260 P O E T R Y 2. What Position dots Poetry take tip in Relation to the other Arts 1 Notwithstanding the labours of Lessing and his followers, the position accorded by criticism to poetry in relation to the other arts was never so uncertain and anomalous as at the present moment. On the one hand there is a class of critics who, judging from their perpetual comparison of poems to pictures, claim her as a sort of handmaid of painting and sculpture. On the other hand the disciples of Wagner, while professing to do homage to poetry, claim her as the handmaid of music. To find her proper place is therefore the most important task the critic can undertake at this time, though it is one far beyond the scope of a paper so brief as this. With regard to the relations of poetry to painting and sculpture, however, it seems necessary to glance for a moment at the saying of Simonides, as recorded by Plutarch, that poetry is a speaking picture and that painting is a mute poetry. It appears to have had upon modern criticism as much in fluence since the publication of Lessing s Laocoon as it had before. Perhaps it is in some measure answerable for the modern vice of excessive word-painting. Beyond this one saying, there is little or nothing in Greek literature to show that the Greeks recognized between poetry and the plastic and pictorial arts an affinity closer than that which exists between poetry and music and dancing. Understanding artistic methods more profoundly than the moderns, and far too profoundly to suppose that there is any special and peculiar affinity between an art whose medium of expres sion is marble and an art whose medium of expression is a growth of oral symbols, the Greeks seem to have studied poetry not so much in its relation to painting and sculp ture as in its relation to music and dancing. It is matter of familiar knowledge, for instance, that at the Dionysian festival it was to the poet as "teacher of the chorus" (xopoSiSao-KoAos) that the prize was awarded, even though the " teacher of the chorus " were /Eschylus himself or Sophocles. And this recognition of the relation of poetry to music is perhaps one of the many causes of the superi ority of Greek to all other poetry in adapting artistic means to artistic ends. In Greek poetry, even in Homer s description of the shield of Achilles, even in the famous description by Sophocles of his native woods in the (Edipus Coloneus, such word-painting as occurs seems, if not inevit able and unconscious, so alive with imaginative feeling as to become part and parcel of the dramatic or lyric move ment 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 eagerness 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 Troths but uotSo?. 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 we should be able to show did our scheme permit an historical treatment of poetry : we should be able to show that music and the lyrical function of the poet began together, but that 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 sister 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 unrhyth mical 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 tram melled by heavy conditions) ; and sometimes poetry, as in Pindar s odes and the waves of the Greek chorus, can I do, though in the same imperfect way, the work of music. i The poems of Sappho, however, are perhaps the best case in point. Here the poet s passion is expressed so com pletely by the mere sound of her verses that a good recita tion 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 ^Eschylus, and from Sophocles. Nor is this power confined to the Greek poets. The students of Virgil have often and with justice commented on such lines as jEn. 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 pro duced by the mere ingenuity of the artist, as in Edgar Poe s "Ulalume." The poet 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 speech he was obliged
1 to add gloomy ideas, in order to give to his work the intellectual coherence necessary for its existence as a poem. I He evidently set out to do this, and he did it, and I " 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 wonder- | ful 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 enthusi-
j astic of his disciples, who almost seem to think that