does the convincing power of the poem depend upon its appeal to the logical faculty in the reader.

But if, on the one hand, we are to speak of reason as an element in poetry without implying formal logic, we must, on the other, extend it far beyond the logician's use. It includes the power of calculating proportions, of perceiving the relevant and the fit, of preserving harmony, of adapting means to ends, of ordering and arranging and selecting detail, especially with a view to emphasizing the type. In all of these processes we are employing the rational judgment, and both in the processes and their results it is easy to distinguish them from the imaginative powers on the one side, and those faculties which we are to group under the sense of fact on the other. In this large sense, then, we are to use the word reason.

The results of these rational processes just enumerated may be fairly summed up in the word "form"; and, as soon as form is mentioned, one realizes how absolute is its claim to a place among the essential elements of poetry. Just as romantic critics, concentrating attention upon the function of the imagination, and finding in it the vital characteristic of poetry, are apt to ignore all else; so critics of an opposite temperament, believing formless beauty to be a contradiction in terms, emphasize this element at the expense of content, and fall into an equally vicious extreme. However it may be with painting and sculpture, there is no question that cries like "Art for Art's sake," when applied to literature, indicate merely the loss of that balance which is as important in the criticism as it is in the creation of poetry.

II

The predominance of the rational and formal element in art results, as has been pointed out, in the tendency known as Classicism. Classicism, however, is unfortunately employed in almost as many senses as Romanticism; and before we can proceed with our illustration of that use of it which we have in mind when we call it the outcome of the predominance of reason, it is necessary to take account of the more important of these senses, and to see whether there is any common element running through all.

Classical, says Arnold, means belonging to the class of the very best. This use, with others closely allied to it, is indeed very familiar. When one reads that Dickens, ten years before his death, had already become a classic, one understands the statement to mean that he had taken his place among those authors whose permanent value is no longer in question, and a knowledge of whose work is taken for granted among cultivated people. If one limits the praise by calling him an English classic, one assumes a knowledge of his books only among English-speaking people; if one calls him a world classic, one assumes it in cultivated people over all the globe. But in making this statement, the critic certainly did not mean, and no one would interpret him as meaning, that Dickens's main characteristic was the predominance of the rational element, or a superlative care for form; for wherever Dickens's chief excellence lies, it is not in these things. A man may be classical in this sense for any one of many reasons: this use of the term is an indication merely of rank and vogue, and does nothing to define the specific qualities on which such rank and vogue depend, and of which we are in search. This meaning, then, we set aside, as it in no way enters into our discussion.

Again, classical is used to describe the art of Greek and Roman antiquity, sometimes as a whole, sometimes with reference to those qualities by virtue of which it contrasts most clearly with medieval or modern art. In the larger application, it again can be of little service to us, and it would be a gain for clear thinking in general if we could substitute "antique,” "Greek antiquity," and "Roman antiquity" for such terms as "classical" and "the classics" when they are used in a broadly temporal and geographical sense. For, on grounds already stated, we are not to expect the art of two very different peoples, produced over a period of a thousand years, to exhibit persistently the preponderance of any one of a group of elements all of which are fundamental in human nature. The facts, too, bear out this expectation. One finds in abundance in the art of Greece and Rome products in which the element of imagination is not only prominent but prevailing. The Odyssey, as contrasted with the Iliad, and still more with the Æneid, is distinctly a romantic tale, suffused with an atmosphere of wonder, with the rational and the realistic elements throughout subordinate to the imaginative. One has only to recall for a moment the nature of the adventures of Ulysses, to call up the images of Circe and Calypso, of Polyphemus and the Cyclops, of Nausicaa, of Scylla and Charybdis, of the great scene of the slaying of the suitors at the close, to realize that the poem is as truly a romance of adventure as Gawain and the Green Knight, or Treasure Island. Again, Euripides,

Our Euripides, the human,

With his droppings of warm tears,
And his touches of things common

Till they rose to touch the spheres,

with his interest in the individual and his inner life, with his humanization of the Gods, with the permeation of his own personality through his whole treatment of Greek legend, is admittedly, in contrast with Sophocles, for instance, romantic and sentimental, sometimes even realistic. Plato, in spite of the parade of logical processes in his dialogues, both as a critic in his theory of inspiration, and as a constructive philosopher in his idealism is clearly of an imaginative rather than of a purely rational type, as appears the moment one contrasts him with Aristotle. The satirists, on the other hand, have a strong realistic strain.