# The Limits of Evolution/Essay 4

THE ART-PRINCIPLE AS REPRESENTED IN POETRY
The subject which is to engage us this morning, ladies and gentlemen, has been stated in your programme by a title, just read, which fits in naturally with your whole present Course, on Art in its General Principles and its Particular Phases. The title describes the actual contents of my essay rather more accurately than the one chosen for it when it was first written nine years ago. It was then called The Essential Principle of Poetic Art. There is still a use in turning your attention to this former title; it will afford us a rather more significant starting-point. To most of you, I dare say, it would seem more natural to speak of the essential principles of poetic art, so many coöperating conditions, of course, must go to the making of poetry. But I purposely leave the main word of the earlier title in the singular. To follow to the end the varied conditions of poetic power, in all their diverging multitude, time would wholly fail us. We must content ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/241 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/242 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/243 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/244 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/245 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/246 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/247 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/248 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/249 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/250 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/251 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/252 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/253 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/254 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/255 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/256 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/257 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/258 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/259 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/260 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/261 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/262 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/263 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/264 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/265 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/266 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/267 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/268 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/269 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/270 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/271 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/272 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/273 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/274 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/275 ​Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/276 ​art combining the mechanical and decorative in one; and oratory, perhaps the highest form of genuine prose, illustrates this fact with the greatest clearness.
Such confusions and oversights as are involved in the misapprehension which has just been exposed, might be prevented if we grouped the whole series of arts as mechanical and fine, and subdivided fine arts into decorative and esemplastic, recognising that in architecture we have the nodal point of ascending transition from the decorative to the creative.
As I reach the end of this over-prolonged inquiry, in its unavoidable hardness and dryness so little akin to the fair attraction of its theme, there float into my memory, as a poetic pointing of our search’s moral, these lines of Emerson’s, from his fragment called The Test: —
    I hung my verses in the wind, —
    Time and tide their faults should find!
    All were winnowed through and through:
    Five lines lasted sound and true!
    Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
    Nor time unmake what Poets know.
       Have you eyes to find the five
       Which five hundred did survive?
* ↑ The essay was read before the Channing Auxiliary Society of San Francisco, October, 1894.
* ↑ Printed in the Overland Monthly, May, 1885.