But the artist himself is not necessarily concerned with these theories. His main business is intercourse with life, and also the envisaging of life rather "by meditation" as Coleridge says, "than by observation." He has to beware of the facts which overcame Coleridge himself, when he sacrificed the divinity of his art to that philosophy which banished the god. "Well were it for me," he exclaims, "if I had continued to pluck the flowers and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths." The "shaping spirit of imagination" which impelled him to unrivalled poetry in his youth was starved in him, not only because of his ill-health, his poverty, his drugs and laziness, but equally because he denied expression to "fancy, and the love of nature and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." For him perhaps it was a poor compensation that through this denial he was able to leave us a unique interpretation of his æsthetic and creative experience. FOOTNOTES: [2] The word "flavour" in this connection was constantly used by the late Canon Ainger. III PASSIONS SPIN THE PLOT If the reader has borne with my audacity in generalising about the main functions of imaginative literature, he will be willing to pursue a further and plainer question concerning its subject-matter. It is time to discuss a little more fully what I mean by that "energetic experience "which a work of art can give us. For the sake of simplicity I will confine myself to a single issue--to that kind of energetic experience invariably afforded by that small body of imaginative literature which the world has agreed to regard as supreme. If we can understand how literature in its greatest examples provides us with an "addition to life," we can, if we are in the mind to do so, extend the inquiry to the lighter and less intense experiences of secondary literature. By "supreme" literature I mean the literature which has proved itself to be supreme--supreme by virtue of its conquest over time and over changes in thought and environment. The Iliad and the Odyssey are in a language which we should have to learn if only for the sake of these two epics; they still profoundly interest us, they present emotions which can still move us; without Homer, the society which they describe would have vanished from human knowledge; through Homer, it is an intimate and cherished part of our experience. This kind of supremacy belongs, I think, to Æschylus and Sophocles, and might perhaps be attributed to the Gospel of S. Mark, if that book may be considered as imaginative literature. Virgil and Dante--in part at least--are of this order, as also are Milton, in _Samson Agonistes_ and the earlier books of _Paradise Lost_, and Goethe in the first part of _Faust_. And there are few besides Mr. Shaw who would deny such supremacy to the tragedies of Shakespeare.