dramatic or lyric movement 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 outline 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 eagemess to use the picture for merely illustrating the solemnity and importance of his story lends to the picture that very authenticity 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 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 7l'OL7]7";]S but riozébs. And as regards 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 could well be shown by a history of poetry: music and the lyrical function of the poet began together, but here, as in other things, the progress of art from the implicit to the explicit has separated the two. Every art has its special function, has a certain work which it can do better than any one of its sistcr arts. Hence its right of existence. For instance, before the “sea of emotion ” within the soul has become “ curdled into thoughts, ” it can be expressed in inarticulate 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 language rhythmically arranged-words steeped in music and colour, but at the same time embodying ideas-can do what no mere wordless music is able to achieve in giving it expression, just as unrhythmical language, language 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, however, are a good case in point. Here the poet's passion is expressed so completely 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 Aeschylus a11d from Sophocles. Nor is this DOWBI confined to the Greek poets. The students of Virgil have often and with Justice commented on such lines as Aen. 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 Iproduced by the mere ingenuity of the artist, as in Edgar Poe's “ lalume.” The oet'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 monotonous reiterations, by hollow and dreadful reverberations of gloomy sounds-though as an artist whose vehicle was articulate sgeech he was obliged to add gloomy ideas, in order to give to is 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.
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 disciples, who almost seem to think that inarticulate tone can not only suggest ideas but express themcan give voice to the Verstand, in short, as well as to the Vermmft 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 vulgari eloquio so important. 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 l1is father was, as 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 resulted from a like exceptional “ environment, ” or from the fact that his father was a musician. But when we find. that Shelley seems to have been without the real passion for music, that Rossetti disliked 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 superfluity, this would only 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.
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. 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. One thing is at least certain, that prose, however 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. Hence, most of the so-called poetry of Hesiod is not poetry at all. The Muses who spoke to him about “truth” on Mt Helicon made the common mistake of confounding fact with
