This involves, of course, a perpetual struggle between thought and language. Language is for ever striving to overtake thought and feeling. Browning indeed may say:—
Perceptions whole, like that he sought
To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought
As language.
But in this we must not acquiesce. Browning himself, indeed, however immense his range of sympathies, however extraordinary his dramatic insight, falls far short in the purely literary gift. He is not a master of language as Shakespeare was or as Tennyson was. Extremist votaries of Browning are accustomed to say either that he is not obscure at all, or else that his obscurities are inseparable from the thoughts. We must not admit this latter plea until we are prepared to call Isaiah and Shakespeare shallower than Browning.
The transcendent literary artist is always compelling language to express what it had seemed incapable of expressing. Indeed the "advance of literature" often means no more than a greater degree of success in giving recognizable shape to the hitherto vague and elusive, in communicating what was supposed to be incommunicable. Often, when we say that such and such a writer gives us "new glimpses," or "opens up new thoughts," it only means that he has discovered how to express such thoughts, so that we can realize and recognize them. He is not an inventor, but a revealer.
And the highest revealer is the great poet. Poetry is language and music. Musicians tell us that music is intended to impart what language cannot express—something unspeakably more delicate, more subtle, emotionally more powerfully or more tranquillizing. But music must not aim at too much. It cannot really describe action or define thoughts; it can only translate feelings and moods into sounds. Now just as music is always advancing, always endeavouring to fulfil more perfectly the functions of art—which are, as I have said, to communicate the spirit of one human being to his fellows—so language also is ever struggling to enlarge its powers and to do what musicians tell us music alone can do. Language, too, must translate feeling, and moods, but into words. It in a sense invades the region of music. And herein lies the justification—the necessity—for poetry, or for a prose which is virtually poetry in its language and movement and imagination. Poetry, in that broad sense, must always be the literary form for the expression of that which is most difficult to express, I mean of anything which is pervaded by a rare exaltation and passion of feeling, or by a delicate grace and charm.
Some people pretend to think that poetry is a wholly artificial thing; that it is merely a pleasing trick, when it is not an irritating trick, with language. Well, alas! it is quite natural that many stern spirits should be irritated by verses; for it is entirely true that nine-tenths of what is being, or has been, written in verse might better have been written in prose, or rather not written at all. The young author, and, for the matter of that, the old author, who thinks that he has a perfect right to choose between the verse form and the prose form simply according as he can versify or not, is grievously in the wrong. There is no more justification for, say, a purely didactic poem or descriptive poem than there is for the rhyming which begins somebody's treatise on optics with these egregious words:—
When parallel rays
Come opposite ways
And fall upon opposite sides.
Everything depends upon the nature of that which a man has to say.
What are the external marks of poetry as distinct from real prose? These: the choice of words of a special emotional or pictorial force, combined with musical cadences, rhythm, and sometimes rhyme. And why are these employed? To tickle the ear? By no means. It is simply because they are most effective agents in that communication of his mood and spirit which is the aim of the artist. When a mere fact has to be stated, there is no defence for verse, unless as an aid to memory, just as we say—