of Demosthenes's speeches. If Sidney said that he could not take up the ballad of Percy and Douglas without feeling his heart moved as by a trumpet, Dionysius says even more beautifully, "When I take up one of his speeches, I am entranced and am carried hither and thither, stirred now by one emotion, now by another. I feel distrust, anxiety, fear, disdain, hatred, pity, good-will, anger, jealousy. I am agitated by every passion in turn that can sway the human heart, and am like those who are being initiated into wild mystic rites."
However, regularity of feet or metre in prose carried on to a great extent makes the prose artificial. The Romans occasionally indulged in it, but they generally used rhythmical prose, as the reader of Cicero and Livy will observe. Quintilian, who recognized that prose has often metrical feet that read like verse, thought it ugly and inelegant that an entire verse should appear in a prose composition. He says that he does not entertain "the idea that prose, which ought to have sweeping and fluent motion, should dawdle itself into dotage in measuring feet and weighing syllables. For this would be the part of a wretched creature, occupied on the infinitely little. Nor could one who exhausted himself in this care, have time for better things."
Probably we need not better reply than this to the high claims made for the French form known as polyphonic verse. Prose that is interspersed with metrical patterns is not natural.
The truth of the matter is that all the metrical features that are demanded of poetry belong to the ornamental requirements like metaphors, myths, rhetorical flourishes and all other gewgaws. There are always stages in civilization when man wants adornment for his speech. Something of that mental state exists in us to-day. We bedeck and bedrape our poetry with trappings without which it is
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 Newbolt. 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: