Page:Poetry for Poetry's Sake (1901).djvu/24

20 ask what is the meaning you can only answer by pointing to the sounds; just as in painting there is not a meaning plus paint, but a meaning in paint, or significant paint, and no man can really express the meaning in any other way than in paint and in this paint; so in a poem the true content and the true form neither exist nor can be imagined apart. When then you are asked whether the value of a poem lies in a substance got by decomposing the poem and present, as such, only in reflective analysis, or in a form arrived at and existing in the same way, you will answer, ‘It lies neither in one, nor in the other, nor in any addition of them, but in the poem, where they are not.’ And when you are told that you are talking a priori metaphysics, you will not mind. ‘Metaphysics’ does not mean anything. It is only a term of abuse applied to the effort to look at facts instead of repeating a priori fictions.

We have then, first, an antithesis of subject and poem. This is clear and valid; and the question in which of them does the value lie is intelligible; and its answer is, In the poem. We have next a distinction of substance and form. If the substance means ideas, images, and the like taken alone, and the form means the measured language taken by itself, this is a possible distinction, but it is a distinction of things not in the poem, and the value lies in neither of them. If substance and form mean anything in the poem, then each is involved in the other, and the question in which of them the value lies has no sense. No doubt you may say, speaking loosely and perilously, that in this poet or poem the aspect of substance is the more noticeable, and in that the aspect of form, and you may pursue interesting discussions on this basis: but no principle or ultimate question of value is touched by them. And apart from