I feel that it is almost impossible for the same ear to seize music so widely differing as Milton’s blank verse and Hugo’s alexandrines, and it seems to me especially strange that critics varying in degree from Matthew Arnold to the obscure paragraphist, never seem even remotely to suspect, when they passionately declare that English blank verse is a more perfect and complete poetic instrument than French alexandrines, that the imperfections which they aver are inherent in the latter exist only in their British ears, impervious to a thousand subtleties.  Mr. Matthew Arnold does not hesitate to say that the regular rhyming of the lines is monotonous.  To my ear every line is different; there is as much variation in Charles V.’s soliloquy as in Hamlet’s; but be this as it may, it is not unworthy of the inmates of Hanwell for critics to inveigh against la, rime pleine, that which is instinctive in the language as accent in ours, that which is the very genius of the language.

But the principle has been exaggerated, deformed, caricatured until some of the most modern verse is little more than a series of puns—­in art as in life the charm lies in the unexpected, and it is annoying to know that the only thought of every poet is to couple les murs with des fruits trop murs, and that no break in the absolute richness of sound is to be hoped for.  Gustave Kahn whose beautiful volume “Les Palais Nomades” I have read with the keenest delight, was the first to recognise that an unfailing use of la rime pleine might become cloying and satiating, and that, by avoiding it sometimes and markedly and maliciously choosing in preference a simple assonance, new and subtle music might be produced.

“Les Palais Nomades” is a really beautiful book, and it is free from all the faults that make an absolute and supreme enjoyment of great poetry an impossibility.  For it is in the first place free from those pests and parasites of artistic work—­ideas.  Of all literary qualities the creation of ideas is the most fugitive.  Think of the fate of an author who puts forward a new idea to-morrow in a book, in a play, in a poem.  The new idea is seized upon, it becomes common property, it is dragged through newspaper articles, magazine articles, through books, it is repeated in clubs, drawing-rooms; it is bandied about the corners of streets; in a week it is wearisome, in a month it is an abomination.  Who has not felt a sickening feeling come over him when he hears such phrases as “To be or not to be, that is the question”?  Shakespeare was really great when he wrote “Music to hear, why hearest thou music sadly?” not when he wrote, “The apparel oft proclaims the man.”  Could he be freed from his ideas what a poet we should have!  Therefore, let those who have taken firsts at Oxford devote their intolerable leisure to preparing an edition from which everything resembling an idea shall be firmly excluded.  We might then shut up our Marlowes and our Beaumonts and resume our reading of the bard, and these witless beings would confer happiness on many, and crown themselves with truly immortal bays.  See the fellows! their fingers catch at scanty wisps of hair, the lamps are burning, the long pens are poised, and idea after idea is hurled out of existence.