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For the purposes of this book, poetry is rhythmic utterance, rhythmic speech, with mainly emotional origin. One must not write a book on poetry without essaying that iter tenebricosum of a definition—a definition, too, that will define, and not land the reader in a mere maze of words. “Rhythmic speech” is a short journey, puts one on solid ground at the end, and brings about no doublings and evasions in the subsequent path of investigation. It says what Robert Browning says in his summary of his art:—

“What does it all mean, poet?—Well,

Your brains beat into rhythm....”

By rhythmic must be understood a regular recurrence which clearly sets off such speech from the speech of prose; and by speech is meant chiefly the combination of articulate words, although inarticulate sounds may often express the emotion of the moment and so pass as poetry. The proportionate intellectual control of emotion in this utterance is a matter of human development, and largely conditions the course of poetry itself. We agree, then, to call by the name of poetry that form of art which uses rhythm to attain its ends, just as we call by the name of flying that motion which certain animals attain by the use of wings; that the feelings roused by poetry can be roused by unrhythmic order of words, and that rhythmic order of words is often deplorably bad art, or “unpoetic,” have as little to do with the case as the fact that a greyhound speeding over the grass gives the spectator quite the exhilaration and sense of lightness and grace which is roused by the flight of a bird, and the fact that an awkward fowl makes itself ridiculous in trying to fly, have to do with the general proposition that flying is a matter of wings. A vast amount of human utterance has been rhythmic; one undertakes to tell the story of its beginnings. With such a definition the task is plain though hard; let go this definition, and there is no firm ground under one’s feet. The patron and the critic of poetry, to be sure, must make deeper and wider demands; from the critical point of view one must find the standard qualities of excellence to serve as test in any given case, one must ascertain what is representative, best, highest; poetry for the critic has its strength measured by the strongest and not by the weakest link in the chain. From the æsthetical point of view, again, poetry must be defined in terms of the purely poetic impulse. On the other hand, any comparative and sociological study must find a definition wide enough for the whole poetic product, whether of high or of low quality, whether due to this or to that emotion. It needs a simple and obvious test for the material. Now as a matter of fact, all writers on poetry take rhythm for granted until some one asks why it is necessary; whereupon considerable discussion, and the protest signed by a respectable minority, but a minority after all, that rhythm is not an essential condition of the poetic art. This discussion, as every one knows, has been lively and at times bitter; a patient and comprehensive review of it in a fairly impartial spirit has led to the conclusion, first, that no test save rhythm has been proposed which can be put to real use, even in theory, not to mention the long reaches of a historical and comparative study; secondly, that all defenders of the poem in prose are more or less contradictory and inconsistent, making confusion between theory and practice; and thirdly, that advocates of a rhythmic test, even in abstract definition, seem to have the better of the argument. Indeed, one might simply point to the actual use of the word “poetry,” and be done. However the student and collector may proclaim the rights of prose to count as poetry, his history, his anthology, shows no prose at all, and he meekly follows in practice the definition against which, in theory, he was so fain to strive and cry. Of this, one example, but a very remarkable example. Baudelaire, in the preface to his Poems in Prose, speaks of one Bertrand^[49] as his master in this art, and of a book, Gaspard de la Nuit, as its masterpiece. This book,^[50] praised highly by Sainte-Beuve, this fantaisie à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot, as its subordinate title runs, makes occasion for a very bold assertion, and apparently for a great innovation, by one of the editors of a collection of French poetry.^[51] “To admit a prose writer,” he says, “into a poetic anthology needs to be explained. It is certain there are poets in prose just as there are prosers in verse,”—the dear old cry, the dear old half-truth! Now Bertrand is “poet not only by his sentiment, not only by the pomp and sublimity of his thought, ... but by the very art itself” which he lavishes upon this poetic prose. True, he wrote verses also in his Gaspard; but his main work is an artistic marvel of prose. “Louis Bertrand prosodie la prose....” Well, a fine defence for the prose-poet; and one turns to the selections for an example of the poetic prose, not only “main work,” but very rare work of the writer, whose book is most difficult to obtain. And what are the selections from the prose-poet? Two poems in the most incorrigible verse! A sonnet, a ballade:—

“O Dijon, la fille

Des glorieux ducs,

Qui portes bequille

Dans tes ans caducs,”—

a kind of refrain, and with the rime in -ille running through all the eight stanzas; and there is no prose at all! Wozu der Lärm? Why this thunder in the index? Why “admit a prose-writer into a poetic anthology,” with all this ceremony, only to ignore his prose and to print his verse?^[52]

It is to be noted, first of all, that in ignoring the test of rhythm, so as to admit great men of letters like Plato and Bacon to the poets’ guild, the advocates of prose fail to set up any other satisfactory test. Sidney and Shelley, Arcadians both who said noble things about their calling, are reckoned as defenders of the poem in prose. As to the younger, all men must feel more deeply and more lovingly about poetry, for the reading of his essay on that art which “redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man,” memorable words indeed; but his more exact definition declares poetry to be “the expression of the imagination.” Nothing is said here of rhythm, for the good reason that while rhythm can be praised in its own place, it must not be a bar to claims which Shelley and his fellows deem important. Yet how tender and how inconsistent is his rejection of the rhythmic test! Rhythm is “created by that imperial faculty whose throne is curtained within the invisible nature of man”; and “the language of poets has ever affected a sort of uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry.”^[53] Well, is this not to set up rhythm as a test? No, for Bacon, as well as Plato, is to be counted with the bards; and how shall this be done save by condemning “the distinction between poets and prose writers as a vulgar error,” and by a widening of rhythm, so that it shall have no bounds, no necessary “traditional forms”? Thus Plato and Bacon come in, and all hope of a definite, working test of poetry goes out. Sidney, again, had in his day this mingled tenderness and contempt for rhythm. “Rhyming and versing” no more make a poet than a long gown maketh an advocate; but the “senate of poets hath chosen verse as their fittest raiment.” Presently, however, the exquisite reason for prose in poetry is clear, when Sidney calls Xenophon’s Cyropædia “an absolute heroical poem.” So, too, there is a saving clause, which, by the way, nobody denies in its simple form, in Ben Jonson’s well-known deliverance; a poet “expresses the life of man in fit measures, number, and harmony,” yet “not he that writeth in measures only, but that feigneth and formeth a fable and writes things like the truth.” Now the test of rhythm, which Ben does not really deny, will work in practice; the test of imagination will not work. Shelley, putting Plato with the poetic sheep, thrusts Cicero, disciple of Plato, among the goats of prose. Sound criticism, perhaps; but what is the formula? And when one is asking, not whom one shall regard as a poet,—that is, a great poet,—but what one shall regard as poetry, as material to include in a survey of the rise and progress of poetry at large, then the test of imagination fails utterly. Sidney was defending his art; “we are not mere rimers,” so he seems to say, “the root of the matter is in us, and we are kin with the gods.” J. C. Scaliger, who insisted on the test of rhythm, and was called many a pretty name for his pains, had a science of poetry in mind, a survey of it, and cast about for a test that would work on earth without reference to celestial origins. The Abbé Dubos^[54] was not willing to think so nobly of verse, and laid main stress on style,^[55]—always granting, to be sure, the conventional test of “genius.” Only genius can unite in lofty degree within the limits of one verse that “poetry of style” and that “mechanics of poetry” which go to make up the ideal poem; however, it is this style that serves as practical test. In short, put genius, or even imagination, to the practical trial, and confusion reigns at once. Shelley and many more make a poet of Plato; Sidney brings in Xenophon. Coleridge,^[56] insisting that all the parts of a poem must support “the purposes and known influences of metrical arrangement,” thus making rhythm a test, promptly says it is not a test, after all, for along with Plato, both Bishop Taylor and Burnet must be counted as of the bards. Beattie^[57] calls Tom Jones and the Merry Wives of Windsor “the two finest comic poems, the one epic, the other dramatical, now in the world.” Emerson^[58] thinks Thomas Taylor the Platonist “a better poet, or, perhaps I should say, a better feeder to a poet, than any man between Milton and Wordsworth,”—excellent second thought. Sir Thomas Browne he regards as a poet. Brought face to face with rhythm, Emerson hedges; as, indeed, all these good folk do. Goldsmith,^[59] for example, in an unacknowledged essay, calls versification “one of the criteria that distinguish poetry from prose, yet it is not the sole means of distinction.” The Psalms of David, and certain Celtic fragments in prose, “lay claim to the title of poetry.” Hazlitt,^[60] speaking of “poetry in general,” seems favourable to rhythm as a test. Poetry “combines the ordinary use of language with musical expression”; and “there is a near connection between music and deep-rooted passion. Mad people sing.” Then the fear of simplicity gets hold upon him, of postman’s rimes and the posy in a ring; “all is not poetry that passes for such,” verse is not absolutely the test; and he stops short of the inconsistency by saying there are three works “which come as near to poetry as possible without absolutely being so; namely, the Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe,^[61] and the Tales of Boccaccio.” Such works are “poetry in kind, and generally fit to become so in name by being ‘married to immortal verse.’” Bagehot^[62] is quite as cautious; “the exact line,” he says, “which separates grave novels in verse like Aylmer’s Field or Enoch Arden from grave novels not in verse like Silas Marner and Adam Bede, we own we cannot draw with any confidence.” This is to be deplored, perhaps, from Bagehot’s point of view; but Adam Bede remains prose, and Enoch Arden is commonly set down as poetry, and there an end. Why, too, should Boccaccio’s Tales, or the Pilgrim’s Progress, be married to immortal verse? Jeremy Taylor’s beautiful bit of prose about the lark is as satisfying in its own way as Shelley’s verses are; they are different ways, and one wishes as little to turn one into verse as to turn the other into prose. Dr. Johnson, who recognizes no poet till “he has ... distinguished all the delicacies of phrase and all the colours of words and has learned to adjust their different sounds to all the varieties of metrical modulation,” yet concedes that “perhaps of poetry as a mental operation metre or music is no necessary adjunct,” brings out, with his sturdy common sense, the clash of theory and practice. As a mental operation, that is, as the poetic impulse and as a matter of theory, poetry is not tested by rhythm; “it is, however, by the music of metre,” he goes on to say, “that poetry has been discriminated in all languages,”—in other words, metre will serve as a practical test. Now this hedging, this confusion of ideas, this facing one way in theory and another way in practice, is due partly to a shame and partly to a tradition. Where is the dignity of the art, if any Bavius can pin this facile badge of rhythm to his coat and strut about a bard in good standing? Ronsard had this scruple on his mind; so had Sidney, so even comfortable Opitz, so, in spite of his own definition, the elder Casaubon. Tradition of the humanists, of days when poetry held in fee all science, all the gorgeous east of wisdom itself, rules to this day, and keeps men groping for a subtle and esoteric definition. Hence, too, a series of futilities and contradictions in dealing with rhythm as a component part of poetry.

So one comes to the second argument for rhythm as the test of poetry. Not only does the test of imagination fail to work, but all the defenders of prose poems fall into contradiction and confusion so soon as they abandon the other test, so soon as they undertake to put their ideas into any but a protestant and academic form; moreover, this protest nearly always rises from the wish to count as poetry some masterpiece of prose. Take a few typical writers on the theme. Baumgarten, the founder of æsthetics, wrote^[63] an essay in which he undertook an exact definition of poetry, and finally summed it up as oratio sensitiva perfecta, speech that is both concrete,—calling up in the mind a distinct picture,—and perfect. A few years later, in his Aletheophilus, he returns to the quest, and asks what a poem really is. A poem, he answers, is speech so charged with energy that it demands metrical expression. Yet the more he ponders over the quality of rhythm, which in the actual definition seemed imperative, the less he feels inclined to insist upon such a test; at last comes the inevitable concession of theory, and a piece of prose—here it is Télémaque—is suffered to pass as a poem. After all this conjuring and throwing about of Latin, one looks for results and finds instead confusion. But Baumgarten was a dull pedant; set genius to work; call up Friedrich Schlegel, who is said to have been the first critic to study the “poem in prose” as it deserved, and whose own performances in Lucinde made more than one of the judicious grieve. Poetry, he says in one place,^[64] demands rhythm; for only that uniformity which lies in the corresponding succession of tones can express the uniformity needed in all true art; yet again,^[65] wishing to put Tacitus as well as Plato among the poets, he makes his wise Lothario say that “any art or science” which uses speech as its expression, works for its own sake, and is at its best, must be counted as poetry. But let this, too, pass as eccentricity of genius; call upon some one who has both genius and method,—say Schleiermacher, who lectured on æsthetics in 1819,^[66] and undertook to reduce to system and clarity this matter of poetry in prose. To help matters, the subject is halved; drama and epic are “plastic,” and can dispense with rhythm, while lyric is “musical” from the start. How came rhythm, then, into drama and epic? Chorus explains the drama, but epic rhythm cannot rest on any such original union of music and words; there must be an “inward” reason. Why does “free” productivity in speech seek after musical form? So one comes back to the difference between poetry and prose, explained by the nature of human speech; one draws a long breath and sets upon another exhilarating run round the circle. Two extremes of speech are possible,—when no syllable is accented at all, and when all syllables are accented alike; this, of course, will not differentiate poetry from prose. But speech alternates accent and no-accent, arsis and thesis; done for logical reasons this alternation makes prose, for musical reasons, verse. In languages like the classical, where rhythmical accent utterly neglects logical accent, there can be little interference of prose with poetry; while in tongues like the Germanic, where verse-accent and word-accent tend to agree, it is easy for poetry to pass into prose. Doubtless this is keen thinking; it explains in some degree why imaginative prose is absent from the classics as compared with modern drama and romance. But it will not do for a definition, and Schleiermacher begins a subtle but ineffectual analysis of poetry old and new. In a Greek drama there was mingling of measures, now more and now less musical; in modern drama this difference appears as a mingling of verse and prose. But if one thinks of the greater musical element in classical verse, then the modern difference between poetry and prose^[67] “is not much greater than the difference in classical poetry between epic and dramatic measures.” Now what has Schleiermacher really done for the matter in hand? For comparative literature he has done a distinctly brilliant piece of work; but, even apart from the fact that no really clear idea of poetry in itself has been gained, the difference between poetry and prose, and the function of rhythm, have not been elucidated. It has not been shown, after all, whether rhythm is or is not a necessary part of poetry. So one turns to the modern scholar, to the student of poetry as an element in human life, to one who studies it in the light of psychology; but here is the same contradiction. Guyau, who thinks this distinction of poetry and prose a problem of high importance, is in one place^[68] quite confident that “poets” like Michelet, like Flaubert,^[69]—he who first of Frenchmen^[70] tried to give to his words an echo of the sensations described, a vague onomatopœia, and the wider hint of a general situation,—and like Renan, “have been able to dispense with rhythm.” But verse, he thinks, is permanent; it will be “the natural language of all great and lasting emotions”; while in another book,^[71] this excellent and lamented writer not only assigns to rhythm an importance capitale, but calls it “the very mainstay of poetic speech.” And here again is intolerable confusion.

Into this pit of contradiction have fallen even sane and capable critics like A. W. Schlegel, and sober philologists like Wilhelm von Humboldt.^[72] Nobody could be more distinctly an advocate of the test of rhythm than the elder Schlegel was in certain Letters, widely read in their day, on Poetry, Metre, and Speech;^[73] if it be objected, he says, that outpourings of a full heart ought not to be hemmed by rule, it is answer enough to say that they always have been under this control, and that, whatever the possibilities of the case, poetry is and has been governed by rhythm. Rhythm is born with poetry, and “whether by Ontario or by the Ganges,” where poetry is, there too is rhythm. As for “the so-called poetic prose,” Schlegel is very bitter; it “springs from poetic impotence,” and it “tries to unite the prerogatives of prose and poetry, missing the perfection of both.” Elsewhere,^[74] in an amusing little dialogue, he sets Grammar and Poetry talking after this wise: “You speak so simply!” says Grammar. “I must,” answers Poetry, “in order to distinguish myself from Poetic Prose!” And again,^[75] he likens prose-poetry to the ostrich, which has a gait half flying, half running, and wholly awkward. Even the dialogue of the drama needs rhythm; for, thinks Schlegel, its style demands measured and regular movement of verse. Master of translation, like Herder before him, he is against the translation of verse save by verse itself; and the context shows that he is looking upon verse as an indispensable condition of poetry.

When, however, in the lectures at Berlin Schlegel begins to define poetry and to theorize about it, holding as he does a brief for the romantic school, for those doctrines of freedom which could not away with any sovereignty of measured speech over the play of fancy and would have no set paths through the “moon-flooded night of enchantment,” he turns squarely upon the test of rhythm.^[76] It is a crude notion of the philistine, he declares, eine bürgerliche meynung, that whatever is in verses is a poem. Nor is much mended by saying only that can be called poetry which ought to be and has to be composed in verse; of late a kind of poetry has come to the fore which rejects verse entirely,—the romance, the novel. And where is yesterday’s scorn for the poem in prose?^[77]

This study of contradictions could be carried into many another field; but it is time to consider a third point,—that in actual argument defenders of the test of rhythm seem really to come off better than their foes. These opponents start in a fog, and fog besets them all their way. The main authority to which they appeal is Aristotle; but over certain passages^[78] in the Poetics, their point of departure, hangs a haze of uncertainty if not of contradiction. It is doubtful whether Aristotle really meant to say what champions of poetry in prose declare him to have said; moreover, these brave texts must be taken along with a brief but pregnant passage in which he looks at origins and beginnings of poetry, a passage which lends itself less readily to the purposes of those who would sweep rhythm from the field. Indeed, sundry say that this is not Aristotle’s meaning in the brave text itself. “Language without metre,” observes Whately,^[79] is a bad translation; it should be “metre without music.” Twining,^[80] one of the best commentators, refers to that other passage, where one is told that “imitation being natural to us, and ... melody and rhythm being also natural, ... those persons in whom, originally, these propensities were the strongest, were naturally led to rude and extemporaneous attempts, which, gradually improved, gave birth to poetry.” Twining makes a judicious comment. “In this deduction of the art from the mimetic and musical instincts, Aristotle includes verse in his idea of poetry, which he at least considered as imperfect without it. All that he drops, elsewhere, to the disparagement of metre, must be understood only comparatively: it goes no further than to say that imitation, that is, fiction and invention, deserves the title of poetry, or making, better than verse without imitation.” Elsewhere, too, as Twining shows, Aristotle puts verse among the requisites of poetry.^[81] A good Aristotelian, J. C. Scaliger, a greater man, by the way, than modern criticism concedes, who first in his time undertook a science of poetry and not a mere guide to the art, who broke new ground, and who had at least the instincts of historical and comparative method, is squarely for the test of verse.^[82] Poetry is imitation in verse. In the opening sections of his work^[83] he calls the poet not so much a maker of fiction as of verses,^[84] defends rhythm almost in Hamann’s phrase as the mother-tongue of man, derives poetry from singing, and, with a touch of psychological method, makes appeal to the child who must go to sleep with song.^[85] In the later sections,^[86] he vigorously attacks the idea of poetry in prose. He is followed by another pioneer of the historic treatment of dogma, G. J. Vossius, who, tossing to the winds any notion that verse itself makes the poet, declares that verse is nevertheless condition of the poetic work.^[87] For poetry was meant to be sung—the genetic consideration has a strong and wholesome influence upon these men—and how can that be sung which has no rhythm? Or take the rhythm from the Iliads; they turn to mere “fabulous stories.” Briefly, while metres without the aid of diction and genius can make no poem, fiction—Aristotelian imitation—is powerless without the help of verse. To the same purpose and earlier, Isaac Casaubon; the test of poetry is rhythm, and any utterance which comes under metrical laws is so far a poem.^[88] Scaliger, Vossius, and Casaubon are “good”; and their credit comes down to them from their betters. Petrarch, with Latin so at his heart, could never confuse poetry and prose. Dante’s definition^[89] is cold comfort for the heretic about a rhythmic test. Of the smaller fry, Ronsard certainly cleaves to this test of rhythm in poetry.^[90] Gascoigne, as the title of his little treatise shows, assumes with his teacher Ronsard that verse is the condition if not the essence of the art; and Puttenham, Webbe, Campion, Daniel, Harvey, even Spenser,^[91] lean the same way. Sidney, it was shown above, is no real opponent. Bacon himself, quoted so often to sustain the cause of poetry in prose, should be read more carefully;^[92] he really tosses to the winds all question of form, and turns to poetry as “one of the principal portions of learning.”

So the great age thought of poetry; and so the balance inclines as one comes nearer to our own days. Isaac Vossius, in a curious work^[93] published without his name, holds to his father’s view of the case. Shaftesbury^[94] is peremptory for “metred prose,” but, as both a lord and a wit, disdains to give his reasons; while another person of quality, Sir William Temple^[95] indeed, regards metred prose as a monstrosity. Trapp, in his Oxford lectures,^[96] is squarely for the rhythmic test, and will hold it in the teeth of all Aristotelians; so will another professor of poetry, Polycarp Leyser,^[97] of Helmstadt, a rationalist in his day, who thinks it high time to have a modern system of poetics not drawn altogether from the ancients.

Across the channel, meanwhile, relations of poetry and prose had been discussed, now as an eddy in the maelstrom of argument about ancients or moderns, now as a question for itself. The Télémaque of Fénelon was defended as a great poem in prose; to the objection that it was not written in verse, came answers in abundance. One of them, for example, calls upon the ancients;^[98] Aristotle, Dionysius, Strabo, said that verse is not essential to epic poetry. “One may write it in prose, as one writes tragedies without rime.” And the old saw—“one can make verses without poetry, and be quite poetic without making verse”—is followed by a definition of the whole matter; what constitutes a poem is “the lively plot, the bold figures, the beauty and variety of the images; it is the fire, the enthusiasm, the impetuosity, the force, a je ne sais quoi in the words and in the thoughts which only nature can give.” So run a dozen other elaborate pleas for prose in poetry; but the arguments usually end in contradiction, and nothing is brought forward that really sets aside the feeling long ago expressed by Tom Dekker^[99] in his sputtering, pamphleteer style, that “poetrie, like honestie and olde souldiers, goes upon lame feete unlesse there be musicke in her,” and that both poets and musicians are children of Phœbus: “the one creates the ditty and gives it the life or number, the other lends it voyce and makes it speake musicke.”

Even those great changes which the second half of the eighteenth century brought about in the making and in the judging of poetry, left this matter of prose and verse in its old estate. Whenever the critic has a writer to set up, a writer to pull down, this test of verse will be thrust aside; and it is no surprise to find men who belong to the same literary creed—say Warton and Lowth—failing to see eye to eye in this one article of faith. Joseph Warton,^[100] in his guarded attack upon Pope, is working slowly to the inference that it is not genius, but a vast talent, shiftiness of phrase and smoothness of verse, that must explain Pope’s overwhelming success. Hence Warton, in a reaction from this polished and accurate rhythm,^[101] is sure that real poetry does not depend on verse. The sublime and the pathetic “are the two chief nerves of genuine poetry.” Lowth,^[102] on the other hand, though quite in line with the new critical movement, setting about his great work, and undertaking to make his audience feel and know the Hebrew scriptures to be poetry, puts metrical questions in the forefront of his study and will prove that these poems are in verse. He would fain shun this path, thorny as it is and full of snares; but it is a necessary part of his journey, for he is sure that poetry is not to be considered apart from metrical form, and it ceases to be poetry when it is reduced to prose.^[103] Here Lowth and Warton clash not only on the main point, but on this subsidiary matter of translation. Warton said that by no “process of critical chymistry,” such as dropping the measure and transposing the words, can one disguise the Iliad, say, or the Paradise Lost, and “reduce them to the tameness of prose.” Reduced to prose, says Lowth, poetry does cease to be poetry. It is strange to see how both sides of the controversy in this matter of verse and prose appeal to translation, and it is mournful to note the unstable character of what ought to be firm and fundamental facts. A. W. Schlegel, one remembers, stood for translations in verse. So Whately, following Lowth’s opinion, appeals to translation for proof that to break the verse is to shatter the poem;^[104] Racine,^[105] on the other hand, appealed to a translation of Isaiah to fortify exactly the opposite opinion. Or will it be said that Goethe has settled this question in favour of Warton’s view? Every critic knows the oracle from Weimar which declared the best part of a poem to be whatever remains when it is translated into prose; every critic, however, is not at pains to quote the entire passage, with its important concession to verse and its reason for the statement as a whole. “I honour,” says Goethe,^[106] “rhythm as well as rime, by which poetry really comes to be poetry;^[107] but the thorough and permanent effect, what develops one and helps one on one’s way, is that which is left of the poet when he is translated into prose. Here is nothing but the contents pure and simple,—otherwise often concealed, or, if absent, replaced by a fine exterior form. For this reason I think prose translations better than poetical in the early stages of education.” He goes on to recommend a prose version of Homer, to praise Luther’s Bible; but it is clear that the whole extract is no argument against the test of rhythm. Not to insist on Goethe’s concession that it is rhythm which makes poetry to be poetry, one may note how little prose translation does for a lyric, which, after all, is the poet’s poem. What would be left in prose, any prose, of Goethe’s own Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’? The heart of poetry is another matter, its spirit, its informing life;^[108] the historian meets it in terms of its bodily appearance, and must have a concrete test. There is no valid test for the historian save this test of rhythm. Particularly as sociological and historical responsibility begins to weigh upon the critic, he finds that such a test is demanded by his work. Adam Smith^[109]—Blair^[110] is almost with him, but slips in a plea for Ossian—is distinctly on the side of verse. So is Monboddo,^[111] a pioneer in anthropology, keen, observant, who did his thinking for himself, and condemned “all that has been written of late in the rhapsody style, or measured prose,” declaring that “poetry is nothing more than measured rhythm.” Sensible things, too, were said on this matter by men who have left no traces in criticism; one of these sayings seems to be a pretty conclusion and summary of the whole debate. Dr. Thomas Barnes, a Unitarian clergyman now forgotten, but one of the founders of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, an interesting group of men, read, in December, 1781, a paper^[112] “On the Nature and Essential Character of Poetry as Distinguished from Prose.” He turns to origins, and refers to “the common remark that the original language of mankind was poetical”; he turns to ethnological hints, and, following Dr. John Brown, speaks of “Indian orators at this day”; then, summing up the case, he charges for rhythm. “To finished and perfect poetry, or rather to the highest order of poetic compositions, are necessary, elevation of sentiment, fire of imagination, and regularity of metre. This is the summit of Parnassus. But from this sublimest point there are gradual declinations till you come to the reign of prose. The last line of separation is that of regular metre.” Dr. Thomas Barnes is forgotten; but his statement of the case is memorable above a host of admired and often quoted deliverances on poetic art.

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—