successors wrote more and more with a view to declamation, not in the noble Homeric manner, but in a style that was both bombastic and amateurish; and so poetry soon degenerated into stale rhetoric and boredom.

[Pg 6]

When after the lapse of centuries poetry emerged again, rejuvenated, its infant energies were still schooled by the same two mistresses, music and intonation. The art of the rhapsodists of the Chanson de gestes may have been ruder than that of the Homeridae, but its æsthetic character and its social function were much the same. And for centuries the medieval lyric was intended[Pg 7] to be sung, not read. But with the multiplication of books the inevitable change began to operate, and the medium of poetry came more and more to be verse spoken and read, rather than performed.

[Pg 7]

The poetical drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, from a historical point of view, no more than a brief and glorious episode. The declamation of dramatic verse may well have been a great art on the English, French and Spanish stage; but, if so, it has not survived into our own time, and shows little sign of resurrection. The development of polyphonic and instrumental music, while it has made modern opera and the Lieder of Schubert and Brahms possible, seems to have destroyed all hope of an equal marriage between music and lyrical poetry. Modern polyphony is a great art, but a tyrannous; and though a beautiful poem may still inspire a beautiful setting, the medium of the[Pg 8] resulting work of art will be musical, and not poetic. Verse no doubt can still be declaimed, whether on the stage or elsewhere; but actors have generally neither taste nor tradition; the poets themselves have seldom enough skill or training to be effective; and professional reciters are “abominable, unutterable, and worse.” Thus it would seem that all the avenues which might lead to the public performance of poetry are blocked. There are either no roads at all, or those that exist are in the possession of road-hogs. Is this state of things a disaster or no? And if it be a disaster, are there any remedies to be found?

[Pg 8]

It is no doubt possible that so summary a diagnosis may be quite misleading. Chaucer, it might be objected, already wrote for readers; and so did Milton. Yet many of us find them, and some of their successors, still quite readable. Surely then great poetry can still be both produced and[Pg 9] enjoyed, even when it is completely divorced from music or intonation. All 

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