gs whose outline is more
strictly geometrical. The laws which regulate the shape of a chalk down
or an ivy tendril are just as severe as the laws which regulate the
monkey-puzzle tree or the talc crystal. My own belief is that the
trained artistic sense is probably only in its infancy, and that it
will advance upon the line of the pleased apprehension of the existence
of less obvious structure.

If we apply this to literature, it is my belief that the love of human
beings for the stanza and the rhyme is probably an elementary thing,
like the love of the crystal and the flower-shape, and that it is the
love not so much of the beautiful as of the kind of effect that the
observer could himself produce. The child feels that, given the
materials, he could and would make shapes like crystals and flowers;
but to make things of more elaborate structure would be outside his
power.

To confine ourselves, then, to one single literary effect, it appears
to me that the poetry of the future will probably not develop very much
further in the direction of metre and rhyme. Indeed, it is possible to
see, not to travel far for instances, in the work of such writers as
Mr. Robert Bridges or Mr. Stephen Phillips, a tendency to write lines
which shall conceal as far as possible their rhythmical beat. It is
indeed a very subtle pleasure to perceive the effect of lines which are
unmetrical superficially but which yet confine themselves to a fixed
structure below, by varying the stresses and compensating for them. It
is possible, though I do not think it very likely, that poetry may
develop largely in this direction. I do not think it likely, because
such writing is intricate and difficult, and ends too often in being a
mere _tour de force_; the pleasure arising from the discovery that,
after all, the old simple structure is there, though strangely
disguised, I think it more probable that the superficial structure will
be frankly given up. If we consider what rhyme is, and what detestable
limitations it enforces on the writer for the sake of gratifying what
is, after all, not a dignified pleasure, the only wonder is that such a
tradition should have survived so long.

What I rather anticipate is the growth among our writers of a poetical
prose, with a severe structure and sequence of thought underlying it,
but with an entire irregularity of outline. The pleasure to be derived
from perfectly proportioned lucid prose is a far subtler and more