e, the fact is so. Poetry has
this life-giving power, and prose has it not; and thus the poet is the
truest historian. Whatever is properly valuable in history the poet
gives us--not events and names, but emotion, but action, but life. He is
the heart of his age, and his verse expresses his age; and what matter
is it by what name he describes his places or his persons? What matter
is it what his own name was, while we have himself, and while we have
the originals, from which he drew? The work and the life are all for
which we need care, are all which can really interest us; the names are
nothing. Though Phoeacia was a dream-land, or a symbol of the Elysian
fields, yet Homer drew his material, his island, his palaces, his
harbour, his gardens of perennial beauty, from those fair cities which
lay along the shores of his own Ionia; and like his blind Demodocus,
Homer doubtless himself sung those very hymns which now delight us so,
in the halls of many a princely Alcinous.

The prose historian may give us facts and names; he may catalogue the
successions, and tell us long stories of battles, and of factions, and
of political intrigues; he may draw characters for us, of the sort which
figure commonly in such features of human affairs, men of the unheroic,
unpoetic kind--the Cleons, the Sejanuses, the Tiberiuses, a Philip the
Second or a Louis Quatorze, in whom the noble element died out into
selfishness and vulgarity. But great men--and all MEN properly so called
(whatever is genuine and natural in them)--lie beyond prose, and can
only be really represented by the poet. This is the reason why such men
as Alexander, or as Caesar, or as Cromwell, so perplex us in histories,
because they and their actions are beyond the scope of the art through
which we have looked at them. We compare the man as the historian
represents him, with the track of his path through the world. The work
is the work of a giant; the man, stripped of the vulgar appendages with
which the stunted imagination of his biographer may have set him off, is
full of meannesses and littlenesses, and is scarcely greater than one
of ourselves. Prose, that is, has attempted something to which it is not
equal. It describes a figure which it calls Caesar; but it is not Caesar,
it is a monster. For the same reason, prose fictions, novels, and the
like, are worthless for more than a momentary purpose. The life which
they are able to represent is not worth representing. Ther