**
--
* `Gates', p. 29.
** See `West', p. 23.
--
In the second place, Lanier thinks that a poet's knowledge of his art
should be scientific. It was this that led him to write
`The Science of English Verse', the motto of which is,
"But the best conceptions cannot be, save where science and genius are."
In `The English Novel' he declares that "not a single verse
was ever written by instinct alone since the world began,"*
and fortifies his statement by Ben Jonson's tribute to Shakespeare, --
"For a good poet's made as well as born,
And such wert thou."
But Lanier clearly saw that no formal laws and no amount
of scientific knowledge could alone make a poet, as appears from the motto
above quoted, from the closing chapter of `The Science of English Verse',
which tells us that the educated love of beauty is the artist's only law,
and from this other motto, from Sir Philip Sidney: "A Poet,
no industrie can make, if his owne Genius bee not carried unto it."
--
* `The English Novel', p. 33.
--
In the third place, Lanier holds that a moral intention on the part
of an artist does not interfere with the naturalness or intrinsic beauty
of his work; that in art the controlling consideration is rather moral
than artistic beauty; but that moral beauty and artistic beauty,
so far from being distinct or opposed, are convergent and mutually helpful.
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