Part 15 (2/2)

Henley's _New Review_ ”No one can fail,” said Mr Brown, a the fineness of his own ear to be common to all mankind--”no one can fail to observe the sweetness and the strength, the outspokenness, the downrightness, and, at the same time, the nervous delicacy of pausation, the rhythm all ripple and suspended fall, the dainty _but_, the daintier _and forsooth_, as though the pouting of a proud reserve curved the fine lip of him, and had to be atoned for by the homeliness of _the chimney-corner_”

Everybody admires Sidney's prose But how of this?--

”Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science Emphatically it may be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare has said of man, 'that he looks before and after' He is the rock of defence of hu everywhere with him relationshi+p and love In spite of difference of soil and clie and one out of ether by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time”

It is Wordsworth who speaks--too rhetorically, perhaps At any rate, the prose will not coood prose, nevertheless; and the phrase I have ventured to italicise is superb

Their high claiht be expected, the poets in this volu We have just listened to Wordsworth Shelley quotes Tasso's proud sentence--”Non c'e in mondo chi merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta”: and hi as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be ienerations” Sidney exalts the poet above the historian and the philosopher; and Coleridge asserts that ”noat the same time a profound philosopher” Ben Jonson puts it characteristically: ”Every beggarly corporation affords the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly; but _Solus rex, aut poeta, non quotannis nascitur_” The longer one lives, the more cause one finds to rejoice that different

Inspiration not Ireement of all these poets on some other matters is reat practitioners of their art; but wonderful is the unanimity hich they dissociate this froame The Poet does not pour his full heart

”In profuse strains of _unpremeditated_ art”

On the contrary, his rapture is the sudden result of long premeditation The first and most conspicuous lesson of this volume seems to be that Poetry is an _art_, and therefore has rules Next after this, one is struck with the carefulness hich these practitioners, when it comes to theory, stick to their Aristotle

Poetry not mere Metrical Composition

For instance, they are practically unani Aristotle's contention that it is not the metrical form that makes the poem

”Verse,” says Sidney, ”is an ornament and no cause to poetry, since there have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and noarm many versifiers that need never answer to the na the word ”Poetry” as synonymous with metrical composition ”Much confusion,” he says, ”has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact or Science The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre: nor is this, in truth, a _strict_ antithesis, because lines and passages ofprose that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even were it desirable” And Shelley--”It is by no e to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error” Shelley goes on to instance Plato and Bacon as true poets, though they wrote in prose ”The popular division into prose and verse,” he repeats, ”is inadmissible in accurate philosophy”

Its philosophic function

Then again, upon what Wordsworth calls ”the more philosophical distinction” between Poetry and Matter of Fact--quoting, of course, the fae in the _Poetics_--it is wonderful hat hearty consent our poets pounce upon this passage, and paraphrase it, and expand it, as the great justification of their art: which indeed it is Sidney gives the passage at length Wordsworth writes, ”Aristotle, I have been told, hath said that Poetry is the e quotes Sir John Davies, rote of Poesy (surely with an eye on the _Poetics_):

”Froross matter she abstracts their fors; Which to her proper nature she transfors

”Thus does she, when from individual states She doth abstract the universal kinds; Which then reclothed in divers nah our senses to our minds”

And Shelley has a re, ”The story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”

In fine, this book goes far to prove of poetry, as it has been proved over and over again of other arts, that it is the h to break the rules who accept and observe them most cheerfully

THE ATtitUDE OF THE PUBLIC TOWARDS LETTERS

Sept 29, 1894 The ”Great Heart” of the Public

I observe that our hoary friend, the Great Heart of the Public, has been taking his annual outing in September Thanks to the German Emperor and the new head of the House of Orleans, he has had the opportunity of a stroll through the public press arht of Kings And the two have gone once ht of the raves of the Thin End of the Wedge and the Stake in the Country You know the unhappy story?--how the Wedge drove its thin end into the Stake, with fatal results: and how it died of remorse and was buried at the cross-roads with the Stake in its inside! It is a pathetic tale, and the Great Heart of the Public can always be trusted to discriminate true pathos from false