Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/320

294 294 THE FIRST MORRIS Froissart the pure essence of our chivalry, and the focus of another faith from Malory — the minted emblems of our simpler moods from the ballads and of our more complex desires from Shelley, Coleridge, Keats — and then welding all together into one in- clusive major myth, would doubtless be to run a theory too far — a stupid, academic weakness ; but to fail to see in the later course of English verse a steady struggle to gain exactly this condition of pure symbol, to rid itself of all the old alloys of message or injunction, is to be sceptical and unscientific both : an even deadlier fault, if possible, than pedantry. Put it, roughly, that what was once the mere body of verse, good to carry counsel, is now regarded as its soul ; that what was once held to be its all-important burden is now looked on only as a pedestal : then the modern cry is " Dissolve the pedestal." Relieved long ago of her earliest office, that of a vessel for lore, knowledge, messages — a smoothly rounded and moulded receptacle, almost physical, in which precepts could be pleasantly transmitted or preserved. Poetry only lately completed another stage of her enfranchisement by transferring bodily to the new faculty of Fiction her other original duty of teller of tales ; and now, in our own time, the chief task has become to remove the last film and trace of rhetoric, to thin away the old appeal to the ear, until at last even the tune may become optical, intellectual, too fine for the slower sense of sound, and the vase be finally dissolved. It was of this purification of " the lyrical cry," this attempt to shake metaphor clear of its moral and capture the foam without the wave, that Rossetti used to dream when he spoke of "a condensed and hinted beauty " ; and it was towards this too that Verlaine with his lures, and the " Symbolists " with their elaborate machinery, and the lamenting voices that are still pleading sadly for beauty in Ireland, and