as quickly as it flowered. Yet the imagination is sometimes kindled by translations even more potently than by scholarship, as is shown by the case[Pg 71] of Keats, who had small Latin and less Greek. And indeed, apart from our ever-growing interest in our own earlier literature, the most helpful and fertile impulse seems likely in the near future to come through translations of Oriental poetry, such as those by Mr. Waley and Mr. Nicholson. But from whatever direction the wind may blow, it will be the most imaginative artists who will first be sensitive to it, and the most skilful and discreet in the use they put it to. The lesser crowd will, as ever, follow their lead, until what was once a renovating breath of inspiration has become a stale and flatulent academicism.

[Pg 70]

[Pg 71]

Even if it be true, as I have suggested earlier in this essay, that poetry has ceased to be a great popular and social art, there will be no need to regret the change in so far as it may make it more easy for poets to disregard fashionable success, and so to retain their artistic integrity. Yet there are certain[Pg 72] dangers to which they will become increasingly liable. An art which presupposes a select initiated audience, very quickly becomes over-precious, and, for all its refinement, essentially parochial. The best art will take nothing for granted in those to whom it is addressed, except artistic intelligence and that human nature which is common to us all. Poets whose idiom is not universal, but calculated for a cultured private coterie, write with the risk of swift oblivion, so soon as the tide of æsthetic caprice has turned. This is all the more regrettable, as such poetry is sometimes of great originality and beauty. The most frequent fault is obscurity, due either to an Alexandrine love of recondite allusions, or more often to an apparently studied neglect of transitions. A contempt for clarity has almost come to be regarded as an artistic virtue, rather than as a vice, or at best an occasionally inevitable evil. Nothing in truth can be more fundamentally[Pg 73] inartistic than needless obscurity. Poetry that is intellectually and emotionally complex, is certain in any case to be difficult enough; and the less a reader is called upon to make avoidable mental effort, the more convincingly will the essential context of a poem be communicated to his mind. The medium of poetry consists not merely of words, but of speech, that is of words, phrases and sentences in syntactic and logical relations to one another; and although these relations necessarily tend to be more emotional and less rational in poetry than 

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