Ossian Collection > Aspects of poetry

58 CRITICISM AND CREATION. [ll.
indeed has maintained that as 'knowledge extends and
as the reason develops itself,' the imaginative arts decay.
It is the literary creed of Mr. Carlyle, several times
announced, that the poetic form nowadays is an ana-
chronism, that plain prose alone is welcome to him, that
he grudges to see men of genius employ themselves in
fiction and versifying, while reality stands in such need of
interpreters. ' Reality is, as I always say, God's unwritten
poem, which it needs precisely that a human genius
should write and make intelligible to his less-gifted bro-
thers.' To discuss these views fully would require several
lectures, not the end of one. I can now but throw out a
few suggestions.
So far is it from being true that reason has put out
imagination, that perhaps there never was a time when
reason so imperatively calls imagination to her aid, and
when imagination entered so largely into all literary and
even into scientific products. Imaginative thought,
which formerly expressed itself but rarely except in
verse, now enters into almost every form of prose except
the barely statistical. Indeed the boundary-lines be-
tween prose and poetry have become obliterated, as
those between prose and verse have become more than
ever rigid. Consider how wide is the range of thought
over which imagination now travels, how vast is the work
it is called upon to do.
Even in the most rigorous sciences it is present, when-
ever any discoverer would pass beyond the frontiers of