Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/72

 derives its significance from the figure of an artistic individual author gathering with free hand in the garden of his country's language such words as shall blend with his ideas in a beautiful harmony of thought and speech. Days without writing when poetic guilds were the great conservators of human tradition—days of courtly imitators crowning their brows with the withered roses of buried poets—days of democratic art when he who has the living spirit is free to choose its proper embodiment—so various are the epochs of social life and literature to which "poetic diction" may belong, so different are the facts and the ideas which it may express.

But, it will be asked, how does the decadence of poetry in an age of analytic thought illustrate the dependence of literature on social conditions? Can we find any connecting links between analytic thought and social conditions, and between both of these and the spirit and form of poetry? We have seen how closely related are the idea and its embodiment, the thought and the language, of poetry, and how different are the harmonies in which they may be combined in different societies or in different ages of the same society. Sever such relations between sound and idea by the separate consideration of each in scientific analysis, and you reach the inartistic or analytic conception of prose as the proper instrument of reflection and totally unconnected with poetic form—you Aristotelise your prose; and poetry, so far as it depends on the harmony of sound and idea, vanishes before a "philosophic" contempt which would ridicule or deny altogether the subtle relations of sound and idea in the languages of social groups. But, however analytic thinkers may deride such relations, the forms of poetry, and even of prose to some degree, prove by the