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are necessary parts—should catch, in short, that inevitableness of structure upon which we have already touched. In order to justify a poet in writing a poem in three different kinds of movement, governed by no musical and no terpsichorean necessity, a necessity of another kind should make itself apparent; that is, the metrical wave moving in the strophe should be metrically answered by the counter-wave moving in the antistrophe, while the epode—which, as originally conceived by Stesichorus, was merely a standing still after the balanced movements of the strophe and antistrophe—should clearly, in a language like ours, be a blended echo of these two. A mere metrical contrast such as some poets labour to effect is not a metrical answer. And if the reply to this criticism be that in Pindar himself no such metrical scheme is apparent, that is the strongest possible argument in support of our position. If indeed the metrical scheme of Pindar is not apparent, that is because, having been written for chanting, it was subordinate to the lost musical scheme of the musician. It has been contended, and is likely enough, that this musical scheme was simple—as simple, perhaps, as the scheme of a cathedral chant; but to it, whatever it was, the metrical scheme of the poet was subordinated. It need scarcely be said that the phrase “metrical scheme” is used here not in the narrow sense as indicating the position and movement of strophe and antistrophe by way of simple contrast, but in the deep metrical sense as indicating the value of each of these component parts of the ode, as a counter-wave balancing and explaining the other waves in the harmony of the entire composition. We touch upon this matter in order to show that the moment odes ceased to be chanted, the words strophe, antistrophe, and epode lost the musical value they had among the Greeks, and pretended to a complex metrical value which their actual metrical structure does not appear to justify. It does not follow from this that odes should not be so arranged, but it does follow that the poet’s arrangement should justify itself by disclosing an entire metrical scheme in place of the musical scheme to which the Greek choral lyric was evidently subordinated. But even if the poet were a sufficiently skilled metricist to compass a scheme embracing a wave, an answering wave, and an echo gathering up the tones of each, i.e. the strophe, the antistrophe and the epode, the ear of the reader, unaided by the musical emphasis which supported the rhythms of the old choral lyric, is, it should seem, incapable of gathering up and remembering the sounds further than the strophe and the antistrophe, after which it demands not an epode but a return to the strophe. That is to say, an epode, as alternating in the body of the modern ode, is a mistake; a single epode at the end of a group of strophes and antistrophes (as in some of the Greek odes) has, of course, a different function altogether.

The great difficulty of the English ode is that of preventing the apparent spontaneity of the impulse from being marred by the apparent artifice of the form; for, assuredly, no writer subsequent to Coleridge and to Keats would dream of writing an ode on the cold Horatian principles adopted by Warton, and even by Collins, in his beautiful “Ode to Evening.”

Of the second kind of regular odes, those consisting of a regular succession of regular stanzas, the so-called odes of Sappho are, of course, so transcendent that no other amatory lyrics can be compared with them. Never before these songs were sung and never since did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers; and from the executive point of view, in directness, in lucidity, in that high imperious verbal economy which only nature herself can teach the artist, she has no equal, and none worthy to take the place of second—not even in Heine, nor even in Burns. Turning, however, to modern poetry, there are some magnificent examples of this simple form of ode in English poetry—Spenser’s immortal “Epithalamion” leading the way in point of time, and probably also in point of excellence.

Fervour being absolutely essential, we think, to a great English ode, fluidity of metrical movement can never be dispensed with. The more billowy the metrical waves the better suited are they to render the emotions expressed by the ode, as the reader will see by referring to Coleridge’s “Ode to France” (the finest ode in the English language, according to Shelley), and giving special attention to the first stanza—to the way in which the first metrical wave, after it had gently fallen at the end of the first quatrain, leaps up again on the double rhymes (which are expressly introduced for this effect), and goes bounding on, billow after billow, to the end of the stanza. Not that this fine ode is quite free from the great vice of the English ode, rhetoric. If we except Spenser and, in one instance, Collins, it can hardly be said that any English writer before Shelley and Keats produced odes independent of rhetoric and supported by pure poetry alone. But fervid as are Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and Keats’s odes “To a Nightingale” and “On a Grecian Urn,” they are entirely free from rhetorical flavour. Notwithstanding that in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” the first stanza does not match in rhyme arrangement with the others, while the second stanza of the “Ode to a Nightingale” varies from the rest by running on four rhyme-sounds instead of five, vexing the ear at first by disappointed expectation, these two odes are, after Coleridge’s “France,” the finest regular odes perhaps in the English language.

With regard to the French ode, Malherbe was the first writer who brought it to perfection. Malherbe showed also more variety of mood than it is the fashion just now to credit him with. This may be especially noted in his “Ode to Louis XIII.” His disciple Racan is not of much account. There is certainly much vigour in the odes of Rousseau, but it is not till we reach Victor Hugo that we realize what French poetry can achieve in this line; and contemporary poetry can hardly be examined here. We may say, however, that some of Hugo’s odes are truly magnificent. As a pure lyrist his place among the greatest poets of the world is very high. Here, though writing in an inferior language, he ranks with the greatest masters of Greece, of England, and of Germany. Had he attempted no other kind of poetry than lyrical, his would still have been the first name in French poetry. Whatever is defective in his work arises, as in the case of Euripides, from the importation of lyrical force where dramatic force is mainly needed.