pear to belong to a barbarous condition of humanity. Say, rather, to a simple and primeval condition. After science and analysis have done their best, there is still need for us nineteenth-century people to make a synthesis, and a larger synthesis than ever to rise from anatomic studies to the contemplation and enjoyment of Lifefrom particulars to the universal. The Man of Science, the Man of Business, break up the whole into little bits, for analysis, for calculation, for sale; the Poet reconstructs the shattered world, and shows it still complete and beautiful. Poetry proper (the Poetry of which I speak) is metrical, by the nature of it. Metre is sine qua non; and though you may compare this given specimen of Prose with that given specimen of Poetry, and prefer the former, and even rightly prefer it, and prove that it possesses a larger share of poetic qualities than the latter, yet the one remains a different quality of thing from the other. And however high the degree of poetic expression that has, in exceptional instances (fewer, perhaps, than we vaguely fancy), been attained in Prose, Metrical Poetry remains the best medium of poetic expression. The works of the Poets-of the high men who wrote in metre, are, as matter of fact, the real treasury of poetic language. The Sense of Beauty, seeking expression in words, finds in Metrical Poetry its most fitting embodiment. Metre, I repeat (for there is much misconception as to this), is the natural form of Poetry; and it brings about certain important results, for thereby is Poetry constituted as one of the Arts an Art which is perhaps the earliest, as it is the most famous of them all. Art comes to man before Science; also, it comes after Science, and includes it. 'But what is your boasted Art, after all, but a toy - a knack of rhymes and metres?' Yes! and what in fact, too, are bits of cobalt and vermillion, when you come to consider them dispassionately? What is Raffael's brush? a tag of bristles (you may count them, if you like) — what is Mozart's harpsichord? a frame of chips and wire. And what are you yourself, my friend? what am I? but a bundle of rods, and strings, and pipes? Only, somehow, there is a something slipt in which we call Life -nay, Soul, and which makes a difference. We don't know what it is: we see it in its effects. Poetry has a good deal of life in it. What is old Homer himself, this very long time, but a name, a dream, a question? But the Homeric Poems are alive at this day over the face of the earth, springing up fresh and fresh like grass, new to every new generation. They have outlived dynasties, and nations, and creeds. Two hundred and fifty years ago, William Shakespeare's body (eyes and hands, tongue and brain) was hidden in the ground beside a little river in Warwickshire; but his Book is not buried in this world yet, it is running about, lively enough. He put himself, partly, into words into words of poetry. Why do we love and reverence Art ? Because it gives a natural scope, and lasting expression, to Genius. Why is Painting' a grand word?. Because the Art of Painting has embodied for us the genius of such men as Van Eyck and John Bellini, Raffael and Titian, Holbein and Hogarth and Turner. What is glorious in music? That it keeps for us, safer than wine in its flask, the fine inspirations that come (we know not how, they knew not how) to a Bach, a Gluck, a Handel, a Mozart, a Purcell, a Beethoven, a Rossini; and to those nameless men who made the delicious old melodies of Ireland, and Scotland, and Wales. And even so, by the Art of Poetry has embodied itself the power and beauty and wisdom and versatility of the minds of the Greek, Latin, Oriental, Italian, Spanish, German, English Poets, a noble crowd. The work of these men cannot be held as toyish and trifling. Their place in human history is honourable, and most honourable. The Art through which they reach us, through which they belong to us, certainly is wonderful, and to be reverenced. I had intended to submit in this place some thoughts on Painting, Sculpture, and Musical Composition, distinguishing these, along with Poetry, as Creative Arts, of course using the word 'creative' in no absolute sense; and also on Acting, on Musical Performance, and on Oratory, describing these as Arts of Personal Communication; as well as on the semi-fine-arts (is there no good phrase for them?) which ally beauty with usefulness. Architecture I reckon one of these: also Prose-Writing, which is perhaps to Poetry what Architecture is to Sculpture and Painting; mere Prose being mere building, like Baker Street, or Pimlico, or a brick wall; good Prose rising and rising, till it meets, competes, almost blends with Poetry. But it seems better to refrain for the present than to deal with these mat Metre is the bodily form of Poetry: and now on metre let us say a few words. Metre, a stimulant and a delight, acts through the ear. A man deaf from his birth could not taste the true enjoyment of Poetry: though he might have some pleasure, through the eye, from those verses ar ranged in the visible forms of eggs, altars turbots, lozenges, which you see in oldfashioned books. Plan, ters too cursorily: and I leave untouched well-proportioned words convey. the question as to Landscape-Gardening's ideas, images, style, words, are all modulatplace among the arts. ed to one harmonious result. All, together, moves and floats, and orbs itself. A rapid-glancing and airy logic (but strong and genuine) makes itself felt throughout; the highest and sweetest gifts of memory, of fancy, of imagination, are now fittest to the soul's mood; the synthetic, comparing, harmonising, unifying power is in the ascendant. The soul rises above trivial cares and hindrances, moving rapidly, breathing in all its body like a bird, rejoicing in every cadence of its beating wings; all its powers at command, all of them acting in due subordination; it is become more refined, clairvoyant, harmonious; organised form and regulated movement are combined with a mystical and super-sensuous beauty. Beautiful Proportionality, manifest yet mysterious, that all-pervading quality of Nature's work, here it is also, developed in the world of man's mind, in the microcosm of human thought. Metrical movement in words, swing, emphasis and cadence, melodious and varied tones, rhythm and rhyme, have (as matter of fact) certain peculiar effects upon us. Some people are more moved than others, more vibrant; but all (unless notably defective) are thus moved in some degree. We do not examine or estimate the Art of Painting or the Art of Music, according to the impressions of those who have least natural sensibility to those arts; nor need we stop to consider degrees of sensibility to Poetry, or to argue with those who care little or nothing for Poetry, or complain of them, or lament over them. Innumerable people know, from experience, that metrical movement tends to draw the mind into, and keep it in, a particular mood -a mood peculiarly favourable to certain impressions. Partly the mind is drawn, partly it yields. Its own feeling coincides with the known intention of the writer, or speaker. It receives, and it prepares itself for delight. It is at once soothed and stimulated. It desires and expects warmth of feeling, beauty of imagery, subtlety and rapidity of thought, refined, rich, and expressive forms of words, in the best possible order. And all these are given to it by good Poetry. In its melodious movement, it raises a succession of pleasurable expectations, and in due succession fulfils them; shows at once a constant obedience to law, and a joyful boldness and mastery; with free yet symmetrical swing and cadence, with regulated exuberance (like that of Nature in all her best forms) a beautiful proportionality develops itself as by spontaneous movement, giving to each part its utmost effect, while each remains in due subordination to the whole. Thus far, the effect closely resembles that of Music; but during the working of Poetry's enchantment, the intellectual powers also are in a peculiar condition of pleasurable excitement and clairvoyance. Beautiful Proportionality permeates the thought and the spirit of the thought which the This is the work of man's joyful sense of beauty (of the beauty which is in all things, rightly seen) expressing itself in choicest rhythmic words; and this is the most complete manner of human expression. Every man, when he speaks his best, would utter Poetry, if he could. Shall we then call any composition of metrical words a poem ?- and leave no distinction at all between Poetry and Verse? This would not do. Without metre, no Poetry; but, given a metrical form of words, have we necessarily Poetry? Not so. What is thus expressed must be something naturally fit to be so expressed. For expression by the Pictorial, or by the Musical Art, certain things are fit, other unfit, and the limits of these Arts are well marked. The Art of Poetry is of wider scope, less definite boundary; hence the innumerable mistakes of critics, and of poets too. But on the whole it is recognised that Poetry is doing its right and peculiar office when it expresses imaginative truth, in forms of beauty, or of sublimity, imbued with tenderness, awe, aspiration, exultation, every mood of noble emotion; and the general result is harmonious thought and feeling in harmonious words. The Poet does not think in prose, and turn his thought into poetry, by measurement and arrangement and decoration. His thought is poetic. The beauties of a true Poem are not excrescences - they are part of the life and nature of the work. When a true poetic impulse, seeking verbal expres sion, clothes itself successfully in rhythmic speech, the rhythm will have a natural suitableness to the thought: its words will be the fittest and choicest words; its arrangement of them, the best possible arrangement. In good Poetry, the Metre is not a limitation, but a power; it gives not shackles, but wings. Which more picturesque and more exact. The Spirit of Poetry itself it was, which, at an earlier stage of language, fitted words to things, and ever it requires the word and phrase not merely to approach but to get as near as possible to the thought. Many or most of the finest forms of language we owe, as we shall find if we trace them up, to the Poets. The chief wealth of Prose is borrowed or adapted from the treasurehouse of Poetry. Poetry has not only ori words, but has taught Prose the general power of language, and given it the hint of invention. They who, loving high prose, disparage Poetry, are, if they knew it, a little ungrateful. I know a very great Prose-writer of our time, who is not always respectful to Poetry in the abstract, yet whose pages are bejewelled with costly phrases and sentences from the Poets. Good Poetry is in every way the choicest arrangement of words: it demands, therefore, and rewards, the nicest elocution. And here let us glance at the benefits which Poetry confers on Language. Poetry preserves, upholds, and improves Language. It chooses the most clear, vivid, and exact forms of speech; and supports the purest methods of pronunciation. Poetry is the chief storehouse of authority on these matters. Changes must gradually come into every Language: but Poetry opposes itself to carelessness, conventionality, vulgarism, ginated the best words and applications of corruption of whatever kind, all those deteriorations to which ordinary speaking and writing are so subject. And remember that when language decays, not merely good taste, but thought and reason also decay. One cannot rate highly the jus et norma loquendi of our own day, but doubtless it would be many degrees worse but for the Poets. The diction of social life is at present for the most part vague, unpoetic and corrupt; so also is the general run of our public writing and public oratory, both of which indeed being addressed to the hour, use naturally the phraseology of the hour; but it is proper for men of literature, and it is their duty, to uphold our noble tongue out of these debasements. This, though a subordinate, is an important function of literature, and especially of the flower of literature, Poetry, namely, to preserve and if possible enhance Language (which is Thought's body) in health and beauty. Many words and phrases now in common use are less than half alive; blood from the intelligent vital source hardly enters their cold lumpish substance. Human speech of this kind resembles the Horny Woman whose skin was hard warts all over, Now think of the diffusion of the English smiles, blushes, every sympathetic change, language over the face of the globe, and of being hopelessly and hideously encrusted. the still mightier future that lies before it The Poets by their genius, their sensibility among the unborn millions of Australia and and culture, are led to use those forms of of the American Continent, and it will aptheir native tongue which are essentially pear no light thing to uphold the purity and best. And the general characteristic of strength of the great English Tongue, and their forms, where differing from those in to confirm it by examples and models. ordinary use, is by no means additional When a language becomes corrupt, so also pomp, elaboration, inflation, but on the con- do thought and reason; the form of civilisatrary greater simplicity, naïvety, directness, tion which it contains and expresses must nature, truth; and thus they are at once deteriorate along with it. FOURTH SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. VI. 176. The youth enjoying his beloved poem, perusing and reperusing till every line becomes familiar as his own name, is unawares storing his memory with better forms of language than he could elsewhere find. Considered merely as a literary composition, a good Poem is incomparably the most perfect of such things, although Prose has a wider and more varied service. - Dealing oftener with high and abstruse matters, good Poetry is always as clear as the nature of the subject and the nature of human speech will allow. If not, it so far falls short of what it might be, and of what Poetry is, at its best. At the same time let me remark, that good Poetry is not to be read lazily and loungingly, but with both eyes open, and all one's wits about one. Even in this lively literary weather, so to speak, of our own day, when it snows novels, and hails essays, and blows newspaper-articles from all points of the compass at once, a good Poem still finds its readers, is oftener read, and better remembered, than the other things. Repeat to me a sentence or two of that leader which you were so much pleased with, eighteen months ago, or say the day before yesterday. You can't. It was not meant, you will say, to be remembered verbatim it did its part, gave its message, had its influence. But (allowing this its value, even allowing the influence of the clever swiftly read newspaper article to have been always a good influence, never a bad, which would be allowing a great deal) do you think it would be well that all writing should be of this hasty and ephemeral character ? nothing written with care, and with the highest care? nothing that will be worth reading next month, or next year? Can we not guess some of the probable effects on taste, and on judgment too? To its Poets, the World on the whole is not unappreciating or ungrateful. The greatest names in Literature, among the greatest in all History, are the names of Poets. Over millions and generations of men they have an influence, not confined to one people or tongue. The higher the Poet's genius, the more it belongs to all mankind; and its effect is to unite them all in the feeling of a common humanity. Poetry, in its actual examples, is differently conditioned and modified in different languages. The Poet is limited by his instrument, and some languages give more freedom and power in poetic expression than others: but we must not deviate into these tempting byways. Poetry, as we believe, preserves and purifies languages, cultivates good taste, helps memory, fills the mind with fair images and high unselfish thoughts, wondrously increases our perception and enjoyment of natural beauty, relieves the pain of our usual lack or poverty of expression, shaping and bringing within compass multifarious thoughts and feelings, otherwise inexpressible. But the boon of boons, including all the rest, is the general enlargement, elevation, emancipation, of the soul. Poetry universalises. In its last result it is never despondent, but inspired with the loftiest joy and courage. It begins in the glad sense of Universal Beauty, and when it bestows the same. glad sense upon its hearers, its result is accomplished. Here and there you find a short poem, exceptional, expressing a despondent mood, but the best Poetry in its total effect is cheerful and encouraging. Even when it treats of sorrow, of pain, of death, it is sympathetic, but not despondent and gloomy. The very production of the exceptional sad poem, indicates a degree of victory over the sadness. The Iliad, treating much of war, wounds, and violent death, is animated and exhilarating throughout : of Dante's great poem the first part is most read, for its fierce picturesqueness and dreadful fascination; but the second is an ascending symphony of hope and faith, and the third part a hymn of heavenly rapture. Chaucer is cheerful as the green landscape after a spring shower; Spenser full of rich vivacity and bold adventure; Shakespeare's book a multifarious world of movement and interest ; nothing did Goethe so much abhor, in life and in literature, as despondency,discourage ment. The Poet, when he is most himself, rises to a high and serene view. He will not exhibit grief, misery, horror, in isolated sharpness and for the mere sensational effect; these must lose their harsh and painful prominence, and fall into place in a large and noble circle of ideas. The merely painful always marks as inferior the work in which it is found. Didactic poetry, and doctrinal poetry, are also inferior, so far as they are narrowed not merely by human but by particular limitations, concerned too much with certain people, opinions, circumstances, with the temporary and accidental. In the pure mountain air which blows over the realm of true Poetry, no mental epidemic can exist, or if it rises thither it melts away; fever of partisanship, itch of personality, ophthalmia of dogmatism, lie below with fog upon the marsh-lands. Yet the Poet escapes not the influence of his time, usually it affects him far too much. He is sensitive, sympathetic, enters easily into the feelings and opinions of others, but does not so easily escape again. He is apt to fall into sudden timidity in the midst of his boldest enterprises, apt to yield to the pressure of the hour. Also his delicate senses persuade him to luxury and sloth. His experience of the stupidity and the selfishness which have possession of so many human beings goads him sometimes into one or another form of cynicism. He may sometimes write below his own dignity, and that of his Art. But, remember, if he puts any evil (here is not meant by evil, what this person or that person may | tion; the other, will, intention, conscious object to, but contradiction of his own effort. Of true Poems, some have more of better self, treason to humanity) · if he the one, and some of the other; and so also puts any wickedness into his poetry, it is so of different parts of a Poem, one part is much the less Poetry. So far it suffers loss done chiefly from will, another part from of value and of rank. The external facts, impulse. The Poets, exceedingly various as too, and incidents connected with composi- they are, seem to me to be divisible maintion and publication, are often ugly, nause- ly into two great classes, those whose work ous and warping. springs chiefly from the pure poetic impulse, and those whose work is chiefly produced by will and intention. The ideal, the typical Poet has all but superhuman power of vision and of speech. But in the actual, every Poet is very limited and imperfect. Even the greatest Poets are faulty, full of faults and short-comings. Each, limited already in his genius, is also limited from without, and does not do even as well as he might. On every side a dull and perverse world of persons and circumstances presses in upon his work. The fair Poem, a gift to many, to the Poet himself is often but a poor shadow, a faint reminiscence of some glorious message. 'Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, Never yet has a Great Poem been really written only hints and fragments. No one as yet has delivered his message even as well as he might have done. The masterpieces of all Poetry are only such by comparison. I think-hope-might almost say believe, that the best poets are yet to come. Do we not hope for a better earth than has yet been? And we all hope for a better life elsewhere. Shall not that have its Poetry, think you, inexpressibly greater and finer than any thing we can now conceive or dream of?-and when Man is more in unison with Heaven (be it here or elsewhere) a fairer, fuller Poetry will surely arise yet, with all its imperfections, that which we already possess is a great gift. Of Poetry as written, Poetry as we have it, there are many degrees and varieties. Every poem need not be great-but it must be genuine in its own kind. Every poem is the result of two co-operating forces: one, impulse, emotion, inspira Those whom I would place in the second named and lower class (let us call it class P.W., from poetic will) are able men who have been turned, by circumstances and choice, in proportions varying in the various instances, to express themselves through the medium of verse, and who on the whole successfully accomplish their aim. Other men, of equal or greater total capacity, are quite ungifted for singing their thoughts; but these of whom we speak have more or less a share of the necessary gift; some true musical impulse moves in the midst of their general intellectual power; each, along with his other qualities, has enough of the metrical, the musical, the poetic, to urge him or at least to enable him to write in verse, and this gives him his claim to be called a Poet; though still, one will prove much more of a Poet than another. Some poets there are, who, in the economy of things, appear to be made for the unpoetic listener, since metrical language works more or less upon all men. In the Poets whom I would reckon in the other class (let us call it class P.I., from poetic impulse), the purely poetic impulse is the master quality, irrepressible and all-pervading; even as the born Painter has a constant delight in colour for its own sake. One might, I think, arrange the names of all Poets known to him (though in certain cases there might be question and difficulty) broadly into these two large classes. This done, it probably strikes us, that such a one standing in the P.W. class is on the whole greater than such another in the P.I.: but we also find that all the greatest Poets in the total list stand in the class marked P.I.; and that the precious qualities peculiar to Metrical Poetry come to us most abundantly from natures wherein also dwell the highest sensibility to beauty, the swiftest movement of thought, the most penetrative intellect. The imagery of these men is usually that of the true Imagination, intuitive, dealing with essential relations of things; the imagery of those who would come into our second class is collected chiefly by the Fancy, in her sport, or for parade. |