Cfje ^oetr^ of Htft 
 
i 
 
 63 
 
 B 
 The Works of 
 
 BLISS CARMAN 
 
 The Kinship of Nature • • • • $ J.50 
 The Friendship of Art • • • . X.50 
 The Poetry of Life U50 
 
 Poetrp 
 
 Ode on the Coronation of King Edward «^^ J.OO 
 
 Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics 
 
 Limited Edition (500 copies) . . ne( 6.00 
 
 Large Paper Edition (200 copies) . net JO. 00 
 
 Autograph Edition (50 copies) . net 15,00 
 
 PIPES OF PAN SERIES as foUows: 
 
 L From the Book of Myths . . «^/ J 00 
 
 2. From the Green Book of the Bards net J.OO 
 
 3. Songs of the Sea Children . . nei UOO 
 
 4. Songs from a Northern Garden ♦ net J. 00 
 
 5. From the Book of Valentines . net J. 00 
 Poems: A sumptuous collected edition of all 
 
 of the author's verse complete with the excep- 
 tion of Sappho. Limited to 300 copies. Two 
 volumes, small folio, printed throughout in 
 red and black on hand-made paper . net *J0 00 
 *0n January 1st, 1906, this price will be advanced to > 15. 00 
 
 L. C. PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 New England Building, Boston, Mass* 
 
^ 
 ^ 
 
 /XCc^y^^^/^i^^y'^<'<^:zc^ 
 
 m 
 
/36 
 

 I THE LIBRARY Oh , 
 •: Two 0«Dies i-s^CalveJl 
 
 I NOV I (905 ( 
 
 Copyright, igos 
 By L. C. Page & Company 
 
 (incorporated) 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Published October, 1905 
 
 COLONIAL PRESS 
 
 Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds &* Co. 
 
 Boston, U.S. A. 
 
To My Sponsors in California 
 
 y. O'B, GunUy of San Francis co^ 
 
 and 
 W, Irving Way, of Los Angeles 
 
 Will you not accept this volume, my good 
 friends, in ever grateful remembrance of 
 our happy days under your Californian sky? 
 
 I recall now, with the continent between 
 us, how gladly I met you on that morning of 
 my arrival, as I strayed through the hall of 
 the St. Francis, feeling like a mouse in a 
 new loft, and how quickly I was made to feel 
 at home. Of all the great-hearted hospital- 
 ity of the Coast which had me in its generous 
 keeping at San Francisco, at San Jose, at 
 Monterey and Santa Barbara, at Pasadena 
 and Los Angeles and Santa Monica, I can 
 
 vii 
 
never adequately speak. If this were a mag- 
 num opus, and there were enough of it to 
 divide, I should have to put a score of names 
 on my dedicatory page in order to indicate 
 anything like my full indebtedness. As it 
 is, perhaps those who do not find themselves 
 spoken of by name, will be indulgent enough 
 to receive this more tacit acknowledgment 
 of their kindly favour and friendship, on the 
 trail and in the town. 
 
 You were always, if I may say it, so con- 
 stant and painstaking in all the finest ofBces 
 of comradeship, so ready and solicitous, that 
 I verily believe if I should find myself sud- 
 denly at the Great Portal, and my references 
 required, I should instinctively answer, " I 
 am a friend of Mr. Gunn's " — or Mr. 
 Way's, whichever name happened to slip 
 from my tongue at that embarrassing mo- 
 ment. If I were so unfortunate as to have 
 outlived either of you, and to come after you 
 to the shining Doubtful Entrance, I should 
 have no anxiety at all about my reception; 
 
 viii 
 
for I would know that you had already se- 
 cured me not only an admission, but prob- 
 ably an introduction to the Management, and 
 an invitation to supper with a few of the 
 choice Stars. 
 
 The book to be dedicated to you ought 
 really to deal with the Art of Friendship; 
 but since I am not likely ever to write such 
 a work, let me have the genuine pleasure 
 of offering you the first that comes to hand 
 since we parted. Indeed, if ever the Art 
 of Friendship should be written, — some 
 golden book on that high theme worthy to 
 stand beside Cicero and Emerson, — it 
 would be a stalk without pith for me, unless 
 its pages were redolent of your names and 
 some memorable tribute to your fine instinct 
 in the art. 
 
 Now that I have finished the writing and 
 am beginning the final revision as it goes to 
 press, I have, as one always must have in 
 such cases, quarter-hours, half-hours, whole 
 hours and days of misgiving (or illumina- 
 
 ix 
 
tion), when I sit aghast at the meagre result, 
 in view of all that one knows might have 
 been done. If I am to go through the ordeal 
 of proof-reading with my sanity intact, and 
 not qualify for the funny-house through fits 
 of melancholy, I shall have to keep your 
 kindly faith constantly in mind. I shall have 
 to think to myself that while you are deli- 
 cate and exacting critics, you are also the 
 most indulgent of friends, and will be sure 
 to find some value in the pages, even if you 
 have to look for it between the lines. I shall 
 be more than conscious of all the short- 
 comings which must be evident in such a 
 collection of essays on poetry as this, when 
 compared with other books on the same sub- 
 ject, by men whose names I hesitate even to 
 recall. But you, I know, will make no such 
 comparison. Your generosity will overcome 
 your scholarship, and, with all your knowl- 
 edge of good books, and your love of the 
 best in letters, you will still be unable to find 
 fault when you read herein. I can see you 
 
 X 
 
2ro Ms Sponuovn 
 
 turn from page to page and smile with only 
 the kindliest appreciation; or when some 
 sentence or paragraph is farther from the 
 truth than the rest, I can hear you offer your 
 suggestions in the gentlest words. 
 
 You may not be critics of the sort that is 
 best for one, very likely, but you are of the 
 sort that one likes best. And if I could al- 
 ways feel as I shall feel while revising this 
 undeniable offspring, I should never need 
 any severer criticism than yours, for I should 
 never again attempt to write. 
 
 I should never again be venturing forth 
 from the safe old beaches of silence upon the 
 splendid perilous alluring sea of English 
 prose, where even to-day I can behold so 
 many hardy young captains sailing without 
 disaster their fairy shallops in the sun. They 
 have all voyaged successfully to the Fortu- 
 nate Islands, and are bringing their untold 
 treasures safely into port, while we stand 
 offering our timorous applause. Yet such 
 is the infatuation of mortals, I dare say I 
 
 xi 
 
a:o JUS Stioni^ori^ 
 
 shall be launching a new skiff through the 
 surf of criticism every year while life lasts, 
 only to have it dashed in pieces about my 
 feet, or to see it dance a few yards from land 
 to sink beneath the waves. For, like the 
 dauntless discoverers of old, I shall always be 
 cheered by the unconquerable hope that one 
 day perhaps I may construct a craft, all my 
 own, yet not unseaworthy nor unshapely, 
 which shall be fit to ride the breakers trium- 
 phantly, and skim the deep blue waters in a 
 breeze of popularity at last. 
 
 However, the book is done now with all 
 its blemishes, and must stand for awhile, — 
 unless, indeed, as I give it this final reading, 
 I could drop it sheet by sheet into the canon 
 (as you would call our Kaaterskill Clove), 
 there to be blown away with vanishing 
 mists. That is but a mad hope I shall have 
 to relinquish. Let me quiet my agitation with 
 the thought that, while I shall have no reader 
 more difficult than myself, I shall have two, 
 at least, more certain to be pleased. 
 
 xii 
 
Take the book, then, if you will, and read 
 it not with the keenest glasses in the world. 
 If it fails in temper or in grasp, and is 
 swept into overstatement by some heat of 
 conviction, or falls into banalities for lack 
 of wisdom, read it only the more leniently 
 and forgive it all its trespasses. With what- 
 ever failings, it shall not be superfluous. I 
 will save it from that final annihilation, at 
 least. For if it is of no account as criticism, 
 very well, let it serve for something far 
 better, — an excuse for this dedication. 
 That will be a sufficient justification for its 
 appearance, — that it should become a votive 
 offering in the Temple of Friendship and a 
 token of affection between men. 
 
 B. C. 
 
 Twilight Park, September , ipOS* 
 
 xni 
 
Contents 
 
 -^ 
 
 
 
 
 fAGB 
 
 The Poetry of Life i 
 
 The Purpose of Poetry 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 15 
 
 How to Judge Poetry 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 52 
 
 The Poet in the Commonwealth 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 63 
 
 The Poet in Modern Life . 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 78 
 
 The Defence of Poetry 
 
 
 
 
 
 . 105 
 
 Distaste for Poetry . 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 1 1 
 
 Longfellow 
 
 
 
 
 
 127 
 
 Emerson 
 
 
 
 
 
 151 
 
 Mr. Riley's Poetry . 
 
 
 
 
 
 159 
 
 Mr. Swinburne's Poetry . 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^11 
 
 The Rewards of Poetry 
 
 
 
 
 
 191 
 
 Cheerful Pessimism . 
 
 
 
 
 
 217 
 
 Masters of the World 
 
 
 
 
 
 224 
 
 The Poetry of To-morrow 
 
 
 
 
 
 237 
 
 The Permanence of Poetry 
 
 
 
 
 
 247 
 
€f^t ©oettg of Cife 
 
 " The poetry of life," says the book of St. 
 Kavin, '' is the poetry of beauty, sincerity, 
 and elation." And when you think of it, 
 it seems reasonable enough that this should 
 be so, since these are the archangelic trio to 
 whose keeping the very sources of life are 
 confided. They are the dispensers of happi- 
 ness, the bringers of wisdom, the guardians 
 of mystery. 
 
 That the poetry of life should of necessity 
 be the poetry of beauty, first of all, seems 
 nearly self-evident. The beauty of the world 
 so outreaches and overcomes all its ugliness, 
 is so much more prevalent and vital and per- 
 sistent. One concludes at once and instinc- 
 tively that life concerns itself with beauty 
 
 I 
 
sue jpoettjj of mtt 
 
 almost, at first glance, to the exclusion of 
 everything else. What more natural, there- 
 fore, since life cares so much for beauty, 
 than that art, life's replica, should care 
 greatly for it also? 
 
 As for its sincerity, the poetry of life 
 need not always be solemn, any more than 
 life itself need always be sober. It may be 
 gay, witty, humourous, satirical, disbeliev- 
 ing, farcical, even broad and reckless, since 
 life is all these, but it must never be insin- 
 cere. Insincerity, which is not always one 
 of the greatest sins in the moral universe, 
 becomes in the world of art an offence of 
 the first magnitude. Insincerity in life may 
 be mean and despicable, and indicate a petty 
 nature; but in art insincerity is death. A 
 strong man may lie upon occasion, and make 
 restitution and be forgiven, but for the artist 
 who lies there is hardly any reparation pos- 
 sible, and his forgiveness is much more diffi- 
 cult. Art, being the embodiment of the 
 artist's ideal, is truly the corporeal sub- 
 
 2 
 
cue ^otivs of fLiU 
 
 stance of his spiritual self; and that there 
 should be any falsehood in it, any deliberate 
 failure to represent him faithfully, is as 
 monstrous and unnatural as it would be for 
 a man to disavow his own flesh and bones. 
 Here we are every one of us going through 
 life committed and attached to our bodies; 
 for all that we do we are held responsible; 
 if we misbehave, the world will take it out 
 of our hide. But here is our friend the 
 artist committing his spiritual energy to his 
 art, to an embodiment outside himself, and 
 escaping down a by-path from all the conse- 
 quences. What shall be said of him? The 
 insincere artist is as much beyond the pale 
 of human sympathy as the murderer. Mor- 
 ally he is a felon. 
 
 There is no excuse for him, either. There 
 was no call for him to make a liar of him- 
 self, other than the most sordid of reasons, — 
 the little gain, the jingling reward of gold. 
 For no man would ever be insincere in his 
 art, except for pay, except to cater to some 
 
 3 
 
2CtIf ^ottvs of atte 
 
 other taste than his own, and to win approval 
 and favour by his sycophancy. If he were 
 assured of his competency in the world, and 
 placed beyond the reach of necessitous want, 
 how would it ever occur to him to create an 
 insincere art? Art is so simple and spontane- 
 ous, so dependent on the disingenuous emo- 
 tion, that it can never be insincere, unless 
 violence is done to all law of nature and of 
 spirit. Since art arises from the sacramental 
 blending of the inward spirit with the out- 
 ward form, any touch of insincerity in it 
 assumes the nature of a horrible crime, a 
 pitiable revolt against the order and eternity 
 of the universe. That the conditions of 
 modern commercialism are to blame for this 
 unhappy possibility, may be true; but that 
 only makes it the more sad, and gives the 
 final selfish touch that robs it of all sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 The environs of the city of art are always 
 full of charlatans. The clever artisan or in- 
 ventor who often does not even pretend to 
 
 4 
 
8CJir ^ottvs of mu 
 
 make the real article you seek, but offers you 
 something " just as good and much cheaper/' 
 is never far from the honest market-place. 
 Often he has the very appearance and pose 
 of the true artist, and his resentment of an 
 imputation of his honesty would deceive 
 many. He is a cheat, for all that, and in 
 his heart he knows it. 
 
 For the books that are written, the plays 
 that are produced, the pictures that are 
 painted by fatuous, misdirected, incompetent, 
 yet sincere energy, one can have nothing but 
 compassionate respect. The sight of some 
 poor spirit, in guileless devoted zeal, spend- 
 ing years and health and hope and resources 
 in the pursuit of some quite hopeless ambi- 
 tion in art, is a thing to make one weep. 
 So pure, so kindly, so praiseworthy in its 
 intentions, and yet so futile! For such as 
 these there must be a special reward here- 
 after. They do not cumber the ground, they 
 keep it sweet; often they shame even the 
 
^iit J&ottvp of aife 
 
 great ones by their singleness of purpose and 
 sincerity of soul. 
 
 It is not necessary, as I say, for art to 
 be solemn and wholly serious-minded in 
 order to be sincere. Comedy is quite sincere. 
 She is one of the most honest of the muses. 
 Yet it is easy to usurp her name and play the 
 fool for pennies, with never a ray of appre- 
 ciation of her true character. I know a 
 comic poet (you may not believe me, but I 
 believe myself), a young man who has 
 recently arisen, who seems to me to be a 
 true artist and no pretender. Whenever I 
 see his name I read his jingles with delight. 
 Such amazing productivity with such un- 
 failing irresistible mirth I have seldom heard 
 of elsewhere. If he is not another Hood, 
 I am mistaken. He is, so far at least, a 
 proof of the fact that one can live in the 
 world yet not be destroyed by the world; 
 for though so eminently popular, he is 
 still genuine in his wit. I always think of 
 his work as an example of art which may 
 
 I 
 
2Ciie jpontfi of atfe 
 
 be perfectly frivolous and perfectly sincere 
 at the same time. And every day, side by 
 side v^ith his, I see other w^ork masking as 
 comedy, which is nothing but false, unin- 
 spired, and wooden, the pitiable product of 
 cleverness without spirit, the worthless con- 
 trivance of journeymen. There seem to be 
 plenty of fabricators of this latter sort of 
 rhyme. They are, I suppose, — they and 
 their works, — the inevitable but odious ac- 
 companiments of our times. They write to 
 please their editors, and their reward is sure, 
 but the comic muse disowns them for all 
 that. 
 
 Sincerity, then, is not in the least averse 
 to fun, it only requires that the fun shall be 
 genuine and come from the heart, as it re- 
 quires that every note of whatever sort shall 
 be genuine and spring from the real person- 
 ality of the writer. 
 
 More than this, I find in the phrase, " the 
 poetry of sincerity," a suggestion as to the 
 function of poetry in relation to science, to 
 
 7 
 
Efit iPoettjj of ILffe 
 
 truth, for our thirst for knowing what is to 
 be known. And the aspiration, Da mihi, 
 Domine, scire quod sciendum est, seems 
 preeminently the daily prayer for a poet 
 to make, the voice of his longing to be 
 brought into communication with things as 
 they are. It points to the necessity poetry is 
 always under of supplying food for our 
 curiosity, answers for our deepest questions, 
 and a reasonable explanation of life. It 
 emphasizes the fact which I have reiterated 
 so often, that it is never enough for poetry 
 to be stirring and entrancing, unless it is 
 illuminating as well. The poetry of sin- 
 cerity is the poetry of truth. 
 
 In the matter of elation as a requirement 
 in the poetry of life, perhaps a little more 
 explanation is needed. As I understand it, 
 *' the poetry of life is the poetry of beauty, 
 sincerity, and elation," because the poetry 
 of ugliness, falsehood, and depression would 
 be a poetry of death. And that is something 
 the world does not want. It has enough of 
 
 g 
 
death in reality, without any artificial copy 
 or reminder of it. When poetry, poetry that 
 is highly esteemed and widely valued, refers 
 to death, it seeks and celebrates some trace 
 of survival, some hint of immortality. It 
 strives to minimize the depressing aspect 
 of death, and bring gladness out of sorrow. 
 There has recently been issued a selection 
 from Whitman's poetry, entitled " The Book 
 of Heavenly Death." It is anything but 
 depressing, of course. It has its place as- 
 sured with the poetry of elation. And so 
 of all great sincere poetry which has proved 
 itself of value in men's eyes, it retains its 
 vogue and influence because of its enhearten- 
 ing power, its power to strengthen our hearts 
 in courage, faith, love, gladness, serenity, 
 wisdom, resignation, or peace. Poetry which 
 emphasizes depression, discouragement, and 
 defeat, and harps upon the horrors or ills 
 or dark enigmas of life, is of no earthly 
 use whatever to men whose whole business 
 
2r)|e ^ottvs of ILltt 
 
 in life is to avoid and mitigate and overcome 
 those sorry evils. 
 
 I have heard a writer who insisted, in 
 season and out of season, perhaps, on the 
 necessity of the joyous note in art, taken 
 to task as a pagan, and accused of being 
 indifferent to the sorrows of man, or even 
 ignorant of them. I am sure that by the 
 word " joy " he could not have meant any 
 mere momentary and shallow gladness, 
 whether of the senses or the spirit. To re- 
 joice, is the injunction repeated again and 
 again by an apostle of Christianity, the 
 religion of the sorrowful. The man who 
 has not tasted sorrow, — natural, inevitable, 
 purifying sorrow, — does not know what 
 joy means in this larger sense. There is a 
 higher joy which includes all sorrow, just 
 as there is a higher good which forgives all 
 evil, though it may scarcely be within the 
 reach of mortals. And one who should 
 advocate the cultivation of a small, thought- 
 less, selfish joy, to the exclusion of all ex- 
 
 lO 
 
srtie ^oetrs of Hife 
 
 perience of sorrow and all sympathy with 
 pain, would be foolish indeed. For such 
 joy is less than the joy of children, being 
 heartless and insecure. 
 
 If one asks for the note of joy in art, and 
 demands that the quality of gladness be 
 emphasized, this does not imply that sorrow 
 is to be ignored. A joy without sympathy 
 would be unnatural, if, indeed, it were 
 possible in such a life as this. And if we 
 are urged to rejoice and be exceeding glad, 
 let us understand that it is to be in spite of 
 sorrow and evil, even somehow by their 
 means, and not regardless of their presence 
 in life. 
 
 That is always good in poetry, as in life, 
 which stimulates the spirit and renews its 
 zest, its strength, its fortitude. Sorrow and 
 the representation of sorrow may do this at 
 times as well as happiness. There is an 
 influence in tragedy, a nobleness of grief, 
 which is tonic to the soul, and leaves us 
 sobered but not dejected. It is the squalid 
 
 II 
 
SCJie ^ottvs of Hift 
 
 and unrelieved depression in them, which 
 makes so many modern tragedies hopeless 
 failures. They emphasize the ugly evil, yet 
 afford the soul no escape, offer it no com- 
 pensation, such as there always is in life. 
 No wonder the public will have none of 
 them. But in classic tragedy there is always 
 some exit for the distraught, indomitable 
 spirit, some incentive to endurance, some 
 consciousness of greatness or nobility. We 
 weep at the sorrows of Lear, yet our pride 
 is touched by the grandeur of that old kingly 
 man, and our just indignation at the im- 
 pious daughters relieves the tension of suf- 
 fering. Both sentiments are kindling to the 
 spirit, and we come away from the play 
 bettered, if not cheered. It belongs to the 
 poetry of elation, tragedy though it is. 
 
 Such poetry is in accord with the trend 
 of life, — life which is full of evil and 
 horror and confusion and mischance, and 
 which yet goes on its long, slow, persistent 
 course, ever putting aside these monstrous 
 
 12 
 
drawbacks, and gathering to itself all love- 
 liness and truth and charity. Anything 
 which can help the spirit of man on his 
 difficult trail, that will he gladly make use 
 of, that only to him is good. In poetry, in 
 the arts, whatever gives us a touch of elation, 
 of glad encouragement, of hope, of aspira- 
 tion, of solace, that do we eagerly seize and 
 hold. It seems to us good, as well as fair and 
 true. If you say that the poetry of sincerity 
 is the poetry of truth, you may add, the 
 poetry of elation is the poetry of goodness. 
 
 To incorporate truth, to arrest and make 
 evident those facts about nature which de- 
 light and satisfy the mind; to incorporate 
 at the same time the feelings which delight 
 and satisfy the heart; and to give this mani- 
 festation a guise which shall allure and 
 delight and satisfy the senses; this is the 
 great and only business of all art, just as 
 it appears to be the supreme concern of all 
 life. 
 
 Life which is constantly realizing itself 
 13 
 
2f1^e ^ottvs of ILIU 
 
 in nature, does so in these three ways, and 
 offers us these three phases of itself. An 
 art which attempts to realize itself, while 
 still neglecting to make itself felt in any one 
 of these three directions, must, therefore, be 
 faulty just to that extent. And since art is 
 a mimic creation, made in imitation of life, 
 we see how this saying was come by, " The 
 poetry of life is the poetry of beauty, sin- 
 cerity, and elation." 
 
 14 
 
€J)e ilurpose erf ©oettg 
 
 Before considering any of the aims and 
 purposes of poetry, or any of its essential 
 characteristics, we had better first consider 
 it in its place as one of the fine arts. If we 
 then ask ourselves what the fine arts are to 
 do for us, what place they are to hold in a 
 civilized nation, we shall perhaps be able to 
 look at poetry in a broader way than we 
 otherwise could; we shall be able to think 
 of it not merely as a pleasant and amusing 
 diversion, but as one of the potent factors 
 of history. 
 
 If we try to find a place for the fine arts 
 among our various human activities, we 
 might begin by making a rough classifica- 
 tion of our subject. The most primitive and 
 
 15 
 
necessary occupations we engage in, such as 
 fishing and agriculture, trading, navigating, 
 and hunting, we call industries. These mark 
 the earliest stage of man's career in civiliza- 
 tion. Then he comes to other occupations, 
 requiring more skill and ingenuity; he 
 weaves fabrics, he makes himself houses, he 
 fashions all sorts of implements for the house- 
 hold and the chase. He becomes a builder, 
 a potter, a metal-worker, an inventor. He 
 has added thought to work and made the 
 work easier. And these new occupations 
 which he has discovered for himself differ 
 from his earlier ones chiefly in this, that they 
 result in numerous objects of more or less 
 permanence, cunningly contrived and aptly 
 fitted to use. They are objects of useful 
 or industrial art. 
 
 Now we must note two things about this 
 step forward which man has taken toward 
 civilization; in the first place he had to have 
 some leisure to do these things, and in the 
 second place the objects he has made reveal 
 
 i6 
 
his ingenuity and forethought. They are 
 records of his life; and it will happen that 
 as his leisure increases, his implements will 
 become more and more elaborate and ornate. 
 Every workman will have his own way of 
 fashioning them, using his own device and 
 designs, so that they will become something 
 more than rude relics of one historic age 
 or another; they will tell us something of 
 the artificer himself; they will embody some 
 intentional expression of human life and 
 come to have an art value. In so far as they 
 can do this, they contain the essential quality 
 of the fine arts. And the more freely the 
 workman can deal with his craft, the more 
 perfectly he can make it characteristic of 
 himself, the finer will its artistic quality 
 become. 
 
 The only purpose of the primitive indus- 
 tries was a utilitarian one. The prime object 
 of the industrial arts is also a utilitarian one; 
 but they have a secondary object as well, 
 they aim at beauty, too. They not only 
 
 17 
 
8Cfie ^ottvs of affe 
 
 serve the practical end for which they were 
 intended, they serve also as a means of ex- 
 pression for the workman. Now just as 
 we passed from the industries to the industrial 
 arts, by the addition of this secondary inter- 
 est, this human artistic expressional quality, 
 so by making this quality paramount we 
 may pass from the industrial arts to the fine 
 arts themselves, where expression is all-im- 
 portant, and utility becomes less prominent. 
 It is the distinguishing mark of the fine arts 
 that they give us a means of expressing our- 
 selves in terms of intelligible beauty. 
 
 I have made this distinction between the 
 fine and the industrial arts merely for the 
 sake of clarifying our ideas, and getting a 
 notion of what is the essence of all art. But 
 really the difference is not important, and, 
 having served its turn, may be forgotten. 
 There is an element of art, of course, in 
 everything that we do; the manner of the 
 doing constitutes the art. The quality of art 
 which we should appreciate and respect may 
 
 i8 
 
quite as truly be present in a Japanese to- 
 bacco-box as in a Greek tragedy. The Japa- 
 nese, indeed, offer an instance of a people 
 who have raised the handicrafts quite to the 
 level of the fine arts. All those fascinating 
 objects of beauty, which they contrive with 
 so much skill, are often, one may guess, only 
 as many excuses for the workman to exhibit 
 his deftness and his taste. This black oak 
 cabinet inlaid with pearl, or that lacquer 
 bowl, may, perhaps, be counted useful ob- 
 jects; but I fancy that before all else they 
 were just so many opportunities for the ar- 
 tist; and when he fashioned them he had 
 in mind chiefly the creation of something 
 beautiful, and dwelt very little upon the use 
 to which they might be put. He was bent 
 on giving play to his imagination, and you 
 may be very sure that he was glad in the 
 work of his hands, and wrought all those 
 intricate effects with loving care. Surely the 
 result is much more deserving of respect than 
 a mediocre epic or a second-rate painting. 
 
 19 
 
8Cfie ^ottvs of mu 
 
 It is not what we do that counts, but how 
 well we do it. There is no saying one kind 
 of work is art, and another kind is not art. 
 Anything that is well done is art; anything 
 that is badly done is rotten. 
 
 I do not wish either to confine the word 
 " useful," in its application, to our material 
 needs. Everything we do ought to be use- 
 ful, and so it is, if it is done well. Tables 
 and chairs are useful; but so are pictures 
 and cathedrals and lyrics and the theatre. 
 If we allow ourselves only what are called 
 the necessities of life, we are only keeping 
 alive one-third of being; the other two- 
 thirds of our manhood may be starving to 
 death. The mind and the soul have their 
 necessities as well as the body. And we are 
 to seek these things, not only for our future 
 salvation, but for our salvation here and now, 
 that our lives may be helpful and sound and 
 happy. 
 
 It is often easy to see how a fine art may 
 grow from some more necessary and com- 
 
 20 
 
monplace undertaking. The fine art of 
 painting, for instance, arose, of course, from 
 the use of ornamental lines and figures, 
 drawn on pottery, or on the walls of a skin 
 tent, where it served only to enhance the 
 value of the craftsman's work and please 
 his fancy. Gradually, through stages of 
 mural decoration, perhaps, where ever in- 
 creasing freedom of execution was given the 
 artist, its first ornamental purpose was for- 
 gotten, and it came to serve only as a means 
 of expressing the artist's imaginative ideals. 
 So, too, of sculpture and architecture, of 
 dancing and acting. It is an easy transition 
 from the light-hearted, superfluous skip of 
 a child as it runs, to the more formal dance- 
 step, as the child keeps time to music and 
 gives vent to its gaiety of spirit. It is an 
 easy transition from gesture and sign lan- 
 guage, employed as a necessary means of 
 communication, to their more elaborate use 
 in the art of acting, where they serve merely 
 to emphasize subtle expression and to create 
 
 21 
 
an illusion. Similarly, too, whenever a piece 
 of information is conveyed by word of 
 mouth, and the teller of the tale elaborates 
 it with zest and interest and grace, making 
 it more memorable and vivid and beautiful, 
 the fine art of letters is born. 
 
 Now we may notice that the quality of 
 art begins to appear in all our occupations, 
 as the direst stress of existence is relieved, 
 and man's spirit begins to have free play. 
 Art is an indication of health and happy ex- 
 uberance of life; it is as instinctive and 
 spontaneous in its origin as child's play. To 
 produce it naturally the artist must be free, 
 for the time being, at least, — free from all 
 doubt or hesitation about the truth, free 
 from all material tortures, free from dejec- 
 tion and fear. The primitive industries 
 mark the first grade in the human story, when 
 we were barely escaping from the necessity 
 for unremitting hand-to-hand physical strug- 
 gle for life; and the second grade in our 
 progress is marked by the appearance of the 
 
 22 
 
industrial arts; while we may look on the 
 fine arts as an index of the highest develop- 
 ment, as we pass from savagery and barbar- 
 ism to civilization. And perhaps we shall 
 not go very far astray, in our comparative 
 estimate of nations, and their greatness on 
 the earth, if we rank them in the order of 
 their proficiency in the arts. 
 
 Now the fine arts, having thus had their 
 rise in the free play of the human spirit as 
 it went about its work in the world, and 
 busied itself with the concerns of life, became 
 a natural vehicle for giving expression to all 
 men's aspirations and thoughts about life. 
 Indeed, it was this very simple elemental 
 need for self-expression, as a trait in human 
 character, which helped to determine what 
 the fine arts should be. To communicate our 
 feelings, to transmit knowledge, to amuse 
 ourselves by creating a mimic world with 
 imaginative shapes of beauty, these were 
 fundamental cravings, lurking deep in the 
 spirit of man, and demanding satisfaction 
 
 23 
 
STfie ^oettff of afft 
 
 almost as imperiously as the desires of the 
 body. If hunger and cold made us indus- 
 trious, no less certainly did love of com- 
 panionship and need for self-expression 
 mould our breath into articulate speech. 
 Since, therefore, the fine arts are so truly a 
 creation of man, we may expect to find in 
 them a trustworthy image of himself. What- 
 ever is human must be there, — all our 
 thoughts, all our emotions, all our sensations, 
 hopes, and fears. They will reveal and em- 
 body in themselves all the traits of our 
 complex nature. Art is that lovely corporeal 
 body with which man endows the spirit of 
 goodness and the thought of truth. For there 
 are in man these three great principles: a 
 capacity for finding out the truth and dis- 
 tinguishing it from error, a capacity for 
 perceiving goodness and knowing it from 
 evil, and a capacity for discriminating be- 
 tween what is ugly and what is fair. By 
 virtue of the first of these powers, man seek- 
 ing knowledge has become the philosopher 
 
 24 
 
and scientist; by virtue of the second, he has 
 evolved religions and laws, and social order 
 and advancement; while by virtue of the 
 third he has become an artist. Yet we must 
 be careful not to suppose that either one of 
 these powers ever comes alone into full play 
 or fruition; for man has not three separate 
 natures, but one nature with three different 
 phases. When, therefore, man finds expres- 
 sion for his complete personality in the fine 
 arts, you may always expect to find there, 
 not only creations of beauty, but monuments 
 of wisdom and religion as well. Art can no 
 more exist without having a moral bearing, 
 than a body can exist without a soul. Its 
 influence may be for good or for bad, but 
 it is inevitable and it is unmistakable. In 
 the same way no art can exist without an 
 underlying philosophy, any more than man 
 can exist without a mind. The philosophy 
 may be trivial or profound, but it is always 
 present and appreciable. 
 
 Art, you see, is enlisted beyond escape, both 
 25 
 
2CDe J^otttff of affe 
 
 in the service of science and in the service 
 of religion. Great art appears wherever the 
 heart of man has been able to manifest it- 
 self in a perfectly beautiful guise, informed 
 by thoughts of radiant truth, and inspired 
 by emotions of limitless goodness. Any 
 piece of art which does not fulfil its obliga- 
 tions to truth and goodness, as well as to 
 beauty, is necessarily faulty and incomplete. 
 At first thought perhaps you might not be 
 quite ready to admit such a canon of criti- 
 cism as this; for truth is the object of all 
 science, and goodness is the object of all 
 morality, and some persons have been accus- 
 tomed to say that art has nothing whatever 
 to do either with morality or science, but 
 exists for its own sake alone, for the increase 
 and perpetuation of pleasure. But art can- 
 not give us complete pleasure if it only 
 appeals to our senses, and leaves unsatisfied 
 our natural curiosity and wonder, — our need 
 for understanding and our need for loving. 
 That is to say, our reason and our emotion 
 
must always be appealed to, as well as our 
 sense of beauty. 
 
 For instance, I may be entranced by the 
 beautiful diction and cadence of a poem, 
 whose conception of life and the universe 
 may be patently false and puerile; from 
 which point of view it could not please me at 
 all, but must disgust me. Or, showing a just 
 estimate of life, it might be true to philoso- 
 phy and science, and yet celebrate some 
 mean or base or ignoble or cruel incident in 
 a way that would be revolting to my spirit. 
 While it satisfied my sense of lyric beauty, 
 it might fail utterly to satisfy my sense of 
 right or my desire for truth. To be worth 
 while, the fine arts must satisfy the mind 
 with its insatiable curiosity, and the soul 
 with its love of justice, quite as thoroughly 
 as they slake the needs of the senses. 
 
 To my mind the great preeminence of 
 Browning as a poet does not rest on any 
 profound philosophy to be found in his work, 
 nor in his superior craftsmanship, nor yet 
 
 27 
 
in his generous uplifting impulse and the 
 way with which he arouses our feelings, but 
 rather on the fact that he possessed all these 
 three requirements of a poet in an equally 
 marked degree. The work of Poe or of 
 William Morris, on the other hand, does 
 not exhibit this fine balance of strength, 
 intellectuality, and passion. On its sensuous 
 side, it is wonderfully beautiful; and yet it 
 is not wholly satisfying, since it fails to give 
 us enough to think about. Its mentality is 
 too slight. Neither of these poets, to judge 
 from their poetry alone, had any large and 
 firm grasp of the thought of the world, such 
 as Browning possessed, and that is why the 
 wizardry of Poe and the luring charm of 
 Morris are not more effective. An artist 
 must be also a thinker and a prophet, if his 
 creations are to have the breath of life. And 
 again poetry may easily fail by being over- 
 laden with this same requisite of mentality. 
 It may have more thought than it can carry. 
 Browning himself, in several of his later 
 
 28 
 
STiie ^uvpont of poett^ 
 
 books, like the '^ Inn Album," quite loses 
 the poetic poise of his powers, and almost 
 ceases to be a poet in his desire to be a 
 philosopher. 
 
 All this is so fundamentally important that 
 we cannot have it too clearly in mind. It 
 is the one great central truth, which must 
 illumine all criticism, and help our under- 
 standing of life, as well as of art. 
 
 When we say, however, that it is the busi- 
 ness of art to give pleasure in all three of 
 these possible ways, of course we must not 
 suppose that the arts do not differ one from 
 another in their ability to meet such demand. 
 The art of music cannot satisfy my reason as 
 completely as the art of poetry, for example, 
 because it cannot transmit a logical statement 
 of fact. It may please my senses more 
 readily than poetry can; it may arouse my 
 emotions profoundly; but it cannot appeal 
 to my mind in the way that poetry does. 
 On the other hand, poetry itself is less 
 strictly rational than prose literature; it 
 
 29 
 
©tie J^oetrs of aift 
 
 does not attempt to satisfy our curiosity as 
 completely as prose does, though it pleases 
 the aesthetic sense more. There need be no 
 question of one art being greater or less 
 than another; a sense of art equality is born 
 of recognizing the interesting ways in which 
 they vary, and of realizing that each has only 
 a different proportion and arrangement of 
 the three requirements which are necessary 
 to them all. 
 
 To speak quite simply, then, art is con- 
 cerned first of all in the creation of beauty. 
 At the same time it is closely related to 
 science on one side and religion on the other. 
 But how? I suppose we may say (to speak 
 again quite roughly) that science is all we 
 know about things, and religion is all we 
 feel about them. Naturally, therefore, 
 every artistic conception to which we give 
 expression will betray something both of 
 our philosophy and of our morality. It can- 
 not be otherwise. In the case of literature 
 the human spirit is finding expression for 
 
 30 
 
2rti( Ji^uvpont of Jl^ottvp 
 
 itself through the medium of human speech; 
 and speech is the most exact means we have 
 for conveying definite thought and narrating 
 facts. So that every literature contains a 
 great body of work which is almost pure 
 science. In De Quincey's useful phrase, 
 " There is a literature of knowledge and a 
 literature of power." Euclid's Geometry, 
 Newton's " Principia," Darwin's " Origin 
 of Species," are works of science rather than 
 of letters. They appeal solely to our reason, 
 and do not attempt to please our sense of 
 the beautiful by their literary structure and 
 the arrangement of verbal sounds, nor to 
 work upon our emotions in any way. Euclid 
 does not care whether you like his forty- 
 eighth proposition or not, so long as he can 
 convince you that it is true. Neither does 
 Darwin care whether his theory pleases you 
 or not. He is only interested in getting at 
 the truth. How that truth may affect our 
 feelings is quite another matter. It is so, 
 too, of theological and philosophic writers, 
 
 31 
 
cue mttvs of atfe 
 
 like Spinoza and Kant; they are primarily 
 scientists and not artists. But when you pass 
 from these austere reasoners to a work like 
 Plato's Dialogues, you perceive that two 
 new elements have entered into the making of 
 a book. Plato is not only interested in find- 
 ing out the truth, and convincing you of its 
 reasonableness; he wishes at the same time 
 to make the truth seem pleasant and good; 
 he tries to enlist your feelings on his side, 
 and also to satisfy your sense of beauty with 
 his form of words. He has added a religious 
 value and an art value to the theme of pure 
 philosophy. He has made his book a piece of 
 literature. 
 
 And as literature is related to science on 
 one hand, it is related to religion on the 
 other. A book of meditation or of hymns 
 may be extremely devout in sentiment, with- 
 out possessing any value as literature. Be- 
 cause, very often it takes a certain set of ideas 
 for granted, without caring very much 
 whether they are the largest and truest ideas 
 
 32 
 
or not; and also because it makes no effort 
 to be fine and distinguished in its diction. 
 It may be entirely worthy in the fervour of 
 its sentiment, and yet be quite unworthy in 
 an artistic way. With great religious books 
 this is not so. Works like the Psalms, or 
 passages of Isaiah, or the poetry of Job, or 
 Tennyson's " Crossing the Bar,'' are, first of 
 all, religious in their intention; they are 
 meant to play upon our emotional nature; 
 but they do not stop there; they are cast in a 
 form of words so perfect and fresh that it 
 arrests us at once, and satisfies our love of 
 beauty. At the same time they accord with 
 the most profound and fundamental ideas 
 about life and nature that humanity has been 
 capable of. They satisfy our mind and our 
 aesthetic sense, as well as our spiritual need. 
 It is because of this threefold completeness, 
 that we class them as pieces of literature, and 
 not merely as records of religious enthusiasm. 
 Depth of religious feeling alone would not 
 have been sufficient to make them literature, 
 
 33 
 
STije ^ottvs of mu 
 
 any more than clear thinking and accu- 
 rate reason alone could have made Plato's 
 book a piece of literature. 
 
 We must remember, too, how vapid the 
 artistic quality is, when it exists by itself 
 without adequate intelligence and underlying 
 purpose. Think how much of modern art is 
 characterized by nothing but form, how 
 devoid it is of ideas, how lacking in anything 
 like passionate enthusiasm. I believe this 
 is due to some extent to our failure to realize 
 that the three components of which I have 
 been speaking are absolutely requisite in all 
 art. We forget that there is laid upon art 
 any obligation except to be beautiful; we 
 forget that it must embody the truest thought 
 man has been able to reach, and enshrine 
 the noblest impulses he has entertained. 
 This is not so much a duty for art to under- 
 take as an inescapable destiny and natural 
 function. 
 
 It is a sad day for a people when their art 
 becomes divorced from the current of their 
 
 34 
 
life, when it comes to be looked on as some- 
 thing precious but unimportant, having noth- 
 ing at all to do with their social structure, 
 their education, their political ideals, their 
 faith, or their daily vocations. But I fear 
 that we ourselves are living in just such a 
 time. Fine arts may be patronized even 
 liberally, but you could not say that they 
 have any hold on us as a people; we have 
 no wide feeling for them, no profound con- 
 viction of their importance. 
 
 There may be many reasons for this, and 
 it is a question with which we are not directly 
 concerned here. One reason there is, how- 
 ever, it seems to me, which is too important 
 not to be referred to. The fine arts are an 
 outgrowth and finer development of the 
 industrial arts. One would expect them to 
 flourish only in a nation where the industrial 
 arts flourish; only in such a nation would 
 the great body of the people be infused with 
 the popular love of beauty, and the feeling 
 for art, which could create a stimulating, 
 
 35 
 
©tie ^ottvs ot mu 
 
 artistic atmosphere in which great artists 
 could be born and nourished. So much will 
 be readily admitted. Now, under modern 
 industrial and commercial conditions, the in- 
 dustrial arts are dead; they have been 
 killed by the exigencies of our business pro- 
 cesses. The industrial artist has become 
 the factory hand. To produce anything 
 worth while, either in the fine or the indus- 
 trial arts, it is necessary that the worker 
 should not be hurried, and should have some 
 freedom to do his work in his own way, 
 according to his own fancy and enjoyment. 
 The modern workman, on the contrary, is a 
 slave to his conditions; he can only earn 
 his bread by working with a maximum of 
 speed and a minimum of conscientiousness. 
 He can have neither pleasure nor pride in his 
 work; and consequently that work can have 
 no artistic value whatever. The result is, 
 that not only have we almost no industrial 
 arts, properly speaking, but the modern 
 workman is losing all natural taste and love 
 
 36 
 
of beauty through being denied all exercise 
 of that faculty. If you allow me to learn the 
 art of a book-binder, or a potter, or a rug- 
 maker, and to follow it for myself as best 
 I can, my perception and love of what is 
 beautiful will grow with my growing skill. 
 But if you put me to work in a modern fac- 
 tory, where such things, or rather where 
 hideous imitations of those things, are pro- 
 duced, I should not be able to exercise my 
 creative talent at all, and whatever love of 
 beauty I may have had will perish for lack 
 of use. Thus it happens that the average 
 man to-day has so little appreciation of 
 beauty, so little instinctive taste, and art and 
 letters occupy so small a place in our regard. 
 Before we can reinstate them in that position 
 of honour which they have always held, 
 hitherto, among civilized nations, we shall 
 have to find some solution for our industrial 
 difficulties. 
 
 It may seem, at a superficial glance, that 
 the arts are all very well as a pastime, for 
 
 37 
 
8Cfit J^oettff of Hift 
 
 the enjoyment of the few, but can have no 
 imperative call for busy men and women 
 in active modern life. And if we should be 
 told that, as a nation, we have no wide-spread 
 love of beauty, no popular taste in artistic 
 matters, we would not take the accusation 
 very much to heart. We should probably 
 admit it, and turn with pride to point to our 
 wonderful material success, our achievements 
 in the realm of trade and commerce, our un- 
 matched prosperity and wealth. But that 
 answer will not serve. You may lead me 
 through the streets of our great cities, and 
 fill my ears with stories of our uncounted 
 millions of money, our unrivalled advance 
 among the nations, but that will not divert 
 my soul from horror at a state of society 
 where municipal government is a venial 
 farce, where there is little reverence for 
 law, where mammon is a real God, and 
 where every week there are instances of mob 
 violence, as revolting as any that ever stained 
 the history of the emperors of degenerate 
 
 38 
 
Rome. We may brag our loudest to each 
 other and even to ourselves, but the soul is 
 not deceived. She sits at the centre of being, 
 judging honestly and severely our violences, 
 our folly, and our crime. And when at last 
 v^e come to our senses, and perceive to what 
 a condition of shame we have fallen from 
 our high estate as a freedom-loving people, 
 we may be able to restore some of those 
 ideals which we have sacrificed, — ideals of 
 common honesty, of civic liberty, of simple 
 unostentatious dignity, of social order, law, 
 and security. 
 
 All this, of course, goes almost without 
 saying. But the point I wish to make is, 
 that this decay in moral standards goes hand 
 in hand with our loss of taste. Our sense 
 of beauty and our sense of goodness are so 
 closely related that any injury to the one 
 means an injury to the other. You cannot 
 expect the nation which cares nothing at 
 all for art to care very much for justice or 
 righteousness. You cannot expect a man 
 
 39 
 
who docs not care how hideous his surround- 
 ings are to care very fastidiously about his 
 moral obligations. And we shall never reach 
 that national position of true greatness, which 
 many Americans have dreamed of; we shall 
 lose entirely those personal traits of dignity, 
 honour, and kindliness, which many old- 
 fashioned Americans still retain, unless we 
 recognize the vital need of moral standards 
 and aesthetic ideals working together hand in 
 hand, and set ourselves to secure them. 
 
 And if you ask me why America is pro- 
 ducing for the most part only that which is 
 mediocre in art and literature, I am forced 
 to reply, that it is because the average man 
 among us has so little respect for moral 
 ideals. In a restless age we may experiment 
 with all kinds of reform, but no permanent 
 scheme of social betterment can dispense with 
 personal obligation and integrity. It all 
 comes back to the man at last. We don't 
 need socialism, or imperialism, or free trade, 
 or public ownership of monopolies, or state 
 
 40 
 
control of trusts, so much as we need honest 
 men, — men in public life and private enter- 
 prise who have some standard of conduct 
 higher than insatiable self-interest. 
 
 Such ideals of conduct, in the widest sense, 
 it is the aim of art to supply, and education 
 to inculcate. And education, like art, has 
 its three-fold object. It has to set itself not 
 only to train our minds in a desire for the 
 truth, but at the same time to train our spirit 
 to love only what is good, and our bodies to 
 take pleasure only in what is beautiful and 
 wholesome; and the work of education, like 
 that of art, must, while proceeding in any one 
 of these directions, be intimately related with 
 the workings of the other two. Emerson's 
 wise phrase is profoundly applicable here: 
 
 " All are needed by each one. 
 Nothing is fair or good alone.** 
 
 An education or an art which does not 
 quicken the conscience, and stimulate and 
 refine all our senses and instincts, along with 
 
 41 
 
8Cfje J^ortts of Hift 
 
 the growing reason, must still remain a 
 faulty process at best. 
 
 Let me ask all who are engaged in the 
 great occupation of teaching, and in the de- 
 lightful art of writing, to consider whether 
 this is not so. I am sure we cannot lay too 
 much stress on this philosophic conception 
 of man in the three aspects of his nature. I 
 believe it is a helpful solvent of many diffi- 
 culties in education, in art, in life, in social 
 and political aims. I believe that without 
 it all of our endeavours for advancement in 
 civilization will be sadly hampered and 
 retarded, if not frustrated altogether, for the 
 simple reason that art and civilization and 
 social order exist for man; and they must, 
 therefore, be adapted to the three differing 
 phases of his requirement. While his intel- 
 lectual needs and capacities must be trained 
 and provided for; his great emotional and 
 spiritual need and powers must be no less 
 adequately recognized and exercised, and 
 
 42 
 
his sensitive physical instincts wisely guided 
 and developed. 
 
 With this notion in mind, we may turn for 
 a few minutes to consider what tasks litera- 
 ture must set itself, and what it may be 
 expected to do for a people. In the first 
 place, it is the business of literature, as of 
 all the arts, to create an illusion, — to pro- 
 ject upon the imagination a mimic world, 
 true to life, as we say, and at the same time 
 more goodly and fair than the actual one 
 we know. For unless the world of art be 
 in some way more delightful than the world 
 of our every-day experience, why should we 
 ever visit it? We turn for sympathy to art, 
 for recreation and refreshment, for solace 
 and inspiration. We ask to find in it, ready 
 to hand, these helpful and pleasant qualities 
 which are so hard to find in real life. And 
 the art which does not give them to us is 
 disappointing, however clever it may be. 
 It is this necessity for being beautiful, this 
 necessity for providing an immediate pleas- 
 
 43 
 
STije portrs of ULift 
 
 ure, that makes pure realism unsatisfying in 
 art. Realism is necessary, but not sufficient. 
 For instance, if you bring me a photo- 
 graph of a beautiful elm-shaded street in an 
 old New England town, it fills my eye 
 instantly with a delightful scene. But by 
 and by something in it begins to offend me, 
 and I see that the telegraph-pole is too 
 obtrusive, and spoils the composition and 
 balance of the picture. The photograph 
 loses its value as a pleasure-giving piece of 
 realism. Now a painter in reproducing the 
 same scene would probably have left out 
 the telegraph-pole. That is the difference. 
 And that is why photography, as usually 
 practised, is not one of the fine arts. It is 
 said by those who contend for realism, for 
 the photographic in literature, that art must 
 be true to nature, and so it must, to a certain 
 extent; but there are other things beside 
 the physical fact to which it must be true. 
 Your photograph was true to nature, but it 
 was not true to my memory of the scene. 
 
 44 
 
sue ^nvpom of ^ottvp 
 
 The painter's reproduction was truer to that; 
 he preserved for me the delightful impres- 
 sion that I carried away on that wonderful 
 June morning, when I visited the spot. For 
 me his picture is more accurate than the 
 photograph. When I was there, I probably 
 did not see the telegraph-pole at all. It 
 is therefore right that literature and art 
 should attempt something more than the 
 exact reproduction of things as they are, and 
 should give us the vision, not the view, of 
 a city more charming and a country more 
 delectable to dwell in than any our feet have 
 ever trod, and should people its world with 
 characters varied and fascinating as in real 
 life, but even more satisfying than any we 
 have ever known. 
 
 There is another reason why art must 
 be more than photographic; as time goes 
 by and the earth grows old, man himself 
 develops, however slowly, in nobleness and 
 understanding. His life becomes different 
 from what it was. He gradually brings it 
 
 45 
 
©tie JPoetts of affr 
 
 into conformity with certain ideals and 
 aspirations which have occurred to him. 
 These new ideals and aspirations have always 
 made their first appearance in art and litera- 
 ture before they were realized in actual life. 
 Imagination is our lamp upon the difficult 
 path of progress. So that even in its out- 
 ward aspect, art must differ from nature. 
 The world is by no means perfect, but it 
 is always tending toward perfection, and it 
 is our business to help that tendency. As 
 long as we are satisfied with the photograph, 
 we are content to have the telegraph-pole. 
 And we shall continue to be satisfied with 
 them both until the artist comes and shows 
 us the blemish. As soon as we perceive the 
 fault, we begin to want the telegraph-pole 
 removed. This is what a clever writer 
 meant when he said that art does not follow 
 nature, but nature follows art. We must 
 make our lives more and more beautiful, 
 simply because, by so doing, we make our- 
 selves more healthy and happy. To this 
 
 46 
 
end, art must supply us with standards, and 
 keep us constantly reminded of what perfec- 
 tion is, so that living much in the influence of 
 good art, ugliness may become less and less 
 possible. 
 
 I lay so much stress on this point because 
 we have somewhat lost the conviction that 
 literature and art must be more beautiful 
 than life. We readily admit that they must 
 be sincere servants of truth, and exemplars 
 of noble sentiment, but there is an idea 
 abroad, that, in its form and substance, art 
 need only copy nature. This, I believe, is 
 what our grandfathers might have called 
 a pestilent heresy. 
 
 If art and literature are devoted to the 
 service of beauty, no less are they dedicated 
 to the service of truth and goodness. In the 
 phrase which Arnold used to quote, it is 
 their business to make reason and the will of 
 God prevail. So that while literature must 
 fulfil the obligations laid upon it to be de- 
 lightful, — to charm and entertain us with 
 
 47 
 
Srne ^t^ttvs of Hftf 
 
 perennial pleasure, — quite as scrupulously 
 must it meet our demands for knowledge, 
 and satisfy our spiritual needs. To meet 
 the first of these demands, of course it is 
 not necessary for literature to treat of scien- 
 tific subjects; it must, however, be enlight- 
 ened by the soundest philosophy at its 
 command, and informed with all the knowl- 
 edge of its time. It may not deal directly 
 with the thought of its age, but it must 
 never be at variance with truth. There 
 can be no quarrel between science and art, 
 for art sooner or later makes use of all 
 knowledge, all discoveries, all new ideas. 
 It is the business of art to assimilate new 
 knowledge, and make it a power; for knowl- 
 edge is not power, so long as it remains mere 
 knowledge, nor until it passes from the 
 mind into the domain of the will. 
 
 In a scientific age like our own, when the 
 limits of knowledge are being extended so 
 rapidly, prose is a much more acceptable 
 medium of expression than poetry, because 
 
 48 
 
Z^t J&nvpout of ^ottts 
 
 it can keep nearer to science than poetry can; 
 though poetry, in the long run, has quite 
 as much need of accurate and wide informa- 
 tion as prose has. 
 
 It is only that they make dififerent use of 
 the same material. Prose serves to bring us 
 definite reports of science, it appeals to our 
 reason, our curiosity. But poetry has another 
 motive as well; it wishes to emphasize its 
 subject so that we can not only know it more 
 clearly, but feel about it more deeply. Of 
 course prose has this aim in view also, 
 though to a less extent, and it invades the 
 dominion of poetry whenever this aim be- 
 comes paramount. So that in literature we 
 must never attempt to separate prose from 
 poetry, too dogmatically. 
 
 The attempt which literature makes to 
 deepen our feeling about a subject is the 
 spiritual purpose of art. And this spiritual 
 or moral influence is always present in all 
 literature, in some degree and condition, 
 whether apparent or not. Art has its relig- 
 
 49 
 
ious value, not because it deals directly with 
 religious themes, but because it plays upon 
 our moral nature and influences our emo- 
 tions. How intrinsically incumbent it is 
 upon art, therefore, to stimulate our gen- 
 erous and kindly feelings, rather than our 
 cruel or violent or selfish impulses. 
 
 It may often be necessary for art and 
 literature to deal with human crime and 
 depravity and moral obliquity, but it must 
 never dwell upon them excessively nor un- 
 necessarily, nor ever make them seem to 
 prevail. For evil does not rule the world; 
 however powerful it may seem at moments, 
 in the long run it is overcome by good. 
 There is a tendency in modern letters to 
 deal with repulsive themes, and depict for 
 us the frailty and sorry shortcomings of 
 human nature, and to do this with an almost 
 scientific emphasis. Some people praise this 
 sort of thing, as being true to life; while 
 others call it immoral, because it touches 
 upon such subjects at all. A juster view of 
 
 50 
 
2r)if ^uvpout of Ji^ottts 
 
 the matter may perhaps lead us to a different 
 opinion. Since it is the prime duty of art 
 to make us happy, to give us encouragement 
 and joy, to urge and support our spirits, to 
 ennoble and enrich our lives, surely the one 
 way in which art can be most immoral is 
 by leaving us depressed and sad, and un- 
 certain of the final issue between sorrow and 
 gladness. 
 
 I have not said much about the technic 
 of poetry, because I wished first to indicate, 
 if I could, a scope and destiny for poetic 
 art more significant than we are accustomed 
 to grant it. If we first assure ourselves of the 
 vital importance of art to a nation, if we 
 set ourselves resolutely to change the tenor 
 of public sentiment in regard to it, if we 
 turn from the absorbing and ridiculous 
 worship of superfluous possessions, and de- 
 vote ourselves generously to the cause of 
 beauty and kindliness, the specific develop- 
 ment of poetry may safely be left to take 
 care of itself. 
 
 51 
 
Mo\3^ to Sutr^e ©oett^g 
 
 Surely one may say the first requisite for 
 the appreciation of poetry is an open mind. 
 To say this, indeed, is only to reiterate the 
 primal prerequisite of all mental and spirit- 
 ual growth. Once let your mind become 
 set or fixed in any mould of thought, com- 
 mitted too irrevocably to any single idea, 
 once allow yourself to be in the least a parti- 
 san or a zealot, and all growth is arrested 
 immediately. To hold any notion or creed 
 as irrevocably final, is to limit the power 
 and reach of intelligence. Experience should 
 teach us better. 
 
 I may be an enthusiastic follower of this 
 or that cult for a time; but as I have out- 
 grown many tenets of thought in reaching 
 
 52 
 
n^oto to ^unst mttv9 
 
 my present attitude of mind, I must admit 
 that my present philosophy is probably 
 ephemeral and certainly transitional. Creeds 
 are but inns for the pious wayfarer upon 
 the road to perfection. We are all higher 
 vagabonds, as it were, putting up now with 
 one host, now with another. Surely, then, 
 I should hold my creed with a light grasp, 
 and insist upon it with becoming moderation. 
 One may allow a generous warmth of heart; 
 one must never permit any heat of mind. 
 To perceive that everything is provisional, 
 and that the end of our spiritual pilgrimage 
 is far beyond our range of vision, — this is 
 one of the first gifts of culture. The deadly 
 frost of prejudice blights the flower of life. 
 It is not only as appreciators of art that we 
 need openness of mind, but also in the com- 
 mon conduct of life. Modern science has 
 brought us no greater good than this very 
 temper of toleration, this tentative mental 
 condition, this faith which is strong, yet 
 flexible. Indeed the scientist offers us a 
 
 53 
 
splendid example of patient detachment. 
 He allows himself to be interested, to be 
 devoted, even to be ardent, but never to be 
 biassed nor overconfident. He knows that 
 truth has not all been compassed, and that 
 the conclusions of to-day may become the 
 axioms of to-morrow, or its fables and super- 
 stitions. When a man of science comes 
 upon a new fact in nature, he does not say 
 to himself, "Well, this may be all very 
 pretty, but I don't believe in it because it 
 does not fit my theory!" He proceeds to 
 try to comprehend the significance of his 
 new knowledge, and to readjust his theory 
 to it. 
 
 This is precisely the habit of mind we 
 must cultivate before we can appreciate any 
 art. Between science and religion there can 
 never be any quarrel. Between science and 
 formalism there can be neither compromise 
 nor peace. To bring new truths to the test 
 of old standards is the indubitable mark of 
 the Philistine. We must crucify the Philis- 
 
 54 
 
fi^oto to Sutroe ^oetrs 
 
 tine in ourselves (Heaven forgive the bar- 
 barous metaphor!) before we can hope to 
 enter even the outer courts of the temple of 
 art. I say temple of art, for art at its best 
 is essentially only religion in another guise. 
 You will see then with what seriousness and 
 willingness and sweetness we ought to ap- 
 proach art. As it is the business of the fine 
 arts to reveal to us new beauties of thought 
 and aspiration and sensibility, surely we 
 must strive to make our mind, our spirit, 
 our senses, as alert as possible — to be as 
 unprejudiced as possible, as sensitive as pos- 
 sible. And we can never be sensitive nor 
 unprejudiced while we permit ourselves a 
 habit of dogmatizing. I dare say the tempta- 
 tion to dogmatize is one of the supreme 
 snares of the Evil One, one of the sins that 
 cannot be forgiven unto men. 
 
 Of all lamentable states of mind in which 
 we may approach a work of art, the most 
 awful is that of the meek and humble igno- 
 ramus who admits that " he doesn't know 
 
 55 
 
anything about art, but he knows what he 
 likes." 
 
 My foolish friend, it isn't your business 
 to know anything about art; the artist 
 doesn't know anything about art himself. 
 It is your business and his to try to find 
 out something about it. Perhaps you think 
 you know why two and two make four, or 
 why the sun is yellow, or the sea blue, or 
 how birds fly, or water runs down-hill. You 
 see it is absurd to say you " don't know any- 
 thing about art"; you ought to say you 
 don't know anything at all. And as for 
 knowing what you like, that is even more 
 ridiculous. You don't like the same thing 
 to-day that you did yesterday. And, more- 
 over, you have not the least right in the 
 world to like the wrong thing. 
 
 It is just as wicked to admire what is 
 ugly, as it is to say what is false or to com- 
 mit a crime. It is just as pernicious a per- 
 version of truth to like the wrong things, as 
 
 56 
 
fl^oto to 3Jttlrfle ^ottvs 
 
 to believe the wrong things, or to do the 
 wrong things. 
 
 It is quite as much our business to find 
 out what is beautiful and try to admire 
 that, as it is to find out what is true and try 
 to believe that, or to find out what is good 
 and try to accomplish that. 
 
 If I do not like Shakespeare and the 
 Bible, you will admit I should have the 
 decency to conceal my shameful barbarity 
 and pray for enlightenment. But equally, 
 if I do not like Walt Whitman or Monet, 
 I ought to suppress my distaste. Why? Not 
 because these men have been placed beyond 
 doubt among the immortals, but because the 
 prejudiced and carping mood is hurtful 
 to myself. I must approach Meredith and 
 Maeterlinck with the same reverence with 
 which I approach St. Mark. True, they 
 may not be equally inspired; but I do not 
 know that; and I can never know it, if I 
 come to them with a mind already half- 
 made up. 
 
 57 
 
ffiije poetts of ILIU 
 
 Some persons seem to have minds like 
 mazes. It is next to impossible to get an 
 idea into their heads; and, once lodged 
 there, it never gets out. The avenues of their 
 intelligence are all beset with barbs and 
 thorns and prickles — a provision of nature 
 for the self-preservation of identity, but an 
 unfortunate endowment to bring to the ap- 
 preciation of art. 
 
 I have insisted on this openness of mind 
 in judging poetry, because without it we 
 cannot begin to judge of anything. But 
 suppose that we bring to the appreciation 
 of poetry a mind thus eager, simple, modest, 
 and unprejudiced, are there any hints that 
 will help us in judging so delicate a work? 
 
 In the first place, it is to be borne in 
 mind that poetry, like any other fine art, 
 makes a threefold appeal to us. If we re- 
 member that art is, vaguely speaking, the 
 manifestation of our human nature, we will 
 at once perceive that it must partake of the 
 threefold character of that nature. It must 
 
 58 
 
H^otD to Slutrge ^ottvs 
 
 express our mental, our moral, and our 
 physical character. And equally it must 
 appeal to each of these three phases of our- 
 selves, as we bring ourselves under its in- 
 fluence. The best poetry will charm our 
 ear, will convince our reason, will enlist our 
 sympathy. It is the endeavour of art to 
 move the whole man. And those persons 
 err who lay particular stress on any one 
 quality of art at the expense of the other 
 two. One must avoid that; one must avoid 
 didacticism and sentimentalism, quite as 
 much as sensuality, in art. 
 
 In the work of Mr. Swinburne, for in- 
 stance, we have poetry appealing to the 
 senses in its most perfect form. Every one 
 admits that no such incomparable achieve- 
 ment in verse has ever been given to us 
 in English. Yet it fails of that great power 
 over men of which poetry is capable, be- 
 cause it makes so little appeal to our hearts 
 and minds. In Browning, on the other hand, 
 you may often find the perfect beauty of 
 
 59 
 
Ettt ^ottvs ot Hift 
 
 poetry spoiled by an overstress of thought, 
 or by an inattention to form. I do not mean 
 this in any cheap and petty sense; for 
 Browning usually is a wonderful master of 
 versification. But at times that fertile quest- 
 ing brain could pursue a curious thought 
 too strenuously and too far, not too far for 
 philosophy, but too far for poetry. That is 
 the difference. And again, the poetry of 
 Pope is an instance of poetry which is too 
 purely mental in its appeal. Consummate 
 common sense is there, certainly; but one 
 does not live by common sense alone. And 
 while it is foolish to say that the ^' Essay on 
 Man " is not poetry at all, as some extremists 
 would, it is right enough to say that it is 
 not the best poetry, for the simple reason 
 that it is content to enlist our reason alone, 
 leaving our senses and emotions almost un- 
 moved. As Arnold said, that was the prose 
 period of English literature; and prose is 
 a lower form of art than poetry, it is a step 
 nearer science. 
 
 60 
 
?©oto to 3nnat H^ottvs 
 
 So poetry may be perfectly obvious, per- 
 fectly clear in the first reading; it may 
 contain much new knowledge and rare wis- 
 dom, and yet be very poor poetry after all. 
 
 <* An honest man's the noblest work of God,** 
 
 is a proper sentiment, but it leaves one cold. 
 It is just as true, perhaps, as saying — 
 
 a+b «c, 
 
 and just as chilly. On the other hand, there 
 is an old friend, the Jabberwock, a poem 
 which does not pretend to approach us 
 through the pure reason; yet what a fund 
 of feeling it has! How we warm toward it! 
 The kingdom of poetry is bordered on the 
 north by mathematics, and on the south by 
 music, partaking of the character of each. 
 
 To be a good judge of poetry one must 
 be a completely normal man, with a clear 
 brain, a happy disposition, and a good appe- 
 tite. If you are one of those weedy, dyspep- 
 tic, ill-ventilated, academic creatures, living 
 
 6i 
 
Kf^t ^ottvp of Hfte 
 
 with your nose in a book, you will only 
 emphasize the purely mental qualities of 
 poetry; you will miss much of its wonderful 
 power through your own incapacity for 
 sheer innocent, sensuous elation. And yet, if 
 you are beery and gross and self-indulgent, 
 you will never understand the finer intima- 
 tions of the muse. To judge poetry, one 
 must be a man of affairs, yet without hurry; 
 a religionist, yet without heat; a philoso- 
 pher, yet without a system. One must be a 
 generous lover, infatuated, but not insane; 
 an unflinching logician, yet not inflexible; 
 and one must be an athlete, also. 
 It is hard to judge poetry. 
 
 62 
 

 v^ A DISCUSSION was started not long ago by 
 a college professor in Chicago who de- 
 clared that a man who works with his hands 
 cannot be a poet. It is one of those definite 
 statements that sound conclusive and have 
 enough truth in them to arouse discussion. 
 In one way it is true, and in another way 
 it is exactly the reverse of the truth. 
 ^ Under our present social system, or rather 
 our antisocial system, a man who works with 
 his hands cannot be a poet, simply because he 
 can scarcely be a man. He cannot be his 
 own master, and he cannot command that 
 amount of freedom which every creator of 
 the beautiful needs. The creation of beauty 
 
 63 
 
8CJir %^ottvs of ILitt 
 
 requires first of all that the artist shall have 
 freedom to do his own work in his own 
 way. But the modern man who works with 
 his hands is a slave to our mercantile system. 
 In that complex and highly organized ma- 
 chine called modern civilization, it is not 
 possible for any working man to remain 
 free. 
 
 On the other hand, abstractly speaking, 
 it is much nearer the truth to say that a 
 man who does not work with his hands 
 cannot be a poet./" 
 
 What do you understand by a poet? What 
 is his office and business in life? What 
 part does he play in the world? First, and 
 speaking most roughly, he is a person who 
 has something important to say about life, 
 and has the special gift of saying it su- 
 premely well. He must be one, I think we 
 will all admit, who has thought profoundly 
 about existence. And yet that is not enough 
 to make him a poet, for that is the accom- 
 plishment of philosopher or scientist. He 
 
 64 
 
2r|ie poet In f^t eommontpeaUi^ 
 
 must also feel deeply and strongly about life. 
 And yet that is not enough to make him a 
 poet, either, for many of us feel much more 
 deeply and sincerely than we can say. No, 
 he must not only be able to speak from a 
 great fund of thought and knowledge and 
 from a great fund of sympathy and emotion ; 
 he must be able to speak with the wonderful 
 power of charm as well. 
 
 The one quality which makes him a poet 
 is his faculty of expression, of course; for we 
 can all be poets of silence. This particular 
 gift or talent, which determines whether a 
 man shall express himself in words or in 
 sound or in colours, who can say by what 
 it is in its turn determined? To say that this 
 man is a poet, and that one a painter, is no 
 more than to say that one has gray eyes and 
 the other black. But the difference in char- 
 acter, that is another matter; and to be a 
 poet or a painter implies being a man. The 
 man behind the faculty, that is the important 
 thing. 
 
 65 
 
The poet must delight our senses with the 
 inevitable beauty of his cadences, his diction, 
 his rhythms — with what is often called 
 technique; he must enlist our sympathy 
 through his own strong and generous emo- 
 tional nature; he must convince our minds 
 by his own reasonableness. He appeals to 
 our sense of beauty, but not to that sense 
 alone; he appeals to our sense of goodness, 
 but not to that sense alone; he appeals to our 
 sense of truth, but not to that sense alone. 
 His appeal is to all three, and to all three 
 equally. 
 
 The gift of technique, with the poet as 
 with all artists, is largely a matter of en- 
 dowment. But what he has to say about 
 life will depend on how profoundly he has 
 thought about it, and how keenly he feels 
 about it. And unless a man has shared in 
 our common life in the world, I cannot see 
 how his opinions can have any great value, 
 or his emotional preferences any great sig- 
 nificance. But our common life in the 
 
 66 
 
8rJie Jloet in tftt eommonUiealtl^ 
 
 world implies a certain amount of work 
 with the hands, so that the conclusion seems 
 inevitable, " A man who does no work with 
 his hands cannot be a poet." 
 
 The argument is so simple. How can I 
 talk to you with any hope of a common 
 understanding, when I only know the facts at 
 second hand, while you have actually ex- 
 perienced them, and when I have no caring 
 about them one way or the other, while to 
 you they are matters of life and death? The 
 idea that a poet can ever be a mere by- 
 stander, an onlooker at life, seems to me too 
 palpably impossible to need refutation. And 
 I cannot believe that any great prophet or 
 poet ever trod the earth who did not know 
 the pinch of life at first hand, its actual 
 bleak necessity, its terrible pathos and tre- 
 mendous joy, its wonderful yet elusive sig- 
 nificance. Nor do I believe that one for 
 whom all the necessities and comforts and 
 luxuries of life have been gratuitously pro- 
 
 67 
 
SCifte ^ottvs of atfe 
 
 vided, from the cradle to the grave, ever 
 can know these things. 
 
 '^In moments of insight, in hours of con- 
 templation, doubtless the poet is a bystander, 
 as we all may be at times. But he cannot 
 be that exclusively. A man who never halts 
 to look upon life in questioning wonder, is 
 no worse fitted to be an artist than one who 
 spends his whole time in speculation and 
 dreaming. The one has no knowledge save 
 experience, the other no experience save in 
 theory. 
 
 If a man has never driven a nail in his 
 life, nor built a fire, nor turned a furrow, nor 
 picked a barrel of apples, nor fetched home 
 the cows, nor pulled an oar, nor reefed a 
 sail, nor saddled a horse, nor carried home 
 a bundle of groceries from town, nor weeded 
 the garden, nor been lost in the woods, nor 
 nursed a friend, nor barked his shin, nor 
 been thankful for a free lunch, do you 
 think it is likely he will have anything to 
 
 68 
 
2ri)r tloet in tf^t eommontDfaUtl 
 
 say to you and me that will be worth listen- 
 ing to? I don't. 
 
 I should as soon expect a child to set a 
 broken bone, or tunnel a mountain, or navi- 
 gate a ship. Yet this is not to disparage the 
 heavenly wisdom of inspiration, nor the 
 strange inexplicable authority of conviction."^ 
 v^The compelling necessity for exertion lies 
 upon all created things. And we ourselves 
 can only achieve life and realize our indi- 
 vidual existence by meeting that necessity 
 hand to hand and overcoming it/ In over- 
 coming it we become what we are, whether 
 we be men or whether we be chipmunks. 
 The moment we cease to overcome and rest 
 inactively on what we have accomplished, 
 that moment we begin to perish. 
 
 There is only one way to be a poet, by 
 sweat and heartbreak and bitter weariness 
 of brain. And even then you won't be a 
 poet, you will only be a man, unless it has 
 pleased the powers to bestow on you the 
 grace of words. But when a man has some 
 
 69 
 
faculty of expression, begotten in him by 
 some happy circumstance, and then learns 
 the taste of life and the touch of it at first 
 hand, he will have some feeling about it 
 and some opinion on it worth heeding, and 
 poetry will come out of him as naturally 
 as milk comes out of a cocoanut. 
 
 The genius of the artist secretes beauty 
 by some natural process, as inevitably as a 
 bee secretes honey, and gives it forth in 
 good time for the mystification and enjoy- 
 ment of the world. The process itself is 
 hidden even from the intelligence that car- 
 ries it on, but the carrying on of the process 
 is a continual satisfaction. The creative 
 instinct of the artist, uneasy with the posses- 
 sion of his unvented ideal, is akin to the 
 procreative instinct of the world, which 
 cannot rest until it has attempted to realize 
 itself in ever fresher, more lovely, and more 
 adequate forms. 
 
 There is another reason why the poet can- 
 not be exempt from the common lot. Afflu- 
 
 70 
 
ence is not good for artists for this reason; 
 affluence is not good for anybody — perfect 
 affluence, I mean, the amount of affluence 
 which relieves one permanently from all 
 need of endeavour. Great wealth, or even a 
 little wealth, may make people sleek and 
 self-satisfied and fat-minded, but it cannot of 
 itself make them either beautiful or loving, 
 nor give them openness of mind. And since 
 artists are always people with a large and 
 vivid capacity for sensuous enjoyment, wealth 
 is more dangerous to them than to others. 
 It does not hurt a miner, or a horse-thief, or 
 a peddler to grow rich, for in nine cases out 
 of ten he does not know how to enjoy his 
 money when he has made it; he can only go 
 on making more and more, and growing more 
 desperate every day at his own incapacity, 
 until finally he begins to give it away in mil- 
 lions in sheer weariness of spirit. VBut in nine 
 cases out of ten, great prosperity will spoil 
 a good artist; he begins to be so engrossed 
 in enjoyment, and he has such a great appre- 
 
 71 
 
STfit Jl^otivp of Hffe 
 
 elation of the easy beauty of life, that he 
 ceases from the strenuous work of creation/^ 
 ^But, after all, all this is only one side of 
 the question, and the whole argument I have 
 made only proves that the poet, and every 
 other artist, in fact, ought to be and must 
 be a normal man — not an average man, but 
 a normal man, with all the best powers and 
 capacities of manhood in him. He must be 
 capable of thought, capable of passion, capa- 
 ble of manual labour. No one lacking in 
 these three essentials, or lacking in any one 
 of them, can be called a normal man; nor 
 can he have anything valuable and great 
 to say to us about life. ^ 
 
 On the other hand, however, modern life 
 IS very complex (and, of course, the more 
 complex it is the more beautiful it may be 
 made), and we all have to specialize a good 
 deal, and it is not possible for one man to do 
 more than one thing superlatively well. If 
 you would be a great financier, a great 
 mechanic, a great statesman, or a great scien- 
 
 72 
 
JETtie pott in tf^t eomtnonttieaUti 
 
 tist, or a great engineer, or a great cook, 
 you must devote your life to it, you must 
 give your mind to it, and your love and 
 your industry. You may learn to do many 
 things so well that the doing of them serves 
 to enlighten and enrich your specialty; but 
 the main issue, the focusing-point and flower 
 of all your effort and ability, must be some 
 one thing that you love most, know most, and 
 do best. 
 
 Now art (and poetry is one of the most 
 difficult of the fine arts) is just such an occu- 
 pation as these. You cannot always com- 
 pose a sonnet over your evening cigar. Art 
 is not an idle amusement, it is a natural phe- 
 nomenon, as significant as war, as beautiful 
 as the northern lights, and as useful as elec- 
 tricity. Of all forms of human activity it 
 is the most exacting, as it is perhaps the most 
 delightful. And the demand which creative 
 output makes on all the energies is just as 
 great and just as exhausting as that made by 
 any other worthy occupation worthily fol- 
 
 73 
 
Ciie ^ottvp of Hift 
 
 lowed. If poetry were a purely artificial 
 pastime, fit only to engage the minds of 
 college youths and schoolgirls, certainly it 
 would not be worth our serious discussion. 
 But if it is what history declares it to be, the 
 voice of revelation, the finest utterance of 
 human wisdom, the basis of religion, and the 
 solace of sorrowing mortals, if it teaches us 
 how to live, how to be happy, how to love the 
 right and appreciate the beautiful and per- 
 ceive the true, if it illumines the dark prob- 
 lems of existence, and heartens us upon the 
 difficult path to perfection, then surely we 
 may well consider how best to foster it and 
 preserve it, and make its influence prevail 
 in the commonwealth. 
 
 If poetry, therefore, is such a serious busi- 
 ness, and worth the attention of strong men, 
 it cannot be cultivated as a mere avocation. 
 It will engage all the energies of any one 
 who follows it. So that, while it seems to 
 me untrue to say that a man who works with 
 his hands cannot be a poet, and while I 
 
 74 
 
acne J&ott in tHe eomiiionttiea^ltii 
 
 think it nearer the truth to say that a man 
 who does no work with his hands cannot be 
 a poet, I think it nearest the truth (at the 
 beginning of the twentieth century) to say 
 that a man who earns his living with his 
 hands cannot be a poet. He will not have 
 time. He will not have leisure for the 
 requisite learning and culture; he will not 
 be able to know even the rudiments of sci- 
 ence and philosophy and social economics; 
 he will not have leisure to know the pleas- 
 ures of aesthetic enjoyment; he cannot be a 
 lover of nature, nor a lover of books, nor a 
 lover of many things lovely. 
 
 Why? Because under existing social and 
 industrial conditions he cannot be the mas- 
 ter of his own time. And while the normal 
 man must have enough physical work to 
 keep him in perfect health, the average 
 man has enough to ruin his health and sicken 
 his soul. The whole question of art rests 
 on the social and industrial problems. The 
 fine arts are closely related to the industrial 
 
 75 
 
arts. And at present we can have no wide- 
 spread national interest in the fine arts, be- 
 cause we have no national industrial arts. 
 The industrial arts of a people, like the fine 
 arts, can only be carried on by men who are 
 free and honest and intelligent, and there- 
 fore happy. For it is quite true, as William 
 Morris said, that art is the expression of 
 man's pleasure in his work. But the mien 
 who engage in our industries to-day cannot 
 have any pleasure in their work. For our 
 industrial arts — or, rather, our industries 
 and manufactures which ought to be indus- 
 trial arts — are carried on by two classes of 
 people, the workmen and the capitalists. 
 And all workmen, under modern industrial 
 conditions, are the slaves of their employers; 
 while capitalists, however generous their 
 impulses, are of necessity slave-owners. Of 
 course the workmen do not know that they 
 are slaves, and the capitalists do not know 
 they are slave-owners. But that does not 
 make the matter any better — it only plunges 
 
 76 
 
QCfie ^ott in tHe eommontoealtl^ 
 
 both in a sea of confusion, as the blind might 
 stumble in fighting with the blind. The 
 workman thinks he is free, because if he does 
 not like one owner he can sell himself to 
 another. And the capitalist thinks he is 
 honest because he plays fairly according to 
 the rules of the game. But the principles of 
 the game are fundamentally rotten, since 
 shrewdness of mind does not make right 
 any more than might of muscle does. 
 
 The first question, however, is not whether 
 a poet should live by the work of his hands, 
 but whether he should live at all. And, 
 however much we may obscure and injure 
 the splendid significance of poetry with our 
 incessant and ineffectual sophistries of a day, 
 I must believe that the world's need for great 
 and fearless poetry is perpetual, and that 
 without its illuminating aid we shall never 
 come near to accomplishing our destiny. 
 
 77 
 

 There is such incongruity between our 
 traditional idea of the poet and our daily 
 experience of modern life that we can hardly 
 reconcile the two; and our conception of the 
 poet in modern life is pretty sure, for that 
 reason, to be either comic or tragic. He will 
 seem to us anything but commonplace, and 
 we cannot take him as a matter of course. 
 The typical poet is out of date; and the 
 poet of the times is slow to arrive, since the 
 time itself is scarcely ripe for his appear- 
 ance. If we are to think justly of the poet 
 in modern life, however, we must be careful 
 not to overvalue his ofHce on the one hand, 
 
 78 
 
nor on the other to depreciate the worth and 
 significance of the age. And the greater our 
 love of poetry, our sympathy with ideals, 
 our feeling for beauty, the more shall we be 
 in danger of undervaluing our own day 
 when these things are not paramount in 
 men's minds. Let us try to look at the ques- 
 tion quite fairly, neither embittered by the 
 facts nor led astray by impossible fancies. 
 
 The poet, if we attempt to form a com- 
 posite photograph of him from impressions 
 gathered here and there through the pages 
 of history, is for the most part a serious 
 figure, nearly always aloof from the affairs 
 of earth, somewhat shy of life and its activi- 
 ties, and dealing more in dreams than in 
 realities. But to be more precise, as we think 
 of the long list of poets whose names still 
 survive, whose words still are alive in our 
 ears, we shall find them dividing them- 
 selves mainly into two groups, — the relig- 
 ious poets and the dramatic poets, — those 
 who were inspired by the moral temper of 
 
 79 
 
Zfft J|oetr» of ILffe 
 
 their time, and those who devoted them- 
 selves to the entertainment of their fellows. 
 The poet is both prophet and entertainer, 
 both priest and artist. He stands for ever the 
 interpreter of nature to men; that is his 
 sacerdotal office. He is also the revealer of 
 men to themselves; that is his business as a 
 dramatic artist. 
 
 David, Isaiah, Job, Dante, Milton, Shel- 
 ley, Wordsworth, Emerson, — these are types 
 of the poet as prophet or priest of nature. 
 They " saw life steadily and saw it whole," 
 but in their heart there burned for ever a 
 passion for righteousness never to be satis- 
 fied by things as they are. They were for 
 ever stirred by a divine unrest; the fever of 
 God throbbed in their veins; they could 
 never suffer fools gladly, nor look with 
 equanimity upon the sorry spectacle of 
 human weakness. They were lean men and 
 laughed little. Possessed continually by a 
 consuming love of the beautiful, the true, 
 and the good, and beholding at the same 
 
 80 
 
8Cl&r Ji^ott In JWolretn mtt 
 
 time how life seems to be inseparable from 
 ugliness and evil, they could never attain the 
 ruddy and placid contentment of the born 
 comedian. The pageant of human en- 
 deavour, the interplay of human character, 
 so engrossing to many, v^as to them only the 
 surface and appearance of the world. They 
 were for ever haunted by a sense of the 
 presence behind the mask, the spirit behind 
 the semblance. To their endless unhappi- 
 ness, one must believe, they were driven 
 forward by an insuperable curiosity for the 
 truth about life, an unassuageable love of 
 the beauty of earth, and above all by a pure 
 and impossible desire to make actual those 
 ideal conditions of conduct and circumstance 
 which never yet have been realized by man, 
 nor will ever leave him at peace in medi- 
 ocrity. 
 
 As long as the stars remain and the soul 
 of man fleets with the breath of his body, so 
 long must he suffer this bitter divergence 
 between " I would " and " I can." To the 
 
 8i 
 
ffiilt lloettfi of ILife 
 
 great poets of nature this realization has 
 come as an overwhelming influence, a bur- 
 den of knowledge almost insupportable. 
 They could hardly be other than grave, 
 impressive, unostentatious, simple, single 
 of purpose, strenuous in endeavour, and 
 modest from the very abundance of their 
 wisdom. So great must have been their 
 ideality, so keen their inward vision, it is 
 little wonder if at times they failed in joy- 
 ousness and permitted a minor strain to 
 sound through their messages of encourage- 
 ment to men. Thus it is that not all poets 
 have been prophets of gladness, but sorrow 
 and uncertainty had their messengers, too. 
 For the life of man, which is so large a part 
 of the poetry of earth, must be given com- 
 plete expression in beautiful words; and the 
 dominant note of triumphant joy must have 
 its undertone of grievous doubt. Through 
 the glad supreme assurance of large faith 
 and unconquerable achievement, the broken- 
 hearted wistfulness of failure must be heard; 
 
 82 
 
Zftt J&ott {If iHotrern lELlU 
 
 else were our poetry imperfect, and half of 
 humanity left without a voice. Moreover, 
 those deep consolations and counsels which it 
 is the business of art and poetry to furnish, 
 can scarcely be rendered effectively without 
 the profoundest sympathy with suffering. 
 The royal psalmist, on whom so many thou- 
 sands have leaned for spiritual support, must 
 have tasted the bitter waters of affliction, to 
 be able to reach the hearts of men so surely. 
 Now, such a conception of the poet in his 
 capacity as interpreter of nature and the 
 deeper moods of the mind, is evidently not 
 the broadest one. When we think of Homer 
 and Virgil and Chaucer and Shakespeare, 
 and the writers of the Greek Anthology, we 
 think of the poet in a very different char- 
 acter. He is no longer the seer labouring 
 under the stress of an almost Orphic inspira- 
 tion; he is the open-eyed, glad-hearted be- 
 holder and recorder of life as he sees it. The 
 God has breathed upon him, indeed, giving 
 him greater insight into the foibles of his 
 
 83 
 
fellows than most men enjoy, and yet has not 
 wholly rapt him out of himself. He is hu- 
 man, comfortable, friendly, merry, and con- 
 tent, a lover of wine and leisure and 
 laughter. He is a lover of beauty, indeed, 
 but his keen satisfaction in the loveliness of 
 nature is not marred by the ever present sense 
 of incompleteness, which must always haunt 
 the preeminent poet of nature. The one 
 finds the answer to his questions in a shrewd 
 analysis of human motives and purposes. To 
 the questions of the other, hearkening per- 
 petually for some hinted solution of the 
 riddle of existence, there is no answer possi- 
 ble. Small wonder, then, that the type of the 
 first should be the jovial Horace or the 
 genial Chaucer, while the type of the second 
 blends something of the austerity of Dante 
 with the zeal of David. 
 
 Now human life, when all is said, is not 
 so very different in ancient and modern 
 days. Barbarism or civilization, city or 
 wilderness, the conditions vary, but the prime 
 
 84 
 
8CJjr ^ott tn JHolrttn Htft 
 
 facts of life remain, and it is with these that 
 the poet deals. 
 
 In modern life, as in that of old time, 
 there are the matters of love and war, friend- 
 ship and hatred, joy in the senses, sorrow, 
 bereavement, loneliness, faith, disquietude, 
 and death; the elemental facts from which 
 the fabric of the universe is built, and the 
 elemental passions and cravings with which 
 we confront them. The poetry of the Old 
 Testament, of Homer, or of Virgil, does not 
 seem antiquated, except in occasional detail 
 of local colour. The lament of David for 
 Absalom, the mighty verses of many chap- 
 ters of Job and Isaiah, the pathetic parting 
 of Hector and Andromache, Virgil's de- 
 scription of the bees or the shadows on the 
 mountainside, are as fresh as if they had been 
 written yesterday. 
 
 This perennial vigour, this power to sur- 
 vive the change of fashion and the flight of 
 years, is a test of poetry which most of our 
 modern verse would be pitifully unable to 
 
 85 
 
J!Ci|t J&ottvs Of iLife 
 
 fulfil, and which the best of it will still have 
 to face. All that is whimsical, fantastic, gro- 
 tesque, of purely contemporary value, will 
 gradually be forgotten and cut away, while 
 a few splendid lyrics, a few noble passages, 
 we may imagine, will be jealously preserved 
 and handed on as part of our bequest to the 
 future. Men will not care to perpetuate 
 what is essentially modern in our work, but 
 rather what is essentially human, essentially 
 poetic, essentially beautiful. In the long 
 run only the fair and noble survives, whether 
 in art or life, for the reheartening and re- 
 generating of the earth. So it happens that 
 all great literature that has come down to 
 us is infused with a simple dignity of spirit, 
 a majestic and pure sincerity, which seem 
 for the time quite beyond the reach of our 
 own accomplishment. Yet we may be sure 
 our ambitious attempts, with all their clever- 
 ness, all their novelty, all their exact faith- 
 fulness to nature, will be wanting in vitality, 
 in permanent interest, if we do not succeed 
 
 86 
 
^f^t ^oet In Jttoiretn Hift 
 
 in giving them just these spiritual quali- 
 ties. 
 
 The spirit of the world is eager but inex- 
 orable, always in need of new thought, new 
 beauty, new funds of emotion, and yet ruth- 
 lessly discarding everything which does not 
 help it forward on the long, arduous prog- 
 ress of the centuries. The ages to come will 
 care no more for our popular airs and songs 
 and paintings than we care for those of van- 
 ished civilizations. But whenever the human 
 spirit, under a stress of intense feeling, and 
 in the face of the inescapable difficulty or 
 bitterness or joy of life, rises to impassioned 
 utterance, that utterance, however slight, is 
 likely to be worth saving. This rule is un- 
 alterable, and obtains for modern poetry as 
 for the most ancient. No art can outlive 
 its own time which does not rise above the 
 commonplace; and any art which rises suffi- 
 ciently far above the average of contempo- 
 rary achievement is sure to be treasured. 
 
 This, however, is only one way of looking 
 
 87 
 
Zftt jpoetrjj of attr 
 
 at the matter. There is much very excel- 
 lent art and poetry produced by every 
 people, which is not great, and which has 
 fulfilled its function when it has been re- 
 membered for a year or two, or for a gener- 
 ation or two, to give pleasure and encour- 
 agement to thousands to whom any more 
 perfect or profound work would not appeal 
 at all. No work is to be condemned simply 
 because it is not of the first rank. Even if 
 we have no great artists, it is good to have 
 an interest in art, to have a number of men 
 giving their energy to keep alive a great 
 tradition, until a more favourable season. 
 And one demands of them only a modest 
 sincerity. 
 
 It is not my aim in the present paper to 
 attempt any inquiry into the purposes of 
 poetry. But in considering the relation of 
 the poet to modern life, one necessarily takes 
 for granted certain requirements of the 
 poetic art, consciously or not. The business 
 of poetry among the fine arts of expression, 
 
 88 
 
as it appears to me, is threefold. It must 
 offer us some delightful counterfeit likeness 
 of life for our entertainment; it must sat- 
 isfy our intellectual need for truth; and 
 finally it must supply us with spiritual re- 
 inforcement and consolation. We look to 
 the fine arts in general to give us a refined 
 pleasure of the senses, to answer the ques- 
 tions of our restless curiosity, and to inten- 
 sify and ennoble our emotional life. We 
 demand all these things of poetry. We ask 
 that it shall have captivating beauty of form, 
 that it shall be consistent with the most ad- 
 vanced discoveries of modern thought and 
 modern science, and that it shall supply us 
 with adequate standards and tests of conduct. 
 We must ask modern poetry, therefore, 
 what It has to say on every topic of prime 
 importance which bears upon life. We must 
 expect it to embody for us all the new and 
 wonderful revelations of modern science, 
 discarding those old conceptions of the uni- 
 verse, however time-honoured and pictur- 
 
 89 
 
Efft ^Ottvs of ILift 
 
 esque, which recent knowledge has proved 
 erroneous. It is not easy for poetry to do this 
 all at once, yet do it it must, if the restless 
 mind of man is to be satisfied. It is only 
 a poet of exceptional power who can see the 
 poetry in modern life, its inventions, its dis- 
 coveries, its ceaseless and venturesome activi- 
 ties, and give that poetic aspect adequate 
 expression in words. The poet, particularly 
 the modern poet, must have the unprejudiced 
 eye and the exuberant spirits of a child, or he 
 will not see the world for himself, and love it 
 as it should be loved. Unless he sees clearly, 
 loves intensely, and reasons profoundly, his 
 poems can take no lasting hold upon us, how- 
 ever ornate or daring they may be. 
 
 To produce the best results in poetry, or 
 in any art, then, the artist must be endowed 
 with the alert, observing eye, the questing, 
 unswervable mind, and a temperament at 
 once ardent, kindly, and above satiety or cor- 
 ruption. He must love his age and under- 
 stand it, in order to represent it justly or 
 
 90 
 
8Cf|r ^oet In iWoifetn ILife 
 
 convert it to his way. This he can hardly 
 do, if he feels himself out of sympathy with 
 its ideals and pursuits. On the other hand, 
 the actual world of things as they are can 
 never seem quite adequate to the idealist. 
 There is no man so uninspired as to be con- 
 tented all the time. There will come to him 
 hours of divine dissatisfaction, when noth- 
 ing short of perfection will seem sufficient. 
 Out of the wistfulness and disquiet of such 
 moments the creative impulse may arise with 
 its passionate longing for beauty, and give 
 vent to that longing in imperishable forms 
 of art; and these creations in colours, in 
 sounds, in magical words, remain to con- 
 vict the actual world of its shortcomings, 
 and stimulate it to fairer endeavour. 
 
 Having in mind the opportunity always 
 presented to poetry, what shall we say of 
 its condition and scope to-day? What of 
 the poet in modern life? Is it a time likely 
 to be favourable for the production of great 
 poetry? And have we any need of the poet 
 
 91 
 
2rf|e ^ottvs ot Hift 
 
 with his visions? Let us admit, what seems 
 to be the truth, that there probably never 
 was a time when poetry was held in less 
 esteem than at present. Why is this? We 
 have wealth, we have leisure, we have great 
 prosperity, we have peace, we have wide- 
 spread intelligence, we have freedom of 
 thought and conscience. All these things, it 
 has always been supposed, go to make up a 
 state of society in which the fine arts can 
 flourish. Why do they not flourish here 
 and now? Why have we no poets whose 
 ability and influence are of national concern? 
 Because, with all our comforts, all our 
 delightful luxuries, all our intellectual alert- 
 ness, we are steadily losing our moral ideas, 
 steadily suffering a spiritual deterioration. 
 Anglo-Saxon civilization, to speak of no 
 other, has become a humiliating and un- 
 scrupulous game. Our fathers and grand- 
 fathers cared for many ideals, for honour, 
 for honesty, for patriotism, for culture, for 
 high breeding, for nobility of character and 
 
 92 
 
Zfit ^ott in ittotrern mu 
 
 unselfishness of purpose. We care for none 
 of these things. They have gone out of 
 fashion. We care only for wealth, and re- 
 spect only those relentless and barbarous 
 traits of character by which it is attained. 
 That the ideal state must be established on 
 material prosperity is quite true. But that 
 we should permit ourselves to rest satisfied 
 with such prosperity, and even become en- 
 grossed by it, is fatal. All that Western 
 civilization has done in the past thousand 
 years to make life more secure and pleas- 
 ant and comfortable, has been done under 
 the impulse of worthy ideals and humane 
 inspirations. Now, having attained so com- 
 plete a control of all the machinery of living, 
 we seem in danger of losing what is best in 
 life itself. Modern life, with its ambitions 
 and triumphs, may seem a very comfortable 
 and delightful period to be alive in, with its 
 immense labour-saving facilities and its many 
 diversions. One does not wonder that people 
 give themselves so unsparingly to the secur- 
 
 93 
 
Eftt ^ottvs of Hffe 
 
 ing of those diversions and luxuries. Yet, 
 from another view-point, one cannot but be 
 amazed at the short-sightedness of men which 
 allows them to spend laborious lives in 
 preparing to live. One cannot but recognize 
 the shameless materialism of the age, its 
 brutal selfishness, ignoble avarice, and utter 
 disregard of all the generous ideals of the 
 spirit. We have gained the whole world, 
 but in doing it we have lost our own soul. 
 
 Here is the theme for the modern poet. 
 He is to bring back inspiration to our un- 
 illumined days. He is to show us how to 
 regain our spiritual manhood. He is to 
 show us how to make use of our wealth, how 
 to turn our immense resources to some rea- 
 sonable account. He must not be a mere 
 detractor of his time, peevish and sour. He 
 must love his age, with all its immense folly 
 and pitiable sordidness; and because of his 
 love and sympathy he must desire to re- 
 establish for it those moral ideals which it 
 has lost. 
 
 94 
 
^f^t ^ott in Mo^tvn ILffe 
 
 The latter half of the past century had, 
 in William Morris, a poet in many ways 
 typical of the modern artist; he loved beauty 
 and hated iniquity with so hearty a good- 
 will that he could see nothing good in his 
 own age. He found nothing in it to love, 
 and much to detest. That was his great mis- 
 fortune. It drove him too far away from 
 us. It made him little better than a medi- 
 aeval visitor among us. We may be keenly 
 aware of the modern lack of ideals, but we 
 must not forget the immeasurable service 
 which modern science has rendered the 
 world. In the sphere of knowledge, in the 
 liberation of the human mind, no century has 
 been more remarkable than the nineteenth. 
 This is no small matter; it is a very great 
 glory indeed. But it did not seem to be of 
 any significance to William Morris. So far 
 as his conception of the ideal life was con- 
 cerned, we might as well have been living 
 in the age of Pericles or Theocritus. A man 
 who cares no more than that for the greatest 
 
 95 
 
2riie Jloetrj? of atte 
 
 achievement of his time, can hardly hope 
 to address it with authority. His noblest 
 ideals must always seem to it somewhat 
 quixotic and ineffective. 
 
 Of the two great Victorians, Tennyson and 
 Browning, the one brooded upon modern 
 life, yet held himself aloof from participat- 
 ing in it; while the other loved it well and 
 partook of its good things, without attempt- 
 ing to address himself directly to its needs. 
 It was the figure of Tennyson which satisfied 
 the popular notion of the poet in majestic 
 calm, undistracted by temporal affairs. And 
 to the mind of Tennyson all our spiritual 
 difficulties and doubts appealed; all the 
 movements of his time were reflected in his 
 work. Browning, on the other hand, was 
 beset by no such difficulties. His themes 
 were uninfluenced by the tenor of his time. 
 The problems of the human spirit which 
 confronted him and engrossed his thought 
 were elemental and eternal. Perhaps for 
 that very reason he could throw himself into 
 
 96 
 
the enjoyment of life with such unquestion- 
 ing zest. 
 
 Of the other two poets of the later Vic- 
 torian period, Rossetti and Arnold, one was 
 a recluse, and belonged to no age, while the 
 other belonged so exclusively to his age that 
 his time was never his own. Though Rossetti 
 lived in our own day, there is no touch of 
 modernity in his work. And Arnold, who 
 comprehended his age so well, was denied 
 the leisure which poetry demands. 
 
 The poet in modern life, if one may in- 
 dulge the fancy for creating an almost im- 
 possible figure, would have some of the 
 characteristics of all these men. He should 
 have all of Matthew Arnold's insight into 
 the trend of social events, all of the sympathy 
 of William Morris, all of the large poise 
 and self-possession of Tennyson. Most of all, 
 perhaps, he would resemble Browning in 
 philosophic power combined with a vigorous 
 love of life. 
 
 Among poets more strictly contemporary 
 97 
 
Efit ^oetts of aiff 
 
 than these, there are two of marked popu- 
 larity and preeminent achievement, whose 
 position entitles them to be considered more 
 or less typical in modern life. Mr. Rudyard 
 Kipling and Mr. James Whitcomb Riley 
 are perhaps the only English-speaking poets 
 of the day who can command a respectful 
 hearing. Others may be listened to by a few 
 hundred admirers, but these men, when they 
 speak, address an attentive audience, com- 
 mensurate with their brilliant powers. They 
 are not only read, but beloved; and their 
 influence is undoubted. And our ideal 
 modern poet, when he makes his appearance, 
 if he is to inherit some of the traits of the 
 greater Victorians, should also possess some 
 of the qualities of our distinguished friends 
 who have written " The Seven Seas " and 
 " Poems Here at Home." He should have 
 Mr. Kipling's capacity for perceiving ro- 
 mance in the midst of the seemingly com- 
 monplace, and Mr. Riley's untarnished 
 spirit of kindliness toward this great, foolish, 
 
 98 
 
cue ^oH in iWotretn iLffe 
 
 distracted world. He would be tolerant and 
 intensely human as they are, he would love 
 his age, as they do, but, at the same time, if 
 such a thing were not impossible, he would 
 be horrified at the consuming greed which 
 is the ruling passion in modern life, and 
 he would be unconquerably possessed by a 
 love of justice and goodness nowhere para- 
 mount in the poetry of the day. 
 
 Meanwhile, our modern bard, of whom 
 we expect so many impossible virtues, will 
 not have a very encouraging progress toward 
 recognition. If he have means at his dis- 
 posal, he will have to face the many dis- 
 tractions which modern society can make 
 so alluring; and if he have none, he will 
 have to face the still less desirable fate of 
 slow starvation. For no man can serve two 
 mistresses, and the muse will not tolerate a 
 rival near the throne. Her devotee must 
 ofifer her a single-hearted service, and be con- 
 tent with a hod-carrier's wage. He will have 
 a taste for good books, good pictures, good 
 
 99 
 
music, and all the charming refinements of 
 the modern world, and yet he must be satis- 
 fied to enjoy them only in the homes of 
 others. He will need all the fortitude and 
 cheerfulness of the poor. Indeed, he will 
 need more of those admirable qualities than 
 the poor possess, since his appreciation of 
 all that is beautiful and elegant in life is 
 so much keener and more profound than 
 theirs. 
 
 It may be contended that the finest achieve- 
 ments of art are born of discouragement and 
 privation, but I must believe there is a limit 
 to the beneficial influence of these severe 
 conditions. A modicum of discouragement, 
 a few years of privation, are probably whole- 
 some and tonic to the artistic temper. A 
 lifetime of them seems more than is neces- 
 sary. And we are always in danger of 
 having genius perish at our doors. How- 
 ever, perhaps it is better that one genius 
 should perish than that a hundred mediocre 
 
 lOO 
 
cut JPott In iWotretn ILlft 
 
 sentimentalists should fill the world with 
 babbling. 
 
 But we must not leave our subject with so 
 discouraging and petulant a thought. In all 
 that I have said I have had in mind only the 
 more serious aspects of poetry; but it is for 
 ever to be remembered that the fine arts 
 were born from sheer exuberance of spirits, 
 and can never flourish long in any dolorous 
 mood. They are analogous to the play of 
 animals and children; they indicate excess 
 of happiness and effervescence of life; they 
 mean always that some mortal had more joy 
 than he could hold, and must find vent for it 
 in expression. The fine arts are quite super- 
 fluous in any scheme of life which looks only 
 to the maintenance of a bare subsistence; 
 they could never spring from a condition of 
 bleak, unmitigated slavery. There must be 
 some elasticity of spirit, some freedom of 
 mind and action, to support them. They 
 must, in truth, echo the sorrows of the world; 
 but far more must they embody its gladness, 
 
 lOI 
 
scut ^ottvp of mu 
 
 its strength, its loveliness, its confident and 
 careless manhood. 
 
 If the modern artist cannot have a good 
 time living, he had better go out of business; 
 success in art is not for him. If the modern 
 poet cannot find a way to take life gaily, re- 
 sourcefully, unquerulously, he had better 
 quench his songs. He must be poor-spirited, 
 indeed, if, in a time like this, so full of 
 generosity, of confidence, of elation, he can- 
 not find something to be happy about. He 
 may have some difficulty in meeting his 
 obligations, but he should certainly be able 
 to present a gentle and cheerful manliness 
 to the world, and manage to participate in its 
 gaiety. He must not be less a man than his 
 struggling fellows, but more. He must 
 not be abashed or envious at any overabun- 
 dance of worldly splendour, but exhibit a 
 keen enjoyment of beauty and elegance and 
 leisure, such as very few of our magnificent 
 moderns can attain. He may sometimes 
 think life is difficult, and poetry the most 
 
 I02 
 
©tie mtt in montvn Hife 
 
 thankless of all pursuits; but he must still 
 be glad to be alive, or no one will care 
 whether he lives or not. Above all, he must 
 see to it that no drop of the poison of ennui 
 finds its way into his work. He must be so 
 loyal to his beautiful art, that he will gladly 
 keep it unimpaired by any chance misfor- 
 tune of his own. However like a failure his 
 own career may seem to him; however utterly 
 he may lose at times the wholesome appetite 
 for life, the longing for wisdom and beauty, 
 the zest for achievement; however his spirit 
 and flesh may fail before the mighty and 
 inexorable enigma, he will still bear himself 
 with courage before others, and look forth 
 upon the confused concourse of life with 
 an uncraven mind. So doing, he will utter 
 no word of personal plaint, but carefully 
 guard his poetry from the note of dejection. 
 For he will perceive that his art is greater 
 than himself, and scrupulously embody in his 
 work only his gladsome and encouraging 
 experiences, letting his darker hours perish 
 
 103 
 
Zftt ^ottva of nift 
 
 unrecorded. However bitter existence may 
 taste to him personally, he surely cannot 
 help seeing that in the long run, in the large 
 account, life as a whole is desirable, and art 
 as a whole is the reflection of its goodly joy. 
 
 104 
 
Cije IBtfmtt of ©oetrg 
 
 There have been many volumes written in 
 defence of poetry, and every little while some 
 fresh champion springs to its rescue with a 
 diligent apology. But that raises the pre- 
 vious question, Why should poetry need 
 any defence? 
 
 Has it survived until now, only to perish 
 in the latter days of the world of neglect and 
 inattention? It has always had defenders; 
 it has always seemed to need apologists; and 
 yet it does subsist. The truth is, one may say 
 that poetry is the voice of the better self, and 
 always needs to be defended from the less 
 fortunate toiling self, who must bear the 
 brunt of life, and sometimes grows cynical 
 under the strain. That part of us which 
 
 105 
 
has to go to the ofBce or the field, which must 
 drive an axe or a pen all day to wrest a 
 living from the clutch of nature, is not apt 
 to be overtolerant of leisure and contempla- 
 tion and the delights of the fine arts. 
 
 To become engrossed in the necessary 
 pursuits of average existence, is to lose 
 patience and sympathy with the finer appre- 
 ciation of the poetry of life; and yet the 
 wise man will be able to give his strength 
 to strenuous service in practical affairs, will 
 be a constant benefactor to his fellows in 
 eminently substantial ways, will efficiently 
 put his shoulder to the muddy wheel, while 
 he is at the same time accumulating a re- 
 serve-fund of refreshing enthusiasm for the 
 poetry of life as he sees it. No wise man is 
 a scoffer, nor a disbeliever in the beautiful. 
 This is true among all kinds of men, whether 
 they live in the west end of London or the 
 east side of New York. The poor foreigner 
 who lives at starvation wages in the tene- 
 ments, and yet saves enough to educate his 
 
 1 06 
 
a;^^ Befence of lloftti? 
 
 boy for better things, does not need any 
 defence of poetry. He is a faithful believer 
 already. The rich American, whose orbit 
 lies between Wall Street and the park, is 
 not necessarily in need of any defence of 
 poetry; his love of beauty, his devotion to 
 art, may form a very wide angle of his 
 pie. 
 
 Nevertheless, for the majority of us, the 
 enchantment of material possessions is all- 
 powerful, and we hold them at an inflated 
 value. So that poetry is always in need of a 
 defence; we are always in need of friends 
 of the spirit, and of helps toward the finest 
 enjoyments; we need to be delivered from 
 our own worse elements. There is no surer 
 escape from the prison of the worse self 
 than through the door of beautiful expres- 
 sion. If we can follow any one of the arts 
 or crafts, ever so humbly, we have, indeed, 
 an exceptional lot, happy beyond the fortune 
 of the majority. But even barring this ad- 
 vantage, we may still escape through the 
 
 107 
 
expression of others; we may be lovers and 
 appreciators of the artistic and the beautiful; 
 we may borrow for a moment some phrase 
 of Wordsworth or Stevenson that exactly 
 speaks our own thought; or some tint from 
 Turner or Monet that exactly conveys our 
 own vision; and so we become sharers with 
 these masters of the universal joy of self- 
 expression. They have thus helped us to 
 realize our own emotion, to visualize our 
 own vague fancy; they have brought us into 
 relation with the outer ocean of truth; they 
 have given us passage out into the deep water 
 of emotional being; they have liberated us 
 from the petty shallows of our smaller selves. 
 The liberal arts are those which make us 
 free; a liberal education is one which gives 
 us the freedom of the commonwealth of the 
 spirit. 
 
 I fancy that the joy of any great artist, a 
 great author like Browning, or a great 
 painter like Millet, must reside in this, that 
 he feels himself closely a part of a greater 
 
 io8 
 
St|f 'Btftntt ot ^ottvs 
 
 life than his own. He is an interpreter, using 
 the common symbols of our own speech, and 
 communicating to us messages from the 
 ancient, uncorrupted language of universal 
 aspiration. He talks to us in terms more 
 apt and beautiful than we could ever invent; 
 he brings us the zest of conviction, the stir 
 of wonder. When we take his expressions 
 for a moment and make them our own, we 
 can no longer be mean, nor petty, nor sordid, 
 nor engrossed in unworthy pursuits. We 
 have touched what is more attractive and 
 entrancing, and henceforth must live by 
 that more alluring standard of enjoyment. 
 To be sensitive to new impressions of beauty, 
 to be able to fill each minute with some keen 
 sense of ennobling joy, this is a great part 
 of the secret of happiness; and it is this that 
 art can help us to attain. Hardly anything 
 else can help us so much or so well. 
 
 Therefore, poetry, be it said again, needs 
 no defender, save against the vandal within 
 us. There is no man walking this earth who 
 
 109 
 
is not himself a defender of poetry in his 
 best moments, and a forwarder of that golden 
 age which is ever fleeting like a shadow 
 before us. 
 
 no 
 
^t0taste for ©oetrg 
 
 Whether or not there actually is a grow- 
 ing distaste for the higher kinds of poetry 
 is more a matter of observation than of judg- 
 ment; and the opinion of a statistician, if he 
 could find the proper data anywhere, would 
 be more valuable than that of the wisest 
 critic. I have no means of coming to an ade- 
 quate conclusion on the subject, but I dare 
 say many thoughtful persons must regretfully 
 share the recent apprehension that poetry 
 has nothing like the hold it used to have on 
 men's minds. 
 
 This, however, would not necessarily 
 mean the final decay of poetry as a fine art 
 It might only indicate a temporary condi- 
 tion, a passing fluctuation of history. Periods 
 
 III 
 
JTlir i^oettrs of mtt 
 
 of fine civilization, of intellectual freedom 
 and spiritual activity, have before now given 
 place to ages of grossness, barbarism, igno- 
 rance, and decay. They may again. If 
 not a book of poetry were sold in a year, it 
 would not prove the death of poetry; it 
 would only prove the degeneration of the 
 time. At least that is the faith which the 
 story of man up to the present time justifies 
 us in holding. 
 
 The division of poetry into descriptive, 
 lyrical, reflective, and narrative (epic and 
 dramatic) is useful academically; but it 
 will hardly give us sufficient help in deter- 
 mining the relative value of poetical works, 
 and is very likely to lead us astray. We 
 should scarcely be justified in calling " The 
 Lady of the Lake " or " The Lays of Ancient 
 Rome " a higher kind of poetry than " Tears, 
 Idle Tears," or "Lead, Kindly Light," 
 simply because the former deal with action 
 and the latter with emotion, — though this, 
 perhaps, is citing a rather unfair compari- 
 
 112 
 
m^tuntt for ^ottvs 
 
 son. I believe we shall derive more help 
 in our consideration of the subject, if we re- 
 flect rather on the aims and natural function 
 of poetry, than on the various forms in which 
 it manifests itself. 
 
 There are essential qualities common to all 
 poetry, and the excellence or eminence of 
 poetry depends on the extent to which these 
 qualities are present and the proportion in 
 which they coexist in any particular in- 
 stance. Poetry, like the other fine arts, has 
 arisen in answer to definite permanent needs 
 in our human constitution. It is a subli- 
 mated means of expression or communica- 
 tion, transcending our daily speech, and 
 helping us to realize ourselves. It fixes the 
 delight of our happiest moments in some 
 recognizable shape to add to the delight of 
 others. It may be called a criticism of life, 
 because it contains the wisest and most ma- 
 ture thought of the race. It is more than a 
 criticism of life, however, since it records 
 not only the best that has been thought, but 
 
 113 
 
8Ciie J&ottt» Of 2L(fe 
 
 the best that has been felt, also, as Arnold 
 himself says. It is not content to appeal to 
 our minds, it must appeal to our emotions- 
 also; it must move as well as inform us; 
 it must convince us by its reasonableness, and 
 at the same time it must quicken us by its 
 passionate sympathy and warmth. In addi- 
 tion to these two essential qualities which 
 good poetry possesses, it must have another: 
 it must appeal to our instinct for beauty, it 
 must charm our aesthetic sensibility with its 
 rhythms and cadences and lovely sounds 
 and entrancing images. It must give us 
 thought, indeed, but thought " touched with 
 emotion," thought suffused with feeling and 
 drenched with beauty. When a poem does 
 these three things for us in an eminent de- 
 gree, it matters very little whether it is 
 lyrical or epic. 
 
 Poetry may, of course, show one quality 
 without the others or in excess of the others. 
 It may be extremely thoughtful at the ex- 
 pense of emotion and beauty, as in the case of 
 
 114 
 
IBlntuntt for ^ottts 
 
 some of Browning's longer poems; or it may 
 appeal chiefly to our feelings, as in the case 
 of so many sentimental poets; while, again, 
 its chief preeminence may be its wonderful 
 mastery of sensuous beauty, as in the work 
 of the pre-Raphaelites. But in whichever 
 way poetry excels, it is just that particular 
 excellence that gives it value. The com- 
 parative worth of a poem depends on the 
 intensity with which it reaches us and the 
 profoundness with which it influences our 
 springs of action. 
 
 Poetry can never have its utmost efiFect 
 except when it makes use of these three 
 avenues of approach, and sways our person- 
 ality in each of these three ways. 
 
 Again, great poetry, like any great artj 
 is only produced in exceptional moments; 
 it is not the product of average every-day 
 life, but of every-day life raised to the pitch 
 of normal perfection; it is the record of 
 heightened, if not unusual, experience. It 
 gives definite utterance and memorable form 
 
 115 
 
Cfje ^ottvp of Hift 
 
 to our universal aspirations and reflections. 
 Whenever a piece of human experience is 
 embodied in words, with more clarity of 
 thought, more intensity of feeling, more 
 haunting charm of speech, than have ever 
 before been bestowed upon it, then is a new 
 poem created which outranks all others 
 on the same theme. It is widely appre- 
 ciated because it refers to a common ex- 
 perience, and it is highly prized because 
 it makes us realize that experience with un- 
 common vividness and intensity. It attains 
 value in our eyes, and will continue to be 
 treasured until in its turn it is superseded 
 by another even more true, more stirring, 
 and more beautiful. 
 
 These fortunate occurrences, these happy 
 realizations of the creative impulse, seem 
 to be quite beyond the control even of the 
 sanest poets. Homer nods, and Wordsworth 
 is often far from his best. No poet, if all 
 his poetry could be recovered, but would 
 have some verse to show which would prove 
 
 ii6 
 
Wintuntt for ^ottvs 
 
 him fallible. All the more wonderful, there- 
 fore, seem the instances of perfection; so 
 that we have come to attribute them to in- 
 spiration and to invest them with reverence. 
 This exceptional quality which we prize 
 in poetry is not, let us remember, one of 
 technique alone. We do not value most 
 highly poetry which is most beautiful in 
 execution, unless it also satisfies our longing 
 for the true and the sublime. It must record 
 for us the noblest aspirations of the human 
 spirit, the ultimate reach of the soul after 
 goodness ; and it must reveal to us the clear- 
 est, widest view of truth the human mind 
 can attain. These spiritual and intellectual 
 feats are only to be achieved in rare moments 
 of ecstasy and insight, when the individual 
 is lifted out of himself and brought into rela- 
 tion with the larger thought and volition of 
 the universe, — of the overself. Naturally 
 such rare and exceptional experiences cannot 
 be appropriately expressed in common or 
 average language. They demand heightened 
 
 117 
 
8CJ|e ^ottvs of ILife 
 
 and transfigured forms of expression for 
 their embodiment; and only when they 
 succeed in finding such appropriate lodg- 
 ment for themselves are their purpose and 
 destiny fulfilled. 
 
 Such experiences manifest themselves in 
 all the arts, and enrich the world with shapes 
 of beauty. When they choose the medium of 
 words, and succeed in moulding it to some 
 happy presentiment of themselves, they pro- 
 duce poetry of the highest rank, of whatever 
 variety it may happen to be. The Book of 
 Job, the Psalms, the Iliad, the plays of 
 Shakespeare, have never been superseded, 
 because they have never been surpassed. 
 They deal with permanent human interests 
 and perplexities that will draw men's atten- 
 tion as long as the world lasts, and they deal 
 with them in a supremely beautiful way. 
 If ever they are supplanted in our affection- 
 ate esteem, it will be because these same 
 themes will have found other poets to treat 
 them even more appropriately, — more lov- 
 
 ii8 
 
mutantt for ^oettj? 
 
 ingly and convincingly and with greater 
 charm. The future appreciation and fame 
 of the poets and artists of any age rest upon 
 no other ground than this. 
 
 If we take this view of poetry, we shall 
 see that it is the result not only of happy 
 concurrences in the nature of the poet, but 
 of exceptional conditions in his age also, 
 since he, even more than other men, must 
 be sensitive to his surroundings and coloured 
 by the temper of his time. A dull or supine 
 or depraved period does not foster what is 
 heroic and ennobling and lovely. This is 
 the law which holds in spite of the fact that 
 such an age may offer to poetry and art a 
 stimulating opportunity, through its very 
 disregard of all they hold most dear, arous- 
 ing them, by its opposition and contempt, 
 to champion all the more valiantly those 
 altruistic causes which it holds in derision. 
 But in the main the art of an age is the meas- 
 ure of that age. The poetry of a people is 
 an index to the character of that people. A 
 
 119 
 
lEftt Poettjj of fLift 
 
 pronounced and continued decline in the art 
 and literature of a nation means a deteriora- 
 tion in one or more of those qualities of 
 taste and aspiration and intellectual power 
 from which art and literature spring. 
 
 If, therefore, there actually is a growing 
 distaste for good poetry among us, only 
 two conclusions are possible. The fault is 
 either in ourselves or in poetry. Either we 
 have become so supine, spiritually and aes- 
 thetically, that the lofty ideals of existing 
 poetry are abhorrent to us, or else we have 
 outgrown them, and the pabulum which 
 nourished our fathers will not do for us. 
 
 There may be some argument in favour 
 of the latter conclusion. With changing 
 times and manners, many forms of art must 
 be laid aside as no longer pertinent. Our 
 wants and beliefs are not those of any other 
 time or place; we must require the sus- 
 taining power of a literature quite different 
 from that of the age of Augustus or Queen 
 Anne or the Pilgrim Fathers. The past 
 
 1 20 
 
mntuuu tot ^ottvs 
 
 century has been one of immense and amaz- 
 ing unfolding of knowledge, and a con- 
 sequent rearrangement of all our ideas. We 
 have not had time to assimilate all our new 
 thought and to imbue it with feeling; and 
 since science must be saturated with emo- 
 tion and become part of the familiar furni- 
 ture of the mind before it can be properly 
 used in poetry, we have hardly had time to 
 evolve any poetry or art commensurate with 
 our increased spiritual needs and representa- 
 tive of our enlarged stores of knowledge. 
 
 Again, much of the old poetry may be 
 inadequate. '' Paradise Lost," for example, 
 can hardly have the same hold on us that it 
 had on our parents. For them it was an 
 impressive rendering of what they believed 
 to be supernatural facts. It must have re- 
 tained for them something of the glamour 
 and authority of religion. For us it is a 
 twice-told tale, an ancient legend retold in 
 our English tongue, less lovely than many of 
 the Greek myths that have come down to 
 
 121 
 
8Ci|e ^otivs of Hift 
 
 us, conspicuous through the stateliness of 
 its verse, but holding no unquestionable 
 moral sanction, having no such spiritual 
 significance as it may once have possessed. 
 So, too, the vogue of Byron passed with the 
 passing tastes and requirements of his day. 
 Because he satisfied the sentimental need 
 and intellectual hunger of a hundred years 
 ago, it does not follow that he should satisfy 
 ours. The same thing may be true of a great 
 deal of poetry that was once highly thought 
 of, — it may no longer be capable of afford- 
 ing the satisfaction which it is the business of 
 poetry to give. I can well believe that many 
 thoughtful people to-day cannoit find in 
 poetry what they need. Matthew Arnold in 
 his poetry gave some expression to the soul- 
 sickness of his time. But it may be that the 
 poetry which is to cure that sickness has yet 
 to be written. Is there not a very large class 
 of modern men and women who are most 
 eager for something great in poetry, — some- 
 thing that shall deal strongly with their 
 
 122 
 
JBiutautt for ^oettfi 
 
 mental disquiet, something that shall help 
 them to live, something that shall allay 
 despair and reestablish their courage? Any 
 adequate poetry ought to do this. Why is 
 it not being produced for us? Here is the 
 garden; where is the voice of God? 
 
 Perhaps, however, the first conclusion is 
 the right one, and the fault does not lie in 
 poetry, but in ourselves. There are critics 
 who accuse us of a too great devotion to 
 affairs, — to the practical and material side 
 of life, — who point out our ruthless greed, 
 our immeasurable self-confidence, our fla- 
 grant corruption, our growing inhumanity. 
 If such accusations are just, and if we are 
 suffering a temporary lapse into the brutality 
 of materialism, then certainly many of our 
 finer instincts must be in eclipse, and a dis- 
 taste for the beauties of poetry is only a 
 natural consequence. Poetry appeals to the 
 better self in man, and when that better self 
 is obscured, poetry must languish. To care 
 for poetry, one must first care for honour, 
 
 123 
 
STJje poetrfi of aife 
 
 for righteousness, for truth, for freedom, for 
 fair play, for generosity, for unselfishness, — 
 in short, for all those ideals of rectitude and 
 loving-kindness which the long battle of 
 civilization has been waged to establish. If 
 it is true that our life as individuals and as 
 nations is permeated with cheap facetious- 
 ness, with disregard for public honesty, with 
 disparagement of personal nobleness, with 
 forgetfulness of the high traditions which 
 belong to our birth, then it would be very 
 unreasonable to expect us to care for poetry. 
 It is the pious office of poetry to bring 
 solace and encouragement and lofty pur- 
 pose to the heart. To those who are recreant 
 to their ideals it can bring nothing but a 
 sense of shame; it can be no delight, but 
 only a rebuke. 
 
 But if we are become a gross and mate- 
 rialistic people, why does no great poet arise 
 to reprove us and lead us back toward per- 
 fection? Here is the wilderness; where is 
 the voice? 
 
 124 
 
mintuntt for jpoettj? 
 
 Lovers of poetry are not the only com- 
 plainants of the present day, however. A 
 gentleman in the University of Chicago has 
 been calling attention to the unwillingness 
 of educated men to enter the ministry. He 
 declares that out of twelve hundred students 
 in Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Prince- 
 ton graduating this year, only twenty-eight 
 of all denominations are reported as intend- 
 ing to enter the ministry. Again, where 
 does the fault lie, with religion or with us? 
 Why should any educated man wish to enter 
 the profession of divinity? As a calling, 
 religion is almost as poverty-stricken as 
 poetry itself, and its ministers as little es- 
 teemed. We don't want religion any more 
 than we want poetry. Why not? Have 
 we outgrown it, or are we so debased that 
 it is altogether distasteful to us? 
 
 No sane and thoughtful man can believe 
 for a moment that a great human trait like 
 our need of religion has passed away, any 
 more than he can statedly believe the literal 
 
 125 
 
declarations of the old orthodoxy. And 
 because we cannot find new forms to replace 
 the old formulas, we seem to be losing our 
 grip on the essential elements of faith and 
 piety. But even if this be partly true, faith 
 in ideals will return. The power of good- 
 ness may seem to be overcome for a time, 
 but it must prevail anew as it prevailed of 
 old. After a season of indifference, uncer- 
 tainty, and worldliness, we shall take up 
 the fight again against iniquity, and dis- 
 honour, and corruption, and oppression, as 
 we have done so many times before in the 
 long history of the world, and reestablish 
 our broken ideals with the beautiful and the 
 good. 
 
 Poetry will return with religion. 
 
 126 
 
ConigWloi!^ 
 
 I HAVE just been holding in my hands a 
 literary treasure lent to me by that delightful 
 book-lover, Mr. Irving Way. It is a first 
 edition of Arnold's volume of selections from 
 Wordsworth in the Golden Treasury Series, 
 and bears the inscription — 
 
 To Mima Quillinan — 
 
 from her aiFectionate friend 
 Matthew Arnold. 
 Septber, 7th 1879. 
 
 To sincere lovers of poetry it is a book that 
 must have a very great quickening interest; 
 to many of our generation who owe to Arnold 
 so much of their training in the valuation of 
 literature, it must certainly appeal in no ordi- 
 nary degree. Not since I picked up Emer- 
 
 127 
 
©tie mttvs of mu 
 
 son's copy of Arnold's own poems, as a 
 visitor in that well-beloved Concord study 
 nearly a score of years ago, have I turned 
 the leaves of any book with a feeling so 
 near to veneration. For Arnold must always 
 evoke, from me at least, that emotion of 
 loving gratitude which only one's parents 
 and most intimate teachers can call forth. 
 Now as I read again this incomparable 
 preface, so lucid, so sound, so graceful, so 
 courteous, yet so just, so penetrating and 
 inflexible in the search for truth, I am re- 
 minded once more, as I have been reminded 
 how often, of our standing obligation to the 
 best in literature and in life. As a friend 
 of mine is always saying, " Only the best is 
 good enough!" It is the glory of Arnold's 
 criticism that he makes us realize this obliga- 
 tion, this opportunity, and helps us to a 
 temper of quiet sanity, neither censorious 
 nor exuberant, in which we can best enjoy 
 what is true and ennobling in letters. If 
 only we could keep that temper, that habit 
 
 128 
 
JLonsmiotii 
 
 of serenity and justness, unimpaired for a 
 single day, how much we should gain in 
 power and happiness! 
 
 It is hardly within the capacity of any 
 living critic, certainly it is not within mine, 
 to write of poetry as Arnold did. It would 
 be folly to try. But when we do our best 
 to look at the work of any poet candidly 
 and judge it fairly, with sympathy yet with- 
 out heat, we cannot but follow Arnold's 
 example and precept. In this introduction 
 of his to Wordsworth's poetry, so invaluable 
 an aid to the appreciation of that great Eng- 
 lishman, and indeed so reliable an assistance 
 to the study of all poetry, there are several 
 remarks which I think ought to help us in 
 estimating the poetry of Longfellow. 
 
 " Wordsworth," Arnold says, " composed 
 verses during a space of some sixty years; 
 and it is not much of an exaggeration to 
 say that within one single decade of those 
 years, between 1798 and 1808, almost all 
 of his really first-rate work was produced. 
 
 129 
 
A mass of inferior work remains, work 
 done before and after this golden prime, 
 imbedding the first-rate work and clogging 
 it, obstructing our approach to it, chilling, 
 not unfrequently, the high-wrought mood 
 with which we leave it. To be recognized 
 far and wide as a great poet, to be possible 
 and receivable as a classic, Wordsworth 
 needs to be relieved of a great deal of the 
 poetical baggage which now encumbers 
 him." 
 
 This is true of other poets as well as of 
 Wordsworth. It is not true of Longfellow, 
 however. Few poets who have written so 
 much have maintained a more even level 
 of achievement. While comparatively few 
 of his poems, perhaps, approach the highest 
 reach of poetry, very few of them could be 
 discarded from the whole body of his work 
 without some loss to his fame. Partly by 
 reason of his exquisite artistic sense, partly 
 by his academic training and cultivated ap- 
 preciation of literary values and proportions, 
 
 130 
 
HonflfelloUi 
 
 and partly, I dare say, by a certain strain of 
 gracious humour in his character, he was 
 saved from falling into such utter banalities 
 as our beloved Wordsworth was capable of. 
 He seems to have had one of those finely 
 poised natures, not common among artists 
 and poets, in which the inspirational and 
 the rational faculties are pretty evenly bal- 
 anced. If he never rose to sublime heights 
 of enraptured expression, under the divine 
 irresponsible possession of the muse, he never 
 sank to absurdities below the approval of 
 sober reason. He may not have been capable 
 of lyrics like '' I wandered lonely as a 
 cloud," and '^ My heart leaps up when I 
 behold," and *' I heard a thousand blended 
 notes," but neither, on the other hand, could 
 he ever have been capable of many a dreary 
 passage in many a forgotten poem of Words- 
 worth's. 
 
 It is easy to forgive a great poet his un- 
 happy departure from the broad highways 
 of sane and reasonable utterance into the 
 
 131 
 
8rj|e ^otits of ILffe 
 
 wilderness of platitude. For we perceive, as 
 in the case of Wordsworth, the intensity of 
 purpose to which they are due. We behold 
 him in fancy, a rapt prophetic figure, pos- 
 sessed by the glory of a theme, blinded by 
 the splendour of his own vision, and so un- 
 regardful of the obvious dictates of common 
 sense that he must often stumble on his 
 solitary way into pitfalls of bathos and 
 quagmires of the commonplace. Sorry as is 
 his plight on these occasions, there must al- 
 ways be something to arouse our sympathy 
 as well as our mirth at the situation. 
 
 Is it not this very unworldliness, this lack 
 of the restraining influence of prudent judg- 
 ment, this quixotic pursuit of the will-o'-the- 
 wisp of the imagination, that enables him 
 at other times to scale the lofty peaks of 
 wisdom which environ life, and to bring us 
 wondrous reports therefrom? It is not the 
 cautious, but the daring, who fall — and 
 attain. We overlook in many a great poet 
 long and tedious passages of prosy vapidity 
 
 132 
 
or superfluous philosophizing for the com- 
 pensation of a few golden words of memo- 
 rable significance, a few lines of haunting 
 and inescapable poetry. We must do so in 
 Wordsworth, we must do so in Whitman, 
 we must even do so, I fear, in Browning. 
 The poets, like Gray and Keats and Rossetti 
 and Arnold and Emerson, who need no such 
 excision, are few, indeed. They are the rare 
 masters of song, endowed with a less facile 
 but more exact and scrupulous genius of 
 expression. As they are too fastidious to be 
 lavish, so they are too sensitive and of too 
 fine a taste to blunder. 
 
 To neither of these classes does Long- 
 fellow belong. He is neither a prolific but 
 uneven poet like Wordsworth, nor a surer, 
 more infallible, though less affluent, poet like 
 Rossetti. He is rather like Scott and Tenny- 
 son in this respect, maintaining an even 
 tenor of utterance with unfailing and sober 
 taste, neither frenzied with inspiration, nor 
 futile for the lack of it. Not that I mean to 
 
 133 
 
assert that Longfellow is a greater or less 
 poet than any of those here named. In 
 matters of criticism we may make compari- 
 sons to advantage sometimes, if they help us 
 at all to classify our own ideas, and to come 
 at a just appreciation of the subject under 
 consideration. It is hardly ever profitable 
 to seek to establish the superiority of one 
 great artist over another. That is a decision 
 which time will manage for us very well. 
 The great thing for us is to be sure to get 
 the best out of his work and take it home 
 to ourselves. 
 
 To mention Longfellow in the same sen- 
 tence with Tennyson, therefore, need not 
 imply any superiority of one or the other. 
 They are comparable in the exquisite ar- 
 tistry of their work and in the tenor of their 
 lives. Both were gentle born; both were 
 college bred; both were happy in their 
 lives, their friends, their homes; both were 
 permitted by fortune to be exempt from 
 poverty and the distressful cares which have 
 
 134 
 
Eongmiotn 
 
 harassed so many poets and dissipated their 
 powers; both were serene and moderate 
 gentlemen, greatly and widely beloved; and 
 both had long unbroken careers of worldly 
 and artistic prosperity, crowned at last with 
 memorials in the great English Abbey. 
 However they may have differed in tempera- 
 ment and mental equipment, the outward 
 similarity of their surroundings may have 
 had something to do with producing this 
 common trait in their work, — its scrupulous 
 artistic perfection. For it may be said of 
 them both that their glory depends on the 
 mass of their poetical achievement, — a large 
 body of work of uniform excellence. I dare 
 say I could be taken to task for emphasizing 
 this similarity, and I dare say there are 
 admirers of the great Laureate who would 
 insist on his complete superiority to our 
 American. If so, they must afford to be 
 generous; for Longfellow certainly did 
 much the same service for poetry in America 
 that Tennyson did in England. He filled 
 
 135 
 
8CJir J^ottvs of mu 
 
 the public eye; he satisfied the popular con- 
 ception of what a poet ought to do; he 
 maintained the prestige of poetry unim- 
 paired; he carried its traditions and exem- 
 plified its worth in the sentiment of his 
 country. In the day of small beginnings he 
 not only made a place and name for himself 
 in his own land, but filled the world with 
 his fame. 
 
 I must return to Arnold's introduction to 
 Wordsworth for another suggestion that will 
 serve as well in thinking of Longfellow 
 and his poetry. It is this significant pas- 
 sage: 
 
 " It is important, therefore, to hold fast 
 to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism 
 of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in 
 his powerful and beautiful application of 
 ideas to life, — to the question, How to live. 
 Morals are often treated in a narrow and 
 false fashion, they are bound up with sys- 
 tems of thought and belief which have had 
 their day, they are fallen into the hands of 
 
 136 
 
Ilon0(ellotai 
 
 pedants and professional dealers, they grow 
 tiresome to some of us. We find attraction 
 at times even in a poetry of revolt against 
 them, — or we find attractions in a poetry 
 indifferent to them, in a poetry where the 
 contents may be what they will, but where 
 the form is studied and exquisite. We de- 
 lude ourselves in either case; and the best 
 cure for our delusion is to let our minds rest 
 upon that great and inexhaustible word life, 
 until we learn to enter into its meaning. A 
 poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a 
 poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of 
 indifference to moral ideas is a poetry of 
 indifference toward life/' 
 
 He then goes on to remark how English 
 poetry has been chiefly notable for the suc- 
 cess with which it has dealt with life, and 
 how Wordsworth's particular glory is that 
 he has dealt with it so powerfully. I fancy 
 that is also true both of Tennyson and Long- 
 fellow. They were both thoroughly ab- 
 sorbed in moral ideas and in getting these 
 
 137 
 
cue ^ottvs of mu 
 
 ideas expressed in their poetry. Not that 
 either one of them was specially devoted to 
 any pronounced or definite system or code. 
 But a profound sentiment for morality, for 
 the ethical opportunity of life, possessed 
 them. Not a poem in their pages but has 
 some bearing on that difficult question. How 
 to live. In this regard, of course, they are 
 brothers of Wordsworth, yes, and of Whit- 
 man and Emerson and Browning also. It is 
 impossible to imagine any of these great 
 poets writing a poem that should be beauti- 
 ful but without spiritual significance. 
 
 Longfellow, then, was not merely nor 
 even primarily an artist in words. He was a 
 man of deep and serious convictions and 
 feelings, beholding the varied pageant of 
 life, and desiring to give utterance to his 
 thoughts about it. That he should have been 
 able to give his thoughts a finished and beau- 
 tiful verbal form, was a subsidiary gift. He 
 was an artist to the tips of his fingers, as 
 has been said of him, but he was first a poet 
 
 138 
 
— since there is no other term to use. It is 
 impossible to read a page of Longfellow 
 without feeling this moral force. It is not 
 only evident in his obviously spiritual poems, 
 like " The Psalm of Life," but is present in 
 all of his poems. It is the main theme every- 
 where. You perceive that the main business 
 of his endeavours is not the creation of a 
 mere illusion, however beautiful, but the 
 revelation of goodness — the great active per- 
 vading goodness of the universe. He is too 
 excellent an artist to be merely didactic, but 
 he is too excellent a poet to be merely ar- 
 tistic. He is no trifler. The great subject of 
 life engrosses him seriously and colours all 
 his work. He may not have dealt with it 
 as powerfully as Wordsworth and Emerson 
 did, nor even as magically as Tennyson did; 
 but he dealt with it constantly and success- 
 fully, and he dealt with little else. 
 
 The ideas he applied to life were not 
 new; they were often trite, and his manner 
 of applying them was often trite. But they 
 
 139 
 
8CJ|t J&ottvp of awe 
 
 were always sincere and always suffused with 
 gentleness. More than that, they were the 
 ideas common to the vast majority of people, 
 — the mighty average of humanity, — and to 
 that great audience Longfellow will always 
 make a stirring appeal. The lucidity and 
 obviousness of his craftsmanship, the quie- 
 tude of his sentiment, the ever present human 
 interest in his work, will always continue to 
 find hosts of readers. He may not be ac- 
 claimed and cherished among persons of a 
 possibly overfastidious culture, but he will 
 always be dear to the hearts of thousands. 
 I cannot feel at the present time that 
 Longfellow restores me to myself as Arnold 
 and Wordsworth do when I read them, or 
 that he enheartens and stimulates me as 
 Browning and Emerson do; but neither can 
 I forget that he once did so. I cannot forget 
 that he was the first poet to stir that living 
 enthusiasm for poetry, which we all possess 
 to some extent; that he revealed to me the 
 world of men with a certain glamour that 
 
 140 
 
has never departed from it, and first hinted 
 at the sad and splendid significance of life. 
 To-day it may take a more cunning art than 
 his to work this magic incantation, and 
 distil a happiness out of poetry; perhaps 
 even the greatest poets can furnish little else 
 than solace to our doubtful maturity; but I 
 for one must for ever remember the haunting 
 flavour of " Hiawatha," or the lines " To the 
 River Charles." 
 
 To bring Longfellow's poetry to the test 
 of any sort of critical scrutiny, however, is 
 a different matter. One must put aside the 
 promptings of personal gratitude and re- 
 membered preference, and make some 
 attempt at impartiality, however inept. 
 Perhaps the high-water mark of Longfel- 
 low's poetical achievement is to be found 
 in his sonnets. At least it is in these rather 
 than in his longer narrative poems that he 
 speaks with the unequivocal note of genius. 
 They have a distinction and dignity of utter- 
 ance not always to be found in his work. 
 
 141 
 
cue ^ottvs ot %lft 
 
 His mastery of technique made him at home 
 in that difficult form, while the strict limi- 
 tations of the sonnet gave his facile genius 
 just the restraint it sometimes lacked. 
 
 In " Evangeline," for instance, I cannot 
 feel that Longfellow is always successful. 
 The great ease and looseness of the form, 
 imposing few restrictions on his narrative, 
 often betrayed him into writing prose, — or 
 at least unpoetical verse. He does not al- 
 ways succeed in being simple without being 
 common and flat. So that occasionally the 
 poem loses its rightful dignity, and seems 
 cheap, where it only ought to seem homely. 
 No flaws in style, however, can nullify the 
 efifect of the story, or make its pathos seem 
 tawdry. It is too genuine for that, and will 
 always have its scores of readers as long as 
 simple people continue to care for simple 
 things, and youthful hearts are moved by 
 tales of sorrow and of love. 
 
 In *'The Courtship of Miles Standish," 
 Longfellow is somewhat more succinct in 
 
 142 
 
style. He seems to have gained a more 
 perfect control over his hexameters in the 
 ten years which passed after the writing of 
 " Evangeline." Perhaps the greater light- 
 ness of the subject may have given a greater 
 neatness and precision to his hand; certainly 
 from a technical point of view the later 
 poem seems the better, though less stirring 
 and serious in its human appeal. That it 
 should have become, like " Evangeline," a 
 classic in American literature (or perhaps 
 we had better say in English literature), is 
 not surprising. Longfellow's inalienable 
 renown rests on a sort of universal suffrage. 
 He has contributed more classics, more 
 recognized favourite poems, to our poetry 
 than any other American author, more, in- 
 deed, than most English authors. And 
 among his longer works none hold a more 
 secure place than these two tales of early 
 Colonial life told in flowing hexameters. 
 
 Only two other extended works of their 
 author can be placed beside them in popu- 
 
 143 
 
larity, — the " Tales of a Wayside Inn " and 
 " Hiawatha.'' In thinking of these impor- 
 tant undertakings, and in reading Longfel- 
 low's life and the account of his literary 
 achievements, one cannot but be amazed at 
 the facility and ease with which he com- 
 posed. That " Evangeline " should have 
 been written in little more than a year seems 
 creditable enough, but that '' Miles Stan- 
 dish " should have been finished within 
 three months and " Hiawatha " in five seems 
 almost incredible. Yet Colonel Higginson 
 notes that " * Hiawatha ' was begun on June 
 25, 1854, and published on November loth 
 of that year." So that our poet must have 
 written about fifty lines every day, includ- 
 ing Sundays, and then only allowed about 
 fifteen days for the printer and binder to do 
 their work. Evidently some people were not 
 slow in those days. I hardly know which to 
 wonder at most, the unflagging and abun- 
 dant vitality of such genius, or the astonish- 
 ing rapidity of such book-making. But there 
 
 144 
 
can be no doubt of Longfellow's copious 
 capacity for production. At a time when he 
 was longing for a good snow-storm to block 
 the door against interruptions, while he was 
 working on '' The Divine Tragedy," he was 
 still able to write '^ a scene or two every 
 day." And again he wrote fifteen of the 
 lyrics of '' The Saga of King Olaf " in as 
 many days, and that " with all kinds of in- 
 terruptions," — an altogether remarkable 
 performance, which we can scarcely par- 
 allel. Our sounding new cities are built out 
 of nothing in a few years, or a few months, 
 but something seems to delay our great new 
 poems. 
 
 Just wherein the peculiar charm of " Hia- 
 watha " rests, it would be hard to say. But 
 the unwonted measure, with its monotonous 
 " feminine endings," as they are called, and 
 the unusual style, with its recurrent phrases, 
 were blended together by a happy inspira- 
 tion for the depicting of its scenes. They 
 keep that air of pristine innocence which 
 
 145 
 
everywhere pervades the poem; they do not 
 rob its themes and characters of the natural 
 dignity which belongs to them, and yet they 
 have none of the sophistication which would 
 have necessarily characterized a more con- 
 ventional treatment of the subject. In blank 
 verse, for instance, these folk-tales would 
 have been much less effective. It is perhaps 
 rash to say that the task could not have been 
 better done, or that no form could have been 
 found more appropriate for this particular 
 purpose. Perhaps we do not know the In- 
 dian well enough to judge. Our conception 
 of him, or at least our conception of his 
 legends, must always be coloured by our 
 remembrance of Hiawatha. And I confess 
 there is an inescapable wizardry hanging 
 about the poem which I can never shake off. 
 It is one of those things which I could never 
 even attempt to judge impartially. Its ca- 
 dences and pictures are too inextricably tied 
 up with memories of charmed days long ago, 
 when bears inhabited the back lot, when 
 
 146 
 
hostile tribes skulked through underbrush at 
 the pasture's edge, and we used to go moose- 
 hunting (on real snow-shoes) with wooden 
 guns of our own manufacture. 
 
 Longfellow's most ambitious work is a 
 comparative failure. Like so many great 
 poets, he experienced the irony of the muse, 
 and when he attempted most, was permitted 
 to accomplish least. " Christus " was born 
 of a noble conception, whose fulfilment lay 
 beyond its author's power. It was, indeed, 
 Longfellow's intention to make this his 
 magnum opus. His meditations upon it 
 dominated a great part of his literary life, 
 and the actual labour expended upon it was 
 greater than on any other one of his writ- 
 ings. Yet it would scarcely be missed by the 
 average reader, if omitted from his works. 
 He was far from being at his best in the 
 drama, even in a drama of the cloister, such 
 as " Christus " is. There is another insuper- 
 able obstacle, however, to his success in such 
 an undertaking, which becomes apparent in 
 
 147 
 
"The Divine Tragedy," the first part of 
 this noble venture. It is simply this, that in 
 retelling the tales of the life of our Lord 
 from the New Testament, he is competing 
 with that great masterpiece of literature, the 
 New Testament itself. The story of Christ 
 has been told once for all. An artist or 
 writer who would use that sublime figure 
 for the centre of interest in his theme, must 
 not adhere to the Bible version of that great 
 life, but must diverge from it. His work, 
 of course, must not controvert the Scriptures, 
 but it must be an imaginative supplement 
 to them. It must be apocryphal. By intro- 
 ducing the words of Christ in all their 
 familiarity into his poem, Longfellow in- 
 evitably lost his hold upon his readers. His 
 work became a graceful transliteration, in- 
 stead of an original creation. The epilogue, 
 for example, is simply the Apostle's Creed, 
 taken verbatim from the Book of Common 
 Prayer. The whole poem, therefore, is a 
 mistake, an error in artistic judgment. 
 
 148 
 
We are not to judge any poet by his errors, 
 however, but by his successes, the great 
 things he accomplished for our lasting bene- 
 fit and enjoyment. We need great poetry 
 to-day — though we do not know it — more 
 than we need anything else. All that indus- 
 try can give we are constantly adding to 
 life; but the spiritual enhancements, the 
 aids to happiness which poetry and art and 
 culture alone can give us, we are as con- 
 stantly neglecting. With all the affairs of 
 daily life we deal with commendable 
 promptness and power; to the affairs of the 
 intellectual life, however, we are still too in- 
 different. It is an old plaint, indeed, one 
 that our preachers and critics are never tired 
 of dinning in our ears; but it is just, never- 
 theless. And as we gradually come to real- 
 ize our human needs in a spiritual and 
 intellectual direction more and more, we 
 shall turn with more and more avidity to art 
 and poetry to satisfy us. Nor will poetry in 
 that day be found deficient. It will arise 
 
 149 
 
8rjie ^ottvp of mfe 
 
 at our demand, fresh and great, to supply 
 our strong requirements, and we shall have 
 a national poetry commensurate with our 
 country, with our race, with our dreams. 
 
 But we shall never be exempt from our 
 debt to the old poets for all they have done 
 for us, and for all they are doing from day 
 to day. For if *' the poetry of earth is never 
 dead," neither is the poetry of man. And 
 among those who have wrought in that wide 
 field of human endeavour with so much 
 lofty and sincere devotion, the blameless 
 Longfellow is eminent and secure. 
 
 150 
 
^mtmm 
 
 Is it a hundred years since Emerson's 
 birth? It is time for another Emerson. 
 There will be many still living this spring 
 to keep his memory fresh, to recount to us 
 what manner of man he was — his personal 
 friends, and those who had the good fortune 
 to hear his voice. 
 
 There are others whose debt to him is 
 also incalculably great, who can only bear 
 testimony to the influence of the prophet 
 and poet. The man himself they never 
 knew. That was their loss and must al- 
 ways remain a regret in their lives. Nothing 
 in later life, I fancy, can supply the impulse 
 which young hero-worship brings; and not 
 
 151 
 
8Cfte ^ottvp of Hlft 
 
 to have seen one's hero in the flesh must 
 always seem an irreparable deprivation. 
 
 Twenty-five years ago, when we were all 
 of us even younger than we are now, there 
 were thousands of youthful hearts imbued 
 with the passion for truth and encouraged 
 in noble ambitions by Emerson's incom- 
 parable words. Scholars, dreamers, stu- 
 dents in college, in the counting-room, by 
 the lonely fire of logs, or within the sound 
 of hurrying feet on the pavement — the 
 message came to them with revelation and 
 hope. It was a time when science was des- 
 troying superstition. To many a conscien- 
 tious mind, being bred under the shadow 
 of scrupulous orthodoxy, and yet beginning 
 to be touched with divine doubt, the proc- 
 ess of change was full of sadness. To the 
 thoughtful boy, beginning to turn his eyes 
 inward for the source of light, yet enam- 
 oured with the engaging loveliness of the 
 earth, it seemed the height of tragedy to have 
 the pillars of established faith removed. 
 
 152 
 
ISmetfiion 
 
 Not every one had the hardihood to accept 
 all the conclusions of the new science with- 
 out shrinking. There was need of a great 
 friend whose unflinching courage might 
 serve as a stay amid tottering creeds and 
 overthrown convictions. 
 
 That friend was Emerson. Other philoso- 
 phers and scientists, inflexible in the cause 
 of truth, might overturn the temples of 
 our fathers, but that gentle yet intrepid 
 spirit gave us a more spacious house of wor- 
 ship, bidding us abandon the old without a 
 regret. He taught us to look with equanim- 
 ity upon the decay of dogma, and reassured 
 us with confidence in the free spiritual life 
 which dogma had overcrusted and obscured. 
 He made us glad of our loss and light- 
 hearted at being freed from an encum- 
 brance. We perceived that while the signs 
 and vestments of our paternal religion might 
 vanish like smoke, the breath of goodness 
 at the core of things remained potent and 
 quickening as before. 
 
 153 
 
cue jpoettff of mu 
 
 To render this incalculable service for 
 a growing generation, secured for Emerson 
 a unique loyalty and enthusiasm, and we 
 came to look upon him with that tender 
 reverence which unquestioned goodness al- 
 ways inspires. I know not how it may be 
 with those who are of age to assume the 
 toga virilts to-day, but I fancy there is no 
 living voice to hearten and inspire now as 
 there was then. However credulous our 
 ears, however fervent our fancy, however 
 noble and unselfish our aspiration, we listen 
 in vain for the confident voice of joyous 
 revelation sounding through the world. 
 There is now no prophet in Israel, and the 
 Philistines may triumph unrebuked. 
 
 In all his prose, in all his verse, Emerson 
 is the lover of truth, the advocate of the 
 spiritual in life, and the foe of all mean con- 
 siderations. Compromise was for him im- 
 possible, and worldly wisdom but another 
 name for poltroonery. So single-hearted 
 was he, so thoroughly the preacher of 
 
 154 
 
righteousness, that his work does not give 
 us the satisfaction in sensuous beauty which 
 we derive from many poets — his inferiors. 
 It has even been said of him, in this regard, 
 that he was not a great artist, that his mes- 
 sage was delivered without regard to effect, 
 that in him the matter was of more impor- 
 tance than the form, that he had no style. 
 But this is hardly so. Consider how thor- 
 oughly the pellucid spirit of the man per- 
 meated all his words, making his phrases, 
 often homely and unadorned, more memo- 
 rable than the most richly wrought utter- 
 ances of other men. His work is like his 
 person, as one imagines it — the most radi- 
 ant and diaphanous tenement of soul. So 
 clear was his conception of the truth, it 
 could not be diluted nor obscured, but must 
 come to us by the shortest way, as simply 
 and directly as possible. He was a speaker 
 of precepts and maxims, not a builder of 
 rhyme — at least not in the sense that Mil- 
 ton and Tennyson were. With him the 
 
 155 
 
2rj|e poetts? of ILift 
 
 main thing was not the creation of a de- 
 tached and finished mechanism in words 
 embodying so much moral truth or philo- 
 sophic thought, but rather the expression of 
 his convictions with the least possible amount 
 of reliance on language. He cared for his 
 message more than his medium. 
 
 Yet in spite of this, I think we must con- 
 cede the greatness of Emerson as an artist 
 — as the master of a style peculiarly his 
 own. For it is the mark of an artist so to 
 impress himself upon his medium, so un- 
 mistakably to qualify his work, as to make 
 it a unique product, the very image and 
 likeness of himself. It is always possible 
 to say of the art of any great master: " This 
 is his; it can be the work of none other; 
 here is the very man himself." And of 
 whom can we say this, if not of the adorable 
 sage of Concord village? He was an origi- 
 nal thinker, it is true; but he also was an 
 original artist; he wrote like no one else. 
 Both in method and in substance he shares 
 
 156 
 
with Whitman the distinction of being the 
 most novel and significant of American 
 poets. For incomparable freshness of 
 phrase and trenchancy of diction they are 
 only approached, in a younger generation, 
 by that other strange, solitary New Eng- 
 lander, Emily Dickinson. And Emily Dick- 
 inson's output, for all its brilliancy and 
 vigour, was somewhat too slight, too un- 
 varied, and too thin, to lift her to a place 
 among the mighty masters of English po- 
 etry, though her place among the lesser 
 immortals — the little masters — is secure. 
 
 Emerson himself is not easily comparable 
 with other poets. At this time of his cen- 
 tennial, a white day in the annals of New 
 England, it is more profitable to heed his 
 lesson than to take his measure. In the 
 bewildering maze of a breathless commer- 
 cial civilization, it is well to have something 
 tonic and unflinching to refer to. We never 
 needed Emerson's radiant faith in ideas and 
 ideals more than we do to-day, and such 
 
 157 
 
Sri^e Jj^ottvn of IBLtU 
 
 2L faith never seemed farther from our 
 thoughts. If we have read him and pondered 
 him when we were boys, and derived any 
 moral stimulus from his wholesome, glad 
 morality, let us read him and ponder him 
 again. He is a deep well, and we may go 
 to him often for refreshment, with no fear 
 of his failing. And if any of us have not 
 yet made his acquaintance, let us hurry to 
 repair that misfortune as quickly as may 
 be. To tell the truth, we need the Philip- 
 pines much less than we need another Emer- 
 son; but since we have got the Philippines, 
 we need an original Emerson all the more. 
 He will help us to add honesty and refine- 
 ment, taste and beauty and modest sincerity, 
 to our sturdy self-assurance; so that our 
 civilization may stand for something noble 
 in history, as well as something gigantic. 
 
 158 
 
Mt. 3Jtteg*0 ©xietrg 
 
 Even if Mr. Riley's delightful poetry — 
 which, along with his prose, now has the 
 distinction of a beautiful uniform edition 
 — had no claim to distinction in itself, the 
 fact of its unrivalled popularity would 
 challenge consideration. But, fortunately, 
 his work does not depend on so frail a tenure 
 of fame as the vogue of a season or the life 
 of a fad. The qualities which secure for it 
 a wider reading and a heartier appreciation 
 than are accorded to any other living Ameri- 
 can poet are rooted deep in human nature; 
 they are preeminently qualities of whole- 
 someness and common sense, those qualities 
 of steady and conservative cheerfulness which 
 ennoble the average man, and in which the 
 
 159 
 
man of exceptional culture is too often lack- 
 ing. Its lovers are the ingenuous home-keep- 
 ing hearts, on whose sobriety and humour 
 the national character is based. And yet, 
 one has not said enough when one says it is 
 poetry of the domestic affections, poetry of 
 sentiment; for it is much more than that. 
 
 Poetry which is free from the unhappy 
 spirit of the age, free from dejection, from 
 doubt, from material cynicism, neither 
 tainted by the mould of sensuality nor wasted 
 by the maggot of reform, is no common 
 product, in these days. So much of our art 
 and literature is ruined by self-consciousness, 
 running to the artificial and the tawdry. It is 
 the slave either of commercialism, imita- 
 tive, ornate, and insufferably tiresome, or 
 of didacticism, irresponsible and dull. But 
 Mr. Riley at his best is both original and 
 sane. He seems to have accomplished that 
 most difficult feat, the devotion of one's self 
 to an art without any deterioration of health. 
 He is full of the sweetest vitality, the sound- 
 
 i6o 
 
est merriment. His verse is not strained with 
 an overburden of philosophy, on the one 
 hand, nor debauched with maudlin senti- 
 mentalism, on the other. Its robust gaiety 
 has all the fascination of artlessness and 
 youth. It neither argues, nor stimulates, nor 
 denounces, nor exhorts; it only touches and 
 entertains us. And, after all, few things are 
 more humanizing than innocent amusement. 
 It is because of this quality of abundant 
 good nature, familiar, serene, homely, that 
 it seems to me no exaggeration to call Mr. 
 Riley the typical American poet of the day. 
 True, he does not represent the cultivated 
 and academic classes; he reflects nothing 
 of modern thought; but in his unruffled 
 temper and dry humour, occasionally flip- 
 pant on the surface, but never facetious at 
 heart, he might stand very well for the 
 normal American character in his view of 
 life and his palpable enjoyment of it. Most 
 foreign critics are on the lookout for the 
 appearance of something novel and uncon- 
 
 i6i 
 
ventional from America, forgetting that the 
 laws of art do not change with longitude. 
 They seize now on this writer, now on that, 
 as the eminent product of democracy. But 
 there is nothing unconventional about Mr. 
 Riley. " He is like folks," as an old New 
 England farmer said of Whittier. And if the 
 typical poet of democracy in America is 
 to be the man who most nearly represents 
 average humanity throughout the length 
 and breadth of this country, who most com- 
 pletely expresses its humour, its sympathy, 
 its intelligence, its culture, and its common 
 sense, and yet is not without a touch of origi- 
 nal genius sufficient to stamp his utterances, 
 then Mr. James Whitcomb Riley has a just 
 claim to that title. 
 
 He is unique among American men of 
 letters (or poets, one might better say; for 
 strictly speaking he is hardly a man of 
 letters) in that he has originality of style, and 
 yet is entirely native and homely. Whitman 
 was original, but he was entirely prophetic 
 
 162 
 
and remote, appealing only to the few; 
 Longfellow had style, but his was the voice 
 of our collegiate and cultivated classes. It 
 is not a question of rank or comparison; it 
 is merely a matter of definitions. It is the 
 position rather than the magnitude of any 
 particular and contemporary star that one 
 is interested in fixing. To determine its 
 magnitude, a certain quality of endurance 
 must be taken into account; and to observe 
 this quality often requires considerable time. 
 Quite apart, then, from Mr. Riley's relative 
 merit in the great anthology of English 
 poetry, he has a very definite and positive 
 place in the history of American letters as 
 the first widely representative poet of the 
 American people. 
 
 He is professedly a home-keeping, home- 
 loving poet, with the purpose of the imagi- 
 native realist, depending upon common sights 
 and sounds for his inspirations, and en- 
 grossed with the significance of facts. Like 
 Mr. Kipling, whose idea of perpetual bliss 
 
 163 
 
cue J^ortrs? of %iU 
 
 is a heaven where every artist shall " draw 
 the thing as he sees it, for the God of things 
 as they are," Mr. Riley exclaims: 
 
 •* Tell of the things jest like they wuz — 
 They don't need no excuse ! 
 Don't tetch 'em up as the poets does. 
 Till they're all too fine fer use ! " 
 
 And again, in his lines on " A Southern 
 Singer": 
 
 '* Sing us back home, from there to here : 
 Grant your high grace and wit, but we 
 Most honour your simplicity." 
 
 In the proem to the volume " Poems Here 
 at Home," there occurs a similar invocation, 
 and a test of excellence is proposed which 
 may well be taken as the gist of his own 
 artistic purpose: 
 
 '* The Poems here at Home ! Who'll write 'em down, 
 Jes' as they air — in Country and in Town ? — 
 Sowed thick as clods is 'crost the fields and lanes, 
 Er these 'ere little hop-toads when it rains ! 
 Who'll 'voice ' 'em ? as I heerd a feller say 
 'At speechified on Freedom, t'other day. 
 And soared the Eagle tel, it 'peared to me. 
 She wasn't bigger' n a bumble-bee ! 
 164 
 
" What We want, as I sense it, in the line 
 O* poetry is somepin' Yours and Mine — 
 Somepin' with live-stock in it, and outdoors. 
 And old crick-bottoms, snags, and sycamores ! 
 Putt weeds in — pizenvines, and underbresh. 
 As well as johnny-jump-ups, all so fresh 
 And sassy-like ! — and groun*-squir'ls, — yes, and * We,' 
 As sayin' is, — * We, Us and Company.' " 
 
 In the lines " Right Here at Home," the 
 same strain recurs, like the very burden of 
 the poet's life-song: 
 
 " Right here at home, boys, is the place, I guess, 
 Fer me and you and plain old happiness : 
 We hear the World's lots grander — likely so, — 
 We'll take the World's word for it and not go. 
 We know /// ways ain't our ways, so we'll stay 
 Right here at home, boys, where we know the way. 
 
 "Right here at home, boys, where a well-to-do 
 Man's plenty rich enough — and knows it, too, 
 And's got a' extry dollar, any time. 
 To boost a feller up 'at zaanfs to climb, 
 And's got the git-up in him to go in 
 And gif thercy like he purt' nigh alius kin ! ** 
 
 It is in this spirit that by far the greater 
 part of his work, the telling and significant 
 part of it, is conceived. The whole tatter- 
 
 165 
 
dcmalion company of his Tugg Martins, Jap 
 Millers, Armazindys, Bee Fesslers, and 
 their comrades, as rollicking and magnetic 
 as Shakespeare's own wonderful populace, 
 he finds " right here at home " ; nothing 
 human is alien to him; indeed, there is 
 something truly Elizabethan, something spa- 
 cious and robust in his humanity, quite ex- 
 ceptional to our fashion-plate standards. In 
 the same wholesome, glad frame of mind, 
 too, he deals with nature, — mingling the 
 keenest, most loving observation with the 
 most familiar modes of speech. An artist 
 in his ever sensitive appreciation and impres- 
 sionability, never missing a phase or mood 
 of natural beauty, he has the added ability 
 so necessary to the final touch of illusion, — 
 the power of ease, the power of making his 
 most casual word seem inevitable, and his 
 most inevitable word seem casual. It is in 
 this, I think, that he differs from all his 
 rivals in the field of familiar and dialect 
 poetry. Other writers are as familiar as he, 
 
 1 66 
 
and many as truly inspired; but none com- 
 bines to such a degree the homespun phrase 
 with the lyric feeling. His only compeer 
 in this regard is Lowell, in the brilliant 
 " Biglow Papers," and several other less 
 known but not less admirable Chaucerian 
 sketches of New England country life. In- 
 deed, in humour, in native eloquence, in 
 vivacity, Mr. Riley closely resembles Lowell, 
 though differing from that bookman in his 
 training and inclination, and naturally, as 
 a consequence, in his range and treatment 
 of subjects. But the tide of humanity, so 
 strong in Lowell, is at flood, too, in the 
 Hoosier poet. It is this humane character, 
 preserving all the rugged sweetness in the 
 elemental type of man, which can save 
 us at last as a people from the ravaging 
 taint of charlatanism, frivolity, and greed. 
 
 But we must not leave our subject without 
 discriminating more closely between several 
 sorts of Mr. Riley's poetry; for there is as 
 much difference between his dialect and his 
 
 167 
 
5Ci)e mttvp of mu 
 
 classic English (in point of poetic excellence, 
 I mean) as there is between the Scotch and 
 the English of Burns. Like Burns, he is a 
 lover of the human and the simple, a lover 
 of green fields and blowing flowers; and, 
 like Burns, he is more at home, more easy 
 and felicitous, in his native Doric than in the 
 colder Attic speech of Milton and Keats. 
 
 This is so, it seems to me, for two reasons. 
 In the first place, the poet is dealing with the 
 subject matter he knows best; and in the 
 second place, he is using the medium of 
 expression in which he has a lifelong facility. 
 The art of poetry is far too delicate and too 
 difficult to be practised successfully without 
 the most consummate and almost unconscious 
 mastery of the language employed; so that 
 a poet will hardly ever write with anything 
 like distinction or convincing force in any 
 but his mother tongue. An artist's com- 
 mand of his medium must be so intimate 
 and exquisite that his thought can find ade- 
 quate expression in it as easily as in the 
 
 1 68 
 
lifting of a finger or the moving of an eye- 
 lid. Otherwise he is self-conscious, un- 
 natural, false; and, hide it as he may, we 
 feel the awkwardness and indecision in his 
 work. He who treats of subjects which he 
 knows only imperfectly cannot be true to 
 nature; while he who employs some means 
 of expression which he only imperfectly 
 controls cannot be true to himself. The best 
 art requires equally the fulfilment of both 
 these severe demands; they are the cardinal 
 virtues of art. Disregard of the first pro- 
 duces the dilettante; disregard of the second 
 produces the charlatan. That either of these 
 epithets would seem entirely incongruous, if 
 applied to Mr. Riley, is a tribute to his 
 thorough worth as a writer. 
 
 His verse, then, divides itself sharply into 
 two kinds, the dialect and the conventional. 
 But we have so completely identified him 
 with the former manner that it is hard to 
 estimate his work in the latter. It may be 
 doubted, however, whether he would have 
 
 169 
 
JCfte 3Poett» of a(fe 
 
 reached his present eminence, had he con- 
 fined his efforts to the strictly regulated 
 forms of standard English. In poems like 
 '' A Life Term " and '' One Afternoon," for 
 instance, there is smoothness, even grace of 
 movement, but hardly that distinction w^hich 
 we call style, and little of the lyric plan- 
 gency the author commands at his best; 
 while very often in his use of authorized 
 English there is a strangely marked reminis- 
 cence of older poets, as of Keats in " A 
 Water Colour" (not to speak of "A Ditty 
 of No Tone," written as a frankly imita- 
 tive tribute of admiration for the author 
 of the " Ode to a Grecian Urn "), or of Em- 
 erson in " The All-kind Mother." In only 
 one of the dialect poems, on the other hand, 
 so far as I recall them, is there any imitative 
 note. His " Nothin' to Say " has something 
 of the atmosphere and feeling as well as 
 the movement of Tennyson's " Northern 
 Farmer." But for the most part, when Mr. 
 Riley uses his own dialect, he is thoroughly 
 
 170 
 
original as well as effective. He has not only 
 the lyrical impetus so needful to good po- 
 etry; he has also the story-teller's gift. And 
 when we add to these two qualities an abun- 
 dant share of whimsical humour, we have 
 the equipment which has so justly given him 
 wide repute. 
 
 All of these characteristics are brought 
 into play in such poems as '^ Fessler's Bees," 
 one of the fairest examples of Mr. Riley's 
 balladry at its best: 
 
 " Might call him a bee-expert. 
 When it come to handlin' bees, — 
 Roll the sleeves up of his shirt 
 And wade in amongst the trees 
 Where a swarm *u'd settle, and — 
 Blamedest man on top of dirt ! — 
 Rake 'em with his naked hand 
 Right back in the hive ag*in, 
 Jes' as easy as you please ! ** 
 
 For Mr. Riley is a true balladist. He is 
 really doing for the modern popular taste, 
 here and now, what the old balladists did 
 in their time. He is an entertainer. He 
 
 171 
 
2rj|e ^ottvp of WLttt 
 
 has the ear of his audience. He knows 
 their likes and dislikes, and humours them. 
 His very considerable and very successful 
 experience as a public reader of his own 
 work has reinforced (one may guess) his 
 natural modesty and love of people, and 
 made him constantly regardful of their 
 pleasure. So that we must look upon his 
 verses as a most genuine and spontaneous ex- 
 pression of average poetic feeling as well 
 as personal poetic inspiration. 
 
 Every artist's work must be, necessarily, 
 a more or less successful compromise be- 
 tween these two opposing and difficult con- 
 ditions of achievement. The great artists 
 are they who succeed at last in imposing 
 upon others their own peculiar and novel 
 conceptions of beauty. But these are only 
 the few whom the gods favour beyond their 
 fellows; while for the rank and file of those 
 who deal in the perishable wares of art a 
 less ambitious standard may well be allowed. 
 We must have our balladists as well as our 
 
 172 
 
bards, it seems; and very fortunate is the 
 day when we can have one with so much 
 real spirit and humanity about him as Mr. 
 Riley. 
 
 At times the pathos of the theme quite 
 outweighs its homeliness, and lifts the author 
 above the region of self-conscious art; the 
 use of dialect drops away, and a creation 
 of pure poetry comes to light, as in that 
 irresistible elegy, " Little Haly," for ex- 
 ample : 
 
 " * Little Haly, little Haly/ cheeps the robin in the tree ; 
 ' Little Haly/ sighs the clover ; * Little Haly/ moans the bee ; 
 * Little Haly, little Haly,' calls the kill-dee at twilight ; 
 And the katydids and crickets hollers * Haly ' all the night.** 
 
 In this powerful lyric there is a simple 
 directness approaching the feeling of Greek 
 poetry, and one cannot help regretting the 
 few intrusions of dialect. The poem is so 
 universal in its human appeal, it seems a 
 pity to limit the range of its appreciation 
 by hampering it with local peculiarities of 
 speech. 
 
 ^73 
 
2r|ie ^ottvs of mu 
 
 At times, too, in his interpretations of 
 nature, Mr. Riley lays aside his drollery and 
 his drawling accent in exchange for an in- 
 cisive power of phrase. 
 
 "The wild goose trails his harrow** 
 
 is an example of the keenness of fancy I 
 refer to. Another is found in the closing 
 phrase of one of the stanzas in " A Country 
 Pathway " : 
 
 •* A puritanic quiet here reviles 
 
 The almost whispered warble from the hedge. 
 And takes a locust's rasping voice and files 
 The silence to an edge.** 
 
 In "The Flying Islands of the Night" 
 Mr. Riley has made his widest departure 
 into the reign of whimsical imagination. 
 Here he has retained that liberty of un- 
 shackled speech, that freedom and ease 
 of diction, which mark his more familiar 
 themes, and at the same time has entered 
 an entirely fresh field for him, a sort of 
 grown-up fairyland. There are many strains 
 
 174 
 
mv. Milts'^ mttvs 
 
 of fine poetry in this miniature play, which 
 show Mr. Riley's lyrical faculty at its best. 
 In one instance there is a peculiar treat- 
 ment of the octosyllabic quatrain, where he 
 has chosen to print it in the guise of blank 
 verse. It is impossible, however, to conceal 
 the true swing of the lines. 
 
 " I loved her. Why ? I never knew. Perhaps 
 Because her face was fair. Perhaps because 
 Her eyes were blue and wore a weary air. 
 Perhaps ! Perhaps because her limpid face 
 Was eddied with a restless tide, wherein 
 The dimples found no place to anchor and 
 Abide. Perhaps because her tresses beat 
 A froth of gold about her throat, and poured 
 In splendour to the feet that ever seemed 
 Afloat. Perhaps because of that wild way 
 Her sudden laughter overleapt propriety; 
 Or — who will say ? — perhaps the way she wept." 
 
 It almost seems as if Mr. Riley, with his 
 bent for jesting and his habit of wearing 
 the cap and bells, did not dare be as poetical 
 as he could; and when a serious lyric came 
 to him, he must hide it under the least 
 lyrical appearance, as he has done here. 
 
 175 
 
JTJje J$ottV9 of mu , 
 
 1 
 
 But that, surely, if it be so, is a great injus- 
 tice to himself. He might well attempt the 
 serious as well as the comic side of poetry, 
 remembering that " when half-gods go, the 
 gods arrive." 
 
 176 
 
JWr* Sli^miume's iloetrg 
 
 It is never very wise to try to make just 
 estimates of our contemporaries. At best, we 
 can only give opinions limited by our angle 
 of outlook and coloured by the atmosphere 
 of our own time. This must be particularly 
 so in the case of poetry, for the reason that 
 poetry makes such a strong appeal to our 
 sympathies and is never a matter to be 
 judged by the reason alone. 
 
 To speak of Mr. Swinburne with proper 
 appreciation one must go back to the early 
 eighties, when his wonderful poetry was 
 taken less as a matter of course than it is now. 
 Those were years when our college tasks 
 were interrupted every little while by the 
 appearance of some new volume of precious 
 
 177 
 
poetry by Browning or Tennyson, by Morris 
 or Rossetti, and long hours would be spent 
 in eager, delightful reading. Arnold, it is 
 true, had ceased to write, except as a critic, 
 but his name and personality were none the 
 less touched with glamour, his work none the 
 less cherished. The sixth of the immortals 
 of that far-off golden age was the author of 
 " Atalanta in Calydon," and in some ways he 
 was the most compelling of them all, aston- 
 ishing and unrivalled in his accomplish- 
 ment. 
 
 He was not so much a mentor as a sorcerer, 
 and it was with a sort of divine intoxication 
 that we used to chant *' The Triumph of 
 Time," "The Garden of Proserpine," the 
 close of " Anactoria," or the choruses of 
 " Atalanta." In volume and magic of sound 
 no English poet had ever matched these 
 things, it seemed. They carried us away 
 by their unexpected splendour of diction, 
 their novel and incomparable harmonies, 
 their noble fervour. They came upon the 
 
 178 
 
impressionable ear like enchanted strains 
 from some mysterious land, fabulous, lonely, 
 and mournful, yet lovely with all the loveli- 
 ness of unforgotten joy. Their sorrov^ful 
 cadences, their sad refrains, their pitiful 
 sentiment, appealed to the wilful melan- 
 choly of youth, while their lofty and uncal- 
 culating radicalism quickened its generosity. 
 It did not occur to us in those days that re- 
 straint was any part of perfection, or that 
 these miracles of poetic artistry would have 
 been more beautiful had they been less reck- 
 lessly diffuse. At least, if any such sus- 
 picion ever crossed our minds, we loyally 
 put it aside. 
 
 But those bright days of romance could 
 not last. One by one the great singers 
 brought their work to a close, leaving none 
 to take their places; while their youthful 
 admirers heard the call of the world, and 
 were forced, however reluctantly, to go 
 about the world's business. Then, too, there 
 had to come a time of riper judgment, more 
 
 179 
 
^ftt ^ottvs of aife 
 
 discriminating appreciation, more exacting 
 taste. As years went by they brought a 
 change of spiritual and mental needs; the 
 sensuous music of " Poems and Ballads " 
 grew a little monotonous and unsatisfying 
 in our ears, and failed to charm us as it had 
 at first. What the reason for this may have 
 been who shall say? In the cold disillusion- 
 ment of an age of prose I find myself won- 
 dering whether it was due to a failure of 
 enthusiasm in ourselves, or whether there is 
 really an inherent deficiency somewhere in 
 Mr. Swinburne's poetry which makes it in- 
 capable of holding one for long. Poetry at 
 its best, like all art at its best, must surely 
 be a thing of such power as to sway men and 
 women of all conditions and requirements 
 with more than a passing influence. Its 
 hold must be permanent, its zest perennial, 
 while its subtle power to move us must pre- 
 vail against the slowly benumbing frost of 
 time. Poetry which falls short of these 
 demands, which charms us for a time and 
 
 1 80 
 
then can charm us no more, which brings our 
 senses under the spell of its enchantment, 
 but in the end fails to answer our rational 
 questions, can hardly be called poetry of 
 the first order. 
 
 Brought to the test of judicial question- 
 ing, much of Mr. Swinburne's poetry is 
 found to fail in this respect. At least so it 
 must seem to many of his admirers, I fancy. 
 And while they must for ever be gratified 
 for the delight which he gave them, they 
 must somewhat sorrowfully admit that he 
 can give the same delight no longer, — that 
 while the beautiful masterpieces of other 
 great Victorians are as potent as of old, 
 his have somehow lost their charm. Why is 
 it that " The Scholar Gipsy " and " Thyrsis '' 
 continue to allure us, while " Ave atque 
 Vale" appeals to us almost in vain? And 
 why do we grow weary of '' A Forsaken 
 Garden," while the simpler measures of 
 "The Neckan" and "The Forsaken Mer- 
 man " still move us profoundly with their 
 
 i8i 
 
Zftt IPoettj? of Hift 
 
 pathos and romance? How is it we can read 
 again and again ^' Tristram and Iseult," 
 " Rabbi Ben Ezra," " Fra Lippo Lippi," 
 and '' Sohrab and Rustum," and hardly once 
 care to turn to *' Tristram of Lyonesse," or 
 "The Last Oracle," or "Delores"? Why 
 do not the familiar words enchant us as 
 they did? How have the charm and potency 
 and conviction escaped from the verse? 
 Must we conclude that all Mr. Swinburne's 
 passionate reverberance is not comparable to 
 " the surge and thunder of the Odyssey," 
 after all? 
 
 What makes this difference? I have an 
 idea that this poetry never was quite as 
 great as it seemed to us. Youth is full of 
 ideals, it is true, but it is also much taken 
 up with the senses. It does not often demand 
 a convincing reason, or look for truth be- 
 neath appearances. The sensuous beauties of 
 the world, the obvious sensuous beauties of 
 art, appeal to it. And if there is one quality 
 which Mr. Swinburne's poetry always ex- 
 
 182 
 
hibits, it is sensuous beauty, beauty of form. 
 You may repeat the stanzas beginning, — 
 
 ** O fair green-girdles mother of mine. 
 Sea, that art clothed with the sun and the rain," — 
 
 or that incomparable chorus, — 
 
 " Before the beginning of years 
 There came to the making of man," — 
 
 until the whole world seems made out of 
 poetry, so splendid and compelling is the 
 fabric of the verse, so free and sincere and 
 impassioned its headlong flow. Yet how 
 easily it becomes redundant! 
 
 There, I believe, is the essential flaw in 
 this masterly poet's work. He is, if we may 
 judge, a man of unbounded exuberance, of 
 unbridled enthusiasm; he knows no modera- 
 tion nor restraint; he is all superlative, 
 always excessive; he will never use an 
 adjective where he can possibly use two; 
 he is never satisfied with a perfect line with- 
 out wanting to duplicate it. From a single 
 poetic thought he will brew a barrel of ver- 
 
 183 
 
biage. He seems never to have compre- 
 hended the value of economy in art. It 
 never has occurred to him that reiteration is 
 almost always a mark of weakness. He has 
 never perceived what power there is in being 
 concise. He is, as was said of Gladstone, 
 " intoxicated with the exuberance of his 
 own verbosity," and can never be quenched 
 as long as there is an adjective left in the 
 dictionary. He must exhaust the very re- 
 sources of language before he will desist. 
 The blunder is fatal. It is a juvenile error 
 which a little judgment ought surely to have 
 corrected, but one which Mr. Swinburne has 
 never outgrown. All of his later work, like 
 his earlier, suffers from this redundancy of 
 expression, this lax and indiscriminate ex- 
 aggeration. So indulgent has he been of his 
 native talent that there are scarcely half a 
 dozen of his poems that would not gain by 
 pruning and condensation. With the great 
 mass of his work, of course, no such amend- 
 ing could be possible. Its blemishes are too 
 
 184 
 
inherent. His genius itself is too diffuse and 
 ungovernable ever to submit to those nice 
 limitations which perfection in any art re- 
 quires of the artist. You may open him 
 almost at random and find examples of his 
 besetting sin. For instance, you may turn to 
 ''March: An Ode," and read the first 
 line, — 
 
 " Ere frost flower and snow blossom faded and fell, and the 
 splendour of Winter had passed out of sight," — 
 
 and feel yourself still in the presence of the 
 same sonorous voice that first sounded in 
 the '' Poems and Ballads," though w^ith just 
 a suspicion of weakness. Before you reach 
 the foot of the page, however, you come 
 upon the line, — 
 
 " That the sea was not lovelier than here was the land, nor 
 the night than the day, nor the day than the night,** — 
 
 and at once feel that all force has evaporated 
 from the poem. " Nor the night than the 
 day, nor the day than the night" — what 
 pitiable bathos, what tawdry ineptitude! 
 
 185 
 
ffHe ^ottvs of ll(fe 
 
 Yet, to speak severely, he has hardly writ- 
 ten a page that is entirely free from any such 
 meaningless superfluity of words. His very 
 facility has been his undoing. This great 
 copiousness of language, while at first indic- 
 ative of abundance of power, produces in 
 the end a sense of incompetence and vapid- 
 ity. Incontinence is a mark of feebleness, 
 not of force, and implies inefficiency or 
 decrepitude. In art, as in life, too much 
 is as bad as too little. Only within the 
 range of the golden mean is perfection pos- 
 sible. In all of Mr. Swinburne's work, in 
 his prose as well as his poetry, we cannot 
 help feeling his lack of balance, his lack of 
 real enduring power. He seems to be led 
 away by every new combination of words 
 that suggests itself to his ear; he cannot 
 light upon a happy phrase without wanting 
 to repeat it in a slightly different form. He 
 has a passion for proficiency rather than 
 perfection, and is always betrayed into over- 
 statement. It cannot be said of his poetry 
 
 i86 
 
that he writes without inspiration, nor of his 
 prose that he writes without insight; but it 
 must often be said that he writes without 
 judgment. He has passion, indeed, a noble 
 passion, for human liberty, but a passion so 
 intemperate that it is more like the hysteria 
 of the invalid than the divine frenzy of the 
 oracle. 
 
 It is a thousand pities that a man of such 
 genius should never have learned the value 
 of moderation, that prime requisite of beauty. 
 For perfection lies on the magic boundary 
 between deficiency and excess, and can no 
 more reside in the one than in the other. 
 Successful art, like successful life, must be 
 modulated, modelled, limited, bounded, 
 directed. The flawless line of the statue 
 appears only when the superfluous marble 
 has been cut away. Without modulation 
 all crude native force must lose half its 
 effectiveness and be dissipated in irrelevancy, 
 whether it is manifesting itself in nature, 
 in society, or in art. It is not enough that 
 
 187 
 
poetic inspiration should be spontaneous 
 and plentiful in any given instance, it must 
 be regulated, controlled, and tempered by 
 logic, before it can wholly serve the best 
 purposes of poetry. 
 
 Again, all art, and particularly the art of 
 poetry, must not only be restrained and free 
 from excess; it must be balanced in all 
 its essentials; it must devote itself to satisfy- 
 ing our curiosity as vs^ell as playing upon our 
 emotions and charming our senses. It must 
 help to satiate our love of truth, our desire 
 for knowledge, our longing for a reasonable 
 explanation of the universe, at the same time 
 and in the same measure that it helps to 
 satisfy our love of sensuous beauty and all 
 the generous aspirations of the spirit. Poetry 
 has obligations, in other words, not only to 
 the fastidious taste and the inflammable 
 heart of the reader, but to his clear reason as 
 well. These latter requirements the poetry 
 of Mr. Swinburne fails to meet. Poetry, 
 indeed, must not smack of philosophy, yet 
 
 1 88 
 
every poet must have a philosophy of his 
 own, and that philosophy must be inherent 
 and discoverable in his work. In poetry of 
 the first order the philosophic pith is sig- 
 nificant and valuable. In less important 
 poetry it is insignificant and of little worth, 
 either because it is trite, or because it is false, 
 or because it is vague or fantastic. 
 
 Some such reason as this, if I am not mis- 
 taken, lies at the root of Mr. Swinburne's 
 comparative failure as a poet — his failure 
 to reach that influential place in current 
 literature which his great gifts would have 
 otherwise entitled him to hold. For while 
 we all gladly acknowledge his eminence, we 
 must also regretfully admit the slightness of 
 his hold on the regard of his age. He has 
 been belauded and revered as a master by 
 all lovers of technique; he has failed to 
 make himself felt as a power in his genera- 
 tion. For all his splendid achievement he 
 pipes to us in vain. He does not touch the 
 heart of the multitude as Tennyson and 
 
 189 
 
STfie ^otivs of WLltt 
 
 Longfellow touched it; he does not stimu- 
 late thought and satisfy our mental unrest 
 as Browning did; he has none of Arnold's 
 clarity and repose. He fills the ear without 
 feeding the mind, and we turn away in 
 disappointment from his resonant but empty 
 dithyrambs. 
 
 All these ungracious things must only be 
 said, of course, in the interest of the severest 
 criticism, in an attempt, which is perhaps 
 futile, after all, to judge the poetry of our 
 own day in comparison with the greatest 
 poetry of all time. And they may be said, 
 I hope, without any detriment to Mr. Swin- 
 burne's fame. For, in spite of all detrac- 
 tions, he remains one of the chief ornaments 
 of the Victorian age of poetry, that is to say, 
 one of the illustrious poets of the world. As 
 a wizard of versification, a startling and 
 magnificent artist, he remains without a 
 rival. 
 
 190 
 
^i\t Eefe^atirs of floettg 
 
 (A Letter to the Lyric Muse from an Im- 
 aginary Correspondent,) 
 
 It is now more than a year, my dear mis- 
 tress, since my last poem was written. As 
 I was wont to be so unfailingly diligent in 
 your service, my conscience tells me I should 
 attempt to explain the long silence, for I 
 truly feel that somehow there has been a 
 breach of duty on my part, a failure to live 
 up to my own sense of what is becoming, if 
 not to meet your gentle illumined expecta- 
 tions. 
 
 Perhaps it has not seemed long to you; 
 perhaps you have not even been aware of 
 
 191 
 
8rj)e J&ottvs of JLitt 
 
 the cessation of my devoted endeavours, nor 
 missed my customary offerings at all. To 
 me, however, the time has seemed heavy and 
 interminable, and I have only borne it, I am 
 sorry to admit, with grievous vexation and 
 a rebellious heart. It has been a bitter and 
 profitless year of estrangement. Had I felt 
 that it was the result of your displeasure, 
 that you had purposely withdrawn your 
 favour from me, that I was being chastised 
 like a loved but erring child in need of 
 discipline, I think I could have endured the 
 separation, the lonesomeness, the defeat, with 
 a comparatively equal mind. But that cir- 
 cumstances and conditions alone should have 
 been the cause of this apparent neglect, is 
 the fact that makes my unhappiness so 
 sombre and sincere. Our life, it seems, is 
 never what we will, but always a hurried 
 compromise with the inexorable drift of 
 events, and we go forward through time and 
 the tangle of affairs as a canoe goes upward 
 through the headlong brawling rapids of a 
 
 192 
 
cue iftetpartri^ of ^ottvp 
 
 stream to the far-lying uncertain reaches of 
 success between the meadows of content- 
 ment. 
 
 You who live constantly in the quiet open 
 light of ideals, like a dweller among lofty 
 mountains where the air is always serene, 
 very likely forget sometimes how it must 
 fare with unfortunate mortals on the earth, 
 forced to snatch a perilous livelihood in the 
 bewildering hubbub of modern times. With 
 your radiant beauty, your perennial youth, 
 your unconquerable joyousness, your calm 
 and happy wisdom, I dare say it has escaped 
 your notice that the world has grown old 
 since the golden age of Hellas, when Mar- 
 syas piped from the riverside and Pan 
 responded from the rugged hills. That 
 was before the blight of modernity, " the 
 strange disease called modern life," had 
 fallen upon men. Life was lived in many 
 ways more sanely then than now, even 
 though the range of knowledge was less 
 unlimited than ours. The people of those 
 
 193 
 
JClfte ^ottvs of atfe 
 
 days surpassed us in the fortunate conduct 
 of their lives, — in securing a just poise of 
 existence, in making all their endeavours 
 subserve the great purpose of happiness. 
 They knew well that there is one thing more 
 important than to be strenuous, and that is 
 to be glad. It is true we have far out- 
 stripped them in conquering the forces of 
 the earth and the secrets of science. Our 
 resources of wealth and knowledge are truly 
 almost incredible; and yet we seem almost 
 powerless to convert them into enjoyment; 
 and our modern world lies in a vast turmoil 
 of excitement, battle, and doubt, beneath un- 
 lifting clouds of hesitation and dismay. 
 We wear out our hearts and brains in the 
 ceaseless fret of affairs, and grow gray be- 
 fore our time; yet seldom reach the goal of 
 all ambition, — one simple hour of joy. 
 
 This sorry plight of the world, I say, you 
 may never have observed. For when you 
 do come among men, and visit any mortal 
 with the inspiration of your gracious pres- 
 
 194 
 
ence, he is at once transfigured. He is no 
 longer one of the average company of 
 humans, but a radiant being, possessed and 
 gay, and even wise. So that to you, behold- 
 ing his happiness, it must seem that all men 
 are happy, that the earth is immortally fair, 
 and that the life of mortals has suffered no 
 change, no deterioration, as the centuries 
 have gone by. 
 
 I am sure that is true in our own case. 
 When I first loved you, it was not even 
 necessary that my sentiment should be re- 
 turned, since I was filled with it as a lamp 
 is filled with flame, and all the dark of the 
 room is illumined even though no watcher is 
 by. You did not need to favour me; my 
 own infatuation was enough to change the 
 face of nature; and when I approached your 
 shrine with my first offerings and supplica- 
 tions, so precious in their origin, so trivial 
 in themselves, you must have beheld a mortal 
 almost transfigured by one touch of the 
 great passion which your piercing beauty 
 
 195 
 
STfje J&ottvp of aife 
 
 arouses. Doubtless in me, as in so many be- 
 fore me, you took the exception for the 
 average, and judged the whole world was 
 still young. I thought it so myself. 
 
 Alas, that was not the whole truth! For 
 while the elation of love made weariness 
 seem a fable, and the age of the universe 
 a myth, the actual signs of failure and un- 
 happiness were abroad, had we but had eyes 
 to perceive them, sprung from seeds of 
 sorrow and decrepitude sown long ago. 
 But we were as blind as crazy happy lovers 
 always are, and never guessed that the 
 actual world could be different from our 
 iridescent vision, or that people could actu- 
 ally be tainted with anxiety and terror and 
 care. 
 
 It did not matter to me then. It does not 
 matter to you now. In your immortal life, 
 dear angel of joy, there is neither age nor 
 care nor the shadow of grief. Others will 
 come to you, in the long, unfailing years, 
 with songs as fresh and a thousand times 
 
 196 
 
more worthy than mine, and win your im- 
 mortal love with the exigency of their mor- 
 tal needs. Yet few will come beneath your 
 spell with a rapture more genuine, a joy 
 more unquestioning, than carried me away 
 in those youthful perished summers of the 
 North. How could I know, then, the truth 
 of the world, being so full of the truth of 
 your unworldliness? 
 
 Did it, indeed, seem to you in those old 
 days, when I haunted your door with all the 
 folly of a mortal lover, all the fervour of an 
 immortal, that the whole earth was fervent 
 and bewitched, — a lovely illimitable gar- 
 den of dalliance and dream? Let me tell 
 you it is only when we mortals are in love 
 that we share in your divinity, only while we 
 are under the domination of your inspired 
 ideals of tenderness and beauty, that we put 
 ofiP for a time many unlovely traits. In this 
 life we lead upon earth, I must remind you, 
 there are pitiful sorrows, blighting disap- 
 pointments, senseless accidents, blunders, dis- 
 
 197 
 
JCiit J^ottvs of affe 
 
 cases, annihilations, and countless forms of 
 envy, hatred, malice, cruelty, and greed. 
 We live and strive and have our being in 
 ways too ghastly and revolting for you to 
 imagine. We do so, I suppose, because of 
 those unlovely characteristics we have de- 
 rived from our inhuman ancestry, an inherit- 
 ance from worse than barbarous times, the 
 vast chaotic aeons of tooth and claw; and 
 we are willing to continue doing so, I sup- 
 pose, because our faith in our better instincts, 
 our intuitions derived from beings like your- 
 self, is so timid as yet, so poor and feeble 
 and frail. In war we strew the lovely earth 
 with ruin and with death, struggling among 
 ourselves for the possession of lands, as 
 children struggle and push one another in 
 the face for the possession of an apple or a 
 candy dog. In peace, throughout all the 
 activities of modern life, our behaviour is 
 even worse, being more underhand and 
 mean; we follow a code, our business code, 
 whose iniquities are no less ruthless and vile, 
 
 198 
 
though more devious and concealed than 
 the flagrant cruelties of the code of war. 
 These things are so common among us 
 that they cause no remark. To you, how- 
 ever, should you contemplate them, they 
 would appear unbelievable in their folly. 
 Even to those who have once come within 
 the sway of your pure intelligence, their 
 enormity seems appalling. 
 
 Indeed, when any mortal has ever felt the 
 benediction of your spiritual influence, to 
 however small a degree, and known the love 
 of beauty and the desire for truth which your 
 friendship always instils, he can never again 
 be quite insensible to the dangerous insanity 
 and animosity of his fellows, but must 
 always tread warily through life, fearful 
 that at any moment the chimera of human 
 perversity may turn and destroy him. So 
 that to have been a devotee of your innocent 
 cult in his youth is not the best preparation 
 a man can have for success, as the world 
 reckons success, since it gives him a tinge 
 
 199 
 
ffHe J^ottvp of mu 
 
 of 'idealism that must always afterward 
 colour his thoughts and deflect his judgment. 
 A man who has loved poetry when he was 
 young, will not be likely, when he grows 
 up, to love money with that absorbing single- 
 ness of heart which alone can establish his 
 position among our respectable church- 
 members. 
 
 For the God of the world is a jealous God, 
 and tolerates no divided allegiance in his 
 worshippers. To those who wear his badge, 
 and toil without ceasing to gather riches in 
 his name, he grants many and great rewards, 
 — lands, houses, raiment, rich foods, horses, 
 automobiles, railroads, senatorships, divi- 
 dends, and cushioned seats in his own fash- 
 ionable houses, where dreary ministers arise 
 to promulgate the monstrous cant of a false 
 Christianity. But to those who have ever 
 in the rashness of youth dared to scorn the 
 enticements of Mammon, and have turned 
 their faces to you in a credulous search for 
 goodness, the God of this world is relentless. 
 
 200 
 
You will know, however, dear Beauty, 
 that while I mock with sincerity, I remain 
 without bitterness. If you cannot compre- 
 hend the perplexity of living the poetic life 
 in a world so topsyturvy as men's inordinate 
 greed has made it, you can certainly under- 
 stand the indifference to small adversities 
 which all your followers must feel. Passing, 
 in the public eye, for slightly demented 
 creatures, harmless enthusiasts, impractical 
 visionaries, they are content with immunity, 
 if only it may be allowed them, and happy 
 enough with the inward irridiation which 
 the joy of your companionship brings. Un- 
 burdened by the distractions of worldly 
 eminence, they are free to behold the pageant 
 of life not only without envy but with 
 sympathy and sometimes with understand- 
 ing. Moreover, vituperation mends no mis- 
 takes. 
 
 To those who have never known you it 
 must be a constant source of wonder what 
 the rewards of poetry can be to induce any 
 
 20I 
 
sane person to give it even the devotion of a 
 day. That one could follow it for a life- 
 time must seem like the wildest lunacy. 
 Indeed, there are times, hours of dreariness 
 and dejection, in which for some cause or 
 other you appear to have deserted me, when 
 I almost share that popular incredulity, and 
 myself indulge in the blasphemy of doubt. 
 Many expensive pleasures in which people 
 find enjoyment, or at least diversion, I can 
 readily forego; they seem to me a very dull 
 way of killing time; but when it comes to 
 the actual pinch of necessity, — when I 
 have had to pawn my cuff-links for a car- 
 fare, or when I have not had the price of a 
 smoke in my pocket, I confess to you, I have 
 been filled with something more acrid than 
 " the ignoble melancholy of pecuniary em- 
 barrassment." A smouldering fury of resent- 
 ment consumes my fastidious soul on such 
 occasions; even the humourous incongruity 
 of the occasion fails to rouse me; and I 
 begin to comprehend that blundering in- 
 
 202 
 
stinct for revolution which makes savages 
 in the midst of civilization. 
 
 I am afraid in this regard I have not the 
 fine superiority to circumstance which was 
 so conspicuous a trait in a vanished comrade 
 of mine, who could remain imperturbable un- 
 der the petty annoyances of low finance. He 
 seemed to perceive that the necessity was 
 a matter of course, and that it was enough 
 to be a poet without wanting to be a million- 
 aire as well. I have always admired that 
 stable courage in him, which could accept 
 things as they are, and never fretted over the 
 fact that the rewards of poetry and the 
 rewards of the world are different and not 
 always convertible. You may wait, I fear, 
 for several generations before you find 
 another poet who will devote himself more 
 whole-heartedly to your service, and will 
 accept the conditions of life with so wise a 
 resignation as he habitually showed, with so 
 unspoiled a temper, and a disposition so un- 
 
 203 
 
8rtie l&ottvs of %ift 
 
 embittered by the tedious, discouraging 
 career of an artist in letters. 
 
 It is not always a comfortable road that 
 your devotees have to follow. Though it 
 is wide enough and easy to trace, with joys 
 of a rare sort here and there, it has many 
 solitary stretches barren of consolation. At 
 its outset there is an enticing glamour hang- 
 ing over it, very alluring to the strong and 
 young, but, in sober truth, few roads require 
 more resolution in the traveller. It is so easy 
 to set out for your fabled and dazzling 
 shrine; all that the adventurer needs is a 
 pencil and pad and a vacant afternoon. 
 With this slight equipment, the immemorial 
 daring of his tribe tells him, he can conquer 
 fame and carry your glory in triumph above 
 the crowd. But after a few years upon the 
 way, he realizes that all he has are the pad 
 (slightly diminished), the pencil (a little 
 worn down), and the vacant afternoon 
 (radiant still, but seemingly not so long as 
 it used to be) ; and your shining temple as 
 
 204 
 
CJl^ Xletuattri^ of Jloettff 
 
 far away as ever. Meanwhile the cakes and 
 ale have not been overabundant, and hd is 
 lucky if he has a clear conscience and sound 
 courage to show after his many days of dusty 
 wayfaring. 
 
 Nearly twenty years ago now, a young 
 man at Harvard began to give his days to 
 the cultivation of poetry, infatuated by the 
 glamour of your fame and beauty, and tasted 
 the first-fruits of ambition when a string 
 of his verses appeared in The Atlantic, your 
 favourite periodical. Since then he has had 
 little other occupation than to do your will 
 and preach your worship in the world. One 
 would suppose that in that time he might 
 have achieved a position of some substance 
 and security, such as men in other profes- 
 sions attain in half the time. Such is hardly 
 the case, however. Only a few months ago, 
 after being out of town for the summer, he 
 called at the office of that friend and pro- 
 tector of many of your votaries, the inestima- 
 ble Runnels, to inquire how his manuscripts 
 
 205 
 
had fared in his absence in their rounds of 
 the editorial rooms. 
 
 " Well," said Runnels, " here is one poem 
 that has been to — let me see — one, two, 
 three, four, seventeen places. Here is an- 
 other that has been to twenty-three. And 
 here is a third one that has come back from 
 twenty-nine editorial visits. I think perhaps 
 you had better take them yourself, and see 
 what you can do with them." 
 
 Not a very encouraging prospect! Yet I 
 can never repine. The compensation of 
 having known your companionship out- 
 weighs with me all other considerations. 
 Only, I would not have any one fancy that 
 your service, perfect freedom though it is, 
 is also a perfect picnic. If any young gentle- 
 man is bent on becoming the poet of the 
 future, the position is open, the applicants 
 are few, but his credit at the bank of pa- 
 tience must be unlimited, for he will have 
 to draw on it heavily and often. 
 
 The poet's relation to the world is not very 
 206 
 
often a happy one, unless, like our friend 
 Horace, he is blessed with a joyous pene- 
 trating interest in the lighter side of society. 
 Even that delightful Roman would have 
 fared ill, I dare say, had it not been for the 
 comfortable estate of Maecenas. But we 
 have come far away from those times; the 
 artist has grown proud of his vocation under 
 the growth of democracy, and is not to be 
 patronized any more. I cannot say that I 
 blame him. And yet, if you look at the fine 
 arts as a whole, you perceive that to be free 
 and beautiful they must be independent of 
 the market to some extent. Just how that is 
 to be done, each artist has to determine for 
 himself, and in the very solving of the diffi- 
 culty he establishes his kinship with this 
 struggling world of men, and gains, I must 
 believe, strength and understanding in the 
 contest, — if it be not too hopeless and too 
 long. 
 
 There has lately been a good deal of dis- 
 cussion of a possible decline in the taste for 
 
 207 
 
8Ciie ^ottts oC atfe 
 
 poetry. Whether or not poetry is less widely 
 read than it used to be, is difficult to say. I 
 notice one thing, however, which gives me 
 grave fears for the supremacy in which 
 high poetry was once held. There are no 
 old poets any more, no men of assured genius 
 and achievement continuing their labours 
 with unabated zeal. Scores begin their am- 
 bitious careers as your followers ; almost none 
 persist in their calling beyond early middle 
 life, no matter how authentic their inspira- 
 tion may have seemed. Men, if I may name 
 them, like Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Dobson, Mr. 
 Lang, Mr. Stedman, Mr. Gosse, — why do 
 they pipe no longer in your honour? Did 
 they not love your art? Have they not 
 proved themselves genuine and worthy up- 
 holders of your best traditions? Yes, indeed! 
 How comes it, then, that they are silent? 
 The time was when every year or two would 
 see a new volume of poems from one of them 
 or another, yet now they seem to belong to an 
 age that is past. It is not that they are old, 
 
 208 
 
cut IlfUiartri^ of It^ottvs 
 
 it is not that their work was ephemeral; 
 there must be some other reason for the hush 
 that has fallen upon them. Our elders, 
 Whitman, Emerson, Tennyson, Browning, 
 Whittier, Morris, Longfellow, and the rest, 
 all grew old in the delightful service of 
 poetry, courageous and productive to the 
 last. Only one quitted your service long 
 before the term of life was closed for him, 
 — one of the most lovely and sincere of mor- 
 tals, one of the best of poets. While still 
 a young man, the inflexible necessity of for- 
 tune compelled Arnold to abandon his true 
 vocation, and devote himself, in his fine 
 sedulous way, to more immediate and prosaic 
 duties. His heart, we all must believe, was 
 always yours, but the unavoidable demands 
 of the world permitted him no respite to fol- 
 low his bent. And though the example of 
 his cheerful, courageous life remains to us, 
 the fate which befell his poetic career seems 
 to me no less pitiful than the premature 
 death of Shelley or of Keats. Had he been 
 
 209 
 
Srtie J&ottvs of ILlft 
 
 permitted to give his whole life to poetry, 
 who can say what beautiful masterpieces 
 might not have been added to the English 
 tongue? 
 
 And in our own day I suspect that the 
 exigent call of the world is growing more 
 and more imperative; its conditions more 
 and more rigorous; and that it is becoming 
 yearly more difficult for the artist in ideals 
 to maintain his independence, — to fight for 
 standing-room and breathing-space, — while 
 he pursues his exacting craft. I suspect that 
 if a number of living poets could be ques- 
 tioned, it would be found that they have 
 allowed their voices to become silent, not 
 from any failure of loyalty toward yourself, 
 but simply from the increasing difficulty, not 
 to say indifference, of the times. What we 
 all recognize as the prevalent complexity 
 and turmoil and distraction of life to-day, 
 with its multitudinous exactions, puts an 
 overwhelming burden upon every citizen, 
 and permits of almost no devotion to lei- 
 
 2IO 
 
surely intellectual occupations. The sky of 
 being is no longer radiant, but overcast as 
 with a cloud of discouragement and depres- 
 sion, and we are surrounded with an atmos- 
 phere in which joyous creative spontaneity 
 is all but impossible. The bounding vigour 
 of youth may support it for a time, but the 
 grim passage of leaden days will wear out 
 the strongest heart at last, and leave the 
 spirit no more elasticity for lofty enter- 
 prise. 
 
 Say what we will in defence of the times, 
 there is no denying their vigour, their practi- 
 cality, their insensitiveness to beauty, and 
 the sad contempt of most people for all 
 that poetry means. In a recent discussion 
 of this subject, a sturdy follower of yours 
 has said the final word, " A scarecrow adver- 
 tisement on our crowded streets is rated of 
 more worth than a copy of the Winged 
 Victory. Otherwise, the victory would be 
 there." 
 
 There is no answer to that argument. 
 
 211 
 
Kfit ^oetts of mu 
 
 Again, I read only last evening this aston- 
 ishing sentence at the opening of an article 
 by a Japanese nobleman on ^' The Heart of 
 the Mikado," " Fortunately for his people, 
 the emperor is a poet." Fancy any one in 
 this country saying in a serious essay, " For- 
 tunately for the United States, Mr. John 
 Hay was a poet." It was something in him 
 the public wished to forget or condone, noth- 
 ing to be proud of. 
 
 In all this, dear, happy Muse, am I quite 
 mistaken? Is it because we are weaklings 
 that we can find no longer the opportunity 
 for song, and your altar is neglected? I 
 write to you with tumultuous feelings of 
 regret, not to excuse my growing negligence 
 of you, but to explain it. However sad you 
 may feel at our parting, my own sorrow is 
 still greater. To you it may seem only the 
 breaking of one more fair promise, but to me 
 it is the frustration of kingly hopes. 
 
 Stripped of prevarication, it comes to 
 this; I am in debt to the world. During 
 
 212 
 
the years spent in your service, I have had 
 the workman's three meals a day; if I have 
 not been elegantly dressed, I have certainly 
 been decently clothed most of the time; and 
 if I have had neither horse nor house to call 
 my own, I have at least not slept in squalor. 
 If such modest equipment as I have enjoyed 
 could still be honestly maintained, all would 
 be very well indeed. But as a matter of 
 fact, my actual and unavoidable account with 
 society shows a considerable balance on the 
 wrong side of the book, with a tendency to 
 increase rather than to diminish with the 
 passing years. This, of course, we can 
 neither of us afford to tolerate. We who 
 profess to set so much store by the finer 
 ideals, can hardly shirk the most ordinary 
 demands of fair play in the daily conduct 
 of affairs. 
 
 When I tell you, therefore, that I must 
 leave you, and turn my attention to the 
 practical business of discharging my debts, 
 I feel sure you will approve my cause, even 
 
 213 
 
though It should seem to be a slight to your- 
 self in the eyes of outsiders. People have 
 been lenient with me long enough ; no doubt 
 on your account. But there is a limit to 
 human patience, and a point beyond which 
 good nature ought not to be strained. I 
 must not bring you into discredit, while 
 professedly attempting to forward your 
 cause. You have had many followers, whose 
 lives were sadly at variance with those ideals 
 of lovely and happy existence of which 
 you perpetually dream. Even if I could 
 rival such predecessors in achievement, the 
 undertaking would still be questionable at 
 such a cost. And I have no right to count 
 on any such success. Your worship must be 
 kept free from disrepute and your name 
 from disrespect, at all hazards. 
 
 You see, then, the drift of my apology, 
 the very good reason for my apparent aban- 
 donment of your favour and your cause. 
 And I trust to your large wisdom for ample 
 forgiveness, if for the future I transfer much 
 
 214 
 
of my labour and my allegiance to your less 
 distinguished but more opulent sister, the 
 muse of prose. 
 
 Still I linger over the page. I cannot 
 bear to bid you farewell. Like a lover 
 parting from the woman he loves, my heart 
 is torn by regrets, and my mind at moments 
 almost wrecked by despair. Just as I have 
 begun to master the difficult technique of 
 your art, just as you have begun to im- 
 part to me the most important revelations, 
 I must resign the absorbing and delightful 
 task of being your amanuensis, and leave 
 you, perhaps never to return. As a novice 
 I came to you in joyousness of enthusiasm, 
 and now I can imagine no happier for- 
 tune than to be allowed to continue in 
 the enjoyment of your teaching, whose rea- 
 son and beauty I was just beginning to 
 comprehend. I abandon your way with 
 grief, but there is no alternative. 
 
 Good-bye once more, dear soul of perfect 
 utterance, whom I have loved so well, — 
 
 215 
 
spirit of imperishable beauty! I turn from 
 the hearth where we have been happy to- 
 gether, where you have often conversed with 
 such gaiety and wisdom. Henceforth the 
 long hours must be given to the piety of 
 profitable toil. For your sake, and to pro- 
 tect our threshold from profanation, I must 
 be prepared to answer the dreaded knock at 
 the door, which I have come to recognize 
 as the inescapable summons or the peremp- 
 tory dun. 
 
 Do you think I would be pitied? Not I, 
 dear heart. I speak of trivial annoyances, 
 the mere outward daily fret of life which 
 may conquer human strength, but cannot 
 subdue the soul. I refer to the rewards of 
 poetry, not the compensation of the poet. 
 Not all the rewards of Philistia are equal 
 to his true and immaterial recompense. 
 There is no arithmetic to tell, no symbol 
 to express, the happiness you have given me, 
 the serenity of spirit you have taught me to 
 prize, and which no adversity can take away. 
 
 216 
 
Ci^eerful tiesstmbm 
 
 A FRIEND of mine, with a ready and plenti- 
 ful wit, discriminated between two persons 
 of his acquaintance by saying that one was a 
 cheerful pessimist and the other a tearful 
 optimist. The distinction is as suggestive 
 as it is delightful, and comes near to divid- 
 ing the world in two. The incongruous 
 blending of sad and gay in both classes lends 
 the universal application to the saying — 
 makes it human and genuine. " Thank God, 
 the worst has happened," says a Chinese 
 proverb, pessimistic, but game to the last. 
 " Though he slay me, yet will I trust in 
 him," says the tearful optimist, Job. Here 
 I am believing everything is just as bad as 
 it can be, and yet with a fine indestructible 
 
 217 
 
cut ^ottvp of mtt 
 
 core of valour still remaining; and there you 
 are, convinced of the excellence of the earth, 
 protesting the unalterable prevalence of law 
 and order, yet touched with the mouldy 
 blight of melancholy. 
 
 After all, it is only a difference in the 
 angle of vision. From your side of the fence 
 it is a green world touched with blue; from 
 my side it is a blue world shading into 
 green. And all on account of an hour's 
 difference in our birth. For you the stars 
 stood in one position at the time of your 
 terrestrial advent; for me they had ranged 
 themselves in a new order. But for both of 
 us the same omnipotent influences of the 
 planets and the suns, the same fortune to 
 inherit from, though you have your portion 
 and I have mine. We float together in a 
 tide of being in the grasp of the same great 
 wind, in the pull of the same great moon. 
 On the perilous, breathless crest of a wave 
 you call yourself an optimist — with your 
 heart in your mouth; I call myself a pessi- 
 
 218 
 
mist, seeing nothing but a wall of water 
 towering overhead as I gasp in the trough 
 of a sea. In a moment we change places. 
 But I have the advantage of you in this, that 
 I can dive from trough to trough, while you 
 cannot skip from crest to crest. You must 
 wallow down the sliding declivity of your 
 unstable mountain of vision, to be cast up 
 again for another momentary prospect. Very 
 well, I take your word for the glorious sea 
 view; meanwhile I prefer the equable tenor 
 of my mid-sea way, engulfed at times, but 
 avoiding your sickening undulations — a 
 Titanic dawdling for which I have no 
 stomach. 
 
 Cheerful pessimism is the creed of com- 
 edy. By comedy one does not mean, of 
 course, the cheap buffoonery which parades 
 before us falsely in the name of the kindly 
 muse. For Comedy is the wisest of all the 
 divine sisters, and, while she enjoys the 
 folly of others, she is herself sane and free. 
 It is she who saves us from our own fatuity, 
 
 219 
 
sriie ^ottva of Hffe 
 
 mistress of so many great joy-givers, from 
 Chaucer and Shakespeare to Browning and 
 Robert Louis Stevenson. Not only is so 
 much great poetry under her care, but all 
 the entertaining stories and pictures of social 
 humanity, from Fielding and Hogarth to 
 Du Maurier and Mr. Meredith. 
 
 Comedy not only makes us laugh, she 
 makes us see; while her solemn sister 
 Tragedy has a way of blinding the sight 
 and distorting our vision with fear. Tragedy 
 makes us start with terror, while Comedy 
 only wrinkles the corners of the eyes. Trag- 
 edy makes us lean and spectacular and un- 
 companionable, while Comedy makes us good 
 comrades, passes the longest day with pleas- 
 antry, and puts us to bed without a regret. 
 Nay, nay. Tragedy, thou tearful optimist, I 
 will none of thy lofty icebergian platitudes 
 and sententious aspirations. But I will fol- 
 low our beloved Comedy, cheery, ironical, 
 pessimistic, to the turning of the street. I 
 had almost said to the ends of the earth, but 
 
 220 
 
that would be to lapse into the tragic phrase 1 
 Even in Comedy's back there is something 
 irresistibly alluring, and to meet her once 
 face to face is to be her adoring slave for 
 life. But imperial Tragedy, let who will 
 gaze upon that awful mien, or follow that 
 ceremonious tread 1 Here, at least, is one 
 poor child of earth who pulls down his 
 window-shade as he sees her approaching. 
 Knock at some less lowly door, I pray, O 
 queen; for to thy fearsome summons I am 
 not at home. But comely Comedy may enter 
 when she will, and stay as long as the law 
 allows. To her I say: 
 
 ** There is no lock for thee. 
 Each door awaits thy hand 1 *' 
 
 As Mr. Aldrich has said with his fine 
 grace, — 
 
 *' Some Melpomene woo, 
 
 Some hold Clio the nearest ; 
 You, sweet Comedy — you 
 
 Were ever sweetest and dearest ! " 
 
 And for the pursuit of the ideal, the crea- 
 tive instinct, the happy moment of inspira- 
 
 221 
 
sri^e J&ottvs of Hffe 
 
 tion, I am not persuaded that any better 
 mood than that of cheerful pessimism has 
 been found. Certainly if we are to be 
 touched by the things of art, if our minds 
 are to be convinced and our emotions en- 
 listed, it must be — it can only be — by one 
 who has plumbed the deepest abyss. And 
 yet, just as certainly, will he fail to hold us, 
 if he has not brought to light, like a diver 
 from the sea, some pearl of great price, some 
 talisman of joy. Your optimism is too apt 
 to have a tearful tinge. Let me be never so 
 stoutly settled in the optimistic faith, there 
 still survives and recurs at times the ines- 
 capable sorrow of the world. And then, of 
 course, disappointment comes to add its 
 drop of bitterness. Whereas our brothers 
 who hoped for nothing, had the glad sur- 
 prise of discovering shreds of happiness and 
 vestiges of good at every turn. 
 
 Taken all in all, you would have a long 
 argument in proving to me the creed of the 
 
 222 
 
cheerful pessimist is the worst in the world. 
 And though she deny me with every breath, 
 I shall still cleave to Comedy, mistress of the 
 heart ot man. 
 
 223 
 
Ma^ttt& of ti^t WotXti 
 
 You may say of conduct, it is never purely 
 ethical, but has always elements of the 
 aesthetic as well. What we do is of great 
 importance in this difficult world; but how 
 we do it is of quite as much importance. 
 It is not enough to do good; we must do 
 good gracefully, so that while righteousness 
 is served, beauty may be served also. For 
 the end of each is perfection, and total per- 
 fection must include what is fair as well 
 as what is noble. The appearance of the 
 act, as well as the gist of the action, is always 
 to be counted. 
 
 More than that, it is always to be asked 
 whether a line of conduct is wise, whether 
 
 224 
 
^uuttvn of tf^t WLovVf 
 
 it is in conformity with the requirements of 
 the economy of the world and the conserva- 
 tion of life. However well meaning, how- 
 ever graceful we may be, we may still work 
 havoc rather than assistance among our fel- 
 lows, if we take no care to act thoughtfully, 
 wisely, judiciously. 
 
 So many lives are stunted and hampered, 
 and their effect almost nullified, for lack of 
 consideration in this regard! How devotedly, 
 how unreservedly, with what untold ardour 
 and self-denial, the saints of the earth in 
 the long march of ages have given them- 
 selves without stint to the cause of good! 
 Poverty, hardship, hunger and cold, perils 
 and buffets, insult and contempt and neglect, 
 sickness and travel, and unrequited labour, — 
 all these they have endured with cheerful pa- 
 tience or rugged fortitude, that the right 
 might at length prevail, and the consuming 
 spirit within them behold the triumph of 
 the cause which enlisted their mighty hearts. 
 Whatever their creed or nation or sect or 
 
 225 
 
age, they have been called by common con- 
 sent the sons of God, and credited with al- 
 most more than human excellence. Builders 
 of churches, founders of religions, carrying 
 some new tidings of hope into thronging 
 cities of eager men, or spreading the conso- 
 lations of their gospel abroad to the far 
 corners of the earth, they have earned a 
 universal respect, a name for piety, and 
 imperishable glory, as men fancy, in a king- 
 dom not of this world. They were seekers 
 of perfection, and perfection to them meant 
 the supreme dominance of goodness, the 
 victory of righteousness over evil. 
 
 Yet they were not alone. Others, too, 
 have dreamed of perfection, — the dreamers 
 who beheld far off the ideal of universal 
 culture, and the dreamers who brooded on 
 the creation of flawless beauty, — the dream- 
 ers who longed to make life intelligible, and 
 the dreamers who longed to make it lovely, 
 — the scholars and the artists. The saint, 
 the scholar, the artist, — these three be- 
 
 226 
 
JHaf^tet!^ of tJie SJKotW 
 
 tween them divide the dominion of the 
 world. The ambition of the artist, like that 
 of his brother the saint, has been prosecuted 
 with zeal and courage and much enduring 
 toil. Yet his aim is somewhat different. To 
 the one life is an opportunity for action, for 
 influencing the course of events, and for 
 ameliorating the condition of temporal and 
 eternal affairs; to the other it offers the 
 plastic media of a radiant fleeting universe, 
 to be moulded and repatterned after his 
 own will into shapes more beautiful than 
 the eye has yet beheld. To the one the out- 
 ward world, with all its entrancing variety 
 and loveliness, appeals with a delirious en- 
 thralment; to the other the inward universe 
 is made clear in ordered excellence and 
 majesty. The one capital mistake of either 
 saint or scholar or artist lies solely in this, 
 that he fails to remember the importance of 
 the others; yet the three are equal, and the 
 work of each is of equal use to the world, — 
 more than that, it is of equal dignity and 
 
 227 
 
equally essential to the furtherance of the 
 cause of man's perfection. 
 
 In that long future to which the soul looks 
 forward, the day will come when we shall 
 awake as from a restless dream, and perceive 
 the mistake of our distracted endeavour. 
 We shall see clearly that not in the pre- 
 dominance of rarefied spirituality, nor in the 
 supremacy of inflexible reason, does man's 
 normal perfection reside, any more than 
 in the vexatious tyranny of the flesh. It 
 will be borne in upon us that an equal bal- 
 ance of these contending forces, brought to 
 fine poise in each personality, is the only true 
 type of character after which we should 
 strive. The terrible waste of energy we now 
 suffer in the suicidal friction of varying 
 ideals, will be apparent; and we shall say 
 to ourselves, " What folly has been ours, to 
 be thus constantly at strife! How foolish 
 to have striven to overcome the flesh, to 
 mortify our goodly beauty and our strength! 
 
 228 
 
IWastttrs of tJ)e WiovVf 
 
 How absurd to suppose we could ever di- 
 vorce ourselves from ourselves!" 
 
 For in truth our differing natures are but 
 different phases of one indivisible nature. 
 If man cannot live by bread alone, neither 
 can he live by prayer alone, nor by taking 
 thought alone. It was natural that in the 
 beginnings of self-consciousness, sustenance 
 and the satisfying of bodily needs should 
 seem the only necessity. It was natural, 
 too, that as man became aware of the pleas- 
 ures of the mind, other needs should seem 
 to him more worthy than those of the body. 
 Just as naturally will spread the glad real- 
 ization of the newer, larger ideal of perfect 
 manhood, which gives free play to each 
 normal instinct, and allows an equal culture 
 for the three natures so strangely brought 
 to focus in the clay-built structure we in- 
 habit. 
 
 Nay, more than that, it will be revealed 
 to us, gradually and like a joyous gospel, 
 that in following this new standard of normal 
 
 229 
 
culture, we are not only giving vent to the 
 varying and seemingly opposed powers we 
 possess, but that the cultivating of one im- 
 plies the growth of all. We shall see how 
 essential health is, not only to happiness, but 
 to righteousness and clear thinking also, — 
 how every service rendered this perishable 
 tenement makes for clarity of mind and 
 sweetness of temper, — and how we can 
 never foster one faculty without bettering 
 our whole being, nor ever approach entire 
 excellence while any need, whether of mind 
 or body or spirit, remains ruthlessly neg- 
 lected. 
 
 To such a code the intellectual life alone 
 can never seem of paramount importance; 
 but the discovery of truth must be followed 
 by actual accomplishment. Nor will accom- 
 plishment suffice without grace. To con- 
 sider wisely is of the first importance; nor 
 is it less important to deal justly and honestly 
 with our fellows. The imperative necessity 
 for making life comely and attractive, how- 
 
 230 
 
JWastetfii of tJie WiovVIt 
 
 ever, is hardly recognized as of equal merit. 
 Yet beauty in itself is only another kind of 
 virtue, and one test of noble conduct is fair 
 seeming. It is, indeed, possible to be good, 
 to be scrupulous, to be humane, to be kindly, 
 while giving scant attention to the figure we 
 cut in the world. This is a common ideal; 
 we all know people of careless, unlovely 
 habits, whom we still declare to be the salt of 
 the earth. But why should our tone be 
 apologetic? Why should they content them- 
 selves with their native goodness, and make 
 no effort to be pleasing as well? It is surely 
 only a warped and stunted virtue which 
 resides in frowsy asceticism; just as all 
 beauty must be perishable and touched with 
 blight, which does not embody a generous 
 moral essence. To give one's self to good 
 deeds, and still care nothing for the graces 
 of living, is to rob those very deeds of half 
 their power; while to attempt to cultivate 
 grace, without sincerity and meaning and 
 impulse, is equally futile. The world will 
 
 231 
 
not long be deceived by either faulty con- 
 ception of the whole duty of man. For we 
 must remember that the universe is normal, 
 and proceeds on normal laws. It is only our 
 fragmentary ideas that are at fault, and all 
 our unhappiness comes from attempting to 
 live according to wrong notions. In the end, 
 in the long run, however, life must be made 
 square with ideals, and the false and unlovely 
 be pared away. 
 
 To govern our daily life according to right 
 principles, then, is our chief concern, if you 
 will ; but to govern it according to the pref- 
 erences of taste, concerns us also. We are to 
 make our conduct not only exemplary, but 
 fair and pleasing, so that our friends may 
 think us charming as well as scrupulous. 
 These passing days are a tissue of appear- 
 ances to be woven into patterns of ugliness 
 or beauty beneath our hands. No time is 
 too precious to spend, no detail too small to 
 be considered, in bringing the fabric of life, 
 as it passes through our fingers, ever nearer 
 
 122 
 
munitvn of tJie fflsaotllf 
 
 and nearer to some preconceived image of 
 beauty. The good of all ages who have 
 been imbued with a passion for righteous- 
 ness, have never hesitated to spend them- 
 selves generously, for the cause they loved, 
 the advancement of goodness; nor should 
 those who care for what is beautiful ever 
 hesitate to give themselves as liberally to 
 make beauty prevail in the world. They 
 should once for all assure themselves of the 
 great and abiding worthiness of their cause, 
 also, knowing it of equal dignity with the 
 cause of righteousness. It is not less hon- 
 ourable to work than to pray. The only 
 dishonour is in slovenliness and faintness 
 of heart; for when we aspire we must aspire 
 with all our might, and when we work we 
 must work with infinite patience and infinite 
 care, so that the greatest wish is not too 
 large for the fluttering soul, nor the smallest 
 detail too insignificant for attention. There 
 is no other road to perfection. 
 
 If you observe the masters in any of the 
 233 
 
8Ciie 31Poett» of atfe 
 
 arts, or in any of the professions, or in any 
 business, you will find that they work with- 
 out hurry, without fret, with an equal regard 
 for great things and small. They know 
 proportion, indeed, but they know, too, how 
 fine a balance exists between success and 
 failure, and how small a trifle may mar the 
 issue of an undertaking. 
 
 I often used to marvel at the endless pains 
 some people would take over the small 
 concerns of life, the hanging of a picture, 
 the trimming of a bonnet, or the number of 
 buttons on a coat; but I have come to see 
 that success depends on trifles, and that 
 the right adjustment of the smallest detail 
 of living is quite as important as the sequence 
 of syllables in a memorable lyric or the 
 proximity of colours in some splendid paint- 
 ing. Moreover, the pleasure of the average 
 man in all he does may be just as keen as 
 the artist's delight in his work. Every one 
 of us may become an artist in the conduct 
 of life, if he will turn his mind to it, culti- 
 
 234 
 
vating his taste, and, above all, using patient 
 care. And we shall come to know a satis- 
 faction in so doing; for all things done well 
 have this great recompense, whatever they 
 cost in time and labour, — they give us an 
 imperishable delight which can never spring 
 from hurried or slighted tasks. 
 
 Notice the difference between men in this 
 matter, how easily some seem to live, and 
 with how much difficulty others go about 
 their business. Here is one who is never 
 hurried, never ill-natured, never anxious, 
 accomplishing much; while there is an- 
 other who frets and toils and complains and 
 never has a moment's leisure, yet accom- 
 plishes nothing. It is largely a matter of 
 art, the art of living. The first has poise, 
 the second has not. The first has the serene 
 temperament and happy spirit of an artist, 
 while his fellow has only the fussy nervous- 
 ness of a dabster. The first would undertake 
 vast affairs with a light heart, and carry 
 
 235 
 
8rj)e ^ottvs of atte 
 
 them through without friction; the second 
 would worry over the merest trifle, and spend 
 all his energy in hesitation, timidity, and 
 indecision. 
 
 236 
 
SCjje ©oetrg t>f Co- 
 
 mom^H^ 
 
 Have we not reason enough to believe that 
 the poetry of to-morrow will be greater than 
 the poetry of to-day, simply because we be- 
 lieve that to-day is greater than yesterday? 
 
 In the elder days the house of knowledge 
 was narrow and low; and art was no more 
 than the telling of a tale whose beginning 
 was " Once upon a time," and its ending, 
 " lived happy ever after." And the religion 
 of that house was mixed with terror. But 
 there came a change. The restless children 
 of that house, possessed by a spirit of divine 
 discontent, must lift the roof and push out 
 the walls. Master Newton, Master Colum- 
 bus, Master Galileo, Master Darwin, and 
 
 237 
 
cue ^oettj? of iLtte 
 
 scores of others, refused to live in the old 
 shack where they had been born. It was 
 good enough for their fathers, but by no 
 means good enough for them. They in- 
 tended to have a roomier habitation, cleaner, 
 airier, and more modern. They gave us the 
 spacious intellectual mansion we occupy to- 
 day, and of which we boast. But who knows 
 how long it will serve the needs of our 
 growing human family? Some day a lad will 
 be born who will kick a hole through the 
 wall for another window here, tear out a 
 place for a doorway there, and push away 
 a corner for a new wing in another place. 
 If there is no limit to knowledge, there 
 can be no limit to art, either, since art con- 
 tains our comment on science, and reflects the 
 growth of our minds. But this progress, as 
 we call it, this expansion, is not even and uni- 
 form. It is rather spasmodic and inter- 
 mittent. If there have been times when the 
 house of knowledge underwent alterations, 
 repairs, and extensions, there have been 
 
 238 
 
CHr ^ottvs of JCo:=ittottroto 
 
 other times when its tenants were content to 
 occupy it in squalor and unillumined 
 lethargy, receiving it from their sires and 
 handing it on to their sons, deteriorated and 
 outworn. 
 
 Yet the ages of depression, of faint-heart- 
 edness, of despair, are only momentary in 
 the history of the world. They are the unfit 
 product of time, and in the natural selection 
 of eternity they will not survive. We are 
 here in spite of sorrow, because there is a 
 joy in living common to the oyster and the 
 octogenarian, the elephant and the epicure. 
 And in our art the joyousness must outweigh 
 the sadness. 
 
 It has often been said that the greatest 
 poet is he who most perfectly voices the 
 trend of emotion of his time. It is claimed 
 that the greatness of Arnold, for example, 
 is attested most clearly in such poems as 
 "A Summer Night," "Dover Beach," 
 " The Youth of Man," and other beautiful 
 meditations which are full of the grievous 
 
 239 
 
Sljr J&ottvs of %itt 
 
 sadness of his age and its moral incertitude. 
 It is said that his claim upon the future for 
 remembrance will lie in his mournful note, 
 because a moral sadness was most distinct- 
 ive of his own time. 
 
 This is only partly true, however. What 
 will the future care for our sentimental 
 gloom, our moral doubts, our sad searchings 
 of the spirit? It will only care to remember 
 in us those traits and traditions that may 
 help it to live. Even in the day of doubt, 
 the dolorous singer will not be listened to 
 by all his contemporaries as gladly as will 
 the sturdier minstrel who sets his face against 
 the desperate dolefulness about him. Arnold, 
 the gracious and wistful abjurer of strife, 
 has his place among the great English poets, 
 first of all by reason of such faultless crea- 
 tions of beauty as '^ Sohrab and Rustum," 
 " Tristram and Iseult," " The Neckan," and 
 " The Forsaken Merman," and only second- 
 arily because of his meditative works. If 
 our descendants turn to him hereafter as 
 
 240 
 
sue jpontff of 5ro=:itiotroto 
 
 one of the eminent poets of the Victorian 
 age, and take delight in his poems, they will 
 judge him by their own standards; and 
 whatever these standards may be, let us 
 assure ourselves they will not value the 
 utterances of doubt more highly than those 
 of joy. 
 
 In front of Chaucer's tomb lie the two 
 Sons of Thunder of the Victorian age, 
 Browning and Tennyson. We have hon- 
 oured Tennyson the more of the two, be- 
 cause his speech was easier to comprehend. 
 Men hereafter, I am sure, will not honour 
 Browning the less, for in time it will seem 
 puerile that we could have thought him 
 obscure, or could have missed the forthright 
 rush and lyric sincerity of his work. If 
 Browning shall be more esteemed hereafter 
 than Tennyson, one reason will be in his 
 abundant and unconquerable faith. Every 
 creation that came from his hand taught 
 self-reliance, heroism, joy. The race of 
 man, alike with the creatures of the field, 
 
 241 
 
2rt)e ^ottvs ot ILitt 
 
 persists by just those qualities. The great 
 poet is he who fosters such positive virtues 
 in the heart. 
 
 It was easy to be a poet in the morning 
 times of the bold Elizabeth, for then hero- 
 ism, joy, and self-reliance were everywhere. 
 Conquest and expansion were in the air, and 
 triumph and elation in every wind that blew. 
 To-day is not less great in discovery, only 
 our discoveries are intellectual, and, there- 
 fore, less obvious, less stimulating to the 
 common imagination. The Elizabethans 
 found new continents, and brought back 
 reports of unimagined dominions oversea. 
 We have made far explorations into the un- 
 known, and made faithful reports of them, 
 but our home-coming is attended with no 
 floating of banners, no sound of drums. It 
 is more difficult for us to translate our por- 
 tentous news into ringing songs than it was 
 for those old discoverers. We deal in treas- 
 ures so much less palpable and picturesque 
 than they. 
 
 242 
 
But to-morrow, doubt not, the Captain of 
 the Ocean Sea will come, the adjuster and 
 revealer of new realms of poetry, who will 
 establish us in our new-found heritage. We 
 may know him by sight, though that is 
 doubtful. We may honour him during his 
 lifetime, though that is not likely. His 
 work will be done without conceit, yet with 
 disregard of the blame of his fellows or their 
 approval. In spite of his essential sensitive- 
 ness, both adulation and neglect will leave 
 him unmoved. Just what his work will be, 
 none can say, for he himself, when he shall 
 arrive, will not be able to tell the secret of 
 his ecstatic vision. The task which his fancy 
 shall so cunningly contrive in an idle noon, 
 his craftsmanship may finish before sunset; 
 yet it will give him no hint of the sudden 
 revelation that may be awaiting him within 
 the doors of the following dawn. 
 
 Nevertheless, there are some traits of his 
 work that we may be sure of. That it will 
 be large and glad and valiant is certain; for 
 
 243 
 
8C8e J&ottvs of mu 
 
 these qualities inhere in the heart of man, not 
 to be thrust out by the overthrow of empires, 
 nor the founding of republics, nor any trifles 
 of history whatsoever. These are the things 
 that help the race forward; and anything 
 that does not so help it will speedily be for- 
 gotten as a surmounted hindrance. But one 
 thing is also certain, the poetry of to-morrow 
 will not be commonly understood; it will 
 appeal only to the children of its own to- 
 morrow. And this, not because it will be 
 incoherent, but because the true artist speaks 
 from within, by an authority which he him- 
 self does not always understand; and his new 
 word, so potent to himself, is a sealed book 
 to most of his troubled fellows. He will 
 be gently obstinate about his work, yet none 
 will be a more willing learner than he, 
 gladly considering even the most casual 
 criticism. 
 
 Nature, the beautiful outer world, is all 
 that the Invisible found to say before the 
 appearance of man. Art is the constant 
 
 244 
 
slow insistent endeavour of the same power 
 to utter itself still more coherently, still 
 more intelligently and finally through the 
 speech of man. If the only end of art were 
 to please and entertain, the critic's task were 
 an easy one. But art has always had some- 
 thing else to do as well. It must please in 
 order to influence, but it has always been 
 infused with the desire to influence and con- 
 trol. It does not specifically wish to be 
 didactic, but it always has at least a covert 
 aim, a wish to impose a dominant standard 
 of beauty upon life. It will lead and stimu- 
 late and suggest. It will content itself with 
 the creation of the beautiful, knowing that 
 therein lies its best and most effective means 
 of aiding the cause of nobility and truth. 
 Its influence will be as generous as the sun 
 and as impassive as the dew, as abundant as 
 the wind, as resistless as the sea, and as subtle 
 and sure as the impress of environment upon 
 the unborn child. Poetry is a criticism of 
 life, indeed, but it is also much more than 
 
 245 
 
Z'^t J?oett» of aife 
 
 that. It is an aspiration toward a new life, 
 the persistent and prescient cry of the soul. 
 The poetry of to-morrow will not neces- 
 sarily be so unlike the poetry of to-day. 
 Perhaps only the knowing will be able to 
 recognize it at once. There is no need to 
 trouble ourselves about it. The ages are not 
 in a hurry. It is only London and New 
 York that are in a hurry. In due time a 
 greater than Shakespeare will arrive. It is 
 foolish to suppose that the Word which was 
 in the beginning, and which has spoken 
 through lips to men so often in these many 
 centuries, will leave us without any testament 
 at last. 
 
 246 
 

 It is often claimed that the day for poetry 
 is past, that we live in an age of prose, and 
 for the future shall get along very well with- 
 out the solace which poetry was wont to 
 supply. It is a question, however, whether 
 those who make this claim have not con- 
 ceived far too narrow a scope for poetry, 
 and been heedless in thinking what poetry 
 really is. They have, one must believe, al- 
 lowed themselves to take a very superficial 
 and hurried view of human history, and been 
 content to accept the current notion of the 
 fine arts and their place in our social order. 
 
 What is that notion? How do we at the 
 present day think of the fine arts, and of 
 
 247 
 
Ef^t J&ottvp of ILffe 
 
 poetry in particular? And what place do 
 we commonly assign them in our scheme of 
 life? Is it not true that we nearly always 
 think of them as luxurious occupations, 
 forms of harmless amusement or innocuous 
 pastimes, to be tolerated perhaps, but yet 
 without any real hold on people, and without 
 any spontaneous life in public sentiment? 
 By the fine arts most of us understand those 
 eccentric, if not questionable, pursuits which 
 fill our rich houses with pictures and statues, 
 and our opera-houses with extravagant music. 
 We have come to think of the fine arts as 
 foreign to our real life, as esoteric, expen- 
 sive, precious, unnecessary, and, therefore, 
 to the ordinary mind, just a trifle ridiculous. 
 This is not an unjust view of the fine 
 arts as they exist among us to-day. They 
 live by sufferance, not by right. We do not 
 acknowledge their title to a place in modern 
 civilization; we accept them as the more 
 or less foolish accompaniments of wealth. 
 They have no source in popular feeling; 
 
 248 
 
8Cfie ^tvmuntntt of ^otttp 
 
 they do not spring up irresistibly from our 
 social conditions; they command no respect 
 save among a small highly educated class. 
 Our people at large have no such sense of 
 beauty, no such native good taste, as the 
 common people of France, for instance, or 
 of Japan. 
 
 Yet for all that, admitting the wholly 
 anomalous and artificial character of all the 
 ancient arts as they survive among us to-day, 
 does it follow that they will always be so 
 entirely divorced from our social and na- 
 tional life? May there not come a time 
 when our debased political institutions will 
 be purified, when our public morals will be 
 elevated, when our industrial and commer- 
 cial ethics will come to acknowledge more 
 honourable standards? May we not look 
 forward to a day when old-fashioned honesty 
 will be restored to the code of American 
 ideals? May we not hope that our present 
 era of unmitigated commercialism, barbarity, 
 and greed, is only a passing phase in the story 
 
 249 
 
of the world, and that time will renew our 
 enthusiasm for things of the mind and the 
 spirit? To see clearly one's own faults, 
 or to mark the shortcomings of one's own 
 time, is not to be a pessimist. The pessi- 
 mist is one who thinks nothing could be 
 better. Admirable, therefore, as our life 
 may be to-day, it is our business as sane men 
 to look for its flaws and strive to mend them. 
 Perfection, not self-gratulation, is the duty 
 of mortals. 
 
 Granted, then, that art and poetry are in a 
 sorry plight at present, shall we conclude 
 that their day is over? While there is even 
 such art life as there is, is there not hope? 
 Had we not better ask ourselves if we are 
 quite sure what art is, and what poetry is, be- 
 fore we proceed to set them lightly aside in 
 the storeroom of oblivion with other dis- 
 carded lumber of time? Our creeds must 
 change as knowledge increases, yet faith 
 remains of paramount importance. Our 
 conception of the universe must change with 
 
 250 
 
accession of science, yet love of truth only 
 becomes more necessary. So, too, we need 
 art in all the business of life more impera- 
 tively to-day than ever before. For art is a 
 manner of doing things, not the thing that is 
 done. Art is not the painting itself, but the 
 loving fervour, the hard knowledge, the 
 skilled industry, that went to make the paint- 
 ing. When anything is ill done, it reveals 
 a lack of art. And this lack of art may 
 spring from lack of sincere devotion in the 
 artist himself, or from a lack of wisdom, 
 or from a lack of skill. 
 
 And this question of poetry? Is poetry 
 a task for children and idlers, a sort of 
 Chinese puzzle in words, something to di- 
 vert the mind, an employment for invalids 
 and weaklings? I believe if we consider 
 a moment, and recall the hold which poetry 
 has had on men's minds, the influence it 
 has exerted on life, we must conclude it is 
 something far more vital and forceful than 
 that. Poetry has been a great power in the 
 
 251 
 
2ft|e J&ottvs of Hffe 
 
 world. If it is not a great power at the 
 present time, that does not prove that we 
 have outgrown it; it only means that we 
 have forgotten it for the moment. We can 
 no more outgrow poetry than we can outgrow 
 gravitation. The mode of poetry may 
 change, as the customs of nations change; 
 we do not enjoy the same kind of poetry that 
 our ancestors did; our own poetry must be 
 native to us, and must express our own 
 thoughts and sentiments, rather than those 
 of an alien clime and a forgotten age; but 
 the natural phenomenon which we call 
 poetry will always be present in the world. 
 Why? Because poetry is nothing more 
 than the form which human speech assumes 
 under the stress of clear thinking and lofty 
 aspiration, under the terms of beautiful 
 utterance. The laws of poetry are not con- 
 ventional, but natural. The first poet to 
 use any given form of verse is rather a dis- 
 coverer than an inventor. Take, for ex- 
 ample, the phenomenon of the iambic pen- 
 
 252 
 
©tie ^tvmuntntt of l&ottvp 
 
 tameter line in English poetry. See how 
 universally it is used from Chaucer to Ten- 
 nyson; all of Shakespeare, all of the Eliza- 
 bethan drama, all of " Paradise Lost," all of 
 Pope and Dryden, all of " The Ring and 
 the Book," all of the " Idylls of the King," 
 indeed, a large portion of our poetic litera- 
 ture is done in this measure. Now how shall 
 we account for this phenomenon? Shall we 
 say that succeeding poets slavishly followed 
 their distinguished predecessors in the use 
 of the blank verse line? Did they have 
 to study to learn the trick? Not at all. They 
 used it spontaneously, naturally, uncon- 
 scicu'^ly. They never could tell you why. 
 And if a poet should be born in England 
 to-morrow and reared in entire ignorance of 
 English poetry, he would discover blank 
 verse for himself. Its recurrence and per- 
 sistence in English mean that it is a vital 
 form of expression, which springs inevi- 
 tably into use, just as a nod of the head 
 
 253 
 
IS an instinctive motion of assent, and not 
 merely a conventional gesture. 
 
 The study of versification, or the outward 
 form of poetry, becomes an empirical science. 
 We simply collate our facts and deduce our 
 laws; for the laws of poetry are truly laws, 
 and not rules. There may be rules for 
 writing sonnets, but there are no rules for 
 writing poetry. The poet is himself always 
 acting under laws of expression, which are 
 far too complex and universal for him 
 wholly to comprehend. He is only a vent 
 for expression — a medium through which 
 certain powers find play in harmonious 
 accordance with their natural laws. When 
 he permits himself to rely on intuition, 
 when he feels instinctively for the perfect 
 phrase, then he attains something like per- 
 fection of utterance. When he attempts to 
 interfere with inspiration, and to write after 
 some plan of his own devising, then he fails. 
 When Wordsworth wrote from instinct, at 
 the dictate of his genius, he was great. When 
 
 254 
 
he allowed himself to put in practice certain 
 conclusions of his own as to how poetry 
 should be written, he became tedious. So, 
 too, of Whitman; when he gave free play 
 to his genius, he spoke with the tongue of 
 a seraph; but when he attempted to imitate 
 himself, when he tried to put in practice 
 certain notions of his own as to what poetry 
 ought to be, he failed. The artist must be a 
 student of his own art, it is true; but he must 
 never try to practise his art according to rule. 
 That is folly. For, as I say, there are no 
 rules, but only laws of art. And these laws 
 are elemental, psychic, and govern the artist 
 himself. He is swayed by them, and it is 
 his business to be sensitive to them and 
 obey them. Whether he chooses to study 
 them, and try to comprehend them or not, 
 is a different matter. He may be a scien- 
 tist as well as an artist; but in order to be 
 the one he does not have to be the other. 
 The form of poetry, then, is a phenome- 
 non determined by the laws of nature, and 
 
 255 
 
Zf^t ^ottvs of 3Life 
 
 as such we may very well consider it a per- 
 manency. I do not mean that the forms of 
 poetry are unchanging. They are not. Just 
 because they are living, they will vary con- 
 stantly. We shall never be able to predict 
 the new forms poetry may take, nor should 
 we attempt to impose conventional limits on 
 versification. Every new poet will find his 
 own new forms, but form of some sort, 
 rhythm of some sort, he will have. He can 
 no more escape those conditions than spirit 
 can escape the influence of all the natural 
 forces when it enters the house of clay. 
 
 The subjects of poetry, too, are perma- 
 nent as well as its form. The things which 
 poetry deals with are the perennial hopes 
 and fears of the human heart, the phenomena 
 of the inner life. From these poetry has 
 made, and will always make, the religions 
 of the world. Nor does it disregard the 
 facts of science. All science and all philoso- 
 phy come within the scope of poetry. It is 
 the function of poetry to assimilate the new 
 
 256 
 
knowledge and make use of the discoveries 
 of science. It cannot do this immediately, 
 however; it has to wait until these new 
 facts become familiar to men's minds, before 
 it can treat of them in its own heightened 
 and impassioned way. For this reason we 
 often hear it said that science and poetry, 
 or science and religion, are opposed to each 
 other. But that is absurd. The soul cannot 
 but love what the mind sees to be true. And 
 when that truth is expressed in terms of 
 beauty, our senses must be delighted as our 
 hearts are encouraged and inspired. 
 
 If all this be so, it does not very well 
 appear how we can ever outgrow the need 
 of poetry. It would rather seem that we 
 shall need it more and more, under the in- 
 creasing distractions and complexities of life. 
 The more truth we know, the more we shall 
 need some means to assimilate it and make it 
 effective for our happiness. The more 
 wealth we acquire, the more we shall need 
 some wise guide to its proper use. An ex- 
 
 257 
 
©lie mttvs of mu 
 
 pansion of power, without an accompanying 
 increase of wisdom, is a mere embarrassment, 
 and only makes life more difficult. Poetry in 
 its largest sense helps us to make use of our 
 knowledge and power in ways that tend 
 toward a happier existence, and there can 
 hardly be anything more important than 
 that, or of more lasting interest to men. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 258 
 
 31^77-1; 
 
Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date: March 2009 
 
 PreservationTechnologies 
 
 A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 
 
 111 Thomson Park Drive 
 Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
 (724)779-2111