hronicles battles and dates, yet not the great movements of
the peoples; economics, because in their view all men are vile;
biography, because it leads the victim to the altar, but never
sacrifices it. Even poetry fails; I do not try to shock, but I doubt
whether the poetic is equal to the prose form.

I do not want to fall into the popular fallacy that prose and poetry
each have their own field, strictly preserved, for prose is not always
prosy, nor poetry always poetic; prose may contain poetry, poetry cannot
contain prose, just as some gentlemen are bounders, but no bounders are
gentlemen. But the admiration many people feel for poetry derives from a
lack of intelligence rather than from an excess of emotion, and they
would be cured if, instead of admiring, they read. Some subjects and
ideas naturally fall into poetry, mainly the lyric ideas; 'To Anthea,'
and 'The Skylark' would, in prose, lie broken-pinioned upon the ground,
but the exquisiteness of poetry, when it conveys the ultimate aspiration
of man, defines its limitations. Poetry is child of the austerity of
literature by the sensuality of music. Thus it is more and less than its
forbears; speaking for myself alone, I feel that 'Epipsychidion' and the
'Grecian Urn' are just a little less than the Kreutzer Sonata, that
Browning and Whitman might have written better in prose, though they
might thus have been less quoted. For poetry is too often
_schwaermerei_, a thing of lilts; when it conveys philosophical ideas,
as in Browning and in that prose writer gone astray, Shakespeare, it
suffers the agonising pains of constriction. Rhyme and scansion tend to
limit and hamper it; everything can be said in prose, but not in poetry;
to prose no licence need be granted, while poetry must use and abuse it,
for prose is free, poetry shackled by its form. No doubt that is why
poetry causes so much stir, for it surmounts extraordinary difficulties,
and men gape as at a tenor who attains a top note. However exquisite,
the scope of poetry is smaller than that of prose, and if any doubt it
let him open at random an English Bible and say if Milton can
out-thunder Job, or Swinburne outcloy the sweetness of Solomon's Song.

More than interesting, the novel is important because, low as its status
may be, it does day by day express mankind, and mankind in the making.
Sometimes it is the architect that places yet another brick upon the
palace of the future. Always it is the showman of