presence of the Comedic Muse, with her incurable modernity, tempers the difficulty of the problem. Thus, though it would be unreasonable to maintain that the Tragic Muse must be unable to live and breathe in the smoky atmosphere of our present-day world, it would be still more absurd to prohibit her escape into the purer clime of a legendary or historical past.

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The case of narrative poetry is somewhat similar, yet with important differences. It is true that the Homeric heroes and the society in which they lived had long ceased to exist when the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed,[Pg 57] and that most of the great epic and narrative writers, Virgil, Ariosto, Milton and Marlowe, preferred mythical or purely fantastic settings for their stories. Yet such a limitation would seem to be hardly so natural to narrative as to tragic poetry. For the quality of narrative being less intense and passionate, and its unity more loose, it is able to indulge copiously in decoration, description and digression, and so should be able to deal all the more effectively with the variegated modern scene. And yet, except for two sombre short stories in blank verse by Wordsworth, and Byron’s Don Juan, there has scarcely been any narrative, dealing with modern life and of first-rate poetical quality, since Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This is perhaps because poets have not sufficiently realised that the telling of a story in verse instead of prose can only be justified when the sensuous and decorative beauty of the medium is continually maintained at the[Pg 58] highest pitch. For whereas in the intense and tragic moments of drama exquisiteness and richness of texture may be unnecessary, or at times even a positive nuisance, bald and graceless verse narrative is always insupportable. Byron indeed atoned for much artistic unscrupulousness and slovenly workmanship by his unfailing energy and wit. But poets will have to take to heart the lesson of Chaucer’s scrupulous attention to beauty of texture, if they are to hold their own in rivalry with prose fiction. They will have also to be aware of the dangers of a too exclusive interest in analytical psychology. Narrative, when it ceases to narrate, very easily becomes a bore. Such writers as Proust and Henry James may have been able successfully to dispense with many of the functions of story-telling, by laboriously evolving a peculiar prose instrument of their own for the expression of psychological subtleties. But it is doubtful whether[Pg 59] anything of the kind would be possible in verse, or, if possible, whether it 

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