If this trend of criticism is in the right direction, then the apparent objectivity of the poet must be pure camouflage, and it is his own personality that he is giving us all the time, in the guise of one character and another. In this case, not his frank confession of his presence in his poetry, but his self-concealment, falsifies his representation of life. Since we have quoted Browning's apparent criticism of the self-revealing poet, it is only fair to quote some of his unquestionably sincere utterances on the other side of the question. "You speak out, you," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett; [Footnote: January 13, 1845.] "I only make men and women speak--give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light." Again he wrote, "I never have begun, even, what I hope I was born to begin and end,--'R.B.', a poem." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 3, 1845.] And Mrs. Browning, usually a better spokesman for the typical English poet than is Browning himself, likewise conceives it the artist's duty to show us his own nature, to be "greatly _himself always_, which is the hardest thing for a man to be, perhaps." [Footnote: Letter to Robert Browning, September 9, 1845.] "Art," says Aristotle, "is an imitation of life." "_L'art, mes enfants_," says the modern poet, speaking through the lips of Verlaine, "_c'est d'etre absolument soi-meme_." Of course if one concedes that the poet is the only thing in life worth bothering about, the two statements become practically identical. It may be true that the poet's universal sympathies make him the most complex type that civilization has produced, and consequently the most economical figure to present as a sample of humanity. But Taine has offered us a simpler way of harmonizing the two statements, not by juggling with Aristotle's word "life," but with the word "imitation." "Art," says Taine, "is nature seen through a temperament." Now it may be that to Aristotle imitation, _Mimeseis_, did mean "seeing through a temperament." But certainly, had he used that phrase, he would have laid the stress on "seeing," rather than on "temperament." Aristotle would judge a man to have poetic temperament if his mind were like a telescope, sharpening the essential outlines of things. Modern poets, on the other hand, are inclined to grant that a person has poetic temperament only if his mind resembles a jeweled window, transforming all that is seen through it, if by any chance something _is_ seen through it.