in prose, because poetry is the more emotional medium, yet there are limits which it is dangerous to exceed. Much no doubt depends upon the nature of the subject-matter. A chorus of Aeschylus, or a soliloquy of Macbeth may be very difficult to analyse and construe satisfactorily; yet their general drift is usually clear enough. Cloudy vagueness or intricate subtlety may well be[Pg 74] necessary and legitimate qualities of a poem; but all superfluous obscurity is æsthetically pure waste. Gerard Hopkins is a deplorable example of a poet of sincerity and genius, who damaged much of his best work by not being sufficiently aware of the nature of his instrument, which was the English language, or of his audience, who could only be educated English-speaking people. The admirers of such writers will often quite honestly deny that they find them unduly difficult. They probably forget how hard they have had to work in order to obtain their reward. The trouble is that the poet ought to have done the larger part of their work for them himself.

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Whatever may be the destinies of English poetry, I do not think it is likely to achieve anything very remarkable until we have grown out of a doctrine or prejudice that is widely prevalent just now, that is to say our dislike and suspicion of rhetoric. By[Pg 75] rhetoric I mean the sum of all the artifices and habits of syntax, phrasing and diction which are necessary in order to sustain the movement and the structure of a poem that is designed on a large scale, or of a short poem of great emotional intensity. That may be a loose and unsatisfactory definition, but it is the best I can come by. Criticism nowadays seems to be mainly interested in lyrical poetry on a small scale; and this may account for the disfavour into which the very name of rhetoric has fallen: for it is true that short lyrics of a certain kind can afford to dispense with rhetoric, in the sense in which I am using the word. Yet if the European poets of the past, and their public, had been as shy of rhetoric as we are at present, it is certain that there would have been no Homer to begin with, still less an Aeschylus, a Milton, a Racine, or a Shelley. We might have produced poetry of exquisite charm and refinement, but its imaginative[Pg 76] range and vitality would probably have been as restricted as that of the Japanese, or of the later Chinese poets. If we compare in Mr. Waley’s translations the classical Tang poets with those earlier primitive writers, who were not yet afraid of composing on a fairly large scale, we shall then see what may be 

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