Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/48

18 grace and personal note. With Aristotle, he yielded the laurel solely to heroic dramatists and epic bards. His example is followed by our brave old Chapman, Homer's bold translator, who declares that the energia of poets lies in "high and hearty Invention." Dryden also accepts the canon of Imitation, but avows that "Imaging is, in itself, the height and life of it," and cites Longinus, for whom poetry was "a discourse which, by a kind of enthusiasm, or extraordinary emotion of the soul, makes it seem to us that we behold those things which the poet paints." Landor, the modern Greek, whose art was his religion, repeats that "all the imitative arts have delight for their principal object; the first of these is poetry; the highest of As an art alone. poetry is the tragic." But recognition of only the structure of verse, without its soul, deadened the poetry of France in her pseudo-classical period, from Boileau to Hugo, so that it could be declared, as late as A. D. 1838, that "in French literature that part is most poetry which is written in prose." Even the universal Goethe repressed his "noble rage" by the conception of poetry as an art alone, so that Heine, a pagan of the lyrical rather than of the inventive cast, said that this was the reason why Goethe's work did not, like the lesser but more human Schiller's, "beget deeds." "This is the curse," he declared, "of all that has originated in mere art." Like Pygmalion and the statue, "his kisses warmed her into life,