character, and also poetry, a thing with its own reasons for existence.
He gave La Fontaine in one way, Moliere in another, Victor Hugo in
another, some poor modern verse in yet another. But in all there was the
same attempt: to treat verse in the spirit of rhetoric, that is to say,
to over-emphasise it consistently and for effect. In a tirade from
Corneille's "Cinna," he followed the angry reasoning of the lines by
counting on his fingers: one, two, three, as if he were underlining the
important words of each clause. The danger of this method is that it is
apt to turn poetry into a kind of bad logic. There, precisely, is the
danger of the French conception of poetry, and M. Silvain's method
brings out the worst faults of that conception.

Now in speaking verse to musical notes, as Mr. Yeats would have us do,
we are at least safe from this danger. Mr. Yeats, being a poet, knows
that verse is first of all song. In purely lyrical verse, with which he
is at present chiefly concerned, the verse itself has a melody which
demands expression by the voice, not only when it is "set to music," but
when it is said aloud. Every poet, when he reads his own verse, reads it
with certain inflections of the voice, in what is often called a
"sing-song" way, quite different from the way in which he would read
prose. Most poets aim rather at giving the musical effect, and the
atmosphere, the vocal atmosphere, of the poem, than at emphasising
individual meanings. They give, in the musician's sense, a "reading" of
the poem, an interpretation of the poem as a composition. Mr. Yeats
thinks that this kind of reading can be stereotyped, so to speak, the
pitch noted down in musical notes, and reproduced with the help of a
simple stringed instrument. By way of proof, Miss Farr repeated one of
Mr. Yeats' lyrics, as nearly as possible in the way in which Mr. Yeats
himself is accustomed to say it. She took the pitch from certain notes
which she had written down, and which she struck on Mr. Dolmetsch's
psaltery. Now Miss Farr has a beautiful voice, and a genuine feeling for
the beauty of verse. She said the lines better than most people would
have said them, but, to be quite frank, did she say them so as to
produce the effect Mr. Yeats himself produces whenever he repeats those
lines? The difference was fundamental. The one was a spontaneous thing,
profoundly felt; the other, a deliberate imitation in which the fixing
of the notes made any personal int