ὡς ὅτ' ἐν οὐρανῷ ἄστρα φαεινὴν ἀμφὶ σελήνην . . . Yes; the English will bear the comparison. The great difficulty is that such texture of language in English is somehow exotic; it has to choose its language and diction with special exclusiveness. It hardly ever, not even in Mr. Swinburne's sea-poems, seems really to belong to the wind and the open air. The strong direct life of the Homeric hexameter comes out more in Sigurd the Volsung: There Gudrun stood o'er the turmoil, there stood the Niblung child: As the battle-horn is dreadful, as the winter wind is wild, So dread and shrill was her crying and the cry none heeded or heard, As she shook the sword in the Eastland and spake the hidden word: 'The brand for the flesh of the people, and the sword for the King of the World.' Then adown the hall and the smoke-cloud the half-slaked torch she hurled, And strode to the chamber of Atli, white-fluttering mid the smoke; 6 And their eyen met in the doorway and he knew the hand and the stroke And shrank aback before her, and no hand might he upraise; There was naught in his heart but anguish in that end of Atli's days. But she towered aloft before him, and cried in Atli's home: Lo, lo, the daylight, Atli, and the last foe overcome.' It is fine poetry, strong and beautiful. I hardly like to say anything against it; but taken as mere metrical workmanship it remains rough. The texture of the language is sometimes cheap, sometimes a little affected; the long unstressed syllable, on which everything depends, is little considered. The texture of Sigurd seems to me sometimes to be founded not upon Homer but, as it were, upon something earlier and cruder than Homer. Keeping the sound of it in your ears, think first of Swinburne, then of the words spoken to the dead Acilies in Od. XX. how all day long down to evenfal the bravest of Achaeans and Trojans met their death μαρνάμενο, περ. Γείς σὶ ὃ ἐι στροφάλιγγ, κονίης κείσι μέγας μεγαλωστί λελασμένος αποσυνάων. The Swinburne had one quality of great poetry, and the Morris another, but has not this, almost to the limit of perfection, both? It is so smooth and splendid, and at the same time so simple and strong. In illustrating this question of poetic texture, I find I have beer speaking chiefly of epic. Is there any future for this form of poem in English? Most people will say that they do not see any clear hope; but we must remember that such negative evidence is not of much value. As soon as somebody can see the thing he will do it. As we said before, it is chiefly architecture that is wanted. The texture, indeed, may need generations of craftsmen to build it up, but we must remember that Milton practically did make such a texture once, single-handed. The other great quality, religion, is wanted, too. Probably a great epic should be based on some traditional story with characters and incidents that already mean something in the national mind. At any rate it must be somehow related to life as a whole, or to the main issues and interests that men feel in their lives. It is some quality of this sort which makes in large part the special greatness of Mr. Hardy's Dynasts. About drama I will say nothing at present, or almost nothing. The three qualities we have noticed, religion, architecture, and beauty of texture, are notably present in Greek tragedy, the religion most obviously so. As to architecture, whatever may have happened to the supposed classical unities, it is the rarest thing in the world to get a Greck drama which does not aim essentially at unity of effect and unity of atmosphere. I think that one of the rea sons why comparatively few scholars enjoy Greek tragedy as much as they enjoy Homer, say, or Theocritus, is that drama so seldom condescends to burst out into specially beautiful scenes or passages. Every character and every scene is subordinate. Each is doing work for the whole. It is largely the same quality, I think, which in modern times leads to the comparative unpopularity of Ibsen with lovers of literature. Of course I do not compare him with the Greeks in his actual attainment of beauty; but in his resolute disregard for the beauty of the part, and his concentration on the value of the whole, he works exactly in their spirit. But how, you may say, does this comparative disregard of beautiful or eloquent language fit with my doctrine of texture? It does so in quite an interesting way. Let us spend a moment in considering it. The diction of a poetical play in any language has, I conceive, two tasks, among others, laid upon it. It must be able to move up and down a certain scale of tension, the lower end tending towards ordinary conversation (or the illusion of ordinary conversation), the upper end towards sheer lyrical poetry. And secondly, it must somehow preserve always a certain poetical quality of atmospheresomething ideal, or high, or remote, however one may define it. Now you will find that the ordinary English poetical play tries to solve this problem by (1) rather slack and formless metre; and (2) ornate, involved, and ultra-poetical diction. The first enables the poet to slide into prose when asking for his boots; the second, almost unassisted, has to keep up the poetical quality of the atmosphere. It does so, of course, at the expense of directness, and often with the ruinous result that where you have Drama you have killed Poetry, and where you have Poetry you have killed Drama. Greek tragedy tried quite a different method. It has (1) a clear ringing and formal metre, based indeed on the Payla så trilhary conversation but perfectly strict in its 7.69 14 TAAStaattle to the ear. Comely ani Tragedy word write their dialogue in lambie trimeters, but the critics 1* *has 13 in comic dialogue any line occurs which Stremveg the metrical rules of tragedy, that line is a parody. *6, seat la the tragic rhythm. (See Mr. Nell's edition of The Kaughte; 12, This metrical system, ailed by a corresynding barersion in vocabulary, so maintains the poetic a morphore that the language can afford to be extraordin*.7 dres and simple, though of course it can also rise to quas, piquta of imaginative or emotional expression] I may mention that these two points constitute part of the tract. why, after many experiments in blank verse, I came to the consusion that the tragic trimeter was best represented in English by rhyme. Rhyme gives to the vers the formal and ringing quality, remote from prose, which. Vela to my ear to be needed; it enables one to more swifty, like the Greek, and to write often in couplets and antitheses, like the Greek. I also found that, while in neither case would English convention tolerate for long the perfect, simplicity of language that is natural in Greek, it was possible in rhyme to write far more directly and simply than in blank verse. Blank verse, having very Lisle metrical ornament, has to rely for its effect on rich and elaborate language. Rhyme often enables you to write lines as plain and direct as prose without violating the poetical atmosphere. That is a digression, and my judgement may of course be wrong. But I believe you will find that one reward which Greek tragedy reaps from its severe metrical rules is that, the ear being satisfied and unconsciously thrilled by the metre, the language can at will cast away all ornament, and go straight for drama. In the greater part of the Oedipus you will find scarcely any deliberate eloquence, and scarcely any poetical ornament. What you do find in every speech and every line is dramatic relevancy. There is beauty, of course, but not as it were a beauty that is deliberately sought and imposed upon the material. It is the beauty that necessarily results from clean well-balanced proportion, psychological truth, and intensity of feeling. It is in lyric poetry that the difference between Greek and English, and, I will venture to say, the great technical superiority of Greek, comes out most strongly. I am considering, of course, as far as the two can be separated, technique and not inspiration. I am not for the moment concerned to deny that for sheer poetic beauty some quite simple English song, with no elaboration or sublety about it, may stand as high as the choruses of the Agamemnon. I merely urge that in point of technique there is hardly any comparison. It is only in the last century that English poetry has begun to learn its business in the writing of lyrics, under the lead first of Shelley, and then of Swinburne. Some admirers of Elizabethan lyrics will, perhaps, here rise in indignation against me, but I must still maintain that in the matter of lyrical skill in the Greek sense Elizabethan song is absolutely rudimentary. I will base that statement on three grounds: 1. Elizabethan song cannot handle the trisyllabic foot. No English poet succeeded in doing so till the generation of Shelley. 2. No Elizabethan song can handle what the Greeks called syncope-that is, the omission of a short unstressed syllable, so that the long syllable that is left becomes over-long (as in 'Break, break, break '). 3. No Elizabethan song can make anything of the unstressed long syllable. These are three purely metrical points, but I would add another of wider range. The whole essence of lyric is rhythm. It is the weaving of words into a song-pattern, so that the |