Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/102

 homely truth about it. It has been the unfortunate habit of most of our poets, and especially of those we have been specially criticizing in this article, to use Verse as the vehicle of whatever thoughts are too thin or too fantastic, too much of the sweet-pea order of products, to stand without the aid of rhythmical props. Ideas too bald for prose, too trivial to stand unadorned, appear unique enough when subjected to the euphuistic process, and robed in all the wordy glitter of rhyme. If any English author, in good round prose, were to call Death "a seizure of malign vicissitude," and compare Life to a Lady with whom he ranged the world till he found a fit "bower" for nuptial performances; or if any author were to narrate for us, still in good round prose, such a savoury narrative as that of "The Leper" in Mr. Swinburne's poems, surely he would very soon receive his just deserts. Yet simply because such ideas and such stories are told in lines cut into certain lengths and jingling at the ends; solely because, by one-half the public, verse is recognised as an unnatural and altogether artificial form of speech, the trash of windy men is christened Art, and writers without one ray of imagination are accredited with the genius of song. It thus happens that, in the opinion of many people, the word "poet" is synonymous with "madman;" and we are told again and again not to judge such and such compositions too severely, as "they are only poetry." It thus happens that we every day behold the melancholy spectacle of inferior men giving themselves the airs of great men merely because they can write meretricious verses. Why, I will venture to say that there is more real genius and more true literary brilliance in any one of Mr. G. A. Sala's "Dutch Pictures" than in all