8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the attention of the understanding is aroused to its fullest capability 

 by the metrical form of poetry, I can not agree with him. Its very 

 monotony tends to lull the discrimination to rest. If Spencer in ex- 

 plaining the value of rhythm means by economy of attention a failure 

 to exercise the intellectual energies, he is inconsistent with himself. 

 Yet in his account of the effects of rhythm I agree with him. In its 

 soporific effect on the intellect, in its holding of the understanding in 

 abeyance, lies the virtue of metrical language. Poetry is necessarily 

 metrical because it is necessarily emotional. Spencer himself recog- 

 nizes not merely, as previously stated, that emotion naturally chooses 

 the bepraised direct order, but that the natural language of emotion is 

 metrical if the emotion be not violent. " Whilst the matter embodied 

 is idealized emotion, the vehicle is the idealized language of emotion," 

 he says in speaking of poetry. 



Before dismissing Spencer's theory of style let us make a further 

 effort to render it plausible. In the first place the essay was written, 

 not as a philosophy of style but as a study of the causes of force of 

 expression. From this point of view it is comprehensible to proclaim 

 the superiority of poetry to prose, to make much of rhythm, and to be 

 a little transcendental in the application of the inverted order. Again, 

 no one can gainsay the principle of economy clearly set forth and rightly 

 applied. But it is misleading in the highest degree to use economy in 

 a double sense, as failure to exercise, and as exercising to the greatest 

 possible advantage. 



Now, it is true that in both prose and poetry there must be the 

 greatest possible economy of both the mental energies and the mental 

 sensibilities. But in poetry economy of the sensibilities means their 

 greatest possible utilization, and economy of the mental energies their 

 comparative suspension and elimination. While, vice versa, the prin- 

 ciple of economy as applied to prose demands economy of the mental 

 sensibilities in the sense of their comparative suspension and economy 

 of the mental energies in the sense of their utmost utilization. In other 

 words in poetry clearness must at times be sacrificed to force, and in 

 prose the emotional must yield to the intellectual impression. This 

 opposition between clearness and force is based on the psychological 

 fact that the emotions interfere with the judgment. Attention to the 

 sensational aspect of an impression may blind us to the perception. 

 The subjective mental attitude militates against the objective. When 

 Spencer recommends the use of Saxon words — a recommendation which 

 in 1902 he confesses not to have himself followed — and at the same time 

 praises the use in prose of the inverted order, he is really regarding the 

 subject from two points of view. The short, familiar Saxon word may 

 bring us more readily to the idea, it may be perfectly clear and all the 

 more so because not emotional. But " Great is Diana of the Ephe- 



