Life and Literature, life and the perfect expression of life. The
principles of the former, as laid down by the Greeks, we may not realise
in an age so marred by false ideals as our own. The principles of the
latter, as they laid them down, are, in many cases, so subtle that we can
hardly understand them. Recognising that the most perfect art is that
which most fully mirrors man in all his infinite variety, they elaborated
the criticism of language, considered in the light of the mere material
of that art, to a point to which we, with our accentual system of
reasonable or emotional emphasis, can barely if at all attain; studying,
for instance, the metrical movements of a prose as scientifically as a
modern musician studies harmony and counterpoint, and, I need hardly say,
with much keener aesthetic instinct. In this they were right, as they
were right in all things. Since the introduction of printing, and the
fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower
classes of this country, there has been a tendency in literature to
appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear which is
really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should seek
to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always. Even
the work of Mr. Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of
English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of
mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the
true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect
that such rhythmical life produces. We, in fact, have made writing a
definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a form of elaborate
design. The Greeks, upon the other hand, regarded writing simply as a
method of chronicling. Their test was always the spoken word in its
musical and metrical relations. The voice was the medium, and the ear
the critic. I have sometimes thought that the story of Homer's blindness
might be really an artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving
to remind us, not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing
less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul,
but that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music,
repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has caught the
secret of its melody, chaunting in darkness the words that are winged
with light. Certainly, whether this be so or not, it was to his
blindness, as an occasion, if not as a cause, that England's great poet
owed much of the majestic movement and sonorous splendour of his later
verse. When Milton could no longer write he began to sing.--_The Critic
as Artist_.