tation becomes an art-language. In concentrating on the subject, and in cutting away all but what is absolutely and directly needed for the interpretation, lies the function of art. Whatever is more than this serves only to show the artisan's so-called skill, which in reality is just the opposite of skill. In spite of what art-critics may usually entitle it, it is merely rhetoric, padding, ranting, etc.-not art.

The Egyptian figure El Beled might be taken as an example of interpretation. It might appear mere realism if superficially observed. But the sculptor knew his subject with a sort of god-like knowledge, and he spun from the depth and strength of his knowledge. I would say played with it, but the word play is usually misunderstood; true play is extremely serious. The sculptor of the great Chephron ennobled his subject-idealized it. This was entirely different from our modern way; when we idealize we are more or less deceitful. There is no real attainment of depth. The artist's brain is either too lazy or shallow, or he is content to bank on the observer's shallowness or laziness.

Rhythm as an art-element is above interpretation, just as interpretation is above didacticism or photography. But being human, with immediate human needs, it is hard for us to believe that rhythm is a greater art-need than interpretation, or even than the various forms of photography— didactic detail, etc.

The recent revolution in the other arts which is divesting them of the various forms of the photographic-didactic,

story, pseudo-rhythm-has had its effect also on poetry. Yet owing to certain peculiarities in the nature of poetry, the modern poet, unlike the other artist, has very few models.

Words being so closely associated with immediate human needs, it is always hard for the poet to escape from these to the greater needs of the human spirit. It is true that even the greatest of the ancient works of art were not entirely free from these influences; still, if the Assyrian man-headed lion or bull had a taint of the didactic, the artist succeeded in melting it almost completely in rhythm. The Egyptians, who did not always bother with rhythm as such, have succeeded in giving us the most perfect interpretive art imaginable. One can see that readily in Thoueris, the statuette representing maternity, and more or less readily in most of their best work. In the early Chinese sculpture, we find a pure and tender handling of reality combined with simplification. In the Hindu art the imagination rambles freely. In the American aboriginal art, we find a noble symbolism; and extreme simplification, not only of the human being, but of almost everything in nature. Rhythm is to be found in most of these, and is predominant in Assyrian art, in Hittite art, and, in a simple or complex form, in Chinese and Japanese paintings.

In poetry the art-quality was less present. Greek poetry was effected by outer elements-nationalistic, philosophic, etc.-which are not pure art-elements. This is true of other ancient poetry.

Reluctant as one may be to admit this, the ardent expression of emotion is not art-it is generally a form of photography. It is only when it is interpretive and combined with simplification, or when the imagination, as it were, melts it and forms something grotesque or fantastic, that it becomes the spirit-food called art. It is only in rare cases, when the poet's soul is very gentle and childlike, that the mere expression of personal moods forms art: in Catullus, Villon, and to a lesser degree in Burns, Keats, Heine, the moods reveal to us something surprising and fresh-are interpretive.

The better models for the modern poet are the ancient sculptors or oriental painters, as the art elements in them are purer and more readily discernible. He should learn from them to simplify his subject, or to idealize it in the pure and genuine way they did. He should learn from them what true idealization is, in order to avoid the pseudo, the shallow, the sentimental, the vulgar and the stupid, all often mistaken among us for idealization.

As for the rhythm of words, the words in poetry must be as if born together with the rhythm. But the reader must learn to distinguish between sing-song or rag-time rhythm, and deep, pure rhythm. It can be laid down almost as a rule that a rhythm that carries the reader too strongly is bad. It will be found to be poor through monotony, and through lack of control. One will usually find the same symptoms in the ideas of the poem.

The poet should remember that there is much good and

bad verse, and that humanity can bear waiting till his work is ripe in every sense of the word.

Max Michelson

THE SIXTEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH

There is need in many quarters to-day, as is invariably the case in a war era, for a defense of the avocation of poesy. That which isn't active in the light of the outer eye must be ostracized, says your hot-headed citizen, devoid of that vision of the inner which sees warfare as a material combat brought on by spiritual forces, among which that supreme lover of liberty, the poet, is, as any mere history demonstrates, a generalissimo. For the benefit of the streetcorner or parliamentary soap-box braggart who sneers at the parchment-faced beauty-priest doing his quiet and presumably innocuous work in the dark of privacy, one might stretch forth a list of the poets now dead, wounded or still engaged on the European battleground; or, for his still larger benefit, one might cite the works which these men and countless others before them have contributed-works which, more than any impassioned outburst in legislatures, have kept liberty driving, digging, scrambling and climbing against and conquering its enemies. In modern times one has only to breathe the single name and the multifarious performances, public as well as personal, of Walt Whitman. However, since it is necessary to bring the achievement of the past to substantiate the ideals and theories of the present against opponents who are always skeptical un

The Sixteenth to the Twentieth

less confronted with records, one might with subtler persuasion echo the name of Sir Philip Sidney, through whom the sixteenth century addresses the twentieth.

A month before his thirty-second birthday, Sir Philip, the star of Elizabethan knighthood, godson of Philip the Second of Spain, son of the lord deputy of Ireland, and a diplomat in the service of Queen Bess-soldier first and poet second-was mortally wounded in the battle of Zutphen. Poetry faced the same criticism in his day which it faces to-day, so much so that Sir Philip was forced to write, "It hath so hard a time that the very earth lamenteth it;" and to lift his hand in that glorious attack on his age which he termed The Defense of Poesy. Surely it would not prove amiss for POETRY to repeat the long drum-roll of this single sentence from the oracular utterance of the great patriot of the sixteenth century; surely it must penetrate the ear-drum of the most veritable deaf-and-dumb asylum in military Germany itself:

Since poetry is of all human learnings the most ancient and of most fatherly antiquity, as from whence other learnings have taken their beginnings; since it is so universal that no learned nation doth despise it, nor barbarous nation is without it; since both Roman and Greek gave divine names unto it, the one of "prophesying," the other of "making," and that indeed that name of "making" is fit for him, considering that whereas other arts retain themselves within their subjects and receive, as it were, their being from it, the poet only bringeth his own stuffs, and doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a conceit; since neither his description nor his end containeth any evil, the thing described cannot be evil; since his effects be so good as to teach goodness, and delight the learner of it; since therein-namely in moral doctrine, the chief of all knowledges he doth not only pass the historian, but for instructing is well-nigh comparable to the philosopher, and for