anon modulated by delicate pauses; always chiming obediently to the strain of thought; then I hold that if we have not actual counterpoint here, we have something remarkably like it,—as we certainly have harmony—

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thoughts that move

or I know not what harmony is. In truth, if counterpoint be (as the dictionary defines it), "a blending of related but independent melodies," then Poetry achieves it by mating a process of sound to a process of thought: and Mr. Watts-Dunton disposes of his own first contention for music when he goes on to say (very rightly), "But if Poetry falls behind Music in rhythmic scope, it is capable of rendering emotion after emotion has become disintegrated into thoughts." Yet I should still object to the word "disintegrated" as applied to thought, unless it be allowed that emotion undergoes the same process at the same time and both meet in one solution. To speak more plainly, Music is inferior to Poetry because, of any two melodies in its counterpoint, both may be (and in practice are) emotional and vague: while of any two melodies in the counterpoint of Poetry one must convey thought and therefore be intelligible. And, to speak summarily, Poetry surpasses Music because it carries its explanation, whereas the meaning of a concerto has to be interpreted into dull words on a programme.

We have arrived at this, then; that Poetry's chief function is to reconcile the inner harmony of Man (his Soul, as we call it) with the outer harmony of the Universe. With this conception of "peerless Poesie" in our minds, we turn to Aristotle's Poetics, and it gives us a sensible shock to read on the first page, that "Epic Poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and dithyrambic Poetry, and the greater part of the music of the flute and of the lyre are all, generally speaking, modes of imitation" (πασαι τυγχανουσιν ουσαι μιμησεις το συνολον[1]). "What?" we say—"Nothing better than that?"—for "imitation" has a bad name among men and is apt to suggest the ape. But, first bearing in mind that there are imitations and imitations (the Imitatio Christi among them), let us go on to see what it is that in Aristotle's opinion Poetry imitates or copies. It is "the Universal" (το χαθολου[2]): and as soon as we realise this we know ourselves to be on the same track as Aristotle, after all. "Imitation," as he uses it, is not an apish or a slavish imitation; it is no mere transcribing or copying of phenomena as they pass (he even allows that the poet may "imitate" men as "better than they are"): it is an expressing, in fiction and harmonious speech, intelligible to his 

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