When Shakespeare says, that
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep,"[370]
he utters a moral idea.
Voltaire was right in thinking that the energetic and profound treatment
of moral ideas, in this large sense, is what distinguishes the English
poetry. He sincerely meant praise, no dispraise or hint of limitation;
and they err who suppose that poetic limitation is a necessary
consequence of the fact, the fact being granted as Voltaire states it.
If what distinguishes the greatest poets is their powerful and profound
application of ideas to life, which surely no good critic will deny,
then to prefix to the term ideas here the term moral makes hardly any
difference, because human life itself is in so preponderating a degree
moral.
It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at
bottom a criticism of life;[371] that the greatness of a poet lies in
his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life,--to the
question: How to live.
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