PART FIRST.

THE KINDS OF POESY.

CHAPTER I.

GENERAL.

In a letter to Sir William Davenant, Hobbes makes the remark, that as philosophers have divided the universe into three regions, celestial, aerial and terrestrial, so poets have divided the world into three correspondent regions, court, city and country,-whence have proceeded three kinds of poesy, heroic, scommatic, and pastoral. This division will be better understood, if it is remembered that, about the same time, he published in his Leviathan a table of the sciences, amongst which he reckons poesy—the Gaya Sciencia of the Spaniards, and, by his account, the science "of magnifying, vilifying, &c." The above division therefore will stand thus: heroic or magnifying poesy, pastoral or contented

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poesy, and scommatic or vilifying poesy; like an insect, divided into three parts, with a sting in the tail. Like an insect also, he gives poesy six legs to go upon, a narrative and a dramatic leg for each division; so that magnifying poesy has the Epos and Tragedy, contented poesy has the Bucolic and the Pastoral Drama, while vilifying poesy has the Satire and the Comedy. Paulo majora canamus.

Of poesy there are at bottom three kinds, Dramatic, Narrative and Lyrical; Play, Tale and Song. Seldom indeed shall we meet with specimens of any one kind that are quite pure. One is ever mingling with another; whence for instance comes the ballad, a cross between tale and song; whence too the pastoral, in which all three combine. Even the purest Epic will very often take a dramatic form; the speeches being delivered not in a narrative style, that is, obliquely (He said that he did it), but directly as in the drama, (He said, I did it). Yet the division is very manifest. It is not so manifest, however, although equally true, that these three kinds go to form a trinity, the second begotten of the first, and the third flowing from both. For the Epic poet and we his readers or his hearers stand in the very relation of dramatis personæ, his narrative being a long and the only remaining speech of a play that is otherwise lost; while again the Lyrical bard is an epic of a particular cast-one who sings the Epos of his own soul.

Now this objective trio tallies point by point with the subjective trinity unfolded in the Second Book of this treatise, the triune law of poetic feeling. The three kinds of poesy pair with the three laws of poetry, Dramatic with the law of imagination, Epic with that of harmony, and Lyrical with that of unconsciousness. This will be self-evident as we go along, and more especially when we shall have grasped the innermost meanings of the different kinds of poesy. Partly, however, it may be seen at once. You can at once understand how the drama, the essence of which is action, should be affianced to the law of activity; how the epic, taking the fleshly form of history, and therefore, with history, being the embodiment of experience, should, so long as experience is possible only through the correlation of subject and object, in plain English, through the affinity of what is in the mind for what is out of the mind, be connected with the law of harmony; and lastly, how, like water from the rock, the outpourings of the lyric should spring from the law of unconsciousness. Personality or selfhood triumphs in the drama; the divine and all that is not Me triumphs in the lyric; while, lying betwixt both, the epic is the complete harmony of self with unself. The first delights in the imagination of variety ; the last depicts the struggle of one mind after the absolute One; to the middle belongs variety in unity, variety of life and character conforming with the narrator's individuality. Such being the principles that underlie

the orders of poesy, it needs not to show that they accord with the three laws of poetry. It may seem strange at first sight that the lyric, wherein the poet's individuality is most apparent, should be the offspring of the law of unconsciousness; and that the drama, wherein it is least evident, should come of that law which is the most conscious. A second thought will convince the reader that we are most ourselves when we forget ourselves, and that in becoming self-conscious we become what we are not. What Sophocles said of Æschylus, that he always did the right thing, but without knowing it, affords a glimpse into his own frame of mind as well as into that of his rival: the most truly dramatic of the Greek tragedians betrayed his own self-consciousness in drawing attention to the unconsciousness of the most highly lyrical.

I.

II.

III.

Law of Imagination; Law of Harmony; Law of Unconsciousness. Dramatic Poesy;

Epic;

Lyrical.

These trinities, objective and subjective, are paralleled by another, which has an outer and an inner meaning, as referring both to the history and to the spirit of poesy. Let us first view it in the outward or historic aspect.

Every one must be more or less acquainted with that distinction between romantic and classical poesy drawn at the close of last century by the German school of critics, and since then adopted on all hands. It was

in truth the old comparison between the ancients and the moderns pursued on deeper grounds; Perrault and Lamothe, Racine and Boileau raised from the dead and ghostly in their talk; a French distinction done into German; history turned philosophy. The distinction has been carried into every branch of art, but chiefly has been applied to the drama, and there employed in settling the rival claims of the French and Italian theatres on the one side, of the English and Spanish on the other. The dramas of the one are said to be written in a classical, those of the other in a romantic vein; and as the French critics had trumpeted the praise of the former, the German critics entered the lists as challengers of these pretensions, and as champions of the latter. Successful as they were in thus battling for the right, it was not all victory with the champions. The issue at stake lay not entirely between the classical and the romantic dramas; it lay, or was understood to lie, between the whole of classical art and the whole of romantic art; and these issues, the lesser and the greater, seemed to be so interwoven, that whichever school of art won the dramatic prize, to that school belonged the prize in every other department. If the drama of classical must yield to that of romantic mould, why, for the same reason, should not every art of classical cast rank below every art of romantic? These issues were never fairly disentangled; nor could they be unravelled so long as no distinct ideas were attached