I40 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



such as Mary peeling potatoes. So the poet obeys, the critics praise him, and the 

 world refuses to read him. Or, if the poet disobeys, the critics shatter him— and, 

 again, the world refuses to read him. That is one reason why poetry languishes 

 to-day in the dungeons of derision. A man of wide taste once said to me in the 

 Academy that the pictures there were the ghost-works of dead artists bitten by 



critics. 



Under these influences modern poetry seems to have become debilitated by the 

 absence of healthy effort along various lines of possible good work. Thus, since 

 Swinburne, there have been few attempts at new measures, and we are given 

 nothing but the common jogtrot double-time and jiggitty-jiggitty triple-time, or 

 the vers libre which Swinburne hated and which is really little more than the 

 rhythmless stuff mentioned above. Compare Horace with his various beautiful 

 rhythms, built probably (I think) on the accentual (drum-music) basis, with ad- 

 herence to the laws of long and short for the purpose, not of measure, but of 

 euphony. His particular rhythms are seldom suitable for English, but we shall 

 easily find others that are, even besides those employed by Swinburne, Bridges, 

 and, very occasionally, by others. We seem to have lost the sense of drum- 

 music — a real music. Every one has heard what Europeans called the " howling 

 dervishes " of Constantinople — who really performed a sacred oratorio of drum- 

 music for which the European has no ear at all. Every day, once in Egypt, an 

 Arab passed my quarters playing on his cymbal an exquisite lyric of rhythm 

 which my friends thought merely barbarous. But this attitude is due rather to 

 inadvertence than nature, for I once heard the difficult choruses of Bridge's 

 Demcter admirably rendered at an open-air performance under the guidance of 

 Prof. Oliver Elton. Our reviewers and public seem, however, to take little interest 

 in such matters ; nor in the delicate beauty of the phone-music which must 

 accompany the drum-music — as in the ancient verse where each syllable is, so to 

 speak, tasted by the poet and the reader ; nor indeed in any of the more subtle 

 fibres of the poet's art. How complete is our loss may be judged from the really 

 monstrous but common stage-habit of turning verse in recitations literally into 

 prose — bad enough with dramatic blank verse but absolute murder with lyric 

 verse, even in jogtrot or jiggitty-jiggitty rhythms. The delusion appears to be 

 that it is only the sense of the words that matters— at least to the audience. I 

 have heard the same barbarism in French. Really a horrible vandalism, but one 

 of which the perpetrators appear to be quite unconscious. 



The critics delight in words of vague meaning such as idealism, realism, 

 individualism, values, and so on, which they hurl like mire at the artists. One 

 observes that they are particularly fond of depreciating work of the previous 

 generation, so that Victorian has become as disgraceful to-day as Georgian was 

 fifty years ago — in order to prove how much wiser they themselves have now 

 become. Each carries his own pocket-sextant with which he measures (from the 

 plain) the altitude of the Parnassians and those climbing upward there. Those 

 whom they dare not censure they depress by calling minor poets ; and doubtless 

 the greatest poets were all set in this category by most of their contemporaries — 

 who could not see the summits beyond the shoulders of the hills. One can have 

 little confidence in their judgments or in their neglect ; and it is a sad thought 

 that really great works may quite possibly often be lost in the flood of matter 

 poured forth daily by the mud-crater of journalism. On the other hand, many of 

 the most commended novels and verses of the day are nothing but another form 

 of this same journalism, meant for the moment and writ for the hour. It is an 

 unhappy reflection, but probably a true one, that literature swamps itself nowadays 



