These three kinds of poets represent three totally different kinds of poetic activity.
With regard to the first, the pure lyrists, the impulse is mere egoism. Many of them have less of even relative vision at its highest than the mass of mankind. They are often too much engaged with the emotions within to have any deep sympathy with the life around them. Of every poet of this class it may be said that his mind to him "a kingdom is" and that the smaller the poet the bigger to him is that kingdom. To make use of a homely image—like the chaffinch whose eyes have been pricked by the bird-fancier, the pure lyrist is sometimes a warbler be cause he is blind. Still, he feels that the Muse loves him exceed ingly. She takes away his eyesight, but she gives him sweet song. And his song is very sweet, very sad, and very beautiful; but it is all about the world within his own soul—its sorrows, joys, fears, and aspirations.
With regard to the second class the impulse here is no doubt a kind of egoism too; yet the poets of this class are all of a different temper from the pure lyrists. They have a wide imagina tion ; but it is still relative, still egoistic. They have splendid eyes, but eyes that never get beyond seeing general, universal humanity (typified by themselves) in the imagined situation. Not even to these is it given to break through that law of cen trality by which every "me" feels itself to be the central "me"— the only "me" of the universe, round which all other spurious "me's" revolve. This "me" of theirs they can transmute into many shapes, but they cannot create other "me's"—nay, for egoism, some of them scarcely would, perhaps, if they could.
The third class, the true dramatists, whose impulse is the simple yearning to create akin to that which made "the great. Vishnu yearn to create a world," are, "of imagination all corn pact"—so much so that when at work "the divinity" which Iamblichus speaks of "seizes for the time the soul and guides it as he will." The distinction between the pure lyrists and the other two classes of poets is obvious enough. But the distinction between the quasi-dramatists and the pure dramatists requires a word of explanation before we proceed to touch upon the various kinds of poetry that spring from the exercise of relative and absolute vision. Sometimes, to be sure, the vision of the true dramatists —the greatest dramatists—will suddenly become narrowed and obscured, as in that part of the Oedipus Tyrannies where Sophocles makes Oedipus ignorant of what every one in Thebes must have known, the murder of Laius. And again, finely as Sophocles has
conceived the character of Electra, he makes her, in her dispute with Chrysothemis, give expression to sentiments that, in an other play of his own, come far more appropriately from the lofty character of Antigone in a parallel dispute with Ismene. And, on the other hand, examples of relative vision in its furthest reaches can be found in abundance everywhere, especially in Virgil, Dante, Calderon, and Milton.
In Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" we find an immense amount of relative vision of so high a kind that at first it seems absolute vision. When the ancient mariner, in his narrative to the wedding guest, reaches the slaying of the albatross, he stops, he can proceed no farther, and the wedding guest exclaims : "God save thee, Ancient Mariner, From the fiends that plague thee thus! Why look'st thou so?" "With my cross-bow I shot the albatross." But there are instances of relative vision—especially in the great master of absolute vision, Shakespeare—which are higher still—so high indeed that not to relegate them to absolute vision seems at first sight pedantic. Such an example is the famous speech of Lady Macbeth in the second act, where she says:— "Had he not resembled My father as he slept, I had done't." Marvellously subtle as is this speech it will be found, if analysed, that it expresses the general human soul rather than any one special human soul. Indeed, Leigh Hunt records the case of a bargeman who, charged with robbing a sleeping traveller in his barge, used in his confession almost identical words—"Had he not looked like my father as he slept, I should have killed as well as robbed him." Again, the thousand-and-one cases (to be found in every literature) where a character, overwhelmed by some sudden surprise or terror, asks whether the action going on is that of a dream or of real life, must all, on severe analysis, be classed under relative rather than under absolute vision—even. such a fine speech, for instance, as that where Pericles, on dis covering Marina, exclaims : "This is the rarest dream that e'er dull sleep Did mock sad fools withal"— even here, we say, the humanity rendered is general and not particular, the vision at work is relative and not absolute. The poet, as representing the whole human race, throwing himself into the imagined situation gives us what general humanity would have thought, felt, said, or done in that situation, not what one par ticular individual and he alone would have thought, felt, said, or done.