698 POETRY 



on aesthetic principles, in an epoch of the world in which the drama 

 was the natural vehicle of imaginative thought, could not possibly be 

 acted, and he made a half promise that, at some future time, he would 

 adapt CroimceU for the stage. I am not aware, however, that he ever 

 reduced his ideas to practice. 



But what "Victor Hugo did not perceive was that, while he professed 

 to be sweeping away all French dramatic tradition, while he imagined 

 himself to be imitating Shakespeare, and to be creating in a spirit 

 of unfettered liberty, he was showing a complete ignorance of the 

 principle on which Shakespeare's plays are constructed, and was uncon- 

 sciously following, though with a variation, the stage principles of his 

 predecessors. As I have already said, Shakespeare's method of dra- 

 matic creations, like that of the Greeks, is to reduce what was orig- 

 inally a well-known epic story into such a form as will please the 

 imagination of spectators in a theatre; the method of the French 

 playwright is to analyze an idea in his own mind and then to repro- 

 duce it in a dramatic shape. It matters not that the idea which 

 Hugo analyzed was that of a single man's character, while that which 

 Corneille analyzed was a psychological situation: that, in The Cid, the 

 spectacle to be contemplated is a conflict between Love and Honor, 

 and, in Cromwell, the conflict of motives in the mind of a regicide; in 

 both cases the imaginative process is the same, the logical combination 

 of abstract ideas; in both cases the artistic result is fundamentally 

 the same, a play depending for its effect on rhetorical speeches and 

 epigrammatic points. This is the method of Seneca, not the method 

 of Shakespeare. 



Examine, again, the motto of another great standard-bearer of 

 Romanticism, Theophile Gautier. His principle, " Art for Art's sake," 

 seems to promise the artist unlimited liberty in imitating Xature, pro- 

 vided he is possessed of adequate skill. When illustrated by Gau- 

 tier s own practice, however, his maxim evidently implies a deter- 

 mination to identify the methods of poetry with the methods of paint- 

 ing. Gautier endeavored to imitate Xature in words, exactly in the 

 same way as the painter imitated her in form and color. Xo\v, in a 

 lecture on "Poetical Decadence" I fully admitted that the art of 

 poetry included an element analogous to the art of painting, as may 

 be plainly seen in the descriptions and similes of great poets like 

 Homer, Virgil, Milton. Spenser, and Ariosto. Xor do I deny that 

 Gautier's poetry abounds in admirable pictorial tours de force, such 

 as the humorous picture, in his Enmux ct Camccs, of Winter as an old 

 violinist. " With red nose and pale face, and with a desk of icicles, 

 he executes his theme in the quartet of the Seasons. He sings with 

 an uncertain voice old-world quavering airs: his frozen foot warms 

 itself while it marks the time. And like Handel, whose wig lost its 



