Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/84

80 the attention of the understanding is aroused to its fullest capability by the metrical form of poetry, I can not agree with him. Its very monotony tends to lull the discrimination to rest. If Spencer in explaining the value of rhythm means by economy of attention a failure to exercise the intellectual energies, he is inconsistent with himself. Yet in his account of the effects of rhythm I agree with him. In its soporific effect on the intellect, in its holding of the understanding in abeyance, lies the virtue of metrical language. Poetry is necessarily metrical because it is necessarily emotional. Spencer himself recognizes not merely, as previously stated, that emotion naturally chooses the bepraised direct order, but that the natural language of emotion is metrical if the emotion be not violent. "Whilst the matter embodied is idealized emotion, the vehicle is the idealized language of emotion," he says in speaking of poetry.

Before dismissing Spencer's theory of style let us make a further effort to render it plausible. In the first place the essay was written, not as a philosophy of style but as a study of the causes of force of expression. From this point of view it is comprehensible to proclaim the superiority of poetry to prose, to make much of rhythm, and to be a little transcendental in the application of the inverted order. Again, no one can gainsay the principle of economy clearly set forth and rightly applied. But it is misleading in the highest degree to use economy in a double sense, as failure to exercise, and as exercising to the greatest possible advantage.

Now, it is true that in both prose and poetry there must be the greatest possible economy of both the mental energies and the mental sensibilities. But in poetry economy of the sensibilities means their greatest possible utilization, and economy of the mental energies their comparative suspension and elimination. While, vice versa, the principle of economy as applied to prose demands economy of the mental sensibilities in the sense of their comparative suspension and economy of the mental energies in the sense of their utmost utilization. In other words in poetry clearness must at times be sacrificed to force, and in prose the emotional must yield to the intellectual impression. This opposition between clearness and force is based on the psychological fact that the emotions interfere with the judgment. Attention to the sensational aspect of an impression may blind us to the perception. The subjective mental attitude militates against the objective. When Spencer recommends the use of Saxon words—a recommendation which in 1902 he confesses not to have himself followed—and at the same time praises the use in prose of the inverted order, he is really regarding the subject from two points of view. The short, familiar Saxon word may bring us more readily to the idea, it may be perfectly clear and all the more so because not emotional. But "Great is Diana of the