But to return to our modern poetry and to the poets whom I have known, and of whom I have something to tell, does it not show the power of tradition if we see them everywhere forcing their feet into the same small slippers of rhyme? And who would deny that they have achieved, and still are achieving, wonderful feats?—_tours de force_, it is true, but so cleverly performed that one hardly sees a trace of the force employed. No doubt much is lost in this process of beating, and hammering, and welding words together (a poet is called a _Reimeschmied_, a smith of rhymes, in German); much has to be thrown away because it will not rhyme at all (_silver_ has been very badly treated in English poetry, because it rhymes with nothing, at present not even with gold), but what remains is often very beautiful, and, as Tennyson said, it sticks to the memory. One wishes one could add that the difficulty of rhyme serves to reduce the number of unnecessary poets that spring up every year. But rhyme does not strangle these numerous children of the Muses, and it is left to our ill-paid critics to perform every day, or every week, this murder of the innocents. It may not seem very filial for the son of a poet thus to blaspheme against poetry, or rather, against rhyme. Well, I can admire rhymed poetry, just as I can admire champagne, though if the wine is really good I think it is a pity to make it mousseux. H. Heine, who certainly was never at a loss for a rhyme, writes, at the end of one of his maddest poems, “Die Liebe”: “O Phœbus Apollo, if these verses are bad, I know thou wilt forgive me, for thou art an all-knowing god, and knowest quite well why for years I could not trouble myself any longer with measuring and rhyming words!” And he adds: “I might, of course, have said all this very well in good prose.” He ought to know, but there will not be many of his admirers to agree with him.[2]