Bible Encyclopedias
Poetry

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 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'oc), 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'oc and langue d'oil. And, in comparing the troubadours with the trouveres, this is what strikes us at once - there are certain troubadours who by temperament, by original endowment of nature, ought to have been trouveres, and there are certain trouveres 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'oc) is manifestly to narrate, and there are those whose impulse (though writing in obedience to contemporary fashions fabliaux in the langue B'o'il) is simply to sing. In other words, there are those who, though writing after the fashion of their brothertroubadours, 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 literatures 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 - (i) the kind of poetic imagina- Absolute tion seen at its highest in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Relative 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 or less 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 evident that the imaginative force we have called relative vision will suffice. And if we consider the matter thoroughly, in many other forms of poetic art - forms which at first sight might seem to require absolute vision - we shall find nothing but relative vision at work.

Even in Dante, and even in Milton and Virgil, it might be difficult to trace the working of any other than relative vision. And as to the entire body of Asiatic poets it might perhaps be found (even in view of the Indian drama) that relative vision suffices to do all their work. Indeed the temper which produces true drama is, it might almost be said, a growth of the Western mind. For, unless it be Semitic, as seen in the dramatic narratives of the Bible, or Chinese, as seen in that remarkable prose story, The Two Fair Cousins, translated by Remusat, absolute vision seems to have but small place in the literatures of Asia. The wonderfulness of the world and the romantic possibilities of fate, or circumstance, or chance - not the wonderfulness of the character to whom these possibilities befall - are ever present to the mind of the Asiatic poet. Even in so late a writer as the poet of the Shah Nameh, the hero Irij, the hero Zal and the hero Zohreb are in character the same person, the virtuous young man who combines the courage of youth with the wisdom and forbearance of age. And, as regards the earlier poets of Asia, it was not till the shadowy demigods and heroes of the Asiatic races crossed the Caucasus, and breathed a more bracing air, that they became really individual characters. But among the many qualities of man's mind that were invigorated and rejuvenated by that great exodus from the dreamy plains of Asia is to be counted, above all others, his poetic imagination. The mere sense of wonder, which had formerly been an all-sufficing source of pleasure to him, was all-sufficing no longer. The wonderful adventure must now be connected with a real and interesting individual character. It was left for the poets of Europe to show that, given the interesting character, given the Achilles, the Odysseus, the Helen, the Priam, any adventure happening to such a character becomes interesting.

What then is this absolute vision, this true dramatic imagination which can hardly be found in Asia - which even in Europe cannot be found except in rare cases? Between relative and absolute vision the difference seems to be this, that the former only enables the poet, even in its very highest exercise, to make his own individuality, or else humanity as represented by his own individuality, live in the imagined situation; the latter enables him in its highest exercise to make special individual characters other than the poet's own live in the imagined situation.

" That which exists in nature," says Hegel, " is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general." And no doubt this is true as regards the plastic arts, and true also as regards literary art, save in the very highest reaches of pure drama and pure lyric, when it seems to become art no longer - when it seems to become the very voice of Nature herself. The cry of Priam when he puts to his lips the hand that slew his son is not merely the cry of a bereaved and aged parent; it is the cry of the individual king of Troy, and expresses above everything else that most naive, pathetic and winsome character. Put the words into the mouth of the irascible and passionate Lear and they would be entirely out of keeping.

It may be said then that, while the poet of relative vision, even in its very highest exercise, can only, when depicting the, Epic external world, deal with the general, the poet of Lyric, absolute vision can compete with Nature herself and deal with both general and particular. If this Singers. is really so we may perhaps find a basis for a classification of poetry and of poets. That all poets must be singers has already been maintained. But singers seem to be divisible into three classes: first the pure lyrists, each of whom can with his one voice sing only one tune; secondly the epic poets, save Homer, the bulk of the narrative poets, and the quasi-dramatists, each of whom can with his one voice sing several tunes; and thirdly the true dramatists, who, having, like the nightingale of Gongora, many tongues, can sing all tunes.

It is to the first-named of these classes that most poets belong. With regard to the second class, there are not of course many poets left for it: the first absorbs so many. But, when we come to consider that among those who, with each his one voice, can sing many tunes, are Pindar, Firdausi, Jami, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Goethe, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Schiller, Victor Hugo, the second class is so various that no generalization save such a broad one as ours could embrace its members. And now we come to class three, and must pause. The third class is necessarily very small. In it can only be placed such names as Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Homer and (hardly) Chaucer.

These three kinds of poets represent three totally different kinds of poetic activity.

With regard to the first, the pure lyrists, the impulse is pure egoism. Many of them have less of even relative vision at its highest than the mass of mankind. They are often too much engaged with the emotions within to have any deep sympathy with the life around them. Of every poet of this class it may be said that his mind to him " a kingdom is," and that the smaller the poet the bigger to him is that kingdom. To make use of a homely image - like the chaffinch whose eyes have been pricked by the bird-fancier, the pure lyrist is sometimes a warbler because he is blind. Still he feels that the Muse loves him exceedingly. She takes away his eyesight, but she gives him sweet song. And his song is very sweet, very sad, and very beautiful; but it is all about the world within his own soul - its sorrows, joys, fears and aspirations.

With regard to the second class the impulse here is no doubt a kind of egoism too; yet the poets of this class are all of a different temper from the pure lyrists. They have a wide imagination; but it is still relative, still egoistic. They have splendid eyes, but eyes that never get beyond seeing general, universal humanity (typified by themselves) in the imagined situation. Not even to these is it given to break through that law of centrality by which every " me " feels itself to be the central " me " - the only " me " of the universe, round which all other spurious " me's " revolve. This " me " of theirs they can transmute into many shapes, but they cannot create other " me's " - nay, for egoism, some of them scarcely would, perhaps, if they could.

The third class, the true dramatists, whose impulse is the simple yearning to create akin to that which made " the great Vishnu yearn to create a world," are " of imagination all coinpact " - so much so that when at work " the divinity " which Iamblichus speaks of " seizes for the time the soul and guides it as he will." The distinction between the pure lyrists and the other two classes of poets is obvious enough. But the distinction between the quasi-dramatists and the pure dramatists requires a word of .explanation before we proceed to touch upon the various kinds of poetry that spring Absolute from the exercise of relative and absolute vision. Vision. Sometimes, to be sure, the vision of the true dramatists - the greatest dramatists - will suddenly become narrowed and obscured, as in that part of the Oedipus tyrannus where Sophocles makes Oedipus ignorant of what every one in Thebes must have known, the murder of Laius. And again, finely as Sophocles has conceived the character of Electra, he makes her, in her dispute with Chrysothemis, give expression to sentiments that, in another play of his own, come far more appropriately from the lofty character of Antigone in a parallel dispute with Ismene. And, on the other hand, examples of relative vision in its furthest reaches can be found in abundance everywhere, especially in Virgil, Dante, Calderon and Milton. Some of the most remarkable examples of that high kind of relative vision which may easily be mistaken for absolute vision may be found in those great prose epics of the North which Aristotle would have called poems. Here is one from the V olsunga Saga. While the brothers of Gudrun are about their treacherous business of murdering Sigurd, her husband, as he lies asleep in her arms, Brynhild, Sigurd's former love, who in the frenzy of love turned to hate " has instigated the murderers to the deed, hovers outside the chamber with Gunnar, her husband, and listens to the wail of her rival who is weltering in Sigurd's blood. At the sound of that wail Brynhild laughs: " Then said Gunnar to her, Thou laughest not because thy heart roots are gladded, or else why doth thy visage wax so wan ? "1 This is of course very fine; but, as any two characters in that dramatic situation might have done that dramatic business, fine as it is--as the sagaman gives us the general and not the particular - the vision at work is not absolute but relative at its very highest exercise. But our examples will be more interesting if taken from English poets. In Coleridge's " Ancient Mariner " we find an immense amount of relative vision of so high a kind that at first it seems absolute vision. When the ancient mariner, in his narrative to the wedding guest, reaches the slaying of the albatross, he stops, he can proceed no farther, and the wedding guest exclaims: " God save thee, Ancient Mariner, From the fiends that plague thee thus !

Why look'st thou so ? " " With my cross-bow I shot the albatross." But there are instances of relative vision - especially in the great master of absolute vision, Shakespeare - which are higher still - so high indeed that not to relegate them to absolute vision seems at first sight pedantic. Such an example is the famous speech of Lady Macbeth in the second act, where she says: - " Had he not resembled My father as he slept, I had done 't." Marvellously subtle as is this speech, it will be found, if analysed, that it expresses the general human soul rather than any one special human soul. Indeed Leigh Hunt records the case of a bargeman who, charged with robbing a sleeping traveller in his barge, used in his confession almost identical words - " Had he not looked like my father as he slept, I should have killed as well as robbed him." Again, the thousand and one cases (to be found in every literature) where a character, overwhelmed by some sudden surprise or terror, asks whether the action going on is that of a dream or of real life, must all, on severe analysis, be classed under relative rather than under absolute vision - even such a fine speech, for instance, as that where Pericles, on discovering Marina, exclaims: " This is the rarest dream that e'er dull sleep Did mock sad fools withal "; or as that in the third act of Titus Andronicus, where Titus, beholding his mutilated and ruined daughter, asks:- " When will this fearful slumber have an end? " even here, we say, the humanity rendered is general and not particular, the vision at work is relative and not absolute. The poet, as representing the whole human race, throwing himself into the imagined situation, gives us what general humanity would have thought, felt, said or done in that situation, not what one particular individual and he alone would have thought, felt, said or done.

Now what we have called absolute vision operates in a very different way. So vividly is the poet's mere creative instinct at work that the ego sinks into passivity - becomes insensitive to all impressions other than those dictated by the vision - by the " divinity " which has " seized the soul." Shakespeare is full of examples. Take the scene in the first act of Hamlet where Hamlet hears for the first time, from Horatio, that his father's ghost haunts the castle. Having by short sharp questions elicited the salient facts attending the apparition, Hamlet says, " I would I had been there." To this Horatio makes the very commonplace reply, " It would have much amazed you." Note the marvellously dramatic reply of Hamlet - " Very like, very like ! Stayed it long ? " Suppose that this dialogue had been attempted by any other poet than a true dramatist, or by a true dramatist in any other mood than his very highest, Hamlet, on hearing Horatio's commonplace remarks upon phenomena which to Hamlet were more subversive 1 Translation of Morris and Magnusson.

of the very order of the universe than if a dozen stars had fallen from their courses, would have burst out with: " Amazed me !" and then would have followed an eloquent declamation about the " amazing " nature of the phenomena and their effect upon him. But so entirely has the poet become Hamlet, so completely has " the divinity seized his soul," that all language seems equally weak for expressing the turbulence within the soul of the character, and Hamlet exclaims in a sort of meditative irony, " Very like, very like ! " It is exactly this one man Hamlet, and no other man, who in this situation would have so expressed himself. Charles Knight has some pertinent remarks upon this speech of Hamlet; yet he misses its true value, and treats it from the general rather than from the particular side. Instances of absolute vision in Shakespeare crowd upon us; but we can find room for only one other. In the pathetic speech of Othello, just before he kills himself, he declares himself to be: " One not easily jealous, but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme." Consider the marvellous timbre of the word " wrought," as coming from a character like Othello. When writing this passage, especially when writing this word, the poet had become entirely the simple English soldier-hero, as the Moor really is - he had become Othello, looking upon himself " as not easily jealous," whereas he was " wrought " and " perplexed in the extreme " by tricks which Hamlet would have seen through in a moment.

While all other forms of poetic art can be vitalized by relative vision, there are two forms (and these the greatest) in which absolute vision is demanded, viz. the drama, and in a lesser degree the Greek epic, especially the Iliad. This will be seen more plainly perhaps if we now vary our definitions and call relative vision egoistic imagination; absolute vision dramatic imagination. Very much of the dramatist's work can be, and in fact is, effected by egoistic imagination, while true dramatic imagination is only called into play on comparatively rare occasions. Not only fine but sublime dramatic poems have been written, however, where the vitalizing power has been entirely that of lyrical imagination. We need only instance the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, the most sublime poem in the world. The dramas of Shelley too, like those of Victor Hugo and Calderon, are informed entirely by egoistic imagination. In all these splendid poems the dramatist places himself in the imagined situation, or at most he places there some typical conception of universal humanity. There is not in all Calderon any such display of dramatic imagination as we get in that wonderful speech of Priam's in the last book of the Iliad, to which we have before alluded. There is not in the Cenci such a display of dramatic imagination as we get in the sudden burst of anger from the spoilt child of gods and men, Achilles (anger which alarms the hero himself as much as it alarms Priam), when the prattle of the old man has carried him too far. It may seem bold to say that the drama of Goethe is informed by egoistic imagination only - assuredly the prison-scene in Faust is unsurpassed in the literatures of the world. Yet, perhaps, it could be shown of the passion and the pathos of Gretchen throughout the entire play that it betrays a female character general and typical rather than individual and particular.

The nature of this absolute vision or true dramatic imagination is easily seen if we compare the dramatic work of writers without absolute vision, such as Calderon, Goethe, Ben Jonson, Fletcher and others, with the dramatic work of Aeschylus and of Shakespeare. While of the former group it may be said that each poet skilfully works his imagination, of Aeschylus and Shakespeare it must be said that each in his highest dramatic mood does not work, but is worked by his imagination. Note, for instance, how the character of Clytaemnestra grows and glows under the hand of Aeschylus. The poet of the Odyssey had distinctly said that Aegisthus, her paramour, had struck the blow, but the dramatist, having imagined the greatest tragic female in all poetry, finds it impossible to let a man like Aegisthus assist such a woman in a homicide so daring and so momentous. And when in that terrible speech of hers she justifies her crime (ostensibly to the outer world, but really to her own conscience), the way in which, by the sheer magnetism of irresistible personality, she draws our sympathy to herself and her crime is unrivalled out of Shakespeare and not surpassed even there. In the Great Drama, in the Agamemnon, in Othello, in Hamlet, in Macbeth, there is an imagination at work whose laws are inexorable, are inevitable, as the laws by the operation of which the planets move around the sun. But in this essay our business with drama is confined entirely to its relations to epic.

Considering how large and on the whole how good is the body of modern criticism upon drama, it is surprising how poor is the modern criticism upon epic. Aristotle, compar Drama ing tragedy with epic, gives the palm to tragedy Compared. as being the more perfect art, and nothing can be more ingenious than the way in which he has marshalled his reasons. He tells us that tragedy as well as epic is capable of producing its effect even without action; we can judge of it perfectly, says he, by reading. He goes so far as to say that, even in reading as well as in representation, tragedy has an advantage over the epic, the advantage of greater clearness and distinctness of impression. And in some measure this was perhaps true of Greek tragedy, for as Muller in his Dissertations on the Eumenides has well said, the ancients always remained and wished to remain conscious that the whole was a Dionysian entertainment; the quest of a commonplace airirrt came afterwards. And even of Romantic Drama it may be said that in the time of Shakespeare, and indeed down through the 18th century, it never lost entirely its character of a recitation as well as a drama. It was not till melodrama began to be recognized as a legitimate form of dramatic art that the dialogue had to be struck from the dramatic action " at full speed " - struck like sparks from the roadster's shoes. The truth is, however, that it was idle for Aristotle to inquire which is the more important branch of poetry, epic or tragedy. Equally idle would it be for the modern critic to inquire how much romantic drama gained and how much it lost by abandoning the chorus.

Much has been said as to the scope and the limits of epic and dramatic poetry. If in epic the poet has the power to take the imagination of his audience away from the dramatic centre and show what is going on at the other end of the great web of the world, he can do the same thing in drama by the chorus, and also by the introduction into the dramatic circle of messengers and others from the outside world. But, as regards epic poetry, is it right that we should hear, as we sometimes do hear, the voice of the poet himself as chorus bidding us contrast the present picture with other pictures afar off, in order to enforce its teaching and illustrate its pathos? This is a favourite method with modern poets and a still more favourite one with prose narrators. Does it not give an air of self-consciousness to poetry? Does it not disturb the intensity of the poetic vision? Yet it has the sanction of Homer; and who shall dare to challenge the methods of the great father of epic? An instance occurs in Iliad v. 158, where, in the midst of all the stress of fight, the poet leaves the dramatic action to tell us what became of the inheritance of Phaenops, after his two sons had been slain by Diomedes. Another instance occurs in iii. 243-244, where the poet, after Helen's pathetic mention of her brothers, comments on the causes of their absence, " criticizes life " in the approved modern way, generalizes upon the impotence of human intelligence - the impotence even of human love - to pierce the darkness in which the web of human fate is woven. Thus she spoke (the poet tells us); but the life-giving earth already possessed them, there in Lacedaemon, in their dear native land: - 6s Oro' f' 7)S? ] KQTexEV CpUQifOOS ala iv AaKEBai,uovc auBt, 41X5 lv iraTpi&c yair. This, of course, is " beautiful exceedingly," but, inasmuch as the imagination at work is egoistic or lyrical, not dramatic; inasmuch as the vision is relative, not absolute, it does not represent that epic strength at its very highest which we call specially " Homeric," unless indeed we remember that with Homer the Muses are omniscient: this certainly may give the passage a deep dramatic value it otherwise seems to lack.

The deepest of all the distinctions between dramatic and epic methods has relation, however, to the nature of the dialogue. Aristotle failed to point it out, and this is remarkable until we remember that his work is but a fragment of a great system of criticism. In epic poetry, and in all poetry that narrates, whether the poet be Homer, Chaucer, Thomas the Rhymer, Gottfried von Strasburg, or Turoldus, the action, of course, moved by aid partly of narrative and partly by aid of dialogue, but in drama the dialogue has a quality of suggestiveness and subtle inference which we do not expect to find in any other poetic form save perhaps that of the purely dramatic ballad. In ancient drama this quality of suggestiveness and subtle inference is seen not only in the dialogue, but in the choral odes. The third ode of the Agamemnon is an extreme case in point, where, by a kind of double entendre, the relations of Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus are darkly alluded to under cover of allusions to Paris and Helen. Of this dramatic subtlety Sophocles is perhaps the greatest master; and certain critics have been led to speak as though irony were heart-thought of Sophoclean drama. But the suggestiveness of Sophocles is pathetic (as Professor Lewis Campbell has well pointed out), not ironical. This is one reason why drama more than epic seems to satisfy the mere intellect of the reader, though this may be counterbalanced by the hardness of mechanical structure which sometimes disturbs the reader's imagination in tragedy.

When, for instance, a dramatist pays so much attention to the evolution of the plot as Sophocles does, it is inevitable that his characters should be more or less plot-ridden; they have to say and do now and then certain things which they would not say and do but for the exigencies of the plot. Indeed one of the advantages which epic certainly has over drama is that the story can be made to move as rapidly as the poet may desire without these mechanical modifications of character.

The only kind of epic for Aristotle to consider was Greek epic, between which and all other epic the difference is one of kind, if the Iliad alone is taken to represent Greek epic. In speaking of the effect that surrounding conditions Ep i c. seem to have upon the form in which the poetic energy of any time or country should express itself, we instanced the Iliad as a typical case. The imagination vivifying it is mainly dramatic. The characters represent much more than the mere variety of mood of the delineator. Notwithstanding all the splendid works of Calderon, Marlowe, Webster and Goethe, it is doubtful whether as a born dramatist the poet of the Iliad does not come nearer to Aeschylus and Shakespeare than does any other poet. His passion for making the heroes speak for themselves is almost a fault in the Iliad considered as pure epic, and the unconscious way in which each actor is made to depict his own character is in the highest spirit of drama. It is owing to this speciality of the Iliad that it stands apart from all other epic save that of the Odyssey, where, however, the dramatic vision is less vivid. It is owing to the dramatic imagination displayed in the Iliad that it is impossible to say, from internal evidence, whether the poem is to be classified with the epics of growth or with the epics of art. All epics are clearly divisible into two classes, first those which are a mere accretion of poems or traditionary ballads, and second, those which, though based indeed on tradition or history, have become so fused in the mind of one great poet, so stained, therefore, with the colour and temper of that mind, as to become new crystallizations - inventions, in short, as we understand that word. Each kind of epic has excellencies peculiar to itself, accompanied by peculiar and indeed necessary defects. In the one we get the freedom - apparently schemeless and motiveless - of nature, but, as a consequence, miss that " hard acorn of thought " (to use the picturesque definition in the Volsunga Saga of the heart of a man) which the mind asks for as the core of every work of art. In the other this great requisite of an adequate central thought is found, but accompanied by a constriction, a lack of freedom, a cold artificiality, the obtrusion of a pedantic scheme, which would be intolerable to the natural mind unsophisticated by literary study. The flow of the one is as that of a river, the flow of the other as that of a canal. Yet, as has been already hinted, though the great charm of Nature herself is that she never teases us with any obtrusive exhibitions of scheme, she doubtless has a scheme somewhere, she does somewhere hide a " hard acorn of thought " of which the poem of the universe is the expanded expression. And, this being so, art should have a scheme too; but in such a dilemma is she placed in this matter that the epic poet, unless he is evidently telling the story for its own sake, scornful of purposes ethic or aesthetic, must sacrifice illusion.

Among the former class of epics are to be placed the great epics of growth, such as the Mahabharata, the Nibelung story, &c.; among the latter the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Paradise Lost, the Gerusalemme liberata, the Lusiadas. But where in this classification are we to find a place for the Iliad? The heart-thought of the greatest epic in all literature is simply that Achilles was vexed and that the fortunes of the world depended upon the whim of a sulky hero. Yet, notwithstanding all the acute criticisms of Wolff, it remains difficult for us to find a place for the Iliad among the epics of growth. And why? Because throughout the Iliad the dramatic imagination shown is of the first order; and, if we are to suppose a multiplicity of authors for the poem, we must also suppose that ages before the time of Pericles there existed a group of dramatists more nearly akin to the masters of the Great Drama, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare, than any group that has ever existed since. Yet it is equally difficult to find a place for it amongst the epics of art. In the matter of artistic motive the Odyssey stands alone among the epics of art of the world, as we are going to see.

It is manifest that, as the pleasure derived from the epic of art is that of recognizing a conscious scheme, if the epic of art fails through confusion of scheme it fails altogether. What At. is demanded of the epic of art (as some kind of compensa tion for that natural freedom of evolution which it can never achieve, that sweet abandon, which belongs to nature and to the epic of growth alike) is unity of impression, harmonious and symmetrical development of a conscious heart-thought or motive. This being so, where are we to place the Aeneid, and where are we to place the Shah Nameh? Starting with the intention, as it seems, of fusing into one harmonious whole the myths and legends upon which the Roman story is based, Virgil, by the time he reaches the middle of his epic, forgets all about this primary intent, and gives us his own thoughts and reflections on things in general. Fine as is the speech of Anchises to Aeneas in Elysium (Aen. vi. 724-755), its incongruity with the general scheme of the poem as developed in the previous books shows how entirely Virgil lacked that artistic power shown in the Odyssey of making a story become the natural and inevitable outcome of an artistic idea.

In the Shah Nameh there is the artistic redaction of Virgil, but with even less attention to a central thought than Virgil exhibits. Firdausi relies for his effects upon the very qualities which characterize not the epic of art but the epic of growth - a natural and not an artificial flow of the story; so much indeed that, if the Shah Nameh were studied in connexion with the Iliad on the one hand and with the Kalevala on the other, it might throw a light upon the way in which an epic may be at one and the same time an aggregation of the national ballad poems and the work of a single artificer. That Firdausi was capable of working from a centre not only artistic but philosophic his Yusuf and Zuleikha shows; and if we consider what was the artistic temper of the Persians in Firdausi's time, what indeed has been that temper during the whole of the Mahommedan period, the subtle temper of the parable poet - the Shah Nameh, with its direct appeal to popular sympathies, is a standing wonder in poetic literature.

With regard, however, to Virgil's defective power of working from an artistic motive, as compared with the poet of the Odyssey, this is an infirmity he shares with all the poets of the Western world. Certainly he shares it with the writer of Paradise Lost, who, setting out to " justify the ways of God to man," forgets occasionally the original worker of the evil, as where, for instance, he substitutes chance as soon as he comes (at the end of the second book) to the point upon which the entire epic movement turns, the escape of Satan from hell and his journey to earth for the ruin of man: " At last his sail-broad vans He spreads for flight, and, in the surging smoke Uplifted, spurns the ground; thence many a league, As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides Audacious; but, that seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuity; all unawares, Fluttering his pinions vain, plumb down he drops Ten thousand fathoms deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not, by ILL. Chance, The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud, Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him As many miles aloft." In Milton's case, however, the truth is that he made the mistake of trying to disturb the motive of the story for artistic purposes - a fatal mistake, as. we shall see when we come to speak of the Nibelungenlied in relation to the old Norse epic cycle.

Though Vondel's mystery play of Lucifer is, in its execution, rhetorical more than poetical, it did, beyond all question, influence Milton when he came to write Paradise Lost. The famous line which is generally quoted as the keynote of Satan's character " Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven " seems to have been taken bodily from Vondel's play, and Milton's entire epic shows a study of it. While Marlowe's majestic move ments alone are traceable in Satan's speech (written some years before the rest of Paradise Lost, when the dramatic and not the epic form had been selected), Milton's Satan became afterwards a splendid amalgam not of the Mephistopheles but of the Faustus of Marlowe and the Lucifer of Vondel. Vondel's play must have possessed a peculiar attraction for a poet of Milton's views of human progress. Defective as the play is in execution, it is far otherwise in motive. This motive, if we consider it aright, is nothing less than an explanation of man's anomalous condition on the earth - spirit incarnate in matter, created by God, a little lower than the angels - in order that he may advance by means of these very manacles which imprison him, in order that he may ascend by the staircase of the world, the ladder of fleshly conditions, above those cherubim and seraphim who, lacking the education of sense, have not the knowledge wide and deep which brings man close to God.

Here Milton found his own favourite doctrine of human development and self-education in a concrete and vividly artistic form. Much, however, as such a motive must have struck a man of Milton's instincts, his intellect was too much chained by Calvinism to permit of his treating the subject with Vondel's philosophic breadth. The cause of Lucifer's wrath had to be changed from jealousy of human progress to jealousy of the Son's proclaimed superiority. And the history of poetry shows that once begin to tamper with the central thought around which any group of incidents has crystallized and the entire story becomes thereby rewritten, as we have seen in the case of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Of the motive of his own epic, after he had abandoned the motive of Vondel, Milton had as little permanent grasp as Virgil had of his. As regards the Odyssey, however, we need scarcely say that its motive is merely artistic, not philosophic. And now we come to philosophic motive.

The artist's power of thought is properly shown not in the direct enunciation of ideas but in mastery over motive. Here Aeschylus is by far the greatest figure in Western poetry - a proof perhaps among many proofs of the Oriental strain of his genius. (As regards pure drama, however, important as is motive, freedom, organic vitality in every part, is of more importance than even motive, and in this freedom and easy abandonment the concluding part of the Oresteia is deficient as compared with such a play as Othello or Lear.) Notwithstanding the splendid exception of Aeschylus, the truth seems to be that the faculty of developing a poetical narrative from a philosophic thought is Oriental, and on the whole foreign to the genius of the Western mind. Neither in Western drama nor in Western epic do we find, save in such rare cases as that of Vondel, anything like that power of developing a story from an idea which not only Jami but all the parable poets of Persia show.

In modern English poetry the motive of Shelley's dramatic poem Prometheus Unbound is a notable illustration of what is here contended. Starting with the full intent of developing a drama from a motive - starting with a universalism, a belief that good shall be the final goal of ill - Shelley cannot finish his first three hundred lines without shifting (in the curse of Prometheus) into a Manichaeism as pure as that of Manes himself " Heap on thy soul, by virtue of this curse, Ill deeds, then be thou damned, beholding good; Both infinite as is the universe." According to the central thought of the poem human nature, through the heroic protest and struggle of the human mind typified by Prometheus, can at last dethrone that supernatural terror and tyranny (Jupiter) which the human mind had itself installed. But, after its dethronement (when human nature becomes infinitely perfectible), how can the supernatural tyranny exist apart from the human mind that imagined it? How can it be as " infinite as the universe "?

The motive of Paradise Lost is assailed with much vigour by Victor Hugo in his poem Religions et Religion. But when Hugo, in the after parts of the poem, having destroyed Milton's " God," sets up an entirely French " Dieu " of his own and tries " to justify " him, we perceive how pardonable was Milton's failure after all. Compare such defect of mental grip and such nebulosity of thought as is displayed by Milton, Shelley and Hugo with the strength of hand shown in the " Salaman " and " Absal " of Jami, and indeed by the Sufi poets generally.

There is, however, one exception to this rule that Western poetry is nebulous as to motive. There is, besides the Iliad, one epic that refuses to be classified, though for entirely different reasons. This is the Nibelung story, where we find unity of purpose and also entire freedom of movement. We find combined here beauties which are nowhere else combined - which are, in fact, at war with each other everywhere else. We find a scheme, a real " acorn of thought," in an epic which is not the self-conscious work of a single poetic artificer, but is as much the slow growth of various times and various minds as is the Mahabharata, in which the heart-thought is merely that the Kauravas defeated their relatives at dice and refused to disgorge their winnings.

This Northern epic-tree, as we find it in the Icelandic sagas, the Norns themselves must have watered; for it combines the virtues of the epic of growth with those of the epic of art. Though not written in metre, it may usefully be compared with the epics of Greece and of India and Persia. Free in movement as the wind, which " bloweth where it listeth," it listeth to move by law. Its action is that of free will, but free will at play within a ring of necessity. Within this ring there throbs all the warm and passionate life of the world outside, and all the freedom apparently. Yet from that world it is enisled by a cordon of curses - by a zone of defiant flames more impregnable than that which girdled the beautiful Brynhild at Hindfell. Natural laws, familiar emotions, are at work everywhere in the story; yet the " Ring of Andvari," whose circumference is but that of a woman's finger, encircles the whole mimic world of the sagaman as the Midgard snake encircles the earth. For this artistic perfection in an epic of growth there are, of course, many causes, some of them traceable and some of them beyond all discovery - causes no doubt akin to those which gave birth to many of the beauties of other epics of growth. Originally Sinfiotli and Sigurd were the same person, and note how vast has been the artistic effect of the separation of the two ! Again, there were several different versions of the story of Brynhild. The sagamen, finding all these versions too interesting and too much beloved to be discarded, adopted them all - worked them up into one legend, so that, in the Volsunga Saga we have a heroine possessing all the charms of goddess, demi-goddess, earthly princess and amazon - a heroine surpassing perhaps in fascination all other heroines that have ever figured in poetry.

It is when we come to consider such imaginative work as this that we are compelled to pause before challenging the Aristotelian doctrine that metrical structure is but an accidental quality of epic.

In speaking of the Nibelung story we do not, of course, speak of the German version, the Nibelungenlied, a fine epic still, though a degradation of the elder form. Between the two the differences are fundamental in the artistic sense, and form an excellent illustration of what has just been said upon the disturbance of motive in epic, and indeed in all poetic art. It is not merely that the endings of the three principal characters, Sigurd (Siegfried), Gudrun (Kriemhilt), and Brynhild are entirely different; it is not merely that the Icelandic version, by missing the blood-bath at Fafnir s lair, loses the pathetic situation of Gudrun's becoming afterwards an unwilling instrument of her husband's death; it is not merely that, on the other hand, the German version, by omitting the early love passages between Brynhild and Sigurd at Hindfell, misses entirely the tragic meaning of her story and the terrible hate that is love resulting from the breaking of the troth; but the conclusion of each version is so exactly the opposite of that of the other that, while the German story is called (and very properly) " Kriemhilt's Revenge," the story of the Volsunga Saga might, with equal propriety, be called Gudrun's Forgiveness.

If it be said that, in both cases, the motive shows the same Titanic temper, that is because the Titanic temper is the special of characteristic of the North-Western mind. The temper of revolt against authority seems indeed to belong to that energy which succeeds in the modern develop ment of the great racial struggle for life. Although no epic, Eastern or Western, can exist without a struggle between good and evil - and a struggle upon apparently equal terms - it must not be supposed that the warring of conflicting forces which is the motive of Eastern epic has much real relation to the warring of conflicting forces which is the motive of Western epic.

And, as regards the machinery of epic, there is, we suspect, a deeper significance than is commonly apprehended in the fact that the Satan or Shaitan of the Eastern world becomes in Vondel and Milton 4 'a sublime Titan who attracts to himself the admiration which in Eastern poetry belongs entirely to the authority of heaven. In Asia, save perhaps among the pure Arabs of the desert, underlying all religious forms, there is apparent a temper of resignation to the irresistible authority of heaven. And as regards the Aryans it is probable that the Titanic temper - the temper of revolt against authority - did not begin to show itself till they had moved across the Caucasus. But what concerns us here is the fact that the farther they moved to the north-west the more vigorously this temper asserted itself, the prouder grew man in his attitude towards the gods, till at last in the Scandinavian cycle he became their equal and struggled alongside them, shoulder to shoulder, in the defence of heaven against the assaults of hell. Therefore, as we say, the student of epic poetry must not suppose that there is any real parallel between the attitude of Vishnu (as Rama) towards Ravana and the attitude of Prometheus towards Zeus, or the attitude of the human heroes towards Odin in Scandinavian poetry. Had Ravana been clothed with a properly constituted authority, had he been a legitimate god instead of a demon, the Eastern doctrine of recognition of authority would most likely have come in and the world would have been spared one at least of its enormous epics. Indeed, the Ravana of the Ramayana answers somewhat to the Fafnir of the Volsunga Saga; and to plot against demons is not to rebel against authority. The vast field of Indian epic, however, is quite beyond us here.

Nor can we do more than glance at the Kalevala. From one point of view that group of ballads might be taken, no doubt, as a simple record of how the men of Kalevala were skilful in capturing the sisters of the Pojohla men. But from another point of view the universal struggle of the male for the female seems typified in this so-called epic of the Finns by the picture of the " Lady of the Rainbow " sitting upon her glowing arc and weaving her golden threads, while the hero is doing battle with the malevolent forces of nature.

But it is in the Nibelung story that the temper of Western epic is at its best - the temper of the simple fighter, whose business it is to fight. The ideal Western fighter was not known in Greece till ages after Homer, when in the pass of Thermopylae the companions of Leonidas combed their long hair in the sun. The business of the fighter in Scandinavian epic is to yield to no power whatsoever, whether of earth or heaven or hell - to take a buffet from the Allfather himself, and to return it; to look Destiny herself in the face, crying out for quarter neither to gods nor demons nor Norns. This is the true temper of pure " heroic poetry " as it has hitherto flourished on this side the Caucasus - the temper of the fighter who is invincible because he feels that Fate herself falters when the hero of the true strain defies - the fighter who feels that the very Norns themselves must cringe at last before the simple courage of man standing naked and bare of hope against all assaults, whether of heaven or hell or doom. The proud heroes of the Volsunga Saga utter no moans and shed no Homeric tears, knowing as they know that the day prophesied is sure when, shoulder to shoulder, gods and men shall stand up to fight the entire brood of night and evil, storming the very gates of Asgard.

That this temper is not the highest from the ethical point of view is no doubt true. Against the beautiful resignation of Buddhism it may seem barbaric, and if moral suasion could supplant physical force in epic - if Siddartha could take the place of Achilles or Sigurd - it might be better for the human race.

But we must now give undivided attention to pure egoistic or lyric imagination. This, as has been said, is sufficient to vitalize all forms of poetic art save drama and the Lyric Greek epic. It would be impossible to discuss adequately here the Hebrew poets, who have pro duced a lyric so different in kind from all other lyrics as to stand in a class by itself. As it is equal in importance to the Great Drama of Shakespeare, Aeschylus and Sophocles, we may perhaps be allowed to call it the " Great Lyric." The Great Lyric must be religious - it must, it would seem, be an outpouring of the soul, not towards man but towards God, like that of the God-intoxicated prophets and psalmists of Scripture. Even the lyric fire of Pindar owes much to the fact that he had a childlike belief in the myths to which so many of his contemporaries had begun to give a languid assent. But there is nothing in Pindar, or indeed elsewhere in Greek poetry, like the rapturous song, combining unconscious power with unconscious grace, which we have called the Great Lyric. It might perhaps be said indeed that the Great Lyric is purely Hebrew. But, although we could hardly expect to find it among those whose language, complex of syntax and alive with selfconscious inflexions, bespeaks the scientific knowingness of the Western mind, to call the temper of the Great Lyric broadly " Asiatic " would be rash. It seems to belong as a birthright to those descendants of Shem who, yearning always to look straight into the face of God and live, could (when the Great Lyric was sung) see not much else.

Though two of the artistic elements of the Great Lyric, unconsciousness and power, are no doubt plentiful enough in India, the element of grace is lacking for the most part. The Vedic hymns are both nebulous and unemotional, as compared with Semitic hymns. And as to the Persians, they, it would seem, have the grace always, the power often, but the unconsciousness almost never. This is inevitable if we consider for a moment the chief characteristic of the Persian imagination - an imagination whose wings are not so much " bright with beauty " as heavy with it - heavy as the wings of a golden pheasant - steeped in beauty like the " tiger-moth's deep damasked wings." Now beauty of this kind does not go to the making of the Great Lyric.

Then there comes that poetry which, being ethnologically Semitic, might be supposed to exhibit something at least of the Hebrew temper - the Arabian. But, whatever may be said of the oldest Arabic poetry, with its deep sense of fate and pain, it would seem that nothing can be more unlike than the Hebrew temper and the Arabian temper as seen in later poets. It is not with. Hebrew beat with Persian poetry that Arabian poetry can be usefully compared. If the wings of the Persian imagination are heavy with beauty, those of the later Arabian imagination are bright with beauty - brilliant as an Eastern butterfly, quick and agile as a dragon-fly or a humming-bird. To the eye of the Persian poet the hues of earth are (as Firdausi says of the garden of Afrasiab) " like the tapestry of the kings of Ormuz, the air is perfumed with musk, and the waters of the brooks are the essence of roses." And to the later Arabian no less than to the Persian the earth is beautiful; but it is the clear and sparkling beauty of the earth as she " wakes up to life, greeting the Sabaean morning "; we feel the light more than the colour. But it is neither the Persian's instinct for beauty nor the Arabian's quenchless wit and exhaustless animal spirits that go to the making of the Great Lyric; far from it. In a word, the Great Lyric, as we have said, cannot be assigned to the Asiatic temper generally any more than it can be assigned to the European temper.

In the poetry of Europe, if we cannot say of Pindar, devout as he is, that he produced the Great Lyric, what can we say of Ode. any other European poet ? The truth is that, like the Great Drama, so straight and so warm does it seem to come from the heart of man in its highest moods that we scarcely feel it to be literature at all. Passing, however, from this supreme expression of lyrical imagination, we come to the artistic ode, upon which subject the present writer can only reiterate here what he has more fully said upon a former occasion. Whatever may have been said to the contrary, enthusiasm is, in the nature of things, the very basis of the ode; for the ode is a mono-drama, the actor in which is the poet himself; and, as Marmontel has well pointed out, if the actor in the mono-drama is not affected by the sentiments he expresses, the ode must be cold and lifeless. But, although the ode is a natural poetic method of the poet considered as prophet - although it is the voice of poetry as a fine frenzy - it must not be supposed that there is anything lawless in its structure. " Pindar," says the Italian critic Gravina, " launches his verses upon the bosom of the sea; he spreads out all his sails; he confronts the tempest and the rocks; the waves arise and are ready to engulf him; already he has disappeared from the spectator's view; when suddenly he springs up in the midst of the waters, and reaches happily the shore." Now it is this Pindaric discursiveness, this Pindaric unrestraint as to the matter, which has led poets to attempt to imitate him by adopting an unrestraint as to form. Although no two odes of Pindar exhibit the same metrical structure (the Aeolian and Lydian rhythms being mingled with the Doric in different proportions), yet each ode is in itself obedient, severely obedient, to structural law. This we feel; but what the law is no metricist has perhaps ever yet been able to explain.

It was a strange misconception that led people for centuries to use the word " Pindaric " and irregular as synonymous terms; whereas the very essence of the odes of Pindar (of the few, alas! which survive to us) is their regularity. There is no more difficult form of poetry than this, and for this reason: when in any poetical composition the metres are varied, there must, as the present writer has before pointed out, be a reason for such freedom, and that reason is properly subjective - the varying form must embody and express the varying emotions of the singer. But when these metrical variations are governed by no subjective law at all, but by arbitrary rules supposed to be evolved from the practice of Pindar, then that very variety which should aid the poet in expressing his emotion crystallizes it and makes the ode the most frigid of all compositions. Great as Pindar undoubtedly is, it is deeply to be regretted that no other poet survives to represent the triumphal ode of Greece - the digressions of his subject matter are so wide, and his volubility is so great.

In modern literature the ode has been ruined by theories and experiments. A poet like La Mothe, for instance, writes execrable odes, and then writes a treatise to prove that all odes should be written on the same model. There is much confusion of mind prevalent among poets as to what is and what is not an ode. All odes are, no doubt, divisible into two great classes: those which, following an arrangement in stanzas, are commonly called regular, and those which, following no such arrangement,. are commonly called irregular.

We do not agree with those who assert that irregular metres are of necessity inimical to poetic art. On the contrary, we believe that in modern prosody the arrangement of the rhymes and the length of the lines in any rhymed metrical passage may be determined either by a fixed stanzaic law or by a law infinitely deeper - by the law which impels the soul, in a state of poetic exaltation, to. seize hold of every kind of metrical aid, such as rhyme, caesura, &c. for the purpose of accentuating and marking off each shade of emotion as it arises, regardless of any demands of stanza. But between the irregularity of makeshift, such as we find it in Cowley and his imitators, and the irregularity of the " fine frenzy " of such a poem, for instance, as Coleridge's Kubla Khan, there is a difference in kind. Strange that it is not in an ode at all but in this unique lyric Kubla Khan, descriptive of imaginative landscape, that an English poet has at last conquered the crowning difficulty of writing in irregular metres. Having broken away from all restraints of couplet and stanza - having caused his rhymes and pauses to fall just where and just when the emotion demands that they should fall, scorning the exigencies of makeshift no less than the exigencies of stanza - he has found what every writer of irregular English odes has sought in vain, a music as entrancing, as natural, and at the same time as inscrutable, as the music of the winds or of the sea.

The prearranged effects of sharp contrasts and antiphonal movements, such as some poets have been able to compass, do not of course come under the present definition of irregular metres at all. If a metrical passage does not gain immensely by being written independently of stanzaic law, it loses immensely; and for this reason, perhaps, that the great charm of the music of all verse, as distinguished L aw. from the music of prose, is inevitableness of cadence. In regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably - it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the inevitableness of emotional expression.. The lines must be long or short, the rhymes must be arranged after this or after that interval, not because it is convenient so to arrange them, but because the emotion of the poet inexorably demands, these and no other arrangements. When, however, Coleridge came to try his hand at irregular odes, such as the odes " To the Departing Year " and " To the Duchess of Devonshire," he certainly did not succeed.

As to Wordsworth's magnificent " Ode on Intimations of Immortality," the sole impeachment of it, but it is a grave one, is that the length of the lines and the arrangement of the rhymes are not always inevitable; they are, except on rare occasions, governed neither by stanzaic nor by emotional law. For instance, what emotional necessity was there for the following rhyme-arrangement ?

' ` My heart is at your festival, My head hath its coronal, The fulness of your bliss I feel - I feel it all.

Oh, evil day! if I were sullen .

While earth herself is adorning, This sweet May morning; And the children are culling, On every side, In a thousand valleys far and wide, Fresh flowers." Beautiful as is the substance of this entire passage, so far from gaining, it loses by rhyme - loses, not in perspicuity, for Wordsworth like all his contemporaries (except Shelley) is mostly perspicuous, but in that metrical emphasis the quest of which is one of the impulses: that leads a poet to write in rhyme. In spite, however, of its metrical defects, this famous ode of Wordsworth's is the finest irregular ode in the language; for, although Coleridge's " Ode to the Departing Year " excels it in Pindaric fire, it is below Wordsworth's masterpiece in almost every other quality save rhythm. Among the writers of English irregular odes, next to Wordsworth, stands Dryden. The second stanza of the " Ode for St Cecilia's Day " is a great triumph.

Leaving the irregular and turning to the regular ode, it is natural to divide these into two classes: (t) those which are really Pindaric in so far as they consist of strophes, antistrophes and epodes, variously arranged and contrasted; and (2) those which consist of a regular succession of regular stanzas. Perhaps all Pindaric odes tend to show that this form of art is in English a mistake. It is easy enough to write one stanza and call it a strophe, another in a different movement and call it an antistrophe, a third in a different movement still and call it an epode. But in modern prosody,. disconnected as it is from musical and from terpsichorean science,. what are these? No poet and no critic can say.

What is requisite is that the ear of the reader should catch a great metrical scheme, of which these three varieties of movement are necessary parts - should catch, in short, that inevitableness of structure upon which we have already touched. In order to justify a poet in writing a poem in three different kinds of movement, governed by no musical and no terpsichorean necessity, a necessity of another kind should make itself apparent; that is, the metrical wave moving in the strophe should be metrically answered by the counter-wave moving in the antistrophe, while the epode - which, as originally conceived by Stesichorus, was merely a standing still after the balanced movements of the strophe and antistrophe - should clearly, in a language like ours, be a blended echo of these two. A mere metrical contrast such as some poets labour to effect is not a metrical answer. And if the reply to this criticism be that in Pindar himself no such metrical scheme is apparent, that is the strongest possible argument in support of our position. If indeed the metrical scheme of Pindar is not apparent, that is because, having been written for chanting, it was subordinate to the lost musical scheme of the musician. It has been contended, and is likely enough, that this musical scheme was simple - as simple, perhaps, as the scheme of a cathedral chant; but to it, whatever it was, the metrical scheme of the poet was subordinated. It need scarcely be said that the phrase " metrical scheme " is used here not in the narrow sense as indicating the position and movement of strophe and antistrophe by way of simple contrast, but in the deep metrical sense as indicating the value of each of these component parts of the ode, as a counter-wave balancing and explaining the other waves in the harmony of the entire composition. We touch upon this matter in order to show that the moment odes ceased to be chanted, the words strophe, antistrophe, and epode lost the musical value they had among the Greeks, and pretended to a complex metrical value which their actual metrical structure does not appear to justify. It does not follow from this that odes should not be so arranged, but it does follow that the poet's arrangement should justify itself by disclosing an entire metrical scheme in place of the musical scheme to which the Greek choral lyric was evidently subordinated. But even if the poet were a sufficiently skilled metricist to compass a scheme embracing a wave, an answering wave, and an echo gathering up the tones of each, i.e. the strophe, the antistrophe and the epode, the ear of the reader, unaided by the musical emphasis which supported the rhythms of the old choral lyric, is, it should seem, incapable of gathering up and remembering the sounds further than the strophe and the antistrophe, after which it demands not an epode but a return to the strophe. That is to say, an epode, as alternating in the body of the modern ode, is a mistake; a single epode at the end of a group of strophes and antistrophes (as in some of the Greek odes) has, of course, a different function altogether.

The great difficulty of the English ode is that of preventing the apparent spontaneity of the impulse from being marred by the apparent artifice of the form; for, assuredly, no writer subsequent to Coleridge and to Keats would dream of writing an ode on the cold Horatian principles adopted by Warton, and even by Collins, in his beautiful " Ode to Evening." Of the second kind of regular odes, those consisting of a regular succession of regular stanzas, the so-called odes of Sappho are, of course, so transcendent that no other amatory lyrics can be compared with them. Never before these songs were sung and never since did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers; and from the executive point of view, in directness, in lucidity, in that high imperious verbal economy which only nature herself can teach the artist, she has no equal, and none worthy to take the place of second - not even in Heine, nor even in Burns. Turning, however, to modern poetry, there are some magnificent examples of this simple form of ode in English poetry - Spenser's immortal " Epithalamion " leading the way in point of time, and probably also in point of excellence.

Fervour being absolutely essential, we think, to a great English ode, fluidity of metrical movement can never be dispensed with. The more billowy the metrical waves the better suited are they to render the emotions expressed by the ode, as the reader will see by referring to Coleridge's " Ode to France " (the finest ode in the English language, according to Shelley), and giving special attention to the first stanza - to the way in which the first metrical wave, after it had gently fallen at the end of the first quatrain, leaps up again on the double rhymes (which are expressly introduced for this effect), and goes bounding on, billow after billow, to the end of the stanza. Not that this fine ode is quite free from the great vice of the English ode, rhetoric. If we except Spenser and, in one instance, Collins, it can hardly be said that any English writer before Shelley and Keats produced odes independent of rhetoric and supported by pure poetry alone. But fervid as are Shelley's " Ode to the West Wind " and Keats's odes " To a Nightingale " and " On a Grecian Urn," they are entirely free from rhetccical flavour. Notwithstanding that in the " Ode on a Grecian Urn " the first stanza does not match in rhyme arrangement with the others, while the second stanza of the " Ode to a Nightingale " varies from the rest by running on four rhyme-sounds instead of five, vexing the ear at first by disappointed expectation, these two odes are, after Coleridge's " France," the finest regular odes perhaps in the English language.

With regard to the French ode, Malherbe was the first writer who brought it to perfection. Malherbe showed also more variety of mood than it is the fashion just now to credit him with. This may be especially noted in his " Ode to Louis XIII." His disciple Racan is not of much account. There is certainly much vigour in the odes of Rousseau, but it is not till we reach Victor Hugo that we realize what French poetry can achieve in this line; and contemporary poetry can hardly be examined here. We may say, however, that some of Hugo's odes are truly magnificent. As a pure lyrist his place among the greatest poets of the world is very high. Here, though writing in an inferior language, he ranks with the greatest masters of Greece, of England, and of Germany. Had he attempted no other kind of poetry than lyrical, his would still have been the first name in French poetry. Whatever is defective in his work arises, as in the case of Euripides, from the importation of lyrical force where dramatic force is mainly needed.

The main varieties of lyrical poetry, such as the idyll, the satire, the ballad, the sonnet, &c., are treated in separate articles; but a word or two must be said here about the song The Song. and the elegy. To write a good song requires that simplicity of grammatical structure which is foreign to many natures - that mastery over direct and simple speech which only true passion and feeling can give, and which "coming from the heart goes to the heart." Without going so far as to say that no man is a poet who cannot write a good song, it may certainly be said that no man can write a good song who is not a good poet. In modern times we have, of course, nothing in any way representing those choral dance-songs of the Greeks, which, originating in the primitive Cretan war-dances, became, in Pindar's time, a splendid blending of song and ballet. Nor have we anything exactly representing the Greek scolia, those short drinking songs of which Terpander is said to have been the inventor. That these scolia were written, not only by poets like Alcaeus, Anacreon, Praxilla, Simonides, but also by Sappho and by Pindar, shows in what high esteem they were held by the Greeks. These songs seem to have been as brief as the stornelli of the Italian peasant. They were accompanied by the lyre, which was handed from singer to singer as the time for each scolion came round.

With regard to the stornello, many critics seem to confound it with the rispetto, a very different kind of song. The Italian rispetto consists of a stanza of inter-rhyming lines ranging from six to ten in number, but often not exceeding eight. The Tuscan and Umbrian stornello is much shorter, consisting, indeed, of a hemistich naming some natural object which suggests the motive of the little poem. The nearest approach to the Italian stornello appears to be, not the rispetto, but the Welsh triban.

Perhaps the mere difficulty of rhyming in English and the facility of rhyming in Italian must be taken into account when we inquire why there is nothing in Scotland - of course there could be nothing in England - answering to the nature-poetry of the Italian peasant. Most of the Italian rispetti and stornelli seem to be improvisations; and to improvise in English is as difficult as to improvise is easy in Italian. Nothing indeed is more interesting than the improvisatorial poetry of the Italian peasants, such as the canzone. If the peasantry discover who is the composer of a canzone, they will not sing it. The speciality of Italian peasant poetry is that the symbol which is mostly erotic is of the purest and most tender kind. A peasant girl will improvise a song as impassioned as " Come into the Garden, Maud," and as free from unwholesome taint.

With regard to English songs, the critic cannot but ask - Wherein lies the lost ring and charm of the Elizabethan songwriters ? Since the Jacobean period at least, few have succeeded in the art of writing real songs as distinguished from mere book lyrics. Between songs to be sung and songs to be read there is in our time a difference as wide as that which exists between plays for the closet and plays for the boards.

Heartiness and melody - the two requisites of a song which can never he dispensed with - can rarely be compassed, it seems, by one and the same individual. In both these qualities the Elizabethan poets stand pre-eminent, though even with them the melody is not so singable as it might be made. Since their time heartiness has, perhaps, been a Scottish rather than an English endowment of the song-writer. It is difficult to imagine an Englishman writing a song like " Tullochgorum " or a song like " Maggie Lauder," where the heartiness and impulse of the poet's mood conquer all impediments of close vowels and rugged consonantal combinations. Of Scottish song-writers Burns is, of course, the head; for the songs of John Skinner, the heartiest song-writer that has appeared in Great Britain (not excluding Herrick), are too few in number to entitle him to be placed beside a poet so prolific in heartiness and melody as Burns. With regard to Campbell's heartiness, this is quite a different quality from the heartiness of Burns and Skinner, and is in quality English rather than Scottish, though, no doubt, it is of a fine and rare strain, especially in " The Battle of the Baltic." His songs illustrate an infirmity which even the Scottish song-writers share with the English - a defective sense of that true song-warble which we get in the stornelli and rispetti of the Italian peasants. A poet may have heartiness in plenty, but if he has that love of consonantal effects which Donne displays he will never write a first-rate song. Here, indeed, is the crowning difficulty of song-writing. An extreme simplicity of structure and of diction must be accompanied by an instinctive apprehension of the melodic capabilities of verbal sounds, and of what Samuel Lover, the Irish song-writer, called " singing " words, which is rare in this country, and seems to belong to the Celtic rather than to the Saxon ear. " The song-writer," says Lover, " must frame his song of open vowels with as few guttural or hissing sounds as possible, and he must be content sometimes to sacrifice grandeur and vigour to the necessity of selecting singing words and not reading words." And he exemplifies the distinction between singing words and reading words by a line from one of Shelley's songs " ` The fresh earth in new leaves drest,' " where nearly every word shuts up the mouth instead of opening it." But closeness of vowel sounds is by no means the only thing to be avoided in song-writing. A phrase may be absolutely unsingable, though the vowels be open enough, if it is loaded with consonants. The truth is that in song-writing it is quite as important, in a consonantal language like ours, to attend to the consonants as to the vowels; and perhaps the first thing to avoid in writing English songs is the frequent recurrence of the sibilant. But this applies to all the brief and quintessential forms of poetry, such as the sonnet, the elegy, &c.

As to the elegy - a form of poetic art which has more relation to the objects of the external world than the song, but less rela Elegy. tion to these than the stornello - its scope seems The to be wide indeed, as practised by such various writers as Tyrtaeus, Theognis, Catullus, Tibullus, and our own Gray. It may almost be said that perfection of form is more necessary here and in the sonnet than in the song, inasmuch as the artistic pretensions are more pronounced. Hence even such apparent minutiae as those we have hinted at above must not be neglected here.

We have quoted Dionysius of Halicarnassus in relation to the arrangement of words in poetry. His remarks on sibilants are Phonetic equally deserving of attention. He goes so far as to Perfection : say that a is entirely disagreeable, and, when it often recurs, insupportable. The hiss seems to him to be more appropriate to the beast than to man. Hence certain writers, he says, often avoid it, and employ it with regret. Some, he tells us, have composed entire odes without it. But if sibilation is a defect in Greek odes, where the softening effect of the vowel sounds is so potent, it is much more so in English poetry, where the consonants dominate, though it will be only specially noticeable in the brief and quintessential forms such as the song, the sonnet, the elegy. Many poets only attend to their sibilants when these clog the rhythm. To write even the briefest song without a sibilant would be a tour de force; to write a good one would no doubt be next to impossible. It is singular that the only metricist who ever attempted it was John Thelwall, the famous " Citizen John," friend of Lamb and Coleridge, and editor of the famous Champion newspaper, where many of Lamb's epigrams appeared. Thelwall gave much attention to metrical questions, and tried his hand at various metres. Though " Citizen John's " sapphics might certainly have been better, he had a very remarkable critical insight into the rationale of metrical effects, and his " Song without a Sibilant " is extremely neat and ingenious. Of course, however, it would be mere pedantry to exaggerate this objection to sibilants even in these brief forms of poetry. (T. W.-D.)