THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 POETRY 
 
 AND 
 
 THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 AYLWIN 
 
 OLD FAMILIAR FACES
 
 POETRY 
 
 AND THE 
 
 RENASCENCE OF WONDER 
 
 BY 
 
 THEODORE 
 WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 68 1 Fifth Avenue
 
 PlUNTBD AT THE DtrOHimm PRKSS, TOMQVAY, ENGLAND,
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 TN 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 IT was my special privilege to be on inti- 
 mate terms of friendship with the author 
 for more than forty years. Soon after 
 our first meeting at the house of my 
 father, Dr. Gordon Hake, the " parable poet," 
 we became in 1873, joint occupiers of a set of 
 chambers in Great James Street, near Holborn. 
 Here we had Swinburne for a neighbour, who, 
 being at that moment engaged in the writing 
 of Bothwell, invited us on many an occasion to 
 assist at his readings from the " drame epique" 
 It was in this " bardic atmosphere " in London 
 that Watts-Dunton began to write on poetic 
 criticism for the literary journals. His first 
 essay, The Lost Hamlet, appeared at this time 
 in the New Monthly Magazine. After a year's 
 residence in Great James Street, we took a 
 set of rooms in Danes' Inn ; and it was now 
 that my friend joined the Examiner, then under 
 the editorship of Professor Minto. It was 
 through Watts-Dunton's literary relations with 
 Minto as will be seen, that he came to be invited 
 
 1181367
 
 vi INTRODUCTION 
 
 to write the essay on " Poetry " for the Ency- 
 clopedia Britannica ; and it was through his 
 success as a contributor to Minto's journal 
 that Norman MacColl, then editor of the 
 Athenceum, " discovered " Theodore Watts, as 
 he was then called, and induced him to become 
 a member of his staff. 
 
 Watts-Dunton soon came to be regarded 
 by everyone in the literary circles in which he 
 moved as an authority on the subject of poetic 
 art. He won this distinctive mark not merely 
 through his criticisms on the poets of the period 
 in the Examiner and afterwards in the Athe- 
 nceum. The " Wednesday evening " gatherings 
 at Danes' Inn did still more to convince those 
 who heard his " talks on poetry " that he was 
 thoroughly conversant with the laws of versifi- 
 cation, and possessed, moreover, an exceptional 
 knowledge of the history of poetry. Persian 
 tales, with their fascinating poetic motives, 
 appealed to him in a marked degree, inspiring 
 the subject for more than one sonnet in his 
 volume " The Coming of Love." 
 
 The truth is, as he told me in our thousand 
 and one quiet talks together in Danes' Inn, 
 that in his earliest days he conceived the bold 
 idea of writing a comprehensive treatise on the
 
 INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 history of poetry ; and when barely nineteen 
 years of age, soon after leaving school, he began 
 to devote many an hour during his solitary 
 walks by the river Ouse, in the neighbourhood 
 of his native town of St. Ives, to meditations 
 over this project. The ambitious design, as 
 far as he achieved it, may be said to represent 
 the chief occupation of a lifetime. 
 
 When he left St. Ives and came to reside with 
 me in London, he was already a middle-aged 
 man. With him he brought his treatise on 
 Poetry in rough manuscript form. It by no 
 means covered the broad field contemplated 
 in the first flush of youthful enthusiasm; even 
 the portions dealing with the first principles 
 of poetic art seemed to him, an exceptionally 
 conscientious worker, to need further revision. 
 But finding himself busily engaged in journalism, 
 while at the same time continuing to follow his 
 profession as a solicitor, those spare moments 
 which he had thought to bestow upon the 
 treatise proved lamentably insufficient. 
 
 It so chanced, however, that while still upon 
 the staff of the Examiner, he learnt from Profes- 
 sor Minto that Thomas S. Baynes had been 
 selected by Messrs. A. and C. Black, the Edin- 
 burgh publishers, to edit the ninth edition of
 
 viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and that this 
 recently-appointed editor was in search of a 
 writer competent to undertake the article on 
 Poetry ; for the new edition of the work was 
 to be almost entirely re-arranged and re-written, 
 fundamentally different, in fact, from the prev- 
 ious editions, and all other previous editions. 
 Professor Baynes was not long in deciding that 
 " Theodore Watts " was the best informed man 
 for the purpose. The editor certainly had had 
 serious thoughts of inviting either Swinburne 
 or Matthew Arnold to write the essay, but 
 he came to realise in time that both these poets 
 had given their attention principally to the 
 historic method of criticism, and that method 
 did not appeal to the editor as likely to meet 
 the requirements of a publication of this des- 
 cription. What he sought to secure was an 
 article setting forth as briefly as possible the 
 nature, functions, and forms of poetry ; an 
 article in a word, that would not occupy more 
 than eight or ten pages of the Encyclopedia 
 Britannica. After some hesitation, Watts-Dun- 
 ton undertook to supply the article. The 
 material far more material than was needed 
 was ready at hand. His hesitation simply 
 arose from this fact ; he began to realise how
 
 INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 hampered he would be as to space ; owing to 
 these " space restrictions " he would be forced 
 not only to delete at least two-thirds of his 
 treatise as comprised in the original manu- 
 script form, but would also have to leave the 
 conclusion of the argument undeveloped. In 
 this unavoidably compressed shape, Watts- 
 Dunton's essay on " Poetry " was written, in 
 1884, and appeared in the ninth edition of the 
 Encyclopedia. It was reproduced in the two 
 subsequent editions without any important 
 alterations. The article has been described by 
 the author himself as "a brief essay on the 
 principles of poetic art as exemplified by the 
 poetry of all the great literatures." 
 
 Meantime the " principles of poetic art," 
 expounded by Watts-Dunton in the Encyclo- 
 pedia Britannica, had attracted the attention 
 of other editors. Besides the Examiner, he 
 wrote for the Academy, and the English Illus- 
 trated Magazine. It was generally recognised 
 in fact, that had he served an apprenticeship to 
 literature with the distinct object of reviewing 
 the chief Victorian poets as their works came 
 from the Press, he could not have been more 
 fully equipped than he proved himself to be, 
 especially when selected to undertake the duties
 
 x INTRODUCTION 
 
 of leading critic on the Athenceum. His con- 
 nection with that journal extended without 
 intermission over more than five-and-twenty 
 years (1876-1902). At one time more parti- 
 cularly during the " eighties " scarcely a week 
 went by without an article from his pen, re- 
 viewing some book of exceptional interest to the 
 literary world. He reviewed in the Athenczum 
 every book published by Swinburne, in prose as 
 well as in poetry, for twenty-two years (between 
 1877 and 1899) some fifteen volumes in all. 
 He reviewed every book by William Morris 
 published between 1888 and 1897 no less than 
 ten volumes. He reviewed all Tennyson's later 
 works, a volume of poems by George Meredith, 
 and a volume of Rossetti's collected works. 
 He reviewed most of Victor Hugo's publications 
 between 1877 and 1882 ; and besides all these 
 critiques, some of them filling five or six columns 
 of the Athen&um, he wrote lengthy reviews on 
 many of the minor poets, novelists, and essayists 
 of that mid- Victorian period. 
 
 In the writing of these numerous reviews, 
 it naturally followed that Watts-Dunton's treat- 
 ise on Poetry came to be gradually absorbed. 
 It had been freely drawn upon for his essay 
 in the Britannica, as already mentioned ; and
 
 INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 so it came about that the original work in its 
 manuscript form finally ceased to exist, except 
 in the pages of the periodicals to which he had 
 contributed his diverse articles on poetic critic- 
 ism. 
 
 These poetic criticisms, however, were by no 
 means confined to the literary journals. He 
 wrote at the request of the editor of Chambers' s 
 Encyclopedia the article on the " Sonnet " for 
 that publication in 1891. Again, there was 
 his preface to " Chatterton," written for J. H. 
 Ward's " British Poets " in 1880, prior to the 
 " Sonnet " essay, it will be noted, and also 
 prior to the essay on " Poetry " in the Britan- 
 nica. It was while writing on Chatterton, in 
 fact, that he first struck the keynote to which 
 all his subsequent essays on Poetry responded. 
 He regarded that " marvellous boy " as " the 
 renascence of wonder incarnate ' ' the poet 
 who " refused to be imprisoned in the jar of 
 eighteenth century convention." " Chatter- 
 ton " was one of his pet subjects ; his favourite 
 poet, Keats, scarcely won from him greater 
 admiration. At the time when he was writing 
 this " Chatterton " preface, it chanced that he 
 was thrown almost daily into the society of 
 D. G. Rossetti, whose appreciation of the poet
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 was, if possible, greater than Watts-Dunton's ; 
 and so deeply interested was Rossetti in the 
 progress of the Chatterton essay, which the 
 author read and re-read to him during their 
 evenings together at Cheyne Walk, that he 
 consulted every work on Chatterton that 
 he could procure in order that he might claim 
 the privilege of tendering his advice when the 
 manuscript was submitted to him for criticism. 
 This criticism on Rossetti's part Watts-Dunton 
 regarded as being extremely valuable, for, as 
 he has recorded in this volume, " the poet of 
 ' Christabel ' himself was scarcely more steeped 
 in the true magic of the romantic temper than 
 was the writer of the " Blessed Damozel " and 
 " Sister Helen." 
 
 From this moment the " renascence of won- 
 der " became the central idea in Watts-Dunton's 
 work on Poetry ; and when, in 1904, some 
 twenty years later than the period of his con- 
 tribution to Ward's " British Poets," Dr. Pat- 
 rick, the editor of Chambers's Cyclopedia of 
 English Literature, asked him to contribute 
 the Introduction to the third volume of that 
 publication, he wrote his now famous essay 
 scarcely less famous than the " Poetry " essay 
 known as " The Renascence of Wonder in 
 English Poetry."
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 Acting as my friend's confidential secretary 
 during the last fifteen years of his life, every 
 opportunity was afforded me of convincing 
 myself that the project of publishing his work 
 on Poetry was never entirely absent from his 
 mind. It was the ruling passion. Other liter- 
 ary projects intervened, projects that appeared 
 to him to demand more immediate attention 
 those fugitive essays, mostly on poetic subjects, 
 contributed to various journals and the work 
 on Poetry was put aside, for the moment. But 
 all these interruptions that come to a man of 
 letters who is also engaged in professional 
 duties never tended to damp his ardour. 
 
 At last he conceived the idea of seriously 
 preparing his work for the Press, based on his 
 essays on " Poetry and the Renascence of 
 Wonder." The new work, according to the 
 scheme he had begun to devise, was to include 
 selections from his criticisms on Poetry contri- 
 buted to the Athenceum. These selections, he 
 considered, could be appropriately inserted in 
 the shape of riders " Athenceum riders," as he 
 called them wherever the treatment of the 
 subject would seem to demand elucidation. 
 All the riders that he selected and arranged 
 ha.ve now been introduced and printed through-
 
 xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 out the volume in a closer type than the essay 
 " Poetry " and the essay " The Renascence of 
 Wonder," which have been reproduced without 
 any material alteration. 
 
 It was, however, it should be mentioned, 
 through the untiring energy and assistance of 
 his friend, Mr. Herbert Jenkins, to whom he 
 consented to entrust the present publication, 
 that this satisfactory state of things with regard 
 to the planning of the new work was brought 
 about. Numerous interviews and a consider- 
 able amount of correspondence took place 
 between author and publisher before the matter 
 was finally settled. When, however, the agree- 
 ment came to be signed by Watts-Dunton, in 
 February, 1914, he appeared to be thoroughly 
 contented, for he wrote to Mr. Jenkins at the 
 time, " I can but congratulate myself upon 
 having found a publisher of the real literary 
 temper." 
 
 During the last few months of his life my 
 friend was giving nearly all his time to this 
 volume which he ultimately decided to call 
 " Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder." 
 One morning, while turning over the pages of 
 the manuscript, he said to me, with sudden 
 elation in his voice, " This book, which I have
 
 INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 always looked upon as my magnum opus, is 
 going to be published after all. My greatest 
 aim in life is going to be achieved at last." 
 He had, in fact, put heart and soul into the task 
 he had set himself to accomplish. Nor can 
 there be any doubt that had " Poetry and the 
 Renascence of Wonder " issued from the Press 
 under his personal supervision had he himself 
 corrected and revised the proof-sheets the 
 book would have been much fuller, if not as 
 complete as it was originally his ambitious 
 thought to make it. It is only fair to state, 
 moreover, that the method of arrangement 
 the order, for instance in which the " Aihenceum 
 riders " were inserted by him, was merely 
 tentative ; and while adding to these riders, 
 which he had so far selected (and he would 
 undoubtedly have added a large number had 
 he lived) he would have seen to it that every 
 one of them had, throughout the volume, a 
 raison d'etre in its relation to the context. 
 
 Swinburne in his collection of essays, " Studies 
 in Prose and Poetry," has remarked, " The 
 first critic of our time perhaps the largest 
 minded and surest sighted of any age 
 has pointed out in an essay on Poetry, which 
 should not be too long buried in the columns
 
 xvi INTRODUCTION 
 
 of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the exhaustive 
 accuracy of Greek terms which define every 
 claimant to the laurel as either a singer or a 
 maker." Another writer, commenting re- 
 cently upon this appreciation, has said that, 
 " After reading Watts-Dunton's essay on Poetry 
 one will probably think Swinburne's praise not 
 much beyond the truth. . . By a personal, 
 an almost emotional quality sometimes to be 
 found in the best English and French criticism, 
 it rises from science to the literature of power." 
 It should be clearly understood, however, 
 with regard to this volume, that I have 
 had grave doubts as to the advisability of 
 inserting the unfinished riders. The difficult 
 question with which I was confronted 
 was : Should the essay on " Poetry " and the 
 essay on ' The Renascence of Wonder " be 
 printed as they appeared respectively in the 
 Encyclopedia Britannica and the Cyclopedia of 
 English Literature, or should they be issued 
 with the riders as placed by the author, ten- 
 tatively, while revising his work ? After 
 careful deliberation I decided to adopt the 
 latter course, differentiating between the original 
 and the added matter in such a way * as to 
 
 The text of the essays as they originally appeared is set with 
 wider spaces between the lines, whereas the new matter, or riders, 
 is set " solid," that is, without leads or spaces.
 
 INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 enable the student to read the one, should he 
 prefer it, without taking heed of the other. 
 
 Watts-Dunton himself regarded his essay on 
 " Poetry " as it appeared in the Encyclopedia 
 Britannica as the basis of his reputation as a 
 critic. And in one of his last remarks on the 
 subject he has recorded what is undeniably 
 true as to the time and thought expended upon 
 the essay ; it seems even to suggest a half- 
 conscious challenge " Poetry and the Re- 
 nascence of Wonder," he said, " is the result 
 of years of quiet meditation in the country, 
 and, for good or for ill, absolutely original." 
 
 THOMAS HAKE.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 POETRY 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. POETRY AS AN ENERGY AND AS AN ART . i 
 
 II. WHAT is POETRY ? 6 
 
 III. THE POSITION OF POETRY IN RELATION TO 
 
 THE OTHER ARTS 51 
 
 IV. COMPARATIVE VALUE IN EXPRESSIONAL 
 
 POWER 74 
 
 V. VARIETIES OF POETIC ART. 81 
 VI. THE SONNET . . . . . .171 
 
 VII. THE BALLAD AND OTHER FORMS OF VERSE . 189 
 
 VIII. ETHICAL POETRY 215 
 
 IX. THE SONG AND THE ELEGY . . . 224 
 
 THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER 
 
 PART 1 235 
 
 PART II 269
 
 POETRY 
 
 POETRY AS AN ENERGY AND AS AN ART 
 
 IN modern criticism the word poetry is 
 used sometimes to denote any expres- 
 sion (artistic or other) of imaginative 
 feeling, sometimes to designate one of 
 the fine arts. 
 
 As an expression of imaginative feeling, as 
 the movement of energy, as one of those great 
 primal human forces which go to the develop- 
 ment of the race, poetry in the wide sense has 
 played as important a part as science. In some 
 literatures (such as that of England) poetic 
 energy and in others (such as that of Rome) 
 poetic art is the dominant quality. It is the same 
 with individual writers. In classical literature 
 Pindar may perhaps be taken as a type of the 
 poets of energy ; Virgil of the poets of art. With 
 all his wealth of poetic art Pindar's mastery over 
 symmetrical methods never taught him to " sow
 
 4 POETRY 
 
 with the hand," as Corinna declared, while his 
 poetic energy always impelled him to " sow 
 with the whole sack." In English poetical litera- 
 ture Elizabeth Barrett Browning typifies, per- 
 haps, the poets of energy ; while Keats (notwith- 
 standing all his unquestionable inspiration) is 
 mostly taken as a type of the poets of art. In 
 French literature Hugo, notwithstanding all his 
 mastery over poetic methods, represents the 
 poets of energy. Nature has always been loath, 
 except in cases of her very choicest favourites, 
 to combine true artistic instincts with great 
 poetic energy. 
 
 In some writers, and these the very greatest 
 in Homer, ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Dante, 
 Shakespeare, Milton, and perhaps Goethe 
 poetic energy and poetic art are seen in some- 
 thing like equipoise. It is of poetry as an art, 
 however, that we have mainly to speak here ; 
 and all we have to say upon poetry as an energy 
 is that the critic who, like Aristotle, takes this 
 wide view of poetry the critic who, like him, 
 recognizes the importance of poetry in its 
 relations to man's other expressions of spiritual 
 force, claims a place in point of true critical 
 sagacity above that of a critic who, like Plato, 
 fails to recognise that importance. And as-
 
 AS AN ENERGY 5 
 
 suredly no philosophy of history can be other 
 than inadequate should it ignore the fact that 
 poetry has had as much effect upon human 
 destiny as that other great human energy by 
 aid of which, from the discovery of the use of 
 fire to that of the electric light, the useful arts 
 have been developed. 
 
 With regard to poetry as an art, these re- 
 marks must be confined to general principles. 
 To treat historically so vast a subject as poetry 
 would be obviously impossible here. 
 
 All that can be attempted is to inquire 
 
 (1) What is poetry ? 
 
 (2) What is the position it takes up in 
 relation to the other arts ? 
 
 (3) What is its value and degree of expres- 
 sions! power in relation to these ? and, finally, 
 
 (4) What varieties of poetic art are the out- 
 come of the two great kinds of poetic impulse, 
 dramatic imagination and lyric or egoistic 
 imagination ?
 
 II 
 
 WHAT IS POETRY ? 
 
 DEFINITIONS are for the most part 
 alike unsatisfactory and treacher- 
 ous ; but definitions of poetry are 
 proverbially so. Is it possible to lay 
 down " invariable principles " of poetry, such 
 as those famous " invariable principles " of 
 the Rev. William Lisle Bowles, which in the 
 earlier part of the century awoke the admira- 
 tion of Southey and the wrath of Byron ? Is 
 it possible for a critic to say of any metrical 
 phrase, stanza, or verse, " This is poetry," or 
 ' This is not poetry ? " Can he, with anything 
 like the authority with which 'the man of science 
 pronounces upon the natural objects brought 
 before him, pronounce upon the qualities of a 
 poem ? These are questions that have engaged 
 the attention of critics ever since the time of 
 Aristotle. 
 
 Byron, in his rough and ready way, has 
 answered them in one of those letters to the 
 
 6
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 7 
 
 late John Murray, which, rich as they are in 
 nonsense, are almost as rich in sense. " So far 
 are principles of poetry from being invariable," 
 says he, " that they never were nor ever will 
 be settled. These principles mean nothing more 
 than the predilections of a particular age, and 
 every age has its own and a different one from its 
 predecessor. It is now Homer and now Virgil ; 
 once Dryden and since Sir Walter Scott ; now 
 Corneille and now Racine ; now Crebillon and 
 now Voltaire." This is putting the case very 
 strongly perhaps too strongly. 
 
 It is unquestioned that all artistic criticism 
 is based very largely on sanctions that 
 are in a deep sense conventional. Absolute 
 aesthetics are as impossible as absolute ethics 
 as impossible as absolute theology ; and 
 beauty itself is entirely a relative term, de- 
 pending for its acceptance upon the relations 
 existing between the admirer and the object 
 admired, as Darwin has proved. There has 
 been much talk about the glory of peacocks' 
 tails, and we are assured that it took the peacock 
 many thousands of years to develop that gor- 
 geous appendage, which gives the peahen as 
 much joy as the peacock himself, though it does 
 not necessarily follow from this that the pea- 
 cock's tail is, as a conception, absolutely, univer- 
 sally, and eternally beautiful. That it is beauti- 
 ful in the eyes of the peahen is as it should be ; 
 but racial prejudice must be taken into account.
 
 8 POETRY 
 
 To the grub which the peacock will sometimes 
 condescend to devour there is nothing beautiful 
 in that array of feathers which the grub's own 
 juices contribute, however unwillingly, to feed 
 and support. And if the associative origin of 
 beauty is apparent in the natural world, how 
 should it be otherwise in the world of art ? 
 For instance, in the matter of the Venus of 
 Japan and Chelsea there are heretics in regard 
 to her charms, just as in the region of Totten- 
 ham Court Road there are said to be good folk, 
 but heretical, who see no loveliness in sage greens. 
 
 If we remember that Sophocles lost the 
 first prize for the (Edipus Tyrannus ; if we 
 remember what in Dante's time (owing partly, 
 no doubt, to the universal ignorance of Greek) 
 were the relative positions of Homer and 
 Virgil, what in the time of Milton were the re- 
 lative positions of Milton himself, of Shakes- 
 peare, and of Beaumont and Fletcher ; again if 
 we remember Jeffrey's famous classification of 
 the poets of his day, we shall be driven to pause 
 over Byron's words before dismissing them. 
 Yet some definition, for the purpose of this 
 essay, must be here attempted ; and, using the 
 phrase " absolute poetry " as the musical critics 
 use the phrase " absolute music," we may, per- 
 haps, without too great presumption submit the 
 following : 
 
 Absolute poetry is the concrete and artistic ex-
 
 WHAT IS POETRY ? 9 
 
 pression of the human mind in emotional and 
 rhythmical language. 
 
 This at least will be granted, that no literary 
 expression can properly speaking be called poetry 
 that is not in a certain deep sense emotional, 
 whatever may be its subject matter, concrete 
 in its method and its diction, rhythmical in 
 movement, and artistic in form. \- * V? 
 
 That the expression of all real poetry must be 
 concrete in method and diction is obvious, and 
 yet this dictum would exclude from the defini- 
 tion much of what is called didactic poetry. 
 With abstractions the poet has nothing to do, 
 save to take them and turn them into con- 
 cretions ; for, as artist, he is simply the man 
 who by instinct embodies in concrete forms that 
 " universal idea " which Gravina speaks of 
 that which is essential and elemental in nature 
 and in man ; as poetic artist he is simply the 
 man who by instinct chooses for his concrete 
 forms metrical language. And the questions to 
 be asked concerning any work of art are simply 
 these 
 
 Is that which is here embodied really per- 
 manent, universal, and elemental ? And is the 
 concrete form embodying it really beautiful 
 acknowledged as beautiful by the soul of man
 
 lo POETRY 
 
 in its highest moods ? Any other question is 
 an impertinence. 
 
 Examples are always useful in discussions 
 such as this. 
 
 As an example of the absence of concrete form 
 in verse take the following lines from George 
 Eliot's Spanish Gipsy : 
 
 " Speech is but broken light upon the depth 
 Of the unspoken ; even your loved words 
 Float in the larger meaning of your voice 
 As something dimmer." 
 
 Without discussing the question of blank 
 verse cadence and the weakness of a line where 
 the main accent falls upon a positive hiatus, 
 " of the unspoken," we would point out that 
 this powerful passage shows the spirit of poetry 
 without its concrete form. The abstract method 
 is substituted for the concrete. Such an abstract 
 phrase as " the unspoken " belongs entirely to 
 prose. 
 
 Matthew Arnold denned poetry as a " criti- 
 cism of life." If by this is meant that poetry 
 is the result of a criticism of life ; that just as 
 the poet's metrical effects are and must be the 
 result of a thousand semi-conscious generaliza- 
 tions upon the laws of cause and effect in metric 
 art, so the beautiful things he says about life, 
 and the beautiful pictures he paints of life, are 
 the result of his generalizations upon life as he
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? II 
 
 passes through it ; and consequently that the 
 value of his poetry consists in the beauty and 
 the truth of his generalizations. 
 
 There is, of course, little to be said against 
 this. 
 
 Yet, it must be confessed, so dangerous is it 
 to indulge in formulas that, having decided that 
 poetry consists of generalizations on human life, 
 Arnold in reading poetry keeps on the watch 
 for those generalizations, and has really at last 
 learned to think that the less they are hidden 
 behind the dramatic action, the more unmistake- 
 ably they are intended as generalizations, the 
 better. 
 
 As to what is called ratiocinative poetry, it 
 might perhaps be shown that it does not exist 
 at all. Not by syllogism, but per saltum must 
 the poet reach in every case his conclusions. 
 We listen to the poet we allow him to address 
 us in rhythm or in rhyme we allow him to 
 sing to us while other men are only allowed 
 to talk, not because he argues more logically 
 than they, but because he feels more deeply 
 and perhaps more truly. It is for his listeners 
 to be knowing and ratiocinative ; it is for him 
 to be gnomic and divinely wise. 
 
 That poetry must be metrical or even rhyth- 
 mical in movement, however, is what some have 
 denied. Here we touch at once the very root 
 of the subject. The difference between all
 
 12 POETRY 
 
 literature and mere " word-kneading " is that, 
 while literature is alive, word-kneading is with- 
 out life. This literary life, while it is only 
 bipartite in prose, seems to be tripartite in 
 poetry ; that is to say, while prose requires 
 intellectual life and emotional life, poetry seems 
 to require not only intellectual life and emotional 
 life, but rhythmic life, this last being the most 
 important of all according to many critics, 
 though Aristotle is not among these. Here 
 indeed is the " fork " between the old critics 
 and the new. Unless the rhythm of any metrical 
 passage is so vigorous, so natural, and so free 
 that it seems as though it could live, if need 
 were, by its rhythm alone, has that passage any 
 right to exist ? and should it not, if the sub- 
 stance is good, be forthwith demetricized and 
 turned into prose ? Thoreau has affirmed that 
 prose at its best, has high qualities of its own 
 beyond the ken of poetry ; to compensate for the 
 sacrifice of these should not the metrical gains 
 of any passage be beyond all cavil ? 
 
 But this argument might be pressed further 
 still. It might seem bold to assert that, in many 
 cases, the mental value of poetry may actually 
 depend upon form and colour, but would it not 
 be true ? The mental value of poetry must be
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 13 
 
 judged by a standard not applicable to prose ; 
 but, even with regard to the different kinds of 
 poetry we must not compare poetry whose 
 mental value consists in a distinct and logical ; 
 enunciation of ideas, such as that of Lucretius 
 and Wordsworth, and poetry whose mental 
 value consists partly in the suggestive richness 
 of passion or symbol latent in rhythm (such as I 
 that of Sappho sometimes, Pindar often, Shelley 
 always), or latent in colour, such as that of 
 some of the Persian poets. To discuss the ques- 
 tion, Which of these two kinds of poetry is more 
 precious ? would be idle, but are we not 
 driven to admit that certain poems whose 
 strength is rhythm and certain other poems 
 whose strength is colour, while devoid of any 
 logical statement of thought, may be as fruitful 
 of thoughts and emotions too deep for words 
 as a shaken prism is fruitful of tinted lights ? 
 The mental forces at work in the production of 
 a poem like the Excursion are of a very different 
 kind from the mental forces at work in the 
 production of a poem like Shelley's " Ode to 
 the West Wind." In the one case the poet's 
 artistic methods, like those of the Greek archi- 
 tects, show, and are intended to show, the solid 
 strength of the structure. In the other, the
 
 14 POETRY 
 
 poet's artistic methods like those of the Arabian 
 architect contradict the idea of solid strength 
 make the structure appear to hang over our 
 heads like the cloud pageantry of heaven. But, 
 in both cases, the solid strength is, and must be, 
 there, at the base. Before the poet begins to 
 write he should ask himself which of these 
 artistic methods is natural to him ; he should 
 ask himself whether his natural impulse is to- 
 wards the weighty iambic movement whose 
 primary function is to state, or towards those 
 lighter movements which we still call, for want 
 of more convenient words, anapaestic and 
 dactylic, whose primary function is to suggest. 
 Nor is it difficult to see why English anapaestic 
 and dactylic verse must suggest and not 
 state, as even so comparatively successful 
 a tour de force as Shelley's " Sensitive Plant " 
 shows. Conciseness is a primary virtue of all 
 statement. The moment the English poet tries 
 to " pack " his anapaestic or dactylic line, as 
 he can pack his iambic line, his versification 
 becomes rugged, harsh, pebbly becomes so of 
 necessity. Nor is this all ; anapaestic and dactylic 
 verse must in English be obtrusively alliterative, 
 or the same pebbly effect begins to be felt. The 
 anapaestic line is so full of syllables that in a
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 15 
 
 language where the consonants dominate the 
 vowels (as in English), these syllables grate 
 against each other, unless their corners are 
 artfully bevelled by one of the only two smooth- 
 ing processes at the command of an English 
 versifier obtrusive alliteration, or an obtrusive 
 use of liquids. Now these demands of form may 
 be turned by the perfect artist to good account 
 if his appeal to the listener's soul is primarily 
 that of suggestion by sound or symbol, but if 
 his appeal is that of direct and logical state- 
 ment the diffuseness inseparable from good 
 anapaestic and dactylic verse is a source of 
 weakness such as the true artist should find 
 intolerable. 
 
 English poets, perhaps, may be divided into 
 born rhymers to whom rhyme is a spur, and 
 those to whom rhyme is not a spur but a curb ; 
 and the two kinds of poets are curiously exem- 
 plified in the joint authors of Lyrical Ballads, 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge. It may almost be 
 said that Coleridge thought in rhyme, and that 
 he never adequately expressed himself except 
 in rhyme : certainly it may be said that it was 
 only in rhyme that he achieved his crowning 
 quality of Naivete*. His rhyme facilities are 
 infinite. Every kind of rhyme-effect was at his 
 command. Take, for instance, rhyme sin- 
 n hasis. In the Ancient Mariner he made it his 
 aramount endeavour to be emphatic and 
 
 r
 
 16 POETRY 
 
 understood at first sight. From a letter of the 
 late Rev. Alexander Dyce to the late H.N. 
 Coleridge, we learn what was the inception of 
 the story of the " Ancient Mariner." This was 
 not the incident of the albatross in Shelvock's 
 voyages, as is commonly supposed, but a dream 
 of a phantom " skeleton ship with figures in it," 
 related to Coleridge by a friend. Now when 
 Coleridge proceeded to write this poem his 
 object was to produce the most vivid poetical 
 narrative of his time to give as unmistakeable 
 a picture as possible of a phantom " skeleton 
 ship with figures in it." The incident of the 
 albatross was only used to furnish a cause for 
 the appearance of the phantom ship, and for the 
 location of its appearance. From the first line 
 of the poem to the actual appearance of the 
 phantom ship on the horizon, everything is 
 made to yield, when necessary to this end. 
 The most effective way of depicting the " skele- 
 ton ship with figures in it " was, of course, to 
 place it between the spectator and the sinking 
 sun, which would then shine through its ghastly 
 skeleton ribs. In order to do this, the sun and 
 the phantom ship must be painted in very 
 strong colour at whatsoever sacrifice of grace, 
 and as the rhyme-word is always ten times 
 stronger than any other word, " Sun " must be 
 the rhyme-word. 
 
 Accordingly Coleridge paints the picture by 
 daring rhymed-tautology such as an inferior poet 
 would shrink from. He knew that tautology 
 in its proper place is a legitimate implement in 
 the hands of a poet, and that the dread of using
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 17 
 
 it is one of the surest signs of timid mediocrity. 
 
 See I See I (I cried) she tacks no more ! 
 
 Hither to work us weal 
 Without a breeze, without a tide, 
 
 Steadies with upright keel 1 
 
 The western wave was all aflame ; 
 
 The day was well-nigh done ! 
 Almost upon the western wave 
 
 Rested the broad, bright sun, 
 When that strange ship drove suddenly 
 
 Betwixt us and the sun. 
 
 And straight the sun was flecked with bars 
 
 (Heaven's mother send us grace) 
 As if through a dungeon grate he peered 
 
 With broad and burning face. 
 
 Here the poet not only repeats the phrase 
 " western wave," but repeats " Sun " as a 
 rhyme-word. 
 
 He realized more fully than did any other 
 English poet the fact that every poem has, like 
 a piece of tapestry, its inner side (the poet's 
 own), and its outer side (the reader's), and that 
 while the perfect master of poetry-weaving 
 works so that his pattern is developed on the 
 outside (the reader's side) the imperfect artist, 
 such as Donne or Browning, is apt to work in 
 the contrary way so that while he himself sees 
 the pattern from within, the outer surface pre- 
 sents the reader with the tangles and knots of 
 many-coloured worsted which should be seen 
 by the poet-weaver alone. That the weaver 
 pleases himself hugely by thus keeping the 
 picture for himself and presenting the knots and 
 
 C
 
 18 POETRY 
 
 tangles to the spectator is obvious, and per- 
 haps it is, after all, worth while to weave one's 
 tapestry for one's own delectation. But then 
 the weaver-poet is never content with this. 
 He weaves not, like the bower bird, for himself 
 and his mate, but for the outer world, and to 
 surpass all other bower birds in the art of weav- 
 ing. 
 
 To the perfect poetic artist it is not a trouble, 
 but a delight, to be continually transplanting 
 himself to the reader's outer standpoint by a 
 rapid kind of imaginative process, the effect of 
 which is similar to that of the little mirrors 
 which the tapestry-weavers hang before their 
 work to show them how the pattern is being 
 developed on the right side of the stuff. Yet 
 Coleridge's critical knowledge of his art was as 
 wonderful as his instinctive mastery over it. 
 The rhyme principle of modern Europe may be 
 answerable in a large degree for that romantic 
 luxury and apparent lawlessness of methods 
 which have been so often contrasted with the 
 purity of the classic style. The moment a born- 
 rhymer has chosen a word for the end of a line 
 all the feasible rhymes in the language leap into 
 his brain like sparks from a rocket. Some 
 poets by instinct take the first spark that rises, 
 and use its suggestions ; others by instinct wait 
 and select. In reading any poet it is perfectly 
 easy to see to which class he belongs. In the 
 heat of composition the sudden inquiry for a 
 rhyme will call up a long-forgotten suggestion 
 or thought or emotion which, though perhaps 
 partially in harmony with the situation, is only
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 19 
 
 partially so, and then sore is the rhymer's 
 temptation to go astray. 
 
 Although at first the feeble relevancy of the 
 image suggested by rhyme may be apparent 
 enough to the rhymer's judgment, it must be 
 dismissed firmly, and at once, or disasters will 
 follow ; for in art, as in common life, it is aston- 
 ishing how soon the judgment will yield to any 
 one of the other faculties, such as fancy, imagina- 
 tion, etc. 
 
 In discarding the incongruous or only partially 
 congruous fancy suggested by rhyme the rhymer 
 who hesitates is lost. To dally with it is to be- 
 come familiar with it, and to become familiar 
 with it is in most cases to begin to love it, and 
 then its rejection becomes impossible. 
 
 The richer the mind of any poet, the more 
 multitudinous and the more clamorous are the 
 (< thick-coming fancies " suggested by each im- 
 pact of the outer world upon the poet's soul. 
 
 In proportion to the activity of the eyes that 
 see is the difficulty of shutting in the one object 
 which alone should be seen. This, indeed, is 
 apparent not in modern literature only ; we see 
 it even among the Greek poets, whose vehicle 
 rhymeless and quantitative was so flexible 
 that the poetic vision was probably disturbed 
 in only a slight degree by the demands of form ; 
 for those who talk so much about the severity 
 of the Greek note are apt to think too much of 
 Sophocles, and too little of ^schylus and 
 Pindar. 
 
 But with regard to modern poetry this is 
 doubtless why such overloaded narratives as
 
 20 POETRY 
 
 ' Venus and Adonis ' and ' Endymion ' (where 
 the demands of narrative art are completely 
 ignored) came to be written by two poets, one 
 of whom was actually, and the other potentially 
 among the greatest that have appeared in 
 England. 
 
 The fact is that no two poets ever did work 
 alike. It is when we contrast Coleridge's style 
 with Wordsworth's, and the methods by which 
 the two styles are reached, that we see how 
 infinite in variety is the form of expression of 
 every faculty and endowment of man. 
 
 Wordsworth's tinkering of his sonnet " Tous- 
 saint 1'ouverture" actually recasting it several 
 times made Rossetti say that he was no poet at 
 all. It simply proves, however, that the poet, 
 having made first a rigorous selection of the 
 line-ending word, and then again a rigorous 
 selection of the answering rhyme-word, filled up 
 the line with unripe material, which became 
 afterwards poetized by the mellowing sun of 
 his genius. 
 
 Keats' s work, like Swinburne's, shows the very 
 opposite of this method it shows that simul- 
 taneously with the rhyme selection comes a line 
 of ripe and almost perfectly poetized material. 
 With each poet the method adopted is, as we 
 have hinted, a matter of temperament, not of 
 consciousness, perhaps, and certainly not of 
 volition, and both methods have their advan- 
 tages both their disadvantages. 
 
 A poet like Keats and a poet like Swinburne, 
 who in this matter alone resemble each other, 
 with the entire poetic diction of our literature
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 21 
 
 at their fingers' ends, and an enormous poetical 
 diction of their own invention to boot, have no 
 need to subject their lines to the poetizing 
 process of Wordsworth, for as regards poetic 
 material they find every rhyme-word as luminous 
 of tail as a comet, as is only too clearly seen in 
 ' Endymion ' and in some of Swinburne's 
 poems. 
 
 But then, for this very reason, they have no 
 time to consider selection and economy, and it 
 is obvious that without a great deal of rhyme 
 selection the climacteric goal of the poem must 
 needs be reached but slowly and circuitously. 
 For not merely every drama, but every poetical 
 work from the epic to the sonnet or roundel, 
 has its climacteric goal, which has to be reached 
 in the most economical way according to the 
 methods of the form of art adopted. 
 
 It is, of course, in the nature of things that 
 poems in which there has been a too rigorous 
 selection of rhymes, as is often the case with 
 Tennyson, are apt to fail in inspiration, while 
 poems in which there has been a too hurried 
 selection of rhymes, as with Keats and Swin- 
 burne, sometimes lack that concentration which 
 characterizes the perfect work of the greatest 
 masters. 
 
 In English rhymed measures in which the 
 paucity of rhyme is so troublesome, it may 
 almost be affirmed that the thing said is a third 
 something between the idea and the rhyme. A 
 notable instance of this occurs in the conclusion 
 of Keats' s "The Eve of St. Agnes, "which it will 
 be remembered runs thus :
 
 22 POETRY 
 
 " And they are gone ; ay, ages long ago 
 These lovers fled away into the storm. 
 
 That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe, 
 And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form 
 Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm, 
 
 Were long be-nightmared. Angela the old 
 Died palsy-twitch'd, with meagre face deform ; 
 
 The Beadsman, after thousand aves told, 
 
 For aye unsought-for slept among his ashes cold." 
 
 Now, if we consider how fantastic (according 
 to the law of association of ideas) are the concep- 
 tions of " Coffin-worm " and " Angela's meagre 
 face deform " in relation to the elopement of 
 two lovers, and if we also recollect how few are 
 the available rhymes to the initial rhyme-word 
 " storm," we shall see that it was mainly rhyme- 
 necessity which caused the warriors to dream of 
 " Coffin- worm " and mainly rhyme-necessity 
 which caused poor Angela (who deserved " to 
 die on a feather-bed sipping a cup of spiced 
 wine ") to have such a miserable latter end 
 going off " palsy-twitched," with meagre face 
 deform." 
 
 It is true that a revered student of Keats has 
 tried to explain away the poet's yielding to 
 rhyme suggestion here, but I fear without avail 
 or merit whatever. But suppose that before he 
 sat down to write ' Endymion ' Keats had 
 studied this important matter of rhyme-selec- 
 tion that he had learnt that a rigid rhyme- 
 selection is one of the first requisites of rhymed- 
 poetry what an ' Endymion ' he might have 
 given us then ! 
 
 For ever since the infamous attacks in Black- 
 wood's and the Quarterly upon ' Endymion ' the
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 23 
 
 fashion has survived of underestimating the 
 marvellous poem. It is crammed full of poetry. 
 
 In the end Keats did learn all this, no doubt, 
 for deficient as " Lamia " is in spirituality from 
 the romantic point of view its strength and 
 masculine grip are very largely the result of 
 effective rhyme-selection. And as for the great 
 odes the most perfect work, from the artist's 
 point of view, that was produced in England in 
 the last century they could never have existed 
 at all without it. 
 
 But if the importance of metrical effects is 
 seen in rhymed-poetry, how much more strongly 
 are they seen in English blank verse in which 
 so much of our great English poetry is embodied. 
 Here the critic's outlook is so widespread and 
 so various that he may well stand aghast before 
 it. It is the most difficult of all movements, 
 and yet it seems the easiest. 
 
 There seems to be a fatality about the writing 
 of English blank verse. The fundamental differ- 
 ence between rhymed verse and blank verse is 
 that while rhymed verse has for support har- 
 mony, melody, rhyme, and colour, and can in 
 the level and working passages of a poem dis- 
 pense with mere elevation of style, blank verse, 
 though it has all these save rhyme, cannot with- 
 out elevation of style exist at all ; and if the 
 mere working portions of a poem are too level 
 in matter to call up the glow requisite to give 
 this elevation, an artificial elevation has to be 
 manufactured for blank verse to distinguish it 
 from prose. Moreover, as in other matters of 
 elevation or individual accent, the poet's style
 
 24 POETRY 
 
 is sure to reach its culmination, and then it is 
 liable to degenerate at once into mere manner 
 afterwards to sink farther still into mannerism. 
 The poet begins by modelling his style upon 
 that of previous writers, or a previous writer 
 strikes out at last a style of his own, works in it, 
 elaborates it, brings it to perfection, and then 
 overdoes it. Shakespeare is an illustrious ex- 
 ample of this. He began by imitating Marlowe, 
 but finding (what most likely Marlowe would 
 have found had he lived) that the " mighty 
 line " is quite unfitted to render the varied 
 fluctuant life of drama (being really an epic 
 movement), he invented a style of his own. 
 The miracle of this later style is that the pleasure 
 we get from it is a something between the 
 pleasure afforded by perfect prose rhythm and 
 the pleasure afforded by poetic rhythm. 
 
 And when we consider that the pleasure 
 afforded by poetic rhythm is that of expecting 
 the fulfilment of a recognized law of cadence, 
 while the pleasure afforded by prose rhythm is 
 that its cadences shall come upon us by surprise, 
 it is no wonder if Shakespeare is the only poet 
 who can catch and secure both these kinds of 
 pleasure and alternate them. 
 
 But even Shakespeare was human, the older 
 he got and the more he drank the delight of 
 faithfully rendering Nature, the more he felt 
 inclined to make the expected cadence (the 
 cadence of art) yield to the unexpected cadence 
 (that of nature) ; and in some of his latest plays 
 there are often between the great passages 
 tracts of matter which, so far as any metrical
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 25 
 
 music goes, might as well have been written in 
 prose. 
 
 And in the same way Milton^beginning also 
 with Marlowe's movement, carrying it to its 
 highest possible point in the early books of 
 " Paradise Lost," could hardly finish the poem 
 without being overmastered by the style 
 natural to his own didactic instincts, which in 
 " Paradise Regained " flattened the lines and 
 produced his mannerism. 
 
 In the * 'Morte d' Arthur " Tennyson had 
 reached a style exceedingly noble of its kind, 
 it seemed to combine the excellencies of Words- 
 worth and of Milton. And the blank verse of 
 " Guinevere " was also very fine, though there 
 were unpleasant affectations such obvious 
 tricks, for instance, as that of seeking perpet- 
 ually to get emphasis by throwing a long pause 
 after the first foot of the line, a device which 
 Milton had already made so stale that it is 
 surprising any successor dared to venture upon 
 it. But from the publication of " Guinevere " 
 Tennyson's style stiffened with every poem, 
 became more mannered and more cold. 
 
 Stiffness in blank verse arises from an attempt 
 to hold up artificially sentences by forcing into 
 them parenthetical matter, and so producing an 
 artificial elevation, instead of suffering no sen- 
 tence to be elevated save by the only natural 
 means of elevation that of the thought or 
 emotion which gives the sentence birth. 
 
 Of course, no subject is fit for treatment in 
 blank verse unless it can call from the writer 
 sufficient glow of emotion to raise it to, and
 
 36 POETRY 
 
 sustain it at, the elevation required for cadence 
 without any resort to artifices such as that of 
 parenthetical interpolation or antithetical 
 balancing. 
 
 But enough has been said to show that in 
 discussing poetry questions of versification 
 touch, as we have said, the very root of the 
 subject. 
 
 Using the word " form " in a wider sense still, 
 a sense that includes " composition," it can be 
 shown that poetry to be entitled to the name 
 must be artistic in form. Whether a poem be a 
 Welsh triban or a stornello improvised by an 
 Italian peasant girl, whether it be an ode by 
 Keats or a tragedy by Sophocles, it is equally a 
 work of art. The artist's command over form 
 may be shown in the peasant girl's power of 
 spontaneously rendering in simple verse, in her 
 stornello or rispetto, her emotions through 
 nature's symbols ; it cnay be shown by Keats in 
 that perfect fusion of all poetic elements of 
 which he was such a master, in the manipula- 
 tion of language so beautiful both for form and 
 colour that thought and words seem but one 
 blended loveliness ; or it may be shown by 
 Sophocles in a mastery over what in painting 
 is called composition, in the exercise of that 
 wise vision of the artist, which, looking before
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 27 
 
 and after, sees the thing of beauty as a whole, 
 and enables him to grasp the eternal laws of cause 
 and effect in art and bend them to his own 
 wizard will. In every case, indeed, form is an 
 essential part of poetry ; and, although George 
 Sand's saying that " L'art n'est qu' une forme " 
 applies perhaps more strictly to the plastic arts 
 (where the soul is reached partly through 
 mechanical means), its application to poetry 
 can hardly be exaggerated. 
 
 Owing, however, to the fact that the word 
 7rotjT7jc (first used to designate the poetic 
 artist by Herodotus) means maker, Aristotle 
 seems to have assumed that the indispensable 
 basis of poetry is invention. He appears to 
 have thought that a poet is a poet more on 
 account of the composition of the action than 
 on account of the composition of his verses. 
 Indeed he said as much as this. Of epic poetry 
 he declared emphatically that it produces its 
 imitations either by mere articulate words or 
 by metre super-added. This is to widen the 
 definition of poetry so as to include all imagina- 
 tive literature, and Plato seems to have given 
 an equally wide meaning to the word nowis. 
 Only, while Aristotle considered Tromms to be 
 an imitation of the facts of nature, Plato
 
 28 POETRY 
 
 considered it to be an imitation of the dreams 
 of man. Aristotle ignored, and Plato slighted, 
 the importance of versification (though Plato 
 on one occasion admitted that he who did not 
 know rhythm could be called neither musician 
 or poet). 
 
 It is impossible to discuss here the question 
 whether an imaginative work in which the 
 method is entirely concrete and the expression 
 entirely emotional, while the form is unmetrical, 
 is or is not entitled to be called a poem. That 
 there may be a kind of unmetrical narrative so 
 poetic in motive, so concrete in diction, so 
 emotional in treatment, as to escape altogether 
 from those critical canons usually applied to 
 prose, we shall see when, in discussing the epic, 
 we come to touch upon the Northern sagas. 
 
 Perhaps the first critic who tacitly revolted 
 against the dictum that substance, and not form, 
 is the indispensable basis of poetry was Diony- 
 sius of Halicarnassus, whose treatise upon the 
 arrangement of words is really a very fine piece 
 of literary criticism. In his acute remarks upon 
 the arrangement of the words in the sixteenth 
 book of the Odyssey, as compared with that in 
 the story of Gyges by Herodotus, was perhaps 
 first enunciated clearly the doctrine that poetry
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 29 
 
 is fundamentally a matter of style. The Aris- 
 totelian theory as to invention, however, 
 dominated all criticism after as well as before 
 Dionysius. When Bacon came to discuss the 
 subject (and afterwards) the only division 
 between the poetical critics was perhaps be- 
 tween the followers of Aristotle and those of 
 Plato as to what poetry should, and what it 
 should not, imitate. It is curious to speculate 
 as to what would have been the result had the 
 poets followed the critics in this matter. Had 
 not the instinct of the poet been too strong for 
 the schools, would poetry as an art have been 
 lost and merged in such imaginative prose as 
 Plato's ? Or is not the instinct for form too 
 strong to be stifled ? 
 
 By the poets themselves metre was always 
 considered to be the one indispensable requisite 
 of a poem, though, as regards criticism, so 
 recently as the time of the appearance of the 
 Waverley Novels, the Quarterly Review would 
 sometimes speak of them as " poems " ; and 
 perhaps even now there are critics of a very 
 high rank who would do the same with regard 
 to romances so concrete in method and diction, 
 and so full of poetic energy, as Wuthering 
 Heights and Jane Eyre, where we get absolutely
 
 30 POETRY 
 
 all that Aristotle requires for a poem. On the 
 whole, however, the theory that versification is 
 not an indispensable requisite of a poem seems 
 to have become nearly obsolete in our time. 
 Perhaps, indeed, many critics would now go so 
 far in the contrary direction as to say with 
 Hegel (Aesthetik, iii. p. 289) that " metre is the 
 first and only condition absolutely demanded 
 by poetry, yea even more necessary than a 
 figurative picturesque diction." At all events 
 this at least may be said that in our own time 
 the division between poetical critics is not 
 between Aristotelians and Baconians ; it is now 
 of a different kind altogether. 
 
 While one group of critics may still perhaps 
 say with Dry den that " a poet is a maker, as the 
 name signifies," and that " he who cannot 
 make, that is, invent, has his name for nothing," 
 another group contends that it is not the 
 invention but the artistic treatment, the form, 
 which determines whether an imaginative writer 
 is a poet or a writer of prose contends in short, 
 that emotion is the basis of all tru^ poetic 
 expression, whatever be the subject matter, that 
 thoughts must be expressed in an emotional 
 manner before they can be brought into poetry, 
 and that this emotive expression demands even 
 yet something else, viz., style and form,
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 31 
 
 But, although, many critics are now agreed 
 that " L'art n'est qu' une forme," that with- 
 out metre and without form there can be no 
 poetry, there are few who would contend that 
 poetry can exist by virtue of any of these alone, 
 or even by virtue of all these combined. Quite 
 independent of verbal melody, though mostly 
 accompanying it, and quite independent of 
 " composition," there is an atmosphere floating 
 around the poet through which he sees every- 
 thing, an atmosphere which stamps his utter- 
 ances as poetry : for instance, among all the 
 versifiers contemporary with Donne there was 
 none so rugged as he occasionally was, and 
 yet such songs as " Sweetest love, I do not go 
 for weariness of thee " prove how true a poet 
 he was whenever he could succeed in presenting 
 to the reader the right side of the tapestry that 
 he was weaving. While rhythm may to a very 
 considerable degree be acquired (though, of 
 course, the highest rhythmical effects never can), 
 the power of looking at the world through the 
 atmosphere that floats before the poet's eyes 
 is not to be learned and not to be taught. 
 This atmosphere is what we call poetic imagina- 
 tion, an atmosphere which, while it trans- 
 figures and ennobles human life, gives it also a 
 certain quality which may perhaps be called a
 
 32 POETRY 
 
 dignified remoteness. What the artistic poet 
 gains in dignity, however, he loses in other 
 ways. As a witness of the human drama, for 
 instance, he loses in apparent trust-worthiness 
 and apparent authority. " The light that never 
 was on sea or land " is apt to fall with a some- 
 what chilling effect upon this our real land 
 where men and women live and love and hate 
 and strive. There is one poet, however, whose 
 muse knew no such light Robert Browning. 
 He gazed at the world through no atmosphere 
 of the golden clime, but confronted life with the 
 frank familiar eyes with which the actors in the 
 real drama gaze at each other. This lends his 
 work a freshness peculiar to itself, but gives it 
 also that air of familiarity which is perhaps the 
 proper quest of the prose delineator of human 
 life rather than that of the poet, a subject which 
 
 will have to be fully discussed further on. But 
 first it seems necessary to say a word or two 
 upon that high temper of the soul which in truly 
 great poetry gives birth to this poetic imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 The " Message " of poetry must be more 
 unequivocal, more thoroughly accentuated, than 
 that of any of the other fine arts. With regard 
 to modern poetry, indeed, it may almost be 
 said that if any writer's verse embodies a 
 message, true, direct, and pathetic, we in 
 modern Europe cannot stay to inquire too 
 curiously about the degree of artistic perfection
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 33 
 
 with which it is delivered, for Wordsworth's 
 saying " That which comes from the heart goes . 
 
 \ * 
 
 to the heart," applies very closely indeed ' 
 
 modern poetry. The most truly passionate poet 
 in Greece was no doubt in a deep sense the most 
 artistic poet ; but in her case art and passion 
 were one, and that is why she has been so 
 cruelly misunderstood. The most truly pas- 
 sionate nature, and perhaps the greatest soul, 
 that in our time has expressed itself in English 
 verse is Elizabeth Barrett Browning, at least 
 it is certain that, with the single exception of 
 Hood in the " Song of the Shirt," no writer of 
 the nineteenth century has really touched our 
 hearts with a hand so powerful as hers and 
 this notwithstanding violations of poetic form, 
 notwithstanding defective rhymes, such as would 
 appal some of the contemporary versifiers of 
 England and France " who lisp in numbers for 
 the numbers [and nothing else] come." The 
 truth is that in order to produce poetry the soul 
 must for the time being have reached that 
 state of exultation, that state of freedom from 
 self -consciousness, depicted in the lines : 
 
 " I started once, or seemed to start, in pain, 
 
 Resolved on noble things, and strove to speak, 
 As when a great thought strikes along the brain, 
 And flushes all the cheek."
 
 34 POETRY 
 
 Whatsoever may be the poet's " knowledge 
 of his art," into this mood he must always pass 
 before he can write a line of high poetry. For, 
 notwithstanding all that we have said and are 
 going to say upon poetry as a fine art, it is in 
 the deepest sense of the word an " inspiration " 
 .. indeed. No man can write a line of genuine 
 poetry without having been " born again " (or, 
 as the true rendering of the text says, " born 
 from above ") ; and then the mastery over those 
 highest reaches of form which are beyond the 
 ken of the mere versifier comes to him as a 
 result of the change. Hence, with all Mrs. 
 Browning's metrical blemishes, the splendour of 
 her metrical triumphs at her best [remains]. 
 
 What is the deep distinction between poet and 
 proseman ? A writer may be many things 
 besides a poet ; he may be a warrior like 
 jEschylus, a man of business like Shakespeare, 
 a courtier like Chaucer, or a cosmopolitan 
 philosopher like Goethe ; but the moment the 
 poetic mood is upon him all the trappings of the 
 world with which for years he may perhaps have 
 been clothing his soul the world's knowing- 
 ness, its cynicism, its self-seeking, its ambition 
 fall away, and the man becomes an inspired 
 child again, with ears attuned to nothing but
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 35 
 
 the whispers of those spirits from the Golden 
 Age, who, according to Hesiod, haunt and bless 
 the degenerate earth. What such a man 
 produces may greatly delight and astonish his 
 readers, yet not so greatly as it delights and 
 astonishes himself. His passages of pathos draw 
 no tears so deep or so sweet as those that fall 
 from his own eyes while he writes ; his sublime 
 passages overawe no soul so imperiously as his 
 own ; his humour draws no laughter so rich or 
 so deep as that stirred within his own breast. 
 
 It might almost be said, indeed, that Sin- 
 cerity and Conscience, the two angels that 
 bring to the poet the wonders of the poetic 
 dream, bring him also the deepest, truest delight 
 of form. It might also be said that by aid of 
 sincerity and conscience the poet is enabled to 
 see more clearly than other men the eternal 
 limits of his own art to see with Sophocles 
 that nothing, not even poetry itself, is of any 
 worth to man, invested as he is by the whole 
 army of evil, unless it is in the deepest and 
 highest sense good, unless it comes linking us 
 all together by closer bonds of sympathy and 
 pity, strengthening us to fight the foes with 
 whom fate and even nature, the mother who 
 bore us, sometimes seem in league to see with
 
 36 POETRY 
 
 Milton that the high quality of man's soul which 
 in English is expressed by the word virtue is 
 greater than even the great poem he prized, 
 greater than all the rhythms of all the tongues 
 that have been spoken since Babel and to see 
 with Shakespeare and with Shelley that the high 
 passion which in English is called love is lovelier 
 than all art, lovelier than all the marble Mer- 
 curies that " await the chisel of the sculptor " 
 in all the marble hills. 
 
 A poet must indeed feel with Coleridge that 
 poetry is its own exceeding great reward. Like 
 Keats he must seek the smiles of the mother 
 of Hermes : 
 
 " Seek as they once were r sought in Grecian isles, 
 By bards who died content on pleasant sward, 
 Leaving great verse unto a little clan." 
 
 And for this reason in all English poetry, at 
 least, a sense of difficulty overcome must be 
 carefully avoided. Such a feeling destroys it 
 at once as a sincere utterance of the poet's soul. 
 
 In the poetry of England, we reiterate, so 
 imperative is it that there should be no faintest 
 suspicion of difficulty overcome the moment the 
 singer passes into the true poetic mood, to 
 avoid such a suspicion is the first care with all 
 true poets. So great is the importance of the 
 art of concealing art in high poetry that when 
 the imagination or the heart of the reader is 
 to be touched, there is actually a kind of danger
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 37 
 
 in using any metres save those of the simplest 
 kind. And this, we may be sure, was all that 
 Coleridge meant when he affirmed that the more 
 purely imaginative is the substance of any poem, 
 the simpler must be its method of presentment. 
 As instances of simplicity of form we can point 
 not only to the stanza of the Border ballads, 
 and to such poems as " Laodamia," " Dion," 
 " The Leech Gatherer," " Gray's Elegy," " The 
 Burial of Sir John Moore," and " The Song of 
 the Shirt," but also to such poems in another 
 kind as " The Ancient Mariner," " Christabel," 
 " Sister Helen," " Rose Mary," " Rizpah," &c. 
 And on the other hand we might point to the 
 " Raven," of Edgar Poe, where the poet, 
 though nearly as full of imaginative music as 
 they who wrote the above poems, and quite as 
 eager as they to touch the heart, entangles his 
 strength in the complexities of a form so arti- 
 ficial that even the simplicity of the diction 
 could hardly warm it into true, passionate life. 
 For when Poe himself declared, in criticizing 
 his own poem, that in the expression of passion 
 there is always something of the homely, he 
 would have done better by saying that, although 
 in poetry of deep passion the diction can either 
 be homely or otherwise, what must always be 
 homely is the metrical form. 
 
 A very notable instance of the mistake of 
 using elaborately artificial metres for the ren- 
 dering of simple subjects is afforded by Mistral 
 in his Mireio a poem in its motive having all 
 the simple charm of Wordsworth, and William 
 Barnes combined. In a lyrical metre of the
 
 38 POETRY 
 
 most elaborate kind, he describes and tells the 
 story of the Provencal maid Mireio gathering the 
 mulberry leaves for her silk-worms, the picture 
 of the footrace at Nismes, the mowers, the 
 female hay-makers, the hay-making, the wag- 
 goners, the treading out of the corn, the lovers 
 climbing the trees, the nest of the titmice, the 
 collector of snails, the girls carrying the orange 
 baskets on head or hip and laughing as they go, 
 the mirage, Mire*io' s crossing of the Rhone in 
 Adrelon's skiff, the girl's sunstroke and swoon 
 on the banks of the pool, her recall to life by the 
 mosquitoes every incident of which is de- 
 lightful, because it is so fresh and so new. This 
 makes the special feature of Mireio the sharp 
 and perpetual contrast it exhibits between 
 matter and form. 
 
 Turning to English poetry, far more powerful, 
 and far more enduring than nine-tenths of the 
 verse of our time, is " Auld Robin Gray " 
 written in the simplest of all measures. The 
 same may be said of Emily Bronte's finest poem. 
 In face of such a poem as Hood's " Bridge of 
 Sighs " it might, perhaps, seem rash to say that 
 to English poems of deep pathos monosyllabic 
 rhymes are essential, and yet we are by no 
 means sure that this might not be maintained. 
 
 For no one will deny that the motive of the 
 " Bridge of Sighs," is as heart-stirring as the 
 motive of the " Song of the Shirt," and yet no 
 one will affirm that the two poems stir the 
 heart with equal power. It is because anything 
 that disturbs in the smallest degree the accent 
 of sincerity is dangerous, is indeed fatal, that in
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 39 
 
 English lyrics difficult metres are only good 
 when the complexity of the form seems to be 
 disconnected with ingenuity seems, in a word, 
 to be the result not of metric skill at all, but of 
 the very movement of the poet's passion, as in 
 Shelley's " Skylark," where the poet, listening 
 in a rapt mood to the music of the bird has 
 passed into a temper so exalted that he must 
 needs attune his words to the very accent of 
 the bird himself. 
 
 The great law of poetic art, that the more 
 earnest, or impassioned, or imaginative the 
 subject, the more carefully must the mere 
 tricks of the trade be avoided, is not a law 
 invented by man, but is founded on the laws 
 of nature. 
 
 Lest any note of self-consciousness should mar 
 the poem's general tone of sincereity, even the 
 commonest resources of the metricist such, 
 for instance, as that of smoothing the run of 
 the lines by alliteration have to be disguised, 
 and by instinct are disguised, the moment the 
 poet has passed into the true poetic dream. 
 
 Though there are certain kinds of poetry where 
 the smoothing of the lines may be effected by 
 the most primitive kind of alliteration, where 
 the alliterative syllables may run off in couples, 
 or at least the bars of the verse may be marked 
 off by clearly accentuated alliterative syllables, 
 the moment the poet gets into an impassioned 
 mood this is no longer practicable. 
 
 The alliterative syllable must, if possible, be 
 embedded in the middle of a word lest serious 
 poetry which, though an art, is primarily a
 
 40 POETRY 
 
 message should be degraded by tricks of 
 artifice. So conscious of the supreme import- 
 ance of sincerity was the great master of the 
 lyric of simple passion, Burns, that in one of his 
 songs he actually exchanged a perfect for a less 
 perfect rhyme, as he tells us, merely in order 
 that the song might have the effect, by its 
 artistic deficiency, of being the natural, spon- 
 taneous expression of feeling. 
 
 Perhaps it might be too bold to say of Mrs. 
 Browning, the most impassioned of all British 
 poets since Burns, that in the " Cry of the 
 Children," and in some other of her superb 
 lyrics, she on occasion consciously allowed her 
 rhymes to run loose in order to add to the effect 
 of spontaneity, but certainly the imperfect 
 rhyming does sometimes seem to have this 
 effect. 
 
 But we must not forget here the obvious 
 division of poetry into worldly and unworldly 
 verse. Indeed, unless we do so divide it, we 
 cannot treat at all of eighteenth century poetry, 
 nor can we treat of nineteenth century poetry 
 as exemplified in the poetry of Byron, whose 
 worldly verse is alone of any great importance 
 among his writings. Among the many functions 
 of poetic art is that of poetising didactic, that 
 is to say prosaic, matter, and bringing it into 
 poetry. For this purpose each literature and 
 each age has had its favourite form. 
 
 As the mind of man widens in mere know- 
 ledge and intelligence fresh prose material is 
 being furnished for the poetic laboratory every 
 day. And the question, What is the poetic form
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 41 
 
 best suited to embody and secure this ever- 
 increasing and ever-varying wealth ? a ques- 
 tion which has to be answered by each literature, 
 and indeed by each period of each literature, 
 for itself goes to the root of poetic criticism. 
 It can of course only be exercised by passing the 
 didactic matter through a laboratory as creative 
 and as recreative as nature's own, the labora- 
 tory of a true poet's imagination. 
 
 Of course, before didactic matter can become 
 anything more than versified prose, it has to be 
 excarnated from the prose tissue in which all 
 such matter takes birth, and then incarnated 
 anew in the spiritualised tissue of which the 
 poetic body is and must always be composed. 
 Hence it is not enough for the poet to " use the 
 sieve," as Dante would say, in selecting " noble- 
 words." The best prose writers from Plato 
 downwards have been in the habit of doing 
 this. When Waller said : 
 
 Things of deep sense we may in prose unfold, 
 But they move more in lofty numbers told 
 
 he meant by "lofty numbers" those semi- 
 poetic " numbers " of the English couplet in 
 which poetised didactics were in his time 
 embodied as in the time of Shakespeare such 
 poetised secretions of the mere intellectus cogita- 
 bundus were put into the mouths of dramatic 
 characters, and in the Greek drama they were 
 put for the most part into the mouth of the 
 chorus. 
 
 Since the Romantic revival, however, poetic
 
 42 POETRY 
 
 art has undergone an entire change. Acted 
 drama cannot now receive poetised didactics, 
 which would in these days slacken the move- 
 ment and disturb the illusion required, while 
 as to the kind of epigram-in-solution or half- 
 poetised quintessential prose which is embodied 
 in the eighteenth-century couplet the criticism 
 of the Romantic revival is apt to consider this 
 not so much as poetry as an intermediate form 
 and an extremely rich and precious one 
 between poetry and prose. Epigrammatic 
 matter must to exist at all, be knowing, and as 
 knowingness and high poetry are mutually 
 destructive, it is evident that some form other 
 than the couplet, which is so associated with 
 epigram, must since the romantic revival be 
 used for the poetising of didactic matter of the 
 unworldly and lofty kind. The form which in 
 the nineteenth century this poetic work has 
 achieved is the sonnet which we shall discuss 
 somewhat fully further on. 
 
 Indeed, it is an open question whether since 
 the Romantic revival the sonnet especially as 
 used by Wordsworth has not been gradually 
 taking precedence of most other forms as an 
 embodiment of poetised didactics. And should 
 this on inquiry be found to be the case, the 
 importance of this form will be made manifest. 
 
 And this brings us to the interesting question 
 of poetic realism. How much of that dramatic 
 realism of which prose seems to be the natural 
 medium can a poet without neglecting the 
 demands of poetic art import into his verses ? 
 Without going so far as to say that according
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 43 
 
 to the measure of his success in this most 
 difficult poetic effort is the measure of the 
 lasting vitality latent in any poet's verses other 
 than verses of high and impassioned song, we 
 may at least affirm that those poets of the world 
 whose measure of success herein has been 
 greatest are such poets as Homer, Dante, and 
 Shakespeare. And as to unbeautiful subjects, 
 the poet must never forget that his final quest 
 is beauty. 
 
 Although, with regard t,o the question as to 
 what is and what is not a subject debarred by 
 its inherent repulsiveness from poetical treat- 
 ment, there can be no formulated rule, yet for 
 a poet to approach repulsive subjects is in the 
 last degree dangerous. Almost everything, how- 
 ever, depends upon the treatment and the 
 temper of the poet. If these be sufficiently 
 heroic to conquer the conditions of the repulsive 
 surroundings, the work even of a surgeon's 
 scalpel in the gruesome cockpit of a man-of-war 
 may become poetic and beautiful ; and if the 
 man under the surgeon's hands be Horatio 
 Nelson, whispering to his brother hero bending 
 over him, " Kiss me, Hardy," the entire poetic 
 picture may be sublime. 
 
 Of Dante's work, this faculty of seizing upon 
 the salient and representative facts of nature 
 and transfiguring them in the fiery crucible of 
 his unequalled imagination is the prominent 
 characteristic. What he sees he flashes upon 
 the actual retina of him who listens to his song, 
 and this he often does by means of details 
 which are essentially prose details selected by
 
 44 POETRY 
 
 the poet's eye. The Dantesque realism is simply 
 an attempt of a marvellously intense imagina- 
 tion to get as close as possible to the physiog- 
 nomy of nature and of human nature. And 
 the same poetic eye for selecting from the 
 materials of prose is seen when we come to 
 consider such secondary, but still great lumin- 
 aries as Villon and Burns. Without a very 
 large endowment of this high quality where 
 would be the most characteristic lyrics of either 
 of these poets ? And Crabbe's realism is quite 
 as true as theirs, though he lacked that sense of 
 beauty and that intensity of vision which alone 
 brings the supreme power of selection belonging 
 to the greatest artists. 
 
 To write melodious verses like the " Adonais " 
 of Shelley, or gorgeously coloured verses like 
 Keats's " Endymion," is no doubt, to do a 
 beautiful and a worthy work, for in the poetic 
 heaven there are many mansions. Indeed, the 
 reader who cannot dally with and enjoy the 
 lovely rhapsody of the " Ode to the West, Wind," 
 and even the golden toy " Sleep and Poetry," 
 may almost be said to lack the poetic sense. 
 Nay, we might go further, and say that it is 
 in the power of producing such poetic bubbles 
 as Coleridge's " Kubla Khan," that the magic 
 gift of the poet, as distinguished from the prose- 
 man, is sometimes most clearly seen. For if 
 we were asked to bring forward the most com- 
 plete example of pure poetry unmixed with any 
 of these qualities which poetry shares in common 
 with prose unmixed, for instance, with passion 
 or thought we should certainly instance
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 45 
 
 " Kubla Khan," where there is nothing but 
 that blending of colour and music with imagina- 
 tive feeling which forms the pabulum of the 
 poetic dream when the vision has plunged right 
 away into the deepest recesses of dreamland. 
 To show the power of writing such a fantasia 
 as Coleridge's is to show an endowment more 
 truly poetic (in the narrowest sense) than the 
 power to write a poem of immeasurably nobler 
 temper such a poem, for instance as " Lao- 
 damia " for there is no smallest portion of 
 " Kubla Khan " that could have been touched 
 by the fingers of prose. 
 
 Having admitted so much as this, why do we 
 affirm of Spenser, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats 
 that between such work as theirs and the work 
 of the others we have named, from Homer down 
 to Villon and Burns, the difference is one of 
 kind, and that the latter kind of poetry has in 
 it a deeper vitality than the former ? The 
 answer to this question is easy enough. Now 
 to do this an amount of realism is required 
 such as can only be compassed by a close study 
 of the external world. 
 
 Therefore, although in admiration of Shelley 
 and Keats we yield to none, it is because we do 
 not find, save in a very few of their noblest 
 works, that loving eye for the physiognomy of 
 life whether it be the life of nature or the life 
 of man which we find in even the smallest of 
 the poets we have contrasted with them. 
 
 Perhaps the reason why so few poets of the 
 most intensely poetical kind have been able to 
 import realism into poetry is that the command
 
 46 POETRY 
 
 over the mere poetic vehicle which we see in 
 poets like Shelley and Keats is so prodigious, 
 and involves such an entire devotion to the 
 study of poetry as a fine art, that but little force 
 is left for the study of nature and man that 
 study, in short, which and which alone, can 
 result in the poetic realism of those great 
 masters who combine all the powers of the two 
 varieties of poets. 
 
 Realism, then, is not only a legitimate, it is 
 an essential quest of the poet until he has passed 
 into that high mood when, in his passion of 
 prophecy, he can see nothing between his tripod 
 and the heaven of which he sings. Yet there is, 
 beyond any question, a limit to the extent to 
 which the poet may invade the domain of the 
 prose writer and steal from the garden of prose 
 the proper nutriment for the poet's fairy land. 
 
 It cannot be said that " Isabella " shows 
 Keats to have had any ear for the ottava rima 
 as a vehicle of serious poetry. As to what he 
 would have done with it in mock-heroic, his 
 treatment of the Spenserian stanza in " The 
 Cap and Bells " was not so successful as to 
 make critics wish that he had given them a 
 cockney " Don Juan." 
 
 The crown of worldly verse is seen in the 
 mock heroic and the greatest master of mock 
 heroic in all literature is Byron. 
 
 It was after the first two cantos of " Childe 
 Harold " that Byron awoke and found himself 
 famous. It is difficult to understand why, for 
 not even the after cantos were good enough to 
 place him alongside the immortal poets of the
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 47 
 
 world. It is his worldly verse it is in such 
 great masterpieces as " The Vision of Judg- 
 ment " and " Don Juan " that his place is 
 immortal. He first found his true wings in 
 " Beppo," a marvel of wit and worldly wisdom. 
 Then came " The Vision of Judgment," where 
 on the wings of worldly verse he soars away 
 almost into that region of the sublime which he 
 sought in " Childe Harold," " Manfred," Cain," 
 &c., and never reached. Then came " Don 
 Juan," by far the greatest piece of worldly verse 
 in any language. All these are, of course, 
 written in ottava rima, the only English stanza 
 that Byron ever mastered. Although this 
 measure has been successfully used for serious 
 poetry, as in Tasso's " La Gerusalemme 
 Liberata," in Fairfax's translation of it, and 
 with less success in Keats's " Isabella," the 
 proper moving spirit of the ottava rima is 
 jauntiness. The ottava rima was suggested to 
 Byron, not apparently by the Italian poets, but 
 by Frere in ' Whistlecraft," where it is used 
 with admirable ease and effect. From this 
 moment Byron's success as a poet was assured. 
 It may be said that it is only in ottava rima, 
 the proper medium for worldly poetry that 
 Byron is likely to take his place among the 
 immortals. 
 
 The present writer has on a former occasion 
 enlarged upon the inherent suggestion of jaunti- 
 ness in ottava rima. He has said that it is 
 just as much an impertinence there as it is in 
 real life, unless the poet makes jauntiness a 
 good weight-carrier. The same horse whose
 
 48 POETRY 
 
 prancings in his box, unburdened by saddle or 
 rider, seem so clumsy and ridiculous, looks a 
 very different creature when he caracols with 
 ten stone upon his back. In seeing a man 
 jauntily touch the strings of a guitar there is 
 nothing exhilarating at all. But when one of 
 those Japanese acrobats whose incredible feats 
 strike the spectator with awe, displays his 
 jauntiness, jauntily touches the strings of his 
 guitar as he balances on his shoulder a bamboo 
 which is curved almost to a semi-circle by the 
 weight of another acrobat twisting and twirling 
 like a monkey at the top, but twisting and 
 twirling in the perfectly contented knowledge 
 that absolute safety to his own neck lies in the 
 genius of the man below, then the jauntiness 
 of such guitar-playing as that adds to the 
 wonder of the performance. 
 
 Now we do not mean to say that a recognition 
 of difficulty overcome, though undoubtedly an 
 element of the pleasure we derive from poetry, 
 is the most important element, even in mock- 
 heroic poetry, but assuredly it is at the bottom 
 of all the pleasure we derive from the jaunting, 
 as properly expressed by the fifth and sixth 
 lines of ottava rima. 
 
 For, to show that the poet can do playfully 
 all that the heroic does seriously is the work 
 of the serio-comic ottava rima Italian or 
 English. The reader should feel that here is 
 one who could scale Parnassus with the best of 
 them, if he would, but that in the riot of his 
 power he lingers to disport himself on its lower 
 slopes. But then it is essential to have the
 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 49 
 
 power before you can play with it. Here is the 
 difficulty ; and now it is that we come to the 
 secret why the serio-comic ottava rima is not 
 to be achieved by the mere word-kneader, 
 knead he never so wisely. It is not born of 
 artifice at all. It is the natural expression of a 
 mood a mood unknown to schoolboys, and to 
 poets who are as school-boys bounded in their 
 playground lives the mood of the full-blooded 
 man who has lived who, if in his time he has 
 laughed more than most other men, has very 
 likely wept more than most ; who, if he has 
 enjoyed more than most other men, has very 
 likely suffered more than most, and who is 
 alive even yet to the beauty and the pathos 
 of human life. 
 
 Byron has had many imitators, and as many 
 failures. But no one has written a single stanza 
 in ottava rima that could be mistaken for one 
 of his stanzas. In the case of Byron's ottava 
 rima all that the imitator can catch is the 
 jauntiness. Perhaps it was his feeling this that 
 made Browning when writing " The Two Poets 
 of Croisic " in ottava rima adopt the variation 
 of the stanza. 
 
 It is difficult to say judging from this poem 
 what Browning could, and what he could not, 
 do with the ottava rima ; for here he has evi- 
 dently been working in accordance with some 
 theory. 
 
 One of the requisites of English ottava rima 
 used for humorous purposes is to give it 
 Italian lightness every now and then by the 
 use of double rhymes, and sometimes even of 
 
 E
 
 50 POETRY 
 
 triple rhymes. Now Browning is a greater 
 master of difficult rhyming than Byron him- 
 self the greatest indeed since Butler but in 
 " The Two Poets of Croisic " there is not one 
 double or triple rhyme. Why is this ? Is it 
 because the moment double and triple rhymes 
 are used in English ottava rima the jaunty 
 effect which they give makes the poem seem 
 an echo of " Don Juan," " Beppo," " Whistle- 
 craft " ? If so, it is of course no wonder that 
 Browning the most truly original poet of his 
 time should be shy of running such a risk. 
 But, on the other hand, jauntiness seems 
 essential to English ottava rima used for comic 
 narrative. 
 
 The fifth and sixth lines, in which the lines 
 of the quatrains are repeated, are imported 
 expressly to " turn into play " what has been 
 said seriously before, and the epigrammatic 
 summing up comes in the couplet. If the charm 
 of the poem consists, as in "The Two Poets of 
 Croisic," in strings of brilliant epigrams merely, 
 there was no need to use the ottava rima ; the 
 " Venus and Adonis " stanza would have done 
 the work better.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE POSITION OF POETRY IN RELATION TO THE 
 OTHER ARTS 
 
 H 
 
 AVING now considered the function 
 of worldly and unworldly verse, 
 we are prepared to ask the ques- 
 tion of the relation of poetry to 
 the other arts. This was never so uncertain 
 and anomalous as at the present moment. On 
 the one hand there is a class of critics who, 
 judging from their perpetual comparison of 
 poems to pictures, claim her as a sort of hand- 
 maid of painting and sculpture. On the other 
 hand the disciples of Wagner, while professing 
 to do homage to poetry, claim her as the hand- 
 maid of music. To find her proper place is 
 therefore the most important task the critic can 
 undertake at this time, though it is one far 
 beyond the scope of a work so brief as this. 
 With regard to the relations of poetry to paint- 
 ing and sculpture, however, it seems necessary 
 to glance for a moment at the saying of Simon- 
 ides, as recorded by Plutarch, that poetry is a 
 
 5 1
 
 52 POETRY 
 
 speaking picture, and that painting is a mute 
 poetry. It appears to have had upon modern 
 criticism as much influence since the publica- 
 tion of Lessing's Laocoon as it had before. 
 Perhaps it is in some measure answerable for 
 the modern vice of excessive word-painting. 
 Beyond this one saying, there is little or nothing 
 in Greek literature to show that the Greeks 
 recognised between poetry and the plastic and 
 pictorial arts an affinity closer than that which 
 exists between poetry and music and dancing. 
 Understanding artistic methods more pro- 
 foundly than the moderns, and far too pro- 
 foundly to suppose that there is any special 
 and peculiar affinity between an art whose 
 medium of expression is marble and an art 
 whose medium of expression is a growth of oral 
 symbols, the Greeks seem to have studied 
 poetry not so much in its relation to painting 
 and sculpture as in its relation to music and 
 dancing. It is matter of familiar knowledge, 
 for instance, that at the Dionysian festival it 
 was to the poet as " teacher of the chorus " 
 (xo/Bo&Saer/coXoc) that the prize was awarded, 
 even though the " teacher of the chorus " 
 were JEschylus himself or Sophocles. And this 
 recognition of the relation of poetry to music
 
 THE POSITION OF POETRY 53 
 
 is perhaps one of the many causes of the 
 superiority of Greek to all other poetry in 
 adapting artistic means to artistic ends. 
 
 In Greek poetry, even in Homer's description 
 of the shield of Achilles, even in the famous 
 description by Sophocles of his native woods 
 in the (Edipus Coloneus, such word-painting as 
 occurs seems, if not inevitable and unconscious, 
 so alive with imaginative feeling as to become 
 part and parcel of the dramatic or lyric move- 
 ment itself. And whenever description is so 
 introduced the reader of Greek poetry need not 
 be told that the scenery itself rises before the 
 listener's imagination with a clearness of out- 
 line and a vigour of colour such as no amount 
 of detailed word-painting in the modern fashion 
 can achieve. The picture even in the glorious 
 verses at the end of the eighth book of the 
 Iliad rises before our eyes seems actually to 
 act upon our bodily senses simply because the 
 poet's eagerness to use the picture for merely 
 illustrating the solemnity and importance of his 
 story lends to the picture that very authen- 
 ticity which the work of the modern word- 
 painter lacks. 
 
 That the true place of poetry lies between 
 music on the one hand and prose, or loosened
 
 54 POETRY 
 
 speech, on the other, was, we say, taken for 
 granted by the one people in whom the artistic 
 instinct was fully developed. 
 
 No doubt they used the word music in a very 
 wide sense, in a sense that might include several 
 arts. But it is a suggestive fact that, in the 
 Greek language, long before poetic art was 
 called " making," it was called " singing." The 
 poet was not Trot^e but aotSoe. And as re- 
 gards the Romans it is curious to see how 
 every now and then the old idea that poetry is 
 singing rather than making will disclose itself. 
 It will be remembered, for instance, how Terence, 
 in the prologue of Phormio, alludes to poets as 
 musicians. That the ancients were right in 
 this we should be able to show did our scheme 
 permit an historical treatment of poetry, we 
 should be able to show that music and the 
 lyrical function of the poet began together, but 
 that here, as in other things, the progress of 
 art from the implicit to the explicit has separa- 
 ted the two. 
 
 Every art has its special function, has a 
 certain work which it can do better than any 
 one of its sister arts. Hence its right of exist- 
 ence. For instance, before the " sea of emo- 
 tion " within the soul has become " curdled
 
 THE POSITION OF POETRY 55 
 
 into thoughts," it can be expressed in in- 
 articulate tone. Hence, among the fine arts, 
 music is specially adapted for rendering it. 
 It was perhaps a perception of this fact which 
 made the Syrian Gnostics define life to be 
 " moving music." When this sea of emotion 
 has " curdled into thoughts," articulate lan- 
 guage rhythmically arranged words steeped 
 in music and colour, but at the same time 
 embodying ideas can do what no mere word- 
 less music is able to achieve in giving it ex- 
 pression, just as unrhythmical language, lan- 
 guage mortised in a foundation of logic that 
 is to say prose, can best express these ideas as 
 soon as they have cooled and settled and 
 cleared themselves of emotion altogether. 
 
 Yet every art can in some degree invade the 
 domain of her sisters, and the nearer these 
 sisters stand to each other the more easily and 
 completely can this invasion be accomplished. 
 Prose, for instance, can sometimes, as in the 
 case of Plato, do some of the work of poetry 
 (however imperfectly, and however trammelled 
 by heavy conditions) ; and sometimes poetry, 
 as in Pindar's odes and the waves of the Greek 
 chorus, can do, though in the same imperfect 
 way the work of music. The poems of Sappho,
 
 56 POETRY 
 
 however, are perhaps the best case in point. 
 Here the poet's passion is expressed so com- 
 pletely by the mere sound of her verses that a 
 good recitation of them to a person ignorant 
 of Greek would convey something of that passion 
 to the listener ; and similar examples almost as 
 felicitous might be culled from Homer, from 
 ^Eschylus, and from Sophocles. Nor is this 
 power confined to the Greek poets. The 
 students of Virgil have often and with justice 
 commented on such lines as ^En v. 481 (where 
 the sudden sinking of a stricken ox is rendered 
 by means of rhythm), and such lines as Georg. 
 ii. 441, where, by means of verbal sounds, the 
 gusts of wind about a tree are rendered as 
 completely as though the voice were that of 
 the wind itself. 
 
 In the case of Sappho the effect is produced 
 by the intensity of her passion, in the case of 
 Homer by the intensity of the dramatic vision, 
 in the case of Virgil by a supreme poetic art. 
 But it can also be produced by the mere in- 
 genuity of the artist, as in Edgar Poe's " Ula- 
 lume." The poet's object in that remarkable 
 tour de force was to express dull and hopeless 
 gloom in the same way that the mere musician 
 would have expressed it that is to say, by
 
 THE POSITION OF POETRY 57 
 
 monotonous reiterations, by hollow and dread- 
 ful reverberations of gloomy sounds though 
 as an artist whose vehicle was articulate speech 
 he was obliged to add gloomy ideas, in order 
 to give to his work the intellectual coherence 
 necessary for its existence as a poem. He 
 evidently set out to do this, and he did it, and 
 " Ulalume " properly intoned would produce 
 something like the same effect upon a listener 
 knowing no word of English that it produces 
 upon us. 
 
 Comparing poetry with music, there is more 
 of music's peculiar and special and essential 
 witchery in the meaningless strains struck out 
 by the wind from the " thunderharp of pines," 
 or from an Molian harp hung in a window than 
 in any of the greatest compositions of Beethoven 
 or Wagner. But then there is the associative 
 effect of music to be taken into account 
 those simple and deathless airs that play upon 
 every chord of the human soul and every nerve 
 of the human body airs such as the " Mar- 
 seillaise" on the one hand, and "Home Sweet 
 Home " on the other. 
 
 And this is because, although poetry is one 
 of the fine arts, it is also much more than one 
 of the fine arts. It is the final expression of the 
 whole genial nature of man, and aspires to read 
 all the symbols of the universe in which man 
 is placed. 
 
 As to what languages are the most musical,
 
 58 POETRY 
 
 that can never be decided. The speakers of 
 each language will decide for themselves. 
 
 It is, however, pathetic to think that the 
 inherent beauty of any language has but little 
 to do with its chance of survival in the great 
 linguistic struggle for life. Here, indeed, as 
 in every other part of nature's great scheme of 
 evolution, no heed is given to beauty. When 
 she does achieve beauty it seems to be by 
 accident. What functions are useful ? What 
 functions are useless ? These only are the 
 questions answered by the history of nations 
 and their languages as by the history of nature. 
 Who would have supposed that human speech 
 starting from the gorilla roar (which Du Chaillu 
 alone among human beings could dare to 
 render), and reaching at length that divine 
 tongue in which Sappho sang, should get no 
 higher ? Those who have listened to the 
 nightingales at Fiesole must have often asked 
 themselves whether the birds alone are to 
 monopolize the perfection of speech, which is, 
 of course, to talk in music whether in this 
 regard man is to stay where he is, half-way 
 between unmusical beasts and the musical 
 birds. 
 
 If " evolution " and " progress " were synony- 
 mous terms, would not human speech have gone 
 on from Greek, (softening, indeed, in some degree 
 eliminating, those sibilants which vexed the 
 poetic ear of Pindar and the critical soul of 
 Dionysius of Halicarnassus), until it became 
 as soft and full of liquids as Italian, but with- 
 out losing any of the strength and grandeur and
 
 THE POSITION OF POETRY 59 
 
 pathos of the tongue of Sophocles ? Would it 
 not have gone on until the perfect human 
 tongue was evolved a tongue so musical that 
 the moment the speaker passed into passionate 
 utterance he would be obliged to sing instead of 
 speak his emotions ? 
 
 On the other hand, music can trench very 
 far upon the domain of articulate speech, as we 
 perceive in the wonderful instrumentation of 
 Wagner. Yet, while it can be shown that the 
 place of poetry is scarcely so close to sculpture 
 and painting as to music on the one side and 
 loosened speech on the other, the affinity of 
 poetry to music must not be exaggerated. We 
 must be cautious how we follow the canons of 
 Wagner and the more enthusiastic of his dis- 
 ciples, who almost seem to think that inarticu- 
 late tone can not only suggest ideas, but express 
 them can give voice to the Ver stand, in short, 
 as well as to the Vernunft of man. Even the 
 Greeks drew a fundamental distinction between 
 melic poetry (poetry written to be sung) and 
 poetry that was written to be recited. It is a 
 pity that, while modern critics of poetry have 
 understood, or at least have given attention to 
 painting and sculpture, so few have possessed 
 any knowledge of music a fact which makes 
 Dante's treatise De Vulgar i Eloquio so im-
 
 60 POETRY 
 
 portant. Dante was a musician, and seems to 
 have had a considerable knowledge of the 
 relations between musical and metrical laws. 
 But he did not, we think, assume that these 
 laws are identical. 
 
 If it is indeed possible to establish the identity 
 of musical and metrical laws, it can only be 
 done by a purely scientific investigation ; it can 
 only be done by a most searching inquiry into 
 the subtle relations that we know must exist 
 throughout the universe between all the laws 
 of undulation. And it is curious to remember 
 that some of the greatest masters of verbal 
 melody have had no knowledge of music, while 
 some have not even shown any love of it. 
 
 All Greek boys were taught music, but 
 whether Pindar's unusual musical skill was born 
 of natural instinct and inevitable passion, or 
 came from the accidental circumstance that his 
 father was, as he has been alleged, a musician, 
 and that he was as a boy elaborately taught 
 musical science by Lasus of Hermione, we have 
 no means of knowing. Nor can we now learn 
 how much of Milton's musical knowledge re- 
 sulted from a like exceptional " environment," 
 or from the fact that his father was a musician. 
 But when we find that Shelley seems to have
 
 THE POSITION OF POETRY 61 
 
 been without the real passion for music, that 
 Rossetti disliked it, that Swinburne was in- 
 different to it, and that Coleridge's apprehension 
 of musical effects was of the ordinary nebulous 
 kind, we must hesitate before accepting the 
 theory of Wagner. 
 
 The question cannot be pursued here, but if 
 it should on inquiry be found that, although 
 poetry is more closely related to music than to 
 any of the other arts, yet the power over verbal 
 melody at its very highest is so all-sufficing to 
 its possessor, as in the case of Shelley and 
 Coleridge that absolute music becomes a super- 
 fluity, this would be another illustration of 
 that intense egoism and concentration of force 
 the impulse of all high artistic energy which 
 is required in order to achieve the rarest miracles 
 of art. 
 
 It could easily be proved that the structural 
 difference between poetry and prose is funda- 
 mental. Among the many delights which we 
 get from the mere form of what is technically 
 called Poetry, the chief, perhaps, is expectation 
 and the fulfilment of expectation. This is 
 very obvious in rhymed verse, having familiar- 
 ized ourselves with the arrangement of the 
 poet's rhymes, we take pleasure in expecting 
 a recurrence of these rhymes according to this 
 arrangement. In blank verse the law of ex-
 
 62 POETRY 
 
 pectation is less apparent. Yet it is none the 
 less operative. Having familiarized ourselves 
 with the poet's rhythm, having found that 
 iambic foot succeeds iambic foot, and that 
 whenever the iambic waves have begun to grow 
 monotonous, variations occur trochaic, ana- 
 paestic, dactylic according to the law which 
 governs the ear of this individual poet ; we, 
 half consciously, expect at certain intervals 
 these variations, and are delighted when our 
 expectations are fulfilled. And our delight is 
 augmented if also our expectations with regard 
 to caesuric effects are realised in the same pro- 
 portions. Having, for instance, learned, half 
 unconsciously, that the poet has an ear for a 
 particular kind of pause, that he delights, let 
 us say, to throw his pause after the third foot 
 of the sequence, we expect that, whatever may 
 be the arrangement of the early pauses with 
 regard to the initial foot of any sequence, there 
 must be, not far ahead, that climacteric third- 
 foot pause up to which all the other pauses have 
 been tending, and upon which the ear and the 
 soul of the reader shall be allowed to rest to take 
 breath for future flights. And when this ex- 
 pectation of caesuric effects is thus gratified, or 
 gratified in a more subtle way, by an arrange- 
 ment of earlier semi-pauses, which obviates the 
 necessity of the too frequent recurrence of this 
 final third-foot pause, the full pleasure of poetic 
 effects is the result. In other words, a large 
 proportion of the pleasure we derive from 
 poetry is in the recognition of law. The more 
 obvious and formulated is the law, nay, the
 
 THE POSITION OF POETRY 63 
 
 more arbitrary and Draconian the more 
 pleasure it gives to the uncultivated ear. This 
 is why uneducated people may delight in rhyme, 
 and yet have no ear at all for blank verse ; 
 this is why the savage, who has not even an ear 
 for rhyme, takes pleasure in such unmistakable 
 rhythm as that of his tom-tom. But, as the ear 
 becomes more cultivated, it demands that these 
 indications of law should be more and more 
 subtle, till at last recognised law itself may 
 become a tyranny and a burden. He who will 
 read Shakespeare's plays chronologically, as far 
 as that is practicable from " Love's Labour's 
 Lost " to the " Tempest," will have no difficulty 
 in seeing precisely what we mean. In literature, 
 as in social life, the progress is from lawless 
 freedom, through tyranny, to freedom that is 
 lawful. 
 
 There are indications already that this axiom 
 is likely to be acted upon by the poets of the 
 twentieth century, but they must mind that 
 they do not carry it too far ; lawless freedom 
 may become anarchy. 
 
 With regard to the relation of poetry to prose, 
 Coleridge once asserted in conversation that 
 the real antithesis of poetry was not prose but 
 science. And if he was right the difference in 
 kind lies, not between the poet and the prose 
 writer, but between the literary artist (the man 
 whose instinct is to manipulate language) and 
 the man of facts and of action whose instinct 
 impels him to act, or, if not to act, to inquire.
 
 64 POETRY 
 
 One thing is at least certain, that prose, how- 
 ever fervid and emotional it may become, must 
 always be directed, or seem to be directed by 
 the reins of logic. Or, to vary the metaphor, 
 like a captive balloon it can never really leave 
 the earth. 
 
 Indeed, with the literature of knowledge as 
 opposed to the literature of power poetry has 
 nothing to do. Facts have no place in poetry 
 until they are brought into relation with the 
 human soul. But a mere catalogue of ships 
 may become poetical if it tends to show the 
 strength and pride and glory of the warriors 
 who invested Troy ; a detailed description of 
 the designs upon a shield, however beautiful 
 and poetical in itself, becomes still more so if it 
 tends to show the skill of the divine artificer 
 and the invincible splendour of a hero like 
 Achilles. But mere dry exactitude of imitation 
 is not for poetry, but for " loosened speech," 
 as the Greeks called prose. Hence, most of the 
 so-called poetry of Hesiod is not poetry at all. 
 The Muses who spoke to him about " truth " 
 on Mount Helicon made the common mistake 
 of confounding fact with truth. 
 
 And here we touch upon a very important 
 matter. The reason why in prose speech is
 
 THE POSITION OF POETRY 65 
 
 loosened is that, untrammelled by the laws of 
 metre, language is able with more exactitude 
 to imitate nature, though of course speech, even 
 when " loosened " cannot, when actual sensible 
 objects are to be depicted, compete in any real 
 degree with the plastic arts in accuracy of 
 imitation, for the simple reason that its media 
 are not colours nor solids, but symbols 
 arbitrary symbols which can be made to in- 
 dicate, but never to reproduce colours and 
 solids. Accuracy of imitation is the first re- 
 quisite of prose. But the moment language has 
 to be governed by the laws of metre the 
 moment the conflict begins between the claims 
 of verbal music and the claims of colour and 
 form then prosaic accuracy has to yield, 
 sharpness of outline, mere fidelity of imitation, 
 such as is within the compass of prose, have 
 in some degree to be sacrificed. But, just as 
 with regard to the relations between poetry and 
 music the greatest master is he who borrows 
 the most that can be borrowed from music, 
 and loses the least that can be lost from metre, 
 so with regard to the relations between poetry 
 and prose the greatest master is he who borrows 
 the most that can be borrowed from prose and 
 loses the least that can be lost from verse. No
 
 66 POETRY 
 
 doubt this is what every poet tries to do by 
 instinct ; but some sacrifice on either side there 
 must be, and, with regard to poetry and prose, 
 modern poets at least might be divided into 
 those who make picturesqueness yield to verbal 
 melody, and those who make verbal melody 
 yield to picturesqueness. 
 
 With one class of poets, fine as is perhaps the 
 melody, it is made subservient to outline or to 
 colour ; with the other class colour and outline 
 both yield to metre. The chief aim of the first- 
 class is to paint a picture ; the chief aim of the 
 second is to sing a song. Weber, in driving 
 through a beautiful country could only enjoy 
 its beauty by translating it into music. The 
 same may be said of some poets with regard to 
 verbal melody. The supreme artist, however, 
 is he whose pictorial and musical power are so 
 interfused that each seems born of the other, 
 as is the case with Sappho, Homer, ^Eschylus, 
 Sophocles, and indeed most of the Greek poets. 
 
 Among our own poets (leaving the two 
 supreme masters undiscussed) Keats and Cole- 
 ridge have certainly done this. The colour 
 seems born of the music, and the music born 
 of the colour. In French poetry the same 
 triumph has been achieved in Victor Hugo's
 
 THE POSITION OF POETRY 67 
 
 magnificent poem " En Marchant la Nuit dans 
 un Bois," which, as a rendering through verbal 
 music of the witchery of nature, stands alone 
 in the poetry of France. For there the poet 
 conquers that crowning difficulty we have been 
 alluding to, the difficulty of stealing from prose 
 as much distinctness of colour and clearness of 
 outline as can be imported into verse with as 
 little sacrifice as possible of melody. 
 
 But to return to the general relations of poetry 
 to prose. If poetry can in some degree invade 
 the domain of prose, so on the other hand prose 
 can at times invade the domain of poetry, and 
 no doubt the prose of Plato what is called 
 poetical prose is a legitimate form of art. 
 Poetry, the earliest form of literature, is also 
 the final and ideal form of all pure literature ; 
 and when Landor insists that poetry and 
 poetical prose are antagonistic, we must re- 
 member that Lan dor's judgments are mostly 
 based on feelmg, and that his hatred of Plato 
 would be quite sufficient basis with him for an 
 entire system of criticism upon poetical prose. 
 As with Carlyle, there seems to have been a 
 time in his life xvhen Plato (who of course is the 
 great figure standing between the two arts of 
 metre and loosened speech) had serious thoughts
 
 68 POETRY 
 
 of becoming a poet. And perhaps like Carlyle, 
 having the good sense to see his true function, 
 he himself desisted from writing, and strictly 
 forbade other men to write in verse. 
 
 If we consider this, and if we consider that 
 certain of the great English masters of poetic 
 prose of the seventeenth century were appar- 
 ently as incapable of writing in metre as their 
 followers Richter and Carlyle, we shall hardly 
 escape the conclusion on the one hand that the 
 faculty of writing poetry is quite another 
 faculty than that of producing work in the 
 kindred art of prose. 
 
 If we confess as we are going to confess 
 that poetry, howsoever powerful, sometimes 
 fails to give us the pleasure we ask from 
 a poet, we know exactly the kind of answer 
 that will be in store for us. It will be said 
 " The Question as to what subjects are, 
 and what subjects are not fit for poetic treat- 
 ment is one which will never be settled, for in 
 these matters a great deal must depend upon 
 temperament." 
 
 Without again going over the old ground of 
 the quaint American heresy which seems to 
 affirm that the great masters of metrical music, 
 from Homer to Tennyson and Swinburne, have 
 been blowing through penny trumpets " feudal 
 ideas " (whatever " feudal ideas " may be), 
 and that the more unmetrical the lines the 
 more free do they become from the penny
 
 THE POSITION OF POETRY 69 
 
 trumpet and the " feudal ideas," we may say 
 this in reference to all metrical structures, 
 whether quantitative or accentual, whether 
 rhymed or unrhymed that where the caesura 
 at the end of a verse, whether a rhyme caesura 
 or a quantitative caesura, is so strong that the 
 ear expects a certain kind of responsive em- 
 phasis in the subsequent verse or verses, the 
 expectation must be gratified, or there is artistic 
 failure. This is why, when in modern versifi- 
 cation quantity came to be supplanted by 
 accent, so many language? adopted alliteration, 
 or assonance, or rhyme. And as regards English 
 poetry, the moment that rhyme emphasis sup- 
 planted the alliterative emphasis which preceded 
 it, rhymeless verses became impossible, save in 
 the measure we call " fluent blank verse." 
 
 As for such so-called rhythmical movements 
 as we get in " The Lily and the Bee," " Pro- 
 verbial Philosophy," " Leaves of Grass," etc., 
 these have, apparently, nothing whatever to do 
 with what Chaucer in the " House of Fame " 
 calls cadence if we may judge from the " Tale 
 of Milibceus." 
 
 What Chaucer meant by "cadence" was 
 evidently a kind of measured prose with no 
 pretensions to metrical structure, though, being 
 measured, it was enabled to escape at will that 
 severe logical sequence demanded in all purely 
 prose compositions. But in each of the modern 
 cases instanced above the writer endeavours to 
 escape the conditions of both prose and verse 
 endeavours to escape, that is to say, the logical 
 march of the one and the metric scheme of the
 
 70 POETRY 
 
 other. They are, indeed, caricatures of Bible 
 rhythm that divine movement compared with 
 which even the music of Shakespeare and Milton 
 seems almost jejune the movement which, as 
 Selden has said, was the happy result of the 
 translators endeavouring to give in English the 
 bars of the sense-rhythm of the original. " The 
 Bible," says he, " is rather translated into 
 English words than into English phrase. The 
 Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that 
 language is kept." 
 
 To discuss the metrical movements of the 
 most famous innovator in this line, Walt. Whit- 
 man, has become positively painful, especially 
 to those who sympathise with the liberal and 
 generous views these innovations embody ; but 
 it would be uncandid to shrink from saying 
 that the endeavour to imitate this movement 
 of our sublime English Bible in poems where the 
 jargon of the slums is mixed up with Bible 
 phraseology and bad Spanish and worse French 
 is a sacrilege which every lover of the Bible 
 finds it hard to condone. Some rhymeless 
 verses, however, are not caricatures of this 
 kind : some are governed by a stanzaic law 
 which is something like that governing the 
 " Kalevala " rhythm of Longfellow's rhymeless 
 verses. Its effect is to enfeeble the substance, 
 however strong. A trochee at the end of even 
 a long English verse is so strong that the ear 
 demands a rhyme response. But in short lines 
 this demand becomes quite inexorable. 
 
 In judging of any young and inexperienced 
 adventurer on Parnassus the first thing after
 
 enquiring into his merits is to inquire whether 
 such defects as he displays come from mere 
 inexperience, or from the fact that his metric 
 art is the art of arithmetic his rhythmic rule 
 the cobbler's " rule of thumb." And perhaps 
 there is no more infallible sign of the poetaster 
 who rhymes not because a natural impulse 
 forces him to rhyme, but because other people 
 rhyme, than his horror of " fluent rhyming " 
 and his love of " hard rhyming " on all occasions. 
 Such a poet goes to his work in exactly the same 
 spirit that the mathematician goes to his lines 
 and angles. He has sufficient apprehension of 
 the sounds of his mother tongue to perceive 
 that while " Jove " is a hard rhyme to " love," 
 " move," and "grove " are not ; and that while 
 " dome " is a hard rhyme to " home," " come " 
 is not. Even he can perceive this ; and at once 
 he feels that he has made a discovery. He 
 takes a solemn oath that nothing on earth shall 
 induce him to use the makeshift rhymes of 
 Shakespeare and the rest ; that nothing on earth 
 shall ever induce him to write such a stanza 
 as : 
 
 Strong son of God, immortal love, 
 Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
 By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
 
 Believing where we cannot prove 
 
 when it is so easy to rhyme " love " with 
 " above," or " glove," that nothing in the world 
 shall ever induce him to write such a stanza 
 as:-
 
 72 POETRY 
 
 Never, though my mortal summers through such 
 
 length of years shall come, 
 As the many-wintered crow that leads the clanging 
 
 rookery home 
 
 when it is so easy to rhyme " come " with 
 " drum " or " rule of thumb." " All the Eng- 
 lish poets," he says, " have used such rhymes 
 under compulsion of the exigencies of form 
 perish the exigencies of form ! " 
 
 The young versifier who is also a poet, howso- 
 ever ignorant he may be of metrical science, 
 feels that the harmonies of our great poets are 
 not used for makeshift purposes ; that, on the 
 contrary, this fluent rhyming gives him, the 
 young poet, that artistic satisfaction of a sense 
 of cadence which is of all intellectual delights 
 the greatest. And as he grows older and bolder, 
 and comes to know his business more thoroughly, 
 the more freely does he rhyme " love " with 
 " move " and " grove," " home " with " come," 
 and even " ever " with " river." He per- 
 ceives that, owing to the blending of conson- 
 antal with vowel power, such fluent rhymes 
 as these are not only as good as hard 
 rhymes, but in many cases very much better, 
 for in long sequences hard rhyming, though 
 grateful at first, may begin to pall. The theory 
 of rhyming cannot be entered upon here ; but 
 perhaps what Bacon says in reference to another 
 matter is applicable to fluent rhyming as a 
 change from hard rhyming. " The sliding," 
 says he, " in the close or cadence hath an agree- 
 ment with the figure in rhetorick which they call 
 prater expectatum, for there is a pleasure in
 
 THE POSITION OF POETRY 73 
 
 being deceived." Indeed, rhymes like " come " 
 and " home " are sufficiently near to hard 
 rhymes to gratify the expectation of the ear, 
 and yet they give that soupc.on of variety and 
 surprise which true poets and true readers of 
 poetry love. 
 
 So much for poetry's mere place among the 
 other arts.
 
 IV 
 
 I 
 
 "^HERE is one great point of superiority 
 that musical art exhibits over met- 
 rical art. This consists, not in the 
 capacity for melody, but in the 
 capacity for harmony in the musician's sense. 
 The finest music of iEschylus, of Pindar, of 
 Shakespeare, of Milton, is after all only a 
 succession of melodious notes, and, in en- 
 deavouring to catch the harmonic intent of 
 strophe, antistrophe and epode in the Greek 
 chorus, and in the true ode (that of Pindar), 
 we can only succeed by pressing memory into 
 our service. We have to recall by memory the 
 waves that have gone before, and then to 
 imagine their harmonic power in relation to the 
 waves at present occupying the ear. Counter- 
 point, therefore, is not to be achieved by the 
 metricist, even though he be Pindar himself ; 
 but in music this perfect ideal harmony was 
 foreshadowed perhaps in the earliest writing. 
 
 74
 
 COMPARATIVE VALUE 75 
 
 We know at least that as early as the twelfth 
 century counterpoint began to show a vigorous 
 life, and the study of it is now a familiar branch 
 of musical science. 
 
 Now, inasmuch as " Nature's own hymn " is 
 and must be the harmonic blending of appar- 
 ently independent and apparently discordant 
 notes, among the arts whose appeal is through 
 the ear that which can achieve counterpoint 
 must perhaps rank as a pure art above one 
 which cannot achieve it. We are, of course, 
 speaking here of metre only. We have not 
 space to inquire whether the counterpoint of 
 absolute poetry is the harmony underlying 
 apparently discordant emotions the emotion 
 produced by a word being more persistent than 
 the emotion produced by an inarticulate sound. 
 
 But if poetry falls behind music in rhythmic 
 scope it is capable of rendering emotion after 
 emotion has become disintegrated into thoughts, 
 and here, as we have seen, it enters into direct 
 competition with the art of prose. It can use 
 the emphasis of sound, not for its own sake 
 merely, but to strengthen the emphasis of sense 
 and can thus give a fuller and more adequate 
 expression to the soul of man than music at its 
 highest can give. With regard to prose, no
 
 76 POETRY 
 
 doubt such writing as Plato's description of the 
 chariot of the soul, his description of the island 
 of Atlantis, or of Er's visit to the place of de- 
 parted souls, comes but a short way behind 
 poetry in imaginative and even in rhythmic 
 appeal. It is impossible, however, here to do more 
 than touch upon the subject of the rhythm of 
 prose in its relation to the rhythm of poetry ; 
 for in this matter the genius of each individual 
 language has to be taken into account. 
 
 Perhaps it may be said that deeper than all 
 the rhythms of art is that rhythm which art 
 would fain catch, the rhythm of nature ; for 
 the rhythm of nature is the rhythm of life 
 itself. This rhythm can be caught by prose as 
 well as by poetry, such prose, for instance, as 
 that of the English Bible. Certainly the rhythm 
 of verse at its highest, such, for instance, as that 
 of Shakespeare's greatest writings, is nothing 
 more and nothing less than the metre of that 
 energy of the spirit which surges within the 
 bosom of him who speaks, whether he speak in 
 verse or in impassioned prose. Being rhythm, 
 it is of course governed by law, but it is a law 
 which transcends in subtlety the conscious art 
 of the metricist, and is only caught by the poet 
 in his most inspired moods, a law, which, being
 
 COMPARATIVE VALUE 77 
 
 part of nature's own sanctions, can of course 
 never be formulated but only expressed, as it 
 is expressed in the melody of the bird, in the 
 inscrutable harmony of the entire bird chorus 
 of a thicket, in the whisper of the leaves of the 
 tree, and in the song or wail of wind and sea. 
 
 Now is not this rhythm of nature represented 
 by that " sense rhythm " which prose can catch 
 as well as poetry, that sense rhythm whose 
 finest expressions are to be found in the Bible, 
 Hebrew and English, and in the Biblical move- 
 ments of the English Prayer Book, and in the 
 dramatic prose of Shakespeare at its best ? 
 Whether it is caught by prose or by verse, 
 one of the virtues of the rhythm of nature is 
 that it is translatable. Hamlet's peroration 
 about man and Raleigh's apostrophe to death 
 are as translatable into other languages as are 
 the Hebrew psalms, or as is Manu's magnificent 
 passage about the singleness of man : 
 
 " Single is each man born into the world ; 
 single he dies ; single he receives the reward 
 of his good deeds, and single the punishment of 
 his evil deeds. When he dies his body lies like 
 a fallen tree upon the earth, but his virtue 
 accompanies his soul. Wherefore let man 
 harvest and garner virtue, so that he may have
 
 78 POETRY 
 
 an inseparable companion in traversing that 
 gloom which is so hard to be traversed." 
 
 Here the " rhythm," being the inevitable 
 movement of emotion and " sense," can be 
 caught and translated by every literature under 
 the sun. While, however, the great goal before 
 the poet is to compel the listener to expect his 
 caesuric effects, the great goal before the writer 
 of poetic prose is in the very opposite direction ; 
 it is to make use of the concrete figures and 
 impassioned diction of the poet, but at the same 
 time to avoid the recognized and expected 
 metrical bars upon which the poet depends. 
 The moment the prose poet passes from the 
 rhythm of prose to the ryhthm of metre the 
 apparent sincerity of his writing is destroyed. 
 
 As compared with sculpture and painting the 
 great infirmity of poetry, as an " imitation " of 
 nature, is of course that the medium is always 
 and of necessity words even when no words 
 could, in the dramatic situation, have been 
 spoken. It is not only Homer who is obliged 
 sometimes to forget that passion when at white 
 heat is never voluble, is scarcely even articulate, 
 the dramatists also are obliged to forget that 
 in love and in hate, at their tensest, words seem 
 weak and foolish when compared with the silent
 
 COMPARATIVE VALUE 79 
 
 and satisfying triumph and glory of deeds, such 
 as the plastic arts can render. This becomes 
 manifest enough when we compare the Niobe 
 group or the Laocoon group, or the great 
 dramatic paintings of the modern world, with 
 even the finest efforts of dramatic poetry, such 
 as the speech of Andromache to Hector, or the 
 speech of Priam to Achilles, nay such as even 
 the cries of Cassandra in the Agamemnon, or 
 the wailings of Lear over the dead Cordelia. 
 
 Even when writing the words uttered by 
 (Edipus as the terrible truth breaks in upon his 
 soul, Sophocles must have felt that, in the 
 holiest chambers of sorrow, and in the highest 
 agonies of suffering reigns that awful silence 
 which not poetry, but painting sometimes, and 
 sculpture always, can render. What human 
 sounds could render the agony of Niobe, or the 
 agony of Laocoon, as we see them in the sculp- 
 tor's rendering ? Not articulate speech at all ; 
 not words, but wails. 
 
 It is the same with hate ; it is the same with 
 love. We are not speaking merely of the un- 
 packing of the heart in which the angry warriors 
 of the Iliad indulge. Even such subtle writing 
 as that of ^Eschylus and Sophocles falls below 
 the work of the painter. Hate, though voluble
 
 80 POETRY 
 
 perhaps, as Clytaemnestra's when hate is at that 
 red-heat glow which the poet can render, 
 changes in a moment whenever that redness 
 has been fanned to hatred's own last complexion 
 whiteness as of iron at the melting-point 
 when the heart has grown far too big to be 
 " unpacked " at all, and even the bitter epigrams 
 of hate's own rhetoric, though brief as the 
 terrier's snap before he fleshes his teeth, or as 
 the short snarl of the tigress as she springs 
 before her cubs in danger, are all too slow and 
 sluggish for a soul to which language at its 
 tensest has become idle play. But this is just 
 what cannot be rendered by an art whose 
 medium consists solely of words. 
 
 It is in giving voice, not to emotion at its 
 tensest, but to the vibrations of emotion, it is 
 in expressing the countless shifting movements 
 of the soul from passion to passion, that poetry 
 shows in spite of all her infirmities her superiority 
 to the plastic arts. Hamlet and the Agamemnon, 
 the Iliad, and the (Edipus Tyrannus, are 
 adequate to the entire breadth and depth of 
 man's soul.
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 
 
 WE have now reached our last general 
 inquiry What varieties of poetic 
 art are the outcome of the two 
 kinds of poetic impulse, dramatic 
 imagination and lyric or egoistic imagination ? 
 It would, of course, be impossible here to 
 examine fully the sub]ect of poetic imagination. 
 For in order to do so we should have to enter 
 upon the vast question of the effect of artistic 
 environment upon the development of man's 
 poetic imagination ; we should have to inquire 
 how the instinctive methods of each poet, and 
 of each group of poets have been modified and 
 often governed by the methods characteristic 
 of their own time and country. We should have 
 to inquire, for instance, how far such landscape 
 as that of Sophocles in the (Edipus Coloneus 
 and such landscape as that of Wordsworth, 
 depends upon difference of individual tempera- 
 ment, and how far upon difference of artistic 
 
 81 G
 
 82 POETRY 
 
 environment. That, in any thorough and 
 exhaustive discussion of poetic imagination, the 
 question of artistic environment must be taken 
 into account, the case of the Iliad is alone 
 sufficient to show. Ages before Phrynichus, 
 ages before an acted drama was dreamed of, 
 a dramatic poet of the first order arose, and, 
 though he was obliged to express his splendid 
 dramatic imagination through epic forms, he 
 expressed it almost as fully as if he had inherited 
 the method and the stage of Sophocles. And if 
 Homer never lived at all, then an entire group 
 of dramatic poets arose in remote times, whose 
 method was epic instead of dramatic simply 
 because there was then no stage. 
 
 This, contrasted with the fact that in a single 
 half -century the tragic art of Greece arose with 
 ^Eschylus, culminated with Sophocles, and de- 
 cayed with Euripides, and contrasted also with 
 the fact that in England at one time, and in 
 Spain at one time, almost the entire poetic 
 imagination of the country found expression in 
 the acted drama alone, is sufficient to show 
 that a poet's artistic methods are very largely 
 influenced by the artistic environments of his 
 country and time. So vast a subject as this, 
 however, is beyond our scope, and we can only
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 83 
 
 point to the familiar instance of the troubadours 
 and the trouve~res and then pass on. 
 
 With the trouve"re (the poet of the langue 
 d'oil), the story or situation is always the end 
 of which the musical language is the means ; 
 with the troubadour (the poet of the langue 
 d'oc), the form is so beloved, the musical 
 language so enthralling, that, however beautiful 
 may be the story or situation, it is felt to be 
 no more than the means to a more beloved and 
 beautiful end. But then nature makes her own 
 troubadours, and her own trouve"res irrespective 
 of fashion and of time irrespective of langue 
 d'oc and langue d'oil. In comparing the trouba- 
 dours with the trouve"res, this is what strikes 
 us at once there are certain troubadours who 
 by temperament, by original endowment of 
 nature, ought to have been trouve"res, and there 
 are certain trouve"res who by temperament 
 ought to have been troubadours. Surrounding 
 conditions alone have made them what they 
 are. There are those whose impulse (though 
 writing in obedience to contemporary fashions 
 lyrics in the langue d'oc) is manifestly to 
 narrate, and there are those whose impulse 
 (though writing in obedience to contemporary 
 fashions fabliaux in the langue d'oil) is simply 
 to sing.
 
 84 POETRY 
 
 In other words, there are those who, though 
 writing after the fashion of their brother- 
 troubadours, are more impressed with the 
 romance and wonderfulness of the human life 
 outside them than with the romance and won- 
 derfulness of their own passions, and who 
 delight in depicting the external world in any 
 form that may be the popular form of their 
 time ; and there are those who, though writing 
 after the fashion of their brother-trouveres, are 
 far more occupied with the life within them 
 than with that outer life which the taste of 
 their time and country calls upon them to 
 paint born rhythmists who must sing, who 
 translate everything external as well as internal 
 into verbal melody. Of the former class Pierre 
 Vidal, of the latter class the author of " Le Lay 
 de 1'Oiselet," may be taken as the respective 
 types. 
 
 That the same forces are seen at work in all 
 literatures few students of poetry will deny, 
 though in some poetical groups these forces 
 are no doubt more potent than in others, as, 
 for instance, with the great parable poets of 
 Persia, in some of whom there is perpetually 
 apparent a conflict between the dominance of 
 the Oriental taste for allegory and subtle sug-
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 85 
 
 gestion, as expressed in the Zoroastrian definition 
 of poetry, " apparent pictures of unapparent 
 realities," and the opposite yearning to repre- 
 sent human life with the freshness and natural 
 freedom characteristic of Western poetry. 
 
 Allowing, however, for all the potency of 
 external influences, we shall not be wrong in 
 saying that of poetic imagination there are two 
 distinct kinds. 
 
 (1) the kind of poetic imagination seen at its 
 highest in ^schylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, 
 and Homer, and 
 
 (2) the kind of poetic imagination seen at its 
 highest in Pindar, Dante, and Milton, or else in 
 Sappho, Heine, and Shelley. 
 
 The former, being in its highest dramatic 
 exercise unconditioned by the personal or lyrical 
 impulse of the poet, might perhaps be called 
 absolute dramatic vision ; the latter, being more 
 or less conditioned by the personal or lyrical 
 impulse of the poet, might be called relative 
 dramatic vision. It seems impossible to classify 
 poets, or to classify the different varieties 
 of poetry, without drawing some such distinc- 
 tion as this, whatever words of definition we 
 may choose to adopt. 
 
 For the achievement of all pure lyric poetry,
 
 86 POETRY 
 
 such as the ode, the song, the elegy, the idyl, 
 the sonnet, the stornello, it is evident that the 
 imaginative force we have called relative vision 
 will suffice. And if we consider the matter 
 thoroughly, in many other forms of poetic 
 art forms which at first sight might seem to 
 require absolute vision we shall find nothing 
 but relative vision at work. 
 
 Even in Dante, and even in Milton and Virgil, 
 it might be difficult to trace the working of any 
 other than relative vision. And as to the 
 entire body of Asiatic poets it might perhaps 
 be found (even in view of the Indian drama) 
 that relative vision suffices to do all their work. 
 Indeed the temper which produces true drama 
 is, it might almost be said, a growth of the 
 Western mind. For, unless it be Semitic as 
 seen in the dramatic narratives of the Bible, 
 or Chinese as seen in that remarkable prose 
 story, " The Two Fair Cousins," translated by 
 Remusat, absolute vision seems to have but 
 small place in the literatures of Asia. 
 
 The wonderfulness of the world and the 
 romantic possibilities of fate, or circumstance, 
 or chance not the wonderfulness of the char- 
 acter to whom these possibilities befall are 
 ever present to the mind of the Asiatic poet.
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 87 
 
 Even in so late a writer as the poet of the Shah 
 Nameh, the hero Irij, the hero Zal, and the hero 
 Zohreb, are in character the same person, the 
 virtuous young man who combines the courage 
 of youth with the wisdom and forbearance of 
 age. And, as regards the earlier poets of Asia, 
 it was not till the shadowy demigods and heroes 
 of the Asiatic races crossed the Caucasus, and 
 breathed a more bracing air, that they became 
 really individual characters. 
 
 But among the many qualities of man's mind 
 that were invigorated and rejuvenated by that 
 great exodus from the dreamy plains of Asia 
 is to be counted, above all others, his poetic 
 imagination. The mere sense of wonder, which 
 had formerly been an all-sufficing source of 
 pleasure to him, was all-sufficing no longer. 
 The wonderful adventure must now be con- 
 nected with a real and interesting individual 
 character. It was left for the poets of Europe 
 to show that, given the interesting character, 
 given the Achilles, the Odysseus, the Helen, 
 the Priam, any adventure happening to such a 
 character becomes interesting. 
 
 What then is this absolute vision, this true 
 dramatic imagination which can hardly be 
 found in Asia which even in Europe cannot 
 be found except in rare cases ?
 
 88 POERTY 
 
 Between relative and absolute vision the 
 difference seems to be this, that the former 
 only enables the poet, even in its very highest 
 exercise, to make his own individuality, or 
 else humanity as represented by his own in- 
 dividuality, live in the imagined situation ; 
 the latter enables him in its highest exercise to 
 make special individual characters other than 
 the poet's own, live in the imagined situation. 
 
 " That which exists in nature," says Hegel, 
 " is a something purely individual and parti- 
 cular. Art on the contrary is essentially des- 
 tined to manifest the general." And no doubt 
 this is true as regards the plastic arts, and true 
 also as regards literary art, save in the very 
 highest reaches of pure drama and pure lyric, 
 when it seems to become art no longer when 
 it seems to become the very voice of Nature 
 herself. The cry of Priam when he puts to 
 his lips the hand that slew his son is not merely 
 the cry of a bereaved and aged parent ; it is 
 the cry of the individual King of Troy, and ex- 
 presses above everything else that most naif, 
 pathetic and winsome character. Put the words 
 into the mouth of an irascible and passionate 
 Lear and they would be entirely out of keeping. 
 
 It may be said then that, while the poet of
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 89 
 
 relative vision, even in its very highest exercise, 
 can only, when depicting the external world, 
 deal with the general, the poet of absolute 
 vision can compete with Nature herself, and 
 deal with both general and particular. If this 
 is really so we may perhaps find a basis for a 
 classification of poetry and poets. That all 
 poets must be singers has already been main- 
 tained. But singers seem to be divisible into 
 three classes : First, the pure lyrists, each of 
 whom can with his one voice sing only one tune ; 
 secondly, the epic poets, save Homer, the bulk 
 of the narrative poets, and the quasi-dramatists, 
 each of whom can with his one voice sing several 
 tunes ; and, thirdly, the true dramatists, who, 
 having, like the nightingale of Gongora, many 
 tongues, can sing all tunes. 
 
 It is to the first-named of these classes that 
 most poets belong. With regard to the second- 
 class, there are not of course many poets left 
 for it ; the first absorbs so many. But, when 
 we come to consider that among those who, 
 with each his one voice, can sing many tunes, 
 are Pindar, Firdausi, Jami, Virgil, Dante, Mil ton, 
 Spenser, Goethe, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, 
 Keats, Schiller, Victor Hugo, the second-class 
 is so various that no generalization save such a
 
 go POETRY 
 
 broad one as ours could embrace its members. 
 And now we come to class three, and must 
 pause. The third class is necessarily very 
 small. In it can only be placed such names as 
 Shakespeare, ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Homer, and 
 (hardly) Chaucer. 
 
 These three kinds of poets represent three 
 totally different kinds of poetic activity. 
 
 With regard to the first, the pure lyrists, the 
 impulse is pure 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 because he is blind. Still he feels 
 that the Muse loves him exceedingly. 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.
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 91 
 
 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 im- 
 agination, 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 situa- 
 tion. Not even to these is it given to break 
 through that law of centrality 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 
 compact " so much so that when at work 
 " the divinity " which lamblichus 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.
 
 92 POETRY 
 
 But the distinction between the quasi-drama- 
 tists 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. Some- 
 times, to be sure, the vision of the true drama- 
 tists the greatest dramatists will suddenly 
 become narrowed and obscured, as in that part 
 of the (Edipus Tyrannus where Sophocles makes 
 GBdipus 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 another 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. Some of 
 the most remarkable examples of that high 
 kind of relative vision which may easily be 
 mistaken for absolute vision may be found in 
 those great prose epics of the North, which 
 Aristotle would have called poems. Here is 
 one from the Volsunga Saga. While the brothers
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 93 
 
 of Gudrun are about their treacherous business 
 of murdering Sigurd, her husband, as he lies 
 asleep in her arms, Brynhild, Sigurd's former 
 love, who in the frenzy of " love turned to hate " 
 has instigated the murderers to the deed, hovers 
 outside the chamber with Gunnar, her husband, 
 and listens to the wail of her rival who is 
 weltering in Sigurd's blood. At the sound of 
 that wail Brynhild laughs. 
 
 " Then said Gunnar to her : Thou laughest not because 
 thy heart roots are gladded, or else why doth thy visage 
 wax so wan ? " * 
 
 This is, of course, very fine ; but, as any two 
 characters in that dramatic situation might have 
 done that dramatic business, fine as it is as 
 the sagaman gives us the general and not the 
 particular, the vision at work is not absolute 
 but relative at its very highest exercise. But 
 our examples will be more interesting if taken 
 from English poets. 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, 
 
 Translation of Morris and Magnusson
 
 94 POETRY 
 
 he can proceed no further, and the wedding 
 guest exclaims : 
 
 " God save thee, Ancient Mariner, 
 
 From the fiends that plague thee thus I 
 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
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 95 
 
 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 discovering Marina, exclaims : 
 
 " This is the rarest dream that e'er dull sleep 
 Did mock sad fools withal." 
 
 or as that in the third act of Titus Andronicus, 
 where Titus, beholding his mutilated and ruined 
 daughter, asks 
 
 " When will this fearful slumber have an end ? " 
 
 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 
 particular individual and he alone would have 
 thought, felt, said, or done. 
 
 Now what we have called absolute vision 
 operates in a very different way. So vividly 
 is the poet's mere creative instinct at work
 
 96 POETRY 
 
 that the ego sinks into passivity becomes 
 insensitive to all impressions other than those 
 dictated by the vision by the " divinity " 
 which has " seized the soul." 
 
 Shakespeare is full of examples. Take the 
 scene in the first act of Hamlet, where Hamlet 
 hears for the first time, from Horatio, that his 
 father's ghost haunts the castle. Having by 
 short sharp questions elicited the salient facts 
 attending the apparition, Hamlet says, " I 
 would I had been there." To this Horatio 
 makes the very commonplace reply, " It would 
 have much amazed you." Note the mar- 
 vellously dramatic reply of Hamlet " Very 
 like, very like ! stayed it long ? " Suppose that 
 this dialogue had been attempted by any other 
 poet than a true dramatist, or by a true drama- 
 tist in any other mood than his very highest, 
 Hamlet, on hearing Horatio's commonplace 
 remarks upon phenomena, which to Hamlet 
 were more subversive of the very order of the 
 universe than if a dozen stars had fallen from 
 their courses, would have burst out with 
 " Amazed me ! " and then would have followed 
 an eloquent declamation about the " amazing " 
 nature of the phenomena and their effect upon 
 him, But so entirely has the poet become
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 97 
 
 Hamlet, so completely has " the divinity seized 
 his soul," that all language seems equally weak 
 for expressing the turbulence within the soul of 
 the character, and Hamlet exclaims in a sort of 
 meditative irony, " Very like, very like 1 " It 
 is exactly this one man Hamlet, and no other 
 man, who in this situation would have so 
 expressed himself. 
 
 Charles Knight has some pertinent remarks 
 upon this speech of Hamlet ; yet he misses 
 its true value and treats it from the general 
 rather than from the particular side. Instances 
 of absolute vision in Shakespeare crowd upon 
 us ; but we can find room for only one other. 
 In the pathetic speech of Othello, just before 
 he kills himself, he declares himself to be : 
 
 " One not easily Jealous, but, being wrought, 
 Perplexed in the extreme." 
 
 Consider the marvellous timbre of the word 
 " wrought " as coming from a character like 
 Othello. When writing this passage, especially 
 when writing this word, the poet had become 
 entirely the simple English soldier-hero, as the 
 Moor really is he had become Othello, look- 
 ing upon himself as " not easily jealous," 
 whereas he was " wrought " and " perplexed 
 
 H
 
 98 POETRY 
 
 in the extreme " by tricks which Hamlet would 
 have seen through in a moment. 
 
 Victor Hugo furnishes two striking examples 
 of what we mean by lyric imagination and 
 dramatic imagination. In the one he makes 
 pure fancy do the work of dramatic imagination. 
 We allude to the passage in the second series 
 of " La Lgende des Siecles," where he calls 
 up the picture of the crescent moon hanging 
 over the lonely sea : 
 
 " Ce fer d'or qu'a laisse" tomber dans les nue"es 
 Le sombre cheval de la nuit ? " 
 
 The other occurs in the first series where, 
 watching Boaz asleep, and looking across him 
 over the harvest-field, Ruth, on seeing the 
 crescent moon bent among the stars, asks her- 
 self : 
 
 " Quel dieu, quel moissonneur de Internal e'te' 
 
 Avait, en s'en allant, n^gligemment jete\ 
 Cette faucelle d'or dans le champ des 6toiles ? 
 
 It would be difficult to find a finer example of 
 dramatic imagination than this. The poet has 
 entered the soul of Ruth. 
 
 While all other forms of poetic art can be 
 vitalized by relative vision, there are two forms 
 (and these the greatest) in which absolute vision 
 is demanded, viz., the drama, and in a lesser 
 degree the Greek epic, especially the Iliad. 
 This will be seen more plainly perhaps if we
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 99 
 
 now vary our definitions and call relative 
 vision egoistic imagination, absolute vision 
 dramatic imagination. 
 
 It is not within the scope of this work to dis- 
 cuss in detail the vast subject of drama, which 
 would require a book by itself ; but inferentially 
 we have been able to say much that will convey 
 our generalizations upon the subject. 
 
 Much of the dramatist's work can be, and in 
 fact is, effected by egoistic imagination, while true 
 dramatic imagination is only called into play on 
 comparatively rare occasions. Not only fine 
 but sublime dramatic poems have been written, 
 however, where the vitalizing power has been 
 entirely that of lyrical imagination. We need 
 only instance the Prometheus Bound of 
 ^Eschylus, the most sublime poem in the world. 
 The dramas of Shelley too, like those of Victor 
 Hugo and Calderon, are informed entirely by 
 egoistic imagination. In all these splendid 
 poems the dramatist places himself in the imag- 
 ined situation, or at most he places there some 
 typical conception of universal humanity. 
 
 There is not in all Calderon any such display 
 of dramatic imagination as we get in that won- 
 derful speech of Priam's in the last book of 
 the Iliad to which we have before alluded.
 
 ioo POETRY 
 
 There is not in the Cenci such a display of 
 dramatic imagination as we get in the sudden 
 burst of anger from the spoilt child of gods and 
 men, Achilles (anger which alarms the hero 
 himself as much as it alarms Priam), when the 
 prattle of the old man has carried him too far. 
 It may seem bold to say that the drama of 
 Goethe is informed by egoistic imagination 
 only assuredly the prison-scene in Faust is 
 unsurpassed in the literatures of the world. 
 Yet, perhaps, it could be shown of the passion 
 and the pathos of Gretchen throughout the 
 entire play that it betrays a female character 
 general and typical rather than individual 
 and particular. 
 
 The nature of this absolute vision or true 
 dramatic imagination is easily seen if we com- 
 pare the dramatic work of writers without 
 absolute vision, such as Calderon, Goethe, Ben 
 Jonson, Fletcher, and others, with the dramatic 
 work of jEschylus and of Shakespeare. While 
 of the former group it may be said that each 
 poet skilfully works his imagination, of ^Eschy- 
 lus and Shakespeare it must be said that each 
 in his highest dramatic mood does not work, 
 but is worked by his imagination. Note, for 
 instance, how the character of Clytaemnestra
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 101 
 
 grows^and glows under the hand of ^Eschylus. 
 
 The poet of the Odyssey had distinctly saM 
 that ^Egisthus, her paramour, had struck the 
 blow, but the dramatist, having imagined the 
 greatest tragic female in all poetry, finds it 
 impossible to let a man like ^Egisthus assist 
 such a woman in a homicide so daring and so 
 momentous. And when in that terrible speech 
 of hers she justifies her crime (ostensibly to the 
 outer world, but really to her own conscience) 
 the way in which, by the sheer magnetism of 
 irresistible personality, she draws our sympathy 
 to herself, and her crime is unrivalled out of 
 Shakespeare and not surpassed even there. 
 In the Great Drama, in the Agamemnon, in 
 Othello, in Hamlet, in Macbeth, there is an 
 imagination at work whose laws are inexorable, 
 are inevitable, as the laws by the operation of 
 which the planets move around the sun. 
 
 Considering how large and on the whole how 
 good is the body of modern criticism upon drama, 
 it is surprising how poor is the modern criticism 
 upon epic. Aristotle, comparing tragedy with 
 epic, gives the palm to tragedy as being the more 
 perfect art, and nothing can be more ingenious 
 than the way in which he has marshalled his 
 reasons. He tells as that tragedy as well as
 
 102 POETRY 
 
 epic is capable of producing its effect even with- 
 out action ; we can judge of it perfectly, says 
 he, by reading. He goes so far as to say that, 
 even in reading as well as in representation, 
 tragedy has an advantage over the epic, the 
 advantage of greater clearness and distinctness 
 of impression. And in some measure this was 
 perhaps true of Greek tragedy, for as Miiller 
 in his Dissertations on the Eumenides has well 
 said, the ancients always remained and wished to 
 remain conscious that the whole was a Diony- 
 sian entertainment ; the quest of a common- 
 place aTrartj came afterwards. And even of 
 of Romantic Drama it may be said that in the 
 time of Shakespeare, and indeed down through 
 the eighteenth century, it never lost entirely 
 its character of a recitation as well as a drama. 
 It was not till melodrama began to be recognised 
 as a legitimate form of dramatic art that the 
 dialogue had to be struck from the dramatic 
 action " at full speed " struck like sparks 
 from the roadster's shoes. The truth is, how- 
 ever, that it was idle for Aristotle to inquire 
 which is the more important branch of poetry, 
 epic or tragedy. 
 
 Equally idle would it be for the modern critic 
 to inquire how much romantic drama gained and
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 103 
 
 how much it lost by abandoning the chorus. 
 Much has been said as to the scope and the 
 limits of epic and dramatic poetry. If in epic 
 the poet has the power to take the imagination 
 of his audience away from the dramatic centre 
 and show what is going on at the other end of 
 the great web of the world, he can do the same 
 thing in drama by the chorus, and also by the 
 introduction into the dramatic circle of mes- 
 sengers and others from the outside world. 
 
 But as regards epic poetry, is it right that 
 we should hear, as we sometimes do hear, the 
 voice of the poet himself as chorus bidding us 
 contrast the present picture with other pictures 
 afar off, in order to enforce its teaching and 
 illustrate its pathos ? This is a favourite method 
 with modern poets and a still more favourite 
 one with prose narrators. Does it not give 
 an air of self-consciousness to poetry ? Does 
 it not disturb the intensity of the poetic vision ? 
 Yet it has the sanction of Homer ; and who 
 shall dare to challenge the methods of the great 
 father of epic ? An instance occurs in Iliad v. 
 where, in the midst of all the stress of fight, 
 the poet leaves the dramatic action to tell us 
 what became of the inheritance of Phaenops 
 after his two sons had been slain by Diomedes.
 
 104 POETRY 
 
 The only other instance occurs in iii. 243-4, 
 where the poet, after Helen's pathetic mention 
 of her brothers, comments on the causes of 
 their absence, generalizes upon the impotence 
 of human intelligence the impotence even of 
 human love to pierce the darkness in which 
 the web of human fate is woven. Thus she 
 spoke (the poet tells us) ; but the life-giving 
 earth already possessed them, there in Lace- 
 daemon, in their dear native land : 
 
 iv A.a.Kt$ai/j.ovi avBi 0iAp EV TrarpiSt yacy. 
 
 This, of course, is ' beautiful exceedingly," 
 but, inasmuch as the imagination at work is 
 egoistic or lyrical, not dramatic, inasmuch as 
 the vision is relative not absolute, it does not 
 represent that epic strength at its very highest 
 which we call specially " Homeric," unless in- 
 deed we remember that with Homer the Muses 
 are omniscient ; this certainly may give the 
 passage a deep dramatic value it otherwise 
 seems to lack. 
 
 The deepest of all the distinctions between 
 dramatic and epic methods has relation, how- 
 ever, to the nature of the dialogue. Aristotle 
 failed to point it out, and this is remarkable un-
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 105 
 
 til we remember that his work is but a fragment 
 of a great system of criticism. In epic poetry, 
 and in all poetry that narrates, whether the 
 poet be Homer, Chaucer, Thomas the Rhymer, 
 Gottfried von Strasburg, or Turoldus, the action, 
 of course, moves by aid partly of narrative 
 and partly by aid of dialogue, but in drama the 
 dialogue has a quality of suggestiveness and 
 subtle inference which we do not expect to find 
 in any other poetic form save perhaps that of the 
 purely dramatic ballad. 
 
 In ancient drama this quality of suggestive- 
 ness and subtle inference is seen not only in the 
 dialogue, but in the choral odes. The third ode 
 of the Agamemnon is an extreme case in point, 
 where, by a kind of double entendre, the relations 
 of Clytsemnestra and vEgisthus are darkly al- 
 luded to under cover of allusions to Paris and 
 Helen. Of this dramatic subtlety Sophocles is 
 perhaps the greatest master ; and certain critics 
 have been led to speak as though irony were 
 the heart-thought of Sophoclean drama. But the 
 suggestiveness of Sophocles is pathetic (as 
 the late Prof. Lewis Campbell has well pointed 
 out) not ironical. This is one reason why drama 
 more than epic seems to satisfy the mere in- 
 tellect of the reader, though this may be coun-
 
 io6 POETRY 
 
 terbalanced by the hardness of mechanical 
 structure which sometimes disturbs the reader's 
 imagination in tragedy. 
 
 When, for instance, a dramatist pays so much 
 attention to the evolution of the plot as So- 
 phocles doe?, it is inevitable that his characters 
 should be more or less plot-ridden ; they have 
 to say and do now and then certain things 
 which they would not say and do but for the 
 exigencies of the plot. Indeed one of the ad- 
 vantages which epic certainly has over drama 
 is that the story can be made to move as rapidly 
 as the poet may desire without these mechanical 
 modifications of character. 
 
 With regard to the difference between epic 
 and drama, the late Leslie Stephen has made 
 some admirable remarks upon this subject. 
 
 " A play may be read as well as seen," he 
 says, " but it calls for an effort of imagination 
 on the part of the reader which can never quite 
 supply the place of actual sight ; and the play 
 intended only for the study becomes simply a 
 novel told in a clumsy method." 
 
 The artistic question raised in this passage is 
 a certain answer to Aristotle. Aristotle, as we 
 have seen, decided in favour of dramatic as 
 against narrative art, on the ground that a play 
 can be both read and seen. But then Aristotle's 
 idea of a play was very different from the mod- 
 ern idea of dramatic art. Narrative pure and
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 107 
 
 simple formed a very large portion of a Greek 
 play. Indeed, in one of the tragedies of ^schy- 
 lus, the ' Septem contra Thebas,' the messenger's 
 narrative and enumeration of the allied chiefs, 
 in about three hundred lines or more, forms 
 something like a third part of the play, while a 
 modern drama, even by an Elizabethan, con- 
 sists of dialogue struck rigidly from the action. 
 Still the drama of the Elizabethans was a 
 flexible form of art. It gave the dramatist 
 sufficient room and freedom not only to depict 
 his characters, but to develop them before the 
 eyes of the audience, not so fully, indeed, as 
 characters can be developed in prose fiction, 
 but still with an almost sufficient fulness. If 
 the exigencies of the contemporary stage are 
 such that the dramatist can do this no longer, 
 while the writers of plays to be read must do 
 it in order to achieve anything like worthy work, 
 then the .difference between the acted and the 
 unacted drama is so wide that they can hardly 
 be placed in the same category. This being so, 
 is or is not the mechanical scaffolding of a play 
 an encumbrance to the writer, and an impedi- 
 ment to the movement of the reader's imagina- 
 tion ? Without attempting to decide upon the 
 point, we may at least say this, that a form of 
 art which at certain periods and in certain 
 countries is flexible may become inflexible at 
 certain other periods and in certain other 
 countries ; and that the moment a form of art 
 has lost its flexibility lost that power which 
 should enable it to give a vital picture of the 
 time it ceases to be a good literary form, and
 
 io8 POETRY 
 
 there is no need to try to kill it, it will die a 
 natural death. 
 
 Much has been written about the severance 
 in our time between the acted drama and 
 dramatic poetry. That the growth of realism 
 in art is a necessary and inevitable result of that 
 complexity, and that searching knowingness of 
 temper, which belong to a social arrangement 
 like that of modern times is true. It is true, 
 too, that in the drama especially the demand of 
 spectators for further and still further material 
 illusion makes it at last necessary that every 
 speech shall have a theatric raison d'etre, and 
 almost even a spectacular one that every 
 response, in short, shall be struck from the 
 dramatic action, so to speak, as the spark is 
 struck from the flint and steel. And this being 
 so, a closet play or unacted drama seems to be 
 the only form of poetic art still remaining in 
 which the poet is able to develop in pure poetic 
 forms his conception of a subtle and complex 
 character, as he would in the time of Shakes- 
 peare have developed it in an acting play. 
 
 But having determined to produce a drama 
 not for the boards, but for the closet, there 
 arises the important question how far the poet 
 may legitimately free himself from those theatric 
 conditions which, being incidents of the modern 
 type of acted drama, are really incidents of a 
 form of art different from that which he is 
 attempting ; for it must be borne in mind that 
 the points which aid illusion in the contem- 
 porary theatre tend not to aid but to destroy 
 illusion in the closet. Take, for instance, such
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 109 
 
 a drama as the late Lord Lytton's " Lady of 
 Lyons," and, again, take " Philip Van Arte- 
 velde " or Swinburne's " Bothwell." In the 
 first case so skilfully is the dialogue elicited by 
 the theatric situation that its utter falsity to 
 nature is forgotten by the spectator ; while in 
 the other two plays dialogue, which is so true 
 to nature and to the actual facts of history as 
 to produce when read something of the illusion 
 of a contemporary chronicle is so little sup- 
 ported by theatric conditions that " Philip Van 
 Artevelde," even after much pruning, does not 
 act well, while " Bothwell " could never be acted 
 at all. A single act of thirteen scenes, and a 
 speech of several hundred verses have been called 
 monstrous, and, indeed, are monstrous in a 
 tragedy. Yet it is, perhaps, a mere question 
 of names after all. Had these plays been called 
 simply, " dramatic chronicles," the reply to 
 objectors against their great length and de- 
 fective construction would be by a question, 
 What, then, is the proper construction, and 
 what is the proper length of a dramatic 
 chronicle ? Clearly, therefore, there is very 
 great freedom of construction allowed to the 
 writer of a modern closet play. Yet the laws 
 of imaginative art are here not less inexorable 
 than they were in an acted drama, but more 
 so. The more entirely free is the closet drama 
 from the conditions of theatrical illusion, the 
 less free is it to dispense with poetic illusion, 
 i.e. with that dramatic truth which the specta- 
 cular realism of the theatre can alone cause us 
 to dispense with and forget,
 
 no POETRY 
 
 "Because things seen are mightier than things heard." 
 
 The only kind of epic for Aristotle to consider 
 was Greek epic, between which and all other 
 epic the difference is one of kind, if the Iliad 
 alone is taken to represent Greek epic. In 
 speaking of the effect that surrounding con- 
 ditions seem to have upon the form in which the 
 poetic energy of any time or country should 
 express itself, we instanced the Iliad as a typical 
 case. The imagination vivifying it is mainly 
 dramatic. The characters represent much more 
 than the mere variety of mood of the delineator. 
 Notwithstanding all the splendid works of 
 Calderon, Marlowe, Webster and Goethe, it is 
 doubtful whether as a born dramatist the poet 
 of the Iliad does not come nearer to ^Eschylus 
 and Shakespeare than does any other poet. His 
 passion for making the heroes speak for them- 
 selves is almost a fault in the Iliad considered 
 as pure epic, and the unconscious way in which 
 each actor is made to depict his own character 
 is in the highest spirit of drama. 
 
 It is owing to this speciality of the Iliad that 
 it stands apart from all other epic save that of 
 the Odyssey, where, however, the dramatic 
 vision is less vivid. It is owing to the dramatic 
 imagination displayed in the Iliad that it is
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART in 
 
 impossible to say, from internal evidence, 
 whether the poem is to be classified with the 
 epics of growth or with the epics of art. 
 
 In poetic art the more Homerically the great 
 fundamental passions of man's nature are 
 treated, that is to say, the more simply and 
 singly, the more powerful is the effect. Shakes- 
 peare is so alive to this great law of the human 
 mind that he sometimes misses an easy and 
 obvious method of lending verisimilitude to a 
 situation rather than vex his audience with a 
 multiplicity of motives, as in the relations 
 between Lear and Cordelia, where it would have 
 been easy to clear the old king from the obvious 
 charge of fatuity by making him to be hood- 
 winked as to Cordelia's real affection by some 
 well-devised plot of Goneril and Regan. 
 
 All epics are clearly divisible into two classes, 
 first those which are a mere accretion of poems 
 or traditionary ballads, and second, those which, 
 though based indeed on tradition or history, 
 have become so fused in the mind of one great 
 poet, so stained, therefore, with the colour and 
 temper of that mind, as to become new cry- 
 stallizations inventions, in short, as we under- 
 stand that word. Each kind of epic has ex- 
 cellencies peculiar to itself, accompanied by 
 peculiar and indeed necessary defects. In the 
 one we get the freedom apparently schemeless 
 and motiveless of nature, but, as a conse-
 
 ii2 POETRY 
 
 quence, miss that " hard acorn of thought " 
 (to use the picturesque definition in the Vol- 
 sunga Saga of the heart of a man) which the 
 mind asks for as the core of every work of art. 
 In the other this great requisite of an adequate 
 central thought is found, but accompanied by a 
 constriction, a lack of freedom, a cold artificiality 
 the obtrusion of a pedantic scheme, which would 
 be intolerable to the natural mind unsophisti- 
 cated by literary study. The flow of the one is 
 as that of a river, the flow of the other as that 
 of a canal. Yet, as has been already hinted, 
 though the great charm of Nature herself is 
 that she never teases us with any obtrusive 
 exhibitions of scheme, she doubtless has a 
 scheme somewhere, she does somewhere hide a 
 " hard acorn of thought " of which the poem 
 of the universe is the expanded expression. 
 And, this being so, art should have a scheme 
 too ; but in such a dilemma is she placed in this 
 matter that the epic poet, unless he is evidently 
 telling the story for its own sake, scornful of 
 purposes ethic or aesthetic, must sacrifice illusion. 
 Among the former class of epics are to be 
 placed the great epics of growth such as the 
 Mahabharata, the Niblung story, &c.; among 
 the latter the Odyssey, the ^Eneid, Paradise
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 113 
 
 Lost, the Gerusalemme Liberata, the Lusiadas. 
 
 But where in this classification are we to find 
 a place for the Iliad ? The heart-thought of the 
 greatest epic in all literature is simply that 
 Achilles was vexed, and that the fortunes of the 
 world depended upon the whim of a sulky hero. 
 Yet, notwithstanding all the acute criticisms of 
 Wolff, it remains difficult for us to find a place 
 for the Iliad among the epics of growth. And 
 why ? Because throughout the Iliad the 
 dramatic imagination shown is of the first order ; 
 and, if we are to suppose a multiplicity of 
 authors for the poem, we must also suppose that 
 ages before the time of Pericles there existed a 
 group of dramatists more nearly akin to the 
 masters of the great drama, ^Eschylus, Sopho- 
 cles, and Shakespeare than any group that has 
 ever existed since. Yet it is equally difficult to 
 find a place for it amongst the epics of art. 
 In the matter of artistic motive the Odyssey 
 stands alone among the epics of art of the 
 world, as we are going to see. 
 
 It is manifest that, as the pleasure derived 
 from the epic of art is that of recognizing a 
 conscious scheme, if the epic of art fails through 
 confusion of scheme it fails altogether. What 
 is demanded of the epic of art (as some kind of 
 
 I
 
 H4 POETRY 
 
 compensation for that natural freedom of evolu- 
 tion which it can never achieve, that sweet 
 abandon which belongs to nature and to the 
 epic of growth alike) is unity of impression, 
 harmonious and symmetrical development of a 
 conscious heart-thought or motive. This being 
 so, where are we to place the vEneid, and where 
 are we to place the Shah Nameh ? Starting 
 with the intention, as it seems, of fusing into 
 one harmonious whole the myths and legends 
 upon which the Roman story is based, Virgil, 
 by the time he reaches the middle of his epic, 
 forgets all about this primary intent, and gives 
 us his own thoughts and reflexions on things in 
 general. Fine as is the speech of Anchises to 
 ./Eneas in Elysium (TEn. vi. 724-755), its in- 
 congruity with the general scheme of the poem 
 as developed in the previous books shows how 
 entirely Virgil lacked that artistic power shown 
 in the Odyssey of making a story become the 
 natural and inevitable outcome of an artistic 
 idea. 
 
 In the Shah Nameh, there is the artistic 
 redaction of Virgil, but with even less attention 
 to a central thought than Virgil exhibits. 
 Firdausi relies for his effects upon the very 
 qualities which characterize not the epic of art,
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 115 
 
 but the epic of growth a natural and not an 
 artificial flow of the story ; so much so indeed 
 that, if the Shah Nameh were studied in con- 
 nexion with the Iliad on the one hand, and with 
 the Kalevala on the other, it might throw a 
 light upon the way in which an epic may be 
 at one and the same time an aggregation of the 
 national ballad poems and the work of a single 
 artificer. That Firdausi was capable of working 
 from a centre not only artistic but philosophic 
 his Yusuf and Zuleikha shows ; and if we con- 
 sider what was the artistic temper of the Per- 
 sians in Firdausi's time, what indeed has been 
 the temper during the whole of the Moham- 
 medan period, the subtle temper of the parable 
 poet, the Shah Nameh, with its direct appeal 
 to popular sympathies, is a standing wonder 
 in poetic literature. 
 
 With regard, however, to Virgil's defective 
 power of working from an artistic motive, as 
 compared with the poet of the Odyssey, this 
 is an infirmity he shares with all the poets of 
 the western world. Certainly he shares it with 
 the writer of Paradise Lost, who, setting out to 
 " justify the ways of God to man," forgets 
 occasionally the original worker of the evil, as 
 where, for instance, he substitutes chance as
 
 n6 POETRY 
 
 soon as he comes (at the end of the second book) 
 to the point upon which the entire epic move- 
 ment turns, the escape of Satan from hell and 
 his journey to earth for the ruin of man : 
 
 " At last his sail-broad vans 
 He spreads for flight, and, in the surging smoke 
 Uplifted, spurns the ground ; thence many a league, 
 As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides 
 Audacious, but, that seat soon failing, meets 
 A vast vacuity ; all unawares, 
 Fluttering his pinions vain, plumb down he drops 
 Ten thousand fathoms deep, and to this hour 
 Down had been falling, hadjnot, by ill chance, 
 The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud, 
 Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him 
 As many miles aloft." 
 
 In Milton's case, however, the truth is that 
 he made the mistake of trying to disturb the 
 motive of a story for artistic purposes a fatal 
 mistake as we shall see when we come to speak 
 of the Nibelungenlied in relation to the old 
 Norse epic cycle. 
 
 Though Vondel's mystery play of Lucifer is, 
 in its execution, rhetorical more than poetical, 
 it did, beyond all question influence Milton 
 when he came to write Paradise Lost. The 
 famous line which is generally quoted as the 
 key-note of Satan's character : 
 
 " Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,"
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 117 
 
 seems to have been taken bodily from 
 Vondel's play, and Milton's entire epic shows 
 a study of it. While Marlowe's majestic move- 
 ments alone are traceable in Satan's speech 
 (written some years before the rest of Paradise 
 Lost, when the dramatic and not the epic form 
 had been selected), Milton's Satan became 
 afterwards a splendid amalgam not of the 
 Mephistopheles, but of the Famtus of Marlowe 
 and the Lucifer of Vondel. Vondel's play must 
 have possessed a peculiar attraction for a poet 
 of Milton's views of human progress. Defective 
 as the play is in execution, it is far otherwise 
 in motive. This motive, if we consider it aright, 
 is nothing less than an explanation of man's 
 anomalous condition on the earth spirit in- 
 carnate in matter, created by God, a little 
 lower than the angels in order that he may 
 advance by means of these very manacles which 
 imprison him, in order that he may ascend by 
 the staircase of the world, the ladder of fleshly 
 conditions, above those cherubim and seraphim 
 who, lacking the education of sense, have not 
 the knowledge wide and deep which brings men 
 close to God. 
 
 Here Milton found his own favourite doctrine 
 of human development and self-education in a
 
 n8 POETRY 
 
 concrete and vividly artistic form. Much, 
 however, as such a motive must have struck a 
 man of Milton's instincts, his intellect was too 
 much chained by Calvinism to permit of his 
 treating the subject with Vondel's philosophic 
 breadth. The cause of Lucifer's wrath had to 
 be changed from jealousy of human progress to 
 jealousy of the son's proclaimed superiority. 
 And the history of poetry shows that once begin 
 to tamper with the central thought around 
 which any group of incidents has crystallized, 
 and the entire story becomes thereby re-written, 
 as we have seen in the case of the Agamemnon 
 of ^Eschylus. Of the motive of his own epic, 
 after he had abandoned the motive of Vondel, 
 Milton had as little permanent grasp as Virgil 
 had of his. As regards the Odyssey, however, 
 we need scarcely say that its motive is merely 
 artistic, not philosophic. And now we come to 
 philosophic motive. 
 
 The artist's power of thought is properly 
 shown not in the direct enunciation of ideas, 
 but in mastery over motive. Here ^Eschylus 
 is by far the greatest figure in Western poetry 
 a proof, perhaps, among many proofs of the 
 Oriental strain of his genius. (As regards pure 
 drama, however, important as is motive, free-
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 119 
 
 dom, organic vitality in every part, is of more 
 importance than even motive, and in this 
 freedom and easy abandonment the concluding 
 part of the Oresteia is deficient as compared 
 with such a play as Othello or Lear}. Notwith- 
 standing the splendid exception of ^Eschylus, 
 the truth seems to be that the faculty of de- 
 veloping a poetical narrative from a philosophic 
 thought is Oriental, and on the whole foreign 
 to the genius of the Western mind. Neither in 
 Western drama nor in Western epic do we find, 
 save in such rare cases as that of Vondel, any- 
 thing like that power of developing a story from 
 an idea which not only Jami, but all the parable 
 poets of Persia show. 
 
 In recent English poetry, the motive of 
 Shelley's dramatic poem Prometheus Unbound 
 is a notable illustration of what is here con- 
 tended. Starting with the full intent of de- 
 veloping a drama from a motive starting with 
 a universalism, a belief that good shall be the 
 final goal of ill Shelley cannot finish his first 
 three hundred lines without shifting (in the 
 curse of Prometheus) into a Manichaeism as 
 pure as that of Manes himself : 
 
 " Heap on thy soul, by virtue of this curse, 
 
 111 deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good ; 
 Both infinite as is the universe."
 
 120 POETRY 
 
 According to the central thought of the poem, 
 
 * """li 
 
 human nature, through the heroic protest and 
 
 /struggle of the human mind typified by Pro- 
 metheus, can at last dethrone that super- 
 natural terror and tyranny (Jupiter) which the 
 human mind had itself installed. But, after 
 its dethronement (when human nature becomes 
 infinitely perfectible), how can the super-natural 
 tyranny exist apart from the human mind that 
 imagined it ? How can it be as " infinite as 
 the universe ? " 
 
 The motive of Paradise Lost is assailed with 
 much vigour by Victor Hugo in his poem 
 Religions et Religion. But when Hugo, in the 
 after parts of the poem, having destroyed 
 Milton's " God," sets up an entirely French 
 " Dieu " of his own and tries " to justify " him, 
 we perceive how pardonable was Milton's failure 
 after all. Compare such defect of mental grip 
 and such nebulosity of thought as is displayed 
 by Milton, Shelley, and Hugo with the strength 
 of hand shown in the " Sdldman " and " Absal " 
 of Jami, and indeed by the Sufi poets generally. 
 
 There is, however, one exception to this rule 
 that Western poetry is nebulous as to motive. 
 There is, besides the Iliad, one epic that refuses 
 to be classified, though for entirely different
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 121 
 
 reasons. This is the Niblung story, where we 
 find unity of purpose and also entire freedom of 
 movement. We find combined here beauties 
 which are nowhere else combined which are, 
 in fact, at war with each other everywhere else. 
 We find a scheme, a real " acorn of thought " 
 in an epic which is not the self-conscious work 
 of a single poetic artificer, but is as much the 
 slow growth of various times and various minds 
 as is the Mahabharata, in which the heart- 
 thought is merely that the Kauravas defeated 
 their relatives at dice and refused to disgorge 
 their winnings. 
 
 This Northern epic-tree, as we find it in the 
 Icelandic sagas, the Norns themselves must 
 have watered ; for it combines the virtues of 
 the epic of growth with those of the epic of art. 
 Though not written in metre, it may usefully be 
 compared with the epics of Greece and of India 
 and Persia. Free in movement as the wind, 
 which " bloweth where it listeth," it listeth to 
 move by law. Its action is that of free-will, 
 but free-will at play within a ring of necessity. 
 Within this ring there throbs all the warm and 
 passionate life of the world outside, and all the 
 freedom apparently. Yet from that world is 
 enisled by a cordon of curses by a zone of
 
 122 POETRY 
 
 defiant flames more impregnable than that which 
 girdled the beautiful Brynhild at Hindfell. 
 Natural laws, familiar emotions, are at work 
 everywhere in the story ; yet the ' Ring of 
 Andvari," whose circumference is but that of 
 a woman's ringer, encircles the whole mimic 
 world of the sagaman as the Midgard snake 
 encircles the earth. 
 
 For this artistic perfection in an epic of 
 growth there are, of course, many causes, some 
 of them traceable, and some of them beyond all 
 discovery causes no doubt akin to those which 
 gave birth to many of the beauties of other 
 epics of growth. Originally Sinfiotli and Sigurd 
 were the same person, and note how vast has 
 been the artistic effect of the separation of the 
 two ! Again, there were several different ver- 
 sions of the story of Brynhild. The sagamen, 
 finding all these versions too interesting and too 
 much beloved to be discarded, adopted them 
 all worked them up into one legend, so that, 
 in the Volsunga Saga we have a heroine possess- 
 ing all the charms of goddess, demi-goddess, 
 earthly princess, and amazon a heroine sur- 
 passing perhaps in fascination all other heroines 
 that have ever figured in poetry. 
 
 It is when we come to consider such imagina-
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 123 
 
 tive work as this that we are compelled to pause 
 before challenging the Aristotelian doctrine that 
 metrical structure is but an accidental quality 
 of epic. 
 
 In speaking of the Niblung story we do not, 
 of course, speak of the German version, the 
 Nibelungenlied, a fine epic still, though a de- 
 gradation of the elder form. Between the two 
 the differences are fundamental in the artistic 
 sense, and form an excellent illustration of what 
 has just been said upon the disturbance of 
 motive in epic, and indeed in all poetic art. 
 It is not merely that the endings of the three 
 principal characters Sigurd (Siegfried), Gudrun 
 (Kriemhilt), and Brynhild are entirely different ; 
 it is not merely that the Icelandic version, by 
 missing the blood-bath at Famir's lair, loses the 
 pathetic situation of Gudrun's becoming after- 
 wards an unwilling instrument of her husband's 
 death ; it is not merely that, on the other hand, 
 the German version, by omitting the early love 
 passages between Brynhild and Sigurd at Hind- 
 fall, misses entirely the tragic meaning of her 
 story and the terrible hate that is love resulting 
 from the breaking of the troth ; but the con- 
 clusion of each version is so exactly the opposite 
 of that of the other that, while the German
 
 124 POETRY 
 
 story is called (and very properly) " Kriemhilt's 
 Revenge," the story of the Volsunga Saga might, 
 with equal propriety, be called Gudrun's For- 
 giveness. 
 
 If it be said that, in both cases, the motive 
 shows the same Titanic temper, that is because 
 the Titanic temper is the special characteristic 
 of the North- Western mind. The temper of 
 revolt against authority seems indeed to belong 
 to that energy which succeeds in the modern 
 development of the great racial struggle for life. 
 Although no epic, Eastern or Western, can exist 
 without a struggle between good and evil and 
 a struggle upon apparently equal terms it 
 must not be supposed that the warring of con- 
 flicting forces, which is the motive of the Eastern 
 epic has much real relation to the warring of 
 conflicting forces, which is the motive of Western 
 epic. 
 
 And, as regards the machinery of epic, there is, 
 we suspect, a deeper significance than is com- 
 monly apprehended in the fact that the Satan 
 or Shaitan of the Eastern world becomes in 
 Vondel and Milton a sublime Titan who attracts 
 to himself the admiration which in Eastern 
 poetry belongs entirely to the authority of 
 heaven. In Asia, save perhaps among the pure
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 125 
 
 Arabs of the desert, underlying all religious 
 forms, there is apparent a temper of resignation 
 to the irresistible authority of heaven. And as 
 regards the Aryans it is probable that the 
 Titanic temper the temper of revolt against 
 authority did not begin to show itself till they 
 had moved across the Caucasus. But what 
 concerns us here is the fact that the farther 
 they moved to the North west the more vigor- 
 ously this temper asserted itself, the prouder 
 grew man in his attitude towards the gods, 
 till at last in the Scandinavian cycle he became 
 their equal, and struggled alongside them, 
 shoulder to shoulder, in the defence of heaven 
 against the assaults of hell. 
 
 Therefore, as we say, the student of epic 
 poetry must not suppose that there is any real 
 parallel between the attitude of Vishnu (as 
 Rama) towards Ravana and the attitude of 
 Prometheus towards Zeus, or the attitude of the 
 human heroes towards Odin in Scandinavian 
 poetry. Had Ravana been clothed with a 
 properly constituted authority, had he been a 
 legitimate god instead of a demon, the Eastern 
 doctrine of recognition of authority would most 
 likely have come in, and the world would have 
 been spared one at least of its enormous epics.
 
 126 POETRY 
 
 Indeed, the Ravana of the Rdmayana answers 
 somewhat to the Fafnir of the Vtilsunga Saga ; 
 and to plot against demons is not to rebel 
 against authority. The vast field of Indian epic, 
 however, is quite beyond us here. 
 
 Nor can we do more than glance at the 
 Kalevala. From one point of view that group of 
 ballads might be taken, no doubt, as a simple 
 record of how the men of Kalevala were skilful 
 in capturing the sisters of the Pojohla men. 
 But from another point of view the universal 
 struggle of the male for the female setms 
 typified in this so-called epic of the Finns by the 
 picture of the " Lady of the Rainbow " sitting 
 upon her glowing arc, and weaving her golden 
 threads, while the hero is doing battle with the 
 malevolent forces of nature. 
 
 But it is in the Niblung story that the temper 
 of Western epic is at its best the temper of the 
 simple fighter whose business is to fight. The 
 ideal Western fighter was not known in Greece 
 till ages after Homer, when in the pass of 
 Thermopylae the companions of Leonidas combed 
 their long hair in the sun. The business of the 
 fighter in Scandinavian epic is to yield to no 
 power whatsoever, whether of earth, or heaven, 
 or hell to take a buffet from the All-father
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 127 
 
 himself, and to return it ; to look Destiny her- 
 self in the face, crying out for quarter neither 
 to gods nor demons, nor Norns. 
 
 This is the true temper of pure " heroic 
 poetry " as it has hitherto flourished on this 
 side of the Caucasus the temper of the fighter 
 who is invincible because he feels that Fate her- 
 self falters when the hero of the true strain 
 defies the fighter who feels that the very 
 Norns themselves must cringe at last before the 
 simple courage of man standing naked and bare 
 of hope against all assaults whether of heaven 
 or hell or doom. The proud heroes of the 
 Volsunga Saga utter no moans and shed no 
 Homeric tears, knowing as they know that the 
 day prophesied is sure when, shoulder to shoul- 
 der, gods and men shall stand up to fight the 
 entire brood of night and evil, storming the very 
 gates of Asgard. 
 
 That this temper is not the highest from the 
 ethical point of view is no doubt true. Against 
 the beautiful resignation of Buddhism it may 
 seem barbaric, and if moral suasion could sup- 
 plant physical force in epic if Siddartha could 
 take the place of Achilles or Sigurd it might be 
 better for the human race. 
 
 Returning now to the general subject of
 
 128 POETRY 
 
 egoistic, or lyrical and dramatic imagination 
 as might be expected, we occasionally meet 
 imagination of a purely dramatic kind in 
 narrative poetry, such for instance as that of 
 Gottfried von Strasburg, of Chaucer, and of the 
 author of the Chanson de Roland. 
 
 . It is in the moulding of characters that the 
 narrative poet competes with the prose story- 
 teller. And here again Chaucer is the great 
 model. It is but natural that opinions should 
 greatly differ about his place among the highest 
 names. 
 
 If it be said of him that he has no prophetic 
 gift, that he is no seer, like ^schylus and Dante, 
 like Milton and Shelley, the impeachment can- 
 not be answered, for it is true. May a poet lay 
 claim to a place in the first rank, and yet be 
 no seer ? There are poets who are organized to 
 see more clearly than we can ourselves see the 
 riches of the " world at hand " ; do they rank 
 below those who are so dazzled by gazing above 
 it, and beyond it, that not only the flowers and 
 grass and trees of the earth, but even its men 
 and women, are common and superfluous ? 
 
 Of the simply terrene poets Chaucer is the 
 king. If health in poetry is the sweet accept- 
 ance and melodious utterance of the beauty of 
 the world as it is, Chaucer is the most healthy 
 poet that has appeared in any literature. His 
 delight is to represent. 
 
 Of all poets he is the most purely artistic ; 
 so that he can paint, for his own enjoyment ancl
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 129 
 
 ours, a beautiful picture, he cares not from 
 what source he draws his materials. The 
 riches and the wonderfulness of life these are 
 his theme a theme which is as fresh and de- 
 lightful now as it was in his time, and as fresh 
 and delightful as it was when all those count- 
 less stories of romantic adventure upon which 
 his poetry and all the imaginative literature of 
 the West are built were lisped in the Aryan 
 cradle. Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" is a 
 splendid piece of narrative poetry, incompar- 
 ably finer than Shakespeare's " Venus and 
 Adonis," and shows yet another side of his 
 superb genius. A famous passage in Keats's 
 " Eve of St. Agnes " was certainly suggested by 
 Marlowe's couplet, 
 
 " Mermaid-like, unto the floor she slid ; 
 One half appeared the other half was hid." 
 
 Character drawing in poetry as the result of 
 relative vision is no doubt the same as character 
 drawing in prose art. 
 
 The true artist is not he who paints exactly 
 what he sees, nor he whose sentimental, humor- 
 ous, aesthetic, or ethical purpose is obtrusively 
 apparent ; but he who, while really fashioning 
 his characters out of broad general elements 
 from universal types of humanity at the same 
 time deceives us into mistaking these characters 
 for real biographies deceives us by appearing 
 (from his mastery over the properties of the 
 "fictionist") to be drawing from particulars 
 from peculiar individual traits instead of from 
 generalities and especially by never obtruding, 
 
 K
 
 130 POETRY 
 
 but rather by hiding away from us, all senti- 
 mental, humorous, aesthetic, or ethical purposes. 
 
 Chaucer is still perhaps our greatest narrative 
 poet. Scott is very great, but his lack of artistic 
 conscience damages and weakens his work. 
 
 It must be said of narrative poets generally 
 that they are apt to fail in " making their flats 
 join " to use a striking locution of the stage. 
 Victor Hugo, for instance, paints his flats most 
 brilliantly, but when he comes to put them 
 together, it is remarkable how clumsy his work 
 is. " La Lgende des Siecles," for instance, 
 consists of a vast number of poems, having as 
 much connection with each other as " marbles 
 in a bag," to use Coleridge's expressive phrase. 
 
 " La Legende des Siecles " pretends to be 
 an epic of which a vast number of hetero- 
 geneous poems are thrown together. 
 
 The first series consisted of a collection of 
 detached scenes from history and legend (pro- 
 duced evidently at various times as the poet's 
 discoursive reading suggested them), scenes 
 beginning with the birth of Eve's firstborn, and 
 ending with " La Trompette du Jugement." 
 
 The second series is more heterogeneous, 
 consisting of narrative, homily, lyric, satire, 
 drama a collection for which an English poet 
 would have been quite unable to find any better 
 name than " Poems " or " Poems and Dramatic 
 Scenes," but for which the quick genius of a 
 countryman of Taine and the author of the 
 Com&die Humaine could easily find a more 
 ambitious title, having most likely " Dieu," 
 " L'Ame," and " L'Homme," for the noun
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 131 
 
 substantives a collection, in short, which Victor 
 Hugo would naturally call " The Legend of the 
 Ages." 
 
 The first volume of the second series opens 
 with a poem, entitled " La Vision d'ou est sorti 
 ce Livre," in which, as in the Preface to the 
 first series, the poet endeavours to show that 
 there is a great idee mire in these 
 
 "Orient pearls at random strung." 
 
 Fortunately, however, as the reader goes on, 
 or, rather, is carried along, breathless from 
 beauty to beauty, from glory to glory, he finds 
 to his delight that there is no such idee mere 
 at all nothing but poetry ; that there is no 
 hint of that appalling " Fin de Satan " ; nothing 
 to dread from " Dieu." 
 
 The power of thought in the artist is, of course, 
 properly shown, not in ratiocination, but in the 
 invention of motif. And Victor* Hugo's "La 
 Legende des Siecles " written under various 
 impulses, and thrown together as recklessly, it 
 would almost seem, as Shakespeare's sonnets 
 we are asked to accept, as embodying the 
 greatest motif cognizable by the mind of man, 
 or, rather, they are to be taken as part of the 
 great embodiment ; for " La Legende des 
 Siecles " is only part of an enormous epic of the 
 Universe, of which " Dieu " is the protagonist 
 and " LTnfini " the field of action. 
 
 Now it is just when we do come to consider 
 these poems as integral parts of that vast 
 organic whole, of any organic whole; it is just
 
 132 POETRY 
 
 when we do come to consider Victor Hugo's 
 claims as a philosopher, who, looking over 
 Past, Present, and Future, has something new 
 to tell us about " Dieu," " La Fin de Satan," 
 and the " Legend of Ages " some explanation 
 to offer us of " the painful riddle of the earth," 
 of the wonder and the mystery of the human 
 story that we see how deficient is this great 
 poet. 
 
 Unless the philosophic power of a poet is of 
 the first order, so gigantic a conception as that 
 of Victor Hugo would of itself, we think, be a 
 sign of an ill-balanced and imperfect artistic 
 mind. 
 
 The true artist's yearning for perfection 
 causes him to feel more pleasure in the perfect 
 representation of a leaf than in the picture of a 
 boundless forest, which, from its very extent, 
 must be imperfect. 
 
 And we will venture to say that the poems in 
 " La Le*gende des Siecles," have, as a group, 
 nothing whatever to do with any Legend of 
 Ages nothing whatever to do with expounding 
 the enigma of " cette grande figure, lugubre et 
 rayennante, fatale et sacre, 1'Homme " : that 
 they have, as a group, no idle mhe whatever, 
 save the very familiar one that man's life in the 
 world has been sad and chequered. 
 
 An artist's moral system is to be judged not 
 by his direct preachments, but by his artistic 
 representations. If, for instance, he depicts 
 man as acting habitually like a devil, it is idle 
 for him to discourse to us of man as an angel. 
 
 Now, a speciality of Hugo's imaginative work,
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 133 
 
 whether in prose or verse, is that, while he is for 
 ever talking about God and the goodness of 
 God as contrasted with the wickedness of that 
 mysterious and universal malefactor called 
 Society, he so arranges the circumstances of his 
 drama and his stories that the reader is likely 
 to rise from reading them with the impression 
 that there is no God at all, or at least that there 
 is no moral governor of the universe. This must 
 be said not only of the poems in "La Legende 
 des Siecles," but also in such works as " Le Roi 
 s' Amuse, "5" Notre Dame de Paris," " Marion 
 Delorme," " Lucrece Borgia," " Ruy Bias," 
 and " Torquemada." 
 
 Of course he has a perfect right to represent 
 human life in this way if he honestly believes 
 it to be a true representation. 
 
 But the artist who generally divides his 
 characters into two classes monsters of cruelty 
 and injustice ("les rois " for the most part), 
 and paragons of all the virtues who become the 
 inevitable and helpless victims of these should 
 not talk about the good God, but should pro- 
 claim at once his belief that the world is governed 
 by blind fatality or by blind chance. 
 
 The truth is, however, that Hugo has no 
 philosophical system at all, and it is merely 
 because these cruel and violent situations are 
 striking and harrowing that he makes such 
 liberal use of them. 
 
 But apart altogether from questions of an 
 ethical or a philosophical kind, it is an artistic 
 mistake to go on heaping woes upon the heads 
 of perfectly innocent people.
 
 134 POETRY 
 
 The question of the apapria ueyaAj spoken 
 of by Artisotle is, of course, too large to be 
 discussed here. And perhaps, if we con- 
 sider it, Aristotle's requirement was hardly 
 an artistic one at all, for it should be borne in 
 mind that Aristotle required an exhibition of 
 some faults in the suffering hero merely to 
 elude the difficulty of touching upon impiety 
 to the gods, from whose fatal decrees all mis- 
 fortunes spring. 
 
 But, artistically speaking, there is something 
 inherently revolting in such spectacles as the 
 death of Esmeralda, in the drawing of the tooth 
 of Fantine, and in the seizure by the blood- 
 thirsty monks of the Inquisition of a pair of 
 perfectly innocent lovers who are carried off 
 from their dreams of bliss to be burnt alive. 
 
 Nor has Hugo that didactic reason for thus 
 shocking us which an ancient writer would have 
 had whose gods werfe themselves the final cause 
 of the entire tragic mischief that didactic reason, 
 in short, which Aristotle seems to glance at as 
 being immoral. 
 
 Mostly the gods were the direct cause of this 
 tragic mischief ; but as Marmontel has ex- 
 cellently said (Poetique Franfoise, ii. 119) : 
 
 " Si, dans la trag^die ancienne, la passion est quel- 
 quefois I'instrument ou la cause du malheur, ce malheur 
 ne tombe done pas sur 1'homme passionne', mais sur 
 quelque victime innocente." 
 
 These words might almost have been written of 
 Hugo's entire dramatic system ; but then he 
 believes in a God who is not the cause of the
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 135 
 
 tragic mischief, and such representations as 
 those we allude to are as faulty in morals as they 
 are in art. Yet they are striking, and that is 
 enough for most French poets. Reservation of 
 power is now almost unknown in French art. 
 
 But we are wandering from the subject of the 
 difficulty poets experience in trying to join flats 
 that have been painted at various times and in 
 various moods. Tennyson affords us a striking 
 example of this in " The Idylls of the King." 
 In 1842 he published the " Morte d' Arthur." 
 For every variety of excellence it was as a 
 " flat " one of the very finest ever produced in 
 this country. He himself, indeed, considered it 
 to consist, as he says, of " Homeric echoes " ; 
 and though this was not wonderful, seeing that 
 all poets consider their heroic poetry to consist 
 of " Homeric echoes," it was wonderful that 
 Landor should pronounce it not only " more 
 Homeric than any poem of our time " (which 
 it could so easily be), but also say it " rivalled 
 some of the noblest parts of the Odyssey " ; for 
 no one knew better than Landor that the 
 " Morte d' Arthur " is Virgilian, or rather it is 
 Virgil plus Lucretius. Years afterwards Tenny- 
 son produced a good many flats, exceedingly 
 fine too, exceedingly like each other, and 
 exceedingly unlike flat the first, and again at 
 intervals he produced others equally unlike the 
 richly painted flat with which he began. And 
 then he proceeded to join them. The idyllic 
 simplicity of " Enid " became absolute baldness 
 by the side of the magnificence of the " Morte 
 d' Arthur " ; the magnificence of the " Morte
 
 136 POETRY 
 
 d' Arthur " became something like magnilo- 
 quence by the side of " Enid." With " The 
 Lotos Eaters," however, Tennyson was more 
 successful in joining the flats produced at 
 various times. It is one of the finest poems in 
 the world. 
 
 As to " Dieu," if we were to accept Hugo's 
 conception of Dieu, what kind of a Dieu should 
 we get ? 
 
 And here it may be worth while to discuss a 
 question which is, we think, very important. 
 How is it that so few poets could, even granting 
 them the genius, produce work to affect the 
 reader as Tennyson's " Rizpah " does ? The 
 answer is that it is because a story in which is 
 contained such a vast amount of pity and terror 
 cannot be treated in any way that is tolerable 
 at all save by a poet who is entirely superior to 
 the infirmity common to most poets pride of 
 poetic power. 
 
 Pride of power has never yet been treated as 
 an important agent of poetical production. It 
 may be said, no doubt, that after vanity, which 
 is first, pride is the great motor of human 
 action. 
 
 Just as a man with an exceptional power of 
 wind and limb takes pride in risking his neck 
 on Mont Blanc, and just as a rich citizen takes 
 pride in displaying the length and strength of 
 his purse, so the poet, the moment he is hailed 
 as the possessor of poetical power, feels im- 
 pelled at once to pose as a poetical athlete. 
 He knows well enough, of course, that his duty 
 as an artist is to use pity and terror merely so
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 137 
 
 as to produce an effect which is at bottom 
 pleasurable. But he cares nothing at all about 
 giving his readers pleasure. He wants to dis- 
 play his power. He must give us pictures of 
 the " Furies " so terrible that he narrowly 
 escapes being torn to pieces by the real furies 
 he has awakened in the breasts of his audience. 
 He must give us pictures of hell that make 
 Christianity itself seem wicked. He must 
 harrow us. 
 
 He must, in short, show in the style of " Titus 
 Andronicus," " The Duchess of Main," " Man- 
 fred," " The Cenci," how strong he is at the 
 expense of all the holiest sanctions of art, till 
 mankind becomes sickened at the display, and 
 is inclined to beg the poets to return to their 
 golden clime, and not turn our clime into 
 a pandemonium of unholy passions, or into 
 shambles of blood and bones. 
 
 It follows from the foregoing remarks that a 
 most important thing for a narrative poet to 
 exercise his mind upon is the choice of a story. 
 
 In considering whether or not a story is 
 adapted for artistic purposes, the poet has to 
 bear in mind that the first quest of a poet, as a 
 poet, is beauty. Whenever a subject is of such 
 a kind that in treating it the poet, in order to 
 avoid the unlovely, must greatly curb his 
 imagination, it is unfit for poetical treatment. 
 There is no truth in art more obvious than this ; 
 yet there is none which has been more ignored 
 in all poetical literature. 
 
 Let us turn to two of the many poems in the 
 English language whose plot is derived from
 
 138 POETRY 
 
 the Italian novelists, Boccaccio, Bandello, Cin- 
 thio and others Keats's " Isabella " and 
 Tennyson's " Lover's Tale," both from Boccac- 
 cio. 
 
 If the poet will touch upon themes that are 
 too painful (and often the poet is an expresser 
 rather than a man who deeply feels) if he will, 
 for the sake of strong writing, depict Isabella 
 kissing the mutilated head of the man she loved 
 he cannot expect that all the poetic power 
 in the world will reconcile to his work the mind 
 which is at once healthy and sorely tried. And 
 it is here that Keats has in some degree fallen 
 short of Boccaccio in instinctive surety of 
 treatment. 
 
 In Bo.ccaccio's story are the simple words, 
 " She cut off the head, which she put into a 
 handkerchief," instead of all Keats's elaborate 
 details about the mutilation. 
 
 With regard to Tennyson, who in his tre- 
 mendous poem of " Rizpah " depicts the mother 
 beneath the gibbet picking up the bones of her 
 dead son and treasuring them, and goes through 
 it without one false note, would never have 
 failed where Keats fails in his story of " Isa- 
 bella." But he does so in his " Lover's Tale." 
 
 Boccaccio's story of Gentil de Carisendi's 
 adventure with Niccoluccio Caccianimico's wife 
 has the advantage of being one of the most worn 
 of sensational stories, and therefore deserves 
 Tennyson's selection of it. Signer Gentil de 
 Carisendi, a knight of Bologna, according to 
 Boccaccio's novel, loved a married woman of 
 great beauty, but, unlike certain other of
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 139 
 
 Boccaccio's heroes, was too honourable to 
 declare his passion. Having, however, heard 
 that she had suddenly died, he visited her tomb 
 in order " to please himself with a kiss." He 
 then perceived that her heart was feebly beating, 
 and by the aid of his servant, who had accom- 
 panied him, carried her oft to his house at 
 Bologna. Here, on being restored to con- 
 sciousness by Gentil's mother, the lady gave 
 birth to a son. The coma which in some cases 
 precedes parturition had been mistaken by her 
 friends for death. Notwithstanding his passion, 
 the knight treated her with the most chivalrous 
 deference. And when Niccoluccio Caccianimico, 
 the lady's husband (who was away), returned, 
 Gentil invited him and some neighbours to a 
 supper, and at the conclusion of the feast 
 imitating " a pretty Persian custom " he had 
 heard of introduced to Niccoluccio Cacciani- 
 mico, as the most precious possession in the 
 house, the lady and her son. 
 
 From the time of Tuber ville's " Tragical 
 Tales," published in 1587, and the drama of 
 " How to Know a Good Wife from a Bad One," 
 published in 1602, down to the publication of 
 Tennyson's " Lover's Tale," this story has been 
 frequently handled. 
 
 On comparing these variations with Boccac- 
 cio's original, we perceive that the great and 
 all-important point in the treatment of such a 
 subject by poet or novelist is to take care that, 
 as the heroine is to be used, after her rescue, 
 for romantic and poetic purposes, the memory 
 of the sepulchre shall not soil her beauty, as it
 
 140 POETRY 
 
 soils the beauty of the Mademoiselle Laurence 
 of Heine's prose story (another variation, by 
 the bye), and poison it, as if 
 
 The conscious Parcae threw 
 Upon those roseate lips a Stygian hue. 
 
 Even in prose fiction, it may be said that what- 
 ever adventures the story-teller may record- 
 however terrible and dreadful they may be- 
 there must cling to the hero and heroine of a 
 love story no memory or forecast of the atmos- 
 phere of the charnel-house. But when the love 
 story is also a poem the charnel-house must 
 not be even hinted at. The " deep dishonour 
 of death " is ineviable to all, but, as the present 
 writer has said elsewhere, "it is insupportable, 
 
 " To taste the fell destroyer's crowning spite 
 That blasts the soul with life's most cruel sight, 
 Corruption's hand at work in life's transition." 
 
 ^ Poetry cannot live apart from beauty this is 
 now so recognised a truth as to be a truism ; 
 and though Death, even as a " cold obstruc- 
 tion," may, as we so clearly see in " Evelyn 
 Hope," be rendered beautiful, nothing can make 
 beautiful to the bereaved soul the corruption of 
 the tomb, nothing can make it other than what 
 it is a dreadful satire upon poetry itself, the 
 saddest and the grimmest exhibition of man's 
 fate, which the poet, whose function it is not 
 to " hurt " (as Joubert puts it), but to soothe 
 and to bless, should be careful to leave un- 
 touched.
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 141 
 
 Tennyson has not curbed his imagination at 
 the point where to curb it was so necessary, but 
 paints the lover kneeling there, 
 
 Down in the dreadful dust that once was man, 
 Dust, as he said, that once was loving hearts. 
 
 While Boccaccio rescues his heroine as quickly 
 as possible from the contamination of the 
 charnel-house, merely saying that the lover, 
 " lying down beside her, put his cheek to hers 
 and wept." 
 
 Conspicuous as the story of Gentil de Cari- 
 sendi is for that perfect sweetness of style 
 which sets Boccaccio at the head of all Western 
 story-tellers, it is scarcely adapted for purely 
 poetic treatment. For if the charnel-house is a 
 subject unfit for the poet, how much more so 
 are those dreadful stories of premature inter- 
 ment which from time immemorial have been 
 a terror and a fascination for the human mind ? 
 
 No story seems fit for poetical treatment which 
 can call up even by suggestion the intolerable 
 picture of a poor soul waking up to find itself 
 in a scene such as that depicted in Tennyson's 
 poem waking up as this lady, our imagination 
 tells us, is in peril of doing, amid such ghastly 
 horrors, shut out hopelessly from the aid and 
 sympathy of man, not by any human cruelty, 
 but by some awful conjunction of fate and 
 circumstance investing man for the time being 
 with what is more appalling and more paralysing 
 still the unconscious cruelty of Nature's blind 
 forces. 
 
 A living poet of distinction has fallen into
 
 142 POETRY 
 
 error of a different kind in selecting another 
 story of Boccaccio's, that of the story of " Giro- 
 lamo and Salvestra." It is difficult to see what 
 poet could avoid the aesthetic perils surrounding 
 the situation involved in a lover entering the 
 chamber of a married woman, and lying by her 
 side, with her husband asleep on the same bed, 
 and eventually dying there. " A full and con- 
 scientious record of the poetic vision " would be 
 inadmissible. Yet a conscientious record can 
 only be avoided by such a false and mawkish 
 pretence of rendering as must have been most 
 galling to the poet. 
 
 We must now give undivided attention to 
 pure egoistic or lyric imagination. This, as has 
 been said, is sufficient to vitalize all forms of 
 poetic art save drama, and the Greek epic. 
 
 The Hebrew poets have produced a lyric so 
 different in kind from all other lyrics as to 
 stand in a class by itself. As it is equal in 
 importance to the Great Drama of Shakes- 
 peare, ^Eschylus, and Sophocles, we may per- 
 haps be allowed to call it the " Great Lyric." 
 The Great Lyric must be religious it must, it 
 would seem, be an outpouring of the soul, not 
 towards man, but towards God, like that of the 
 God-intoxicated prophets and psalmists of 
 Scripture. Even the lyric fire of Pindar owes 
 much to the fact that he had a child-like belief 
 in the myths to which so many of his contem-
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 143 
 
 poraries had begun to give a languid assent. 
 But there is nothing in Pindar, or indeed else- 
 where in Greek poetry like the rapturous song, 
 which we have called the great lyric, where 
 alone we get the perfect example of the Great 
 Style. 
 
 But what is the Great Style ? The Great 
 Style is far more easily recognised than 
 defined. To define any kind of style, indeed, 
 we must turn to real life. When we say of an 
 individual in real life that he or she has style, 
 we mean that the individual gives us an im- 
 pression of unconscious power or unconscious 
 grace, as distinguished from that conscious 
 power or conscious grace that we call manner. 
 It is the same in literature ; style is unconscious 
 power or grace manner is conscious power or 
 grace. But the Great Style, both in literature 
 and in life, is unconscious power and uncon- 
 scious grace in one. 
 
 And whither must we turn in quest of this, 
 as the natural expresssion of a national temper ? 
 Not to the Celt, we think, as Arnold does. Not, 
 indeed, to those whose languages, complex of 
 syntax and alive with self-conscious inflections, 
 bespeak the scientific knowingness of the Aryan 
 mind not, certainly, to those who, though 
 producing ^Eschylus, turned into Aphrodite the 
 great Astarte of the Syrians. We might, per- 
 haps say that there were those in Egypt once 
 who came near to the great ideal. That descrip- 
 tion of the abode of " Nin-ki-gal," the Queen of
 
 144 POETRY 
 
 Death, recently deciphered from a tablet in the 
 British Museum, is nearly in the Great Style, 
 yet not quite. Conscious power and conscious 
 grace are Hellenic, of course. That there is a 
 deal of unconsciousness in Homer is true ; but, 
 put his elaborate comparisons by the side of the 
 fiery metaphors of scenes in the Bible, and how 
 artificial he seems. And note that, afterwards, 
 when he who approached nearest to the Great 
 Style wrote Prometheus and the Furies, Orienta- 
 lism was overflowing Greece, like the waters of 
 the Nile. It is to the Latin races some of 
 them that has filtered Hellenic manner ; but 
 whensoever, as in Dante, the Great Style has 
 been caught more than in any other European 
 writer, it conies not from the Hellenic fountain 
 but straight from the Hebrew. What the Latin 
 races lack, the Teutonic races have uncon- 
 sciousness ; often unconscious power, but often 
 also unconscious brutaliU. In discussing epic 
 poetry we have spoken enthusiastically of the 
 Northern Epic, the Vdlsunga Saga, but it must 
 be remembered that sublime as is the Northern 
 mythology, it is often dashed with what can 
 only be called primeval savagery : the coarse 
 grotesque mingles with and often mars its 
 finest effects. Even that great final conflict 
 which we have described in our remarks upon 
 the Northern epic that conflict between gods 
 and men and the swarming brood of evil on the 
 plain of Wigrid, foretold by the Voluseeress, 
 when from Yotunland they come and storm 
 the very gates of Asgard even this fine combat 
 ends in the grotesque picture of the Fenrir-wol
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 145 
 
 gulping Odin down like an oyster, and digesting 
 the universe to chaos. But, out of the twenty- 
 three thousand and more verses into which the 
 Bible has been divided, no one can find a vulgar 
 verse ; for the Great Style allows the stylist to 
 touch upon any subject with no risk of defile- 
 ment. This is why style in literature is virtue. 
 Like royalty, the Great Style " can do no 
 wrong." 
 
 But then it will be said that the English Bible 
 is a translation from a foreign tongue a tongue 
 as unlike the English as can well be. Just so, 
 and here comes the most interesting fact in the 
 history of all literature, and one upon which it 
 is absolutely necessary that we should linger over. 
 Taine, amidst a large number of hypothetical 
 generalizations which we must take with caution, 
 sometimes lights upon a deeper thing than has 
 been said by any other critic. Among these 
 deep generalizations we are startled by the 
 following, which explains the vast superiority 
 of the English translation of the Bible over all 
 other translations, and in a certain deep sense 
 makes it an original work. " More than any 
 race in Europe," he says, " they (the British) 
 approach by the simplicity and energy of their 
 conceptions the old Hebraic spirit. Enthusiasm 
 is their natural condition, and their Deity fills 
 them with admiration as their ancient deities 
 inspired them with fury." 
 
 Of Teutonic graceless unconsciousness, the 
 Anglo-Saxons have by far the largest endow- 
 ment. They wanted another element, in short, 
 not the Hellenic element ; for there never was a
 
 146 POETRY 
 
 greater mistake than that of supposing that 
 Hellenism can be engrafted on Teutonism and 
 live ; as Landor and Arnold two of the finest 
 minds of modern times have testified by their 
 failures. 
 
 But, long before the memorable Hampton 
 Court Conference ; long before the Bishop's 
 Bible or Coverdale's Bible ; long before even 
 Aldhelm's time Hebraism had been flowing 
 over and enriching the Anglo-Saxon mind. 
 From the time when Casdmon, the forlorn cow- 
 herd, fell asleep beneath the stars by the stable- 
 door, and was bidden to sing the Biblical story, 
 Anglo-Saxon literature grew more and more 
 Hebraic. Yet, in a certain sense, the Hebraism 
 in which the English mind was steeped had been 
 Hebraism at second hand that of the Vulgate 
 mainly till Tyndale's time, or rather till the 
 present Authorized Version of the Bible appeared 
 in 1611. "There is no book," says Selden, 
 " so translated as the Bible for the purpose. 
 If I translate a French book into English, I 
 turn it into English phrase, not into French- 
 English. "II fait froid," I say, "'tis cold, not 
 it makes cold ; but the Bible is rather trans- 
 lated into English words than into English 
 phrase. The Hebraisms are kept, and the 
 phrase of that language is kept." 
 
 And in great measure this is true, no doubt ; 
 yet literal accuracy importation of Hebraisms 
 was not of itself enough to produce a trans- 
 lation in the Great Style a translation such as 
 this, which, as Coleridge says, makes us think 
 that " the translators themselves were inspired/'
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 147 
 
 Taine's deep theory is required to explain it. 
 To reproduce the Great Style of the original in 
 a Western idiom, the happiest combination of 
 circumstances was necessary. The temper of 
 the people receiving must, notwithstanding all 
 differences of habitation and civilization, be 
 elementally in harmony with that of the people 
 giving ; that is, it must be poetic rather than 
 ratiocinative. Society must not be too com- 
 plex its tone must not be too knowing and 
 self -glorify ing. The accepted pyschology of the 
 time must not be the psychology of the scalpel 
 the metaphysics must not be the metaphysics 
 of newspaper cynicism ; above all, enthusiasm 
 and vulgarity must not be considered synony- 
 mous terms ; above aJl the enthusiasm mentioned 
 by Taine is necessary. That this is the kind of 
 national temper necessary to such a work might 
 have been demonstrated by an argument a 
 priori. It was the temper of the English nation 
 when the Bible was translated. That noble 
 heroism born of faith in God and belief in the 
 high duties of man which we have lost for the 
 hour was in the very atmosphere that hung 
 over the island. And style in real life, which 
 now, as a consequence of our loss, does not 
 exist at all among Englishmen, having given 
 place in all classes to manner nourished then 
 in all its charm. And in literature it was the 
 same ; not even the euphuism imported from 
 the Continent could really destroy or even 
 seriously damage the then national sense of 
 style. 
 Then, as to the form of literature adopted in
 
 148 POETRY 
 
 the translation, what must that be ? Evidently 
 it must be some kind of form which can do all 
 the high work that is generally left to metrical 
 language, and yet must be free from any soup- 
 on of that " artifice " in the " abandonment " 
 of which, says an Arabian historian, " true art 
 alone lies." For, this is most noteworthy, that 
 of literature as an art, the Semites show but 
 small conception, even in Job. It was too 
 sacred for that drama and epic in the Aryan 
 sense were alike unknown. 
 
 But if the translation must not be metrical 
 in the common acceptation of that word, 
 neither must it be prose ; we will not say logical 
 prose ; for all prose, however high may be its 
 flights, however poetic and emotive, must 
 always be logical underneath, must always be 
 chained by a logical chain, and earth-bound 
 like a captive balloon ; just as poetry, on the 
 other hand, however didactic and even ratio- 
 cinative it may become, must always be steeped 
 in emotion. It must be neither verse nor prose, 
 it seems. It must be a new movement alto- 
 gether. The musical movement of the English 
 Bible is a now movement ; let us call it " Bible 
 Rhythm." And the movement was devised 
 thus : Difficulty is the worker of modern miracles. 
 Thanks to Difficulty thanks to the conflict 
 between what Selden calls " Hebrew phrase 
 and English phrase," the translators fashioned, 
 or rather, Difficulty fashioned for them, a move- 
 ment which was neither one nor wholly the 
 other a movement which, for naivete" and 
 pathos in the narrative portions, for music,
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 149 
 
 variety, splendour and sublimity, in the purely 
 lyrical portions is above all the effects of English 
 poetic art, above all the rhythms and all the 
 rhymes of the modern world a movement, 
 indeed, which is a form of art of itself but 
 a form in which " artifice " is really " aban- 
 doned " at last. This rhythm it is that runs 
 through the English Prayer-Book, and which 
 governs every verse of the Bible, its highest 
 reaches perhaps being in the Psalms. Re- 
 ferring to what has been previously said as to 
 the fundamental difference between structural 
 poetry and prose with regard to expectation of 
 cadence, the great features of Bible Rhythm are 
 a recognised music apart from a recognised law 
 " Artifice " so completely abandoned that 
 we forget we are in the realm of art pauses 
 so divinely set that they seem to be " wood- 
 notes wild," though all the while they are, and 
 must be, governed by a mysterious law too 
 subtly sweet to be formulated ; and all kinds of 
 beauties infinitely beyond the triumphs of the 
 metricist, but beauties that are unexpected. 
 There is a metre, to be sure, but it is that of the 
 " moving music which is life " ; it is the living 
 metre of the surging sea within the soul of him 
 who speaks ; it is the free affluence of the 
 emotions and the passions which are passing 
 into the words. And if this is so in other parts 
 of the Bible, what is it in the Great Lyric, 
 the Psalms, where "the flaming steeds of song," 
 though really kept strongly in hand, seem to 
 run reinless as " the wild horses of the wind ? " 
 And it is this which compels us to place the
 
 150 POETRY 
 
 English Bible at the top of English Literature. 
 A great savant once characterized the Bible as 
 " a collection of the rude imaginings of Syria," 
 "the worn-out old bottle of Judaism into which 
 the generous new wine of science is being 
 poured." The great savant was angry when he 
 said so. The " new- wine " of science is a 
 generous vintage, undoubtedly, and deserves all 
 the respect it gets from us, so do those who 
 make it and serve it out ; they have so much 
 intelligence ; they are so honest and so fearless. 
 But whatever may become of their wine in a 
 few years, when the wine-dealers shall have 
 passed away, when the savant is forgotten as 
 any star-gazer of Chaldsea the " old-bottle " is 
 going to be older yet. For that which decides 
 the vitality of any book is precisely that which 
 decides the value of any human soul not the 
 knowledge it contains, but simply the attitude 
 it assumes towards the universe, unseen as well 
 as seen. The attitude of the Bible is just that 
 which every soul must, in its highest and truest 
 moods always assume that of a wise wonder 
 and a noble humility in front of such a universe 
 as this. This is why like Alexander's mirror 
 like that most precious " Cup of Jemshid " 
 imagined by the Persians the Bible reflects 
 to-day, and will reflect for ever, every wave of 
 human emotion, every passing event of human 
 life reflect them as faithfully as it did to the 
 great and simple people in whose great and 
 simple tongue it was written. Coming from the 
 Vernunft of Man, it goes straight to the Vernunft. 
 This is the kind of literature that never does die.
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 151 
 
 The very quintessence of the Bible is the 
 Book of the Psalms. Therefore the universal 
 passion for Psalm-singing is not wonderful ; the 
 wonder is that, liking so much to sing, they 
 can find it possible to sing so badly. It is not 
 wonderful that the court of Francis I. should 
 yearn to sing Psalms ; the wonderful thing is 
 that they should find it in their hearts to sing 
 Marot's Psalms when they might have sung 
 David's that Her Majesty the Queen could 
 sing to a fashionable jig, " O Lord, rebuke me 
 not in thine indignation " and that Anthony, 
 King of Navarre, could sing to the air of a 
 dance of Poitou, " Stand up, O Lord, to revenge 
 my quarrel." For, although it is given to the 
 very frogs, according to Pascal, to find music in 
 their own croaking, the ears that can find music 
 in such frogs as Marot in France, in England 
 such frogs as Brady and Tate, and in Scotland 
 such frogs as Rous, must be of a peculiar con- 
 volution. 
 
 When Macaulay's tiresome New Zealander 
 has done contemplating the ruins on London 
 Bridge, and turned into the deserted British 
 Museum to study us through our books what 
 volume can he take as the representative one 
 what book, above all others, can the ghostly 
 librarian select to give him the truest, the 
 profoundest insight into the character of the 
 strange people who had made such a great 
 figure in the earth ? We, for our part, should 
 not hesitate to give him the English Book of 
 Common Prayer, with the authorised version 
 of the Psalms at the end, as representing the
 
 152 POETRY 
 
 modern British mind in its most exalted and 
 its most abject phases. That in the same 
 volume can be found side by side the beauty 
 and pathos of the English Litany, the grandeur 
 of the English Version of the Psalms and the 
 effusions of Brady and Tate masters of the 
 art of singing, compared with whom Rous is 
 an inspired bard would be adequate evidence 
 that the Church using it must be a British 
 Church that British, most British, must be 
 the public tolerating it. 
 
 " By thine Agony and bloody Sweat ; by thy Cross 
 and Passion ; by thy precious Death and Burial ; by thy 
 glorious Resurrection, and Ascension ; and by the coming 
 of the Holy Ghost, 
 
 Good Lord, deliver us." 
 
 Among Western peoples there is but one that 
 could have uttered in such language this cry, 
 where pathos and sublimity and subtlest music 
 are so mysteriously blended blended so divinely 
 that the man who can utter it, familiar as it is, 
 without an emotion deep enough to touch close 
 upon the fount of tears must be differently 
 constituted from some of us. Among Western 
 peoples there is, we say, but one that could 
 have done this ; and now listen to this : 
 
 When we, our wearied limbs to rest, 
 Sat down by proud Euphrates' stream, 
 
 We wept, with doleful thoughts opprest, 
 And Zion was our mournful theme. 
 
 Among all the peoples of the earth there is 
 but one -who could have thus degraded the
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 153 
 
 words : " By the rivers of Babylon, there we 
 sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered 
 Zion." For, to achieve such platitude there is 
 necessary an element which can only be called 
 the " Hopkins element," an element which is 
 quite an insular birthright of ours, a character- 
 istic which came over with the " White Horse " 
 that " dull coarseness of taste " which dis- 
 tinguishes the British mind from all others ; 
 that " achtbrittische Beschranktheit " which 
 Heine sneers at. The Scottish version is rough, 
 but Brady and Tate's inanities are worse than 
 Rous's roughness. 
 
 Such an anomaly as this in one and the same 
 literature, in one and the same little book, is 
 unnatural ; it is monstrous ; whence can it 
 come ? It is, indeed, singular that no one has 
 ever dreamed of taking the story of the English 
 Prayer-Book, with Brady and Tate at the end, 
 and using it as a key to unlock that puzzle of 
 puzzles which has set the Continental critics 
 writing nonsense about the English for genera- 
 tions : " What is it that makes the enormous 
 difference between English literature and all 
 other Western literatures Teutonic no less than 
 Latin or Slavonic ? " The simple truth of the 
 matter is, that the British mind has always 
 been bipartite as now has always been, as now, 
 half sublime and half homety to very coarseness ; 
 in other words, it has been half inspired by 
 David King of Israel, and half by John Hopkins, 
 Suffolk schoolmaster and archetype of prosaic 
 bards, who, in 1562, took such of the Psalms as 
 Sternhold had left unsullied and doggerellized
 
 154 POETRY 
 
 them. For, as we have said, Hopkins, in many 
 and various incarnations, has been singing 
 unctuously in these islands ever since the in- 
 troduction of Christianity, and before ; for he 
 is Anglo-Saxon tastelessness, he is Anglo-Saxon 
 deafness to music and blindness to beauty. 
 When St. Augustine landed here with David he 
 found not only Odin, but Hopkins, a heathen 
 at that time in possession of the soil. 
 
 There is, therefore, half of a great truth in 
 what Taine says. The English have, besides 
 the Hopkins element, which is indigenous, much 
 of the Hebraic temper, which is indigenous 
 too ; but they have by nature none of the 
 Hebraic style. But, somehow, here is the 
 difference between us and the Continentals that, 
 though style is born of taste though le style 
 c'esl la race, and though the Anglo-Saxon 
 started, as we have seen, with Odin and Hop- 
 kins alone, yet, just as instinct may be sown 
 and grown by ancestral habit of many years- 
 just as the pointer puppy, for instance, points 
 he knows not why, because his ancestors were 
 taught to point before him so may the Hebraic 
 style be sown and grown in a foreign soil if the 
 soil be Anglo-Saxon, and if the seed-time last 
 for a thousand years. The result of all this is, 
 that the English, notwithstanding their de- 
 ficiency of artistic instinct and coarseness of 
 taste, have the Great Style, not only in poetry, 
 sometimes, but in prose sometimes when they 
 write emotively, as we see in the English Prayer 
 Book, in parts of Raleigh's " History of the 
 World," in Jeremy Taylor's sermons, in Hall's
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 155 
 
 " Contemplations," and other such books of the 
 seventeenth century. 
 
 Yet in spite of this there is not, in the whole 
 of modern history, a more suggestive subject 
 than that of the persistent attempts of every 
 Western literature to versify the Psalms in its 
 own idiom, and the uniform failure of these 
 attempts. At the time that Sternhold was 
 " bringing " the Psalms into " fine English 
 meter " for Henry the Eighth and Edward the 
 Sixth, continental rhymers were busy at the 
 same kind of work for their own monarchs 
 notably Clement Marot for Francis the First. 
 And it has been going on ever since, without a 
 single protest of any importance having been 
 entered against it. This is astonishing, for the 
 Bible, even from the point of view of the literary 
 critic, is a sacred book. 
 
 It might perhaps be said indeed that the 
 Great Lyric is purely Hebrew. 
 
 But, although we could hardly expect to find 
 it among those whose language, complex of 
 syntax and alive with self-conscious inflexions, 
 bespeaks the scientific knowingness of the 
 Western mind, to call the temper of the Great 
 Lyric broadly " Asiatic " would be rash. It 
 seems to belong as a birthright to those des- 
 cendants of Shem who, yearning always to 
 look straight into the face of God and live, 
 could (when the Great Lyric was sung) see not 
 much else.
 
 156 POETRY 
 
 Though two of the artistic elements of the 
 Great Lyric, unconsciousness and power, are 
 no doubt plentiful enough in India, the element 
 of grace is lacking for the most part. The 
 Vedic hymns are both nebulous and unemo- 
 tional, as compared with Semitic hymns. And 
 as to the Persians, they, it would seem, have 
 the grace always, the power often, but the 
 unconsciousness almost never. This is inevit- 
 able if we consider for a moment the chief 
 characteristic of the Persian imagination an 
 imagination whose wings are not so much 
 " bright with beauty " as heavy with it- 
 heavy as the wings of a golden pheasant 
 steeped in beauty like the " tiger-moth's deep 
 damasked wings." New beauty of this kind does 
 not go to the making of the Great Lyric. 
 
 Then there comes that poetry which, being 
 ethnologically Semitic, might be supposed to 
 exhibit something at least of the Hebrew temper 
 the Arabian. But, whatever may be said of 
 the oldest Arabic poetry, with its deep sense of 
 fate and pain, it would seem that nothing can 
 be more unlike than the Hebrew temper and the 
 Arabian temper as seen in later poets. It is 
 not with Hebrew, but with Persian poetry that 
 Arabian poetry can be usefully compared. If
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 157 
 
 the wings of the Persian imagination are heavy 
 with beauty, those of the later Arabian imagina- 
 tion are bright with beauty brilliant as an 
 Eastern butterfly, quick and agile as a dragon- 
 fly or a humming-bird. To the eye of the 
 Persian poet the hues of earth are (as Firdausi 
 says of the garden of Afrasiab) " like the tapestry 
 of the kings of Ormuz, the air is perfumed with 
 musk, and the waters of the brooks are the 
 essence of roses." And to the later Arabian no 
 less than to the Persian the earth is beautiful ; 
 but it is the clear and sparkling beauty of the 
 earth as she " wakes up to life, greeting the 
 Sabaean morning " ; we feel the light more than 
 the colour. 
 
 But it is neither the Persian's instinct for 
 beauty, nor the Arabian's quenchless wit and 
 exhaustless animal spirits that go to the making 
 of the Great Lyric ; far from it. In a word, the 
 Great Lyric, as we have said, cannot be assigned 
 to the Asiatic temper generally any more than 
 it can be assigned to the European temper. 
 
 In the poetry of Europe, if we cannot say of 
 Pindar, devout as he is, that he produced the 
 Great Lyric, what can we say of any other 
 European poet ? The truth is that, like the 
 Great Drama, so straight and so warm does it
 
 158 POETRY 
 
 seem to come from the heart of man in its 
 highest moods that we scarcely feel it to be 
 literature at all. 
 
 Passing, however, from this supreme ex- 
 pression of lyrical imagination, we come to the 
 artistic ode. Whatever may have been said 
 to the contrary, enthusiasm is, in the nature 
 of things, the very basis of the ode ; for 
 the ode is a mono-drama, the actor in 
 which is the poet himself ; and, as Marmontel 
 has well pointed out, if the actor in the mono- 
 drama is not affected by the sentiments he 
 expresses, the ode must be cold and lifeless. 
 But, although the ode is a natural poetic method 
 of the poet considered as prophet although 
 it is the voice of poetry as a fine frenzy it 
 must not be supposed that there is anything 
 lawless in its structure. " Pindar," says the 
 Italian critic Gravina, " launches his verses 
 upon the bosom of the sea, he spreads out all 
 his sails ; he confronts the tempest and the 
 rocks ; the waves arise and are ready to engulf 
 him ; already he has disappeared from the 
 spectator's view ; when suddenly he springs up 
 in the midst of the waters, and reaches happily 
 the shore." 
 
 Now it is this Pindaric discursiveness, this
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 159 
 
 Pindaric restraint as to the matter, which has 
 led poets to attempt to imitate him by adopting 
 an unrestraint as to form. Although no two 
 odes of Pindar exhibit the same metrical 
 structure (the ^Eolian and Lydian rhythms 
 being mingled with the Doric in different 
 proportions), . yet each ode is in itself obedient, 
 severely obedient, to structural law. This we 
 feel ; but what the law is no metricist has per- 
 haps ever yet been able to explain. 
 
 It was a strange misconception that led 
 people for centuries to use the word " Pindaric " 
 and irregular as synonymous terms ; whereas 
 the very essence of the odes of Pindar (of the 
 few, alas ! which survive to us) is their regularity. 
 There is no more difficult form of poetry than 
 this, and for this reason ; when in any poetical 
 composition the metres are varied, there must, 
 as the present writer has before pointed out, 
 be a reason for such freedom, and that reason 
 is properly subjective the varying form must 
 embody and express the varying emotions of 
 the singer. But when these metrical variations 
 are governed by no subjective law at all, but by 
 arbitrary rules supposed to be evolved from the 
 practice of Pindar, then that very variety 
 which should aid the poet in expressing his
 
 i6o POETRY 
 
 emotion crystallizes it and makes the ode the 
 most frigid of all compositions. Great as Pindar 
 undoubtedly is, it is deeply to be regretted that 
 no other poet survives to represent the trium- 
 phal ode of Greece, the digressions of his 
 subject-matter are so wide, and his volubility 
 is so great. 
 
 In modern literature the ode has been ruined 
 by theories and experiments. A poet like 
 La Mothe, for instance, writes execrable odes, 
 and then writes a treatise to prove that all 
 odes should be written on the same model. 
 
 There is much confusion of mind prevalent 
 among poets as to what is and what is not an 
 ode. All odes are, no doubt, divisible into two 
 great classes : those which following an arrange- 
 ment in stanzas, are commonly called regular, 
 and those which, following no such arrange- 
 ment, are commonly called irregular. 
 
 We do not agree with those who assert that 
 irregular metres are of necessity inimical to 
 poetic art. On the contrary, we believe that in 
 modern prosody the arrangement of the rhymes 
 and the length of the lines in any rhymed 
 metrical passage may be determined either by 
 a fixed stanzaic law, or by a law infinitely 
 deeper by the law which impels the soul, in a
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 161 
 
 state of poetic exultation, to seize hold of every 
 kind of metrical aid, such as rhyme, caesura, etc., 
 for the purpose of accentuating and marking 
 off each shade of emotion as it arises, regardless 
 of any demands of stanza. 
 
 But between the irregularity of makeshift, 
 such as we find it in Cowley and his imitators, 
 and the irregularity of the " fine frenzy " of 
 such a peom, for instance, as Coleridge's Kubla 
 Khan, there is a difference in kind. Strange 
 that it is not in an ode at all, but in this unique 
 lyric Kubla Khan, descriptive of imaginative 
 landscape, that an English poet has at last 
 conquered the crowning difficulty of writing in 
 irregular metres. Having broken away from all 
 restraints of couplet and stanza having caused 
 his rhymes and pauses to fall just where and 
 just when the emotion demands that they 
 should fall, scorning the exigencies of make- 
 shift no less than the exigencies of stanza 
 he has found that every writer of irregular 
 English odes has sought in vain a music as 
 entrancing, as natural, and at the same time as 
 inscrutable as the music of the winds or of the 
 sea. 
 
 The prearranged effects of sharp contrasts 
 and antiphonal movements, such as some poets 
 
 M
 
 162 POETRY 
 
 have been able to compass, do not, of course, 
 come under the present definition of irregular 
 metres at all. If a metrical passage does not 
 gain immensely by being written independently 
 of stanzaic law, it loses immensely ; and for this 
 reason, perhaps, that the great charm of the 
 music of all verse, as distinguished from the 
 music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. 
 In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of 
 feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under 
 a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if 
 the passage flows independently of these, it 
 must still flow inevitably it must, in short, 
 show that it is governed by another and a yet 
 deeper force, the inevitableness of emotional 
 expression. The lines must be long or short, 
 the rhymes must be arranged after this or after 
 that interval, not because it is convenient so to 
 arrange them, but because the emotion of the 
 poet inexorably demands these and no other 
 arrangements. When, however, Coleridge came 
 to try his hand at irregular odes such as the 
 odes " To the Departing Year " and " To the 
 Duchess of Devonshire," he certainly did not 
 succeed. 
 
 As to Wordsworth's magnificent " Ode on 
 Intimations of Immortality," the sole impeach-
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 163 
 
 ment of it, but it is a grave one, is that the 
 length of the lines and the arrangement of the 
 rhymes are not always inevitable ; they are, 
 except on rare occasions, governed neither by 
 stanzaic nor by emotional law. For instance, 
 what emotional necessity was there for the 
 following rhyme-arrangement ? 
 
 " My heart is at your festival, 
 My head hath its coronal, 
 The fulness of your bliss I feel I feel it all. 
 Oh, evil day 1 if I were sullen 
 While earth herself is adorning, 
 This sweet May morning ; 
 And the children are culling, 
 
 on every side, 
 
 In a thousand valleys far and wide, 
 Fresh flowers." 
 
 Beautiful as is the substance of this entire 
 passage, so far from gaining, it loses by rhyme 
 loses, not in perspicuity, for Wordsworth like 
 all his contemporaries (except Shelley) is mostly 
 perspicuous, but in that metrical emphasis the 
 quest of which is one of the impulses that leads 
 a poet to write in rhyme. In spite, however, 
 of its metrical defects, this famous ode of Words- 
 worth's is the finest irregular ode in the language, 
 for, although Coleridge's " Ode to the Departing 
 Year," excels it in Pindaric fire it is below 
 Wordsworth's masterpiece in almost every other
 
 164 POETRY 
 
 quality save rhythm. Among the writers of 
 English irregular odes, next to Wordsworth, 
 stands Dry den. The second stanza of the " Ode 
 for St. Cecilia's day " is a great triumph. 
 
 Leaving the irregular and turning to the 
 regular ode, it is natural to divide these into 
 two classes : (i) those which are really Pin- 
 daric in so far as they consist of strophes, 
 antistrophes, and epodes, variously arranged 
 and contrasted ; and (2) those which consist of 
 a regular succession of regular stanzas. Per- 
 haps all Pindaric odes tend to show that this 
 form of art is in English a mistake. It is easy 
 enough to write one stanza and call it a strophe, 
 another in a different movement and call it an 
 antistrophe, a third in a different movement 
 still, and call it an epode. But in modern 
 prosody, disconnected as it is from musical 
 and from terpsichorean science, what are these ? 
 No poet and no critic can say. 
 
 What is requisite is that the ear of the reader 
 should catch a great metrical scheme, of which 
 these three varieties of movement are necessary 
 parts, should catch, in short, that inevitable- 
 ness of structure upon which we have already 
 touched. In order to justify a poet in writing 
 a poem in three different kinds of movement
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 165 
 
 governed by no musical and no terpsichorean 
 necessity, a necessity of another kind should 
 make itself apparent ; that is, the metrical wave 
 moving in the strophe should be metrically 
 answered by the counter wave moving in the 
 antistrophe, while the epode which, as origin- 
 ally conceived by Stesichorus, was merely a 
 standing still after the balanced movements of 
 the strophe and antistrophe should clearly, in 
 a language like ours, be a blended echo of these 
 two. 
 
 A mere metrical contrast such as some poets 
 labour to effect is not a metrical answer. And 
 if the reply to this criticism be that in Pindar 
 himself no such metrical scheme is apparent, 
 that is the strongest possible argument in 
 support of our position. If indeed the metrical 
 scheme of Pindar is not apparent, that is 
 because, having been written for chanting, it 
 was subordinate to the lost musical scheme of 
 the musician. It has been contended and is 
 likely enough, that this musical scheme was 
 simple as simple, perhaps, as the scheme of a 
 cathedral chant ; but to it, whatever it was, 
 the metrical scheme of the poet was subor- 
 dinated. It need scarcely be said that the 
 phrase " metrical scheme " is used here not in
 
 166 POETRY 
 
 the narrow sense as indicating the position and 
 movement of strophe and antistrophe by way of 
 simple contrast, but in the deep metrical sense 
 as indicating the value of each of these com- 
 ponent parts of the ode, as a counter-wave 
 balancing and explaining the other waves in 
 the harmony of the entire composition. 
 
 We touch upon this matter in order to show 
 that the moment odes ceased to be chanted, 
 the words strophe, antistrophe, and epode lost 
 the musical value they had among the Greeks, 
 and pretended to a complex metrical value, 
 which their actual metrical structure does not 
 appear to justify. It does not follow from this 
 that odes should not be so arranged, but it 
 does follow that the poet's arrangement should 
 justify itself by disclosing an entire metrical 
 scheme in place of the musical scheme to which 
 the Greek choral lyric was evidently sub- 
 ordinated. But even if the poet were a suffi- 
 ciently skilled metricist to compass a scheme 
 embracing a wave, an answering wave, and an 
 echo gathering up the tones of each, i.e., the 
 strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode, the ear 
 of the reader, unaided by the musical emphasis 
 which supported the rhythms of the old choral 
 lyric, is, it should seem, incapable of gathering
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 167 
 up and remembering the sounds further than 
 the strophe and the antistrophe, after which it 
 demands not an epode, but a return to the 
 strophe. That is to say, an epode, as alter- 
 nating in the body of the modern ode, is a 
 mistake ; a single epode at the end of a group 
 of strophes and antistrophes (as in some of the 
 Greek odes) has, of course, a different function 
 altogether. 
 
 The great difficulty of the English ode is that 
 of preventing the apparent spontaneity of the 
 impulse from being marred by the apparent 
 artifice of the form ; for, assuredly, no writer 
 subsequent to Coleridge and to Keats would 
 dream of writing an ode on the cold Horatian 
 principles adopted by Warton, and even by 
 Collins, in his beautiful " Ode to Evening." 
 
 Of the second kind of regular odes, those 
 consisting of a regular succession of regular 
 stanzas, the so-called odes of Sappho are, of 
 course, so transcendent that no other amatory 
 lyrics can be compared with them. Never 
 before these songs were sung, and never since 
 did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion 
 utter a cry like hers ; and, from the executive 
 point of view, in directness, in lucidity, in that 
 high imperious verbal economy which only
 
 168 POETRY 
 
 Nature herself can teach the artist, she has no 
 equal, and none worthy to take the place of 
 second not even in Heine, not even in Burns. 
 Turning, however, to modern poetry, there are 
 some magnificent examples of this simple form 
 of ode in English poetry Spenser's immortal 
 " Epithalamion " leading the way in point of 
 time, and probably also in point of excellence. 
 
 Fervour being absolutely essential, we think, 
 to a great English ode, fluidity of metrical 
 movement can never be dispensed with. The 
 more billowy the metrical waves the better 
 suited are they to render the emotions expressed 
 by the ode, as the reader will see by referring 
 to Coleridge's " Ode to France " (the finest ode 
 in the English language, according to Shelley), 
 and giving special attention to the first stanza 
 to the way in which the first metrical wave, 
 after it had gently fallen at the end of the first 
 quatrain, leaps up again on the double rhymes 
 (which are expressly introduced for this effect), 
 and goes bounding on, billow after billow, to 
 the end of the stanza. 
 
 Not that this fine ode is quite free from the 
 great vice of the English ode, rhetoric. If we 
 except Spenser, and, in one instance, Collins, 
 it can hardly be said that any English writer
 
 VARIETIES OF POETIC ART 169 
 
 before Shelley and Keats produced odes in- 
 dependent of rhetoric and supported by pure 
 poetry alone. But fervid as are Shelley's " Ode 
 to the West Wind," and Keats's Odes " To a 
 Nightingale " and " On a Grecian Urn," they 
 are entirely free from rhetorical flavour. Not- 
 withstanding that in the " Ode on a Grecian 
 Urn " the first stanza does not match in rhyme 
 arrangement with the others, while the second 
 stanza of the " Ode to a Nightingale " varies 
 from the rest by running on four rhyme-sounds 
 instead of five, vexing the ear at first by dis- 
 appointed expectation, these two odes are, after 
 Coleridge's " France," the finest regular odes 
 perhaps in the English language. 
 
 With regard to the French ode, Malherbe 
 was the first writer who brought it to perfection. 
 Malherbe showed also more variety of mood 
 than it is the fashion just now to credit him 
 with. This may be specially noted in his " Ode 
 to Louis XIII." His disciple Racan is not of 
 much account. There is certainly much vigour 
 in the odes of Rousseau, but it is not till we 
 reach Victor Hugo that we realize what French 
 poetry can achieve in this line ; and contem- 
 porary poetry can hardly be examined here. 
 We may say, however, that some of Hugo's
 
 i;o POETRY 
 
 odes are truly magnificent. As a pure lyrist 
 his place among the greatest poets of the world 
 is very high. Here, though writing in an 
 inferior language, he ranks with the greatest 
 masters of Greece, of England, and of Germany. 
 Had he attempted no other kind of poetry than 
 lyrical his would still have been the first name 
 in French poetry. Whatever is defective in 
 his work arises, as in the case of Euripides from 
 the importation of lyrical force where dramatic 
 force is mainly needed.
 
 VI 
 THE SONNET 
 
 IN poetic art the sonnet a stanza mostly 
 iambic in movement, properly decasyl- 
 labic or hen-decasyllabic in metre, always 
 in fourteen lines arranged properly accor- 
 ding to some law that is recognised at once as 
 having universal acceptance belongs entirely 
 to the rhymed poetry of the modern world. 
 
 Sonnets are divided into regular and irregular. 
 All regular sonnets are divisible into : (i) The 
 sonnet of simple stanza in which the staves 
 follow each other in three quatrains of alternate 
 rhymes clinched at last by a couplet. This 
 form is for obvious reasons called the Shakes- 
 pearean sonnet. (2) The sonnet of compound 
 stanza divided generally, but not always, both 
 as regards sense-rhythm and metre-rhythm, 
 into two parts an octave consisting of eight 
 lines (the first line of which rhymes with the 
 fourth, the fifth, and the eighth lines, the second 
 line with the third, the sixth, and the seventh), 
 
 171
 
 172 POETRY 
 
 and a sestet consisting of six lines running on 
 two or else three rhymes in an arrangement 
 which, though free from prescription, must 
 always act as a response by way of either ebb 
 or flow to the metrical billow embodied in the 
 octave. This form is for equally obvious 
 reasons called Petrarchan. 
 
 Though poetic art has many functions and 
 many methods, the two following among its 
 functions seem specially to concern us in treat- 
 ing of the sonnet : The function of giving 
 spontaneous voice to the emotions and passions 
 of the poet's soul : and the function of poetising 
 didactic matter and bringing it into poetic art. 
 
 With regard to the first of these functions, 
 although the sonnet is a good medium for ex- 
 pressing passion and emotion, it cannot be said 
 to take precedence in this respect of other and 
 less inherently monumental forms. The ode of 
 Sappho, the bird-like song of Catullus, and the 
 free-moving rhymed lyric of modern times are 
 probably better adapted to give expression to 
 simple passion at white heat while on the 
 other hand they are certainly better adapted 
 to give voice to that less intense form of passion 
 which can pause to deck itself with the flowers 
 of a beautiful fancy than is the sonnet
 
 THE SONNET 173 
 
 the sonnet of simple stanza of Shakes- 
 peare and Dray ton. With regard, however, to 
 the second of the above-mentioned functions of 
 the poet that of poetising didactic matter a 
 function which of course can only be exercised 
 by passing the didactic matter through a 
 laboratory as creative and as recreative as 
 nature's own, the laboratory of a true poet's 
 imagination, the pure lyric must of course 
 yield to the sonnet. Indeed, it is an open 
 question whether since the Romantic revival 
 the sonnet has not been gradually taking pre- 
 cedence of most other forms as an embodiment 
 of poetised didactics. And should this on 
 inquiry be found to be the case, the importance 
 of this form will be made manifest. For as the 
 mind of man widens in mere knowledge and 
 intelligence fresh prose material is being fur- 
 nished for the poetic laboratory every day. 
 And the question, What is the poetic form best 
 suited to embody and secure this ever-in- 
 creasing and ever-varying wealth ? a question 
 which has to be answered by each literature, 
 and indeed by each period of each literature, 
 for itself goes to the root of poetic criticism. 
 Of course, before didactic matter can become 
 anything more than versified prose, it has to be
 
 I 7 4 POETRY 
 
 excarnated from the prose tissue in which all 
 such matter takes birth, and then incarnated 
 anew in the spiritualised tissue of which the 
 poetic body is and must always be composed. 
 Hence it is not enough for the poet to use the 
 sieve, ' as Dante would say, ' in selecting 
 ' noble words.' The best prose writers from 
 Plato downwards have been in the habit of 
 doing this. When Waller said : 
 
 Things of deep sense we may in prose unfold, 
 But they move more in lofty numbers told. 
 
 he meant by ' lofty numbers ' those semi-poetic 
 1 numbers ' of the English couplet in which 
 poetised didactics were in his time embodied 
 as in the time of Shakespeare such poetised 
 secretions of the mere intellectus cogitabundus 
 were put into the mouths of dramatic characters 
 after the approved old fashion of the classical 
 dramatists. 
 
 Since the Romantic revival, however, poetic 
 art has undergone an entire change. Acted 
 drama cannot now receive poetised didactics, 
 which would in these days slacken the move- 
 ment and disturb the illusion required, while 
 as to the kind of epigram-in-solution or half- 
 poetised quintessential prose which is embodied
 
 THE SONNET 175 
 
 in the 18th-century couplet the criticism of the 
 Romantic revival is apt to consider this not so 
 much as poetry as an intermediate form 
 and an extremely rich and precious one 
 between poetry and prose. Epigrammatic 
 matter must, to exist at all, be knowing, and as 
 knowingness and romanticism are mutually 
 destructive, it is evident that some form other 
 than the couplet, which is so associated with 
 epigram, must in our time be used for the 
 poetising of didactic matter of the unworldly 
 and lofty kind. And the sonnet of octave and 
 sestet is a form less epigrammatic than any 
 other a form moreover which can never, as 
 certain other stanzaic forms can do, embody 
 mere quintessential prose without proclaiming 
 its poverty, but must always be poetic in its very 
 texture a form indeed which will not bear 
 one line that is not either in essence or in 
 method poetic or else ' rhetorical ' in Dante's 
 sense when he denned poetry to be ' a rhetorical 
 composition set to music.' So absolutely poetic 
 a form is this that if it should happen that 
 the diction will not on account of the subject 
 bear elevation, it has to be at once poetised by 
 one of those skilful disturbances of the prose 
 order of the words of which Wordsworth was 
 so great a master.
 
 176 POETRY 
 
 The fact of the word sonnet being connected 
 with suonare, to play upon an instrument, 
 shows that a knowledge of music, though per- 
 haps not essential, is of great value to a sonnet- 
 writer. Indeed, owing to the consonantal 
 character of our language a knowledge of music 
 is really of more importance to the English 
 than to the Italian sonnet- writer. Although the 
 ' singing words ' essential to a good song for 
 music need not perhaps be greatly sought in 
 the sonnet (save in the special and somewhat 
 rare form mentioned further on), still vowel- 
 composition and that attention to sibilants 
 which Pindar is constantly showing in his odes 
 that attention which Dionysius of Halicarn- 
 assus extolled and also the softening of con- 
 sonantal feet by liquids are extremely im- 
 portant in the sonnet, even although it is no 
 longer written to be set to music. After much 
 practice in the art of rhymed poetry when 
 every feasible rhyme leaps into the brain of 
 the poet the moment that a line-ending has 
 suggested itself to his mind this attention to 
 structural demands becomes instinctive, and is 
 exercised in that half unconscious and rapid 
 evolution of the mental processes which the 
 witty conversationist shows in repartee, and
 
 THE SONNET 177 
 
 which the pianist exhibits when touching the 
 key-board supposing, of course, that the poet 
 is a born rhymer. It is, however, a curious and 
 interesting fact that ever since the time of 
 Piers Plowman (when alliterative measures gave 
 way to rhymed measures) English poets have 
 been clearly divisible into two classes those to 
 whom rhyme is an aid, and those to whom 
 rhyme is more or less a check. And still more 
 curious and interesting is it, that while three 
 of the greatest poets, Shakespeare, Marlowe, 
 and Milton, belong to the one class, Coleridge 
 (who by endowment perhaps stands next to 
 them) belongs to the other. This is why some 
 of the strongest English poets have not been 
 successful in the sonnet, where the rhyme- 
 demands are very great. For some reason or 
 another the rhythmic impulse within them has 
 not been stimulated, but crippled and tortured 
 by the spur of rhyme. 
 
 With regard to prescription in the number of 
 the lines and the arrangement of the rhymes 
 of the sonnet, metrical art offers the reader two 
 opposite kinds of pleasure ; the pleasure derived 
 from a sense of prescribed form, as in the sonnet, 
 the ballade, the rispetto, the stornello, etc., and 
 the pleasure derived from a sense of freedom 
 
 N
 
 178 POETRY 
 
 from prescribed form as afforded by those pure 
 lyrics, in which the form is, or at least should 
 be, governed by the emotion. Now every 
 poetical composition should show at once which 
 of these kinds of pleasure is being offered to the 
 reader, and should also satisfy the expectation 
 raised, for he will experience a sense of dis- 
 appointment on being proffered one kind of 
 poetic pleasure when he has been led, by the 
 stanzaic arrangement or otherwise, to expect 
 another. Nevertheless, a certain few of our 
 great sonnets are irregular, for a great poet can 
 do anything. 
 
 With reference to regular sonnets it is self- 
 evident, as regards the sonnet of compound 
 stanza, that there are four different forms into 
 which may fall a metrical structure consisting 
 of an octave of a prescriptive arrangement of 
 rhymes and a sestet consisting of another set of 
 rhymes that are free in arrangement from 
 prescription. And some years ago the present 
 writer exemplified these in ' four sonnets on the 
 sonnet/ one only of which under the name of 
 ' The Sonnet's Voice,' originally printed in the 
 Athenceum, was widely circulated in sonnet- 
 anthologies. These varieties of the sonnet of 
 octave and sestet are : (i) The sonnet in which
 
 THE SONNET 179 
 
 the stronger portion both in rhythm and in 
 substance is embodied in the sestet. (2) The 
 sonnet in which the stronger portion both in 
 rhythm and in substance is embodied in the 
 octave. (3) The sonnet in which the sestet is 
 not separated from the octave, but seems to be 
 merely a portion of the octave's movement 
 rising to a close more or less climacteric. (4) 
 The sonnet in which the sestet seems to be added 
 to the octave's movement, added after its 
 apparent termination in a kind of tailpiece, 
 answering to what in music we call the ' coda.' 
 With regard to the second of these varieties 
 the one exemplified in ' The Sonnet's Voice ' 
 perhaps the ideal form has the octave in 
 double rhymes, and the sestet in single rhymes. 
 But it has to be remembered by the poet that 
 between the effect of Italian rhymes and the 
 effect of English double rhymes there is a great 
 difference. Save in the hands of a sonnet-writer 
 of great practice in the art of vowel-composition, 
 in the art of using singing words, and in the art 
 of softening our consonantal language, by the 
 proper use of liquids and subtle and concealed 
 alliterations, the English rhyme-beat in the 
 double-rhyme octave of this variety is apt to 
 become too heavy for the single-rhyme rhyme-
 
 i8o POETRY 
 
 beat in the sestet. By attention to these re- 
 quirements, however, the rhyme-beat may be 
 so lightened that this variety may become the 
 most brilliant of all. 
 
 With regard to the sonnet of simple stanza, 
 it has two special glories : it was the form 
 adopted by Shakespeare, and in it is written 
 Dray ton's famous love-sonnet. Hartley Cole- 
 ridge wrote some fine sonnets in this form ; so 
 did Keats ; but on the whole it has been neg- 
 lected in recent times. A renewed attention has, 
 however, been lately given to it by critics of 
 the sonnet both in England and America owing 
 to Dr. Gordon Hake's book of nature poems, 
 The New Day, where the Shakespearean form of 
 sonnet is used. Here, by a free use of double 
 rhymes the poet gives a lyrical movement to 
 his verse, which, though an occasional feature 
 of Shakespeare's sonnets, is not a characteristic 
 one. 
 
 So flexible is the sonnet that every sonnet- 
 writer can and does put into his work the 
 rhythmic movement natural to his own ear. 
 The fact is that, although in a language like 
 the English, it requires no doubt considerable 
 ingenuity to construct a satisfactory sonnet 
 running upon two rhymes in the octave and 
 two or three in the sestet, the sonnet does not 
 really belong to the poetry of ingenuity. Its
 
 THE SONNET 181 
 
 ingenuity of structure is only a means to an 
 end, the end being that a single wave of emotion, 
 when emotion is either too deeply charged with 
 thought or too much adulterated with fancy to 
 pass spontaneously into the movements of pure 
 lyric, shall be embodied in a single metrical 
 flow and return. Hence the variety of rhythm 
 in the sonnet is infinite. 
 
 The movement of Milton, the movement of 
 Wordsworth, the movement of Keats, the 
 movement of Mrs. Browning, the movement of 
 Rossetti, the movement of Swinburne the 
 reader knows them all. Between a sonnet of 
 Tennyson's and a sonnet of Rossetti's so vast 
 is the difference as regards rhythmic emphasis 
 that it is difficult to realize that the rhyme 
 structure is the same in the one as in the other. 
 And the same remark applies, though not in an 
 equal degree, to Italian sonnets, in regard to 
 Dante, Petrarch, and others. 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that Keats pro- 
 duced more than one supremely fine sonnet of 
 octave and sestet. No doubt the sonnet ' On 
 first looking into Chapman's Homer ' is, if not 
 the finest sonnet in the language, very nearly 
 so, and can only yield to one or two of Words- 
 worth's or Rossetti's best. This appeared in 
 Keats' s first volume : the critics who failed to 
 see from it what a future lay before the poet 
 simply proclaimed their own ineptitude or their 
 own malignity. But in all Keats's other sonnets 
 of the Petrarchan type there are those signs of 
 hasty and incomplete work which compelled 
 Rossetti to characterize them as " first drafts."
 
 i82 POETRY 
 
 The sonnets on the Shakespearean model are 
 some of them better, and the one upon Homer 
 in this latter form is, beyond doubt, very fine. 
 
 But to place in the front rank of sonnet- 
 writers a poet who left but one first-rate sonnet 
 seems scarcely right. 
 
 In modern Europe the sonnet has always had 
 a peculiar fascination for poets of the first- 
 class poets, that is, in whom what we have 
 called poetic energy and plastic power are 
 equally combined. It would seem that the very 
 fact that the sonnet is a recognized structure 
 suggestive of mere art suggestive in some 
 measure, indeed, of what Schiller would call 
 " sport " in art has drawn some of the most 
 passionate poets in the world to the sonnet as 
 the medium of their sincerest utterances. With- 
 out being coldly artificial, like the rondeau, the 
 sestina, the ballade, the villanelle, &c., the 
 sonnet is yet so artistic in structure, its form is 
 so universally known, recognized, and adopted 
 as being artistic, that the too fervid spontaneity 
 and reality of the poet's emotion may be in a 
 certain degree veiled, and the poet can whisper 
 as from behind a mask, those deepest secrets 
 of the heart which could otherwise only find 
 expression in purely dramatic forms. 
 
 That the sonnet was invented, not in Provence, 
 as French critics pretend, but in Italy in the 
 I3th century, is pretty clear, but by whom is 
 still perhaps an open question. Mr. S. Wadding- 
 ton (Sonnets of Living Writers) and several 
 other contemporary critics attribute to Fra 
 Guittone the honour of having invented the
 
 THE SONNET 183 
 
 form. But J. A. Symonds has reminded us that 
 the sonnet beginning Pero ch y amore, attributed 
 to Pier delle Vigne, secretary of state in the 
 Sicilian court of Frederick, has claims which no 
 student of early Italian poetry can ignore. 
 
 As regards English sonnets, whether the 
 Petrarchan and the Shakespearean are really the 
 best of all possible forms we need not inquire. 
 But, inasmuch as they have become so vital 
 and so dominant over other sonnet forms that 
 whenever we begin to read the first verse of an 
 English sonnet we expect to find one or other 
 of these recognised rhyme arrangements, any 
 departure from these two arrangements, even 
 though the result be such a magnificent poem 
 as Shelley's " Ozymandias," disappoints the 
 expectation, baffles the ear, and brings with it 
 that sense of the fragmentary and the inchoate 
 to which we have before alluded. If, however, 
 some writer should arise with sufficient origin- 
 ality of metrical endowment and sufficient 
 poetic power to do what Keats, in a famous 
 experiment of his tried to do and failed 
 impress the public ear with a new sonnet struc- 
 ture, impress the public ear so powerfully that 
 a new kind of expectance is created the moment 
 the first verse of a sonnet is recited then there 
 will be three kinds of English sonnets instead 
 of two. 
 
 With regard to the Petrarchan sonnet, all 
 critics are perhaps now agreed that, while the 
 form of the octave is invariable, the form of the 
 sestet is absolutely free, save that the emotions 
 should govern the arrangement of the verses.
 
 184 POETRY 
 
 But as regards the division between octave 
 and sestet, Mark Pattison says, with great 
 boldness, but perhaps with truth, that by 
 blending octave with sestet Milton missed the 
 very object and end of the Petrarchan scheme. 
 Another critic, however, Mr. Hall Caine, in his 
 preface to Sonnets of Three Centuries, contends 
 that by making " octave flow into sestet with- 
 out break of music or thought," Milton con- 
 sciously or unconsciously invented a new form 
 of sonnet ; that is to say, Milton, in his use 
 of the Petrarchan octave and sestet for the 
 embodiment of intellectual substance incapable 
 of that partial disintegration which Petrarch 
 himself always or mostly sought, invented a 
 species of sonnet wluch is English in impetus, 
 but Italian, or partially Italian, in structure. 
 Hence this critic, like William Sharp (Sonnets 
 of this Century} divides all English sonnets into 
 four groups : (i) sonnets of Shakespearean 
 structure j (2) sonnets of octave and sestet of 
 Miltonic structure ; (3) sonnets of contem- 
 porary structure, i.e., all sonnets on the Pet- 
 rarchan model in which the metrical and in- 
 tellectual " wave of flow and ebb " (as origin- 
 ally formulated by the present writer in a 
 sonnet on the sonnet, which has appeared in 
 most of the recent anthologies) is strictly 
 observed, and in which, while the rhyme- 
 arrangement of the octave is invariable, that 
 of the sestet is free ; (4) sonnets of miscellaneous 
 structure. 
 
 With regard to what is called the contem- 
 porary form, a Petrarchan arrangement with
 
 THE SONNET 185 
 
 a sestet divided very sharply from the octave 
 the crowning difficulty and the crowning 
 triumph of the sonnet writer has always been 
 so to handle the rhythm of the prescribed 
 structure as to make it seem in each individual 
 sonnet the inevitable and natural rhythm de- 
 manded by the emotion which gives the in- 
 dividual sonnet birth, and this can perhaps 
 only be acheived when the richness and ap- 
 parent complexity of the rhyme-arrangement 
 is balanced by that perfect lucidity and sim- 
 plicity of syntax which is the special quest of 
 the " sonnet of flow and ebb." 
 
 The wave theory has found acceptance with 
 most recent students of the sonnet, such as 
 Rossetti and the late Mark Pattison, J. A. 
 Symonds, Mr. Hall Caine, and William Sharp. 
 J. A. Symonds, indeed, seems to hint that the 
 very name given by the Italians to the two 
 tercets, the volta or turn, indicates the metrical 
 meaning of the form. " The striking meta- 
 phorical symbol," says he, " drawn from the 
 observation of the swelling and declining wave 
 can even in some examples be applied to sonnets 
 on the Shakespearean model ; for, as a wave 
 may fall gradually or abruptly, so the sonnet 
 may sink with stately volume or with precipitate 
 subsidence to its close. Rossetti furnishes in- 
 comparable examples of the former and more 
 desirable conclusion ; Sydney D obeli, in Home 
 in War Time, yields an extreme specimen of the 
 latter." 
 
 And now as to the Shakespearean sonnet. 
 Some very acute critics have spoken as if this
 
 186 POETRY 
 
 form were merely a lawless succession of three 
 quatrains clinched by a couplet, and as if the 
 number of the quatrains might just as well 
 have been two or four, as the present prescribed 
 number of three. If this were so, it would 
 unquestionably be a serious impeachment of the 
 Shakespearean sonnet, for save in the poetry 
 of ingenuity no metric arrangement is other- 
 wise than bad unless it be the result of a deep 
 metrical necessity. 
 
 If the prescriptive arrangement of three quat- 
 rains clinched by a couplet is not a metrical 
 necessity, if it is not demanded in order to 
 prevent the couplet from losing its power, such 
 an arrangement is idle and worse than idle ; 
 just as, in the case of the Petrarchan sonnet, 
 if it can be shown that the solid unity of the 
 outflowing wave can be maintained as com- 
 pletely upon three rhymes as upon two, then 
 the restriction of the octave to two rhymes is 
 simple pendantry. But he who would test the 
 metrical necessity of the arrangement in the 
 Shakespearean sonnet has only to make the 
 experiment of writing a poem of two quatrains 
 with a couplet, and then another poem of four 
 quatrains with a couplet, in order to see how 
 inevitable is the metrical necessity of the 
 Shakespearean number and arrangement for the 
 achievement of the metrical effort which Shakes- 
 peare, Dray ton, and others sought. While in 
 the poem of two quatrains the expected couplet 
 has the sharp epigramatical effect of the couplet 
 in ordinary stanzas (such as that of ottava rima, 
 and as that of the Venus and Adonis stanza),
 
 THE SONNET 187 
 
 destroying that pensive sweetness which is the 
 characteristic of the Shakespearean sonnet, the 
 poem of four quatrains is just sufficiently long 
 for the expected pleasure of the couplet to be 
 dispersed and wasted. 
 
 The quest of the Shakespearean sonnet is 
 not, like that of the sonnet of octave and sestet, 
 senority, and, so to speak, metrical counter- 
 point, but sweetness ; and the sweetest of all 
 possible arrangements in English versification 
 is a succession of decasyllabic quatrains in 
 alternate rhymes knit together and clinched by 
 a couplet a couplet coming not so far from the 
 initial verse as to lose its binding power, and 
 yet not so near the initial verse that the ring 
 of epigram disturbs the " linked sweetness long 
 drawn out " of this movement, but sufficiently 
 near to shed its influence over the poem back 
 to the initial verse. A chief part of the pleasure 
 of the Shakespearean sonnet is the expectance 
 of the climacteric rest of the couplet at the end 
 (just as a chief part of the pleasure of the sonnet 
 of octave and sestet is the expectance of the 
 answering ebb of the sestet when the close of 
 the octave has been reached) ; and this ex- 
 pectance is gratified too early if it comes after 
 two quatrains, while, if it comes after a greater 
 number of quatrains than three, it is dispersed 
 and wasted altogether. 
 
 The French sonnet has a regular Petrarchan 
 octave with a sestet of three rhymes beginning 
 with a couplet. The Spanish sonnet is also 
 based on the pure Italian type, and is extremely 
 braceful and airy. The same may be said of the
 
 i88 POETRY 
 
 Portuguese sonnet a form of which the illus- 
 trious Camoens has left nearly three hundred 
 examples.
 
 VII 
 
 THE BALLAD AND OTHER FORMS OF 
 VERSE 
 
 M AMPERE, in his instructions to 
 the Committee appointed in 
 9 1852-53 to search for the re- 
 mains of ballads in France, told 
 the collectors to look for the following charac- 
 teristics : 
 
 " The use of assonance in place of rhyme, the 
 brusque character of the recital, the textual 
 repetition, as in Homer, of the speeches of the 
 persons, the constant use of certain numbers, 
 as three and seven, and the representation of 
 the commonest objects of e very-day life as 
 being made of gold and silver." 
 
 Among English writers of historical ballads 
 Macaulay stands easily first, although Lock- 
 hart's Spanish ballads make a very fine second. 
 The very first requisite in a ballad, whether 
 historic or romantic, is simplicity of rhyme 
 
 189
 
 igo POETRY 
 
 arrangement as in the old form of " Chevy 
 Chase." 
 
 " The Persy leaned on his brand 
 And saw the Douglas dee ; 
 He took the dead man by the hand, 
 And said wae me for thee." 
 
 Extreme simplicity of metre being the first 
 requisite in a ballad, it follows that Tennyson's 
 " The Revenge " and " The Defence of Luck- 
 now " are, with all their excellence, failures. 
 
 In the historical ballad the first requisite is 
 " business." Whatever in the smallest degree 
 interferes with this, whether it is the importa- 
 tion of unbusinesslike matter, or the use of 
 unbusinesslike metre, is injurious. Unexpected 
 metrical effects fundamental irregularites of 
 pause and stanzaic arrangement are dan- 
 gerous. 
 
 If, for instance, we are waiting for the ex- 
 pected striking down of the hero, we demand 
 that the rhymes and their arrangement shall 
 be aids in our rush towards the catastrophe ; 
 and if we are suddenly brought to a halt by 
 finding no answering rhyme where we expected 
 one, and have to ask ourselves when this 
 expected rhyme is to come, our imaginative 
 pleasure is baffled and thwarted to a certain
 
 THE BALLAD 191 
 
 extent. The otherwise fine ballad, ' The Re- 
 venge/ is very seriously injured by forgetful- 
 ness of this most obvious law. Long lines and 
 short lines, long stanzas and short stanzas, are 
 mixed up without the slightest principle at 
 moments when the reader's imagination has no 
 time to wait ; and, moreover, some of the lines 
 are so harsh as to be with difficulty scanned. 
 It is a pity, for the ballad has every requisite 
 but this one. Yet it is doubtful whether Tenny- 
 son's genius energetic always, but never brisk 
 is suited to the historical ballad. There are 
 symptoms of a spurring of Pegasus in the lines 
 of " The Defence of Lucknow "a rather 
 exclamatory style, which an ungallant criticism 
 would call feminine, and which makes us think 
 that, varied as were his gifts, this kind of work 
 is hardly in harmony with them. 
 
 As to the Romantic Border ballads, if they 
 are to be taken as a true reflex of the character- 
 istics of the people for whom they were sung, 
 it was in the north of England that wild passions 
 akin to those which we associate with Southern 
 Europe were in former times seen ; in virtue 
 as in crime the likeness between the two was 
 very striking. 
 
 Two of the foremost poets who flourished late
 
 192 POETRY 
 
 in the Victorian period William Morris and 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti men known to be 
 richly endowed with humour themselves, had a 
 theory that in high romantic poetry humour 
 had no place, and this in spite of the glaring 
 fact that the greatest poet in all literature, 
 Shakespeare, was also among the greatest 
 humorists of the world, and was constantly 
 introducing humour into poetry. This makes 
 it necessary before treating of the variety of 
 humorous poetry such as parody, mock heroic, 
 comic opera, vers de societi, etc., to inquire 
 whether humour has any place in high poetry 
 and, if so, what kind of humour. 
 
 In the " Paradise of Fruits," the judge who 
 decided upon the stolen flavours of the pine- 
 apple, was ' the taster without a palate." And, 
 in the same way, we may be sure that, among 
 the sixty members of that famous " Court of 
 Humour " held at Heracleum, the man whose 
 function it was to record the jokes for King 
 Philip was the dullest out of sixty dullards. 
 
 For, although the desire to be witty and 
 humorous is universal, it seems to be stronger 
 in dull people than in others. The fact is 
 curious, and deserves the attention of the philo- 
 sophical inquirer. In a classification of dullards,
 
 THE BALLAD 193 
 
 for instance, the highest place must be given to 
 the middle-class Briton, yet there are more 
 jokes cracked over a single Bayswater dinner 
 than were ever cracked over an Attic wine 
 party more " funny " things said in the Stock 
 Exchange in a single day than were said in a 
 week at the Mermaid, or in Jerrold's gatherings 
 by Covent Garden. Yet this, which to the 
 superficial inquirer seems anomalous, is, as we 
 shall show, perfectly natural. There are, in- 
 deed, no anomalies in Nature ; we have only 
 to go deep enough to find everything in harmony. 
 
 The true inference to be drawn from the facts 
 is, not that the dull people have really a stronger 
 yearning to be facetious than the bright ones, but 
 that they seem to do so by their superior strength 
 of numbers, and that, as the one touch of nature 
 that makes the whole world kin is the desire 
 to be humorous, humour has been supposed to 
 be the " principium hylarchicum" of the Cosmos. 
 
 Humour is as difficult as poetry itself to be 
 defined. Critics use the loosest language con- 
 cerning it : they almost always confuse wit and 
 humour, and speak of humour as though it were 
 only another name for wit. Not only are the 
 two temperamental qualities not the same, but 
 they are the opposites of each other, although
 
 194 POETRY 
 
 they are sometimes combined in the same 
 writer. 
 
 As we have already hinted, the greatest master 
 of poetic humour that has appeared in English 
 literature since Burns is Hood, as seen in "Miss 
 Killmensegg." Burns, however, stands ahead 
 of all English poets as regards humour, and he 
 often reaches a high mark as an absolute 
 humorist. 
 
 Dickens does not come within the scope of an 
 article upon poetry. In treating of the comic 
 opera of W. S. Gilbert, we have to draw a 
 distinction between comedy and farce. The 
 very laws of their existence are in conflict with 
 each other in conflict so much that where one 
 lives the other must die. 
 
 Of Comedy, in short, the breath of life is 
 illusion ; of Farce, the breath of life is mock- 
 illusion. Comedy, whether "broad" or "gen- 
 teel," is a make-believe. She pretends that her 
 mummery is real. Farce, whether " broad " or 
 " genteel," is the very soul of frankness. By 
 a thousand tricks, which she keeps up 
 between herself and her audience, she says, 
 " My acting is all sham, and you know it." 
 Yet we find all the critics even Charles Lamb 
 himself talking of Farce as if she were merely
 
 THE BALLAD 195 
 
 Comedy with a broadened grin Thalia with 
 her girdle loose and run wild. 
 
 Between the two the difference is not one 
 of degree at all it is one of kind. The fun of 
 Comedy may be just as broad as that of Farce, 
 as in the Dogberry scenes in " Much ado about 
 nothing " ; and Farce can be just as genteel 
 as Comedy herself, even when putting on her 
 genteelest airs in Tottenham Street or Sloane 
 Square. 
 
 But here is the fundamental difference be- 
 tween the two: probability of incident, logical 
 sequence of cause and effect, are as necessary 
 to the very existence of Comedy as they are 
 to Tragedy herself, while Farce would stifle 
 in such air. Rather, she would be poisoned 
 by it just as Comedy would be poisoned by what 
 Farce flourishes on that is to say, in conse- 
 quence of reasoning topsy-turvy logic. Born 
 in the fairy country of Topsy-turvy, her logic 
 would be illogical if it were not upside down. 
 
 So with coincidence with improbable accum- 
 ulation of convenient events. Farce can no 
 more exist without these than Comedy can 
 exist with them. 
 
 W. S. Gilbert's comic operas are all farces 
 farces of the most brilliant kind. The Mikado,
 
 196 POETRY 
 
 although it owes much to the superlative music 
 of Sullivan, is, of course, the broadest farce 
 from beginning to end. And the accomplished 
 actors who represented it spared no pains to 
 show the farcical atmosphere. 
 
 It is superfluous to give examples of works 
 that everybody knows. But take the song of 
 " the First Lord of the Admiralty." This is 
 the very perfection of farce. It tells how an 
 office boy, whose function was to polish the 
 handle of the front door, becomes by his assi- 
 duity in polishing the First Lord of the Ad- 
 miralty and " the ruler of the Queen's Navee." 
 
 We have now to turn to those artificial forms 
 of verse which for a short time had a vogue in 
 England. Of these the rondeau is perhaps the 
 most notable. 
 
 The rondeau is a short metrical structure 
 which in its perfect form is divided into three 
 strophes of unequal length, knit together by 
 rapidly recurrent rhymes and a refrain. 
 
 The laws of the rondeau have varied at dif- 
 ferent periods, and even with different poets of 
 the same period varied so fundamentally that 
 some important critics have found a generic 
 difference between the " rondeau " and the 
 "rondel" or " rondet."
 
 THE BALLAD 197 
 
 Rondeau, however, is possibly nothing more 
 than the modern spelling of the word rondel, 
 as marteau is the modern spelling of martel, 
 chateau of chdtel, etc. When the rondeau was 
 called the rondel it was mostly written in four- 
 teen octosyllabic lines of two rhymes as in the 
 rondels of Charles d'Orleans. 
 
 In this variability of structure it contrasts 
 with the stability of the Sonnet. The structure 
 under consideration, whether called rondeau 
 or rondel or rondet, may, it seems, consist of any 
 number of lines from eight to thirteen. 
 
 But when we find that the kind of triolet 
 used by Froissart is a " rondel " we are com- 
 pelled to admit that the names given to this 
 form are very elastic. 
 
 In Clement Marot's time, however, the laws of 
 the rondeau became more settled, and, accord- 
 ing to Voiture, in the iyth century the approved 
 form of the rondeau was a structure of thirteen 
 lines and a refrain. 
 
 Ma foy, c'est fait de moy, car Isabeau 
 M'a conjurd de luy faire un Rondeau : 
 
 Cela me met en une peine extreme. 
 
 Quoy treize vers, huit en eau, cinq en tone, 
 Je luy ferois aussi-tot un bateau 1
 
 198 POETRY 
 
 En voil cinq pourtant en un monceau : 
 Faisons en huiet, en invoquant Brodeau, 
 En puis mettons, par quelque stratageme, 
 Ma foy, c'est fait ! 
 
 Si je pouvois encore de mon cerveau 
 Tirer cinq vers, 1'ouvrage seroit beau ; 
 Mais cependant, je suis dedans 1'onzieme, 
 Et si je croy que je fais le douzieme 
 En voila treize ajustez au niveau. 
 Ma foy, c'est fait! 
 
 All forms of the rondeau, or rondel, however, 
 are alike in this that the distinguishing metrical 
 emphasis is achieved by a peculiar use of the 
 refrain. Though we have the English rondels 
 of Occleve and a set of rondeaus in the Rolliad 
 (written by Dr. Lawrence, the friend of Burke, 
 according to Mr. Edmund Gosse, who has given 
 us an admirable essay upon exotic forms of verse), 
 even in such comparatively inartistic forms of 
 verse as those introduced by Herrick and 
 Cowley, and other poets and light versifiers of 
 the seventeenth century, the Poetry of In- 
 genuity, in the shape of pure dilettantism, has 
 never really flourished in this country never 
 flourished, for example, as it has flourished on 
 the Continent, where, to write a poem in the 
 shape of a wine-glass or a decanter was con- 
 sidered an effort of high poetic genius; never
 
 THE BALLAD 199 
 
 flourished as it has done in Asia, where vers 
 de societe (whether Arabic or Persian, Turkish 
 or Hindoostani) must, to be vers de societe at all, 
 have a repetition of the same rhyme in every 
 alternate line. 
 
 Nay, if we had room here to prove our case, 
 we would have almost ventured upon the asser- 
 tion that the temper of the English Muse is not 
 really favourable to Poetry of Ingenuity in any 
 form, unless it coruscates with fancy or is 
 steeped in the many coloured dyes of life 
 not even to such simple mechanism as that of the 
 imported double-rhymed ottava rima of the 
 modern mock-heroic (which, if we are to judge 
 from the fate of " Whistlecraft," the once- 
 famous " Godiva " of Moustrie, " Maimoune," 
 " Sir Launfal," etc., cannot live unless in- 
 formed by the robust humour of Byron ; not 
 even to such brilliant, though still simple, 
 metrical rope-dancing as that of " Miss Kill- 
 mansegg," which could not have lived, we 
 think, without the brilliant wit, and often 
 profound humour, of Hood. While in France 
 metrical skill may be (and, far too often, is) 
 the end itself of versification, it is never in 
 this country more (properly) than a means to 
 an end.
 
 200 POETRY 
 
 It was not till our own day that this form, 
 together with many other forms of artificial 
 verse, had a sudden ephemeral vogue in Eng- 
 land. Some of the English rondeaus written 
 during that brief period are as bright and 
 graceful as Voiture's own. 
 
 As to rondeaus on the pure French model of a 
 rhymeless refrain, we believe them to be, even 
 in French poetry, always disappointing and bad, 
 and in English poetry intolerable. We can 
 easily understand why so fine a metricist as 
 Swinburne refused in his Century of Rondels to 
 write rondeaus with a rhymeless refrain. Swin- 
 burne, who in his Century of Rondels was the 
 first to make the refrain rhyme with the second 
 line of the first strophe, seemed as though he 
 would bring the form into high poetry. 
 
 Although the origin of the refrain in all 
 poetry was no doubt the impro visa tore's need 
 of a rest, a time in which to focus his forces 
 and recover breath for future flights, the re- 
 frain in all forms where it is used has a distinct 
 metrical value of its own, it knits the structure 
 together, and so intensifies the emotional energy, 
 as we see in the Border ballads, in the " Oriana " 
 of Lord Tennyson, and especially in the " Sister 
 Helen " of Rossetti.
 
 THE BALLAD 201 
 
 The suggestion of extreme artificiality of 
 " difficulty overcome " which is one great 
 fault of the rondeau as a vehicle for deep emotion, 
 does not therefore spring from the use of the 
 refrain, but from the too frequent recurrence 
 of the rhymes in the strophes for which there 
 is no metrical necessity as in the case of the 
 Petrarchan sonnet. " Difficulty Overcome," 
 though a legitimate source of pleasure in French 
 poetry even of the most serious kind, finds no 
 place in the serious poetry of England. 
 
 We have alluded above to the extraordinary 
 passion that sprang up in England during the 
 eighties of last century, vigorously flourished, 
 and then rapidly subsided, for all forms of 
 artificial verse, of which the rondeau was the 
 most important. It came of course from 
 France. The country seemed ringing with 
 rondeaus, ballads, villanelles, triolettes, pan- 
 toums and other forms with equally fantastic 
 names, with elaborate repetitions of rhyme. 
 
 That it is possible to have too little of such 
 a good thing as rhyme Walt Whitman's poetic 
 achievements have shown ; but it is quite clear 
 that in this, as in all other matters, " too much 
 of a good thing " is a sorer sorrow than too 
 little.
 
 202 POETRY 
 
 Hence the student after studying these forms 
 turned to the Leaves of Grass, and in those 
 marvellous pages found, if not so much joy as 
 the Whitmanians can find therein, still a com- 
 fort and a solace such as only he can know 
 who has narrowly escaped being rhymed to 
 death. Not that we have a word to say against 
 artificial forms of verse. 
 
 In the art of poetry there are and always have 
 been delights of two opposite kinds : the delight 
 of the poetic art which conceals art, and the 
 delight of the poetic art which makes art 
 manifest. There is the delight afforded by him 
 who hides his art in the Iliad, and there is the 
 delight afforded by the chorus of singers in what 
 are called " fixed forms " ; who did not (and 
 for the world would not) have their art con- 
 cealed. 
 
 But here is the difference between him of 
 the Iliad and the writer of the ballades, pan- 
 toums, vilanelles, etc., that while it is impossible 
 to have too much of the former, it is painfully 
 possible to have a deal too much of the latter. 
 The feasible rhymes in English are not so 
 numerous but that every reader of verse soon 
 has them at his fingers' ends. For a time it is 
 pleasant to see with what tact and ingenuity
 
 THE BALLAD 203 
 
 the ballade-writer will fill in his bouts rims. 
 But this pleasure does not last long. After 
 reading a few score of ballades the curiosity in 
 the writer's manipulations of his rhymes flags. 
 After reading a few hundreds of ballades what 
 was before simply wearisome becomes intoler- 
 able, till at last the very sight of a ballade on 
 the page of a magazine was at the time when 
 these poems were fashionable, calculated to give 
 the reader a painful shudder. 
 
 The trick which at first seemed interesting 
 gradually appears jejune and worse than worth- 
 less ; and the criticism that applies to the ballade 
 applies to the rondeau, the sestina, the triolet, 
 and those other fixed forms for the inspiration of 
 which the English poet is apparently indebted to 
 Walker's rhyming dictionary. 
 
 This criticism, however, does not apply, we 
 think, to the sonnet, even in its most rigid 
 Petrarchan form, for reasons which we have 
 discussed elsewhere. 
 
 Between the ballades of Lang (charming as 
 they are) and the ballades of Henley and Mr. 
 Austin Dobson (charming as they are) the dif- 
 ference is that of substance ; it is never, and 
 can never be, a difference of spontaneous 
 rhythmic movement, as in the sonnet. Nor is
 
 204 POETRY 
 
 this the only reason why it is so easy to have too 
 many of these artificial forms. There is an- 
 other reason quite as strong : in art tours de 
 force, whether the artist's vehicle be marble or 
 colours, or words, have just as much value and 
 just as little as have prodigies in Nature. 
 
 Art, undoubtedly, has her sportive side a 
 fact which seems to be forgotten by those who 
 rail against the muse of " debonair verse " 
 that jaunty muse who, leaving heroism and 
 imagination to her sisters Calliope and the rest, 
 says to them : " Do ye think that because ye are 
 virtuous there shall be no more cakes and 
 ale ? " It will not be forgotten that no artistic 
 effort can be challenged if it reach its own 
 proper goal. If " debonair verse " did really 
 represent England's contempory poetry, it would 
 be right to say that such a fact was not exhila- 
 rating it would be right to say that " Eng- 
 land's heroism and imagination are not to be 
 judged by her verse at that moment." 
 
 The craze reached such a pass that it aroused 
 the wrath of the American poet-critic Stedman, 
 who, in the revised edition of The Victorian 
 Poets, gave strong utterance to his wrath and 
 indignation at this degradation of the noblest 
 imaginative literature of any race or tongue.
 
 THE BALLAD 205 
 
 This was to take the matter much too seriously. 
 The seeds of dissolution were apparent in the 
 thing from the first. And now it is interesting 
 to compare these artificial forms with the forms 
 of the new school of 2oth century poets, with 
 Mr. John Masefield at their head. 
 
 In answer to these strictures we have but to 
 reply, he who expected to find heroism and 
 imagination in such twiddlings of the lyre as 
 ballades, kyrielles, pantoums, sestinas, vil- 
 lanelles, would be a very sanguine critic. Lang's 
 piece is charming, but it would be so no longer 
 if it pretended to be anything more than a 
 " ballade in blue china." It is not given to man 
 to be heroic while dancing in spangles. 
 
 Reginald Scot says in his Discoverie of Witch- 
 craft : " Irishmen. . . will not sticke to affirme 
 that they can rime either man or beaste to 
 deathe." Without preferring any opinion as 
 to the lethal wizardry of Irishmen, we, for our 
 part, will not "sticke to ainrme" that English- 
 men (aided and abetted by Scotchmen and 
 Americans) can rhyme a student of poetry to 
 death. If on Parnassus there is a place at all 
 for the muse of " debonair verse " it is far down 
 on the lowest slopes. 
 
 Stedman speaks forcibly, and yet with a
 
 206 POETRY 
 
 fine judicial temper, about the recent degrada- 
 tion of " the noblest imaginative literature 
 of any race or tongue " by poets who, having 
 nothing to say, say it admirably in bouts rim&s. 
 
 Our great English masters have never known 
 anything of the poetry of ingenuity. Sidney 
 and Drummond and others did no doubt try 
 their hands at the sestina and the like, but then 
 even Sidney's place as a poet is a long way from 
 the first. 
 
 The metres in which not only Shakespeare, 
 Marlowe, and Milton, but also Coleridge, Keats, 
 and Shelley sang, were simplicity itself com- 
 pared with these elaborate forms these forms 
 in which, according to Stedman's notion, the 
 " heroism and imagination " of English poetry 
 have now become stifled. The most elaborate 
 metrical structure ever attempted by England's 
 greatest rhythmist, Coleridge, was perhaps the 
 " Ode to France." 
 
 But Stedman seems to forget that, on the 
 other hand, where the motive power of a poem is 
 neither passion, imagination, nor meditation, 
 but fancy or some other kind of sport, the self- 
 conscious art of the poet may, and perhaps should, 
 be brought so prominently forward as to pro- 
 claim itself for artifice, and Stedman ought to
 
 THE BALLAD 207 
 
 have remembered Schiller's profound remark 
 that " art is sport." 
 
 And now as to vers de Societe. 
 
 If the poet depicts contemporary society, 
 ideality is more essential in this form than in 
 any other department of poetic art. This is 
 what we mean : so perennially fresh is Nature 
 so infinite in the variety of her beauty that she 
 may be rendered with the photographic accur- 
 acy of Tennyson and the sympathy of Words- 
 worth and beauty will be the result. 
 
 And as to the great elemental characteristics 
 of human nature so eternally interesting are 
 they so rich in colour are the universal passions 
 of man that these, too, may be painted with 
 close realism and, again, beauty may be the 
 result. 
 
 But, with convention, it is not so. Yet 
 through every poem, no matter what the sub- 
 ject be it joyful or sad, heroic or terrible 
 the breath of beauty must be felt blowing like 
 a breeze from Heaven : and vers de societe are 
 no exception. 
 
 But no poet could ever make modern society 
 beautiful ; the painting, even in prose, of London 
 " society " realistically would result in some- 
 thing quite unreadable.
 
 208 POETRY 
 
 This is why most writers of vers de societe 
 adopt the cynicism, which, through the mere 
 expression of Thackeray's individual tempera- 
 ment, Robertson and the kettledrum dramatists 
 mistook, it seems, for the temperament of a 
 class. 
 
 It follows, therefore, that the writer of vers 
 de societe must imagine a form of society of his 
 own, or go to societies of the past for his pictures. 
 
 The best vers de societe are rarely the produc- 
 tion of those who have seen most the Bucking- 
 hams, the Rochesters, the Dorsets but of those 
 who have the advantage of that "distance" 
 which (in the case of courts especially) " lends 
 enchantment to the view." 
 
 For we do not consider such moralisings as 
 the " Conseils a une Parisienne," and " A la 
 mi-Car erne " of that darling of the court, 
 Alfred de Musset, vers de societe in the proper 
 sense of that word, but satires rather satires 
 in the mood of Byron's " Waltz " ; while the 
 notion that Praed was really a man of society 
 in the general acceptation of the word is a 
 popular error. Something of it he knew, but 
 not so much as he could have seen, from his 
 social position. 
 
 Alfred de Musset, too, in some parts of his
 
 THE BALLAD 209 
 
 " Sur trois Marches de Marbre Rose " has left his 
 impress. By Theodore de Banville, however, 
 the great modern master of dilettantism, he 
 seems to have been influenced not so much as 
 by those earlier poets who have influenced 
 Theodore de Banville. 
 
 Theodore de Banville has lately been playing 
 with (in his " Odes Funambulesque " and " Oc- 
 tidentales "), the triolet, the villanelle, and the 
 Malayan pantoum. The temper of the English 
 Muse is against dilettantism ; so, perhaps, is 
 the genius of the English language. One thing 
 is essential in vers de societe perfection of form. 
 And this is seen, we think, in our vers de societe, 
 which, like all the other varieties of the Poetry 
 of Ingenuity, has, in England, as we have said 
 above, to rely for its vitality upon other quali- 
 ties than those of delicate workmanship. Prior, 
 until the coming of Mr. Austin Dobson, was 
 our greatest name. But the vitality still left 
 in Prior is owing not to his workmanship, but 
 to his exceedingly fine humour. The same 
 may be said with regard to Praed, who coupled 
 a power of epigram sometimes true, if some- 
 times false with an endowment of humour 
 which, though far below Prior's, was still 
 respectable,
 
 2io POETRY 
 
 And it is just the same with all varieties 
 of the Poetry of Ingenuity mock-heroic, comic 
 story, court poetry, parody, or what not; the 
 flavour must be as bracing, stinging, and full- 
 bodied as that of British ale. 
 
 And if we were asked for a reason for this, 
 we should be sufficiently insular, we think, to 
 say that England is peculiarly the land of 
 " the Poetry of Inspiration " a complete an- 
 swer, if true. For the Poetry of Inspiration 
 that melodious utterance which is born (or is 
 assumed to be born) of irresistible impulse- 
 is the exact antithesis of the Poetry of Ingenuity, 
 that melodious utterance whose quest is " pleas- 
 urable surprise " in some shape, such as that of 
 difficulty overcome, or the like. To be con- 
 scious and at the same time unconscious, in- 
 spired as Cassandra and yet " knowing " as 
 the Jackdaw of Rheims, is altogether beyond 
 the power of any muse whatsoever. In French 
 poetry there is always and properly a pleasur- 
 able sense of " difficulty overcome: " hence its 
 delight, among other things, in the barbarism 
 of rime riche. But neither in rondeaus nor 
 rondels, villanelles nor pantoums, wine-glass 
 stanzas nor decanter stanzas, can the English 
 Muse give utterance to that " divinity which
 
 THE BALLAD 211 
 
 seizes the soul and guides it at his will." And 
 it is, we think, because English poetry is specially 
 and peculiarly the utterance of that " divine 
 guide " that the taste for the Poetry of Ingenuity 
 is not strong in these islands, that the taste for 
 dilettantism in poetry scarcely exists here at 
 all. 
 
 Form is written neither in rhyme nor in 
 blank verse, nor in prose, but belongs entirely 
 to the poetry of arithmetic, and takes rank with 
 those verses written in the shape of lozenges 
 and bottles which were once in vogue on the 
 Continent. 
 
 An extreme instance of the danger of writing 
 serious poetry in elaborate verse is exemplified 
 by a modern poet in a poem called " The Dance 
 of Death." The writer of this poem narrowly 
 escaped writing the finest meditative poem of 
 our time one of the finest, indeed, in the 
 English language. He escapes doing so simply 
 because he is so much too clever a rhymer for a 
 mere poet, and must needs write it in a sestina 
 that is to say a sestina of sixty lines. 
 
 A sestina is a poem written neither in rhyme 
 nor blank verse, but in so-called six-line stanzas, 
 each of which has to take the last word of the 
 stanza preceding it, and twist it about into some
 
 212 POETRY 
 
 new and fantastic meaning, and then to go on 
 twisting every other line in the same way. 
 
 Thus if, as in a certain sestina, the first line 
 in the first stanza ends with " paradise," the 
 second line with " heart," the third line with 
 " tears," the fourth line with " fan," .the fifth 
 line with " rose," and the sixth line with " fate," 
 the line endings of all the other stanzas must 
 be "paradise," "heart," "tears," " fan," "rose," 
 " fate," only that each stanza has a line ar- 
 rangement of its own. 
 
 Of course it is not, save from the arithmetic- 
 ian's point of view, versification at all ; there- 
 fore, many judges consider it to be the supreme 
 work of poetic art in fixed forms, and laments 
 that the sestina has been " comparatively 
 an exotic in French poetry, as in English, 
 until recent years." French poetry we must 
 leave to the French critics, but that the sestina 
 may remain comparatively an exotic in English 
 poetry is what we earnestly hope. 
 
 Now in this form " The Dance of Death " is 
 written. And now for the substance of the 
 poem. 
 
 Underlying its deep pathos and solemnity 
 there is in " The Dance of Death " a sort of 
 Shakespearean humour which, as far as we
 
 THE BALLAD 213 
 
 know, has hardly been reached by any other 
 poem. Why, then, has it not taken its place 
 in the first rank of our meditative poetry ? 
 Simply because of the poet's appalling clever- 
 ness simply because his poem, being written 
 in one of the most absurdly artificial measures 
 ever invented even in that paradise of the 
 arithmetical bards, Provence, wants, or seems 
 to want (which artistically is the same thing), 
 that salt of sincerity which is the salt of poetic 
 life. 
 
 It is difficult to imagine how sophisticated 
 must have become the ear and the taste of a 
 poet who, setting out to discourse of death 
 in the profound mood of him whose moralizings 
 in Elsinore churchyard are for all times and 
 for all lands, could betake himself to his lyre, 
 arithmetical table in hand, and rack his fine 
 calculating powers to find what are the feasible 
 rhymes for a sixty-two-line poem in which all 
 the stanzas shall run on the same rhymes as 
 those of the first stanza ! 
 
 No doubt the ingenuity required to construct 
 such a metrical {ramework and to fill it with 
 real intellectual and poetical ore, is so high as to 
 be in itself a kind of genius. 
 
 But between artifice, however high, and art
 
 214 POETRY 
 
 there is a deep gulf fixed. To an unsophisti- 
 cated ear this reiteration of the rhyme sound, 
 which to the poets of ingenuity seems the " be- 
 all and end-all " of the rhymer's art, gives no 
 pleasure at all, but irritation irritation because 
 the fantastic wrestlings with the lyre proper 
 to the writer of sportive verse, amusing enough 
 in their proper domain, are felt to be here 
 grievously out of place. 
 
 Though Death may be approached humor- 
 ously, as in Shirley's magnificent song, he can- 
 not without offence be approached with the 
 mincing steps of the dancing-master. The 
 moment that, in the first stanza, the serious 
 attention of the reader has been arrested upon 
 the greatest of all subjects, Death's omnipotence, 
 he naturally expects, even underneath the 
 poet's humour, grave and solemn " thoughts to 
 their own music chanted." 
 
 Sincerity, in a word, is what he looks for now, 
 not all this ingenuity of the mere rhyming acro- 
 bat. To say that all the ingenious manipulations 
 of the fifty-one lines that follow the first stanza 
 are lost upon the reader is r^ot to say nearly 
 enough ; they are resented by the only readers 
 whom it was worth while to please resented 
 as an impertinence.
 
 VIII 
 
 ETHICAL POETRY 
 
 WE have now to turn to a very 
 important branch of the subject, 
 that is, ethical poetry. 
 Art has her two great fountains 
 of pleasure quite distinct from each other ; one the 
 pleasure of mere representation ; the other the 
 pleasure of symbol and ethical motif. If a poet will 
 give us a beautiful picture of any beautiful 
 fragment of the varied tapestry of life, he 
 delights us. And, from this point of view, 
 George Sand was right when she said that 
 " 1'Art n'est qu'une forme " ; and Goethe was 
 right when he said that art is representation. 
 If on the other hand, he incarnates beautifully 
 abstract ideas that are beautiful, he delights us. 
 And, from this point of view, Zoroaster was 
 right when he denned poetry to be " apparent 
 pictures of unapparent realities." But, always, 
 the one thing in art is that the artist should do 
 that which he pretends to do. If he pretends to 
 represent, he must sacrifice all or most things 
 to the representation. If he pretends to sym- 
 bolize, he must sacrifice all or most things to the 
 symbol. 
 
 Although there is noble ethical poetry in the 
 
 215
 
 216 POETRY 
 
 Western world its home is in the East, where the 
 doctrine of Karma prevails the greatest doc- 
 trine in all ethical systems. Karma is that 
 inherent force in every action which, by a law 
 of scientific necessity superior to all other 
 powers, brings about the good or evil conse- 
 quences latent in the action's very essence. 
 Eastern poetry is full of it to the very brim. 
 From what we have said before in discussing 
 the Epic and the Great Lyric, it may perhaps be 
 inferred that the greatest ethical poetry in the 
 world is Hebraic. This, however, would be a 
 mistake. The greatest ethical poetry, it would 
 seem, is either Sufistic or Buddhistic. 
 
 Buddhism has existed for something like 
 twenty-four centuries. In the area of its 
 prevalence stretching from Ceylon and Japan 
 to Siberia and Swedish Lapland it surpasses 
 all other creeds, as it surpasses them all in 
 the number of its followers, comprising as these 
 do more than a third of the entire human race. 
 Yet as regards the doctrine of self-abnegation 
 the fundamental difference between it and all 
 other systems save sufism has not been clearly 
 pointed out. And the fact is remarkable if we 
 remember the considerable amount of attention 
 that has been given in Europe to Buddhism 
 since the publication of Eugene Burnouf's 
 " Introduction to the History of Buddhism " in 
 1844. Up to that time, owing perhaps to its 
 having almost died out in India, the cradle 
 of its birth, the most ignorant notions were 
 prevalent concerning it, while Brahmanism was 
 a familiar subject even in popular literature.
 
 ETHICAL POETRY 217 
 
 It is true, no doubt, as the French Orientalists 
 have pointed out, that it is in the preaching of 
 benevolence that Buddhism is affined to Chris- 
 tianity. But note the difference between these 
 two benevolent systems : Christianity enjoins 
 benevolence because there is a Ruler who 
 (notwithstanding Evil aud its impeachment) is 
 a benevolent, and, at the same time, an omnis- 
 cient and omnipotent God. Buddhism, like 
 European Paganism, knows no such benevolent 
 God, but it enjoins benevolence none the less 
 enjoins it, indeed, because it knows no benevolent 
 God. The Buddhistic thinker exclaims, " There 
 is none in the skies to love and watch over you, 
 therefore love and watch over one another." 
 And the same may be said of the sufi poets. 
 It is more than a thousand years ago since a 
 certain saintly woman Rabi'a uttered this 
 sublime prayer : 
 
 " Oh God, if I worship Thee in fear of Hell, burn me in 
 Hell ; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude 
 me from Paradise ; but if I worship Thee for Thine own 
 sake, withhold not Thine everlasting beauty." 
 
 If we compare these two systems with European 
 Paganism the contrast is very striking. 
 
 " We are quite ready," says the human race, 
 under the teaching of Paganism under the 
 teaching of all systems except the Christian 
 sufistic and the Buddhistic " to be benevolent, 
 to practise all virtues, to be tender of life, to 
 be pitiful in suffering to be very good, in 
 short : " que messieurs les dieux commencent." 
 
 But sympathizing profoundly as Buddhism
 
 218 POETRY 
 
 would do with the Greek mind, if it believed 
 in a God at all, in that apprehension of the 
 cruel indifference of the gods which runs through 
 Greek literature, and which Tennyson has so 
 admirably rendered in the " Lotos-Eaters," the 
 temper with which Buddhism meets that in- 
 difference is the very opposite of the Greek 
 temper, as expressed not more clearly in the 
 Titanic impeachments of ^Eschylus than in the 
 lofty ethical moods of Epictetus, of Marcus 
 Aurelius, and of those other stoics who incul- 
 cate benevolence as a means of self-culture. 
 For the Buddhistic temper is precisely that 
 with which Christianity meets the paternal 
 guardianship of a benevolent God. 
 
 The Western mind seems quite unable to 
 understand the Oriental doctrine of Karma 
 described above. 
 
 The Hindoo doctrine that he who is kind to 
 the lower animals enjoys in the next world, as 
 Mann says " bliss without end," is one of the 
 most favourite subjects always with the Eastern 
 poets and moralists. The object with these has 
 been to enunciate an ethical truth, not to use 
 an ethical truth as an added ornament to a 
 brilliant piece of writing, as mostly in Western 
 poetry. The writer of that very remarkable 
 Pahlavi M.S. (published in 1872 in Bombay, and 
 London) Arda Viraf, gives us the vision of a 
 man whose body all but the right foot was 
 being gnawed in hell by a noxious creature 
 without a name. He was a sluggard who, when 
 living, would not work, but who had once, with 
 the right foot, kicked a bundle of grass before
 
 ETHICAL POETRY 219 
 
 the mouth of a hungry ox at plough. Here we 
 get a perfect ethical lesson taught by a perfect 
 symbol. 
 
 Take again Buddhagosha. When he would 
 teach the lesson of the universality of sorrow 
 and death he simply tells us the story of the 
 weeping girl Kisogatami, who, on being told 
 by the prophet she has applied to for help that 
 he could make a medicine to restore her child's 
 dead body to life if she could bring him a handful 
 of mustard-seed from a house where no beloved 
 one had died went from house to house 
 begging what no one could give her ; for, alas ! 
 11 few are the living, but the dead are many." 
 
 Here, be sure, the concrete form succeeded 
 the abstract idea, and was, indeed, born of it. 
 Not that there is any reason why a poem, or a 
 group of poems, should be the embodiment of 
 an ethical or philosophical idea. 
 
 The method of work of the Western poets 
 seems to be the opposite of that of the great 
 Eastern masters of Ethical poetry, whether 
 Buddhistic, or Mohammedan. It seems im- 
 possible to them not to imagine a striking 
 situation first, and, having rendered it, look 
 around for some philosophical doctrine of which 
 it may be used as a symbol ; whereas with those 
 whose temperaments impel them to look out 
 upon Nature not for the pictures as they do not 
 for sensational situations as they do but for 
 symbols, the ethical motif comes first, the 
 picture afterwards. And what is really in- 
 explicable, is that even when the Western poet 
 does start with the motif first which is very
 
 220 POETRY 
 
 rarely he seems at once to lose all his imagina- 
 tion he cannot give it imaginative form at all 
 but takes the poem right away from human 
 sympathy by bringing in the cold machinery of 
 fancy. 
 
 For instance, so great a Western poet as 
 Victor Hugo can find it in his heart to travesty 
 thus the beautiful Eastern symbols of Karma. 
 To be striking is Hugo's first function. He 
 describes in language which for vigour is quite 
 unmatched in French poetry, Sultan Mourad, a 
 monster compared with whom Genghis Khan 
 was tender a friend, who among other exploits, 
 strangled his eight brothers ; disembowelled a 
 dozen children to find a lost apple ; sawed his 
 uncle into sandwiches between two cedar planks, 
 burnt a hundred Christian convents ; built 
 twenty-thousand prisoners of war into a stone 
 wall, to avenge an uncivil message received 
 from his enemy ; and who, when he comes, 
 after death, to be tried at the bar of God, is 
 pardoned all his cruelties, and enjoys the 
 promised " bliss without end," because once 
 the whim had seized him to drive away the flies 
 that were teasing a dying pig. And there in 
 heaven is the grotesque picture of pig and 
 Dieu having a discussion on the subject, a 
 discussion which ends by the pig and the victims 
 being weighed in a balance, the pig outweighing 
 the human victims. 
 
 There are in the Western world a few poets 
 only and these include poets like Sophocles, 
 Shakespeare, Burns, Tennyson, Browning who 
 seem to feel the real pathos of human life as a
 
 ETHICAL POETRY 221 
 
 whole. Many can feel, and more can express 
 the fire of personal passion ; at least, they can 
 thrill us intensely with the cries of an individual 
 soul in its supreme ecstasy of joy or pain. 
 
 But only a few among Western poets realise 
 the unutterable pathos of the tangled web of 
 human life as a whole ; a few only see clearly 
 what a pathetic thing it is to live and die, 
 surrounded by myriads of others who live and 
 die " to be here " as Corporal Trim says, 
 " to-day and gone to-morrow " to come we 
 know not whence, fluttering for a day or two 
 " in the sunshine and the rain," to leave it and 
 go we know not whither ; to feel that our 
 affections, however deep, our loves, however 
 passionate, are twined around beings whose 
 passage is more evanescent than " the flight of 
 the swift bird across the sky " nay, more 
 fleeting (as the Talmud says) than " the shadow 
 along the grass of the bird as it flies " beings 
 dearer to us nevertheless than our hearts' blood ; 
 and dearer still for this, that when they leave 
 us we know we shall never see them any more 
 as they are now, and half dread that we may 
 never see them any more at all. 
 
 Along with lyric intensity at its greatest 
 this feeling is not found, and the reason is 
 obvious. 
 
 All Art is, if we search deep enough, an 
 expression of an egoism stronger and more vital 
 than common an egoism too strong to be 
 content to " die without sign " ; but lyric art is 
 egoism's very self. " I enjoy I suffer " ; this, 
 from Sappho downwards, has been the motif
 
 222 POETRY 
 
 of all the very finest lyric music. The lyrist, 
 it is true, " learns in suffering what he teaches 
 in song " ; but he has learned nothing but the 
 poignancy of his own joys and woes, " Son 
 ceur est un luth suspendu si tot qu'on le 
 touche il resonne." 
 
 Of the pathos of the human drama as a con- 
 ception the Western poet generally knows 
 nothing save of that one little part. 
 
 In order to feel that deep pathetic mean- 
 ing of human life that we have been speaking 
 of, a poet must have done something more than 
 feel his own joys and woes ; and he must have 
 done something more than sit in his chamber 
 weaving the high fancies of his soul, as the 
 pageantry of life goes by. He must be able 
 to say, as Voltaire said, with pardonable boast- 
 fulness " At least, I have lived." If he has 
 been " cradled into poetry by wrong " he must 
 have learned therefrom something more than 
 the trick of bemoaning it. He must not only 
 have " loved his beautiful lady " ; he must also, 
 like the Knight of Beauvais, have " loved much 
 to listen to the music of beauteous ladies." He 
 must not only have " greatly loved his friend, 
 he must also have had his sweet enemies and. 
 
 "Drunk delight of battle with his peers." 
 
 Above all, he must have had the rare faculty 
 of enjoying, through sympathy, the perennial 
 freshness of human youth. 
 
 Every-day life, which rhymsters call prosaic 
 and flee from, is not prosaic to him, but a
 
 ETHICAL POETRY 223 
 
 romance ; and his love of man becomes in- 
 tensified by the very thought of the evanescence 
 of man's life ; as the preciousness of a vase, 
 says Pliny, is intensified by the thought of its 
 fragility.
 
 IX 
 
 THE SONG AND THE ELEGY 
 
 A WORD or two must be said here about 
 the song and the elegy. To write 
 a good song requires that sim- 
 plicity of grammatical structure 
 which is foreign to many natures that mastery 
 over direct and simple speech which only true 
 passion and feeling can give, and which " coming 
 from the heart goes to the heart." Without 
 going so far as to say that no man is a poet 
 who cannot write a good song, it may certainly 
 be said that no man can write a good song who 
 is not a good poet. 
 
 The motif sentimental, patriotic, or pas- 
 sionate which starts any song should run 
 simply down to the last line. Otherwise, indeed, 
 the composition almost ceases to be a song in 
 the modern sense of the word, and becomes an 
 ode an ode not only as the word was under- 
 stood by the Greeks, but as it was understood 
 by Horace, and in still later times by Coleridge, 
 Shelley, and Keats. This oneness of motif, 
 which is the fundamental characteristic of the 
 
 224
 
 SONG AND THE ELEGY 225 
 
 song, goes far, perhaps, to explain the fact that 
 in most songs the really vital portion consists 
 of but one stanza often the first from which 
 the remainder of the lyric hangs as a mere 
 fringe. Among the exquisite song-writers of 
 the seventeenth century Shakespeare was one 
 of those who knew when to stop after the 
 motif had been fully expressed ; for it must be 
 remembered that the second stanza, which mars 
 the divine song in ' Measure for Measure/ 
 " Take, oh, take those lips away," is not Shakes- 
 peare's at all, but Fletcher's. After Shakes- 
 peare's time, however, some of the best English 
 songs written until Tennyson rose have been 
 the work of those who are called " minor poets " 
 that is to say, poets who have made no attempt 
 to " build the lofty rhyme," while often those 
 who have indulged in that risky kind of archi- 
 tecture have only partially succeeded in the 
 humbler efforts of the song-writer. When a 
 large body of the poetic stream is at the com- 
 mand of the writer, the very magnitude of the 
 forces at work perhaps makes it difficult for him 
 to restrain them for the single expression of a 
 single motif. But even unity of motif is not 
 enough to lend full vitality to a song. Extreme 
 brevity of structure is a primary requisite even 
 where the motif has not been departed from. 
 To all forms of literary art Voltaire's maxim 
 applies, that the most effective way to weary 
 the listener is to say all that can be said upon a 
 subject ; but this volubility is destructive of the 
 very existence of the song. 
 
 In a word, it is here that is seen more clearly
 
 226 POETRY 
 
 than in any other department of poetic art the 
 imperious truth of Hesiod's saying that the 
 half is better than the whole ; it is here that 
 literary self-indulgence always more or less 
 injurious to literary art is seen to be fatal. 
 This could easily be made manifest, if it were 
 worth while to instance any one of those fine 
 but half-forgotten lyrics of our time, which 
 nothing would have prevented from passing 
 into universal acceptance had not the poet's 
 embarrassment of wealth tempted him into 
 saying everything that could be said upon the 
 subject in hand. 
 
 If brevity is the soul of song-writing as of 
 wit, those " short odes " of the Japanese poets, 
 for a knowledge of which English readers are 
 indebted to Mr. Chamberlain, are " twice 
 blessed," blessing him that gives and him that 
 takes. Love as a sentiment rather than Love 
 as a passion inspires most successful song- 
 writers. 
 
 In modern times we have, of course, nothing 
 in any way representing those choral dance- 
 songs of the Greeks, which, originating in the 
 primitive Cretan war-dances, became in Pindar's 
 time, a splendid blending of song and ballet. 
 Nor have we anything exactly representing the 
 Greek scolia, those short drinking songs of 
 which Terpander is said to have been the 
 inventor. That these scolia were written, not 
 only by poets, like Aleaeus, Anacreon, Praxilla,
 
 SONG AND THE ELEGY 227 
 
 Simonides, but also by Sappho, and by Pindar 
 shows in what high esteem they were held by 
 the Greeks. These songs seem to have been as 
 brief as the stornelli of the Italian peasant. 
 They were accompanied by the lyre, which was 
 handed from singer to singer as the time for 
 each scolion came round. 
 
 With regard to the stornello, many critics 
 seem to confound it with the rispetto, a very 
 different kind of song. The Italian rispetto 
 consists of a stanza of inter-rhyming lines 
 ranging from six to ten in number, but often 
 not exceeding eight. The Tuscan and Umbrian 
 stornello is much shorter consisting, indeed, of a 
 hemistich, naming some natural object which 
 suggests the motive of the little poem. 
 
 The nearest approach to the Italian stornello 
 appears to be not the rispetto, but the Welsh 
 triban. 
 
 Perhaps the mere difficulty of rhyming in 
 English and the facility of rhyming in Italian 
 must be taken into account when we inquire 
 why there is nothing in Scotland of course 
 there could be nothing in England answering 
 to the nature-poetry of the Italian peasant. 
 Most of the Italian rispetti and stornelli seem 
 to be improvisations ; and to improvise in
 
 228 POETRY 
 
 English is as difficult as to improvise is easy in 
 Italian. Nothing, indeed, is more interesting 
 than the improvisatorial poetry of the Italian 
 peasants, such as the canzone. If the peasantry 
 discover who is the composer of a canzone, 
 they will not sing it. The speciality of Italian 
 peasant poetry is that the symbol which is 
 mostly erotic is of the purest and most tender 
 kind. A peasant girl will improvise a song as 
 impassioned as " Come into the Garden, Maud," 
 and as free from unwholesome taint. 
 
 With regard to English songs, the critic 
 cannot but ask Wherein lies the lost ring and 
 charm of the Elizabethan song-writers ? Since 
 the Jacobean period at least, few have succeeded 
 in the art of writing real songs as distinguished 
 from mere book-lyrics. Between songs to be 
 sung and songs to be read there is in our time a 
 difference as wide as that which exists between 
 plays for the closet and plays for the boards. 
 
 Heartiness and melody, the two requisites of 
 a song which can never be dispensed with can 
 rarely be compassed, it seems, by one and the 
 same individual. In both these qualities the 
 Elizabethan poets stand pre-eminent, though 
 even with them the melody is not so singable 
 as it might be made. Since their time hearti-
 
 SONG AND THE ELEGY 229 
 
 ness has, perhaps, been a Scottish, rather than 
 an English endowment of the song-writer. It 
 is difficult to imagine an Englishman writing a 
 song like " Tullochgorum " or a song like 
 " Maggie Lauder," where the heartiness and 
 impulse of the poet's mood conquer all im- 
 pediments of close vowels and rugged con- 
 sonantal combinations. Of Scottish song- 
 writers Burns is, of course, the head ; for the 
 songs of John Skinner, the heartiest song- 
 writer that has appeared in Great Britain (not 
 excluding Herrick), are too few in number to 
 entitle him to be placed beside a poet so prolific 
 in heartiness and melody as Burns. With 
 regard to Campbell's heartiness, this is quite a 
 different quality from the heartiness of Burns 
 and Skinner, and is in quality English rather 
 than Scottish, though, no doubt, it is of a fine 
 and rare strain, especially in " The Battle of the 
 Baltic." His songs illustrate an infirmity, which 
 even the Scottish song-writers share with the 
 English a defective sense of that true song- 
 warble, which we get in the stornelli and rispetti 
 of the Italian peasants. A poet may have 
 heartiness in plenty, but if he has that love of 
 consonantal effects which Donne displays, he 
 will never write a first-rate song. Here, indeed,
 
 230 POETRY 
 
 is the crowning difficulty of song-writing. An 
 extreme simplicity of structure and of diction 
 must be accompanied by an instinctive appre- 
 hension of the melodic capabilities of verbal 
 sounds, and of what Samuel Lover, the Irish 
 song- writer, called " singing " words, which is 
 rare in this country, and seems to belong to the 
 Celtic rather than to the Saxon ear. " The 
 song-writer," says Lover, " must frame his song 
 of open vowels with as few guttural or hissing 
 sounds as possible, and he must be content 
 sometimes to sacrifice grandeur and vigour to 
 the necessity of selecting singing words and not 
 reading words." And he exemplifies the dis- 
 tinction between singing words and reading 
 words by a line from one of Shelley's songs 
 
 " The fresh earth in new leaves drest." 
 
 " where nearly every word shuts up the mouth 
 instead of opening it." But closeness of vowel 
 sounds is by no means the only thing to be 
 avoided in song-writing. A phrase may be 
 absolutely unsingable though the vowels be open 
 enough, if it is loaded with consonants. The 
 truth is that in song-writing it is quite as 
 important, in a consonantal language like ours, 
 to attend to the consonants as to the vowels ;
 
 SONG AND THE ELEGY 231 
 
 and perhaps the first thing to avoid in writing 
 English songs is the frequent recurrence of the 
 sibilant. But this applies to all the brief and 
 quintessential forms of poetry, such as the 
 sonnet, the elegy, &c. 
 
 As to the elegy a form of poetic art which 
 has more relation to the objects of the external 
 world than the song, but less relation to these 
 than the stornello its scope seems to be wide 
 indeed, as practised by such various writers as 
 Tyrtaeus, Theognis, Catullus, Tibullus, and our 
 own Gray. It may almost be said that per- 
 fection of form is more necessary here and in the 
 sonnet than in the song, inasmuch as the artistic 
 pretensions are more pronounced. Hence even 
 such apparent minutiae as those we have hinted 
 at above must not be neglected here. 
 
 We have quoted Dionysius of Halicarnassus 
 in relation to the arrangement of words in 
 poetry. His remarks on sibilants are equally 
 deserving of attention. He goes so far as to say 
 that a- is entirely disagreeable, and when it often 
 recurs, insupportable. The hiss seems to him 
 to be more appropriate to the beast than to man. 
 Hence certain writers, he says, often avoid it, 
 and employ it with regret. Some, he tells us, 
 have composed entire odes without it. But if
 
 232 POETRY 
 
 sibilation is a defect in Greek odes, where the 
 softening effect of the vowel sounds is so potent, 
 it is much more so in English poetry, where the 
 consonants dominate, though it will be only 
 specially noticeable in the brief and quin- 
 tessential forms such as the song, the sonnet, 
 the elegy. Many poets only attend to their 
 sibilants when these clog the rhythm. To write 
 even the briefest song without a sibilant would 
 be a tour de force ; to write a good one would no 
 doubt be next to impossible. It is singular 
 that the only metricist who ever attempted it 
 was John Thelwall, the famous " Citizen John," 
 friend of Lamb and Coleridge, and editor of the 
 famous Champion newspaper, where many of 
 Lamb's epigrams appeared. Thelwall gave 
 much attention to metrical questions, and tried 
 his hand at various metres. Though " Citizen 
 John's " saphics might certainly have been 
 better, he had a very remarkable critical in- 
 sight into the rationale of metrical effects, and 
 his " Song without a sibilant " is extremely 
 neat and ingenious. Of course, however, it 
 would be mere pedantry to exaggerate this 
 objection to sibilants, even in these brief forms 
 of poetry.
 
 THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER 
 IN ENGLISH POETRY
 
 THE RENASCENCE OF WONDER IN 
 ENGLISH POETRY 
 
 PART I 
 
 IN the preceding treatise on poetry first 
 principles have been discussed with but 
 little reference to the historic method of 
 criticism. This essay, on the contrary, 
 will be entirely historical : it will consist of a 
 survey of the revival in England at the end of 
 the eighteenth century, and the beginning of the 
 nineteenth of the romantic temper that temper 
 without which English poetry can scarcely 
 perhaps hold a place at all when challenged in 
 a court of universal criticism. 
 
 Had this great change been a revolution in 
 artistic methods merely, it would still have been 
 the most important change in the history of 
 English literature. But it affected the very soul 
 of poetry. It had two sides ; one side concerned 
 that of poetic methods, and one that of poetic 
 energy. It was partly realistic as seen in 
 Wordsworth's portion of the Lyrical Ballads, 
 
 235
 
 236 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 and partly imaginative as seen in Coleridge's 
 portion of that incongruous but epoch-making 
 book. As the movement substituted for the 
 didactic materialism of the eighteenth century 
 a new temper or, rather, the revival of an old 
 temper which to all appearance was dead it 
 has been called the Romantic Revival. The 
 French Revolution is generally credited, by 
 French writers at least, with having been the 
 prime factor in this change. Now, beyond 
 doubt, the French Revolution, the mightiest 
 social convulsion recorded in the history of the 
 world, was accompanied in France by such 
 romantic poetry as that of Andre Chenier, and 
 was followed, many years afterwards, by the 
 work of writers like Dumas, Victor Hugo, and 
 others, until at last the bastard classicism of 
 the age of Louis XIV. was entirely overthrown. 
 In Germany, too, the French Revolution 
 stimulated the poetry of Goethe and Schiller, 
 and the prose of Novalis, Tieck, and F. Schlegel. 
 And in England it stimulated, though it did not 
 originate, the romanticism of Scott, Coleridge, 
 Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. But 
 in this, as in so many matters, while other 
 countries have had the credit of taking the lead 
 in the great human march, the English race has
 
 OF WONDER 237 
 
 really been in the van. Just as Cromwell and 
 Washington preceded, and were perhaps the 
 main cause of Mirabeau and Danton, so Chat- 
 terton, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, 
 Keats, and Byron preceded, and were the cause 
 of the romantic furore in France which, later on, 
 was decided by the great battle of Hernani. 
 As the storm-wind is the cause, and not the 
 effect of the mighty billows at sea, so the 
 movement in question was the cause, and not 
 the effect of the French Revolution. What was 
 this movement ? It was nothing less than a 
 great revived stirring of the slumbering move- 
 ment of the soul of man, after a long period of 
 prosaic acceptance in all things, including 
 literature and art. 
 
 To this revival the present writer, in the in- 
 troduction to an imaginative work dealing with 
 this movement, has already for convenience' 
 sake, and in default of a better one, given the 
 name of the Renascence of Wonder. As was 
 said on that occasion, ' The phrase, the Re- 
 nascence of Wonder, merely indicates that 
 there are two great impulses governing man, and 
 probably not man only, but the entire world of 
 conscious life ; the impulse of acceptance the 
 impulse to take unchallenged and for granted
 
 238 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 all the phenomena of the outer world as they 
 are and the impulse to confront these pheno- 
 mena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.' In 
 order, however, to explain the phrase fully it is 
 necessary to postpone the discussion of the 
 Lyrical Ballads until we have made a rapid 
 sweep over the antecedent methods and the 
 antecedent thought which prepared the way for 
 the book. 
 
 It would seem that something works as 
 inevitably and as logically as a physical law 
 in the yearning which societies in a certain 
 stage of development show to get away as 
 far away as possible from the condition of the 
 natural man ; to get away from that despised 
 condition not only in material affairs, such as 
 dress, domestic arrangements and economies, 
 but also in the fine arts and in intellectual 
 methods, till, having passed that inevitable 
 stage, each society is liable to suffer (even if 
 it does not in some cases actually suffer) re- 
 action, when nature and art are likely again 
 to take the place of convention and artifice. 
 
 Anthropologists have often asked, what was 
 that lever-power lying enfolded in the dark 
 womb of some remote semi-human brain which, 
 by first stirring, lifting, and vitalising other
 
 OF WONDER 239 
 
 potential and latent faculties, gave birth to man. 
 Would it be rash to assume that this lever-power 
 was a vigorous movement of the faculty of 
 wonder ? But certainly it is not rash to affirm 
 as regards the races of man, that the more in- 
 telligent the race the less it is governed by the 
 instinct of acceptance, and the more it is gov- 
 erned by the instinct of wonder that instinct 
 which leads to the movement of challenge. 
 The alternate action of the two great warring 
 instincts is specially seen in the Japanese. 
 Here the instinct of challenge which results in 
 progress became active up to a certain point and 
 then suddenly became arrested, leaving the 
 instinct of acceptance to have full play, and 
 then everything became crystallised. Ages upon 
 ages of an immense activity of the instinct of 
 challenge were required before the Mongolian 
 savage was developed into the Japanese of the 
 period before the nature-worship of " Shinto " 
 had been assaulted by dogmatic Buddhism. 
 But by that time the instinct of challenge had 
 resulted in such a high state of civilisation that 
 acceptance set in, and there was an end, for 
 the time being, of progress. 
 
 There is no room here to say even a few words 
 upon other great revivals in past times, such,
 
 240 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 for instance, as the Jewish- Arabian renascence 
 of the ninth and tenth centuries, when the 
 interest in philosophical speculation which had 
 previously been arrested, was revived ; when 
 the old sciences were revived ; and when some 
 modern sciences were born. 
 
 There are, of course, different kinds of wonder. 
 Primitive poetry is full of wonder the naive 
 and eager wonder of the healthy child. It is 
 this kind of wonder which makes the Iliad and 
 the Odyssey so delightful. The wonder of 
 primitive poetry passes as the primitive con- 
 ditions of civilisation pass. And then for the 
 most part it can only be succeeded by a very 
 different kind of wonder the wonder aroused 
 by a recognition of the mystery of man's life 
 and the mystery of nature's theatre on which 
 the human drama is played the wonder, in 
 short, of ^Eschylus and Sophocles. And among 
 the Romans, Virgil, though living under the 
 same kind of Augustan acceptance in which 
 Horace, the typical poet of acceptance, lived, 
 is full of this latter kind of wonder. 
 
 Among the English poets who preceded the 
 great Elizabethan epoch there is no need to 
 dwell upon any poet besides Chaucer. He 
 stands at the head of those who are organised
 
 OF WONDER 241 
 
 to see more clearly than we can ourselves see 
 the wonder of the " world at hand." Of the 
 poets whose wonder is of the simply terrene 
 kind, those whose eyes are occupied by the 
 beauty of the earth and the romance of human 
 life, he is the English king. But it is not the 
 wonder of Chaucer that is to be specially dis- 
 cussed in the following sentences. It is the 
 spiritual wonder which in our literature came 
 afterwards. It is that kind of wonder which 
 filled the souls of Spenser, of Marlowe, of Shakes- 
 peare, of Webster, of Ford, of Cyril Tourneur, 
 and of the old ballads ; it is that poetical atti- 
 tude which the human mind assumes when 
 confronting those unseen powers of the universe 
 who, if they did not weave the web in which 
 man finds himself entangled, dominate it. That 
 this high temper should have passed and given 
 place to a temper of prosaic acceptance is quite 
 inexplicable, save by the theory of the action 
 and reaction of the two great warring impulses 
 alluded to in the foregoing passage. Perhaps 
 the difference between the temper of the Eliza- 
 bethan period and the temper of the Chaucerian 
 on the one hand, and Augustanism on the other, 
 will be better understood by a brief reference 
 to the humour of the respective periods.
 
 242 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 There are, of course, in all literatures two 
 kinds of humour absolute humour and relative 
 humour. The difference between these is as 
 fundamental as that which as has been already 
 shown in the essay on " Poetry " exists bet- 
 ween absolute vision and relative vision. That 
 a recognition and an enjoyment of incongruity 
 is the basis of both absolute and relative humour 
 is no doubt true enough ; but while in the case 
 of relative humour that which amuses the 
 humorist is the incongruity of some departure 
 from the laws of convention, in the case of 
 absolute humour it is the incongruity of some 
 departure from the normal as fixed by Nature 
 herself. In other words, while relative humour 
 laughs at the breach of the conventional laws 
 of man and the symmetry of the social pyramid 
 of the country and the time which laws and 
 which symmetry it accepts as final absolute 
 humour sees the incongruity of these conven- 
 tional laws and this pyramid with the absolute 
 sanction of Nature's own harmony. It follows 
 that in trying to estimate the value of any age's 
 humour, the first thing to consider is how it 
 stands in regard to absolute humour and how it 
 stands in regard to relative humour. Was there 
 more absolute humour in the age of wonder 
 than in the age of acceptance ?
 
 OF WONDER 243 
 
 On the whole, the answer must be, we think, 
 in the affirmative. Chaucer's humour was more 
 closely related to absolute humour than any 
 kind of humour in English poetry which followed 
 it until we get to the greatest absolute humor- 
 ist in English poetry, Burns. 
 
 Perhaps the difference between the temper of 
 one period and another of English poetry could 
 be more thoroughly understood if we were to 
 make a brief reference to the humour of the 
 respective periods. For although humour can 
 be expressed as perfectly in prose as in poetry 
 more perfectly, perhaps it is an essentially 
 poetical quality, and may be conveniently con- 
 sidered in discussing Chaucer in relation to the 
 Renascence of Wonder. 
 
 The singular fact in connection with Chau- 
 cer's humour is its modernness. The prologue 
 to the Canterbury Tales might almost have 
 been written yesterday. It is in no way akin 
 to the humour of his contemporaries. 
 
 There are, we repeat, in all literatures two 
 kinds of humour absolute humour and relative 
 humour : the difference between these is as 
 fundamental as that which, (as has just 
 been shown), exists between absolute vision and 
 relative vision. That a recognition and an en- 
 joyment of incongruity is the basis of both 
 kinds of humour is no doubt true enough ; but 
 while in the case of relative humour that which 
 amuses the humorist is the incongruity of 
 some departure from the laws of convention,
 
 244 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 in the case of absolute humour it is the incon- 
 gruity of some departure from the normal as 
 fixed by Nature herself. In other words, while 
 relative humour laughs at the breach of the con- 
 ventional laws of man and the symmetry of 
 the social pyramid of the country and the time 
 which laws and which symmetry it accepts as 
 fina 1 absolute humour sees the incongruity 
 of this pyramid itself and of the conventional 
 laws which govern it with the deeper sanctions 
 of what is supposed to be Nature's own har- 
 mony. It follows that in trying to estimate 
 the quality of any age's humour, the first thing 
 to consider is how it stands in regard to abso- 
 lute humour, and how it stands in regard to 
 relative humour. It is a singular thing that in 
 Chaucer's humour we get but little of that 
 abandon of mirth which is the characteristic 
 of all the other humour of his own time, and in- 
 deed right down to the time of Rabelais. Pan- 
 tagruelism, it will be observed, becomes almost 
 cosmic at times, inasmuch as it seems to com- 
 pare the accustomed laws of the universe with 
 some ideal standard of its own, or with that 
 ideal or noumenal or spiritual world behind 
 the cosmic show that sees the incongruity of 
 the laws of nature themselves. 
 
 This kind of humour seems to be based on 
 metaphysics, while the humour of Chaucer is 
 so far akin to that of the relative humorist 
 that both are based on experience. The 
 humorist of this last mentioned kind is, like 
 Rabelais, perpetually overwhelmed with the 
 irony of the entire game of human life irrespec-
 
 OF WONDER 245 
 
 live of standards, social or even terrene. The 
 temper of this kind of humorist is to laugh the 
 laugh of Anacharsis, the Scythian philosopher, 
 who, when jesters were taken to him, could not 
 be made to smile, but who afterwards, when a 
 monkey was brought to him, broke out into a 
 fit of laughter and said " Now, this is laughable 
 by nature, the other by art." A child can 
 become a relative humorist, or, as we say, 
 caricaturist, by adding a line to the nose of 
 Wellington, or by reversing the nose of the 
 Venus de Medici. The absolute humorist has 
 been so long saying to himself, " What a whim- 
 sical idea is the human nose ! " that he smiles 
 the smile of Anarcharsis when he finds the child 
 laughing at the human nose turned upside 
 down. Chaucer had nothing of the humour of 
 the old Greek who, on seeing a donkey eat, died 
 of a sharp and sudden recognition of the humour 
 of the bodily functions. 
 
 The period of wonder in English poetry may 
 perhaps be said to have ended with Milton. 
 For Milton, although born only twenty-three 
 years before the first of the great poets of accept- 
 ance, Dryden, belongs properly to the period 
 of romantic poetry. He has no relation what- 
 ever to the poetry which followed Dryden, and 
 which Dryden received partly from France and 
 partly from certain contemporaries of the great 
 romantic dramatists themselves, headed by Ben 
 Jonson. From the moment when Augustanism,
 
 246 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 as it is called, really began in the latter de- 
 cades of the seventeenth century the periwig 
 poetry of Dryden and Pope crushed out all the 
 natural singing of the true poets. All the 
 periwig poets became too ' polite ' to be natural. 
 As acceptance is, of course, the parent of 
 Augustanism or gentility, the most genteel 
 character in the world is a Chinese mandarin, 
 to whom everything is vulgar that contradicts 
 the symmetry of the pyramid of Cathay. It 
 was, notwithstanding certain parts of Virgil's 
 work, the characteristic temper of Rome in the 
 time of Horace, as much as it was the temper 
 of England in the time of Pope, Congreve, and 
 Addison, and of France at that period when the 
 blight of gentility did as much as it could to 
 stifle the splendid genius of Corneille and of 
 Moliere. In Greek literature the genteel finds 
 no place, and it is quite proper that its birth 
 should have been among a people so com- 
 paratively vulgar as the Romans of the Empire. 
 A Greek Horace would have been as much an 
 impossibility as a Greek Racine or a Greek 
 Pope. When English writers in the eighteenth 
 century tried to touch that old chord of wonder 
 whose vibrations, as we have above suggested, 
 were the first movement in the development 
 of man, it was not in poetry but in prose.
 
 OF WONDER 247 
 
 Yet there was no more interesting period of 
 English history than that in which Milton and 
 Dryden lived the period when the social 
 pyramid of England was assaulted but not 
 overturned, nor even seriously damaged, by the 
 great Rebellion. This Augustan pyramid of ours 
 had all the symmetry which Blackstone so 
 much admired in the English constitution and 
 its laws ; and when, afterwards, the American 
 colonies came to revolt, and set up a pyramid 
 of their own, it was on the Blackstonian model. 
 At the base patient as the tortoise beneath the 
 elephant in the Indian cosmogony was the 
 people, born to be the base, and born for nothing 
 else. Resting on this foundation were the 
 middle classes in their various strata, each 
 stratum sharply marked off from the others. 
 Then above these was the strictly genteel class, 
 the patriciate, picturesque and elegant in dress 
 if in nothing else, whose privileges were theirs 
 as a matter of right. Above the patriciate was 
 the earthly source of gentility, the monarch, 
 who would, no doubt, have been the very apex 
 of the sacred structure save that a little a 
 very little above him sat God, the suzerain to 
 whom the prayers even of the monarch him- 
 self were addressed.
 
 248 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 The leaders of the Rebellion had certainly done 
 a daring thing, and an original thing, by striking 
 off the apex of this pyramid, and it might 
 reasonably have been expected that the building 
 itself would collapse and crumble away. But it 
 did nothing of the kind. It was simply a 
 pyramid with the apex cut off a structure to 
 serve afterwards as a model of the American 
 and French pyramids, both of which, though 
 aspiring to the original structures, are really 
 built on exactly the same scheme of hereditary 
 honour and dishonour as that upon which the 
 pyramids of Nineveh and Babylon were no 
 doubt built. Then came the Restoration : the 
 apex was restored : the structure was again 
 complete ; it was indeed, more solid than ever 
 stronger than ever. 
 
 Subject to the exception of certain great and 
 glorious prose writers of that period, the in- 
 congruity which struck the humorist as laugh- 
 able was incongruity not with the order of 
 nature and the elemental laws of man's mind, 
 but with the order of the Augustan pyramid. 
 It required the genius of a Swift in England, 
 as it required in France the genius of a Molie"re, 
 to produce anything like the absolute humour 
 which had died out with Rabelais. In Fielding,
 
 OF WONDER 349 
 
 to be sure (notably in Joseph Andrews], and once 
 in Addison in the fine description of the Tory 
 Squire in The Freeholder, we do seem to get it, 
 but in poetry never. 
 
 As to the old romantic temper which had 
 inspired Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's 
 Faustus, Shakespeare's Hamlet, that was dead 
 and gone seemed dead and gone for ever. 
 In order to realise how the instinct of wonder 
 had been wiped out of English poetry we have 
 only to turn to Dry den's modernisation of 
 Chaucer ; his translations from Virgil, Boc- 
 caccio, and others ; and to Pope's translations 
 of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Let us take first 
 the later and smaller of these two Augustan 
 poets. Instead of the unconscious and un- 
 literary method of rendering the high temper 
 of man in the heroic youth of the world man 
 confronting and daring the arrows of Fate and 
 Chance what do we get ? The artificial, high- 
 sounding lines of a writer of worldly verse whom 
 nature, no doubt, intended to be a poet, but 
 whom " Augustanism " impelled to cultivate 
 himself like a Dutch garden in order to become 
 ' polite ' all round. 
 
 That Dryden should fail as Pope failed in 
 catching the note of primitive wonder which
 
 250 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 characterises Homer was to be expected. But 
 it might at least have been supposed that he 
 would succeed better with Virgil ; for Virgil was 
 born only five years before the typical Augustan 
 poet of Rome, Horace. But then it chanced 
 that Virgil was something much more than an 
 Augustan poet. Nothing, indeed, is more re- 
 markable in connection with the chameleon-like 
 character of Virgil's genius than the fact that 
 in the laureate of Caesarism and the flatterer of 
 Augustus we should get not only the dawn of 
 modern love love as a pure sentiment but also 
 that other romantic note of wonder get, in a 
 word, those beginnings of mysticism and that 
 speculative temper which made him the domi- 
 nant figure of the Middle Ages. To all these 
 qualities to all that made Bacon call him the 
 ' chastest poet and royalist that to the memory 
 of man is known ' the coarse, vigorous, ma- 
 terialistic mind of Dryden was as insensitive 
 as was the society in which he moved. 
 
 And does he prosper any better with his own 
 countryman, Chaucer, whose splendid poem, 
 The Knight's Tale he essayed to modernise 
 with others ? Upon the Knight's Tale, based 
 upon Boccaccio's Teseide, Shakespeare and an- 
 other built one of the great dramas of the modern
 
 OF WONDER 251 
 
 world, and so far from depriving it of the charm 
 of wonder, added to it a deeper wonder still 
 the wonder of their own epoch. This superb 
 poem Dryden undertook to make Augustan. 
 Again, see how his coarse fingers degraded 
 Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida when he 
 took upon himself to make that strange work 
 " polite." No doubt the littleness of greatness 
 is the humorous motif of the play. No doubt 
 Shakespeare felt that there is no reason why 
 the heroic should not be treated for once from 
 the valet point of view. But how has Dryden 
 handled the theme ? By adding to the coarse- 
 ness of Thersites and Pandarus in the play 
 coarse enough already and by simply excising 
 all the poetry. 
 
 But if his treatment of Troilus and Cressida 
 is grotesque, what shall be said of his treatment 
 of the most romantic of all plays, The Tempest, 
 where, in order to improve the romantic in- 
 terest of the play, he and D'Avenant give us a 
 male Miranda who had never seen a woman, 
 and a female Caliban to match the male monster 
 of Shakespeare ? The same fate befel him 
 when he undertook to modernise Boccaccio. 
 The one quality which saves the cruel story 
 of Theodore and Honoria from disgusting the
 
 252 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 truly imaginative reader is the air of wild ro- 
 mance in which it is enveloped. Remove 
 that and it becomes a story of mutilation, blood, 
 and shambles. Dryden does take away that 
 atmosphere from the story and ruins it. Again, 
 take Boccaccio's beautiful story of Sigismonda 
 and Guiscardo. It seems impossible to coarsen 
 and brutalise this until we read Dry den's 
 modernisation. 
 
 Nothing shows more forcibly the distinctive 
 effect of the new temper of acceptance than the 
 ill-fortune that befel those priceless romantic 
 ballads which in their oral form had been so 
 full of the poetry of wonder in the days of the 
 poetical past. From various European coun- 
 tries from Germany, from Italy, from France, 
 from Spain, from Roumania a stream of legen 
 dary lore in ballad form had flowed into Great 
 Britain and spread all over the island, not in 
 Scotland and the Border country merely, but 
 in mid and southern England also, where it had 
 only an oral life. But when there came from 
 the Continent the prosaic wave of materialism 
 which killed poetry properly so called, inasmuch 
 as it stifled for a time the great instinct of won- 
 der, it killed, as far as mid and south England 
 are concerned, the romantic ballad also. For
 
 OF WONDER 253 
 
 during this arid period the ballad in the southern 
 counties passed into type. The " stall copy," 
 as was pointed out by that fine genius and var- 
 iously equipped critic, Andrew Lang, destroyed 
 the South English ballad. For the transcriber 
 of ballads for the stall was under the influence 
 of the anti-poetic literature of his time, and 
 the very beauties of the ballads as they came 
 from the reciter's mouth seemed to him bar- 
 barisms, and he substituted for them his notions 
 of " polite " poetic diction. 
 
 With regard to what we have called the 
 realistic side of the romantic movement as 
 distinguished from its purely poetical and super- 
 natural side, Nature was for the " Augustan " 
 temper much too ungenteel to be described 
 realistically. Yet we must not suppose that 
 in the eighteenth century Nature turned out 
 men without imaginations, without the natural 
 gift of emotional speech, and without the faculty 
 of gazing honestly in her face. She does not 
 work in that way. In the time of the mammoth 
 and the cave-bear she will give birth to a great 
 artist whose materials may be a flint and a tusk. 
 In the period before Greece was Greece, among 
 a handful of Achaians she will give birth to the 
 greatest poet, or, perhaps we should say the
 
 254 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 greatest group of poets the world has ever yet 
 seen. In the time of Elizabeth she will give 
 birth, among the illiterate yeomen of a diminu- 
 tive country town, to a dramatist with such 
 inconceivable insight and intellectual breadth 
 that his generalisations cover not only the in- 
 tellectual limbs of his own time but the intel- 
 lectual limbs of so complex an epoch as that of 
 the twentieth century. 
 
 Poetic art had come to consist in clever 
 manipulations of the stock conventional langu- 
 age common to all writers alike the language 
 of poetry had become so utterly artificial, so 
 entirely removed from the language in which the 
 soul of man would naturally express its emotions, 
 that poetry must die out altogether unless some 
 kind of reaction should set in. Roughly speak- 
 ing, from the appearance of the last of Milton's 
 poetry to the publication of Parnell's Night- 
 piece, the business of the poet was not to repre- 
 sent Nature, but to decorate her and then work 
 himself up into as much rapture as gentility 
 would allow over the decorations. Not that 
 Parnell got free from the Augustan vices, but 
 partially free he did get at last. Among much 
 that is tawdry and false in his earlier poems, the 
 following lines describing the osier-banded graves
 
 OF WONDER 255 
 
 might have been written at the same time 
 as Wordsworth's Excursion so far as truthful 
 representation of Nature is concerned. 
 
 The grounds which on the right aspire 
 In dimness from the view retire ; 
 The left presents a place of graves 
 Whose wall the silent water laves ; 
 That steeple guides thy doubtful sight 
 Among the livid gleams of night. 
 
 ****** 
 Those graves, with bending osier bound, 
 That nameless heave the crumbled ground, 
 Quick to the glancing thought disclose 
 Where toil and poverty repose. 
 
 Then came Thomson's Seasons and showed 
 that the worst was over. If we consider that 
 his Winter appeared as early as 1726, and Sum- 
 mer and Spring in 1727 and 1728, and if we 
 consider the intimate and first-hand knowledge 
 Thomson shows of Nature in so many of her 
 moods in the British Islands, it is not difficult 
 to find his place in English poetry. No doubt 
 his love of Nature was restricted to Nature in 
 her gentle and even her homely moods. He 
 could describe as " horrid " that same Penmaen- 
 mawr which to the lover of Wales is so fascina- 
 ting. Still from this time a new life was breathed 
 into English Poetry. But the new growth was 
 slow.
 
 256 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 Take the case of Gray, for instance. Not 
 even the Chinese mandarin above described was 
 more genteel than Gray. In him we get the 
 very quintessence of the " Augustan " temper. 
 Yet no one who reads his letters can doubt that 
 Nature had endowed him with a true eye for 
 local colour. And although Gray was not 
 strong enough to throw off the conventional 
 diction of his time, he was yet strong enough to 
 speak to us sometimes through the muffler 
 of that diction with a voice that thrills the ears 
 of even those who have listened to the song of 
 Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley. Gray's chief 
 poem, the famous elegy, furnishes a striking 
 proof of the poet's slavery to Augustanism. 
 While reading about " the solemn yew-tree's 
 shade," " the ivy-mantled tower," and the rest 
 of the conventional accessories of such a situa- 
 tion, the reader yearns for such concrete pictures 
 as we get in plenty not only in Wordsworth and 
 those who succeeded him, but even in Parnell 
 and Thomson. Noble as this poem is, it has a 
 fundamental fault a fault which is great 
 it lacks individual humanity. Who is the 
 " me " of the poem this " me " to whom, in 
 company with " Darkness " the homeward plod- 
 ding ploughman " leaves the world " ? The
 
 OF WONDER 257 
 
 thoughts are fine ; but is the thinker a moralising 
 ghost among the tombstones, or is he a flesh- 
 trammelled philosopher sitting upon the church- 
 yard wall ? The poem rolls on sonorously, 
 and the reader's imagination yearns for a stanza 
 full of picture and pathetic suggestion of in- 
 dividual life full of those bewitching qualities, 
 in short, which are the characteristics of all 
 English poetry save that of the era of acceptance 
 the era of gentility the Augustan era. 
 
 At last, however, the poet does strike out 
 a stanza of this kind, and immediately it sheds 
 a warmth and a glow upon all that has gone 
 before vitalises the whole, in short. Describ- 
 ing the tomb of the hitherto shadowy moraliser, 
 Gray says : 
 
 There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, 
 By hands unseen, are showers of violets found ; 
 
 The redbreast loves to build and warble there, 
 And little footsteps lightly print the ground. 
 
 Now at last we see that the moraliser is not a 
 spectre whose bones are marrowless and whose 
 blood is cold, but a man, the homely creature 
 that Homer and Shakespeare loved to paint ; 
 a man with friends to scatter violets over his 
 grave and little children to come and mourn by 
 it ; a man so tender, genial, and good that the 
 
 s
 
 258 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 very redbreasts loved him. And having written 
 this powerful stanza, full of the true romantic 
 temper, having printed it in two editions, Gray 
 cancelled it, and no doubt the age of acceptance 
 and gentility approved the omission. For what 
 are children and violets and robins warb- 
 ling round a grave compared with " the muse's 
 flame " and " the ecstasy " of the " living lyre," 
 and such elegant things ? 
 
 And again, who had a finer imagination than 
 Collins ? Who possessed more fully than he the 
 imaginative power of seeing a man asleep on a 
 loose hanging rock, and of actualising in a 
 dramatic way the peril of the situation ? But 
 there is something very ungenteel about a mere 
 man, as Augustanism had discovered. A man 
 is a very homely and common creature, and the 
 worker in ' polite letters ' must avoid the 
 homely and the common ; whereas a personifi- 
 cation of Danger is literary, Augustan, and 
 ' polite.' Hence, Collins, having first imagined 
 with excessive vividness a man hanging on a 
 loose rock asleep, set to work immediately to 
 turn the man into an abstraction : 
 
 Danger, whose limbs of giant mould 
 What mortal eye can fixed behold ? 
 Who stalks his round, a hideous form, 
 Howling amidst the midnight storm, 
 Or throws him on the ridgy steep 
 Of some loose hanging rock to sleep.
 
 OF WONDER 259 
 
 There is one Greek poet who in virtue of a few 
 fragments of immortal verse is often placed by 
 critics and, as we think, rightly placed at 
 the very head of all lyric poets ; we need only 
 refer, we say, to her who in one quality is first 
 among the poets of the world first, without a 
 second in that rare verbal economy which is 
 the very accent of passion when at white heat 
 Sappho. To write of such a poet as Sappho 
 with any approach to adequacy would tax the 
 best efforts of the best poets. This is how an 
 eighteenth century poet, Smollett, speaks of 
 her : 
 
 When Sappho struck the quiv'ring wire, 
 The throbbing breast was all on fire ; 
 And when she raised the vocal lay, 
 The captive soul was charm'd away 1 
 
 If Gray and Collins were giants imprisoned 
 in the jar of eighteenth-century convention, 
 they were followed by a ' marvellous boy ' who 
 refused to be so imprisoned. It may be said of 
 Chatterton that he was the Renascence of 
 Wonder incarnate. To him St. Mary Redcliffe 
 Church was as much alive as were the men 
 about whom Pope wrote with such astonishing 
 prosaic brilliance. This is one of the reasons 
 why he bulks so largely among the poets of 
 the Renascence of Wonder. For this renascence 
 was shown not merely in the way in which 
 Man's mysterious destiny was conceived, but
 
 260 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 also in the way in which the theatre of the 
 human drama was confronted. This theatre 
 became as fresh, as replete with wonder, as the 
 actors themselves. A new seeing was lent to 
 man's eyes. And of this young poet it may 
 almost be said that he saw what science is now 
 affirming the kinship between man and the 
 lower animal ; nay, even the sentience of the 
 vegetable world : further still, he felt that what 
 is called dead matter is as the very latest 
 science is telling us in a certain mysterious 
 sense alive, shedding its influence around it. 
 
 With regard to his poetical methods, I have 
 on several occasions partially discussed this 
 matter. I have pointed out that all Chat- 
 terton's critics seem to miss a peculiar musical 
 movement governing his ear, which often ren- 
 ders it impossible to replace, by any modern 
 word whatsoever, an archaism or pseudo- 
 archaism of his, whether invented by himself or 
 found in Bailey or Speght. Dominated as he 
 generally was by eighteenth century move- 
 ments, Chatterton yet showed at times an 
 originality of ear that is very remarkable. His 
 metrical inventiveness has never been perceived 
 certainly it has never been touched upon 
 by any of his critics, from Tyrwhitt downwards. 
 His influence has worked primarily through the 
 great lord of romance, Coleridge himself, who 
 (partly, it may be, from Chatterton's connexion 
 with Bristol) was profoundly impressed both by
 
 OF WONDER 261 
 
 the tragic pathos of Chatterton's life and by the 
 excellence, actual as well as potential, of some 
 of his works. And when we come to consider 
 the influence Coleridge himself had upon the 
 English romantic movement generally, and 
 especially upon Shelley and Keats, and the 
 enormous influence these latter have had upon 
 subsequent poets, it seems impossible to refuse 
 to Chatterton the place of the protagonist of 
 the New Romantic school. 
 
 As to the romantic spirit, it would be difficult 
 to name any one of his successors, except 
 Coleridge himself, in whom the high temper of 
 romance has shown so intense a life. And, as 
 to the romantic form, it is matter of familiar 
 knowledge, that the lyric octo-syllabic move- 
 ment of which Scott afterwards made such 
 excellent use in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 
 was originally borrowed by Scott from Cole- 
 ridge. Afterwards, when Christabel was pub- 
 lished in 1816, Coleridge speaks of the ana- 
 paestic dance with which he varies the iambic 
 lines, as being " founded on a new principle " ; 
 and he has been much praised, and very justly, 
 for such effects as this : 
 
 ' And Christabel saw the lady's eye, 
 And nothing else saw she thereby, 
 Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, 
 Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall." 
 
 That this " new principle " was known to 
 Chatterton is seen in the following extract, 
 which has exactly the Christabel ring the ring
 
 262 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 which Scott only half caught, and which Byron 
 failed really to catch at all : Coleridge alone 
 caught it entirely and splendidly. 
 
 " But when he threwe downe his asenglave, 
 Next came in Syr Hotelier bold and brave, 
 The dethe of manie a Saraceen, 
 Theie thought him a devil from Hell's black den, 
 Na thinking that anie of Mortalle menne 
 Could send so manie to the grave. 
 For his life to John Rumsee he render'd his thanks, 
 Descended from Godred, the King of the Manks." 
 
 With regard to octo-syllabics with ana- 
 paestic variations, it may be said no doubt that 
 some of the miracle-plays (such as the Fall of 
 Man) are composed in this movement, as is 
 also one of the months in Spenser's Shepherd's 
 Calendar ; but the irregularity in these is, like 
 that which is too often seen in the Border 
 Ballads, the irregularity of makeshift, while 
 Chatterton's Unknown Knight, like Christabel, 
 and like Goethe's Erl King, had several varia- 
 tions introduced (as Coleridge says of his own) 
 " in correspondence with some transition in the 
 nature of the imagery or passion." The " new 
 principle," in short, was Chatterton's. 
 
 Again, in the mysterious suggestiveness of 
 remote geographical names, a suggestiveness 
 quite other than the pomp and sonority which 
 Marlowe and Milton so loved the world-in- 
 volving echoes of Kubla Khan seem to have been 
 caught from such lines as these in Chatterton's 
 African eclogue Narva and Mored
 
 OF WONDER 263 
 
 " From Lorbar's cave to where the nations end, . . 
 Explores the palaces on Lira's coast, 
 Where howls the war-song of the Chieftain's ghost, . . 
 Like the loud echoes on Toddida's sea, 
 The warrior's circle, the mysterious tree." 
 
 And turning to the question of Chatterton's 
 influence upon Keats, it is not only indirectly 
 through Coleridge that the rich mind of Keats 
 shows signs of having drunk at Chatterton's 
 fountain of romance : there is a side of Chat- 
 terton which Keats knew, and which Coleridge 
 did not. 
 
 It is difficult to express in words wherein lies 
 the entirely spiritual kinship between Chat- 
 terton's Ballad of Charity and Keats's Eve of 
 St. Agnes, yet most critics, I think, will recog- 
 nise that kinship. Not only are the beggar 
 and the thunderstorm depicted with the sen- 
 suous sympathy and melodious insistence which 
 is the characteristic charm of the Eve of St. 
 Agnes, but the movement of the lines is often 
 the same. Take, for instance, the description 
 of Keats's bedesman, " meagre, barefoot, wan," 
 which is, in point of metrical movement, identi- 
 cal with Chatterton's description of the arms- 
 craver, " withered forwynd, dead." More ob- 
 vious perhaps, yet not more essentially true, 
 is the likeness between the famous passage in 
 Keats's Isabella, beginning, 
 
 " For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, 
 And went all naked to the hungry shark," etc. 
 
 and these four lines in Chatterton's Narva and 
 Mored,
 
 264 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 " Where the pale children of the feeble sun 
 In search of gold through every climate run 
 From burning heat to freezing torments go, 
 And live in all vicissitudes of woe." 
 
 It was perfectly fit, therefore, that Keats 
 should dedicate his Endymion to the memory 
 of Thomas Chatter ton. Not that Keats or 
 Coleridge stole from Chatterton : no two poets 
 had less need to steal from anyone. But the 
 whole history of poetry shows that poetic 
 methods are a growth as well as an inspiration. 
 
 So steeped indeed was Chatterton in romance, 
 that, except in the case of the African Eclogues, 
 his imagination seems to be never really alive 
 save when in the dramatic masquerade of the 
 monk of Bristol. 
 
 Then came Cowper, whose later poetry, when 
 it is contrasted with the jargon of Hay ley, 
 seems to belong to another world. But it is 
 possible, perhaps, to credit Cowper with too 
 much in this matter. 
 
 He was followed by a poet who did as much 
 for the romantic movement as even the " mar- 
 vellous boy " himself could do. Although Burns 
 like so many other fine poets has left behind 
 him some poor stuff, it would be as difficult to 
 exaggerate his intellectual strength as to over- 
 estimate his genius. The dialect of the Scot- 
 tish peasantry had already been admirably 
 worked in by certain of his predecessors, but
 
 OF WONDER 265 
 
 it was left to Burns to bring it into high poetry. 
 In mere style he is, when writing in Scots, 
 to be ranked with the great masters. No one 
 realised more fully than he the power of verbal 
 parsimony in poetry. As a quarter of an ounce 
 of bullet in its power of striking home is to an 
 ounce of duck-shot, so is a line of Burns to a 
 line of any other poet save two, both of whom 
 are extremely unlike him in other respects and 
 extremely unlike each other. To conciseness 
 he made everything yield as completely as did 
 Villon in the Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis, 
 and in Les Regrets de la Belle Heaulmihe, and as 
 completely as did Dante in the most concise of 
 his lines. As surely as Dante's condensation is 
 born of an intensity of imaginative vision, so 
 surely is Burns' s condensation born of an inten- 
 sity of passion. Since Dray ton wrote his son- 
 net beginning : 
 
 " Since ther's no helpe, come let us kiss and part ! " 
 
 there had been nothing in the shape of pas- 
 sionate English poetry in rhyme that could 
 come near Burns' s lines : 
 
 Had we never loved sac kindly, 
 Had we never loved sae blindly, 
 Never met or never parted, 
 We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
 
 266 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 But, splendid as is his passionate poetry, it is 
 specially as an absolute humorist that he 
 towers above all the poets of the eighteenth 
 century. Undoubtedly, to get away on all 
 occasions from the shadow of the great social 
 pyramid was not to be expected of a poet at 
 the time, and in the conditions in which Burns 
 was born. Yet it is astonishing how this 
 Scottish yeoman did get away from it at times, 
 as in " A Man's a Man for a' that.' It is aston- 
 ishing to realise how he was able to show a 
 feeling for absolute humour such as in the 
 eighteenth century had only been shown by 
 prose writers prose writers of the first rank 
 like Swift and Sterne. Indeed, if we did not 
 remember that he followed the creator of Uncle 
 Toby, he would take, if that were possible, a 
 still higher place than he now does as an absolute 
 humorist. Not even Uncle Toby's apostrophe 
 to the fly is finer than Burns's lines to a mouse 
 on turning her up with a plough. But his lines 
 to a mountain daisy, which he had turned down 
 with the plough, are full of a deeper humour 
 still a humorous sympathy with the veget- 
 able no less than with the animal kingdom. 
 There is nothing in all poetry which touches it. 
 Much admiration has been given, and rightly
 
 OF WONDER 267 
 
 given to Dorothy Wordsworth's beautiful prose 
 words in her diary about the daffodil, as showing 
 how a nature-lover without the ' accomplish- 
 ment of verse ' can make us conscious of the 
 consciousness of a wild-flower. But they were 
 written after Burns, and though they have 
 some of Burns' s playfulness, they cannot be 
 said to show his humour. 
 
 It is in poems of another class, however in 
 such poems as the f Address to the De'il ' 
 that we get his greatest triumph as an absolute 
 humorist, for there we get the " cosmic 
 humour " before alluded to the very crown 
 and flower of all humour. And take " Holy 
 Willie's Prayer," where, biting as is the satire, 
 the poet's humorous enjoyment of it carries it 
 into the rarest poetry. In ' Tarn o' Shanter ' 
 we get the finest mixture of humour and wisdom, 
 the finest instance of Teutonic grotesque, to be 
 found in all English poetry. In ' The Jolly 
 Beggars,' Burns now and again shows that he 
 could pass into the mood of true Pantagruelism 
 a mood which is of all moods the rarest and 
 the finest a mood which requires in the 
 humorist such a blessed mixture of the juices 
 as nature cannot often in a climate like ours 
 achieve.
 
 268 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 A true child of the Renascence of Wonder who 
 followed Burns, William Blake, though he was 
 entirely without humour, and showed not much 
 power of giving realistic pictures of nature, had 
 a finer sense of the supernatural than any of his 
 predecessors.
 
 PART II 
 
 AND now, at last, after this swift and 
 wide circuit, we are able to turn to 
 the central idea of this essay, the 
 modern Renascence of Wonder, 
 which followed the long epoch of acceptance 
 known as " English Augustanism." It is not 
 our purpose in this work to discuss the poetry 
 of any one of the poets of this great epoch 
 except in regard to the Renascence of Wonder. 
 In 1765 Percy had published his famous collec- 
 tion of old ballads, and this directed general 
 attention to our ballad literature. The first poet 
 among the great group who fell under the 
 influence of the old ballads was probably Scott, 
 who in 1802 brought out the first two volumes 
 of his priceless Border Minstrelsy. The old 
 ballads were, of course, very unequal in quality, 
 but among them were ' Clerk Saunders,' ' The 
 Wife of Usher's Well,' ' The Young Tamlane,' 
 and the great ballad which Scott afterwards 
 named ' The Demon Lover,' with certain 
 others which compel us to set the ' Border 
 
 269
 
 270 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 Ballads/ as they are called, at the very top 
 of the real poetry of the modern world. Cole- 
 ridge, as we are going to see, could give us the 
 weird and the beautiful combined, but he could 
 not blend with these qualities such dramatic 
 humanity and intense pathos as are expressed 
 in certain stanzas in " The Wife of Usher's 
 Well," and in such writing as this from ' Clerk 
 Saunders,' where Saunders's mistress, after he 
 had been assassinated by her brothers throws 
 herself upon his grave and exclaims : 
 
 Is there ony roome at your head, Saunders ? 
 
 Is there ony roome at your feet ? 
 Or ony roome at your side, Saundera, 
 
 Where fain, fain, I wad sleep ? 
 
 Scott, we say, is entitled to be placed at the 
 head of those who are generally accredited with 
 originating the Renascence of Wonder at the 
 end of the eighteenth century. 
 
 But great as was the influence of Scott in this 
 matter, it is hard to see how the effect of his 
 romantic work would have been so potent as it 
 now is without the influence of Coleridge. 
 Scott's friend Stoddart, having heard Coleridge 
 recite the first part of Christabel while still in 
 manuscript, and having a memory that retained 
 everything, repeated the poem to Scott. The
 
 OF WONDER 271 
 
 seed fell upon a soil of magical fertility. Scott 
 at once sat down and produced The Lay of the 
 Last Minstrel. There is no need to say with 
 Leigh Hunt that Scott's vigorous poem is a 
 coarse travesty of Christabel in order to admit 
 that, full as it is of splendid imaginative quali- 
 ties, it is defective in technique, and often cheap 
 in diction. Some of Scott's romantic ballads 
 and snatches of verse, however, scattered 
 through his novels show that it was a languid 
 artistic conscience alone that prevented him 
 from taking a much higher place as a poet than 
 he now takes. If he never learnt, as Coleridge 
 knew by instinct, the truth so admirably 
 expressed in Joubert's saying that ' it is better 
 to be exquisite than to be ample,' it really seems 
 to have been because he did not think it worth 
 while to learn to be exquisite. For the distinctive 
 quality of Scott is that he seems to be greater 
 than his work as much greater, indeed, as a 
 spreading oak seems greater than the leaves it 
 sheds. Coleridge's Christabel, The Ancient 
 Mariner, and Kiibla Khan are, as regards the 
 romantic spirit, above and far above any 
 work of any other English poet. Instances 
 innumerable might be adduced showing how 
 his very nature was steeped in the fountain
 
 272 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 from which the old balladists themselves drew, 
 but in a survey so brief as this there is room 
 to give only one. In the ' Conclusion ' of the 
 first part of Christabel he recapitulates and 
 summarises, in lines that are at once matchless 
 as poetry and matchless in succinctness of 
 statement, the entire story of the bewitched 
 maiden and her terrible foe which had gone 
 before : 
 
 A star hath set, a star hath risen, 
 O Geraldine ! since arms of thine 
 Have been the lovely lady's prison. 
 O Geraldine 1 one hour was thine 
 Thou'st had thy will ! By tairn and rill, 
 The night-birds all that hour were still. 
 But now they are jubilant anew, 
 From cliff and tower, tu-whoo ! tu-whoo 1 
 Tu-whoo 1 tu-whoo 1 from wood and fell 1 
 
 Here we get that feeling of the inextricable web 
 in which the human drama and external nature 
 are woven which is the very soul of poetic 
 wonder. So great is the maleficent power of the 
 beautiful witch that a spell is thrown over all 
 Nature. For an hour the very woods and fells 
 remain in a shuddering state of sympathetic 
 consciousness of her 
 
 The night-birds all that hour were still.
 
 OF WONDER 273 
 
 When the spell is passed Nature awakes as from 
 a hideous nightmare, and ' the night-birds ' are 
 jubilant anew. This is the very highest reach of 
 poetic wonder finer, if that be possible, than 
 the night-storm during the murder of Duncan. 
 And note the artistic method by which Cole- 
 ridge gives us this amazing and overwhelming 
 picture of the oneness of all Nature. However 
 the rhymes may follow each other, it is always 
 easy for the critic, by studying the intellectual 
 and emotional movement of the sequence, to 
 see which rhyme-word first came to the poet's 
 mind, and suggested the rhyme-words to follow 
 or precede it. It is the witch's maleficent will- 
 power which here dominates the poet's mind 
 as he writes. Therefore we know that he first 
 wrote 
 
 Thou'st had thy will. 
 
 In finding a rhyme-word for ' will ' and ' rill/ 
 the word ' still ' would of course present itself, 
 among others, to any poet's mind ; but it 
 required a poet steeped in the true poetic 
 wonder of " pre-Augustanism," it required Cole- 
 ridge, whose genius was that very Lady of the 
 Lake, 
 
 Sole-sitting by the shores of Old Romance 
 
 T
 
 274 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 to feel the most tremendous and awe-inspiring 
 picture, perhaps, in all poetry called up to his 
 imagination 
 
 The night-birds all that hour were still. 
 
 The nearer in temper any other line approaches 
 this, the nearer does it approach the ideal of 
 poetic wonder. It is, however, owing to the very 
 rarity of Coleridge's genius that not he but 
 Scott popularised the romantic movement. In 
 such purely poetical work as the first part of 
 Christabel, which was entirely unlocalised, real- 
 istic mediaeval pictures were not requisite as 
 they were in the Lay of the Last Minstrel. After 
 such work as Coleridge's all that the romantic 
 revival needed was a poet who would supply 
 it with feet in addition to wings. Scott supplied 
 those feet. However, in the second part of 
 Christabel, written later in which the poem is 
 localised after Scott's manner Coleridge showed 
 so much of Scott's influence that it may not be 
 too fanciful to call these two immortal poets 
 the binary star of romanticism revolving around 
 one common poetic centre. Scott's poetry 
 became so immensely popular that it soon set 
 every poet and every versifier, from Byron 
 downwards, writing romantic stories in octo-
 
 OF WONDER 275 
 
 syllabic couplets, with the old anapaestic lilt 
 of romantic poetry. 
 
 As regards Wordsworth's share in this move- 
 ment, though it was, no doubt, confined largely 
 to poetic methods, the following superb lines 
 from ' Yew Trees ' can be set beside even 
 Coleridge's masterpieces as regards the romantic 
 side of the Renascence of Wonder : 
 
 Beneath whose sable roof 
 Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked 
 With unrejoicing berries ghostly shapes 
 May meet at noontide, Fear and trembling Hope, 
 Silence and Foresight, Death the Skeleton 
 And Time the Shadow there to celebrate, 
 As in a natural temple scattered o'er 
 With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, 
 United worship, or in mute repose 
 To lie, and listen to the mountain flood 
 Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves. 
 
 Whether the reaction would have died out (as 
 did the revival of natural language by Theo- 
 critus after such comparatively feeble followers 
 as Bion and Moschus) had not Wordsworth's 
 indomitable will and masterful simplicity of 
 character stood up and saved it, or whether, 
 on the contrary, the movement was injured and 
 delayed by this obstinacy and simplicity of 
 character which led him into exaggerated 
 theories, exposing it to ridicule is perhaps a.
 
 276 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 debatable question. However, it ended by the 
 " poetic " temper, the " poetic " diction, and 
 the " poetic " methods, of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury being swept away. But as to real know- 
 ledge of the mere physiognomy of medievalism, 
 Coleridge and Scott were perhaps on a par. 
 Indeed, imperfect knowledge of this physiog- 
 nomy was a weak point in the entire group of 
 poets who set to work to revive it. Coleridge 
 showed a certain knowledge of it, which, like 
 Scott's, was no doubt above that of Horace 
 Walpole and Mrs. Radcliffe. But since the great 
 accumulation of learning upon this subject 
 which came afterwards for the use of English 
 poets it seems slight enough. Abbotsford alone 
 is enough to show that Scott did not fully 
 escape the bastard medievalism of the eight- 
 teenth century. But we can forgive Scott all 
 in the matter of exactitude. If he in Ivanhoe 
 vanquished every difficulty, and wrote an 
 immortal mediaeval romance with not many 
 touches of true medievalism, that is only 
 another proof of his vitalising imagination and 
 genius. Fortunately, however, Scott was some- 
 thing more than a man like his successor, 
 Meinhold, who had every mediaeval detail at his 
 command. Had the author of Ivanhoe been as
 
 OF WONDER 277 
 
 truly mediaeval as the author of Sidonia, he 
 would have appealed to a leisured few by whom 
 the past is more beloved than the present ; but 
 he would not have given the English-speaking 
 race those superb works of his which are 
 
 " A largess universal like the sun." 
 
 Though the Ettrick shepherd, in The Queen's 
 Wake, shows plenty of the true feeling for the 
 supernatural side of the movement, he had not 
 even in Bonnie Kilmanny sufficient governance 
 over his vivid imagination to express himself 
 with that concentrated energy which is one of 
 the first requisites of all poetry. 
 
 As to Wordsworth as a nature-poet, there are, 
 of course, three attitudes of the poet towards 
 Nature. There is Wordsworth's attitude that 
 which recognises her as Natura Benigna ; there 
 is the attitude which recognises her as Natura 
 Maligna, that of the poet who by temperament 
 exclaims with the Syrian Gnostics, ' Matter is 
 darkness matter is evil, and of matter is this 
 body, and to become incarnate is to inherit 
 sorrow and grievous pain ' ; and there is the 
 attitude which recognises her as being neither 
 benign nor malignant, but the cold, passionless, 
 unloving mother to whom the sorrows, fears,
 
 278 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 and aspirations of man are indifferent because 
 unknown the attitude, in a word, of Matthew 
 Arnold in his poem ' In harmony with Nature/ 
 and other recent poets who have written after 
 the general acceptance of the evolutionary 
 hypothesis. 
 
 Wordsworth's influence in regard to the 
 painting of Nature was no doubt great upon all 
 the poets of his time, and upon none was it 
 greater than upon Byron, who scoffed at him. 
 In order to see Wordsworth's influence upon 
 Byron we have only to compare the third and 
 fourth cantos of Childe Harold with the first 
 and second. But besides this, Byron was 
 evidently in the later decade of his life a student 
 of Wordsworth's theories as to the use of 
 natural language instead of poetic diction. In 
 Julia's letter in Don Juan, notwithstanding 
 occasional echoes such as that of a couplet by 
 an obscure writer, Barton Booth 
 
 So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole, 
 As vibrates my fond heart to my fixed soul 
 
 is an admirable illustration of Wordsworth's 
 aphorism, ' What comes from the heart goes 
 to the heart.' The same may be said concerning 
 the pathetic naturalness of the Haide*e episode.
 
 OF WONDER 279 
 
 Would this ever have been written as we now 
 have it had it not been for Wordsworth's 
 Preface ? Byron's success in passionate writing 
 seems to have left behind it the strange notion 
 that because there is such a thing as the fine 
 frenzy of the poet, the more frenzy the better. 
 But what makes Byron an important figure in 
 the romantic revival is that, while his own 
 draughts of romanticism were drawn from the 
 well-springs of Scott, Wordsworth and Cole- 
 ridge, it was from Byron's own reservoir that 
 the French Romantiques drank. Indeed it may 
 almost be said that to his influence was largely 
 due that revival which, according to Banville, 
 " made French poetry leap from the sixteenth 
 century to the nineteenth." 
 
 Sou they 's voluminous and industrious work 
 upon romantic lines is receiving at this moment 
 less attention than it deserves. There is really 
 a fine atmosphere of romance thrown over 
 Thalaba and the Curse of Kehama. But the 
 atmosphere is cold. His experiments in rhyme- 
 less metre are far from being unworthy of 
 attention, especially as they were imitated 
 (sometimes not very successfully) by Shelley, 
 Matthew Arnold, W. E. Henley, and notably 
 by the interesting poet, William Sharp (Fiona 
 Macleod). Shelley preceded Keats by three 
 years, but it is convenient in this survey to take 
 Keats first in regard to this subject, as we have
 
 280 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 a great deal to say upon the influence of Shelley 
 upon certain poets of a subsequent date. 
 
 Tennyson for the most part resisted the 
 influence of Shelley, but was greatly influenced 
 by the blended colour and music of Keats. The 
 present writer has elsewhere dwelt upon the 
 fact that, brief as was Keats's life, he who 
 had already passed through so many halls of the 
 poetic palace was at one time passing into yet 
 another the magic hall of Coleridge and the 
 old ballads. As expressions of the highest 
 romantic temper there are not many things in 
 our literature to be set above The Eve of St. 
 Mark, and La Belle Dame sans Merci. 
 
 Shelley's place in the Renascence of Wonder 
 is peculiar. His vigorous imagination was parti- 
 ally strangled by his humanitarianism and 
 ethical impulse, inherited largely from Rousseau. 
 Of all the poets of this group he was by far the 
 most inspired b)' the social upheaval of the 
 French Revolution, and, of course, apart from 
 his splendid work in so many kinds of poetry, 
 he is a very important figure in the revival of 
 romanticism broadly considered. But those 
 poems of his dealing with subjects akin to 
 those represented by the purely romantic work 
 of the old ballads, Christabel and The Ancient 
 Mariner show that in the Renascence of Won- 
 der his place is not among the first. Queen 
 Mab is not the least in touch with the spiritual 
 world. And there is more of the pure romantic 
 glamour in Keats's two lines 
 
 " Charmed magic casements opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn "
 
 OF WONDER 281 
 
 than in the whole of The Witch of Atlas. It is, 
 however, in the effect of Shelley's writings upon 
 certain poets who succeeded him that his in- 
 fluence is so curious. 
 
 After Shelley's music began to captivate the 
 world certain poets set to work upon the theory 
 that between themselves and the other portion 
 of the human race there is a wide gulf fixed. 
 Their theory, in short, was that they are to 
 sing, as far as possible, like birds of another 
 world. Indeed, it may be said that in Philip 
 James Bailey, Sydney Dobell and Alexander 
 Smith, all true poets, and the first narrowly 
 escaping becoming great, wonder ran to seed, 
 while " acceptance " shrank to a fearfully minus 
 quantity. It might also be said that the poetic 
 atmosphere became that of the supreme Palace 
 of Wonder Bedlam. 
 
 With regard to Bailey's endowments, there 
 are passages in his tremendous poem of ' Festus ' 
 which fully justify all that his contemporaries, 
 including Tennyson, prophesied for him. 
 
 As to Sydney Dobell, he, in " Balder " far out- 
 shot Bailey in extravagance, and Alexander 
 Smith, whose ambition was 
 
 " To shoot a poem like a comet out, 
 Far splendering the sleepy realms of night " 
 
 tried to outshoot Dobell, while Stanyan Bigg 
 tried to outshoot them all. 
 
 But the strange thing is that these writers 
 of Bedlamite poetry were not Bedlamites at all, 
 but men of great common sense. This is seen 
 in Dobell's Edinburgh lecture upon poetry,
 
 282 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 in which he said admirably, that the poet must 
 be " the man with the perfect mind," and that 
 " the poem is the perfect expression of that 
 perfect mind " ; yet in " Balder," Dobell, and 
 in the " Life Drama " Alexander Smith pro- 
 duced each a poem so exactly like a Bedlamite's 
 poem, that nothing will ever now persuade 
 the reader of this generation that they were not 
 each more or less mad. They were on the 
 contrary, among the sanest men of their time, 
 and the reason why " Balder " and the " Life 
 Drama " read like a Bedlamite's poems is this, 
 that the writers deliberately tried to make 
 them read so. And so poets of our own day are 
 apt to forget in their worship of Shelley, that, 
 admitting Dobell's theory about the poet's 
 " perfect mind," the question still is, What 
 kind of mind is the perfect mind ? Is it that 
 mind which, like the mind of Homer, of Sopho- 
 cles, of Shakespeare, of Goethe, is in accord 
 with the healthy mind of general humanity ? 
 or is it that mind which is in accord with noth- 
 ing, not even with itself and the phantasms 
 of its own conjuring ? 
 
 The country from which the followers of 
 Shelley sing to our lower world was admirably 
 named " Nowhere " by Bailey. And one of the 
 most striking scenes of " Festus " would seem to 
 show that " Nowhere " is a country of remark- 
 able geographical peculiarities. 
 
 Browning's Sordello seems to be laid in this 
 country of " Nowhere," and there are other 
 splendid successes in this direction, but he soon 
 left the region.
 
 OF WONDER 283 
 
 In such poems as "La Saisiaz " he is apt to 
 fall into the mistake which spoilt Hamlet's life 
 that of trying to make the best of both these 
 worlds. 
 
 Nineteenth century poets finding that they 
 have two places to think about at once the 
 physical universe, and that which is beyond 
 the physical universe cannot determine which 
 they will claim for inheritance. Having these 
 two " wheres," " Somewhere " and " No- 
 where," upon which to exercise their " perfect 
 minds," they are vexed by an ' embarras de 
 richesses.' 
 
 Both these inferences are, however, wrong. 
 First, there is no reason whatever why a poet 
 should be madder than the rest of us ; and, 
 secondly, so far from " Nowhere " being his 
 proper singing gallery, if ever there was a 
 vocalist whose place is especially and peculiarly 
 " Somewhere," that vocalist is the poet. " Some- 
 where " being the poet's home, the most awk- 
 ward results naturally follow if the poet wanders, 
 as so many poets of the romantic school do 
 wander, into " Nowhere." 
 
 As regards, however, the French romantigues 
 of the thirties to whom Banville alludes those 
 whose revolt against French classicism cul- 
 minated, perhaps, in that great battle of Hernani 
 before mentioned their revolt was even more 
 imperfectly equipped with knowledge of the 
 physiognomy of mediae valism than that of Scott. 
 
 With regard to Victor Hugo, however, it may
 
 284 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 be said that, modern as he was in temper, he 
 was able by aid of his splendid imagination in 
 La Pas d'Armes du Roi Jean, and indeed in 
 many other poems, to feel and express the true 
 Renascence of Wonder. But while in poetry 
 the mere physiognomy of life is only suggested, 
 in prose it has to be secured. 
 
 Hugo never secured it. His faculty of wonder, 
 indeed, seems to have grown with the years, for in 
 the second series of La L&gende des Si&des pub- 
 lished in his seventy-fifth year, depicting a certain 
 tremendous struggle " Entre Grants et Dieux," 
 he gives us a picture of the giant Phtos, manacled 
 and buried under Olympus by the usurping 
 gods. Phtos breaks a hole through the bottom 
 of the mountain, and sees certain sights which 
 for wonder surpass all the wonderful sights seen 
 by all our English poets put together. 
 
 " Phtos est a la fentre immense du mystefe. 
 It voil 1'autre cot6 monstrueux de la terre, 
 L'inconnu, ce qu' aucun regard ne vit jamais, 
 Des profondeurs qui sont en me'me temps sommets 
 Un tas d'astres derriere un gouffre d'empyre'es, 
 Un ocean roulant aux plis de ses marges, 
 Des flux et des reflux de constellation." 
 
 This in fact, is that famous " 1'Infini," about 
 which the venerable poet is calculated to have 
 written from the publication of " Irtamlne " 
 downwards, fifty thousand epigrams.
 
 OF WONDER 285 
 
 " Un globe est une balle, un siecle est un moment ; 
 Mondes sur mondes, 1'un par 1'autre ils se limitent. 
 ****** 
 
 O Stupeur ! il finit par distinguer, au fond 
 
 De ce gouffre, ou le jour avec la nuit se fond, 
 
 A travers I'^paisseur, d'une brane e*ternelle, 
 
 Dans on ne sait quelle ombre enorme, une prunelle." 
 
 Phtos then scales Olympus, and frightens the 
 gods by crying out, " O, dieux, il est un Dieu ! " 
 
 Our object being merely to trace to its sources 
 that stream of Romanticism upon which the 
 poetry of the nineteenth century has been 
 nourished, this work should properly close here. 
 And if a word or two is said upon the poets who 
 immediately followed the great group, it must 
 not be supposed that any general criticism of 
 these latter poets is attempted. 
 
 It was inevitable, no doubt, that Tennyson, 
 a poet so absolutely voicing the Victorian age 
 and its narrow cosmogony, who alone seemed 
 to speak for that age, should suffer considerable 
 decadence of fame the moment that a new 
 epoch with a new cosmogony should begin to 
 clamour for utterance, and undoubtedly this 
 has been the case. Yet in virtue of the large 
 mass of perfect work actually done he would 
 perhaps be the greatest poet of the nineteenth 
 century if Coleridge had not left us among his 
 own large mass of inferior work half-a-dozen
 
 286 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 poems which will be the delight, the wonder, 
 and the despair of English poets in all time to 
 come. In the blending of music and colour so 
 that each seems born of each, it is hard to 
 think that even the poet of The Eve of St. Agnes 
 and The Ode to a Nightingale was the superior 
 of him who gave us The Lady of Shalott and 
 The Lotos-Eaters. But when it comes to the 
 true romantic glamour it cannot be said that 
 he was instinctively in touch with the old 
 spirit. The magnificent Idylls of the King, in 
 temper as well as in style one of the most 
 modern poems of its time, does occasionally, as 
 in the picture of the finding of Arthur, give us 
 the old glamour very finely. But the stately 
 rhetorical movement of his blank verse is 
 generally out of harmony with it. That roman- 
 tic suggestion which Shakespeare's blank verse 
 catches in such writing as we get in the fifth act 
 of The Merchant of Venice, in Pericles, and in 
 hundreds of other passages, shows, however, that 
 blank verse, though not so ' right ' in romantic 
 poetry as rhyme, can yet be made sufficiently 
 flexible. It is only in the poetic methods of 
 his rhymed poems that Tennyson successfully 
 worked on romantic lines, though of course the 
 the fairy-like, unconscious grace of
 
 OF WONDER 287 
 
 Coleridge at his best, were never caught by any 
 of his successors. And yet above all nineteenth- 
 century poets Tennyson is steeped in the 
 absolute humour of romanticism. In Shakes- 
 peare himself there is no finer example of 
 absolute humour than he gives us in those lines 
 where the " Northern Farmer " expresses his 
 views on the immorality of Bessy Harris : 
 
 Bessy Harris's barne ! tha knaws she laaid it to mea. 
 Mowt a bean, mayhap, for she wur a bad un, shea. 
 'Siver, I kep 'um, I kep 'um, my lass, tha mun understand, 
 I done moy duty boy 'um as I 'a done boy the lond. 
 
 As to Browning, in order to discuss adequately 
 his place as regards the Renascence of Wonder 
 a long treatise would be required. On the 
 realistic side of the Romantic movement he is, 
 of course, very strong. His sympathies, how- 
 ever, are as modern as Matthew Arnold's own, 
 except, of course, on the theological side, where 
 he is a century behind his great poetic con- 
 temporaries. His desire is to express not wonder 
 but knowingness, the opposite of wonder. In 
 a study of his works, made by the present 
 writer many years ago, the humour of Browning 
 was named Teutonic grotesque. The name is 
 convenient, and nearly, though not quite, 
 satisfactory. Perhaps Teutonic grotesque, which
 
 288 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 in architecture at least, lies in the expression of 
 deep ideas through fantastic forms, is the only 
 absolute grotesque. In Italian and French 
 grotesque the incongruity throughout all art lies 
 in a simple departure from the recognised line 
 of beauty, spiritual or physical ; but in the 
 Teutonic mind the instinctive quest is really not 
 save in music beauty at all, but the wonder- 
 ful, the profound, the mysterious ; and the 
 incongruity of Teutonic grotesque lies in ex- 
 pressing the emotions aroused by these qualities 
 in forms that are unexpected and bizarre. It 
 is easy, however, to give too much heed to 
 Browning's grotesquery in considering his re- 
 lation to Romanticism. Ruskin has affirmed 
 that such poems as The Bishop Orders his Tomb 
 is the best rendering to be found in literature 
 of the old temper, and on this point Ruskin 
 speaks with authority. 
 
 With regard to Matthew Arnold, in The 
 Scholar Gypsy he undoubtedly shows, reflected 
 from Wordsworth, a good deal of the realistic 
 side of Romanticism. But there is no surer sign 
 that his temper was really " Augustan " than 
 the fact that in his selections from Gray in 
 Ward's English Poets, he actually omits the one 
 stanza in Gray's Elegy, which shows him to have
 
 OF WONDER 289 
 
 been a true poet the stanza about the robin, 
 above quoted in the remarks upon Gray. The 
 Forsaken Merman, whose very name suggests 
 the Renascence of Wonder, beautiful as it is, 
 is quite without the glamour and magic of such 
 second-rate poets as the author of the Queen's 
 Wake, and has no kinship with Coleridge or the 
 old ballads. As to his attitude towards Nature, 
 it is in such poems as Morality and In Harmony 
 with Nature that Arnold shows that he comes 
 under the third category of nature-poets above 
 mentioned. With regard to his humour, Arnold 
 was essentially a man of the world of the 
 very modern world and his humour, though 
 peculiarly delicate and delightful, must cer- 
 tainly be called relative and not absolute. 
 
 As regards the romantic temper, two English 
 imaginative writers only have combined a true 
 sympathy with a true knowledge of it, and 
 these were of more recent date Rossetti and 
 William Morris. They had, of course, immense 
 advantages owing to such predecessors in 
 literature as Meinhold, and also to the attention 
 that had been given to the subject in Pugin's 
 Gothic Architecture and in the works of other 
 architects, English and foreign. 
 
 The poet of Christabel himself was scarcely
 
 290 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 more steeped in the true magic of the romantic 
 temper than was the writer of The Blessed 
 Damozel and Sister Helen, while in the know- 
 ledge of romance Coleridge was far behind the 
 later poet. With regard to humour, Rossetti 
 and Morris hold in their poetry no place either 
 with the absolute or relative humorists, but 
 those who knew them intimately can affirm 
 that personally they are both humorists of a 
 very fine order. 
 
 The truth is, as already mentioned, that 
 Rossetti consciously, and Morris, perhaps uncon- 
 sciously, worked upon the entirely mistaken 
 theory that in romantic poetry humour has pro- 
 perly no place. Those who have styled Morris 
 unhealthy on account of his lamentations about 
 Death are inconsistent. He was as healthy as 
 Chaucer himself. " It is the characteristic of every 
 conscious organism in health to want to live," 
 says a great naturalist. Surely it is the sign 
 of a perfectly healthy mind to lament now and 
 then that the time is approaching faster and 
 faster when the good things of this comfort- 
 able earth will be at an end when there will be 
 no more making of verses no more pleasant 
 translating of Sagas no more Icelandic trips- 
 no more companionship of friends and even, 
 perhaps, no more " sage greens." " The deep 
 dishonour of death " aroused the honest in- 
 dignation of Shakespeare ; and he surpasses 
 Morris in the amount of abuse he pours upon the 
 " spoiler of life's feast." In fact, the genuine
 
 OF WONDER 291 
 
 gusto with which Morris gives vent to his wrath 
 against Death convinces us that, besides being 
 one of the most delightful poets that ever lived 
 (and also one of the greatest if we properly 
 consider what gifts went to the writing of 
 ' Sigurd '), he is one of the healthiest, in the 
 sense that an old Viking or an old Greek was 
 healthy who loved life and detested, though he 
 might not fear, death. 
 
 Into this mistake George Meredith never fell 
 and certainly he is the last poet who can be 
 called a " poet of acceptance." Still he does 
 not belong in the same way to the Renascence 
 of Wonder as Morris, Swinburne, and Rossetti 
 do. His early book " Modern Love," is a 
 delight to all readers, full of true passion and 
 true everything. But it cannot be said that he 
 fulfilled the promise of his early work. In many 
 of his later poems, the beautiful image seems 
 struggling and iridescent, like a fish in a net. 
 
 The difference between literature and mere 
 word-joining is that while literature is alive, 
 word-joining is without life, and cannot by any 
 power be vivified. This literary life is bi- 
 partite in prose, tri-partite in poetry ; that is 
 to say, that while prose requires intellectual life 
 and emotional life, poetry requires not only 
 intellectual life and emotional life, but rhythmic 
 life, this last being the most important of all. 
 
 Unless the rhythm of any metrical passage 
 is so vigorous, so natural, and so free that it 
 seems, like Swinburne's poetry, as though it 
 could live, if need were, by its rhythm alone, 
 that passage has no right to existence, and
 
 292 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 should, if the substance is good, be forthwith 
 demetricized and turned into honest prose ; for, 
 as Thoreau has pointed out, prose at its best 
 has high qualities beyond the reach and ken of 
 poetry, and to compensate for the sacrifice of 
 these the metrical gains of any passage should 
 be beyond all cavil. 
 
 In a language so powerful and yet so rude as 
 ours a language requiring such an infinity of 
 manipulation before it can be worked into 
 melodious sequences the difficulty of producing 
 poetry that is at once perfect in art and adequate 
 to the motive and intellectual power of the 
 national character is enormous. 
 
 A Greek of the time of Pericles might have 
 nourished his genius upon all that the broadest 
 Athenian life could afford, and yet so inherently 
 melodious was his mother-tongue, he could have 
 given in his verses all those subtle nuances of 
 metrical effect which in more imperfect lan- 
 guages are the result of a lifelong study of 
 poetry as a fine art. But, save in the cases of a 
 few of the most illustrious names, the poets of 
 England, and especially the poets of the nine- 
 teenth century, fail from that lack of experience 
 of life without which poetry is but the idle 
 tinkling of the lyre ; or else, having that ex- 
 perience of life, they fail because they have no 
 time to overcome the countless technical diffi- 
 culties and metrical delicacies of poetic art. 
 
 Meredith had something of an ear for iambic 
 verse, though none for anapaestic, and yet, for 
 some reason or another, he is fond of attempting 
 anapaests.
 
 OF WONDER 
 
 There is no more clear and sharp distinction 
 between poets than that which divides them 
 between poets who have the iambic ear, and 
 poets who have the anapaestic. While writers 
 like Keats and Wordsworth in passing from the 
 iambic to the anapaestic movement pass at once 
 into doggerel, writers like Shelley and Swin- 
 burne are so entirely at home in anapaestic 
 movements that even their iambic lines seem 
 always on the verge of leaping into the ana- 
 paestic dance. 
 
 (If verse were simply quintessential prose, then 
 assuredly Meredith would be one of the most 
 effective poets in English literature. In the art 
 of " packing a line " he is almost without an 
 equal. Take the following stanzas from the 
 poem called " Earth and Man." 
 
 He may entreat, aspire, 
 
 He may despair, and she has never heed. 
 
 She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need, 
 Not his desire. 
 She prompts him to rejoice, 
 
 Yet scares him on the threshold with the shroud. 
 
 He deems her cherishing of her best-endowed, 
 A wanton's choice. 
 
 The first two lines here are much more than 
 quintessential prose, they are poetry worthy 
 of almost any writer in the English language. 
 But the lines which follow are metrically bad, 
 and bad in the worst way, for they show that 
 the poet whose natural instinct, judging from 
 his " Modern Love," is to avoid elision and to 
 spread out the syllables of his lines after Keats' s 
 fashion, attempts an elision here without under-
 
 294 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 standing what is the true nature and function of 
 elision in English poetry. And throughout his 
 poetry there are lines which strike upon the ear 
 like flints : 
 
 She fancied, armed beyond beauty, and thence grew, 
 In mind only, and the perils that ensue. 
 Hear, then, my friend, madam 1 Tongue-restrained he 
 stands. 
 
 Still, notwithstanding all the rugged lines in 
 Meredith's poetry, there are plenty of poems of 
 his which easily show that he has a true call to 
 express himself in metre. Perhaps " The Lark 
 Ascending " is the finest of all these, though, 
 of course, even that is without the supreme 
 metrical inspiration of Shelley's " Skylark " and 
 Swinburne's " Sea Mew." And this is no faint 
 praise, for among those who express, or en- 
 deavour to express, themselves in metre, how 
 many have really a call to do so ? 
 
 Nothing is more inscrutable than the desire 
 for metrical expression. Carlyle's endowment of 
 some of the poetic qualities such as imagina- 
 tion, picturesqueness, emotive eloquence was 
 very great ; but judging from his own doggerel 
 verses and his ignorant and stupid talk about 
 Keats and Shelley, his ear for music was the ear 
 of Bully Bottom after he had been translated. 
 
 Compare, for instance, the poems of O' 
 Shaughnessy with Meredith's poems. So rugged, 
 harsh, and flinty are many of Meredith's lines 
 that the reading of them would have inflicted 
 positive physical pain on O' Shaughnessy 's ear. 
 Yet we do not hesitate to say that one or two of 
 Meredith's poems contain more of the raw
 
 OF WONDER 295 
 
 material of poetry than could have been pro- 
 duced by O'Shaughnessy in a lifetime. 
 
 The throb of emotional and intellectual life 
 stirs nearly every line ; whereas in O'Shaugh- 
 nessy's verses we often find nothing but that 
 rhythmic life without which no metrical writing 
 has any raison d'etre at all. 
 
 The truth is that in modern England poetry 
 is not large enough for the growing limbs of life 
 or rather our poetic forms are not large enough 
 to cover the limbs of life and the limbs of art. 
 Sir William Temple's comparison of life to a 
 blanket too small for the bed was never so 
 applicable as now. In order to pull it over one 
 part of our bodies another part has to be left 
 out in the cold. 
 
 Manliness and intellectual vigour combined 
 with a remarkable picturesqueness are the most 
 noticeable qualities of Meredith's work. 
 
 It is hard to think that even the singer of the 
 Ode to the West Wind is in lyric power greater 
 than he who wrote the choruses of Atalanta 
 and the still more superb measures of Songs 
 before Sunrise and Erechtheus. Indeed, we have 
 only to recall the fact that before Shelley wrote 
 it was an axiom among poets and critics that 
 few, if any, more metres could ever be invented 
 in order to give his proper place to a poet who 
 has invented more metres than all the poets 
 combined from the author of Piers Plowman 
 down to the present day,
 
 296 THE RENASCENCE 
 
 Swinburne, too, seems, consciously or un- 
 consciously, to act upon the theory that humour 
 is out of place in romantic poetry. For in his 
 prose writings he shows a great deal of wit 
 and humour. With regard to form and artistic 
 qualities generally, a new kind of poetic diction 
 now grew up a diction composed mainly of that 
 of Shelley and of Keats, of Tennyson, of Rossetti, 
 of Swinburne, yet mixed with Elizabethan and 
 more archaic forms a diction, to be sure, far 
 more poetic in its elements than that which 
 Coleridge, Scott, and Wordsworth did so much 
 to demolish, but none the less artificial when 
 manipulated by a purely artistic impulse for the 
 production of purely artistic verse. It is, we 
 say, true enough that the gorgeous and beauti- 
 ful word-spinning of writers like Arthur O' 
 Shaughnessy, Philip Bourke Marston, and those 
 called the Pre-Raphaelite poets is far more like 
 genuine poetry than was the worn-out, tawdry 
 texture of eighteenth-century platitudes in which 
 Hayley and Samuel Jackson Pratt bedecked 
 their puny limbs. Rossetti, the great master of 
 this kind of poetic diction, saw this, and during 
 the last few years of his life endeavoured to 
 get away from it when writing his superb poems, 
 A King's Tragedy, and The White Ship. 
 
 THE END
 
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