pushed too far. Yet it is useful in explaining
the differences among men as they regard, now
the external form of verse, and now its inner
spirit, and as they ask themselves how these
two elements are related. Professor Butcher,
in his Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, ¹
describes the natural tendencies of two sorts
of men, who are quite as persistent to-day as
ever they were in Greece in looking at one
side only of the question:

"We need not agree with a certain modern
school who would empty all poetry of poetical
thought and etherealize it till it melts into a
strain of music; who sing to us we hardly know
of what, but in such a way that the echoes of the
real world, its men and women, its actual stir and
conflict, are faint and hardly to be discerned. The
poetry, we are told, resides not in the ideas con-
veyed, not in the blending of soul and sense, but
in the sound itself, in the cadence of the verse.
Yet, false as this view may be, it is not perhaps
more false than that other which wholly ignores
the effect of musical sound and looks only to the
thought that is conveyed. Aristotle comes peril-
ously near this doctrine."

But it is not Aristotle only who permits
himself at times to undervalue the formal
element in verse. It is also Sir Philip Sidney,

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