Lanier's theory is a good one in so far as it applies to the ideal rhythm, for the melody of verse does approximate that of music. If one considers actual rhythm, however, he is forced to come to the conclusion that no such mathematical relation exists between the syllables of a foot of verse as that existing between the notes of a musical bar. In poetry another element enters in to interfere with the ideal rhythm of music, and that is what Mr. More has called "the normal unrhythmical enunciation of the language." The result is a compromise shifting toward one extreme or another. Lanier's theory would apply to the earliest folk-songs. He illustrated his point by referring to the negro melodies, which, says Joel Chandler Harris, "depend for their melody and rhythm upon the musical quality of the time, and not upon long or short, accented or unaccented syllables." His citation of Japanese poetry was also a case in point. Unquestionably, the lyrics and choruses of the Greek drama were thoroughly musical; Sophocles and Aeschylus were both teachers of the chorus. Many of the lyrics of the Elizabethan age were written especially for music, and more than one collector of these lyrics has bemoaned the fact that in later times there has been such a divorce between the two arts. Who will say that Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" are not disembodied music? Lamb said that Coleridge repeated the latter poem "so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into any parlor when he says or sings it to me." Mr. Arthur Symons has recently said: "`Christabel' is composed like music; you might set at the side of each section, especially of the opening, `largo vivacissimo', and as the general expressive signature, `tempo rubato'." Tennyson realized the musical effect of "Paradise Lost" when he spoke of Milton as "England's God-gifted organ-voice"; and he himself in such lyrics as those in the "Princess" and the eighty-sixth canto of "In Memoriam" wrought musical effects with verse. Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton says of Poe's "Ulalume" that, if properly intoned, "it would produce something like the same effect upon a listener knowing no word of English that it produces upon us." It needs to be said, in parenthesis, that in all these cases, while there is the musical effect from the standpoint of time and tone-color, there is still the perfection of speech. The theory will not hold, however, in much dramatic verse, or in meditative blank verse, as used by Wordsworth. Much of the poetry of Byron, Browning, Keats, and Shakespeare, while supremely great from the standpoint of color, or dramatic power, or picturesqueness, or thought, is not musical. To bring some poems within the limit of musical notation would be impossible.

While then one must modify Lanier's theory, the book emphasizes a point that needs constantly to be emphasized, both by poets and by students of poetry. Followed too closely by minor poets, it will tend to develop artisans rather than artists. Followed by the greater poets, -- consciously or unconsciously, -- it may prove to be one of the surest signs of poetry. This phase of poetical work needed to be emphasized in America, where poetry, with the exception of Poe's, has been deficient in this very element. Whatever else one may say of Emerson, Bryant, Whittier, or Longfellow, he must find that their poetry as a whole is singularly lacking in melody. Moreover, the poet who was the most dominant figure in American literature at the time when Lanier was writing, prided himself on violating every law of form, using rhythm, if at all, in a certain elementary or oriental sense. "I tried to read a beautifully printed and scholarly volume on the theory of poetry received by mail this morning from England," said Whitman, "but gave it up at last as a bad job." One may be thoroughly just to Whitman and grant the worth of his work in American literature, and yet see the value of Lanier's contention that the study of the formal element in poetry will lead to a much finer poetry than we have yet had in this country. Other books will supplant the "Science of English Verse" as text-books, and few may ever read it understandingly; but the author's name will always be thought of in any discussion of the relations of music and poetry. It is not only a scientific monograph, but a philosophical treatise on a subject that will be discussed with increasing interest.

While Lanier thus stated his conception of the formal element in poetry, he has, in many other places, given his ideas of the poet's character and his work in the world. If on the one hand he criticised Whitman for lack of form, on the other he blamed Swinburne for lack of substance. Seemingly a follower of Poe, he yet would have incurred the displeasure of that poet for adopting the "heresy of the didactic". He had an exalted sense of what poetry means in the redemption of mankind. He had little patience with the cry, "Art for art's sake," or with the justification so often made for the immorality of the artist's life. Milton himself did not believe more ardently that a poet's life ought to be a true poem. In the poems "Individuality", "Clover", "Life and Song", and the "Psalm of the West", Lanier expresses his view of the responsibility of the artist. In the first he says: --

    Awful is Art because 't is free;
    The artist trembles o'er his plan
    Where men his Self must see.

In the "English Novel" he says: "For, indeed, we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who is therefore not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty; that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light within him, he is not yet the great artist."

Lanier believed that he was, or would be, a great poet. While for a time he considered music as his special field of work and "poetry as a mere tangent," after 1875 his aspiration took the direction of poetry. Criticism of his work only strengthened his conviction that it was of a high order. Letters to his father and to his wife indicate his positive conviction that he was meeting with the misunderstanding that every great artist has met since the world began: "Let my name perish, -- the poetry is good poetry and the music is good music, and beauty dieth not, and the heart that needs it will find it." "I KNOW, through the fiercest tests of life, that I am in soul, and shall be in life and utterance, a great poet," he said again.

Accordingly he hoped that he would accomplish something different from the popular poetry of the period. Time and again he spoke of "the feeble magazine lyrics" of his time. "This is the kind of poetry that is technically called culture poetry, yet it is in reality the product of a WANT of culture. If these gentlemen and ladies would read the old English poetry . . . they could never be content to put forth these little diffuse prettinesses and dandy kickshaws of verse." And again: "In looking around at the publications of the younger American poets, I am struck with the circumstance that none of them even ATTEMPT anything great. . . . Hence the endless multiplications of those little feeble magazine lyrics which we all know: consisting of one minute idea each, which is put in the last line of the fourth verse, the other three verses and three lines being mere surplusage." His characterizations of contemporary poetry are strikingly like those of Walt Whitman. Different as they were in nearly every respect, the two poets were yet alike in their idea that there should be a reaction against the conventional and artificial poetry of their time, -- the difference being, that Whitman's reaction took the direction of formlessness, while Lanier's was concerned about the extension and revival of poetic forms. In both poets there is a range and sweep, both of conception and of utterance, that sharply differentiates them from all other poets since the Civil War.