There is nothing, it may be said, about these achievements to indicate the poet. How can this most public of publicists woo the shy and exacting Muse? His superabundant energy may now and again overflow in little lyrical rivulets, but how can he find time to turn it into the deep channels of song?
Well, what is the difference between a poet who writes prose and a prose-writer who writes verse? The difference is easy to see but hard to describe. Mr. Thomas Hardy is a prose writer. He has forsaken the novel, of which he was so distinguished a master, to make cynical little sonnet portraits and to pour the acid wine of his philosophy--a sort of perverted Presbyterianism--into the graceful amphora of poetic drama. But he is not a poet. Thackeray was a prose-writer, in spite of his delicious light verse. Every novelist writes or has written verse, but not all of them are poets.
Of course, Sir Walter Scott was first of all a poet--the greatest poet who ever wrote a novel. And no one who has read _Love in the Valley_ can hesitate to give Meredith his proper title. Was Macaulay a poet? I think so--but perhaps I am in a hopeless minority in my belief that the author of _The Battle of Naseby_ and _The Lays of Ancient Rome_ was the last of the great English ballad makers.
But this general truth cannot, I think, honestly be denied; there have been many great poets who have devoted most of their lives to writing prose. Some of them have died without discovering their neglected talent. I think that Walter Pater was one of these; much that is annoyingly subtle or annoyingly elaborate in his essays needs only rhyme and rhythm--the lovely accidents of poetry--to become graceful and appropriate. His famous description of the Mona Lisa is worthless if considered as a piece of serious æsthetic criticism. But it would make an admirable sonnet. And it is significant that Walter Pater’s two greatest pupils--Lionel Johnson and Father Gerard Hopkins, S.J.,--found expression for their genius not in prose, the chosen medium of their “unforgetably most gracious friend,” but in verse.
From Walter Pater, that exquisite of letters, to the robust Hilaire Belloc may seem a long journey. But there is, I insist, this similarity between these contrasting writers, both are poets, and both are known to fame by their prose.