diction of the poet, but at the same time to avoid the recognized
and expected metrical bars upon which the poet depends. The
moment the prose poet passes from the rhythm of prose to the
rhythm of metre the apparent sincerity of his writing is destroyed.
As compared with sculpture and painting the great infirmity
of poetry, as an “imitation ” of nature, is of course that the
pl I medium is always and of necessity words-even when
nf, § f, § , ,, , no words could, in the dramatic situation, have been
spoken. It is not only Homer who is obliged sometimes
to forget that passion when at white heat is never voluble,
is scarcely even articulate; the dramatists also are obliged to forget
that in love and in hate, at their tensest, words seem weak and
foolish when compared with the silent and satisfying triumph and
glory of deeds, such as the plastic arts can render. This becomes
manifest enough when we compare the Niobe group or the Laocoon
group, or the great dramatic paintings of the modern
world, with even the finest efforts of dramatic poetry, such as the
speech of Andromache to Hector, or the speech of Priam to
Achilles, nay such as even the cries of Cassandra in the Agamemnon,
or the wailings of Lear over the dead Cordelia. Even when
writing the words uttered by Oedipus, as the terrible truth breaks
in upon his soul, Sophocles must have felt that in the holiest
chambers of sorrow and in the highest agonies of suffering reigns
that awful silence which not poetry, but painting sometimes, and
sculpture always, can render. What human sounds could render
the agony of Niobe, or the agony of Laocoon, as we see them in
the sculptor's rendering? Not articulate speech at all; not
words but wails. It is the same with hate; it is the same with
love. We are not speaking merely of the unpacking of the heart
in which the angry warriors of the Iliad indulge. Even such
subtle writing as that of Aeschylus and Sophocles falls below the
work of the painter. Hate, though voluble perhaps, as Clytaemnestra's
when hate is at that red-heat glow which the poet can
render, changes in a moment whenever that redness has been
fanned to hatred's own last complexion-whiteness as of iron
at the melting-point—when the heart has grown far too big to
be “ unpacked ” at all, and even the bitter epigrams of hate's
own rhetoric, though brief as the terrier's snap before he ffeshes
his teeth, or as the short snarl of the tigress as she springs before
her cubs in danger, are all too slow and sluggish for a soul to
which language at its tensest has become idle play. But this is
just what cannot be rendered by an art whose medium consists
solely of words.
It is in giving voice, not to emotion at its tensest, but to the variations of emotion, it is in expressing the countless shifting movements of the soul from passion to passion, that poetry shows in spite of all her infirmities her superiority to the plastic arts. Hamlet and the Agamemnon, the Iliad and the Oedipus Tyrannus, are adequate to the entire breadth and depth of man's soul
Varieties of Poetic Art.-We have now reached the inquiry: What varieties of poetic art are the outcome of the two kinds of poetic impulse, dramatic imagination and lyric or egoistic imagination? It would be impossible here to examine fully the subject of poetic imagination. In order to do so we should have to enter upon the vast question of the effect of artistic environment upon the development of man's poetic imagination; we should have to inquire how the instinctive methods of each poet and of each group of poets have been modified and often governed by the methods characteristic of their own time and country. We should have to inquire, for instance, how far such landscape as that of Sophocles in the Oedipus Coloneus and such landscape as that of Wordsworth depends upon difference of individual temperament, and how far upon difference of artistic environment. That, in any thorough and exhaustive discussion of poetic imagination, the question of artistic environment must be taken into account, the case of the Iliad is alone sufficient to show. Ages before Phrynichus, ages before an acted drama was dreamed of, a dramatic poet of the first order arose, and, though he was obliged to express his splendid dramatic imagination through epic forms, he expressed it almost as fully as if he had inherited the method and the stage of Sophocles. And if TRY
Homer never lived at all, then an entire group of dramatic poets arose in remote times whose method was epic instead of dramatic simply because there was then no stage This, contrasted with the fact that in a single half-century the tragic art of Greece arose with Aeschylus, culminated with Sophocles, and decayed with Euripides, and contrasted also with the fact that in England at one time, and in Spain at one time, almost the entire poetic imagination of the country found expression in the acted drama alone, is sufficient to show that a poet's artistic methods are very largely influenced by the artistic environments of his country and time. So vast a subject as this, however, is beyond our scope, and we can only point to the familiar instance of the troubadours and the trouveres and then pass on.
With the trouvere (the poet of the langue d'oil), the story or situation is always the end of which the musical language is the means; with the troubadour (the poet of the langue d'oe), the form is so beloved, the musical language so enthralling, that, however beautiful may be the story or situation, it is felt to be no more than the means to a more beloved and beautiful end. But then nature makes her own troubadours and her own trouveres irrespective of fashion and of time-irrespective of langue d'oe and langue d'oil. And, in comparing the troubadours with the trouvéres, this is what strikes us at once—there are certain troubadours who by temperament, by original endowment of nature, ought to have been trouvéres, and there are certain trouvéres who by temperament ought to have been troubadours. Surrounding conditions alone have made them what they are. There are those whose impulse (though writing in obedience to contemporary fashions lyrics in the langue d'oe) is manifestly to narrate, and there are those whose impulse (though writing in obedience to contemporary fashions fabliaux in the langue d'ozl) is simply to sing. In other words, there are those who, though writing after the fashion of their brother troubadours, are more impressed with the romance and wonderfulness of the human life outside them than with the romance and wonderfulness of their own passions, and who delight in depicting the external world in any form that may be the popular form of their time: and there are those who, though writing after the fashion of their brother-trouveres, are far more occupied with the life within them than with that outer life which the taste of their time and country calls upon them to paint-born rhythmists who must sing, who translate everything external as well as internal into verbal melody. Of the former class Pierre Vidal, of the latter class the author of Le Lay de l'oiselet, may be taken as the respective types.
That the same forces are seen at work in all literature's few students of poetry will deny-though in some poetical groups these forces are no doubt more potent than in others, as, for instance, with the great parable poets of Persia, in some of whom there is perpetually apparent a conflict between the dominance of the Oriental taste for allegory and subtle suggestion, as expressed in the Zoroastrian definition of poetry-“ apparent pictures of unapparent realities ” -and the opposite yearning to represent human life with the freshness and natural freedom characteristic of Western poetry.
Allowing, however, for all the potency of external influences, we shall not be wrong in saying that of poetic imagination there are two distinct kinds-(1) the kind of poetic imagina- Absome tion seen at its highest in Aeschylus, Sophocles, #Hd Relafive Shakespeare and Homer, and (2) the kind of poetic vision imagination seen at its highest in Pindar, Dante and Milton, or else in Sappho, Heine and Shelley. The former, being in its highest dramatic exercise unconditioned by the personal or lyrical impulse of the poet, might perhaps be called absolute dramatic vision; the latter, being more orless conditioned by the personal or lyrical impulse of the poet, might be called relative dramatic vision. It seems impossible to classify poets, or to classify the different varieties of poetry, without drawing some such distinction as this, whatever words of definition we may choose to adopt.
For the achievement of all pure lyric poetry, such as the ode, the song, the elegy, the idyll, the sonnet, the stornello, it is
