kind; but the truth is, that, with one possible exception,* no form of poetry is rigid; no poet is governed by any rules which obstruct his freedom of expression. The rules are manufactured by commentators who observe the habits of poets, but the poetry is written by men and women who wish to express an idea in the manner best adapted to convey it clearly to another mind. This fact is important, because it dispels the delusion that poetry is an artificial product. There is a kind of obstinate belief that a man sitting down to write a poem has to put away the natural uses of language, that, instead of saying "I feel cold" when he means it, he has to fit that sentiment into the clamps of a rigid framework of poetic diction; that he undertakes to construct a certain article, and is bound by fixed rules of construction. Nothing is further from the truth. A man writes a poem as a baby utters a cry; each is a natural expression. A baby's cry is a song without words, the expression of a feeling of pain or joy within the capacity of an infant's mind. As the mind grows more capable of feeling, and the powers of expression increase, the song takes a more definite shape. Thought deepens and expands, emotions gather and grow subtle, and the cry of the infant develops into the song of the man. This, at least,

*See Note 4.

is the process of poetry in its simplest and most direct form of lyrical verse. Catullus, the Roman, one of the greatest lyric poets, wrote two lines of verse which contain the whole secret of his art :

"I hate, I love. You ask the causes of this fact?
I know not, but I feel it happen, and I'm racked."

Just as a baby, supposing that he could argue about his emotions, might inform his nurse, "I am hurt and I am pleased. You ask me why I am hurt and pleased? I don't know, but I feel it, and I cry out," so Catullus tells the sympathetic world that his songs of love and hate are the natural expression of the emotions that he feels. By no other form of expression could he make his meaning equally clear. He does not choose his form of utterance; above all, he does not pretend to feel: the emotion is genuine, and the utterance direct, poeta nascitur, non fit. It is by those who come after the poets that the rules of poetry are made.

§ 22. Expression must be Imperfect. We reach two conclusions: words, we see, are the expression of thoughts, and the form that the words assume depends on the nature of the thought. Language, therefore, is a means of communication, and, though the best means at our disposal, it is often imperfect and inadequate. Sometimes it says too much, and

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at other times too little. "People never sufficiently reflect," declared Goethe, "that a language, after all, is nothing but a collection of symbols or pictures, which never directly express the objects, but only imitate them." If I say "lion," for instance, I do not create the beast; I merely avail myself of a sign which you and I have agreed to use when we want to represent it. If you do not possess the key to my symbols-if, that is to say, we do not imitate the same object by this sign-the word will convey nothing to you, or it will convey a different meaning. Thus, the symbol "pain" has a different meaning on either side of the Channel. In a Frenchman's mind it calls up the idea and image of bread; in an Englishman's it represents the feeling contrary to joy. This is an obvious instance of a symbol losing its vitality; the use of a foreign language cuts the lines of communication till the meaning of the new symbols has been acquired. But there is another sense in which language is an imperfect instrument of expression. "What do you read, my lord?" asks Polonius of Hamlet; Words, words, words," is the Prince's passionate reply, and a great revolt of action against speech is contained in that cry of despair. Language is the instrument of knowledge, as action is the instrument of will; but as the act itself may imper

fectly express the will, so the poet's expression
may be inadequate to his thought. In a sense,
it must be inadequate. Heine, the great German
poet, tells us in one place, "out of my great
sorrows I make my little songs," but during the
process of expression, between the sorrow and the
song, something, one feels, must be lost.
He can
but imitate his emotion by signs, he can but hint
at what he feels; and another German poet,
oppressed by this imperfection of the symbols
of expression, declares that

"The greatest poems are silent,
Silent as deepest grief,

Like phantom ghosts, they wander,
Mute through the broken heart."

Tennyson, again, like Hamlet in his revolt against "words, words, words," was aware that emotion cannot always be adequately expressed in song, that the symbols of feeling do not always imitate the reality:

"The Wye is hush'd, nor moved along,

And hush'd my deepest grief of all,
When, fill'd with tears that cannot fall,
I brim with sorrow drowning song.

"The tide flows down, the wave again
Is vocal in its wooded walls;
My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then."

There are several points to notice here. First,

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there is the favourite device of poets, of discovering a likeness between their own emotional mood and a natural phenomenon. Tennyson sees it in the resemblance between the course of the Wye and the movement of his grief. When the river is silent, and its stream hardly seems to move, the poet's tears cannot flow, and his deepest grief is hushed. But when the banks of the river are narrower, and the current becomes more impetuous, his own anguish is likewise released, and he can find words for his feeling. Next, we may note, for the sake of practice, the frequent use of alliteration in these musical lines. There is not only the sound-reproduction, which is identical in the middle verses of both stanzas (all, fall; walls, falls), and the word-repetition (hush'd hush'd, deepest . . . deeper), but we have also to allow for fill'd . . . fall, sorrow song, wave vocal . . . wooded walls, and for the releasing effect of the free open vowels in tide, flows, wave, vocal, in estimating the skill of the poet's appeal to the ear. But the point particularly to be noticed in our context is Tennyson's confession of the imperfection of words. His deepest grief is silent, and great as In Memoriam is as the expression of a poet's sorrow, it is yet not wholly adequate to the feeling that it utters. For there are thoughts in the human mind "that lie too