withstanding all his unquestionable inspiration) is mostly taken as a type of the poets of art. In French literature Hugo, notwithstanding all his mastery over poetic methods, represents the poets of energy.
In some writers, and these the very greatest in Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and perhaps Goethe—poetic energy and poetic art are seen in something like equipoise. It is of poetry as an art, however, that we have mainly to speak here; and all we have to say upon poetry as an energy is that the critic who, like Aristotle, takes this wide view of poetry the critic who, like him, recognizes the importance of poetry in its relations to man's other expressions of spiritual force, claims a place in point of true critical sagacity above that of a critic who, like Plato, fails to recognize that importance. And assuredly no philosophy of history can be other than inadequate should it ignore the fact that poetry has had as much effect upon human destiny as that other great human energy by aid of which, from the discovery of the use of fire to that of the electric light, the useful arts have been developed.
With regard to poetry as an art, in the present work most of the great poems of the world have been or will be examined either in connexion with the names of the writers or with the various literatures to which they belong; consequently these remarks must be confined to general principles. To treat historically so vast a subject as poetry would be obviously impossible here.
Previous xxxxxAll that can be attempted is to inquire briefly—(1) What is poetry? (2) What is the position it takes up in relation to the other arts? (3) What is its value and degree of expressional power in relation to these? and, finally, (4) What varieties of poetic art are the outcome of the two great kinds of poetic impulse, dramatic imagination and lyric or egoistic imagination?
xxxxxxxx1. What is Poetry?—Definitions are for the most part alike unsatisfactory and treacherous; but definitions of poetry are proverbially so. Is it possible to lay down invariable principles of poetry, such as those famous "invariable principles" of the Rev. Mr Bowles, which in the earlier part of the century awoke the admiration of Southey and the wrath of Byron? Is it possible for a critic to say of any metrical phrase, stanza, or verse, "This is poetry," or "This is not poetry"? Can he, with anything like the authority with which the man of science pronounces upon the natural objects brought before him, pronounce upon the qualities of a poem? These are questions that have engaged the attention of critics ever since the time of Aristotle.
Byron, in his rough and ready way, has answered them in one of those letters to the late John Murray, which, rich as they are in nonsense, are almost as rich in sense. "So far are principles of poetry from being invariable," says he, "that they never were nor ever will be settled. These principles mean nothing more than the predilections of a particular age, and every age has its own and a different from its predecessor. It is now Homer and now Virgil; once Dryden and since Sir Walter Scott; now Corneille and now Racine; now Crébillon and now Voltaire." This is putting the case very strongly—perhaps too strongly. But if we remember that Sophocles lost the first prize for the Œdipus Tyrannus; if we remember what in Dante's time (owing partly, no doubt, to the universal ignorance of Greek) were the relative positions of Homer and Virgil, what in the time of Milton were the relative positions of Milton himself, of Shakespeare, and of Beaumont and Fletcher; again, if we remember Jeffrey's famous classification of the poets of his day, we shall be driven to pause over Byron's words before dismissing them. Yet some definition, for the purpose of this essay, must be here attempted; and, using the phrase "absolute poetry" as the musical critics use the phrase "absolute music," we may, perhaps, without too great presumption submit the following:—
Absolute poetry defined.Absolute poetry is the concrete and artistic expression of Absolute the human mind in emotional and rhythmical language.
This at least will be granted, that no literary expression can properly speaking be called poetry that is not in a certain deep sense emotional, whatever may be its subject matter, concrete in its method and its diction, rhythmical in movement, and artistic in form.
It is concrete in method.That the expression of all real poetry must be concrete in method and diction is obvious, and yet this dictum would exclude from the definition much of what is called didactic poetry. With abstractions the poet has nothing to do, save to take them and turn them into concretions; for, as artist, he is simply the man who by instinct embodies in concrete forms that "universal idea" which Gravina speaks of—that which is essential and elemental in nature and in man; as poetic artist he is simply the man who by instinct chooses for his concrete forms metrical language. And the questions to be asked concerning any work of art are simply these—
Is that which is here embodied really permanent, universal, and elemental? and Is the concrete form embodying it really beautiful—acknowledged as beautiful by the soul of man in its highest moods? Any other question is an impertinence.
Examples are always useful in discussions such as this.
As an example of the absence of concrete form in verse take the following lines from George Eliot's Spanish Gypsy:—
"Speech is but broken light upon the depth
Of the unspoken; even your loved words
Float in the larger meaning of your voice
As something dimmer."
Without discussing the question of blank verse cadence and the weakness of a line where the main accent falls upon a positive hiatus, "of the unspoken," we would point out that this powerful passage shows the spirit of poetry without its concrete form. The abstract method is substituted for the concrete. Such an abstract phrase as "the unspoken" belongs entirely to prose.
As to what is called ratiocinative poetry, it might perhaps be shown that it does not exist at all. Not by syllogism, but per saltum, must the poet reach in every case his conclusions. We listen to the poet—we allow him to address us in rhythm or in rhyme—we allow him to sing to us while other men are only 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.
It is rhythmic in movement.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
