Rhythm and Harmony in Poetry and Music

ideal of a poet had been Swinburne, and whose most vehement artistic energy had hitherto expended itself almost entirely upon dainty turns of melody in rondeaus and villanelles. The result merely verified an old wellknown principle. Extremes meet. The apotheosis of form, when the smoke of the incense clears away, reveals, enthroned on high, a Whitman; and not in any of Whitman's works is there even a suggestion of that kind of excellence in form, which once his worshippers supposed to be the only standard of poetic merit.

Precisely the same principle is exemplified in painting, too. When an artist starts out with an idea that the subject of art may be "anything," of course he begins to develop the form for its own sake. He has nothing else to do. But form may mean many different things. With some, it means the imitation of natural outlines or colors. With some, it hardly means imitation at all. It means the development of color according to the laws of harmony. Even where the subject of art is a person, éven in portraiture, there are critics who tell us that the result should not be judged by its likeness to the person depicted. It is not a photograph, forsooth. It is a painting, to be judged by the paint, they say, and mean, apparently, by the color, irrespective of its appearance in the face portrayed. Of course, this supposition will be deemed by some unwarranted. Few would second it, made thus baldly. But we must judge of beliefs by practices; and scarcely an art-exhibition in New York fails to show some portraits on the walls-nor the ones least praised-in which those slight variations of hue which every careful observer recognizes to be essential to the effects of life in the human countenance, are so exaggerated for the sake of mere effects of color, that faces in robust health are

made to look exactly as if breaking out with the measles; or, not infrequently, as if the victim had had the disease, and died of it. Thus in painting as in poetry, and the same fact might be exemplified in all the arts, exclusive attention to form, the conception that art is the application of its laws to "anything "—may lead in the end, and very swiftly too, to the destruction not only of all in art that is inspiring to the soul, but even of that which is pleasing to the senses. A law of art-form is worth nothing except as it is applied to forms that have worth; and that which gives them worth is not by any means synonymous with that which makes them "anything."

Contrast the conception that it is, with that underlying proposition of Lessing in his great criticism upon the Laocoön, namely that "the Greek artist represented nothing that was not beautiful. . . . The perfection of the subject must charm in his work." In this contrast is represented a difference between the American and the Greek ideal of art which may well cause serious reflection. And when we recall not only the literary works of Goethe and Schiller, but the marvellous advances in all the arts that are universally traced to the acceptance in Germany of the principles developed by Lessing, we can surmise just how much the acceptance of like principles might do for our own country, as well as how far we yet are from a position in which we may even begin to entertain a hope that they may ultimately obtain supremacy.

The author is under obligations to Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Charles Scribner's Sons, and others, for their kind permission to insert in this work poems of which they hold the copyrights.

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