rceived merely by the ear, this monotonous,
rudimentary music, so paltry by the side of the musician's real music,
is it this which requires for its production that wondrous combination
of faculties, that whole intensified human individuality? For those same
faculties, that same intensified individuality, will act and bear fruit
in the man who lets his words drift on, unmetrical, in mere spoken
manner. And yet he shall be accounted less, and shall cede to the other,
who can measure his words into verses, and couple them into rhyme.
Surely there is injustice in this. Wherefore, I pray you, should you, my
friend, my beloved little child poet, with the keen eyes and eager lips
of Keats, who sit (in fancy at least) here by my side on the rough wall
overlooking the orchard ravine at Perugia, drowsily listening (as poets
listen to prose) to our discussion, wherefore should you, the poet, be
worth more than I, the prose writer, merely inasmuch as you are the one
and I am the other? Why be surrounded, even in my eyes, by a sort of
ideal halo; why pointed out by my own secret instinct as the artist? All
this must be mere folly, prejudice, dried old forms of thought handed
down from the days when poets were priests and lawgivers and prophets,
when their very credit depended upon their not being solely what you
modern poets are; all this is a mere historic myth, in which the world
continues foolishly to believe, letting itself be told from generation
to generation, till the idea has become engrained in its mode of
thinking, that the poet is a special creature, a thing of finer mould,
in whose life, and movements, and feelings it expects something
different from the rest of humanity; in whose eyes it seeks a dim
reflection, in whose voice a distant echo of the colours and sounds of
that fairyland out of which he has come as a changeling into the world
of realities. Infatuation and injustice. But no! mankind at large is
right in its ideas, but as it usually is, without knowing why it has
them: right in giving instinctively this place of artist of the merely
suggested, as distinguished from the absolutely seen or heard forms of
other arts, to the poet alone. For the poet is, in the kingdom of words,
the real, complete artist. The artistic external form which he gives to
his creations removes them out of the domain of the practically useful,
or the scientifically interesting. This metrical setting enables the
poet to show a part, to mak