Many years ago, when I was more enterprising intellectually than I am to-day, I proposed the application of Haeckel’s celebrated biogenetic law--to wit, that the history of the individual rehearses the history of the species--to the domain of human ideas. So applied, it leads to some superficially startling but probably quite sound conclusions, for example, that an adult poet is simply an individual in a state of arrested development--in brief, a sort of moron. Just as all of us, _in utero_, pass through a stage in which we are tadpoles, and almost indistinguishable from the tadpoles which afterward become frogs, so all of us pass through a stage, in our nonage, when we are poets. A youth of seventeen who is not a poet is simply an ass: his development has been arrested even anterior to the stage of the intellectual tadpole. But a man of fifty who still writes poetry is either an unfortunate who has never developed, intellectually, beyond his teens, or a conscious buffoon who pretends to be something that he isn’t--something far younger and jucier than he actually is--, just as the late Richard Mansfield, in Schiller’s play, pretended, by the use of a falsetto voice and a girlish skip, to be the eighteen-year-old Don Carlos. Something else, of course, may enter into it. The buffoonery may be partly conscious and deliberate, and partly Freudian. Many an aging man keeps on writing poetry simply because it gives him the illusion that he is still young. For the same reason, perhaps, he plays tennis, wears green cravats, and tries to convince himself that he is in love.