322 CRITICAL STUDIES admirable essay) ; and which, with its corollaries, I may be allowed to repeat here, as I consider it not less applicable to Garth Wilkinson than to William Blake :— "... we ought not to be kept from studying these writings [the turbid and turbulent prophetic books] by any apparent obscurity and ludicrousness, if we have found in the easily comprehended vernacular writings of the same man (as in Blake's we certainly have found) sincerity, and wisdom, and beauty. Nor is it pro- bable that even the most mysterious works of Blake would prove more difficult to genuine lovers of poetry than many works of the highest renown prove to nine-tenths [rather ninety-nine hundredths] of the reading public. " ' Sie haben dich, heiliger Hafis, Die mystische Zunge genannt ; Und haben, die Wortgelehrten, Den Werth des Worts nicht erkannt.' " For many intelligent persons, Carlyle at his best is almost or quite as unintelligible as if he was using an unknown language ; and the same may be asserted of Shelley and Robert Browning. (I do not select lofty old names, because in their cases the decisions of authoritative judges, accumulating throughout cen- turies, overawe our common jurymen into verdicts wise without understanding ; so that a dullard can speak securely of the sublimity of Milton, for example, though we are pretty certain that he never got through the first book of the ' Paradise Lost,' and that he would find himself in a Slough of Despond, when twenty lines deep in the opening passage of Samson Agonistes.) Indeed, I doubt whether it would be an exaggeration to assert that, for a very large majority of those who arc accounted edu- cated and intelligent people, poetry in itself is essentially an unknown tongue. They admire and remember a verse or a passage for its wit, its cleverness, its wisdom, its clear and brief statement of some fact, its sentiment, its applicability to some circumstance of their own life, its mention of some classic name, its allusion to some historical event ; in short, for its associations, and not for its poetry, per se. Yet, assuredly, here are still men in England with an infallil)le sense for
