Selected Poems (Engelse vertaling)

INTRODUCTION xxiii

supremely inimitable, as one who "broke into
the treasure-house of song", and who, going
out again, "shut the gate behind him". His
love-songs, his prayers, his epistles are all alike
"drawn from the Holy Spirit". Some six
centuries later, when Herder—a philosopher-poet
like Jehudah Halevi himself—composed his epoch-
making treatise on the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry,
his model (so he himself recorded) in great
passages of dialogue was "not Plato but Jehudah
Halevi." And Heine has immortalised his own
appreciation of our poet in several famous
stanzas of his Romanzero.

Hence we ought not to assent without res-
ervation to a judgment passed by Joseph Jacobs
in his brilliant essay on Jehudah Halevi. He
there draws an interesting and just distinction
between poetic form and poetic force. Brown-
ing, he points out, had great poetic force, but
little poetic form; Swinburne, a master of form,
lacked force. As applied to Yannai and Kalir
and others of that earlier school, this distinction
is perhaps relevant. But it is not profitable
to say of them, still less of Jehudah Halevi, that
"they worked in a medium that did not admit
of great poetic form". If defect there were, it
was in the mediary not in the medium; in the
hand, not in the instrument. In Kalir—to cite