cal meaning. As Joubert has said, in a figure which is a precise definition: 'In the style of poetry every word reverberates like the sound of a well-tuned lyre, and leaves after it numberless undulations.' The words may be the same, no rarer; the construction may be the same, or, by preference, simpler; but, as the rhythm comes into it, there will come also something which, though it may be born of music, is not music. Call it atmosphere, call it magic; say, again with Joubert: 'Fine verses are those that exhale like sounds or perfumes'; we shall never explain, though we may do something to distinguish, that transformation by which prose is changed miraculously into poetry.

Again, it is Joubert who has said once and for all the significant thing: 'Nothing is poetry which does not transport: the lyre is in a certain sense a winged instrument.' Prose indeed may transport us, though not of the necessity with which poetry is bound to do so. But, in all the transport of prose, something holds us to the ground; for prose, though it may range more widely, has no wings. That is why substance is of so much greater importance in prose than in verse, and why a prose-writer, Balzac or Scott, can be a great writer, a great novelist, and yet not a great writer of prose; here, as elsewhere, prose makes conquest of new tracts of the earth, with leave to fix firm foundations there, by its very lack of skill in flight. The prose play, the novel, come into being as exceptions, are invented by men who cannot write plays in verse, who cannot write epics; and, the usurper once firmly settled, a new dynasty begins, which we come to call legitimate, as is the world's way with all dynasties.

Prose is the language of what we call real life, and it is only in prose that an illusion of external reality can be given. Compare, not only the surroundings, the sense of time, locality, but the whole process and existence of character, in a play of Shakespeare and in a novel of Balzac. I choose Balzac among novelists, because his mind is nearer to what is creative

in the poet's mind than that of any novelist, and his method nearer to the method of the poet. Take King Lear and take Père Goriot. Goriot is a Lear at heart, and he suffers the same tortures and humiliations. But precisely where Lear grows up before the mind's eye into a vast cloud and shadowy monument of trouble, Goriot grows downward into the earth and takes root there, wrapping the dust about all his fibres. It is part of his novelty that he comes so close to us and is so recognisable. Lear may exchange his crown for the fool's bauble, knowing nothing of it; but Goriot knows well enough the value of every banknote that his daughters rob him of. In that definiteness, that new power of 'stationing' emotion in a firm and material way, lies one of the great opportunities of prose.

The novel and the prose play are the two great imaginative forms which prose has invented for itself. The essay corresponds in a sense to meditative poetry: has the lyric any analogue in prose? None, I think, in structural form, though there may be outbursts, in such elaborate prose as De Quincey's, which are perhaps only too lyrical, and seem to recognise a more fixed and releasing rhythm, that of verse. The prose of science, philosophy, and even history, has few fundamental duties to literature, or to prose as a fine art. Science, when it is not pure speculation, is concerned with mere facts, or theories of facts; and where a fact in itself is more important than the expression or illumination of that fact, there can be no literature. Philosophers have often been dreamers, poets turned inside out; and such may well bring concrete beauty into the domain of abstract thought. But for the most part philosophers have regarded prose much as ascetics have regarded the body; as a necessary part of matter, a necessary evil. To the historian prose becomes much more important, yet remains less important than it is to the novelist. The historian, after all, like the man of science, is concerned primarily with facts. He undertakes to tell us the truth about the past,

and it is only when he competes with the novelist, and attempts psychology, that he is free to become a writer of actual literature. Much fine literature has been written under the name of criticism. But for the critic to aim at making literature is to take off something from the value of his criticism as criticism. It may produce a work of higher value. But it will cease to be, properly speaking, what we distinguish as criticism.

Only in the novel and in the prose play does prose become free to create, free to develop to the utmost limits of its vitality. Together with fiction I would include autobiography, perhaps of all forms of fiction the most convincing. In all these we see prose at work directly on life. 'The sense of cadence in prose,' says Rémy de Gourmont, 'has nothing in common with the sense of music; it is a sense wholly physiological. We set our sensations obscurely to rhythm, like prolonged cries of joy or sorrow. And thus everything can give finer shades, and adapt itself better to thought, in prose than in verse.' It is thus in prose that men confess themselves, with minute fidelity; Rousseau's 'Confessions' could have been written only in prose. All the best fiction, narrative or dramatic, is a form of confession, personal or vicarious; and, in a sense, it is all personal; for no novelist or dramatist ever rendered vitally a single sensation which he had not observed in himself or which he had not tested by himself. In verse even Villon cannot 'rhythme ses sensations' so minutely as Rousseau can in prose. The form forces him to give only the essence of his sensations, and to give them in a manner modified by that form. In prose we can almost think in words. Perhaps the highest merit of prose consists in this, that it allows us to think in words.

There is no form of art which is not an attempt to capture life, to create life over again. But art, in verse, being strictly and supremely an art, begins by transforming. Prose fiction transforms, it is true, it cannot help transforming; but by its nature it is able to follow line for line in a way that verse can

never do. 'The artifices of rhythm,' said Poe, 'are an insuperable bar to the development of all points of thought or expression which have their basis in truth. . . . One writer of the prose tale, in short, may bring to his theme a vast variety of modes or inflexion of thought and expression(the ratiocinative, for example, the sarcastic or humorous) which are not only antagonistical to the nature of the poem, but absolutely forbidden by one of its most peculiar and indispensable adjuncts: we allude, of course, to rhythm.' It is, in fact, that physiological quality which gives its chief power, its rarest subtlety, to prose. Prose listens at the doors of all the senses, and repeats their speech almost in their own tones. But poetry (it is again Baudelaire who says it) 'is akin to music through a prosody whose roots plunge deeper in the human soul than any classical theory has indicated.' Poetry begins where prose ends, and it is at its chief peril that it begins sooner. The one safeguard for the poet is to say to himself: What I can write in prose I will not allow myself to write in verse, out of mere honour towards my material. The further I can extend my prose, the further back do I set the limits of verse. The region of poetry will thus be always the beyond, the ultimate, and with the least possible chance of any confusion of territory.

II

Critics or historians of poetry are generally concerned with everything but what is essential in it. They deal with poetry as if it were a fashion, finding merit in its historical significance, as we find interest in an early Victorian bonnet, not because it is beautiful, but because people once thought it 'genteel.' But poetry is a reality, an essence, and is unchanged by any change in fashion; and it is the critic's business to find it where it is, to proclaim it for what it is, and to realise that no amount of historical significance or adaptability to a

former fashion can make what is bad poetry in the present century good poetry in any century of the past.

There is a theory, at present much in vogue, by which the evolution of poetry is to be studied everywhere but in the individual poet. This theory has been summed up by M. Rémy de Gourmont in an essay on one of its chief practitioners, Ferdinand Brunetière: 'Literary history,' he says, 'is no longer to be a succession of portraits, of individual lives; the question is now of poetry or of history, not of poets or of historians; works are to be studied, without too much importance being given to their writers, and we are to be shown. how these works give birth to one another by natural necessity; how from the species poetry are born the varieties sonnet and madrigal; how, under the influence of surroundings, the lyrical variety is transformed, without losing its essential characteristics, into eloquence, with many further metamorphoses.' The same point of view is expressed by Mr. Courthope when he tells us that 'it is unphilosophical to believe that a single poet can turn the art of poetry into any channel he will by his own genius: the greatest artists are those who best understood the conflict of tendencies in their own age, and who, though they rise above it into the region of universal truth, are moved by it to reflect in their work its particular form and character.' In other words, we are to believe that the cart drives the horse, that the taste of the time makes the genius of the poet. It is the poet who, by his genius, makes the taste of the time. All that 'conflicts of tendencies' and the like have to do with the poet is to help him now and again to a convenient form, to suggest to him the lute or the stage, to' give him this or that malleable lump of material. He is supremely fortunate if, like Shakespeare, born with a genius for drama, he finds a stage already alive and awaiting him; comparatively unfortunate if, like Goethe, his dramatic genius, lacking a stage for its complete expression, can but create individual works, which, however great, lose their chance of