facts selected, modified, arranged, and heightened, in order to bring them into accordance with a mental conception. In other words, imagination has taken its place beside the sense of fact: "ideal imitation" is the reproduction in any artistic medium of observed or recorded facts remoulded by the imagination.

The greater part of Aristotle's discussion of the different kinds of poetry concerns, not definitions, but the means by which each kind becomes effective in producing its appropriate sort of pleasure. It is largely critical generalization from the practice of the Greek poets whose works he knew; and it became the basis for almost all future discussion on the formal side of poetry. It is here that we find a place for Bacon's division of reason; for the intellectual qualities necessary for the adept use of the prescribed means to artistic effectiveness are mainly qualities of judgment; the sense of probability, proportion, fitness, harmony, coherence, and the like. It is on such qualities as these that what we call form in art primarily depends; and this group of form-giving qualities will be intended when we speak of the element of reason in poetry. It will now have become clear that there has long been a recognition of the existence in poetry of these three fundamental elements of imagination, reason, and the sense of fact. Other factors, of course, enter into the production of poetical effects, and some of those will be taken up later; but there is ground for regarding these three as, in some sense, essential. The absence of any one of them is fatal in a way which cannot be maintained of those other subsidiary factors. The presence of all three, balanced and coöperating, will be found to characterize those works which a consensus of opinion places in the first rank. The excess of any one indicates the presence of a tendency which may not be destructive, but which, while conferring qualities which for a time bring popularity, ultimately stamps the work in which it appears as, in some essential respect, inferior.

V

The particular qualities in poetry which are to be traced to the exercise of each of the three faculties just enumerated may best be perceived by a consideration of classes of poetry in which each in turn may be seen dominant. As soon as this is done, we shall find

ourselves in the midst of familiar classifications, but with, it is hoped, a clearer view of their nature and contents.

The three most persistent tendencies exhibited in the history of poetry are Romanticism, Classicism, and Realism. These terms have been used with a freedom that has often resulted in confusion, and there is no general agreement in defining them; but that the tendencies exist, and are distinguishable in the concrete, seems to be admitted by all. If a correspondence between them and our threefold division of the faculties employed in poetry can be discerned, we shall have made some progress towards definite conceptions. Such a correspondence is revealed by the theory that each of these three tendencies is definable as the predominance of one of the faculties over the other two. Romanticism is the tendency characterized by the predominance of imagination over reason and the sense of fact. Classicism is the tendency characterized by the predominance of reason over imagination and the sense of fact. Realism is the tendency characterized by the predominance of the sense of fact over imagination and reason.

At first sight, such a statement falls under suspicion from its very baldness and simplicity. Literary and artistic phenomena, one is apt to reflect, are hardly to be adequately disposed of by a formula apparently so mechanical. The subject-matter under discussion involves the infinite variety of mood and emotion, the complex interplay of ideas and their hidden associations, the perpetually shifting panorama of mental imagery, which take place in the consciousness when it is confronted with a work of art. And in each separate art there is, in addition, the whole mass of considerations affecting the technical devices by which color, form, and sound are brought into the service of expression. All this, it might be urged, is too complex, too full of minute shadings, to be cleared up by a handful of drastic distinctions.

To this it may be replied that the simplicity of the definitions proposed is more apparent than real. The three important terms employed contain each a central idea, but they have a vast number of manifestations, and are, moreover, practically never found in isolation. In later chapters, the attempt will be made to expound the more important of these manifestations, and to show that they really belong to the central ideas. But, in the mean time, the argument may be safely followed without the fear that the criticism of poetry is to be rendered either easy or mechanical.

VI

In looking to literary history for some preliminary corroboration of our definitions, it will be well to recall a principle to which allusion has already been made. Just as no poem is created exclusively by the imagination, the reason, or the sense of fact, so no age is exclusively Romantic, Classical, or Realistic. If we yield to current fashion and speak, say, of a Romantic period, let it be understood that this implies only that in that period there was a notable increase in the amount of the imaginative element in the poetical product of the time, not that reason and the sense of fact had completely vanished. Further, the greater the age from the artistic point of view, the less likely is it to be marked by a notable deficiency in any of the three faculties. In SO far as it succeeded in giving in artistic form a deep, broad, permanently and universally satisfying representation of human life, it con

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