the fate of a literature that has grown ashamed of employing the breadth and energy of movement without which great poetry is impossible. Of course there has always been, and always will be, bad rhetoric, as well as good. The inferior imitators of Milton, for instance, used to impose upon their own commonplace poetic conceptions the whole stylistic apparatus which Milton had elaborated for the purpose of sustaining the enormous movement of his verse, and enriching its texture. Bad rhetoric is always stale rhetoric. “No bird,” as Blake says, “soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.”

[Pg 75]

[Pg 76]

But it is an ill wind that blows nobody[Pg 77] any good; and we may gratefully welcome this impatience of rhetoric, in so far as it serves to purify the air of that pestilential blight which is known as “poetic,” but would be more truthfully named “prosaic diction.” To quote Mr. Santayana, “when use has worn down a poetic phrase to its external import, and rendered it an indifferent symbol for a particular thing, that phrase has become prosaic. It has also become, by the same process, transparent and purely instrumental.” Poetry, when it is healthy and vigorous, is continually discarding such worn-out words and phrases, as being indeed no longer poetical enough for its purposes. It is the simpler, homelier words and idioms of everyday speech that carry with them most poetic suggestion. Not but what rare and far-fetched diction may not on fit occasions be ornamentally useful, or justify itself by its grandeur and impressiveness. Shakespeare knew his business when he wrote,[Pg 78] “The multitudinous seas incarnadine”; but how thankful we should have been if succeeding poets had had the wisdom to refrain from debasing his coinage! Poetry need not be always simple, sensuous or passionate; but when it wishes to be decorative or extravagant, it will do well to remember the fable of the jay in peacock’s feathers, and grow novel and appropriate plumage of its own.

[Pg 77]

[Pg 78]

With regard to poetic inversion, there is bound to be great divergence both in practice and in critical taste. Swinburne considered Ben Jonson’s line, “But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,” to be an inexcusable blemish in an otherwise perfect masterpiece. Yet Jacobean readers would probably have found the order of the words sufficiently natural and unforced. It is true that since then there has been a considerable change in our linguistic sense, due in part to the long dominance of prose during the 

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