The connective as here does duty in a construction to which it is not perfectly adapted: "Never was blind strength and stubborn form so disciplined or that will less re pugnant, . . . as during the century," etc. (15 17-21). In the following the second member of the compound sentence is left without a verb: "Tragedy becomes a cold imitation ; and often the very form misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines," etc. (19 14 ff.). 'Form' and 'attempt' simulate noun-subjects, but the close of the sentence leaves them suspended, as it were, in midair. These offences, it will be said, are venial, and so indeed. they are in relation to the splendid qualities by which they are offset, but the reference to them may perhaps serve as an excuse for occasional lapses in our elder writers, as where Sidney says (Defense 47 28): "Our tragedies and comedies not without cause cried out against," etc., in which the finite verb is lacking. The counterbalancing, and more than counterbalancing, merit, is the apothegmatic character of many of Shelley's statements. Perhaps no English essay so flowing and easy in its style, and so brief in its compass, ever contained an equally large number of pregnant sayings, so excellently true and so adequately expressed. Two, at least, have become proverbial: "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." "The rich have become richer, and the poor poorer.' But there is a large number scarcely less deserving of popular currency. A few of these may be instanced: "A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal. truth." "It is not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which their imperfection consists." "A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively." "Man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave." "For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure; and therefore it is corruption." "Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of that pleasure which exists in pain." "All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contains all oaks potentially." But to continue to quote would be to repeat the Essay in the Introduction. 2. SHELLEY'S VIEWS IN COMPARISON WITH SIDNEY'S. In essentials Shelley and Sidney agree. Both being poets, and acquainted with the same early literatures and authorities, it might be expected that their views would not be widely divergent. Among the opinions which they hold in common, only the principal need be mentioned. According to both, then, poetry is the first of didactic agencies, in time as well as in order of importance, and, to descend to particulars, outranks both history and philosophy, each of which, in its infancy, embodies something of its great predecessor. It is true that the philosophy which Sidney has in mind is ethics, while Shelley is thinking rather of ) Boetry outranks, history & philosophy political science, but this difference is merely indicative of sidney ethics Shelley the period; that which was academic and general in the sixteenth century, had become democratic and specifically sociological by the beginning of the nineteenth. Again, while they pronounce poetry to be the first of didactic agencies, neither writer will allow that the poetry which studiously and incessantly reminds us of its moral aim has a right to a place among the highest. They agree that there is something prophetic about poetry; the poet has the "vision and the faculty divine." Accordingly there is much poetry in the Bible. Moreover, something prophetic the insight of the true seer cannot be acquired through scholastic discipline; there is a sense in which the poet must be born to his lofty mission. It is not necessary that poetry take the form of verse, although, since harmony is the soul of poetry, numbers constitute the usual and fitting body to this soul. Plato is instanced by both as a prose-poet, or, if the phrase be preferred, as a prosaist whose substance is poetical. Again, poetic art improves upon nature; the world of the poet is a fairer one than was ever seen by mortal eye, and hence his imagined world may well become the foundation of the actual one, the type which men seek to realize. Not only is such endeavor at realization possible, but, as an historical fact, men have taken the figments of the poets for models, Homer being an instance in point. The truth revealed by poetry is infinitely attractive, but can only be seen by ordinary men in the creations of the bard; the latter are therefore true in the deepest sense, and fictitious only in the superficial one. Finally, the test of poetry is its delightfulness in combination with its didactic efficacy and elevation; let it fail of either, and it must at once be consigned to a lower rank as poetry, or be denied that name altogether; Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci Notwithstanding a concurrence of view extending to so many particulars, it must not be inferred that Shelley's essay is a mere reproduction of Sidney's. Even in poetic endowment they were unlike, and no less in education and temperament. Sidney was trained in a severer school than Shelley, issuing from it more cautious, more sober, one is tempted to say, more prosaic. By disposition and training, Shelley. was rather Hellenic, Sidney rather Roman. Sidney followed of preference the matter-of-fact Aristotle, while Shelley was more admiringly attached to the ardent and soaring Plato, اس not the Plato of the Republic, but him of the Ion and the Symposium. In considering the ancient drama, Shelley has his eye upon the Athenians, Sidney upon Seneca and Plautus. His acquaintance with Greek literature enabled Shelley to assume toward Roman poetry the attitude of a stern but upright judge; this is shown as well in his appreciation of Lucretius as in his estimate of the general literary inferiority of the Romans, and in his censure of the Alexandrianism upon which no small part of the Latin poetry was nourished. The moral instruction which poetry should impart appears, mocal according to Sidney, to be, as it were, mechanically suspended in the liquid mass of poetry; according to Shelley, the bubbling wellspring of poetry is highly charged with secret medicinal virtue, which renders still more agreeable the medium by which it is conveyed. The one seeks to disguise a wholesome bitterness; the other is conscious of nothing but an exhilarating and healthful potency. Sidney, in his utilitarian vein, can condescend to speak of the mnemonic value of verse. He presents himself before us as an ad instruct for Sydney suspended Poetry Sydney poetry disguises vocate holding a brief for a discredited client, and seeking morals to convince by any fair means, even to the sacrifice of the defendant's dignity. His eloquence is forensic and practical like the literary genius of Rome. It deals with the tangible, Shelley the ponderable; with it he descends into the arena in order y to conquer. Once there, if his adversary's armor resist the keen thrust of his sword, he is willing, like a Homeric hero, Abade more agreeable to cast about for some convenient boulder with which to meaning crush him. Shelley, on the other hand, disdains to leave the empyrean. Thence if he hurl a missile, it shall be the bolt of Jove, which dazzles while it smites. To his glance the farthest horizons are simultaneously disclosed. Accordingly he recognizes the identity of poetry with invention; with every species of fine art; with the prescience of great lawgivers; with an intuitional philosophy; with vision which, in the poverty of language, we call prophetic, but which is really timeless, affirmatory of an eternal Now. its Shelley's historical perspective is larger and juster than Sidney's; he sees the ages unroll the panoramic destinies of the race, and marks the elements of renewal and decay. He gazes critically at the past, and hopefully into the future. Sidney could not see a decade in advance, could not even discern the youthful Shakespeare; Shelley virtually foresaw the whole transcendental movement in England and America, with the train of beneficial effects by which it was to be accompanied. In a word and a figure, if Sidney is mounted on a strong and active steed, it is still of mortal strain, while Shelley is aloft on Pegasus, and scarcely condescends to touch the ground in his airy flight. 3. THE PROVINCES OF INSPIRATION AND OF LABOR. In one point of the highest importance Shelley has perhaps expressed himself too strongly. Speaking of the impotence of the will in the production of poetry, he explains (p. 39): "I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and study. The toil and the delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connection of the spaces between their suggestions by the intertexture of conventional expressions." The decision in this matter is one that can be given by none so well as by the poets themselves. What testimony is borne by the ancients, and what by the moderns? If it were possible to compare the utterances of men so various as Pindar, Horace, Dante, Milton, Goethe, Schiller, Burns, and Shelley himself— Shelley the artist rather than Shelley the theorist it would seem that the question might be settled. Pindar is usually regarded as the type of the fiery and |