Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/280

270 P O E T R Y kind from all other lyrics as to stand in a class by itself. As it is equal in importance to the Great Drama of Shake speare, yEschylus, and Sophocles, we may perhaps be allowed to call it the "Great Lyric." The Great Lyric must be religious it must, it would seem, be an out pouring 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 contemporaries had begun to give a languid assent. But there is nothing in Pindar, or indeed else where in Greek poetry, like the rapturous song, combining unconscious power with unconscious grace, which we have called the Great Lyric. It might perhaps be said indeed that the Great Lyric is purely Hebrew. The great But, although we could hardly expect to find it among those whose language, complex of syntax and alive with brews *" self-conscious inflexions, bespeaks the scientific knowing- stands ness of the Western mind, to call the temper of the Great alone. Lyric broadly "Asiatic" would be rash. It seems to belong as a birthright to those descendants 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. 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 inevitable if we consider for a moment the chief charac teristic 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." Xow beauty of this kind does not go to the making of the Great Lyric. Then there comes that poetry which, being ethnologic- ally 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 the wings of the Persian imagination are heavy with beauty, those of the later Arabian imagination 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 1 The truth is that, like the Great Drama, so straight and so warm does it 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 expression of lyiical imagination, we come to the artistic ode, upon which The arti subject the present writer can only reiterate here what tic d ei he has more fully said upon a former occasion. What- " reece - ever 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 spec tator 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 Pindaric unrestraint 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 ^olian 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 perhaps 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 regularit} 7 . There is no more difficult form of poetry than this, and for this reason : when in any poetical composi tion the metres are varied, there must, as the present writer has before pointed out, be a reason for such free dom, 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 sup posed to be evolved from the practice of Pindar, then that very variety which should aid the poet in expressing his 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 repre sent the triumphal 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 The and experiments. A poet like La Mothe, for instance, modern writes execrable odes, and then writes a treatise to prove ode> 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 arrangement in stanzas, are commonly called regular, and those which, following no such arrangement, are commonly called irregular. We do not agree with those who assert that irregular The ir metres are of necessity inimical to poetic art. On thegular- contrary, we believe that in modern prosody the arrange- ment 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 state of poetic exaltation, to seize hold of every kind of metrical aid, such as rhyme, caesura, &c., 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 make-

ihift, such as we find it in Cowley and his imitators, and