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 rhythmical in movement, however, is what some have denied. Here we touch at once the very root of the subject. The difference between all literature and mere “ Word-kneading ” is that, while literature is alive, word-kneading is without 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 substance 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 sacrince of these, should not the metrical gains of any passage be beyond all cavil?
This argument might be pressed farther 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 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 rhyt m (such as that of Sappho sometimes, Pindar often, Shelley always), or latent in colour, such as that of some of the mpodmoe Persian poets. To discuss the question, Which of these "Mama, twc kinds of poetry is the more precious? would be Quesuoum 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 p{rism is fluitful of tinted lights P The mental forces at wor in the production of a poem like the Excurszon are of a VCI? different kin from the mental orces at worfk in the production o a poem like Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind.” In the one case the poet's artistic methods, like those of the Greek architect, show, and are intended to show, the solid strength of the structure. In the other, the 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 towards the weighty iambic movement whose rimary function is to state, or towards those lighter movements which we still call, for want of more convenient words, anapestic and dactylic, whose primary function is to suggest. Whenever Wordsworth and Keats pass from the former to the latter they pass at once into doggerel. Nor is it difficult to see why English anapestic 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 anapestic or dactylic line as he can pack his iambic line, is versification becomes rugged, harsh, pebbly—becomes so of necessity. Nor is this all: anapestic and dactylic verse must in English be obtrusively alliterative, or the same pebbly effect begins to be felt. The anapestic line is so full of syllables that in a 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 smoothing 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 sou is rimarily that of suggestion by sound or symbol, but if his appeal) is that of direct and logical statement the diffuseness inseparable from good anapestic and dactylic verse is a source of weakness such as the true artist should fmd intolerable.
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, TRY
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 storrzello or rispetto, ggzufud her emotions through nature's symbols; it may be shown by Keats in that perfect fusion of all poetic elements of which he was such a master, in the manipulation 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 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 est 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 vromrns (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 superadded. This is to widen the definition of poetry so as to include all imaginative literature, and Plato seems to have given an equally wide meaning to the word vroimns. Only, while Aristotle considered rroimns to be an imitation of the facts of nature, Plato 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 nor poet).
Perhaps the first critic who tacitly revolted against the dictum that substance, and not form, is the indispensable basis of poetry was Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose treatise upon the arrangement of words is really a very ine 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 is fundamentally a matter of style. The Aristotelian 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 between 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, even in the time of the appearance of the Waverley N ovels, the Quarterly Review would sometimes speak of them as “ poems ”; and perhaps even later the same might be said of romances so concrete in method and diction, and so full of poetic energy, as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, where we get absolutely 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. Perhaps, indeed, many critics would now go so far in the contrary direction as to say with Hegel (A esthetik, ii. 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 the division between poetical critics is not now between Aristotelians and Baconians; it is of a different kind altogether. While one group of critics may still perhaps say with Dryden that “ a poet is a maker, as the name signifies, ” and that “ he who cannot make,
