■m 
 
 
 A'l< 
 
?N 
 
 OfDrncU HwiOTtaitg 2Iibrarg 
 
 Jft^aca, mtw Qatk 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRVfWfSAGE 
 
 1891 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PN 1042.L22 
 
 Rudiments of criticism 
 
 3 1924 027 091 804 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027091804 
 
THE RUDIMENTS 
 
 OF 
 
 CRITICISM 
 
 BY 
 E. A. GREENING LAMBORN 
 
 HEADMASTER OF THE EAST OXFORD SCHOOL 
 
 OXFORD 
 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 1 916 
 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK 
 TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
PREFACE 
 
 ' I COULD wish that there were authors of this kind, 
 who, besides the mechanical rules, which a man of very 
 little taste may discourse upon, would enter into the very 
 spirit and soul of fine writing and show us the several 
 sources of that pleasure which rises in the mind upon 
 the perusal of a noble work . . . which few of the critics 
 besides Longinus have considered.' 
 
 We cannot complain that Addison's wish has not 
 been amply fulfilled in the last century and in our own 
 day by the critics both of England and France. Yet 
 I believe it is still true that no one since Longinus has 
 given us, point by point, in a small compass and in a 
 simple style, a general introduction to the meaning and 
 scope of criticism. > There are numerous and admirable 
 books on particular poets and poems and periods, but I 
 do not know of any modern ' Poetics ', a general study 
 of poetic form, on the model of the treatise of Longinus 
 ' On the Sublime ', with illustrations from our own poets. 
 Moreover, all the critical studies that I know are for the 
 advanced student, they preach to the converted, to those 
 who have already learned to love poetry. For a long 
 time I have been looking for a simply-written introduc- 
 tion to the study of poetry such as might be put into the 
 hands of young students to show them what to look for 
 and to prevent them falling at the outset into the fatal 
 error of reading poetry for the substance and not the 
 
 A 2 
 
4 Preface 
 
 form of its matter : this is the error of the annotated 
 editions which are the common substitute for the kind of 
 book I mean, and not one student in a hundred survives 
 their vicious influence. If such a book exists my excuse 
 for the present essay is gone. I began it with no thought 
 of publication, but simply with the idea of setting down, 
 for the use of my staff and of the young teachers whose 
 practice I supervise, some record of methods I had 
 found useful in my own lessons, and some suggestions 
 and conclusions drawn from my experience as a teacher 
 and a student of literature. But I have been led to 
 suppose that the notes may be helpful in other schools 
 and training colleges ; and I should like to cherish a 
 hope that they might be the means of leading some, 
 whom the schools have failed to persuade, to the study 
 and appreciation of poetry. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION , . . 7 
 
 10 
 19 
 
 39 
 S6 
 
 I. What is Poetry 
 II. Rhythm and Rime . 
 
 III. Poetry is Music 
 
 IV. Sound and Sense 
 V. Stanza-Form 
 
 VI. Pictures in Poetry. 64 
 
 VII. The Figures of Speech . 84 
 
 VIII. Other Artifices and Other Arts . 103 
 
 IX. Poetry is Formal Beauty . . 117 
 
 X. Children's Exercises . . . 138 
 
 SUPPLEMENT .... , . 163 
 Children's Verses and Essays . 163 
 
 Selected Questions 189 
 
None of us yet know, for to none has it yet been revealed 
 in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build for ourselves of 
 beautiful thoughts — proof against all adversity. — Ruskin. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Thy mind 
 Shall be a mansion for all lovely thoughts, 
 Thy memory be as a dwelling-place 
 For all sweet sounds and harmonies. 
 
 I BELIEVE that ' why ? ' is always a more important 
 question than ' how ? ' for Englishmen especially and for 
 teachers in particular. We are so fond of action that we 
 do not care to think of aims ; we are so eager for results 
 that we seldom pause to consider if they are really 
 worthy of our efforts. So long as something is attempted, 
 something done, we do not often ask whether that 
 thing is the best which could occupy us in the circum- 
 stances. And when we do we are apt to be content 
 with the answers of tradition. This may be a source of 
 strength as well as of weakness in a nation ; but I agree 
 with those ^ who have declared it to be the origin of much 
 mistaken teaching in the elementary schools. 
 
 So although the essay is concerned mainly with 
 methods, I will begin by stating the end at which all art 
 teaching should aim : it is, in a word, Appreciation, 
 which is a form of Appraising, which, shortly, is Praise ; 
 it is to learn the true value of a work of art that we may 
 admire and love it. 
 
 Though in the material sense of utility it is true that 
 ' all art is useless ', yet in a deeper anH far more real sense 
 ' studies that serve for delight ', like poetry, are the very 
 end for which utilitarian science and skill exist; we 
 learn and labour to provide material things in order 
 
 1 e. g. Mr. E. G. A. Holmes in ' M^hat Is and 'What Might Be '. 
 
Introduction 
 
 that we may enjoy spiritual things. But that poetry is 
 not a means of supplying useful information or of 
 training the memory — except to learn more poetry — or 
 improving the morals, or providing sage axioms or 
 grammatical examples, or serving any practical purpose, 
 let us with joy admit and declare. It is the charm and 
 the glory of poetry that its high and single purpose is 
 ' to make glad the heart of man '. 
 
 But, like all the fine arts, it will only yield its full 
 delight to the trained seeker, the critic — in the true 
 meaning of that much-abused word. 
 
 Those who think of the difficulties and drudgery of 
 the old days, when so many lines 'with knowledge of 
 meanings and allusions' had to be taught each year; 
 of the annotated editions with three pages of notes to 
 two of poetry ; and of the difficulty in making children 
 remember that the Mincius is a tributary of the Po, that 
 a prism—' prisms in every carven glass '—is a solid figure 
 whose sides are parallelograms, the ends, whatever their 
 shapes, being equal and parallel, that samite is Greek 
 hexamiton and German samwiet which is English velvet, 
 that Idylls, Eclogues, and Bucolics are, more or less, 
 names for the same thing— I am quoting actual notes, 
 not drawing on memory or imagination — may fear that 
 real criticism is too difficult a matter for children. If 
 that were indeed so we ought to abolish poetry from the 
 schools : for in all seriousness it were better that a mill- 
 stone were hanged about our necks and we drowned 
 in the sea than that we should continue, as we have done 
 in the past, to make poetry a task and a trouble. But it 
 is not so. Children are naturally good critics of poetry, 
 for they are akin to the poet, who is the child of the 
 
Introduction 
 
 race; and they have an instinctive appreciation of its 
 beauty — what other meaning has that poem which is the 
 crown of Wordsworth ? 
 
 To develop this critical instinct, to reveal it as a 
 means of culture within reach of the very poorest, and 
 as naturally leading on to interest in other arts, is the 
 purpose of our poetry lessons. These notes are the 
 record of my own attempts to fulfil that purpose. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 WHAT IS POETRY? 
 
 ' May God make this world, my child, as beautiful to you as it has 
 been to me.' — Blake, in old age. 
 
 'He beholds the light and whence it flows, 
 He sees it in his joy.' 
 
 What poetry is, in spite of all the definitions, we can 
 no more define than we can define life or love ; but what 
 things are poetry we know, as we know what things 
 are living, and loving, by their attributes and by their 
 effects upon us. And the first of these is a troubling of 
 the waters of the spirit : all poetry expresses some one's 
 feelings and attempts to awaken the corresponding 
 emotions in the heart of another. 
 
 All of us are poets in a measure because all of us 
 have feeling, and power to communicate what we feel to 
 others; but those we call poets are at once more 
 sensitive, with a wider range of feeling ; and better able 
 to express what they feel, and move others to share their 
 feelings. To speak in metaphor, the senses of their soul 
 are more numerous and more acute, and their voices have 
 a greater compass than is in common men. All of us, 
 for example, see dimly, as a half-blind man sees a light, 
 beauty in a hill or a cloud or a primrose ; but the poet 
 sees it as a radiant glow that moves him to cry aloud 
 with delight and so to make us also look again more 
 earnestly to share his vision. We hear, as a deaf man 
 is conscious of a voice, the echo- of music in running 
 water ; but he hears the full clear melody and calls to us 
 
What is Poetry? n 
 
 to listen more intently that we too may catch it. We all 
 have wondered vaguely at the mystery and the majesty of 
 the stars, but he falls on his face before them and priest- 
 like prays us, as many as hear him, to accompany him to 
 the throne of heavenly grace, and to say after him words 
 that once spoken are felt to be the only ones worthy, yet 
 such as we ourselves could never have found. And in 
 many places where there is a shy and subtle beauty that 
 most of us would never see, a poet's eye discovers it and 
 his voice makes it plain to us. 
 
 If the inventors of machinery, as Samuel Butler says, 
 have given mankind supplementary, extra-corporeal 
 limbs, the poets have a far nobler gift for us : they have 
 opened new windows in our souls. 
 
 The greatest poet is he who has felt the most of all 
 the things that move the hearts of men and felt them 
 most deeply ; and can touch the most' hearts to 
 sympathy. And that is why Shakespeare, whose heart 
 was made out of the hearts of all humanity and whose 
 tongue had learned all human speech, sits and smiles 
 alone ; and that is why we call him God-like. 
 
 As in all vital matters— and poetry is a vital matter — 
 instinct plays a large part in recognition of what is good ; 
 and with children especially. But the condition of man's 
 advance has been the sacrifice of instinct to judgement ; 
 and so children have to learn to know poetry by 
 criticism as well as by intuition ; for what is called the 
 critical instinct in adults is really habit. 
 
 That it should be a£_ attempt^ to_ communicate 
 a genii jne^motion is the first condition o fjgoetry. But 
 our hearts are hard and our senses dull compared with 
 a poet's ; and sometimes are moved without being 
 
IV hat is Poetry? 
 
 conscious of it. Emotion, then, will not always be our 
 guide — except to the very highest poetry. We must 
 learn to recognize it by its attributes and its outward 
 form. There are no poetical subjects — there are indeed 
 no artistic subjects, for art can find and reveal an aspect 
 of beauty in everything that God has permitted to exist. 
 It is not the thing but the saying that moves us, not 
 the matter but the manng- of its presentation. Poetry 
 shows us an aspect of a thing, not the thing itself, which, 
 as we know from Plato, we never can see as it really 
 is ; science shows us another aspect ; religion another ; 
 common sense, perhaps, another. 
 
 On the high road near my house is a row of ancient 
 cottages falling into decay, dark and dirty and really 
 unfit for human habitation ; in the daytime an eyesore 
 and a reproach. Yet at night, when the beams of 
 powerful car-lights fall on their tall fronts, they are 
 transfigured and glow with a strange and weird beauty 
 like the glamour of a dream. So art can make sad 
 things beautiful, and sordid things wonderful, as in 
 Mr. Hardy's novels. 
 
 Why this should be so is a question that would lead 
 us into the deepest of all problems, the nature of good 
 and evil. Can that be really ugly that may sometimes 
 appear beautiful ? Must not the beauty be there always, 
 though we cannot see it? What was the vision that 
 made Keats say 
 
 There is a budding morrow in midnight? 
 
 Mr. G. K. Chesterton, in his clever attack on 
 Mr. Hardy's art, assumes with Matthew Arnold that 
 art should ' show us things as they are ' ; but art has 
 
What is Poetry? 13 
 
 nothing to do with the truth of things as they are, 
 but with the impression they make on the artist's mind ; 
 sincerity we may demand from the artist but not truth, 
 for who knows what is truth outside the narrow limits 
 of mathematical science ? Art is the expression of the 
 artist's mood, not the representation of objective fact. To 
 a poet in a lover's mood the sea smiles with him in his 
 joy, the winds whisper the name of his beloved, the stars 
 look down on him like friendly eyes ; to the same poet, 
 in another mood, the same sea looks grim and cruel, the 
 winds mock his sighs, and the cold stars watch him with 
 a passionless inscrutable gaze. 
 
 The gloom of Egdon Heath, the baseness of Sinister 
 Street, the cruelty of Lear's daughters are not facts, but 
 as subjective as Christmas at Dingley Dell or the Forest 
 of Arden or things seen in a dream ; but, like the things 
 in dreams, they are more real than reality : they move 
 us with more poignant emotions ; while they are with us 
 we enjoy a more concentrated experience ; they make 
 us live more poetically, while the mood they com- 
 municate endures. 
 
 But the actors are all spirits and soon 
 
 Are melted into air, into thin air 
 
 And we are awake again to that other aspect of things 
 which we call reality : 
 
 Dreams, indeed, they are ; but such as even 
 Jove might dream. 
 
 Criticism is the study of the art by which the poet 
 presents the emotional aspects of things so as to com- 
 municate his own feelings to others. 
 
14 What is Poetry? 
 
 Emotion is not poetry, but the cause of poetry; and 
 emotional expression is only poetry when it takes a 
 beautiful form. Here again w6 are faced with the 
 indefinable : we can only say that certain men have innate 
 power to produce under the influence of emotion sounds 
 and sights that thrill the senses of other men, and that 
 the exercise of that power is called art — music, painting, 
 sculpture, perhaps, acting. To exist as poetry, emotion 
 must be translated into music and visual images, clear 
 ahd beautiful; they may be terrible or saddening, but 
 still beautiful; for it has been said that the greatest 
 mystery of poetry is its power to invest the saddest 
 things with beauty. When emotion takes an inartistic 
 form, the result is not poetry but a sort of echo of 
 poetry, sometimes so like the real thing that only a 
 cultivated taste can distinguish between them. Then 
 why trouble to do so ? I cannot too strongly aflSrm that 
 only by such trouble and training can we appreciate art 
 at all or get any real good from it. ' We needs must 
 love the highest when we see it ' : that applies to God 
 alone and not to the works of any of His creatures. 
 But if ' appreciate ' be substituted for ' see ', then it is 
 true of art. 
 
 The echo of poetry awakes not emotion but that 
 shadow of emotion, sentimentalism ; usually as harmless 
 as it is useless ; but capable of becoming, when indulged, 
 the most pernicious influence that can enter the heart of 
 man. The most infamous name in human history is his 
 who died with the words on his lips, ' What an artist 
 perishes in me ! ' So have other sentimentalists deluded 
 themselves, even in our own time. Criticism of letters, 
 the effort to realize a genuine emotion, as Voltaire said, 
 
What is Poetry? 15 
 
 and Cicero before him, ' nourishes the soul, strengthens 
 its integrity, furnishes a solace to it ' ; but an uncritical 
 susceptibility to mere sentiment is more dangerous than 
 the craving for strong drink. 
 
 This matter is of such vital importance to my point of 
 view that unless I succeed in making it clear and carrying 
 the reader with me, the rest of my labour will be lost. 
 I will try to explain by an example. Eliza Cook's verses 
 on ' The Old Arm-Chair ' have been familiar to three 
 generations : 
 
 I love it, I love it, and who shall dare 
 
 To chide me for loving that old arm-chair? 
 
 I've treasured it long, as a sainted prize, 
 
 I've bedewed it with tears and embalmed it with sighs; 
 
 'Tis bound by a thousand links to my heart ; 
 
 Not a tie will break, not a link will start. 
 
 Would ye learn the spell? A mother sat there. 
 
 And a sacred thing is that old arm-chair. 
 
 That is the attempt to express a real emotion, one of 
 the deepest and purest that the heart can know, the 
 loving remembrance of a dead mother. Yet somehow 
 it misses the emotions and only awakens sentiment ; 
 sentimental minds may not be aware of the difference ; 
 but it does not ' tell ' with most of us. The reason is 
 that tlie form, the medium of expression, is not adequate 
 to convey, to communicate, the emotion. 
 
 First, and most significant, it is lacking in musical 
 power ; I shall try to examine later on the technique of 
 musical hnes, but in the present instance the ear alone 
 is a suflScient guide, and it feels these verses to have 
 no adequate volume of sound to impart a strong emotion 
 
1 6 IV hat is Poetry? 
 
 and no cadences to voice a deep one. If the verses are 
 read aloud and then immediately afterwards 
 
 O that those lips had language ! Life has passed 
 
 With me but roughly since I heard thee last. 
 
 Those lips are thine — thy own sweet smile I see, 
 
 The same, that oft in childhood solaced me ; 
 
 Voice only fails, else how distinct they say 
 
 ' Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away ! ' 
 
 The meek intelligence of those dear eyes 
 
 (Blest be the art that can immortalize, 
 
 The art that baffles Time's tyrannic claim 
 
 To quench it) here shines on me still the same — 
 
 ' The Old Arm-Chair ' will sound like a mere jingle by 
 the side of the solemn and deep musical noteofCowper's 
 lines ; yet the same emotion inspired both. Each is written 
 in riming couplets with ten syllables to the line ; but one 
 rattles along with a bounce and a jerk: the other has 
 a slow, grave movement befitting its sad reflective theme. 
 Shall we say that Cowper loved his mother more deeply 
 than Eliza Cook loved her's ? I believe that not the 
 depth of emotion but the power to transmute it into 
 music, the command of the emotional medumT, consti- 
 tutes the real difference. Words may be but a tinkling 
 cymbal even when there is love. 
 
 But, secondly, the visual images, the pictures, in ' The 
 Old Arm-Chair ' are vague and indefinite ; we are not 
 made to see them ; and if we wish to do so we must 
 construct them for ourselves ' from information received '. 
 Then we have to view an old arm-chair as ' a prize ' — an 
 unusual role for a piece of second-hand furniture to play ; 
 and as it has been ' bedewed ', a risk to which indoor 
 effects are not meant to be subjected nor formed to 
 
What is Poetry? 17 
 
 sustain, it is not likely to excite much competition even 
 though its being ' embalmed ' (but ' sighs ' are a poor 
 preservative) might seem to warrant its durability. But 
 whoever wins this prize must apparently take the lady 
 as well ; for it ' is bound by a thousand links to her 
 heart ', not one of which will break. One line of Cowper, 
 ' The meek intelligence of those dear eyes ', has more 
 worth for the imagination than this whole stanza. 
 I should be very sorry to make fun of a daughter's love 
 for her dead mother. I am trying to show that the form of 
 emotional expression does not convey the real emotion, 
 "and~that those wno tancy tnemselves • moved ' by it 3re~ 
 from laziness or carelessness taking the shadow for the 
 substance and deluding themselves with mere words. 
 By such readers the publishers of feuIUetons grow rich ; 
 worse still, a sense of unreality gradually grows upon 
 them — for Eliza Cook's verses are much nearer the real 
 thing than the great mass of bad verse — and then they 
 assume that all poetry is an echo and a fiction, and cease 
 to read it in any form. I fancy that people who have no 
 taste for poetry fall roughly into two classes, those who 
 have been fed on sentiment till they sickened of it, and 
 those who have been crammed with notes on meanings 
 and allusions and grammatical examples and biographical 
 records until they have learned to curse the poets and all 
 their works. , 
 
 But neither of these classes has known poetry at all. 
 I am not going to add another failure to the many 
 attempts at defining what in its very essence Is undefin- 
 able : but on the tomb of Lord Falkland's grandfather In 
 Burford Church is an epitaph written by his wife ; it 
 concludes with a quatrain which always to me seems to 
 
i8 What is Poetry? 
 
 express in poetry of the tenderest beauty the most 
 essential truth about poetry : 
 
 Love made me poet 
 
 And this I writt, 
 My harte did doe yt, 
 
 And not my witt. 
 
 A poet, by his very name, is a ' maker ' : a maker of 
 music, and of pictures ; and in both, to some extent, 
 a maker of the material — viz. language — in which he 
 works. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 RHYTHM AND RIME 
 
 While yet a child and still unknown to fame 
 I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. 
 
 And first of Music. Every one, almost, finds pleasure 
 in music ; yet delight in poetry is an enjoyment revealed 
 but to a happy few ; so that I have known a professed 
 lover of music whose knowledge of poetry was limited 
 to a line or two of Shakespeare's description of ' the man 
 that hath no music in himself, with which he used to 
 taunt people who had not learned to play the piano. 
 The first and most fatal mistake we can make in regard 
 to poetry is to forget that poetry was born of music 
 and is a form of music. Its first appeal is through the 
 ear direct to the emotions. It is to this extent a univer- 
 sal language, like all the fine arts. The sonorous flow 
 of Greek verse, the stately rhythm of Latin, the subtle 
 grace of French, have power to communicate the 
 emotion of the poet quite apart from the literal meaning 
 of his words. Repeated experiments have shown that 
 children not only enjoy listening to the music of poetry 
 in an unknown tongue, but that they are keenly respon- 
 sive to its emotional appeal. 'Aux armes, citoyens! 
 Formez vos bataillons ' will stir them as a trumpet-call ; 
 the hiss of ' qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons ! ' needs 
 no translation to be recognized as a curse ; nor the 
 lingering pathos of ' miserere Domine ' as a prayer. 
 
 Those who have not made such experiments will be 
 
 B 2 
 
20 Rhythm and Rime 
 
 astonished by children's intuitive insight into the meaning 
 of mere sound — unless they happen to have really loved 
 a dog. I lately heard a ' Greats ' man read a passage of 
 Homer to some boys of twelve, who knew no language 
 but their own ; they listened breathlessly and then told 
 him that there had been a challenge, a fight, and a song 
 of triumph— which was really the ' substance ' of the 
 passage. He then read some lines of Vergil, and they 
 said ' it was a cavalry charge ' ; ' passer mortuus est ' of 
 Catullus, and they suggested that ' some one was speak- 
 ing of a dead child'. Ages before articulate speech 
 existed emotion was expressed and communicated in 
 sound, and in poetry it still is so communicated, apart 
 from the mere dictionary meaning of the words used. 
 
 I once asked a boy the meaning suggested by the 
 sound of 
 
 Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore 
 
 and he said he thought it was a part of the psalm that 
 tells how by the waters of Babylon they sat down and 
 wept. 
 
 It will usually be found that people who do not care 
 for poetry have never learned to listen for the music in 
 it, often have never realized that it is there. This, then, 
 must be our first aim : to reveal poetry as melody and 
 to help the children to read it musically, almost as one 
 teaches them to read the melody of a musical score ; 
 not necessarily aloud at first, for young voices have not 
 the necessary range or power to express their ideal, 
 but to help them to make its music sound in the inward 
 ear as one helps them to make its pictures flash upon the 
 inward eye. 
 
Rhythm and Rime 
 
 Rhythm and rime are the most obvious elements in 
 the music of verse, and children must be taught to mark 
 them, to bring them out and make them tell. The 
 tendency to ' sing-song ', which many teachers are apt to 
 check, is a perfectly natural one — it lies at the very root 
 of poetry — and the opposite extreme, poetry read in a 
 light, snip-snap, conversational tone, controlled only by 
 punctuation like the plainest prose, is far more offensive 
 to a cultivated ear — and also to the natural ear. If any 
 onewill read — say — Blake's ' Little lamb, who made thee?' 
 to a young child not yet sophisticated by school, first as 
 prose and then with the rhythm marked even to sing- 
 song and pausing at the ends of the lines, to mark the 
 rimes regardless of punctuation, he will be left in no 
 doubt as to which rendering the natural ear prefers. 
 And instinct is a guide we ought never to disregard. 
 We are told again and again in Lord Tennyson's Memoir 
 that when Tennyson recited his own poems he almost 
 intoned or chanted them, and Hazlitt tells us the same 
 of both Wordsworth and Coleridge. What we have to 
 teach children is that their reading must satisfy alike the 
 ear and the mind, both the demand of the sense for music 
 and of the intellect for logic. But, for children at least, 
 the first is by far the more important — and by far the 
 less considered as a rule. 
 
 How rhythm and ' the jingling of like endings ' affect 
 the nervous system, and why certain sounds are pleasing 
 to the ear, are ultimately physiological questions but, I 
 believe, have not yet been explained ; of smells, of course, 
 biologists know more and can explain their 'survival 
 values'. Men in a state of emotion tend naturally 
 to speak rhythmically ; the explanation may prove to be 
 
22 Rhythm and Rime 
 
 connected with the nervous control of the breath. 
 Rhythm appears to be an attribute of life : wherever 
 a heart beats or breath is drawn it is present. 
 
 Verse probably had its origin in meaningless sounds 
 spontaneously uttered to accompany the rhythm of 
 primitive dances ; a great deal of early verse, e. g. folk 
 songs, consists more or less largely of ' nonsense rhythm ', 
 like ' hey nonny oh nonny nonny nonny oh ! ' ' ri fol ri 
 fol down-derry dey doh ri fol ri fol dee '. Then words 
 without much ' content of thought ' were chosen instead 
 to fit the rhythm, and so began the earliest form of 
 ballad — in schools, now happily growing more common, 
 where dancing is taught, the practice of accompanying 
 the. dance by song might also be revived to the greater 
 delight of the children : I know at least one school where 
 folk dances, quadrilles, and lancers are always accom- 
 panied by the singing of nursery rimes or nonsense 
 jingles. But words as spoken have a rhythm Of their 
 own which does not always correspond with the regular 
 alternate beats of ' nonsense verse ' ; when we disregard 
 this ' speech-rhythm ' for the sake of the regular ' verse- 
 rhythm ' we have ' sing-song '. For example, the verse- 
 rhythm in 
 
 To-morrow is our wedding day 
 \j _ V — \j — 
 And we will then repair 
 
 Unto the Bell at Edmonton 
 
 i-* — w — \j — 
 
 All in a chaise and pair 
 
 would please the ear but offend the reason because it 
 fails to recognize the rhythm of speech — in singing, of 
 course, we are content to do so because we seek to 
 
Rhythm and Rime 23 
 
 gratify the ear alone. But bj slightly modifying this 
 rendering, shifting a beat or dropping one here and there, 
 yet still retaining a sufficiently regular fall to suggest 
 the verse-rhythm, we may effect a compromise that will 
 meet both demands : 
 
 \j — 
 
 To-morrow is our wedding day 
 
 y^ ^ \J ^_» — 
 
 And we will then repair 
 
 Unto the Bell at Edmonton 
 
 All in a chaise and pair. 
 
 It is of course the ear-pleasing verse- rhythm that we 
 seek to keep near, and th,is is the more easy because 
 speech-rhythm in phrases is less fixed and rigid, and 
 so often offers alternatives one of which may be not far 
 removed from verse-rhythm ; for example in the line 
 
 w — w 
 
 Or let me sleep alway 
 
 where the verse-rhythm is as marked, the speech -rhythm 
 
 may be : 
 
 — \j ^ — — ^^ 
 
 Or let me sleep alway 
 or 
 
 Vi/ — -* — — w 
 
 Or let me sleep alway 
 
 and we choose the second alternative as better allowing 
 the verse-rhythm to be heard as the ' base music ' of the 
 line. When a line is written with so little art that no 
 compromise is possible without sensible loss to one or 
 other of the rhythms, we get doggerel: 
 
 v> _ w 
 
 A Mister Wilkinson, a clergyman 
 
24 Rhythm and Rime 
 
 is a well-known example : if we mark the verse-rhythm 
 it is mere sing-song ; but if we give it speech-rhythm 
 
 A Mister Wilkinson, a clergyman, 
 
 all suggestion of a ' dance of numbers ' disappears ; not 
 only so, but we can find no means of modifying the two 
 rhythms to make them approach one another sufficiently 
 to restore the suggestion of a regular beat. On the other 
 hand in Hudibras, much of which is doggerel, the short, 
 strong verse-rhythm is powerful enough to override the 
 speech-rhythm. 
 
 If the reader will experiment with other Knes, of 
 blank verse particularly, he will discover that this com- 
 promise between verse-rhythm and speech-rhythm is 
 not merely a means of reconciling the conflicting demands 
 of mind and sense, but is the source of a new and endless 
 delight : it offers an almost infinite variety to the ear 
 that would otherwise be tired and satiated by the very 
 regularity for which it craves. The ipontrast between 
 the two rhythms, with the resulting relief afforded by 
 the constant necessity to vary the verse-rhythm in 
 different ways, is indeed the one thing that enables the 
 poet to maintain his readers' delight throughout a long 
 poem. Gray's Elegy, fine poetry though it is, falls 
 below the highest partly for this reason ; he has been 
 so careful to maintain the regularity of the verse-rhythm 
 by choosing speech-rhythm that almost always corre- 
 sponds, that towards the end, in spite of the beautiful 
 imagery, we are beginning to be faintly conscious of 
 a feeling of monotony. Those who habitually read 
 poetry only for its ideas may dissent ; but I believe that 
 the music-lovers, to whom poetry is melody first, will 
 
Rhythm and Rime 25 
 
 agree that there is ' too much of a good thing ' in the 
 unvarying regularity of metre in the Elegy. 
 
 With Shakespeare, on the other hand, 'the thought 
 constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will 
 best bring out the rhythm ' ; he leaves the verse-rhythm 
 to take care of itself — which in his hands it always does, 
 rippling along like a deep under-current. If the reader 
 will turn to Henry VIII, iii. 2, 'where Shakespeare's 
 work is mixed with Fletcher's, and will begin at line 351, 
 he will find that the twenty lines of Wolsey's soUloquy 
 are set to a regular verse- rhythm, so that they can easily 
 be read as a ' sing-song ' by any one who tries : 
 
 Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye : 
 
 \^ — \J ^ \^ — \J — v^ _ 
 
 I feel my heart new-opened. O 1 how wretched 
 
 \j — \j — \j — \>_\> — 
 
 Is that poor man that hangs on princes' favours ! 
 
 \^ ^ \j — t^ — \^ _Vi/_ 
 There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to, 
 
 ^ — \j — \^ ■• \j _ \j — 
 That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin. 
 
 More pangs and fears than wars or women have 
 
 That is Fletcher, though it is often learned by small 
 boys as ' a Shakespearian gem '. 
 
 Now, at line 374 enters Shakespeare : 
 
 Never so truly happy, my good Cromwell. 
 
 t^— W— — \J \^ — \m^ — S^ 
 
 I know myself now; and I feel within me 
 
 ._, — ^_. — — \j — \j \^ 
 
 A peace above all earthly dignities, 
 
 A still and quiet conscience. The king has cur'd me, 
 
 \j — \j — \j — 
 
 I humbly thank his Grace; 
 
26 Rhythm and Rime 
 
 The verse-rhythm has ceased to be insistent ; it has 
 sunk into subconsciousness ; to read the rest of the 
 scene in ' sing-song ' is impossible without constantly- 
 doing violence to the sense. For though there is a 
 rhythmic tune the sense has made it. 
 
 Teaching children to read verse so as to make it 
 a delight to themselves and others, means, very largely, 
 teaching them to mark the verse-rhythm, and at the 
 same time avoid sing-song by modifying it where speech- 
 rhythm dictates. It also means helping them to appre- 
 ciate and render the full musical value of rime. 
 
 Rime is the one beauty in words which was not 
 revealed to the Greeks. Like Gothic architecture, it is 
 a gift conceived in France and developed by the western 
 nations under French leadership. It was meet that it 
 should come into England with the law and organization 
 of the Conqueror, for it is a natural source — as he was 
 and his race — of order and organized form. It brought 
 the stanza into being, as he the state, and gave it definite 
 shapes, as the mighty Normari hand formed lawless 
 elements into the union of regular communities. / An ill- 
 instructed genius like Walt Whitman may preach and 
 practise an ignorant contempt for rime as ' a feudal 
 superstition ', and inartistic minds who read him only for 
 the substance of his thoughts may believe him. But 
 without rime and its restricting and shaping control only 
 the very greatest have power to force verse into the 
 mould of beauty ; and without rhythm poetry soon 
 degenerates into the chaos of anarchy ; for 
 Rimes the rudders are of verses 
 With which like ships they steer their courses. 
 The ear has an unexplained but natural delight in 
 
Rhythm and Rime 27 
 
 them and listens for a rime as children listen for an 
 echo, and, like them too, is the more delighted when 
 the gratification is repeated ; that is the great charm of 
 the perfect sonnet-form. The simplest and probably the 
 earliest use of rime is when two lines are associated by the 
 bond of a similar ending to form the stanza or poetic unit 
 called a couplet. But this is too cheap and obvious 
 a gratification. It satisfies desire too soon ; a great part 
 of the pleasure given by rime to a cultured ear lies in the 
 expectation of it. So the enjoyment of food, speaking 
 generally, bears relation to the time one has been hungry. 
 That is one reason why people now read Pope only for his 
 philosophy and wit, and do not read his disciples' couplets 
 at all.^ The early couplet was shorter than Pope's, with 
 only two or three stresses between the rimes : 
 
 Violette y fut moult belle 
 
 Et aussi parvenche nouvelle 
 
 Si estoit soef flairans 
 Et reflagrans et odorans. 
 
 The first advance was to lengthen the interval by 
 increasing the number of stresses ; and then, to avoid 
 lines of unwieldy length, to break each one into two, and 
 produce a quatrain of blank and riming lines alternating. 
 
 — Sumer is icumen in, 
 a Lhude sing cuccu ! 
 
 - Groweth sad and bloweth mad, 
 a And springth the wude nu. 
 
 » The riming in Browning's beautiful ' Love among the Ruins'— 
 Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles 
 Miles on miles . . . 
 does not form couplets because there are no stresses to make an interval 
 between the rimes ; sound and echo are practically simultaneous. 
 
28 Rhythm and Rime 
 
 Soon an additional delight was devised by means of 
 new rimes at the ends of the blank lines, interwoven 
 with the original pair : 
 
 a J'ai un roi de Cecile 
 
 b Veu devenir berger, 
 
 a Et sa femme gentille 
 
 b De ce propre mestier. 
 
 Then a fifth line, echoing one of the pairs, or a cou- 
 plet with a similar echo or with a fresh pair was added 
 to the quatrain. Chaucer's most characteristic stanza 
 combines both these additions : 
 
 In hir is heigh beautee, withoute pryde, a 
 
 Yowthe, withoute grenehede or folye; b 
 
 To alle hir werkes vertu is hir gyde, a 
 
 Humblesse hath slayn in hir al tirannye. b 
 
 She is mirour of alle curteisye ; b 
 
 Hir herte is verray chambre of holinesse, c 
 
 Hir hand ministre of fredom for aim esse, c 
 
 Or the quatrain was treated as a half-stanza and another 
 half was composed to correspond, which could of course 
 be done in a great variety of ways, e. g. : 
 
 a There star nor sun shall waken, 
 
 b Nor any change of light, 
 
 a Nor sound of waters shaken, 
 
 b Nor any sound or sight; 
 
 c Nor wintry leaves nor vernal, 
 
 c Nor days nor things diurnal, 
 
 c Only the sleep eternal 
 
 b In an eternal night. 
 
 So in rime the stanza had its origin and through the 
 
Rhythm and Rime 29 
 
 various possibilities of rime-arrangement was developed, 
 until from it in turn grew the sonnet, the noblest piece 
 of verbal architecture that the mind of man has con- 
 ceived. I shall return to the subject of rimes and rhythms 
 in considering stanza-forms in a later chapter ; at present 
 I am mainly concerned to show that the delight of 
 poetry is primarily a sensuous one — that it has a natural 
 power to charm, independent of the meaning of its 
 words. For I believe this conception to be at once most 
 vital to fruitful study and teaching and least realized in 
 the schools and training colleges. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 POETRY IS MUSIC 
 
 ' Bid me discourse : I will enchant thine ear.' 
 ' Repeat me these verses again . . . for I always love to hear poetry 
 twice, the first time for the^sound and the latter for the sense.' 
 
 There is a much finer and a more subtle music in 
 poetry than the mere rhythm and rimes of verse can 
 impart. It lies in the poet's choice of melodious words 
 and in their harmonious arrangement ; it is a charm 
 common as well to prose as to poetry, and is the secret 
 of greatness, of ' the grand style ', in both. 
 
 But it is a beauty as ethereal as it is subtle, and its 
 appreciation depends almost absolutely on perfect in- 
 tonation and accent in rendering it. It is the nearest 
 realized as we best succeed in approaching the sound the 
 poet heard in the inward ear as he composed his lines — 
 every vowel with its full value ; every consonant, 
 especially the terminals, clear ; the I's liquid ; the r's 
 trilled, gently but perceptibly ; and yet without any 
 unnaturalness and obvious effort or suggestion of ' prunes 
 and prisms '. No easy matter all this for most of us in 
 these ' derderderderdy ' days. Above all, the pitch of the 
 voice is important ; the light head-voice of colloquial 
 speech — in which children are too often taught to read for 
 the sake of what is believed to be ' expression ' — would 
 utterly abolish and destroy the beauty of the finest line. 
 The musical charm of poetry depends almost as much 
 upon tone and enunciation in the reader as that of music 
 
Poetry is Music 3^ 
 
 itself does upon perfect tune in the instrument. Poetry 
 in slovenly or perverted speech is as excruciating to 
 a sensitive ear as a song on a gramophone. 
 
 I think we shall better reveal to children the music in 
 good verse, and train them to ' sound ' it mentally, by 
 frequently reading, or better still, reciting to them poems 
 whose music we ourselves by loving study have learned 
 to feel, than by requiring them, especially in class, to read 
 or recite aloud. When we have made music for them, and 
 they have learned to love it and look for it, they will want 
 to make oral music for themselves, to use their voices as 
 instruments to express the melody they_/«^/ in poetry — 
 
 That mind and voice according well 
 May make one music. 
 
 But, at first, the more they feel the less ready will they 
 be to give their feeling utterance aloud in class. Indi- 
 vidual help, diflScult as it is in the battalion -classes of our 
 barrack schools, is the best way to encourage confidence 
 and secure correct and musical rendering. 
 
 I believe there is far too much reading aloud in the 
 primary schools ; we learn to read mainly for personal 
 and private enjoyment and not, unless we are parsons, for 
 public edification: this is not selfishness, but common 
 sense. Constant reading aloud in youth tends to slow the 
 thoughts and may result in a confirmed habit of mutter- 
 ing when one is reading to himself, which is next door to 
 idiocy, and is also a deplorable waste of nervous energy. 
 
 Moreover, the voices of younger children, at least, are 
 quite incompetent to render fine poetry so as to give 
 pleasure to others : they know it ; and they have told me 
 again and again that they can ' sound it in their heads but 
 
32 Poetry is Music 
 
 cannot say it '. If we were not so possessed by the evil 
 spirit of Examinable Results, we should know that 
 physical organs can never perfectly render the ideal con- 
 ception, and that music in the brain is a far better thing 
 than music on the tongue. 
 
 It is of the highest importance to train children to 
 distinguish between the swing and jingle of mere verse and 
 the finer music of poetry, between e.g. O'Shaughnessy's 
 ' We are the Music-makers ' and ' Casablanca ' ; to help 
 them to compare the sound, the melody, apart from the 
 matter. The presence of incident in ' Casabianca ' will 
 tend to corrupt their judgement. But I believe that the 
 natural ear is an instinctive guide, and that if good and bad 
 verse are read one after the other, most children, unless 
 their ear has already been spoilt, will prefer the good. 
 
 I suggest that we should frequently select poems for 
 reading or recitation to the children solely for their beauty 
 of music ; that we should neither ask ourselves whether 
 children are likely to ' understand ' them, nor them 
 whether they do. We do not always ask what a piece 
 of music 'means' — though we might do so more fre- 
 quently ; we are content to listen ' in a wise passiveness ', 
 or even to enjoy a purely sensuous pleasure. And 
 though such enjoyment is only 2. part of the delight of 
 poetry,yetit is an essenffal part ; and in order to help them 
 to feel it we should do well to read them Swinburne as 
 we might read them Catullus, for the beauty of sound 
 alone. 
 
 I have found that children enjoy the music of the 
 Milking Song, in Jean Ingelow's ' High Tide ', when it is 
 well recited, as much as they enjoy a fine song ; they like 
 Tennyson's ' Frater, Ave atque Vale ', though they 
 
Poetry is Music 33 
 
 certainly cannot understand the words ; and when I ask 
 them what poem they would like to hear they often 
 ask for ' The Northern Farmer ' or William Barnes's 
 ' Wife A-lost ' or ' Blackmwore Maidens ', though the 
 dialects are largely unintelligible in Oxfordshire. 
 
 The art which creates that diviner music that seems 
 independent of the mechanism of prosody is the gift of 
 the great poets and sometimes seems beyond the reach 
 of criticism, the effect of magic or inspiration. Yet it is 
 art, and as such depends upon a technique whose secrets 
 are not all past our study. 
 
 The use of alliteration, for example, can be noted and 
 appreciated even by the younger children; not the 
 cheaper and more obvious device of head-rime only, at 
 which Shakespeare laughs in 
 
 Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade, 
 He boldly broached his boiling bloody breast, 
 
 but his own subtle and secret effects that we enjoy with- 
 out observing the means until we look for them : 
 
 O mvs\.ress mine, where a;-e you roa.ming? 
 O, stay and hear! your true Move's cowing. 
 That can nng both high and /ow 
 
 alliteration that is like the beauty of shot silk. 
 
 The effect of hard and soft consonants can also be 
 studied. When our ears, with the Ancient Mariner's, are 
 
 Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound 
 Which sky and ocean smote 
 
 suddenly follows a hush 
 
 And all was still save that the hill 
 Was telling of the sound. 
 
34 Poetry is Music 
 
 The contrast itself is the highest art ; but the means 
 by which it is wrought is art also. It lies partly in the 
 numerous mutes, ' consonantal sounds produced by the 
 sudden and forcible interruption of the passage of the 
 breath ', of the first description— the final rf's and fs and 
 in the explosive/"; and in the liquids and sibilants of 
 which the second is full. 
 
 It lies, too, in the choice of vowel-sounds, to which 
 Tennyson attached so much importance : most of the 
 vowels in the first passage are long and open, o's and 
 ou's, full of sound ; most in the second are short and 
 closed «'s and z's and <?'s. 
 
 Tennyson's ' secret ' of varying vowel-sounds can be 
 found and studied in every great musical line — 
 
 1 23 4 567869 
 
 And leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged 
 
 1 10 5 119 7 1 9 5 12 
 
 Among the bulrush beds, and clutched the sword 
 
 1 13 14 1 15 6 
 
 And strongly wheeled and threw it . . . 
 
 In less than three lines, taken not from the book but 
 from memory at random, the first that came to mind, 
 there are fifteen different vowel-sounds, and only five 
 of them occur more than once, and then not in juxta- 
 position. 
 
 The original verse of the children will afford examples 
 for discussion of the discord produced by neglect of this 
 artistic ' canon ' — there is an instance in the clash ol 
 ' sounds ' and ' found ' a few lines above, which, now that 
 I have noticed it, may stand as an example. I will 
 quote one from a poet more often guilty of such blemishes 
 than the enthusiasm of some of his admirers would have 
 us believe. 
 
Poetry is Music 35 
 
 1234 51 6761 
 
 Lift not thy hands to it [heaven] for help for it 
 
 8 1 27124 963 
 
 Rolls impotently on as thou or I. 
 
 There we have but nine variations of vowel-sounds 
 in twenty ; one of them is repeated five times, two others 
 thrice each ; the lack of music in the first line, especially, 
 would strike an organ-blower. 
 
 Another source of music is to be found in the harmony, 
 in the literal sense of the word, that results from the 
 apposition of words of different lingual origin — the long 
 rolling Latin and Greek polysyllables contrasting with 
 the more numerous stresses of the short Anglo-Saxon 
 words : 
 
 Not marble nor the gilded monuments 
 Of princes shall outlive this powerful rime. 
 
 It is one of the secrets of the music in the English 
 Prayer-book and particularly of the consummate prose 
 of the Litany : 
 
 That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land 
 or by water, all women labouring of child, all sick persons, 
 and young children ; and to shew thy pity upon all prisoners 
 and captives. 
 
 Much cant has been written about this ' device ', often 
 by people who suppose that any monosyllable is Saxon ; 
 on the other hand, it is often held too cheap by scholars 
 who remember that ' a little learning is a dangerous thing ' 
 because a scholar said it, and forget that ' half a loaf is 
 better than no bread ' because it is vulgar wisdom. 
 
 Consciously used as an artifice it always fails, and it is 
 insufficient, alone, to explain the finest music— 
 The uncertain glory of an April day. 
 
 C 2 
 
36 Poetry is Music 
 
 Substitute other Romance words, as ' varying ' and 
 ' splendour ' for ' uncertain ' and ' glory ', and the magic 
 of the music disappears. But the fact remains that in 
 most fine lines the two elements are to be found. 
 
 One cannot imagine a more interesting introduction to 
 etymology than the attempt to distinguish the interwoven 
 strains that combine to make the harmony of verse. 
 
 I should be sorry to be thought for a moment to 
 suggest that any great poet ever wrote with definite 
 ' rules ' or ' artistic canons ' in mind : works of art are not 
 composed in that way ; instinct, the gift of the poet's ear, 
 are alone his guides. But though works of art are not 
 made by rule, yet rules may be made from them ; cer- 
 tain definite touchstones and principles can be found in 
 fine work, and we know that Tennyson for instance, 
 when his poem was finished, examined it by the light 
 of them. He knew, for example, that the excess of 
 sibilants in English is a source of hissing, and he care- 
 fully went through his work to rid it of this element — 
 he called it ' kicking the geese out of the boat '. But he 
 knew too that the use of esses in hushing a passage to 
 suit a quiet theme is a most valuable resource in our 
 language — 
 
 Muiic that brings fweet deep down from the bliwful s\iits, 
 Mu^ic that gentlier on the spirit lies 
 Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eye^. 
 
 What lullaby was ever more soothing? The eyelids 
 droop as one quotes. 
 
 Most beautiful eflfects are obtained by this means. And 
 that J is in itself unmusical a single quatrain of Shake- 
 speare is sufficient to disprove : 
 
Poetry is Music 37 
 
 When to the sessions of sweet silent thought 
 
 I summon up remembrance of things past, 
 
 I sigh a lack of many a thing I sought, 
 
 And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste. 
 
 One of the most wonderful lines in the world is made 
 so by the poet's taking advantage of the very thing that 
 has sometimes been held a fault in English : 
 
 O mors, quam apiara est memoria tua homini pacem habenti 
 in jubrtantiij snis ! 
 
 There, surely, ' the music of silence speaks if it ever 
 has spoken. The words seem to tremble back into the 
 silence their whisper has interrupted.' The truth is that 
 esses only hiss when a terminal j clashes with an initial 
 one ; Tennyson had this in mind when he said that his 
 famous line 
 
 Freedom slowly broadens down . . . 
 
 often suffered by being misquoted with the esses in con- 
 tact: 
 
 Freedom broadens ylowly down. 
 
 Still less do I mean that criticism is a balance in which 
 to weigh the infinite, a calculus by which small minds 
 can sum up great ones ; we must recognize with reverence 
 that when criticism has said its last word there is some- 
 thing, there is much, still unexplained in great art. We 
 know some words make music, but we often cannot say 
 why ; names, for example, like — 
 
 Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides 
 And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old 
 and 
 
 Ariel and Arioch and the violence 
 
 Of Ramiel . . . 
 
38 Poetry is Music 
 
 and of heavenly handmaidens 
 
 Whose Names 
 Are five sweet symphonies, 
 Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, 
 Margaret and Rosalys. 
 
 Alter the order and you spoil the symphony : why ? 
 That we cannot always find an answer is no reason why 
 we should not inquire. The superhuman is not really 
 appreciated as divine until we have tried to measure it. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 SOUND AND SENSE 
 
 ' 'Tis not enough no harshness gives oflFence, 
 The sound must seem an echo to the sense.' 
 ' For if proper and natural! wordes in well joyned sentences do lyvely 
 expresse the matter, let it be troublesome, quyet, angry or pleasant, a man 
 shal thincke not to be ready ng but present in doyng of the same.' 
 
 Next, and almost equal in importance to the music of 
 poetry is its power to suggest its meaning by its sound. 
 We have touched on this matter several times already 
 and we shall meet it again, for it is of the very essence of 
 poetry. Children, particularly, should learn to look for 
 it in every poem they study, not merely in single words, 
 but, what is much more rare and beautiful, in sustained 
 passages ; for here, if anywhere, ' beauty is truth, truth 
 beauty '. 
 
 I say children particularly because they are primitive 
 people and this is an essentially primitive device, and one 
 which never fails to delight them when they appreciate 
 it— as they are wonderfully quick to do. A great part of 
 language had its origin in attempts to imitate natural 
 sounds, as of water, the wind, thunder, and the cries of 
 animals. The Greek root kdke for example, with its 
 meaning of evil and worthless, suggests by its gutturals the 
 sound one makes in rejecting from the palate some 
 unpleasant thing taken into the mouth ; and though it is 
 not in the English dictionary it is almost identical in sound 
 with the noise an English mother makes in teaching her 
 baby that certain things are nauseous. So in most lan- 
 guages of western Europe the words for thunder are 
 almost identical and are derived from the actual sound. 
 
 Such words belong to a stage of human evolution in 
 
40 Sound and Sense 
 
 which man was an ' emotional ' but not yet a ' reasoning ' 
 being, in which he apprehended sounds, as very young 
 children and even the higher animals do, but did not 
 comprehend them. Now poetry, which speaks primarily 
 to that older, deeper, unchanging being in us, which we 
 call the heart, is full of these primitive words that are of 
 the instinct rather than of the understanding. Many of 
 them, as we shall see later on of metaphors, have lost all 
 trace of their origin, but their power is still latent in them 
 and the poet calls it out. But he does more : what the 
 primitive poets who first made language did for single 
 words the later poets do for whole phrases ; they charge 
 them with the power to suggest at once the sound of 
 things and the mood it produced in the hearer. 
 
 Nothing is more important in rendering poetry than to 
 give the full emotional sound-value to such imitative 
 words and passages. If a child does it in his reading 
 there is no need to ask him — always a dangerous and 
 often a deadly thing — to ' explain ' the meaning. 
 
 This art of fusing sense in sound exists in varying 
 degrees according as the veritable sound as well as the 
 mood that accompanies it is more or less suggested. In 
 all good poetry the general sound of a poem or passage 
 corresponds with the mood in which it is written and 
 which it is meant to communicate: we have found in 
 this a test for ' The Old Arm-Chair ' and we should always 
 apply it. Is the music written in the right key ? Thus 
 Browning's song with its refrain : 
 
 Marching along, 
 Fifty score strong, 
 Great-hearted Gentlemen 
 Singing this song 
 
Sound and Sense 41 
 
 has a hearty jovial sound in keeping with its sentiment 
 and a short rapid swing corresponding to the action 
 which it expresses. So Constable's 
 
 Diaphenia like the daffadowndilly, 
 White as the sun, fair as the lily ; 
 Heigh ho ! how I do love thee 
 
 is light and airy, like his fancy — for it is only a fancy and 
 not love — and comes tripplingly off the tongue ; while 
 
 On Linden when the sun was low 
 
 All bloodless lay the untrodden snow, 
 
 And dark as winter was the flow 
 
 Of Iser, rolling rapidly 
 
 has a deep solemn tone of ' old unhappy far-off things, 
 and battles long ago ' ; and, not to multiply examples, 
 
 Hame, hame, hame, O hame fain wad I be — 
 O hame, hame, hame, to my ain countree ! 
 
 breathes hopeless passion and yearning in every syllable. 
 
 We should always look for this general correspondence 
 between mood and sound, for the quiet hushed words 
 that speak of peaceful things, for the light phrases of 
 gaiety, for the full sonorous 'noisy' words that tell 
 of battle and tumult, for the long slow-footed rhythm 
 of grief and lamentation. 
 
 Metre, as we have seen, and as we shall see more at 
 large in the next chapter, accounts partly for these 
 effects ; the more the stresses in proportion to the number 
 of syllables the slower the movement; Cowper had five 
 stresses in ten syllables, Eliza Cook but four. Browning's 
 'Marching Along' has practically only one stress in 
 aline— on the first syllable in each ; the force of which is 
 sufficient not only to give rhythm to the whole line, but 
 
42 Sound and Sense 
 
 to weaken the theoretical stress on the last syllable 
 almost to vanishing point ; Constable's ' Diaphenia ' has 
 only two, or at most three stresses, in his long lines of 
 ten or twelve syllables. But in 'Hame, hame, hame' 
 almost every syllable is stressed, and a./eli sigh between 
 them takes the place of the others. 
 
 The choice of vowels is almost equally important: 
 long vowels slow the movement, short vowels quicken 
 it. The third stanza of Wordsworth's ' Daffodils ' is 
 a good example: 
 
 The waves beside them danced, but they 
 
 Outdid the sparkling waves in glee; 
 A poet could not but be gay, 
 In such a jocund company : 
 I gazed— and gazed— but little thought 
 What wealth the show to me had brought. 
 The quatrain, with most of its vowels short, moves 
 lightly like the flowers and waves of which it speaks ; 
 but the couplet with its long a's and aw's suddenly slows 
 the movement down to correspond with the reflective 
 mood with which the stanza ends. The contrast, alike 
 between the sound of the fourth and fifth lines and the 
 length of their vowels, should be particularly noticed. 
 Another fine example is Tennyson's : 
 By the margin, willow-veil'd, 
 Slide the heavy barges, trail'd 
 By slow horses; and unhail'd 
 The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd 
 bkimmmg down to Camelot. 
 The slow motion of the barges and horses is 
 
Sound and Sense 43 
 
 marvellously suggested by the dragging movement of 
 the long vowels in ' slide ', ' barges', ' trail'd', 'by', 'slow', 
 ' horses ', while the short vowels in the last two lines 
 wing the words so that they fly like the shallop. Here 
 too the ^'s help to slow the movement by their demands 
 on the breath to mark them distinctly ; so too, and for the 
 same reason, do the terminal rf's in ' slide ' and ' trail'd ' ; 
 they cannot be said quickly without a slovenly slurring. 
 Again, in Shelley's 
 
 Wild roses, arid ivy serpentine 
 
 With its dark leaves and buds wandering astray, 
 
 and inTennyson's 
 
 Overhead the wandering ivy and vine 
 
 the rhythm suggests the waving and winding of the 
 trailing plants. 
 
 In criticism, as in biology^ it is not only the adaptation 
 of means to ends, of structure to function, that interests 
 us ; we have also to study the method by which such 
 results are produced, to ask how ? as well as why ? We 
 know, for example, by simple observation that most 
 leguminous plants scatter their seeds afar by twisting 
 their pods until the smooth, rounded seeds are squeezed 
 and shot out by the pressure ; but kow that torsion is 
 accomplished we can only discover by a microscopical 
 examination of cell-tissues. Darwin tells us with regret 
 that he could find no pleasure in poetry, and hasty 
 generalizers have been known to quote him as proof of 
 a natural antithesis between science and art. It is rather, 
 I think, further evidence that, like most of us, he was 
 unfortunate in his schoolmasters. And this is not 
 altogether by the way. 
 
44 Sound and Sense 
 
 Failure to appreciate how an effect was produced, 
 although he understood why, led Johnson astray in a 
 well-known criticism on Pope's 
 
 With many a weary step, and many a groan, 
 Up a high hill he heaves a huge round stone; 
 The hugh round stone resulting with a bound 
 Thunders impetuous down and smokes along the ground. 
 
 " Who does not perceive the stone to move slowly upward 
 and roll violently back?' says Johnson. 'But set the 
 same numbers to another sense : 
 
 While many a merry tale and many a song 
 
 Cheered the rough road, we wished the rough road long; 
 
 The rough road then returning in a round 
 
 Mocked our impatient steps, for all was fairy ground. 
 
 We have now surely lost much of the delay and much 
 of the rapidity,' and he then goes on to declare that 
 ' Beauties of this kind are commonly fancied '. If he had 
 used ' commonly ' in the exact sense of the word, as a 
 lexicographer should have done, he might have seen 
 that what is perceived by all cannot be dismissed as 
 fanciful — even by a Dictator who thought he had de- 
 molished Berkeley's whole philosophy by kicking his 
 foot against a stone. But by neglecting to examine the 
 ntechanisnt of Pope's art he failed to see that he had 
 produced his effect, partly by means of the difference 
 between the sense-rhythm and the verse-rhythm ; partly 
 by using long vowels in the stressed words — ' weary ', 
 ' groan ', ' high ', ' heaves ', ' huge ', ' round ', and ' stone ' 
 in the upward movement, and short ones in the down- 
 ward — ' the ', ' resulting', ' with ', 'a ', ' thunders ', ' im- 
 petuous ', and ' along ' ; and partly, very largely indeed. 
 
Sound and Sense 45 
 
 by the repeated ^'s in the second line suggesting the 
 slow, panting effort of the toiler. In his parody he has 
 omitted the most important of these devices ; the sense- 
 rhythm trips along with the verse-rhythm; he has no 
 stressed long vowel in the whole of the first line and 
 few short ones in the two last ; he has got rid of all the 
 aspirates and with them of the laborious effect of Pope's 
 upward movement ; and by the terminal d's of his last 
 two lines he has slowed the movement of that part. So 
 he obtains the uniformity at which he aims. But 
 contrast is as much a fact, and as much a matter of 
 technique, in poetry as in painting. 
 
 But there is a further degree of onomatopoeic poetry 
 in which not the mood only but the suggestion of the 
 appropriate sound itself is produced by the words 
 employed. 
 
 Professor Saintsbury has remarked that in the stanza 
 
 The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, 
 
 The furrow foUow'd free ; 
 
 We were the first that ever burst 
 
 Into that silent sea 
 
 — the rush of the words corresponds with the swift 
 movement they express. That is a fine example of 
 general harmony between the subject and the sound; 
 so is the quietness, the result of the esses, in the last line. 
 But a boy of twelve lately suggested to me that, beyond 
 this general correspondence, the actual sound of a keel 
 forced swiftly through waves can be heard in the 
 repeated ff's ! That is an example of the imitation of 
 particular sounds. 
 
 I had not noticed it before ; some ears may not hear 
 
46 Sound and Sense 
 
 it now. But I thanked the boy and shall always be 
 indebted to him for increasing- my appreciation of 
 Coleridge. It would be quite irrelevant to suggest that 
 Coleridge never intended this effect ; if he did not, which 
 we hardly dare assume, he wrought, as all poets do, but 
 better than he knew. 
 
 Let me say here, although I may be guilty of repeating 
 myself in another chapter, that we should be scrupulously 
 careful to receive with respect and encouragement any 
 suggestion from children as to what a sound means to 
 them, even though we ourselves do not hear the same. 
 They are nearer the poet's heart, and perhaps nearer the 
 truth of things, than we are ; their intuition is often 
 wiser than our wisdom. Out of the mouths of babes 
 and sucklings may come the truest and subtlest criticism ; 
 it is the deep things that are often hidden from the wise 
 and prudent and revealed unto babes. The little child 
 is free of the kingdom of poetry as well as of the 
 kingdom of heaven and may lead us into it. Indeed 
 I shall try to maintain that what was said of the condition 
 of entry into the one kingdom applies also to the other. 
 
 But all this is from our point of view. Quite apart 
 from our own advantage we ought to encourage 
 children's ideas ; for as Pater somewhere says : ' The salt 
 of all aesthetic study is in the question— what, precisely 
 what, does this mean for me"^'; and as a greater than he 
 has said : 
 
 There is nothing, either good or bad, 
 But thinking makes it so. 
 I dwell on this because I have found that nothing in 
 poetry attracts children more, and nothing more excites 
 them to spontaneous appreciation and criticism than that 
 
Sound and Sense 47 
 
 ' echo of the sense ' which Dr. Johnson found ' fanciful ', 
 and which Dr. Hadow — it is true, only in a school-book 
 — like him dismisses as ' tricks of descriptive music, a 
 quip and a conceit . . . amere jingle '. But when it is asserted 
 that although ' Tennyson himself said that the couplet 
 from " Birds in the High Hall Garden " 
 
 Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, 
 They were crying and calling 
 
 was intended to represent the cawing of rooks. But we 
 can hardly take this seriously ', I can only think that the 
 writers know no more of Tennyson than they do of 
 birds : Tennyson was not in the habit of saying what he 
 did not mean ; and rooks are in the habit of saying, 
 ' Maud, Maud, Maud ', ' or ', as Tennyson said, ' some- 
 thing very like it '. 
 
 Tennyson is the great modern master of suggestive 
 sound ; but he drew from ancient springs, closed alas to 
 elementary schools, scholars and teachers, and, by the 
 suicidal policy of the older universities, soon to be closed 
 to the modern world; for optional Greek will lead to 
 optional Latin, and then the last stronghold of liberal 
 learning, where so many generations of men have learned 
 the meaning of humanity, will be transformed into a 
 great technical school where clerks learn book-keeping 
 and druggists learn dispensing. 
 
 Andrew Lang tells us that Vergil was Tennyson's 
 master ; and we know from his own lips that ' the only 
 good thing he got from school was the memory of the 
 words " sonus desilientis aquae " and of an old wall, covered 
 with weeds, opposite the school windows'; pregnant 
 facts, both of them, to a student of Tennyson's poetry. 
 
48 Sound and Sense 
 
 Before I quote examples let me deplore the existence 
 of the superior person who murmurs ' hackneyed ' when 
 famous lines are mentioned. 
 
 Great art can never be hackneyed in spite of the hacks ; 
 
 Age cannot wither her^ nor custom stale 
 Her infinite variety. 
 
 I know that has been quoted before, and I hope it will be 
 quoted many thousands of times again. For those who 
 love the poets, no less than they themselves, are 
 For ever piping songs for ever new. 
 
 And it is because of their undamageable beauty and 
 charm that miscalled hackneyed lines are constandy found 
 Where breath most breathes — even in the mouths of men. 
 
 F. W. H, Myers once said that ' the highest use of 
 language, of history itself, has been to bestow upon man- 
 kind a few thousand lines of poetry for which all other 
 study of bygone ages is but practice and preparation, 
 and which should become by endless broodings no 
 mere acquisition from without, but the inmost struc- 
 ture and prepotent energy of the onward-striving soul' 
 
 To have made even a little of 'the inner soul of 
 poetry ' a part of the texture of one's thought is a better 
 thing than all a pedant's knowledge. Really to love 
 the Ancient Mariner, for example, is alone a Uberal 
 education ; it is to possess a sure touchstone of taste and 
 a standard of literary worth. 
 
 In 
 
 The moan of doves in immemorial elms 
 
 as in the line of Vergil which perhaps suggested it 
 
 Nee gemere aeria cessabit turtur ab ulmo 
 
Sound and Sense 49 
 
 we hear something more than a soothing sound in 
 keeping with cooing; we have the voice of the dove 
 itself speaking in music ; and in 
 
 Murmuring of innumerable bees 
 
 there is, beside the drowsy sense of summer afternoons, 
 the actual hum of insects. So when he tells us that 
 
 Miriam Lane 
 Made such a voluble answer promising all, 
 
 it is not the sense of the words but \he. sound of her 
 breathless chatter that tells us most; and we have no 
 need to translate the voice of the brook saying 
 
 I-babble-on-the-pebbles 
 
 into consciousness : the sound, not the words, tells what it 
 is doing. Tennyson is very fond of reproducing the 
 music of waters. He makes us hear 
 
 'The water lapping on the crag 
 
 And the long ripple washing in the reeds '. 
 
 'The scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the 
 
 waves ', 
 'The league-long roller thundering on the reef, 
 
 and the quiet breathing of a peaceful world in 
 
 Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles. 
 
 But nothing that Tennyson ever did in this way is 
 finer than Wordsworth's 
 
 What sorrow would it be 
 
 That mountain floods should thunder as before 
 And Ocean bellow from his rocky shore. 
 And neither awful voice be heard by thee ! 
 
 1922 D 
 
5° Sound and Sense 
 
 To me, though it may be but a personal fancy, the last 
 of those lines is the most wonderful. Coming after the 
 roar of the torrent and the bellowing of the sea there 
 seems in it the low, muttering echo that one hears as the 
 voice of the thunder dies away. 
 
 One of the finest stanzas in Jean Ingelow's finest poem 
 suggests its subject both by its rhythm and by the use of 
 onomatopoeia : 
 
 So farre, so fast the eygre drave. 
 The heart had hardly time to beat 
 Before a shallow, seething wave 
 Sobb'd in the grasses at our feet : 
 The feet had hardly time to flee 
 Before it brake against the knee 
 And all the world was in the sea. 
 
 Here the whispering esses in 'shallow', 'seething', 
 'sobb'd', and 'grasses', give the very sound of the 
 stealthy waters creeping in the grass ; and the swift rush 
 of monosyllables in the next lines and the feeling of a 
 great force in the last one — how accomplished I cannot 
 tell — brings home to us by sound alone the irresistible 
 advance of the flood. 
 
 I believe that whenever a great poet speaks of sounds 
 he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to suggest them 
 . by the music of his verse — 
 
 Methought the billows spoke and told me of it, 
 The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, 
 That deep and dreadful organ pipe, pronounc'd 
 The name. 
 
 He knows as well 
 
 To tear with thunder the wide cheeks of the air 
 
Sound and Sense 51 
 
 as to 
 
 Kiss the wild waves whist, 
 
 to imitate the sound of 
 
 A wind that shrills all night in a waste land 
 as of 
 
 The swish of a skirt in the dew. 
 
 Where the subject is suitable sound-writing may often 
 be sustained throughout a long passage or a whole poem. 
 It is, naturally, in such a poem as Dryden's music Ode 
 that we should look for an example. The opening lines 
 
 In harmony, in heavenly harmony 
 This universal frame began . . . 
 
 always make me think of an orchestral overture, and 
 though that may be fanciful it is no fancy that in the 
 succeeding stanzas the actual sounds of individual instru- 
 ments are successively suggested, first — 
 
 The trumpet's loud clangour 
 
 Excites us to arms ! 
 With shrill notes of anger 
 
 And mortal alarms, 
 
 then the big drum booms 
 
 The double double double beat 
 Of the thundering DRUM ! 
 
 and the quick kettledrum rattles 
 
 'Tis-too-late-to-retreat, 
 
 then all is hushed while 
 
 The soft complaining flute 
 
 In dying notes discovers 
 
 The woes of hapless lovers 
 Whose dirge is whispered by the warbling lute, 
 D 2 
 
52 Sound and Sense 
 
 and then, with a passionate outcry, 
 
 Sharp violins proclaim 
 
 Their jealous pangs and desperation, 
 
 Fury, frantic indignation 
 Depth of pains and height of passion, 
 
 if ever violins ' speak ' they speak there ; if the passage 
 
 is properly rendered one hears their swift falsetto rise 
 
 almost into a scream in ' despevAtion ' ' indignMt'on '. 
 
 But now the deep, full tones of ' the sacred organ ', 
 
 Notes inspiring holy love. 
 
 Notes that wing their heavenly ways 
 
 To mend the choirs above, 
 
 calm the unruly passions and lift the heart above. 
 
 Bell-music, perhaps from the simplicity of its rhythm, 
 has often been imitated. Poe's poem is of course 
 familiar, but Kipling's ' Bells and the Queen ' is even 
 closer to the sound'of bells ' ringing down '. Swinburne's 
 
 All the bells of heaven may ring 
 
 wiU give me an opportunity to emphasize the impor- 
 tance of careful study of a poem as a preliminary to 
 reading it aloud : the line quoted might be read, and 
 would be read by a casual eye, with no suggestion of 
 bell-music ; but the rhythm is there, and the line may, 
 and should, be made to suggest a peal of bells running 
 down an octave 
 
 ' The Charge of the Light Brigade ' is a good example 
 of sustained sound-writing. You hear the horses canter 
 
 Half-a-league, | half-a-league, | half-a-league, 
 
Sound and Sense 53 
 
 and then gallop ; 
 
 All in the | valley of death | 
 Rode-the-six | hundred, | 
 
 you hear the roar of cannons and the confused hurly- 
 burly of battle ; 
 
 Cannon to right of them, 
 
 Cannon to left of them, 
 
 Cannon in front of them. 
 Volleyed and thundered. 
 
 Flash'd all their sabres bare, 
 Flash'd as they turn'd in air. 
 Sabring the gunners there, 
 
 and then the halting retreat of tired and wounded 
 horses as 
 
 Then they rode back, | but not | 
 Not I the six hundred, 
 
 the repetition of the ' not ' with the slowness due to the 
 need to clear the /'s is almost the whole secret of the drag 
 in these two lines. 
 
 But much finer than the ' Charge ' is the end of the 
 Revenge : 
 
 They mann'd the Revenge with a swarthier alien crew. 
 And away she sail'd with her loss and long'd for her own; 
 When a wind frorii the lands they had ruin'd awoke from 
 
 sleep. 
 And the water began to heave and the weather to moan, 
 And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew. 
 And a wave like the wave that is rais'd by an earthquake 
 
 grew, 
 
54 Sound and Sense 
 
 Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts 
 
 and their flags, 
 And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter'd 
 
 navy of Spain, 
 And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags 
 To be lost evermore in the main. 
 
 The poet, unlike the musician, has no ' marks of 
 expression ' to guide the beginner in rendering his work. 
 If the use of musical terms be for once allowed for the 
 sake of an example we might mark the first two lines 
 piano or pianissimo, to suggest their burden of sadness ; 
 the next two lines will be crescendo, rising in the next 
 line to forte and fortissimo as the storm gathers and 
 breaks and smites 
 
 On their hulls and their sails and their masts and their flags 
 
 (the repetition is again responsible for the effect of con- 
 centrated and growing energy) ; then, diminuendo, in 
 the penultimate line, the force and fury die away, and 
 the last line is pianissimo. 
 
 The rest is silence. 
 
 It is to be noted that these sound-effects are not simply 
 the result of selecting onomatopoeic words ; Southey's 
 ' Lodore ', which we feel, to be a mere four de force and 
 which leaves us cold, is evidence of. this; it is simply 
 a list of words made by prehistoric poets. But the great 
 poets begin where the prehistoric onomatopoeia ends and 
 fuse sense not into single sounds but into phrases. How 
 they do it is often a mystery ; yet we can sometimes 
 
 Wa'tch 
 The Master work and catch 
 Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true play. 
 
Sound and Sense 55 
 
 Some people may smile at this chapter as moonshine. 
 And from their own point of view they will be perfectly 
 right. For poetry is moonshine, that moonshine by which 
 Lorenzo and Jessica looked at the world and in which 
 all true lovers see it always ; and in the light of which 
 Puck went about his business. May I have always 
 glimpses of this light, and my boys and my readers. 
 
 Others, more learned, will contemn delight in imitative 
 sound as love of jingle, primitive, barbarian. I am sure 
 that no child will grow up to love poetry who has not 
 first delighted in jingle. And for myself, if such enjoy- 
 ment is primitive, I am content to remain a barbarian. 
 Better a barbarian than a Philistine. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 STANZA-FORM 
 
 For of the soul the body form doth take, 
 For soul is form and doth the body make. 
 
 A GOOD deal may be done to develop the musical 
 sense in children, and to help them to appreciate verbal 
 melody, by examination of the architecture of verse. 
 They should learn to count the ' beats ' or stresses in the 
 lines, and observe their relations to the unaccented sylla- 
 bles ; e. g. they may be led to see that 
 
 - v-* — *U — \J 
 
 Twinkle, | twinkle, | little star | 
 
 runs lightly and quickly, partly because a beat is followed 
 by an unaccented syllable : it ' trips from long to short ' ; 
 while 
 
 \^ — s^ vy — \_» _ 
 
 The way | was long | the wind | was cold | 
 
 has a slower and graver movement, ' from short to long 
 in solemn sort', partly due to the beats following the 
 unaccented syllable (but the short and long vowels how- 
 ever have at least as much to do with this). I have 
 marked off the syllables as ' feet ' in the ancient manner, 
 but children should not be troubled by the vexed question 
 of quantities versus stresses involved in the use of the 
 term foot, and they should learn to measure a line not 
 by dividing it into compartments by vertical strokes but 
 by placing a mark, e. g. a horizontal stroke, above the 
 stressed syllables. 
 
Stanza-Form 57 
 
 . Again by increasing the number of beats, as in 
 
 The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, 
 
 the slowing effect is increased, till with six stresses we 
 get the Alexandrine line 
 
 Which like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. 
 
 And by decreasing the proportion of stresses, as in 
 anapaestic and dactylic verse, the action is quickened ; 
 even the younger children can appreciate the swift move- 
 ment in 
 
 As I ride as I ride 
 
 With a full heart for my guide 
 
 As I ride as I ride, 
 and in 
 
 Half a league, half a league. 
 
 I have found all this as simple as it is interesting to 
 children ; and, though no certificates are to be gained 
 by it — a rare distinction for a subject in these days — it 
 is an interest that will last when the fever and the fret 
 of competitive examinations are over, and certificates 
 have lost their charm ; it will be a pleasure when the 
 evil days come and it may serve us, more than most of 
 our studies, in preparing for the final examination. 
 
 Plans of rime-arrangement are also very simple and 
 interesting : rimes may be indicated by letters and blanks 
 
 by dashes : 
 
 I know the way she went - 
 
 Home with her maiden posy, a 
 
 For her feet have touched the meadows - 
 
 .And left the daisies rosy. a 
 
58 Stanza-Form 
 
 I think it is a good plan in writing rimed verse to 
 arrange the lines so that the initial letters of the riming 
 lines fall under one another, and similarly the initials of 
 the blank lines ; thus at a glance blank verse is dis- 
 tinguished from rimed, and the stanza-form is outlined. 
 Moreover children are thus prevented from varying the 
 stanza-form in their own verses, which in early attempts 
 they always tend to do ; they will rime their first stanza 
 a b a b ior example, and then in the second will forget 
 the secondary rimes and write — a — a ; or they will 
 change from a quatrain to couplets, a a b b. But I hope 
 to return to this in a chapter on original verse. 
 
 Children should be led to see that the rime arrange- 
 ment that gives form to the stanza is neither haphazard 
 nor arbitrary, but is purposely designed to please the 
 ear, as I have shown when speaking of rime. One of 
 the simplest examples of this is Fitz Gerald's stanza : 
 
 Ah, Love, could thou and I with Fate conspire 
 To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 
 Would we not shatter it to bits, and then 
 Remould it nearer to the heart's desire ! 
 
 The ear is gratified by the rime in the second line, but 
 might be satiated by its repetition in the third ; and so 
 that hne is left blank. Then the recurrence of the rime 
 in the fourth line comes like a pleasant memory, and 
 moreover pleases by contrast with the blank one. 
 
 The elder children should certainly be helped to 
 appreciate the artistic beauty of some of the more 
 intricate stanza-forms; the study of the structure of 
 Matthew Arnold's ' Scholar Gipsy ' and ' Thyrsis ' stanza, 
 
Stanza-Form 59 
 
 for example, reveals in the architecture alone the genius 
 of a great artist : — ' Lament for Thyrsis ' : 
 
 a 5 Well ! wind-dispersed and vain the words will be, 
 
 b s Yetj Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour 
 
 (T 5 In the old haunt, and find our tree-topp'd hill ! 
 
 b s Who, if not I, for questing here hath power? 
 
 <r 5 I know the wood which hides the daffodil, 
 
 a 3 I know the Fyfield tree, 
 
 d ^ I know what white, what purple, fritillaries 
 
 e 5 The grassy harvest of the river-fieldSj 
 
 e 5 Above by Eynsham, down by Sandford, yields, 
 
 d^ And what sedged brooks are Thames's tributaries. 
 
 For more than a third of the way there is no rime ; 
 the music depends, as in blank verse, on the rhythm and 
 cadence of the words : only a master's hand could dare 
 so much ; then just at the point when the ear is almost 
 content to resign itself solely to the beauty of blank verse, 
 but before it has quite ceased to listen for a rhyme, one 
 comes : like the first bell that begins a chime ; then 
 one after another they chime in, and in the last quatrain 
 they are ringing close and crowded in a fizll peal. 
 
 It was exactly the same artistic restraint that made 
 Magdalen Tower one of the most beautiful buildings of 
 the Middle Ages; in its lower stages there is no 
 ornament; its beauty here is simply the beauty of 
 perfect proportion, and of massive strength, fit support 
 for its load ; but above, in the belfry story, comes course 
 upon course of ornamentation, till in parapet and pinnacles 
 every stone is a carven jewel.^ 
 
 1 I can enjoy bread and cheese, and know nothing of gastronomy ; 
 but I believe that skilled culinary professors have arts to excite the 
 
6o Stanza-Form 
 
 The order in which the long-looked-for rimes occur 
 should be noted : the first of them, in the fourth line, 
 echoes the second ; the fifth, the third. And then, after 
 long expectation comes the rime of the first line and 
 completes the sestet. The interval is too long- for any 
 but a cultivated ear, but to an ear that has listened for the 
 rime the pleasure is proportionate to the waiting. No 
 other poet, I think, has used a stanza with rimes so far 
 apart ; the shortening of the sixth line lessens the 
 interval and, more important, makes the stress on the 
 last rime heavier. But it has also a further artistic signi- 
 ficance : the reflective, even mournful, mood of the two 
 poems needs long, slow lines for its expression, and so 
 nine of the ten lines have five ' beats '. But a long stanza 
 of such lines would tire the ear, and so the short line of 
 only three ' beats ' is introduced to give relief. Further 
 it ' completes ' the first set of rimes, the sestet, and so 
 provides a natural pause, a kind of stanza -caesura ; which 
 divides, as a caesura should, unequally, so that the break 
 comes after five lines and before four. 
 
 This Arnold stanza seems to me the most beautiful 
 ever devised, and I have often wondered that so little has 
 been written both of it and in it. If the Greeks, or 
 Aristotle at least, were right in holding that a certain 
 largeness is an essential element in a beautiful thing.i this 
 stanza surely touches the limits of size possible in the 
 unit of a poem — the sonnet of course is not a stanza but 
 a complete whole in itself. 
 
 appetite by means of scraps and mouthfuls, keeping the stomach waiting 
 and eager, to surfeit it with sweets at last. 
 
 ' I believe that our modern Corinthians hold a similar view of the 
 relative value of large and small animals. 
 
Stanza-Form 6i 
 
 Boys who are sufficiently advanced to appreciate the 
 beauty of form in this stanza will find interest and critical 
 training in a comparative study of stanza-forms, e.g. in 
 comparing Spenser's form in the Faery Queen with 
 Prior's modification of it : 
 
 It often falls in course of common life, a 
 
 That right long time is overborne of wrong b 
 
 Through avarice, or power, or guile, or strife, a 
 
 That weakens her and makes her party strong : b 
 
 But Justice, though her doom she doth prolong b 
 
 Yet at the last she will her own cause right c 
 
 As by sad Beige seems, whose wrongs though long b 
 
 She suffered, yet at length she did requite c 
 
 And sent redress thereof by this brave Briton knight, c 
 
 and 
 
 To the close rock the frighted raven flies a 
 
 Soon as the rising eagle cuts the air, b 
 
 The shaggy wolf unseen and trembling lies a 
 
 When the hoarse roar proclaims the lion near. b 
 
 Ill-starred did we our forts and lines forsake c 
 
 To dare our British foes to open fight, d 
 
 Our conquest we by stratagem should make, c 
 
 Our triumph had been founded upon flight. d 
 
 'Tis ours by craft and by surprise to gain, e 
 'Tis theirs to meet in arms and battle on the plain, e 
 
 To Johnson's ear Prior's stanza had lost none of the 
 power of pleasing in throwing overboard Spenser's 
 intricate and difficult repetition of rimes. But we know 
 from his criticism of 'Lycidas', that good as his ear was for 
 balance and rhythm and the harmony of prose, he could 
 never appreciate the finer music of poetry. To prefer 
 Prior's stanza to Spenser's is to prefer a chime on four 
 
62 Stanza-Form 
 
 bells to the Magdalen peal ; for indeed it is not properly 
 a stanza but simply two quatrains of four lines completed 
 by a couplet ; there is no common rime to link together 
 the parts and give unity to the whole. 
 
 I have often used these stanzas as a test of musical 
 appreciation, and I have found that three out of four boys 
 prefer the Spenser form when they read them to them- 
 selves, and nine out of ten, at least, when the stanzas are 
 recited or read to them. 
 
 The difference between them is exactly the same in 
 kind as the difference between the Miltonic and Shake- 
 spearian sonnet-forms, though it is less in degree. The 
 almost immeasurably superior musical capacity of the 
 older form is often unappreciated because the supreme 
 genius of Shakespeare was able to draw such music from 
 the inferior instrument as hardly any one else could 
 produce from the better one. But there is perhaps no 
 more striking evidence of their respective merits than 
 that there were other men, e.g. Milton, Wordsworth, 
 Keats, and even Rossetti, whose best sonnets can bear 
 comparison with Shakespeare's. In all else he stands 
 alone, but as a sonnet-writer he has his peers. When Ben 
 Jonson said he ' wanted art ' he was not thinking of his 
 sonnets, but I believe that in them, if anywhere, the 
 statement may be justified. I often wonder, what ' The 
 Expense of Spirit ', the most powerful, but not the 
 finest, sonnet in the language, would have been if its 
 power had concentrated in and expressed itself through 
 the finer medium of the Petrarchan form. But this is 
 perhaps going beyond the scope of elementary criticism. 
 
 Another fascinating study is to attempt to trace corre- 
 spondence between the spirit of a poem and its stanza- 
 
Stanza-Form 63 
 
 form to see how the soul informs the body. Every one, 
 I suppose, must realize that such a correspondence exists, 
 that ' In Memoriam ', for example, would have a different 
 meaning if its stanza;/o^z« were different ; but why this 
 should be is very hard to explain. 
 
 I think that in Rabbi Ben Ezra, with its two short lines 
 followed by the long rush of the third, I see a visible 
 image of the poet's process of thought brooding over 
 a deep and diffi ult subject — ^thoughts coming, as 
 Shakespeare says of the words of a stammering speaker, 
 like water out of a narrow- necked bottle, now in trickles 
 now in gushes — 
 
 Grow old along with me; 
 
 The best is yet to be, 
 The last of life for which the first was made. 
 
 Our times are in His hand 
 
 Who saith 'A whole I planned, 
 Youth shows but half; trust God : see all nor be afraid.' 
 
 I have discussed stanza-form at some length, because, 
 though it too often escapes study in school, it is a sort of 
 test of literary appreciation. The art in it is quite un- 
 noticed by an illiterate reader, but it is absolutely funda- 
 mental : literature is/orm ; there are no literary subjects. 
 From him who cannot receive this the meaning of art is 
 hidden. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 PICTURES IN POETRY 
 
 And as the imagination bodies forth 
 The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
 Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
 A local habitation and a name. 
 
 As the poet speaks in music which goes straight to 
 the heart without translation by the intellect, so he 
 speaks in pictures i-ather than in symbols — he gives us the 
 thing itself and not its intellectual sign. Coleridge will 
 not, or cannot, say simply ' in winter ' ; he must express 
 himself by a picture and show us the time : it is 
 
 When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow, 
 And the owlet whoops to the wolf below 
 That eats the she- wolf's young.^ 
 
 Shakespeare will not say ' three years ago ' ; he shows 
 us a pageant of the seasons. 
 
 Three winters cold 
 Have from the forests shook three summers' pride, 
 Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd, 
 Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd 
 Since first I saw you. 
 
 Instead of saying ' in the autumn ' he calls up the 
 spirit of the ruined year, 
 
 When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang 
 Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, 
 Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang, 
 
 ' It should be noticed, in view of what comes later, that in this picture 
 there are the essentials of winter : famished hunger, heavy snow, and 
 the most characteristic sound ; cf. ' When Icicles hang by the Wall '. 
 
Pictures in Poetry 65 
 
 and in the next lines, instead of saying ' evening ' and 
 leaving us to imagine it for ourselves, he shows us sun- 
 set, twilight, and the dark as his glorious im agination 
 sawthem. One often hears ' practical ' persons, whose 
 childhood has been soured by paraphrasing and gram- 
 matical disquisitions, object to poets that ' they do not 
 say plainly what they mean ; if he means " it is three 
 years since I saw you ", why can't he say so simply in 
 plain prose ? ' Now the way to help such people, if 
 they have any intellectual interests at all (if they have not, 
 as often happens, the case is hopeless) is to confront them 
 with a piece of good prose, say a paragraph of Kingsley's 
 scene on a tropical river in Westward Ho ; or any one of 
 a score of descriptive passages in Macaulay's^ third 
 chapter, e.g. of London sti-eets, of border peels, of 
 a typical highway ; or Dickens's ' Yarmouth Beach ' or 
 what Rebecca saw from the window,- in Ivanhoe — I take 
 the first examples that come to mind. If the patient 
 admits that these are good, or any of them, then he will 
 be forced to agree that it is because they ' b ody fo rth 
 th e forms of things unkn own ' and make them real, and 
 present to us so that we actually see them — in a word, 
 hprause th'e3£-apeak„to.us. i n. pictures . In what else lies 
 the charm of the great novelists, of Fielding, whose 
 pictures of country inns make wayfaring life in the 
 eighteenth century more real to us than the morning's 
 paper can make the events of yesterday, of Smollett, 
 whose frigates we know better than Lord Fisher's newly- 
 invented torpedo -proof batteries, of Scott, whose Monk- 
 barns would more please than surprise us if he stopped 
 us in the street to-morrow to inquire lor the ruins of 
 ' For such people are commonly radicals. 
 
 1922 E 
 
66 Pictures in Poetry 
 
 Rewley ? Again, it is the master-secret of the great 
 historians, from the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers downwards 
 ^I speak, unfortunately, as one who knows not 
 Herodotus. Pater may take too limited a view when he 
 declares that the only ' true business of the historian is 
 to bring us face to face with energetic personahties ', but it 
 is certain that we can have no ' philosophy teaching by 
 examples ' from the past until we have been helped to 
 appreciate its reality^ to visualize its men and conditions 
 as we do those of to-day. The historians who help us most 
 are those who are most pictorial, i. e. those who are most 
 poetical ; those who say not 'in proportion as the manners, 
 customs, and amusements of a nation are cruel and 
 barbarous, the regulation of their penal codes will be 
 severe ', but ' when men delight in battles, bull-fights, and 
 the combats of gladiators, they will punish by hanging, 
 burning, and crucifying '. The men who have done most 
 in our day to call up spirits from the vasty deep of time, 
 and make them move and speak before us, have written 
 in pictures, like poets ; two of them who wrote Puck of 
 Pook's Hill and Richard Yea and Nay are known as 
 poets ; another is Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher, whose Introduc- 
 tory History of England is as full of life and colour as 
 a pageant. 
 
 Even in science, which is popularly supposed to be 
 the antithesis of poetry, and to which the plain and 
 practical men attach so much more importance, the 
 greatest writers are those who present scientific facts 
 in pictures. Mr. H. G. Wells has such poetical power 
 to make facts seem as real as fiction that few will admit 
 him to be a scientific writer. But the writings of Huxley, 
 Grant Allen, Belt, Bates, Buckland, and Wallace, for 
 
Pictures in Poetry 67 
 
 example, are full of pictures ; you can hardly open a page at 
 random without coming upon facts pictorially presented. 
 Even Darwin, for all his professed dislike of poetry, and 
 its indubitably evil results on his style, is most successful 
 in making his meaning clear when he gives it as in 
 a picture. For instance, in chapter xii of the Origin of 
 Species he is explaining the means by which species 
 become distributed over the earth, and he gives us as an 
 example : 
 
 ' I suspended a duck's feet, which might represent those of 
 a bird sleeping in a natural pond, in an aquarium where many 
 ova of fresh-water shells were hatching; and I found that 
 numbers of the extremely minute and just-hatched shells 
 crawled on the feet and clung to them so firmly that when 
 taken out of the water they could not be jarred off. These 
 just-hatched molluscs survived on the duck's feet in damp air, 
 from twelve to twenty hours ; and in this length of time a duck 
 or heron might fly at least six or seven hundred miles and 
 would be sure to alight in a pool or rivulet if blown across sea 
 to an oceanic island or to any other distant point.' 
 
 If he had always written like that the popular ideas 
 of his ' theories ' would be less ridiculous. 
 
 The structure of a horse's teeth is a highly scientific 
 matter ; but Huxley, by using the characteristic arts of 
 poetry, makes it perfectly clear to every reader : 
 
 ' The teeth of a horse are not less peculiar than its limbs. 
 The living engine, like all others, must be well stoked if it is to 
 do its work ; and the horse, if it is to make good its wear and 
 tear, and to exert the enormous amount of force required for 
 its propulsion, must be well and rapidly fed. To this end 
 good cutting instruments and powerful and lasting crushers axe 
 needful. Accordingly the twelve cutting teeth of a horse are 
 
 E 2 
 
68 Pictures In Poetry 
 
 close-set and concentrated in the fore part of its mouth, like so 
 many adzes or chisels. The grinders or molars are large and 
 have an extremely complicated structure, being composed of 
 a number of different substances of unequal hardness. The 
 consequence of this is that they wear away at different rates, 
 and hence the surface of each grinder is always as uneven as 
 that of a good millstone. 
 
 If the practical man is not yet convinced that the 
 poet's method of telling things in pictures is the plainest 
 of all possible ways of speaking, let us ask him : in what 
 book of geology are the effects of the great secular 
 changes in the earth's crust made so plain to us as in 
 Tennyson's pictures ? 
 
 There rolls the deep where grew the tree — 
 Oh, earth, what changes hast thou seen; 
 There, where the long street roars hath been 
 The stillness of the central sea. 
 
 The hills are shadows and they flow 
 From form to form, and nothing stands; 
 They melt like mists, the solid lands. 
 Like clouds they shape themselves and go. 
 
 What botanist can teU us as much about pollen in 
 a paragraph as the poet's 'fruitful cloud and living 
 smoke ', or what chemist can bring home to us the very 
 essence of chemistry like 
 
 From his ashes shall be made 
 The violet of his native land? 
 
 So far from being obscure, the poet is the physician 
 who saves us from ' that first distemper of learning, 
 when men study words and not things '. 
 
 We ought to work and pray for the conversion of the 
 
Pictures in Poetry 69 
 
 practical man, because he is a very important person in the 
 schools. He exists, e. g., in the form of Mr. Holmes's 
 older unregenerate inspectors who, having had a hard 
 time themselves and won their promotion by certificates, 
 are naturally convinced that learning is a necessary 
 drudgery whose purpose is to help one on in the world ; 
 they do not suppose that boys can like poetry any more 
 than they themselves do, but they insist on so many ' anno- 
 tated' lines being got by heart, ' because the Board pre- 
 scribes it '. I once suggested that poetry forcibly adminis- 
 tered had the rather negative merits of Mrs. Squeers's 
 brimstone and treacle, ' it came cheap and spoilt the boys' 
 appetites', so that when they left school they would want 
 no more of it. The inspector seemed to think that very 
 natural and probable, but he reminded me that what 
 they did when they left school was not my business ! 
 
 Then the local authorities which now control the 
 schools consist very largely of people who pride them- 
 selves on being ' business men '. There is no real 
 opposition between business and poetry— else how should 
 a nation of shopkeepers have produced the most and the 
 greatest poets ? but business men are apt to think more 
 of the need of ' a ' living than of living when you have it; 
 and as they see that poetry has no relation to the one 
 they do not consider it in relation to the other. 
 
 Last and most important, the parents of primary school 
 children, wise as most of them are — much wiser than the 
 so-called ' lower middle class ', for they realize better that 
 life is more than meat and the body than raiment — ■ 
 tend to regard poetry as a mere ' accomplishment '. 
 They like to hear ' Our Bill ' recite ' The Boy stood on 
 the Burning Deck', but they do not appreciate (how 
 
70 Pictures in Poetry 
 
 should they?) the importance of poetry to the life of 
 the mind. . . . 
 
 ' Art is imitation ', and poetry is the supreme art 
 because it gives us not only sound, like music, and form, 
 like sculpture, and colour, like painting, but unites them 
 all, and affects the senses like reality itself Indeed we 
 might even say that the images of poetry are more real 
 than reality : what we see with the eye is outside us, 
 objective ; but ' when Shakespeare describes a thing you 
 more than see it : yOMfeel'it too ' — you feel it, i.e. ' inside ' 
 as children say. We can look, e.g., at the snowy roofs and 
 fields of a winter landscape with no sense of cold, if we 
 are well clad and healthy ; but we cannot hear or read 
 
 Deep on the convent-roof the snows 
 
 Are sparkling to the moon : 
 My breath to heaven like vapour goes ! 
 
 May my soul follow soon ! . . . 
 
 without feeling- the presence of a frost that has frozen 
 everything into absolute stillness and silence : the cold is 
 inside us. 
 The pictures in poetry are first ideal images — of 
 
 of 
 
 Magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn 
 
 Sandstrewn caverns, cool and deep, 
 Where the winds are all asleep. 
 Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, 
 Where the salt weed sways in the stream, 
 Where the sea-beasts ranged all round, 
 Feed in the ooze of their pasture ground. 
 Where the sea-snakes coil and twine, 
 Dry their mail and bask in the brine . . . 
 
Pictures in Poetry 71 
 
 of 
 
 of 
 
 Flowers azure, black and streaked with gold, 
 Fairer than any waking eyes behold, 
 
 Old palaces and towers 
 Glittering within the waves' intenser ray, 
 All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers. 
 So sweet the sense faints picturing them, 
 *and secondly, clear and faithful presentati ons of observed 
 
 an d observable fact — of flo wers : 
 
 The. rathe primrose that forsaken dies, 
 
 The tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine, 
 
 The white pink and the pansy freaked with jet, 
 
 The glowing violet. 
 
 The musk-rose and the well-attired woodbine 
 
 With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head. 
 
 And every flower that sad embroidery wears, 
 
 and 
 
 Gold-dusted snapdragon. 
 
 Sweet-william with his homely cottage smell. 
 
 And stocks in fragrant blow, 
 
 Roses that down the alleys shine afar, 
 
 And open, jasmine-muffled lattices, 
 
 And groups under the dreaming garden trees, 
 
 And the full moon and the white evening star, 
 
 of cities, like our own : 
 
 Sweet city with her dreaming spires. 
 
 She needs not June for beauty's heightening, 
 
 and London : 
 
 The city now doth like a garment wear 
 The beauty of the morning ; silent bare, 
 Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie 
 Open unto the fields and to the sky 
 All bright and glittering in the smokeless air 
 
73 Pictures in Poetry 
 
 and hills, and the sea, and ships, and things in the sky 
 above and in the earth beneath ; for all the kingdoms of 
 the world and the glory of them are the poet's province. 
 It is ours to reveal to children the delight of finding 
 and appreciating these beauties of description ; and ours 
 to study with them the art by which they are created- 
 The essential attribute of that art is its absolute precisio n, 
 due first to a definiteness of vision cle ar as his who ' was 
 in the spirit on the Lord's day ', secondly to an intuitive 
 perception of es sential c h aracteristi cs, and thirdly to an 
 ^ 'equally inst inct ive sense of the one and only wo rd. AU 
 these axe~^gtfis, Tncommunicable, inexplicable ; all that 
 education can give a poet is experience and a vocabulary. 
 With these gifts a poet can never be vague, and without 
 them he can never be vivid. 
 
 The last gift is the only one that criticism can examine, 
 the others we can only know by their consequences; 
 but into the master-secret of the epithe t we can learn to 
 penetrate, and we shall find it to lie in the choice of words 
 into which the most ideas are concentrated — for co nden- 
 sation is o ne of the unfailing marks of poetry^— words 
 I that crystallize a perfect descri ption into a single phrase 
 I or adjjgctive, that seize upon the_ most vital characteristic 
 of the thing described, its essence, words vibrating with 
 life, movement, and colour, that thrill the senses with their 
 
 sh&er physical appeal. 
 
 A poet stands on an Irish cliff and looks down on the 
 sea below ; it moves, it murmurs, it heaves, it ebbs and 
 
 ' And the greatest is the most highly concentrated, vide criticism ot 
 some lines of ' Lycidas ' in Sesame and Lilies. A mechanical touchstone for 
 poetry would be the trial to express precisely the same ideas in fewer 
 words : all good poetry would bafBe the attempt. 
 
Pictures in Poetry 73 
 
 flows, it shimmers, it glitters, it has waves and troughs 
 made tiny by the immense height — what among all this 
 are its typical traits by which we may know it, and in 
 what words is the perfect expression ot them ? 
 Tennyson answers with t wo words, each as co mmon as 
 l ife and ^death : 
 
 The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls 
 
 That is final. So long as language lasts and men have 
 eyes, that picture of the sea from above remains for men 
 to approve. Aubrey Beardsley could work a miracle 
 with a very few strokes of a pencil ; but not with two. 
 
 The same poet stands beside other water, not bright 
 and moving, but dark, sullen, deep, and still, those cold, 
 forbidding mysterious depths that contrast so strangely 
 with the smiling, dancing, broken water below the mill. 
 What words will he choose to fix for ever the essential 
 things in this picture ? 
 
 A sluice with blackened waters slept. 
 
 It is impossible to paraphrase that ; therejs_more in 
 the epithet ' blacken ed ' than colour, depth, mystery, an 
 eerie feeling : there is something beyond explanation, 
 which in painting is called atmosphere, a thing to he. felt, 
 not tjjked about. 
 
 Such words as these are the ' inevitable ' or as Professor 
 Saintsbury calls them the ' absolute ' words : once used 
 they are felt to be final, of the very nature of things ; 
 no other words will do. They are perhaps, more than 
 any other, the mark of genius, for to explain their genesis 
 bafiles criticism. It is not a guestion of kee n observation 
 and a good vocabulary, for the facts observed are obvious 
 to all and'the words are common to all ; it is the instinctive 
 
74 Pictures in Poetry 
 
 selectici ip of fundamentals among all the facts observed 
 and of the precise words out of the whole vocabulary. 
 This throws us back on the hypothesis of inspiration. 
 We may follow the art of Gray or Fitzgerald through 
 version after version to the final polished product ; but 
 even if we did not know that Shakespeare ' never blotted 
 a line ' we feel that his pictures — of 
 
 ' The burning crest 
 Of the old feeble and day-wearied sun ' 
 
 ' Of moving accidents by flood and field 
 Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach 
 Of being taken by the insolent foe . .' 
 
 'Of antres vast and desarts idle' 
 
 of forlorn virgins 
 
 Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon 
 
 of stars still 
 
 Quiring to the young-eyed cherubim 
 
 and a thousand such mysteries of perfect description 
 came into being not by the pangs of human labour, but 
 sprang like Athene from the head of Zeus. So with 
 Keats, who wrote the' Ode to a Nightingale ' in a morning, 
 we .feel, as Mr. Stopford Brooke said, as if ' Nature 
 herself had discovered the right word for him '. That is 
 why Matthew Arnold classed him with Shakespeare. 
 
 Of Matthew Arnold himself it may be said that the 
 hag^ py epithe t was his greatest gift. His favourite, ' shy ', 
 is a most beautiful and suggestive one, but he has used it 
 perhaps too often— three times in the ' Scholar Gipsy ', 
 twice in successive stanzas, and once again in ' Thyrsis '. 
 One or two of them, however, must underlie the grave 
 
Pictures in Poetry 75 
 
 charge of in accurac y : h e was not always, like the grea t 
 poets" a ifiifriffproK^rv p.r. Thus, the backs of the swallows 
 that haunt the glittering Thames, are not black but steely 
 blue ; and the stalks of the corn grow yellow first at the 
 root, so that he ought to have written 
 
 Round green stalks and yellowing roots I see 
 Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep. 
 
 It is in the use of epithets that the poet is most often 
 a maker of language : h is genius gives him both vision a nd 
 the words to make others see. B ut he does not so much 
 make new words a s new uses, or what is practicalljrthe 
 same thing, restore old lises ; words tend to become 
 conventionalized, narrow, and lifeless : poets give them 
 back their early freshness, so that we feel some of the 
 joy and wonder that early men must have had when 
 language was in the making — ' surly ^ sullen bell ', ' blond 
 meadowsweet ', '■faint sweet cuckoo-flowers ', ' thin anemo- 
 nes ', ' long dun wolds, ribbed with snow ' — these are all 
 common word s eno ugh, so familiar that they have become 
 almost contemptible and unpoetic ; but it needed a poet's 
 vision to see in them the c |ualitv th at ex.i3res ses the very 
 essence of meadow-sweet or cuckoo-flowers or a tolling 
 bell or the wind-swept flanks of the high wolds in 
 winter. 
 
 This freshness , which is the life of the epigram, is 
 never far from poetry, but very often we find a perfect 
 description in ordinary words in their ordinary meanings, 
 The last red leaf is whirled away. 
 
 The beauty in that depends not on any charm of freshness 
 of^pifase or meaning but' purely on the consummate 
 artistry which selects significant traits : the last leaf leaves 
 
76 Pictures in Poetry 
 
 the trees bare : that one word gives a whole background 
 to the picture ; red puts into it the single splash of vivid 
 ^ colour in a sombre canvas which in some famous pictures 
 seems in some subtle way to modify the whole ; whirled 
 gives movement and life to the scene, it sets the trees 
 swaying for us and carries the spot of colour across the 
 face of the picture. 
 
 Colou r in poetry is of great importance to children. 
 We, as a nation, have not enough of it ; there is prob- 
 ably more in Browning's pictures than in all the rest of 
 our poets — which suggests the influence of the great 
 Italian masters, among whose works he spent so much 
 of his life. Keats often gives us rich colour, but there 
 is generally somietHlng of Rembrandt in itj" browns jind 
 pM golds and purple shadows. The colour that pleases 
 children is the clear bright varied hues of the open air, 
 not the atmosphere of Madeline's chamber, but of 
 
 Three ducks upon a pond, 
 A green bank beyond, 
 The blue sky of spring, 
 
 White clouds on the wing 
 
 Oh, what a little thing 
 To remember for years, 
 To remember with tears. 
 
 It is not so much in words as in phrases that the poet 
 leaves his mark on language ; the words that Shakespeare 
 coined or fixed may be known to the dictionary-makers, 
 but his 'Jewels five words long' have enriched the speech 
 of humanity for ever. Part of our lessons in criticism 
 should deal not only with the fi tness of the epi thet but 
 with the fineness of the phrase. " Too many^oTus, I am 
 
Pictures in Poetry 77 
 
 afraid, get our phrases filtered for us through the news- 
 papers — that is why they are so often misquoted and 
 misapplied. Nine men out of ten who piously reflect 
 that ' the Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb ' 
 imagine that they have biblical warrant for believing so, 
 whereas the man who first gave extended currency to the 
 phrase was, though a parson, as pagan a writer as ever 
 lived. 
 
 To use another s phrase surely and well — and there is 
 no greater help in writing — we ought to have won it, 
 to havggeep \t in its place , appreciated it and picked it 
 out for ourselves. Then it is legitimate spoil, as much 
 ours as his who cast it. 
 
 I think that all children should learn at school to keep 
 a commonplace book, if only for this purpose alone — 
 just as an apprentice used gradually to accumulate his 
 stock of tools. There will then be some hope that they 
 will continue the habit when they leave us ; there is no 
 sound reading which relies on memory unaided — unless 
 we were all Macaulays or Scotts. The hope may be 
 faint, it must be faint, when boys leave school at fourteen 
 to return to homes where books are few and bookish 
 influences fewer. But if every elementary school suc- 
 ceeded in producing but one real lover of hterature 
 yearly, the money spent on education would be more 
 than justified in succeeding generations. 
 
 Sometimes, when existing langTiage is inadequate to 
 express his vision, the p oet does coin ne w words ; Tenny- 
 son so gave us ' yellowing ' bowers, a word for what had 
 before required a phrase, Keats_ gave us 'palely ' loiterin g, 
 a pictorial adver b, Byron gave us ' dayless ' gloom. But 
 Keats's ' parle ' of voices, Madeline ' all amort ', and still 
 
78 Pictures in Poetry 
 
 more some of his hyphenated words remind us that part 
 of the training in criticism is the careful scrutiny of new 
 coinage, for in it lurks a danger both for poets and their 
 disciples. Making new words, by combining old ones 
 particularly, is so easy and fascinating that there is 
 a temptation to use them even when the old currency is 
 fully adequate ; Tennyson's early poems are full of them 
 — rose-lips, silk-soft, faint-blue, sand-erased, sabbath- 
 drawler, and bright-eyed, wild-eyed, and hawk-eyes, all 
 in one short poem. Most of us have been intoxicated 
 in youth by their fascination ; one gets a delightful 
 feeling of writing poetically in making single-word 
 pictures by hyphenating the noun and its epithet. Yet 
 in nothing is the progress of Tennyson's art better shown 
 than by his gradual disuse of the practice ; for restraint 
 is the mark of the supreme artist's work, and itTs'because 
 the young Keats died before he had had time to develop 
 it, that we are still uncertain whether his was a supreme 
 genius or not. 
 
 In this attribute more than in Walter Bagehot's ' choice 
 of subject ' wa shall find the secret of that quality which 
 we call ' classic ', both in architecture and poetry. Lack 
 of it has been the ruin of art again and again ; it marred 
 the Greek orders in Roman hands, and utterly debased 
 them in English ; it was one of the chief causes of Gothic 
 deterioration ; and though Shakespeare, like a god, was 
 a law unto himself, its effects within a few years of his 
 death brought poetry in England lower than it has ever 
 been since we have had a literature at all. Fo r lawl ess- 
 ness is asteet in the flower but bitter indeed in the fruit. 
 
 I will quote as a warning to the young a sentence of 
 Mr. Kipling's to illustrate how licence, so far from 
 
Pictures in Poetry 79 
 
 enriching language, may corrupt it with ' flash ' coin : 
 'Between the snow-white cutter and the flat-topped 
 honey-coloured rocks on the beach, the green water 
 was troubled with shrimp-pink prisoners-of-war bathing'. 
 That, with its clash of crude colours, is not a picture but 
 a poster. But, unfortunately, like a Victorian oleograph, 
 it appeals to untrained tastes, or rather to tastes per- 
 verted by the cheap journalism which infected us from 
 America twenty years ago. That influence, almost uni- 
 versal in the homes from which our children come, is 
 the worst enemy that we have to face in our English 
 lessons — far worse than the vernacular of the home or 
 the slang of the street, and so before we leave Mr. Kip- 
 ling's sentence I will try to suggest how children may be 
 helped to criticize his epithets. ^ 
 
 In the first place two of them at least are ugly in 
 sound, flat- topped, and shrimp-pink ; the clash of the 
 medial fs and /5's and the repetition of «, the least musi- 
 cal of the vowels, help to explain why ; then they are all 
 crude and glaring, not rich and deep — if any one will 
 read them side by side with the picture of the water- 
 snakes in the ' Ancient Mariner ', or of the flowers in 
 Shelley's ' Dream of the Unknown ', they will feel the 
 difference ; and only in snow-white, which indeed is not 
 of Mr. Kipling's coinage, do the two elements in the com- 
 pound mutually beautify each other. Shrimps, boiled 
 of course, may modify pink, but not in the least beautify 
 it, and honey only modifies colour very indefinitely. 
 And vivid as the picture is, like the L. N. W. R. posters 
 of Llandudno, it is only true in an impressionist sense : 
 sea water is not green except in patches and those con- 
 stantly changing, men's skins vary from white to brown 
 
8o Pictures in Poetry 
 
 and all of them are different in colour, shadows and 
 reflections from the waves patch the whiteness of cutters, 
 lam not competent to discuss the merits of the impression- 
 ist school in painting, but I know that great literature 
 seizes on the permanence in things, and I believe too 
 that great painting, unlike photography, catches some- 
 thing more than a phase, that the artist looks deeper 
 than externals, and sees and fixes for us what Tennyson 
 called ' a sense of the abiding in the transient '. What 
 would a photographer have made of Dr. Johnson ? Yet 
 Reynolds saw and makes us see the man as he was, not 
 merely his appearance ; a face, for all his dim eyes and 
 scrofulous skin, to study and delight in. 
 
 However, the fi nal test for new words is not so much 
 their intrinsic merit as their nece ssity : are the existing 
 words inadequate J;dl. express the idea? Many of our 
 new scientific words are deplorable in themselves, but 
 their coinage is justified by the need of a new term to 
 express a new notion. 
 
 No one knows better than Mr. Kipling that the resources 
 of the English language had not been searched in vain 
 when he wrote his unfortunate sentence in the American 
 tongue. 
 
 At the risk of breaking the thread of the chapter, let 
 me quote as a contrast to this a poem of Mr. Kipling's 
 in English: 
 
 They shut the road through the woods 
 Seventy years ago; 
 
 Weather and rain have undone it again, 
 And now you would never know 
 That there was a road through the woods 
 Before they planted the trees. 
 
Pictures in Poetry 8i 
 
 It is underneath the coppice and heath 
 
 And the thin anemones ; 
 
 Only the keeper sees 
 That where the ringdove broods, 
 
 And the badgers roll at ease, 
 There was once a road through the woods. 
 But if you enter the woods 
 
 On a summer evening, late, 
 
 When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools 
 
 Where the otter whistles his mate — 
 They fear not men in the woods 
 
 Because they see so few — 
 
 You will hear the beat of a horse's feet 
 And the swish of a skirt in the dew 
 Cantering steadily through 
 
 The misty solitudes 
 As though they perfectly knew 
 
 The old, lost road through the woods — 
 
 But there is no road through the woods. 
 
 There Mr. Kipling is for once with the immortals : he 
 has shown us a scene, not ' on any common earth ', not 
 ' in the light of common day ', by which we perforce 
 must see the workaday world, not in the flash and 
 glare of an American searchlight, but a scene in Merlin's 
 Isle of Gramarye in that light which never was on sea or 
 land, but only in the poet's soul and in the country of 
 dreams. 
 
 We see the woods as clearly as we saw the shore, but 
 we see them through an atmosphere that invests them 
 with mystery : on the shore there was no presence but 
 the sailors ; but here we have a sense of something unseen, 
 it is 
 
 1922 F 
 
82 Pictures in Poetry 
 
 A savage place, as holy and enchanted 
 
 As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 
 
 By woman wailing for her demon lover. 
 
 And we know^ that if we walked in that wood we should 
 tread softly and speak low and look around us a little 
 fearfully, like children. This means that a poet has put 
 his spell upon us and is waking our imaginations to creative 
 activity, independently of his own vision, by suggesting 
 more than he shows us. I do not think Mr. Kipling's 
 verse has anywhere else, not even in Puck's Song, so 
 large an element of this suggestiveness that is inseparable 
 from great art. Neither has he anywhere written sweeter 
 music ; the melody is largely due to the delicious echoes 
 of his subtle rimes. 
 
 Lastly, it is a good exercise in criticism to compare 
 the epithets in his picture of English woodland with 
 those in his American poster : 
 
 ' Weather and rain have undone it again,' 
 
 ' Thin anemones,' 
 
 ' The badgers roll at ease ' — 
 common words all of them, yet it needed a poet's vision 
 to see that each was the very word to express the 
 essential thing. And by a happy chance he has given 
 us a genuine new coin to compare with his own spurious 
 metal, ' trout-ringed pools', a word as beautiful in its 
 sound as in its image ; and a legitimate birth. 
 
 The artist's hand must be subdued to what it works 
 in ; he must be bound by the nature of his medium ;i 
 
 ' Reynolds, who knew nothing of glass, produced at New College 
 something which is not a window, because it obscures the light, nor 
 a fine picture, because glass is not a suitable medium for fine painting. 
 The older artists who produced the other windows in the ante-chapel 
 
Pictures in Poetry 83 
 
 and his triumph is not in defying its laws but^n express- 
 i ng himself gloriously within their limits. That is why 
 the perfect sonnet is the most beautiful of all poems. 
 
 Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room, 
 And hermits are contented with their cells, 
 . . . Bees that soar for bloom 
 Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells : 
 In truth the prison, unto which we doom 
 Ourselves, no prison is. 
 
 It is only the feeble who claim ' poetic licence ' : great 
 poets increase the resources of language less by coining 
 new words than by re vealing the full powers of old o nes. 
 For 'in tennis all play with the same ball: but one places 
 it best '. We have seen how genius discerns and calls 
 f orth the latent poetic force of common epith ets to 
 show us picture s, but infinitely more important than this 
 extension of literaLrneaning is the figurative use of 
 language, which we have now to study. 
 
 have given us light and beautiful colour as well : they understood and 
 accepted the nature of their medium. 
 
 F 2 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE FIGURES OF SPEECH 
 
 Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare 
 And left the flushed print in a poppy there ; 
 Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came, 
 And the light wind puffed it to flapping flame ; 
 With burnt mouth, red like a lion's, it drank 
 The blood of the sun as he slaughtered sank. 
 And dipped its cup in the purpurate shine 
 When the eastern conduits ran with wine. 
 
 The clearness of vision and the originality of mind 
 which make a poet see the application of common words 
 outside their conventional use — which make him, for 
 example, see ' dun ' in clouds and skies and woods and 
 distant hills, while a dairyman sees it only in cows — 
 that enable him to seize upon fypz'ca/ a.ttnhutes, reveal to 
 him also the identity of attributes in diverse things so 
 that he is able to give us a picture of one thing by using 
 the epithets, or even the very name, of another. 
 
 So Ben Jonson, wishing to give us the image of a lady, 
 and finding the common words that describe others can- 
 not express her charms, looks round him to see where 
 each is found in most perfection and bids us look there 
 for her likeness : 
 
 Hast thou seen but a white lily grow 
 Before rude hands have touched it? 
 
 Hast thou marked the fall of snow 
 Before the soil hath smutched it? 
 
The Figures of Speech 85 
 
 Hast thou felt the fur of the beaver, 
 Or swans down ever? 
 
 Or hast smelt the smell o' the brier, 
 
 Or the nard in the fire? 
 
 Or hast tasted the bag o' the bee? 
 O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she! 
 
 It is as if a painter could dip his brush into the rose 
 itself and transfer its living blush to his pallette — it is 
 more, for similes can speak to every sense ; not only 
 
 My love is like a red, red rose 
 That 's newly sprung in June ; 
 but 
 
 My love is like the melody 
 That's sweetly played in tune. 
 
 So to Blake, feeling himself and wishing to make us 
 feel, the insatiate fierceness, cruelty, energy, and splen- 
 dour which are the essence of the tiger's nature, comes 
 the revelation that all these are the essential attributes of 
 fire also ; he can, if he chooses, compress them all into 
 a single simile ; but he does more, he concentrates them 
 in one marvellous metaphor. 
 
 Tiger, tiger, burning bright, 
 
 probably the finest single word in all literature. Or 
 Shakespeare, to paint the sadness and desolation of trees 
 from which the summer glory has departed with its 
 music of bird-song and richness of apparel, calls up 
 another picture, that must have awakened in his day an 
 even more poignant feeling than now, of desecrated 
 churches, rifled of their vestments, their organs silent and 
 their singers scattered, windowless, roofless and open to 
 the winter sky, solitary and fast crumbling to decay. All 
 
86 The Figures of Speech 
 
 these ideas and the atmosphere ox feeling accompanying 
 them he transfers to the trees condensed into three short 
 words 
 
 Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. 
 
 But, as in the deepest depth a lower depth is found, so 
 sometimes the highest degree in which an attribute 
 exists will not satisfy the poet as a comparison, and then 
 he resorts to hyperbole — 
 
 They were swifter than eagles ; they were stronger than lions ; 
 
 or that wonderful hyperbole by which Tennyson expresses 
 the deathless power of love : 
 
 My dust would hear her and beat 
 
 Had I lain for a century dead, 
 
 Would start and tremble under her feet 
 
 And blossom in purple and red. 
 
 Again by the device — I ought rather to say by his 
 instinct, of investing inanimate nature with the attributes 
 of human beings, by making persons of things, the poet 
 makes his pictures more real than reality for us : 
 They rowed her in across the hungry foam, 
 The cruel, crawling foam — 
 
 no sea that physical eyes have seen could make us 
 shudder as that figure does. 
 
 These four pictorial figures of speech, particularly 
 metaphor the greatest of them, are to poetry what 
 a colour box is to painting. Some understanding of 
 them is fundamental to any intelligent study of literature, 
 and nothing in language-teaching is more important than 
 helping children to an appreciation of their value. 
 Through them mainly poetry achieves that concentration 
 which is one of the marks of all great art ; they are the 
 
The Figures of Speech 87 
 
 principal medium by which the vision of the poet's mind 
 flashes upon our own, and the great miracle of genius is 
 wrought ' that things which are not. should be as though 
 they were, that the imaginations of one mind should 
 become the personal recollections of another '. 
 
 I have sometimes wondered whether their Greek or 
 Latin names are a sort of bugbear in teaching, but there 
 is really no difficulty here at all. The things are no 
 more Greek than physicians or pedagogues — and their 
 ways are less incomprehensible to children. They are 
 a kind of picture-writing such as early people had before 
 they learned, or could learn, without the concrete and 
 the visual. And they illustrate again my point that 
 poetry is a natural study of childhood. Of children's 
 instinctive power to use the figures no less than to 
 appreciate them I shall speak in a separate chapter. 
 
 Simile is the simplest of the figures, and I suppose 
 philologists would tell us it is the oldest ; the easiest way 
 to give an idea of an unknown thing, e. g. a tiger, is to 
 say it ' is like ' a known thing, viz. a cat ; such an elemen- 
 tary form of simile is used and understood by babies. 
 But in poetry it is usually a single attribute, rather than 
 a group, that the writer seeks to present ; then he thinks 
 of a thing which possesses that attribute in the highest 
 degree and calls up its image into the reader's mind so that 
 he may 'abstract' its attribute and transfer it to the 
 image of the thing described. Thus Tennyson, to give 
 us an idea of the dark eyelashes of a girl we can only 
 see through his vision, remembers that the one place in 
 the world where their shade can be matched is in the 
 buds of the ash in late spring, and tells us they were 
 Black as ashbuds in the front of March. 
 
88 The Figures of Speech 
 
 Of this beautiful simile we must notice two things— to 
 help us and to warn. It is not any mere blackness that 
 Tennyson is seeking- ; it is that blackness, soft yet 
 brilliant, a kind of bloom which is found only in beauti- 
 ful hair and in the ashbuds in spring ; and secondly, 
 a simile must introduce no jarring secondary idea, 
 its attribute must be, not pure which is impossible, but 
 so dominant that its other qualities never occur to the 
 mind ; thus ' black as soot ' or even ' coal ', apart from 
 their failure to express the exact shade, would have been 
 defective because the secondary idea of grime and even 
 baseness could not be prevented from intruding into the 
 mind, blurring and spoiling the picture. This does not 
 mean that no secondary idea at all should accompany the 
 image, but that no jarring_^z'ic/(7?-za/ element should intrude 
 itself: often a fine simile pleases both eye and ear; 
 Tennyson, for example, uses a simile to give a picture of 
 a man with 
 
 Arms on which the standing muscles sloped 
 As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, 
 Running too vehemently to break upon it. 
 
 Here the extraordinary correspondence between the 
 swiftness and sound of the brook and the movement and 
 music of the words in the last line compels our notice, 
 but rather heightens than detracts from our pleasure in 
 the picture. 
 
 The perfect simile, as Johnson said, ' must both 
 illustrate and ennoble the subject ; must show it to the 
 understanding in a clearer view and display it to the 
 fancy with greater dignity '. Thus Butler's 
 Like a lobster boiled, the morn 
 From black to red began to turn, 
 
The Figures of Speech 89 
 
 compares the greater to the less, the fine thing to the 
 mean one, and so, in spite of its wit, it offends a sensitive 
 taste. And on the other hand, Byron's comparison of 
 a rainbow above a torrent to 
 
 Love watching madness with unalterable mien, 
 
 though it sounds dignified and grand, does not put any- 
 thing ' in a_clearer view ' ; it is mere meaningless bom- 
 bast. So many of Shelley's similes in the ' Skylark ' — ' like 
 a high-born maiden ', ' like a rose ', ' like a glowworm ' 
 — do not make the bird more real, but less real to us ; 
 they take our attention away from its song to fix it upon 
 irrelevant pictures. 
 
 I have spoken of concentration as an essential 
 attribute of the highest poetry ; the finest figure, like 
 the finest epithet, is that into which the most ideas are 
 condensed : in ' High Tide' two similes occur together to 
 illustrate this point. We are shown a picture of the 
 tidal wave. 
 
 It swept with thunderous noises loudj 
 Shaped like a curling snow-white cloud, 
 Or like a demon in a shroud. 
 
 Here the second simile is infinitely finer than the first, 
 because there is far more involved in it: a cloud is simply 
 a shape, and a vague one ; but a demon is a thing of 
 fear and force and malice and mischief; more, it is 
 a personal thing and so more real; and most of all 
 and above all a shrouded demon is a mysterious thing; 
 mystery, a sense of some presence not of this world, is an, 
 essential element in poetry. 
 
 Poetry is so full of similes that there can be little 
 
9° The Figures of Speech 
 
 excuse for quoting more — except the pleasure of recall- 
 ing them for the purpose. Chaucer's 
 
 Reed as the bristles of a sowfes ear, 
 
 which is the finest touch in the miller's portrait, reminds 
 us of the single simile which, among all the subtle touches 
 that go to make the portrait we know best in Shake- 
 speare, is the most telling and significant : it shows us 
 Falstaff walking before his page 
 
 Like a sow that has overwhelmed all her litter but one, 
 
 Shelley's ' Skylark ' and Byron's ' Sennacherib ' are all 
 simile — but 
 
 Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, 
 So do our minutes hasten to their end. 
 
 Metaphor is by far the most important, as it is the com- 
 monest, figure of speech. In its origin every metaphor 
 is poetry, an attempt to express an emotion within by an 
 image or picture of something external ; thus my ' expla- 
 nation ' is ' laying out flat ' the ideas ' involved ', i. e. 
 ' rolled up ' in the term. But thousands of metaphors 
 have been household words so long that they have 
 acquired a direct and literal meaning ; they are ' fossil- 
 poetry' and are used with no consciousness of their 
 difference from other words, as coal is used without 
 remembrance of its former life in sun and rain and wind. 
 Some metaphors again, like ' stand up for ', ' grounds for 
 belief, &c., are in the peat stage, dead but not yet fos- 
 silized ; they have become commonplace and no longer stir 
 the faintest thrill of emotion, but in using them we are still 
 conscious that they are figures of speech. 
 
 But though we rightly and necessarily use dead meta- 
 
The Figures of Speech 91 
 
 phors as ordinary words, we only do so with full 
 intelligence when their metaphorical meaning is in our 
 subconsciousness ; no one, for example, can completely 
 understand the word ' metaphor ' unless he knows, or has 
 known, that it was originally used in 2. physical %&!v^& to 
 express a ' carrying across ' of something. It is therefore 
 of great importance to the language-lessons that the 
 children should have etymological dictionaries and that 
 they should form the habit of looking always for a meta- 
 phor that may be fossilized in the word they turn up.^ 
 
 However, we are most concerned here with living 
 figure of speech, the metaphor that awakens in us the 
 emotion that brought it into being. For these figures, 
 let me repeat, are the products of an emotional state ; the 
 companions in arms of Richard I were not stating simply 
 their conception that he was a brave man when they 
 called him Coeur de Lion : they were trying to express 
 ihs. feeling that his valour stirred in them, to say not what 
 they thought^ but what they jfelt about him. To an 
 excited imagination he ceased to be a man and became 
 a symbol, all his other attributes sinking out of sight, and 
 they gave him the name of the symbol of warlike prowess 
 and called him the lion's heart. This is the essence of 
 a metaphor, that a thing is visualized as the symbol of an 
 attribute. 
 
 A simile is always a phrase, a metaphor usually a word ; 
 but it is a mistake to regard their difference merely as 
 one of form ; the real difference is in the degree of 
 imaginative stimulus. ' He fought like a lion ' is a weaker 
 
 1 Incidentally it follows that no one can use the full range of English 
 with a sure hand who has not been well grounded in the ancient 
 tongues. 
 
92 The Figures of Speech 
 
 image than 'He was a lion in the fight', because it 
 involves two distinct pictures ; one must 
 
 Look now upon this picture and on that, 
 
 whereas the metaphor fuses man and lion into one idea. 
 Children usually have no difficulty in recognizing 
 a metaphor and interpreting the primary picture in it : 
 but in a fine metaphor so many images are concentrated 
 that they need help in appreciating its full force and 
 beauty. For example, if children are reading Blake's 
 ' Little Black Boy ' and come to the metaphor 
 
 This black body and this sunburnt face 
 Are but a cloud . . . 
 
 they will readily see that the body is pictured as a cloud, 
 because in a body of cloud you cannot see clearly ; but 
 they will not so readily appreciate a cloud as the symbol 
 oi partial obscurity, though it hides the source of warmth 
 and light, yet it allows them to reach us ; nor will they 
 notice without help that the cloud is essentially transitory, 
 it is the symbol of the evanescent ; again, that deeper 
 suggestion that only by the death of the material part of 
 us can we know God is fundamental to the metaphor, but 
 will not be perceived by the child unaided. Yet all these 
 ideas, at least, are in the figure and must be revealed 
 before children can fully appreciate it. 
 
 So when Wordsworth calls the daisy ' a nun ', children 
 must be helped to see in a nun the picture of modesty, 
 shyness, gentleness and purity made visible by means of 
 a metaphor of three letters. 
 
 Any one who would appreciate the wealth of imagery 
 concentrated in a fine metaphor should read, or read 
 again, what Ruskin found in Milton's 'blind mouths' 
 
The Figures of Speech 93 
 
 in ' Lycidas ' — more than two pages oi Sesame and Lilies, 
 i. 22. 
 
 The metaphors that present most difficulty are not 
 those that ' call one thing by the name of another to give 
 a better picture of it' (which I have found to be for 
 children a sufficiently good description of most metaphors), 
 but those derived from verbs — like Blake's ' burning'. 
 
 But the difficulty is less in appreciating them than in 
 making and using them, and it was probably this kind of 
 metaphor that Aristotle had in mind when he said that 
 ' the greatest of all excellence is to be happy in the use of 
 metaphor, for this alone cannot be acquired . . . and is 
 a certain mark of genius '. However, a boy whom I have 
 no reason to suspect either of genius or of plagiarism 
 lately wrote in some original verse that 
 
 The chestnut trees are rusting fast, 
 
 and I took some trouble to discover the genesis of the 
 metaphor. The boy only remembered that the tree had 
 reminded him of old, rusted machinery (i.e. he had seen 
 a typical characteristic common to the two images, but 
 most striking in the iron), and that he had tried to make 
 a simile, but could not fit it to his metre. He must then, 
 I suppose, have visualized not the thing, the machinery, 
 but the action, and so got his picture ' rusting '. So Blake 
 may perhaps have thought first of the tiger as a consum- 
 ing fir€^nd from that got a still higher image of 'burning'. 
 This kind of metaphor is however rare : usually when 
 the poetic mind seeks to visualize action it puts the 
 agent also into the picture — 
 
 Autumn's fire burns slow along the woods 
 
 SO metaphor merges into personification. 
 
94 The Figures of Speech 
 
 I suggested that simile was probably the oldest figure 
 of speech, but personification also must be as old as 
 language ; when we speak of these figures as ' art ' we 
 need always to remember that they were first instinctive, 
 they came not by man taking thought, but spontaneously 
 from his feeling. And even now the perfect figure, 
 though we admire it as art, seems not to be ' thought 
 out ' by the poet, but to ' occur ' to him ; it is not sought 
 for, it is simply the description of the vision that is his 
 inexplicable gift. There is a remarkable instance of this 
 in the figure put into the mouth of Horatio, 
 
 But look the morn in russet mantle clad 
 Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill. 
 
 Horatio was not the man to see a vision of the dawn as 
 a person; conscious art would have made him speak 
 soldierly words more befitting his part. But Shakespeare 
 had to tell that dawn was breaking, and as the fact 
 occurred to him in a picture he made Horatio describe 
 what he himself saw. It is in just such touches as this, 
 where some one speaks for a moment out of character, 
 that we get glimpses of Shakespeare the man, that was 
 behind and within Shakespeare the artist. He did not 
 consciously impersonate th ings to make his picture of them 
 more real to his audience, but he seems always to have 
 thought in persons rather than in things. He scarcely 
 ever refers to the sea, for example, except as a person : 
 
 'The rude sea's enraged and foamy mouth.' 
 
 'As good to chide the waves as speak them fair.' 
 
 'I saw him beat the surges under him 
 And ride upon their backs ; ' 
 
The Figures of Speech 95 
 
 earth to him has always a ' bosom' or ' veins ' or ' bones ' or 
 ' entrails ' ; fire (in Lear) is a minister of vengeance that 
 will come when called, yet (King John) 
 
 There is no malice in this burning coal, 
 
 The breath of heaven hath blown his spirit out 
 
 And strewed repentant ashes on his head. 
 
 Sleep Is nature's sweet nurse, night is death's second self 
 that seals up all in rest. 
 
 In all this Shakespeare is much more primitive than 
 Spenser or Wordsworth ; personification is an instinct of 
 primitive man ; he does not so much ' See God in clouds 
 and hear him in the wind ' — that is moi'e literally true of 
 Wordgworth — as see personality in all things ; children 
 do the same, but civilized men, though they still retain 
 'gender ' in most languages, only feel personal communion 
 with external things, when emotion for the moment sits 
 in reason's seat. Shakespeare, among the innumerable 
 personalities that composed his identity, had a primi- 
 tive myth-making child of the race. In the use of 
 personification Shelley and Blake are nearest to Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 To Wordsworth too, 'Nature was a person, distinct 
 from himself, and capable of being loved. He could 
 brood on her character, her ways, her words, her life. 
 Hence arose his minute and loving observation of her 
 and his passionate description of all her charms.' But 
 that is worlds away from primitive man and children 
 and Shakespeare ; it is a much more intellectual idea, as 
 Shelley says of it, 'it is a sort of thought in sense'. 
 Wordsworth sees all things as manifestations of one 
 personality, not as individual persons : in him the myth- 
 
96 The Figures of Speech 
 
 maker never altogether worked independently of the 
 philosopher. 
 
 Spenser's personification represents a third type ; he is 
 more the conscious artist, like Collins and Tennyson ; he 
 has visions of things as persons, of course ; but they are 
 called up by him rather than come to him instinctively. 
 He calls them because he delights in them ; but also 
 because he knows that by describing them he will make 
 his pictures more real to his readers, will make them_/%// 
 more. ' Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is ' : 
 the most ' real ' thing to him is that which is nearest him- 
 self, which has most of his own attributes ; he is a social 
 animal and instinctively seeks for communion with other 
 beings ; the same instinct which a child gratifies when 
 she talks to her doll makes men find pleasure in imagin- 
 ing things as persons. In a word, it is our nature to 
 take more interest in a personified thing. And that is 
 why the poets use the figure, consciously or unconsciously, 
 for their own delight or for ours. 
 
 The attributes of things are intensified by personifica- 
 tion ; the sea that drowns men is more terrible when 
 conceived as a purposeful being than as a blind and 
 lifeless force, for man, in spite of all man's inhumanity to 
 man, instinctively looks to persons for sympathy and 
 fellowship, and his spirit as well as his body is hurt by 
 cruelty. 
 
 We know so little of our own nature that much of 
 what is called psychology is but vague speculation and 
 hypothesis. But the myth of the Earth-mother may 
 have its root in one of the deepest instincts of humanity. 
 Unless indeed Berkeley and the mystics are right, man 
 is but a few fragments of the earth's substance held 
 
The Figures of Speech 97 
 
 togethjer in a temporary association by the same chemical 
 forces that give shape to all matter, soon to return by 
 the continued action of those forces into the great reser- 
 voir of the inorganic, and anon to be regrouped by them 
 into other forms. Scott's Meg Merrilies was crazed, but 
 Keats's who felt : 
 
 Her brothers were the craggy hills, 
 Her sisters larchen trees, 
 
 and regarded all natural phenomena as her great family, 
 was simply a primitive being in whom intellectual illu- 
 sions had not weakened intuitive perceptions. 
 
 At moments all of us have the same feeling : we lift up 
 our eyes to the hills for help, or cry to the sea breaking 
 on its desolate rocks or find comfort because 
 Our tree yet crowns the hill. 
 
 Ruskin may call it a ' pathetic fallacy ' that leads men 
 to do these things, but still they do them, and are per- 
 suaded that they find help and healing, 
 
 I have spoken at some length of personification because 
 I believe that an instinct so strong in children should be 
 more considered in the schools. There is no figure 
 which children use so naturally, so easily, and so effect- 
 ively. A child will write an infinitely better essay on 
 the Thames, or on Autumn, or even on coal or steam, if 
 he is asked to think of his subject as a person, than if he 
 sets about it in the grown-up way. But I shall illustrate 
 this point presently. 
 
 Between personification and apostrophe, the imaging 
 things as persons and addressing them as such, children 
 need draw no line. 
 
 The other figures of speech, except hyberbole, of 
 
98 The Figures of Speech 
 
 which something must be said, are of much less impor- 
 tance ; the essence of them, as of the greater figures, is the 
 aid given to the imagination by the use of the concrete 
 and the visual to body forth the abstract and ideal, of the 
 known thing to suggest the unknown, of the familiar for 
 the remote. Thus, using the figure with the rather 
 cumbrous title synecdoche, we pray for our daily bread, 
 using the name of the most typical food instead of the 
 indefinite general term ; or we speak — thank God there 
 are signs that we may soon be ashamed to do so any 
 more— of a workman as a ' hand ' : ' hardly entreated 
 brother' indeed, that thy marred, misshapen, work- 
 roughened hand should stand for the whole body and 
 soul of thee. 
 
 So, by metonymy, we make the well-known image of 
 a crown or a sceptre stand for the unfamiliar figure of the 
 sovereign whose identity is securely hidden from most 
 of his subjects by the illustrated newspapers ; or we say, 
 pleasantly and pictorially, of a friend that he is fond of 
 ' the bottle ' instead of using that vague term so dear to 
 intemperate reformers, ' the drink '. It is the method of 
 Hogarth and all the great artists. 
 
 Hyperbole is to poetry what the harmless exaggera- 
 tion, natural to children, is to their story-telling — which 
 indeed is a form of poetry. They like to come upon 
 examples of it, and to use it themselves ; but it seems too 
 primitive for modern taste. Pegasus in these days is 
 tightly reined. In Homer's hands, to judge from Lon- 
 ginus and the translators, the thing became a trumpet 
 to stir men's souls. 
 
 Fierce as he passed the lofty mountains nod, 
 The forests shake, earth trembled as he trod. 
 
The Figures of Speech 99 
 
 he says of Neptune ; and 
 
 While scarce the skies her horrid head can bound, 
 She stalks on earth, 
 
 of Discord. 
 
 Shakespeare too uses it constantly, sometimes con- 
 sciously, for effect : 
 
 The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch. 
 But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek, 
 Dashes the fire out. 
 
 There the effect of the figure must surely be as sublime 
 as anything in Homer. But when he makes a rude sea- 
 captain tell the Duke of Suffolk he is like 
 
 Ambitious Sylla, overgorged 
 
 With gobbets of thy mother's bleeding heart, 
 
 we think of his audience and of the dyer's hand. 
 
 H yperbole ^is always in danger of descending into 
 bombast, as we are often reminded in reading Shake- 
 speare's contemporaries. But ' those hyperboles are the 
 best ' says Longinus, and he says the same thing of all 
 the figures, ' which have not the appearance of being 
 hyperboles at all'. No one notices the exaggera- 
 tion in the lines from ' The Tempest ' until the emotion 
 excited by them has passed away and he examines the 
 figure critically ; but an obvious hyberbole, except 
 perhaps in Marlowe where the whole atmosphere is 
 ' hyberbolical ', produces effects contrary to those for 
 which it was designed. 
 
 Here perhaps is a suitable place to say something of 
 artifice as distinct from art. 
 
 I have already entered a caveat lest I should be sus- 
 
 G2 
 
loo The Figures of Speech 
 
 pected of being one of those persons flayed — but that 
 their skins are so thick — by Ruskin, ' who fancy that Art 
 may be learned as book-keeping is.' Art depends on 
 vision and the gift of tongues, and these can no more 
 be acquired than physical beauty. But though artists 
 are born, they are not born ready-made any more than 
 Helen was born beautiful : they have to grow, and they 
 have to learn like other men, and criticism of their 
 fellows' work will help them in their own. Criticism, 
 as I have been trying to show, can be learned, and leaving 
 artists out of the question, must be learned by those who 
 would really appreciate their work. 
 
 It is true that the very greatest poetry, in Shakespeare 
 often, in Keats and Shelley sometimes, in Wordsworth 
 now and again, in Tennyson once or twice, does seem 
 to be the absolutely spontaneously perfect expression 
 of a feehng, an inspired voice: the fact is one of the 
 great arguments for God. But these are exceptions to 
 the human rule ; they are the ideal poetry ; and it is, 
 partly, by studying them, that human powers learn to 
 approach them. Human spontaneity alone, however, 
 will not give us the highest poetry, without artistic form. 
 Blake is the best example of this : he sings, as the linnet 
 sings, absolutely without taking thought ; but his poetry, 
 with all the freshness of childhood, has childish faults 
 of form which art could have smoothed away, if he had 
 been more of an artist, without ceasing to be a seer. It 
 is surely a pity that a charming and most characteristic 
 litde lyric like ' A Dream ' should end in something that 
 is neither a rime nor an assonance : 
 
 Follow now the beetle's hum ; 
 Little wanderer, hie thee home, 
 
The Figures of Speech loi 
 
 when five minutes' revision would have found him a per- 
 fect rime. 
 
 The opposite extreme, which we find very often in 
 Tennyson, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold, pleases us 
 even less, because it is obviously meant to please us 
 more. Here the firs t, si mple, spontaneous expression 
 seems to have been so revised, smoothed, polished, and 
 added to by c onscious art, that though it has gained an 
 artificial beauty it has lost a natural one. 
 
 Swinburne ends the first stanza of a poem that Blake 
 might have begun, with the lines : 
 
 Welling water's winsome word, 
 Wind in warm, wan, weather. 
 
 Now Blake could never have written that ; the power 
 to do something like it was the one thing he lacked; 
 but Swinburne had cultivated the power to too great 
 a degree, and it has spoilt his stanza. The rest of it — 
 ' A Child's Laughter ' : 
 
 All the bells of heaven may ring, 
 All the birds of heaven may sing, 
 All the wells on earth may spring, 
 All the winds on earth may bring 
 All sweet sounds together ; 
 Sweeter far than all things heard, 
 Hand of harper, tone of bird, 
 Sound of woods at sundown stirred — 
 
 is as fresh and natural as the voice of the birds, or the 
 winds, or of Blake ; but the last couplet is not art but 
 artifice ; it is be autiful , but it is made so by deliberate 
 device, like the spots of white paint which Constable puts 
 on his leaves and water to suggest reflection, of lights. 
 
I02 The Figures of Speech 
 
 The words are chosen for alliterative effect, and we 
 can see it. Winsome is a beautiful word, but its use is a 
 little, a very little, forced ; and wan, also a beautiful 
 word, with its atmosphere and its ethereal colour-sense 
 is certainly out of harmony with warm. 
 
 In the best art we feel the effect without being 
 conscious of the means used to produce it — sometimes 
 indeed without being able, after all our study, to find 
 them out. 
 
 Very often in Tennyson and Swinburne we can watch 
 the hand of the conscious artist at work, ' charging every 
 rift with gold ', adding beauties till the simple texture 
 of the original thought grows into stiff brocade. Their 
 best work is not so wrought, but such work is more 
 beautiful than the unpolished crystals of all but the 
 greatest. Shakespeare or Blake or Shelley may cast 
 from the crucible a flashing jewel that a single further 
 touch could only spoil, but their temperature is their own 
 secret ; other men must cut and polish more or less, 
 though the stone lose a little in glow while it gains in 
 lustre. Better at least the polished gem than the shape- 
 less stone which now gleams luridly and now is dull as 
 glass, now glows like a carbuncle and now fades into 
 a grey pebble. 
 
 But this would lead us into a discussion on Browning, 
 which is far too big a matter for a little book like this. 
 All I will say here is that beautiful form is the first 
 essential of any work of art ; pure gold or pure carbon 
 are beautiful in themselves and in their nature ; but 
 until the artist's hand has shaped them, or until by some 
 rare miracle he has cast them as perfect jewels, they are 
 not art whatever else they may be. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 OTHER ARTIFICES AND OTHER ARTS 
 
 True ease in writing comes from art not chance, 
 As those move easiest who have learned to dance. 
 
 The power to thrill the heart with music and to light 
 up the imagination with pictures belongs only to the 
 poet's ear and eye ; it is a gift. But besides their secret 
 spell over the magic sound and the magic word poets 
 and artists use, like ordinary people, various common 
 devices that are at the disposal of us all.^ 
 
 One of these is simple repetition of a word or phrase. 
 As children say, and as pill-sellers know, ' you'll believe 
 me if I say it twice ' ; and that seems to be human nature. 
 Two of the most wonderful lines in the ' Ancient Mariner ', 
 as intensely charged with feeling as any in literature, 
 are simply the repetition of three or four words — 
 
 Alone, alone, all, all, alone, 
 Alone on a wide, wide sea ! 
 
 ' Behold and see : is any sorrow like unto my sorrow ? ' 
 By means of nine letters we are made to feel the climax of 
 the mariner's punishment, and the depth of his despair, 
 and a sense of utter solitude, and an illimitable waste 
 of sea. 
 
 The two most fated persons of whom I have read are 
 
 ' Even here, however, the poet often seems to do by instinct what 
 ordinary writers do by design. 
 
I04 Other Artifices and Other Arts 
 
 Richard II and Ravenswood, and each of them, in his 
 bitterest hour, can find only a few words, and those 
 repeated, to express his passion.^ Richard cries for 
 
 A little grave, 
 
 A little, little, grave ! 
 
 And Ravenswood, when Lucy returns the broken coin, 
 can only repeat his wonder that she could have worn it 
 next her heart while accepting his rival's addresses. 
 
 Lear's ' never ' five times repeated is no human cry, 
 and I at least can make no comment on it ; but excepting 
 that 
 
 depth of some divine despair 
 
 I know no more poignant words than those Milton 
 reiterates when for once his mighty self-control is over- 
 whelmed by his grief at his cruel deprivation : 
 
 Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon 
 Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse 
 Without all hope of day. 
 
 But here there is not only the repetition of the telling 
 word and the reiteration of the idea : we are also made 
 to feel the darkness by contrast with the blaze of noon. 
 ,,_ This use of contrast, of which we have already noticed 
 some examples, is one of the most effective artifices in all 
 art ; musicians and painters constantly employ it, and so 
 do poets both in their pictures and in their music. Thus, 
 in the 'Ancient Mariner', the terrible picture of the 
 
 1 For only men incredulous of despair 
 Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air, 
 Beat upward to God's throne in loud access 
 Of shrieking and reproach. 
 
Other Artifices and Other Arts 105 
 
 rotting deck, strewn with corpses with the death-dews 
 on their limbs, is followed immediately by a scene of the 
 most magical beauty, of moonlight on the waters and ot 
 the water-snakes at play. And this visual contrast is 
 accompanied by a corresponding contrast in the music 
 of the verse : the harsh, stern, aspirated stanza that tells : 
 
 An orphan's curse would drag to hell 
 
 A spirit from on high; 
 
 But oh ! more horrible than that 
 
 Is a curse in a dead man's eye ! 
 
 Seven days, seven nights I saw that curse, 
 
 And yet I could not die, 
 
 is succeeded by one of the most melodiously soothing 
 stanzas in the whole poem : 
 
 The moving moon went up the sky 
 And nowhere did abide : 
 Softly she was going up 
 And a star or two beside. 
 
 So, by means of contrast, the great poet plays upon our 
 emotions as the great musician on a violin. 
 
 Another fine example of the skilful use of this device 
 is to be found in ' High Tide '. Elizabeth's husband 
 comes riding up with might and main : we hear his voice 
 raised in a great shout ' Elizabeth ! Ehzabeth ! ', and then 
 comes the quiet parenthesis of the old mother : 
 
 A sweeter woman ne'er drew breath 
 Than my son's wife, Elizabeth. 
 
 I will not multiply examples, partly because any one 
 who has once learned to look for them will find them 
 everywhere in great art, and also because my last example 
 
io6 Other Artifices and Other Arts 
 
 reminds me of another artistic excellence which is, in 
 a sense, the opposite of contrast, and which, for want of 
 a special word, may be called consistency. The old 
 mother's repetition of the words quoted is finely in keep- 
 ing with her character as an old woman, and as a sweet 
 and loving woman herself. It is but a little touch, but it 
 is the touch of a true artist. One of the finest illustrations 
 of this particular artistic merit is a poem of Dr. Bridges 
 called ' Winter Nightfall '. It begins with a picture of 
 a winter landscape at evening : 
 
 The day begins to droop, — 
 
 Its course is done ; 
 But nothing tells the place 
 
 Of the setting sun. 
 
 An engine pants and hums 
 
 In the farm hard by : 
 Its lowering smoke is lost 
 
 In the lowering sky. 
 
 The soaking branches drip, 
 
 And all night through 
 The dropping will not cease 
 
 In the avenue. 
 
 Few stanzas that I know have such power as these to 
 suggest the "gloom of a rural landscape when the day 
 and the year are alike ending : we are made to feel the 
 palpable, damp, heavy atmosphere, and the heavy clouds 
 seem to press upon our heads; moreover, the effect is 
 progressive; the gloom deepens with each successive 
 stanza; dark smoke is added to dark clouds, and the 
 melancholy drone of a thresher andtheequallymonotonous 
 
Other Artifices and other Arts 107 
 
 drip of water saddens ear as well as eye. All this, how- 
 ever, is but to prepare us for a deeper gloom : 
 
 A tall man there in the house, 
 Must keep his chair ; 
 He knows he will never again 
 Breathe the spring air ; 
 
 His heart is worn with work ; 
 He is giddy and sick 
 If he rise to go as far 
 As the nearest rick : 
 
 He thinks of his morn of life, 
 
 His hale, strong years, 
 And he braves as he may the night 
 
 Of darkness and tears. 
 
 What is the gloom outside to the gloom in the house 
 And far deeper than any physical shadow is the gloomy 
 hopelessness in the man's heart as he thinks of the dark- 
 ness of the night into which he must go. What are 
 lowering clouds and rain-drops to its darkness and 
 tears ? 
 
 Byron may have felt such a gloom, but Byron nowhere 
 makes us feel it as these lines do. The sound of the 
 poem, too, is marvellously in keeping with its sense ; the 
 slow monosyllables with their long vowels, the many 
 pauses, owing to the short lines, make^it sound, to ine at 
 least, like the dread Tormula heard from a deep voice in 
 a hushed court at evening, when one must go forth and 
 be no more seen. 
 
 The one well-planned novel of Dickens, Great 
 Expectations, is curiously like Dr. Bridges' poem in 
 
io8 Other Artifices and Other Arts 
 
 maintaining one atmosphere throughout. It begins in 
 fog on the marshland on a winter's afternoon, and the 
 gloom that falls upon our spirits remains until the end — 
 for of course Pip never really married Estella, it was 
 foredoomed otherwise from the first ; it deepens in Miss 
 Havisham's darkened room, and in the bare blank 
 brewery, and in the filthy associations of Smithfield 
 Market and in the close, evil-smelling, murky atmosphere 
 of the police-court ; and it is in Pip's heart, and in our 
 hearts, at the lastw 
 
 ' Winter Nightrall ' in turn suggests by its use of the 
 present tense, or as it has been called the historic present, 
 another device of which Longinus says, ' when you 
 introduce things past as actually present and doing, you 
 will no longer relate, but display the very action before 
 the eyes of your readers '. He gives an illustration from 
 Xenophon, and, ' as every schoolboy knows ', this is also 
 Caesar's method. It is La Fontaine's too. 
 
 It is more common in prose than in poetry, for it is 
 chiefly valuable in narrative, with which poetry has 
 little to do. I mention it because I wish to suggest that 
 children should be encouraged to use it, particularly in 
 writing essays in history ; it will demand that they should 
 make pictures in their minds, have clear images of the 
 things they are writing about — and, unless they do this, 
 history is a barren and useless study. 
 
 From change of tense Longinus goes on to discuss 
 change of person as a device ' powerfully effective, and 
 oftentimes makes the hearer think himself actually 
 present and concerned in the dangers described ' ; and 
 he quotes Herodotus, ' You will sail upwards from the 
 city Elephantina, and then you will arrive at a level 
 
Other Artifices and Other Arts 109 
 
 coast. And when you have travelled over this tract of 
 land you will go on board another ship and sail two 
 days, and then you will arrive at a great city called 
 Meroe.' And then he says, very justly, ' Do you see, 
 my friend, how he carries your imagination along with 
 him in his excursion : how he conducts you through the 
 different scenes, converting hearing into sight ? And all 
 such passages, by appealing to the hearers personally, 
 make them fancy themselves present in the actual 
 transactions.' This device is the great secret of Mr. 
 Belloc — or rather it is a part of his secret : the other 
 and more important part is intimate personal acquaintance 
 with the scenes of which he writes. He says ' You will 
 go to Jericho ' because he has been to Jericho. 
 
 As in the last paragraph, I had an ulterior rather than 
 a direct motive in referring to this device; but what 
 that was will appear in the last chapter. 
 
 Here, if I had the necessary knowledge, I should 
 attempt to show that all or most of these devices are 
 common to all the arts, and to illustrate their use, 
 particularly in music and painting. The reiteration of 
 the ' theme ' of the Venus motif, in Tannhauser for 
 example, corresponds to that repetition of a word, or 
 phrase, or idea by which the poet intensifies our sense of 
 his emotion. So the painter uses the same device for 
 the same end — to increase the effect of his picture upon 
 our feelings. Hazlitt shows us that in Hogarth's picture 
 of ' The Enraged Musician ' the central idea of discord 
 is repeatedly suggested — ' by the razor grinder turning 
 his wheel ; the boy with his drum, and the girl with her 
 rattle momentarily suspended ; the pursuivant blowing 
 his horn ; the shrill milkwoman ; the inexorable ballad- 
 
"o Other Artifices and Other Arts 
 
 singer with her squalling- infant ; the fishwomen ; the 
 chimney sweepers at the top of the chimney, and the two 
 cats in melodious concert on the ridge of the tiles ; with 
 the bells ringing in the distance — as we see by the flags 
 flying ' ; and he might have added the howling dog 
 whose tail has been stepped upon, and the squalling 
 parrot outside the window. He shows, too, that in ' Gin 
 Lane ' the ' theme ' of the picture is reiterated again and 
 again — ' in the woman on the stairs of the bridge asleep, 
 letting her child fall over ; her ghastly companion 
 opposite, next to death's door, with hollow famished 
 cheeks and staring ribs ; the dog fighting with the man 
 for the bare shin-bone ; the man hanging himself in 
 a garret ; the female corpse put into a coffin by the 
 parish beadle ; the men marching after a funeral, seen 
 through a broken wall in the background; and the 
 very houses reeling as if drunk and tumbling about the 
 ears of the infatuated victims below, the pawnbroker's 
 being the only one that stands firm and unimpaired '—all 
 which helps to ' enforce the moral meant to be conveyed 
 by each of these pieces with a richness and research of 
 combination and artful contrast not easily paralleled in 
 any production of the pencil or the pen.' 
 
 In Hogarth again, who as the first and almost the 
 greatest of our English painters is the most worthy of 
 our study, Hazlitt notes the presence of that artistic trait 
 wtich I have called consistency ; for example in 'Modern 
 Midnight Conversation ', the hands of the clock in the 
 room, where some are drunk, and the rest still drink- 
 ing, point to four in the morning. He even draws 
 a parallel between the poets' use of alliteration, and 
 Hogarth's ' continuing the red colour of the sanguine 
 
Other Artifices and Other Arts m 
 
 complexion and flame- coloured hair of the female 
 Virtuoso (in the music scene in " Marriage a la Mode") into 
 the back of the chair ' in which she is sitting. Thackeray, 
 in the ' English Humorists ', shows how the very pictures 
 on the walls of the room in ' Marriage a la Mode ' strike 
 the same note with the main theme of the story. 
 
 So the skilful use of contrast marks the great 
 master's work in all the arts. I have shown how much 
 of its effect the finest tower of the Middle Ages owes to 
 the contrast between the richness of its upper stage and 
 the massive severity of its base. In every noble spire, 
 again, the crocketed shaft and fretted pinnacles and 
 traceried flying buttresses spring from a tower that 
 suggests the contrasting beauty of simple strength. The 
 principles of light and shade must be learned by the 
 architect no less than by the painter. 
 
 Lord Tennyson records that his father, discussing with 
 Joachim his poem ' The Revenge ', referred to the artistic 
 effect of contrast in the quiet line, 
 
 And the night went down and the stars came out far over 
 the summer sea, 
 
 in the middle of the battle scene, and asked ' Could you 
 do that on your violin ? ' Joachim's answer is not given ,' 
 but we know that he could have suggested by his music 
 a sudden calm and breathing space in the midst of com- 
 bat, for to the musician, not less than to the poet, contrast 
 is a source of beauty. 
 
 However, any adequate examination of the relations 
 between poetry and the other arts would need a better 
 knowledge than I possess of the technique of most of the 
 latter ; for ' aU things cannot be in man, because the son 
 
112 Other Artifices and Other Arts 
 
 of man is not immortal '. Yet I can imagine no better 
 service to poetry than such an examination competently 
 carried out. Since every one likes pictures and most 
 find pleasure in music, the common indiiference to 
 poetry must be due to a failure to realize that poetry is 
 really both. We have forgotten that poetry is one of the 
 arts and, therefore, like all the rest, ' is dedicated to Joy ', 
 that there might be ' forgetfulness of evils and a truce from 
 cares '. It should not be possible for any one who cares 
 for art at all — and I would add to the many definitions 
 of man that he is an art-loving animal — to be indifferent 
 to it in any of its manifestations. 
 
 ' Art for art's sake ' is a mistaken principle (so far as 
 it has any meaning at all) ; but one art for the sake of 
 mere proficiency is a more mistaken and a more common 
 one. What we should aim at is using the influence of all 
 the arts towards development of the power to appreciate 
 beautiful things. 
 
 I think we might try much more than we do in schools 
 to use one art to illustrate and help in teaching another. 
 I believe, for example, that we could often find a passage 
 of music having the same ' theme ' as a passage of poetry, 
 and so producing the same 'mood' in the hearers. 
 Moreover, those with musical gifts could improvise such 
 illustrations. I remember sharing the delight of a class 
 of boys when a visitor to the school sat down at the 
 piano and illustrated the contrast of which I have 
 spoken between the two stanzas of the ' Ancient Mariner ' 
 beginning : 
 
 An orphan's curse . . . 
 and 
 
 The moving moon went up the sky. 
 
Other Artifices and Other Arts 113 
 
 The practice of 'setting' poems as songs is a very 
 different matter. If that can be justified at all it is not on 
 the ground that it illustrates and emphasizes the beauty 
 of poetry : a poem, such as ' Crossing the Bar ', has its 
 own music of the speaking voice, and was never con- 
 ceived as sung sound nor meant to be translated into it ; 
 to my mind there could be no worse example of ' waste- 
 ful and ridiculous excess ' ; it is at least as bad as to paint 
 the lily. I understand that Shelley's ' West Wind ' has 
 been ' set ' as a song. I hope I may never hear it. But 
 the same them.e might doubtless be expressed, by 
 a musician of genius, in instrumental music; Joachim 
 could have done it on his violin. 
 
 On the other hand, it would doubtless be too much to 
 say that verse intended to be set to music and sung should 
 suggest the need for music when heard in the speaking 
 voice ; and yet in reading the songs of the Middle Ages we 
 do often feel an impulse to put notes to them. Try, for 
 
 example, 
 
 I sing of a maiden 
 That is makeless; 
 King of all kings 
 To her son she ches. 
 
 He came all so still 
 Where his mother was, 
 As dew in April 
 That falleth on the grass. 
 
 So most of Shakespeare's songs seem to suggest 
 a light, airy framework — beautiful in itself, but purposely 
 designed to be filled in, as it were, with music ; they have 
 a perfect rhythm for the purpose, simple not subtle; 
 
 1922 H 
 
"4 Other Artifices and Other Arts 
 
 they have no great weight or volume of sound, and none 
 of the wonderful cadences of his other verse ; they are 
 indeed intended as material for the musician, and to be 
 finished by him. 
 
 The exceptions that occur to me are ' Full Fathom 
 Five ' and ' Fear no more the heat o' the Sun ', and 
 I think that in these poetry mastered Shakespeare as it 
 so often did, and he forgot that he was writing songs, and 
 let his own full music escape into them. At least I love 
 them better spoken than sung. There is too much 
 of Shakespeare's deeper mind in them for them to be 
 good songs. 
 
 There is a very wide, fertile and almost virgin field in 
 the relation between poetry and painting; poetry will 
 reveal new beauties in pictures and open the lips of those 
 who would speak of them ; and painting will help the 
 imagination to see form and colour in words. 
 
 Comparatively few schools are within reach of picture 
 galleries (and I fear that few of those make full use of 
 their opportunities), but the great advance made in colour- 
 printing has brought good reproductions of fine pictures 
 within reach of all schools : the catalogue of the Medici 
 Society especially should be in the hands of every 
 teaher. 
 
 Many pictures have been specifically painted to illus- 
 trate certain poems — the rich colours and striking detail 
 of Tennyson's early work attracted painters as they still 
 attract children— but we are not limited in our range of 
 illustrations by such designed parallelisms: indeed the 
 most successful for our purpose are likely to be those in 
 which the painter has been separately inspired by the 
 same subject. For example, although Tennyson specially 
 
Other Artifices and Other Arts 115 
 
 approved Burne Jones's ' Lady of Shalott ', the deep 
 pathos of her story is better suggested in Millais' picture 
 of another ill-fated lady, Ophelia; so Pettie's 'Vigil' 
 suggests the atmosphere of Sir Galahad, whose ' knees 
 were bowed in crypt and shrine ', although it was 
 painted without reference to the poem. 
 
 It is a good exercise in art criticism to compare a 
 picture and a poem having the same theme ; to study for 
 example, Hawker's ' Cornish Mother ' and La Thargue's 
 ' Man with the Scythe ' or Keats's poem and Dixie's 
 picture of ' La Belle Dame Sans Merci ', side by side. 
 Children should be asked to decide which form of 
 presentation pleases them better, which tells them most 
 and moves them most, and to give their reasons for 
 their views. They might also be encouraged in every 
 school to study poetry with the school pictures in mind, 
 and to watch for illustrative passages which might be 
 printed on cards on the picture-frame. Below our school 
 picture of ' Napoleon on the Bellerophon ', for example, 
 we have Shirley's ' The glories of our blood and state ' ; 
 over Briton Riviere's ' Beyond Man's Footsteps ' are the 
 lines from ' Morte d'Arthur : ' 
 
 Seen where the moving isles of winter shock 
 By night with noises of the northern sea; 
 . . . Night in a waste land, where no one comes, 
 Or hath come, since the making of the world ; 
 
 beneath Miss Kemp Welch's ' Colt-hunting ' we have the 
 description in ' Mazeppa' of the wild horses' dash from the 
 forest and also Shakespeare's lines on the power of music 
 over even ' a herd of wanton colts ' ; near our Arundel 
 print of Romanino's ' The Chase' is Scott's hunting song, 
 
 H 3 
 
ii6 Other Artifices and Other Arts 
 
 ' Waken lords and ladies gay ' ; and so with all our 
 pictures. 
 
 Again, it is a good exercise to make a picture in words, 
 whether in verse or prose, ' translating' a painting. But 
 this matter belongs rather to the chapter on ' Children's 
 Exercises '. 
 
 I know that this chapter is as sketchy and insufficient 
 as it is short ; but it is concerned with a subject on which 
 very little has been written, and if it suggests to others 
 some matter for further consideration its purpose will 
 have been accomplished. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 POETRY IS FORMAL BEAUTY 
 
 A Thing of Beauty is a Joy for ever. 
 
 I SUPPOSE that most people who read so far will ask : 
 But is there nothing in poetry but music and pictures ? 
 Granted that poetical form should be studied and 
 appreciated, for what other good shall we seek ; what of 
 the poets' message to men ; what of the meaning of the 
 poem ? And some will add : What does poetry teach ? 
 
 If it were commonly accepted that poetic form should 
 be studied for the sake of appreciative enjoyment, my 
 end would have been gained and I could leave these 
 questions to answer themselves. But that morbid 
 growth, the examination system, which had its roots in 
 nineteenth-century utilitarianism, has so warped our 
 educational ideals that even poetry is expected to show 
 ' results ', some tangible efifects, upon which the appraiser 
 may lay his hand. Many teachers, I hope, would be glad 
 to feel that their children appreciated poetry as a thing 
 of beauty, but I fear that very few would be content to 
 let them find in it, as Keats did, simply a joy. That, 
 however, is the point of view I want to put in this 
 chapter. 
 
 In good poetry there is something more than we have 
 yet spoken of; it is a something that is in all good art. 
 But it is nothing tangible, nothing that can be explained 
 or exhibited to children. So far as words will take us 
 we may call it an atmosphere, a glamour investing the 
 
ii8 Poetry is Formal Beauty 
 
 verse, a kind of dream-light not created but proceeding ; 
 it stirs in us a sense of some mysterious meaning not 
 expressed by the words themselves, not even consciously 
 intended by the poet. It thrills us with the presence as of 
 
 A shrine 
 
 Occult, with-held, untrod. 
 
 But though we cannot explain it, it is as real a presence 
 as life itself; those who have not felt it in poetry will 
 have known it in the mysterious melancholy that haunts 
 fine music, or will have seen it in the eyes of the ' Monna 
 Lisa '. Only the Philistine cannot feel it, and he denies its 
 existence: 
 
 Hame, hame, hame, O hame fain wad I be — 
 
 hame^ hame, hame, to my ain countree ! 
 
 What is there in the repetition of a single monosyllable 
 that has such power over the heart ? No critic can tell. 
 When the stars threw down their spears, 
 And watered heaven with their tears . . . 
 and 
 
 1 will make you brooches and toys for your delight 
 Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. 
 
 I will make a palace fit for you and me 
 
 Of green days in forests and blue days at sea. 
 
 That is either poetry or nonsense. We, who feel its 
 mysterious charm, know it is poetry, though criticism, 
 the judgement, cannot analyse it or state it in terms of 
 music or pictures simply. But the heart knows that the 
 lines are poetry because it is moved by them. This is 
 the final test of poetry, that it communicates a mood. 
 There is the artist's function ; it has little or nothing to 
 do with the intellect, for it presents not ideas but images, 
 
Poetry is Formal Beauty 119 
 
 that produce in us a definite state of feeling but have no 
 meaning that can be expressed in intellectual conceptions. 
 If the reader will only think of music instead of poetry, 
 this paragraph will not appear so difficult. But, unfor- 
 tunately, we have separated poetry from the other arts, 
 and have almost forgotten that she, too, is Apollo's, not 
 Minerva's, child. 
 
 The question ' What does poetry teach ? ' is one that 
 could only be asked in a society which has made examin- 
 ations a be-all and end-all in education. Poetry does 
 not teach : it inspires. Those who would teach must 
 before all things be logically clear ; but the very essence 
 of poetry is exactly what cannot be intellectually ^ con- 
 ceived or expressed : the poet is not a schoolmaster but 
 a prophet, and his speech is dark. I do not mean verbally 
 obscure, like Browning; no great poet is vague any 
 more than a great painter is indefinite ; the language of 
 Blake and Shakespeare, as has been said, is as precise as 
 the Book of Revelation. But you can get no system 
 of thought out of it. The water is clear as crystal, but it 
 is unfathomable. Browning's language, on the other 
 hand, is difficult, but only as Tacitus is difficult: when 
 you have mastered his style you find that a great deal of 
 his poetry is not poetry at all but versified philosophy. 
 It is a deep and turbid stream, but you can get to the 
 bottom of it and discover most of what is there. 
 
 There is a great deal of ' teaching ' in Wordsworth, but 
 the best of it is in his prose prefaces — e.g. in the preface 
 
 ' It is true that the supreme artistic gift is never unaccompanied by 
 great intellectual power ; but the relation between them, so far from 
 being direct and obvious as might be supposed, is profoundly obscure, 
 an, at present, insoluble mystery. 
 
Poetry is Formal Beauty 
 
 in which he teaches that ' All good poetry is the spon- 
 taneous overflow of powerful feelings ' — and all of it 
 would have been more effective in prose than in verse. 
 
 The mistake of supposing that the teaching of a poem 
 can be formulated is responsible for the lamentable 
 practice of paraphrasing poetry. Paraphrasing itself as 
 an exercise may be good intellectual discipline, like con- 
 struing, but poetry cannot be translated without ceasing to 
 exist ; it is true that in a poet-translator's hands it may 
 give birth to a new poem, as happened to Homer and 
 Omar Khayyam, but that is neither paraphrase nor 
 translation ; it is a new creation. 
 
 The mark of all bad criticism is that it seizes on the 
 matter rather than on the form. Dr. Johnson has been 
 justly rebuked by Matthew Arnold for his judgement of 
 Lycidas ; but his very worst blunder was to ' suppose 
 that no one could read Lycidas with pleasure because 
 the true meaning is so uncertain and remote ', and into 
 this blunder Arnold himself fell when he charged SheUey 
 with ' an incurable want in his poetry of sound subject 
 matter and so of an incurable fault of unsubstantiality '. 
 We need to get rid of this kind of criticism if poetry is 
 again to become a national joy. Men want to be made 
 to feel not made to think, and the only helpful criticism 
 is that which seeks not to make them understand some 
 supposed message or teaching but that which shows 
 them the art and leaves them to enjoy it and get the 
 good of it into their souls and not into their minds. 
 Tennyson laid down the first canon of poetry when he 
 said, speaking for all true poets, ' It doesn't matter what , 
 we say, if people only knew ; but it matters everything 
 how we say it '. 
 
Poetry is Formal Beauty 121 
 
 The worst thing we ever got from Germany was the 
 Higher Criticism, not of the Bible but of Shakespeare ; 
 the misguided attempt to dissect out his theology, his 
 philosophy, his moral teaching, his educational theory, his 
 political thought. The Germans have made a monster of 
 him ; they have discovered that the 'Midsummer Night's 
 Dream' is really a lay sermon — and probably by this time 
 that the sonnets are really tracts. Dr. Johnson showed 
 what I suppose he would now admit to be ' pure ignor- 
 ance ',when he blamed Shakespeare because 'he is so much 
 more careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to 
 write without any moral purpose ' ; and Emerson, with 
 perhaps more excuse (for good criticism can hardly be 
 expected from a nation that has produced no good poetry), 
 gravely reproves him because he chose to give us pictures 
 when he might have given us doctrine. But no one was 
 mischievous enough to suggest that the man whose 
 sweet temper could tolerate all mankind but school- 
 masters was reaUy one in disguise until Matthew Arnold 
 brought home the idea from Germany and extended it to 
 poetry as a whole. 
 
 Never was there a more fatal error than his ' criticism 
 of life ' theory ; even when he said that Shelley's letters 
 would last longer than his lyrics he was not more com- 
 pletely mistaken. What Arnold and the Germans 
 began Browning finished — nobody read him till they did 
 begin ; and now, instead of criticism we have pure 
 di^ectical analysis, so that litde boys who once cursed 
 Vergil and all his works for his grammatical complexities 
 now hate Keats and all his because they cannot explain 
 his meaning to their taskmasters. 
 
 We have mistaken Martha for Mary — and she has 
 
122 Poetry is Formal Beauty 
 
 proved a bad stepmother to the children. The one 
 spring- of art really open to all is muddied at the source, 
 and neither the wayfaring man nor the child will 
 willingly drink. 
 
 The good that I seek in poetry for me and mine is the 
 good that Keats learned from the thrush to seek in it : 
 
 Oh^ fret not after knowledge, I have none, 
 And yet my song comes native with the warmth. 
 Oh, fret not after knowledge, I have none. 
 And yet the evening listens. 
 
 Let us try to rescue poetry at least from the examiners, 
 that we may have one study for pure delight. 
 
 Rightly received this disposes of the other questions : 
 art's message is a personal mystery ; its meaning is infinite 
 — a poem, a picture, a sonata, has its own meaning for 
 every individual, and all its interpretations are but 
 shadows of the true one. ' The meaning of any beautiful 
 created thing is at least as much in the soul of him who 
 looks at it as it was in his soul who wrought it.' What a 
 poem means for each one of us, what mood it communi- 
 cates to us, is a personal matter ; ordinary school relations 
 between teacher and taught will rarely permit the 
 question. 
 
 What individual words and phrases mean is a different 
 thing. But even here, we teachers with our everlasting 
 questions, and our unreasoning reverence for facts, need 
 to impose a severe restraint upon our 'explanations'; 
 there is a vicious tendency to give explanations for their 
 own sake and not for the sake of the children. To tell 
 them only what they wish to know is a good rule, though 
 its breach may often be justified— and it will make waste 
 
Poetry is Formal Beauty 123 
 
 paper of most annotated editions for examination 
 purposes. They always make me think of that wise 
 child who said, ' Mother, I think I should understand if 
 only you wouldn't explain.' Notes, as Dr. Johnson said, 
 ' may sometimes be necessary ; but they are necessary 
 evils ' at the best. 
 
 There happens to be in Lycidas an ' allusion ' upon 
 which aU the annotators since Johnson have broken their 
 teeth and which is still unexplained : What did Milton 
 mean by his ' two handed engine at the door ' ? That the 
 meaning is ' uncertain and remote ' has spoiled no one's 
 enjoyment of the poem but Johnson's. I am not sure 
 that the very mysteriousness of the threat does not add 
 to its effect upon us. I should like to know what he 
 meant, but I should wish to have remained in imaginative 
 ignorance if it was discovered that his engine was 
 nothing very terrible after all or something that had 
 lost its dread. Even when I was grown up I learned 
 with regret, from an annotated school Tennyson, that 
 ' samite ' was German velvet ; as a matter of fact samite 
 is nothing of the kind ; it is a stuff that is only worn in 
 the spirit world, by White Ladies of Avenel and her 
 who sits among the hidden bases of the hills. 
 
 Most of these ' notes ' add nothing to a child's enjoy- 
 ment or appreciation of poetry. I remember a long note 
 on ' citron-shadows ', from ' Recollections of the Arabian 
 Nights ', in a children's Tennyson, full of botanical inform- 
 ation concerning Citrus Medica, C. Limonum, and C. 
 acida or C. Limetia, but with no hint of the beauty in 
 the word. It should be a rule without an exception that 
 explanations are only allowable when they increase en- 
 joyment by revealing artistic beauty. A child can enjoy 
 
124 Poetry is Formal Beauty 
 
 Miss Kemp Welch's picture of New Forest ponies without 
 knowing anything of William the Conqueror or that 
 quercus is Latin for an oak ; and he can enjoy Matthew 
 Arnold's beautiful vision of Apollo and the Nine in 
 Callicles' song without knowing the names of the 
 individual muses. Later on he may learn these things, 
 and the knowledge may do something to make up for 
 the inevitable loss of zest that years will bring ; but it is 
 as ridiculous as it is fatal to try to make a poem suggest 
 for a child the ideas it suggests to the adult. Their 
 common ground is in enjoyment of its music and 
 pictures ; the setting and the background must vary with 
 knowledge and age. 
 
 Still more ridiculous is the attempt to force upon 
 children details of the poet's life before they have learned 
 to love the poet's work. Why should any one be interested 
 to know that Shakespeare was born at Stratford, until he 
 has become interested in the plays ? Then indeed it is 
 a holy joy to go on pilgrimage and kneel on the chancel 
 steps before the blue ledger stone ; then it is a labour of 
 love to find out all one can about his family, to hunt for 
 the Ardern coat in the churches of the neighbouring 
 counties, rejoicing when you come upon its cheeky fess ; 
 then even the aridity of genealogical parchment will 
 blossom for you when you discover why the new 
 spear-charged bend of Shakespeare should be quar- 
 tered with the old arrow-pierced buck's head of Saxon 
 Bulstrode. But you must love Shakespeare first. And 
 who that loved him could bear scraps and snippets of 
 notes ? 
 
 Let the children postpone, save up, these biographical 
 matters to be a resource and an interest in later years ; 
 
Poetry is Formal Beauty 125 
 
 they will not make the poetry more beautiful but the 
 , poetry will sweeten them. 
 
 As for the people who cannot find enough grammatical 
 oakum for their children to pick, suflSciently ridiculous 
 syntactical posers to bewilder them, in mere prose, I can 
 only suggest that, if they cannot be prosecuted for an 
 offence against the young, a very little stretching of the 
 law would bring them under the blasphemy act. 
 
 The mistake of considering matter rather than form 
 leads to further misconception in the choice of poetry for 
 the young. Children like stories, and so it is assumed 
 that narrative verses are the most suitable for them. 
 Thus, on the one hand, plays of Shakespeare as stories, 
 together with Mrs. Hemans' stories in verse, are selected 
 for them to study ; and on the other, ' Kubla Khan ', 
 ' L'AUegro ', ' The Remote Bermudas ', ! A Dream of the 
 Unknown ', 'The Highland Reaper ', are neglected because 
 they are supposed to have no childish interest. These are 
 fundamental errors. Children like other things besides 
 stories, and one of them is poetry, for its mystery and 
 for its music and pictures, and the sensuous enjoyment 
 they bring. Shakespeare, except in extracts and, of 
 course, in his lyrics is not interesting to children : as 
 Tennyson said of himself 'boys cannot understand 
 Shakespeare '. His insight into the hearts of men, his 
 knowledge of 
 
 All pains the immortal spirit must endure, 
 All weakness that impairs, all griefs that bow, 
 
 can only be appreciated by those who have known 
 spiritual suffering and sin and have eaten the fruit of the 
 tree of knowledge of good and evil ; but they do not 
 
126 Poetry is Formal Beauty 
 
 read ' Hamlet ' to hear the story of a murder and its 
 punishment, but to weigh with him the known ills of this 
 life against the unknown ones of a possible life to come ; 
 nor ' The Tempest ' for a tale of intrigue and usurpation, 
 but to learn how Hamlet might have emerged scorched 
 but serene from the fires if he had been Prospero or 
 William Shakespeare. 
 
 Narrative verse is very seldom good poetry; Scott's 
 Lays, as everybody knows, are far inferior to his prose 
 narratives and, as poetry,' Proud Maisie' is worth them all 
 except ' Flodden Field '. The best parts of them, as of 
 Macaulay's poems, are not narrative at all but lists of 
 magic names : 
 
 Pibroch of Donuil Dhu, 
 
 Pibroch of Donuil, 
 
 Wake thy wild voice anew, 
 
 Summon Clan-Connel. 
 
 Or pictures, that for all their truth to Scottish scenery, 
 are seen by him and by us through Keats's magic 
 casement. 
 
 Even the ballad, which some one has said, perhaps 
 hastily, to be the lowest form of poetry, does not really 
 tell a story ; it does a better thing for us : it sets us 
 wondering and imagining many possible stories. What 
 is the real story of Helen of Kirkconnel ? Or of the 
 knight in the ' Twa Corbies ' .? or of La Belle Dame Sans 
 Merci ? or of Sir Hugh in William Morris's ' Shameful 
 Death ' ? or of Browning's ' Patriot ' ? We are given a 
 scene or two and left not with a story but with a riddle. 
 That is Shakespeare's method, though it is not always 
 Chaucer's. 
 
Poetry is Formal Beauty 127 
 
 It is no more 2i poet's function than it is a painter's to 
 tell a tale ; each gives us pictures and leaves us to inter- 
 pret them or weave stories about them for ourselves, or 
 simply to enjoy them with a purely sensuous pleasure. 
 The pictures in the ' Blessed Damosel ', for example, 
 delight the sense by their beauty, although neither the 
 logical connexion between them, which we call the 
 ' meaning ', is appreciated by the mind, nor their mystic 
 symbolism even suspected. We must choose poetry not 
 for the sake of stories, but that our young men may see 
 visions and our children may dream dreams. 
 
 Let children read narrative verse by aU means and let 
 themwriteit, but do not let them suppose, as they are some- 
 times led to suppose, that they are enjoying poetry when 
 they are simply amusing themselves with a tale. For my 
 sins it has more than once happened to me to hear a series 
 ofselections from the 'Ancient Mariner' read to children, 
 followed by a demand that they should ' write the substance 
 of the story in their own words and say what it teaches us '. 
 To such base uses may we come when exegesis is mistaken 
 for criticism and the marble is thought to be the statue. 
 
 Another consideration that misleads teachers to choose 
 poetry for its subject and substance is the moral one. 
 Wilde's unfortunate remark that ' all art is immoral ' must 
 not blind us to the fact that most of what he said on art 
 is true ; those who are ever seeking in poetry for direct 
 moral instruction would do well to read his ' Intentions ', 
 for it is certain that they are farther from the truth than 
 he, even in his most mocking moments. 
 
 Art has really no more to do with morality than with 
 the intellect. It speaks to something in us that is older 
 than either, that existed in Eden before the Fall. 
 
128 Poetry is Formal Beauty 
 
 Morality is not feeling, like poetry, but willing. Art 
 may move the feelings as sex does, but is no more an 
 evil ; the evil is in the will, not in the emotions. Where 
 there is no knowledge there may be innocence, but there 
 is no morality. Ruskin rightly complained of his own 
 upbringing that it was designed to make him ' by pro- 
 tection innocent instead of by practice virtuous ' : he 
 might have said ' ignorance ' and ' will ' for ' protection ' 
 and ' practice '. Morality, like patriotism, is a poor 
 thing when blind. 
 
 There are m,any things, both in art and nature, to be 
 admired for their beauty yet not to be desired for their 
 wholesomeness. I do not of course mean that we should 
 read ' Venus and Adonis ' or the Decameron to school 
 children any more than we should give briony berries to 
 babies, simply because they are beautiful. But I do 
 mean very decidedly that we should choose our children's 
 poems for their beauty of form first and only negatively 
 on account of their matter ; and also that we should 
 strive to make them understand that ' art is a way of say- 
 ing a thing ', and that art criticism is concerned not with 
 the matter but with the manner of expression. 
 
 Judged by its substance, a great deal of the most 
 beautiful poetry is worse than worthless — 
 
 Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus 
 
 Rumoresque senum severiorum 
 
 Omnes unius aestid'emus assis. 
 
 Soles occidere at redire possunt : 
 
 Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, 
 
 Nox est perpetua una dormienda. 
 
 Da mi basia mille . . . 
 
 The doctrine is as pernicious as the music of its 
 
Poetry is Formal Beauty 129 
 
 expression is tenderly beautiful. What can be more 
 mischievous teaching than the whole burden of Fitz- 
 gerald's ' Rubaiyat ' — 
 
 Ah, fill the cup, what boots it to repeat 
 How time is slipping underneath our feet ; 
 Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday — 
 Why fret about them if to-day be sweet? 
 
 Yet where can its delicious melancholy be matched — 
 unless it be by Swinburne — 
 
 From too much love of living, 
 From hope and fear set free, 
 We thank with brief thanksgiving 
 Whatever Gods may be 
 That no life lives for ever ; 
 That dead men rise up never ; 
 That even the weariest river 
 Winds, somewhere, safe to sea. 
 
 Are we to lose such music as that, because it enshrines 
 a false doctrine .' Art has nothing to do with absolute 
 truth ; it shows truth coloured by the artist's mood, seen 
 through the medium of the artist's mind. It is no more in 
 the purpose or the power of art to ' show us things as 
 they really are ' than it is within the power of science. 
 We can never know things as they really are. But we 
 can know things as the world knows them for the practi- 
 cal purposes of our material life, and we can know things 
 as the artist sees them for the enjoyment of our imagina- 
 tive life without confusing the two aspects. To seek for 
 doctrine in poetry is to confuse the two. 
 
 It is not the poet's part to teach us but to make us 
 feel, to share with him his intuitive experience of the 
 
13° Poetry is Formal Beauty 
 
 varied heart of man, and so to widen and deepen our 
 humanity by imaginative sympathy. 
 
 Queen Victoria, who represented her age ahnost as 
 well as Elizabeth did hers, admired the symbolized moral- 
 ity of Tennyson's ' Idylls ' ; but her views on art were about 
 as edifying as her predecessor's on morality— she also 
 admired and encouraged the activities of Sir Edgar 
 Boehm. But Tennyson really knew better ; it is signi- 
 ficant that he was always reticent and even irritated 
 when questioned about the symbolism of his ' Idylls ' : he 
 knew, and said in a poem that will be loved when the 
 ' Idylls ' are long forgotten, what Shakespeare and Keats 
 knew, and Gray did not, that the beauty of the summer 
 flower, the beauty of the poet's dream, is an end in itself, 
 not a means of teaching morality. 
 
 I believe that Madame de Stael's saying that ' Morality 
 is in the nature of things ' is profoundly true, but I know 
 that morality is not in the nature of poetry. For the 
 world of art is not the world of things but of the imagi- 
 nation. In the world of things, as butchers, bakers, and 
 candlestick-makers, we have to live our material lives ; 
 as citizens we must submit to be bound by conventions ; 
 even as parents we must remember that, the world being 
 what it is, our sons will be 
 
 Neither children nor gods, 
 But men in a world of men. 
 
 There is fine romance in tallow; but you cannot keep 
 
 a customer waiting for his candles while you dream of 
 
 bucking steers on the pampas with John Masefield ; the 
 
 butcher in Chuzzlewit, who cut the steak slowly because 
 
 The meat was a picture for painters to study, 
 
 The fat was so white and the lean was so ruddy, 
 
Poetry is Formal Beauty 13* 
 
 and he delighted to admire it : who insisted on putting 
 it carefully into Ruth's pocket himself — ' for meat ', he 
 said with some emotion, ' should be humoured and not 
 drove ', probably went bankrupt, and certainly never 
 became Sir Joseph Loins.^ 
 
 Yet ' the daily round, the common task ' will «<?/ furnish 
 all we need to ask ; and the only god it will bring us 
 nearer to is the god of Mammon : 
 
 Shop each day, and all day long? 
 
 Friend, your good angel slept, your star 
 
 Suffered eclipse. Fate did you wrong; 
 From where these kinds of treasures are 
 There should our hearts be — Christ, how far ! 
 
 As a material being, ' since flesh must live ', I must act 
 
 for a part of my existence as a producer or purveyor of 
 
 material things : but also, above . and beyond all that, 
 
 ' I am a man, and I desire to experience all that men 
 
 can feel, to know all human moods ' ; so that I may say 
 
 with Ulysses — 
 
 I will drink 
 
 Life to the lees : all times I have enjoy'd 
 Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those 
 That lov'd me, and alone ; on shore and when 
 Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 
 Vext the dim sea : — I am become a name 
 For always roaming with a hungry heart — 
 . . . . Life piled on life. 
 Were all too little, and of one to me 
 Little remains : but every hour is saved 
 From that eternal silence, something more 
 A bringer of new things. 
 
 ' With a coat of three loins proper, on a field argent gouttte de sang, to 
 blazon on his meat carts. 
 
 I 2 
 
132 Poetry is Formal Beauty 
 
 Therefore I will love the still, sad music of Omar, 
 The player upon plaintive strings, 
 
 no less than the cheerful brass of Ben Ezra, and will wish 
 that my soul should flee before the Hound of Heaven 
 with Francis Thompson's as well as be lifted to the 
 golden doors upon St. Agnes' Eve ; and I will yield my 
 spirit to the mood of the Indian Serenade, and try also 
 to bring it into communion with Sir Galahad ; and the 
 passion of Cleopatra shall be as real and wonderful to 
 me as the devotion of Cordelia. 
 
 The practical man, who is often a tailor, and always 
 a fractional part of a whole man, will scoff at the unreal- 
 ity of imaginative experience : there is no other reality ; 
 actual events are real only to the imagination. Denis and 
 Gerard wandered through Europe together and shared 
 the same experience : it left the one as it found him— 
 a mere soldier ; ^ it made of the other a man fit to be 
 the father of Erasmus, because it found him a poet, one 
 ' of imagination, all compact ', and he made poetry of all 
 he saw. Those who actually stood round the body of 
 Marguerite's father and saw her little letter taken from 
 his dead hand did not feel the pathos of- the scene that 
 Austin Dobson makes us see in 'Before Sedan'; the 
 men who brought home the wagon through the darken- 
 ing lanes on a winter nightfall, and saw the tall man in 
 the flesh, felt little of the gloom without, and nothing of 
 the deeper gloom within ; ihey only saw the ' real ' 
 things ; but we see a great poet's vision of them. 
 
 The practical man, again, remembering that visions 
 in the Bible were usually a guide to conduct, may ask 
 
 ^ Denis's one experience was his love for Gerard. 
 
Poetry is Formal Beauty 133 
 
 what the poet would have us do : he might as well ask 
 the flowers and the birds the same question : he might 
 as well expect Turner's ' Rain, Steam, and Speed ' to 
 help him like a diagram in a problem of practical 
 engineering. We have lost the truth so long that this 
 will seem a hard saying, and most parsons would 
 denounce it as ' contrary to the teaching of religion and 
 of Aristotle ' ; is not conduct three-fourths of life ? and 
 is not poetry a guide to conduct ? The answer to both 
 questions should be an emphatic denial. Conduct may 
 be three-fourths of life, or more, to an ant or a rising 
 greengrocer ; but it is a far smaller part of the life of 
 a man : 
 
 What is a man, 
 If his chiet good and market of his time 
 Be but to sleep and feed ? a beast, no more. 
 Sure he that made us with such large discourse, 
 Looking before and after, gave us not 
 That capability and god-like reason 
 To fust in us unus'd. 
 
 Contemplation as well as conduct, the life ot the 
 imagination as well as the life of action, is a large and 
 essential part of the life of man, and it is with this part 
 that the arts are solely concerned. 
 
 Never did the middle class Victorian mind find more 
 characteristic utterance than in Matthew Arnold's asser- 
 tion that conduct was the largest part of life, and that 
 great poetry depended upon great actions. We must go 
 back, and if we cannot yet receive the saying that 
 
 To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 
 
134 Poetry is Formal Beauty 
 
 let us appeal from Matthew sober to Matthew intoxicated 
 with the spirit of poetry : let us see how small a part 
 conduct played in the life of his scholar-g-ipsy and how 
 little the beauty of his poem depends upon action. 
 
 The scholar gipsy, like Stevenson's vagabond, who 
 asked but the heaven above him and the open road 
 before, and like Mr. Polly, who burnt down his house, 
 and threw all social responsibilities to the winds, that he 
 might live ' according to nature ', forgot that man has 
 a dual nature : they forgot that he has a duty to his own 
 body and to other bodies, just as the millionaire forgets 
 that he has a soul. But whereas the millionaire, like 
 Browning's Venetians, does often succeed in delivering 
 himself from his soul,^ this too, too solid flesh is with us 
 to the end, and its demands must condition our conduct ; 
 it is futile and hopeless, and immoral, to seek to evade 
 them. We may hope — it is the highest teaching of 
 Ruskin and Carlyle, the most inspired, if not the greatest 
 men of modern times — that men may come more and 
 more to understand that it is 
 
 Poor vaunt of life indeed 
 
 Were men but formed to feed 
 On joy, to solely seek, and find, and feast, 
 
 Such feasting ended, then 
 
 As sure on end to men — 
 Irks care the cropful bird? Frets doubt the maw- 
 crammed beast? 
 
 and that they may realize how relatively small a part 
 material things need play in the full life of man. 
 
 Meanwhile those critics are utterly mistaken who would 
 
 ' ' What of soul was left I wonder when the kissing had to stop ? ' 
 
Poetry is Formal Beauty 135 
 
 have us find in poetry a guide to conduct in this world 
 instead of an ideal existence in a world of the mind, who 
 would persuade us that art shows us things as they are, 
 when it really reveals to us a refuge from things as they 
 are.^ We must realize, and make our children realize, 
 that poetry, as poetry, is not a guide to conduct but 
 a solace to life. I said as poetry because the words of 
 the poets do very often express the conclusions of the 
 moralist; but equally often they can no more be recon- 
 ciled with the conventions of life than could Don 
 Quixote's romanticism. The kingdom of poetry is not 
 of this world. 
 
 Men have always felt this and some, like Plato, have 
 therefore desired to suppress poetry or at least to exclude 
 it from education. But Plato, too, falls into the common 
 error of supposing that poetry, as poetry, is doctrine, and 
 that poetry, as poetry, is to be judged by the reason. 
 Yet once he actually has the truth on his tongue and can- 
 not hear it : ' what a poor appearance the ideas of the 
 poets make when stripped of the colours which music 
 puts upon them and recited in simple prose '. What he 
 fails to see is that judgement of ideas and enjoyment of 
 the manner of their presentation are totally different 
 functions: one is dialectic, the other art criticism: one 
 is concerned with the intellect, the other with the emo- 
 tions. 
 
 Poetry, hke rhetoric, is beautiful form ; and judgement 
 of the matter presented is an entirely different thing from 
 appreciation of the art which presents it. 
 
 Poetry expresses opinions that we ought to accept and 
 act upon, and opinions that we ought to reject ; but this 
 
 1 In their material aspect. 
 
136 Poetry is Formal Beauty 
 
 discrimination has nothing to do with art criticism or 
 artistic enjoyment. Because this truth is not realized, nine- 
 tenths of us are in danger of rejecting poetry altogether 
 as roundabout prose, and the rest of seeking philosophy 
 where we should be finding pure enjoyment and intel- 
 lectual rest. Ruskin saw better than Plato the true 
 attitude towards art. He shows us three points of view : 
 the first, Peter Bell's, of ' the man who perceives rightly 
 because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is 
 very accurately the primrose because he does not love 
 it ' ; the second, of the man that Plato seems to think 
 typical ' who perceives wrongly because he feels, and to 
 whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose — 
 a star, or a sun, or a fairy's shield or a forsaken maiden '; 
 and then lastly, ' there is the man who perceives rightly 
 in spite of his feelings and for whom the primrose is for 
 ever nothing else than itself— a little flower apprehended 
 in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how 
 many so ever the associations and passions may be that 
 crowd around it '. 
 
 That is the point of view we should desire for our 
 children. 
 
 If we would only bring to poetry simply ' a heart that 
 watches and receives ', would leave the intellect and all its 
 problems outside the door as we do at a picture gallery 
 or a music room, we might begin to understand something 
 of what art meant in happier ages. Or if we cannot do that 
 for ourselves let us try to save it from being 'sicklied o'er 
 with the pale cast of thought ' at least in our children's 
 sight, so that they may find in it the gates of Eden still 
 open, a world of pure feeling and a refuge from the 
 world of action and of thought. 
 
Poetry is Formal Beauty 137 
 
 "In poetry as in religion, we have been over-anxious for 
 our souls, we can do nothing without thinking how it 
 shall profit them, we are too ready to believe that a man 
 by taking thought can add to his spiritual stature. 
 
 It is profoundly true that the great poet is also the 
 great seer, and that his poetry will ' do us good ' ; but 
 that is not the message men need to-day ; the few are 
 already too conscious of it, and the many have heard'it too 
 often to believe it. 
 
 \ The first lesson for us to learn in the schools is 
 Dryden's, that ' poetry only instructs as it delights ' ; the 
 truth the world has forgotten is not that poetry is 
 edifying but that it is delightful. If we can help children 
 to enjoy the art of it, its music and its pictures, so that 
 they will read it for this alone, we may leave the poets 
 to speak to them without any schoolmaster-interpreter, 
 remembering that those who seek beauty only will find 
 truth also. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 CHILDREN'S EXERCISES 
 
 I want to know a butcher paints, 
 A baker rimes for his pursuit, 
 
 Candlestick-maker much acquaints 
 
 His soul with song, or haply mute 
 Blows out his brains upon the flute. 
 
 The one great purpose of the poetry lesson is to help 
 the children to appreciate poetry so that they may learn to 
 love it and to wish to read it for themselves in after years. 
 But a secondary, though very important, purpose is to 
 develop their own creative power : we must help them 
 not merely to enjoy poetry but to write clearly and 
 attractively themselves, with the poets as their models. 
 
 Many teachers wiU reply that it is hard enough to 
 teach children to write grammatically without expecting 
 them to write poetically. That is the traditional point of 
 view and with it I wish to deal, for I believe it to be 
 radically wrong. To write brightly and picturesquely is 
 far better than to write merely grammatically, and though 
 it is far more difficult for adults, is really natural and easy 
 to children. For the child is a poet by nature. Only 
 yesterday, in marking some exercises in original verse, 
 I found in a stanza written by a boy of twelve, a barber's 
 son, an average boy in all respects, the line : 
 
 Rooks at work in pairs . . . 
 And merry are the sandy hares. 
 
 Now that is pure poetry. There is a blemish in sound in 
 
Children's Exercises 139 
 
 the lack of vowel -variety, especially in the recurrence of 
 the terminal y, but the epithets are perfect. ' Merry ' has 
 life and movement ; ' sandy ' has colour : and each is 
 le mot Juste ; theyhitthe very essence of the hare,bodyand 
 spirit, its inward being and its outward seeming. More- 
 over, and this is a subtle but vital matter, they are 
 emotional words ; they express the effect and impression 
 the hare makes on the spirit, or the feelings, not what he 
 is to the mind or understanding. Older people may 
 perhaps have a little diflSculty in appreciating the 
 distinction, for it is very hard to explain ; but those who 
 look at the hare to understand him rather than to enjoy 
 him would think of neither of those words — certainly not 
 merry— but of more scientific ones. 
 
 This is not a single instance but a typical childish 
 expression. I hope to induce some of my readers to 
 experiment for themselves, and they will find that when 
 children are given scope for the exercise of the poetic 
 power, which is the special gift of their time of life, the 
 results are surprising. I am not speaking only, or even 
 mainly, of original verse, but of the use of imagery, of the 
 figures of speech and of pictorial epithets in descriptive 
 essays, and of imaginative writing generally. 
 
 In the average school neither the subjects commonly 
 set for essays nor the methods of treating them are such 
 as will call into play the peculiar powers of children ; 
 they are too ' grown up ', too conventional, very often 
 wretchedly hackneyed — one of the most deplorable things 
 in the elementary schools is the existence of what may 
 almost be called an elementary school ' style '. This is 
 in part a legacy from those dreadful days when the 
 child was supplied with a card on which was printed 
 
14° Children's Exercises 
 
 a ' model ' essay on Thrift or Punctuality or Coke upon 
 the basis of which he had to ' construct ' an original 
 essay for himself; only in the leading- articles of con- 
 temporary provincial newspapers could the style of 
 these models be matched. But it is more largely due 
 to the still prevalent practice of ' composition from the 
 blackboard '. The teacher chooses a subject, discusses it 
 at length with the class, plans out — with their co-opera- 
 tion he fondly believes — a scheme or skeleton of the 
 essay, and then invites sentences from individual children, 
 selections from which, according to his taste, he writes 
 on the blackboard, duly correcting the grammar. Finally, 
 the children copy the concoction into their exercise books. 
 The hardest lesson for a teacher to learn is that children's 
 intuition is often wiser than his own learning : he may 
 write a grammatically correct essay, but the children's, 
 if they are given a free hand, will be much more interest- 
 ing and attractive, because their ideas and their style 
 are fresh and unconventional, however inaccurate. We 
 are too apt to put our own ideas into their heads, and 
 then demand them at their hands. Not our style but the 
 poets' should be our children's model. 
 
 Abstract subjects, hke ' Honesty ' or ' A stitch in time 
 saves nine ' and subjects in their commercial aspects, e. g. 
 'Salt' or 'Railways', though very popular with teachers 
 are not suitable for children ; they involve word-spinning 
 without interest, whereas we need above all things to 
 awaken the zest for self-expression, and the sense of 
 delight that comes with power over words. Moreover 
 the child thinks in images, not in ideas, and so can write 
 most naturally on concrete subjects. Above all, abstract 
 subjects give a child no opportunity of measuring the 
 
Children's Exercises 141 
 
 value of his work, of testing its practical success : his 
 teacher may mark his essay Good or Poor, but he him- 
 self has no means of criticizing the judgement. 
 
 Picture-making, the writing of descriptions, and the 
 use of figures of speech, put his work to the test of 
 practical success ; if he writes a picture of a given place 
 or thing, or finds a simile to describe a colour or a shape, 
 or a metaphor to express an essential characteristic, he 
 knows, independently of his teacher's approval, whether 
 his work is accurate or not. Moreover, he can submit 
 such work to the judgement of his peers and contempo- 
 raries — his fellow pupils. 
 
 I have found it good training in prose-description to 
 ask boys to write a picture of some person, place, or 
 building known to all of us — for example a school-fellow, 
 or a chapel, or a street-corner — and afterwards to read 
 their description aloud, and judge its success by the num- 
 ber of their class-mates who recognized the portrait. 
 Such an exercise helps them to realize the importance 
 of seizing essentials and of choosing the most striking 
 epithets to describe them. To show them how great 
 writers have attempted the same sort of task, I have read 
 such pictures as Defoe's of Crusoe and of his house, 
 Boswell's of Johnson (Globe Ed., e.g. pp. 166, 690), 
 Fuller's of Henry V or Elizabeth, Clarendon's of a bull- 
 fight. Miss Mitford's of a cottage in ' Our Village ', Dickens's 
 of Mr. Wemmick's house or Miss Havisham's room, 
 Kingsley's of a tropical river, Scott's of Meg Merrilies 
 or Cedric's Hall— to take but a few random examples. 
 Any one who will note suitable passages in his own 
 reading will soon have a plentiful list. 
 
 Until boys have learned to write clear and life-like 
 
142 Children's Exercises 
 
 pictures pf persons and things known to them, they 
 cannot be expected to produce good essays in history 
 or geography ; if they cannot describe clearly their 
 brothers and the places they have seen, how shall they 
 make clear to others the figure of William the Conqueror, 
 or a lumber-camp, or a mediaeval street ? But when 
 they can describe things seen, they may go on to paint 
 things imagined. As an exercise leading up to this 
 I have exposed a picture to observation for one minute, 
 then removed it, and required the class to write a de- 
 scription which they subsequently compared with the 
 original picture. For this purpose, posters, in these 
 days of really artistic posters, will be found very useful, 
 and may readily be obtained. 
 
 These descriptive exercises immediately call into play 
 the children's power to use the figures of speech. We 
 have seen that the simile, particularly, is often used by 
 poets to supply deficiencies of language; how much 
 more valuable must it be, as an aid to expressing them- 
 selves, to children whose vocabulary is naturally limited ? 
 They like, as much as, or even more than older people, 
 to do something, even if it is only writing, well, but they 
 have not the necessary stock of epithets. But the simile 
 is such a simple figure, and yet so strong in pictorial 
 effect, that they can easily use it to supply their lack of 
 descriptive words. 
 
 Even the youngest children may be asked, in describing, 
 say, the strength of a man, to think of a thing possessing 
 strength in the highest degree, and so to write ' This 
 man was as strong as a bull ' or ' had the strength of 
 a horse ', instead of simply ' was very strong ' ; or in 
 describing a girl's eyes, they may be asked to think 
 
Children's Exercises 143 
 
 where their colour may be found, and instead of saying 
 vaguely they were blue or brown, to write ' blue like 
 the chicory ', or ' as the cornflowers ', or ' brown as a peat- 
 stream ', or ' grey like the sea '. One will perhaps say 
 ' brown as my father's pipe ' and thus give an opportunity 
 for discussion on incongruous ideas. 
 
 Children enjoy exercising their poetical powers in the 
 invention of metaphors. I have asked the little ones, 
 for example, to ' find a new name for the baby which 
 will tell how precious she is ' (i. e. to give her the name 
 of a symbol of preciousness) ; and they have written, 
 ' Our baby is a pearl ', or ' a jewel ' or ' a treasure '. Or 
 I have asked them to find ' new names ' for flowers, and 
 trees, and animals, for example a name for the oak 
 which will tell he is the chief of the trees, or for the 
 lion which will proclaim him above all the beasts, or for 
 the elm which will describe its hugeness. 
 
 The most elementary exercise with metaphors is to 
 take a simile and compress it into a metaphor. For 
 example, if children cannot readily find a ' new name ' 
 for a lily, they will perhaps suggest she is 'like a 
 queen ' and so discover that we can call her ' a queen 
 of flowers '. 
 
 And this brings me to the figure which all children 
 use by a deep-rooted instinct — personification. 
 
 It is not an unusual exercise in some schools to allow 
 children to write life-stories of inanimate things in the 
 first person. This practice might be greatly extended 
 and applied to essays on subjects where the third person 
 is commonly used ; a child will write a better account of 
 the Saxon land system if he writes as a serf or a thegn, 
 or of monasticism if he writes as a monk, or of Flodden 
 
144 Children's Exercises 
 
 Field if he writes as an archer, than he could do speaking 
 in the third person as a detached observer : hefeels his 
 subject more, i.e. he writes as a poet. Of course he 
 must learn to use the ordinary form in time, but when he 
 has gained the sense ot controlling language he will 
 have no difficulty over a httle matter like that. More- 
 over this form of writing will be a far better test of the 
 knowledge he has assimilated : he cannot, as children so 
 often do, reproduce chunks of undigested text-book 
 strung on a thin string of his own composition. He 
 will thus learn the first great lesson for all who write — 
 that one must first have a clear perception of something 
 to say and a strong desire to say it. 
 
 I believe that the older children, especially, in our 
 schools write a great deal of vague, woolly, colourless, 
 cheerless stuff to order on subjects in which they do not 
 feel the least interest. But writing, to the young, should 
 never be a task but a pleasure, the gratification of desire, 
 and it can only be such when the writer is interested in 
 his subject. In order to stimulate this zest I encourage ' 
 my own boys, in their last six months at school, to leave 
 the ordinary school-books and school syllabuses and to 
 browse in the public library and choose subjects of study 
 for themselves, to obtain from the library the books that 
 interest them and bring them to school for the purpose. 
 To this privilege I attach only one condition : that they 
 convince me by their essays that they are really interested 
 in something \ I do not care much what it is. I have 
 boys who read Boutell's Heraldry in the history 
 lessons and go out of school to sketch coats of arms in 
 the drawing lessons, and others who study Kelly's Guide 
 to Oxfordshire when the time-table says ' geography 
 
Children's Exercises 145 
 
 and are brass-rubbing in a village church when it says 
 ' handwork '. 
 
 What a boy knows when he leaves school at fourteen 
 must necessarily be very little and, fortunately, matters 
 very little. But what a boy thinks about the value of 
 knowledge and the purposes of study, whether or not he 
 has formed some intellectual interests, if he has begun to 
 distinguish between the style of R. L. Stevenson and 
 that of Mr. Le Queux— these things will matter to him 
 till his dying day and will matter to his children after 
 him. 
 
 Pictures of the images ot things personified are good 
 exercises alike for the imaginative life — which is human 
 life — and for developing literary power. Children who 
 have appreciated Keats's ' Ode to Autumn ' or Long- 
 fellow's ' Building of the Ship ' will like to attempt for 
 themselves a picture of Winter or the Thames ' as he 
 looked when I saw him ', and they will do it with a 
 freshness of detail, an instinct for pictorial effect, and 
 a vivid use of simile and of colour surprising to older 
 people. I am constantly getting essays of this kind from 
 children which I could never have written myself. But 
 we are too apt to measure children's powers by our own, 
 and that is why we fail to make the best use of them ; we 
 set them the kind of work that we ourselves think we 
 can do well. 
 
 The repression of instinct which comes with age makes 
 apostrophe, except perhaps of golf balls, an unusual 
 exercise with aduhs. To children it is a natural and 
 interesting one— Jean Ingelow's child in ' Seven ' might 
 be any child. They can write an ' Address to the Sun ' 
 and afterwards compare it with Tennyson's ' Hymn of 
 
 1922 K 
 
146 Children's Exercises 
 
 Akbar ', or to the moon and compare it with Shelley, or 
 to the Thames and then read Denham's lines, or to a 
 lamb and read Blake, or to a skylark and read Hogg. 
 I do not think children are allowed, anything like so 
 frequently as they should be, to bring their own work to 
 the touch of good writers, or even to realize that great 
 writers have thought ' worth while ' such themes as they 
 themselves are interested to write upon. 
 
 I believe that formal grammar teaching in anuninflected 
 language like ours is more useless than oakum picking, 
 and that correct syntax will come by the incidental 
 correction of errors ; but this use of apostrophe, by em- 
 ploying the second person singular, will incidentally give 
 opportunities, not often found, to ensure the proper 
 agreement between pronoun and verb. 
 
 Children may try not merely to emulate the poets but 
 even to compete with them. That is not so ridiculous 
 as it may sound, for to have failed is to have a criterion 
 of success. But actually, if a good deal of poetry is a 
 rhetorical presentation of a point of view, children may 
 find good training in attempting to set forth the opposite 
 point of view. I will give as an illustration an exercise 
 I lately set to some senior boys. I gave them the follow- 
 ing passage of Hazlitt on Coleridge's sermon : 
 
 ' The sermon was upon peace and war ; upon Church and 
 State — not their alliance but their separation— on the spirit of 
 the world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same but as 
 opposed to one another. He talked of those who had 
 "inscribed the Cross of Christ on banners dripping with 
 human gore". He made a poetical and pastoral excursion, 
 and to shew the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast 
 between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or 
 
Children's Exercises 147 
 
 sitting under the hawthorn piping to his flock " as though he 
 should never be old '', and the same poor country lad, crimped, 
 kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an alehouse, 
 turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on 
 end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and 
 tricked out in the loathsome finery of the profession of blood.' 
 
 Every one, at least every one competent to form an 
 opinion, will admire that passage as art, as a noble and 
 moving expression of a mood and an effective exposition 
 of a point of view. (It is prose, but Southey's ' Blenheim ' 
 or Austin Dobson's ' Before Sedan ' would have been 
 equally suitable for my purpose.) Art-criticism will be 
 at one in admiring its form.. But as to its matter 
 opinions and prejudices will be strongly opposed. Some 
 will say that all children should read, mark, learn, and 
 inwardly digest it : others will hold that no English child 
 should see it. I asked my boys to examine it and, using 
 it as a model, to attempt to set forth the opposite argu- 
 ment, the justification of war, its nobler aspects, the 
 effect of discipline on the idle and debauched. For 
 I believe that those who best appreciate rhetoric as 
 an art wiU be least likely to surrender their judgement 
 to it. 
 
 I would emphasize the observation that many of the 
 exercises suggested in this chapter have an educational 
 value that extends far beyond ' English ' even in its 
 widest meaning ; they involve training in exact observa- 
 tion such as we usually associate with the science, nature- 
 study and drawing lessons ; they mean (what education 
 ought always to mean) making environment a constant 
 mental and imaginative stimulus. 
 
 And so I return to the original problem of this chapter, 
 K 2 
 
148 Children's Exercises 
 
 how can we preserve the poetic clearness of vision and 
 directness of description that are the child's birthright, 
 while widening his range of experience, of thought, and 
 vocabulary; how can we save him from developing, 
 as most of us do, conventional views of things and 
 a hackneyed style ? Is it a law of nature, or only an 
 unhappy and preventible accident that, while the youth 
 
 By the vision splendid 
 
 Is on his way attended, 
 At length the man beholds it die away 
 And fade into the light of common day ? 
 
 I shall make no apology for quoting again, as the 
 first principle of education, that 'it is the first distemper of 
 learning when men study words and not things', for I am 
 convinced that a great deal of our teaching in history, 
 geography, mathematics, even science, is conventional, 
 mechanical, and so unfruitful because that wisest word of 
 one of the wisest of Englishmen remains still unregarded 
 in our schools. Unreality is the root of all evil in teach- 
 ing. Little children who have never seen the sea learn 
 glib definitions of bights and promontories like parrots ; 
 older children who could not distinguish at sight a forty 
 acre field from a ten pole allotment, work long calculations 
 in square miles, and tell you that ' area is length multiplied 
 by breadth', never realizing either that if you multiply 
 ' length ' you get more length, or that you cannot multi- 
 ply by yards or miles of breadth ; nearly all children 
 learn the results of the Norman Conquest, and never, 
 knowingly, see a Norman church or castle. As for the 
 ridiculous humbug miscalled ' science ' in some of our (still 
 more miscalled) ' higher grade ' schools, Mr. Wells has 
 
Children's Exercises 149 
 
 dealt with it, but with too light a hand. The one vital 
 purpose of science, in general education, is to develop 
 a scientific outlook on things, a habit of mind that makes 
 men observant of natural phenomena and curious about 
 their meaning. School science, like school arithmetic, 
 is often mere conjuring and juggling with matters the 
 children never hear of except in the schoolroom ; they 
 infer that ' science ' is concerned with sundry evil-smelling, 
 mysterious things in bottles, and would hear with astonish- 
 ment that the boy scout who learns, say, first to distinguish 
 all the finches by the bar on their wings and next to deduce 
 from it their descent from a common ancestor ; or who 
 makes a collection of the labiate flowers and then, by 
 watching the bees at work in them, discovers the purpose 
 of the lip and the hood, and, by observing the sunlight on 
 their leaves, the reason for the plants' pyramidal form ; 
 who can tell by the kind of mud on his brother's boots 
 the way he went on his Sunday walk — is making a real 
 approach to science : and making it, too, by the natural 
 road followed by the primitive fathers of science. 
 
 Come forth into the light of things, 
 Let Nature be your teacher. 
 
 It is certain that poetry at least can never be properly 
 appreciated unless it is realized as the mirror of nature. 
 A child can appreciate 
 
 His hair was crisp, and black, and long, 
 His face was like the tan, 
 
 or even 
 
 The sunset that doth glorify 
 
 The orange and pale-violet evening sky, 
 
 although he knows little of nature outside the streets — 
 
150 Children's Exercises 
 
 but even so not unless habits of observation have been 
 encouraged ; but the full beauty of Birds in the high Hall 
 garden ' is only revealed to one who has heard the rooks 
 say ' Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud ', and the thrushes answer 
 ' He-re, he-re, he-re ', and seen the sleeping daisies rosy. 
 Unless poetry, like so much else in schools, is to be 
 ' words ! words ! words ! ' it must be an out-of-door study, 
 and must go hand in hand with observation of nature. 
 The first service of the poets for us is to find us words to 
 voice our feelings ; what children feel most is the wonder 
 of the constant stream of impressions from the outside 
 world ; and, like Adam in the garden, their first need is for 
 language to express the effect of things upon them. God 
 showed the creatures he had made to Adam that he might 
 name and describe them. Science and art are twins in 
 the cradle of the primitive mind however far apart they 
 afterwards grow. To observe the external world and to 
 express the feelings aroused by it are the first functions 
 of the mind of man. The study of nature, and of poetry, 
 under the guidance of those who know and love both, are 
 necessities of life to all children, and must be carried on 
 side by side. Contact with the one will keep alive the 
 divine gift of wonder, and contact with the other will 
 preserve freshness of style. 
 
 And here arises the question of learning by heart. 
 Why should children learn by heart, what should they 
 learn, and how ? Most of us are too ready, and too sure, 
 in answering. 
 
 I need not discuss the old idea that learning by heart 
 trains the memory, since it has been exploded with the 
 rest of the ' special faculties ' doctrine ; the only faculty 
 improved by learning poetry is the faculty for learning 
 
Children's Exercises 151 
 
 more poetry. But I fancy that with that theory has 
 gone the only ground on which many teachers could 
 justify their practice. How many teachers still retain 
 the stores of verse they themselves once learned to order ? 
 How many have forgotten them without regret ? How 
 few hold them as a dear possession and recall them as 
 a sweet memory ? How few add to them from day 
 to day? 
 
 Those who have forgotten most of the poetry they 
 ever learnt themselves still insist in forcing on children 
 a fixed number of lines to be learned yearly — and for- 
 gotten the year after. Stores unused are useless, and 
 soon vanish, as if they had never been. Experience has 
 convinced me that the value of the poetry children learn 
 is in inverse ratio to the trouble taken in acquiring it; 
 and that the vast majority of what is learnt lies absolutely 
 sterile in the memory till it gradually fades out of it. 
 Lines learnt as Tom Sawyer learned them, for recitation 
 at the school concert or the inspector's visit, will be 
 forgotten when the occasion has passed. 
 
 Those parts of what we learn are most fruitful that 
 are constantly brought back to the stream of conscious- 
 ness by our favourite subject of thought, or by the 
 stimulus of our surroundings. To a man often pondering 
 over the spiritual state of present-day England the whole 
 of Wordsworth's greatest sonnet will return again and 
 again ; but a child who has learnt it all will recall spon- 
 taneously only 
 
 The sea that bares her bosom to the moon, 
 The winds that will be howling at all hours, 
 And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers. 
 
152 Children's Exercises 
 
 because as yet he lives in a world of images, not ol 
 reflection. Yet I think we might be glad indeed to feel 
 that the sight of the sea, or the sound of the wind, would 
 bring those magnificent lines into the mind of a child we 
 cared for. 
 
 Here, I believe, is an approachable ideal. Let us train 
 the children to look, in every poem they study, for some 
 beautiful passage to remember and quote in the presence 
 of the things that inspired it ; let us encourage them to 
 make a habit of noting these in their commonplace books 
 — which is half-way to knowing them by heart— so that 
 gradually 
 
 Meadow, grove, and stream. 
 
 The earth and every common sight 
 
 shall have its own association with a poet's phrase ; so 
 that when the vision splendid fades, if fade it must, the 
 youth who daily farther from the east must fare shall 
 take some of the glory with him on his way. 
 
 But I prefer to believe, with Ruskin, that the vision 
 need not fade ; it did not fade for the Greeks, and those 
 who love the Greek muses seem to preserve it still — I 
 am not thinking only of Keats, but of ' Greats ' men 
 I have known, who seem to have learned from them the 
 secret of 
 
 Glad perennial youth, 
 
 and who will die young because they will never grow 
 old. But they, alone, in English education to-day, under- 
 stand that studies s^rv^ first for delight. Certainly there 
 is no other reason for learning poetry. 
 
 A good deal may be done to reduce the drudgery ot 
 learning by heart — for to ordinary memories it is 
 
Children's Exercises 153 
 
 a drudgery — by better considered methods than now 
 obtain. The once universal practice of simultaneous 
 repetition is discouraged by the school inspectors, and is 
 therefore dying out ; the inspectorial objection to it is 
 that it cultivates, not individual expression, but a common 
 sing-song tone. From my experience of exaggerated, 
 over-inflected individual expression I am inclined to 
 prefer the common chant as the lesser of two evils. But 
 the real ground of objection to the simultaneous method 
 is that it allows the mind of the individual to wander 
 instead of concentrating its power ; a class wiU repeat 
 thirty- or forty lines in chorus once or twice a week 
 throughout a whole term, and half the members will not 
 know the passage at the end of it. 
 
 I have found the old misused and now despised exer- 
 cise of dictation a very valuable means towards getting 
 poetry by heart; there is no such thing as 'memory 
 training ', but forming habits of thought is the very 
 basis of education, and dictation is the best of all exercises 
 for forming the habit of listening with concentrated 
 attention. Unfortunately, it is generally used as a mere 
 spelling exercise ; three or foiur words are repeated three 
 or four times, syllable by syllable, with an altogether 
 inhuman attempt at clearness of enunciation, and the 
 children are then required to write them down in correct 
 spelling. (I know nothing, in a world of wonders, more 
 remarkable than an old-time teacher ' giving out dicta- 
 tion '.) 
 
 But the newer school, while rightly condemning such 
 a method as mechanical and unintelligent, is equally 
 wrong in abandoning dictation altogether ; rightly used 
 it can train children so to concentrate their minds that 
 
154 Children's Exercises 
 
 they can retain long phrases in the memory after hearing 
 them once or twice or seeing them for a few moments. 
 
 I have found that average children, when once they 
 have learned to listen with full concentration, have no 
 difficulty in writing down a couplet after hearing it once, 
 or a rimed quatrain recited twice or thrice according to 
 length and difficulty of subject. So if a stanza of ordinary 
 length is exposed on a blackboard for 60-90 seconds, 
 children who have learned to use that time with concen- 
 trated energy can reproduce the lines accurately from 
 memory. This does not mean that they will thereafter 
 retain them permanently ; but they will have very litde 
 trouble in doing so ; a week afterwards they will be able 
 to rewrite the quatrain after a single hearing, or to write 
 two stanzas instead of one. 
 
 Rime arrangement should always be used as a help in 
 getting a stanza by heart ; the rimes may be made a kind 
 of prompter suggesting the lines to come. Any one 
 who has once made himself thoroughly familiar with the 
 architectural form of the sonnet, or of a long stanza like 
 Spenser's, or Keats's, or Arnold's, will learn a whole 
 stanza or sonnet more readily and more surely than hall 
 a dozen lines of irregular or unrimed verse. Those who 
 have not realized this should experiment with a stanza of 
 the Scholar Gipsy, a peculiarly suitable stanza for the 
 purpose, because its rime arrangement is so subtle that 
 it is possible to learn the sestet like blank verse, without 
 noticing the rime at all ; but when once the rimes are 
 used as a clue the time taken to learn a stanza will be 
 halved at least. 
 
 The greatest difficulty in learning by heart, especially 
 for children, is to retain the ' logical sequence ' of the 
 
Children's Exercises 155 
 
 parts except in verses which tell a story. Now no great 
 poetry depends on the mere thread of a narrative, and so 
 long passages are hard to learn. I know every separate 
 stan2a of the ' Elegy ' or of ' The Blessed Damosel ', 
 for instance, and yet I am sure I could not recite them in 
 the right order, and so I should fail to satisfy the school 
 inspector that I ' knew ' them. For, unfortunately, there is 
 a type of inspector who can judge only by word-perfect 
 recitation whether or not work has been done. Any 
 dunce can drive verses into children's heads for another 
 dunce to get them out again, and dunces have been doing 
 both since first there were schools ; but they cannot make 
 them stay there when their victim has escaped their 
 ferule; and in driving the poetry into the head they 
 usually drive the love of it out of the heart. 
 
 Let me be quite frank about this : poetry is taught in 
 all schools, men are born with a natural appetite for it ; 
 and not one in a thousand learns, nor one in a hundred 
 even reads, a line when his school-days are over. 
 
 There is something wrong somewhere. Examiners 
 and inspectors, and teachers who live only to propitiate 
 them, have turned what should be a natural joy into 
 an artificial drudgery, by cramming the hapless children 
 with 'meanings and allusions' and with 'passages for 
 recitation'. 
 
 I should be the last to undervalue learning by heart ; 
 I know that the more poetry a boy learns, the better 
 and the happier for him, and that no poem can be fully 
 appreciated until it is known by heart. But unless we 
 can induce him to learn for pure delight, our efforts will 
 be a curse to him and not a blessing. Only the labour 
 we delight in can physic its own pain ; a child who has 
 
156 Children's Exercises 
 
 learnt poetry from any other motive will learn no more 
 in after life ; some subjects he may continue to labour at 
 from material considerations, but 
 
 Farewell Horace whom I hated so. 
 
 Poetry taught for examination is like a little corn 
 buried in a napkin where it can be dug up again for 
 inspection. But if we regard school life as the seed-time 
 fora harvest we ourselves shall never see, then we must 
 consider how best to use the short, precious time so that 
 the seed may bear fruit in after years. Only a very few 
 hours weekly for a few years are available for poetry in 
 school ; but if we can, in that brief space, awaken a love 
 for it, the child has a whole life-time in which to develop 
 the subject, and, through it, his own being. 
 
 There is one good reason and only one for learning 
 poetry — to increase our enjoyment of it. 
 
 I suggest, therefore, that in spite of tradition and 
 inspectors and examinations we should give children 
 a perfectly free option as to what poetry they should 
 learn, and, failing to induce them to learn any, should 
 not make a bad matter worse by forcing them to do so ; 
 and that in spite of superior persons, with their admirable 
 maxim (for professors), 'aut professor aut nullus,' and 
 their scorn of ' snippets ', we should be content if our 
 children learn the contents of their commonplace books, 
 the short passages they have themselves selected for 
 their bearing on their own lives and interests. 
 
 An acorn, fairly planted, may grow into a great tree, 
 but a branch, however large, will wither if it is only 
 stuck in. 
 
 The tree we want to raise is the love of fine poetry ; 
 
Children's Exercises i57 
 
 and from it, if we and our children are fortunate, another 
 delightful shoot may spring : original verse. 
 
 The point I have been trying to make all through this 
 essay is that poetry, its rhythm, its music, its imagery, 
 its figures of speech, are instinctive in children, that they 
 have a natural appetite for them, and an intuitive gift ot 
 using them. The reader will therefore not be surprised 
 if I suggest that children can express themselves better 
 inverse than in prose— I will not raise the question 
 whether they can express themselves in prose. 
 
 I have found that some of the dullest boys, if given 
 a suitable subject, tend naturally to write rhythmically, 
 and instinctively resort to inversion in order to obtain 
 rhythm ; and verse is simply rhythm measured off in 
 lines, so many stresses in each. 
 
 I lately recited Peacock's ' War Song ' to some boys, 
 and asked them to write an account of the raid, in the 
 person either of a warrior who took part in it, or as 
 a woman of the conquered tribe. One very primitive 
 and usually very obtuse member of the class actually 
 became for the time a savage and produced the following, 
 written of course as prose, but I have marked off the 
 rhythmic parts as verse. 
 
 One morning when the sun was bright 
 
 We gathered altogether. 
 
 -Five hundred strong were we 
 
 And with our bows and glittering shields 
 
 We marched off down to Dyfed. 
 
 Ha ! there we saw the cattle grazing 
 
 And there our banner glittered, 
 
 And then we gave a desperate rush 
 
 And killed our foes in hundreds. 
 
158 Children's Exercises 
 
 O'er many a dale our prizes went 
 
 And we marched just behind them. 
 
 We looked behind and there we saw both orphans 
 
 and widows ; 
 They sobbed and sighed and bitterly cried, 
 But we marched off from Dyfed. 
 
 On the way we met their king so bold. He had with him 
 two hundred bold men but not so bold as ours. He in his 
 rage rushed at us but we stood strong together ; 
 
 Eight score we slew and the rest they flew 
 
 But we marched on from Dyfed. 
 
 We sacked the gold and drank the wine and with our 
 prizes we then marched home 
 
 On our way five score we met 
 But they flew in terror 
 
 My farm is now five hundred sheep 
 
 And as jolly was I never 
 In our house or hut we have both silver and gold. 
 
 It will be noticed that this has not only an unconscious 
 rhythm and a feeling after rime but a well-marked 
 tendency to repeat a burden or refrain. My cousin, 
 Dr. William Lamborn, a Central African naturalist, tells 
 me that he has observed exactly the same tendency in 
 the ' chants ' of primitive races, both in Africa and South 
 America. 
 
 It is thus a complete mistake to regard original verse 
 as an ' accomplishment ' like the things taught in Miss 
 Pinkerton's seminary : it is first of all a natural outlet for 
 emotion ; the child, like the true poet. 
 Sings because he must, 
 And pipes but as the linnet sings. 
 
Children's Exercises 159 
 
 But it is incidentally also a very valuable training in 
 choice of words and in literary style. 
 
 In a more advanced stage of scholarship that training 
 is afforded by prose : we become our own critics, and will 
 let no sentence stand till we have hunted through our 
 vocabulary and found the words that most exactly express 
 what we desire to say. But younger people have not 
 the instinct for such nice discrimination. The exigencies 
 of rimeandrhythm, however, will compel them to examine 
 their stock of words and to weigh their values for the 
 desired purpose, to make sure of the exact meaning of 
 many words which they know vaguely but would not 
 otherwise use ; such words thus become part of their 
 actual, not merely of their potential, vocabulary. Equally 
 valuable is the training in construction : if a statement 
 will not ' beat ' or rime in the form in which it first occurs 
 to the mind, or, a still more important matter, if it does 
 not sound well in the ear, they have to recast it until it 
 assumes a suitable form. Such a process is of the very 
 essence of good style. 
 
 In beginning class-teaching of original verse a well- 
 marked rhythm is the first thing to aim at. Short riming 
 couplets are perhaps the simplest form of approach. 
 One couplet may be written on the blackboard, e. g. 
 
 The snow is on the ground, 
 It muffles every sound, 
 
 and the class should then beat the verse-rhythm 
 
 v^ — W — 
 
 on the desks or on their hands, repeating it several times 
 till they have thoroughly got the feel of it. 
 
 Then suggestions for the beginning of another couplet 
 
i6o Children's Exercises 
 
 may be asked for ; each boy who volunteers one should 
 be required to beat it on the desk to prove its rhythm as 
 he speaks it; the most popular line should then be 
 written down ; the class will readily see that they must 
 choose one ending with a word that can be rimed, e. g. 
 
 Now all the air is hushed^ 
 
 which might be suggested, would face them with the 
 difficulty of getting a rime to ' hushed '. They may thus 
 be led to express the same idea, either by inversion or by 
 recasting, so as to end the line with a word that has 
 more rimes, e. g. 
 
 Now hushed is all the air^ 
 or, 
 
 The air is hushed and still. 
 
 Next, suggestions for the second line may be written 
 down and criticized by the class as to smoothness of 
 rhythm, exactness of rime, variety of vowel-sound, clear- 
 ness and beauty of pictorial effect. For example, the 
 line 
 
 And all the trees are still 
 
 may be offered to rime with ' still ', and thus give an 
 opportunity to distinguish between rime and assonance. 
 Or, 
 
 The rill below the mill 
 
 will afford an example of the clash ot rimes, jarring like 
 neighbour notes, when they come too near together. 
 Or, 
 
 A noise comes from the rill 
 
 will introduce, first, the objection to allowing stresses to 
 fall on prepositions like ' from ', and secondly, to the use 
 of vague words like ' noise ' instead of more precise or 
 
Children's Exercises i6i 
 
 onomatopoetic words like music or murmur or babbling ; 
 so, perhaps, suggestion for an improved line may be 
 offered, e. g. 
 
 I hear the murmuring rill. 
 
 Every opportunity should be taken to mark the dis- 
 tinction between a mere verse and a line of real poetry ; 
 that is, one with a fine picture or fine music in it. 
 
 After the couplet a quatrain of four lines with only two 
 rimes, e. g. Mary's Lamb may be taken for a model and 
 treated in the same way, and next a quatrain riming 
 alternately, like the Casablanca stanza. 
 
 Only a little of this preliminary class work will be 
 necessary. As soon as possible children should be 
 allowed to attempt stanzas for themselves, choosing at 
 first their own subject and metre ; the class work should 
 then be criticism of individual efforts. Two stanzas at least 
 should be required in order to ensure that the unit chosen 
 is properly repeated, e. g. a boy will perhaps produce one 
 stanza riming a b a b and having four stresses to the line, 
 and the next riming — a — b and having two lines of only 
 three stresses. Children should be required at first to 
 indicate the rimes and stresses at the end of each line «4, 
 3 3, 4, (5 3 ; so that they may themselves prove the 
 uniformity of stanzas. 
 
 Later on, stanzas of set rime arrangements may be 
 demanded, e. g. 
 
 a b a b c c 
 
 or a a b a a b 
 
 or a b a b b a 
 
 The last wiU lead up to the octave of the sonnet ; and 
 such stanzas as 
 
 1922 L 
 
i62 Children's Exercises 
 
 a b c a b c 
 or a b b a b a 
 
 will prepare for the sestet. 
 
 I repeat again that these things really present very little 
 diflSculty to boys : I lately asked inadvertently for a stanza 
 riming 
 
 aaabaaab 
 really meaning 
 
 aaabcccb 
 
 and I was surprised to see how many boys succeeded in 
 finding the necessary number of rimes. 
 
 The visible results of this kind of teaching will of course 
 vary with the home advantages of the children: boys 
 who often hear poetry quoted, and whose vocabulary is 
 enriched, in conversation at home, will naturally produce 
 better verse. For example, Mr. Caldwell Cook, who 
 practised here when preparing for the Oxford Diploma 
 in Education, has since, as the Persse Playbooks show, 
 got much better poetry from the Persse schoolboys than 
 he could get from our children ; but that is not because 
 any one social class has a monopoly of the poetic instinct, 
 but because some children have less chance than others to 
 develop it : 
 
 Knowledge to their eyes her ample page, 
 Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll ; 
 Chill penury repressed their noble rage, 
 And froze the genial current of the soul. 
 But there cannot be a more unfortunate mistake than 
 to measure the success of our teaching by its immediate 
 results. To write poetically is natural and easy to 
 children ; but what we ought to desire for them is that 
 they should think and live poetically as men. Their 
 
Children's Exercises 163 
 
 little exercises are but straws on the current. How they 
 will make love at twenty, how they will use their leisure 
 at thirty, what they will desire for their children at forty, 
 what this life means to them at fifty and the next at 
 seventy — these are ultimate and vital questions which 
 the love of poetry will profoundly aifect. And most of 
 us can only hope to see the fruits of our labours with 
 the eye of faith. 
 
 We shall have need of all our faith in the time that is 
 at hand. 
 
 SUPPLEMENT TO CHAPTER X 
 
 I GIVE as a supplement to this chapter a selection of 
 verses and essays written by primary school children ; 
 some are from my own school in Oxford and some, by the 
 kindness of my friend Mr. W. S. Tompkinson, from the 
 village school of Littlemore. And since examinations, 
 however dangerous — like a burning-glass, in ignorant 
 hands — do serve to bring aims as it were to a focus, 
 I have added a selection of questions from examin- 
 ation papers which I have set in recent years and which 
 I think must be unique, because they have cost as much 
 time and thought in the setting as is reguived in the 
 answering : when that is true of all examinations they 
 will cease to be the curse and stumbling-block of education 
 that now they are ; they will then test, as these papers. 
 are designed to test, not mere brute memory but the 
 higher, creative and critical, faculties of the mind ; and 
 caU upon the pupils, and their teachers, to examine the 
 basis of their tastes and opinions as opposed to their 
 ' passions and prejudices masquerading as thoughts '. 
 
 L 2 
 
i64 Children's Exercises 
 
 THE CELANDINE 
 
 In the dark and dreary nights 
 
 When wild the winds do blow, 
 The golden little celandine 
 
 Lies snug amid the snow. 
 
 This pretty little celandine 
 
 In days so bright and clear 
 Lives in the shade and lovely glade 
 
 Which is so sweet and dear. 
 
 But when the days are fairer 
 
 And milder breezes blow 
 The golden little celandine 
 
 To paradise shall go. 
 
 C. Rose (12 yrs.). 
 
 SPRING 
 
 In Spring when flow'rs look very gay 
 The birds come back and begin to lay 
 Their eggs and make their nests of sticks, 
 And mud, and hay from the farmer's ricks. 
 
 The cuckoos now begin their song. 
 While skylarks sing all the day long. 
 And thrushes begin their song once more, 
 And the lapwings in the air do soar. 
 
 And forward now the leaves do shoot, 
 The bees do fly away with their loot. 
 The primrose springs up from its root, 
 Cowslips put on their golden suit. 
 
 H. Orchard (13 yrs.). 
 
Children's Exercises 165 
 
 MAY 
 
 Thou art the daughter of summer, 
 O thou beautiful May, 
 Thou comest as a peace maker, 
 With sunshine in thy way. 
 
 Thy robes are of the purest white, 
 Thy escort is of green, 
 The sun sheds forth a glorious light, 
 And thy flow'rs give back its sheen. 
 
 P. W. NuTT (13 yrs.). 
 
 WINTER 
 
 Winter is coming with the cold 
 And the year is getting old 
 Dark is the night ; dull is the day ; 
 So children round the fire do play. 
 
 On the snowy trees and ground 
 
 The little robin can be found. 
 
 Then the wind is moaning, moaning 
 
 And through the key-holes groaning, groaning. 
 
 Peeping from the snow looks pale, 
 The snowdrop in the windy gale. 
 Waving her head with the breeze. 
 As the snow clings on the trees. 
 
 Frederick John Ivings (13 yrs.). 
 
 MAY 
 
 The sun uprist, up through the mist 
 That hung like a white-winged cloud, 
 Its glorious light did put to flight 
 That woven silken shroud. 
 
i66 Children's Exercises 
 
 Now birds do sing, and the heavens do ring 
 With the song of the unseen lark, 
 The meadow green bathed in golden sheen 
 Forgets old winter stark. 
 
 The flowers do peep from their golden deep, 
 
 And many a nest is found, 
 
 Up in the hedge and in the sedge. 
 
 And on the mantled ground. 
 
 J. Savage (13 yrs.). 
 
 THE WAR 
 
 Like the leaves in the forest when Autumn is here, 
 Like the stars in the heaven when nights are so clear, 
 Down swept the Germans like wild savage hordes, 
 And killed the poor Belgians with pistols and swords. 
 
 Their banners did glow like the stars in the sky, 
 And where they did march poor men heaved a sigh; 
 For burnt were their homes, yes and dead were their sons 
 All shot and destroyed by the enemy's guns. 
 
 But the angel of God will show his great power 
 And crush these vile men as the frost kills a flower. 
 And they shall be scattered like leaves in the blast. 
 And their nation from off this great earth shall be cast. 
 
 C. Rose (12 yrs.). 
 
 BIRDS 
 
 The lark is singing, the heavens are ringing. 
 The sweetest notes I hear. 
 She ends her song, and leaves the sky. 
 And returns to the meadows dear. 
 
Children's Exercises 167 
 
 The swallow to her old home comes. 
 She skims across the skies, 
 In a nest of mud her young she rears, 
 And then away she flies. 
 
 The speckle-breasted thrush doth sing, 
 In woods and valleys green, 
 And at the top of green fir trees, 
 The greenfinch can be seen. 
 
 "the goldfinch flits across the sky, 
 And sings a merry song, 
 The bullfinch in the privet feeds, 
 She '11 feed her young ere long. 
 
 H. Horn (13 yrs.). 
 
 BIRDS 
 As I was walking through a wood 
 I heard a small bird sing, 
 It sang as loud as e'er it could, 
 Which made the woodland ring. 
 
 I looked up and saw a thrush 
 Upon a large horn-beam. 
 And underneath that bough did gush 
 A sparkling little stream. 
 
 Then in a bush a blackbird sang, 
 Which sounded sweet and clear. 
 For ev'ry note did seem to twang 
 With everything a-near. 
 
 The larks were merrily singing 
 
 As they, rose into the sky. 
 
 And the church bells were merrily ringing 
 
 As I was passing by. 
 
 E Horn (12 yrs.). 
 
r68 Children's Exercises 
 
 THE BLACKBIRD 
 
 Have you heard the blackbird sing? 
 
 From bush and tree its voice doth ring, 
 
 It has a lovely note, 
 
 And a bright black coat, 
 
 Which sparkles in the morning light. 
 
 It's a very pleasant sight. 
 
 Have you seen the pretty nest, 
 
 Where the httle birds do rest? 
 
 In the hedge and trees. 
 
 Sheltered from the breeze, 
 
 Have you seen it being made, 
 
 With hay, and straw, and mud it's laid. 
 
 D. Pargeter (i2 yrs.). 
 
 BIRDS 
 
 'Tis the merry month of May 
 When the throsde tunes her lay, 
 When the sky-lark flies all day 
 Mounting up to sing and play. 
 
 The cuckoo now begins to sing, 
 Early summer he does bring ; 
 He, of tuning birds the king, ! 
 Makes the woodland arches ring. 
 
 In yon verdant, fragrant grove, 
 The nightingale sings from above. 
 In the sandy, wave-lapped cove. 
 The cliffs with martins' nests are wove. 
 
 S. W. Shrimpton (i2 yrs.) 
 
Children's Exercises 169 
 
 A DAINTY LITTLE MAIDEN 
 
 One day I saw a maiden 
 Along the water side 
 She was the prettiest maiden 
 That ever I espied. 
 
 Her cheeks were red as roses 
 Her eyes a lovely blue 
 Her voice the sweetest music 
 That e'er I'd listened to. 
 
 W. Lord (12 yrs.). 
 
 MAY 
 
 May is here with all its joys, 
 No more dreary days for boys. 
 Come let us walk over the lea. 
 The lark is up and singing his glee. 
 
 Away from the murmuring humming town, 
 To yonder hillside's glossy crown. 
 Now let us see how the country fares. 
 And float from the world of trouble and cares. 
 
 Come let us see how the nestlings are, 
 And how each flower shines like a star 
 On yonder meadow, fresh and green ; 
 And lose ourselves in nature's scene. 
 
 Reginald E. Crump (12 yrs.). 
 
 JUNE 
 
 June the month of roses. 
 Comes in summer bright 
 We all gather posies 
 In the hours of light. 
 
17° Children's Exercises 
 
 Summer brings her gifts, 
 In bird and fruit and flower, 
 The swallows and the swifts 
 The sunshine and the shower. 
 
 Summer will soon be past 
 
 And Autumn will be here. 
 
 The days are going fast. 
 
 But Summer's the time of the year. 
 
 Dennis Pargeter (12 yrs.). 
 
 SUMMER 
 
 The long midsummer days are here. 
 Bringing forth the brightest flowers, 
 The days are full of warmth and cheer, 
 There is no rain, no gentle showers. 
 
 The wild woodbine climbs the trees, 
 The ruddy clover paints the meads; 
 And by the river, in the breeze, 
 Sway flow'ring sedges, and glist'ning reeds. 
 
 The fork-tailed swallow is flitting by. 
 The chaffinch mounts the willow tree. 
 The merry swift is swerving high, 
 To see the sights that one may see. 
 
 The buttercups with daisies mix. 
 The bunting likes the swaying sedge, 
 The groundsel finds a home on ricks. 
 While pink dog roses deck the hedge. 
 
 Leslie Lucas (13 yrs.). 
 
Children's Exercises 171 
 
 SUMMER 
 
 Summer 's coming ; there 's no doubt. 
 
 Its days will soon be here ; 
 
 The country flowers have all come out, 
 
 Birds do gaily fly about 
 
 It's the brightest time o' the year. 
 
 In the fields the bright hued flow'rs 
 
 Gently shake and smile, 
 
 With them the children clothe their bow'rs, 
 
 Gathering them spend happy hours. 
 
 For of flowers are many a mile. 
 
 Soon the cornfields are of gold. 
 Then forth the reapers go. 
 And bring the farmer wealth untold. 
 Who stores the corn in gran'ry old. 
 This corn next year he will sow. 
 
 But when the summer's gone away 
 And the autumn comes. 
 The children then begin to play. 
 In the grass, the new mown hay; 
 Then the bee no longer hums. 
 
 E. Allen (ii yrs.). 
 
 THE, SEASONS 
 
 In winter when we have the snow 
 And little streams have ceased to flow 
 Then pretty bulbs begin to grow 
 
 Upon the icy land; 
 In morning winter frosts arrive, 
 Not one small bee doth now survive ; 
 Instead the cold winds now do drive 
 
 The pretty birds away. 
 
172 Children's Exercises 
 
 But next does come the bright fair spring 
 And now fair birds begin to sing 
 And pretty bells go ring a ting 
 
 Throughout the country side. 
 The little streams begin to flow 
 And other birds begin to crow 
 For now we don't have any snow 
 
 For winter has gone by. 
 But next comes summer warm and dry 
 The air is clear and blue the sky 
 All animals in fields now lie 
 
 Beneath the shady trees. 
 The fields are green with flowers gay 
 The children now are all at play 
 In amongst the new-mown hay 
 
 Or hay-stacks warm and dry. 
 Then next comes royal autumn fair 
 All apples ripe and scanty pear 
 Is ripe ; while children up the stair 
 
 To bed at sunset go. 
 The sun is now so very dull 
 And to the farm the horses pull 
 The carts of hay ; and baskets full 
 
 Of fruit so ripe and sweet. 
 
 Ernest W. Coles (13 yrs.). 
 
 THE SUN 
 The golden sun doth shine once more 
 And lights up all the earth, 
 It shines in every crack and door 
 It gives the flowers their birth, 
 It fills all homes with joy and mirth. 
 Then the church's bells do ring 
 And the little birdies sing. 
 
 P. Long (12 yrs.). 
 
Children's Exercises 173 
 
 THE RIVER 
 
 The river from the hills is born 
 A little brook so bright and fair 
 It passes fields of mellow corn 
 It sees the home of the frisky hare 
 It passes through the forest air 
 But when it joins the river large 
 It has to carry many a barge. 
 
 E, Coles (13 yrs.) 
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 Autumn has come again, 
 
 Which is a sign of rain, 
 
 And the leaves are falling in hosts. 
 
 And the trees are turning to ghosts. 
 
 And the birds have ceased to sing. 
 
 And the swallows have gone away, 
 
 And the world is left ungay, 
 
 And the children's voices no longer ring, 
 
 And the winds do howl and cry, 
 
 And the robin begins to sing. 
 
 C. W. Harse (13 yrs.). 
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 All the rain is falling 
 And the winds do blow, 
 And the little robin's calling. 
 The rivers will overflow. 
 And the clouds are very low, 
 The garden is very bare 
 Because the leaves are rare. 
 
 William Cantell (ii yrs.). 
 
174 Children's Exercises 
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 The leaves are falling fast 
 
 Upon the hard hard ground, 
 The Summer time is past, 
 
 The leaves turn round and round. 
 
 The mellow fruit is dropping, 
 
 From the trees so bare, 
 And the chestnuts will soon be popping 
 
 But the trees do not care. 
 
 Now, no sound of thrushes. 
 
 Is heard among the trees, 
 But the robin in the bushes, 
 
 Every body sees. 
 
 James Bayliss (ii yrs.). 
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 Autumn, Autumn has come again, 
 
 Bringing the mist the fog and rain. 
 
 Oh how happy we all shall be. 
 
 When the mellow fruit we see. 
 
 Better still, will be the treaty 
 
 When we start the fruit to eat. 
 
 The lovely leaves are a pretty sight, 
 
 Fluttering down from the bowers of light. 
 
 Some are yellow, some are red, 
 
 Some alive, and others dead. 
 
 And the ground beneath the oak, ^ 
 
 Soon will have a coloured cloak. 
 
 And the boys who come from school, 
 
 See the leaves in ditch and pool. 
 
 F. Richardson (12 yrs.). 
 
Children's Exercises 175 
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 Autumn, Autumn, thou hast come, 
 We have no bees to hear their hum, 
 The golden leaves are falling fast. 
 Loud shall roar the heavy blast. 
 
 Now no bird doth sing its song. 
 And now the days are not so long. 
 The leaves fall down with silent sound. 
 The leaves are shuffling round and round. 
 
 In the purple sunset light. 
 When the western heaven is bright, 
 All the swifts go flying by. 
 Far into the purple sky. 
 
 J. King (13 yrs.). 
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 Autumn has come at last, at last, 
 And the leaves are falling fast. 
 When the rime is on the grass. 
 Then the frost paints on the glass. 
 
 The birds are gone from the hedges and trees 
 To another land with a warmer breeze 
 The woods are fair, the hedges bare 
 And the trees their cloak no longer wear. 
 
 The flowers are dying, winter is near 
 The birds of the Spring we cannot hear 
 The days are so dull the nights are so long 
 So men sit in taverns singing a song. 
 
 Frederick John Ivings (13 yrs.). 
 
176 Children's Exercises 
 
 APRIL 
 
 The month of April has come at last, 
 And now the wintry winds have past, 
 Melodious birds begin to sing, 
 To welcome yet another Spring. 
 
 Young April cooling showers doth bring, 
 The lark is high upon the wing. 
 While children hear in soft green lanes 
 The joyful skylark's ringing strains. 
 
 The thrush doth sing with melody 
 Saying all is well to-day, 
 Upon the pear trees tall and slim 
 The sparrows chirp on ev'ry limb. 
 
 The air is cool and fragrant now 
 And buds do burst on ev'ry bough, 
 While down upon the ground beneath 
 The flowers do show upon the heath. 
 
 The Spring with all its glory's come 
 And soon the bees will start to hum; 
 All is blithe with cooling rain 
 So we our Spring games start again. 
 
 Boys and girls go out to play 
 
 Rejoice and laugh the live-long day. 
 
 Because the sky is now all song 
 
 The sun wakes flowers who've slept so long. 
 
 William Wilson (12 yrs.). 
 
 APRIL 
 April is a month for flowers, 
 Healthy winds and sunny showers, 
 Time when trees begin to show. 
 How their lovely blossoms grow. 
 
Children's Exercises 177 
 
 For in April comes the rain 
 
 From which the earth does so much gain; 
 
 Gentle breeze and little showers 
 
 Help bring forth the sweet Spring flowers. 
 
 Fields with flowers will soon be gay 
 And the hedges white with May. 
 Little lambs will frolic round 
 With their mothers on the mound. 
 
 From the hedge the birds are taking 
 Hay for their nests which they are making. 
 Eggs are laid, and soon we see 
 Young ones flitting in the tree. 
 
 In the meadows we shall see 
 Children playing merrily. 
 Happy now their laughter rings 
 As they play beside the springs. 
 
 April soon will pass away. 
 Then will come the month of May. 
 And children with their garlands green 
 In the village will be seen. 
 
 Charles Holley (10 yrs.). 
 
 A STREAM 
 
 I FLOW through fields from distant hills 
 And on my way I pass the mills 
 Where farmers send their wheat ; 
 And often in the early Spring 
 I hear the thrush and blackbird sing 
 When httle lambs first bleat. 
 M 
 
178 Children's Exercises 
 
 At morn I see the stars grow pale, 
 I hear the little brown nightingale 
 Cease singing and take to flight. 
 And then I know the day has come, 
 The cattle awake, and bees do hum, 
 And the east is bright with light. 
 
 Hubert Horn (14 yrs.). 
 
 WINTER 
 
 I SAW Winter dressed in a brown bare dress with snow and 
 frost on the cloak, walking across a bare field. He said, ' I like 
 not the coloured princes, I like not the golden corn. I bury 
 the coloured leaves.' 
 
 After him came boys sliding merrily. Then came father 
 Christmas, laden with toys. 
 
 As Winter walked along he was destroying all the flowers. 
 As they asked for pity, he said ' No ' sternly, and instead of 
 leaving them alone he called to the snow and cold winds 
 which came merrily. He told them to destroy the flowers. 
 Then he asked the winds why they had come in Autumn, 
 Then he said that that was the flowers' time. 
 
 Mr. Winter looked very old and I think he was the 
 grandfather of Autumn and Spring was Autumn's child. 
 Mr, Winter had robins peeping out of his pockets. I think 
 I could describe him as a grandfather. 
 
 I asked him what he had come for. He said, ' I come to 
 finish the year and destroy the flowers.' The last I saw of him 
 he was lying on his deathbed, with Spring just peeping over 
 the hills. I could faintly hear the thrushes and birds in the 
 distance, coming along with Spring. 
 
 J. K. MACLEOD (10 yrs.). 
 
Children's Exercises 179 
 
 A PICTURE OF THE SCENE 
 (After hearing ' Before Sedan '. — Austin Dobson.) 
 
 It was late in Autumn when leaves are crunched under foot, 
 that in a lonely grove, far from habitation, birds were surprised 
 to find men invading their solitude. Lying under a bare 
 black-trunked tree was the body of a man. The man felt no 
 pain, for he had left his earthly house. A few men stood 
 round it. One having a very commanding appearance held 
 in his hand a slip of paper which fluttered in the wind. All 
 the men looked sad, and all had wrinkles on their sorrowful 
 faces. 
 
 V. Steventon (12 yrs.). 
 
 THE OTHER SIDE 
 (After hearing Hazlitt's account of Coleridge's ' Sermon on War '.) 
 
 I THINK it does a poor, miserable shepherd boy a great deal 
 of good to join the army. The wretched shepherd is always 
 piping away, and staring at his sheep. He sits there in the 
 sun and pipes until he falls asleep. Every day he gets lazier 
 than the day before. The wretch sits there with a hump on 
 his back from sitting, and pipes, and stares. He is so lazy 
 that when he has gone to sleep and he wakes up and finds the 
 sheep have wandered he fetches them back and ill-treats them. 
 
 If the poor idle shepherd boy knew the smartness and 
 happiness of the soldiers, he would not be Ipng in joining 
 them. The soldiers, smart and happy, dressed in gaudy array, 
 beautiful and clean go out to war, and move themselves about. 
 They go out and see life, and for long route marches where 
 they have not been before. But the idle and wretched 
 shepherd boy sits and pipes in the same place every day. 
 The soldier is always merry and bright, and he has his hair 
 greased and powdered beautifully, so that it shall keep tidy. 
 
 M 2 
 
i8o Children's Exercises 
 
 But the vagabond shepherd boy has his shaggy hair anyhow, 
 
 making him look untidy. 
 
 R. Whitford (i2 yrs.). 
 
 TO THE SUN 
 
 O SUN, you break the darkness with your golden light. You 
 set the eastern sky on fire. All around you the sky is a fire. 
 The hearts of men are gladdened at your sight. 
 
 The natives of heathen lands bow their heads before you. 
 They worship you as a god. You never change your colour 
 although the skies around you are dark with rain. You shine 
 in dismal and dark houses and light them up with your gold, 
 warm rays. You make the shadows ; you kill the shadows ; 
 you chase the light from one clime to another. Every bird 
 and man and flower adores you. 
 
 P. Long (13 yrs.). 
 
 A SHORT ADDRESS TO THE THAMES 
 
 O King of the rivers glistening with golden ripples and silver 
 stars, I hear your soft voice speaking low. The wind drives 
 you on, pushing your weary head over lashers and big rocks. 
 At night time your appearance is changed. In the dull day- 
 time your face is black and your garments are very dirty. 
 But oh in the night time you are a noble Emperor. Your 
 garments are covered with golden stars. When your garments 
 wave in the soft moonlight, I am dazed by the golden light. 
 I think you are bewitched. 
 
 Edward Pulker (13 yrs.). 
 
 WINTER 
 
 When I was walking on the hills I saw Winter. He was 
 an old man, with short hair, a very thick walking-stick, and 
 very large heavy boots. If he passed trees with a few dark red 
 
Children's Exercises 18 1 
 
 and golden leaves, he would blow them all off, clothing the 
 fields in a red and gold coat. 
 
 When the flowers saw him enter the field in which they 
 were growing they drooped and died. He waved his stick at 
 the birds, and drove the swallows to a warmer land. The 
 robins flew to his hands and shoulders and sang their merry 
 songs. They were the only birds which were not afraid of 
 Mr. Winter. 
 
 When the people saw him coming they gathered in their 
 fruit. At night he made the mists, and dropped the snow 
 and rain, and at night after a storm he breathed on the wet 
 ground, and the rain turned into ice. 
 
 He crossed the floods and covered them with ice. He blew 
 over the towns at night and made his breath moan in the bare 
 trees. He placed a misty ring round the moon some nights, 
 and when people saw this they knew that Mr. Winter was 
 going to send another storm. 
 
 H. Horn (14 yrs.). 
 
 A PROCESS 
 
 The Process which I am about to describe is a very 
 interesting one. Many of our boys are very familiar with it, 
 because it is a most wonderful process, and by it many men 
 have become great. Some men have even written books on it to 
 show others how to do it and make others share their interest. 
 Any one who is interested in this process can carry it out 
 because it is so easy. This process which I have partly 
 described is brass-rubbing. 
 
 First of all, the best brasses have to be found. Well, many 
 churches in Oxford and Oxfordshire have them ; generally the 
 best brasses to rub are found on the floors, because those on 
 the walls are very awkward to get at, and so not much pressure 
 can be put upon them. 
 
i82 Children's Exercises 
 
 When the best brass is found it has to be well cleaned with 
 a hard brush and a rag. If the brass is not cleaned at first 
 the dust and grit gradually works its way through the paper, so 
 making numerous holes which spoil the rubbing entirely. 
 When the brass is cleaned the paper must be laid over the 
 surface, and held down tightly, so that it does not slip while 
 the rubbing is taking place. The paper being fixed the 
 rubbing commences. A tablet of Ullathorn's heelball is what 
 I use myself and have always found it the best ; it has to be 
 rubbed on very hard. It is- astonishing the way the picture 
 gradually forms on the paper, and to see the small parts come 
 up one after the other. After the heelball is well rubbed on 
 the rubbing is polished. The constant rubbing with a flannel 
 gives a beautiful black shiny appearance and so makes the 
 rubbing much finer. 
 
 Brass-rubbing teaches a great deal of history to those who 
 carry out the process properly and with patience. Many 
 shields are carved out in the brasses, and so they help us on 
 with our heraldry. Some of the shields are very pretty, with 
 the decoration painted or enamelled. 
 
 The rubbings can be easily mounted on calico, which makes 
 them more strong and durable. They make fine pictures 
 when they are mounted and hung up. Some men even have 
 them mounted and stowed away in museums. 
 
 F. Richardson. 
 
 THE FORSAKEN MERMAN 
 
 I AM to look for marks of the poet's feeling for truth and 
 beauty : 
 
 (i) In pictures, in metaphors, in similes, in faithfulness of 
 observation and description and epithets. 
 
 (2) In sound that delights the ear, especially in sound that 
 is itself truth-telling. 
 
Children's Exercises 183 
 
 This poem is very good poetry. The sound delights the 
 ear because the poem was written with feeling ; and it fills one 
 with pity for the merman. 
 
 All through the poem, the sound suits the sense. It is 
 a sad poem, and sorrowful sounding words are used to make 
 it sound sad. Two good lines are : 
 
 Children dear, was it yesterday 
 
 We heard the sweet bells over the bay? 
 
 Also there are some good epithets in the poem. Two good 
 ones are : 
 
 The 'whizzing' wheel stands still 
 and 
 
 On the ' blanched ' sands a gloom. 
 
 The poem brings very good pictures to the mind. I think 
 the best picture is brought by : 
 
 Where the sea snakes, ranged all round, 
 Feed in the ooze of their pasture ground : 
 Where the sea snakes coil and twine, 
 Dry their mail and bask in the brine. 
 
 Another good picture is : 
 
 When sweet airs come seaward, 
 From heaths starr'd with broom, 
 And high rocks throw mildly, 
 On the blanched sands a gloom. 
 Up the still glistening beaches, 
 Up the creeks we will hie. 
 Over banks of bright seaweed 
 The ebb tide leaves dry. 
 
 There are a number of metaphors ' in the poem. Some 
 good ones are : 
 
 A 'ceiling' of amber. 
 A ' pavement ' of pearl. 
 
184 Children's Exercises 
 
 The 'wild white horses' foam and fret, 
 and 
 
 Her eyes are 'sealed' to the holy book. 
 
 I think the best alliterations are : 
 
 Now the wild white horses play, 
 Champ and chafe and toss in the spray, 
 
 and 
 
 E. Allen. 
 
 The whizzing wheel stands still. 
 I think the poem is a very good one. 
 
 SPRING FLOWERS 
 
 The Spring has come at last, 
 And the showers are falling fast, 
 She brings her golden daffodils, 
 Which cluster thick upon the hills. 
 
 The poppies grow among the corn, 
 The cowboy blows his golden horn; 
 The buttercups so brightly gay. 
 Are welcomed by the Queen of May. 
 
 And when the warm Spring goes away. 
 
 Then doth enter Summer gay, 
 
 The cuckoo then retreats again, 
 
 Until Spring comes with its pattering rain. 
 
 Amelia Haynes (13 yrs.). 
 
 CHRISTMAS 
 
 Hark the merry Christmas bells. 
 They sound through many frosty dells. 
 May every one have joy to-day, 
 While the children romp and play. 
 
Children's Exercises 185 
 
 The snow is falling fast 
 The folk are hurrying past, 
 With many balls and pretty things. 
 And little dolls with fairy wings. 
 
 Oh may this be a happy day. 
 And every one have this to say : 
 Many Christmas joys to you 
 And everything be bright and new. 
 
 K. Joyce (n yrs.). 
 
 CHRISTMAS 
 
 Christmas is come at last, 
 The snow is falling fast : 
 The trees are gaunt and bare, 
 In the winter air. 
 
 Three wise men came from country far, 
 And followed behind the shining star. 
 And all around him as he lay, 
 People kneeled and did pray. 
 
 J. Butler (ii yrs.). 
 
 CHRISTMAS 
 
 Our Lord was born on Christmas day, 
 
 He in a little manger lay, 
 
 With Mary standing at his side, 
 
 Three wise men came that Christmas tide. 
 
 The wise men brought him presents three, 
 And each did bow upon their knee, 
 The star so brightly shone above 
 While each one gave him all their love. 
 
 D. OvENDEN (13 yrs.). 
 
i86 Children's Exercises 
 
 CHRISTMAS 
 
 Christmas is here 
 With joyful cheer 
 A Christmas tree 
 For you to see. 
 
 The church-bells ring 
 The children sing 
 The old year out 
 And the new year in. 
 
 Samuel J. Birt (12 yrs.). 
 
 CHRISTMAS DAY 
 
 She is here with her white coat gay 
 She dances the whole of the day, 
 She has brought with her to earth, 
 Tidings of sweet joy and mirth, 
 This day. 
 
 This is holy Christmas-tide 
 When the snow doth drift and glide 
 And the children happily sing, 
 When they hear the church-bells ring. 
 This day. 
 
 Constance Ireland (12 yrs.). 
 
 CHRISTMAS 
 
 Christmas came one peaceful night, 
 When the snow lay thick and white. 
 While the Shepherds watched their sheep 
 While all people lay asleep. 
 
Children's Exercises 187 
 
 A Child was born of Mary mild, 
 And in the heavens a bright star smiled, 
 To tell the birth of the King of kings, 
 And of the peace he came to bring. 
 
 This child was God from heaven above, 
 
 His heart was full of holy love. 
 
 In a cold manger he did lay. 
 
 On that first joyful Christmas Day. 
 
 Amelia Haynes (13 yrs.). 
 
 CHRISTMAS BELLS 
 
 Ring out ye merry Christmas Bells 
 In cities and in lonely dells 
 Again the joyful tidings tell 
 How Christ was born in Bethlehem. 
 
 The shepherds watching through the night 
 Will hear the bells and see the light 
 That round the angels shines so bright 
 When Christ was born in Bethlehem. 
 
 Anna Isabella Thomson (12 yrs.). 
 
 WOODS IN SPRING 
 
 The woods are alive with birds; and the green of the 
 bluebells mingles with the Ughter green of the budding trees. As 
 you walk the dreamy wind is sweet and refreshing and your 
 feet sink in the tender grass and make no sound. There is an 
 air of sweet contentment ; this is very diiferent from Autumn, 
 when you tread on rotten leaves and the air breathes desola- 
 tion. But now the scent of some early flower greets your 
 nostrils. You stop and breathe it and wish you could for ever 
 stay amidst this sweet contentment. Presently you hear the 
 
1 88 Children's Exercises 
 
 doves softly cooing in the trees above you, and whatever 
 troubles you have are, for a while lulled in slumber. When 
 you come from the wood you will look back with a sigh before 
 turning to this troubled world again. 
 
 Reginald Harding. 
 
 AUTUMN PERSONIFIED 
 
 One Autumn morn, when the winds blew strong, as I was 
 walking along the road, I met the Spirit of Autumn. She was 
 dressed in russet-brown and had a crown of leaves upon her 
 head. She had very graceful features and walked very 
 slowly. Her beautiful face and eyes were very sad. As I drew 
 nigh to her a sweet smile illuminated her sad face. She turned 
 to me and said, 'Thou art a mortal, I conceive; dost thou 
 know who I am ? ' ' Thou art the Spirit of Autumn,' said I. And 
 with another sweet smile she said, ' Thou hast answered right.' 
 With that she bowed low and turned away. 
 
 Isabella Thompson. 
 
QUESTIONS 
 
 1. Instead of saying 'At Daybreak' Tennyson says 
 
 When merry milkmaids click the latch, 
 And rarely smells the new-mown hay, 
 And the cock has sung beneath the thatch 
 Twice or thrice his roundelay. 
 Try to write something of the kind, not necessarily in verse, 
 for ' At Evening ', and quote a passage that similarly speaks of 
 Place instead of Time. 
 
 2. Rewrite the following passages in verse, giving in each 
 instance a plan (a) of the rimes, (b) of the beats : 
 
 'Now who shall arbitrate? Ten men love what I hate, 
 shun what I follow, slight what I receive ; ten who in ears and 
 eyes match me : we all surmise — they, this thing and I, that. 
 Whom shall my soul believe ? ' 
 
 ' In one year they sent a million fighters forth, south and 
 north, and they raised their gods a brazen pillar, high as the 
 sky; yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force — gold of 
 course.' 
 
 3. Say what you can about the metaphor which calls the 
 birch ' The Lady of the Woods ' ; and then find metaphors to 
 describe its catkins and its bark. 
 
 4. Quote three passages you know to illustrate (a) Sound 
 echoing sense, {b) Colour in words, {c) Musical speech. 
 
 5. In what order of preference would you place the 
 following passages?' Give your reasons in the case of the 
 passages you place first and last. 
 
 1 Stanzas from 'Thyrsis', 'Mariamne', 'The Tiger', 'Three Years 
 She Grew ', and four of doggerel or bombast invented for the purpose 
 of the question. 
 
19° Questions 
 
 6. Mention any place you know which a poet might have 
 had in mind in writing any passage you can quote. Give your 
 reasons for thinking so. 
 
 7. Which of the following do you think might be improved 
 by re-writing ? ^ Try your hand on what you consider the worst 
 of them. 
 
 8. 'Home, Rose and Home, Provence and La Palie.' Can 
 you tell from this fragment whether or not it is a part of 
 poetry ? 
 
 g. Use ' sword ' ' child ' and ' dead ' as metaphors, and 
 ' down ' and ' daffodil' in similes. 
 
 10. Tell the story of Alfred and the Cakes in the present 
 tense or in the first person. 
 
 I r. Taking the first stanza of ' After Blenheim' as an example, 
 write a short prose picture of A Time and Place. (When this 
 had been done the boys were asked to review their scenes and 
 rewrite them so as («) to make the picture clearer, {b) to 
 introduce living things, movement, or colour, {c) to improve 
 the sound of their exercise.) 
 
 12. Give an example of poetry in prose, and one of verse 
 that is not poetry, and state briefly your reasons in each case. 
 
 13. Clomb above the eastern bar 
 
 The hornfed Moon, with one bright star 
 Within the nether tip. 
 
 Coleridge knew as well as every schoolboy that this 
 phenomenon is impossible in nature. Can you justify his 
 disregard of astronomical fact in this poem ? 
 
 ' A scene from ' Robinson Crusoe ', a stanza of Adelaide Procter, 
 a vague Latinized passage from a School History, and a stanza of 'The 
 Forsaken Merman ' 
 
Questions 191 
 
 14. Write a short address to a Star or a Stream as to 
 a Person. 
 
 15. Say what pleased you in any poem you have heard or 
 read so often as to know it fairly well. 
 
 16. Describe the print shown you (Elmer Keene's ' Wild 
 Waters ') as if you could see the colours of the original. 
 
 17. Sir Philip Sidney said that the function of poetry was 
 'to make this much loved earth more lovely' ; quote not more 
 than four passages that might be used to illustrate this. 
 
 x8. What do you understand by a fine epithet? Illustrate 
 by examples. 
 
 19. Mention any poems or prose passages that would help 
 you in writing a description of a Ship, a Sunset, April, and 
 a Mother's Love ; and give one quotation in, each instance. 
 
 20. What marks of poetry do you find in the following 
 passages (Ruth i. 16-18 ; 2 Sam. xviii. 33 ; Job xxviii. 5-8)? 
 
PRINTED IN ENGLAND 
 AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
'M 
 
 w%