Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/266

GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS mind of the artist who comprehends the laws of form and tone. How logical was his exposition of the mathematics of beauty is seen in that unique work, The Science of English Verse.

Now it is a question whether, Art being so long, and Time so fleeting, a poet should consider too anxiously the rationale of his song. Again, he strove to demonstrate in his verse the absolute co-relations of music and poetry—and seemed at times to forget that rhythm is but one component of poetry, albeit one most essential. While music is one of the poet's servitors, and must ever be compelled to his use, there still remains that boundary of Lessing's between the liberties of the two arts, though herein less sharply defined than between those of poetry and painting. The rhythm alone of Lanier's verse often had a meaning to himself that others found it hard to understand. Of this he was conscious. In a letter to me, he said that one reason for his writing The Science of English Verse was, that he had some poems which he hoped soon to print, but which "he could not hope to get understood, generally, without educating their audience." To this he added that the task was "inexpressibly irksome" to him, and that he "never could have found courage to endure it save for the fact that in all directions the poetic art was suffering from the shameful circumstance that criticism was without a scientific basis for even the most elementary of its judgments."

If, in dwelling upon the science of his art, he hampered the exercise of it, he was none the less a man [252]