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“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.