Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/292

262 aroused, they speed together like the wind-sired horses of Achilles.

The mere artisan in verse, however adroit, will do Emotion must be unaffected and ideal. well to keep within his liberties. Sometimes you find one affecting the impassioned tone. It is a dangerous test. His wings usually melt in the heat of the flame he would approach. Passion has a finer art than that of the æsthete with whom beauty is the sole end. Sappho illustrated this, even among the Greeks, with whom art and passion were one. Keats felt that "the excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relations with beauty and truth." Passion rises above the sensuous, certainly above the merely sensual, or it has no staying power. I heard a wit say of a certain painting that it was "repulsive equally to the artist, the moralist, and the voluptuary." Even in love there must be something ideal, or it is soon outlawed of art. A few of Swinburne's early lyrics, usually classed as erotic, with all their rhythmic beauty, are not impassioned. His true genius, his sacred rage, break forth in measures burning with devotion to art, to knowledge, or to liberty. There is more real passion in one of the resonant "Songs before Sunrise" than in all the studiously erotic verse of the period, his own included.

The idea that poetry is uttered emotion, though now somewhat in abeyance, is on the whole modern. It was distinctive with the romantic school,