will excite as though it were novel and contemplated for the first time. They are vividly conscious of the things which bring to a stand every faculty of man but wonder, which no science can account for or explain, of the problems which no philosophy can solve, of the mysteries which 'Heaven will not have earth to know.' And as the man of religious spirit is free from the illusion of finality he is also unconcerned for a premature consistency. He makes no pretension to totality or harmony in the perception of the various perspectives of truth. He is suspicious of the 'beautiful coherence' of systems. Here, too, the poet is in sympathy with him. He has the same taste for the infinite. He thinks as freely. His own vision is his authority. He looks into his own heart and writes. He prefers to tell the hour by looking at the sun rather than by consulting any time-keeper. He will run the risk of losing precision for the pleasure of original observation and of verifying the truth for himself. He is not afraid of contradicting himself so long as he veraciously reports what he at the moment sees and feels. Poetry and religion agree not only in feeling the presence of the mysterious and the infinite, they accept it with delight. For both it has a fascination a charm. 'I love,' said the author of Religio Medici, 'to lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O altitudo!' The secret of the charm is well discovered to us in the words of Carlyle: 'Well might the Ancients make Silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude or transcendental greatness; at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends. In the same sense, too, have poets sung "Hymns to the Night"; as if Night was nobler than Day, as if Day was but a small motley-colored veil spread transiently over the infinite bosom of Night, and did but deform and hide from us its purely transparent, eternal deeps. So, likewise, have they spoken and sung as if Silence were the grand epitome and complete sum total of all Harmony.' Emerson says the same thing in his own way: 'Silence is the solvent that destroys personality and gives us leave to be great and universal.' There is a greater charm in anything that is transcendently great than in any perfection we can see the end of. The mysterious the infinite-- so far from being depressing to the poetic or religious mind is exhilarating. In those passages of the Scripture in which the sense of mystery is most fully confessed, the language breaks into a rapture; it rises into the purest poetry. There is no book in the Bible which treats more of the mysteries of life than the book of Job; and there is none in which the poetry is more sublime: There is a path which no fowl knoweth and which the vulture's hath not seen. eye The lion's whelps have not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. Where shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of understanding? The depth saith - It is not in me, and the sea saith It is not with me. It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. No mention shall be made of corals or of pearls, for the price of wisdom is above rubies. Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven, what canst thou do? Deeper than hell, what canst thou know? The measure thereof is larger than the earth, and broader than the sea. In the New Testament thankfulness for the things that are not known and that pass understanding is more rapturous than for the things that are known: 0 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God; how unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out. Of him and through him and to him are all things; to whom be glory forever. The sense of the mystery of life, so far from depressing man in the scale of being immeasurably raises him. To be haunted by it, to have the impulse within us, to lift our eyes and stretch forth our hands to something above ourselves does it not relate us to the infinite and the eternal? It is the element in which we live and move and have our being. The infinite is immanent in everyone of us, in every creature of God, in the meanest life, in the commonest things. O world invisible, we view thee; IV Poetry and religion are akin in their idealism. They have the same feeling of the infinite on the moral as on the intellectual side. Their aspirations are insatiable. The prize well grasped is not worth a thought When the ungrasped gives a call. All the greatest poets have faith in the practicableness of the highest and best aspirations of the soul. Nor do they regard them as realizable only by a few rare spirits. They believe in a law of moral gravitation, in accordance with which the will of the pure runs down from them into other natures like water to a lower level.' In a law of moral illumination in accordance with which the light which first breaks on the mountain peaks descends to the valleys and floods them with its radiance. They believe that a fresh vision of the truth once promulgated can never be put aside. One accent of the Holy Ghost This heedless world hath never lost. The Christian idealism, the audacity of its optimism has nowhere out of Scripture received such expression as it has in poetry, as, for example, in Browning's Abt Vogler: All we have willed or dreamed of good shall The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard, The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky, Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard; Enough that he heard it once, we shall hear it by and by. To religious and poetic minds the infinite in the moral ideal is also exhilarating. Not that they are unvexed by the pressure and power of moral evil in the world and by all the suffering it entails not that they live in an aerial region where the still sad music of humanity does not reach them: not that they are unvisited by moods in which they feel the burthen and the mystery, the heavy and the weary weight of all their unintelligible world.' But they have in them a secret resource by which the burden is lightened. The poet we have just quoted tells us elsewhere what it is. VOL. 14-NO. 691 Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark And irremovable, gracious openings lie By which the soul, with patient steps of thought Now toiling - wafted now on wings of prayer May pass in hope, and though from mortal bonds Yet undelivered, rise with sure ascent Even to the fountainhead of peace within. The challenge of evil and of suffering provokes man to his being's height and rouses within him those hidden powers by which he is able to subdue them to himself. V Poetry and religion are, to use Shakespeare's phrase, 'of imagination all compact.' Wordsworth in his essay supplementary to the preface of the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, says of the rationale of their community in this respect: "The concerns of religion refer to indefinite objects and are too weighty for the mind to support without relieving itself by resting a great part of the burden on words and symbols. Its element being infinitude and its trust the supreme of things, it submits itself to circumscription, and is reconciled to substitutes. Poetry being ethereal and transcendent is yet incapable to sustain its existence without sensuous incarnation.' It is only by metaphors we can express the invisible. So the language of poetry and religion is always woven by the imagination. The formula is foreign to their genius. Imagination is in living sympathy with the whole of things, with the infinite that is immanent in them all; the formula abstracts and separates. The image is not only the most vivid expression of the spiritual and the invisible; it has above every other the supreme quality of inevitableness. A happy symbol,' says Emerson, 'is a sort of evidence that the thought is just. I had rather have a good symbol of my thought or a good analogy than the suffrage of Kant or Plato. If you agree with me, or if Locke or Montesquieu agree, I yet may be wrong. But if the elm tree thinks the same thing, if running water, if burning coals, if crystals, if alkalies in their several fashions say what I say, it must be true.' The secret of the trustworthiness of the imagination is to be found in Newton's dictum that the universe was made at one cast. The central unity makes it possible for anyone who has perceived any aspect of the truth to find symbols for it on every hand. Figures are the natural language of all passionate beliefs and emotions, of all the elemental affections of the soul of man. The opulence in figures which distinguishes both the poetic and the religious genius is the sign of a true vision. From the Poetry Review The richer poetry is in musical quality the more it can be sung the more confidence we may have that the thoughts and feelings it expresses are true and trustworthy. So Carlyle, following a suggestion of Coleridge, says: 'A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of a thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely, the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, by which it exists, and has a right to be here in this world. All inmost things we may say are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song. The meaning of Song goes deep. Who is there that in logical methods can express the effect which music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that.' G. K. CHESTERTON: A STUDY BY E. T. RAYMOND MR. CHESTERTON, as a jesting philosopher, suffers one considerable disadvantage. Serious people tend to like his jokes and distrust his philosophy. Flippant people are willing to respect his philosophy at a distance, but refuse to be amused by his pleasantries. There is a highly intellectual set of men- their view is expressed by Mr. A. G. Gardiner who will not have Mr. Chesterton as a thinker, but roar their sides out when he says, 'Pass the mustard.' They insist on treating him simply as an embodied, even over embodied jest, as 'your only jigmaker,' a 'Thousand Best Things,' bound, like the books of Meudon, in human skin. On the other hand, the professional merry-makers find little amusement in Mr. Chesterton. Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Cadbury parted. Mr. Chesterton and Sir Owen Seaman have apparently never met. The greatest joke of the age is never seen in Punch. It is, I suppose, Mr. Chesterton's own fault that he is so generally conceived as a chuckle, et præterea par rum. He has made himself, or allowed himself to become, too much of a character. There was a time when he sat on a high-legged stool, in a city office, doing something with invoices. It is true he did not stay there long, but his mere presence for the fraction of a day would seem proof that at one time he was thought commercially possible, capable of being made some sort of a clerk. That is to say, he must have presented some outward resemblance to other youths; from Aldgate Pump to St. Paul's Churchyard no firm exists wide-minded enough to admit a recruit with the vast sombrero, the Samsonian locks, and the Bolivar-poncho cloak which at a later period were the honest pride of Fleet Street, still revelling, though grown prim itself, in the reputation of Bohemianism. Whether Mr. Chesterton, of fixed purpose, adopted the dress and mannerisms of his earlier period, or whether it was all more or less an accident, only Mr. Chesterton may say. But in permitting himself to become a character he threw away much of his birthright as an influence. The fault is, of course, the time's as well as Mr. Chesterton's. Socrates was joked at as much as Mr. Chesterton, but Socrates was no joke. Many a saint must have raised a coarse laugh by his appearance, but no saint was ever a laughing matter. Yet we moderns, with our mania for specialism, will hardly allow Jack Point to have a soul to save or a tooth to ache. If accepted as an authentic funny man, he must be funny forever. The mere fact about Mr. Chesterton is that he is a big man, who dresses as he likes, and, being inactive and fond of his comfort, used to take many cabs when cabs could be taken. He also drank a certain moderate quantity of beer when it was, at least, an intelligible proceeding to drink beer. Further, he preferred an excellent meal in a tavern, with good company, to decorous malnutrition at two shillings a mouthful. It was inevitable that a legend should grow round such a man; unfortunately the legend, for most people, has strangled the man, as ivy does a tree. I have before me what purports to be a critical study of Mr. Chesterton. If I knew nothing else of the subject I should picture a person physically and mentally inert, conceited, rather puerile, and given to paltry verbal smartness a Cockney Tony Lumpkin who, like Olivia Primrose, had 'read a great deal of controversy.' It may be Mr. Chesterton's fault that he is so represented. It is certainly society's misfortune that it has no clearer estimate of one of the most powerful personalities of the time. Clearly the only way to arrive at the truth is to put in as evidence Mr. Chesterton's own books. Swinburne has protested against the theory that an unlettered-Shakespeare wrote Hamlet without effort in odd times- as a bird might moult a feather or a fool might break a jest'; he knew that such things were not made so. And the works of Gilbert Keith Chesterton contain ample testimony on which to found an impeachment of a quite novel kind. He stands hereby indicted for that he has labored well and faithfully, first to see the truth and then to tell it; for that he, being a great rhetorician, seldom uses rhetoric to obscure or to deceive; and, being a great wit, employs wit only to season wisdom and make it memorable. How say you, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, are you guilty or not guilty? Of course, Mr. Chesterton talks nonsense sometimes, and often he is right rather by a divine luck than by conscious effort. Of much of his work he can say, like Petruchio, 'It is |