"THE HYBRID ART."

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1271, 28 October 1911, Page 9

"THE HYBRID ART."

One of the things which make tho article on "The Hybrid Art" in the current "Nineteenth C'eniury" interesting is that it reveals the author of "Thysia" to have been Mr Morton Luce. "Thysia," it will be remembered, was a volume of sonnets distinguished by an exquisitely tender elegiac note which was published anonymously a few years ago. It at once appealed to a large public, and it was trumpeted into an even wider popularity by an encomiastic article by Mr. Harrison in ono of tho reviews. This time Mr. Luce condescends upon prose, and criticisms at that. He had been reading Mr. Hewlett's "Agonists," and pronounces tho verse to be neither poetry nor prose. It is not poetry because, although rhythmical, its rhythms are not controlled "by metrical feet, yet it has pretensions to be more than prose because it is printed in verse form. It is thus a hybrid, and Mr. Luce fears that "the distinction between verso and prose, M well maintained throughout all ths centuries of good literature, is now in some danger of being questioned and discredited, perhaps even of being obliterated." It is, it will be wen, an old battle to which Mr. Luce with his contention that poetry must be metrical blows the horn. The question as to the distinguishing priucirjlo between prose and .verse, and, indeed", whether there is any such principle, is a favourite subject of students of poetics, and has often been debated. It was 'debated in France not many vcars ago by the survivors of tho Parnassian school en the one hand and the champions of the "vers librc" cu tho after, and one who wishes to seo how kearly.jin spito of tho difference between French and English prosody, the discussion at Limes approximated to tnat between Mr. Luce and Mr. Hewlett, may turn to certain of the papers included in Sully Prudhonime's "Testament Poetiqne." No doubt if Mr. Hewlett cared to enter tho ring with Mr. Luce he could threw out a pretty pair of lists for himself. Mo could argue that poetry is not to be subjected to a metrical or any other test, but oulv to taste and instinct, and thai if Mr. Luce not his verse, why, then, belike, ho likes it rot, pcrdy. Nevertheless, many will iind themselves in agreement with Mr. Luce •■•> the extent, at least, of confessing that poetry of Mr. Hewlett's sort does not appeal to them. Such readers, indeed, find themselves somewhat puzzled by contemporary verse. They have boon suckled on the •\malthean "milk of Tennyson, Rossetti, and the earlier work of Swinburne, and know they are not without a. certain measure of poetic discernment, but when thev turn to the vcise of to-day they find the" held occupied by two schools, with neither of which they are in full sympatic. There are the traditionalists, who are iiot sufficiently original. They work upon their predecessors' methods, but, unlike Laertes, it is not "full of most excellent differences." Then there are the innovators, who are original enough in all conscience, hut their work disconcerts tho average reader. Ho finds it sometimes turgid, sometimes untunable, and if obscure, obscure not from fullness but from exiguity of content. Whatever beauty they do discern in it is only by glimpses, and is of the tenuous and evanescent sort of the iridiscent ray that runs along a single thread of gossamer. Of tho two schools, however, it is the innovators who are the moro interesting. They claim to have found a new thing, and they have a following who say they are right.—"Manchester Guardian."