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Poetry, then, is still rhythmic utterance, though it has lost great stretches of territory to prose. Prose, to be sure, makes a tempting proposition to her impoverished friend. “Let us call ourselves by one name,” she says, “unite all our power, and so make front against science.” Such a union has long appealed to the French. Fénelon, one knows, sought thus to revive the epic; and many pens were set scratching for or against the Télémacomanie. Chateaubriand^[139] tried a cadenced prose in his Martyrs, by way of putting new life into sacred poetry. Flaubert^[140] and sundry of his school, above all, the Italian D’Annunzio, annex poetry to the prose romance, and not poetry as an informing spirit simply, but the cadences, the colour, the very refrain.^[141] Maeterlinck uses the poetic device of repetition—say in the Princesse Maleine—to the verge of regular rhythm. Rime itself is not excluded; witness this from D’Annunzio’s novel:^[142] “rideva, gemeva, pregava, cantava, accarezzava, singhiozzava, miniaciava; ilare, flebile, umile, ironica, lusinghevole, disperata, crudele.”^[143] Is poetry, then, fallen by the wayside, and has prose spoiled her of her raiment, so as to stand hereafter in her stead? No. Whatever Walter Pater may have done for English or these men for Italian and French, they have at best set up a new euphemism^[144] of no real promise and permanence. When the final balance is struck, these writers will perhaps take a place in prose analogous, even if in a contrary spirit, to the place of Swift in verse. Swift’s “unpoetic verse” is remorselessly clear, remorselessly direct; one must read his poetry, and in great measure admire, even like it, for its compelling energy and lucidity of style. Yet, after all, one feels that these are alien virtues, imported from the realm of prose; and one reads Swift’s poems much as one listens to a foreigner conversing correctly, admirably, in one’s own tongue. And as with Swift’s prose excellence in poetry, so with this poetic excellence in prose; in the long account, laudatur et alget. It makes the vain attempt to move landmarks set up, not by men, but by man, by human nature itself.