As one steps into the modern world, one finds the controversy in its old estate, getting no help from new methods and ridiculous enough, by this expense of motion without progress, in contrast with the gain made by sciences of every other sort. Does Coleridge,[[113]] master of rhythm, reject rhythm as a test, Poe[[114]] comes forward to declare it an essential condition, and to announce “the certainty that music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm, and rime, is of so vast a moment in poetry as never to be wisely rejected.” Carlyle himself, reckoned by sundry critics as a poet in prose, names the “vulgar” definition of verse only to approve it. Germans, he says,[[115]] have spoken of “infinitude” as differencing true poetry from true speech not poetical; “if well meditated, some meaning will gradually be found in it. For my own part, I find considerable meaning in the old vulgar distinction of poetry being metrical, having music in it, being a song.” And he really adopts the test,—of course, with characteristic riders. “Observe,” he says, “how all passionate language does of itself become musical ... all deep things are song.... Poetry, therefore, we will call musical thought.” So, again, the vague and passionate protests of Stuart Mill beat in vain against such a temperate statement as Whately made in his Rhetoric.[[116]] “Any composition in verse (and none that is not) is always called, whether good or bad, a Poem, by all who have no favourite hypothesis to maintain.... The title of Poetry does not necessarily imply the requisite beauties of Poetry.” Such a test, cried Mill,[[117]] is vulgarest of all definitions, and “one with which no person possessed of the faculties to which poetry addresses itself can ever have been satisfied.” This “wretched mockery of a definition” is more than inadequate; for poetry may exist in prose as well as in verse, may even do without words, and can speak through musical sounds, through sculpture, painting, and architecture. It is strange to hear Mill making a serious formula out of phrases to which one is indulgent enough when they come in half playful guise.[[118]] Apart from the uselessness of such a formula,—fancy the historian of poetry opening a new chapter with “We will now consider the Parthenon!”—it has no theoretical value, as is easy to see when Mill begins to run his division lines. Two definitions of poetry please him, one, by Ebenezer Elliott, that it is “impassioned truth,” the other, by a writer in Blackwood, that it is “man’s thought tinged by his feelings.” But these “fail to distinguish poetry from eloquence,” and Mill goes on to say that eloquence is “something heard,” while poetry is “something overheard.” Something overheard? I mean, he explains, that “all poetry is in the nature of a soliloquy,” is “the natural fruit of solitude and meditation.” Now this is sheer nonsense, although more than one critic has hailed it as an oracle; of that which comes down to us as poetry, a good part is anything but soliloquy or the fruit of solitude. “Read Homer,” cried out Herder, perhaps at the other extreme, but certainly with better reason than Mill, “as if he were singing in the streets!” It will be shown how vast a proportion of poetry, too, that belongs to the higher class, was made and sung in throngs of men. Poetry is a social fact. Mill’s own words defeat him. “Whosoever writes out truly any human feeling, writes poetry”; and “what is poetry but the thoughts and words in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself?” A few pages before, it was “the fruit of solitude and meditation,” a test that would make poetry of Kant’s categorical imperative, refusing the title to Luther’s outburst at the diet, although this at once becomes poetry if one accepts the later definition in terms of emotional spontaneity. And that wrath at the “vulgarity” of a rhythmic test is nothing more than the old mistake; because, forsooth, colours and lines fail to account in themselves for the grandeur of painting, one jumps to the assertion that paintings need not have colours and lines. Let us cling to vulgarity, if leaving it means to assert that the Parthenon is a poem, and, by implication, that a sigh is a statue.
One of the most consistent expositions of poetry is that given by Hegel.[[119]] Here is a careful abstract of propositions as carefully formulated and proved. He has ruled out the “poetic sentence.” Specimens of the sublime, like that Let there be light, and there was light which Longinus[[120]] admired, are not poetry. History, too, is excluded, Herodotus, Tacitus, and the rest,[[121]] as well as eloquence, and not as Shelley rejects Cicero, on personal grounds, but because of the law in the case. Yet this summary is still inadequate as a practical test, and with it the historian is in a plight no better than when with Sidney or Coleridge he was including whatever piece of writing seemed certainly though indefinitely poetic. In the latter case he steered by a compass which was at the mercy of unnumbered hidden magnets; in the former case the signs on the card are blurred.[[122]] But Hegel does not leave the matter here; purposely or not, he gives a clear test for the historian when, twenty pages later, he comes to speak of versification. Professors Gayley and Scott[[123]] point out that the present writer has made too much of this concession; instead of saying that verse is “the only condition absolutely demanded by poetry,” one should say that Hegel makes verse indispensable. But this is quite enough for the purpose. The passage in question runs thus: “To be sure, prose put into verse is not poetry, but simply verse, just as mere poetic expression in what is otherwise prosaic treatment results only in a poetic prose; but nevertheless, metre or rime, being the one and only sensuous aroma,[[124]] is absolutely demanded for poetry, and indeed is even more necessary than store of imagery, the so-called beautiful diction.” And now for Hegel’s reason, which quite agrees with the historian’s demand for an available test. He goes on to say that the fact of verse in any piece of literature shows at once, as poetry indeed demands there should be shown, that one is in another realm from the realm of prose, of daily life; this constraint, if one likes to call it constraint, forces the poet outside the bounds of common speech into a province wholly submitted to the laws of art. That poetry has to be something more than this, that there are other canons, nobody denies; but the first step for a poet is into this realm of verse where he must prove in sterner tests and by other achievements whether he is citizen or trespasser.
Hegel, it might be said, is in the clouds; he is out of touch with science, and with that logic of facts which rules investigations of the present day. But the same way of thinking holds with a practical Englishman like Mr. Edmund Gurney,[[125]] whose feet are planted very firmly on solid ground, who is distinctly hostile to the poem in prose, that “pestilent heresy,” as Professor Saintsbury has called it, and whose idea of art, which always includes an appeal to the sense of form, demands in poetry a definite metre or rhythm. And the same way of thinking holds with a student of modern psychology, M. Souriau,[[126]] who undertakes to define poetry in terms of science. Poetry itself derives from music and prose,—presumably he means by prose the speech of daily life, and not what Walter Pater means in his essay on Style when he makes “music and prose literature ... the opposite terms of art”; poetry might therefore be called musical speech.[[127]] To show how much depends on the music, M. Souriau turns to translations from foreign poetry into prose vernacular. “The more poetical this original text, the more it loses in the change.... This depreciation is due to the change of process, and not to the change of tongue, for the translation of a piece of prose would not show these faults.” On the other hand, now, take an irreproachable piece of verse, with this superiority just shown to be due to its rhythm, and look at it with regard to logical worth. How unsatisfying, how “thin,” is the thought in it! Change again the point of view, and study poetry for its music; one will be no better pleased than when one hunted for its thought. The rhythm would be intolerably monotonous in a piece of music. The sonorous words, taken as sound, are not really pleasing to the ear. Rime, if one will look at it this way, is a procédé enfantin. In sum, poetry is logically inferior to prose, and musically inferior to pure melody,—and what, then, is its own charm? It pleases us, not by either one of these elements, but by their combination; it is harmony, but in a peculiar sense. “It is not the harmony of thought, logical system, and order, not the harmony of sounds or musical system, but the harmony between sounds and thoughts. One loves to feel the idea bending and adjusting itself to the rules of verse, and the verse yielding to the demands of the idea.”[[128]]
It is time to close the poll. For poetry in prose no one has spoken in such a temperate and yet forcible fashion as Mr. Frederic Harrison,[[129]] though his arguments are by no means new. Nothing but “poetry,” he asserts, can serve as the word to express what one finds in Malory’s Death of Arthur, in chapters of Job and Isaiah. But arguments such as he makes with energy and eloquence lose their force when confronted with the cool reasoning of Mr. Bosanquet,[[130]] who shows clearly that poetry, whatever else it may be, must be rhythmic utterance. Even in the clash of opinion between these modern writers, one finds what is to be found throughout the entire controversy, down from the days of the early renaissance, that the advocates of a rhythmic test for poetry have the better of the argument. It has been shown that there is no other test for the historian of poetry as a social institution; and whenever another test has been set up, its own advocates have not only abandoned it in practice, but even in theory have obscured it with a mass of contradictions.[[131]]
There remains, of course, the ambulando argument; the champion of poetry in prose points to the work which passes under this name. A book could be written on the long series of concessions in matter of territory which verse has made to prose; but no sensible critic will allow these transfers to prove that poetry has ceased to be rhythmic utterance. The most obvious transfer, of course, is translation; is not the English Bible as noble poetry, one asks, as can be found in any time or clime? Mr. Theodore Watts[[132]] is sure of the rhythmic test until he faces the claims of this noblest prose. Yet surely what appeals to us here is not poetry, but the genius of the English tongue at its greatest and best,[[133]] flinging its full strength upon a task which at the time lay close to the heart of the English people. The Bible is not the masterpiece of our poetry, but of our prose; it beats not only with the divine pulse of its original, but also with that immense vitality and energy of English religious life in days when to many Englishmen life and religion were identical. That does not make it poetry. One must not open the gates of poetry to this or that passage of prose, and shut them, through whim or shame, upon a thousand other passages.[[134]] Let in that great chapter of Job, and anon Werther is there, Silas Marner, Tom Jones,—we have marshalled this rout already. No, if the Bible be poetry, it is because it is rhythmic utterance, not because it is sublime. That tremendous reach of emotion borne on the cadence of a style majestic and clear, the voice of a solitary desolation crying to the desolation of all mankind, the wail of an eternal and unanswered question—
Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery,
And life unto the bitter in soul?
—is not this a poem? It is almost certainly a poem in the original; it might be a poem in English, provided the rhythm of the lines, printed as they now are, with parallelism and cadence properly brought out, seemed to the reader to have a recurrent regularity which could take it into the sphere of rhythmic law; otherwise it is prose, the prose of great literature, indeed, but prose. It must be granted, too, that the latter view is preferable. As great literature, the book of Job belongs with Dante, and Milton, and with a few passages, where Goethe touches the higher levels, in Faust; but it is not poetry in the sense that Dante and Milton and Goethe impress upon one when one reads their great passages. Longinus writes on the sublime in literature, and he is within his rights when he puts Thucydides and Homer and Moses upon one plane; but it is the plane of sublimity in thought and phrase, and it is not the plane of poetry. Poetry has no monopoly of the emotions; a line that stirs the heart is poetry when it belongs in a rhythmic whole, and is prose when it does not. Tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore is Vergil’s verse; “the future balances and the hieroglyphic meanings of human suffering” is De Quincey’s prose. Carlyle says of his murdered Princess de Lamballe, “She was beautiful; she was good; she had known no happiness,”—anvil-strokes as strong as the strongest in English speech. Webster, over his murdered Duchess of Malfi, makes the brother cry out, “Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.” What have phrases like “poetic prose” to do with great literature of this sort, and how will one distinguish between these two isolated passages, both throbbing with an intensity of expression which breaks out in the three short clauses? Well, the rhythm of one comes to its rights in the full poetic period where Webster, rough as his verses are, infused a noble harmony; while the cadence of the other falls naturally into the sweep of Carlyle’s prose. Dryden, indeed, with his wonted critical felicity, gives the key of the whole matter. “Thoughts,” he says in his preface to the Fables, “thoughts come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose.”
Since Turgot[[135]] told France and the world that a new kind of poetry had come in the guise of Gessner’s prose idylls the poem in prose has made many claims for Parnassian recognition. At Bertrand we have glanced already; his scholar Baudelaire[[136]] made as bold essay; and so, in quite recent times, the Swede Ola Hansson;[[137]] all these are Werther with a difference, and in the last case with a dash of Nietzsche. He, too, wrote a dithyrambic prose for his hysterical but noteworthy Zarathustra; yet who does not feel the passage, as into another realm of art, when one suddenly comes upon that powerful lyric in verse,[[138]] O Mensch, gieb Acht? Nietzsche, to be sure, had something to say; but with the little men these dithyrambic phrases threaten to turn into mere raving, and often carry out the threat. What saves a poet from this danger, and the great poets know it, is the dignity, the self-restraint, and the communal human sympathy of rhythm, which binds one, as in that old consent of voice and step, to one’s fellows, and checks all individual centrifugal follies; there are no bounds, no laws, there is no decorum, in such whirling words, until they whirl in ordered motion and until cosmos is where chaos was. “Slaves by their own compulsion,” these sensual and dark things rebel in vain against the laws of poetic form; pastels and whatever else, they have not even the dignity of truly great prose. They are out of their sphere; to adapt a line from the Dunciad, prose on stilts is several degrees worse than poetry fallen lame.
Poetry, then, is still rhythmic utterance, though it has lost great stretches of territory to prose. Prose, to be sure, makes a tempting proposition to her impoverished friend. “Let us call ourselves by one name,” she says, “unite all our power, and so make front against science.” Such a union has long appealed to the French. Fénelon, one knows, sought thus to revive the epic; and many pens were set scratching for or against the Télémacomanie. Chateaubriand[[139]] tried a cadenced prose in his Martyrs, by way of putting new life into sacred poetry. Flaubert[[140]] and sundry of his school, above all, the Italian D’Annunzio, annex poetry to the prose romance, and not poetry as an informing spirit simply, but the cadences, the colour, the very refrain.[[141]] Maeterlinck uses the poetic device of repetition—say in the Princesse Maleine—to the verge of regular rhythm. Rime itself is not excluded; witness this from D’Annunzio’s novel:[[142]] “rideva, gemeva, pregava, cantava, accarezzava, singhiozzava, miniaciava; ilare, flebile, umile, ironica, lusinghevole, disperata, crudele.”[[143]] Is poetry, then, fallen by the wayside, and has prose spoiled her of her raiment, so as to stand hereafter in her stead? No. Whatever Walter Pater may have done for English or these men for Italian and French, they have at best set up a new euphemism[[144]] of no real promise and permanence. When the final balance is struck, these writers will perhaps take a place in prose analogous, even if in a contrary spirit, to the place of Swift in verse. Swift’s “unpoetic verse” is remorselessly clear, remorselessly direct; one must read his poetry, and in great measure admire, even like it, for its compelling energy and lucidity of style. Yet, after all, one feels that these are alien virtues, imported from the realm of prose; and one reads Swift’s poems much as one listens to a foreigner conversing correctly, admirably, in one’s own tongue. And as with Swift’s prose excellence in poetry, so with this poetic excellence in prose; in the long account, laudatur et alget. It makes the vain attempt to move landmarks set up, not by men, but by man, by human nature itself.