POETRY AND PROSE. N OT a few readers will recall Macaulay's
celebrated dis- cussion as to the possibility of producing great poetry in an elaborate state of civilisation. Poetry, he almost avers, is possible only under a semi-barbarous social condition; an opinion in which Dr. Johnson seemed to agree when he spoke of the Greeks as barbarians. The poetry of Goethe, of Milton, of Wordsworth, of Tennyson, is a sufficient answer, perhaps, to this association of poetry with an assumed rustics simplicity. Recent archaeological investigation has proved, too, that 2Eschylus and Sophocles, nay even the mighty Homer, were comparatively late products in Greece, while Roman poetry was essentially an urban and highly civilised muse. On the whole, we think criticism must pronounce Macaulay's dictum to be superficial, if not entirely erroneous. But while it is true that great poetry seems to originate alike in simplex and complex social conditions, great prose appears to indicate an advanced and highly elaborated state of sooiety,
in which literary instinct and culture, as opposed to original poetic impulse, is the prevailing intellectual factor.
Does this mean that poetry and prose are inherently opposed ? The question is a difficult one which we should rather answer on historical than on purely analytic lines, though both answers must be forthcoming if any secure judgment is to be given. On the whole, have poets written prose supremely well? We should be inclined to say that, as a matter of fact, they have not. It may be said at once that the great majority have scarcely written prose at all. They have folded their singing-robes around them, and have been content to leave to the world the pure cadence of their song. But there are such important exceptions to this rule that they must be considered. Plato is reported to have written poetry of which one beautiful stanza has been handed down, tad he has written perhaps the most perfect prose he world has ever seen. Dante produced the greatest Dot:day, and he has also left us three or four great prose works. Goethe wrote poetry and prose, each great of its kind, with equal facility. Milton, our own greatest epic poet, was also one of our greatest prose writers. Shelley, perhaps our first lyric poet, also produced in his "Defence of Poetry " one of the most perfectly beautiful pieces of English prose. Byron was somewhat inferior, but vigorous alike in prose and poetry. Victor Hugo was supreme, and Lamartine interesting and effective in both. Schiller, Lermontoff, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, essayed prose and verse with more or less success in both. It is plain, therefore, that the creation of poetry, and even the greatest poetry, is not incompatible with the production of a fine and powerful prose.
And yet we all feel that between these forms of creative power there is such a real difference that it surprises us when a poet site down to a prose composition. We think it natural that a Shakespeare or a Tennyson should have been content to leave as a legacy his immortal verse unrelieved by any prose work. When we think of a great prose composition, we turn at once to the work of a Tacitus, a Gibbon, a Bacon, a Pascal, who brought prose to a high state of elaborate perfection, but who was in- capable of the kind of work which we designate poetry. We are apt to say that the one kind demands inspiration, the other analytic power. If this is so, we must say that the great poets we have quoted who also wrote prose had their moments of inspiration and their moments of analysis,—that -when Dante wrote his " De Monarchia " he was almost a Efferent being from the great poet who descended into hell; that Milton the controversialist was well nigh a different personality from the blind poet whose inner vision was lighted by ITrania's lamp. That analysis is mainly, though not wholly, true. Two considerations limit its truth. In the first place, much of the prose work done by these poets was essentially poetic and highly imaginative in its nature ';hough not cast in poetic forms. Take Goethe's " Wahrheit and Dichttmg," whose very title indicates its poetic as well as autobiographic quality. Shelley's " Defence of Poetry " is in essence instinct with the spirit of poetry ; it is alive with the shaping power of imagination, as is his translation of the " Banquet " of Plato. Dante's " Vita Nuova " makes the same kind of impression upon one as does his poetical work. One feels that in none of these cases were the singing-robes necessarily replaced by meaner apparel. In such cases as those of Schiller or Goldsmith, where hack work had to be done to keep the wolf from the door, the impression is of course different; and yet what excellent work Goldsmith did under these dismal conditions.
The second consideration to which we must allude concerns work done by writers not technically poets, writers incapable of anything more, to say the least, than mediocre poetry, and yet whose prose shines with a glow which at once strikes one as reflected from the burning sun of high poetic vision. Ruskin's early poetry was scarcely worth writing ; his splendid prose will not only live as long as the language, it will live as the vehicle of high poetic thought. Burke's stately sentences have this same high imaginative quality. The purple patches in Emerson belong to the same order, and there are pages in Carlyle which make the same impression on us as do the powerful lines of Byron. W hen reading such authors and comparing them with the tame meanderings of Pope's contemporaries (we do not say of Pope himself), we are tempted to exclaim, " Which is poetry ? Is the so-called prose or the so-called poetry the creative, forming art to which the Greeks gave the immortal name ? "
These two considerations apart, then, we hold that poetry and prose will generally not be brought to supreme excellence by the same writers. The kind of power, the "inevitable- ness," to quote the word used by Arnold, which characterises great poetry, is a creative power, not exclusive of criticism and analysis, but dominating and pervading them. While the creative power is, of course, not absent from great prose, and while in some kinds of prose, as those of Shelley and Ruskin, it is as pervasive and regnant as in poetry, still in general it is dominated and regulated by criticism and analysis. Prose may argue in the treatise, it may preach in the sermon, it may narrate as in the history, or converse as in the novel, or criticise as in the essay. But poetry and music do not preach, or criticise, or argue, or expound ; they steal by unperceived ways into the soul's citadel; they are the evidence of things not seen, the copies of those patterns which, as Plato says, are laid up in heaven. So far as the true poet deserts his muse for criticism, however luminous, he is expending a divine force on the things of earth. And therefore, though, as we have said, history contradicts Macaulay as to plain matters of fact, there is this element of truth in what he said or intended to say,—that, in so far as the spirit of spontaneity, of what Wordsworth termed a " wise passiveness," is absent from society, poetry will dwindle, peak, and pine; while a very keen and widespread spirit of analytic inquiry will have the tendency to raise a vigorous prose to a high level of excel- lence. The Elizabethan age gave us Shakespeare and Spenser; the Georgian, Fielding and Gibbon.
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