Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/268

258 POETRY demetricized and turned into prose ! Tboreau 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 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 that of Sappho sometimes, Pindar often, Shelley always), or latent in Import- colour, such as that of some of the Persian poets. To ance of discuss the question, Which of these two kinds of poetry ncal is the more precious t would be idle, but are we not driven Uous to a dmit 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 architect, show, and are intended to show, the solid strength of the struc ture. 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 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. 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 anapaestic and dactylic verse must suggest and not state, as even so comparatively successful a tour de force as Shelley s " Sensitive Plant " shows. Concise ness 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 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 ob trusive 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 statement the diffuseness inseparable from good anapaestic and dactylic verse is a source of weakness such as the true artist should find intolerable. 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 I* is that includes " composition," it can be shown that poetry artist ic to be entitled to the name must be artistic in form. m fom< Whether a poem be a Welsh triban or a stamello impro vised 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 may be shown by Keats in that per fect 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 TTOI??T^S (first used to designate the poetic artist by Herodotus) means maker, Aristotle seems to have assumed that the indis pensable basis of poetry is invention. He appears to have thought that a poet is a poet more on account of the com position 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 imita tions either by mere articulate words or by metre super- added. 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 TTOI^O-IS. Only, while Aristotle considered TroiT/cris 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). 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 un metrical narrative so poetic in motive, so concrete in dic tion, 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 Dionysius 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 is fundamentally a matter of style. The Aristo telian theory as to invention, however, dominated all criti cism 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 fol lowers 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 imagina-