You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia or the natural sweets
Of the spring-violet: they are not yet much wither’d.
With all her reality, Anna Karenina could never say
“You have oft for these two lips
Neglected cassia”.
Some of the most profound of human emotions are therefore beyond her reach. The extremes of passion are not for the novelist; the perfect marriages of sense and sound are not for him; he must tame his swiftness to sluggardry; keep his eyes on the ground, not on the sky: suggest by description, not reveal by illumination. Instead of singing
Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew;
Maidens, willow branches bear;
Say I died true,
he must enumerate the chrysanthemums fading on the grave and the undertakers’ men snuffling past in their four-wheelers. How then can we compare this lumbering and lagging art with poetry? Granted all the little dexterities by which the novelist makes us know the individual and recognise the real, the dramatist goes beyond the single and the separate, shows us not Annabella in love, but love itself; not Anna Karenina throwing herself under the train, but ruin and death and the
. . . soul, like a ship in a black storm,
. . . driven, I know not whither.
So with pardonable impatience we might exclaim as
