POETRY 



THE IDEA OF LAW IN POETKY. 1 



BY WILLIAM J. COURTHOPE 



[William John Courthope, Professor of Poetry, University of Oxford, 1895- 

 1901; b. 1842; educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford; Litt.D., Dur- 

 ham, 1895; LL.D. Edinburgh, 189S. Author of Life of Addison (Men of 

 Letters series) ; History of English Poetry; Life in Poetry, Law in Taste. 

 Editor of the Standard Edition of Pope (including a. life of Pope from hii 

 pen).] 



PAET I. FRENCH POETRY. 



FINE art is the imitation, by the poets, painters, sculptors, and 

 musicians of any people, of the idea of the Universal in Nature. This 

 idea springs out of the character of the race, the course of its history, 

 the common perceptions of its men of genius. As the life of a nation 

 develops, the practice of its various artists instinctively falls in with 

 the growth of society, advances with it to maturity, and languishes in 

 its decline. Sometimes, as in ancient Greece, the history of art seema 

 to manifest itself with almost as much certainty and regularity aa 

 the life of a flower, or a tree, or a human body. The Greek poet dis- 

 covered by a kind of spontaneous instinct how to express the idea of 

 greatness in his race in the divine simplicity of hexameter verse; the 

 Greek musician learned at a very early stage how to imitate human 

 passions in dance and song. With the remarkable development of 

 civic life that followed the Persian invasion the Greek architect and 

 sculptor co-operated to embody in marble the loftiest ideas of religion. 

 Instinctively, in the same age. the dramatist combined, from the epic 

 minstrelsy and the religious hymn, a mode of imitation fitted to ex- 

 press the profounder ideas of society about life and nature. With 

 rare and delicate taste, /Eschylus and his two great successor? made 

 the drama, in its progressive development, a mirror for all the 

 changes of moral and religious feeling that transformed the Athenian 

 mind between the battle of Marathon and the Sicilian Expedition. 



