Method and Effect.
His style has distinction, elegance, urbanity, precision, an exquisite
clarity. Of its kind it is as nearly as possible perfect. You think of
Horace as you read; and you think of those among our own eighteenth
century poets to whom Horace was an inspiration and an example. The
epithet is usually so just that it seems to have come into being with the
noun it qualifies; the metaphor is mostly so appropriate that it leaves
you in doubt as to whether it suggested the poem or the poem suggested
it; the verb is never in excess of the idea it would convey; the effect
of it all is that 'something has here got itself uttered,' and for good.
Could anything, for instance, be better, or less laboriously said, than
this poet's remonstrance _To an Intrusive Butterfly_? The thing is
instinct with delicate observation, so aptly and closely expressed as to
seem natural and living as the facts observed:
'I watch you through the garden walks,
I watch you _float_ between
The _avenues_ of dahlia stalks,
And _flicker_ on the green;
You _hover_ round the garden seat,
You _mount_, you _waver_. . .
* * * * *
Across the room _in loops of flight_
I watch you wayward go;
* * * * *
Before the bust you flaunt and flit--
* * * * *
You _pause_, you _poise_, you _circle up_
Among my old Japan.'
And all the rest of it. The theme is but the vagaries of a wandering
insect; but how just and true is the literary instinct, how perfect the
literary _savoir-faire_! The words I have italicised are the only words
(it seems) in the language that are proper to the occasion; and yet how
quietly they are produced, with what apparent unconsciousness they are
set to do their work, how just and how sufficient is their effect! In
writing of this sort there is a certain artistic good-breeding whose like
is not common in these days. We have lost the secret of it: we are too
eager to make the most of our little souls in art and too ignorant to do
the best by them; too egoistic and 'individual,' too clever and skilful
and well informed, to be content with the completeness of simplicity.
Even the Laureate was once addicted to glitter for glitter's sake; and
with him to keep them in countenance there is a thousand minor poets
whose 'little life' is merely a giving way to the necessities of what is
after all a condition of intellectual impotence but poorly redeemed by a
habit of artistic swagger. The singer of Dorothy and Beau Brocade is of
another race. He is 'the co-mate and brother in exile' of Matthew Arnold
and the poet of _The Unknown Eros_. Alone among modern English bards
they stand upon that ancient way which is the best: attentive to the
pleadings of the Classic Muse, heedful always to give such thoughts as
they may breed no more than their due expression.