[The enlarged photograph on the wall represents the same party when not engaged in comic composition.
THE POETS AT PLAY
Addison in his Papers on Wit makes vigorous onslaught against “false wit.” “The first species of false wit which I have met with is venerable for its antiquity, and has produced several pieces which have lived very near as long as the Iliad itself; I mean those short poems printed among the minor Greek poets, which resemble the figure of an egg, a pair of wings, an axe, a shepherd’s pipe, and an altar.”
Further on, he says, referring to these conceits, “the poetry was to contract or dilate itself according to the mould in which it was cast. In a word, the verses were to be cramped or extended to the dimensions of the frame that was prepared for them, and to undergo the fate of those persons whom the tyrant Procustes used to lodge in his iron bed; if they were too short he stretched them on a rack; and if they were too long he chopped off a part of their legs, till they fitted the couch which he had prepared for them.”
Most people accept this dictum of Addison as a final pronouncement on the distinction between true and false wit; but on further consideration it may be found that “much can be said on the other side.” Addison asserts that the matter must suffer if it has to be squeezed into a certain shape. This may be so, but it need not be much more so in the forming of a pair of wings in verse, than in the construction of a sonnet. Every sonnet, no matter how inspired, must follow an artificial measure, every poem, be it never so soulful, must have a definite number of feet in each of its lines and a preconceived arrangement; yet, no one advances the opinion that Scott was wasting his sense of poetry by casting it in the form of octo-syllabic verse, or that Shakespeare had a difficulty in fitting his thoughts to the measure of his sonnets or the blank verse of his plays.
THE POETS ILLUSTRATED.
1.—“For, indeed, my father did something smack—.”—Merchant of Venice.
2.—“Take any shape but that!”—Macbeth.