Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/71

 called epochs of classical imitation. It would be easy to show that some of the grandest specimens of poetry in the world (Greek and Indian epics, for example) offer many a mark of stereotyped diction in repeated epithets. Partially, such epithets may be attributed to an early and inartistic age in which the dependence of memory on the verse—writing being yet unknown—must have tended to stereotype many a striking epithet as a kind of resting-place for the memory. So far, "poetic diction" would seem to be the common property of poetic guilds, religious or secular, common aids to the memory of bard- clans like the Homêridæ. But partially, also, "poetic diction" may be attributed to a very real feeling of art, the feeling that made the Greek orator rest assured that an exquisite turn of phrase, when once discovered, was the most artistic combination of thought and sound of which his language was capable, and should be repeated in preference to any search for variety. "Form," says Victor Hugo, "is something much more fixed than people suppose. It is an error, for example, to think that one and the same thought can be written in many ways, that one and the same idea can have many forms. One idea has never more than one form peculiarly its own, excellent, complete, rigorous, essential, the form preferred by it, and which always springs en bloc with it from the brain of the man of genius. Hence in the great poets nothing is more inseparable, nothing more united, nothing more consubstantial, than the idea and the expression of the idea. Kill the form and you nearly always kill the idea." Here is a conception of "poetic diction" which is neither that of lifeless imitation nor that of antique epithets stereotyped as aids for the memory, one by no means peculiar to Victor Hugo, but which, wherever we find it,