better off. Artificialities appear even in comparatively modern prose. The prose of Milton is full of rhetoric and the great Burke had rhetorical characteristics that we call Asiatic. We are familiar with the euphuistic qualities of the Elizabethan prose, especially pervading John Lyly's novel Euphues and Sidney's Arcadia. In an excellent essay Plutarch shows that he understood that verse was largely natural to man in a certain stage of civilization, because all ornament was natural to him. In his essay on "Wherefore the Pythian Priestess now Ceases to Deliver Her Oracle in Verse," he gives the love of ornament as the real reason for the growth of metre as a form of literary expression. Often the topic is broached whether men like Hardy and Meredith are greater as poets than as novelists. The question is not put properly. It should be, Do these writers cease being poets when they use the fetters of rhyme and metre, or are they with those fetters greater poets than they were in their novels. I have no intention of trying to answer these questions, though it is usually agreed that these writers are greater in their novels than in their verse, but the point is that they are poets whether they use prose or verse as their medium. Some authors get more ecstasy into their work when they write in prose than in verse, as readers of the novels and verse poems of Dickens, George Eliot and Thackeray are aware. Other authors are successful in crystallizing their ecstasy whether they write in prose or verse. Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Scott, Emerson, Poe, James Thomson, B. V., Hardy, Meredith, Symons, Hugo, De Musset, Goethe and Heine, are examples of masters of the literature of ecstasy in both prose and verse. Other verse poets have not at all succeeded nor tried to succeed in writing ecstasy in ordinary prose. The authors who have given us ecstasy only in prose but have not tried to do so at all in verse are too numerous to mention. I believe that poetry will again return to the natural language of prose. Critics are taking an entirely different stand toward rhythm, admitting that the poets have the right to vary their measures, create new rhythm and not be held in bondage to old verse forms. The day is disappearing when a man like Hegel could say that a production not in metre is not poetry. A sane attitude towards the free use of rhythms by poets has been given us in a New Study of English Poetry by Henry Newboldt. Liberal critics are helping the poets break their shackles; the following passage from a review of Newbolt's book, by J. Middleton Murry is worth quoting: Great Poets have always been those who believed that poetry was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest arguments of which the soul of man is capable. Yet a poetic theory such as this seems bound to include great prose, and not merely the prose which can most easily be assimilated to the conditions of poetry, such as Plato's Republic, or Milton's Areopagitica, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely the colloquial prose of Tchekov's Cherry Orchard has as good claim to be called poetry as The Essay on Man, Tess of the D'Urbervilles as The Ring and the Book, The Possessed as Phedre. Where are we to call a halt in the inevitable progress by which the kinds of literary art merge into one? If we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in danger of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening upon what will have to be in the last analysis a merely formal difference. The difference in such must be substantial and essential aspects of Literature.* *Passages of a similar import will be found by Professor George M. Harper in the preface to his John Morley and Other Essays, in Richard Aldington's "The Art of Poetry," The Dial, August, 1920, and the preface to F. S. Flint's Otherworld. CHAPTER VII MORAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS AS POETRY WHEN WRITTEN WITH ECSTASY OUR views of poetry, or the literature of ecstasy, illuminate many dark crannies in one of the most unfathomable caverns of aesthetic speculation; speculation of the connection between poetry and morals, form and matter, art for art's sake and didacticism. It has been often asked whether poetry should deal with moral subjects, sociological questions, and philosophical ideas. The question disappears when we regard literature of ecstasy in prose as poetry, for all ideas are dealt with in prose and some may be ecstatically treated. If poetry is an atmosphere that suffuses literature, it may bathe most u various ideas. Emotional treatment of the ideas gives us literature of ecstasy or poetry. If the natural language of ecstasy is prose, we certainly do not wish to see a train of philosophical, moral or sociological views treated in verse. To this extent the old critic was right who did not want poetry (a long composition in verse, as he understood it) to deal with ethics or science. The question is then not really whether poetry should be concerned with moral, sociological or psychological themes, for these themes always have poetry in them, and an emotional treatment of them brings the poetry into prominence. Ideas are the substance of poetry and nearly all ideas are moral, sociological or psychological. Even scientific facts and metaphysical utterances may be so stated by a writer as to show the latent poetry. The two 123 are But if thing Jorno, neb life! !! moral, etc..., not phitesорчае ophical !! Of course Poel may (1) anything; it simps clases to be poety of Bral with it remains in the demain qemorals, famous passages in Leaves of Grass beginning “I open my scuttle at night” and “I am an acme of things accomplished and an encloser of things to be" are emotional statements of the facts of the infinity of the universe and of the evolution of man, respectively; Whitman brought out the poetry in a philosophical and in a scientific idea. Moral views may be imaginatively treated and be poetry. The theme of Great Expectations is a sermon against pride and snobbery, and the emotional treatment, especially by force of example, makes part of the book poetry. Portrayals of hypocrites, for instance, so truthfully and movingly artistic as to arouse an ecstatic state in the reader, become poetry. Hence Tartuffe and Pecksniff are poetical portraits, even when drawn in prose. Poetry was supposed to appeal to the imagination, prose to the intellect; poetry was presumed to be dictated by the heart, prose by the mind; fancy was thought to hold sway in poetry, logic in prose. But nevertheless, the great English poets like Shakespeare, Browning, Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, gave us much poetry that was produced by the intellect, weighed by the mind, and governed by logic. Any intellectual and even moral per; formance may be elevated into poetry, when emotionally and ecstatically presented. And philosophers like Plato, Pascal, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have demonstrated this. Our definition of poetry throws much light on the subject of the relations of politics and morals, of social and philosophical problems to poetry. Poets should instruct, while delighting, is the contention of one group. They ought merely to express beauty and emotions, is the emphatic demand of another class. I doubt if there has ever been a great poet who hasn't done both of these things. If a poet is to teach he must teach something; he must express ideas, and ideas mean thoughts about life, and these in turn refer to the relations of man to himself, to one another, to the opposite sex, to society, to the universe, to nature. But it is while doing this that he must give us beauty and emotion. (2) or in any imaginatur werk! what a muddle! and how is overs mphasizes Difference betime When a prose writer is purely didactic without any emotional or aesthetic appeal he is no poet. It is manifestly absurd also for an author to give in metre didactic works which could be better written in prose. To this extent the disciples of art for art's sake are right, that the poet should not give us unecstatic political, philosophical or moral lessons in metre. If, as I believe, our emotions may be expressed in prose or free verse probably more poetically than even in metre, it is surely inadvisable to drive home a prosaic idea in verse, and especially at great length. Yet this has often been done. Browning gave us an effective harangue against spiritualism in Mr. Sludge, "The Medium," in blank (verse, Byron proved a good critic of society in Don Juan, in Ottava Rima metre, Shelley preached moral reforms in the Revolt of Islam, in the Spenserian stanza. Two of the best poems of the nineteenth century, among the masterpieces of their authors, are Swinburne's Hertha, and Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra, and they are both ecstatically didactic. The non-Essental But the future poets will not spin out their ideas in metre at great length. The short verse poem embodying an idea will always be with us, but I doubt if we will have, or at least ought to have, philosophical or moral works, extending into hundreds or thousands of lines of regular verse. John Addington Symonds has in his Essays Speculative and Suggestive taken two of the most famous dicta. in English literature regarding the function of poetry in prose |