represent the writer's views: a sentence taken from a drama may well mean the opposite of the dramatist's real opinion. Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe. These words are found in Shakespeare: no one would dream of supposing they represented Shakespeare's own view of conscience, for he has put the lines into the mouth of the greatest villain in all literature. If the reply be made that so broad a distinction as that between drama and other literature would not often be overlooked, I would remind the reader of the instances enumerated in the preceding chapter of interpretations depending upon variations of parallel structure. A later chapter will show how upon a fine technical distinction between a drama and a lyric idyl rests a difference of interpretation for Solomon's Song which offers as alternatives two stories underlying the poem, totally different in facts and in moral complexion. It is no exaggeration to say that form is the foremost factor in the interpretation of matter. The Higher The preceding chapters have dealt with the simplest and most elementary of all literary forms, the distinction of prose and verse. I now pass to the Higher Forms: such distinctions as are expressed by the terms Epic, Lyric, Rhetoric, and the like. The present chapter will endeavour briefly to arrive at the fundamental conceptions underlying these terms in universal literature The next chapter will deal with the application of the terms to the literature of the Bible. The four Cardinal ture Let the reader firmly fix four ideas in his mind, as what may be called the four Cardinal Points of Literature. Two of these are given by the antithesis Descrip- Points of Literation and Presentation. When an incident is described to us, the incident itself belongs to the past, the words describing it are throughout the words of the author. When it is presented, the author himself nowhere appears, but he leaves us to hear the words of those personages who actually took part in the incident, perhaps to see their doings; we become spectators, and the circumstances Description and make themselves present before us. Homer and Milton give us literature of description; for presentation the most complete illustration is Shakespeare, in whose pages all varieties of mankind are speaking and moving, but the poet himself is never heard. The other two ideas are conveyed by the words Poetry and Prose. It is impossible to use other terms; and yet about these there is an unfortunate ambiguity, owing to the exiPoetry and Prose gences of language which have imposed a double duty on the word 'prose': it is antithetic to 'poetry' and it is also antithetic to 'verse.' No doubt there is a good deal in common between these two usages of the word: Poetry is mostly conveyed in verse, and Prose literature in the style called prose. But the terms must be used with a cautious recollection that Poetry is sometimes cast in the form of prose — notably, we shall see, in the Bible; while in the earlier stages of literary history verse has often been utilised for works of science and philosophy which would later have been thrown into a prose form. The conception we are at present seeking will be best grasped if we translate the Greek word 'poetry' into its Latin equivalent, 'creative literature'; it assists also to remember the old English usage by which a poet was called a 'maker.' The idea underlying these words is that the poet makes something, creates, adds to the sum of existences; whereas the antithetic literature of Prose has only to discuss what already exists. When Homer has sung and Euripides exhibited plays the world is richer by an Achilles and an Alcestis. It makes no difference whether, as an historic fact, the Greek warrior and the Queen of Pheræ ever existed, or whether they are pure figments of the imagination, or whether they existed but behaved quite differently from what the poem and the play suggest to our poetic sense the Homeric Achilles and the Euripidean Alcestis are as real as the Cæsar of history. On the contrary, the literature of Prose moves only in the region limited by facts; history and philosophy have to deal only with what actually has existence, accurately describing things, or bringing out the relations between one thing and another. Primitive liter Ballad Dance These four ideas, Description and Presentation, Poetry and Prose, I have called the four Cardinal Points of Literature: they are to be regarded, not as divisions or classes into which literary works may be divided, but as so ary form: the many different directions in which literary activity may move. But to understand this movement a fifth conception must be added as a starting-point for such activity. The startingpoint of literature is found in what is technically called the Ballad Dance. The study of Comparative Literature reveals that wherever literature arises spontaneously its earliest form is a combination of verse, music, and imitative gesture. Whether it be a story, or an uplifting of the heart in worship, or a burst of popular frolic, the expression of these will be in rhythmic words, which are chanted to a tune with or without instrumental accompaniment, and further emphasised by expressive gestures of the whole body such as have come to be denominated 'dancing.' Hebrew literature was no exception. Of course, the actual contents of our Bibles are far removed from such primitive productions. But some portions of Sacred Scripture are early enough not to have lost the triple form with which poetry started. Thus we are expressly informed that the Song of Moses and Miriam was accompanied with timbrel music and dances; even when the bringing of the Ark to Jerusalem II. Sam. vi. 5, called forth such lofty strains of poetry we have a 14-16 Exodus xv. 20 full description of the orchestra with which that poetry was accompanied, and we know how David himself "danced with all his might" in its performance. If then the reader keeps in his mind this starting-point of literature in the Ballad Dance, and also the four directions in which its impulses are likely to carry it, he will be able Fundamental to lay down as in a chart the great forms which Forms for Literliterature assumes as it develops. On the side of ature in general Poetry three great types of literature arise, which on examination are found to reflect the three elements-verse, music, dancingcombined by primitive poetry in one. Epic is a branch thrown |