905 
 
LECTURES ON 
 POETRY 
 
 
 J. W. MACKAIL 
 
 . EDINBURGH' 
 
 AND ST. ANDREWS 
 FORMERLY FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE AND PROFESSOR OF 
 POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 LQNGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 
 
 1911 
 
All rights reserved 
 
TO 
 
 MARGARET 
 
 256355 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY . . . . .1 
 
 POETRY AND LIFE 23 
 
 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 48 
 
 THE AENEID . . 72 
 
 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY . . . . . .93 
 
 ARABIAN EPIC AND ROMANTIC POETRY . . .123 
 
 THE DIVINE COMEDY 154 
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 179 
 
 THE NOTE OF SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES . . . 208 
 THE POETRY OF OXFORD . . . . . .231 
 
 IMAGINATION 259 
 
 KEATS 281 
 
 , . 
 
 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 309 
 
 vii 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE main substance of the following pages consists 
 of public lectures given to the University of Oxford in 
 the years 1907 to 1911. Together with two volumes 
 previously published, The Springs of Helicon (1909) and 
 Lectures on Greek Poetry (1910), this volume contains 
 all the lectures given by me from the Chair of Poetry, 
 except a few which were given on particular occasions 
 or were of more local and transitory interest. 
 
 The paper on the Divine Comedy was read to the 
 Oxford Dante Society; and that on the Aeneid incor- 
 porates the substance of two addresses given to the 
 Classical Associations of the University College of 
 South Wales and the Victoria University of Manchester. 
 The greater part of the lecture on Virgil and Vir- 
 gilianism has already been printed in the Classical 
 Review for May 1908. 
 
 The Professorship of Poetry is an institution pos- 
 sessed by Oxford alone among the two hundred and 
 fifty Universities of the modern world. It is a Chair 
 which allows its successive occupants an infinite 
 variation of scope, even were it not the case that the 
 import of poetry and the substance of poetical criticism 
 are themselves subject, from age to age, to processes 
 of change and continuous growth. The guiding idea 
 pursued by me during my tenure of the Chair was 
 
x INTRODUCTION 
 
 that of the progress of poetry regarded as a vital and 
 'organic art: my object was to give, so far as I could, 
 an interpretation of poetry, to trace its pattern, in 
 some such way as poetry itself presents an interpre- 
 tation and pattern of life. 
 
 In the volume of Lectures on Greek Poetry I 
 attempted to trace the progress of poetry in the 
 Hellenic civilisation, from the Homeric epics beyond 
 which records are wanting down to the absorption of 
 Greece in a new world. At the end of that cycle, the 
 central life of European poetry passed to Italy, to 
 the civilisation created and imposed on the West 
 by Rome. 
 
 English poetry is not merely the successor of 
 Greece and Italy in the line of torchbearers, but 
 at all the critical moments of its development has 
 drawn fresh life from Greek and Italian sources. 
 In The Springs of Helicon I touched on the progress 
 of poetry in England between Chaucer and Milton, 
 from the time when the goal first shone before 
 it until the time when the consummation was 
 attained. This progress was in pursuance of native 
 growth, but growth and progress were alike affected 
 by the influx into English poetry of earlier and dis- 
 tant springs. In that volume of lectures I attempted 
 to indicate how decisive was the effect of the Italian 
 classics of the fourteenth century on Chaucer, and how 
 under that influence Chaucer launched English poetry 
 on its main current : how largely the development of 
 poetry in the age associated with the name of Spenser 
 was due to the impact of the full Italian Renaissance, 
 conveying as it did not only the impulse of its own 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 great poetry, but the revitalisation of Rome and the 
 rediscovery of Greece : how at last, in Milton, English 
 poetry came into complete touch and gained organic 
 affinity with the whole body of both the Greek and 
 the Italian classics. 
 
 The contents of this volume range over a wider 
 area. They all bear on the interpretation of poetry 
 in one or other of its aspects, in one or other of its 
 endless embodiments. Their object will have been 
 attained wherever they send back a reader to the poetry 
 which is their subject with any fresh or quickened 
 interest. Their unity, so far as I may have been able 
 to impress any unity on them, is that of a single central 
 doctrine; that poetry, like life, is one thing, but that 
 this one thing is perpetually transmuting and re- 
 creating itself in the progress of history. Essentially a 
 continuous substance or energy, poetry is historically a 
 connected movement, a series of successive integrated 
 manifestations. Each poet, from Homer or the pre- 
 decessors of Homer to our own day, has been, to some 
 degree and at some point, the voice of the movement 
 and energy of poetry : in him, poetry has for the 
 moment became visible, audible, incarnate; and his 
 extant poems are the record left of that partial and 
 transitory incarnation. 
 
 These lectures take up the study of poetry here and 
 there, at certain points, or in relation to the work 
 of certain poets. Everywhere the point taken up 
 appears as the centre of a vast organism which radiates 
 from it in all directions. All poetry involves all other 
 poetry; for all poetry is the interpretation of life.: but 
 life is one thing; and the interpretation, the appre- 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 ciation, of any poet or poem implies the potential 
 interpretation and appreciation of poetry itself as a 
 substance or energy coextensive with life. 
 
 More than a hundred and fifty years ago, Gray, the 
 finest scholar and poet of his age, laid down in his 
 famous Ode on the Progress of Poesy what still remain the 
 main lines, the guiding ideas, of poetical criticism. 
 That Ode is not less remarkable for its just thought and 
 profound insight than for its perfection of phrasing and 
 movement. In it he set forth, under the imaginative 
 light which only poetry itself can throw upon poetry, 
 the doctrine of the power and function of poetry in 
 itself, and of its progress in the life of mankind. It 
 remains true still that poetry, in Gray's classic words, is 
 the controller of sullen care and frantic passion ; that it 
 is the companion in youth of desire and love ; that it 
 is the power which in later years dispels, or solaces where 
 it cannot dispel, the ills of life labour, penury, pain, 
 disease, sorrow, death itself; that it is the inspiration, 
 from youth to age and in all times and lands, of the 
 noblest human motives and ardours, of glory, of gene- 
 rous shame, of freedom and the unconquerable mind. 
 
 No less permanently true is the envisagement which 
 he gives of the secular movement of poetry in her 
 central progress from age to age and from race to 
 race. But we see that movement now with immensely 
 increased knowledge ; we see it with an insight 
 deepened, an outlook widened by generations of re- 
 search and rediscovery, by new methods, by organised 
 study, by the enrichment added to our inheritance 
 through a century and a half of fresh poetical 
 creation. 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 The progress of poetry, with its vast power and its 
 exalted function, is immortal. The great poets are the 
 immortals in the fullest sense in which we may speak 
 of anything human as exempt from the common law 
 of mortality. The laws of poetry are at the same time 
 the conditions of life. 
 
 " Onde convenne legge per fren porre, 
 Convenne rege aver, che discernesse 
 Delia vera cittade almen la torre : 
 Le leggi son ; ina chi pon mano ad esse 1 " 
 
 The true city is now, as it always has been, dis- 
 cernible only in the distance, by glimpses. But in 
 the fully socialised commonwealth which, as a dreani 
 or vision, mankind begin to have before their eyes, 
 there may be a future for poetry larger, richer, more 
 triumphant than its greatest achievements in the past 
 have reached. Poetry will become the nobler interpre- 
 tation of an ampler life. That vision is in the future. 
 But to some at least, here and now, it is a vision and 
 no dream. 
 
LECTURES ON POETRY 
 
 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 IT is a maxim of civil law that definitions are hazard- 
 ous. Whoever first asked the question, What is 
 poetry ? and waited for an answer, stimulated thought 
 and provoked discussion, but has perhaps not earned 
 much gratitude. For the definition of poetry has 
 ever since been, as it still is, the ignis fatuus of 
 criticism. A thousand definitions have been offered, 
 all varying from one another, sometimes to the extent 
 of not having a single element in common. Some 
 have been given by those whose views demand close 
 attention and deep respect : many have been brilliant, 
 enlightening, suggestive ; all are unsatisfying. In no 
 part of the field of letters have the Baconian idols 
 exercised greater sway, particularly the idols of the 
 cave and of the theatre. Definitions of poetry are 
 nearly all infected by some fallacy due to a received 
 system or an individual predilection. They escape 
 from these dangers, if they do escape, only to fall 
 victims to the idols of the market-place. For the 
 influence exercised over men by words is greatest, and 
 most difficult alike to estimate or to disentangle, when 
 words themselves, the art of language, are the subject- 
 matter as well as the medium of the enquiry. 
 
 Such attempted definitions, varying infinitely as 
 
4 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 passive faculty, which he calls the imagination. Only 
 four years earlier, Shelley in his Defence of Poetry had 
 defined poetry as the expression of the imagination, as 
 that which lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of 
 the world. To the one type of mind poetry is the 
 mechanism of an illusion ; to the other it is the vital 
 energy of a revelation. The definitions of poetry 
 which they frame are accordingly in essential con- 
 tradiction. 
 
 Again, there is a whole class of definitions of poetry 
 which are not philosophical but rhetorical, and the 
 object of which is not to state facts or even to draw 
 generalisations, but to win persuasion, and to create al) 
 attitude of mind favourable or unfavourable to poetry 
 According to the aim in view, these may be definitions 
 of eulogy or definitions of detraction. Their object and 
 effect is to create a prejudice for or against poetry. 
 " One of the Fathers," says Bacon, " calleth Poesy 
 Vinum Dcemonum " : the definition is at all events 
 succinct, but it is uncritical : it is given, as Bacon says, 
 " in great indignation." Thus too Nash, in a sentence 
 where the words seem to tumble over one another in 
 excitement, wrote, " Nor is poetry an art whereof there 
 is no use in a man's whole life but to describe dis- 
 contented thoughts and youthful desires." Of as 
 little technical value are the many splendid tributes 
 which have in all ages been paid to poetry by its 
 lovers under the guise of a definition. V " Poetry," 
 writes Wordsworth, " is the breath and finer spirit 
 of all knowledge ; it is the impassioned expression 
 which is in the countenance of all science." " Poetry," 
 writes Shelley, " is the record of the best and happiest 
 moments of the happiest and best minds." " Poetry," 
 writes Arnold, " is nothing less than the most perfect 
 speech of man, that in which he comes nearest to being 
 
THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 5 
 
 able to utter the truth." These and like payings are 
 stimulating, interesting, and illuminating : but they 
 define, nothing, 
 
 Or you may remember how the two things, the 
 eulogy and the detraction, are flashed together by 
 Aurora Leigh, in a passage most characteristic of Mrs. 
 Browning's generous, passionate, chaotic mind. 
 
 " You write so of the poets and not laugh ? 
 Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark, 
 Exaggerators of the sun and moon ? 
 I write so of the only truth-tellers, 
 The only speakers of essential truth, 
 The only teachers who instruct mankind 
 To find man's veritable stature out." 
 
 Even when definitions of poetry are not mere rhetori- 
 cal flights or imaginative descriptions, even when they 
 approach poetry with the intention of saying the 
 real truth about it, and telling what it is, they do so 
 normally and almost inevitably by singling out one 
 side or one element of it, and defining that. It may 
 be singled out either as the most obvious of the many 
 elements which go to make up the full content of 
 poetry, and therefore, as it may be argued, the most 
 characteristic : or as the least obvious of them, 
 and therefore, as it may be and has been argued, 
 the deepest and most central. In any case it is the 
 thing on which special stress is laid for a special 
 purpose ; and the special purpose in view determines 
 the choice. Under this head fall many of the most 
 brilliant things that have been said about poetry, the 
 sayings that are most arresting in their brevity and 
 most pregnant in their implication. One might fill a 
 sort of jewel-cabinet with these lustrous fragments. 
 I will quote a few, not more remarkable in some cases 
 from their own weight and point than from the time 
 
6 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 at which they were said and the persons who said them. 
 " Poetry is the best words in the best order " : this is 
 the saying not of a prosaic mind, of one who slighted 
 poetry and wished to put it down into its proper place, 
 but of the mystic and romantic Coleridge, the poet 
 whose genius may almost be said to have created a 
 new world for poetry. " Poetry is invention " : this is 
 the conclusion, not of any imaginative artist or leader 
 of a new movement, but of the massive common-sense 
 of Johnson. " Poetry is articulate music " : we owe 
 this definition, which sounds so modern and so romantic, 
 to the master of the classicist school, a poet no doubt 
 of high rank and immense influence, but one who has 
 his highest title to fame and his most permanent value 
 as a prose writer and critic ; for the words are those of 
 Dryden. One more and I have done. " Poetry is a 
 speaking picture " : these are the words not of any 
 modern, not of any rhetorician : they are those of 
 Simonides, the master of the matured Greek lyric, 
 and the earliest, as one may call him, of the supreme 
 poets of Athens. When one thinks over and thinks 
 out these definitions so far as they may be called 
 definitions in relation to the personality and the 
 poetical quality of the men who framed them, they 
 open up in all directions a limitless field of thought. 
 
 Such are only a few of the classes into which 
 definitions of poetry, or what purport to be definitions 
 of poetry, may be variously distributed. Most of the 
 definitions which have been offered do not belong to 
 one single type, but partake of several. We shall seldom 
 find in them either the rhetorical or the scholastic, 
 the mystical or the mechanical element, fully dis- 
 engaged and standing by itself without admixture. 
 Very generally too we shall find that, not in one type 
 only but in most if not in all, another element has to 
 
THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 7 
 
 be taken into account, and this time a deflecting or 
 vitiating element. For the greater part of all these 
 definitions are in their origin polemical : they assert a 
 doctrine rather than disengage an essence. They are 
 dogmatic ; and even if a dogma is true, here and now 
 and relatively to its place in a scheme, it is by its very 
 nature not the whole truth. Such definitions express 
 a view of poetry which is the reaction from some other 
 view, and which so far as it is a reaction is necessarily 
 off the truth itself, on the other side. What wonder 
 then if after considering and rejecting definition after 
 definition we end in a sort of bewilderment ? if we 
 find ourselves landed either in philosophic doubt or in 
 unphilosophic dogmatism, in either case concluding 
 the whole thing to be undefinable ? 
 
 Undefinable in a sense it is, but not in the sense 
 implied by either of these conclusions. For either of 
 these conclusions is based on an essential fallacy. On 
 the one hand it is a fallacy to suppose that an art can 
 be defined in terms of science, or that a vital and 
 functional process can be defined in terms of mechanism. 
 On the other hand it is a fallacy to suppose that the im- 
 possibility of such definitions means the impossibility 
 of any definition at all. In any case, before we begin 
 trying to define, we must have some notion of what 
 the thing is that we would define. And it is here that 
 in the matter of poetry confusion begins. 
 
 The sources of confusion, like the resulting con- 
 fusions themselves, are many. But the principal one 
 is this : that in defining poetry, as more generally in 
 speaking or thinking about poetry, two different and 
 incommensurate things are mixed up with one another, 
 namely, poetry as a function of life, a vital, creative, 
 and progressive energy, and poetry as an art or tech- 
 nique. Poetry is both the one and the other ; but the i 
 
8 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 two are formally distinguishable, and the distinction 
 is at the root of all clear thinking about poetry. The 
 object of the following pages is to separate the formal 
 or technical element in poetry from the other elements 
 which go to make up its essence, and to try to get at a 
 clear notion of that one element. Poetry in this sense 
 is a concrete art, its material being language. 
 
 Let us then for the moment dismiss all the defini- 
 tions of poetry, the good and the bad alike, which 
 attempt to define it in its full meaning. For these are 
 not really definitions of poetry, but things said about it, 
 or about its effects or its objects ; through them at best 
 we see it, in Wordsworth's fine phrase, " not otherwise 
 than through a tender haze or a luminous mist." In 
 many of them the mist is indeed wonderfully luminous, 
 but it is a mist none the less. Within it, things melt 
 into one another and have no certain outline. "I 
 have said," Wordsworth writes in the Preface to the 
 Lyrical Ballads, " that poetry is the spontaneous over- 
 flow of powerful feelings." We turn back to verify 
 the reference ; and we find that what he had said was 
 that " all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of 
 powerful feelings" a very different thing. That is 
 not a definition of poetry; it is a statement as to its 
 origin, which at the same time, in the more carefully 
 limited form of words, is made a criterion of its quality. 
 " Poetry," says Mr. W. B. Yeats, himself a poet whose 
 technical mastery of the art is indisputable, " is an 
 endeavour to condense out of the flying vapours of the 
 world an image of human perfection." It is true and 
 beautifully said ; it cannot be called a definition, but 
 it seems at least to give us a glimpse in clear outline 
 of the thing itself which is to be defined. To some of 
 these and the like sayings we may have occasion to 
 return : meanwhile let us set them aside, and con- 
 
THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 9 
 
 sider poetry as an art, in its formal and technical 
 definition. 
 
 It is singular, and not without an odd sort of rele- 
 vance, that the very etymology of the word poetry, 
 apparently so simple, is remote and obscure. It is 
 generally and very naturally supposed to be a word 
 formed by the addition to the word poet of the old 
 French and English suffix which is one of the 
 commonest in both languages. We have it in a 
 thousand common English words like dairy, buttery, 
 pantry, laundry. But in fact it seems that this is a 
 merely accidental coincidence. The Latin word poetria 
 in the sense of poetry is found in scholia on Horace's 
 Epistles written as early as the seventh century and 
 extant in MSS. of the tenth. Its use may be traced 
 down from there to Dante. In the Convito (ii. 14), 
 and also in the Vita Nuova (c. 25, Siccome dice Orazio 
 net principio della Poetria) he calls the De Arte Poetica 
 of Horace by this name. How or when the Latin 
 word originated, what if any relation it has to the other 
 Latin word poetria meaning a poetess, is a problem still 
 unsolved and apparently insoluble. 
 
 On its technical or formal side, which is what we 
 are now considering, poejtry_ may be taken for all 
 practical purposes as in a^tithesis^-fee-^ose^ The re- 
 levance of the antithesis from another point of view 
 may of course be, and often has been, disputed or 
 denied. That is an old doctrine, though it was only 
 in comparatively modern times that it was insisted upon 
 strongly or had any wide predominance. " One may be 
 a Poet without versing, and a versifier without poetry. 
 Verse is but an ornament and no cause to poetry, sith 
 there have been many most excellent poets that never 
 versified " : thus it runs as laid down in the orthodox 
 Elizabethan text-book. The contrast between " poetic 
 
10 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 prose " and " prosaic poetry " is stated in these express 
 terms in the middle of the eighteenth century. More 
 modern instances might be quoted by the hundred. 
 But they all only serve to emphasise the broad re- 
 cognised distinction ; in all of them there is a more or 
 less conscious rhetorical artifice. What they imply is 
 either a fallacy or a mere figure of speech. Advantage 
 is taken of the fact that the exact boundary between 
 the two things is not easily defined and leaves a strip 
 of debateable frontier, in order to suggest that they are 
 not two things; or stress is laid on some particular 
 quality which they have in common to the extent of 
 ignoring other qualities, equally essential, which they 
 do not have in common ; or oftener still, language is 
 used in a loose metaphorical way, just as one might 
 (and occasionally does) speak of a piece of architecture, 
 or the movements of a dancer, or an apple pie, as 
 poetry. 
 
 This then need not trouble us. But the distinction 
 between prose and poetry on which the technical 
 definition of poetry has to be based is not the same 
 as the distinction between prose and verse. It is so 
 nearly the same that the terms poetry and verse might 
 often be used indifferently ; but there is a difference, 
 which though subtle is yet important, and the neglect 
 of which leads certainly to confusion. It is worth 
 while to look into the matter a little more closely. 
 Prose, prosa omtio, straightforward or continuous lan- 
 guage, is, as the etymology of the word implies, the 
 complement or antithesis to language which is discon- 
 tinuous, which does not move straight forward. But 
 this latter kind of language includes more than verse, 
 if the word verse be taken in its ordinary meaning as 
 equivalent to metre or a series of metrical units. To 
 quote Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads 
 
THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 11 
 
 again : " I here use the word poetry," he says, " as 
 opposed to the word prose, and synonymous with 
 metrical composition : but the only strict antithesis 
 to prose is metre ; nor is this in truth a strict antithesis." 
 It is on the last clause of this sentence, on the words 
 " nor is this in truth a strict antithesis," that special 
 stress is to be laid. Its truth is obvious if we consider 
 that we must needs use the word metre either to 
 express something which is a quality of some poetry 
 only, not of all, or to express something which is 
 a quality not only of good poetry but of good prose. 
 We must exclude here such language, whether it 
 purports to be prose or verse, as has no artistic 
 quality : for we are here considering not mere language, 
 but language as a fine art. The fine art of which 
 language is the vehicle or means of expression, as in 
 the other arts the vehicle is colour or form or sound, 
 is literature. The art of language includes both prose 
 and poetry : both in this sense are composition, both 
 have structural and artistic quality; both have laws 
 of composition, and apply to language a technique 
 which is no less subtle and elaborate in prose than it 
 is in poetry ; but the kind of composition, the quality 
 of technique, is different in the two. Johnson, in the 
 middle of the eighteenth century, defines poetry on its 
 technical side as " metrical composition " : this is the 
 definition alluded to by Wordsworth. It bears the 
 mark of Johnson's plain good sense and rough jus- 
 tice ; it is pretty near the mark. A century earlier, 
 Edward Phillips, quoting perhaps, or possibly just 
 misquoting, words that had been beaten into him 
 by Milton, had said that poetry is writing " consisting 
 of rhythm or verses." This is still nearer the mark : 
 so near that it seems too good to be Phillips' own. I 
 am not sure that it is possible to better this definition 
 
12 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 materially : only the words used in it are, like all the 
 terms with which we are dealing, not wholly free from 
 ambiguity or rather from something falling short 
 of exact certainty of meaning. This certainty we 
 may at least attempt to give by going back a little 
 and approaching the problem from a slightly different 
 direction. 
 
 All art implies composition : to the art which 
 uses language as its vehicle, the term composition 
 is specially and as it were primarily appropriated ; 
 and the definition which we are now seeking is that 
 of poetry as a species, of composition distinct from 
 other species of composition all coming within the 
 wider scope of the application of art to language, 
 or what we call by a single comprehensive word, 
 literature. 
 
 The essence of poetry technically, of poetry as an 
 art working in language, is not that it is rhythmical. 
 All elevated or impassioned language is that; at all 
 events all elevated or impassioned language which 
 possesses the amount of structure, of conscious artistic 
 purpose, that is implied in its being literature at all. 
 Nor is it the essence of poetry technically that it is 
 metrical ; for unless we stretch the meaning of the 
 term much beyond ordinary usage, metre is not a 
 necessary, though it is a normal and habitual predicate 
 of poetry. What then is it ? 
 
 The essence of poetry technically is that it is paj> 
 terned language. This is its specific, central, and 
 indispensable quality as a fine art. Pattern, in its 
 technical use as applied to the arts, is distinct from 
 composition generally. It is composition which has 
 in it what is technically called a " repeat." The artistic 
 power of the pattern-designer is shown in the way he 
 deals with the problem of his repeat: the problem 
 
THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 13 
 
 being, stated baldly, to make the rhythm of his repeat 
 felt in such a way that the pattern which is based on 
 and consists of a repeated unit may at the same time 
 not fall asunder in separate units, but move and 
 spread in a continuous and larger composition over 
 the whole surface which is covered by the pattern. 
 
 In poetry this repeat is what is known by the name 
 of verse. Verse opposed to prose is, in fact as well 
 as in etymology, returning or repeating language, 
 opposed to language which moves on without any such 
 return or repeat. In this sense the definition given 
 by Phillips is exact, if insteacj of saying that poetry 
 consists of " rhythm or verses " we say that it consists 
 of " rhythm in verses." In verses which are merely 
 mechanical there is not the rhythm; in rhythm 
 which is not in verses there is not the quality that 
 constitutes pattern. Neither apart from the other is 
 technically poetry. A pattern which merely consists 
 of mechanical repetition, without the repetition being 
 caught up into a larger rhythm, is a pattern in the 
 mechanical, but not in the artistic sense; it fails of 
 being art because it lacks composition. A composi- 
 tion which has not pattern is art and may be art of 
 a very high kind, but it is not the specific art with 
 which we are dealing. In the art of composition 
 applied to language, verse which consists of a series 
 of detached units is not poetry, because the verse 
 is not caught up into a larger rhythm ; and rhythm 
 which is not based on the repeat of verse is not 
 poetry, because it has not the specific quality of 
 pattern. 
 
 In language which comes within this technical 
 definition, the verse, the return and repeat of pat- 
 tern, may be of many kinds. Some are more patent, 
 where the repeat is more obvious and as it were 
 
14 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 more detachable. Others are more subtle, where 
 the repeat is more implicit and more organic. The 
 feeling for poetry (we are still speaking of poetry in its 
 technical sense) very largely consists of the feeling 
 for rhythm in pattern, and for pattern in rhythm.^ 
 With the born designer this feeling is instinctive; 
 with all designers it is felt most in the actual process ; 
 it grows with exercise; up to the culmination of the 
 artist's power the senses go on feeling it more swiftly 
 and certainly, the hand executes more and more of 
 what the senses feel. Poeta nasdtur et fit. But when 
 the artist tries to explain what he is doing, or why 
 and how he does it, he is often quite at a loss ; he 
 tries to give a reasoned explanation, and it is inade- 
 quate, it is perhaps unintelligible ; it lays itself open 
 to the easy task of destructive criticism. Or he falls 
 back upon images and metaphors, in the attempt to 
 give some vivid and concrete expression of what he 
 feels but is unable or unwilling to define. These last 
 are illustrations rather than definitions : among them 
 however are included many of the most searching and 
 illuminating things that have been said about poetry. 
 In the double attempt the artist often falls into 
 obvious inconsistencies, due to the emphasis being 
 thrown on one or another aspect of the complex 
 matter with which he is dealing. V It is through the 
 grouping and synthesis of these partial and formally 
 inconsistent views that we arrive at a larger and more 
 comprehensive view. 7 Thus, to take one instance out 
 of many, Shelley in his Defence of Poetry, when he is 
 putting emphasis on the quality of poetry as a means 
 of imaginative expression, lays down the sweeping 
 doctrine that "the distinction between poets and 
 prose writers is a vulgar error." Yet, just a little 
 before, when he was regarding the subject from 
 
THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 15 
 
 another side, he had said, with perfect truth but 
 obvious inconsistency, that " the language of poets 
 has ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious 
 recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry." 
 Uniform recurrence not only is not a quality of prose, 
 but is a quality which vitiates prose, makes it cease to 
 be prose in an artistic sense. Wherever it is allowed 
 to occur through negligence or accident, it results in 
 what is technically bad prose. A little later in the 
 same treatise, Shelley combines the two aspects of the 
 thing. " The functions of the poetic faculty," he says, 
 " are twofold ; by one it creates new materials of 
 knowledge and power and pleasure; by the other, 
 it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and 
 arrange them according to a certain rhythm and 
 order." 
 
 The repeating and yet continuous pattern in lan- 
 guage which makes it technically poetry is subject to 
 the general laws of composition and also to certain 
 special laws of its own. These special laws vary from 
 language to language, from country to country, and from 
 time to time ; they allow of many types. These are often 
 far apart from one another ; and it is only by paying 
 attention to the general test of pattern that we can 
 readily bring them under a single definition. So like- 
 wise the repeat in the pattern may be simpler or more 
 complex, may be patent on the surface or implicit in 
 the structure. A general rule may indeed be laid 
 down, that the repeat must not be so accented as to 
 destroy the continuity, nor the movement so continuous 
 that there is no repeat left. It is clear that a very 
 wide field is left between these limits. On the one 
 hand there is the kind of poetry where the recurrence 
 does not amount to what is generally called verse, is 
 not measurable in definite lengths of stresses or 
 
16 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 quantities or accents, and yet is there sufficiently to 
 be felt. In such cases it may be difficult to draw 
 a precise boundary between poetry and impassioned 
 prose : in the Book of Job, to take a familiar instance, 
 or in other parts of what are called the poetical books 
 of the English Old Testament: for in such cases we 
 are on the borderland where poetry and prose tend to 
 coalesce or are not yet fully differentiated in function ; 
 where poetry has not worked out its full nature, in the 
 Aristotelian phrase, or else where prose attempts to 
 clothe itself in the garments and exercise the functions 
 of poetry. On the other hand there is the kind of 
 poetry where the verse has not only become definite 
 metre whether that metre be expressed in terms of 
 quantity or accent or stress but has let metre 
 dominate over continuous rhythm of structure and has 
 treated the specific requirements of metre as though 
 they covered the whole technical requirements of 
 poetical composition. 
 
 Milton's attack on rhymed verse in the preface to 
 the second issue of Paradise Lost is directed towards 
 emphasising this latter defect. That famous pro- 
 nouncement is often misquoted or misinterpreted. 
 Milton did not, as is often supposed, wish to abolish 
 rhymed verse. What he did was to point out, with 
 exact truth, the dangers or inconveniences to which 
 rhymed poetry is subject ; and even so, he limits his 
 strictures carefully to large works, which require 
 a correspondingly large freedom of pattern, "rime 
 being," as he says, " no necessary adjunct of poem or 
 good verse, in longer works especially," where its 
 tendency is to make poets " express many things other- 
 wise, and for the most part worse, than else they would 
 have expressed them." But he goes on to lay equal stress 
 on the like defect in rhymeless metres which allow the 
 
THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 17 
 
 unit of pattern to dominate the larger rhythm. The 
 " musical delight " of poetry, according to his doctrine, 
 "consists in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and 
 the sense variously drawn out from one verse into 
 another." In the complex fabric of patterned language 
 which is poetry, each artist, according to the particular 
 tendency and affinity of his genius, lays stress on one 
 or another element. He may even deny the authenticity 
 or relevance of elements to which exaggerated import- 
 ance is attached by popular usage. But such a denial 
 must be taken in relation to the circumstances, and to 
 the particular point on which he is at the time insisting. 
 
 Let me recapitulate the substance of the matter 
 in the briefest possible words. Poetry, while in its 
 essence it is a function of life, and as indefinable 
 as life itself except through imagination expressing 
 itself in symbols and metaphors, is formally and 
 technically patterned language : the technical essence 
 of pattern is repeat : and where there is no repeat, ! 
 there is technically no poetry. The art of the pattern- ; 
 designer lies in the choice of the unit of repeat and! 
 thereafter in the way he uses it as the basis of struc-/ 
 tural composition obeying the larger laws of rhythmj 
 and growth : and so it is with the art or technique of) 
 the poet. 
 
 If we keep firmly by this definition (or if we prefer 
 not to call it a definition, by this central clue) we shall 
 not be much troubled by the dust of controversy that 
 has risen round such phrases as " prose poetry " ; for we 
 shall realise that all such phrases arise in a confusion, 
 and it is natural therefore that fresh confusion should 
 arise out of them. As composition, as a fine art, prose 
 has its own nature and virtue, and they are different 
 from those of poetry : if forced beyond these in order 
 to be brought within some loose definition of poetry, 
 
 
18 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 it only departs from its own nature and loses its 
 own excellence, without acquiring the specific nature 
 and specific excellence of poetry. 
 
 This definition of poetry as a formal art must 
 be judged on its own merits, and as it appears to 
 give, or to fail in giving, a sufficiently logical and 
 precise account of the facts. But there is a test to 
 which we are able to submit it. If it fails to meet 
 this test, there is something wrong with it. If it satisfies 
 this test, there is at least a presumption that it is sound. 
 I will now proceed, very briefly, to indicate the test and 
 apply it, or at least suggest its application. 
 
 Much of the confusion which has arisen with regard 
 to the nature and definition of poetry has arisen, as 
 we have seen, from failure to draw any clear dis- 
 tinction between two things which are different. One 
 of these is the formal quality of poetry as an art ; the 
 other is its essential or vital quality in relation to life 
 whether we speak of poetry in this regard as the 
 interpretation of life, or as the imaginative expression 
 of life, or in more general terms as a function of life. 
 But these two things, though formally distinguishable, 
 are not actually separable. There is no such thing as 
 art in the abstract. L- Concrete poetry consists of form 
 and substance; and just as there is no substance 
 apart from form, so there is no form apart from 
 substance. It follows that in the thing poetry, form 
 and substance must have a mutual and intimate 
 relation. We may express this relation, according 
 to the general terms in which we choose to put our 
 system of thought, by saying that form embodies 
 itself in a certain substance, or that substance takes 
 shape under certain forms, or tha between form and 
 substance there exists a certain pre-established har- 
 mony. In any case, what is true formally of the 
 
THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 19 
 
 form must also be true substantially of the substance 
 of the thing in which the form has its visible embodi- 
 ment and concrete existence. The work of art must 
 have a relation to life analogous to the relation between 
 the form of art and the material in which it works. 
 Poetry is a particular form of art working in the 
 material of language, and we have defined it as 
 patterned language. If the technical art of poetry 
 consists in making patterns out of language, the 
 substantial and vital function of poetry will be analo- 
 gous ; it will be to make patterns out of life. 
 
 And this is the case. This is what poetry has 
 been doing from its earliest days and is doing still. 
 This is what it will always continue to do, and what 
 ensures its progress and its immortality. So long 
 as the instinct to make patterns out of life endures, 
 so long as language is the means of giving shape to 
 human thoughts and emotions and aspirations, so 
 long will the making of poetry be a necessity, because 
 through poetry alone can that instinct be satisfied. 
 The poetry of the past is our inheritance, and it is 
 priceless ; but it is not enough. The poetry of each 
 age must reinterpret and reincarnate life anew. Not 
 the art which we inherit, but the art which we create, 
 is our own art, the expression of our own life. Let 
 me quote once more from Shelley. 
 !, " The language of poets," he says, " is vitally meta- 
 phorical ; that is, it marks the before unapprehended 
 relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, 
 until the words which represent them become, through 
 time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead 
 of pictures of integral thoughts ; and then, if no new- 
 poets should arise to create afresh the associations 
 which have thus been disorganised, language will be 
 dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse." 
 
20 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 Thus we find that in periods when the vital creative 
 energy of poetry has been at its lowest, the effective 
 energy, the effective appreciation, of existing poetry has 
 also dwindled. The classics have survived ; but they 
 have lost their vital force, their vitalising influence, in 
 the torpor of classicism. To the extent that poetry 
 ceases to be a living art, to that extent the work of the 
 older poets ceases to be living poetry and becomes like 
 the contents of a museum. It is preserved, catalogued, 
 annotated ; but it remains living art only to the 
 measure in which living artists keep in touch with 
 it, reincarnate it, find in it kinship with their own 
 instincts and impulse for their own inspiration, and 
 can say in its presence, Ancti io sono poeta. 
 
 If we pass in review the most notable things that 
 poets or great thinkers have said of poetry, we shall 
 find running through them and giving them substantial 
 coherence this notion of the function of poetry being 
 make patterns out of life. Sometimes it is dis- 
 tinctly expressed, more often suggested or implied. 
 This is what is implied in Sidney's quaint words when 
 he says in the Apology for Poetry, still harking back, 
 you will notice, on the old confusion of technique with 
 substance : " It is not riming and versing that maketh 
 a poet, but fayning notable images of vertues, vices, 
 or what else, which must be the right describing note 
 to know a poet by." This is what underlies the 
 vivid Platonic metaphor of a seventeenth-century 
 author when he speaks of poetry as being " the 
 dreams of them that are awake." This is the central 
 thought in the striking words of Shelley, " A poem 
 is the very image of life expressed in its eternal 
 ruth," and again, " Poetry is a mirror which makes 
 beautiful that which is distorted " which brings out 
 the pattern in life, that is to say ; a pattern that is there, 
 
 i CO 
 
 to 
 
THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 21 
 
 though it is confused, broken, or hidden until poetry 
 disengages it. The same thought is expressed with 
 great beauty by Carlyle in his Lectures on Heroes, and 
 it is worth while setting the words beside Shelley's 
 and noticing how nearly two minds so different as 
 theirs approached one another. "It is a man's sin- 
 cerity and depth of vision," says Carlyle, " that makes 
 him a poet. See deep enough, and you see musically ; 
 the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you 
 can only reach it." We come still closer to the 
 point, even down to the exact phrasing, in a celebrated 
 sentence of Milton's : " A true poem, that is, a com- 
 position and pattern of the best and honour ablest 
 things." It is the last words of this sentence on 
 which Milton is for the moment laying stress: the 
 words " composition " and " pattern " fall from him 
 as it were incidentally. But they are all the more 
 significant for that: for in them we have Milton 
 speaking as it were off his guard, not laying down 
 any law or formulating any theory, still less confuting 
 any other view, but saying quite simply and instinctively 
 what lay at the foundation of his own thought and 
 guided his own practice. It would be tedious to multiply 
 quotations further; and I have singled out these few 
 ad narrandum non ad probandum. It is not the office 
 of a Professor of Poetry, as I conceive it, to lay down 
 laws about poetry, or to argue about poetry, but to 
 present poetry, and so far as he can, to present it as it 
 really is. His privilege is to do for poetry something 
 faintly analogous, on its lower plane, to what poetry 
 itself does for life. 
 
 Let me then recur to two passages which I have 
 already quoted in part, and quote them once more in 
 full: for they are among the most considered and 
 authentic utterances that poets have given about their 
 
22 THE DEFINITION OF POETRY 
 
 own art ; and they will bear repeating ; for they must 
 be thought out and thought over before they will yield 
 their full significance. 
 
 "Poetry," said Shelley, "lifts the veil from the 
 hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar 
 objects be as if they were not familiar." 
 
 "All art," says Mr. Yeats, "is in the last analysis an 
 endeavour to condense as out of the flying vapours of 
 the world an image of human perfection, and for its own 
 and not for the art's sake." 
 
 To lift the veil from the hidden beauty of poetry 
 and make familiar poems be as if they were not 
 familiar is the highest aim and function of poetical' 
 criticism or exposition. For our own and not for the 
 art's sake, I have endeavoured here to condense, out of 
 the flying vapours of definitions, an image of poetry. 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 IN leaving Homer and Chaucer we pass away from the 
 Middle Ages. These two poets, both so full of the 
 unexhausted joy of life, both so steeped in what seems 
 to us the radiance of morning, represent the final 
 splendours of a day that was drawing near its close. 
 ^Unlike in profound essentials as are the poetry of the 
 Iliad and Odyssey on the one hand, the poetry of 
 Troilus and the Knight's Tale on the other, they are 
 alike in being the finished product of a mediaeval art 
 which perished in creating them. */ Once in the East, 
 once again after more than two thousand years in the 
 West, a mediaeval period came to its final fruition in 
 the two countries which lie on the extreme verges 
 of the European world. When the darkness that 
 follows these two great sunset splendours lifts we find 
 ourselves in the pallor of a new dawn ; here in modern 
 England, there in a Hellenic world which, however we 
 may speak or think of it as ancient, is in its whole 
 quality as distinctively and as essentially modern. 
 
 The Iliad and the Odyssey are the treasure saved 
 from the submerged world of pre-Hellenic Greece. Be- 
 yond what can be divined from the poems themselves, 
 we know little or nothing of their poetic predecessors, 
 and almost as little of their immediate poetic successors. 
 Traces of pre-Homeric poetry are in the Iliad at all 
 events extant, however much they may be elusive and 
 however often debateable. Traces of post-Homeric 
 poetry are to be found in accretions which have attached 
 
24 POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 themselves to the authentic Iliad, and also, it may be, 
 in the conclusion of the authentic and unfinished 
 Odyssey. The later poetry of the Cycle has perished. 
 Its fragments lie in a dim twilight, among the be- 
 ginnings of the Greek lyric. With Chaucer the case 
 is entirely different. We know nearly everything that 
 we want to know. We know the earlier native and 
 foreign poetry that preceded him, the soil out of which 
 his poetry grew, the political and social environment ; 
 we have abundant examples of the contemporary arts 
 other than poetry. We know too what came after him, 
 the poetry of the Chaucerian school which reached up 
 to and overlapped the renaissance of poetry in England 
 in the sixteenth century. Of this post-Chaucerian 
 poetry we possess large masses. But it is in quality 
 as secondary as were the lost Cyclic epics; it repre- 
 sents decadence, not progress, for the progress of poetry 
 had diverged from it. In both cases the new birth of 
 poetry comes after a long engulfing interval, and begins 
 afresh in a changed world. 
 
 But before passing on, as poetry itself passed on, to 
 those fresh developments, something still remains to 
 be considered. All art is a function of life ; and the 
 matter which we now must pause upon is one with 
 which poetry, as a function of life, is deeply concerned. 
 The Homeric poems present us with the picture of a 
 world ; a world embodied in art at a high tension, vivid, 
 various, convincing. So do the poems of Chaucer in 
 a lesser degree. His world is as various and fresh as 
 Homer's, if not so large or noble ; more coloured and 
 crowded, but conceived at a lower imaginative heat. 
 But neither of them is the whole world. I have had 
 occasion, when dealing with Homer and Chaucer, to 
 speak in passing of another world that lay alongside of 
 or beneath theirs, and that suggests another aspect of 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 25 
 
 the function of poetry. The world of Hesiod and of 
 Langland is not one of high passions or romantic 
 achievements ; it has little enchantment and little joy ; 
 it is the under side of that pattern of life, whether 
 epic or romantic, through which the central current of 
 poetry had been moving. 
 
 Whatever our opinion may be as to the poetical 
 value of the Works and Days and the whole of what is 
 called, by a brief and useful term, Hesiodic as opposed 
 to Homeric poetry, we must remember that it occupied 
 a very important place in the development of the 
 Greek genius for poetry, and in later Greek literary 
 judgment. The coupling of Homer and Hesiod was 
 a thing fully established as early as the middle of the 
 sixth century B.C. It is assumed as a matter of course 
 by Xenophanes, and is thereafter habitual. Virgil's 
 ambition to be the Roman Hesiod was quite unaffected, 
 and does not seem to have caused any surprise, or even 
 any comment. For us, as we read the timid, halting 
 work of the Boeotian school, with its lack of con- 
 structive power, its narrow range of imagination, its 
 inexpert use of the Homeric court-language, it seems 
 strange that Ascraeum carmen should be the title given 
 by its author to a work which is the highest technical 
 achievement of Latin poetry. Clearly the Hesiodic 
 poetry was nothing inconsiderable to the classical mind. 
 Nor were the place and influence of Langland incon- 
 siderable in his own time or in the age which imme- 
 diately followed. There are forty-three extant MSS. of 
 Piers Plowman in its different versions as against sixteen 
 only of Chaucer's greatest poem ; nearly as many, in fact, 
 as there are of the Canterbury Tales with their obvious 
 appeal to a large and to a somewhat mixed public. 
 
 But Langland's poem had not a long life, as length 
 of life in such matters is to be computed. It lay 
 
26 POETRY AND 
 
 outside of the main stream of poetry, and did not 
 become a classic. Partly this is due to the over- 
 whelming triumph of the exotic forms of verse. After 
 Chaucer, this was a decided matter. In the first 
 printed edition of Piers Plowman (1550) there had 
 to be a preface to explain the metre. After a second 
 edition a few years later, the poem was never reprinted 
 until the nineteenth century; it had dropped out of 
 poetical currency. This was not all a matter of obso- 
 lete language and metre ; it is one very largely of inner 
 poetical quality. Neither of course would it be true 
 to say that Chaucer himself remained a vital influence 
 over later English poetry through its full extent. 
 Homer and Hesiod were a part of Greek life; they 
 dominated it to an extent to which no English poet, 
 not even Shakespeare, has dominated English life. 
 They were and this is even more true of Hesiod than 
 of Homer the Greek schoolbooks, the Greek Bible. 
 Neither Chaucer nor Langland was ever that. 
 
 Hesiod, the body of poetry passing under that name, 
 is the antithesis or complement to Homer. It is the 
 poetry of the minutus populus ; of what Langland, and we 
 after him, call the commons. It is the voice of the 
 democracy which was implicit in the static mediaeval 
 system, and which was destined, when it became self- 
 conscious and dynamic, to annul that system, to create a 
 New Doctrine, to launch the world upon a changed orbit. 
 
 The versified textbook of theology known as the 
 Generation of the Gods need not detain us as poetry. 
 Whatever poetry it has is derivative, and of no sub- 
 stantive value. In the Works and Days, on the other 
 hand, we see and feel a new poetry in the making. 
 The poetical art is moving towards a new subject, a 
 new audience, a new aspect of life. It applies itself to 
 what may be called in a sense real things, in a sense 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 27 
 
 different from that in which we can speak of the 
 Homeric world as real. Its subject is the life and \ 
 labour of the people. Discarding both the epic and 1 
 the romantic treatment, it sets itself to deal with ' 
 conduct, which, in Arnold's phrase, is three-fourths of 
 life, and with the poor, who, in no mere phrase, are 
 three-fourths of the human race. It leaves the bright 
 sunlight of the epic ; it leaves the shadowed halls and 
 gardens of romance : it passes from these into a grey 
 world, lying obscure in a doubtful dusk which is also a 
 dawn. It turns the methods and language of poetry, 
 hesitatingly and awkwardly, to a new use ; it wavers 
 between adapting old and creating new forms of ex- 
 pression. The Homeric life lies all broad in the day- 
 light ; in sharp contrast to this is Hesiod's remarkable 
 expression, " The Gods have made the life of mankind 
 hidden." With the collapse of the epic structure or 
 pattern of life there came the beginnings of a new 
 movement of poetry, one that goes out into the 
 wilderness, that seeks to reconstruct some sort of 
 shelter from the ruins of a Palace of Art. 
 
 " So when four years were wholly finished 
 
 She threw her royal robes away. 
 ' Make me a cottage in the vale,' she said, 
 
 Where I may mourn and pray.' " 
 
 In Hesiod is the beginning of the instinct of the common- \ 
 alty after something that, even if poor, shall be its own. 
 It is the same instinct which, later, created the personal 
 poem, the lyric, a'nd with the lyric, made what we mean 
 by Greece. For while the Greek genius created the 
 state x it also created the individual. The growth and the 
 interaction of these two forces are what, throughout Greek 
 history, gives Hellenic life its enthralling and immortal 
 interest. The full synthesis of the two, once nearly 
 
* 
 
 \ 
 
 28 POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 realised in the brief central splendour of Athens, was not, 
 as it still is not, of this world. Greece was shattered 
 in the attempt to do what, on a larger scale, with 
 greater experience and greater resources, mankind are 
 still attempting to do now, and still without success. 
 
 In this life and labour of the people, the K\ea avSpuv, 
 the deeds of kings and heroes, count for nothing. 
 Fleetfoot Aeacides and Argive Helen have faded away 
 into a phantom White Island beyond the unfriendly 
 sea. The world of ladies dead and lovely knights 
 av&pwv fjpatov 0elov <yeVos, " the god-like hero-brood," 
 at Trdpo$ yarav evTrXoKajmides 'A^ata/, " Achaean women 
 lovely-tressed of old" has become a chronicle of 
 wasted time, a tale of little meaning. The motives of 
 trie Iliad and Odyssey have ceased to exist. The great 
 motive force in life is AFyuo?, hunger, the bodily hunger 
 for bread, and with it, the growth of a hunger for 
 understanding what life really means. To the farmer 
 of Ascra, as at or about the same time in another 
 country to the herdsman of Tekoa, "the days come 
 that I will send a famine into the land, not a famine 
 of bread nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the 
 words of the Lord." They wander from sea to sea, 
 they run to and fro to seek that word, and do not find 
 it. The physical unrest of the Greek migrations and 
 colonisations reflects a corresponding ferment in things 
 of the mind. Poetry is turning to what are felt to be 
 in a new way real things ; for the things with which 
 it had dealt hitherto are losing reality. It has ex- 
 changed the opulence of autumn, full-foliaged and 
 rich-fruited, for the pinched faint greenness of what is 
 hardly yet spring 
 
 " For all the miles and miles of unsprung wheat, 
 And for the Spring waiting beyond the portal, 
 And for the future of its own young art : " 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 29 
 
 grey under the east wind, leafless, only with here and 
 there a point of vivid colour, a waft of piercing scent. 
 Inchoate, uncertain, immature, it yet has stirring in it 
 the principle of life. But its hope is still overburdened 
 by its sense of the misery of the world. 
 
 Thus, the author of the Works and Days sums up 
 what is to him the whole upshot of the Iliad and 
 Odyssey, when he says that the Son of Cronos now 
 and again destroys a broad army or a walled city, 
 or takes vengeance on ships at sea. Thus, too, he 
 draws the picture of Justice sitting helpless by the 
 side of Zeus, and complaining to him of the injustice 
 of men. The mediaeval or Homeric world had a gap 
 in its completeness ; at that gap it is breaking down. 
 
 But between these two great changes, with their 
 striking and fertile analogies, there is one profound 
 difference. In Homer the way of looking at life is 
 instinctive rather than reasoned. The Homeric theory 
 of the world so far as it can be said to exist is 
 implicit and vague. In mediaeval Europe, on the 
 other hand, it was explicit, and worked out to the 
 utmost detail ; in the feudal system, in the Summa 
 Theologiae, in Dante's Divine Comedy. Piers Plowman is 
 the last effort made by poetry in England to think 
 seriously about that world before the thing itself 
 vanished., Jt embodies, for the last time, that orga- 
 nised coherent system of politics and theology which 
 to the mediaeval mind gave a complete account of the 
 whole of human life. , 
 
 Langland himself has no forecast of the modern 
 world. The so-called prophecy of the dissolution of 
 the religious houses by the Tudor monarchy is only 
 one of those many passages in poetry which have been 
 distorted into prophecy after the event, like the Fourth 
 Eclogue in Virgil. But as in Hesiod, the new spirit 
 
30 POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 which was to create the modern world, before which 
 the whole structure of mediaeval poetry and of 
 mediaeval life was destined to melt away, is working 
 inarticulately within him. The life of the court, the 
 ordinances of chivalry, the romantic side of feudalism, 
 he only sees from a distance and without sympathy, 
 as a villager might look on at a tournament, or glance, 
 as he passed by on his daily work, through the open 
 doorway of a lord's castle. What interests him as 
 a poet, what for him has become the substance of 
 poetry, is the life and labour of the people; of the 
 landowners in their manor-houses, of the merchants 
 and shopkeepers, of the labourers who make up nine- 
 tenths of the population, of the floating mass of 
 landless men, outlaws, beggars, and thieves. His 
 vision of the world is as precise and distinct as that 
 portrayed on the shield of Achilles. But this new 
 world is full of agonies, of the cry of the poor, of the 
 stirrings of a far-off democracy. The "mirror of 
 middle-earth," into which he looks in his vision, is a 
 " land of longing," set between the two unseen worlds. 
 
 " I saw the sun and the sea 
 
 and the sand after : 
 And where that birds and beasts 
 
 by their mates they yeden : 
 Wild worms in woods 
 
 and wonderful fowls, 
 With flecked feathers 
 
 and of fele colours. 
 And sithen I looked upon the sea 
 
 and so forth upon the stars : 
 I saw flowers in the fryth 
 
 and their fair colours, 
 And how among the green grass 
 
 grew so many hues." x 
 
 1 This and the other quotations from Piers Plowman are from the B 
 text, with the spelling modernised on the principle indicated at the 
 end of the Introduction to The Springs of Helicon, 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 31 
 
 The world lies outspread before him, bright, clear, 
 changeable and yet constant. 
 
 " Lo ! birds and beasts 
 
 that no bliss ne knoweth 
 And wild worms in woods 
 
 through winters thou them grievest, 
 And after thou sendest them summer 
 
 that is their sovereign joy, 
 And bliss to all that been 
 
 both wild and tame." 
 
 But in human life, evil preponderates; and its pre- 
 ponderance is against nature, is a thing against which 
 humanity instinctively revolts. 
 
 " Bliss and bale 
 
 both I saw at once ; 
 And how men tooken meed 
 and mercy refused." 
 
 " Much mirth is among rich, as in meat and cloth- 
 ing," Langland says. For the upper classes life had 
 become refined and luxurious beyond all former ex- 
 perience, and was made even more so by contrast 
 with the increasing poverty of the poor. Feudalism 
 was hardening into tyranny; lawlessness had spread 
 in the track of the French wars, and the Black Death 
 shaken the foundations of all customary morality. 
 There is a description in the poem of a feast in a rich 
 house on a winter's night, towards Christmas, with 
 music and minstrelsy under the light of the great 
 twisted wax tapers, which recalls the Phseacian palace of 
 the Odyssey. But meanwhile, Langland breaks out, 
 
 " The careful may cry 
 
 and carpen at the gate 
 Both ahungered and athirst, 
 
 and for chill quake ; 
 Is none to nymen him near 
 
 his annoy to amend, 
 
32 POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 But huen on him as an hound 
 
 and hoten him go thence : 
 Ne were mercy in mean men 
 
 more than in rich, 
 Mendinants meatless 
 
 might go to bed. 
 And beggars about Midsummer 
 
 breadless they sup : 
 And yet is winter for them worse, 
 
 for wet shod they gang 
 Athirst sore and ahungered, 
 
 and foul y-rebuked 
 And arated of rich men 
 
 that ruth is to hear." 
 
 The life of the labourer was hard and joyless : 
 
 " Ere I have bread of meal 
 
 oft might I sweat, 
 
 And ere the commune have corn enough, 
 many a cold morning." 
 
 His housing was (as it is now) scandalous : 
 
 "If his house be unhilled 
 
 and rain on his bed, 
 He seeketh and seeketh 
 
 till he sleep dry ; 
 And smoke and smoulder 
 
 smiteth in his eyen, 
 Till he be blear-eyed or blind 
 
 and hoarse in the throat." 
 
 And to make matters worse, he was (as he is now) 
 hopelessly entangled by the petty usurer : " evermore 
 needy, and seldom dieth he out of debt." 
 
 The revolution was on its way. As yet, however, 
 the old religion on which the whole mediaeval system 
 was based reigned in almost unimpaired power and 
 charm. Langland is deeply moved by the civilised 
 life and splendid art of the great religious communities, 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 33 
 
 His poetry kindles, he becomes almost romantic, when 
 he turns to these, when he speaks of the superb archi- 
 tecture, the huge glazed windows of the churches, the 
 covered cloisters, the white walls all painted and 
 portrayed, the bells of brass or of bright silver, the 
 gospels and psalters with their leaves of burnished 
 gold, the volumes of " Plato the poet," of " Ypocras and 
 Virgil " that filled their libraries, the skill of hand and 
 love of nature that made their gardens and orchards 
 a fit surrounding for their beautiful buildings. More 
 deeply still is he moved by what underlay that life and 
 art, the beauty of holiness, the mysterious angelical 
 grace of the Catholic religion: the consolation that 
 lay in the offices of the Church and its appointed 
 minister : 
 
 (" For he shall answer for thee 
 At the high Doom " ) 
 
 the uplifting brought to people for whom this world 
 was wretched enough by that great mediaeval art where 
 music, architecture, and painting, no less than poetry, 
 converged through all the avenues of beauty upon an 
 almost visible heavenly world. 
 
 "Woolward and wet shod 
 
 went I forth after, 
 Till I waxed weary of the world 
 
 and willed eft to sleep : 
 Of girls and of Gloria Laus 
 
 greatly me dreamed, 
 And how Osanna by organy 
 
 olde folk sungen." 
 
 But the cry of the poor was no longer to be stilled by 
 spiritual narcotics. The ferment of the modern spirit, 
 within a few years after the date of Langland's poem, 
 had spread so alarmingly in England that the Church, 
 in self-defence, instituted the burning of heretics alive. 
 
 c 
 
34 POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 The claims of labour are becoming identified with the 
 claims of life. 
 
 " Joy, that never joy had, 
 
 of rightful judge he asketh." 
 
 The right to have joy is indefeasible, unless life is 
 to be, in the proper sense of the word, hell. For 
 the poor, 
 
 "That all their life have lived 
 
 in languor and in default, 
 But God sent them sometime 
 
 Some manner joy 
 Either here or elsewhere, 
 
 Kind would it never. 
 Angels that in hell now been 
 
 hadden joy sometime." 
 
 Either here or elsewhere it must be ; but the claim is 
 now definitely made that it shall be here and not 
 elsewhere : 
 
 " For all are we Christ's creatures 
 
 and of his coffers rich, 
 And brethren as of one blood 
 as well beggars as earls/' 
 
 To " have ruth of the poor " has become the first and 
 great commandment. Those who ignore or neglect 
 that duty are swept away out of the fellowship of 
 Christ in a passage of splendid invective : 
 
 " But ye liven truly 
 
 and eke love the poor, 
 And such good as God sent 
 
 truly parten, 
 Ye have no more merit 
 
 in mass nor in hours 
 Than Malkin of her maidenhood 
 
 that no man desireth." 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 35 
 
 In such passages as this Langland's verse kindles to a 
 white heat : there is no question about their being 
 noble poetry : and poetry that might seem to be of a 
 higher quality than Chaucer's as dealing with more real 
 things. Here is all the high moral passion that 
 Chaucer lacks ; and it is not merely the moral passion 
 of the preacher, but the imaginative passion of the 
 poet. AlLart is an endeavour to condense an image of 
 human perfection. Is not then, it may be asked, this 
 image of human perfection a truer one than any that 
 has taken shape in epic or romance, in tales of the feats 
 of princes before windy Troy, or of the whispering of 
 lovers in moonlit gardens ? Is not the poetry which 
 fixes this image a higher poetry, a superior art ? And 
 if the answer be no, is not art an illusion ? and have 
 we not come to the point where, with Plato, we shall 
 expel the poets from our commonwealth ? 
 
 The answer is no : and art is not an illusion. Poetry 
 moves through this world as in it but not of it. It 
 deals with real things, for only in real things can be 
 found the image which it desires. But they are not 
 real things in the technical philosophic sense of that 
 term, any more than they are real things in the crude 
 popular sense. Either of these may be, and have 
 been, called illusions; be that as it may, neither are 
 the real things of poetry. No theory of life, no 
 drapery or stage presentment of life, but life itself, is 
 the poetic reality. 
 
 If we consider what is the reason of the admitted 
 fact that Troilus is greater poetry than Piers Plow- 
 man, that the Iliad is greater poetry than Troilus, the 
 most obvious answer is that Chaucer was a greater 
 poet than Langland, and Homer than Chaucer. But 
 this answer only restates the question. The poet and 
 the poetry cannot be separated; each only exists in 
 
36 POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 virtue of the other, or, we might say, as a function of 
 the other. What is real for poetry, what is real to the 
 poet, has not, as such, either tangible or metaphysical 
 reality. It is that in which and through which both 
 these other kinds of reality exist, life itself. 
 
 Hence it is not possible to define poetry except in 
 terms of life : just as, conversely, it is not possible to 
 define life except in terms of poetry. The poet, at a 
 given moment, in a given aspect, fixes life, makes it 
 imaginatively visible. Bound that point, for that 
 moment, the whole universe groups itself, takes rhythm 
 and completeness. This is what the poets themselves, 
 in metaphor and allegory, or in the " little flash " of a 
 sublimed lyric, have touched, and have expressed so 
 far as it is expressible. It is put most succinctly by 
 Blake. 
 
 ' To see a world in a grain of sand 
 
 And heaven in a wild flower, 
 Hold infinity in the palm of your hand 
 And eternity in an hour." 
 
 For a more sustained attempt to express the same 
 thought we may turn to Browning, the one among all 
 modern poets who realises most intensely and most 
 clearly that poetry is what gives form to life, and life the 
 substance of poetry. The passage where he expresses 
 his doctrine most clearly and fully is the concluding 
 part of the Epilogue to Dramatis Personae. 
 
 " Witless alike of will and way divine, 
 How heaven's high with earth's low should intertwine ! 
 Friends, I have seen through your eyes : now use mine ! 
 
 Take the least man of all mankind, as I ; 
 Look at his head and heart, find how and why 
 He differs from his fellows utterly : 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 37 
 
 Then, like me, watch when nature by degrees 
 Grows alive round him, as in Arctic seas 
 (They said of old) the instinctive water flees 
 
 Toward some elected point of central rock, 
 As though for its sake only roamed the flock 
 Of waves about the waste : awhile they mock 
 
 The mimic monarch of the whirlpool, king 
 O' the current for a minute : then they wring 
 Up by the roots and oversweep the thing, 
 
 And hasten off to play again elsewhere 
 The same part, choose another peak as bare, 
 They find and flatter, feast and finish there." 
 
 The particular point, the particular moment, is the 
 centre of reality only in virtue of being the focus, or 
 if we prefer to call it so, the radiating point, of life as the 
 poet then and there realises it. Apart from its formal 
 or technical quality, poetry is greater, not as it pur- 
 ports to deal with a greater subject, but as it gathers 
 and absorbs into itself more of life, more of what 
 Browning at the end of this poem calls " my universe 
 that feels and knows," the sum of self-conscious exist- 
 ence. When we speak of the Iliad as greater poetry 
 than Troilus and Creseide, or of Troilus and Creseide as 
 greater poetry than Piers Plowman, we do not mean, 
 or at least we ought not to mean, that the Wrath of 
 Achilles is more a subject for high poetry than the 
 story of an unhappy love, or the story of an unhappy 
 love more a subject for high poetry than the life and 
 labour of the people. No subject is in itself, we may 
 say, even though the statement may wear an appear- 
 ance of paradox, more poetical or less poetical than 
 another; for no subject is poetical at all, except in_so I/' 
 far as poetry touches and kindles it. A subject does 
 not inspire poetry : it is poetry that inspires a subject. 
 
38 POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 An unpoetical subject means a subject which has not 
 become poetical because poetry, the shaping spirit, has 
 not in fact condensed out of it an image of perfection. 
 
 Life itself, the whole vitally organised universe, is, 
 as the philosophers teach and as experience tells, in 
 constant flux. It is, in the vivid phrase of Lucretius, 
 natura rerum, " the being born of things." And poetry, 
 which is a function of life, is similarly in constant flux 
 or progress. It touches now one point of the whole, 
 now another. Where it touches, it creates. That 
 which it touches becomes a real thing ; and not only 
 so, but it becomes, there and then, the centre and 
 essence of reality. This is what is expressed by 
 Browning's image of the rock in Arctic seas. Only 
 there is this difference : the peak which the spirit of 
 poetry has once touched and lit is not " finished " ; 
 the concrete work of art, the embodied imagination of 
 life, survive : and through imaginative sympathy, may 
 live on, may live again and again, for other minds in 
 other ages. They may seem to fade, to die, to be 
 forgotten. But there are not instances wanting to 
 show that a poet for long forgotten or slighted may 
 come again to be prized and remembered. 
 
 The history of poetry is full of such ironies and 
 reversals. Homer passed through a period of sub- 
 mergence ; so did Dante. The case of Shakespeare's 
 Sonnets is a familiar instance. That the Sonnets 
 should ever, to any generation of men, have been dead 
 poetry might well astonish us, if it were not that at 
 the present day an acute and able scholar has sought 
 to show, with an imposing array of arguments, that 
 they never were living poetry at all. Every eye has 
 its limit of vision, and far within that limit, actually 
 in the central field, has its blind point : it is only as 
 the parallax shifts, with the progress of poetry or with 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 39 
 
 the progress of life, that certain things become visible. 
 Of many poets, long after they had seemed forgotten 
 or dead, we may say in the words of the wise 
 Centaur, 
 
 " Siete voi accorti 
 
 Che quel di retro move cio ch' ei tocca 1 
 Cosi non soglion far i pi de' morti." 
 
 The eclipsed light resumes its luminousness, the sus- 
 pended force renews its potency. ^ Of no poetry that 
 has once been alive, that has once moved what it 
 touched in the souls of men, can we say with certainty 
 that it will not do so again : that it will never again 
 be a centre from which the threads of life radiate. 
 Least of all can we base any such doctrine on what 
 we consider the inadequacy, the unimportance, the 
 irrelevance to life, of its subject. For all things imply 
 all other things ; and the system of things has no 
 centre other than that of which some one, at some 
 moment, can say, " It is here." 
 
 Poetry may receive an adventitious, and, in a strict 
 use of words, a non-poetical value from the largeness of 
 its subject, as largeness is judged by ordinary measure- 
 ments. Just so a poem may derive a secondary but 
 quite real importance from its length. Greek criti- 
 cism, with its cool good-sense, noted size, /weyeflo?, 
 as a quality which counted towards the value or 
 importance of a work of art ; not so much theoretically 
 or with any direct relation to the essence of art, as 
 practically and in view of the normal capacity of the 
 human eye or mind for receiving an impression and 
 retaining it. That is a matter not so much of art as 
 of experience. If elevated to a criterion of art it 
 is rejected by instinct as much as by reflection. It 
 becomes, so far as it is accepted, gravely misleading, 
 
40 POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 and has been responsible for many aberrations of 
 criticism, when criticism, as it always tends to do, has 
 founded itself on current generalisations and elevated 
 them into regulating laws. As an instance, let me 
 quote from a writing which for long exercised great 
 influence over English thought, Addison's essay on 
 Milton in the Spectator, which was said to have estab- 
 lished, or almost to have created, Milton's fame as a 
 poet among his own countrymen. He is speaking of 
 the largeness of the subject of the Paradise Lost, which 
 gives it, he says, an importance greater than that of 
 the Iliad or the Aeneid. 
 
 "The anger of Achilles was of such consequence, 
 that it embroiled the kings of Greece, destroyed the 
 heroes of Asia, and engaged all the gods in factions. The 
 settlement of Aeneas in Italy produced the Caesars, and 
 gave birth to the Roman empire. Milton's subject was 
 still greater than either of the former; it does not 
 determine the fate of single persons or of nations, but 
 of a whole species." 
 
 " A Roman," Addison goes on, " could not but 
 rejoice in the escapes, successes, and victories of 
 Aeneas, and be grieved at any defeats, or disappoint- 
 ments, that befell him ; as a Greek must have had the 
 same regard for Achilles. Milton's poem is admirable 
 in this respect, since it is impossible for any of its 
 readers, whatever nation, country, or people he may 
 belong to, not to be related to the persons who are the 
 principal actors in it. We have an actual interest in 
 everything they do, and no less than our utmost 
 happiness is concerned, and lies at stake in their 
 behaviour." 
 
 As formal criticism this is obsolete. In quoting it 
 I may possibly seem merely to be setting up a man of 
 straw for the pleasure of knocking him down again. 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 41 
 
 But there is a reason for quoting it and for laying 
 emphasis on it. It is this ; that while the criticism 
 is obsolete, the misapprehension of poetry which it 
 implies will never be obsolete. Now it is just this 
 misapprehension of itself, and of life as functionally 
 related to itself, that poetry has perpetually to come 
 into fresh existence in order to correct. So long as 
 the misapprehension of poetry exists, the progress of 
 poetry is secured. 
 
 At the centre of all poetry, just because it is poetry 
 and in so far as it is poetry, is what is central and 
 elemental. The relative largeness or smallness of its 
 subject-matter is, to use the luminous metaphor of 
 Plato, the same text written in larger or smaller letters. 
 It may be written in the script of epic or romance, of 
 lyric or of drama. It may deal with feats of kings 
 and destinies of nations, with the life of those who wear 
 soft raiment and are in kings' houses or with the 
 obscure labour and sorrow of the people. The thing 
 round which it takes shape may be so slight as a dead 
 sparrow or a flower in the crannied wall : whatever it 
 be, Addison's words apply in the full weight of their 
 literal meaning : " We have an actual interest in it, and 
 no less than our utmost happiness is concerned." 
 
 Poetry ranges in its progress over all the immense 
 scale of existence. The image of perfection which it 
 condenses from the flying vapours of the world fades, 
 dissolves, is re-condensed, over and over again. It 
 never continues in one stay. Movement is the con- 
 dition of its being. 
 
 Hence it is that poetry, like life, is always beginning 
 afresh. In all the embodiments of itself through 
 which it passes it is mixed with matter. To that 
 matter it gives life ; by its incorporation in that 
 matter it makes its own life visible and sensible. But 
 
42 POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 the matter tends to encroach upon the vital spirit 
 which informs it ; poetry becomes encumbered by its 
 own creations. It has to shake itself free from them, 
 to volatilise for a new condensation. What is called 
 and not unjustly the full development of any 
 body or age of poetry is the sign that poetry is pre- 
 paring to pass elsewhere, to pass away from what it 
 has created and resume its function of creating. 
 
 This holds true not of mediaeval poetry only, but 
 of all poetry. It is equally true of Sophocles and 
 Euripides, or in more modern times and in our own 
 language, of Tennyson and Browning. The great in- 
 novation of the Athenian dramatists (to quote the 
 familiar sentence of Grote) consisted in the rhetorical, 
 the dialectical, and the ethical spirit which they 
 breathed into their poetry. That stage in the progress 
 of poetry means, once again, that poetry is preparing 
 for a new embodiment. The rhetoric, the dialectic 
 and the ethics soon clog the poetry. They were not 
 the essence of the poetry, but only its transitory 
 vesture. The vesture wears out, it ceases to fit ; the 
 live body of poetry outgrows it, slips it off, casts it 
 away. Poetry finds that it has no further use for 
 rhetoric and dialectic, or even for ethics. The image 
 of human perfection is not permanently in these. The 
 realities of life lie deeper, and are simpler. 
 
 " In the eyes of the Gods 
 War-laden galleys, and armies on white roads, 
 And unforgotten names, and the cold stars 
 That have built all are dust on a moth's wing. 
 These are their lures, but they have set their heart 
 On tears and laughter." 
 
 Or again, what makes the Aeneid (that I may take an 
 instance now from Latin poetry) is not the greatness 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 43 
 
 of its subject, great as that is : as Heyne describes it 
 in the fine preface from which it is a delight to quote, 
 Magna ct ardua consilia, excelsi et magnifici animorum 
 sensus, virtus ultra vulgarem mortalitatis modulum, solus 
 civium et imperil maiestas. These are not what make 
 the Aeneid: they are what make a Pharsalia or a 
 Thelaid. What makes the Aeneid is the divine Vir- 
 gilian pity. These are the lures of the high Muses, 
 but they have set their hearts on tears and laughter. 
 To Virgil they gave the " tears of things." 
 
 Let us take, as another instance, the poetry of 
 Horace a poet who for the purpose of testing theories 
 or generalisations about poetry is of unique value, 
 because he gives us, as one might say, poetry stripped 
 to the bone. It is not the enlarged matter, the high 
 argument of his political and moral odes that gives 
 him his quality as a poet: indeed it is only his ex- 
 quisite workmanship that redeems these from being, 
 as all lyrics based on their model have since been, 
 mannered and dull. He makes that universal appeal 
 against which time and change and fashion seem power- 
 less, because the Odes deal with the central realities of 
 life the little things. By the piled logs when Soracte 
 is white, under the ilex that shadows the spring in the 
 summer heat, yes, even in the suburban back-garden 
 with its clipped vine, he sees the whole pageant of the 
 world pass as though at a great distance. Unconcerned 
 with the life and labour of the people neglegens ne qua 
 populus laboret he is almost as little concerned with 
 the large subject-matter of epic or romance, with high 
 actions, and deep passions, and wide adventures. Cetera 
 fluminus ritu feruntur ; in the quiet life, with its 
 bounded scope, its narrow range of thought and feel- 
 ing, he found and fixed that on which the gods, and 
 men too, have set their heart: tears and laughter, 
 
44 POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 debita lacrima, lentus risus note the scrupulous felicity 
 of the epithets, those weighed and measured epithets 
 in the use of which Horace is so consummate a master, 
 the " quiet laughter/' the " due tears " of that narrow 
 bounded space which is most central and most real in 
 life. 
 
 Thus it is that the progress of poetry involves, in a 
 certain sense, a continual reversion to its first elements. 
 It develops and expands under the hand of successive 
 poets, gathering into itself more and more of the 
 whole complex fabric of life, conquering province after 
 province. With the development of technique things 
 that once were difficult for it to express become com- 
 paratively easy. It masters the art of expression; it 
 meets the requirements of a closer truth to nature ; it 
 becomes more and more realistic : and then, one day, 
 men find that with all its achieved realism it has lost 
 touch of reality. 
 
 The first result of this discovery is dismay and dis- 
 illusion; the cry goes up that poetry is exhausted. 
 According to their temperament, people raise this cry 
 with feelings that range from exultation to despair. 
 To one view, the progress of human thought has got 
 beyond poetry and is putting it away as a childish 
 thing. To another, the world has entered upon an 
 age too late, and the Muses have left earth. Both 
 views are profoundly wrong. It is not that poetry is 
 exhausted: it is that poetry has exhausted one par- 
 ticular form of expression, one particular embodiment of 
 perishable matter. It has used up that, done what 
 can be done with it, and turns to look elsewhere for a 
 new body to fill with its own unexhausted; imperish- 
 able life. 
 
 That phrase of an age too late is familiar. As it was 
 first used by Milton (if he was the first to use it, which 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 45 
 
 I do not know : the meaning, if not the exact wording, 
 was of course no novelty, then or in Virgil's time or in 
 a time as far back again beyond Virgil) it had a special 
 and obvious relevance. At the age of over fifty, blind, 
 poor, amid the wreck of all his own earlier hopes and 
 the triumph of his enemies, it was natural that he 
 should fall into a mood of despondence. We may not 
 all remember that the exact phrase is used again, 
 whether by coincidence or design, by Wordsworth in 
 1798, the annus mirdbilis from which modern poetry 
 began its splendid progress. " The world's a sleepy 
 world, and 'tis, I fear, an age too late," he wrote then, 
 just when the sleep was being broken and the new 
 day had begun. And in the very next verse of the 
 same poem comes that wonderful confession of faith in 
 which poetry itself becomes reincarnate : 
 
 " Long have I loved what I behold, 
 The night that calms, the day that cheers : 
 The common growth of mother-earth 
 Suffices me her tears, her mirth, 
 Her humblest mirth and tears." 
 
 With these words poetry has gone back to life ; or 
 rather, we might say, life has come back to poetry. 
 
 /Neither poetry nor history repeats itself. With 
 both, the movement of revolution is also a movement 
 of advance ; and when the wheel has come full circle, 
 it has reached a different point from that at which the 
 circle began. Of that large orbit on which the epi- 
 cycles are described we know little ; we have not its 
 formula and cannot, except by divination, predict its 
 course. We call it, whatever be the implication 
 attached to the word, by the name of progress. It 
 has a periodic element ; the periodic element in it is 
 indeed obvious, and often appeals strikingly to the 
 
46 POETRY AND LIFE 
 
 imagination. We can speak quite rationally of the 
 lessons of history, although they are lessons the rele- 
 vance of which is generally perceived only after the 
 event. Just so we can speak of the lessons of poetry, 
 can learn them and in some degree teach them. We 
 can trace successive cycles of poetical development, and 
 use the analogies of one to throw light upon another. 
 
 The analogies between the two bodies of poetry with 
 which I have been particularly dealing are in a high 
 degree suggestive and fertile. An interesting point on 
 which I have barely touched is that in both cases the 
 " popular " poetry, the poetry produced by the people 
 for the people, is more archaic and hieratic than the 
 poetry of the court. It reminds one of the saying 
 that nothing is so conservative as a democracy. New 
 departures, while they are in a sense the product of 
 a progressive consciousness diffused through a whole 
 race or nation, are in fact initiated by a single person, 
 or a few persons, who are different from the mass 
 of people, and with whom the mass of people are 
 out of sympathy. Genius is individual, while taste is 
 a matter of diffused habit ; and every new develop- 
 ment of poetry is at first as unpopular with the 
 general public as it is with the expert critic. To 
 gain its ground, the new poetry may have for a 
 time to clothe itself in the garments of a language 
 which has been so long familiar that it is on the point 
 of becoming obsolete. Its forms remain conservative, 
 while its spirit is revolutionary. The most splendid 
 renascences have taken the form of going back to a 
 past, when they were really creating a future. 
 
 Homer and Chaucer are alike in this, that they both 
 represent static worlds, " middle ages." Langland, in 
 the way which I have attempted to indicate, gives the 
 complement of the Chaucerian world, as Hesiod does 
 
POETRY AND LIFE 47 
 
 of the Homeric. They deal with what Homer and 
 Chaucer left out. In that part of life left out, that 
 unaccounted-for residuum, there lay, as in the un- 
 explained errors in the calculations of astronomy, 
 the promise and potency of fresh advances among 
 unimagined worlds. The advance was not through 
 Hesiod in Greece, nor through Langland here. It was 
 through the gap in the Homeric and Chaucerian 
 poetry which the existence of Hesiod and Langland 
 implies. Nor did it take the form of filling up that 
 gap. The progress of Greek poetry did not take the 
 direction of regaining the romance which in Homer is 
 suppressed. The progress of English poetry did not 
 take the direction of regaining that touch with the 
 pathos of existence, the life and labour of the people, 
 which Chaucer had ignored. It was a new birth. In 
 both cases a long interval elapses, obscure in history 
 in the one case, obscure in literature in the other. 
 Then conies in both cases the Renascence, the new 
 world : there Hellas and the Greek lyric, here England 
 of the sixteenth century and the predecessors of Shake- 
 speare, rising to embody in modern poetry the many- 
 sidedness, the mobility, the thrusting and expanding 
 movement of modern life. 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 VARIOUS collections of minor Latin poetry, extant in 
 MSS. dating from the eighth to the eleventh century, 
 have been put together by modern editors into the 
 volumes which are briefly and conveniently called the 
 Latin Anthology. They contain a considerable number 
 of pieces attributed at one time or another, and with or 
 without reason, to Virgil's hand. At the one end of 
 the scale is the Culex, where the external evidence for 
 Virgilian authorship is exceptionally strong. At the 
 other end are pieces where the Virgilian attribution is 
 obviously a mere piece of ignorance or stupidity ; the 
 best known instance being the Pervigilium Veneris, 
 where the first word of the title was misread by a 
 blundering transcriber into the words Per VergiLium. 
 It will be sufficient here to confine our attention to the 
 pieces printed in Professor Ellis' volume, Appendix 
 Vergiliana sive Carmina minora Vergilio adtributa. The 
 contents of this volume are as follows : the Culex, the 
 Ciris, the Moretum, the Dime, the Copa, the Catalepton, 
 the JUst et Non, the Vir Bonus, and the Maecenas. Of 
 the last three, the Est et Non and the Vir Bonus are in 
 the manner, and may be confidently assigned to the 
 period, of the fourth- century revival in which Ausonius 
 is the principal figure ; while the elegy on the death 
 of Maecenas, whether it is a piece actually written 
 on the occasion, or an academic exercise on that 
 theme composed at a somewhat later date, has in 
 either case no connexion with a poet who predeceased 
 
 48 
 
VIRGIL AND VIKGILIANISM 49 
 
 Maecenas by eleven years. The others fall into two 
 groups. 
 
 The first of the two groups consists of three poems, 
 the Culex, Ciris, and Moretum, which stand by them- 
 selves. They were all, we may say with full assurance, 
 written within Virgil's lifetime ; and for the ascription 
 to Virgil himself there is strong tradition in the case of 
 the Culex and Ciris, and a greater or less amount of 
 prima facie plausibility in the case of all three. On 
 any theory of their authorship they throw much 
 valuable light on the development of Latin poetry in the 
 Virgilian age, and on the poetical methods and ten- 
 dencies which contributed towards Virgil's own poetry. 
 
 The second group is at once slighter and more 
 miscellaneous in its contents. The Dirae consists of 
 two hexameter pastorals, in the manner, and attribut- 
 able to about the date, of Virgil's Eclogues. In the 
 hands of some transcriber they had been run together 
 as a single poem, but are distinguished as two, the 
 Dirae and the Lydia, by modern editors since Friedrich 
 Jacobs. The bright little elegiac piece called the Copa 
 belongs to about the same date. It is the work of a 
 real poet : but the touch and handling are totally un- 
 like Virgil's. Next on the list come three pieces pre- 
 fixed to the Catalepton. They are inscriptions for a 
 garden-statue, each in a different metre. All belong to 
 the school of Catullus, whose language and manner 
 they follow closely and with no small measure of grace 
 and charm. The Catalepton proper is a collection of 
 fourteen pieces, omitting the two numbered 13A and 
 14A, which are epigrams of no literary value and of 
 obviously late date. Eight of them are in elegiac verse, 
 and the rest in iambics or scazons. There are only 
 three among the fourteen of which it can be said con- 
 fidently that they are not early works of Virgil ; there 
 
 D 
 
50 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 is only one of which it can be said confidently that it 
 is : and the confidence in its case rests on no internal 
 certainty, but on the express testimony of Quintilian. 
 
 Such, described as succinctly as possible, are the 
 contents of the Appendix Vergiliana. In regarding 
 them from the point of view which I wish to take 
 that of a study of Virgilianism in the age of Virgil 
 they group themselves rather differently. For this 
 purpose the Juvenilia may be left pretty much out oi 
 account. Whether occasional pieces or merely schoo' 
 exercises, they are of little use towards our understand- 
 ing of Virgil : they do not tell us anything about tht 
 development of his genius, and the surroundings ir 
 which it developed, that we do not already know 
 One exception may be made to this general statement 
 They enforce the recognition to be given to the in- 
 fluence of Catullus on the generation which succeeded 
 or outlived him, on the movement in poetry which was 
 proceeding at Rome midway between the Ciceroniar 
 and the Augustan age, say from the death of Catullui 
 in 54 to the appearance of the Georgics in 30 B.C 
 They enable us therefore to appreciate rather mor< 
 fully than we could appreciate without them ho^ 
 much it meant, to himself and the world, wher 
 Virgil by the publication of the Eclogues cancellec 
 the existing tradition and announced a new poetry 
 to a new age. 
 
 Dismissing these minor pieces then with this singl< 
 note of recognition, we find that we have to deal witl 
 five poems which fall into two groups. The earlier o 
 the two groups stands in intimate relation to the Virgi 
 of the Bucolics ; the later, in a relation possibly lesi 
 intimate as to this I shall have something to sa^ 
 later but in any case marked and important, to th< 
 Virgil of the Georgics. The one group consists of th< 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 51 
 
 Ciris, Dime, and Lydm\ the other, of the Culex and 
 Moretum. 
 
 If any argument were needed to show how baseless 
 is the notion of a hostility between poetry and science, 
 one might be found in the immense gain that has 
 come in the last generation to appreciation and under- 
 standing of the poets from the introduction of scientific 
 method into the study of poetry. It is only this 
 which has enabled us to realise, in any full way, how 
 poetry is a function of life. It is only this which has 
 enabled us to realise at all, how the progress of poetry 
 is not something discontinuous, accidental, and un- 
 accountable. Our very notions of poetic creation have 
 silently and profoundly changed. We no longer think 
 of poetry as something half mechanical and half 
 magical. The mechanism and the magic are both 
 there, both as wonderful as ever; but they are being 
 realised now as the mechanism of life and the magic 
 of life. 
 
 One result of this changed attitude is that the 
 poet does not present himself to us as an isolated 
 personality or the poem as an isolated fact. Both are 
 attached organically to their environment by a thousand 
 filaments. All poetry is the projection on a visible 
 plane of a vast and exceedingly complex mass of 
 poetical tendencies and potentialities. It is a living 
 organism with powers of absorption, assimilation, re- 
 constitution. The originality of a poet or of a poem 
 does not mean that he makes it, or that it makes itself 
 in some unaccountable way, out of nothing. The 
 greatest poets may derive the most from predecessors or 
 even from their contemporaries. The greatest poems 
 and this is the case with Virgil's poems to an eminent 
 degree may be the fullest of what are called borrow- 
 ings, if they do not receive the blunter name of thefts. 
 
52 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 Before the organic quality of poetry was illuminated 
 by modern science, this fact, which is unquestionable, 
 had to be apologised for and explained away. " His 
 known wealth was so great," said Johnson of Cowley, 
 "that he might borrow without loss of his credit." We 
 know now that in dealing with the vital energy of 
 poetry the case cannot be put fully in these mechani- 
 cal terms. The poet does not borrow, he absorbs and 
 assimilates; what passes into his imagination reissues 
 as his own, because it has become part of himself. 
 The boundaries of personality are, in this as in 
 other matters, elusive, and can only be fixed by certain 
 conventions. But the central fact of personality is as 
 vital as it is indisputable. 
 
 It is in this light that we must regard Virgil if 
 we are to understand his position in poetry. For at 
 least ten years before the publication of the Eclogues 
 he had been studying his art intensely. But it is 
 equally important to remember that he had not done ! 
 so in isolation. He was one of a school or circle 
 so close were the relations among them that we may 
 perhaps call them a brotherhood to whom poetry j 
 had taken a new meaning and who felt in it new 
 possibilities. Something of the same sort happened 
 in Elizabethan England with the group of young poets 
 and students which included Sidney and Spenser. 
 In both cases, as if to make the parallel more com- 
 plete, the most brilliant and accomplished member 
 of the group was swept away from poetry into public ; 
 life, and died young. Sidney, more fortunate than 
 Cornelius Gallus, was struck down on the field of 
 battle, and died before the coldness with which he 
 was regarded by his sovereign had matured into 
 disgrace. The heartless words in which Elizabeth 
 is said to have commented on his death are such 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 53 
 
 as one may fancy Augustus using of Gallus if he had 
 perished gloriously while still viceroy of Egypt. But 
 in both cases the decisive step in poetry was taken 
 by the student, not by the courtier. The Eclogues, 
 like Spenser's Shepherds Calendar, were issued and 
 accepted as the manifesto of the new poetry. Their 
 shy, diffident, reserved author found himself the leader 
 of a movement, the gate-vein of the heart's blood 
 (to use the vivid phrase applied by Browning to the 
 poet who, nearly thirteen centuries later, attempted 
 a like task anew), which was to fill the exhausted 
 channels of poetry. Virgil became, at once and once 
 for all, the mouthpiece of that larger movement which, 
 as we now look back upon it in the result, we may 
 best describe by the name of Virgilianism. 
 
 In spite of all the obvious weaknesses of the 
 Eclogues, they obtained an easy, immediate, and 
 almost universal conquest alike of popular fame and 
 of critical admiration. There were two reasons for 
 this. One was what I have just mentioned, the 
 fact that they bore the standard of the new poetry. 
 Latin poetry was in a critical position. The extra- 
 ordinary personal genius of Catullus had given an 
 adventitious lustre to the hard, scholarly Alexandrian- 
 ism of the school to which he technically belonged. 
 It seemed to hold the field. But it was leading 
 poetry up a blind alley. From this the new poetry 
 opened an outlet ; and the enthusiasm evoked by 
 \he Eclogues was very largely due to a sense of relief. 
 Still tentative, uncertain, imperfect, full of faults 
 of workmanship, the new poetry had shaken off the 
 fetters of an exhausting convention ; its feet still 
 stumbled, its eyes did not see clear, but it was alive. 
 It bore the hope and promise of the future. 
 
 But there was another reason. We are too apt 
 
54 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 to fancy, in an age intoxicated with discoveries, and 
 staggering under its new armament of critical methods, 
 that we can understand and interpret the poets better 
 than their contemporaries could better even than 
 they could themselves. Do the Eclogues mean more 
 to us now than they did to their first readers ? Can 
 they mean half as much ? They come to us indeed 
 charged with a thousand associations which have 
 gathered round them in the course of nearly twenty 
 centuries. But these associations, while they enrich, 
 also obscure. We can never have a first impression 
 of them, as a thing hitherto unknown, a new voice, 
 the dawn of a new day. To some at least of their 
 earliest readers perhaps to many they represented 
 not merely a movement but a literal creation. They 
 were not only Virgilianism, but Virgil himself; some- 
 thing wholly new, wholly alone, in tenderness and 
 sweetness, in vibrating pathos of language, in that 
 melancholy majesty which was to expand later into 
 what we know. The criticism passed on them by 
 scholars may have been, as it still tends to be, formal 
 and shallow ; it was not however on the critics, but 
 on the lovers of poetry, that they told in their full 
 effect as poetry. The new poet, no less than the new 
 poetry, became a passion, an adoration. 
 
 Virgilianism spoke through Virgil in the Eclogues. 
 But it also spoke through other voices^ Gallus, 
 Varius, Macer, Cinna, the poet only known under the 
 unidentified pseudonym of Codrus, perhaps others of 
 whom all certain trace is lost, were likewise its 
 exponents, though each of them added some personal 
 note of his own. Even did we possess all the poetry 
 produced by the circle, we should find it hard to 
 distinguish sharply between the work of one and that 
 of another, or to distinguish that in any one of them 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 55 
 
 which was the product of the movement, and almost 
 impersonal, from that which was individual. The 
 methods and language of the new poetry were not 
 yet crystallised. As they became fixed, Virgil's work 
 came to differ more and more from that of his brother- 
 poets of the school, not because it was more original 
 in the sense of deriving less from others, but because 
 of two qualities in which he left the others far behind. 
 One of these was the constructive and architectural 
 power which was part of his own gift from nature, and 
 which he slowly developed through unceasing study. 
 The other was his power of fusing his material by the 
 greater intensity of his own genius. In this latter 
 quality he was pre-eminent from the first. 
 
 The output of the Virgilian circle, other than the 
 Eclogues, was certainly large in these years ; but the 
 three poems which we are now considering are the 
 only substantial fragments which survive. Their 
 authorship has been long a puzzle, and the wildest 
 conjectures have been made with regard to it. No 
 one in modern times has seriously argued that they 
 are by Virgil himself; it is their relation to Virgil 
 that is the problem. It will be convenient to take 
 the Ciris first. 
 
 What leaps to the eyes in reading the Ciris is its 
 saturation throughout with Virgilian phrases. A pas- 
 sage of three lines occurs, with one slight verbal 
 change, in the sixth Eclogue. A passage of four lines 
 occurs, with no change at all, in the first Georgic. 
 But these are only the two most glaring instances 
 of what is the case throughout. Go through the Ciris 
 carefully, marking all the lines and half lines and 
 phrases which occur, with or without some slight 
 variation, in the Eclogues, in the Georgics, and in the 
 earlier books of the Aeneid, and you will find at the 
 
56 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 end that your Ciris is a mass of pencil-marks. The 
 most obvious conclusion to draw would naturally be 
 that the Ciris is a post-Virgilian poem, and that 
 Virgil's poems have been ruthlessly laid under con- 
 tribution for it, as they were, hundreds of years after- 
 wards, by the cento-makers of the decadence, and by 
 the Latin poets of the Renaissance. But this ex- 
 planation will not bear scrutiny. For on the one 
 hand the Ciris is not merely a set of verses cleverly 
 strung together : it is not an exercise in a dead 
 language, nor a fabric of verse mechanically compiled. 
 It is a living and a complete work of art, with a 
 genius of its own, an unmistakeable personal note of 
 style and manner. And on the other hand the 
 internal evidence of language and versification fixes 
 it demonstrably within the period we are now con- 
 sidering, the twenty years or thereabout after the 
 death of Catullus. That being its date, it follows 
 from its pervading and inwrought Virgilianisms that it 
 is a product of the Virgilian circle. This fact, together 
 with certain very distinguished poetical qualities of its 
 own, makes it a document of great importance in the 
 history of poetry. 
 
 Only in recent years have the delicate and rigorous 
 processes of modern analysis been applied to the Ciris ; 
 only in recent years indeed could that have been 
 possible, for such analysis is the creation of modern 
 science or rather perhaps we should say, is a creation 
 of that development of the human mind from which 
 modern science itself has been created. Professor 
 Skutsch of Breslau, one of the ablest of modern Latin 
 scholars, has approached the problem in his two 
 treatises entitled Aus Vergils Fruhzeit, published in 
 1901 and 1906. If any fault is to be found with 
 these two volumes, it is that they show here and 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 57 
 
 there, in particular criticisms, a somewhat imperfect 
 realisation of the way in which a poet works and the 
 way in which poetry comes into existence. No one 
 who is not himself a poet quite knows this ; and few 
 scholars, even if they be scholars of real judgment 
 and insight, are wholly free from a tendency to 
 analyse poetry as if it were an inorganic substance. 
 Dann hat 'er die Teile in seiner Hand ; Fehlt leider nur 
 das geistige Band : the old gibe of Mephistopheles is 
 still true of scholars in the country of Faust and in 
 other countries as well But subject to this reservation 
 and it is a reservation only, not a detraction Professor 
 Skutsch has produced a work of masterly constructive 
 criticism. He has not only seen and stated the prob- 
 lem ; though that would have been much, for it had 
 hardly been done at all adequately or lucidly before. 
 He has done much more ; he has given a solution of it 
 which may be accepted as in the main right; and in 
 doing so he has made the most important contribution 
 of modern times towards the appreciation of Virgil 
 as an artist, and of Virgilianism as art. 
 
 The solution, as he states it, is that the Ciris was 
 written by Gallus, at the time when Gallus and Virgil 
 were both young poets living in the closest intimacy. 
 That intimacy has always been matter of common 
 knowledge; one need not go beyond the Eclogues 
 themselves for evidence. The association was probably 
 quite as close as that of Spenser and Sidney in 1579, 
 or even as that of Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. 
 But the true inference, as it bears both upon the Ciris 
 and on those lines in the sixth and tenth Eclogues 
 which, according to the Servian commentary, were 
 taken from poems by Gallus, now lost, was until 
 recently missed. It may be taken as now established 
 that, so far as the Ciris is the work of Gallus, the 
 
58 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 phrases and passages which are common to it and 
 to the Georgics or the Aeneid were taken by Virgil 
 from the Ciris, and not taken by the author of the 
 Ciris from the Aeneid and the Georgics. 
 
 There is nothing surprising in this. Nor is it per- 
 haps surprising that some German critics should find 
 in it an opportunity for taking a turn at their national 
 pastime of Virgil- baiting. Virgil was hotly assailed 
 with the charge of plagiarism by his own contem- 
 poraries ; but it never seems to have troubled him 
 much. He knew his art. He knew that the thing 
 that matters is not where a poet gets his material, but 
 what he does with h\ Whether from Homer, or from 
 Apollonius, or from Theocritus, or from Euphorion and 
 Parthenius ; whether from Ennius or from Lucretius 
 and Varro of Atax, or from his own friends and fellow- 
 students, he took, largely and unsparingly, whatever he 
 found in them that served his purpose. What he took, 
 he made his own by the mere act of taking it. Homer 
 by Homer I mean the poet who gave us our Iliad 
 had done the same thing long before. Both argosies 
 are freighted with the treasure of many sunken ships. 
 
 But there is an important point to be added. " So 
 far," I said just now, " as the Ciris is the work of 
 Gallus." That it is the work of Gallus, to something 
 of the same extent as the Eclogues are the work of 
 Virgil, we cannot I think on view of the whole 
 evidence reasonably doubt. But the two young poets 
 were not only linked by a close friendship, and in- 
 spired by common aims and enthusiasms. They 
 worked at their art together. Their poetry in those 
 years sprang up between them, in the interaction -and 
 mutual influence of their two minds. To what extent 
 this was so in any particular poem or passage we cannot 
 tell. But the fact, with all it involves, is indisputable. 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 59 
 
 We do not know what of Sidney there is in the Shepherds 
 Calendar. Coleridge in later years gave a statement 
 of what he had contributed to Wordsworth's pieces, 
 and Wordsworth to his, in the Lyrical Ballads. We 
 may accept that statement as correct, or not, according 
 to the view we are disposed to take of the accuracy of 
 Coleridge's memory or of the degree of his regard for 
 truth. But the poems came into being through the 
 interpenetration of genius between the two : their 
 authors were the Wordsworth who was influenced 
 by Coleridge, and the Coleridge who was influenced 
 by Wordsworth. Such, or of such a kind, was the 
 relation between Virgil and Gallus. And this would 
 be true even if it were the case that the sensuous, 
 brilliant, erratic Gallus was as far below Coleridge 
 in essential poetic genius as the brooding solitary 
 Virgil was above Wordsworth. 
 
 When therefore Servius tells us that certain lines 
 in the tenth Eclogue were taken over (translata) from 
 Gallus ; or when we come ourselves to the conclusion 
 that certain other lines common to the Ciris and the 
 Georgics must have appeared in the Ciris first, because 
 it was written before the Georgics ; or when Professor 
 Skutsch, entering on a much more debateable ground, 
 argues that certain other lines or phrases common 
 to the Ciris and the Eclogues are Gallus' and not 
 Virgil's, because to his mind, and according to his 
 canons of criticism, they come more naturally and more 
 relevantly in the Ciris in all these cases it is 
 necessary to emphasise the very subtle nature of 
 joint poetical authorship and mutual poetical influence. 
 " Great contemporaries," said a famous critic long ago, 
 " whet and cultivate each other ; and mutual borrow- 
 ing and commerce makes the common riches of 
 learning." This is true of poetry as well as of other 
 
60 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 branches of the literary art. Gallus was a borrower, 
 if we must use the word, as well as Virgil : the Ciris 
 is full of borrowings, and it is more likely than not 
 that among them are borrowings from Virgil. What 
 Virgil may have lent he had the right to resume, 
 as what he borrowed he had the right to keep. Both 
 were his own. 
 
 Yet with all its Virgilianism, the quality of the 
 poetry in the Ciris is different from that of the 
 poetry in the Eclogues. It has a distinct individual 
 touch. The line of development taken by its author 
 is not the same as Virgil's, though as yet the two have 
 diverged from one another but little. We may trace, 
 I think, in the Ciris 1 a genius that had developed 
 faster than Virgil's, that was more quick and alert. 
 It is the common case of early brilliance which shoots 
 ahead, but soon comes to its limit. Virgil, we know, 
 composed slowly and with difficulty : the author of 
 the Ciris seems to write with ease, and to have a 
 great natural gift of imitating the style of his pre- 
 decessors. The Ciris begins with four lines which 
 are pure Catullus. Of the opening line, 
 
 "Etsi me vario iactatum laudis amore," 
 
 one might be tempted to say, Aut Valerius aut diabolus. 
 Then follow a dozen lines more which are as pure 
 Lucretius; not only full of Lucretian phrases, but 
 accurately reproducing the Lucretian colour and move- 
 ment. The first forty-seven lines are indeed throughout 
 a brilliant exercise or variation in a synthesis of these 
 two styles. Then, in lines forty-eight to fifty-three, 
 the new style shows itself for the first time. 
 
 " Impia prodigiis ut quondam exterrita mollis 
 Scylla novos avium sublimis in aere coetus 
 Viderit, et tenui conscendens aethera penna 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 61 
 
 Caeruleis sua tecta supervolitaverit alls : 
 Hanc pro purpureo poenam scelerata capillo 
 Pro patria solvens excisa [et] funditus urbe." 
 
 That new style is Virgil's. Eclogues, Georgics, the 
 earlier part of the Aeneid : we have them all in these 
 six lines. It is as though Virgil himself had sat 
 down by Gallus and guided his pen, or as though 
 Gallus had suddenly felt and begun to reproduce 
 Virgil's own melody and phrasing. So it goes on, 
 in the same rapid brilliant movement, with the same 
 enriched style and language which seem crossed and 
 mingled, as in a web of shot silk, to produce a new 
 fabric with a sheen and lustre of its own. It would 
 be fascinating to follow this through the poem line by 
 line : let me just quote one instance in which the 
 two elements, the older and the newer, lie side by 
 side most unmistakeably. (11. 349-352.) 
 
 " Postera lux ubi prima diem mortalibus almum 
 fExtulit et gelida taedamf quatiebat ab Oeta 
 Quern pavidae alternis fugitant optantque puellae, 
 Hesperiurn vitant, optant ardescere Eoum." 
 
 The MSS, are corrupt and the reading uncertain in 
 the second of these four lines : and what I have 
 printed above has no authority. But for the rest, the 
 first line of the four is in the exact phrasing and 
 rhythm of the Aeneid ; the third and fourth are in the 
 exact phrasing and rhythm of the marriage-hymn of 
 Catullus. 
 
 Virgil tells us that he had already begun to sing 
 of kings and battles when he wrote the Eclogues. 
 The Aeneid was the work not only of the eleven years 
 after the publication of the Georgics, but of his whole 
 lifetime ; and the number of instances in which the 
 Ciris recalls or anticipates the Aeneid lends support 
 to the view, which is in itself highly probable, that 
 
62 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 much of what afterwards became the Aeneid was 
 written in these early years, in the ardour of youth and 
 under the stimulus of close friendship and emulation 
 among that circle of young poets. All through the 
 Aeneid, here and there, a trained ear and eye can 
 still retrace the lines and cadences of that youthful 
 composition, though it was afterwards brooded over, 
 remoulded and retouched year after year, and left still 
 imperfect at his death in Virgil's own fastidious and 
 merciless judgment. 
 
 When we turn from the Ciris to the two pastorals, 
 the Dirae and Lydia, we find ourselves still in the 
 same circle of poetry, but reading the work of a third 
 poet. Who he was cannot be even plausibly con- 
 jectured. The Sicilian landscape in the two poems 
 seems not wholly conventional; nor have they that 
 delicate but distinct romantic touch which the Ciris 
 shares with the Eclogues, and which it is tempting, 
 though fanciful and of doubtful relevance, to connect 
 with a Northern and Celtic element in the blood of 
 both Gallus and Virgil. They suggest the Latin of 
 the South ; there is a flavour in them which is analo- 
 gous to that of the volcanic wines of the Terra di 
 Lavoro. A little hard, a little heavy, they are more 
 on the ordinary lines of Roman poetry, and show its 
 characteristic defects. They have a quality of style 
 and substance which is peculiarly Roman but likewise 
 peculiarly un-Virgilian. The influence of Virgilianisrn 
 is strong in them, but it has not penetrated to the 
 centre. 
 
 A note in their style, which is also Roman, is the 
 tendency to be sententious, and the tendency to state 
 things clearly and leave little to suggestion or impli- 
 cation. "Virgil," says Dryden, and it is one of his 
 many exquisite criticisms, " had the gift of expressing 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 63 
 
 much in little, and sometimes in silence." That gift 
 was personal to himself; he did not share it with his 
 school. This other poet will not be content to end, 
 in the final apostrophe to Lydia, on the cadence of 
 semper amabo. He must needs add another line to 
 make all sure : 
 
 " Gaudia semper enim tua me meminisse licebit." 
 So too in the Dirac 
 
 " Piscetur nostris in finibus ad vena arator," 
 he says, and then cannot forbear from going on : 
 " Advena civili qui semper crimine crevit." 
 
 " The last and greatest art " is lacking here. Dryden's 
 criticism recurs : "as he knew what to say, so he 
 knows also when to leave off, a continence which is 
 practised by few writers." This failure of continence, 
 it may be noted in passing, is also characteristic of the 
 Culex. We find it there in passages which reproduce 
 the exact phrasing of this passage : 
 
 " impia lotos, 
 Impia, quae socios Ithaci maerentis abegit," 
 
 or, 
 
 or, 
 
 " feror avia car pens, 
 Avia Cimmerios inter distantia lucos : " 
 
 " Ditis sine iudice sedes, 
 ludice, qui vitae post mortem vindicat acta." 
 
 If the Culex is from Virgil's own hand, we see here 
 what those first drafts of Virgil's were like which he 
 
64 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 distilled and concentrated later, and which he kept so 
 jealously from the public eye. 
 
 Yet this poet was no mere versifier. He is at his best 
 when he is perfectly simple ; sometimes he is almost 
 Greek in his faculty of putting into a phrase of plain 
 prose that faint inner glow, that just perceptible musical 
 cadence, which make it poetry. This is most striking 
 in the Lydia, the second of the two pieces. 
 
 " Non ulla puella 
 Doctior in terris fuit aut f ormosior " 
 
 it is like a phrase from a Greek lyric for pellucid 
 colour. Or again : 
 
 " Luna, tuus tecum est : cur non est et mea mecum ? 
 Luna, dolor nosti quid sit : miserere dolentis." 
 
 There is the touch of Theocritus here in the way that 
 the popular ballad-verse is taken up and woven into the 
 structure of a poem. It is not such an easy thing to 
 do. Theocritus could do it, but that was because 
 Theocritus was not only a poet but a Greek poet : for 
 a quality of the finest Greek poetry, from Homer to the 
 late Anthologists, is its power of taking common lan- 
 guage and transforming it into poetry by an all but im- 
 perceptible touch. Virgil could do it, but not always ; 
 he attempted it in the last four lines of the fourth 
 Eclogue with very dubious success. 
 
 Nor is that all. One can hear in this couplet, 
 pulsing under the foreign vesture of the quantitative 
 hexameter, the native poetical form of Italy, the 
 accentual rhyming trochaic. Listen, and it will emerge. 
 
 " Luna, tuus est ut tecum, 
 Cur non est et mea mecum ? 
 Luna, quid sit dolor sentis, 
 Miserere tu dolentis." 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 65 
 
 The subterranean current of the native metres was, 
 long afterwards, to come to the surface again. Even in 
 the central classical period it was never wholly lost ; 
 and here it is. 
 
 This poet had, too, a sensitiveness beyond the 
 common run of Latin poets for the aspects and 
 processes of nature. In this quality Yirgil stands 
 alone ; but in Virgil it is from the first mixed up with 
 the rapt, almost mystical spirit in which he regards 
 the external world. There is none of this here ; but 
 there is a notable power of seizing and expressing 
 natural phenomena, especially visible tones or colours, 
 with a delicate precision. This may be seen for in- 
 stance where he speaks of the rain smoking on the 
 hills, fumantes montibus imbres : or of the first appear- 
 ance of the stars at evening faint in a clear green sky : 
 sidera per viridem redeunt cum pallida mundum. 
 
 The poems we have been considering are all that is 
 left to us to supplement the Eclogues themselves 
 in trying to reconstitute and appreciate the earlier 
 growth and movement of Virgilianism in the Virgilian 
 circle. When we pass from them to the Culex and 
 Moretum we pass from the period of the Eclogues 
 to that of the Georgics. In the ten years between 40 
 and 30 B.C. the group of new poets had grown or drifted 
 apart. Virgil had developed his unique personal genius, 
 and already stood alone, in unquestioned and solitary 
 eminence. Gallus had been absorbed into public life, 
 and perhaps had already exhausted his precocious and 
 brilliant gift of poetry. Of the work of Macer, Varius, 
 Cinna, and the rest, we know little or nothing. So far 
 as the progress of poetry showed itself in them, we may 
 conjecture that it took developments analogous, up to 
 the limit of their powers in each case, to the develop- 
 ment which took place in Virgil himself. But 
 
 E 
 
66 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 Virgilianism, in the significant sense of the term, is 
 now no longer a common poetical impulse, a joint 
 poetical movement, of which Virgil is the recognised 
 mouthpiece, the chosen standard-bearer. It has be- 
 come the movement and impulse produced by Virgil, 
 and communicating itself from his poetry to that of 
 other poets, who are now not his colleagues, but his 
 imitators or his followers. It is already well started 
 on its way towards becoming an external model, an 
 academic standard. The Virgilians have become a 
 school, of which Virgil is the master. The result is 
 that the Vergiliana belonging to these later years 
 throw but little in the way of side-light on Virgil's 
 own poetry. The problems of authorship which they 
 involve are difficult, subtle, and interesting, but they 
 have not the same suggestive and fascinating quality. 
 
 The poems in question are the Culex and the Moretum: 
 and the question with regard to them is whether one 
 or both are, in part or in whole, Virgil's own work. 
 
 That Virgil must have written a good deal, besides 
 the Georgics as they were given by him to the world, 
 during the ten years after the publication of the 
 Eclogues, would be obvious even if there were not 
 express and authentic testimony to the fact. His 
 whole life was given up to poetry. He wrote much, 
 brooded over it long and wrought on it endlessly, 
 altered it, expunged it, destroyed it mercilessly. The 
 Eclogues, a volume of little over eight hundred lines, 
 were all that he published as the result of ten or 
 twelve years of work and study. In the ten years 
 which followed he was working as incessantly, and 
 with expanding power, greater sureness of hand, more 
 mastery over his art. He was content that what he 
 had to show for those ten years should be the 
 Georgics. Even after that, the Aeneid as he left it at 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 67 
 
 his death is the final distillation of immense labour and 
 of fresh experiments and developments which were 
 going on up to the end of his life. By his will he left 
 express instructions that nothing of his should be 
 published beyond what he had published himself. It 
 required imperial command, or at least a strong 
 expression of opinion by the Emperor, to except the 
 Aeneid itself from this ordinance. But the ordinance 
 was carried out as regards all the rest of his unpub- 
 lished poetry. Much of this we must suppose to have 
 been destroyed. With what was not so destroyed one 
 or both of two things may have happened. Some of 
 it was, we know for certain, extant in copies which 
 were beyond the control of his executors. Some of it 
 was, in all probability, not destroyed by them, although 
 they did not publish it. It is obviously possible that 
 any of his poetry which fell under this latter class may 
 have crept into private and later into public circulation. 
 But if any of it had reached us, it would reach us in 
 an unauthorised and dubious text, and would be very 
 liable to confusion and interpolation. These considera- 
 tions must be carefully borne in mind when we enter 
 on the question of authorship as it applies to the Culex 
 and the Moretum. 
 
 Both poems are alike in this, that on formal analysis 
 they show nothing which makes it impossible, or even 
 improbable, that they should have been written by 
 Virgil. Their grammatical, verbal, and metrical 
 technique is the same as his. This is, however, only 
 negative evidence; we may attach greater or less 
 weight to it, but it decides nothing. Beyond it, the 
 factors which have to be weighed and balanced 
 towards forming a conclusion are, curiously enough, 
 almost exactly reversed for the two poems. Briefly, 
 the case may be put thus. The external evidence for 
 
68 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 the Virgilian authorship of the Culex is so good, 
 that but for certain internal or poetical considerations 
 it would be accepted without question, or only doubted 
 by professional athetisers. The internal evidence for 
 the Virgilian authorship of the Moretum is so good that 
 it would require but little external support : but there 
 is no external evidence for it at all. For the ascription 
 of a poem to Virgil in a collection which does not date 
 back beyond the fifth century, and which also included 
 under Virgil's name pieces that bear the mark of the 
 fourth century on their face, is not evidence enough to 
 hang a dog upon. 
 
 As regards the Culex, we have the express testimony 
 of Martial and Suetonius, and twice over, of Statius, 
 that a poem of Virgil's under this name was extant. 
 In a matter of this sort, Statius, who was not only a 
 scholar and poet but a profound student and literal 
 worshipper of Virgil, could hardly be mistaken. That 
 the poem known to Statius was a different one from 
 the poem which we possess there is not the slightest 
 ground for supposing. Attempts have been made to 
 argue that it both was and was not, by a hypothesis of 
 large interpolations in our poem made on a basis of 
 Virgil's poem. But they are futile. The texture of 
 the Culex as we have it is uniform. Two theories alone 
 seem possible : either that it was written by a contem- 
 porary of Virgil who had caught the Virgilian technique 
 to perfection, that it became confused with a poem on 
 the same subject which Virgil had written but which 
 he or his executors had destroyed, and that the con- 
 fusion was so complete as to impose on the whole body 
 of Virgilian scholars of the Silver Age : or, that it is 
 Virgil's work. The former theory seems a desperate 
 paradox. But the latter involves a paradox apparently 
 almost as great, and from the point of view of poetry 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 69 
 
 more interesting. For it means this : that Virgil, at a 
 time when he had matured his technique, could write 
 a poem as long as a book of the Georgics with great 
 care and finish, and yet leave out of it the specific 
 personal note of the Virgilian genius. Is such a thing 
 possible, and if so, how ? The question opens up a 
 larger one : that of the whole method and process, or 
 body of methods and processes, by which the concrete 
 work of art called a poem comes into being. 
 
 In poetry, as in painting or in any other art, each 
 great artist has his own method. Within certain large 
 limits, fixed by the nature of the material, these methods 
 vary much from one another. The artist himself can- 
 not, if he would, always give an account of them ; they 
 are partly conscious, but in large measure sub-conscious 
 or instinctive. Of Virgil's methods we know something 
 from fairly authentic tradition, and can gather a good 
 deal more from study of the poems themselves. In the 
 Life by Donatus there are two statements made which 
 are of great interest in this connexion, and which we 
 need not hesitate to accept as substantially true : first, 
 that before beginning to compose the Aeneid, Virgil set 
 it out in prose (prosa prius oratione firmatam componere 
 instituit) and worked on various parts of this prose 
 framework or sketch according as the fancy took him 
 at one time or another : secondly, that in the actual com- 
 position, he wrote down passages which were merely 
 meant to fill a gap temporarily, and to be rewritten 
 later: shores, tibicines, he called them, which were to 
 keep up the structure until the solid pillars were ready 
 to take their place. From these statements, in the 
 light thrown on them by careful study of those portions 
 of the Aeneid which have clearly not received the final 
 touches, we may gather that at certain stages in its 
 progress, an episode or even a whole poem may have 
 
70 VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 
 
 been in a sense complete, while it still had to be worked 
 over from beginning to end in order to give it its final 
 colour, life, and tone. " Though I alter not the draught," 
 Dryden said of one of his own masterpieces, " I must 
 touch the same features over again, and change the 
 dead colouring of the whole." The metaphor is taken 
 from painting : and this is the practice of some painters. 
 A picture over which months of work have been spent 
 is brought to a stage in which it is highly finished, but 
 dead : and then (for the artist knew what he meant, 
 and up to what he was working, from the first) two or 
 three days' work all over it, by such slight touches as 
 to be individually almost imperceptible, transfigures it 
 and makes it alive. It is not impossible that the Culex 
 is a work of Virgil's which had reached that stage, and 
 which he then laid aside, either knowing that he could 
 put the vitalising, Virgilianising touches to it when he 
 chose, or because it was written as an exercise and he 
 had no further use for it. 
 
 If this general theory may be hazarded to explain 
 the problem of the Culex, it would exactly fit the 
 facts as regards the Moretum. This little highly - 
 finished cabinet-piece is said to be pretty closely 
 modelled on a Greek idyl with the same subject by 
 Parthenius of Nicaea. Parthenius was an accom- 
 plished scholar and poet. Gallus was his patron and 
 pupil, and he was in intimate relations with the 
 Virgilian circle: Virgil himself together with the 
 rest of them no doubt owed much to his instruc- 
 tion and criticism. But the Moretum, to whatever 
 extent it may have followed a Greek original, is 
 itself a work of finished and individual art. It may 
 remind us of some early piece by Raffaele, in which 
 the composition and colouring of a painting by 
 Perugino are closely followed, but transformed to 
 
VIRGIL AND VIRGILIANISM 71 
 
 new beauty by the genius of the pupil. It has a 
 Raffaelesque suavity and grace. No one else among 
 the pupils of Parthenius, so far as is known, could 
 have done work of such luminous silvery colour, 
 such order of composition and purity of line. 
 
 That the little piece, if it be authentic, should be 
 omitted from the lists given in the Life by Donatus 
 and in the Servian commentary is curious, but not at 
 all unaccountable. It was probably among Virgil's 
 unpublished works, and its existence even may have 
 been known only to a few friends. That it was not 
 wholly lost may be a chance due to the preservation 
 in private hands of a single copy. Even published 
 poems had then a very precarious life when they 
 were not regularly reproduced for the market. It 
 was easier to suppress them than to ensure their pre- 
 servation. The original ending of the fourth Georgic 
 had been published for four or five years before it 
 was recalled and cancelled. Many copies of it must 
 have existed. Yet it has vanished utterly, and not 
 left a line or a trace. Virgil chose to be represented 
 to future ages only by his approved and finished work. 
 He was not allowed to exclude the Aeneid from his 
 gift to Rome and to the world : with that exception, 
 he has had his desire. 
 
THE AENEID 
 
 THE Aeneid is eminently, and perhaps more than any 
 other single work of the Graeco-Latin world, a classic 
 in the full sense that can be attached to that word. 
 This statement is not meant either to put Virgil in 
 some way into competition with other Latin authors, 
 or to put the Latin classics in some way into com- 
 petition with the classics of Greece. In such matters 
 there is no question of competition. 
 
 This is well understood as regards any rivalry 
 between Greek and Latin; it is indeed implied 
 throughout when we speak, as we all traditionally 
 and quite rightly do, of Greek and Latin authors 
 conjointly under the common name of the Classics. 
 Greece and Rome represent two forces, two different 
 streams of tendency and bodies of achievement 
 which are nevertheless indissoluble, which flow 
 together, intermingle and reinforce each other to 
 fill the sources from which succeeding ages have 
 drawn. But of the two, Rome is the closer to us, 
 the more directly in the line of ascent. Modem life 
 
 ^ 
 
 whol^sncture and 
 
 existence to the creation of Rojiie. And so also with 
 the two languages; for while Greek is a language of 
 unequalled beauty, flexibility, and strangeness, Latin 
 is, to us and to all the inheritors of the Latin civilisa- 
 tion, a second mother tongue. 
 
 Of that Latin literature through which the life and 
 
 72 
 
THE AENEID 73 
 
 thought of Rome and the Latin race most fully ex- 
 pressed themselves, and have continued most fully to 
 impress the world, the Aeneid is the central point. We 
 may put aside any question as to- the relative value 
 of prose and poetry in the world of letters, as we may 
 put aside any question as to the relative poetical 
 merits of Virgil and the other Latin poets, Lucretius 
 for instance, or Catullus, or Horace. As a mere 
 matter of fact and history, Virgil has been, from his 
 own day until now, the voice, the interpreter, the 
 chosen recorder and exponent of Rome of the Latin 
 race, the Latin empire, the Latin civilisation. Virgile, 
 said the great French critic, and the sentence, though 
 familiar, is still well worth repeating, depuis I'keure o'il 
 il parut a t le poete de la LatiniU toute entibre. Virgil 
 has been from the hour of his appearance the poet 
 of the whole of Latinity, of the Latin world : not 
 merely of those countries and ages, which have been 
 fully Roman and possessed, as one might say, the full 
 Roman citizenship, but also of that far wider circle 
 over which the Latinitas, the secondary citizenship 
 of the intellectual and spiritual Rome, has extended 
 itself. He sums up and in a way includes or at least 
 implies all the rest. It is almost impossible to 
 imagine what a difference it would make to the whole 
 of Latin literature if Virgil had disappeared from it. 
 All that comes before him leads, in one way or 
 another, up to him : all that comes after him is 
 profoundly affected by him, holds of him, draws from 
 him, to a greater or less degree, but always visibly, 
 and for the most part deeply, its inspiration, its ideas, 
 much of its very language. That this is true of the 
 later Latin poets is a familiar commonplace ; but post- 
 Augustan Latin prose likewise is saturated with 
 Virgilianism ; you will find this direct Virgilian 
 
74 THE AENEID 
 
 influence in authors so widely remote from one 
 another, to name three typical instances, as Tacitus, 
 .the last of the classics, Apuleius, the first of the 
 medievalists, Augustine, the greatest of the Christians. 
 The literature of the pagan decadence, of the Christian 
 Middle Ages, and of the emancipated Renaissance 
 all draws from Virgil as one of its main sources, just 
 as the constructive work of those successive ages, 
 their life and civilisation, all draw from Rome. To 
 sum the matter up in a single sentence; so far as 
 language embodies life, so far as men's written words 
 are the soul and action of mankind made incarnate, 
 so far, in no mere metaphor but as actual fact, Virgil 
 was Rome. 
 
 He became so at once, even within his own lifetime. 
 Horace was the laureate of the Augustan age, if one 
 may use the term of laureate in a wide sense without 
 pressing its meaning too far: he was the court poet, 
 and in his official odes the greatness of Rome, of the 
 Roman character and the Roman civilisation, found 
 memorable expression. But Virgil was much more 
 than laureate ; he was the voice of Rome and of the 
 whole Italian race ; in him they instinctively and all 
 \ but universally recognised, not only their poet but 
 Hheir prophet and interpreter. Some seventy or 
 eighty years after his death, a brilliant and accom- 
 plished man of letters had occasion to mention him 
 and Horace in the same sentence. It is in that 
 sentence that he gives us that singularly fine and 
 luminous phrase with regard to Horace which has 
 passed into universal currency curiosa felicitas. The 
 two words even now sum up the genius of Horace 
 more exactly than a whole volume of critical appre- 
 ciation. But for Virgil he has no such brilliant 
 phrase ; what he says of him is even briefer, only one 
 
THE AENEID 75 
 
 word, but a word of just insight and profound mean- 
 ing : Romanus Vergilius, Roman Virgil. 
 
 The art, the achievement, the purpose and effect 
 of Virgil culminate and are summed up in the Aeneid ; 
 what I desire to do now is to consider the circum- 
 stances in which the Aeneid was created, and to 
 consider its quality as a work of art, and as an ex- 
 pression and interpretation of life. Within the limits 
 of a single lecture it is of course impossible to deal, 
 even in outline, with the whole subject. I will 
 merely indicate briefly some of the more important 
 things to be borne in mind, and some of the lines 
 upon which a fuller study may be pursued, as time 
 and circumstances may permit. What follows is to 
 be taken as suggestive rather than informing, and 
 its object will be fully met if it sends back any reader 
 to the Aeneid itself with some amount of quickened 
 interest in the study from one or another point of 
 view. 
 
 A movement has been spreading in recent years 
 among our schools and colleges, towards the reading of 
 the Aeneid as a whole. That it should be so read, that 
 it must be so read if it is to be either understood or ap- 
 preciated, is a proposition so self-evident that it requires 
 no argument to support it. The Aeneid is a single and 
 complete work of art, which is meant to produce, and 
 does produce, a single and complete effect. Certainly 
 it is only by reading it as a whole and letting it pro- 
 duce its total effect upon the mind that we can see 
 it for what it is : only then can we begin to grasp 
 its full significance, to feel its actual quality : only 
 then can we realise the way in which it gathers up, 
 so to say, all the threads of interest which run through 
 the Graeco-Latin world at its fullest development. 
 The Aeneid as a whole, in its total accumulated 
 
76 THE AENEID 
 
 import, embodies and makes visible the Latin genius 
 on all its sides; in its own native growth, and as 
 affected by Greek influence and again interpreting 
 Greece to a larger world, and once more, as itself 
 affecting for succeeding ages their whole thought and 
 art and view of life. No one knows Latin in any real 
 sense who does not know the Aeneid ; and it may 
 be said conversely that any one who really knows the 
 Aeneid knows Latin. What one can call a real 
 knowledge of the Aeneid of course implies long study, 
 and a scholarship both wide and deep. But the 
 beginnings of it can be made by all who have 
 advanced beyond the merely elementary stage of 
 learning Latin : and they can be carried on, to such 
 an extent as each student may find possible, and in 
 such directions as he finds most specially interesting, 
 with constant pleasure and profit, because with per- 
 petually increasing appreciation. 
 
 The composition of the Aeneid was begun by Virgil 
 at the age of forty, after he had finished and published 
 the Georgics. It went on through the rest of his 
 life ; when he died at the age of fifty-one he left the 
 MS. of it almost complete, though it still lacked the 
 final revision. Three years' more work, he thought, 
 was still necessary to bring it to completion, or such 
 completion as was within his power. So sensitive 
 was he towards his own ideals in poetry, so merciless 
 towards imperfect work of his own however good it 
 might be, that his last instructions to his executors 
 were to destroy the manuscript. This was not done ; 
 it was carefully and competently revised ; a choice 
 was made between the alternative drafts which were 
 found of some passages, and other passages were 
 struck out which were clearly imperfect, or as to 
 which there was evidence that he had himself meant 
 
THE AENEID 77 
 
 to omit them ; but no retouchings or additions were 
 made. The poem as thus revised was published ; the 
 rejected material was suppressed, and except for one 
 passage of four lines, has wholly disappeared. 
 
 While the Aeneid thus represents the systematic 
 and incessant work of eleven years, it represents a 
 good deal more than this ; for Virgil wrought into it 
 the work of a whole lifetime. Epic poetry had been 
 his earliest ambition ; he had begun, in his own words, 
 " to sing of kings and battles " long before he wrote 
 the Eclogues ; and in the Aeneid we can find here and 
 there traces of quite early work. We can find 
 passages which though worked over, remodelled, and 
 partly rewritten later, still bear clear signs of youth- 
 ful composition in substance as well as in style and 
 diction : just as elsewhere we meet with episodes 
 which seem to incorporate separate shorter poems, 
 epyllia or short epic pieces, that may have been 
 composed in their original form before he had set 
 the scheme of the Aeneid definitely out. Such for 
 instances are the epic idyls, as they may be called, of 
 Nisus and Euryalus, of Hercules at Pallanteum, and 
 of the life and death of Camilla. These and others 
 were absorbed into and became parts of the larger 
 design after he had resolved to concentrate himself 
 wholly on the Aeneid and include in it all that he 
 meant to give to the world. 
 
 It was this resolution which determined the form 
 and substance of the Aeneid : it was this which on the 
 one hand made it the richest, the most fully charged, 
 of all Latin poems, perhaps even of all poems that 
 ever have been written, and which on the other hand 
 caused it to remain up to the last something expand- 
 ing, widening, even in a sense tentative and incomplete 
 in the whole design as well as in the execution of 
 
78 THE AENEID 
 
 its parts. Throughout we can see and feel the sub- 
 stance of the poem changing and growing under Virgil's 
 hand. We can trace in it successive moods, successive 
 interests. The motive idea is throughout complex, 
 but in varying measures of complexity ; one can hardly 
 speak of a single dominant motive in the whole poem, 
 though in portions of it one or another motive asserts 
 itself beyond the rest. Still less however can one dis- 
 entangle in it separate layers of poetry. During all 
 the years in which Virgil brooded over it and wrought 
 upon it, he kept his material, with but few exceptions, 
 in fusion, not crystallised and hardened into a final 
 shape. It was continually taking from his hands not 
 only enlargements of plan but increasing depths of 
 substance from an increasing store of knowledge, sym- 
 pathy, imagination, vision. To such a process there 
 could really be no end, except the end which came of 
 the swift fever at Brundisium in the autumn of 19 B.C. 
 
 But while it is impossible in the Aeneid to divide 
 Virgil's work into layers where all is interwoven and 
 to a greater or less degree fused ; while it is impossible 
 to speak of enlargements or accretions where the ex- 
 pansion is vitally imaginative and the growth organic, 
 it is yet possible in various directions to trace that 
 growth ; and such a study is not only possible but in 
 the highest degree interesting and fertile. We can do 
 so in two ways more particularly ; on the one hand 
 formally, by study of his diction, rhythm, and phrasing ; 
 and on the other hand structurally, by considering the 
 various objects which he had to combine, or among 
 which he had to choose, and the various models which 
 lay before him for guidance or stimulus or suggestion. 
 
 It is on this latter side, the larger, more human and 
 more widely interesting of the two, that I shall proceed 
 to offer a few notes and suggestions, rather by way of 
 
THE AENEID 79 
 
 indicating lines of enquiry and points of view than of 
 following out any one of these in detail. 
 
 The poetry of kings and battles towards which 
 Virgil had bent his early ambition represents the 
 simpler form of the epic. It might take the form 
 of fiftl fthrfl.ting_g._ h.^lLlTII^-gill^X--^---^--^ an( ^ some 
 great action or episode in it, as had been done 
 by the creator of the Iliad. Or it might follow the 
 example of later poets and of Virgil's own great 
 Latin predecessor, and take the annalistic scope of 
 a historical epic, to which unity was given by national 
 sentiment, and in which the central thread of in- 
 terest, the hero of the poem as one might almost say, 
 was the nation itself, imagined as having a life and 
 story of its own extending over successive ages of 
 mortal men. This, according to the possibilities of a 
 ruder art and a more undeveloped language, had been 
 the achievement of Ennius ; and Enniiis' Annales were 
 in Virgil's own youth established as the national poem 
 and schoolbook of Rome, much as the Iliad had been 
 the national poem and schoolbook of Greece. Or once 
 more, it might take a form which was, for obvious 
 reasons, in high favour, that of the celfibration_of ihe 
 events .struggles and triumphs of the poet's own age. 
 This was what was actually done by Varius, the friend 
 and poetical colleague of Virgil, and joint-editor of the 
 Aeneid after Virgil's death ; it was what Horace, with 
 his customary tact and good sense, declined to attempt 
 at the suggestion of Augustus ; it was pressed upon 
 Virgil himself repeatedly by the Emperor, in a way 
 which he found it difficult wholly to ignore. In the 
 actual Aeneid we can see alLthe^e_thrfi.e_3kinds of scope 
 and subject mingling to produce a poem which, from 
 one point of view, was called the Latin Iliad ; which 
 from another point of view was named, as a sort of 
 
80 THE AENEID 
 
 second title, G-esta Populi Itomani, " the deeds of the 
 Roman people " ; and which, from yet another point of 
 view, was expressly dedicated to the glory of Augustus 
 and was meant to fulfil the promise held out in the 
 Georgics, where the reges et proelia of the sixth Eclogue 
 had become specifically the pugnae Caesaris which he 
 then undertook to celebrate. 
 
 The fusing of three motives which are in their nature 
 so disparate was a task which taxed the genius of Virgil 
 to its utmost. He felt it himself to be almost im- 
 possible ; he had periods of discouragement in which 
 he was inclined to renounce the attempt as hopeless, 
 even as senseless : " I seem to myself," are his own strik- 
 ing words, " to have been almost mad when I undertook 
 it," paene vitio mentis tantum opus ingressus esse mdeor. 
 But it had by that time mastered him ; even if he could 
 have let it go, it would not have let him go. It absorbed 
 into itself all his other interests, all his other schemes 
 in poetry ; and as his life went on, each fresh motive, 
 each new study and acquirement, all the results of his 
 vast learning and profound thought were used up for 
 what had become his single outlet in expression and 
 creation, the one and all-including work of his life. 
 
 Modern scholars have accustomed themselves to speak 
 of an original Iliad, out of which an Iliad (the Iliad of 
 Homer) was produced by successive expansions, re- 
 modellings, and additions. In the sense in which this 
 view is poetically tenable, we may speak also of an 
 original Aeneid ; and it is useful to do so, if we take 
 care to remember that the original Iliad and the original 
 Aeneid are both abstractions, and never existed in any 
 intelligible sense as actual poems. Abstractly and 
 constructionally, we may think of the Aeneid as having 
 grown up round or out of an original Italian Aeneid, 
 just as we may think of the Iliad as having grown up 
 
THE AENEID 81 
 
 round or out of an original Achilleid ; and it is not 
 absurd to conjecture that such an Italian Aeneid re- 
 presents something like Virgil's earliest project ; that 
 it was what he dreamed of and had in his mind before 
 he wrote the Eclogues, and what he never wholly 
 abandoned as we never do wholly abandon our 
 young dreams however much the scheme became 
 enlarged and transmuted. This conjectured original, 
 the Ur-Aeneis or core of the actual Aeneid, is re- 
 presented roughly by Books VII. to XII. The epic 
 of kings and battles which these six books contain has 
 a substantive unity and is constructed upon a definite 
 epic scheme. That scheme is one well chosen and of 
 ample scope. Stated in summary, its subject is the 
 arrival of Aeneas and his Trojans in Latium, and their 
 establishment there, after varying but finally successful 
 battles and negotiations ; the incorporation of the two 
 races which ensues, with the resulting enrichment of 
 blood, capacity, and tradition, laying the foundations 
 upon which Rome was created and the imperial Roman 
 race came into being. 
 
 Mr. Warde Fowler, in his admirable volume, Social 
 Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero, has brought out more 
 clearly than ever had been done before, how the 
 national and Roman character of this subject is the 
 dominant motive in one beautiful episode; which 
 indeed in this fresh illumination becomes less an 
 episode than a keynote. The scene in Book VIII. 
 where Aeneas sails up the Tiber and lands on the spot 
 which was to be the site of Rome has always been 
 recognised as one of those in which Virgil reaches his 
 highest point of romantic beauty. The vivid pictorial 
 treatment is raised to inspiration by an impalpable 
 sense of natural magic. But it is only now that we 
 can fully realise all that it implies. The little town 
 
 F 
 
82 THE AENEID 
 
 nestled among the three hills which rise round the 
 hollow of the Forum bore to Virgil the same or much 
 the same imaginative associations as it bears again to 
 us now, after the centuries have been re-illumined. 
 That long hollow with cattle grazing on it in the 
 westering sunlight the Campo Vaccino then, as it 
 became again long afterwards and remained until a 
 time still within living memory was to become the 
 centre of the world : 
 
 " Armenta videbant 
 Roraanoque Foro et lautis mugire Carinis." 
 
 Virgil brings it before us in a clear and charming 
 picture ; and he makes it as clear that from it his imagi- 
 nation passes over the whole course of history. Here 
 was to be founded the settlement which was to be 
 Home ; the Latin frontier- fortress against Etruria and 
 the populous North, with the mid-Italian peoples 
 clustered on hill and plain behind it, and with its 
 waterway down to Ostia, " the sea-gates " fronting 
 towards Sicily and Africa. Here was the germ of the 
 city which was to beat back and civilise the Celtic 
 North, to overthrow the rival power of Carthage, and 
 to extend its supremacy over the whole Mediterranean 
 and the lands that bordered it from the Euxine and 
 the Euphrates to the Atlantic sea. 
 
 This was the scheme of what we may call the 
 original Aeneid as we may conceive it to have formed 
 itself in Virgil's mind. The first great enlargement 
 which it took was to incorporate with the epic of 
 Italian war and settlement an epic of travel and 
 adventure; to engraft a Latin Odyssey, as we might 
 say, upon a Latin Iliad. The coming of Aeneas to 
 Italy followed upon the fall of Troy : and in the work 
 of his Latin predecessors, Naevius and others, Virgil 
 
THE AENEID 83 
 
 found this second motive already suggested and par- 
 tially dealt with. He enlarged the scope of his poem 
 to cover a seven years' wandering between the departure 
 from Troy and the arrival in Italy. His treatment of 
 this part of the poem was suggested, and greatly deter- 
 mined, by two Greek sources. One of these, as I have 
 just said, was the Odyssey; the other was a poem 
 to which Virgil owed much, and a careful study of 
 which is one among the things necessary towards any 
 full comprehension of Virgil's aim and achievement, 
 the Argonautica of Apollonius. From the Odyssey 
 he took the idea of a poem in which the first 
 half should end by bringing the hero, after many 
 episodes and adventures, to the place where the main 
 action was to take place. According to a well-authen- 
 ticated tradition, the adventures of the seven years 
 were originally planned as the poet's direct narrative. 
 They brought Aeneas, towards the end of the period, 
 to Carthage ; and there, following again the suggestion 
 of the Odyssey, Virgil found an opportunity to place 
 in the mouth of Aeneas, as told by him at night in the 
 Punic Queen's palace, the story of the Fall of Troy 
 itself. 
 
 But meanwhile the Carthaginian episode had been 
 taking further shape and assuming greater importance. 
 Two motives united in it. One was to link up the 
 early history of the two great Mediterranean powers, 
 the long contest between which had been by far the 
 most memorable and dramatic in the whole of Roman 
 history, and had left an indelible impression, as the 
 whole of Latin literature bears witness, on the Roman 
 imagination. The other was to bring into the poem 
 the love-interest which was demanded by the feeling 
 of Virgil's time, and for the expression of which in 
 poetry he must have been fully conscious of his 
 
 
84 THE AENEID 
 
 own unsurpassed genius. In Latin poetry as in the 
 Alexandrian Greek poetry which supplied Latin poetry 
 with nearly all its models and with a great part of 
 its inspiration, this interest was dominant over at 
 least half the field ; and Virgil was attracted towards 
 it not merely by fashion and tradition, but by the 
 influence of his own special poetical circle in his 
 youth, by his romantic sensibility, and by his pro- 
 found and delicate psychological instinct. Under the 
 joint influence of these motives the Carthaginian 
 episode grew into an importance which had not been 
 foreseen. It dominates the whole of the earlier books 
 of the Aeneid: and by its combination of intense 
 human interest with extreme beauty of workmanship, 
 makes what had been at first meant for a prologue 
 into what we might almost call a substantive epic 
 by itself, and one which the majority of readers, from 
 St. Augustine to Tennyson, have probably always 
 found the most attractive part of the whole Aeneid. 
 Partly of course this is due to the fact that it comes 
 first and so is naturally read first; but this is not 
 the only reason. The other reason is one which has 
 a direct bearing on the progress and evolution of 
 poetry itself. 
 
 Poetry, being vital and organic, never rests anywhere : 
 at the same moment at which, and by the same 
 impulse by which, it has brought any of the forms 
 in which it embodies itself to maturity, it passes 
 out of and beyond that form on a further voyage 
 to search for a new embodiment. The epic, when 
 enriched by new motives into a complex structure, 
 begins at once to develop these motives on their 
 own account ; it puts forth new blossoms on new 
 branches, and sends into them the current of its life. 
 Like the branches of the Indian fig-tree in Milton's 
 
THE AENEID 85 
 
 famous description, they strike root on their own 
 account in the soil, growing round and enshrouding 
 the parent tree, and finally replacing it 
 
 " Branching so broad and long that in the ground 
 The bended twigs take root and daughters grow 
 About the mother tree, a pillar'd shade 
 High overarch'd, and echoing walks between." 
 
 Or we may liken the process to the engrafting which 
 changes the whole character of the old tree and does 
 not so much enrich it as cause it to enrich, and feed, 
 from its own native strength, those new boughs, for 
 the sake of which it now exists: so that, in Virgil's 
 own exquisite lines, 
 
 "Nee longum tempus et ingens 
 Exiit ad caelum ramis felicibus arbos, 
 Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma." 
 
 The engrafted epic of Aeneas and Dido, with its 
 thrilling story of ill-fated love and its prophetic or 
 mystical import as foreshadowing the fame and fate 
 of Rome and the great historic drama of the Punic 
 Wars, became under the genius of Virgil something 
 even more wonderful and more enthralling than its 
 parent stem, the Italian epic of conquest and settle- 
 ment. It became, as Tennyson says of FitzGerald's 
 Omar, " a planet equal to the sun which cast it "- 
 equal, and even greater, because even more Virgilian. 
 
 As it grew, it absorbed into itself much of what 
 had belonged to the prologue and accessories of the 
 main story. Not only the tale of the Fall of Troy, 
 but nearly the whole tale of the wanderings, was 
 sucked into it, and became a narrative discoursed by 
 Aeneas to Dido, and delaying the development of the 
 love-story only to make it break out with reinforced 
 splendour in the fourth book. So complete and so 
 
86 THE AENEID 
 
 sufficing is this part of the Aeneid when Virgil had 
 given it its full expansion, that it took all his art 
 and skill to make the transition and keep the whole 
 Aeneid as a single poetic unity. It may even be 
 doubted as it has been by many, both professed 
 critics and ordinary readers whether the task had 
 not become one for which no art or skill was per- 
 fectly adequate. Something almost but not quite as 
 difficult had been done with triumphant success by 
 the poet of the Odyssey. In that masterly poem 
 the best constructed, as has been truly said, of all 
 narratives the prologue of the TelemacJma, which 
 occupies the first four books, while fascinatingly in- 
 teresting in itself, never diverts the attention from the 
 main story. jOdysseus, though he never appears until 
 the fifth book, is from the first the central figure. 
 The action remains single, and the poet has the whole 
 of its threads completely under his control. To study 
 the construction and mechanism of the two poems in 
 comparison with each other is a work on which it 
 would be impossible to enter now, but which is an 
 essential part of any vital study of the Aeneid. uust 
 one feature of comparison and contrast I may indicate, 
 as a sort of starting-point for the study. The action 
 of the Odyssey opens in Ithaca ; from the first we are 
 at the centre; we stand on the very hall-floor where 
 the consummation is to come. But the Aeneid opens 
 at sea off the coast of Africa Italiam contra Tiberinague 
 longe ostia. In this line, as in a hundred others, Virgil 
 does all he can to keep Italy the centre, to link up all 
 the action with Italy ; yet it is the word longe, " far 
 away," on which we find ourselves laying the stress. 
 The action of the Aeneid never does succeed in attaining 
 complete unity. No one can go on from the end of the 
 fourth to the beginning of the fifth book without feeling 
 
THE AENEID 87 
 
 a lowering of temperature; no one could go straight 
 from the fourth book to the seventh from the death 
 of Dido at Carthage to the landing of Aeneas in 
 Latium without feeling a change of subject, a passage 
 from one poem into another. 
 
 To bridge over this chasm wholly was a task which, 
 if Virgil did not succeed in it, we may well believe to 
 have been beyond human power. But the means he 
 took to bridge it over are what we have to consider ; 
 for nothing throws greater light on the Virgilian art, 
 which in combination with the Virgilian pity makes 
 the quality of Virgil as a poet so incomparable. Of 
 the most obvious means I have just spoken. This is 
 the constant and deliberate reference forward, in the 
 earlier story, to the quest of Italy and the foundation 
 of a kingdom there as the appointed purpose of God, 
 the event towards which the fall of Troy and the 
 adventures of Aeneas were fore-ordained. This note 
 is clearly struck in the seven lines of introduction or 
 argument with which the Aeneid opens; it is em- 
 phasised at every turn thereafter ; the Trojan exiles 
 are driven irresistibly onward, are continually as 
 one might say being rounded up and headed off 
 towards Italy ; they are not allowed to rest anywhere 
 short of it ; at first a goal only dimly seen or vaguely 
 surmised, it opens out more and more clearly before 
 them through successive acts of Providence, and 
 direct or indirect divine monitions; the tragedy of 
 Dido itself is brought on by the conflict of merely 
 human love with that unalterable ordinance. 
 
 But this was not enough. All these links might 
 have been sufficient to knit up into the main story 
 events which formed a mere prologue; but as we 
 have seen, they became in Virgil's hands and almost, 
 we might fancy, against his will, or at least beyond 
 
&8 THE AENEID 
 
 his intention, something larger than any prologue. 
 Art had been greater than the artist. How was he 
 to recover his hold over a work that had expanded 
 so far beyond formal limits, that had become the 
 first of Latin romances as well as the greatest of 
 Latin epics ? What was he to do further that might 
 enable him to pass, within the scope of a single epic 
 structure, from the fascination of Troy and Carthage 
 to the goal of Italy ? to disengage himself, like 
 Aeneas, from the romance of strange lands and 
 tragical passions that he may attain the destined 
 object of his poem ? The poet, like his own hero, had 
 almost succumbed to that fascination. Ardet abire 
 fuga dulcesque relinquere terras. Heu quid agat ? Quae 
 prima exordia sumat ? And in fact we can see him 
 feeling his way through different devices, postponing 
 his resolution, making tentative advances, until the 
 final inspiration came to him. 
 
 His first project was simply to resume the story 
 of the wanderings from the point at which it had 
 been broken off by the expansion of the Carthaginian 
 episode. The earlier portion of that story had already 
 been remodelled from the form of direct narrative and 
 incorporated with the secondary narrative put into 
 the mouth of Aeneas, told by him to Dido in con- 
 tinuation of the tale of the fall of Troy. In the fifth 
 book Virgil resumes the direct narrative, and brings 
 the Trojans from Africa to Italy, to the threshold 
 of the main scene. But he seems to have felt that 
 this was inadequate. The lowered temperature which, 
 as I said, we feel at the opening of Book V. had some- 
 how to be raised, and a high tension regained. Until 
 this could be done, the Aeneid was practically at a 
 standstill. The long episode of the funeral games of 
 Anchises which fills more than half of that book, and 
 
THE AENEID 89 
 
 gives the effect of filling almost all of it, is generally 
 and rightly considered the weakest part of the poem. 
 The original upon which it was modelled, the episode 
 of the funeral games of Patroclus at the end of the Iliad, 
 is largely at least a post-Homeric addition, out of tone 
 with the rest of the Iliad : and we have a similar feeling 
 about the games of the fifth Aeneid. Partly no doubt 
 the pause in the action is deliberate; but partly it 
 is unwilling. Virgil is waiting, circling round, feeling 
 his way. 
 
 Then the transcendent stroke of genius came. The 
 sixth book slips the keystone into the interrupted 
 arch, and locks the whole structure. It is even more 
 than that. The two epics, as by this time we may 
 call them, the epic of Troy and Carthage and the 
 epic of Italy, are brought into unity; but they are 
 brought into unity, if I may borrow a phrase from 
 the mathematicians, through a fourth dimension. The 
 vision of the sixth book does not merely unify, but 
 transcends and absorbs, the whole action of the poern. 
 Aeneas, it has been said, and the saying is at least sug- 
 gestive, passes in this book through a process analogous 
 to what is known in the language of religion as con- 
 version. But this is true not only of Aeneas but of the 
 Aeneid. The poem passes here out of space and time. 
 It becomes an impassioned vision of the whole of 
 existence. History is merged in what for want of 
 a better word we call philosophy. The vision includes 
 and incorporates past and future. The heroes of the 
 Trojan war are seen in it alongside of the kings and 
 consuls of Rome. Men long dead and men who. have 
 still long to wait before they reach the borders of light 
 live here side by side in the still light of eternity. 
 Dido herself moves silently in the same world as 
 Phaedra and Eriphyle, and with them are the daughter 
 
90 THE AENEID 
 
 of Julius and the mother of Marcellus. The armies 
 that fought at Troy, Danaum proceres Agamemnoniaeque 
 phalanges, take their place by those Roman legions which 
 met in the shock of battle at Ilerda and Pharsalia during 
 Virgil's own lifetime. The creative imagination of the 
 poet opens up for us the ultimate secret of existence, the 
 creative processes of the universe. Human life itself is 
 shown as the manifestation, under forms of space and 
 time, of the thought of God, the essential life of the 
 world. 
 
 Thus when Aeneas passes back through the gate of 
 ivory into what is called real life, he resumes his 
 place in what is, in the real reality, a world of false 
 dreams sed falsa ad caelum mittunt insomnia manes. 
 But to live in that world and bear his part in it has 
 become, more than ever, his destiny and duty: and 
 over the whole of his life thereafter, as over the whole 
 of Virgil's poetry, rests the light which is also a 
 shadow, the shadow which is also a light, of an in- 
 visible world. 
 
 >xThis transmutation and spiritualisation of poetry 
 was Virgil's final achievement; and it is this which, 
 in the end, gives him his unique place among the 
 poets. It transcends art, properly so called ; for the 
 function of art is to create and embody some image 
 of perfection ; and the image which Virgil finally sets 
 before us is of imperfection; the wistfulness, the 
 haunting trouble of his poetry, is of its inmost quality. 
 It is, in the apt phrases used of him by the two 
 greatest masters of modern English prose and verse, 
 his "pathetic half lines" and his "lonely words" 
 through which and by virtue of which he makes his 
 deepest appeal to mankind. But that transcendence, 
 that continual search further and further after what 
 cannot be found, that stretching out of the hands 
 
THE AENEID 91 
 
 (to use his own words rather than those of any later 
 appreciation) in love of a further shore, is not con- 
 sistent with the requirements of a complete and 
 finished work of art. 
 
 Into the Aeneid Virgil tried to put the riches 
 of a whole world. He loaded the framework of 
 the epic with more, perhaps, than it could bear. He 
 attempted to unite in it the large simple Homeric 
 structure with the later and more specialised re- 
 finements of poetry as they had been brought out 
 by the final efforts of the art of Greece. Partly he 
 did this by interweaving into the epic scheme the 
 new romantic motives; in this he followed his 
 own romantic temperament, possibly the instinct of 
 his own Celtic blood, and it made him, for later 
 ages, the fountainhead of romanticism. Partly he 
 followed the Alexandrian fashion, and bettered his 
 examples, by the introduction of those highly finished 
 and richly ornamented episodes to which allusion 
 has already been made, and which are more or less 
 detachable as matters of composition, though skilfully 
 interwoven with the main structure and enhancing 
 the total effect of the poem. 
 
 Into the Aeneid, too, Virgil poured his vast and 
 multifarious learning. He made it a treasury of 
 Italian antiquities. For the classical archaeologist, as is 
 now fully recognised, the Aeneid is one of the first and 
 most indispensable handbooks, whether his particular 
 study be of the geography and ethnography of ancient 
 Italy, or of its religious practices, its social life, and 
 the growth of its civic institutions. On this side, we 
 are only now beginning to understand Virgil. 
 
 To the kingdom of poetry Virgil thus strove to 
 annex the provinces of human knowledge, history, 
 archaeology, philosophy. Such an attempt was never 
 
92 THE AENEID 
 
 made again until Dante; it is never likely to be 
 made again with anything like equal success until 
 a poet of immense learning and genius comes to birth 
 just at the precise time which is, as Virgil's time was, 
 the critical point of passage from an old to a new 
 world. Or it may be that the genius makes his own 
 time rather than is made by it. In any case, the 
 anima mundi works both in the poet and in his en- 
 vironment. Virgil received divine honours not long 
 after his death; the Aeneid was gravely consulted 
 by Emperors for omens of their own fate and that 
 of the Empire; and the Christian world for many 
 ages believed that just as the Koman Empire had 
 been established by the direct act of Providence 
 to prepare the way for the coming of the Son of 
 God upon earth, so the Roman poet, Vergilius 
 Romanus, was elect and inspired by God as the 
 Prophet of the Gentiles. These beliefs have passed 
 away, but not their effects, and still less their causes ; 
 for their causes may be summed up in this, that 
 in Virgil and the Aeneid was heard not only the 
 imperial and prophetic voice of Rome, but the very 
 voice of mankind itself speaking, with majestic tender- 
 ness, of patience and obedience, of honour in life, of 
 hope beyond death. 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 THE GOLDEN ODES 
 
 THE lectures which I have hitherto given from this 
 Chair have dealt, at one or another point, and in one 
 or another aspect, with a single subject. That subject 
 is the progress of poetry within what may be called 
 broadly the European or Western civilisation ; within 
 the world from which we directly inherit, and to which 
 we primarily belong. But that world is not the whole 
 world. Wherever the human mind is, it strikes inward 
 and outward ; it brings with itself the processes of re- 
 flection and creation : it seeks instinctively after some 
 interpretation and pattern of life in the forms of 
 patterned and interpretative speech ; and the product 
 of that instinct is poetry. 
 
 Within the closed field of European poetry there is 
 indeed room enough to expatiate : and for English 
 students and artists the main current of progress to be 
 traced in history is the current which passed, in Gray's 
 brief and pregnant phrase, from Greece to Italy, and 
 from Italy to England. But that current is neither 
 single nor continuous. It is true that the more we 
 study it, the more we are impressed with the element 
 of continuity in it. Of no age in poetry, as of no single 
 poem, can we say that it is isolated and unaccountable, 
 that it is a thing which happens. That doctrine has 
 been laid down, not merely of poetry but of all art, by 
 artists whose opinions are not negligible. But it is 
 merely the reaction from another doctrine which is 
 
94 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 equally partial and equally misleading, the doctrine 
 that poetry, or art in general, can be defined and ex- 
 plained in mechanical terms. Both views put one side 
 of the case so partially and with so much over-emphasis 
 that they are in effect untrue. But among the elements 
 of truth which the former view seizes on and distorts 
 by exaggeration is this : that the springs of poetry are 
 numerous, intricate, and often obscure ; that its main 
 current is reinforced by many affluents, and that the 
 very soil over which or it may be under which it 
 moves imparts to it a perpetually varying colour and 
 quality. 
 
 Between the disappearance of the classical or Graeco- 
 Roman tradition and the new birth which it took in 
 the earlier Middle Ages, European poetry ran under- 
 ground. But during that period in its progress it was 
 subjected to many influences which profoundly modified 
 it. It sank one thing, and rose again another. Among 
 these influences the most important perhaps, as it is 
 certainly the most subtle in its effect and the most 
 obscure in its working, was that of Arabian art, of the 
 imaginative interpretation of life given by an Asiatic 
 race. The obscurity of that influence is at once the 
 cause and the effect of the fact that insufficient attention 
 has hitherto been paid to it by historians of literature 
 and interpretative critics of poetry. But though ob- 
 scure,jtjs yit&l. Just as the course of European his- 
 tory in the earlier Middle Ages involves and is affected 
 by the Crusades, and all that movement, partly of 
 antagonism, partly of interpenetration, of which the 
 Crusades are the symbol, so the development of 
 | European poetry was deeply and organically affected 
 iby the Arab poetry which seems so entirely detached 
 $from it, and which after it had leavened the art of 
 Southern Europe disappeared again into the East and 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 95 
 
 was forgotten or ignored in the West, except among a \ 
 few Oriental scholars, until quite modern times. 
 
 To trace the historical connexion and the organic 
 effect of this Arabian influence is a task which still 
 remains largely unaccomplished. It is one which 
 requires very wide knowledge and very sensitive artis- 
 tic perceptions. Even in the more concrete and 
 measurable province of architecture it is still, I 
 believe, a matter of debate how far a distinct 
 Asiatic influence is to be found, alike in matters of 
 construction and of ornament, in the Byzantine work 
 which culminates in the masterpiece of Anthemius; 
 and how far again the Mohammedan architecture of 
 later centuries itself drew from European sources and 
 was engrafted on or varied from Byzantine or 
 Byzantino-Romanesque originals. In the world of 
 poetry we are dealing with causes and effects which 
 are still more subtle and imponderable. 
 
 At no time have the European and the Asiatic mind 
 been wholly shut off from one another, but there are 
 whole periods in which the two have been brought into 
 a contact more than usually direct through the move- 
 ments of national or political history. The earliest in- 
 stance which bears on extant living poetry is that of the 
 Homeric poems themselves. The Iliad and Odyssey 
 are the product of a region and age whose historical 
 relations and significance we are only now beginning 
 to comprehend. Mr. Hogarth, in his volume on Ionia 
 and the East, has shown with great skill and know- 
 ledge how that period in history was marked to an 
 unusual degree by Oriental pressure upon the civilisa- 
 tion to which by that time we may begin to give 
 the name of Greek. Such pressure is never wholly 
 mechanical; it always involves some considerable 
 amount of intellectual, imaginative, and artistic inter- 
 
96 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 penetration, something of what we may call by analogy 
 chemical action and the formation of new substances, 
 or by a closer analogy still, cross-fertilisation and the 
 creation of new species in the organic world. At a 
 later period the effect of the Persian wars on the 
 development of Athens cannot be wholly measured 
 in terms of political and military history ; it had also 
 a direct bearing on the development of Athenian 
 poetry. 
 
 The Alexandrian school, so immense in its in- 
 fluence as well as in its actual product, was from 
 first to last not wholly Greek, not wholly European ; 
 the ambiguous position which Egypt has always 
 occupied in history is reflected in the composite 
 flowerage of the poetry which takes its name from 
 the Egyptian capital. From its beginnings in the 
 reign of Ptolemy II. until its final disappearance about 
 the beginning of the sixth century A.D., a time almost 
 within sight of the Arab conquest, that school was 
 more or less continuous. It on the whole represented 
 the main current of poetic tradition, so far as poetry 
 remained Greek and had not moved westwards into 
 the Latin world. Just at the period when the central 
 life of poetry was transferring itself from Greek to 
 Latin, the Syrian poet Meleager infused into Greek 
 poetry a new tone and colour which ' are specifically 
 those of Arabia and the Syro- Arabian plateau. Gadara, 
 his birthplace, itself is within that geographical and 
 ethnographical area. Tyre, the place of his education, 
 is just on its edge. In his poetry, as in that of the 
 whole school in which he is the central and the most 
 striking figure, we do not get the new element clean : 
 it is a ferment introduced into Greek poetry and 
 reacted upon by the fresh environment ; and in the 
 resulting product as happened similarly a thousand 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 97 
 
 years later in Provence there is something of a nerve- 
 less and deliquescent quality, something exotic and 
 even unwholesome. But its effect was none the less 
 potent and long-continuing. Further west, once m'ore, 
 in the Roman province of Africa, where the native race 
 and genius were more akin to an Asiatic than a 
 European type, and where the earlier Phoenician 
 colonisation had emphasised the native Orientalism, 
 we meet an analogous phenomenon. The African 
 poets of the fourth century A.D. are, both in form 
 and in substance, the precursors of Romance literature, 
 the beginners, one may properly say, of the Middle Ages. 
 These earlier influences and more might no doubt 
 be discovered or noted are indications of a more or 
 less continuous deflecting force exercised by the East 
 over Western poetry : one which in different ways and 
 to various degrees fertilised, enriched, possibly some- 
 times warped, the central course of its development. 
 But they are all inconsiderable in comparison with the 
 effect produced by the full impact of the brilliant Arab 
 civilisation which spread behind the great Arab con- 
 quests. As Europe owes its religion to Judaea, so it 
 owes its romance to Arabia : and not only that, but 
 the.awakening of imaginative and creative force that 
 issued in the romantic poetry of the twelfth and thir- 
 teenth centuries. Classical Italian poetry, in which 
 the central current of the life of poetry was once more 
 embodied, was derived historically this is a matter of 
 common knowledge from the earlier poetry of Provence 
 and Sicily. But Provence was saturated with Arabic 
 influence ; and Sicily was half Saracen, a debateable land 
 on the frontier of the Arabian empire. Ciullo d'Alcamo, 
 reputed the first of the predecessors of Dante, took his 
 name from the Arab fortress near Palermo which was 
 his birthplace. Another of them, in the next century, 
 
 G 
 
98 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 actually bears the name of Saladin, the hero of the 
 Third Crusade and the destroyer of the Latin king- 
 dom of Jerusalem. The Emperor Frederick II. was 
 an accomplished Arabic scholar as well as a poet. 
 During the Dark Ages in Europe the arts, including 
 the art of poetry, had flourished at the courts and 
 under the favour of the Arab Khalifats, and when 
 they revived again in Europe, their revival, like that of 
 learning generally, took place under strong Asiatic 
 influence. The Spanish school of poetry, which comes 
 to its flower in the Poem of the Cid in the twelfth 
 century, derived much, both in form and in substance, 
 from the poetical art as it was practised under the 
 Umayyad Emirat of Cordova roughly for a period 
 of three centuries from 750 to 1050 A.D. It no doubt 
 traces its parentage on the other side to the French 
 Chansons de Geste. But the French epic was itself not 
 produced on a soil unaffected by Arab invasion. The 
 Arabian conquests of the eighth century pushed up into 
 Central France. The Chanson de Roland, in its metrical 
 and formal mechanism as well as in its subject, is a 
 sort of symbol of an influence that had been left in 
 the soil then, and had germinated in it. 
 
 It is therefore immediately relevant to any large con- 
 sideration of the progress of poetry to know something 
 about Arabian poetry itself; and the work of modern 
 scholars has recently made it possible to do so even 
 for those who, like myself, derive their acquaintance 
 with it only from translations. Of the many sources 
 available I will only name three, which are all indis- 
 pensable in different ways, and which taken together 
 and intelligently used give perhaps as much insight 
 into the history, scope, and specific quality of Arab 
 poetry as can well be got by those who cannot go 
 direct to the originals : at least if there be added to 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 99 
 
 their study not only some broad knowledge of history 
 but some amount of that imaginative appreciation 
 one might almost speak of it as divination without 
 which the study of poetry as a vital process, an inter- 
 pretation and function of life, remains necessarily barren. 
 
 The first of these is Sir Charles Lyall's volume, 
 Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry, chiefly prae- 
 Islamic, with an Introduction and Notes, published in 1 8 8 5. 
 It is one of those books of admirable taste and sound 
 scholarship which do not appeal to a large public ; but 
 to those who were able to appreciate it, it came, a 
 generation ago, as a sudden revelation of unsuspected 
 riches. So far as its scope extends it remains the 
 classical work on its subject. But its scope is strictly 
 limited ; and for a larger view, in which that early 
 Arabian poetry takes its place in the general course of 
 Arab history and letters, it can now be supplemented 
 by another work of great value published quite recently, 
 Mr. Nicholson's Literary History of the Arabs. The 
 third of the three indispensable volumes is of a dif- 
 ferent and even a rarer kind ; for it presents us with 
 a version of and commentary on the acknowledged 
 masterpieces of early Arab poetry by one whose 
 acquaintance with Arabia and the Arab mind is un- 
 usually great and whose sympathy with them is almost 
 unique ; and even more than this, one who is himself 
 a poet. This is Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's rendering of the 
 Golden Odes, also known as the Muallakdt, into English 
 verse, with an introductory essay which is no less 
 illuminating than fascinating. It was published in 1 9 3 . 
 
 It may be worth while however to point out another 
 source, subsidiary and secondary indeed, yet also in 
 its way invaluable, which is familiarly known and 
 lies ready to every one's hand. This is a book with 
 which all English readers are or ought to be well 
 
100 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 acquainted, Lane's Arabian Nights. Let me then 
 digress for a moment to call your attention to the 
 fact that the scraps of verse in the Arabian Nights, 
 while they differ much in poetical quality, and from 
 the circumstances in which they are introduced tend 
 to confine themselves mainly to brief gnomic or 
 didactic fragments, contain among them pieces of 
 authentic and characteristic Arab poetry. The fasci- 
 nation of the Arabian Nights simply as stories is so 
 great that they are but little studied as literature, and 
 insufficient stress is laid either on the time and 
 circumstances of their origin, or on their extraordinary 
 variations of literary quality. In this matter Western 
 readers only follow the bad example of neglect set 
 by Arab scholars themselves. " The native critics of 
 Arabic literature," so Mr. Lane-Poole writes, "paid 
 small attention to a collection of romances which 
 appeared to them (as one of them wrote) only as 
 'a corrupt book of silly tales.'" The collection 
 was formed by accretion through centuries, and was 
 subject to all kinds of interpolation and corruption, 
 alike in the oral transmission of the stories through 
 a succession of professional story-tellers, and in the 
 manuscript copies which were from time to time made 
 for use or sale. The greater part of it belongs, at all 
 events in its extant form, to a time considerably later 
 than that of Haroun al Rashid, the contemporary of 
 Charlemagne, who has already become in many of the 
 stories an idealised and half legendary figure like his 
 Western colleague in the Carlovingian epics and 
 romances. Some of it may be as late as the sixteenth 
 century. But the original nucleus goes back to the period 
 ;.of the earlier Abbasid Khalifat, and is not later than the 
 tenth, while it may be as early as the eighth century. 
 And the range in the literary quality of the collection 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 101 
 
 is correspondingly great. Together with much work 
 that as art is crude, invertebrate and vulgar, it includes 
 literary masterpieces which have suffered but little 
 through long transmission stories like those of the 
 City of Brass, or of Nur-ed-din and Enis-el-Jelis, or 
 of Aziz and Azizeh. Among the scraps of poetry 
 quoted in these stories are some which, together with 
 the romantic sensibility of the East, have the pellucid 
 quality of the finest, or all but the finest, Greek work. 
 So far as the romantic poetry of the earlier Middle 
 Ages in Europe remains alive now, it is in virtue of 
 the extent to which it approximates to this combina- 
 tion. And where it has done so, it was under the 
 subtle ferment of Arabian influence. 
 
 The lyrical fragments in the earlier and nobler 
 stories of the Arabian Nights remind one, again and 
 again, of the Greek epigram as it took its latest new 
 development in the hands of Meleager and his con- 
 temporaries, blown over and quickened to a strange 
 beauty by a breath from the East. But these Arabian 
 lyrics have not the exotic and feverish quality of those 
 others: they preserve the simplicity, the genuine 
 flavour, of a native growth. Let me quote one or two 
 instances, in which those familiar with the Greek 
 Anthology will at once recognise the strong likeness 
 and the impalpable yet organic difference. Compare 
 this for instance with the famous AaV^oua a-ol KOI vepOe, 
 Meleager's lamentation over Heliodora : l 
 
 " I have lost my existence among mankind since your absence, 
 
 for my heart loveth none but you. 
 Take my body then in mercy to the place where you are laid, 
 
 and there bury me by your side. 
 
 And if at my grave you utter my name, the moaning of my 
 bones shall answer to your call." 
 
 1 Anth. Pal., vii. 476. 
 
102 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 It is the pulse of the Greek elegiac, at its lyric tension, 
 beating in a different blood. 
 
 Or again, compare with the mixed languor and 
 passion of Meleager's love-pieces this quatrain from the 
 story of Nur-ed-din : 
 
 " Her skin is like silk and her speech is soft, neither redundant 
 
 nor deficient. 
 
 Her eyes, God said to. them, Be, and they were, affecting 
 men's hearts with the potency of wine." 
 
 Or this other sestet : 
 
 "You made a covenant with me that you would remain faith- 
 ful ; but when you had gained possession of my heart you 
 deceived me. 
 
 I conjure you by Allah, if I die, that you write upon my 
 tombstone, This was a slave of love : 
 
 That perchance some mourner who hath felt the same flame 
 may pass by the lover's grave and pity her." 
 
 Nearly every single phrase here may be matched from 
 Meleager's epigrams. " We swore, he to love me, and I 
 never to leave him ; but now he says that such vows 
 are in running water " : " When I am dead, I pray 
 thee lay me under earth and write above, Love's gift to 
 Death " : "I will leave letters uttering this voice, Look, 
 stranger, on Loves murdered man " : " Even myself I 
 carry the wounds of Love and shed tears over thy 
 tears." 1 
 
 Or we may set beside the finest examples of the 
 later Greek elegy whether we are disposed to regard 
 these as sentimentalised and hyperbolical, or as suffused 
 with a new wistfulness and delicacy, a new touch of 
 romantic beauty the poem engraved on the tomb of 
 the loving and heroic Azizeh : 
 
 1 Anth. Pal., v. 8, 215 ; xii. 72, 74. 
 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 103 
 
 " I passed by an undistinguished tomb in the midst of a garden, 
 
 with seven anemones upon it ; 
 And I said, Whose tomb is this 1 ? The soil answered, Be 
 
 respectful, for this is the resting-place of a lover. 
 So I said, God keep thee, O victim of Love, and lodge thee in 
 
 the highest stage of Paradise ! 
 Were I able, O tomb, I would make of thee a garden and 
 
 water it with my streaming tears." 
 
 These lines are earlier than the thirteenth century, but 
 how much earlier we cannot conjecture. There is 
 something in them which hardly reappears in poetry 
 until about a hundred years ago : they have a natural 
 magic which in one way suggests Wordsworth, in 
 another, the more modern neo-Celtic revival. In 
 them, as in other fragments quoted in the Nights, the 
 poetry has not only this finer magic; it has also a 
 greater strength and gravity than anything belonging 
 to the later Greek or Hellenistic world. Poetry was 
 to those Arabian poets something solemn and awful : 
 something (as it was also to Wordsworth) not to be 
 touched without a sense of deep responsibility : it was 
 the creation by man of what was more than human. 
 In one of the fragments we read : 
 
 " There is no writer that shall not perish ; but what his hand 
 
 hath written endureth for ever. 
 
 Write therefore nothing but what will please thee when thou 
 shalt see it on the day of resurrection." 
 
 That gra,ve religious feeling about poetry, as about 
 all art, came with the new religion : it was part of the 
 Puritanism which was the strength of Islam and won 
 it its amazing victories. But the Mohammedan Arabs, 
 whether in their own ancient home or in their new 
 capitals, at Cairo or Damascus, at Baghdad or Cordova, 
 regarded their classic poetry as belonging to an earlier 
 age. It had culminated during the Ignorance, and in 
 
104 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 Arabia itself. And Arabia was then still, as it always 
 had been, and as it became again soon afterwards, a 
 strangly isolated country, living its own contracted life 
 intensely, but hardly touched by external civilisation 
 or by the movements of the vast empires which almost 
 immediately adjoined it. 
 
 " In Europe/' as Mr. Blunt strikingly says, " the 
 nearest analogy to it is to be found in the pre-Christian 
 verse of Celtic Ireland, which by a strange accident was 
 its close contemporary, and lost its wild natural impulse 
 through the very same circumstance of the conversion 
 of its pagan bards to an overmastering new theology." 
 The influence of that Celtic and pagan Ireland upon 
 the imagination and art of Western Europe was also 
 undoubtedly great. In both cases it was the new 
 religion that broke the barriers of what had previously 
 been a wholly isolated civilisation. It was isolated, 
 and one might almost use the term in its literal sense 
 of insular, cut off by an impassable sea ; for the deserts 
 which divide Central and Southern Arabia from the 
 rest of the Continent are comparable to the ocean, as 
 the ocean was in the infancy of navigation, the dis~ 
 socidbilis Oceanus. Both Ireland and Arabia were extra 
 anni solisque mas, beyond the known world. 
 
 It is also singularly striking that the two bodies of 
 poetry, the Irish and the Arabic, were both considered 
 to culminate at the same time, in or about the latter 
 half of the sixth century of our era. It was a time in 
 which for the rest of the world poetry was almost dead. 
 The Dark Ages had settled down over Europe. In the 
 East, the illusive brilliance of the age of Justinian 
 the first attempt at a classical Renaissance had passed 
 away as quickly as it rose; it flowered, and fell away 
 fruitless, within a single generation. In the West but 
 little tradition of letters survived. The monastic 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 105 
 
 chroniclers who were almost the only representatives 
 of literature had to record mere wretchedness ; in Italy, 
 the extinction of the Gothic kingdom and with it of 
 the hopes of a new Europe ; beyond the Alps, the 
 sanguinary annals of the earlier Franks. Only in two 
 countries, and these both beyond the extreme verge of 
 the Roman Empire at its fullest extent, was there 
 imaginative life. Neither into Ireland nor into Arabia 
 had Rome ever effectively penetrated. From these two 
 remote soils, unbroken and virgin, there rose a flowerage 
 of exquisite poetry. In neither case had it the chance 
 to develop further in its native country. In Ireland 
 it was a desperate protest against the new religion 
 which was already dominant : we hear in it the cry of 
 subjugated heathendom. 
 
 " If I were as I once was, the strong hoofs crushing the sand 
 
 and the shells, 
 Coming out of the sea as the dawn comes, a chant of love 
 
 on my lips, 
 Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth 
 
 with the bells, 
 I would leave no saint's head on his body from Rachlin to 
 
 Bera of ships." 
 
 The poetry of Pagan Ireland was crushed out or driven 
 underground by Christianity. To Ireland no doubt, 
 as well as to the kindred Welsh and Breton stocks, 
 some at least of the elements in the Arthurian romance 
 are to be traced. But on a large view we may say 
 that Ireland flooded the world not with poets, but Y 
 with missionaries. The triumph of Islam in Arabia 
 might have done something similar, but that its 
 normal effect in this way was merged in a much 
 vaster movement. Arabia emptied itself out bodily 
 over half the known world. Until then it had been 
 a blank in history. In one generation it issued in the 
 
106 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 storm of conquest which broke the Persian empire 
 in a single battle, and hurled the disciplined armies 
 of Heraclius into irretrievable rout ; within two gene- 
 rations it had spread its dominion from the Oxus to 
 the Guadalquivir, and Byzantium itself was only saved 
 by its fleet to be for seven hundred years longer the 
 capital of a European empire. An immense exhaustion 
 followed that incredible effort : Arabia has ever since 
 been like a scoria-heap left naked and barren after a 
 volcanic outburst. 
 
 The Arab poetry, so far as it survived when it passed 
 * out of Arabia, became something different, something 
 weaker. Good poetry was written, according to the 
 Arab critics, down to the end of the second century of 
 the Hejira. But from the establishment of the Abbasid 
 Khalifat soon after the end of the first century in the 
 year 7 5 of our era it took, like the Khalifat itself, a 
 distinctly Persian flavour ; it ceased to be purely Arabic 
 and became cosmopolitan. The Golden Age of Islam 
 in the reign of Harun al Rashid was one of splendid 
 culture which was on the verge of decay : a culture 
 which had become fully matured, but in doing so had 
 lost its vitalising force. This was long before Hulagu, 
 with his Mongol hordes and his trained corps of 
 Chinese engineers, stormed Baghdad and made an end 
 of the Khalifat. By that time the mediaeval poetry 
 of Western Europe had been made : the period of 
 romance had culminated : there were only seven years 
 more until the birth of Dante. 
 
 Even in the first century of the Hejira something 
 was already lost. The fatalism which is fundamental 
 and essential in Islam perhaps laid a numbing touch 
 on the springs of poetry. In any case the world was 
 altered for the Arabs. "All that was best of them," 
 says Mr. Blunt in apt and accurate words, " had passed 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 107 
 
 outside the desert borders and had become city- 
 dwellers in Syria, Irak, Persia, and Egypt. Their old 
 ways of thought had been exchanged for new ones ; 
 they were no longer Bedouins; they had intermarried 
 with strangers ; their insularity was gone. As far as 
 the rules of the art go, good verse was written ; but 
 the special desert flavour of the old is certainly lack- 
 ing in the new, that splendid realism in regard to 
 natural things, that plainness of speech and that 
 naivet^ of passion which distinguish the pre-Islamic 
 from all other poetry, and which we Europeans find 
 of such priceless value." If we make an exception 
 for the early Greek lyric, this statement as to the 
 unique quality of the pre-Islamic Arab poetry is 
 substantially true. There is indeed one other excep- 
 tion, though it is beyond the stricter bounds of 
 Europe. In the marvellous heroic literature of Iceland 
 there are these same qualities, raised by a certain stern 
 greatness to a level as high if not higher. But that 
 literature remained insular; it produced no effect on 
 Europe until it was rediscovered (one might almost 
 say) within living memory : nor at its full height did 
 it embody itself in the forms of poetry, but in those 
 of the classical Icelandic prose. 
 
 It is then to what remains of the pre-Islamic poetry, 
 the poetry of the Ignorance, that we must turn in order 
 to appreciate the quality of Arabian poetry at its fullest 
 and finest. Only a little of it survives ; but we have 
 at least the satisfaction of knowing that among what 
 survives are the pieces deliberately chosen as its best. 
 The seven Golden Odes, like the seven extant plays 
 of Sophocles, were chosen out and transcribed as 
 masterpieces. They derive that name, according to 
 an unauthentic tradition, from the circumstance that 
 " being judged in the pagan days to be the most 
 
108 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 excellent compositions of the Arabs, they were written 
 in letters of gold upon pieces of fine Egyptian linen 
 and hung up in the court of the Ka'bah at Mecca." 
 But this story is now regarded as a mere piece of 
 mythology, invented to account for the two titles 
 under which they became known, the MudaJiabdt or 
 Golden Poems, and the Muallakdt or Suspended Poems. 
 The date of the earliest and also the noblest of the 
 seven, the Muallaka of Imr-el-Kais, is reckoned to be 
 about the middle of the sixth century A.D. It became 
 the model for a school of verse previously unknown to 
 Arabian poetry ; and the other six, composed at various 
 times during the fifty or sixty years after it, follow 
 more or less closely its structural arrangement, and 
 also, with various modifications, the general form of its 
 rhythms and metres. Both structurally and metrically 
 the odes are elaborated with great finish and with 
 strict adherence to canon. It is clear that they 
 represent a matured art, and one which, but for the 
 genius of the poet, would be becoming academic. 
 Structurally their nearest European parallel is to be 
 found in the Odes of Pindar : of which they may 
 remind one also by their sudden transitions, and their 
 elaborate figuring upon the motives which succeed one 
 another in a determined, one might almost say a con- 
 ventional order. But they differ from the Pindaric 
 ode essentially in their vividly personal or auto- 
 biographic quality; and they differ from it funda- 
 mentally in metrical structure. They are written in 
 a series of uniform stanzas, each consisting of a 
 rhyming or assonant couplet, the same assonance 
 being continued (as the Arabic language permits and 
 even suggests) right through the poem. The first 
 line of each couplet has likewise an internal rhyme, so 
 that we may also think of the couplets as quatrains, 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 109 
 
 each line being a couplet. They have thus a pretty 
 close metrical analogy with more than one familiar 
 European form; with the Greek elegiac; or with the 
 Latin and English trochaic tetrameter, the metre of 
 the Pervigilium Veneris and of Locksley Hall', or with 
 the metre which accurately reproduces one of the 
 favourite Arabian lyric metres of Browning's Alt 
 Vogler. 
 
 The rigid and elaborate formal rules of the Arabian 
 Ode must have been the outcome of a long tradition 
 and of generations of practice. Both the art of ex- 
 pression and the capacities of the language must have 
 been deeply studied for long before the date of the 
 earliest compositions which are now extant. These 
 show nothing archaic or immature ; and in fact, so far 
 as dates are assignable, the earliest are at the same 
 time the most perfect. During the sixth century 
 A.D. poetry was not only fully established as a pro- 
 fessional art, but was becoming an appanage of the 
 courts of chiefs and kings. The Arab kingdoms of 
 al-Hirah on the lower Euphrates and Ghassan in the 
 desert south of the Hauran were on the very edge of 
 the Persian and Graeco-Roman civilisation, and were, 
 to some undefined extent, tributary to the Sassanian and 
 Byzantine empires : both were the resort of court-poets, 
 who were highly honoured and lavishly rewarded. As 
 under the outlying Ionian dynasties which were in 
 touch with and subject to the influence of an adjoining 
 great foreign monarchy the Androclids at Ephesus, 
 or the Neleids at Miletus the development of the 
 native poetry seems in these surroundings to have 
 been quickened and reinforced, while it did not lose 
 its distinctively native quality. It remained purely 
 Arabian : it retained the fine and austere desert 
 flavour. There is in it a quality which it is difficult 
 
110 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 to describe by any single word. The word of hardness 
 would be exaggerated, that of crispness would be too 
 feeble : it is a quality of sharp edge, unwavering and 
 yet delicately elastic, such as is found in its highest 
 degree in the sculpture and poetry of Athens at their 
 culminating period. It seems hard, both in outline 
 and modelling, to minds which are accustomed to the 
 
 (infusion of sentiment in imagination. Arab poetry 
 only became sentimental, the best authorities agree, 
 ^fter the Arab conquest of Persia. Then the infusion, 
 or infection, spread rapidly. Acting in conjunction 
 with other causes, particularly with the enormous 
 dilution of blood and character which accompanied 
 the spread of the Arabian conquests, it transformed 
 the substance of the older and more purely native art. 
 " With the fall of the house of Umayyah," Sir Charles 
 Lyall says, " Arabian poetry, rightly so called, came to 
 an end." 
 
 The pure, clean, tense quality of that poetry can 
 only be fully appreciated so we are told, and we may 
 well believe it by those who know it in the original 
 and who have become to some degree acclimatised to 
 the physical and moral atmosphere in which it was 
 produced. But some idea may be got of it from 
 Mr. Blunt's fine translations, especially if these are 
 compared with other and more prosaic renderings. Mr. 
 Blunt's versions, while they do not seem to fail at all 
 in fidelity, have the immense advantage of reproducing, 
 so far as can well be done in English, the original 
 metres, and preserve in a wonderful degree the sharp 
 accentuation of a language meant (as has been said of 
 it) to be shouted through clear air from hill to hill, 
 full of a strange ring and of strong sudden cadences. 
 Here is one specimen, an elaborated descriptive pass- 
 age from the Muallaka of Antara : 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 111 
 
 " So is a garden new-planted, fresh in its greenery, 
 
 Watered by soft-falling raindrops, treadless, untenanted. 
 Lo, on it rain-clouds have lighted, soft showers, no hail in 
 
 them, 
 
 Leaving each furrow a lakelet bright as a silverling. 
 Pattering, plashing they fell there, rains at the sunsetting, 
 
 Wide- spreading runlets of water, streams of fertility, 
 Mixed with the humming of bees' wings, droning the daylight 
 
 long, 
 
 Never a pause in their chanting, gay drinking-choruses : 
 Blithe iteration of bees' wings, wings struck in harmony 
 Sharply as steel on the flint-stone, light-handed smithy- 
 strokes." 
 
 Here again is a specimen in a different manner, 
 showing the gnomic or reflective side of the Odes. 
 It is from the " wisdom," to use the phrase of the 
 Northern Sagas, which concludes the Muallaka of 
 Zoheyr. Eighty years, the poet says, have taught 
 him 
 
 " That he that doeth for his name's sake fair deeds shall 
 
 further it, 
 But he that of men's praise is careless dwindleth in 
 
 dignity : 
 That he who keepeth faith shall find faith; who in 
 
 simplicity 
 Shall pursue the ways accustomed, no tongue shall wag at 
 
 him : 
 
 That he who flieth his fate shall meet it, not, though a sky- 
 ladder 
 He should climb, shall his fear fend him ; dark death shall 
 
 noose him down : 
 
 That he who shall refuse the lance-butts borne by the peace- 
 bearers, 
 Him the lance-heads shall find fenceless, naked the flesh of 
 
 him : 
 That he who guardeth not his tent-floor with the whole 
 
 might of him, 
 
 Cold shall be his hearthstone broken, ay, though he smote 
 at none ; 
 
112 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 That he who fleeth his kin shall fare far, foes for his guest- 
 fellows : 
 That he who his own face befouleth none else shall honour 
 
 him : 
 
 That whatso a man hath by nature, wit-wealth or vanity, 
 Hidden deep, the day shall prove it ; all shall be 
 manifest." 
 
 Or once more let me quote part of what is perhaps 
 the most splendid single passage from the most 
 splendid single Arabian Ode, the conclusion of the 
 Muallaka of Imr-al-Kais. Like all really great poetry 
 it suffers by being detached from its context : and 
 indeed the Ode produces its superlative effect as a 
 whole rather than in its parts. The exquisite de- 
 scriptions of the lovers meeting at night, of the for- 
 saken desert camp, of the chase and capture of the 
 deer, follow one another in massed harmonic evolution, 
 like the movements in a symphony. The Coda, the 
 final movement, is a vividly imagined picture of a 
 storm in the night sweeping over the desert. It comes 
 abruptly, like the storm itself, with a sudden change of 
 key and atmosphere. This on the one hand makes it 
 detachable for quotation : on the other hand it must be 
 borne in mind that on this very change of key depends 
 much of its poetical effect. I do not quote this time 
 from Mr. Blunt's rendering, but (to be on the safe side) 
 from the more literal and perhaps more scholarly 
 though less poetical version of Sir Charles Lyall. It 
 lacks the strong rhythm and ringing cadence of the 
 other ; it lacks, too, something of the characteristic 
 Arabian swiftness which Mr. Blunt reproduces so 
 admirably, with its paratactic constructions and its 
 extreme compression of language. The outlines in 
 this English version are a little blurred, the edge a 
 little softened : the whole effect is slightly occiden- 
 talised. 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 113 
 
 " O friend, see the lightning there ! it flickered and now is gone, 
 As though flashed a pair of hands in the pillar of crowned 
 
 cloud. 
 
 Nay, was it its blaze, or the lamp of a hermit that dwells alone, 
 And pours o'er the twisted wicks the oil from his slender 
 
 cruse ? 
 We sat there, my fellows and I, twixt Darij and al-Udhaib 
 
 And gazed as the distance gloomed, and waited its oncoming. 
 The right of its mighty rain advanced over Katan's ridge, 
 The left of its trailing skirt swept Yadhbul and as-Sitar. 
 Then over Kutaifah's steep the flood of its onset drave 
 
 And headlong before the storm the tall trees were borne to 
 
 ground. 
 
 And the drift of its waters passed o'er the crags of al-Kanan 
 And drave forth the white-legged deer from the refuge they 
 
 sought therein. 
 And Taima it left not there the stem of a palm aloft, 
 
 Nor ever a tower save one firm-built on the living rock. 
 And when first its misty shroud bore down upon Mount Thabir, 
 He stood like an ancient man in a grey-streaked mantle 
 
 wrapt. 
 The clouds cast their burden down on the broad plain of al- 
 
 Ghabit 
 
 As a trader from al-Yaman unfolds from the bales his store ; 
 And the topmost crest on the morrow of al-Mujaimir's cairn 
 Was heaped with the flood-borne wrack like wool on a distaff 
 
 wound. 
 
 At earliest dawn on the morrow the birds were chirping blithe 
 
 As though they had drunken draughts of riot in fiery wine : 
 
 And at even the drowned beasts lay where the torrent had borne 
 
 them, dead, 
 
 High up on the valley sides, like earth-stained roots of 
 squills." 
 
 There is a touch in this passage of the early connexion, 
 slender enough and almost imponderable, between 
 pre-Mohammedan Arabia and the Western world. 
 The first flicker of the distant lightning is compared 
 with the upleap of flame in a lamp when its keeper 
 pours oil into it : and that is the lamp of a Christian 
 hermit, such as were to be found here and there, in 
 Arabia itself as well as in Syria and Upper Egypt, 
 
 H 
 
114 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 before they were swept away by the flood of the new 
 religion. They represented almost the whole amount 
 of the penetration of the West into that isolated land. 
 
 Not many years before this Ode was composed, a 
 forlorn company of seven philosophers had, after the 
 formal closure of the schools of Athens, sought refuge 
 at the court of Khosru Nushirvan from an unfriendly 
 world. They returned utterly disillusioned. Had 
 their contemporaries, that Pleiad of Byzantine poets 
 who made the last additions to the long jewel-chain of 
 the Greek Anthology, made a like venture into the 
 Arabian desert, they might have returned equally 
 empty-handed. For the flower was of the soil, and 
 would not bear transplantation. It was only after an 
 interval of several centuries, in a vastly diluted form, 
 and through tortuous and circuitous channels, that this 
 strange and potent poetry, so primitive and yet so 
 elaborate in its art, could become communicable, could 
 strike upon and refertilise the West. 
 
 In one of his miraculous phrases, phrases created 
 by a power of instinctive divination which seems little 
 less than magical, Keats speaks of 
 
 "Asian poppy or elixir fine 
 Of the soon- fading, jealous Caliphat." 
 
 This early Arab poetry is a fine elixir distilled from 
 Arab life, with its vastness, its mystery, its strange 
 combination of vivid colour with immense mono- 
 ' tony. Something like it, something wholly lost 
 and only to be guessed at through reconstructive 
 imagination, lies behind the Homeric poems : it be- 
 longed to the dawn of that day of which the Iliad and 
 Odyssey represent the magnificent sunset. Let me 
 quote again a fine passage of Mr. Blunt's. " These 
 living wild creatures they described ; these and the 
 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 115 
 
 storms which occasionally wrecked their valleys, blot- 
 ting out in a night the memorial stones of their en- 
 campments ; the sun's heat in their long day-marches ; 
 the stars hung overhead at night like lamps from the 
 firmament ; the ships seen from their sea-coasts ; and 
 yet again their camels and their horses, for it, was 
 always to these that their thoughts returned, and 
 which they did not weary of depicting." We might 
 be reading here of the earlier poetry that has left its 
 traces indelibly in Homer ; the lion- hunt and the boar- 
 hunt, the nine days' rain that blotted out the great 
 Achaean wall, sweat and dust under the strength of the 
 sun, the march of the constellations that guided the 
 mariner and gave sign of the seasons, Sirius and 
 Arcturus and the Pleiades. Only, in that primitive 
 pre-Homeric poetry, it would not be ships seen from 
 their sea-coasts that the poets described so much as 
 sea-coasts seen from their ships, and it was to the 
 horses of the sea aAo? "inroi that their thoughts 
 always returned, and which they never wearied of 
 depicting. 
 
 The formal and finished Ode is not the only pro- 
 duct of early Arabian poetry of which specimens 
 survive. Many more are preserved in the Kitdb-al- f ' 
 Aghdni, a great collection made early in the tenth 
 century by a distinguished Arab scholar, a descendant 
 of the dethroned House of Umayyah. They consist 
 chiefly of lyrical or elegiac pieces of briefer form and 
 slighter texture than the Odes, but belonging to the same 
 period. Some of these are fragments of longer poems ; 
 others are complete in themselves. Their scope and 
 range may be roughly compared to that of the Greek 
 epigram in its widest signification : only to make the 
 comparison just, we should have to include with the 
 epigram the shorter Greek lyrics and elegies. Some 
 
116 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 may properly be described as pure lyrics : others are 
 descriptive or reflective pieces ; but they can only be 
 divided into distinct classes in a somewhat arbitrary 
 way. The Sicilian sonnet, which was afterwards 
 naturalised and perfected in Italy and has remained a 
 distinct poetical form in Europe ever since, seems to 
 derive, partly at least, from Arabian models. In the 
 Spanish Romance, which may be dated back at least as 
 early as the eleventh century, the Arabian influence is 
 even stronger and more unmistakeable. In it, as in 
 J the Chansons de Geste, we find the strongly accentuated 
 rhythms, and the rhyming system of the laisse or tirade 
 a series of lines carried on upon the same rhyme or 
 assonance throughout which are both distinguishing 
 features of Arabian poetry. 
 
 The question how far the whole element of rhyme in 
 the poetry of the Romance languages is a native growth 
 derived from Latin, and how far it is also of Arabian 
 origin, is a difficult and complex one, into which I do 
 not now propose to enter. That accentual rhymed 
 verse was in certain specific forms native to the Latin 
 tongue is beyond doubt : there are traces of it under 
 the surface throughout the whole of the classical period, 
 and we can follow its re-emergence in the third and 
 fourth centuries when the quantitative metres imposed 
 on Italy by the genius of Greece were beginning to give 
 way with the general transformation of the world and 
 the loosening of the classical civilisation and culture. 
 Accentual rhymed or assonant verse has already 
 attained a decisive predominance when the Romance 
 languages begin to develop substantive bodies of poetry 
 of their own. But it is no less certain that in this 
 predominance Arab influence had a substantial if not 
 even a decisive share. It is likewise to be noted that 
 while the native Latin rhythms were falling or trochaic, 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 117 
 
 those of the new Romance poetry are rising or iambic : 
 the one therefore is not the direct descendant or 
 derivative of the other. The origin of the ten-syllabled 
 or eleven-syllabled line on rising rhythm which became 
 the norm for the great bulk of European poetry has been 
 accounted for in different ways, but no fully satisfactory 
 account has yet been given. The eleven-syllabled Italian 
 line (the superbissimum carmen of Dante) is almost the 
 precise metrical equivalent of the accentualised Latin 
 Sapphic, a form very widely used in ecclesiastical Latin 
 poetry. It is also an approximate equivalent of the 
 Phalaecian hendecasyllabic verse, the favourite metre of 
 Catullus, if that verse became similarly accentual in 
 its structure. But the Italian eleven-syllabled line is 
 historically derived from the ten-syllabled line of earlier 
 literatures, Provencal, and French, and Sicilian: and 
 that decasyllabic line, while it bears little relation to 
 any known Latin metre whether quantitative or accen- 
 tual, is in fact a metrical form largely used in Arabian 
 and Arabo-Persian poetry. 
 
 The problem is technical and historical. It has no 
 direct bearing on the progress of poetry as an inter- 
 pretation of life. But in poetry, as in all art, form and 
 substance are inseparable, and even technicalities have 
 a distinct value towards poetical interpretation as well 
 as towards the historic sense through which poetry 
 itself becomes more alive and more intelligible. This 
 subject belongs to the province of the Modern Language 
 School which is one of the most important additions 
 made in this generation to the field of University 
 studies : and it is one of those upon which specialists 
 in that School might profitably concentrate their 
 attention. 
 
 It is however to the lyrico-elegiac poetry of early 
 Arabia in its inner and more strictly poetical quality 
 
118 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 that we must for the present return : and perhaps its 
 quality may be even more readily and more vividly 
 brought out by instances than by a formal disquisition. 
 The normal metres of these minor pieces, I may add, 
 are, unlike those used in the formal Ode, in rising or 
 iambic rhythm, corresponding closely to the eight - 
 syllabled and ten-syllabled lines which were established 
 for England by Chaucer, and have remained ever since 
 characteristic and normal for English poetry. Many 
 of these short poems are alike remarkable for depth of 
 y feeling, clearness of expression, and intensity of realisa- 
 tion. These qualities set them alongside of the finest 
 European work, whether Italian or Greek. 
 
 Here is a lyric of intense and restrained passion, 
 strong without any loss of tenderness, sweet without 
 any tinge of sentimentality : 
 
 " O God, if I die, and thou give not my ghost to drink 
 
 Of Laila, no grave lies thirstier than my grave. 
 If I forget my pain though Laila be not for me, 
 
 My comforter is despair : patience no comfort brings. 
 And if I suffice myself without her, seeming strong and stern, 
 Ah ! many are the strengths of soul that lie near to lacking 
 sore." 
 
 Or take this lyric, which like the other is from the 
 Hamdsah, a collection made in Northern Syria about 
 the middle of the ninth century of our era : 
 
 " By him who brings weeping and laughter, who deals Death 
 
 and Life as he wills, 
 She left me to envy the wild deer that graze twain and twain 
 
 without fear. 
 Love of her, heighten my heart's pain and strengthen the 
 
 pang every night ! 
 Comfort that days bring, forgetting, the last of all days 
 
 be thy tryst ! " 
 
 Here again, in a short piece probably belonging to 
 the sixth century A.D., is a vision of the splendour 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 119 
 
 and transitoriness of life. I give Sir Charles Lyall's 
 translation. It is in the metre of the original, but 
 without the rhymes, except in the last verse, where, 
 as they happen to be on proper names, they remain. 
 
 " Koast flesh, the glow of fiery wine ; 
 To speed on camel fleet and sure, 
 As thy soul lists to urge her on 
 
 Through all the hollow's breadth and length ; 
 
 White women statue-like that trail 
 Rich robes of price with golden hem ; 
 
 Wealth, easy lot, no dread of ill, 
 
 To hear the lute's complaining string ; 
 
 These are life's joys. For man is set 
 The prey of Time, and Time is change. 
 
 Life strait or large, great store or nought, 
 All's one to Time, all men to Death. 
 
 Death brought to nought Tasm long ago, 
 
 Ghadt of Bahm, and Dhu Judiin, 
 The race of Jash and Marib and 
 
 The house of Lukman and at-Tukun." 
 
 The splendid effect of the names with which this piece 
 ends is to be felt rather than dwelt upon. 
 
 Or take this verse from a poem on a dead warrior, 
 where spirit and language are both nearly akin to those 
 of the Sagas, with their heroic iron temper that meets 
 life and death alike with the same clear steady eyes : 
 
 " Slaughter chose from all men born the race of Simmah for her 
 
 own : 
 They chose her, and would none other ; so fate goes to the 
 
 fated end. 
 Flesh to feed the sword are we, and unrepining we meet our 
 
 doom; 
 Well we feed him, slain or slaying : joyfully he takes our food." 
 
 Or this other from the Muallaka of Zoheyr, which 
 is like the death-song of Gunnar in the house of King 
 Atli: 
 
i20 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 " I know what to-day unfolds, what before it was yesterday, 
 But blind do I stand before the knowledge to-morrow 
 
 brings. 
 I have seen the Dooms trample men as a blind beast at 
 
 random treads ; 
 
 Whom they smote, he died ; whom they missed, he lived 
 on to strengthless eld." 
 
 Or again this passage, drawing, in a few clear firm 
 strokes, the Arab ideal of manhood : 
 
 " Sunshine in winter, and when the Dog-Star burned, coolness 
 
 and shadow ; 
 Lean-flanked and thin, but not from lacking ; liberal-handed, 
 
 keen-hearted, haughty : 
 He journeyed with Wariness, and where he halted, Wariness 
 
 halted as his comrade ; 
 A rushing rain-flood when he gave of his fulness ; when he 
 
 sprang to the onset, a mighty lion. 
 Two savours had he, of sweet and bitter, and one or the other 
 
 all men have tasted. 
 He rode Fear alone, without a fellow but only his deep- notched 
 
 blade of al-Yaman." 
 
 Finally let me quote a noble passage of reflective 
 poetry : it occurs in a poem written when the author's 
 tribe were forced under pressure of war to migrate 
 from their ancestral home, leaving nothing in their 
 loved meadows but ruinous tents and penfolds. 
 
 " The righteous shall keep the way of the righteous, 
 
 And to God turn the steps of all that abideth. 
 And to God ye return, ye too : with Him only 
 
 Rest the issues of things and all that they gather ; 
 All that is in His book of knowledge is reckoned, 
 
 And before Him revealed lies all that is hidden. 
 Is there aught good in life ? Yea, I, I have seen it, 
 
 Even I, if the seeing bring aught of profit. 
 Long has life been to me, and this is its burden : 
 
 Lone against Time abide Tiar and Yaramram 
 And Kulaf and Badi the Mighty, and Dalfa, 
 
 And Timar that towers aloft over Khubbah ; 
 
ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 121 
 
 And the Stars, marching on all night in procession, 
 Drooping westward as each moves forth to his setting. 
 
 Sure and steadfast their course : the Underworld draws them 
 Gently downwards, as maidens circling the Pillar ; 
 
 And we may not know, when their lustre is vanished, 
 Whether long be the ropes that bind them or little." 
 
 These lines, alike profound and majestic, come in an 
 ode which in main substance is a wild tale of foray 
 and plunder and revenge. 
 
 Romance reaches its height in the brilliant opening 
 of one of the seven Golden Odes themselves, the 
 Muallaka, of Tarafa : where the art is not only (as we 
 are apt to say about anything that pleases us) strangely 
 modern, but unusually complex and subtle. In those 
 lines a motive not uncommon in Arab poetry, the 
 moving of the camp in spring, is transfigured by the 
 romantic spirit into a magic magnificence. The how- 
 dahs pass silently at dawn, like a dream moving 
 through a dream : fair women in them, white-armed 
 and supple-waisted, half hid behind the scarlet-lined 
 curtains, " the precious stuffs with fluttering ensan- 
 guined borders." " They seemed a white fleet of tall- 
 rigged ships, wandering wide through the night to 
 meet at sunrise : thus clomb they the long wave-lines 
 with prows set aloft, ploughing the drifted ridges of 
 sand." Then, without any phrase of transition, the 
 splendid vision of dawn and dreams melts into an 
 even lovelier daylight. 
 
 " Ah, the dark-lipped one, the maid of the topazes, 
 Hardly yet grown a woman, sweet fruit-picking loiterer, 
 A girl, a fawn still fawnless, aloof in the long valleys : 
 The face of her how joyous ! the day's robe enfolding her, 
 Clean as a thing fresh-fashioned, untouched. ..." 
 
 Love in the Valley has never had a more exquisite 
 embodiment, or been set against a more wonderful 
 background. 
 
122 ARABIAN LYRIC POETRY 
 
 We seem, in this early Arabian work, in thatjjpc 
 age_so kindled and irradiated by the spirit of romance, 
 to be on the verge of a great poetry, a romantic epic 
 such as has been only achieved a few times in the 
 progress of poetry. It did not come. But what 
 advances were made towards it, how far the lyrical, 
 elegiac, and idyllic poetry of Arabia went in the 
 direction of the larger scope of epic and romantic 
 poetry will be the subject of another lecture, in 
 which also I shall attempt to indicate, or at least 
 to suggest, the bearing which that Arabian poetry 
 and the pattern of life that it drew has on our own 
 Middle Ages and the development of romance in the 
 Western world. 
 
ARABIAN EPIC AND ROMANTIC 
 POETRY 
 
 THE STEALING OF THE MARE 
 
 THE saying that history repeats itself is one of those pro- 
 visional theories or approximate generalisations which 
 are useful as stepping-stones towards progress. The 
 object of history indeed, if history be regarded as more 
 than the endless amassing of isolated grains of fact, is 
 to find the pattern in human affairs ; for that pattern, 
 if we could find it, is the meaning of the world, or if 
 we prefer to put it so, the manifestation of the thought 
 of God. And the essence of pattern, as we have seen 
 already when we were considering the question of the 
 definition of poetry, is repeat. But that this repeating 
 pattern may become art in the full sense, something 
 else is required. The repeat must be so planned and 
 varied as to become more than a mere repeat ; it must 
 become the organic element of a whole which is not 
 an aggregate but an organic unity. In art, as in all 
 vital processes, nothing repeats itself absolutely ; even 
 if when abstracted and taken by itself it appears to do 
 so, the mere fact that it has occurred before makes its 
 recurrence something new and different, because bear- 
 ing a different relation to the whole integrated past out 
 of which it rises, and the whole potential future of 
 which it is both the germ and the soil. But it is 
 seldom that the recurrence bears even superficially 
 the aspect of a mere repetition; the difference, even 
 at first sight, is generally as obvious as the likeness : 
 
 123 
 
124 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 and if because of the weakness and imperfect flexibility 
 of language we use the same word for two different 
 things, we are conscious that such language suggests 
 an analogy rather than affirms an identity. 
 
 In speaking of the epic age of Arabian poetry we 
 avail ourselves of this loose and approximate applica- 
 tion of language. It was the age which was epic, 
 rather than the poetry. Nothing corresponding strictly 
 to the European epic, even if that term be taken at the 
 full stretch of its meaning, was produced by the genius 
 of Arabia. That genius worked for a time on lines 
 presenting a rough parallel suggestive and illuminat- 
 ing even in its roughness to the lines on which the 
 poetical genius of Europe grew towards what we call 
 the epic. Then it swerved off, and took a course of its 
 own. But meanwhile its effect, direct and indirect, 
 upon the mediaeval epic as well as upon the mediaeval 
 romance of Europe was great. 
 
 To enquire why it was that Arab poetry never 
 produced an epic may be too curious. Where we have 
 an actual work of art, we can put it into relation with 
 its environment, and can see to some extent at least 
 how, if not why, it came into being. But our know- 
 ledge is too imperfect, our analysis not fine enough, to 
 let us see why or how, in art as in other matters, any- 
 thing did not happen. We can no more do this than 
 we can say how the course of history would have been 
 deflected if facts at any moment had been different 
 from what they were. But we can say this much, that 
 the conditions in which epic poetry has in fact arisen 
 elsewhere, did not hold here. Arabia before Islam was 
 a loose aggregate of small tribes. They had little in 
 common beyond a general resemblance in manner of 
 life and habits. It was only towards the end of the 
 period that they had even a common language. They 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 125 
 
 were without anything that could be called a national 
 self- consciousness, and they could not therefore have a 
 fully developed national poetry. After the tremendous 
 conquests and expansions of the seventh century, 
 anything like nationality was out of the question. The 
 bond of the empire of the Khalifs was one of religion : 
 and that religion was a fierce Puritanism which was 
 jealous of art. The concentration of Arabian poetry in \ 
 what may be called the epic age never had a chance to 
 expand and dilate itself by any normal course of growth. 
 It is like the wine in the Odyssey that had to be mixed 
 with twenty parts of water in order to be used for drink- 
 ing and to disengage its flavour. The jar that held that 
 strong heady wine of poetry was violently broken, and 
 the wine spilt before it had been mixed for the larger 
 draught. But where the scattered drops fell they were 
 not all drunk by the sand ; still potent in strange sur- 
 roundings, still capable of immense dilution without losing"^ 
 their virtue, they gave to the poetry of other races not I 
 merely a new colour and tone but a new element of life, j 
 The new element was one to which no single worcT ' 
 precisely corresponds. It held in it, embodied in a 
 single texture, the two things which we call romance^ 
 and chivalry: the chivalrous romance which is akin to 
 the epic and distinct from the sentimental romance of 
 a later development : and the romantic chivalry which 
 is different from anything in either classical or Nor- 
 thern literature, but when engrafted on and inter- 
 fused with these became the imaginative soul of the 
 Middle Ages. Western romance and chivalry derive 
 from Arabian origins much as Western religion 
 derives from Jewish origins. To the kindred stocks of 
 the Arabo-Syrian plateau for of that single race and 
 region Palestine is also a part we owe largely or even 
 mainly the vital forces which make the Middle Ages 
 
126 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 spiritually and imaginatively different from the world 
 ruled over by Rome. 
 
 Their influence did not come all at once or through 
 one channel. As we have seen, the Asiatic influence 
 counts for something even as far back as the epic 
 age of Greece. It was present and active in the 
 Alexandrian school, when Egypt, itself according to 
 the division of the ancient geographers an Asiatic 
 country, was the central nursery of Greek litera- 
 ture, as it afterwards became the centre, or one of 
 the chief centres, of Arabian literature also. It acted 
 on Europe at a later period in and through Byzantium 
 and the Greek empire of the East. But its determining 
 impact as regards poetry was more direct. Historians 
 have gone too far in tracing to Byzantine origins what 
 reached and affected the West through a more imme- 
 diate contact with the East. The formula " a travers 
 \ Byzance," in which that doctrine was summarised by 
 j Gaston Paris, must be supplemented and modified if it 
 I is not to be misleading. It is applied by him not only, 
 for example, to Parthenopeu de Blois and to the Ckdte- 
 laine de Vergi, but to Aucassin and Nicolete. In this 
 last instance certainly, as perhaps in the others, any 
 Byzantine influence or suggestion is remote and 
 conjectural ; the immediate Oriental influence is patent 
 and dominant. In the Middle Ages from first to last 
 Byzantium was as much a foreign city as Cairo or 
 Damascus, as Samarcand or Cordova : Greek was as 
 much a strange language as Arabic. The rediscovery 
 of Greek at the Renaissance was a discovery of some- 
 thing of which all touch had for many centuries been 
 lost. To Dante and Petrarch, as to the whole age of 
 their contemporaries and predecessors, Homer was a 
 sealed book. But the knowledge of Arabic literature 
 was for several centuries before them widely diffused 
 
 I/ 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 127 
 
 in the countries bordering the Western Mediterranean. 
 
 " Era scritto in Arabica, che '1 Conte 
 Intendea cosi ben come Latino " 
 
 so Ariosto says of Orlando reading the inscription left 
 in the cave by Medoro and Angelica, and romance here 
 follows, in a broad way, the facts of history. 1 In a 
 notable passage of Sordello, Browning, with a true his- 
 torical instinct, couples Greek and Arabic as among 
 the accomplishments of Salinguerra, each acquired for 
 its own reason 
 
 " Speaking the Greek's own language, just because 
 Your Greek eludes you, leave the least of flaws 
 In contracts with him ; while, since Arab lore 
 Holds the stars' secret take one trouble more 
 And master it ! " 
 
 The Western knowledge of Greek was in the main * 
 confined to traders and diplomatists ; it had nothing 
 to do with literature : while the knowledge of Arabic 
 was not only of much wider use, being necessary in the 
 whole circle of the arts and sciences, but much more 
 intimate and vital. It held the stars' secret in more 
 senses than one. 
 
 It is a common and accepted, but a fallacious, 
 belief that Arab romance was confined to prose. Mr. 
 Bourdillon, in his excellent introduction to Aucassin 
 and Nicolete, falls into this error. " Fauriel first ob- 
 served/' he writes, " that this poem " I don't know 
 why he calls it a poem "has the form of Arabian 
 romances: and the probability of this origin has not 
 been denied. Only, as Dr. W. Herz remarks, there is 
 this difference, that in this work the story continues 
 uninterruptedly, told alternately in prose and verse ; 
 while in the Arabian and Persian romances the verses 
 
 1 Orlando Furioso, B. xxiii. st. 110, 
 
128 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 are of a purely lyrical or didactic character, merely 
 illustrating and not continuing the story told in 
 the prose ; they could in fact be left out without 
 injuring the course of the tale. In thus departing 
 from his models, the French poet hit upon a most 
 happy and telling method, employed with marked 
 skill." This is true of the Arabian Nights: but the 
 Nights are not the whole body of Arabian romances ; 
 and we shall see presently that this form was not 
 an invention of the French poet, but had been used, 
 and developed with even greater skill and constructive 
 power, by his Arabian models or predecessors. Even 
 Mr. Nicholson, if I may venture to say so, generalises 
 somewhat too widely, or omits, as for his purposes 
 he was justified in omitting, a qualification which for 
 our purpose is important, when he says in his Literary 
 History of the Arabs that Arabian literature " produced 
 no great epic, but only prose narratives which, though 
 sometimes epic in tone, are better described as his- 
 torical romances." That it produced no great epic is 
 accurately true, but it did not confine itself to prose 
 narratives. In its feeling after the epic, before the 
 romantic period had fully set in and before Arabian 
 poetry, much about the same time, came to an end, 
 it struck upon, and pursued for some way, a form 
 of poetry which is an Jnchog-fo ftpic. That form 
 was not pursued to completion : it remained only 
 half-developed. But the key had been found, and 
 
 handed over to the West. 
 
 It is to one of the few surviving specimens of this 
 highly significant form of poetry a new departure 
 which was to have immense issues that I wish to 
 draw attention. This is the romance entitled The 
 Stealing of the Mare. It has been made accessible to 
 English readers by Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's admirable 
 
 .^w 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 129 
 
 translation. Even among Arabic scholars I find it 
 is but little known. But with the instinct of a poet, 
 he realised its value; and with the skill of a born 
 man of letters he has presented it so as to lose none 
 of its unique fascination, and has thus increased the 
 debt already owed to him by students of literature 
 and lovers of poetry. 
 
 The Romance of the Stealing of the Mare was 
 composed in the tenth century. It is one of a cycle 
 composing the Romance of Abu Zeyd. Its author 
 was one Abu Obeyd, of whom nothing but the 
 name is known. The Beni-Helal, the tribe of which 
 Abu Zeyd was the national hero, belonged originally 
 to Nejd. About the end of the ninth century A.D. 
 they migrated under stress of famine (like the Beni- 
 Israel between two and three thousand years before 
 them) to the eastern borders of Egypt, where they 
 remained for upwards of a generation and then, accord- 
 ing to tradition, moved on again westwards. Tribes 
 claiming descent from them still exist in Tunisia, and 
 for all we know they may have penetrated into Spain ./ 
 and come into actual contact with the developing 
 poetry of Southern France. An elaborate simile drawn 
 from the flooded Nile, and some other allusions to 
 Egyptian monuments and customs, make it reasonably 
 probable that the romance was composed, in its actual 
 form, during the Egyptian sojourn : and it is in Egypt 
 that it has been orally preserved till modern times. 
 But it contains reminiscences of earlier history : the 
 Chosroes are mentioned in it as though they were still 
 kings in Iran, and the framework and ideas of the poem, 
 with one striking and important exception which I 
 shall mention, are mainly pre-Islamic and take us back 
 to the period of the Ignorance. 
 
 The incidents on which it is founded were quasi- / 
 
 i 
 
130 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 \ historical, as they were with the almost contemporary 
 \ Charlemagne-epic in France : but as historical docu- 
 ments they are equally valueless. Fact, if there, is 
 overlaid with and transmuted by imagination. The 
 work was transmitted orally through centuries, as in 
 ^fragments it still is; when it was first written down 
 > there are no means of determining, but in the long 
 I course of transmission, chiefly through illiterate story- 
 tellers, both language and versification became much 
 corrupted. Nevertheless its essential excellence of 
 construction was so great that it has resisted decay ; 
 it has become neither greatly debased nor badly muti- 
 lated. Arab scholars, we are told, hold it in contempt 
 on account of vulgarisms of dialect and defects of metre. 
 But it is true metal : and we may judge, without strain- 
 ing probability, that its form was originally not un- 
 worthy of its substance. Even now it is the best single 
 picture which we possess of romantic chivalry as the 
 ) Arabs of the ninth and tenth century understood it ; 
 ^ and this was also as they created it, and as they handed 
 (it over to Western Europe. 
 
 The formjof the romance is however no less remark- 
 able than its substance ; and in form as well as in 
 substance it throws a flood of light on the development 
 of mediaeval poetry in the West. It is planned and 
 executed in alternate prose and verse. This form of 
 literature the cante-fdble occurs in a number of in- 
 dependent literatures. It is most familiar through a 
 single European example, the French romance of Au- 
 cassin and Nicolete. It has been little followed at any 
 time of fully developed art. Aucassin and Nicolete is 
 unique of its period. Later Western romances made the 
 choice between verse and prose and stuck to it through- 
 out. In our own time Morris, that great experimenter 
 and rediscoverer, brought the form into use again. The 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 131 
 
 House of the Wolfings, the earliest, and in the judgment of 
 many the finest, of the romances of his later life, bears 
 a remarkable analogy to the Stealing of the Mare in its 
 use of the alternation of verse with prose ; and that 
 analogy is the more striking because in both cases the 
 romance may properly be described as a romantic epic : 
 it has the epic concentration and nobility, the tone and 
 colour of an epic age. When Aucassin and Nicolete 
 was composed, about the end of the twelfth century 
 (the extant Northern French version belongs to the 
 beginning of the thirteenth) the epic age of France 
 was practically over ; the period of the cyclic epic, of 
 literary rifaccimenti, had begun. This tenth-century 
 Arabian romance, springing from deeper roots, has 
 what Gaston Paris calls, in an admirable phrase, 
 the " large uninterrupted movement " of the true 
 epic, which does not either move in spasmodic 
 jerks like the Chanson de fioland or crawl along like 
 the Nibelungenlied. It has the essential epic con- -^ 
 struction; but it stops short of reaching the full / 
 epic form. 
 
 Mastery of construction is a quality that can be 
 hardly shown by a sketch ; it has to be pursued 
 throughout the complete work. A work of art only 
 shows its constructive quality when the whole is 
 considered as the integration of all its parts, and 
 when the parts are considered as the elements, 
 essential and mutally interrelated, in which the 
 whole receives its substance and creates its effect. 
 But it is worth while giving a sketch necessarily on 
 this occasion brief of the Stealing of the Mare ; both 
 because of the extreme art and beauty of particular 
 episodes, and also because we may thus incidentally 
 emphasise some of the qualities of the work as poetry, 
 the kind of pattern of life which it embodies. In 
 
132 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 doing so I shall quote freely, as I am permitted to 
 do, from Mr. Blunt's translation. 
 
 It will be convenient to say here that as regards 
 its technical mechanism this romance is a poem set 
 in a framework of connecting passages of prose, differ- 
 ing thus from Aucassin and Nicolete, which is a prose 
 romance set in a framework of connecting passages of 
 verse. The prose here is only about one quarter of 
 the whole ; with one exception the prose passages are 
 brief, not exceeding a page or two in each case. The 
 art of narrative prose had been developed in Arabic 
 to perfection; and read together, the prose passages 
 make a continuous and complete story, short indeed, 
 but as brilliant as the best of those in the Arabian 
 Nights. The verse taken by itself does not set forth 
 the story quite completely and continuously, but it 
 covers most of the ground. The prose is all in direct 
 narrative, the verse partly in narrative, partly put in 
 the mouth of the hero by an impersonation which is 
 half lyrical and half dramatic. At the beginning, and 
 for some way on, each section begins with a (Jformulary 
 line, Saith the hero Abu Zeyd, the Helali Salame. TEis 
 line gives the name, the patronymic, and the race of 
 the hero in full : an exactly equivalent line in Homeric 
 language would be, etV' 'OSvarev? Aaejorm^? /u.eya KV<$O$ 
 J A*xaia)v. The sections are likewise introduced by 
 formulary words ; " said the narrator " before each 
 section of prose; "and the narrator began to sing," 
 or some variation of these words, before each section 
 of verse : just as in the French romance the respective 
 sections are headed " or se cante " and " or dient et 
 content et fabloient." 
 
 The opening of the romance, in its succinctness 
 and swift precision^, shows an art already studied and 
 mature. There is no fumbling, no preluding, no 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 133 
 
 getting under weigh. There are indeed a few pre- 
 fatory lines in prose ; but these are something between 
 an epistle to the reader and a title-page : they bear in 
 fact a close resemblance to one of those lengthened 
 title-pages with which we are familiar in old printed 
 books. I may quote this preface because it is at 
 once brief and characteristic : it is a pleasant bush 
 for good wine. 
 
 " In the name of God, the Merciful, the Com- 
 passionate ! He who telleth this tale* is Abu Obeyd ; 
 and he saith : When I took note and perceived that 
 the souls of men took pleasure in hearing good tales, 
 and that their ears were comforted and they made 
 good cheer in the listening, then I called to mind the 
 tale of the Agheyli Jaber and his mare, and of what 
 befell him and his people. For this is a story of 
 wonderful adventure and marvellous incidents, and a 
 tale which when one hears he desires to have it ever 
 in remembrance as a delight tasted by him and not 
 forgotten. And the telling of it is this." 
 
 Then the romance at once begins. In what follows 
 I shall quote from the verse, but borrow from the 
 briefer and more unadorned prose where it can con- 
 veniently be used for giving the outline of the story. 
 The first lay or canto opens with the formulary line 
 I have mentioned, and adds to it curiously what does 
 not occur elsewhere, a flourish or cadenza. This seems 
 also to be formulary and to descend directly from the 
 lyric with a refrain, familiar in all popular or ballad 
 poetry. 
 
 " Saith the hero Abu Zeyd, the Helali Salame : 
 (Woe is me, my heart is a fire, a fire that burneth ! ) 
 
 On a Friday morning once I sat with three companions, 
 I in my tent, the fourth of four, with the sons of Amer. 
 Sudden I raised my eyes and gazed at the breadth of the desert, 
 
134 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 Searching the void afar, the empty hills and the valleys. 
 
 Lo in the midmost waste a form, where the rainways 
 
 sundered, 
 Wandering uncertain round in doubt, with steps of a 
 
 stranger." 
 
 This form, drifting like a leaf in the wide vast land- 
 scape, is Ghanimeh, the widow of a great man among 
 the Arabs. At her husband's death, his brother (like 
 Julian Avenel in the Monastery) had possessed himself 
 by the strong hand of his inheritance, driven out the 
 widow, and degraded her boy, the rightful heir, to be 
 a herder of camels. He pacified the indignation of 
 the tribe by engaging that when the boy grew up he 
 should marry his own only daughter, and succeed to 
 his position. But when Ghanimeh returned to claim 
 this promise, and was backed up by the great ones of 
 the tribe, he attached a condition that he meant to be 
 impossible. He required that the boy should bring, 
 as the price for his bride, the mare of the Agheyli 
 chief, Fadel Jaber. When the men of the tribe heard 
 it, they said to one another, "No man alive can do 
 this, unless it were Abu Zeyd." And Ghanimeh 
 disappeared into the desert, and came to the Beni- 
 Helal to ask Abu Zeyd for succour. 
 
 The plea was made simply to his chivalry and his 
 spirit of knight-errantry. To undertake an adventure 
 so perilous was in itself a motive to the romantic Arab 
 spirit ; and to that spirit not only were the rights of a 
 guest unbounded, but the duty of succouring the weak 
 was imperative, and the request of a woman, at least 
 if she were a woman in distress, was equivalent to a 
 law. " Frank, honest, and approximately equal relations 
 of the sexes," says Sir Charles Lyall in carefully chosen 
 words, " were guaranteed by mutual courtesy and re- 
 spect " : and this courtesy, even to the extreme of what 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 135 
 
 we should regard as knight-errantry, was fostered by 
 the feeling that it was at once the inborn character and 
 the outward proof of noble blood. It had little to do 
 with sentiment, and nothing with physical attraction. 
 Love came otherwise, as we shall see. 
 
 This mare was the most celebrated in Arabia, 
 
 " The grey mare, the renowned : in the world there is none like 
 
 her, 
 Not with the Persian kings, the Chosroes, the Irani." 
 
 She was the treasure of the tribe, guarded more care- 
 fully than a princess. To attempt the enterprise and 
 fail in it meant almost certain death. But Abu Zeyd 
 did not hesitate for a moment. To the remonstrances 
 of his chief and his tribesmen he only answered, " To 
 leave this adventure were shame ; though I were given 
 to drink of the cup of confusion, yet must I go forward." 
 A suggestion that he should be kept back by force was 
 met with a flash of anger that silenced it. His sister 
 Rih, a beautiful figure firmly and delicately drawn in a 
 few lines, tried vainly to dissuade him : 
 
 " And Rih cried, 'Woe is me, the burning of my trouble : 
 How shall I quench this flame ? Yet shall he take our 
 
 blessing. ' 
 
 And I : ' The word farewell is but a wound to the goer : 
 Cease therefore from thy tears.' And weeping thus she left 
 
 me. 
 
 But I mounted on my camel and went my way in silence, 
 Going by unknown paths in the wide trackless desert, 
 Nor turned my head again when they had turned back 
 
 silent." 
 
 One other touch at this point is notable : for it is 
 very characteristic of that lavish and often ostentatious 
 generosity which was part of the curiously compounded 
 Arab ideal. Before going, Abu Zeyd ordered his slave, 
 
136 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 Abul Komsan, to take charge over Ghanimeh during 
 his own absence : 
 
 " Go with this lady and build her a pavilion 
 With breadths of perfumed silk, and bid prepare all dainties, 
 That she may eat of the best, and serve her in due honour : 
 For well it is in life to be of all things generous, 
 Ere we are called away to death's unjoyful dwellings/' 
 
 So Abu Zeyd went on, fifteen days' journey, till he 
 came to the pastures of the Agheylat. There he left 
 his camel among shepherds, whom he won completely 
 over by his stones, and songs he sang to the Arab lute 
 the rebab } which is one of the few Arabic words used 
 by Chaucer. Music as well as gymnastic was an essen- 
 tial part of the Arab idea of knighthood : and the poeti- 
 cal device which makes Abu Zeyd the singer of his 
 own achievements, while it is dramatic, is dramatically 
 probable. 
 
 His first plan had been to make his way disguised 
 as a minstrel or a pedlar right into the encampment. 
 But in an accidental meeting with a girl of the 
 Agheylat outside the camp (we have to note through- 
 out the romance the almost absolute freedom and 
 fearlessness of women, alike married and unmarried) 
 he let drop something about the mare which roused 
 her suspicion. She spoke sharply yet kindly to him 
 in warning : 
 
 " Fly for the life thou hast nor linger here for its losing. 
 Fly ere I spread the word and bring the Arabs upon thee : 
 And I shall tell them truth, and give thee up to the spear- 
 points." 
 
 Abu Zeyd tried, with partial success, to throw her off 
 the scent : 
 
 " Ha ! the mare, what is she that I should wish for or win her 1 
 Never in all my days have I bent my leg to a saddle, 
 Being of the unskilled, and little apt in learning." 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 137 
 
 But when she was gone, he was left very uneasy. As 
 night fell, he found himself by a spreading tree with 
 low-set branches beyond the furthest camp-fires; and 
 there he sat down to wait for dawn. 
 
 Through the darkness some one approached. Abu 
 Zeyd swung himself up into the tree and lay along 
 one of the low branches, watching. The new comer 
 stopped under the tree ; and this was Sahel ibn 
 Aaf. He waited there, looking ever to the right 
 and to the left, till a third of the night was over: 
 then there came softly out of the camp another, an 
 exceedingly fair woman ; and this was Zohwa. Sahel 
 was a felon and an outlaw, whose outlawry had come 
 on him however not through any of his crimes, but 
 through an unintentional insult the story of Artemis 
 and Actaeon over again, and exquisitely described in 
 the poem that he had offered to the princess Alia, the 
 daughter of Jaber. Under the savage Arab code of 
 honour which was also a code of revenge, this was as 
 much as his life was worth. Jaber had hunted him, 
 and not finding him had killed his father and set a 
 blood-price upon his head. Barbarous as this was, it 
 was within the accepted rules. But Sahel now broke 
 completely through these, and designed to take his 
 revenge, not on the men of the Agheylat, but on Alia 
 herself. By doing this, he broke the code of Arab 
 honour, and put himself not only out of law, but out of 
 sympathy. 
 
 In Zohwa, who was secretly his mistress, he found 
 an apt confederate. The prose narrative goes on : 
 
 " And they fell to talking, and presently they spoke 
 of Alia. And Sahel became troubled, and he said to 
 Zohwa, ' that I could behold her ! that thou 
 couldst bring her hither ! ' And she asked of him, 
 c Why so ? is she then more beautiful than I ? are her 
 
138 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 eyes more fairly painted ? ' And he said, ' Not so ; 
 but listen.' " 
 
 He tells his story and ends, " c And now, O Zohwa, 
 I have but this one desire, to soothe my soul with 
 slaying her, and after that I care not what may come, 
 not though they hew me to pieces with their swords. 
 And surely the news of her death at my hand would 
 travel abroad and grieve the heart of Fadel, and 
 wound him so that he too should die.' 
 
 " And when Zohwa heard this story, she bade him 
 to be of good comfort, for she would bring him to his 
 heart's desire. And she said, ' I will fetch thee Alia 
 hither, and in a short space. Wait only until I 
 return.' 
 
 "And she left him, and returned to the tents, and 
 she sought the pavilion of the Princess Alia. And Alia 
 rose and went forward to meet her, and enquired the 
 cause of her coming. And Zohwa said, ' my lady, I 
 am in a great perplexity, and therefore am I come to 
 thee.' And she sat down beside her, and told her 
 a long tale and kept her thus talking through the 
 night, and soothed her with soft words, deceiving her 
 and flattering her with fair speeches of praise until she 
 touched her heart with her cunning, nor did she cease 
 from discoursing until a second third of the night was 
 spent, and there remained but these two awake of all 
 the camp. Then Zohwa arose as if to go, and asked 
 leave to depart ; but Alia asked her to stay and sleep 
 there in the tent beside her. And Zohwa said, ' Of a 
 truth that would be before all things pleasant, and 
 an honour to me ; but I have been at pains to escape 
 unperceived from my people, and to them I must 
 return.' And Alia was moved to pity, and said, 
 ' Go then.' And Zohwa went out of the tent, and on 
 a little way, but presently returned trembling. And 
 
EOMANTIC POETRY 139 
 
 Alia asked her, 'What aileth thee ? ' And she answered, 
 ' lady, I am overcome with lack of courage ; wilt 
 thou not come with me a little way ? ' And Alia said, 
 ' If I should go with thee, who should return with me ? 
 The guards are sleeping, and all my damsels : nor am 
 I too without danger of enemies who might do me 
 a hurt, and more than the rest, of that dog Sahel 
 ibn Aaf.' 
 
 " And Zohwa answered quickly, < Say not so, lady. 
 How should Sahel hurt thee, or how should any other, 
 seeing that thou art the daughter of the prince of 
 our tribe ? and yet thou speakest thus, thou daughter 
 of the generous ? It is no far journey. Listen ; between 
 thy tents and ours are but ten furlongs, and if thou 
 wilt come but one half the road, thou canst then turn 
 back and I will go forward, and the way will have been 
 divided between us. ' 
 
 " And Alia agreed, for her wit failed her ; and she 
 arose and went with Zohwa out of the camp: and 
 Zohwa's tongue wagged as they walked, so that the way 
 seemed short, and Alia lost reckoning in the darkness." 
 
 So they came to the place where Sahel was waiting 
 in the dim starlight, and Abu Zeyd was still crouched 
 above in the branches of the tree. 
 
 " And Alia's eyes misgave her 
 Seeing a form in the dark : and she called out, ' What thing 
 
 art thou ? 
 
 Art thou a passer-by, or one with intent a prowler 1 ' 
 And he, the approacher, said : * Now truly art thou taken, 
 Captured as in a net, and the Maker of earth and heaven 
 Yieldeth thee to my hand and blindeth thee to thy peril.' 
 And Sahel began to curse her, and to the tree he drew her ; 
 And she knew her hour was come, and the heart within her was 
 
 shaken." 
 
 Sahel dragged her to the tree by her neck-ornaments, 
 tied her wrists together, and began to prepare to kill 
 
140 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 her, leisurely, that he might have the full taste of 
 his revenge. She appealed to his mercy and that of 
 Zohwa in vain. The traitress who had lured her out 
 by an appeal to her kindness stood by, taunting her 
 coldly. For Zohwa, a sort of Arabian Regan, cruel, mean 
 and dissolute, no sympathy can be felt from the first. 
 But for Sahel there was more pretext ; and the Islamic 
 re-fashioner of what is in its essentials a Pagan and 
 y pre -Islamic story has inserted here a touch which is 
 meant to destroy any excuse for him and make him a 
 moral as well as a legal outlaw. Sahel added to his 
 outrage what was to the Mohammedan Arab mind the 
 last and most horrible refinement of cruelty. He refused 
 to say the Fatha for her, the dying confession of faith 
 which a Moslem was bound to recite for any other too 
 weak, or too ignorant, or, as here, too terrified to speak 
 the words. This touch was needed to make the refusal 
 of mercy to Sahel's own plea for mercy later unchal- 
 lengeable even according to the extravagant code of 
 Arab chivalry. To what lengths that code went is well 
 illustrated by an incident in the Romance of Nur-ed-din. 
 When the murderous traitor El Mo'in is put in Nur- 
 ed-din's power, " the Khalifeh addressed him, saying, 
 ' Take this sword and strike off with it the head of 
 thine enemy.' And he took it, and approached El 
 Mo'in : but he looked at him, and said to him, ' I did 
 according to my nature, and do thou according to 
 thine.' And Nur-ed-din threw down the sword from 
 his hand.' " 
 
 To return to our own romance. 
 
 " And Alia raised up weeping 
 
 Her beautiful eyes to heaven, and prayed to him who hath pity. 
 ' O thou searcher of hearts,' she said, * who knowest the secrets 
 Even of every heart, to thee I look for compassion. 
 Thou the Merciful, the Eternal, the Most Mighty, 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 141 
 
 Thou who art of thyself, the Giver of Consolation, 
 Thou the Pitiful one, to thee I come in my sorrow 
 Calling on thee by the name of thy deeds, the might of thy 
 
 wonders 
 Done for those thou hast chosen against the unbelievers.' " 
 
 " But he laughed at her words " (says the prose,) " and 
 said, ' If thou be of the blameless, pray on.' And he 
 went to Zohwa and kissed her, and Alia beheld it." 
 
 " And to Ibn Aaf she said, ' I appeal to thee of thine honour, 
 So may the Lord spare thee and heal thy soul of blindness.' 
 But Sahel answered, ' Nay by the Prophet I will not spare thee, 
 Not though Abu Zeyd were here himself, the Helali : 
 Let him deliver thee ! let him help thee, thou dog's daughter ! ' 
 But she, ' Yet if God so willed he were here even now upon 
 
 thee.' 
 
 And Sahel, ' Hold thy peace, for to-night thy life hath ending.' 
 And Abu Zeyd from the tree heard all the words between 
 
 them : 
 
 And my mind rose to her help as a full pot boiling over, 
 And I heard my name in their mouths, and my heart grew hot 
 
 within me, 
 
 Like a pitcher from the well which brims and spills with fulness. 
 Sahel has drawn his sword and leapt on her with cursings, 
 The while she crieth aloud. But I too cried, * Take courage : 
 Lo, I am here to thy hand, one able for thy burden.' 
 And of a sudden I dropped and ran to the three that struggled, 
 And Sahel I seized by the throat and dragged towards destruc- 
 tion. 
 And he cried, ' Who art thou and whence ? and what the way of 
 
 thy sending ? ' 
 
 And I, ' From Death the King a in I come to take possession : 
 Life is weary of thee, and Death's edge presseth nearly.' 
 And he, ' O Sheykh of Afrits, wilt thou not spare the sword- 
 stroke ? 
 
 Lo, I turn from my sin in thought of the day of judgment.' 
 But I, * Thou art but a heathen. Thou didst refuse the verses. 
 Thou hast done a treacherous deed : thou hast angered thy 
 
 Creator, 
 
 Purposing death to souls, and therefore will I slay thee.' 
 And I put my hand to the sword and drew it from the scab- 
 bard, 
 
142 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 And it flashed as lightning flasheth, making a flame in the 
 
 darkness, 
 And I smote him with its edge, and his head flew from his 
 
 shoulders. 
 
 And turning then on Zohwa I smote her too, while Alia 
 Watched with the eyes of thanks the issue of the swordstroke. 
 And I severed the cord from her wrists and she rose and took 
 
 her bracelets : 
 
 And I bade her go in peace nor speak a word of the doings ; 
 For ever the mouth is blest that holdeth its own counsel." 
 
 This grim and great scene is followed immediately 
 by another between Abu Zeyd and Alia of such radiant 
 beauty that I shrink from spoiling it by a summary. 
 It is like the breaking of a lovely dawn over the dark- 
 ness and horror of the night. For restraint, and inter- 
 play of humour and emotion, and a sort of delicate 
 purity, it is unsurpassable. When the two clasp hands 
 as a token of the covenant that the doings of the 
 night shall be kept secret, the poet lifts a veil for a 
 moment. 
 
 " And I stretched my hand to her hand and touched it with my 
 
 fingers, 
 And its softness made me wonder, and its most slender 
 
 fashion, 
 And the palm of her hand in mine was cool as a cloud in 
 
 summer." 
 
 From that moment they are plighted lovers. And 
 what love meant to the Arab poet may best be told in 
 his own words. The two, in a moment so charged 
 with -emotion, can have no secrets from one another. 
 He tells her who he is, Abu Zeyd, her enemy, the 
 slayer of her kindred. 
 
 " And Alia heard me speak and stood up tall before me, 
 Like to one making a cry ; but I shut her mouth with my 
 
 hand's palm, 
 
 And hot tears came to my eyes, and 'Cry not,' I said, 'O 
 Alia, 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 143 
 
 Cry not for pity aloud, lest I fall in a sea of trouble.' 
 
 And she said, ' My cry was unwilled, for thy love my whole 
 
 heart filleth, 
 
 And now fear is forgot. And O Abu Zeyd Salame, 
 Know that we twain must love, for I am of noble lineage 
 Even as thou thyself,/ the hero, the lion of Amer.' 
 And I said, ' Now listen, Alia, to that which I would tell thee. 
 Love is a building fair, broadbased on sure foundations, 
 And the builders built it high as was no other dwelling.' 
 And she said, 'Thou speakest truth. And love is of three 
 
 conditions, 
 
 And to men of understanding each hath a sign to know it. 
 The first compelleth thee to kiss the hand thou lovest : 
 This is a moment's love. The next is more enduring, 
 Which kisseth thee on the cheek. But there is yet the 
 
 latest, 
 
 Love which shall kiss thy forehead. This is a love for ever. 
 Mine is of all the three.' " 
 
 Alia took Abu Zeyd back with her to the women's 
 tents, where she hid him for twenty days. To the other 
 women, " the daughters of the Arabs," she explained the 
 situation with perfect simplicity. With the same per- 
 fect simplicity they accepted it, and there was not a 
 whisper of scandal. " Were we in thy place, so would 
 we do also." On the twenty-first night she brought 
 him the mare (she had access to the keys), and sent 
 him away. At the moment of parting she almost broke 
 down. " She clung to his stirrup, and said, ' Take me 
 also with thee, and leave me not to suffer blame.' But 
 he swore an oath to her that he would return. And 
 she let go the stirrup. And in that guise he left her ; 
 and they were both weeping." 
 
 Abu Zeyd rode off on the mare to the outer pastures, 
 till he came to a well of water, where he drank and 
 watered the mare, and sat down to think out his plans. 
 Meanwhile the loss of the mare had fallen like a 
 thunderbolt on the Agheylat. Her grooms, when they 
 entered the stable in the morning, found a lantern 
 
144 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 burning in it, but no mare. The skilled trackers who 
 
 were summoned found footsteps all ending at the tent 
 
 of Alia. The truth came out : and then the romance 
 
 Xturns to that element of savagery which (as also in the 
 
 Homeric and the Arthurian stories) is mingled with 
 
 \,high chivalry and magnificent courtesy. Alia, like 
 
 Guenevere in the Morte d' Arthur, was " appeached of 
 
 treason " and condemned to be burnt alive. 
 
 Abu Zeyd, after thinking the matter out, had come 
 to the conclusion that her danger was the greatest, and 
 her claim on his honour the first. Ghanimeh must 
 wait, like Lucius in the fifth Act of Cymheline ; 
 
 "Alack! 
 
 There's other work in hand : I see a thing 
 Bitter to me as death." 
 
 He hid the mare in a cave, blocking the mouth with 
 stones, disguised himself like a dervish, and returned 
 to the camp of the Agheylat. " Said the narrator : 
 And when they had lit the fire, while Alia watched the 
 kindling, her fear was great and her eyes looked to the 
 right and to the left ; and while she was in this wise, 
 suddenly she saw Abu Zeyd standing in the midst of 
 the Arabs who were around her. But he signed to 
 her to be silent, as it were he would say, ' Fear not, 
 for I am here.' And when she was sure that it was 
 indeed he, she smiled on him very sweetly. And now 
 the flames began to break forth." 
 
 The execution was already a thing in which the 
 authorities had little heart; and when a holy man, 
 a stranger, appeared to stop it, there was a revulsion 
 of feeling which no one sought to check. 
 
 " I took her by the hand, while the crowd looked on in 
 
 wonder, 
 
 And I thrust them back with my hands and stood beside the 
 burning 
 
KOMANTIC POETRY 145 
 
 And cried out, 'Burn me not, O fire, nor seek thou to 
 shame me, 
 
 For if thou work me ill, I bear to the Lord my witness.' 
 
 And I passed out through the fire ; and by the Lord's per- 
 mission 
 
 The flames died and fell down, and I walked forth from them 
 scathless ; 
 
 And I came to the side of Alia, of her with the plaited 
 tresses, 
 
 And I undid her bonds while all the world beheld us. 
 
 And they said, ' He is a Sheykh, a holy man of wonder/ " 
 
 The next stage in the story is an episode which is 
 one way like that of Theoclymenus in the Odyssey, in 
 another like something out of the fantastic diablerie 
 of the Arabian Nights. There came to them, says 
 the narrator, a swift horseman, and his name was 
 Bedr-ibn-Saleh, the sand^diyiuer, and he came from 
 the land of Baghdad, a knower of things hidden. 
 And when he had lighted down, he said to Jaber: 
 " Prince of the people, the news has reached me of 
 the loss of thy mare, nor have I come save for her 
 sake." Then he made divination, first by the sand 
 and then by an image of gold in the form of a son of 
 Adam : after fumigations and invocations a smoke 
 rose, and there came to him of the Jinns crowding 
 round him, and the image began to speak. 
 
 What follows is very dramatic and exciting, but too 
 intricate to be made clear in a short summary. In 
 the end the image speaks again, and this time plainly : 
 " ' Fadel, the prince Abu Zeyd saved thy daughter ; 
 and he slew Sahel and Zohwa for her sake, and she 
 helped him to obtain thy mare and gain that which 
 he desired of thee.' And in making an end of speak- 
 ing it said : ' If thou wouldst hearken to my bidding, 
 thou wouldst make fellowship and friendship with 
 him; for to thee he were the truest of companions 
 
 1C 
 
146 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 and helpers/ And when the Emir Fadel heard these 
 words of the image, then he cried with a loud voice, 
 and his cry filled the assembly and all the tribes heard 
 it, and he swore a great oath and said, ' Yea verily 
 will I, though he be the first of my foemen.' And 
 when he swore that oath, the prince Abu Zeyd started 
 to his feet and cried with a loud cry, ' I am here, even 
 I, Salame.' And he told his tale from the beginning ; 
 and Fadel rose and pressed him to his heart, and all 
 his trouble passed from him." 
 
 Abu Zeyd told where he had hidden the mare; 
 she was brought back, " and Fadel gave her to Abu 
 Zeyd, and other noble gifts, and said, ' What wilt thou 
 at my hand ? ' And he said, ' That which I would 
 have of thee is Alia thy daughter.' And Fadel 
 answered, ' By the faith of the Arabs, that also is my 
 desire.'" 
 
 Then the pledge for which the quest of the mare 
 was undertaken is fulfilled. Abu Zeyd rode back with 
 the mare to his own people and handed her over to 
 Ghanimeh, and sent Abul Komsan with her to En 
 Naaman, the usurping uncle. Naaman flatly refused 
 to carry out his promise. He bullied and stormed, 
 threatening to kill on the spot any one who interfered. 
 Abul Komsan, like Dickie of Dryhope when he met 
 fause Sakeld, had little skill in arguing, and as little 
 inclination : 
 
 " The ne'er a word had Dickie to say, 
 
 Sae he thrust his lance through his fause bodie." 
 
 " But Abul Komsan," says the narrator, ".struck him 
 with his spear upon his breast and pierced him through, 
 so that the spear shone beyond him. And he called 
 out to the tribe, and defied them : but they said, ' Nay, 
 but thou bast done us a service, for this one refused 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 147 
 
 to do according to our counsel. 5 So Abul Komsan 
 bade them bury him." 
 
 The boy Amer, Ghanimeh's son, was reinstated in 
 his sovereignty, and married to his cousin amid 
 general rejoicings. 
 
 " And they said, ' O Abul Komsan, thou art a man of honour, 
 For thou hast slain the wicked, and we are thine, thy pro- 
 tected, 
 And thou hast befriended Amer. Do with us as thou 
 
 desirest.' 
 But he answered them, 'O people, peace be with you, O 
 
 people : 
 
 Salame is my lord, to day and now and for ever.' 
 And Amer brought him the mare, and with it gifts and 
 
 treasures, 
 And said, ' Thou didst bring this gift. A gift of me shalt 
 
 thou take her.' 
 So he took the mare at his hand, and the gifts, and he 
 
 departed. 
 
 And when he came to his tribe he told Abu Zeyd the story : 
 And Abu Zeyd gave thanks. And this is the end of the 
 
 telling." 
 
 So the poem ends. It is the epic manner of ending ; 
 the reconciliation is effected, the tension relaxed ; the 
 story of the Stealing of the Mare is at an end with her 
 return to Abu Zeyd, just as the story of the Wrath is 
 at an end in the Iliad with the burial of Hector under 
 the truce guaranteed by Achilles. At this point the 
 epic poet instinctively and unhesitatingly ends also. 
 The romance-writer finds it more difficult to stop 
 here. For a romance, or at least a romance which is 
 no longer capable of being described alternatively as 
 a romantic epic, has no inevitable structural unity ; it 
 prolongs itself from delight in itself, as its less organic 
 character and its fainter and more diffused vitality 
 enable it to do. In this case the prose continues to 
 linger on over the story : it was meant for a popular 
 
148 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 audience, and such an audience does not care for unity 
 of action ; it wants to know what happened next, and 
 next, and yet again next ; and so the narrator proceeds 
 to tell how Abu Zeyd went back to the Agheylat with 
 two thousand horsemen, how he married the Princess 
 Alia, and how they went back to the Helalat after a 
 while, and lived there in happiness until the end of 
 their time. 
 
 The Homeric analogies in the Arabian poem are 
 manifold and striking; some of them have come out 
 incidentally in this sketch of its contents, and I need 
 nolflabour them. But what is more important than 
 particular analogies, of incident or treatment or lan- 
 guage, is the common quality of epic elevation and 
 largeness. We are almost forced to ask the question, 
 whether this is the nearest to a fully-developed epic 
 poetry that the Arab genius reached, and if so, how it 
 is that it stopped here. 
 
 One of the first questions that occur is whether this 
 romance, in the actual form in which we possess it, is 
 on the line of ascent to, or on the line of descent from, 
 a realised epic form. Whether it was committed to 
 writing as originally composed we cannot tell ; it has 
 certainly reached us mainly through a long oral tradi- 
 tion, and has suffered some amount of wastage and 
 deterioration in the process. It is then at least theo- 
 retically possible that it originally existed in the shape 
 of a continuous poem ; the interstitial prose being the 
 later work of rhapsodes, of professional story-tellers 
 who recited portions or lays of the original poem, but 
 brought these in incidentally, here and there as they 
 felt inclined, in the course of telling the story as a 
 story. The actual verse certainly is the work of a 
 poet who had the power of producing an ceuvre de 
 longue haleine, who was capable of putting a long and 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 149 
 
 complex narrative into structural form, and keeping 
 up his work at high tension ; the mechanism of an 
 epic poem in the full sense does not seem beyond him. 
 Nor is the process thus suggested without parallels 
 elsewhere. Some such disintegration of the Iliad for 
 popular use had taken place before the Iliad as a 
 whole was brought together again, and in a sense effec- 
 tively recreated, at Athens in the sixth century B.C. 
 
 But a more exact appreciation of the poetical 
 quality of the Stealing of the Mare does not bear out 
 this hypothesis ; it leads one to see that we are deal- 
 ing not with an epic in disintegration, but with the 
 epic in the making. We have here the epic well on 
 the way towards being made, but lacking yet the 
 critical lifting movement, the decisive effort of genius 
 that was needed to bring it fully into being. It is 
 still attached organically to the earlier organism, out 
 of which it had to be born in order to launch itself 
 and attain substantive life of its own. It still partakes 
 of the nature of the lyrico-elegiac poetry of a previous 
 age. Throughout the greater part of the poem, as I 
 have said, the hero narrates in his own person, and 
 indeed there are whole passages in the earlier part 
 of the romance which, standing alone, might be clas- 
 sified with those lyrical or quasi-lyrical fragments 
 which are among the precious relics of the Poetry of 
 the Ignorance. It is always on the point of slipping 
 over into the direct narrative form, and attaining the 
 objective quality of epic. Every now and then it 
 does actually so pass over. But it has not freed itself 
 from the subjective quality of lyric. Homer worked 
 on analogous material; and Books IX. to XII. of the 
 Odyssey show in the most striking way, among many ; 
 other instances on a smaller scale, how subjective and 1 
 quasi-lyrical narrative could be fused and merged in 
 
150 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 the large epic structure by a poet of immense 
 genius. 
 
 This tendency towards crystallisation into the authen- 
 tic epic form becomes more marked as the romance 
 goes on. The half-lyrical and half-dramatic imperso- 
 nation is wholly dropped after the point at which the 
 sand-diviner comes on the scene. The canto in which 
 he appears is introduced by a line in which the poet 
 for the first time speaks clearly in his own person : 
 
 " Now doth my song return to the Emir Agheyli Fadel." 
 
 From that point on to the end the poem is all pure 
 narrative, comparable to Homeric narrative in its ease, 
 swiftness, and lucidity. The secret of the epic has 
 been found : even some of its specific devices are 
 used, and used with complete skill : for instance, the 
 v- artifice of repetition or recapitulation. This is admir- 
 ably used in a passage where the whole of the first 
 part of the story, from the arriving of Ghanimeh to 
 the rescue of Alia, is told in summary by the golden 
 image. Another device is of more fundamental im- 
 portance, for it is of the essence of the epic. This is 
 the artifice of completing the structure without closing 
 the pattern. It is of the essence of the saga that it 
 goes on to the end of the story : it is of the essence of 
 the epic that it does not. The story of the Iliad, as 
 a story, does not end where they went about the 
 burial of Hector the knight : the story of the Aeneid, 
 as a story, does not end where the life of Turnus flies 
 indignant into the dark. But the Iliad and the Aeneid 
 end there, rightly and inevitably. One of the chief 
 reasons for believing that the end of the Odyssey either 
 is a later addition, or at the least represents material 
 which had not been fully wrought into epic shape 
 by the poet, is just this, that it trails off into telling 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 151 
 
 the end of the story. So likewise the prose Volsunga- 
 saga does not stop until the whole story has been told 
 to the end : the saga-writer does not stay his hand 
 until he has brought the whole kin of the Volsungs to 
 their destruction, root and stem. When he reshaped 
 it as an epic, Morris, the greatest master of structure 
 among modern poets, made his poem end at the epic 
 ending. And similarly, the poet of the Stealing of the 
 Mare had the intuition of an epic poet when he ends 
 the poem where he does ; while the prose story-teller, 
 as we have seen, continues it with the intuition, no 
 less just for its own purposes, of the story-teller. We 
 can see in the Stealing of the Mare what I do not know 
 that we can see elsewhere in literature, the actual 
 process of the invention and creation of epic poetry 
 going on, like the precipitation in a chemical solution, 
 like the determination of an embryonic structure, 
 before our eyes. To see poetry in the making is a 
 rare and a fascinating privilege; but here we see a 
 sight rarer still, a whole generic form of poetry in the 
 making, and that one of the noblest of its forms, 
 perhaps even the noblest of all, according to the view 
 ably presented and somewhat inconclusively refuted 
 by Aristotle in the Poetics. 
 
 It was this Arabian poetry, charged and saturated 
 with the potentialities of a supreme poetical art, which 
 kindled the new life of poetry in Europe. That was 
 its last achievement. Its own day of frost and sun 
 was over. " The wild desert flavour ebbed out of it." 
 Its romance did not long survive its conquests. 
 Its chivalry, its splendid courtesy and magnanimity, 
 hardened and dwindled : and its constructive and 
 creative power, divorced more and more from actual 
 life, became dissipated in the fluid material of what 
 the world has agreed to call Arabian Tales. By the 
 
152 ARABIAN EPIC AND 
 
 twelfth century of our era, the chance for an Arabian 
 epic was over. What survived of the instinct for 
 narrative poetry was wasted on monstrous and form- 
 less romantic chronicles, still from time to time flash- 
 ing up into fine episodes, but in the mass invertebrate 
 and insufferably tedious. Some of these survive ; one, 
 the Romance of Antar, has even been printed. Few 
 people have ever read it through ; and this is not sur- 
 prising when we learn that it fills thirty-two printed 
 volumes. The historical Antar was a pre-Islamic 
 warrior and poet, the author of one of the finest of 
 the Golden Odes. In the romance, which shows a 
 strong Persian influence, he has been transmuted into 
 a full-blown hero of chivalry. The process of trans- 
 mutation was gradual ; the date of the romance, which 
 used to be put as far back as the end of the eighth 
 century, is now ascribed to a much later period, perhaps 
 not before the end of the eleventh. In any case it 
 
 H would appear to be the earliest example now known 
 of the roman chevaleresgue in its full development. 
 The scene of the death of Antar, alike by its romantic 
 incidents and its epic magnificence, is not inferior to 
 anything in Homer or the Icelandic Sagas. The 
 poisoned arrow, shot across the river at midnight by 
 a blind archer ; the retreat through the desert, led by 
 the dying hero's heroic wife mounted on his horse and 
 dressed in his armour ; the last stand in the pass ; the 
 dead man sitting all night on his motionless steed 
 propped on his terrible spear, the thirty pursuing 
 horsemen not venturing to approach him : all this, for 
 splendour and concentration, is unsurpassed by any 
 death-scene in literature. The inchoate Arabian epic, 
 already stricken with decay, flamed up into this momen- 
 tary brilliance before it fell to pieces. 
 
 Greek poetry, from the sixth century B.C. onwards, 
 
ROMANTIC POETRY 153 
 
 was based on Homer ; but the whole body of Arabian 
 poetry was organically and structurally what we may 
 call pre-Homeric. And if we ask why it stopped there, 
 while many reasons may be plausibly named as con- 
 tributory, the central truth is this, that history does 
 not repeat itself, and that Homer was not born twice. 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 ALL those who have studied Dante's great poem as 
 poetry a class which includes at least a respectable 
 minority among his readers must I fancy have at one 
 time or another asked themselves two questions : first, 
 Why did he call it a Comedy ? and secondly, In what 
 sense is that name rationally or poetically applicable 
 to it ? And all who have asked themselves the questions 
 must have found some little difficulty in answering the 
 first, and a great deal in answering the second. 
 
 Byron in 1821 writes, with his usual incisive swift- 
 ness and lucid common sense, that there are in poetry 
 " compositions which belong to no class at all. Where 
 is Dante ? His poem is not an epic : then what is it ? 
 He himself calls it a divine Comedy ; and why ? This 
 is more than all his thousand commentators have been 
 able to explain." How far Byron had looked into the 
 " thousand commentators " is a question which need 
 not be pressed. He could not have gone far into them 
 without knowing that the substantive, without the ad- 
 jective, was Dante's own title ; nor, probably, had he 
 ever read Dante's own explanation of it. But these are 
 details; Byron's question " What is it?" is what matters : 
 and the answer to it, so far as an answer can be given, 
 involves an enquiry of no little interest, which affects 
 the definition of poetry itself as well as that of the 
 formal " classes " or subdivisions of poetry. 
 
 To the first of the two questions, why Dante called 
 the poem a Comedy, we have Dante's own answer, in 
 
 154 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 155 
 
 his letter to Can Grande ; or at least if this is not ex- 
 actly an answer, it is his explanation, and in effect the 
 only explanation he has vouchsafed to give. The second 
 question, that of the scope and applicability of the name, 
 was raised and discussed by Boccaccio a generation after- 
 wards; the discussion comes towards the end of his 
 Life of Dante. Boccaccio felt the difficulty fully, and 
 stated it fully. Since then, the question has remained 
 pretty much where it was. Later commentators appear 
 to have done little more than repeat, in various forms 
 of words, what Dante and Boccaccio had said already, 
 and Byron's sweeping statement, even if carelessly made, 
 is in fact justified. It is worth while to restate the 
 case now in simple terms and to see whether in the 
 first place any fresh light can be thrown on the facts, 
 and whether in the second place any fresh inference or 
 suggestion can be drawn from them. Probably there 
 is little to be done in either direction ; but there is 
 something. And consideration may open up some 
 suggestions, not without interest, as to the bearing 
 which the problem has on another and a more general 
 question : that is, on the position and function if I 
 may so express myself of the Divine Comedy in the 
 field of poetry. 
 
 What Dante himself says, in section 10 of the 
 Epistle to Can Grande, is in effect this : 
 
 " The title of the book is, the Comedy of Dante. 
 Comedy is a kind of poetical narrative, differing from 
 all others. It differs materially from tragedy, in that 
 tragedy begins in peace and ends in horror, whereas 
 comedy opens with a distressing circumstance, but 
 brings it to a prosperous conclusion. This may be 
 seen in the tragedies of Seneca and the comedies of 
 Terence. They likewise differ in their language ; that 
 of tragedy being elevated and sublime, while that of 
 
156 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 comedy is lax and humble; though as Horace lays 
 down in his Poetic, each may occasionally adopt the 
 language proper to the other. It is accordingly clear 
 why the present work is called a Comedy ; for if we 
 regard its substance, it begins with horror, in Hell, and 
 ends beautifully and happily, in Paradise : while if we 
 regard its language, it is in the vulgar tongue, such as 
 is employed even by women. There are other kinds 
 of poetical narrative, such as the pastoral, the elegy, 
 the satire, the dedication ; but on these I need not 
 dwell here." 
 
 There are several points which call for special 
 remark in the passage which I have thus paraphrased. 
 As will be noticed, I have omitted some portions of the 
 passage which are parenthetical and have no particular 
 bearing on the main point : and exception might 
 perhaps be taken to my translation in some parti- 
 culars : the meaning for instance of the phrase wtiva 
 sententia, which is taken from Horace, has been from 
 very early times a battle-ground of commentators on 
 Horace himself, and we cannot tell what meaning 
 Dante attached to it, if indeed he attached any definite 
 meaning to it at all. But my abbreviated paraphrase 
 gives I think with sufficient accuracy all in Dante's 
 own statement which is strictly relevant. 
 
 Now the first thing which any one would say on 
 reading this passage would probably be to remark on 
 the strangeness of calling either comedy or tragedy a 
 " poetical narrative." The distinction between narrative 
 and dramatic poetry is to us fundamental, just as it 
 was to Aristotle. It would seem that to Dante, at all 
 events, it was so far from being fundamental that it 
 was not even noticeable. " Nothing " said a capable 
 critic a century ago <c can more strongly prove 
 how little dramatic ideas or associations were afloat 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 157 
 
 in the time of Dante, than that he should have 
 ventured to call his shadowy and awful panorama 
 of Hell, Heaven and Purgatory a comedy." In the 
 main, this observation still holds good. 
 
 Again, if Dante was mentioning other kinds of 
 poetry, why should he omit altogether the principal 
 among them all, the epic ? Of the five great poets in 
 Limbo, three are epic poets : so is Statius. He cannot 
 have meant here to ignore Homer, Lucan, Statius, 
 Virgil himself. Once more, what does he mean by 
 speaking of the language or diction of his own poem 
 as " relaxed " or " low " modus loquendi remissus et 
 humilis? These are just the opposite, one would 
 suppose, of the terms by which the style of the 
 Divina Commedia would be described. Human language 
 has never been used with a greater elevation, at 
 a higher tension. In the poem itself Dante is con- 
 tinually laying stress, in the most marked way, on 
 just this quality. Lo bello stile, die m'ha fatto onore, 
 he says at the beginning of the Inferno. Qui la morta 
 poesl risurga, he says again at the beginning of the 
 Purgatorio. The alta fantasia of the Paradiso is such as 
 lets him crown himself with the authentic laurels of 
 Apollo, the wreath of supreme sovereignty " per trionfare 
 o Cesare o Poeta " : as poet, he is the equal of an em- 
 peror. But it is needless to multiply citations. Even in 
 this same epistle he has already used the term sullimis 
 of his poem; specifically, no doubt, of the Paradiso, 
 but that is because it is the Paradiso of which he has 
 set himself to give a particular account. 
 
 We may now turn from this to Boccaccio's comment, 
 in which the commentator does not seek to conceal his 
 perplexity. " Vogliono alcuni," he says, " mal con- 
 venirsi a questo libro questo titolo " ; and then proceeds 
 to set forth, very lucidly and very fairly, the substance 
 
158 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 of their objections, with which he was clearly in a 
 good deal of sympathy. 
 
 He begins by repeating, substantially in the same 
 terms, the twofold distinction between tragedy and 
 comedy, as regards matter and as regards manner, 
 already drawn by Dante in the passage cited. Both 
 he and Dante took it pretty much as they found it in 
 >- Uguccione's dictionary, which appears to have remained 
 a standard work since it was produced somewhere 
 about the year 1200: and it is worth while giving it 
 again in Uguccione's terse and precise Latin, the more 
 so because he adds a distinction which both Dante 
 and Boccaccio pass over, but which, as we shall see, is 
 both relevant and important. 
 
 "Comedia," says Uguccione again I do not quote 
 in full, but only what is immediately to the point 
 " id est villanus cantus, qui . . . affinis est cotidianae 
 locutioni ... Differunt tragedia et comedia, quia 
 comedia privatorum hominum continet acta, tragedia 
 regum et magnatum. Item comedia humili stilo 
 scribitur, tragedia alto. Item comedia a tristibus 
 incipit sed in laetis definit, tragedia e contrario." 
 
 Starting from and commenting on this accepted 
 general definition of comedy (so far as it is strictly to 
 be called a definition) Boccaccio proceeds to set forth 
 under six heads the reasons which may be, and are, 
 urged for the inappropriateness of calling Dante's poem 
 a comedy. These are as follows : first, the matter is 
 not low: secondly, the style is not low; thirdly, the 
 poet speaks throughout in his own person; fourthly, 
 similes and episodes are freely introduced ; fifthly, the 
 story or plot does not deal with fictitious characters and 
 events ; sixthly and lastly, the poem is not in scenes 
 but in cantos. 
 
 First, as to the majiter : " Canti villeschi " the 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 159 
 
 mllanus cantus of Uguccione " come noi sappiamo, 
 sono di basse niaterie ... a' quali in alcuno atto non 
 sono conformi le cose narrate in alcuna parte della 
 presente opera " : village or rustic poetry (the deriva- 
 tion of the word comedy then accepted being from 
 Ktojmr] and w<W), as we are all aware, deals with low 
 subjects, to which the things narrated in the work 
 before us have no conformity anywhere or in any part 
 of the action. 
 
 Second, as to the style or diction : " Lo stilo comico 
 e umile e rimesso, acciochk alia inateria sia conforme ; 
 quello che della presente opera dire non si puo . . . 
 quantunque in volgare scritta sia ... e nondimeno 
 ornato e leggiadro e sublime " : the style of comedy is 
 low and relaxed, to be proportionable to its matter : 
 this cannot be said of the work before us, written in 
 the vulgar tongue though it be ; the language is 
 nevertheless ornate, brilliant, and sublime. The word 
 leggiadro is not easy to render ; " light " in English fails 
 to convey its meaning. It conveys the sense of some- 
 thing which moves in a lighter element, or which is a 
 lighter element itself, the " air and fire " of Shakespeare's 
 Cleopatra. The three epithets taken together are an 
 accurate description of the style of the Commedia, with 
 its rich though grave ornament, its elastic radiance, 
 and its general though not uniform nobility. 
 
 Third, as to the absence of the specific dramatic 
 form which is common to both tragedy and comedy : 
 " Mai nella Commedia non usa introducere se medesimo 
 in alcun atto a parlare, ma sempre a varie persone " : 
 it is the uniform practice of comedy that the author 
 does not speak in his own person, but through the 
 characters, who speak in their persons. In the Com- 
 media Dante speaks in the first person throughout; 
 this to be sure varies from the usage of epic, in which 
 
160 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 the poet only speaks in the first person rarely and 
 occasionally, but varies still more fundamentally from 
 what is not only the usage, but the essence of drama. 
 
 Fourth, as to the enrichments : " Nelle commedie 
 non s'usano comparazioni n& recitazioni d'altre storie " : 
 both formal similes and episodic narratives are alien to 
 the dramatic method. This is true and well observed. 
 Any large use of similes is undramatic, because except 
 in the rarest instances they do not help, but obstruct 
 and retard what is the end of dramatic art, the repre- 
 sentation of action. Any large use of them therefore 
 means bad dramatic quality. In all the seven extant 
 plays of Sophocles, for example, there are only about 
 half a dozen. Used sparingly and with judgment, they 
 may be dramatically justifiable and even dramatically 
 valuable in either of two ways: by momentarily suspend- 
 ing the representation of action and so creating a dra- 
 matic pause ; or by accumulating ornament on a point of 
 the action where it is so swift and intense that it can 
 carry this added weight without any loss of life and 
 speed, and only with a resulting increase of momentum. 
 
 So too with Boccaccio's remark on episodic narra- 
 tives ; these are undramatic, in the first place because 
 they are narratives (though it is doubtful whether 
 Boccaccio meant to make this point), and in the second 
 place because they are episodic. The art of the 
 dramatist is nowhere more expressly shown than in 
 the skill with which he contrives to avoid narration, to 
 make the action act itself instead of telling us about 
 it. The conquest of this feature of the art is really, 
 one may add in passing, the main distinction between 
 Greek and modern tragedy; and that there is no 
 similar distinction (or at least none nearly so strongly 
 marked) between Greek and modern comedy indicates 
 that Greek comedy belongs to a later evolutionary 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 161 
 
 stage than Greek tragedy partly no doubt because the 
 latter was from first to last subject to a much more 
 rigorous hieratic convention. And again, it is of the 
 essence of a well-constructed dramatic work that it 
 shall have no episodes, that it shall confine itself 
 strictly to the action with which it deals, to the setting 
 and solving of a single problem. The romantic drama 
 may from its looser texture indulge in episodes ; they 
 have no place in the perfect tragedy or in the perfect 
 comedy. On the main issue it is needless to say that 
 Dante's poem is crowded with similes, often most 
 elaborately expanded, and nearly always of extreme 
 beauty. And tha._wJioJ^kejLlura-of t.he..p.ofinL,may_m 
 a way be called a,, continuous- series- of -episodic nar- 
 ration, though the episodes, like the rows of figures 
 in the finest primitive painting, fall into place in 
 the rhythm of a .single vast pattern. The unity of 
 th&j2!amm&fe. is. a unity of progressive design: it is 
 not the dramatic unity, which is a unity of completed 
 action. 
 
 It would not be too much to say that most lovers 
 of poetry begin by reading Dante for the sake of the 
 similes and episodes ; and even when to a more trained 
 appreciation these have taken their place as detail 
 subordinate to the larger design, they do not lose by 
 that in their separate and specific charm. A real and 
 full knowledge of Dante, of the Commedia as a single 
 and complete whole, was until a generation ago 
 confined to comparatively few persons. It has since 
 then been spreading enormously; yet even now the 
 dozens and scores of text-books and commentaries 
 nearly all take for granted that this knowledge does 
 not come naturally, that people need to be coaxed or 
 driven into it. The world-wide reputation of Dante 
 has rested in the main on certain particular episodes, 
 
 L 
 
162 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 and not very many even of these such episodic 
 narratives, recitazioni d'altre storie, as those of Fran- 
 cesca, of Ugolino, of the last voyage of Ulysses, of Pia 
 de' Tolommei. This is a fact of which account must 
 be taken in any attempt, if I may so put it, to place 
 Dante ; to indicate his position in, and his effect upon, 
 the whole progress and evolution of poetry. 
 
 Fifth, as to the invention : " Sono le cose che nelle 
 commedie si raccontano cose che perawentura mai non 
 furono, quantunque non sieno si strane dai costumi 
 degli uomini che essere state non possono " : the drama 
 (for this statement of course applies to tragedy and 
 comedy alike) deals not with things that have actually 
 happened, but with things such as might happen. 
 Whether with or without some indirect knowledge of 
 Aristotle's Poetics, Boccaccio here almost reproduces 
 Aristotle's words : ov TO. yevo/j-eva \eyetv TOVTO TTOIIJTOV 
 epyov <JTLV, aXX' ola av yevoiTO KOL TO. SvvaTa Kara TO 
 GIKOS rj TO avayKctiov. In effect he might go on to say, 
 following the next sentence in the Poetics, ew; yap av TO, 
 Aai/Tou etV [ACTpa TeOrjvai KOI ovSev YITTOV av e'irj IcrTOpia 
 rt? /meTa /meTpov rj avev jmeTpwv. This is not the sort of 
 difficulty that troubles us much now, any more than it 
 troubles us with regard to Paradise Lost: partly be- 
 cause we do not any longer believe in the narration as 
 a narration of fact, partly because we have come to see 
 that even if it were a narration of fact, fact as passed 
 through the processes of poetic imagination becomes 
 transmuted or rather transubstantiated. To Dante no 
 doubt, as to Milton, the substantial facts of his poem 
 were literally true ; what matters to us in both cases, 
 what makes them and the poem alive, is that they are 
 imaginatively possible. So likewise we regard trage- 
 dies, as tragedies, with little regard to the degree in 
 which they reproduce recorded facts of history. We 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 163 
 
 read Coriolanus or Antony and Cleopatra in precisely the 
 same spirit as we read Othello or Hamlet ; we attach to 
 them precisely the same sort of poetical value. 
 
 Sixth, as to the technical form : Comedies, Boccaccio 
 goes on, are in scenes, where the actors (the mimi) 
 transform themselves into the people who are to act 
 or speak ; but our author calls the parts of his comedy 
 not scenes, but canti, cantos, and there is no imper- 
 sonation : even where there is dialogue, it is narrated 
 dialogue, not acted dialogue. This is really the third 
 difficulty over again, only put in a more techmcal and 
 limited way. The bondage of words, always great, was 
 in the Middle Ages and to persons brought up in the 
 severe traditions of scholastic philosophy, prodigious ; 
 and one might almost fancy that Boccaccio would have 
 waived this last objection if he had found the divisions 
 of the poem headed scene and not canti in the manu- 
 script that lay before him. 
 
 The cumulative effect of all these points, thus con- 
 cisely and lucidly set forth, was so great on Boccaccio's 
 mind that he felt tempted to think that there was 
 some mistake, and that those who thought mal con- 
 venirsi a questo libro questo titolo were right. But he 
 was faced with the fact that the poet, who surely must 
 have known best, expressly calls it a Comedy twice 
 over in the poem itself, and that in the most pointed 
 way : per le note di questa commedia, lettor, ti giuro ; 
 and again, parlando die mia commedia cantar non cura. 1 
 He had not of course Dante's letter to Can Grande 
 before him for confirmation, but it was not needed. 
 He finds himself accordingly driven to the conclusion, 
 as the only possible solution of the difficulty, that 
 in giving his poem this name Dante looked only to 
 the broad fact (al tutto) that comedy, according to 
 
 1 Inferno, xvi. 128; xxi. 2. 
 
164 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 the orthodox definition of the dictionary, " begins in 
 discord and ends in tranquillity." " E questo," he con- 
 cludes rather lamely and without any accent of strong 
 conviction, " dee poter bastare a fare che cosi fatto 
 nome si possa di ragione convenire a questo libro " 
 notice the hesitating way in which he slowly piles 
 word on word " this ought to be able to be sufficient 
 to justify the possibility of the title being reasonably 
 appropriate to the work." It is hardly the Q.E.D. of a 
 mathematician, or the precise conclusion of a syllogism. 
 What, then, may we suppose Dante to have had in 
 his mind beyond what appears on the surface of the 
 words in his own explanation as given in the letter to 
 Can Grande ? The question is not an easy one to 
 answer ; for in order to be able to answer it at all fully 
 we should have to succeed in putting ourselves more 
 or less at Dante's own point of view : and that would be 
 not only as regards the scope and function of poetry in 
 its different kinds, but also as regards the amount and 
 nature of his actual acquaintance with the ancient 
 writers with the poets and dramatists in the first 
 place, and in the second place with the critics who 
 had divided poetry into its specific kinds and settled a 
 terminology for them. It is difficult at least I always 
 find it so to remember where the line runs, in Dante 
 or in any mediaeval writer, between vast and most 
 carefully organised knowledge on the one side, and on 
 the other what we should now call gross ignorance. 
 Even among the works accessible in his own time Dante's 
 reading shows curious gaps. When we are enquiring 
 what the term comedy really meant to him, apart from 
 dictionary definitions, clearly the first or almost the 
 first question which we have to ask is, What first-hand 
 knowledge had he of classical comedy, or of what had 
 been written about comedy by classical critics ? 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 165 
 
 In the first place, the whole of the Greek drama, 
 tragedy and comedy alike, was a sealed book to him. 
 He could not read the originals, and there were no 
 translations. He never even mentions the name of 
 Aeschylus or Sophocles, of Aristophanes or Menander. 
 Nor is there any evidence that he was acquainted 
 with Aristotle's Poetics, even through the channel of 
 such obscure and partly unintelligible translations into 
 Latin from the Arabic abridgement as unquestionably 
 existed at the time : in fact the negative evidence 
 seems conclusive in the other direction. Of the Latin 
 dramatists, Plautus was extant, at least as regards eight 
 of the plays, but in the Middle Ages he was to all 
 intents and purposes unknown. The casual mention 
 of his name in the Commedia means no more than the 
 mention of the name of Euripides a little further on. 1 
 A generation later we find him in fact unknown to a 
 trained scholar of high reputation. Giovanni Andrea 
 of Bologna, Professor of Canon Law in that University, 
 " did not believe there was no such person," and 
 actually accused Petrarch 2 of inventing an ancient 
 author and giving him that name ; just as Chaucer, a 
 generation later again, did for his own purpose invent 
 an ancient author and give him the name of Lollius. 
 
 The two ancient dramatists who were effectively 
 extant, and whose works formed or were supposed to 
 form part of the reading of all scholars, were Terence 
 in comedy and Seneca in tragedy. It is here that we 
 come on one of the curious gaps in Dante's scholarship. 
 There is no distinct trace in any of his writings of his 
 ever having read either Terence or Seneca. When I 
 say Seneca, I mean of course the tragedies, not the 
 moral or philosophical works. If this is so and 
 
 1 Purgatorio, zxii. 98, 106. 
 
 2 Petrarch, Familiar Epistles, iv. 15. 
 
166 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 apparently it is so, however strange it may seem the 
 only ancient source left is Horace's Ars Poetica; and it 
 is an obvious remark that Horace in the Ars Poetica 
 takes the distinction between tragedy and comedy for 
 granted and does not either define or elaborate it. 
 The phrases in the letter to Can Grande, ut patet per 
 Senecam in suis tragediis, and ut patet per Terentium in 
 suis comediis, have all the air of being mere transcripts 
 from Dante's dictionary authority, Uguccione or some 
 one else. Clearly if Dante had never read either any 
 ancient plays or any systematic ancient exposition and 
 criticism of the dramatic art, it is not surprising that 
 he should use the terms of that art in a very loose 
 and vague way. Drama of a rude sort was being pro- 
 duced in his own time in the vernacular ; the giuochi 
 di scena are mentioned by chroniclers (e.g. in the Cronica 
 Bolognese of the thirteenth century). But this he would 
 not take into account, because, according to the whole 
 tenor of the argument in the de Vulgari JZloquentia, it 
 was not literature. 
 
 In that treatise, Book II. chapter 4, de varietate 
 stili eorum qui poetice scribunt, he had already opposed 
 " tragedy " to " comedy " and spoken of their essence, 
 both in distinction from one another and in dis- 
 tinction from other kinds of poetry, as consisting 
 not in form but in substance. I may quote part of 
 this passage also as relevant and rather illuminating. 
 
 When we propose to write poetry, he says, we must 
 discriminate whether the canenda, the subject-matter of 
 the poetry, should assume the tragic, the comic, or the 
 elegiac manner, utrum tragice sive cornice sive elegiace sint 
 canenda. For the first, the vulgare illustre is the proper 
 language ; for the second, either the vulgare mediocre or 
 the vulgare humile according to circumstances ; for the 
 third, the vulgare humile. As regards the cornice canenda, 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 167 
 
 he promises a further discussion in the fourth book of 
 the treatise : unhappily the treatise as we possess it 
 breaks off in the middle of the second book. In the 
 meantime he proceeds with further remarks on the 
 tragic style. This exists where three things are com- 
 bined with gravitas sententiae, with weighty subject 
 matter ; namely, superbia carminum, " magnificence of 
 versification," elatio constructionis, " height of design," 
 and excellentia vocabulorum, "distinction of language." 
 This tragic style is the summus stilorum ; it is the only 
 one appropriate to the three greatest subjects of poetry 
 (summe canenda), Salvation, Love and Virtue : quando 
 tria haec, he goes on, pure cantare intendit, vel quae ea 
 directe ac pure secuntur, prius Helicone potatus, tensis 
 fidibus, adsumptum secure plectrum turn movere incipiat. 
 No description could be more appropriate to the Bivina 
 Commedia ; and the phrases of this last sentence give 
 an echo to those of the poem the " a buon cantor buon 
 citarista" of the Paradiso (xx. 142), the "or convien 
 ch' Elicona per me versi" of the Purgatorio (xxix. 40), 
 or the double invocation to Apollo at the beginning of 
 the first and second cantos of the Paradiso. But there 
 is some clue to his use of the term comedy in the 
 remarks on language. We know from other sources 
 that Dante in the Commedia did deliberately what the 
 most cursory reading shows he did in fact, namely to 
 enlarge the poetic vocabulary far beyond what had 
 hitherto been considered its limits. For his purpose, 
 nothing in language was to be common or unclean. 
 The vulgare mediocre, and even to some extent the 
 vulgare liumile, was swept in and fused. He did not 
 confine himself to what might be called classical 
 Tuscan ; he did something infinitely more, made the 
 whole of Tuscan classical. In this he broke away from 
 and superseded the Virgilian or " tragic " tradition. 
 
168 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 It is noticeable that he makes Virgil himself speak 
 of the Aeneid as alta mia tragedia ; and it is the 
 more significant that it is on the very next page, 
 twenty lines further on in the poem, that he 
 expressly refers to his own work as mia commedia. 1 
 The juxtaposition, though we need not suppose it to be 
 deliberate, is not accidental in the sense that we can 
 suppose it to have escaped Dante's notice. Partly 
 no doubt this is according to the common mediaeval 
 usage in which the name of tragedy was applied to 
 any great story of the deeds or fates of great men 
 and princes. The familiar instance is in the Monk's 
 Prologue in Chaucer : 
 
 " Or elles first tragedies will I tell 
 Of which I have an hundred in my cell. 
 Tragedy is to say a certain story 
 As olde bookes maken us memory, 
 Of him that stood in great prosperity 
 And is yfallen out of high degree 
 Into misery, and endeth wretchedly. 
 And they been versifyed commonly 
 Of six feet, which men clepe exametron. 
 In prose eke been indited many one, 
 And eke in metre in many a sundry wise." 
 
 Here there is no distinction between dramatic and 
 epic form, but the exametron, that is to say the epic, is 
 casually mentioned as the normal type. The Monk's 
 Tale itself begins, 
 
 " I will bewail in manner of tragedy 
 The harm of them that stood in high degree : " 
 
 and ends, 
 
 "Tragedy is none other manner thing, 
 Ne can in singing crye ne bewail 
 But for that fortune alway will assail 
 With unwar stroke the regnes that been proud : " 
 
 1 Inferno, xx. 113; xxi. 2. 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 169 
 
 in both of these passages the implication being of what 
 Dante calls the cantionum modus, the form of the 
 canzone or regular lyric, which " excellentissimum 
 esse pensamus." This cantionum modus, the " singing 
 cry " of Chaucer, roughly corresponds to what we call 
 lyrical poetry. But lyric and dramatic poetry tend to 
 coalesce ; at all events their dividing line cannot be 
 sharply defined. There are dramatic lyrics and lyrical 
 dramas. Tennyson invented for his Maud, which is a 
 series of lyrics, all in the first person, and conveying 
 in their sum the substance of a dramatic narration, the 
 name of monodrama. That name, if legitimate at all, 
 as to which I express no opinion, might also be applied 
 to Dante's poem. It is interesting to note too, that of 
 the seventeen " tragedies" which Chaucer's Monk recites, 
 one is the story of Ugolino, " Erl Hugelyn of Pise," out 
 of the Inferno. And another remark may be made 
 by the way : among the reasons that Dante gives 1 
 why the cantio is the most excellent of poetical 
 forms is that cantiones per se totum quod debent efficiunt, 
 and in solis cantionibus ars tota comprenditur just the 
 doctrine which Aristotle lays down about tragedy, 
 or rather, although he is speaking of tragedy specifi- 
 cally, about the drama. 
 
 Modern writers most generally, when they have occa- 
 sion to give the Com/media a name, call it an epic. Byron, 
 in the letter I have already quoted, with his slashing ac- 
 curacy, his way of hitting the nail hard on the head, had 
 tersely denied this : " it is not an epic." But here, though 
 he was perfectly right, he stood almost alone. Shelley 
 for instance in his Defence of Poetry, where he is using 
 terms with great care, calls Dante an epic poet. And 
 very possibly Dante might have done the same himself 
 had the name epic been ready to his hand : but he was 
 
 1 Vulg. Eloq., ii. 3. 
 
170 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 probably ignorant of it. It does not occur in the Ars 
 Poetica : and if we read the Ars Poetica attempting to 
 remove from our minds all that we instinctively read 
 into it from other sources, we shall be struck very 
 much by the way in which Horace fluctuates back and 
 forward between dramatic and epic poetry in his rules 
 and criticisms. One could not infer with certainty 
 from the Ars Poetica itself that Homer was not a 
 tragedian. Horace's " observations follow one another," 
 to quote Addison's demure and exquisite words, " with- 
 out that methodical regularity which would have been 
 requisite in a prose writer " ; and to the mediaeval 
 mind, accustomed as it was to excessive parade of 
 logical arrangement and subdivision, they must have 
 been more than usually perplexing. 
 
 The only word which Dante himself uses so as in 
 any way to suggest epic as opposed to drama is Storia. 
 Statius' Thebaid is called the " Tebana storia " in the 
 Convito (iv. 25). The absence of any definite con- 
 ception of narrative poetry as such, and of a fixed 
 term to express it, is still more notable in the list 
 given by Boccaccio in his life of Dante : " Le poetiche 
 narrazioni," he says, " sono di piu e varie maniere, 
 siccome e tragedia satira e commedia, buccolica, elegia, 
 lirica ed altre." Dante again, also in the Convito (i. 5), 
 when speaking of the supremacy of the Latin language, 
 says " onde vedemo nelle scritture antiche delle com- 
 medie e tragedie Latine che non si possono trasmutare." 
 Here the " Latin comedies and tragedies " simply 
 mean Latin poetry, and both are named simply in 
 order to cover the whole of that poetry, whether more 
 familiar or more august. 
 
 Similarly when towards the end of the Paradiso 
 Dante, after he has entered the Empyrean, speaks 
 of his stthjject having at this point become 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 171 
 
 he employs two phrases which express the same 
 meaning. 
 
 " Da questo passo vinto mi concede 
 Piu che giammai da punto di suo tema 
 Soprato fosse comico o tragedo " : 
 
 " Conquered more than ever comedian or tragedian 
 was overcome by a point of his theme." " Comedian 
 or tragedian " simply means here " any poet " : and 
 so Dante goes on, a few lines later, to say : 
 
 " Ma or convien, che il mio seguir desista 
 Piu dietro a sua bellezza poetando, 
 Come all' ultimo suo ciascun artista " : 
 
 " Now must my pursuit needs fall back from before her 
 beauty and cease making poetry, as every artist must 
 from before his ideal." The " tragedian or comedian " 
 of the first of these two passages is the same as the 
 " every artist " of the second : and poetare, " to make 
 poetry," is the common work of both. 
 
 There is however another point to notice, and it is 
 one which without attention might easily be forgotten. 
 TioisJQantejs a classic.; in his own day he was not a 
 
 nlnssift, Vmf, t,hp iPJ.tifttfOT "f dn.rincr fl.nrl Hnnhf-.fiil irmo- 
 
 vajion . OLieaching the greatest-heights. ,of_tha classi- 
 cal poetry, he thought any language but Latin essentially 
 incapable. This feeling runs through the Vita Nuova : 
 it -comes out strikingly in another passage of the Convito 
 (ii. 13) "della donna di cui io m' innamorava non 
 era degna rima di volgare alcuno palesemente poetare." 
 The feeling is like that of the famous passage in 
 Hyperion : 
 
 "Words she spake 
 
 In solemn tenour and deep organ-tone : 
 Some mourning words, which in our feeble tongue 
 Would come in these like accents : O how frail 
 To that large utterance of the early Gods ! " 
 
172 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 Of the whole of modern poetry, not merely of his 
 own, one can seem to hear Dante saying : 
 
 " Vidi questo globo 
 
 Tal, ch' io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante, 
 E quel consiglio per migliore approbo 
 Che T ha per meno " : 
 
 and he might say this even when he let his eyes rest on 
 " L'aspetto di suo nato, Iperione." 
 
 Speaking in Oxford, and to scholars, I need not spend 
 many words in saying that this doctrine is less than 
 a paradox, that to the civilised world Latin is still a 
 mother tongue, " perpetuo e non corruttibile," " sovrano 
 e per nobiM e per virtu e per bellezza," and that modern 
 poets may well hesitate, as Dante did, before they 
 apply to their own work a title appropriated to the 
 highest work of those whom we still call the classical 
 poets. Few indeed would be inclined now to justify 
 the title of the Commedia in the way in which it was 
 justified by my predecessor Thomas Warton, as appro- 
 priate to " a compound of tragical and comical inci- 
 dents, of familiar and heroic manners, and of satirical 
 and sublime poetry." Yet the description is not with- 
 out an element of truth. And as we turn from Dante 
 to Virgil, from poetry often unsurpassed in ardour and 
 brilliance, yet unequal, often harsh and mannered, 
 sometimes dare I say ? laborious and even tedious, 
 to the golden cadence and majestic rhythm of his 
 master, we shall feel that his own definition of the title, 
 " qualunque componimento poetico in stile mezzano," 
 has more to be said for it than we might at first have 
 been inclined to think. 
 
 Yet even on the ground that is common to Dante 
 and Virgil, the name of comedy has a relevant applica- 
 tion ; for it was applied by ancient critics I do not 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 173 
 
 think the point has ever been noticed in this con- 
 nexion to certain parts of the Aeneid. This is a fact 
 of much significance ; and the more so, because it is 
 probable that Dante himself knew it, though his com- 
 mentators have been ignorant of it. Dr. Moore has 
 proved, beyond all reasonable possibility of doubt, that 
 the Dimna Commedia shows, in several passages, know- 
 ledge of the Servian commentary on Virgil. In that 
 commentary, the introductory remarks prefixed to the 
 fourth book contain a striking passage, which in this 
 connexion is of much significance. 
 
 " Est paene totus in affectione, licet in fine pathos 
 habeat. Sane totus in consiliis et subtilitatibus est : 
 nam paene comicus stilus est : nee mirum, ubi de 
 amore tractatur." 
 
 The wording here requires and repays careful appre- 
 ciation. " The whole book, broadly, deals with mental 
 states, although at the conclusion it contains tragic 
 incident. It is completely occupied with mental pro- 
 cesses and delicate psychological touches. The style 
 approximates to that of comedy, as is natural, since 
 love is the theme." 
 
 The terms, affectio, subtilitas, and comicus stilus, are 
 all highly technical. The word qffectio is by itself of 
 ambiguous meaning : as Servius uses it here, and 
 placing it as he does in antithesis to the word pathos, 
 it conveys a sense almost equivalent to our term of 
 sensibility. The phrase in sultilitatibus est conveys 
 the idea which we should express in the words " it is 
 concerned with the refinements of psychology." These 
 two qualities, the sensibility appropriate to poetry 
 dealing with love, whether that love be human, as in 
 the Aeneid, or divine, as in Dante, and the concern with a 
 study, at once profound and minute, of the human soul, 
 do not belong, in the view here indicated, to the epic or 
 
174 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 tragic sphere ; they belong to the sphere of something 
 larger, something that has the largeness and freedom 
 of comedy, and that we may call a sort of comedy, 
 paene comicus, " comedy with a difference/' for fault of 
 a better word. And these two qualities, it is needless 
 to say, are of the essence of Dante's poem from begin- 
 ning to end. It is totus in affectione, and totus in suUili- 
 tatibus ; and the style follows the matter. Only, both 
 the affectio and the sultilitas are more than merely 
 human; they are attached to and incorporated with a 
 theology, as though the fourth Aeneid were incorpo- 
 rated with the sixth. In the sixth Aeneid the subject 
 of the fourth has become dim and distant ; the silent 
 phantom of Dido in the myrtle- wood is just seen, like 
 the thin crescent of the moon faintly revealed or sur- 
 mised through clouds. But the Beatrice of Dante 
 expands and brightens as the poem moves up from 
 circle to circle of Paradise, and his last sight of her is 
 
 " Che si facea corona 
 Riflettendo da se gli eterni rai." 
 
 Comedy and tragedy alike are transcended and merged 
 in vision. 
 
 Thus it was only natural that the epithet " divine " 
 became attached to the title " comedy " within less 
 than a generation after Dante's death. Suggested no 
 doubt by actual expressions used in the Commedia 
 itself sacrato poema and poema sacro 1 the attached 
 epithet was also found necessary to redress the balance 
 and remove the implication which the title Commedia, 
 standing alone, inevitably suggested. It placed Dante 
 formally in the same class (to say on the same level 
 would be going too far) with Virgil ; for there can be no 
 doubt that it bore express reference to the established 
 application of the epithet to Virgil himself. Origi- 
 
 1 Paradiso, xxiii. 62 ; xxv. 1. 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 175 
 
 nating with the divinam Aeneida of Statius, the term of 
 " divine poet " had become an understood equivalent for 
 Virgil's name : Dante's own phrase divinus poeta noster 
 in the De Monarchies merely follows common usage. 
 
 The epithet, once attached, became permanently 
 incorporated in the title ; indeed to the ordinary and 
 instinctive appreciation the stress laid on the epithet 
 diverts attention from any close questioning as to the 
 force and application of the noun. It was a lucky 
 stroke on the part of whoever it was that invented it 
 before Boccaccio. For the reinforced title indicates 
 very appositely the character of the poem as at once 
 complex and unique. It has been pointed out that 
 the, damned cannot be in more places of Hell than one, 
 and that therefore they have to be placed where their 
 most conspicuous sin is punished. Somewhat analo- 
 gously, Dante's poem could not well be called by more 
 names than one ; and so the name selected for it is 
 one which lays stress on what is, in some ways at all 
 events, its most conspicuous quality, namely, its width of 
 range and all-inclusiveness. For here we touch a point 
 not perhaps always sufficiently emphasised by the inter- 
 preters, that whether the name of comedy be apposite 
 or not, the name of any form of poetry covering a nar- 
 rower scope than that of comedy would be less apposite 
 still. If we turn again to the Epistle to Can Grande, we 
 shall find in it another sentence of the utmost relevance 
 and significance. Est subjectum operis, Dante says, liter- 
 aliter, status animarum post mortem; allegorice, homo. 
 The status animarum, in the literal sense of these words, 
 is what the analytic poets Browning very notably 
 and very insistently have taught us to regard as the 
 real subject of poetry. And when Dante wrote Sul- 
 jectum operis est homo, one can hardly doubt that he 
 had in his mind, consciously or subconsciously, the 
 
176 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 famous line of the Terentian comedy, the Homo sum, 
 nihil humani a me alienum puto of Chremes which is 
 the complete and permanent motto of comedy itself. 
 Thus too Quintilian though Quintilian was unknown 
 in the age of Dante uses not of the tragedians nor 
 of the epicists, but of the master of the New Attic 
 Comedy, the striking phrase, offering another sugges- 
 tive parallel to Dante's words, omnem vitae imaginem 
 expressit. It is the phrase which we should use of 
 Shakespeare; and of Shakespeare also we might, if 
 we reverted to the scholastic forms of language, use 
 Dante's words with but one word changed : est suljectum 
 operis literaliter, status animarum ante mortem ; allegorice, 
 homo. Change the post into ante and you have the 
 Humana Comedia, the volume of 1623. 
 
 John of Salisbury, whom Dante had probably read, 
 uses a striking phrase, or pair of phrases, that is not 
 irrelevant in this connexion. Comedia, he says, 1 est vita 
 hominis super terram ; and he goes on to explain this 
 aphorism by the exegetic or interpretative words, ubi 
 quisque sui ollitus personam exprimit alienam. He uses 
 the term comedia, that is to say, instinctively and 
 without reflection, to cover the whole field of what has 
 dramatic quality. But a little further on, he returns 
 on the phrase and feels obliged to correct or modify 
 it : vita hominum, he says, tragediae quam comediae videtur 
 esse similior, quod omnium fere tristis est exitus, et extrema 
 gaudii luctus occupat. The two sentences between them 
 give the doctrine and the practice of Dante in his use 
 of the term Comedy. 
 
 The great truth implied in, latent in, these frag- 
 mentary yet illuminating sentences is that in the 
 evolution of poetry, comedy tends to displace tragedy, 
 or tragedy to merge in a higher and wider tragi-comedy. 
 
 1 Policraticon, iii. 8. 
 
THE DIVINE COMEDY 177 
 
 Only in that larger and wider scope can the expression 
 of life be given, the pattern and interpretation of life 
 be found. For life is, as it was called by Marcus 
 Aurelius, the jmeifyv o-icifwy, a theatre more extensive 
 than that of tragedy. What is true of life is true of 
 poetry also ; and it is true of poetry because it is true of 
 life : JULY) TOIS Spa/maori JULOVOV, says Plato in the Philebus, 
 aAXa KCII Tfl TOV (3iov frvjuLTraarrj Tpaycpoia Kai KW/ULWola. 
 So Chaucer at the end of his Troilus, when his head 
 and heart are both full of the sorrow and splendour of 
 his tragedy, prays to God his Maker that he may yet 
 " make some comedy " before he die. So Shakespeare 
 passed on from the period in which he scaled the 
 heights and plumbed the depths of life under its tragic 
 aspect to those later tragi- comedies or romances which 
 in their wider scope and freer handling present the 
 whole spectacle of life, of things as they happen, 
 not as a conflict but as a pageant or vision. So like- 
 wise all the more tense and exclusive forms of poetry 
 gradually translate themselves into a larger pattern 
 and looser texture. The modern Greek word for 
 ballad to take one instance is, as Mr. Ker has 
 recently reminded us, rpayovSi : and the essence of 
 the ballad is that it has a fastidiously narrow limit of 
 theme, and rigorous restrictions of treatment. Like 
 tragedy, it gains its effects by concentration and re- 
 jection. So, up to a certain point, does formal comedy, 
 which indeed is framed in the main on the tragic 
 model. But the larger comedy gains its effects by 
 inclusion ; its breadth is its distinguishing quality. 
 Dante meant to include everything in his poem ; and 
 the title of Comedy is to that extent relevant and 
 appropriate. 
 
 He meant to include everything ; but that would be 
 to attain finality, and in poetry as in all vital processes 
 
 M 
 
178 THE DIVINE COMEDY 
 
 there is no finality. He summed up all that had 
 gone before him, but he did not see forward. The 
 mediaeval system, so rounded and seemingly complete, 
 was actually on the verge of changing its life: the 
 new world, unsuspected, was at the doors. The 
 founders of modern poetry, Petrarch and Boccaccio, 
 were both born before Dante died ; and the new world 
 came with v them. Dante was left, a solitary and 
 superb figure, the monument of a day that was gorie. 
 
 " Facesti come quei che va di notte,^ 
 Che porta il lume dietro, e se non giova, 
 Ma dopo se fa le persone dotte." 
 
 The status animarum ante mortem became the theme of 
 the new comedy, which was the creation of that liber- 
 ating, enlarging, and expanding movement known as 
 the Renaissance. Dante's influence waned and almost 
 disappeared in a world to which his art seemed inverted, 
 like the back of a tapestry where the live figures, the 
 real forms and colours, were on the other side. Only 
 for those to whom the real reality still lay behind, to 
 whom the actual world (as it is called) was the shadow 
 and human life a rude and imperfect symbol of things 
 invisible, did he retain the full quality of the artist, 
 the interpreter and designer of life. For these the 
 Divina Oommedia, so far from its name being a con- 
 tradiction in terms, is the only real comedy, in the 
 complete sense of the term, that exists. It is for 
 them that Dante carries his light. 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 Habent sua fata libelli : and of no book is this more 
 true than of the little quarto volume entitled Shake- 
 speare's Sonnets which came into the world, irregularly 
 and under ambiguous auspices, in 1609. Shakespeare, 
 at the age of forty-five, had then already produced 
 nearly all his greatest plays. He was loosening his 
 hold on London and the world of letters and preparing 
 to resume the life of a burgess of Stratford. The 
 singular carelessness which, except in the case of the 
 two juvenile pieces with which he graduated as a 
 poet, Shakespeare always displayed towards his own 
 work, is not the less surprising because it is so familiar. 
 The Sonnets were printed from an imperfect and 
 faulty MS. They were very probably brought out 
 by what would now be called a pirate publisher, 
 though this is taken for granted rather on general 
 grounds than on any sufficient evidence. However 
 this may be, Shakespeare never took the pains 
 either to stop their publication or to issue an 
 authentic edition. They stole into the world, in 
 both senses of the phrase. There are no allusions 
 to their appearance in contemporary literature, and 
 there was, as it would seem, little demand for them 
 among the public. A collection of Shakespeare's 
 poems brought out in 1640 included a garbled, 
 incomplete, and disarranged version of the majority of 
 them. Except for this it was exactly a century from 
 their first appearance before they were reprinted ; and 
 
 179 
 
180 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 it was a century more before they attracted much 
 attention, or were recognised as having a place among 
 the masterpieces of English poetry. What Shake- 
 speare thought of them himself we know as little, 
 except from what may be inferred from the Sonnets 
 themselves, as we know what he thought of Much Ado 
 or of Hamlet. Towards his own work he preserved 
 uniformly a close silence, as of some Deus absconditus, 
 some power that created merely for the sake of creat- 
 ing, and of whom it might be said as in the line of 
 Menander, dVai/ra a-tywv 6 0eo? e^epyd^erai. In one of 
 two purposely enigmatic sonnets which stand at the 
 end of the main body of the collection (124 and 125) 
 we may infer or surmise a momentary intermission 
 of that sphinx-like silence ; the phrasing at all events 
 is singularly applicable to the Sonnets themselves 
 and the history of their fortune. For two hundred 
 years after its appearance, the volume seemed as 
 though 
 
 " It might for fortune's bastard be unfathered, 
 As subject to time's love or to time's hate, 
 Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered " 
 
 the illegitimate issue of the press of a thievish pub- 
 lisher, little regarded, little mentioned for either praise 
 or blame. But for the next hundred years which are 
 now expiring the words in which that sonnet goes on 
 are as strikingly applicable : 
 
 " No, it was builded far from accident ; 
 It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls 
 Under the blow of thralled discontent 
 Whereto the inviting time our fashion calls : 
 It fears not policy, that heretic, 
 Which works on leases of short numbered hours, 
 But all alone stands hugely politic, 
 That it nor grows with heat nor drowns with showers." 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 181 
 
 The Sonnets have not in effect suffered either from 
 the pompous and unsubstantial edifices of guesswork 
 that have been erected upon them, or from the narrow- 
 ing criticism which finds in them a set of purely 
 literary exercises. Towards this latter heresy the 
 fashion of the time has called some of our ablest 
 modern students. Sir Sidney Lee has applied his vast 
 and minute knowledge of the European poetry of the 
 sixteenth century, and in particular of the French 
 sonneteers of that age, to enforce the doctrine that 
 Shakespeare's Sonnets are derivative, artificial, and even 
 academic. The work he has done is of great value ; 
 but it hardly touches their quality as a work of art ; 
 it does not even affect to any considerable extent the 
 question how far they are a transfusion into poetry of 
 Shakespeare's personal experience. 
 
 Scholarly criticism of the Sonnets began, in a 
 tentative way, with Malone's edition of 1780. Poetic 
 appreciation of the Sonnets, towards which the work of 
 scholars is ancillary, may be said to have begun with 
 Wordsworth. The celebrated and familiar passage in 
 Wordsworth's Supplementary Essay to the Preface to 
 the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1815, is worth 
 quoting even now : for it is the starting-point for all 
 subsequent appreciation of the Sonnets as poetry. 
 
 " There is extant a small volume of miscellane- 
 ous poems" the Sonnets had been reprinted in full, 
 from the original edition, by Lintott in 170910 among 
 " all the miscellanies of Mr. William Shakespeare 
 which were published by himself," and two or three 
 times subsequently, though the mutilated text of 1640 
 was reissued as late as 1775 "in which Shakespeare 
 expresses his own feelings in his own person. It is not 
 difficult to conceive that the editor, George Steevens, 
 should have been insensible to the beauties of one 
 
182 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 portion of that volume, the Sonnets ; though in no part 
 of the writings of this Poet is found in an equal com- 
 pass a greater number of exquisite feelings felicitously 
 expressed. But from regard to the critic's own credit, 
 he would not have ventured to talk of an act of 
 parliament not being strong enough to compel the 
 perusal of those little pieces, if he had not known that 
 the people of England were ignorant of the treasures 
 contained in them." 
 
 Wordsworth was hardly the person to appreciate the 
 impish humour of George Steevens, who was never so 
 happy as when he was making some preposterous 
 statement with an air of deep gravity, and to whose 
 ghost this passage must have given deep and malicious 
 satisfaction. But it is true that the Sonnets were then 
 little known, and less appreciated. To most of their 
 readers they seemed, pretty much as they seem to some 
 critics now, little more than literary exercises in a 
 manner which had become obsolete. The new eyes 
 with which the romantic revival regarded our older 
 poetry at once fastened upon them as being/in the words 
 which Wordsworth here uses, alike exquisite in feeling 
 and felicitous in expression. 
 
 H The study which originated in this fresh poetic 
 appreciation was enormously reinforced by the dis- 
 covery in the Sonnets of what seemed to be an auto- 
 biography, and one which had the double enchantment 
 of a strange romance and of a tantalising and partially 
 insoluble enigma, even apart from the added interest 
 which it received in some minds from the suspicion 
 of something in the story which was morbid, if not worse. 
 The Shakespeare-worship initiated by Coleridge and 
 Lamb united with the general movement of literary 
 research to originate a minute study of all documents 
 which could throw any light on Shakespeare's person- 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 183 
 
 ality, or on the facts of his life. It also united with 
 the new mysticism which was one of the by-products 
 of the romantic movement to give birth to a whole 
 crop of allegorising interpretations, and to find in the 
 Sonnets, as in the plays, secret meanings, and latent 
 philosophical or quasi-philosophical systems. First 
 mythologising Shakespeare's works, this latter move- 
 ment then sought in them some key to all mytho- 
 logies. But these movements have spent their force. 
 A treatise on the hidden meaning of the Sonnets would 
 probably now attract but little attention. In the dry 
 light of the comparative method, to which Shake- 
 spearian study, like all other studies, owes much, the 
 Platonism of the Sonnets, or whatever other name 
 we may give to their supposed esoteric meaning, is 
 seen to be a fashion of the age, a passing mode 
 of poetic expression. But another change, and one 
 much more important, has come over the methods 
 of criticism. The nature of poetry, as a function 
 and interpretation of life, has come to be better 
 understood. It is understood, not yet fully, but 
 more and more as the science of criticism advances, 
 that poetry does not record, but creates. The germ 
 of actual fact, of tangible personal experience, is but 
 a nucleus round which that creative process goes on. 
 In art, and in poetry as one of the arts, there is no 
 such thing as a narrative of facts. The facts, so far 
 as they were the origin of the creative process, have 
 become transmuted ; they have dissolved into the 
 created work of art. This essential truth is very 
 clearly stated in some words of Tennyson's quoted in 
 his Life. " Since it is so much the fashion in these 
 days," he says, " to regard each poem and story as a 
 story of the poet's life or part of it, I may be allowed to 
 remind my readers of the possibility that some event 
 
184 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 which comes to the poet's knowledge, some hint 
 flashed from another mind, some thought or feel- 
 ing arising in his own, or some mood coming 
 he knows not whence or how, may strike a chord 
 from which a poem evolves its life, and that this to 
 other eyes may bear small relation to the thought 
 or fact or feeling to which the poem owes its 
 birth." 
 
 In reading the Sonnets then it is necessary, if we 
 will not go all astray, to keep sharply distinct from 
 one another the considerations of their poetical quality 
 and of their autobiographic value. That they contain 
 personal experience, naylSore, that they are saturated 
 with personal experience, may be fully conceded. !) The 
 creative processes of art do not make anything out of 
 nothing : ex nihilo nihil fit is as true in art as it is in 
 physics. And that this personal experience was no 
 mere experience of books, was not anything merely 
 secondary and derivative, is no less clear to any sound 
 insight. But the experience was transmuted into 
 poetry, and we cannot, where any such vital and not 
 mechanical process is in question, reverse the action, 
 uncreate the creation, and retrace and reconstitute the 
 original experience. In virtue of their extraordinary 
 poetical quality the Sonnets stand alone ; as an instance 
 of the transmutation of experience they have many 
 analogies. I need only mention two, belonging to 
 modern times, and both, as in Shakespeare's case, 
 sonnet-sequences. One is Meredith's Modern Love ; the 
 other is Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's Esther. Both are poetry 
 of a high order. Both bear relation to facts, to ex- 
 periences which their authors had passed through. 
 But it is not necessary to enquire in either case what 
 the precise personal experience was out of which the 
 poems grew, or what precise relation they bear to facts 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 185 
 
 in the lives of their authors as to which we may have 
 knowledge from other sources. 
 
 Of Shakespeare's Sonnets at least, in this respect, 
 the best word that has been said, if not the last word 
 that can be said, is in the line and a half of Sophocles 
 prefixed by Francis Palgrave to his edition more than 
 forty years ago : 
 
 co Oeoi, r/9 apa KVTrpis y r/9 
 
 The words, like all Sophocles at his finest, are untrans- 
 lateable : and like Sophocles at his most characteristic, 
 where he goes to the very heart and centre of life, they 
 have two qualities : first that they are extraordinarily 
 simple and direct ; and secondly that they settle upon 
 the note of wonder, the endless and fathomless miracle 
 of existence ; not explaining, not passing judgment, but 
 seeing the wonder of life with that clear and yet 
 impassioned vision which is the last reward that life 
 has to give. 
 
 What we know about the date and circumstances of 
 composition of the Sonnets, as distinct from more or 
 less plausible guesswork and more or less illogical 
 inference, comes within very small compass. They 
 were published, together with A Lovers Complaint, in 
 June 1609. The only certain allusion in them to 
 contemporary history is in Sonnet 107, where the 
 reference to the death of Elizabeth and the peaceful 
 accession of James, though it has been questioned, is, 
 I think, unmistakeable. A possible allusion to the 
 Gunpowder Plot of 1605 in Sonnet 124 is merely 
 conjectural, and not probable even as a conjecture : 
 and there is no reason to think that 1603 or 1604 
 is not the posterior limit of their composition. As 
 regards the anterior limit we find critics plunged into 
 
186 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 a sea of controversy. Internal evidence of style 
 supports the numerous allusions in substance which 
 indicate that they were written at various times over 
 a space of several years, three or four at least, if not 
 more. Shakespeare is named by Meres in 1598 as 
 the author of sonnets which were in private circulation : 
 but that these were the sonnets which we possess is 
 only an inference, though one which has a prima facie 
 probability. In the next year, 1599, we have one 
 solid fact, namely that two of the Sonnets, 138 and 
 144, were then published in the collection entitled 
 
 / The Passionate Pilgrim, but with a text varying from 
 that of the volume of 1609, the variations in 144 
 being merely verbal, but in 138 amounting to sub- 
 stantial revision. For a date three years earlier we 
 have a piece of evidence which may be interpreted 
 in two ways. In the play of King Edward III., first 
 printed in 1596, there is a line which is verbally the 
 
 -. same as one in Sonnet 94, and a phrase "scarlet 
 "* ornaments " which occurs in Sonnet 142. The author 
 of the play is unknown, and whether Shakespeare 
 himself had some hand in composing or retouching it 
 is a question which is much and inconclusively debated. 
 In any case the mere facts of these coincidences are 
 equally consistent with the theory that the phrases 
 were transferred from the play to the Sonnets, and 
 with the theory that they were transferred from the 
 Sonnets to the play. But it is worth remarking that 
 the " scarlet ornaments "of the Sonnet bear a different 
 meaning from those of the play and imply a different 
 metaphor. The line in the play is : 
 
 " when she grew pale 
 His cheeks put on their scarlet ornaments." 
 
 It is the same pretty fancy as in the familiar passage 
 of Esmond : " When I came a-courting, you would see 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 187 
 
 miss blush. She said herself, when I joked with her 
 about her d^f fed smiling red cheeks, ''Tis as they 
 do at St. James's : I put up my red flag when my 
 king comes.' " But the scarlet ornaments of the Sonnet 
 are the lady's wax-red lips which, in one of the many 
 figures of speech drawn in the Sonnets, as in all 
 Shakespeare's work, from the terminology of law, are 
 compared here to the wax seal on a deed : 
 
 " those lips of thine 
 
 That have profaned their scarlet ornaments 
 And sealed false bonds of love." 
 
 The strong presumption is that the phrase in the 
 play, whether Shakespeare's own or another's, had 
 clung in his mind and was here reproduced by him 
 in a new application. 
 
 So far, the natural conclusion to be drawn would 
 be that the Sonnets were in the main composed at 
 intervals over a space of some five years, 15981603. 
 This is the period which includes the great central 
 group of the comedies, Much Ado, As You Like It, and 
 Twelfth Night ; following almost immediately on them, 
 the full maturing of Shakespeare's dramatic power in 
 Julius Caesar; the strange inverted romance of Troilus 
 and Cressida ; and the slow gestation of Samlet. At 
 its end we are opening on the culminating period of 
 the great tragedies, from Othello and the second quarto 
 of Hamlet in 1604 to Coriolanus in 1609. 
 
 But here we are at once faced by a formidable body 
 of criticism which assigns the bulk of the Sonnets to a 
 much earlier date, one contemporary with or imme- 
 diately following that of the poems in which Shake- 
 speare had first appeared before the public in his own 
 name, the Venus and Adonis of 1593 and the Lucrece of 
 1594. Both of these poems were dedicated to the 
 
188 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 Earl of Southampton ; and on this slender basis has 
 been piled a mountain of misinterpretation. 
 
 Further evidence, if it can be called evidence, rests 
 chiefly on three possible identifications. These are, 
 taken in their order, the identification of Mr. W. H. : 
 that of the boy, to whom, or about whom, the bulk of 
 the Sonnets are written ; and that of the rival poet to 
 whom allusion is made in a group of Sonnets, 78 to 86, 
 which stand by themselves and seem all to have been 
 written about the same time. 
 
 A fourth identification has been attempted, that of 
 the Dark Lady of the later portion of the Sonnets, who 
 is assumed to be the same person as is alluded to, in 
 carefully veiled terms, in Sonnets 40 to 42. It may 
 at once be said that no such identification is possible, 
 and that all the labour that has been spent upon it is 
 pure waste. It is best to dismiss it at once, and to 
 return to the other three, which are all to a considerable 
 extent implicated in one another, and make up a single 
 very complex problem. 
 
 On the question of the rival poet I do not propose 
 to spend any time : for the fact is, as to his identity 
 we are wholly in the dark. Attempts have been made 
 by one investigator or another to identify him with 
 at least six of Shakespeare's contemporaries Barnes, 
 Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, Jonson, and Marston : I 
 give the names in alphabetical order, because any one 
 of them appears to me to be almost as unlikely as 
 any other. The apparent plausibility of the case made 
 out for Chapman will not bear investigation. The case 
 for Barnes and Daniel rests almost wholly on the fact 
 that Barnes was a protege of Lord Southampton's and 
 Daniel of Lord Pembroke's, and falls to the ground if 
 we reject, as I think we must do, the connexion of 
 either of these noblemen with the Sonnets. For the 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 189 
 
 other three there is really no argument beyond the 
 fact that they all were Shakespeare's rivals in the 
 sense that they all shared a certain jealousy of his 
 success as a dramatist. It seems to me most likely 
 that the reference in the Sonnets is to a poet to whose 
 identity all clue is lost, though it is not impossible that 
 we possess at least one poem written by him. We 
 must remember that the Elizabethan poetry which has 
 come down to us, large as its amount is, is only a small 
 fraction of the poetry which was actually written. 
 Much even of what was printed is lost : an immense 
 amount was never printed at all. Shakespeare's 
 Sonnets themselves have only been preserved by an 
 accident. Had not Thorpe got hold of the MS., years 
 after they were written and when Shakespeare himself 
 would seem to have lost all interest in them, they also 
 (except the two, and these not of the best, independently 
 preserved) would have gone to oblivion. 
 
 Until recently it was generally taken for granted that 
 the W. H. to whom the volume of the Sonnets is 
 dedicated, and who is spoken of in the dedication as 
 their only begetter, was the same person as the boy of 
 the Sonnets themselves. Sir Sidney Lee is the originator 
 of a theory, worked out by him with much learning and 
 ingenuity, that this is not the case: that W. H. was 
 simply some acquaintance or accomplice of the pirate 
 publisher; that it was through his hands that the 
 MS. from which the Sonnets were printed came into 
 Thorpe's possession, and that this dedication is merely 
 a compliment paid, in the way of business, by one 
 more or less disreputable tradesman to another. In 
 one William Hall, a printer and publisher in a small 
 way, who meets the requirements of his theory suffi- 
 ciently well, Sir Sidney Lee is confident that we have 
 the W. H. of Thorpe's dedication. 
 
190 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 But the theory itself is wholly unconvincing. 
 Taking words in their plain meaning, we are bound to 
 hold that Mr. W. H. was, or at least was understood to 
 be, the person without whom and apart from whom 
 " the ensuing Sonnets " would not have been written. 
 If it were possible to believe that the Sonnets are 
 from first to last a mere literary exercise upon a 
 prescribed theme, it would also be possible to sup- 
 pose that W. H. was merely the person who had 
 suggested the theme to Shakespeare, and had no 
 further connexion with the series of dramatic situa- 
 tions and vividly realised moods which the Sonnets 
 convey. But if we believe, as it seems to me we 
 are bound to believe, that the Sonnets convey more 
 than this; that they convey, however largely trans- 
 muted by the creative imagination as well as by the 
 influence of an overwhelming literary fashion, the 
 effect of a poignant and remarkable personal experi- 
 ence, it will follow inevitably that W. H. either was, or 
 was understood to be, the boy of the Sonnets himself. 
 
 Further than this we cannot go ; for the boy of the 
 Sonnets is unidentified, and unidentifiable. Of the 
 many theories which have been started and run to 
 death, three only are worth serious consideration, and 
 none of these three rests on a shred of evidence. 
 These are, the theory which identifies the object of 
 Sonnets 1 to 125 and of the short poem in couplets 
 which follows them as an envoi and is printed in the 
 series as Sonnet 126, with Henry Wriothesley, Earl 
 of Southampton ; that which identifies him with 
 William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke ; and that, the 
 most fancifully ingenious of the three, which identifies 
 him with an otherwise unknown William Hughes. 
 
 The Southampton theory is based on little more 
 than the fact that Southampton, who was nine years 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 191 
 
 younger than Shakespeare, was one of his early 
 patrons, and that the Venus and Adonis and the Lucrece 
 are dedicated to him in terms of eulogy which follow 
 the common convention of the time. In order to 
 make the theory tenable, it is necessary to believe, in 
 the first place, that the bulk of the Sonnets were 
 written as early as 1594 or 1595, and in the second 
 place, that in substance and tone they are such as 
 might be addressed by a young poet to a wealthy and 
 powerful nobleman whom he was at the same time 
 addressing publicly in the ordinary terms used by 
 struggling men of letters towards magnificent patrons. 
 Both of these positions make impossible drafts on 
 credulity. As regards the first it is sufficient to say 
 that in the large majority of the Sonnets, the power of 
 thought, the charged fulness of language, the mastery 
 of compressed and allusive style, are qualities not of 
 the Shakespeare of Venus and Adonis or Lucrece, not of 
 the Shakespeare of the Midsummer Night's Dream, not 
 even of the Shakespeare of Loves Labours Lost after its 
 revision in 1597: they are those_ol-the-Shakespeare 
 who has fully mastered his^ iu:t jin _ the. greja_CQmedies, 
 who has deepened his hold on life and the human soul 
 to the potency of the great tragedies ; they are those 
 more particularly of the Shakespeare who is face 
 to face with the whole vexing sorrow of the world, the 
 Shakespeare who was writing or was preparing him- 
 self to write Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida. These 
 two plays and the Sonnets are the three works of 
 art which their author left enigmatic, irritating and 
 fascinating beyond all the rest. 
 
 As regards the alternative Pembroke theory the 
 dates fit well enough. Pembroke came to London 
 in 1598 at the age of eighteen; it is not impos- 
 sible that Shakespeare may have met him earlier, 
 
192 SHAKESPEAKE'S SONNETS 
 
 at Wilton or at Penshurst ; and the fact that in the 
 previous year a project of marriage was under dis- 
 cussion between Pembroke and Bridget Vere, daughter 
 of the Earl of Oxford, but came to nothing, agrees as 
 well with the theme of Sonnets 1 to 17 as does the 
 record of Pembroke's subsequent life as a young man 
 about town with the tragic or squalid story, according 
 as one may choose to regard it, which is revealed, 
 clearly enough in its main motive though enigmatically 
 in its details, in Sonnets 40 to 42, and apparently also, 
 though this cannot be taken for granted without re- 
 servation, in Sonnets 133 and 134. But all this falls 
 short of evidence ; it might supplement and confirm 
 any evidence that existed, but of such evidence there 
 is none. 
 
 There is indeed the further coincidence that Pem- 
 broke's name was William Herbert, and his initials W. H. 
 It was this fact which led the first investigators of the 
 problem of the Sonnets, early in last century, to pro- 
 pose the identification. It is not preposterous, like the 
 identification of Mr. W. H. with Southampton on the 
 ground that the initials of the latter were H. W., or 
 W. H. read backwards. But apart from the fact that 
 nobody would ever have thought of calling Pembroke 
 Mr. W. H. any more than of calling the late Lord 
 Salisbury Mr. R C., these particular initials are so 
 common that they would fit dozens and scores of 
 persons. A cursory examination shows about a 
 hundred Mr. W. H.'s in the index to the Oxford 
 University Calendar, and over three hundred in the 
 Dictionary of National Biography. If, with the sup- 
 porters of the Southampton identification, we allow 
 W. H. to include its reversed form of H. W., the field for 
 choice would be doubled. Sir Sidney Lee, it may be 
 well to remark, though he believes that the " boy " or 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 193 
 
 " friend " of the Sonnets was a literary patron, and that 
 this was Southampton, expressly rejects the identifica- 
 tion of Southampton with the W. H. of the dedication. 
 But his own theory, that the dedication is a mere whim 
 of the publisher's, and that W. H. is the printer William 
 Hall, is to me and I think to many others as uncon- 
 vincing, though not so absurd, as those which make 
 W. H. into William Herbert Earl of Pembroke, or 
 Henry Wriothesley Earl of Southampton. 
 
 The third, or William Hughes, theory, first suggested 
 by that able critic Thomas Tyrwhitt, is founded on 
 suggestions in the Sonnets themselves. Briefly the 
 argument is this: that the punning Sonnets 133 to 
 136 indicate that the friend's name, as well as Shake- 
 speare's own, was Will ; and that an obscure line in 
 Sonnet 20, 
 
 " A man in hew, all Hews in his controlling," 
 
 can be best explained, or possibly can only be explained, 
 by supposing another pun on the name Hughes. 
 In support of this latter point stress is laid on the fact 
 that the word Hews is printed with a capital and in 
 italics, like Will in Sonnets 135 and 136, where the 
 play on the name is obvious and admitted. 
 
 The Hughes theory, as Dean Beeching drily points 
 out, has this advantage over some others, that if it can- 
 not be proved, neither can it be disproved. It has the 
 disadvantage, that even if it were proved, it would leave 
 us exactly where we were. For nothing is known of 
 any William Hughes to whom the description implied 
 in the Sonnets could apply; and if we frankly admit, 
 as I think we are bound to do, that the boy of the 
 Sonnets is an unknown Eros, it does not matter whether 
 we call him William Hughes or John Stiles. It may 
 however be worth observing, as regards the " Will " 
 
 N 
 
194 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 Sonnets, that while they are not merely compatible 
 with the view that the friend's name was Will, but dis- 
 tinctly suggest that view, they do not necessitate it : 
 if analysed closely, they will be found to contain no 
 thought or phrase which is not satisfied by a play 
 of words between the poet's own name and the various 
 senses which the word will bears as a common noun. 
 The case for supposing a play on the name Hughes is 
 even slenderer. The text of the crucial line in Sonnet 
 20 is confessedly corrupt, for, whether the play on the 
 name be assumed or not, the first four words of the 
 line as they stand in the quarto do not make sense. 
 No argument can be safely based on the capital and 
 the italics, for these are found elsewhere, in such 
 common words as autumn, informer, heretic, and statues, 
 and are clearly a mere irrelevant eccentricity of the 
 type-setter in a very irregularly and carelessly printed 
 volume, which is full of typographical blunders, and 
 was not corrected in proof either by the author or by 
 any competent reader. 
 
 Indeed if we are to give rein to fancy, a much 
 stronger case might be made for another name for the 
 boy of the Sonnets ; for the name, not of Hughes, but of 
 Rose. Had the initials in the dedication been W. R. 
 instead of W. H., there is little doubt that this clue 
 would have been eagerly traced and would be an 
 accepted theory with a whole faction of editors. Hews 
 only occurs once in the Sonnets: the singular, hew, 
 indeed occurs five times, but without the least sug- 
 gestion either by context or typography of a double 
 meaning. But Rose occurs no less than ten times, always 
 spelled with the initial capital, and with a plausible 
 suggestion of a play upon words in more than one 
 instance. Let us just look at these. How does the 
 first Sonnet open ? 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 195 
 
 " From fairest creatures we desire increase 
 That thereby beauty's Rose might never die." 
 
 There you have it at once, italics, capital and all. 
 Again in Sonnet 67, one of those where the personal 
 note is most passionate and unmistakeable : 
 
 "Why should poor beauty indirectly seek 
 Roses of shadow, since his Rose is true 1 " 
 
 And again in Sonnet 95, he cries out, in the full 
 bitterness of a love that is proof even against shame, 
 on the vicious life 
 
 "Which like a canker in the fragrant Rose 
 Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name." 
 
 Once more, and perhaps most remarkably, towards the 
 end of the series, in Sonnet 109: 
 
 " For nothing this wide universe I call 
 Save thou, my Rose : in it thou art my all." 
 
 Here are the elements of a theory : I only lay 
 stress on them in order to show what a fabric may be 
 raised out of mere fancy when once we move along 
 the perilous path of conjecture, and try to wring 
 Shakespeare's secret from him, to pluck out the heart 
 of his mystery. Of his relations, actual or imagined, 
 with the enigmatical KVTrpi<s-iiJ.po<; of the central group 
 of the Sonnets, " the master-mistress of my passion," 
 as he calls him in Sonnet 20 with a singularly close 
 approximation to the Sophoclean phrase, we know 
 exactly as much as Shakespeare himself has chosen to 
 tell us. He might have been making fun of his own 
 interpreters in the passage of Twelfth Night where 
 Malvolio puzzles over Maria's letter. 
 
 " I may command where I adore, 
 
 But silence, like a Lucrece knife, 
 With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore : 
 M-O-A-I doth sway my life. 
 
196 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 M-O-A-I doth sway iny life : nay, but first let me see, let me 
 see, let me see. What should that alphabetical position por- 
 tend 1 if I could make that resemble something in me softly ! 
 M-O-A-I : M why, that begins my name. M but then there 
 is no consonancy in the sequel ; that suffers under probation : 
 A should follow, but O does : and then I comes behind. 
 M-O-A-I : this simulation is not as the former ; and yet to crush 
 this a little, it would bow to me, for every one of those letters 
 are in my name." 
 
 Over the Sonnets Shakespeare has in effect written 
 the superscription of Malvolio's letter, " To the un- 
 known beloved." 
 
 In one of the concluding pieces of the collection, 
 Sonnet 121, the one beginning 
 
 "'Tis better to be vile than vile-esteemed 
 When not to be receives reproach of being," 
 
 Shakespeare himself emphasises the same note, not 
 humorously, but with an indignant gravity, and a claim 
 for himself as superb as it is justified. 
 
 " For why should others' false adulterate eyes 
 Give salutation to my sportive blood 1 
 Or on my frailties why are frailer spies, 
 Which in their wills count bad what I think good 1 
 No, I am that I am, and they that level 
 At my abuses reckon up their own. 
 I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel, 
 By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown." 
 
 " I am that I am " : these words are in effect Shake- 
 speare's single and final self-criticism. They are almost 
 appalling in their superb brevity and concentrated 
 insight ; beside them even the pride of Milton dwindles 
 and grows pale : for here Shakespeare, for one single 
 revealing moment, speaks not as though he were God's 
 elect, but as though he were God himself. 
 
 " With this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart " : so 
 Wordsworth wrote of the Sonnets in 1827. The words 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 197 
 
 have become a sort of battle-cry between conflicting 
 schools of criticism, and like most battle-cries have 
 become a good deal distorted from their original mean- 
 ing. The scornful " Did he ? " of Browning is a counter- 
 stroke not to what Wordsworth said, but to what his 
 phrase had become extended and interpreted to mean. 
 As he wrote it and meant it, it expresses the truth 
 with precise and almost punctilious accuracy. A strange 
 and vast mass of experience, passion, imagination, was 
 the central heat under that rich surface out of which 
 the Shakespearian drama bloomed. Of that mass of 
 experience the author of the Soonets might say to his 
 readers in Ophelia's words : 
 
 " 'Tis in my memory locked, 
 And you yourself shall keep the key of it." 
 
 But to hold the key is a different thing from holding 
 the casket which it unlocked and locked again ; and no 
 poring over the wards, no fingering and balancing of 
 the key itself will tell us what were the contents of the 
 casket. He says himself no doubt, in Sonnet 76, in 
 words which are a little startling at first sight, that 
 every word of these Sonnets almost tells his name. 
 
 "Why is my verse so barren of new pride, 
 So far from variation or quick change *? 
 Why with the time do I not glance aside 
 To new-formed methods and to compounds strange 
 Why write I still all one, ever the same, 
 And keep invention in a noted weed, 
 That every word doth almost tell my name, 
 Showing their birth and where they did proceed 1 " 
 
 Now and then, but rarely, as in Sonnet 111, where he 
 breaks out into a bitter cry against the degradation 
 involved in his own profession as a purveyor of popular 
 amusement, " public means, which public manners 
 breeds," he speaks quite frankly about himself. In the 
 
198 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 group of Sonnets dealing with the rival poet or rival 
 poets for Dean Beeching may be right in holding 
 that the reference is not to one poet only he clearly 
 speaks of matters of fact which must have been common 
 knowledge in his own circle. But these points only 
 touch the fringe of the experience which he locked up 
 in the Sonnets. 
 
 As bearing on the question of the date of the Sonnets, 
 the passage from Sonnet 76 which I have just quoted 
 has a special significance. For it indicates clearly, what 
 on other grounds we might suspect, that Shakespeare 
 was deliberately using a poetical form which was passing 
 out of vogue, but in which his genius saw hitherto 
 unreached possibilities. The history of the English 
 Sonnet in the sixteenth century has been fully set out by 
 Sir Sidney Lee in his masterly essay prefixed to the two 
 volumes of Elizabethan Sonnets reprinted from Arber's 
 English Garner in 1904. The sonneteering craze had 
 spread through Europe in the middle of the century. 
 The output of sonnets in Western Europe in that 
 century may be estimated from the fact that the 
 number actually extant now in print is computed at 
 not less than three hundred thousand. The fashion 
 took some time to reach England, where its career was 
 violent and rather brief. It did not break out in its 
 full volume until the publication, in 1591, of the 
 Sonnets of Philip Sidney. The effect of that publica- 
 tion was to give the sonnet, for some five years, an over- 
 whelming vogue. Sonnet-sequences poured from the 
 press : Daniel's Delia and Constable's Diana in 1592; 
 Lodge's Phillis, Barnes' Parihenophe, Giles Fletcher's 
 Licia in 1593; Dray ton's Idea and Percy's Celia in 
 1594 ; Spenser's Amoretti and Griffin's Fidessa in 1595 ; 
 Smith's Chloris and Linche's Diella in 1596; Tofte's 
 Laura in 1597. These collections, numerous as they 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 199 
 
 are, probably do not represent a tenth or a twentieth, 
 part of the sonnets which were being produced and 
 circulated in print or MS. during these five years. 
 Then the reaction came, as far as one can judge, almost 
 suddenly. It is not until 1604 that we come on the 
 next sonnet-sequence in Sir Sidney Lee's lists, the Earl 
 of Stirling's Aurora; and that was the aftermath of 
 Scottish poetry following at some interval, as it had 
 done in^the age of the Chaucerians, after English 
 models. The same remark applies to another body of 
 sonnets brought out three years later by Drummond 
 of Hawthornden. Last of all come Shakespeare's, in 
 effect closing the roll of the great sonnet-writers of the 
 Elizabethan age. From that time forward the sonnet 
 did not bulk largely among the forms of English 
 poetry until it was reinstated, two centuries later, by a 
 new school of poets who revived, in this as in other 
 respects, the genius of the Elizabethans. If we read 
 the 76th Sonnet in the light of these facts, it assumes 
 a fresh and clear significance. Shakespeare had been 
 writing sonnets, like everybody else, during the years 
 of the sonneteering fashion ; there are sonnets in his 
 earliest plays, from 1591 onwards. But he took up 
 this poetical form for the first time seriously and con- 
 secutively just when it was beginning to fall out of 
 fashion, and seemed exhausted by an immense over- 
 production. In the plays, as has been noted, there 
 are a number of more or less sarcastic references to 
 sonneteering, ranging from Loves Labours Lost in 1591 
 to Much Ado in 1599. These references throw ridicule in 
 particular on the fashion of poets promising immor- 
 tality through verse to the subjects of their sonnets, 
 which had been similarly ridiculed by Sidney in 1581 
 in his Apology for Poetry. This was the face Shake- 
 speare put upon it to the public. But all the while 
 
200 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 he was quietly practising the scorned art. Up to 1603 
 at least he persisted; as he puts it, in " dressing old 
 words new, spending again what is already spent." The 
 apology he makes is not only, is not even mainly, for any 
 deficiency in his own powers ; it is for persisting in the 
 use of a poetical manner which was regarded as obsolete, 
 a poetical form which had fallen out of fashion. " My 
 gracious numbers are decayed," he writes, " and my sick 
 Muse doth give another place " : " thou art enforced to 
 seek anew some fresher stamp of the time-bettering 
 days." But in these phrases there is an accent, if not 
 of sarcasm, at least of pride, of consciousness of his 
 own immense genius. " I was not sick of any fear from 
 thence" he says of the new school of poets, just after 
 he has spoken of his own sick Muse. And the promise 
 of immortality which he gives is too splendid to be 
 insincere ; it is no mere nourish of rhetoric, but the 
 authentic and inspired voice of poetry, which sounds 
 in these noble lines : 
 
 " Your name from hence immortal life shall have 
 Though I, once gone, to all the world must die : 
 The earth can yield me but a common grave 
 When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie. 
 Your monument shall be my gentle verse 
 Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read, 
 And tongues to be your being shall rehearse 
 When all the breathers of this world are dead." 
 
 So in effect it has been and will be. And if any 
 one should be inclined to say, " Small thanks to 
 Shakespeare, considering how little pains he took to 
 preserve the Sonnets," we must recollect that the 
 same inconsistency meets us in the case of other 
 great artists. Throughout the Sonnets we constantly 
 find the fluctuation of mood if it be not rather an 
 antinomy of thought between the feeling that art 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 201 
 
 is immortal and the overwhelming sense of the transi- 
 toriness of all art as of all earthly things. In Lucrece 
 Shakespeare had already given splendid expression 
 to this latter thought. There, apostrophising Time 
 as the " lackey to Eternity," he speaks of blotting old 
 books and altering their contents as one phase of that 
 universal process whose task it is " to feed Oblivion 
 with decay of things." Years later, in the famous 
 speech of Prospero in the Tempest, he gave expression in 
 terms of unequalled gravity and beauty to the same 
 thought, with a hardly veiled allusion to the world 
 of his own creation as included under the sentence. 
 And when he was writing the Sonnets he was par- 
 ticularly possessed by the thought, recurrent in all 
 philosophies, of a cyclical revolution of the universe 
 which repeated itself, at vast intervals, down to the 
 most precise detail. This thought has weighed 
 heavily on some of the greatest artists, and made 
 them regard the products of their own art as some- 
 thing not merely transitory, but phantasmal. Such 
 a feeling is strongly marked in Lucretius; it is at 
 the base of the beautiful chorus at the end of 
 Shelley's Hellas, with its wonderful change of key 
 from the exultant opening 
 
 " The world's great age begins anew 
 The golden years return " 
 
 to the bitter cry at the end, 
 
 " O cease ! cease ! cease ! 
 The world is weary of the past ; 
 O might it die or rest at last ! " 
 
 Under the obsession of this thought it is not so 
 wonderful that Shakespeare should have left the 
 Sonnets, as he left the plays, to take their chance. 
 For that he left them to take their chance there 
 
202 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 is no doubt. Careful analysis of the Quarto text 
 shows convincingly, not only that it was carelessly 
 printed and not intelligently corrected, but that it 
 was printed from a rough MS. containing altera- 
 tions, erasures, and in some cases alternative readings. 
 There is not time here to go into this point in 
 the full detail through which alone the proof can 
 be given; it is a point not fully taken as yet by 
 the editors, and leaves something to be added even 
 to Dean Beeching's admirable and otherwise almost 
 faultless edition. From the fact as established, more 
 than one conjectural inference may be drawn. We 
 may suppose either that the Sonnets were printed 
 from Shakespeare's own MS. before it had received 
 his final revision, or that they were collected for 
 printing from various MS. sources, autographs or 
 copies. There are indications, not very certain, but 
 highly probable, that the MS. before the printers 
 was not all in the same handwriting. 
 
 This question is connected with another, of which 
 indeed it forms part, and which gives it its main 
 interest, whether the Sonnets were arranged by 
 Shakespeare hi their present order, and whether, or 
 to what extent, they form a continuous sequence. 
 As to this we must distinguish sharply between the 
 main series, Sonnets 1 to 126, and the appendix of 
 twenty-eight sonnets which follows, and which deals 
 in the main with the sinister and elusive figure known 
 as the Dark Lady. This appendix is arranged in 
 no traceable order. It ends with two Sonnets which 
 have no connexion with the rest. These are purely 
 literary exercises. They are alternative versions of 
 a sixteenth-century Latin epigram itself rendered 
 from a Greek epigram of the Byzantine period in 
 the Anthology, arid judging from style I am inclined 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 203 
 
 to think that they are not by Shakespeare at all. 
 The remaining twenty-six vary very much in style 
 and quality. They include some, like 129, 140, 
 146, which are unmistakeable Shakespeare and in 
 Shakespeare's finest manner; others which are quite 
 Shakespearian in style, but of little poetical merit ; 
 and at least two, 128 and 145, which are both trivial 
 in substance and undistinguished in style. From a 
 general consideration of the facts one is inclined to 
 believe that this portion of the volume is a mis- 
 cellaneous addition, which may have reached Thorpe 
 from the same source as the main body of the 
 Sonnets or may have been put together by him 
 from more than one source. Short poems, we must 
 remember, were at that time multiplied very largely 
 in MS. : they passed from hand to hand, and people 
 selected and transcribed them, for their own use or 
 pleasure, in MS. volumes such as are mentioned in 
 Sonnet 77 : that sonnet is an occasional one extrane- 
 ous to the series, and is sent with a blank book in 
 which the friend to whom it is presented is urged 
 to transcribe what his memory cannot retain. Two 
 extant specimens are described by Sir Sidney Lee 
 of such " blank books " in which collections including 
 one or more of the Sonnets have been transcribed ; 
 one of them was written in or about 1610, the other 
 twenty years later. 
 
 Of the main body of the Sonnets, 1 to 126, I see 
 no reason to doubt that they were arranged by Shake- 
 speare, or at all events that they left his hands, in 
 their present order, and that this order is substantially 
 the order of their composition. But this belief is 
 subject to two reservations : in the first place, those 
 Sonnets which constitute a consecutive group may 
 have been arranged by him in an order different from 
 
204 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 that of the dates of their writing ; in the second place, 
 he may have been working on more than one of those 
 groups contemporaneously. As the Sonnets extend 
 over a period of several years, and as different groups 
 of them were clearly sent to their recipient at different 
 times, it was obviously possible either for him, or 
 for some third person into whose hands they had 
 come before they went to the printer, to alter the 
 arrangement ; but there is no proof, and no proba- 
 bility, that this was in fact done. 
 
 As regards their grouping, there are no formal 
 subdivisions in the Quarto, and the numbering is 
 continuous from 1 to 126, as it is also with the 
 Sonnets 127 to 154 which follow. But on the inter- 
 nal evidence, this main body of the Sonnets clearly 
 falls into three parts. The arrangement is as follows : 
 
 I. A first group of twenty-five Sonnets (1 to 25); 
 then a considerable gap of time. 
 
 II. A second group of fifty Sonnets (27 to 76), 
 ending in Sonnet 76 with a vindication of the charge 
 of monotony and old-fashionedness made against the 
 writer. Sonnet 26 is an introductory or covering 
 Sonnet prefixed to this group ; and at the end of 
 the group is attached 77, an occasional Sonnet sent 
 with the gift of an album, and not properly belonging 
 to the series at all. From the persistence in these fifty 
 Sonnets of a misprint due to misreading of the' MS. 
 
 "their" for "thy" (and once also in Sonnet 31 
 for " thee ") it is highly probable that they were set 
 up from a MS. in a different hand from that of the rest. 
 The mistake is made fourteen times in this group, and 
 nowhere else in the Sonnets except in 128. 
 
 III. A third group of forty-eight Sonnets (78 to 125), 
 opening with the famous rival-poet series (78 to 86), 
 a prolonged and elaborate development of the theme 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 205 
 
 touched upon in the concluding Sonnet of the second 
 group, and ending with the four great Sonnets of self- 
 vindication, 121,123,124, and 125. Between the first 
 and second of these four is intercalated, without any 
 obvious relevance, another occasional Sonnet of inferior 
 merit and little interest. At the end of all come the 
 six couplets of envoi, which, though not a Sonnet in 
 form, are numbered in the series as 126. 
 
 It may be taken as not improbable, though we are 
 here only moving among conjectures, that this main 
 body, Sonnets 1 to 126, is what Thorpe specifically 
 meant by " the ensuing Sonnets " in his dedication ; 
 and if we are to yield to the fascination of guess-work, 
 it is tempting to believe that W. H. himself handed 
 them to Thorpe, though there are of course other 
 ways in which they may have come into Thorpe's 
 possession. Together with them, in any case, Thorpe 
 also became possessed of a MS. copy of the Dark 
 Lady Sonnets, and of various others which he printed 
 to fill out the volume. Of these twenty-eight addi- 
 tional Sonnets, I have already indicated my belief 
 that two at least, and possibly four, are not by Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 At the end of the volume of Sonnets, and after the 
 Finis, is printed the curious poem entitled A Lovers 
 Complaint, ly William Shakespeare. This piece de- 
 serves closer study than it has yet received'; for it 
 raises problems, as regards its authorship and its re- 
 lation to the other contents of the volume, which are 
 of no little interest and intricacy. But these problems 
 are subsidiary, and discussion of them here would be 
 irrelevant. 
 
 I have not yet approached, except incidentally, 
 what is most relevant and central in the whole matter, 
 the quality of the Sonnets as poetry, their value as 
 
206 SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 
 
 art. But of this it is the less necessary to speak 
 in any detail, because for once we are dealing with 
 something of which the appreciation is as large as 
 it is sound, and on which all critical opinion is at one. 
 Extremists from all quarters meet here. Those who 
 profess to find in the Sonnets a body of metaphysical 
 or mystical doctrine ; those who extract from them, 
 with as much violence to psychology as to the rules 
 of evidence or to common propriety, a Procopian 
 Secret History of Shakespeare's own life ; those who 
 argue that they are mere literary exercises on a con- 
 ventional theme; all at least agree that they are an 
 unequalled masterpiece of imaginative power, of psycho- 
 logical skill and pictorial vision, of mastery in rhythm 
 and phrase. They combine, with a perfection of which 
 Shakespeare alone had the secret, the most sumptuous 
 richness with the most direct simplicity. Beside them 
 the whole of that mass of Elizabethan sonnet-litera- 
 ture of which they are the crown grows pale, mannered, 
 and thin. Here all is at a higher power ; it is poetic 
 quality distilled and concentrated. That this quality 
 is mixed with the conceits and mannerisms of the age is 
 true, as it is true of all Shakespeare's work even at its 
 finest, as it is true of Much Ado or of Hamlet. This 
 much must be allowed and even emphasised if we are 
 to keep our feeling for Shakespeare sane, and on this 
 side idolatry. It is true too that in some of the 
 Sonnets Shakespeare is sounding on a dim and perilous 
 way; of this he has given, in words which I have 
 already quoted, his own vindication. 
 
 The concentration of poetry in the Sonnets is so 
 great, its sweetness so condensed, that we can only 
 appreciate it fully through a sort of process of sepa- 
 ration and dilution. This is not the case with the 
 Sonnets only. It is shown more generally in the 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS 207 
 
 extraordinary effect which Shakespeare produces in 
 quotation. The poetry as it stands is so close-packed 
 that it must be disengaged to give out its full effect. 
 " Roses, dauiask and red," says Bacon in his Essay of 
 Gardens, " are fast flowers of their smells, so that you 
 may walk by a whole row of them and find nothing 
 of their sweetness." They must be approached closely 
 and singly, if their " royal scent " is to produce its full 
 effect. The effect of Shakespeare's poetry is indeed 
 universal and immediate. Yet a line or phrase thus 
 disengaged from it always thrills one with unsus- 
 pected depths of beauty. It expands, .takes colour, 
 becomes as it were a live thing. And the only way 
 to appreciate the Sonnets fully is, I think, to know 
 them by heart, to become saturated with them, and 
 then to let passage after passage, phrase after phrase, 
 line after line, expand and germinate as memory re- 
 calls it, association touches it, imagination kindles it. 
 Then an enhanced richness, a subtler grace, a more 
 essential beauty will flash upon that inward eye which 
 is the bliss of solitude ; then Shakespeare will not 
 have written for us in vain. But in saying this I 
 speak not of Shakespeare only, but of all great poetry. 
 
THE NOTE OF SHAKESPEARE'S 
 ROMANCES 
 
 "THE best actors in the world," Polonius calls the 
 troop of strolling players who when they arrive on the 
 scene are consciously identified with Shakespeare's own 
 company : " the best actors in the world either for 
 tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, 
 historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical- 
 historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem un- 
 limited." Polonius was a fool, or so at least he seemed 
 to Hamlet : but he was not, like Patroclus in the play 
 to which I shall presently have occasion to refer, a 
 fool positive. He had a large experience, and the 
 remains of what once had been a good average critical 
 faculty. Sometimes, as in his advice to Laertes and 
 in this passage, he says things that are by no means 
 devoid of good sense and even of insight : the trouble 
 with him is that he has lost all power of applying 
 maxims and definitions, which may be sensible and 
 just in themselves, to the circumstances in hand. 
 Though both Laertes and Ophelia deceased without 
 issue, the family of Polonius is still largely represented 
 among men of letters. 
 
 In this curious enumeration Shakespeare no doubt 
 meant to introduce a tinge of burlesque. But it has 
 clearly in view a fact of some importance, namely that 
 the drama, being a mirror and image of life in its 
 whole aspect and working, cannot be sorted out under 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 209 
 
 the two ancient divisions of tragedy and comedy ; and 
 that even if to these' two names we add two more, 
 history and pastoral, we do not in fact cover the scope 
 of the Shakespearian drama. The thing has become 
 too mixed and complex for this treatment. It has 
 taken to deal with the whole of life, and it has become 
 like life itself, something that cannot be shut off into 
 separate compartments. 
 
 Hence the division of Shakespeare's plays roughly 
 made by his first editors into three groups called 
 respectively comedies, histories, and tragedies, though 
 convenient for reference, and based on real distinc- 
 tions so far as it goes, is inadequate and a little un- 
 satisfactory. It is all right as concerns the central 
 group, the ten plays founded on English history, from 
 King John to King Henry VIII. But the other two 
 groups each contain certain plays of very various type, 
 which can only be put under a single name by some 
 forcing of terms. There is no need to labour this 
 point. I may just in passing call attention to the 
 difficulties which the division involves by ignoring 
 tragi-comedy as a distinct species, although the name 
 is a very necessary one and was in fact freely used 
 in Shakespeare's own time : one result of this is that 
 in the first folio, and in all subsequent usage, we find 
 a serious and essentially tragic play like Measure for 
 Measure wedged in between two farces, the Merry 
 Wives of Windsor and the Comedy of Errors, as though 
 they belonged to the same division of dramatic art. 
 But the point in the tripartite arrangement of the 
 folio to which I wish to call particular attention, is 
 this : that the sections classed as Comedies and 
 Tragedies begin and end, in each case, with plays 
 which are of an essentially different character from 
 those which constitute the main body of the two 
 
 o 
 
210 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 
 
 sections. One rnay assume, or conjecture plausibly, 
 that these plays were placed where they stand with a 
 distinct feeling that this difference existed, and that 
 there was a real difficulty felt in assigning them their 
 proper place among the rest. The contents of the 
 volume ; you will remember, are as follows: first, the 
 Tempest, twelve comedies, and the Winters Tale : then 
 the ten English Histories : then Troilus and Cressida, 
 ten tragedies, and Cymbeline. The Tempest and the 
 Winter s Tale are not specifically entitled comedies, 
 but then neither are any of the other plays in the first 
 section. Troilus and Cressida and Cymbeline are both 
 specifically entitled tragedies, as are all the plays 
 which come between them, with the single exception 
 of Timon of Athens, which by what must be a mere 
 freak or accident is called "The Life of Timon of 
 Athens " not even the " Life and Death." There is 
 the further interesting point to remark, that Troilus 
 and Cressida is inserted where it stands by an after- 
 thought : its pages are not numbered, and it is omitted 
 from the table of contents at the beginning of the 
 volume. It had been meant, when the printing of 
 the Folio was first put in hand, to follow Romeo and 
 Juliet : and it must have been removed from that 
 place for some considered reason, a reason of what 
 may be broadly called an aesthetic or critical kind. 
 This is one of several indications which show that the 
 arrangement of the plays in the Folio, whether it is a 
 good one or not, was not made at random or left to the 
 printers. 
 
 Three of these four plays, namely, the Tempest, the 
 Winters Tale, and Cymbeline, constitute a section of 
 Shakespearian dramatic work which differs materially, 
 both in tone and in treatment, from the rest. All 
 three may be confidently assigned, alike from external 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 211 
 
 and internal evidence, to his latest period. I do not 
 know who first hit on the happy thought of giving 
 them the distinctive name of Shakespearian romances : 
 but it is now an accepted and convenient term. Troilus 
 and Cressida belongs to an earlier period, about con- 
 temporary with Hamlet, and (at least according to my 
 view of the matter) a little after the main body of the 
 Sonnets. The unplaced manner in which it appears in 
 the First Folio is a sort of symbol of its unique and 
 enigmatic character as a play. To this I will return 
 later, only saying now that it may be called a sort of 
 inverted romance, and that it has a close affinity in 
 some respects with the other three plays known as 
 the romances. 
 
 No study of the Shakespearian romances can be 
 complete which does not take account of two other 
 plays, Pericles and the Two Noble Kinsmen. But for 
 the purpose of bringing out the special point I have 
 in view, it will be simpler to omit these, or only speak 
 of them incidentally. The Two Nolle Kinsmen I 
 speak of the part of it written by Shakespeare is a 
 fragment only ; it is a fragment of great magnificence, 
 including some pieces of Shakespeare's finest writing ; 
 and it is further notable as the only instance in which 
 Shakespeare set himself to dramatise the romantic epic, 
 while at the same time preserving its tone and colour. 
 But inferences, and still more generalisations, drawn 
 from a dramatic fragment are insecure, and very likely 
 to be erroneous. Pericles is also a play of mixed author- 
 ship. As regards its undoubtedly Shakespearian parts 
 it bears a strong affinity to the romances proper of a 
 few years later ; one scene, the recognition of Marina 
 by Pericles, may indeed be called the culmination of 
 Shakespeare's romantic manner ; it is as miraculous in 
 language and movement as anything in the Tempest or 
 
212 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 
 
 Cymbeline, and as distinct from any manner to be found 
 in the tragedies or comedies. 
 
 This last point may perhaps be emphasised. Shake- 
 speare is, from first to last, a romantic poet in one of 
 the senses of that very ambiguous term ; and in some 
 of the plays, particularly in the more serious comedies, 
 there are passages conceived and written in a highly 
 romantic manner. An element of romance runs through 
 the Midsummer Night's Dream ; there is a strong touch 
 of it in Act iv. scene 3 of As You Like It, and in the 
 lovely lyrical interlude at the beginning of Act v. of 
 the Merchant of Venice. But this is not the romantic 
 manner as we find it in the romances proper, or induce 
 a definition of it from these. And the element is 
 incidental, not essential; we may notice that the in- 
 stances just cited occur in plays all of which, in their 
 different styles, are strict comedies, and comedies of 
 the first order. In the romances proper we are in a 
 different world, and one the note of which is as 
 distinct from comedy as it is from tragedy. 
 
 The difference, the distinguishing note of the romance, 
 is as concerns the artist, one of purpose, as concerns 
 the work of art, one of tension. To put it broadly and 
 simply, we must somewhat overstate it ; but the quali- 
 fications can be made later, and in some measure are 
 self-evident. Broadly then, and if you like, exagger- 
 atedly, it may be put thus : in the romances you have 
 Shakespeare writing not to satisfy his art, but to please 
 himself; and the life or action in the romances is not 
 the tense, concentrated, idealised life of tragedy or 
 comedy, but life as it actually happens. 
 
 This statement may sound not merely exaggerated, 
 but paradoxical. In any case it requires explanation. 
 This I will now try to give. Clearly in the three 
 romances Shakespeare shows himself an accomplished, 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 213 
 
 even a consummate artist. Clearly too, the action in 
 them (what used to be called the " fable ") is not such 
 as takes place in the life of ordinary people. The 
 Tempest moves among enchantments and impossi- 
 bilities. The Mediterranean island on which the 
 action passes is not solid land, like the Cyprus of 
 Othello or the Britain of King Lear. It is ten leagues 
 beyond man's life ; it is inhabited by witch-spawn and 
 airy spirits ; phantoms of the old mythology appear 
 upon it in visible shape. The scenes of the Winters 
 Tale, with its Bohemian sea-coast and its embassage 
 to the oracle of Apollo in the island of Delphi, are 
 almost as fantastic and shadowy. Even in Cymbdine, 
 in spite of the familiar names, Lud's town and Milford 
 Haven, Ave are in a sort of fairyland. But the life 
 presented in these strange romantic surroundings is 
 actual life. It does not consist in action and passion, 
 stripped of accident and closely knitted into the 
 structure of essential tragedy : or, it may be, into 
 the structure of essential comedy ; for comedy is 
 almost as tense as tragedy, and idealises or sublimates 
 real life almost to as great a degree. 
 
 It is this tension involving as it does the rejection 
 of accident and the subordination of incident which 
 is the fundamental idea of high dramatic art. It is 
 at the basis of the so-called doctrine of the unities, 
 which represents an attempt to express it in some of 
 its more obvious aspects. The unities are an empirical 
 rule for indicating the concentration that is necessary 
 in order to make it possible to secure the requisite 
 tension throughout a play. To do this the action 
 must all be brought within compass ; it must deal 
 only with what is essential as cause and effect in trans- 
 forming the situation with which the drama begins into 
 the situation with which it ends. A tragedy, or a 
 
214 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 
 
 comedy, is not ondoyant et divers like actual life ; it 
 gathers up out of life, or abstracts from life, what is 
 requisite for its own artistic purpose, and no more. 
 
 I said, for its own artistic purpose. I do not mean 
 to hint at any esoteric doctrine of art for art's sake. 
 By artistic purpose, or the purpose of art, I mean the 
 creation of something complete in itself and satisfying 
 the laws of composition the laws, as Aristotle names 
 them, of " size and arrangement." In actual events 
 in the life of the individual, or in history, which is the 
 life of the various complex interacting associations of 
 individuals that make up the human race, there is no 
 limit other than that set by the accidents of birth and 
 death, and no clearly perceptible arrangement. The 
 law of causality exists everywhere ; everything has its 
 cause, and produces its effect ; but cause and effect are 
 so vast in their own complexity that they do not make 
 a pattern. It is the function of art to make patterns 
 out of life. 
 
 In tragedy and comedy these patterns are closely 
 woven, intelligibly shaped, precise. A problem, we 
 may say, is in each case set and solved. In order 
 to set the problem, and in order to solve it when set, 
 everything must be put aside which does not bear 
 upon the problem, or is not a step towards its ex- 
 position and solution. Further, the dramatic art, like 
 all arts, works in a certain medium and has to work 
 according to the nature and limits of that medium. 
 In dramatic art that medium is the stage, and repre- 
 sentation by actors on the stage ; its action is what 
 can be acted. 
 
 Romance represents the tendency to transcend or 
 ignore these limits. In the Shakespearian romances 
 we have the artist playing with his art. He neglects 
 the rules of the drama, He does not apply his con- 
 

 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 215 
 
 structive faculty to the creation of a composition pos- 
 sessed of dramatic unity and dramatic concentration. 
 He follows not so much the chain of causality as the 
 stream of circumstance. He begins the action capri- 
 ciously, almost accidentally : he ends it in a situation 
 that does not necessarily arise out of the movement 
 impressed upon the play at its beginning. Of all 
 Shakespeare's plays we may say boldly that the 
 romances are the least imitable. For they are the 
 product of a strenuous, highly trained and consummate 
 artistic genius which has let itself loose to move at ease. 
 The Winters Tale is the by-product of Othello and Much 
 Ado : the Tempest is the by-product of As You Like It 
 and Macbeth. Cymbeline is the by-product of the whole 
 of the volume of plays which it ends. To produce 
 work like Shakespeare's romances it would be necessary 
 that the artist should have already produced work like 
 the finest of Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies. 
 Ne faict pas ce tour qui veult. Most people have perhaps 
 felt, more or less indistinctly, that some explanation 
 was needed, some reason had to be sought, why these 
 romances have so superb a beauty and so overpowering 
 a charm. They are I speak in broad general terms 
 ill-constructed, slackly knitted, full of irrelevances 
 and exorbitances. In the Tempest there is properly 
 speaking no dramatic action at all. In the Winters 
 Tale there are several, but they are all fragmentary. 
 In Cymbeline the dramatic action is like that of an 
 unusually coherent dream. This is felt in reading : it 
 is still more obvious (if one may judge from modern 
 performances) when the plays are acted. Yet these 
 three plays are, each in its own way, unsurpassable. 
 In parts of the Winters Tale a sort of golden beauty is 
 reached which is almost if not quite unequalled in 
 Shakespeare. The Tempest is admittedly so much 
 
216 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 
 
 so that one is tired of hearing the thing repeated the 
 tit crown to be set for a finish on Shakespeare's work. 
 For the last of the three, it does not require Swinburne's 
 noble lines to convince us that the death of Tennyson 
 with Cymleline in his hand, his burial with Cymbeline 
 in the coffin, was just as lovers of Tennyson and of 
 Shakespeare would have had it. The reason is this ; 
 that in these plays we have a superlative artist, a 
 master of dramatic construction, a poet of profound 
 weight and unsurpassed concentration, writing as he 
 likes, carelessly, following the suggestion of circum- 
 stance and the play of fancy. Shakespeare had passed 
 through the furnace-fire, like Dante on the Mountain 
 of Purgatory. 
 
 " Come fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro 
 Gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi ; 
 Tant' era ivi lo incendio senza metro." 
 
 When he issued from it, the Muse said to him as 
 Virgil had said to Dante : 
 
 " Tratto t'ho qui con ingegno e con arte : 
 Lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce ; 
 Fuor se' dell' erte vie, fuor se' dell' arte. . . . 
 Seder ti puoi, e.puoi andar tra elli ; 
 Non aspettar mio dir piu, ne mio cenno." 
 
 Or, as the lines are finely rendered by Gary : 
 
 " I with skill and art 
 
 Thus far have drawn thee. Now thy pleasure take 
 For guide. Thou hast o'ercome the steeper way, 
 O'ercome the straighter : thou mayest seat thee down 
 Or wander where thou wilt. Expect no more 
 Sanction of warning voice or sign from me." 
 
 He obeyed her: he took his pleasure for guide, and 
 wandered where he would. One is tempted to go on 
 with the Dante ; so apt it is to the occasion. 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 217 
 
 A little glimpse of sky was seen above, 
 
 Yet by that little I beheld the stars 
 
 In magnitude and lustre shining forth 
 
 With more than wonted glory. . . . About the hour, 
 
 As I believe, when Venus from the East 
 
 First lightened on the mountain, she whose orb 
 
 Seems alway glowing with the fire of love, 
 
 A lady young and beautiful, I dreamed, 
 
 Was passing o'er a lea ; and as she came 
 
 Methought I saw her ever and anon 
 
 Bending to cull the flowers ; and thus she sang." 
 
 Her name in Shakespeare is Miranda, Perdita, Imogen. 
 But this radiance of beauty illuminates plays which 
 are weak or loose in structure, fantastic in detail, 
 irregular in proportion ; and in portions of which 
 Shakespeare is if I may say so with due respect 
 
 all abroad, and writing anyhow. Let us go into 
 this a little more in specific instances, taking the 
 romances in the order in which they come in the 
 First Folio. 
 
 The Tempest has been called a masque rather than 
 a drama. Names prove nothing. But it is clear that 
 it has little if any dramatic action, in the sense of 
 interplay of human will or character. The events are 
 brought about by magic. Prospero, directly or through 
 his instruments, Ariel and Caliban, moves the other 
 persons of the drama like a chess-player. In order 
 to get the scene set at all, Shakespeare has to assume 
 a long-continued absence of interest in the whole 
 affair on Prospero's part : in order to make the play 
 last out through the normal five acts, it is necessary 
 that Prospero should in its course be subject to fits 
 of abstraction or lapses of memory. At the opening 
 of the second act the play stands still while Shake- 
 speare throws into the form of dialogue a discussion 
 on the general principles of politics which had in- 
 
218 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 
 
 terested him in reading Montaigne. The wonderful 
 lines in which Prospero speaks of the masque within 
 the masque as a baseless fabric, melted into thin air 
 before it was ended, are too well known to quote. 
 But another speech of his, a little earlier, which is 
 less often quoted, is no less notable in the tone of 
 easy carelessness about the dramatist's art which it 
 conveys. " I must use you," says Prospero, 
 
 "For such another trick. Go bring the rabble 
 O'er whom I give thee power, here to this place : 
 Incite them to quick motion : for I must 
 Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple 
 Some vanity of mine art." 
 
 Prospero in these lines is speaking of the play within 
 the play: Shakespeare through Prospero's mouth is 
 speaking of the play itself. The persons of the play 
 are a rabble over whom he has power; he incites 
 them to motion, and uses them to bestow some vanity 
 of his art upon the eyes of a delighted world. " It 
 is my promise," he goes on, " and they expect it 
 from me " : the usual excuse made by all of us for 
 doing something we like, when we have a feeling 
 that we might be doing, or should be doing, some- 
 thing more serious. 
 
 Turning now to the Winters Tale we find the same 
 characteristics showing themselves, and even more 
 remarkably, because the play is engrafted upon, or 
 expanded out of, a tragic drama of normal type. 
 With a few trifling excisions of passages which anti- 
 cipate the later action, the first three acts of the 
 Winters Tale are a play by themselves. That play 
 is a tragedy of jealousy. But it is without its begin- 
 ning. The first scene of Act i. is a short explanatory 
 preface : then in scene 2 we are suddenly in the 
 middle of the complication : the jealousy of Leontes 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 219 
 
 is presented full-blown, unexplained, perfectly irrational. 
 We have the feeling that at least a whole act has 
 been omitted : and so it would be, if the Winters Tale 
 was a formal tragedy, for it is the essence of a tragedy 
 that effects follow from causes, and that the fatal 
 action is neither unaccountable nor motiveless. To 
 a certain extent there is this same, or a similar 
 anomaly at the beginning of Macbeth. It is one of 
 the features which make Macbeth unique in structure 
 among Shakespeare's regular tragedies. It forms part 
 of a complex puzzle together with certain other facts 
 which have been held, not without strong reason, 
 to prove that the beginning of Shakespeare's play 
 is either lost, and replaced by some fadged and 
 abbreviated stage-version, or at the least gravely 
 mutilated. 
 
 But in the Winters Tale there is no question of 
 mutilation. The play is deliberately begun at a point 
 which is well after the dramatic beginning of the action 
 presented in the first three acts. This is because 
 two separate plays, two separate though connected 
 actions, are forged or beaten into one. The beginning 
 of the first play is cut away that there may be room 
 left for the second ; that is to say, for Acts iv. and v. 
 A short connecting piece consisting of the last scene of 
 Act iii. forms the transition. You will notice, if you 
 dismiss this latter half of the composite play from your 
 minds, that the former half ends, in the exact tragic 
 manner, upon the formal tragic finishing-note. The 
 final speech is that of Leontes : 
 
 " Prithee bring me 
 
 To the dead bodies of my queen and son. 
 One grave shall be for both : upon them shall 
 The causes of their death appear, unto 
 Our shame perpetual. Once a day I'll visit 
 
220 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 
 
 The chapel where they lie, and tears shed there 
 
 Shall be my recreation : so long as nature 
 
 Will bear up with this exercise, so long 
 
 I daily vow to use it. Come and lead me 
 
 Unto these sorrows." [Exeunt. 
 
 It is the precise motive, at once in its dramatic and its 
 musical quality, of the concluding speech of Aufidius 
 in Coriolanus, of the concluding speech of Fortinbras 
 in Hamlet, of the concluding speech of Octavianus in 
 Antony and Cleopatra. 
 
 Of the great adroitness with which Shakespeare 
 interlinked the second part of the Winters Tale with 
 the first it would be superfluous to say anything 
 in praise. Whatever he chose to do, he could do with 
 the ease of immense power and trained skill. The 
 point is, that here he was using this power and skill, 
 I will not say at random, but for his own and for 
 our amusement. In the lines spoken by Time as 
 chorus at the opening of Act iv. there is a note of the 
 same feeling which is expressed so wonderfully in the 
 Tempest the feeling that art itself, even the greatest 
 art, is transitory, and that the artist, even the greatest 
 artist, is a child playing with toys, a pattern- designer 
 whose patterns dissolve almost as soon as they are 
 drawn. It is of a piece with this, that when Shake- 
 speare gets among his rustics in that fourth act, he 
 plunges into the sheep-shearing festival with such 
 abandon, such enjoyment, that he can hardly tear 
 himself away from it. That single scene the fourth 
 of Act iv. is nearly nine hundred lines long. That is 
 the length of a short play by itself. It is about half the 
 length of Macbeth. It is not much shorter than six out 
 of the seven tragedies of Aeschylus. It is actually 
 longer than Terence's Hecyra. In writing it, Shake- 
 speare clearly threw the reins on the neck of his genius 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 221 
 
 and went on and on from sheer delight in writing it : 
 it is endless, and endlessly delightful ; for the rest, he 
 does not care. 
 
 So it is too with the substance as well as the form 
 of the play. As a study of jealousy in its action and 
 effects it gives an interesting contrast to the treatment 
 of a similar motive in the sphere of tragedy, in Othello, 
 and in the sphere of comedy, in Much Ado. It is all 
 at a lower pressure, more ordinary. The action has 
 not the dramatic concentration of either tragedy or 
 comedy. As a tragedy it would have to be pronounced 
 a failure, and what is more, a deliberate failure. There 
 is no great conflict between will and fate. Leontes acts 
 violently and irrationally, but not with the sort of fatal 
 error which is the essence of a tragic situation. He 
 does not awaken pity or fear. The same is true of the 
 subsidiary characters. Paulina is a figure from daily 
 life, very nearly the common scold. The fundamental 
 difference between tragedy and romance is well brought 
 out by a comparison between her and the Emilia of 
 Othello. Emilia, slight and shallow as she is, is swept 
 up into greatness by the intense tragedy in which she 
 is involved, and towards which she has innocently, or 
 at least ignorantly, given the fatal impulse. She has 
 to die for it, by a sudden, a cruel, and yet an inevitable 
 doom. Paulina is subject to no such necessity. She 
 lives on, her tongue clacking from first to last. The 
 second marriage huddled up for her at the end of the 
 play is just what would happen. Camillo replaces the 
 husband whose death was so far from being a tragic 
 issue that we have hardly noticed it, otherwise than 
 with the languid interest with which we might read 
 a newspaper paragraph headed " Strange fatality in 
 Bohemia." Things happen in this play as in life, 
 corning near tragedy and then sliding away from it 
 
222 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 
 
 again. As in life, effects do not visibly or deinonstrably 
 follow from causes : things happen : and time heals all, 
 or covers with his dust and oblivion what was 
 unhealed. One generation comes and another goes ; 
 time remembered is grief forgotten. The peace which 
 falls is not the awed hush of a tragic ending ; it is the 
 peace that life brings in its ceaseless progress, when the 
 tragedy of the past has itself become numbered among 
 old, unhappy, far-off things. This is the upshot and 
 significance of the wonderful lines spoken by Time as 
 chorus at the beginning of Act iv. 
 
 "I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror 
 Of good and bad, that make and unfold error, 
 Now take upon me, in the name of Time, 
 To use my wings. Impute it not a crime 
 To me or my swift passage, that I slide 
 O'er sixteen years and leave the growth untried 
 Of that wide gap ; since it is in my power 
 To o'erthrow law, and in one self -born hour 
 To plant and o'er whelm custom. Let me pass 
 The same I am, ere ancient'st order was, 
 Or what is now received : I witness to 
 The times that brought them in : so shall I do 
 To the freshest things now reigning, and make stale 
 The glistering of this present, as my tale 
 Now seems to it. Your patience thus allowing, 
 I turn my glass and give my scene such growing 
 As you had slept between." 
 
 Tragedy does not leave gaps untried, or let us fall 
 asleep in the progress of the action. It does not 
 overthrow law or supplant it by custom : it establishes 
 law. It declares the ancient order as that which 
 has been and is and shall be : " not of now or of 
 yesterday," in the words of Antigone, " but that lives 
 for ever, and no man knows whence it was born." 
 
 Cymbeline, which for several reasons into which it 
 is not possible to enter here one is inclined to think 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 223 
 
 the latest of the romances, and of Shakespeare's plays, 
 comes in some ways nearer the scope of a single 
 dramatic action ; but in its details it is even more 
 strikingly marked than the others by waywardness 
 and a sort of careless following of fancy. The action 
 has in its main course something of the tragic gravity, 
 and even rises at certain points to the tragic intensity. 
 But it is not stripped like a runner : it is overlaid 
 and embroidered with collateral incident, amid which 
 it moves in a leisurely, one might say in a pleasurable 
 way. It is the most striking instance of the faculty 
 Shakespeare has, through his complete mastery of 
 stagecraft and dramatic structure, of combining high- 
 tension and low-tension work into one fabric. If we 
 possessed the full earlier draughts of his tragedies 
 it may be conjectured that we should find a great 
 deal of this in them. Traces of it are left even in 
 the completed form of Hamlet. But as a rule, in 
 the great tragedies, the low-tension work has been 
 nearly all distilled away or brought up to high 
 tension. 
 
 Exactly the same thing is noticeable as regards 
 the language, the actual writing. The style in Cym- 
 leline is distinguishable, on a broad view, from the 
 characteristic finished style of Shakespeare's mature 
 work. Many passages show clearly what is a very 
 fascinating thing in the work of a great artist, and 
 one but rarely seen, his work in the making. The 
 superfetation of thought, as it has been called, which 
 makes Shakespeare's style different from that of 
 any one else, is expressed in Cymleline by a new 
 verbal notation. It stands midway between the 
 redundance of his earlier work and the peculiarly 
 Shakespearian quality of his greatest work, in which 
 the imaginative intensity is so enormous that it fuses 
 
224 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 
 
 all the threads of thought into a single continuous 
 element for so we must call it rather than a fabric 
 or a structure, since these words convey the idea 
 of something which can be analysed or separated. 
 The most obvious note of this Cymbeline-style is the 
 immense number of parentheses, and of parentheses 
 within parentheses. It is as though Shakespeare's 
 mind were working at its full compass on three or 
 four lines abreast as one might say but not at its 
 full tension or concentration in which the concurrent 
 processes of thought become molten into one. He 
 is writing with obvious pleasure, and obviously for 
 his pleasure. The fires are drawn, and the beautifully 
 adjusted engines go on running under a lower steam- 
 pressure, and almost by their own momentum. 
 
 It is of a piece with this, that we can trace in all 
 these three romances some amount of reversion to- 
 wards his earliest work in method and subject. This 
 kind of reversion is noticeable in other great artists 
 towards the end of their life ; it is of course a general 
 law of life in all matters, not only in art. There is just 
 this note of reversion, very subtle and not to be pressed 
 it is to be felt rather than stated or explained 
 in Cymleline to the Two Gentlemen, the earliest of 
 the plays : subject to the caution however, that the 
 Two Gentlemen itself, which remained unpublished 
 until it appeared in the First Folio, may have been 
 retouched and retoned by Shakespeare himself at a 
 comparatively late period ; there are a few lines 
 in it which suggest this as the easiest explanation 
 of what would otherwise be very remarkable antici- 
 pations of the author's mature style. There is a 
 similar note, fainter but still traceable, in the Winters 
 Tale of reversion to the Midsummer Night's Dream. 
 In Cymbeline, as I have already hinted, the reversion 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 225 
 
 is more of the nature of recapitulation, and extends over 
 the whole field of Shakespearian dramatic work. 
 
 The notes of Shakespearian romance on which 
 I have thus touched to work them out would be 
 a matter for much more minute and prolonged study 
 may serve even in this sketch for guidance, or 
 at least for suggestion, in the problems presented 
 by other plays. Let me take an instance in the 
 Two Noble Kinsmen. 
 
 Professor Herford, in his excellent introduction to 
 that play, has the following passage : " Even where 
 style and metre are most persuasively Shakespearian, 
 the design and motive of a scene often suggest rather 
 Fletcher's careless and superficial technique, his eye 
 for sensation and effect, his carelessness of connexion 
 and continuity." This is quite true, and admirably 
 said, of Fletcher : but it is also true, though in a 
 different sense, of romance as distinct from closely 
 wrought high-tension drama, be it tragedy or comedy. 
 In both there is the careless technique, though in 
 the one case it is the carelessness of inferior artistic 
 sense and inferior grasp of life, and in the other 
 case the carelessness of the master who is, in words 
 which one might hesitate to use were it not they 
 have been used by one great artist of our own time 
 in speaking of another equally great, 1 "making art 
 to please himself," for his own enjoyment. In both 
 there is the eye for sensation, though in the one 
 case it is the shallow eye that does not see much 
 below the surface, in the other the eye, at once 
 wide-ranging and profound, that can plunge into the 
 deep bases and hidden springs of life, but chooses 
 now rather to play over the complex coloured surface 
 with which life in fact passes visibly before us. 
 
 1 Burne-Jones of Morris. 
 
226 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 
 
 Again, Professor Herford says of the Theseus of the 
 Two Nolle Kinsmen: "There is more of Fletcher's 
 ethics than of Shakespeare's in the conception that 
 a man may possibly, in the face of crying need, if 
 piteously entreated, consent to postpone his marriage 
 for a day or two, but not without some lofty self- 
 gratulation at the close : 
 
 ' As we are men 
 
 Thus should we do : being sensually subdued 
 We lose our human title.' 
 
 Theseus' extraordinary severity again, in the last scene 
 of the act, to the prisoners whose prowess he admires, 
 remains unaccountable. He combines with touches of 
 the godlike wisdom of Prospero and Pericles a pecu- 
 liarly aimless ferocity." 
 
 As to the first of these points, it is sufficient to point 
 out that the Theseus of the Two Noble Kinsmen is 
 precisely the Theseus of the Midsummer Night's Dream 
 over again ; this is indeed one of the most convincing 
 arguments for the Shakespearian authorship of these 
 scenes, and one may commend those who are dis- 
 posed to attribute them to Fletcher to the conversation 
 which passes at the masked ball in Much Ado between 
 Antonio and Ursula. It is Shakespeare's Theseus, and 
 there's an end. As to the second point, it is not easy 
 to understand in what sense godlike wisdom is to be 
 attributed to either Prospero or Pericles, two very 
 human characters. But the aimless ferocity com- 
 plained of here, whether or not it is properly so 
 described, is found both in Leontes and in Cymbeline. 
 As regards Leontes this is self-evident. Cymbeline 
 shows it not only at the beginning of the play in the 
 interview with his daughter and her husband, but at 
 the end in his cold arrangement to massacre the 
 Roman prisoners, and in his furious order for this 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 227 
 
 immediate execution of Belarius. These gusts of un- 
 governable temper do not, however, as in King Lear, 
 work out tragic consequences. They are part of the 
 shifting, apparently inconsequent, surface of life which 
 is dealt with in the large scope of romance. 
 
 It is not, to be sure, by arguments like these that the 
 authorship of certain parts of the Two Noble Kinsmen 
 has to be finally decided. But a consideration of the 
 essential features of Shakespearian romance goes to 
 show that the points singled out as arguments against 
 that authorship in these instances are really, so far as 
 they go, arguments in its favour. 
 
 The upshot of what I have been saying is this ; 
 that romance has a constructional or artistic quality 
 of its own differing from that of tragedy and comedy, 
 and that it is this quality, and not the serene temper 
 of the group of the three late romantic plays, nor their 
 happy endings, on which criticism may most profit- 
 ably lay stress when it distinguishes them as a group 
 standing by themselves. The happy ending, in the 
 technical sense of the phrase, is common to Cymbeline 
 and the Winters Tale with Measure for Measure, which 
 no one would call a romance, and many would be 
 inclined to call a thwarted tragedy. The serene 
 temper, the mellowness and indulgence, which critics 
 find in these romances is no doubt in sufficiently 
 striking contrast with the storm and agony of the 
 great tragedies. But it is a note of these particular 
 romances, not of romance as such. 
 
 We may now turn back to Shakespeare's other 
 romance, which has an unhappy ending the un- 
 happiest among all his plays and which, so far from 
 having an atmosphere of placidity and a tone of 
 indulgence towards human life, is from first to last 
 restless, bitter, and angry. This is Troilus and Cressida. 
 
228 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 
 
 Yet like the others, Troilus and Cressida is a romance, 
 not a tragedy. It is not merely that the subject is one 
 taken from the romantic mediaeval epic. It is that 
 here, as in his other romances, Shakespeare is writing 
 not to satisfy the laws of dramatic art, not towards the 
 intense embodiment and strenuous evolution of a tragic 
 problem, but to please himself. But what pleased him 
 in those later romances was to handle the large beauty 
 of the surface of life : what pleased him here was to 
 handle its large ugliness. In Troilus and Cressida 
 there is a sort of inverted indulgence, a desperate 
 serenity which throws helve after hatchet and does 
 not attempt even to save a solid fragment out of the 
 welter of a world lying in wickedness. It develops no 
 great problem, no vital contest between great forces, 
 no great manifestation of human will or even of human 
 passion : it ends in no hush of peace and awe. Indeed 
 it hardly ends at all, except with such an ending as 
 nightfall might bring to a confused battle fought for 
 no reason. Shakespeare flung material of all kinds 
 into it, following the impulse of a sort of acute rest- 
 lessness, we may imagine, such as often accompanies 
 temporary mental or physical exhaustion. It includes 
 scenes which take their place among his most remark- 
 able work : the debates in the Greek and Trojan 
 councils of war, the love-ecstasy of Troilus in Act iii., 
 the great speech of Ulysses in the following scene. 
 But in spite of these passages with their high intellec- 
 tual or spiritual elevation, the atmosphere throughout 
 the play, taken as a whole, is thick and oppressive. 
 The pattern of life presented in it so far as it can be 
 called a pattern at all is tawdry, squalid, ugly. That 
 Serbonian bog swallows up and effaces even the chiv- 
 alry of Hector, even the beauty of Helen. The action 
 moves through petty chicane and petty cruelty, petty 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 229 
 
 selfishness and jealousy and unfaithfulness. Over it 
 all we feel the cold sarcastic eyes of Ulysses, the man 
 with no illusions. Among all these littlenesses and 
 meannesses, the one great permanent force that we 
 are made to feel is that which we are expressly asked 
 to feel in the Winters Tale, the force of time. But it is 
 not here, as in the Winters Tale, Time the healer : it 
 is Time the annihilator ; the force which feeds oblivion 
 with the decay of things, under whose hand those con- 
 flicts which make tragedy, with all their tension and 
 splendour, dwindle away and are as small dust in the 
 balance. Perhaps the most significant passage in the 
 whole play, as it is the most romantic in its accent of 
 strangeness kindling into beauty, is the brief dialogue 
 between Hector and Ulysses when they meet in the 
 Greek camp, and speak to each other for a few minutes 
 seriously, from outside as it were and from overhead of 
 the action. 
 
 " Hector. I know your favour, Lord Ulysses, well. 
 Ah, sir, there's many a Greek and Trojan dead 
 Since first I saw yourself and Diomede 
 In Ilion, on your Greekish embassy. 
 
 Ulysses. Sir, I foretold you then what would ensue : 
 My prophecy is but half his journey yet. 
 For yonder walls that pertly front your town, 
 Yond towers, whose wanton tops do buss the clouds, 
 Must kiss their own feet. 
 
 Hector. I must not believe you. 
 There they stand yet, and modestly I think 
 The fall of every Phrygian stone will cost 
 A drop of Grecian blood : the end crowns all, 
 And that old common arbitrator, Time, 
 Will one day end it. 
 
 Ulysses. So to him we leave it." 
 
 So in effect it is left. But to leave it so gives up the 
 game. It makes the strictly dramatic handling of life 
 impossible. Troilus and Cressida is the reaction from 
 
230 SHAKESPEARE'S ROMANCES 
 
 Hamlet: it is the sort of play, one might say, that 
 Harnlet himself might have written. It represents a 
 temporary phase in Shakespeare's art. After it, he 
 addressed himself to the problems of art and life anew. 
 He wrote the great series of tragedies. In them, time 
 is not the arbitrator, and life is not the endless un- 
 rolling of a transitory pageant. When he returned to 
 romance in his latest plays, it was as one who had 
 earned the right to deal with life as he chose, because 
 he knew it all, and had traversed it from surface to 
 centre. We may be grateful that he chose as he did. 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 OXFOKD has always been the mother or nurse of poets. 
 But this itself would not entitle us to speak of the 
 poetry of Oxford : when we give the name of Oxford 
 poets to poets who were educated at Oxford, we are 
 doing little more than pleasing our fancy and flattering 
 our local patriotism. One does not call Virgil a 
 Milanese poet, nor Goethe a Leipsic or Strasburg poet. 
 Normally the place of a poet's education has little 
 direct bearing on his poetry, nor has his poetry much 
 direct bearing on the place of his education. 
 
 But the poetry of Oxford, as a term used in the 
 stricter sense, may bear two meanings. In the first 
 place it may mean poetry written about Oxford; 
 description of Oxford, either in its outward aspect or in 
 its intellectual and social life, raised by some touch of 
 melody or imagination into the sphere of poetry and 
 forming the figured background upon which some image 
 of life is set in relief. This kind of poetry falls under 
 one or other of two divisions, according as the treat- 
 ment is substantive or episodic : on the one hand 
 the occasional piece, often a mere sketch or fragment, 
 which consists of description coloured by imagination ; 
 on the other, the passage in some larger imaginative 
 composition which gives the picture of Oxford inci- 
 dentally, as ornament included in and subordinated 
 to a larger design. 
 
 In the second place, the poetry of Oxford may mean 
 
 231 
 
232 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 something quite different ; it may mean the poetical 
 quality of Oxford itself, the image of perfection which 
 Oxford embodies; or rather, does not embody but holds 
 within itself like a latent energy, that can be made 
 active and embodied in language by the imaginative 
 power of a poet. This latter sense is the more im- 
 portant, as it is the subtler and more vital. 
 
 If we turn over the pages of one of the many 
 modern collections of poems relating to Oxford, such 
 as the Minstrelsy of Isis, which is I fancy the fullest and 
 most varied of them all in its contents, we cannot fail 
 to be struck by two things. One of these is the per- 
 sistence, from generation to generation, of certain 
 motives, the treatment of which varies but little except 
 in so far as it follows general changes, such as are set 
 forth and discussed in any history of literature, in 
 manner and diction and what may be called the 
 rhetorical evolution of style. The other is the 
 emergence from time to time, in that superficial 
 uniformity, of a new imaginative quality : a new power 
 of vision, one might call it, on the part of a poet, or, in 
 another way of regarding the matter, a new power of 
 making itself visible on the part of Oxford. The eye 
 changes ; but what makes the eye change is (among 
 other causes) the effective impact on it of new vibra- 
 tions. 
 
 Of the persistent physical charm of Oxford this is the 
 last place where there is any occasion to speak : and 
 hardly less obvious is her persistent sentimental charm, 
 the charm which she exercises over even the stupidest 
 and most prosaic, and which, or some fragment of which, 
 they all take away with them when they leave as her 
 parting gift. Both of these have always been a theme 
 for poetry. Among the colleges there have never failed 
 to be nests of singing-birds. In presence or in ab- 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 233 
 
 sence, each breaks into some variation of the familiar 
 theme : 
 
 " And I'll be sworn upon't that he loves her : 
 For here's a paper written in his hand, 
 A halting sonnet of his own pure brain." 
 
 The theme is throughout nearly the same : it is set 
 out in its barest form by a minor Elizabethan when 
 he writes of 
 
 " Ancient Oxford, noble nurse of skill, 
 A city seated rich in everything, 
 Girt with wood, water, pasture, corn and hill." 
 
 Here a few straightforward words are used to convey 
 the meaning. The art is primitive. Detail is ignored ; 
 sentiment, rhetoric, romance, introspection are all 
 absent. On that simple theme successive ages and 
 fashions have woven their descants, their methodical 
 figurings, their fioriture, and their massed chromatic 
 harmonies. We pass gradually to the rhetorical in- 
 volutions of the seventeenth century, to the sober and 
 restricted clarity of the eighteenth, to the sentimental, 
 introspective and romantic handling of the nineteenth, 
 and finally to the composite eclecticism of our own day. 
 In any style and at any period the great mass of 
 Oxford poetry as indeed is true of the great mass of 
 any poetry has no light proceeding from itself and 
 of its own, no imaginative and creative value. It is 
 only of interest historically ; but that interest is often 
 very great. Let me cite two characteristic examples, 
 one at the beginning, the other towards the end, of 
 the eighteenth century. 
 
 " Wheresoe'er I turn my wandering eyes 
 Aspiring towers and verdant groves arise ; 
 Immortal greens the smiling plains array, 
 And mazy rivers murmur all the way. 
 
234 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 Aloft in state the airy towers arise, 
 And with new lustre deck the wondering skies. 
 Lo, to what height the schools ascending reach, 
 Built with that art that they alone can teach ! 
 The lofty dome expands her spacious gate 
 Where all the decent Graces jointly wait. 
 Here colleges in sweet confusion rise ; 
 There temples seem to reach their native skies. 
 See how the matchless youth their hours improve 
 And in the glorious way to knowledge move ! 
 Pure to the soul and pleasing to the eyes, 
 Like angels youthful and like angels wise." 
 
 It is hardly surprising that Isis should, as the author 
 of these lines goes on to say it does, " boast more bards 
 than Helicon," if work of this quality is all to which 
 they aspire. 
 
 Eighty years later, the Muse of Tickell is succeeded 
 by the Muse of Hurdis. 
 
 " So on thy banks too, Isis, have I strayed 
 A tassel'd student. Witness you who shar'd 
 My morning walk, my ramble at high noon, 
 My evening voyage, an unskilful sail, 
 To Godstow bound or some inferior port, 
 For strawberries and cream. What have we found, 
 In life's austerer hours, delectable 
 As the long day so loitered ? Ye profound 
 And serious heads, who guard the twin retreats 
 Of British learning, give the studious boy 
 His due indulgence. Let him range the field, 
 Frequent the public walk, and freely pull 
 The yielding oar." 
 
 I have chosen these passages, from among scores of 
 others, for two particular reasons. In the first place, 
 they are by Professors of Poetry (or to be strict, the 
 latter by a Professor, the former by a Deputy-Pro- 
 fessor) and thus bear the hall-mark of what was con- 
 sidered, in their time, the proper manner in which the 
 poetry of Oxford should be handled. In the second 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 235 
 
 place, you can hardly have failed to notice that they 
 sound like deliberate parodies of Pope and Words- 
 worth. The same might be said of many unsuccess- 
 ful imitations. But the interesting thing here is that 
 these are not imitations at all. The only curses that 
 Pope and Wordsworth could call down on them would 
 be the curses invoked on those qui ante nos nostra 
 dixerunt. When they were written, neither Pope in 
 the one case nor Wordsworth in the other had 
 appeared on the horizon. Oxford was exploring, was 
 showing the way. 
 
 The sense of the poetry of places, as distinguished 
 from mere description on the one hand or from a 
 purely ethical or philosophic treatment on the other, 
 is one of the things we owe to that great germinal 
 age, the latter half of the eighteenth century. Pane- 
 gyrical pieces (to use a term the convenience of which 
 may justify its employment) hardly come into account ; 
 for it is seldom that under any but a very loose defini- 
 tion they fall within the sphere of poetry at all. Apart 
 from these it is not until the eighteenth century that 
 the poetry of places becomes important : and it is not 
 until the middle of the century that it takes on itself 
 the inner and finer spirit of poetry. If we accept the 
 common and roughly accurate statement that Denham's 
 Coopers Hill, which appeared in 1642, is the first of 
 purely descriptive English poems, it is exactly a cen- 
 tury from that point before we come to the beginnings 
 of a new poetical method, which did not, as purely 
 descriptive poetry does, impose a poetical treatment on 
 places, but sought to bring out from them their own 
 latent poetical quality. Gray's Eton Ode, written in 1 742, 
 was the earliest distinct example of the new method. 
 It is still overweighted by the ethical treatment charac- 
 teristic of its age ; but in its fusion of description and 
 
236 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 sentiment, and still more, in the imaginative sympathy 
 by which it merges both in something different in kind 
 from either, it is the prelude of a new era. The voice 
 we hear in it is not only that of Gray speaking of 
 Eton; it is also, and very vitally, the voice of Eton 
 speaking through Gray. We can speak thenceforth, 
 as we could not have spoken before, of the poetry of 
 Eton. A little later, Gainsborough began to do the 
 same thing in the sister art of painting. 
 
 It is not so easy to fix a precise date, or to name a 
 single poem, which enables us to say in this sense 
 that the poetry of Oxford begins there. But the name 
 which marks the turning-point is that of another Pro- 
 fessor of Poetry, Thomas War ton. He is better known 
 now as a historian than as a poet. But his poetry, 
 though not great in amount and hardly of the first 
 quality, is by no means negligible, and is historically 
 very significant. Percy's Eeliques were published 
 during Warton's tenure of the Chair of Poetry ; and 
 Warton took up the history of English poetry where 
 Gray's hesitation and fastidiousness had dropped it. 
 The three names stand together in the movement 
 which created a revolution in taste, and prepared the 
 way for a new age of poetry. To some extent all 
 three suffered from being in advance of their time. 
 It was only the next generation that came into their 
 inheritance, and it was only much later that the effect 
 of their work was realised. It is a small matter but 
 rather suggestive, and I have never seen it noticed, 
 that the exquisite motto from Euripides prefixed by 
 Palgrave to the Golden Treasury had already served 
 the same purpose on the title-page of Warton's Miscel- 
 laneous Pieces. 
 
 In Warton's poems, several of which deal either 
 expressly or incidentally with the poetry of Oxford, 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 237 
 
 we can see not merely the growth of a new sensibility, 
 but the creation of a new imaginative value. He had 
 begun, as a young man, in the convention of his 
 predecessors. Take, for instance, the characteristic 
 passage from the Triumph of Isis, written in 1749, 
 beginning : 
 
 " Ye fretted pinnacles, ye fanes sublime, 
 Ye towers that wear the mossy vest of time, 
 Ye massy piles of old munificence 
 At once the pride of Learning and defence ; 
 Ye cloisters pale that length'ning to the sight 
 To contemplation step by step invite ; 
 Ye high-arch 'd walks where oft the whispers clear 
 Of harps unseen have swept the poet's ear ; 
 Ye temples dim where pious duty pays 
 Her holy hymns of ever-echoing praise ; 
 Lo ! your lov'd Isis from the bordering vale 
 With all a mother's fondness bids you hail." 
 
 Such a passage, with its clattering movement and 
 mechanical enumeration, might have been written by 
 any one at any time during the previous fifty years 
 or for that matter during the following fifty, and even 
 more ; for the persistence of the old tradition among 
 Oxford versifiers is remarkable. But a dozen years later, 
 in the Com/plaint of Cherwell, the breath of a new imagi- 
 native movement is distinctly perceptible through a 
 rhythm and diction which still remain largely those of 
 the Augustan school. 
 
 " All pensive from her osier-woven bower 
 Cherwell arose. Around her darkening edge 
 Pale eve began the steaming mist to pour, 
 And breezes fann'd by fits the rustling sedge." 
 
 Not only is there direct and loving observation of 
 nature in these lines ; there is also the germ of that 
 imaginative sympathy with nature which was to give 
 poetry a new language and a revived life. We can 
 
238 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 foresee the time coming when a poet could say of a 
 place or scene that it haunted him like a passion. 
 But the imaginative passion had first to throw off 
 from itself, to burn its way through, layer after layer 
 of sentiment or of convention. 
 
 The two Oxford poets of the end of the eighteenth 
 century are Russell and Bowles. They were contem- 
 poraries and schoolfellows. Russell, the higher of the 
 two in promise and the finer in accomplishment, died 
 at twenty-six, having written but little, although that 
 little included what Warton's biographer calls, in terms 
 of eulogy which are not so extravagant as they might 
 seem, " sonnets than which are none better in the 
 English language." But of these his Oxford sonnets 
 are not the best, and would not by themselves justify 
 any such claim. 
 
 Russell died before he had established a reputation : 
 Bowles outlived his. What keeps him from being 
 altogether forgotten is the fact that his little volume 
 of sonnets was what gave a decisive impulse to the 
 developing powers of Coleridge. In its time it had a 
 most unusual success and influence : it passed through 
 nine editions between 1789, when it first appeared, 
 and 1805. In the sonnets on Oxford the new note 
 tentatively struck by Warton is now sounded quite 
 clearly. They are sentimentally imaginative ; and 
 the formal classical diction is fading away before a 
 new simplicity and harmony. 
 
 " Peace be within thy walls ! 
 I scarce have heart to visit thee " 
 
 the elegiac grace of such a cadence as this points 
 forward to the age of romanticism. In his beautiful 
 elegy on the death of Russell, we hear the note which 
 was to be struck with a fuller tone long afterwards in 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 239 
 
 Arnold's Thyrsis, especially in the contrast between 
 the eternal and serene youth of Oxford and the pass- 
 ing away of youth and serenity from those whose life, 
 for a few brief years, made one music with hers ; when, 
 as Bowles writes, 
 
 " We heard the merry bells by Isis' stream 
 And thought our way was strewed with fairy flowers." 
 
 Forty years later, Bowles writes again, in the bewilder- 
 ment felt by a survivor from an earlier age, of a new 
 world in which 
 
 " All are poets in this land of song, 
 And every field chinks with its grasshopper." 
 
 The chinking of those grasshoppers has now long ago 
 faded away, has become forgotten and inaudible. We 
 can hear now, uninterrupted by their din, the few 
 nightingale notes. In May 1820 Wordsworth, passing 
 through Oxford on his way to London and the Con- 
 tinent, was inspired to that magnificent sonnet which 
 is the most splendid of all the tributes ever paid to 
 Oxford the enchantress : 
 
 " Ye sacred nurseries of blooming youth ! 
 In whose collegiate shelter England's flowers 
 Expand, enjoying through their vernal hours 
 The air of liberty, the light of truth ; 
 Much have ye suffered from Time's gnawing tooth ; 
 Yet, O ye spires of Oxford ! domes and towers ! 
 Gardens and groves ! your presence overpowers 
 The soberness of reason ; till, in sooth, 
 Transformed, and rushing on a bold exchange, 
 I slight my own beloved Cam, to range 
 Where silver Isis leads my stripling feet ; 
 Pace the long avenue, or glide adown 
 The stream-like windings of that glorious street 
 An eager novice robed in fluttering gown ! " 
 
 fie was foj the moment carried completely out of 
 
240 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 himself: in a second sonnet he makes a sort of 
 shamefaced apology. 
 
 " Shame on this faithless heart, that could allow 
 Such transport, though but for a moment's space : 
 Not while, to aid the spirit of the place, 
 The crescent moon cleaves with its glittering prow 
 The clouds, or nightbird sings from shady bough, 
 But in plain daylight ! " 
 
 The spirit of the place, now fully realised, and per- 
 haps now fully realised for the first time, as an incar- 
 nation of poetry, had intoxicated him. Just five years 
 later, on such another May day in 1825, the same in- 
 toxication, in its still more potent effect on a poet who 
 was in his first youth, and who was not only in Oxford 
 but of it, inspired Beddoes to a lyrical outburst that 
 sets him for a moment by the side of Keats. It is the 
 poetry of Oxford in one of its loveliest phases, the spirit 
 of the summer term incarnate. 
 
 " In every tower that Oxford has is swung 
 Quick, loud, or solemn, the monotonous tongue 
 Which speaks Time's language, the universal one 
 After the countenance of moon or sun, 
 Translating their still motions to the earth. 
 I cannot read : the reeling belfry's mirth 
 Troubles my senses ; therefore, Greek, shut up 
 Your dazzling pages ; covered be the cup 
 Which Homer has beneath his mantle old 
 Steamy with boiling life ; your petals fold, 
 You fat, square blossoms of the yet young tree 
 Of Britain-grafted, nourishing Germany. 
 Hush, Latin, to your grave ; and with the chime 
 My pen shall turn the minutes into rhyme . . . 
 So come, shake London from thy skirts away : 
 So come, forget not it is England's May. 
 For Oxford, ho ! Here thou at morn shalt see 
 Spring's dryad-wakening whisper call the tree 
 And move it to green answers : and beneath, 
 Each side the river which the fishes breathe, 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 241 
 
 Daisies and grass, whose lips were never stirred 
 Or dews made tremulous but by foot of bird : 
 And here a primrose pale beneath a tree, 
 And here a cowslip longing for its bee, 
 And violets and lilies every one 
 Grazing in the great pasture of the sun." 
 
 Just at that point came a check. The Oxford 
 Movement is formally dated as having been born on 
 the 14th of July 1833 : it formally came to its con- 
 clusion on the 8th of October 1845. During these 
 twelve years, and for a period extending both before 
 and after them for some years more, Oxford, and 
 with it the poetry of Oxford in so far as it was a 
 vital function of the place, was deflected violently 
 from its course. 
 
 Anglicanism has produced vast quantities of verse, 
 mostly bad, but often refined and melodious. Oxford 
 itself, as one would expect, figures in the poems of 
 Keble. It figures still more largely in the poems 
 of those others who are already almost forgotten 
 names, or retain a precarious and ghostly life in 
 anthologies where the collector has cast his net 
 widely. In the Minstrelsy of Isis may be found ten 
 or a dozen specimens of Faber, at once the most 
 prolific and the most graceful of the school. In 
 these poems he embodied the spirit of Oxford as he 
 felt it a combination of religious and antiquarian 
 sentiment with a real and keen sense of natural 
 beauty. While he and the other Anglican poets 
 were still writing and still held the field, the revolu- 
 tion overtook them. In the year 1853 the volume of 
 poems appeared which included the Scholar Gipsy. 
 
 When we speak of the poetry of Oxford, it is of 
 the Scholar Gipsy and of Thyrsis that we immediately 
 and instinctively think. These two poems seem to 
 
242 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 include or to blot out nearly everything else. It 
 would be idle to analyse them ; it would be useless 
 to praise them. If I were to begin quoting from them 
 now it would be impossible to stop. After more than 
 half a century they preserve their radiance and magic 
 unimpaired. Description more exquisite than the city 
 and her lovely surroundings had ever received before 
 is fused in them with a faultless power of imaginative 
 interpretation. The only way in which it is possible 
 to criticise them is simply to read them, pausing in 
 every verse over some new felicity of phrase or epithet 
 " the warm green-muffled Cumnor hills " " those 
 wide fields of breezy grass where black- winged swallows 
 haunt the glittering Thames" "the causeway chill 
 where home through flooded fields foot-travellers go " 
 " bluebells trembling by the forest ways " " threshers 
 in the mossy barns " " boys who in lone wheatfields 
 scare the rooks/' and in the centre of all, felt rather 
 than described, " that sweet city with her dreaming 
 spires," Oxford herself like the soul of poetry. 
 
 Words would be wasted on these poems; and the 
 more so, because whatever can be said of them, and 
 of the spirit or personality of Oxford which they em- 
 body, has been excellently said in another form. Mr. 
 Reginald Fanshawe's Corydon, an elegiac and reflective 
 poem of great skill and beauty, has done this. If I 
 deny myself the pleasure of quoting from it, it is only 
 because the limits of space forbid. Those who do 
 not know it already will I am sure be grateful to 
 me if I cause them to make its acquaintance. 
 
 The Scholar Gipsy has sunk into the common con- 
 sciousness ; it is inseparable from Oxford ; it is the 
 poetry of Oxford made, in some sense, complete. 
 But it would be curious to find out and it could be 
 more or less found out whether its effect was at all 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 243 
 
 immediate. I fancy it was not. Arnold used to com- 
 plain half humorously of being an unpopular author, 
 and he was certainly for a long time not a popular 
 poet. The Oxford poem of 1853 which had vogue 
 and fame was of a very different quality; it was the 
 Installation Ode to the Earl of Derby. It is amazing 
 to read the Ode and think that its glittering me- 
 chanical rhetoric could have ever been accepted, then 
 or at any time, as expressing the poetry of Oxford. 
 It is like a stained-glass window of the same period. 
 Isis keeps a silver requiescat all night long; the 
 moon walks up and down among the starry fires ; 
 dying pleasure sings with sweet and swanlike tone. 
 The climax is where Oxford herself, in whose mouth 
 the main part of the poem is placed, bethinks herself 
 that she has said enough in her own glorification, and 
 breaks off with this happy turn : 
 
 " But night is fading I must deck my hair 
 
 For the high pageant of the gladsome morn. 
 I would not meet my chosen Stanley there 
 In sorrow or in scorn." 
 
 It was the epoch of mid-Victorianism triumphant ; a 
 period to which time is beginning now to lend the 
 enchantment of distance, but which artists who lived 
 in it found hard to bear. 
 
 In these two poems of Arnold's it might seem that 
 the poetry of Oxford had reached not merely com- 
 pletion, but finality. But in poetry there is no finality. 
 Progress is the essence of its being. And the spirit of 
 Oxford, though it is persistent and continuous, also 
 changes, shifts, develops, revealing fresh depths to new 
 eyes, or expanding to fresh embodiments under a 
 new touch. We may say that in Arnold the poetry 
 of Oxford at last became fully articulate. It might be 
 
244 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 better to put it that the poetry of Oxford before him 
 and the poetry of Oxford after him are different things. 
 The book did not close with him ; there are pages of 
 it since opened, there are pages still unwritten. 
 
 In such matters prose is more definite than poetry, 
 or at least, it lends itself to a clearer definition. What 
 the spirit of Oxford is to different minds, all of them 
 approaching it at a high imaginative tension, may be 
 illustrated by a few quotations, all very brief, and all 
 highly charged with meaning. 
 
 Keats writes in 1817: " This Oxford, I have no 
 doubt, is the finest city in the world it is full of old 
 Gothic buildings, spires, towers, quadrangles, cloisters, 
 groves, &c., and is surrounded with more clear streams 
 than ever I saw together." 
 
 The words are singularly like those I quoted already 
 from an Elizabethan poet ; they have the same clean 
 definition, the same primitive directness of vision. In 
 sharp contrast to them is this passage by Hazlitt 
 written a little later : 
 
 " There is an air about it resonant of joy and hope : 
 it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart: it 
 waves its mighty shadow over the imagination: it 
 stands in lovely sublimity on the hill of ages, and 
 points with prophetic fingers to the sky : it greets the 
 eager gaze from afar, with glistening spires and pin- 
 nacles adorned, that shine with an eternal light as 
 with the lustre of setting suns; and a dream and a 
 glory hover round its head, as the spirits of former 
 times, a throng of intellectual shapes, are seen re- 
 treating or advancing to the eye of Memory : its 
 streets are paved with the names of learning that can 
 never wear out : its green quadrangles breathe the 
 silence of thought, conscious of the weight of yearn- 
 ings innumerable after the past, of loftiest aspirations 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 245 
 
 for the future : Isis babbles of the Muse, its waters 
 are from the springs of Helicon, its Christ Church 
 meadows classic Elysian fields." 
 
 The substance of this passage (which, for all its 
 splutter of redundant rhetoric, is perfectly sincere) is 
 the common theme of the lesser, the uninspired, 
 Oxford poets. They are often feeling after something 
 else, and something better worth saying ; but this, in 
 one form of words or another, is all they can manage 
 to say. 
 
 Next to it let me put the famous sentence from the 
 Preface to Arnold's Essays in Criticism, with its un- 
 equalled combination of beauty and satire. It is the 
 magnificently ironic answer of Oxford herself to those 
 who approach her in the spirit of Hazlitt. Even 
 Heine never excelled this picture of a queen of 
 romance, grown a little elderly, but unravaged by 
 intellectual life. 
 
 " Beautiful city ! so venerable, so lovely, so -serene ! 
 steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens 
 to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers 
 the last enchantments of the Middle Age: adorable 
 dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic, home of 
 lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, 
 and impossible loyalties ! what example could ever so 
 inspire us, what teacher could ever so save us ? " 
 
 The next passage I quote is but a single phrase, 
 leaping out at high imaginative tension, and extra- 
 ordinary in the way in which it reveals and fixes an 
 image like something seen by a lightning flash. It 
 comes, apropos of nothing, in the middle of the talk 
 between Will Green and the man from Essex in the 
 Dream of John Ball. 
 
 " ' Hast thou seen Oxford, scholar ? ' 
 
 " A vision of grey -roofed houses and a long winding 
 
246 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 street and the sound of many bells came over me 
 at that word as I nodded ' yes ' to him." 
 
 Now once more, pass away from all these to another 
 appreciation of Oxford, perhaps the most remarkable 
 of all in its dark passion and haunting significance. 
 It is by the only survivor now left of the great 
 Victorian writers; and Mr. Hardy, although it is in 
 the art of prose that he is pre-eminent, has also the 
 instinct and the accomplishment of a poet. Here 
 there is no vivid single objective impression ; the 
 effect is got by subtle accumulation and suggestion. 
 It is the voice of a new world : or rather of a 
 world infinitely old, but become newly and appallingly 
 articulate. 
 
 "It was a windy, whispering, moonless night. 
 After many turnings he came up to the first ancient 
 mediaeval pile that he had encountered. It was a 
 college, as he could see by the gateway. Close to 
 this college was another; and a little further on 
 another ; and then he began to be encircled as it 
 were with the breath and sentiment of the city. A 
 bell began clanging, and he listened till a hundred 
 and one strokes had sounded. - He must have made a 
 mistake, he thought; it was meant for a hundred. 
 High against the black sky the flash of a lamp would 
 show crocketed pinnacles and indented battlements. 
 Down obscure alleys, apparently never trodden now 
 by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed 
 to be forgotten, there would jut out into the path 
 porticoes, oriels, doorways of enriched and florid 
 middle-age design. He began to be impressed with 
 the isolation of his own personality. Seeming almost 
 his own ghost, he gave his thoughts to the other 
 ghostly presences with which the nooks were haunted. 
 He saw that his destiny lay not with these, but among 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 247 
 
 the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he 
 himself occupied, unrecognised as part of the city at 
 all by its visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose 
 denizens the hard readers could not read nor the high 
 thinkers live." 
 
 Arnold was of the transition. Wandering, in his 
 own melancholy words, between two worlds, one dead, 
 the other powerless to be born, he had the genius to 
 fix the portraiture of the older Oxford as it was just 
 before it began to pass away. Since then both the 
 outward aspect and the inner life and spirit of Oxford 
 have been in the course of a continuous and vast 
 revolution, a revolution whose vastness only fails to 
 impress us because it is masked by its continuity. 
 The first distinct new note after him in the poetry of 
 Oxford is the note of distress and pain at the effects 
 of that revolution when they began to manifest them- 
 selves. Thirty years ago, that note was beautifully 
 struck in a sonnet, the form and spirit of which are 
 alike characteristic of the period, and are not, in my 
 judgment, unworthy of the subject. I hope I shall 
 not alarm the modesty of Mr. Bowyer Nichols by 
 quoting his lines; but indeed it is a regret shared 
 by all his friends that he has let the world see so 
 little of his fine insight and delicate craftsmanship. 
 " Here in these walks," he wrote then, in the walks 
 of Magdalen 
 
 " Here in these walks where May brings June to birth 
 Peace reigns and rest : these leafy aisles are free 
 From harm of axe and hammer ; every tree 
 Dense-clad with summer and shrill-tongued with mirth. 
 Spirit of beauty, very God on earth, 
 Earth loves thee ever and is loved of thee. 
 Is it by man alone that thou must see 
 Wrong done thee, thankless change and waste and dearth ? 
 Nay, but thou lovedst us too in days gone by. 
 
248 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 Wilt them not turn and visit us in pity, 
 
 Here, where thou once wast wont to show thy face 
 
 To those whose sons forget thee or deny, 
 
 Before they have destroyed thy holy city 
 
 And quite laid waste what was thy dwelling place ? " 
 
 That is almost the last note of the romantic revival, 
 of the movement which vainly strove to recreate the 
 past and lay an arresting hand on the present. But 
 poetry, like life, had to move on. 
 
 The main effort of art since then, not of the art 
 of poetry only, has been to find a new language. 
 Descriptive poetry and descriptive painting had both 
 done all they could. To continue on the same lines 
 meant that art was becoming academic once more, 
 that it was being given over to secondary emotions 
 and an increasing imaginative unreality. Like the 
 new painting, the new poetry set itself to the task 
 of reproducing life not as something solid and out- 
 lined, but as fluid, impalpable, cognisable only as a 
 complex of impressions : even these impressions only 
 existing, for the purposes of art, in the emotion which 
 they evoke. The older art had mastered a language 
 in which it could express form and action; the 
 language sought by the newer art was one which 
 should express atmosphere. The two kinds of art 
 are not hostile to one another, though their followers 
 often are ; they deal with the same matter ; but they 
 approach it in a different way. 
 
 Of this impressionist poetry, where atmosphere and 
 emotion are everything, the poetry of Oxford offers 
 one remarkable example. There are those among us 
 who, like myself, have grown up in and stand by the 
 more ancient tradition ; but we too can recognise, with 
 hope and gratitude, that this new language in poetry 
 can do things which the other could not ; and that 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 249 
 
 it can do them so as to create beauty, so as to 
 reincarnate and reinterpret life. There are many 
 methods of art : there are only two kinds of art, 
 good and bad : and if two pieces of art fret and 
 clash, it is only because, and in so far as, one or 
 the other, or both, are bad art. 
 
 About fifteen years ago, a series of tiny volumes 
 of poetry came out, in paper covers, under the name 
 of the Shilling Garland. It went on, I think, for a 
 dozen numbers or so before it gently disappeared. 
 The greater number of the authors were Oxford 
 poets. The late Canon Dixon contributed a selection 
 of his austere and refined lyrics. There was a volume 
 of short poems by Mr. Bridges who is not only an 
 Oxford poet but also, in more than one ode or elegy 
 of exquisite finish and high temper, an interpreter 
 of the poetry of Oxford. There was the first, or all 
 but the first, flower of the Muse of Mr. Binyon, dis- 
 tinguished even then by a singular gravity and sweet- 
 ness. But among all the rest there is a single poet 
 and a single poem outstanding ; and these were the 
 creator and the creation of a new Oxford poetry. The 
 poet was Mrs. Woods ; the poem, which gave its name 
 to the little volume, was called Aeromancy. 
 
 " All art," Pater said, " constantly aspires towards 
 the condition of music : and the perfection of poetry 
 seems to depend in part on a certain suppression of 
 mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through 
 ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding." 
 Just at present music itself is perhaps the most 
 living and most interpretative of the arts as actually 
 practised : however this may be, the new quality in 
 poetry which came of its greater approximation to- 
 wards the condition of music has the effect of giving 
 to poetry a fresh medium of expression. 
 
250 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 This poem, by virtue of the new method in fine 
 and capable hands, captures and embodies the inmost 
 spirit of Oxford. The opening lines of Aeromancy 
 bear a singular verbal likeness to those I have 
 already quoted from Beddoes, that wayward and 
 ineffectual genius who felt poetry so keenly and 
 did so little with it. But the likeness is external ; 
 the contrast is vital. 
 
 " The watchers on the everlasting towers, 
 Blind watchers of bright heaven, the bells who own 
 No changing years, but the unchanging hours 
 
 Listen ! they strike ; a sinister monotone 
 
 Deep as all time. The same sound, and who hears 
 
 Could be the same, did she not hear alone. 
 
 Those iron tongues have portioned out our years 
 Indifferently, with fateful rumours blown 
 About the solemn spires and aery tiers 
 
 Of clustered pinnacles, and far unknown 
 Utterance that communes with the void. It fills 
 The valley broadening round their ancient throne 
 Out to the edges of the violet hills." 
 
 This is the new method in art, used by a strong and 
 delicate hand. Without any disastrous loss of either 
 form or colour, the artist, working in a medium where 
 language approximately reaches the effect of music, is 
 able to give a new expression to atmosphere and emo- 
 tion. The poet, piercing further inward below the 
 surface, draws the spirit of poetry from deeper re- 
 cesses. It is what Wordsworth had done a century 
 before; it is what poetry is perpetually doing, per- 
 petually has to do, that it may keep itself alive by 
 getting afresh at the sources of life. The poetry of 
 Oxford has here become transmuted and essentialised 
 into the poetry of a secret garden hortus condusus, 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 251 
 
 fons signatus such as that garden and fountain whose 
 image it goes on to create in a passage that follows : 
 
 " How in yon high- walled garden has mine ear 
 Hung on their imminent voices, where the yew 
 Darkens above each grey majestic pier 
 
 Of the antique gate. 'Tis closed : none passes through. 
 
 But in the unfooted mimic theatre 
 
 A fountain springs, scattering a lonely dew. 
 
 Time was this formal garden seemed our own, 
 So world-forgot and beautiful : the glow 
 Of its great flowers, the birds that as alone 
 
 Made sparkling sport upon the fountain's rim, 
 Its diamond drip into the pool, o'ergrown 
 With iris and pale reed, the skyey, slim 
 
 Poplar that still October turns to flame, 
 
 All was our own the couchant monsters grim 
 
 Remember it : and the bells sound the same." 
 
 That garden is Oxford. It is indeed an actual garden, 
 one we pass by, or even may enter, any day ; but for 
 the poet it is only the point at which Oxford is made 
 imaginatively visible. The music of the poetry calls 
 out, attaches, gathers up about that point, the spirit of 
 Oxford, and makes it speak. 
 
 It speaks again, retracing the process through which 
 it formed itself. what is this that knoivs the road I 
 came? that single line of Rossetti, by a sort of 
 triumphant magic, had already said the thing once 
 for all. 
 
 " Hour after hour most ignorantly I heard. 
 A certain night, a warm and obscure night, 
 On a dim lawn I found the master-word. 
 
 Dawn and high day, wan visitings of light 
 Out of the haunting moon, come to the bells : 
 Heaven's horologe turns in their darkling sight. 
 
252 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 Blind aeromancers, from their hollow cells 
 Float forth the eyeless ghosts of all hours dead 
 With voices hidden as the sigh in shells. 
 
 The living hour leaps clangorous overhead 
 
 To living ears. A thin ethereal 
 
 Long sound pursues, the sweep of pinions spread, 
 
 Rushing they knew not whither, and the call 
 Of the oblivious ghosts wild- whispering 
 To dust of unremembered burial. 
 
 . . . That Hour forbore 
 
 To come again and whisper all she knew. 
 Young was she yet, and taught me first her own 
 Young secret. Hark ! the ancient hours renew 
 
 Their solemn solitary undertone ; 
 
 And I do hear them, yet as one who hears 
 
 A talk confused in a tongue half-known, 
 
 With hints of roaring battle, hopes and fears, 
 And festival and music and shrill play, 
 Of loves forgotten and forgotten tears, 
 
 And one grey murmur under arches grey 
 The sigh of cloistral hours that fain would tell 
 Of how they stole and stole long lives away, 
 Issueless, void, alike, innumerable." 
 
 Is poetry trying here to do more than poetry can do ? 
 To this question, of whatever poem it is asked, there is 
 but one answer : nothing is more than poetry can do ; 
 for poetry, as Shelley said of it in words not less true 
 than noble, is the very image of life expressed in its 
 eternal truth. But even if we vary the question and 
 ask whether it is trying here to do something different 
 from what it can do, trying to pass beyond itself and 
 become another art, the answer must still I think be 
 the same. To determine whether it can do anything 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 253 
 
 or not, there is but one criterion ; does it do it ? The 
 progress of poetry, as I have over and over again 
 insisted, is traceable from now backward to the re- 
 motest part, but is incalculable from now forward to 
 the nearest future. Any day it may effect, to all 
 seeming with effortless ease, what it has never done 
 yet. It may master the new language of atmosphere 
 and emotion as completely as it mastered, long ago, 
 the language of description and reflection. 
 
 In stanzas added as an epilogue to this poem, the 
 author returns to more familiar ways. Perhaps this is 
 the most beautiful passage in the whole poem. It also 
 concentrates and presents the poetry of Oxford, with 
 a fresh delicacy and sweetness. But it does so now 
 through the old and known methods (though en- 
 riched, I think, by the influence of the new language) ; 
 through description, through visual images quickened 
 by imagination. The poetry of Oxford here is all 
 crowded, as though in a magic convex mirror, into 
 one corner of it, a house and garden in Holywell 
 as Holywell was then. 
 
 "There was a summer silence in the street 
 Where half the shouldering gables caught the sun, 
 Your bloomy window fragrant in the heat. 
 
 Me thought 'twas but a little way to run 
 
 To cross your threshold ; then a shadowy space ; 
 
 Reach the gay garden and yourself and one 
 
 Standing amid her flowers. In many a place 
 Does this white moon of May find multitude 
 Of flowers more beautiful than her own face : 
 
 What long glades pale with hawthorn, what bedewed 
 Soft slopes o'erspangled with the cowslips' sheen 
 And nested primroses, a late lone brood. 
 
 Through nets of delicate shadow she hath seen 
 The sea-blue splendour of wild hyacinths spread 
 Up Wytham woods, under the first fresh green : 
 
254 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 O'er foamy orchards her young light is shed 
 And flash of wilding blossom and the pride 
 Of country gardens richly tapestried 
 
 With royal tulips sumptuously dyed 
 
 Purple and gold and sanguine, striped and smeared, 
 
 Or pure in their keen colour as a bride 
 
 Is in her whiteness. Yet as oft she peered 
 Over the black tower, smiling silverly, 
 In yonder strip of city earth appeared 
 
 As crowded wealth of flowers as she might see 
 By ample lawns o'erflowed with ministrant air, 
 Or hollow coverts none explore save she." 
 
 This is the poetry of Oxford speaking still in the same 
 language as that of the Scholar Gipsy, though in a 
 different manner and with a different accent ; and also, 
 I may add, with a new grace. 
 
 For this is a woman's poetry, and may be the begin- 
 ning of more. To Oxford men Oxford is, or at least 
 has been, so much a part of themselves that they are 
 in some ways almost unconscious of it. To see a thing 
 as it is, one must be a little outside it. It is part of 
 the relation of Oxford men to Oxford (and part of 
 Oxford's special charm), that they never get quite out- 
 side of Oxford ; or if they do, it is either through 
 indifference or through hostility neither of them keys 
 to unlock the springs of poetry. Here we have a poet 
 who with a knowledge of Oxford as nearly as may be 
 complete, yet not absorbed into its machinery, and not 
 having merged her own personality into its corporate 
 life, has been able to express, with an intimacy and 
 suggestiveness not attained by other poets, the Oxford 
 atmosphere, the Oxford emotion. 
 
 Genius is individual. But the adjustment now in 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 255 
 
 process between the differentiated complexes of sensi- 
 bility, interpretative faculty and discursive intelligence 
 I apologise for using such long words otherwise 
 known as men and women, suggests and already shows, 
 not in this instance or in this sphere alone, further 
 possibilities. A little volume of poems, Leaves in the 
 Wind, was recently published in Oxford by a new 
 author, who chooses to be known under the name of 
 Elsa Lorraine. She is, as Mr. Armstrong tells us in a 
 prefatory note, in the strictest sense a daughter of the 
 University, though not of course a member of it, and 
 not even of British blood on either side. In these 
 poems we find, as Mr. Armstrong goes on to say with 
 exact and admirable truth, " the Oxford atmosphere 
 tempered or transmuted by an imagination which is 
 not of Oxford." The workmanship in these poems is 
 still tentative ; the imagination has not yet found its 
 wings. But in some of them which are specifically 
 poems of Oxford there is, very distinct, the new note 
 of which I have been speaking. A sonnet on the 
 Radcliffe Square, overcharged with imperfectly fused 
 thought and imperfectly refined expression, is never- 
 theless entirely original and very remarkable : and the 
 same praise may be given with even less reservation 
 to another on St. Mary's Church a subject which a 
 hundred artists have tried to translate into language 
 and which will still tempt a hundred others. Arnold, 
 as it happened, never touched it. The passage which 
 of all I know comes nearest to putting its poetry into 
 words is not even by a poet at all; it is a casual 
 sentence in Henry Kingsley's Ravenshoe. Or again, we 
 may compare with the subtle technique and insight of 
 Aeromancy a fragment in Elsa Lorraine's volume on 
 the vision of the entrance into Oxford from the east 
 still incomparably lovely in spite of all that modern 
 
256 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 changes have done to spoil it since Mr. Nichols wrote 
 the sonnet I quoted already the verses beginning : 
 
 " The curtain wrought in green and gold 
 Of the twelve poplars by the bridge 
 Autumn-day after autumn-day 
 More slender and transparent grows." 
 
 The lines are imaginatively symbolic. For the inner 
 movement of poetry now is towards making descrip- 
 tion or narrative more and more translucent, to- 
 wards making external things the veil or atmosphere 
 through which the soul is seen, out of which the 
 soul takes form and substance. 
 
 Oxford is in transition ; no one needs to be told 
 of this. Poetry is in transition, as it always is and 
 always will be. And the poetry of Oxford is in 
 transition likewise. I have indicated one side of 
 the new development which we may conjecture it to 
 be taking. Others, not less important, are more 
 distant and as yet more obscure. The enormous 
 expansion which Oxford is undergoing on every side 
 and in every aspect of her life involves changes 
 equally great in what may be called the spirit or 
 personality of Oxford, in her impact on the poetic 
 imagination, her vivifying power upon art. And if 
 art is seeking a new language, this " ancient Oxford, 
 noble nurse of skill," may do much towards de- 
 veloping that language; the more so now that she 
 draws into herself, and enriches herself with, the 
 youth, the enthusiasm, the inherited or acquired 
 aptitudes of a larger world : while she still retains 
 her own high intellectual tradition, and much of 
 her own distinctive, perennial, and incommunicable 
 charm. 
 
 Unpoetical periods are periods of poetical germina- 
 tion. The spirit of poetry, like sap in winter, with- 
 
THE POETRY OF OXFORD 257 
 
 draws into its central springs, to pass there in silence 
 through secret changes and prepare itself for a new 
 resurgence. Meanwhile the visible life of art runs 
 low; belief wavers, aims fluctuate; creative imagina- 
 tion disappears behind piled outworks of research, 
 criticism, and experiment. The poet, in every age, 
 is under the impression that he has been born too 
 late ; and that cry is generally most audible just 
 at the times when poetry is on the verge of its 
 greatest movements and its most splendid achieve- 
 ments. 
 
 One thing at least is certain ; and that is, that 
 just as Oxford herself is passing through a process of 
 expansion and modernisation, the poetry of Oxford, 
 the imaginative pattern and interpretation of Oxford 
 life, must undergo a corresponding change. It will not 
 go on indefinitely re-weaving the pattern of a fading 
 past, sentimentalising over an academic tradition. 
 
 " The elms are bare, the creepers die 
 
 In scarlet on the wall : 
 It is a place of ghosts, and I 
 Am ghostlier than all " 
 
 this verse, from a recent poem by one of the most 
 graceful of the modern Oxford poets, Mr. St. John 
 Lucas, expresses a mood which merely leads poetry 
 up a blind alley. Oxford is a place of ghosts only 
 to those who have become ghosts themselves. 
 
 My colleague Professor Holmes in his recent 
 volume, Notes on the Science of Picture Making, a book 
 which may be read with great interest and profit 
 by others as well as by painters just touches on the 
 future of painting. He indicates or suggests that 
 the future of that art may lie in the development 
 of what may be called socialist painting. This is 
 so with poetry also. Oxford has opened not only 
 
258 THE POETRY OF OXFORD 
 
 her gates, but her eyes ; she is realising the world. 
 And no poetry in future will be the poetry of Oxford 
 in any full sense which does not take account of 
 more than Oxford poetry has hitherto taken account 
 of; which does not take account of those other lives 
 whose destiny is included with ours, those with- 
 out whom the readers could not read, nor the 
 artists live. The seven seals of the book which this 
 University bears on her arms have been one by 
 one opened. At the opening of the last there is 
 silence; but it is in that silence that the seven 
 angels take their trumpets and prepare themselves 
 to sound. 
 
IMAGINATION 
 
 THE word imagination, like most of the terms used 
 to express vital and organic functions, is vague and 
 ambiguous. Of those who have, whether of set 
 purpose or incidentally, dealt with imagination as a 
 quality or essence in poetry, the greater number have 
 either not denned the term at all, or have given some 
 definition of it which has not satisfied any one except 
 themselves. Both courses are open to exception. 
 But the former of them, the absence of any de- 
 finition, is the source of much confusion ; for there are 
 fallacies which the existence of some definition, even 
 if it were only approximate and provisional, would at 
 once render obvious, but which in the absence of any- 
 thing of the sort may elude observation and must in 
 any case perplex argument. The defence made for 
 avoiding definition would probably be the same as is 
 made for refusing to define poetry ; namely, that in a 
 general way, the import of the term is a matter of 
 common knowledge, and that any attempt to define 
 it more closely only leads to wrangling over abstrac- 
 tions without adding anything to real knowledge, or 
 even to real clearness of thought. 
 
 It is true that a strict definition of any vital process, 
 just as of life itself, is theoretically unattainable. Life 
 cannot be subsumed under any larger concept, nor 
 can it be expressed in terms of anything which is not 
 itself alive. Poetry, as a function of life, is subject to 
 
 259 
 
260 IMAGINATION 
 
 the same law : and to carry the matter one step 
 further, imagination as a function of poetry for of 
 poetry in the real and not merely the formal sense it 
 will be agreed that imagination is a function and not 
 an accident likewise eludes definition. But in all 
 these cases something short of a strict definition is 
 discoverable something that might rather be called, in 
 the term with which modern criticism was enriched by 
 Cardinal Newman, a note, or if that word be regarded 
 as having slipped through over-use into meaningless - 
 ness, something that may be called, and is, a central 
 guiding clue. It is discoverable, and it is not only 
 discoverable, but is necessary. It will at the least keep 
 critics from mutually chasing one another's shadows 
 and never getting face to face, like Lysander and 
 Demetrius in the wood. I wish in this lecture to dis- 
 cuss the matter so far as may enable us to clear our 
 minds on certain points. So much is necessary 
 towards any distinct appreciation of what is implied, 
 when we speak, as we all do, of imagination as being 
 in some sense the essence or principle of poetry ; and 
 so much is useful for practical guidance in the pursuit, 
 not merely in the criticism, of poetry as an art. For 
 like all arts, poetry is a matter very largely of sound 
 craftsmanship; and sound craftsmanship is not an 
 instinct, it is an acquisition. It can even, to a greater 
 degree than is always recognised, be taught ; it does 
 not come without learning, without practice ; and the 
 learning will be more substantial, the practice more 
 fruitful, if they are guided from first to last by clear 
 thinking. The poet must know what he would be 
 at ; he must be conscious, whether through direct 
 instruction or not, of certain things to be aimed at 
 and of certain things to be avoided. Above all, he 
 must know good art when he sees it ; and this know- 
 
IMAGINATION 261 
 
 ledge, while it largely comes, of itself as one might 
 say, through habituation to good work, is made more 
 solid and more certain if he is able to apply to any 
 work, his own or that of others, a few very simple and 
 practical criteria such as distinguish good work from 
 bad. 
 
 The canons of art when stated seem very simple : 
 but that is just their value; it is their simplicity 
 which makes them applicable. The simpler they are, 
 the more practical they are likewise : and they cannot 
 be so simple that they may not be ignored or forgotten 
 unless, by habit and training, we apply them uniformly 
 and continuously. We may make mistakes in their 
 application at first ; but by continuing to apply them, 
 the mistakes will tend to correct themselves; the 
 judgment will become swifter and truer, until at last 
 it will work without effort like an acquired instinct. 
 It was one of the most fertile doctrines of William 
 Morris that the appreciation of art is natural; that 
 normal human beings are potential artists, and that in 
 order to make this potentiality actual only two things 
 are required : first, a little guidance at the beginning, 
 such guidance as can be, and must be, given not in 
 this only but in every field of life, by the master to 
 the scholar, by the skilled craftsman to the appren- 
 tice, by experience to inexperience ; and secondly, the 
 clearing away of the mass of purely artificial obstacles 
 created by false conventions, conventions false because 
 they are, when looked at closely, meaningless. 
 
 Any definition, or quasi-definition, of imagination 
 which I may incidentally propose in this discussion 
 will then be personal and provisional; it will merely 
 crystallise, or summarise, for a particular purpose, a 
 particular way of regarding poetry. And the parti- 
 cular purpose in question is this : to connect it with a 
 
262 IMAGINATION 
 
 similarly provisional definition of poetry which I have 
 already given, and to indicate how the two things 
 play into one another and throw light upon one 
 another. 
 
 The use of the word imagination as a term of art 
 I am using the phrase " term of art " in the lawyer's sense 
 is a comparatively modern thing : and modern usage, 
 broadly speaking, all goes back to and starts from the 
 doctrine struck out by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 
 combination. This was first expounded at any length 
 in Wordsworth's famous Supplementary Preface of 1 8 1 5 ; 
 it was worked out with great eloquence and brilliance, 
 though as usual fragmentarily and incompletely, by 
 Coleridge in the BiograpJiia Literaria a couple of years 
 later ; and it was in fact the staple of the poetical criti- 
 cism of both poets. Before that period there had been 
 no attempt to fix the word down to a precise and 
 technical meaning : and in particular, the terms imagina- 
 tion and fancy, on the distinction between which both 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge laid such immense stress, 
 ~>had normally been used as interchangeable. " A faculty 
 called imagination or fancy " was part of the accepted 
 nomenclature of eighteenth-century psychology. It has 
 indeed remained so in much modern usage, even that 
 of authors who have employed language most care- 
 fully. A striking instance occurs in Darwin's Descent 
 of Man. " By this faculty/' he writes there, " man 
 unites, independently of the will, former images and 
 ideas, and thus creates brilliant and novel results." 
 This singular statement, however we may turn it, is 
 certainly not true of imagination in the Wordsworthian 
 sense, whether or not it be true of the faculty which 
 Wordsworth separates and distinguishes from imagina- 
 tion under the name of fancy. Imagination, in this 
 usage, is a term indicating something capricious, incon- 
 
IMAGINATION 263 
 
 sequent, and unreal. So we often speak of a descrip- 
 tion or account as being " imaginative " when we mean 
 to say that it has no connexion, or only a slight 
 connexion, with reality ; that it is fanciful, and either 
 untrue from the point of view of intelligence, or mis- 
 leading from the point of view of conduct, or both. 
 
 It is interesting however to notice that if we go 
 back much earlier, to a time before our language had 
 been formalised and when Latin words were used more 
 sparingly and more choicely, we shall find the term 
 imagination often coupled with the term wisdom, with 
 an implied sense of an affinity between the two things. 
 Thus the author of Piers Plowman assigns both to the 
 operative sphere of the Spiritus prudentiae and opposes 
 them to " weening," or as we might say after Words- 
 worth, to fancy ; 
 
 " Wenynge is no wysdome ne wyse ymagynacioun." 
 
 Similarly, " sage and imaginative " is a conjunction of 
 words used by Berners in his Froissart, and elsewhere 
 by other authors of the same period. Imagination was 
 regarded as a quality of poetry in the sense in which 
 the " sage poet " was the only worthy wearer of the 
 laurel. It was the alta fantasia of Dante ; a faculty 
 so high that it only lost its power in face of the 
 central splendour of Paradise. But we shall perhaps 
 gain more insight into the power and scope of the 
 word by looking at Shakespeare's use of it. For it 
 is the central quality of Shakespeare's work that he 
 uses language, not more closely or accurately, but 
 more vitally, at a higher power and tension, than any 
 other English writer. His use of a word does not help 
 us directly towards its definition ; but it gives us a 
 new insight into its range and scope, its vital 
 potency. 
 
264 IMAGINATION 
 
 The locus classicus here is of course the famous 
 speech of Theseus in Act v. of the Midsummer Night's 
 Dream, and the comment made on it by Hippolyta. 
 It is worth while quoting these in full : 
 
 " More strange than true : I never may believe 
 These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. 
 Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, 
 Such shaping j^ntasies, that apprehend 
 More than cool reason ever comprehends. 
 The lunatic, the lover and the poet 
 Are of imagj[nation all compact : 
 One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, 
 That is, the madman : the lover, all as frantic, 
 Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt : 
 The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 
 Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; 
 And as imagination bodies forth 
 The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
 Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing 
 A local habitation and a name. 
 Such tricks hath strong imagination, 
 That if it would but apprehend some joy 
 It comprehends some bringer of that joy : 
 Or in the night, ^rnagining some fear, 
 How easy is a bush supposed a bear ! " 
 
 So Theseus discourses ; and Hippolyta answers : 
 
 " But all the story of the night told over, 
 And all their minds transfigured so together, 
 More witnesseth than fancj'gjmages, 
 And grows to something of great constancy : 
 But howsoever, strange and admirable." 
 
 In this passage, which we are accustomed to quote 
 fragmentarily and so to miss a great deal of its mean- 
 ing, there are several things to notice. In the first 
 place, we must carefully observe its dramatic quality. 
 The speech is put into the mouth of Theseus : into 
 the mouth, that is, of one of the most prosaic and 
 
IMAGINATION 265 
 
 unimaginative of Shakespeare's characters: the con- 
 summate type of what Arnold called the barbarian, 
 and yet with a strong dash in him of the Philistine. 
 The type is fully seized, and drawn with masterly 
 accuracy. In this speech Theseus gives his notion of 
 poetry, which is that of his class : he couples it with love 
 and lunacy as a thing rejected by cool reason, abnormal 
 and even morbid; something that his own superior 
 common sense looks on . with a sort of indulgent 
 censure. Poetry is to him partly a frenzy a fine 
 frenzy, to be sure and partly a trick. The poet is 
 something between a child and a savage, whose ima- 
 gination makes a bear out of a bush : the ponderous 
 witticism is almost in the manner of a " beef-witted 
 lord " like the Ajax of Troilus and Cressida. 
 
 But while the discourse is that of Theseus, the 
 language is that of Shakespeare : his own swift insight 
 and luminousness shape the phrases which Theseus 
 uses, and the mind of Shakespeare glitters through 
 them. The " seething brains " of which Theseus speaks 
 with placid contempt are the human soul working at 
 its highest power. The particular phraseology is, more 
 than once, significant in the highest degree. He speaks 
 of " shaping fantasies," of " strong imagination." The 
 epithets are carefully chosen : they enforce the doctrine /.- 
 that imagination is not a weakness, but a strength, 
 not a disintegrating, but a constructive force. Not 
 only does it apprehend more than comes within 
 the scope of " cool reason," of the mind working at 
 low temperature ; but it has the power of turning its 
 apprehensions into comprehensions, of making them 
 real, making them organicf ) It " bodies forth forms," 
 it makes the unknown into the known by turning it to 
 shapes. Hippolyta, already in training to become an 
 ideal wife, feels that the account given of the matter 
 
266 IMAGINATION 
 
 by Theseus is confused and unintelligent, but does not 
 say so ; she merely, in a few gentle words, enters an 
 implied protest against the acceptance of Theseus' 
 views. Very characteristically, he does not even listen 
 to what she says, but turns to another subject : for 
 Bottom and his company are just filing on to the 
 stage. 
 
 There are other passages in Shakespeare which rein- 
 force the thought implied by him here, the view of 
 imagination as something strong, large, and construe- 
 tive. We can see this view in phrases like the " strong 
 imagination " of Antonio in the Tempest, the " big 
 imagination " of the Poet in Timon one of the most 
 brilliantly conceived and subtly modelled among 
 Shakespeare's minor characters or where Miranda 
 speaks of imagination " forming a shape," and Hamlet 
 of imagination " giving shape " to offences. Or again, 
 where the Friar in Much Ado says : 
 
 " The idea of her life shall sweetly creep 
 Into his study of imagination," 
 
 and where Hamlet once more says that imagina- 
 tion may trace the dust of Alexander, what is implied 
 in the terms " study " and " trace " is nothing casual, 
 erratic or irresponsible, but a process of the higher 
 intelligence involving solid application and conse- 
 quential reasoning. To this aspect of imagination as, 
 in the full sense, a rational faculty, we shall have occa- 
 sion to return. But for the present let us pass on to 
 the doctrine set forth by Wordsworth and Coleridge. 
 
 That doctrine was slowly evolved by Wordsworth, 
 according to his wont, through hard thinking and in- 
 tense brooding over the depths of his own mind. In 
 the Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads 
 (1800), he still uses the word imagination in a custo- 
 
IMAGINATION 267 
 
 mary and imperfectly defined sense. " The principal 
 object proposed in these Poems," he writes there, " was 
 to choose incidents and situations from common life and 
 to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was 
 possible, in a selection of language really used by men, 
 and at the same time to throw over them a certain 
 colouring of imagination whereby ordinary things 
 should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect." 
 I have quoted these words in full, in order to avoid any 
 possibility of misconception ; what in them is relevant 
 to the immediate point may now be repeated in an 
 abridged form, and generalised, so as to apply the 
 statement to poetry generally. " Poetry," the sentence 
 would then run, " relates or describes chosen incidents 
 and situations, at the same time throwing over them 
 a colouring of imagination." Imagination here is some- 
 thing which gives a particular colour to the things 
 which poetry presents ; it is not something which gives 
 them shape and structure, it only sets them in a new 
 light. This may be called the normal and popular 
 content of the term : the faculty, in its essence and 
 effect, is not creative and organic, it is only illumi-u- 
 native ; and this illumination, so far as the definition 
 goes, may be either true or false, its specific " difference " 
 being that it is unusual. 
 
 It is instructive to compare this with what Cole- 
 ridge says in the Biographia, where he notes as the 
 excellence of Wordsworth's poems their " balance of 
 truth in observing with the imaginative faculty in 
 modifying the objects observed, \and above all, the 
 original gift of spreading the tone and atmosphere 
 of the ideal world around . . . incidents and situa- 
 tions." The toning or colouring power is here sharply 
 distinguished from the imaginative faculty; and the 
 latter is cursorily described as a modifying power. 
 
268 IMAGINATION 
 
 This is Wordsworth's later doctrine, though it is hinted 
 at rather than fully stated. 
 
 This doctrine is set out in the Preface of 1815, in 
 the course of an enumeration of what Wordsworth 
 calls the powers requisite for the production of poetry. 
 These he sets down as observation and description, 
 sensibility, reflection, invention, judgment, and together 
 with these, " Imagination and Fancy to modify, to 
 create, and to associate." Poems, he adds, may be 
 arranged according to the power among all these which 
 is predominant in their production. He attempted a 
 classification of his own poems in this way, not to his 
 own satisfaction, nor to the enlightenment of his readers. 
 What he says about Fancy is acute, interesting and 
 suggestive; yet it may be doubted whether it does 
 not, through too strained and mechanical an antithesis, 
 actually obscure the distinction which it is meant to 
 illustrate; one is not without an uneasy feeling that 
 he is apt to be guided, in assigning certain poems or 
 passages to the heading of imagination and certain 
 others to the heading of fancy, by no other criterion 
 than that of a personal preference for the one poem or 
 passage over the other. It is always to be borne in 
 mind, in studying Wordsworth's criticism, that while 
 on general principles he is sound and thorough, his 
 application of them to particular instances is often 
 bungling and occasionally even fantastic. He was so 
 habituated to moving among the recesses of his own 
 mind, among the deep springs of life, that when he 
 emerges from them he is sometimes like an owl in the 
 daylight. It is better, for the present purpose at least, 
 to ignore what he says about fancy as something con- 
 trasted with imagination, and to stick to what he says 
 about imagination itself; the more so that the anti- 
 thesis, whatever value it may have as barely stated, is 
 
IMAGINATION 269 
 
 overlaid by him with so many incidental qualifications 
 and reservations as to lose much of its significance. 
 He speaks of fancy aiming at a rivalship with imagi- 
 nation, and imagination stooping to work with the 
 materials of fancy. Fancy is also, he says, under her 
 own laws a creative faculty ; but he has just said that 
 the law under which the processes of fancy are carried 
 on is capricious, and its influence unstable or transitory. 
 This comes dangerously near being a contradiction in 
 terms ; and when he adds that " fancy is given to 
 beguile the temporal part of our nature, imagination 
 to incite and to support the eternal," he is writing like 
 Coleridge rather than like himself, evading the point 
 in a luminous haze of sentiment and rhetoric. The 
 preface, as you may remember, breaks off abruptly; 
 the reason which he himself assigns for this is that 
 while it was his intention, when he sat down to write, 
 to have made it more comprehensive, he fears he has 
 already detained the reader too long. It may be 
 suspected that he was aided towards the decision of 
 coming to a conclusion by a feeling that the distinction 
 on which he has been laying stress as fundamental 
 is turning out to be not of kind at all, but only of 
 degree. 
 
 What he says about imagination itself is this. 
 " Imagination is a word denoting operations of the 
 mind upon external objects, and processes of creation 
 or of composition, governed by certain fixed laws." 
 " The processes of imagination are carried on by con- 
 ferring properties upon an object or abstracting them 
 from it," in either case enabling the object to react, as 
 though it were a new existence, on the mind which 
 has performed the process. Finally and this is the 
 most important statement of all "Imagination also 
 shapes and creates," 
 
270 IMAGINATION 
 
 In the Biographia Literaria Coleridge, according to 
 his wont, extends and refines or embroiders upon these 
 bare and concise statements. I need perhaps hardly 
 recall the fact that the chapter on imagination which 
 Coleridge had written, or says he had written, for that 
 work, does not appear in it. " I shall content myself," 
 he says, " for the present with stating the main result 
 of the chapter, which I have reserved for future 
 publication." That publication never took place. 
 Our loss is great. But our gain is also not incon- 
 siderable ; for the " main result " or summing up of his 
 doctrine which he gives is, for him, unusually compact, 
 and also unusually lucid. By drawing, with a firm 
 hand, an arbitrary distinction between fancy and 
 imagination, he is able to avoid Wordsworth's confusion 
 and give each of the terms a quite definite meaning. 
 Fancy and imagination, according to this delimitation, 
 are distinct and different faculties, not higher and lower 
 degrees of one and the same power. (Fancy is a mode 
 of memoryy emancipated from the order of space and 
 time, and Deceiving all its material ready made from 
 the law of Association. Imagination is primarily " a 
 repetition, in the finite mind, of the eternal act of 
 creation." There is also, he goes on, a secondary 
 imagination, identical with the primary in kind, and 
 differing only in degree and in mode of action, " an 
 echo of the former." It dissolves in order to re-create, 
 or at the least, to idealise and unify. It is essentially 
 vital. 
 
 This definition, alike profound and luminous, requires 
 
 hardly any expansion or comment. Two terms in it 
 
 however may be made clearer by a word of explanation. 
 
 To idealise a word which Coleridge, though he did 
 
 \ not actually introduce it into English, was the first to 
 
 . bring into general currency bears with him its proper 
 
IMAGINATION 271 
 
 meaning, to give form, in the Platonic sense. And 
 when he speaks of imagination as vital, he conveys 
 the same sense in other words; the form, or idea, is 
 vital, because it is through it that the matter which 
 it informs is vitalised, or indeed, in any intelligible 
 meaning, exists. Coleridge here follows the doctrine : 
 and language of the English Platonists of the seven- 
 teenth century. A definition given by one of that 
 school, Norris of Bemerton, puts the matter pretty 
 clearly. " By the ideal state of things," he writes, " I 
 mean that state of them which is necessary, permanent, 
 and immutable, not only antecedent and pre-existing 
 to this, but also exemplary and representative of it." 
 The wording here deserves close attention, particularly 
 that of the last clause. 
 
 Imagination then is the power or faculty which 
 creates, in so far as creation is within human power. 
 It is the likeness or echo of the divine creative power ; 
 like it, according to its measure, it gives shape and 
 substance to what had neither, what was without form 
 and void; it puts into shape what was shapeless, it 
 fills out into substance what was void. It dissolves 
 in order to re-create, or if the word create be too 
 strong, to unify and idealise ; to bring, that is, the 
 material with which it deals within the compass of a 
 single pattern. That pattern is in some sense pre- 
 existent for nothing can be made out of nothing 
 but is also, in Norris' phrase, " exemplary and represen- 
 tative," or, in the more modern words which I have 
 already quoted, an image of perfection condensed out 
 of the flying vapours of the world. 
 
 Here, as in other instances, we have the great ad-" 
 vantage of being able to check Coleridge's prose by 
 his poetry. For his prose criticism, even when most 
 luminous, is apt to be clouded by rhetoric, and its 
 
272 IMAGINATION 
 
 outlines lost in an iridescent mist of words. Language 
 intoxicates him, and the thought, swathed in gorgeous 
 rhetoric and ramifying into subtle dialectic, becomes 
 dark with excess of light. When he theorises, he is 
 apt to lose touch of reality. In the passage from the 
 Biographic*, Literaria from which I have been citing, he 
 is, for once, comparatively clear and precise. But in 
 the very next chapter of the same work he throws us 
 back into confusion again by re-defining imagination 
 as a magical power. Magical, in a sense, it may be : \ 
 but it is clear that when we call a thing magical \ 
 we are deliberately giving up the attempt to give" 
 a rational account of it, or to explain what it' 
 actually is. 
 
 But in his poetry and when I speak of Coleridge's 
 poetry I mean the poetry of those six wonderful years 
 in which he was one of the immortals his touch is 
 certain, his power of definition impeccable. The last 
 great poem of that great period is the Dejection Ode of 
 4th April 1802. In that Ode his swan-song over 
 what he felt to be his own approaching extinction as 
 a poet he defines or substantialises imagination by a 
 single masterly touch, at the end of a passage where 
 every word is loaded with meaning. 
 
 " O Lady ! we receive but what we give, 
 And in our life alone does nature live. 
 Ah ! from the soul itself must issue forth ' 
 A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud 
 Enveloping the earth : 
 And from the soul itself must there be sent 
 A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, 
 Of all sweet sounds the life and element. 
 
 O pure of heart ! thou needst not ask of me 
 What this strong music in the soul may be, 
 This beautiful and beauty-making power. . . . 
 Joy, Lady, is the spirit and the power, 
 
IMAGINATION 273 
 
 Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud ; 
 And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight, 
 All melodies the echoes of that voice, 
 All colours a suffusion from that light. 
 
 There was a time when though my path was rough, 
 This joy within me dallied with distress, 
 And all misfortunes were but as the stuff 
 Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness. 
 But now afflictions bow me down to earth. 
 Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, 
 | But oh ! each visitation 
 Suspends what Nature gave me at my birth, 
 My shaping spirit of imagination. " 
 
 Imagination, in this wonderful passage, is brought 
 before us as a " potent voice," like the voice which said 
 " Be," and the world was : a " strong music," which com- 
 pels and marshals into its rhythm the fragmentary 
 evanescent sounds of life : a " shaping spirit," which 
 creates, out of formlessness and incoherence, images 
 of perfection. It is the music-making power, in the 
 sense in which the universe is built out of music ; its 
 character and essence are in its shaping potency. As 
 Browning finely says of music that out of three sounds 
 it can fashion, " not a fourth sound but a star," so 
 Coleridge tells us that imagination fashions out of 
 what are called real things, out of " incidents and 
 situations " as Wordsworth said, not other incidents 1 
 and situations, but something archetypal and eternal, 
 something, in the Platonist's phrase, " exemplary and: 
 representative," a pattern or rhythm according to 
 which and by means of which these so-called realities 
 intelligibly and essentially exist. And this shaping 
 power is not only human, but so essentially and 
 vitally human that the happiness of life consists in it. 
 'Without imagination life is joyless ; nay more, the 
 two things are the same ; imagination is joy.? Even 
 
 s 
 
274 IMAGINATION 
 
 when warped and distorted, even when exercising itself 
 viciously, it is still joy of a sort -one of those mala mentis 
 gaudia which Virgil in his vision of the underworld 
 saw couching, side by side with Anguish and Death, 
 in the gateway of Hell. In its right exercise it is the 
 substance and consummation of human felicity that 
 ev^aijuioma which Aristotle agrees with the Christian 
 theologians in naming as the chief end of man. 
 
 I would ask you to observe then how this definition 
 '.of imagination given by Coleridge incidentally and 
 as it were involuntarily in two words, the " shaping 
 ; spirit," coheres with the definition which in a previous 
 : lecture I have given, or suggested, of poetry. On its 
 formal and technical side, according to that definition, 
 poetry is patterned language. But as there is no such 
 thing as art in the abstract, as poetry consists of form 
 and substance, whether we choose to speak of it as 
 form which has embodied itself in substance or as 
 substance which has taken form, the substantial and 
 vital quality of poetry must be analogous to its formal 
 quality. And this is the case. For just as the tech- 
 nical art of poetry consists in making patterns out of 
 language, so the vital function of poetry consists in 
 making patterns out of life. These patterns are latent 
 and implicit ; poetry reveals, and in a quite real sense, 
 creates them. It " lifts the veil," in Shelley's words, 
 "from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes 
 familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." 
 This it does by virtue of imagination, by the potency 
 of the shaping spirit. 
 
 These definitions constitute a single doctrine; or 
 we need not call them definitions ; we may be content 
 to consider them as a central clue, to guide us through 
 materials and processes which are in the highest degree 
 subtle and complex. But if we hold by this clue it; 
 
IMAGINATION 275 
 
 will give coherence to our whole view of poetry ; and 
 not only to our whole view, but our whole appreciation 
 of it, and our whole attitude towards it. It will even 
 provide us with a test by which, if we will only apply 
 it sincerely, we may distinguish, not one kind of poetry 
 from another, but true poetry from its counterfeit. It 
 will free us, or at least go a long way towards freeing 
 us, from one of the great dangers of poetical criticism, 
 the practice of classifying poets and putting poems in 
 competition with one another. More important still, it 
 will help us towards reading poetry as it ought to be 
 read ; may I even say here in a nursery of potential 
 poets, towards writing it as it ought to be written ? 
 It may save us from what befalls so many, the falling 
 away from poetry, the getting out of touch with it, in 
 advancing years. There are several reasons why this 
 happens, most of them well enough known ; but one of 
 them is not so well known as it should be. It is this : 
 that in youth we take to poetry unreasoningly, and 
 love it for its accidents more than for its essence. 
 We do not then or few of us do know how to read 
 poetry; our appreciation of it, sincere so far as it 
 goes, is superficial. As time goes on, the superficial 
 attraction loses its hold, and there has been no deeper 
 and more vital attraction growing up to take its place. 
 We cease to care for bad poetry; good and well. 
 We cease to care for the things in poetry that once 
 attracted us, but that were not the poetry, though 
 we could not distinguish then between them and 
 the poetry with which they were bound up; there 
 would be no harm in that. But unhappily we had 
 never taught ourselves to care for the poetry itself, for 
 its own sake ; and when the shadow passes, we are 
 without the substance. The care of this world and 
 the deceitfulness of riches are responsible for much; 
 
276 IMAGINATION 
 
 but it is still more common that the love of poetry is 
 not devoured up nor choked, but simply fades, because 
 it was never really part of our life. " Forthwith they 
 sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth : 
 and when the sun was up, they were scorched, and 
 because they had no root, they withered away." If 
 poetry has ever become a shaping spirit in us, an 
 organic and constructive element in our life, it never 
 ceases to be so. Something which men call their 
 imagination, said Rossetti, may decline as the animal 
 spirits lessen, but the genuine thing grows with age. 
 
 The poetic imagination is not confined to poets, 
 though it is only in poets that it works fully. It 
 makes poets create patterns of life. But the same 
 ' faculty, at a feebler power and lower tension, is present 
 in the readers of poetry, enabling them, in a greater 
 or less measure, to realise or appreciate the patterns 
 created by the poets. It is by virtue of this fainter 
 (power of imagination that poetry, in some sense, lives 
 janew, is created anew, in the mind of each of its 
 ireaders. Any poetry that we read is vital to us just 
 to the degree in which we thus create it anew for 
 ourselves by some imaginative faculty of our own. 
 This inchoate faculty, present to some degree in all 
 normal human beings, can like any other faculty be 
 developed by study and exercise. The " study of 
 imagination," to recur to Shakespeare's phrase, is 
 neither futile nor negligible; it is part, and a most 
 important part, of education, of the realisation and 
 conquest of life. 
 
 This is the doctrine of imagination, expressed in 
 what, broadly speaking, are the terms of Platonism. 
 But before leaving the subject it is worth while to 
 point out, very briefly, how the Aristotelian doctrine 
 set forth in the Poetics, coming at the thing from a 
 
IMAGINATION 277 
 
 different direction and using a completely different 
 set of terms, reaches the same conclusion. 
 
 Poetry is, according to Aristotle, imitation in the 
 material of language. Imitation, jULi/mrjcris, has two 
 notes or characteristics ; the first is that it is innate 
 in, or connate with, mankind, O-V^VTOV TOI<? av9po)7roi$ : 
 the second is that it is a natural and universal source 
 of pleasure. It takes its place in the general scheme 
 of life as follows. 
 
 Human activity has three spheres or methods of 
 operation, distinguishable by analysis, though inter- 
 fused and incorporate in actual life. First, thought, 
 or the energy of ^intellect. Secondly, action, or the 
 energy of wilj_ and ^Earacter. Thirdly, production, or 
 the energy of ^creaTIbn, of making things exist which 
 did not, in the same sense, exist before. This last 
 faculty again has a double sphere, distinguishable 
 both in logic and in fact. Man creates in order to 
 satisfy external wants. He also creates for the 
 pleasure of creating. This latter kind of creation is 
 art. And art working in the material of language is 
 poetry. 
 
 In a life such as it ought to be, all the faculties, 
 with the natural pleasure attached to their exercise, 
 must work and be developed. Creation with pleasure 
 and for the sake of creating is the only kind of 
 creation in which the specific creative energy an 
 energy essential in human nature and co-ordinate 
 with the energies of thought and action is fully and 
 harmoniously exercised. That is to say, imagination 
 is an integral part of life ; and poetry, which is the 
 product of imagination working in language, is a 
 necessary element in any life which is not defective, 
 which does not fall gravely short of fulfilling its 
 meaning. 
 
278 IMAGINATION 
 
 In both these views alike then and between them 
 they sum up the profoundest thought of mankind 
 poetry is something not external to life, but immanent 
 in life and interpretative of it, giving life its meaning 
 or pattern. In both alike imagination is something 
 not external to poetry, but its constituent and vital- 
 ising spirit. Poetry shapes life ; imagination is the 
 shaping spirit in poetry. 
 
 May I add one more word, addressed not to those 
 who read poetry, but to those who write it ? On 
 these I would impress, with all the strength I 
 can, to keep in mind that of all the poetical 
 faculties and in all the poetical methods and of 
 both there are many this strong shaping power, 
 imagination, is most central and most essential. 
 Turn back to Wordsworth's list of the powers, as 
 he calls them, requisite for the production of poetry. 
 
 ( O First he names observation and description ; the open 
 eye which sees life not blurred and featureless, but 
 everywhere filled with form and colour, and the 
 
 ^9> command of language which can translate life as 
 thus seen into words, can put down a clear record 
 of clear impressions.^ Next, there is sensibility; deli- 
 cacy of perception added to clearness, the power of 
 responsiveness to slight touches: so that the "finely 
 touched spirit " (in Shakespeare's admirable phrase) is 
 sensitive to subtleties of form, to play of colour, to 
 the latent harmonic relations which vibrate through- 
 out life and make the finer texture of experience. 
 
 ^ Then there is reflection ; the faculty of weighing and 
 plumbing experience, of penetrating below the surface 
 aspect of things and brooding over them in the still 
 darkness, far down among the central springs of thought 
 and emotion.^ In addition to these, there is invention, 
 the active intelligence which puts forth on voyages 
 
IMAGINATION 279 
 
 of discovery, and passing beyond the material of 
 observation as responded to by sensibility and re- 
 handled by reflection, creates for itself new incidents 
 and situations, new combinations of language, new 
 cadences and harmonies; 1 * -Finally, there is judgment, 
 the presiding power which moves among all the rest, 
 ordering them and setting them in their place, de- 
 termining what shall be chosen and what rejected, 
 testing them and passing sentence on them. 
 
 But over and above all there is imagination, the 
 shaping spirit; and without imagination there is not 
 poetry. The observation may be clear and the de- 
 scription true ; the sensibility to impressions may be 
 delicate, and the reflection over the content of ex- 
 perience, whether experience from without given by 
 life, or experience from within given by living, may be 
 careful and even profound. These only bring one to 
 the point where the process of the poet begins. In 
 that process, as in all human processes, success will 
 imply skill of invention, and soundness of judgment. 
 But these things are all external to the process itself, 
 which is the work of imagination ; the shaping, the 
 composition into patterned language conveying a 
 pattern of life, of the matter observed and described, 
 apprehended by sensibility and worked over by reflec- 
 tion, set out by invention and weighed by judgment. 
 
 Without this shaping spirit poetry remains uncreated. 
 There is such a thing, no doubt, as impressionist 
 poetry : but its impressionism, if it is really poetry 
 and not merely a phantom or counterfeit of poetry, is 
 not the imaginative substance of the poetry ; it is only 
 one particular method among others of setting 
 that substance forth. Nor is that substance a matter 
 of intellect, though it involves intellectual processes 
 carried on at a high power, what Rossetti called, 
 
280 IMAGINATION 
 
 in an apt phrase, fundamental brainwork. It is a 
 thing which, dealing with impressions through intelli- 
 gence, creates out of them an organic pattern, a vital 
 structure. Much of what is brought before one as 
 poetry is merely the inorganic material for poetry, not 
 yet in any fully effective way passed through the 
 shaping process and become alive. Much is merely 
 the ornament of poetry ; ornament, it may be, grace- 
 fully and delicately wrought, but with little meaning 
 or value, because it is not ornament designed for, and 
 taking its organic place in, a structural composition. 
 I would not undervalue these things or say that the 
 labour spent on them is wasted. But they are prepara- 
 tions for poetry ; they are not poetry itself. 
 
KEATS 
 
 IN our time, Keats has come by his own. There is 
 no need to insist on what is universally recognised, 
 that he stands in the first rank of the English poets. 
 There is little, if any, need to refute, or even to notice, 
 the obloquy that he suffered under in his lifetime, nor 
 to comment upon the tardy and tepid appreciation 
 which he won for many years after his death. His 
 light goes on burning clearer and larger. Even the 
 criticisms which are still made on certain qualities 
 and certain imperfections in his poetry are made 
 with but few exceptions, and these of little importance 
 in no spirit of detraction, but rather with the view 
 of distinguishing what is best in it from what is faulty 
 through youth, through inexperience, through the in- 
 fluence of bad models on one who was little more 
 than a boy ; and towards the end, through illness and 
 a fever of the heart. Such criticism is not only just 
 but necessary. What is neither necessary nor just, 
 and what is now less and less done, is to adopt, in 
 making it, a tone either of fault-finding or of apology. 
 They who level at my offences, he might say like 
 Shakespeare, reckon up their own. And the patronage 
 which in his life was the one thing that he could not 
 b6ar, even from tjie greatest of his contemporaries, is 
 equally ill-bestowed upon his poetry now. It requires 
 no apology; it requires understanding. Love and 
 admiration we may and must give to it: it hardly 
 
 281 
 
282 KEATS 
 
 needs praise, except the praise of admiring thankful- 
 ness : such praise as Land or speaks of when he says : 
 
 " There fs delight 
 
 In praising, though the praiser sit alone 
 And see the praised far off him, far above." 
 
 To no one else, perhaps, among the English poets, do 
 the words of Odysseus to Diomede in the Iliad so 
 fully apply : " Praise me not much, neither find 
 fault with me at all." 
 
 It is specially gratifying to remember here that so 
 much of the best and finest appreciation of Keats has 
 come from Oxford. It was not so at first. It was a 
 Cambridge man, the late Lord Houghton, who was 
 the first to redeem England from the reproach of 
 neglecting him, who really made him known. And 
 in continuing this work, it is another Cambridge man, 
 Sir Sidney Colvin, who has done most to elucidate 
 and fill in Lord Houghton's sketch by giving us Keats' 
 fascinating letters and by his biographical and critical 
 study of Keats in the English Men of Letters a book 
 which I may without presumption call a masterpiece, 
 for in doing so I am only mentioning an acknowledged 
 fact, not passing any judgment of my own. But the 
 tribute paid by Oxford to Keats, the work done for* 
 him by Oxford, has in recent years been but little 
 less. I need hardly mention, and I may assume that 
 they are already familiar, the editions of Keats' poems 
 by the late William Arnold, an accomplished scholar, 
 a fine critic and a patriotic citizen, whose premature 
 death was a grave loss to his country and to letters, 
 and more recently by Mr. de Selincourt, who did so 
 much for the School of English Literature in Oxford 
 before he left it for another University. Of this last 
 edition it may be said that in virtue of its thorough- 
 
KEATS 283 
 
 ness and its critical insight, it took its place at once 
 as definitive and classic. I need hardly mention the 
 brilliant Essay on Keats by Mr. Bridges, who brings 
 such a fresh eye and mind to whatever he touches. 
 Nor need I recall how Keats has been handled, 
 how his poetry has been interpreted and communicated 
 to the University and to the world at large by three 
 occupants of the Chair of Poetry; for I may assume 
 likewise the general knowledge of Arnold's masterly 
 appreciation in the Second Series of Essays in Criticism ; 
 of Francis Palgrave's edition, in the introduction to 
 which Palgrave's own fine taste and judgment were 
 reinforced by the judgment and taste of Tennyson; 
 and more recently, of Mr. Bradley's study of Keats 
 in specfftl relation to the Letters, first given from this 
 Chair and now accessible in his volume of Oxford 
 Lectures on Poetry. 
 
 Indeed the question may at once arise, when one 
 casts one's eye over these names, what occasion there 
 is for adding to the list, and whether for the present 
 at least the last word on Keats has not been said. 
 To this question, or objection, there are two answers. 
 One is, that at no time can the last word be said on 
 any great poet ; to each of his lovers he means some- 
 thing different, and each has his own word to say 
 about him ; for the appeal of all great art is direct 
 and individual, and it calls for individual interpreta- 
 tion. The other is simply this, that I should not like 
 to quit this Chair without having said something 
 from it about a poet whom I read year by year with 
 increasing love and deepening admiration, and who 
 seems to me to go, in some respects, straighter than 
 almost any other English poet to the heart of poetry. 
 
 When critics, as they all rightly do, lay stress on 
 the fact that Keats died at the age of twenty-five, in 
 
284 KEATS 
 
 order to emphasise the swiftness of his achievement 
 and the marvellousness of his genius, they really 
 understate the case. For even in that short life, the 
 body of poetry which makes him immortal, which 
 sets him, as Arnold says, with Shakespeare, was all 
 produced within two astonishing .years or to be 
 accurate, not even years, but two periods of eight 
 or nine months each. Endymion was begun in April 
 1817 and finished in the following November. That 
 is one of the two periods. The other, the annus 
 miralilis in the fullest sense, begins, after an interval 
 of a little more than a year, in December 1818 or the 
 beginning of January 1819. In it were written is 
 there such a constellation of blazing jewels in nine 
 months of the life of any other poet ? Hyperion, The 
 Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The 
 Eve of St. Mark, and the six great Odes. The last of 
 these, the Ode to Autumn, written at Winchester on 
 the 19th of September 1819, was also Keats' last great 
 poem. He was already fatally ill. A few months 
 later he had his death-sentence ; and he lingered on 
 for another year only as a doomed man. " I have a 
 habitual feeling," so he wrote pathetically in one of 
 his last letters, " of my real life having passed and 
 that I am leading a posthumous existence." 
 
 He wrote, to be sure, fine poetry, both before and 
 after these two periods, and also in the interval between 
 them. The sonnet On first looking into Chapman s 
 Homer, the first poem in which he shows himself not 
 only a pupil, a poet in the making, but a poet of 
 actual accomplishment and mastery, dates as far back 
 as the spring of 1815, two years before Endymion was 
 begun. The equally famous and equally magnificent 
 sonnet, Bright Star ! would I were steadfast as thou art t 
 was written on the blank leaf in his Shakespeare on 
 
KEATS 285 
 
 the 28th of September 1820, just a year after the 
 Ode to Autumn. It was literally his last poem, as the 
 other may in a sense be called his first. These two 
 sonnets alone would give him a place among the Eng- 
 lish poets; and so would other poems which do not 
 fall within the two miraculous periods. But speaking 
 largely we may say that it is the work of these two 
 periods the latter of the two pre-eminently, though 
 the former alone would be sufficient which gives 
 him not only a place among the poets, but a place not 
 inferior to the highest. 
 
 The priceless letters of Keats enable us to form in 
 our minds something like a solid image of him in this 
 brief period of his culminating achievement as a poet : 
 at the time when, in his own burning words, " Poetry 
 has conquered ; I have relapsed into those abstractions 
 which are my only life and I am thankful for it. 
 There is an awful warmth about my heart like a load 
 of Immortality." One of these letters, above all, gives 
 by itself this image not a picture, but more, some- 
 thing in the round, something that places him before 
 us, as one might say, on all his sides, in all three 
 dimensions. This is the famous journal-letter, written 
 at intervals in the spring of 1819 to George and 
 Georgiana Keats, his brother and sister-in-law, while 
 he was waiting to get the first news from them of 
 their arrival at the settlement on the Ohio, at what 
 is now Louisville, to which they had emigrated the 
 year before. We know little or nothing of Georgiana 
 Keats to whom in the main this and the other joint- 
 letters were really written beyond what is told us 
 by the letters themselves and by one charming sonnet 
 addressed to her. But it is certain that she was a 
 great dear ; Keats was very fond of her ; and the way 
 in which he writes, or rather talks on paper, to her, 
 
286 KEATS 
 
 with its affection and absolute unrestraint, brings 
 us very close to Keats himself. His own sister 
 Fanny was only a schoolgirl. Between Georgiana 
 and him, just as if she had been his sister by birth, 
 there was that unique relation which except between 
 brother and sister can hardly exist, and which even 
 so is somewhat rare and very precious. In a famous 
 passage of his Autobiography, Gibbon has described it 
 in one of his august sentences : " It is a familiar and 
 tender friendship with a female much about our own 
 age ; an affection perhaps softened by the secret influ- 
 ence of sex, but pure from any mixture of sensual 
 desire, the sole species of Platonic love that can be 
 indulged with truth and without danger." 
 
 From this journal-letter I will quote, not making 
 many comments but leaving it in the main to produce 
 its own impression. 
 
 " I have not been to see your Mother since my 
 return from Chichester I believe I told you I was 
 going thither. I was nearly a fortnight at Mr. John 
 Snook's and a few days at old Mr. Dilke's. Nothing 
 worth speaking of happened at either place. I took 
 down some thin paper, and wrote on it a little poem 
 called St. Agnes' Eve. 
 
 " In my next packet, as this is one by the way, I 
 shall send you the Pot of Basil, St. Agnes' Eve, and if 
 I should have finished it, a little thing called the Eve 
 of St. Mark. You see what fine Mother Kadcliff names 
 I have it is not my fault I do not search for them. 
 I have not gone on with Hyperion, for to tell the 
 truth I have not been in great cue for writing lately ; 
 I must wait for the spring to rouse me up a little." 
 
 He had not been in great cue for writing lately, and 
 he had written St. Agnes Em in the last three weeks ! 
 
. 
 
 KEATS 287 
 
 " The only time I went out from Bedhampton was 
 to see a Chapel consecrated Brown, I, and John 
 Snook the boy, went in a chaise behind a leaden horse. 
 Brown drove, but the horse did not mind him. This 
 chapel is built by a Mr. Way, a great Jew converter, 
 who in that line has spent one hundred thousand 
 pounds. He maintains a great number of poor Jews. 
 Of course his Communion plate was stolen. He spoke 
 to the Clerk about it The Clerk said he was very 
 sorry, adding, ' I dare shay, your honour, it's among 
 ush.' 
 
 " The chapel is built in Mr. Way's park. The 
 Consecration was not amusing. There were numbers 
 of carriages, and his house crammed with clergy. They 
 sanctified the chapel, and it being a wet day, conse- 
 crated the burial ground through the vestry window. 
 
 " Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any 
 alertness of countenance as they pass by me; they 
 seem rather like figures on a Greek vase. 
 
 " I am, however, young, writing at random, straining 
 at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness. 
 Give me this credit do you not think I strive to 
 know myself? with no Agony but that of ignorance, 
 with no thirst of anything but Knowledge. 
 
 " When you have nothing else to do for a whole 
 day I tell you how you may employ it. First get up, 
 and when you are dressed, as it would be pretty early 
 with a high wind in the woods, give George a cold Pig 
 with my Compliments. When you are both set down 
 to breakfast, I advise you to eat your full share, but 
 leave off immediately on feeling yourself inclined to 
 anything on the other side of the puffy avoid that, 
 for it does not become young women. After you have 
 eaten your breakfast keep your eye upon dinner it 
 is the safest way. You should keep a Hawk's eye 
 
288 KEATS 
 
 over your dinner and keep hovering over it till due 
 time, then pounce, taking care not to break any plates. 
 While you are hovering with your dinner in prospect 
 you may do a thousand things put a hedgehog into 
 George's hat pour a little water into his rifle soak 
 his boots in a pail of water cut his jacket round into 
 shreds like a Roman kilt or the back of my grand- 
 mother's stays sew off his buttons. 
 
 " ' what can ail thee Knight at arms 
 
 Alone and palely loitering ? 
 The sedge has withered from the Lake 
 And no birds sing ! 
 
 ' what can ail thee Knight at arms 
 
 So haggard, and so woe-begone 1 
 The squirrel's granary is full 
 
 And the harvest's done. 
 
 ' I see a lily on thy brow, 
 
 With anguish moist and fever dew, 
 
 And on thy cheek a fading rose 
 Fast withereth too.' 
 
 ' I met a Lady in the Meads 
 
 Full beautiful, a faery's child. 
 Her hair was long, her foot was light 
 
 And her eyes were wild. 
 
 ' I made a Garland for her head 
 
 And bracelets too, and fragrant Zone. 
 
 She looked at me as she did love 
 And made sweet moan. 
 
 ' I set her on my pacing steed 
 
 And nothing else saw all day long, 
 
 For sidelong would she bend and sing 
 A faery's song. 
 
 ' She found me roots of relish sweet 
 And honey wild and manna dew, 
 
 And sure in language strange she said, 
 I love thee true, 
 
KEATS 289 
 
 * She took me to her elfin grot 
 
 And there she wept and sighed full sore, 
 
 And there I shut her wild, wild eyes 
 With kisses four. 
 
 ' And there she lulled me asleep, 
 
 And there I dream'd Ah Woe betide ! 
 
 The latest dream I ever dreamt 
 On the cold hill side. 
 
 ' I saw pale Kings and Princes too, 
 Pale warriors death-pale were they all, 
 
 They cried, La belle dame sans merci 
 Thee hath in thrall. 
 
 ' I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam 
 
 With horrid warning gaped wide, 
 And I awoke, and found me here 
 
 On the cold hill's side. 
 
 ' And this is why I sojourn here 
 
 Alone and palely loitering ; 
 Though the sedge is withered from the Lake 
 
 And no birds sing/ 
 
 " Why four kisses, you will say why four, because 
 I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my 
 Muse she would fain have said ' score ' without hurt- 
 ing the rhyme but we must temper the Imagination, 
 as the Critics say, with Judgment." 
 
 That is Keats : and I do not know that any critical 
 introduction will give one a clearer or more solid 
 image of him. Of course one should read the whole 
 letter ; but what I have read gives its essence, 
 and the essence of Keats himself. Distilled into 
 poetry, concentrated and illuminated by the genius of 
 one who understood and appreciated him, it is given 
 again in the stately lines of Rossetti : 
 
 " Around the vase of Life at your slow pace 
 He has not crept, but turned it with his hands, 
 And all its sides already understands. 
 
 T 
 
290 KEATS 
 
 There, girt, one breathes alert for some great race, 
 Whose road runs far by sands and fruitful space, 
 Who laughs, yet through the jolly throng has passed ; 
 Who weeps, nor stays for weeping ; who at last, 
 A youth, stands somewhere crowned, with silent face." 
 
 We may compare with this nobly imagined and nobly 
 executed passage what Keats himself wrote to Wood- 
 house a little earlier than the letter from which I have 
 just been quoting : " I will speak of my views, and of the 
 life I purpose to myself. I am ambitious of doing the 
 world some good : if I should be spared, that may be 
 the work of maturer years in the interval I will assay 
 to reach to as high a summit in poetry as the nerve 
 bestowed on me will suffer. All I hope is, that I may 
 not lose all interest in human affairs ; that the solitary 
 Indifference I feel for applause, even from the finest 
 Spirits, will not blunt any acuteness of vision I may 
 have. I do not think it will." 
 
 This independence of judgment, this solitary in- 
 difference to applause, is central to Keats. It is the 
 more remarkable in him because he was so fine-strung, 
 so acutely and tremulously sensitive, so hungry for 
 affection and so lavish of it. Wordsworth seems to 
 have cared for nobody, outside of his own family 
 circle ; even there he exacted service rather than gave 
 it ; everything had to give way to what he for the 
 moment required: he wrote an Ode to Duty, as his 
 friends said, and then considered he was done with 
 that subject. Of Milton this could not have been 
 said ; but duty was for him a part of self-culture ; his 
 real life was, like his art, alone. Yet Keats, when it 
 comes to a matter of his art, is as proud and inde- 
 pendent as Wordsworth or Milton. Even to Shelley, 
 when Shelley gave him advice about poetry and one 
 cannot doubt that it was given not only with the 
 
KEATS 291 
 
 insight of a great poet, but with Shelley's invariable 
 sweetness and courtesy he bristles up and becomes 
 for once quite disagreeable. 
 
 One might say indeed hastily, when Keats speaks of 
 his indifference to applause, that there was little or no 
 applause for him to be indifferent to. But this would 
 be a mistake ; there was plenty of it waiting if he 
 would consent to be false to his art, and to swerve 
 from his high purpose. There were voices to left and 
 right, luring him from his path ; but almost from the 
 first, and almost to the last, he shut his ears and 
 walked straight forward. The concessions he made in 
 his last year of illness must not be counted against a 
 dying man. In his pupilage, Leigh Hunt was always 
 pressing him, by precept and example, to be silly ; the 
 orthodox critics, blind as owls to his excellencies, 
 brutal to any weakness in him that they could pounce 
 on, were ready to praise him if ever he went really 
 wrong. A well-known story illustrates this. One of 
 his early sonnets, the one beginning, How many bards 
 gild the lapses of time, was read to Horace Smith. It 
 is a poor sonnet ; no worse than what many great 
 poets have written in youth before they found them- 
 selves, but only interesting because it is by Keats, and 
 has glimmerings in it of the real Keats of two or three 
 years later. But it contains one perfectly abominable 
 line, 
 
 " That distance of recognisance bereaves." 
 
 Smith went straight for it with unerring accuracy. 
 " He was specially struck with it," is the record, " and 
 observed, ' What a well-condensed expression for one 
 so young ! " It was fortunate for Keats that he was 
 indifferent to such applause as that. 
 
 What made him indifferent to it was partly tempera- 
 
292 KEATS 
 
 ment, partly his extraordinary critical insight. Just 
 think of what he said, in 1817, about Wordsworth's 
 Gipsies and Hazlitt's criticism on it. " It is a bold 
 thing to say, and I would not say it in print, but it 
 seems to me that if Wordsworth had thought a little 
 deeper at that moment, he would not have written the 
 poem at all." Then he goes on, " Nor is it fair to 
 attack him : for it is with the critic as with the poet ; 
 had Hazlitt thought a little deeper and been in a good 
 temper, he would never have spied out imaginary 
 faults." Over such insight as this the enchantments 
 of the Sirens have no power. 
 
 I do not propose to attempt any general apprecia- 
 tion of Keats' poetry. That has been done, and done 
 as well as I could do it. What I wish to do now 
 is to consider some particular features and elements 
 in his poetry and in his poetical development" that 
 do not seem to have been quite fully brought out. 
 Unless they are brought out, appreciation of Keats, 
 though perfectly sound and right, and even in its main 
 substance complete, will have some gaps in it. 
 
 The solid greatness of Endymion is now recognised. 
 Even by its admirers it used to be thought of as a 
 sort of wilderness of capricious or fantastic beauties : 
 it was a romance as incoherent in structure as it 
 was rich in ornament. We can see now, by the help 
 of abler and more appreciative criticism, that it is not 
 that. So far from being without thought, it suffers 
 from being overloaded with thought beyond what 
 Keats was able to express clearly or articulately. 
 So far from being a fantasy or series of fantasies, it 
 is a spiritual allegory, confused indeed, or rather 
 perplexed, but serious, even profound. When Keats 
 told Shelley to " be more of an artist, and load every 
 rift of your subject with ore," he was speaking of 
 
KEATS 293 
 
 what he had done himself. To Shelley indeed he 
 goes on to say, " Is not this extraordinary talk for the 
 writer of Endymion, whose mind was like a pack of 
 scattered cards ? " But we must supplement this by 
 what he had said elsewhere and before he had lost 
 his nerve : " That which is creative must create itself. 
 In Endymion I leaped headlong into the sea, and 
 thereby have become bettor acquainted with the 
 soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I 
 had stayed upon the green shore and piped a silly pipe." 
 He could afford, a year or two after he had written 
 Endymion, to look back on it as a slight thing, even 
 as a failure. But no one else can afford to do so. 
 
 Nor again does it lead to the clearest view of 
 Endymion to regard it as revolutionary in art. Re- 
 volutionary no doubt it was, as all new movements 
 in art are. But it was so in its effect rather than 
 in its purpose and essence. It was simply Keats 
 writing as well as he could " as good as I had 
 power to make it " is his own phrase. Then he 
 published it in order to get rid of it ; in order to 
 begin again and do better. He would not waste 
 time over altering it and making it better. Other 
 tasks for other worlds; this task was done, and done 
 with. " Had I been nervous about its being a perfect 
 piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled 
 over every page, it would not have been written; for 
 it is not in my nature to fumble." When we criticise 
 Endymion, when we discriminate in it between what is 
 good and what is not so good, or what is frankly bad, 
 we run the risk of falling into just the mistake that 
 Keats himself had the genius and the insight to avoid. 
 It could not have been written otherwise ; it is a 
 living organism, which only exists, and can only be 
 dealt with, as a single thing. 
 
294 KEATS 
 
 Thus it is that our appreciation of Endymion normally 
 passes through three stages. There is the first' intoxi- 
 cation, when it comes with its full impact on us in 
 youth, producing its effect as a whole in some sense, 
 but still confusedly : 
 
 " A wilderness of sweets, for Nature here 
 Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will 
 Her virgin fancies, pouring forth more sweet, 
 Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss." 
 
 Then there is an intermediate period many readers, 
 not a few genuine lovers of poetry, never get beyond 
 it when we see the faults, the immaturities, the 
 lapses of taste ; and of course the poem is full of 
 all these if we look for them. The " enormous bliss " 
 turns at this stage into a series of enormities that set 
 our teeth on edge. It is a disillusionment like that of 
 Endymion's own waking. 
 
 " Lo ! the poppies hung 
 Dew-dabbled on their stalks, the ouzel sung 
 A heavy ditty, and the sullen day 
 Had chidden herald Hesperus away, 
 With leaden looks : the solitary breeze 
 Blustered and slept." 
 
 But if we have patience, there comes a time when 
 the faults cease to matter, when we do not trouble 
 about them; when we do not even desire that the 
 poem should be other than what it is, realising at 
 last, as Keats did from the first, that it could not 
 be other than what it is. And then, if I may judge 
 from my own experience, it resumes all its fascina- 
 tion, and now permanently ; it becomes what Keats 
 meant, a joy for ever. 
 
 " Its loveliness increases ; it will never 
 Pass into nothingness : but still will keep 
 A bower quiet for us, and a sleep 
 
KEATS 295 
 
 Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. 
 
 Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing 
 
 A flowery band to bind us to the earth, 
 
 Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth 
 
 Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, 
 
 Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways 
 
 Made for our searching : yes, in spite of all, 
 
 Some shape of beauty moves away the pall 
 
 From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon, 
 
 Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon 
 
 For simple sheep ; and such are daffodils 
 
 With the green world they live in " 
 
 and such is Endymion. To quote again from it : 
 
 " Its influence, 
 
 Thrown in our eyes, genders a novel sense, 
 At which we start and fret ; till in the end, 
 Melting into its radiance, we blend, 
 Mingle, and so become a part of it." 
 
 Looked at in this Avay, Endymion is simply the incar- 
 nation of poetry in Keats in the year 1817. There is 
 plenty in it to criticise; but we shall be inclined 
 to feel that the time is in some sense wasted in 
 criticising it, which we might spend in reading it. 
 Otherwise we shall be apt to fall into the mistake of 
 regarding the faults as substantive things. They are 
 not that, any more than the beauties are. Both are 
 merely qualities of the thing itself. 
 
 Endymion is the palmary instance of what is more 
 clearly marked in Keats than in almost any other poet, 
 the progress of poetry in the poet himself. The 
 progress is so swift, the medium in which it takes 
 place so transparent, that one can see the move- 
 ment, one might almost say, from page to page. In 
 his short poetical life, it is as though he were rapidly 
 shedding skin after skin, and throwing the cast skin 
 away from him, pushed out and falling away under the 
 
296 KEATS 
 
 pressure of the swift central growth. It is as though 
 the seven-years' change that insensibly replaces the 
 human body by wholly new tissues were going on 
 visibly, at seven-fold speed. This early poetry of 
 his is never Astatic : it is what is just caught for a 
 moment in the very act of transformation. Even, for 
 instance, at the points where Endymion is likest Leigh 
 Hunt, the likeness is superficial and transitory. There 
 are lines and passages in the Story of Rimini which 
 give a momentary impression of being like Keats. 
 
 " April with his white hands wet with flowers " 
 
 some one who came suddenly on the line might 
 very well say, or think, " Surely that is Keats " ; and 
 similarly with the line about the fountain that 
 
 " Shakes its loosening silver in the sun " : 
 
 or with a passage, once or twice, running into several 
 lines. Take one instance : 
 
 " Roses in heaps were there, both red and white, 
 Lilies angelical, and gorgeous glooms 
 Of wall-flowers, and blue hyacinths, and blooms 
 Hanging thick clusters from light boughs ; in short, 
 All the sweet cups to which the bees resort." 
 
 It would be possible to mix up, for a moment, 
 that garden in the wood at Rimini with the bower 
 of Adonis in Endymion. But as soon as one looks at 
 it with a steadied eye, the difference becomes clear. 
 To feel it, one has not to go to Keats where he is 
 absolutely miraculous, to lines like 
 
 " As does the nightingale up-perched high, 
 And cloister'd among cool and bunched leaves 
 She sings but to her love, nor e'er conceives 
 How tiptoe Night holds back her dark-grey hood " : 
 
KEATS 297 
 
 or the couplet, with its dark splendour and wild pierc- 
 ing sweetness : 
 
 "And here is manna pick'd from Syrian trees, 
 In starlight, by the three Hesperides." 
 
 It is sufficient to take a passage where he is only, so 
 to speak, at his normal, not at his best : 
 
 "Above his head 
 
 Four lily stalks did their white honours wed 
 To make a coronal ; and round him grew 
 All tendrils green, of every bloom and hue ; 
 Convolvulus in streaked vases flush, 
 The creeper, mellowing for an autumn blush, 
 And virgin's bower, trailing airily." 
 
 That is not so good, technically, as the passage from 
 the Story of Rimini which I have just quoted. The 
 metre straggles and trails. It is impossible to say 
 that " Four lily stalks did their white honours wed " 
 is even a passably good line: still less that it is a 
 line with the quality of Hunt's " lilies angelical and 
 gorgeous glooms." But the vital difference is this, and 
 it transcends or ignores all merely technical points : 
 the Hunt is static, inert, finished ; the Keats thrills 
 and is alive. The growth and progress of poetry 
 pulsate in it. Then Keats passes forward and leaves it 
 behind. 
 
 This process of perpetual transformation and rein- 
 carnation may be traced most plainly if we look at it 
 going on in a single separable group of Keats' poems, 
 in his Odes. Let us look at them. 
 
 I omit, as of little importance for this purpose, like 
 the rest of his early and only inchoate work, the two 
 Odes written before Endymion, the Ode to Apollo, and 
 the Ode on a Lock of Milton s Hair: and also the two 
 pieces included as Odes by Mr. de Selincourt, but 
 hardly belonging to this type of poetry under any 
 
298 KEATS 
 
 ordinary definition, the lines To Fanny, and the piece 
 beginning What can I do to drive away Remembrance 
 from my eyes ? I omit likewise the four lovely lyrics 
 in the volume of 1820, Ever let the Fancy roam, Bards 
 of Passion and of Mirth, Souls of Poets dead and gone, 
 and, No, these Hours are gone away. These four are 
 sometimes called Odes, and in fact Keats calls one 
 of them an Ode himself ; but if one has to give them 
 a technical name, they are not Odes, but rondels. 
 Apart from these, there are ten or eleven Odes to 
 consider : the precise number is arguable, as I will 
 explain directly. Three, or four, of these occur in 
 Endymion ; one, the Ode to Maia, is of the inter- 
 mediate year : the other six all belong to the annus 
 mirdbilis, and are justly singled out as standing 
 apart in literature. "Had Keats left us only these," 
 Mr. Bridges says, and one can hardly disagree, " his 
 rank among the poets would not be lower than it is." 
 
 The Odes in Endymion are, like Endymion itself, not 
 yet poetry consummate, but poetry in the very act and 
 process of full creation. Two of them are mere frag- 
 ments the Hymn to Neptune in Book III. and the 
 Ode of Diana in Book IV. ; both of these break off, 
 dramatically for the purposes of the poem, in the 
 middle of a line and of a sentence. Another, the 
 exquisite song of the Indian Maid in Book IV., can 
 perhaps be called an Ode, but doubtfully. It is a 
 unique and extraordinary experiment in what we may 
 alternatively call the treatment of an Ode in the 
 manner of a rondel, or the expansion of a rondel into 
 the scope and movement of an Ode. Keats himself, 
 it is worth noting, calls it a rondel, or, in the form of 
 the word that he uses, a roundelay. The fourth, or 
 the third if we exclude this one, is the Hymn to Pan 
 in the first book. 
 
KEATS 299 
 
 In all these, we see Keats getting at the Ode, both ^ 
 in form and in substance. The metrical form in the 
 two fragmentary Odes is irregular, the movement un- 
 certain. The Ode has not yet fully realised itself and 
 taken shape. In the Hymn to Pan it has almost done 
 so ; it is shaping beautifully, but is not quite shaped. 
 Keats has got hold of the strophic form and is playing 
 on it, fingering the strings and seeing what it will do. 
 He never perhaps wrote anything in a way more 
 beautiful, but its beauty comes in and through what is 
 imperfection. He and poetry will shed this off them, 
 throw it behind them, and pass on. 
 
 The "immortal fragment of inimitable beauty" I 
 quote Mr. Bridges again, for I cannot better his words 
 the Ode to Maia, belongs, as I said, to the intermediate 
 year, the year of pause and concentration. I do not 
 call it the year of growth, though it was that too, and 
 very remarkably ; but the growth in and throughout 
 the two great years was equally swift and equally 
 remarkable. This is the first poem of Keats in which 
 we feel, without any doubt or qualification, his com- 
 plete mastery of the instrument. The fragment has 
 only fourteen lines : it is even uncertain whether these 
 were meant to be a complete strophe, and how either 
 the theme or the rhythmical movement would have 
 been developed by him. What we do know when we 
 come to it, and what we know at once, is that the poet 
 who wrote it had the Ode, as a form of poetry, fully 
 between his hands. And so it was : for when we pass 
 on to the six Odes of 1819, we find his mastery of the 
 instrument complete. The Ode is now an attained 
 thing. He has settled its structure and movement; 
 he has compassed its form : so sure of it, and of 
 himself, is he now, that he can play with it, can make 
 the subtlest variations upon a perfect pattern, can even 
 
300 KEATS 
 
 in one case leave the pattern altogether with trium- 
 phant success. For Keats never stands still, never 
 repeats himself. " Rounded by thee, my song should 
 die away," he wrote in the Maia Ode. But that round 
 had no limit to its expansion. 
 
 When he wrote the six Odes, Keats had, so far 
 as concerned his own use, created and denned the 
 form of the Ode. In the Ode to Psyche he cast that 
 aside and created something quite new, a design so 
 beautiful that we do not miss the pattern. But in 
 the other five, the pattern on which he settled down 
 is of their essence. It is the pattern of a ten-line 
 stanza consisting of a quatrain followed by a sestet. 
 And when I say settled down, I mean settled down on 
 it as a central pattern or motive, round which he kept 
 moving, varying the detail, never making it exactly the 
 same twice. Not only does the metrical form of these 
 five Odes vary slightly between each and the others, 
 but all except one have internal variations also. The 
 Ode to Indolence and this is a touch which is extra- 
 ordinarily fine, whether it be calculated or instinc- 
 tive is precisely regular throughout. The Odes To 
 Autumn, To Melancholy, and On a Grecian Urn vary the 
 rhyming system between stanza and stanza. In the 
 Ode to the Nightingale, not only is there the exquisite 
 device of the shortened eighth line, which changes the 
 poise and movement of the whole stanza, but the 
 second stanza ends on a hypermetric line, " And with 
 thee fade away into the forest dim " with an instinct 
 so wholly right, with an effect so perfect, that one may 
 know the poem by heart and never notice the varia- 
 tion, but only feel the magic of the cadence. In the 
 9de to Autumn, the latest and the most absolutely 
 faultless of them all, it would be curious to ask how 
 many of the thousands by whom it is read and loved 
 
KEATS 301 
 
 and known have even noticed that the ten-line has 
 become an eleven-line stanza, and that the whole tone 
 and colour of the Ode are thus, by a device as simple 
 as it is masterly, carried into the metrical form itself. 
 The added line gives, as it is difficult to say how 
 anything else could have given, the richness, the lin- 
 geringness, the superflux, which are of the imagina- 
 tive essence of the subject. Form and substance are 
 wholly fused, and the body of the poem cannot be 
 distinguished from its soul. 
 
 When we pass from the Odes to Hyperion, here too 
 we see poetry in the act of growth, and now the growth 
 is so rapid that the execution could not keep pace with 
 it. Keats dropped it; took it up again the one in- 
 stance in which he did such a thing and began, 
 with dying hands, to remodel it ; and left it, a superb 
 and wonderful fragment, like the Transfiguration left 
 half-painted on the easel of Raffaele. The distance 
 between it and Endymion, when we remember that there 
 are only thirteen or fourteen months of time between 
 them, is incredible. Let us take one concrete instance, 
 which will serve as well as another for an illustration, 
 and set beside one another two passages from the two 
 poems which deal with the same motive of stillness. 
 First, that from Book I. of Endymion : 
 
 " And as a willow keeps 
 A patient watch over the stream that creeps 
 Windingly by it, so the quiet maid 
 Held her in peace ; so that a whispering blade 
 Of grass, a wailful gnat, a bee bustling 
 Down in the bluebells, or a wren light rustling 
 Among sere leaves and twigs, might all be heard." 
 
 Now, that from the beginning of Hyperion : 
 
 " No stir of air was there, 
 Not so much life as on a summer's day 
 
302 KEATS 
 
 Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, 
 But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. 
 A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more 
 By reason of his fallen divinity 
 Spreading a shade : the Naiad 'mid her reeds 
 Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips." 
 
 Between these two passages, each perfect of its kind, 
 poetry in Keats has undergone an enormous expansion. 
 It has become at once larger and deeper. This immense 
 growth in range and power had all been made in the 
 year's interval. 
 
 Poetical growth, like all other functions of life, is 
 secret ; it cannot be analysed and accounted for. But 
 we can trace, and mark definitely in it, certain factors ; 
 and there is one factor here of great importance, which 
 has not yet, I think, been singled out and weighed. 
 Stress has been laid, and rightly, on the Miltonic 
 influence and its effects. But there was another in- 
 fluence almost as potent, but more indirect and thus 
 less obvious. It is that of Dante. 
 
 In the revised Hyperion of a few months later, this 
 influence is still more marked. Curiously, it was 
 almost ignored until recently : Mr. Bridges was the 
 first to name it and bring it out clearly. But when 
 he says that it appears in the revised Hyperion for the 
 first time, I think he fails to notice that in the original 
 Hyperion it is already present. Unless I misunder- 
 stand him, he thinks that between the two versions 
 Keats had been reading Dante in the original, and 
 thus got at qualities in Dante's poetry which he could 
 not get at through a translation. It is worth while 
 looking into this. 
 
 We know that Gary's Dante was the one book that 
 Keats took with him on his Scottish tour in the 
 summer of 1818. We also know that he was study- 
 
KEATS 303 
 
 ing Italian, in order to read the Italian poets, in the 
 summer and autumn of 1819 that is, between the 
 composition of the earlier and the later versions of 
 Hyperion. To this there are a number of allusions in 
 his letters. But he never speaks of reading Dante in 
 the Italian. In September he writes from Winchester, 
 three days after he had composed the Ode to Autumn, 
 that he is reading Ariosto, not managing more than 
 six or eight stanzas at a time. He was still, that is, 
 a beginner, who found Ariosto difficult ; and this does 
 not look like reading Dante. But there is more than 
 this presumptive evidence ; for in the same letter he 
 goes on to speak of the reading of Dante as something 
 to come, and as part of his reason for learning Italian : 
 it is, he says, well worth while. The conclusion seems 
 certain, that when he wrote the revised Hyperion he 
 still knew Dante only through Gary, and that the 
 heightened Dantesque influence in the revision (which, 
 as Mr. Bridges well says, is shown not merely in the 
 gravity of the vision, but in echoes of the Italian 
 balance, and in a mastery here and there, both in 
 thought and style, of Dante's especial grace) is only 
 the deepened working of what was already there, and 
 what he had got through Gary. The instinct which 
 enabled Keats to divine Greek poetry from what he 
 found in Tooke's Pantheon and in Spence and Lempriere 
 would find no difficulty in seeing Dante through a 
 translation. And Gary, we must recollect, gives much 
 of Dante's poetry ; he still remains, after all the 
 modern versions, the classical and in some respects 
 the unreplaceable English translation. Only there is 
 this to remember: that Gary's Dante is not only 
 Dante imperfectly given (as all translations of poetry 
 must be), but Dante, one might say, a little Miltonised : 
 and the result is that the Dantesque influence in 
 
304 KEATS 
 
 Hyperion which also I think exists, though it is less 
 clearly traceable, in others of Keats' poems of that 
 year was mixed up with, and has not been discrimi- 
 nated from, the Miltonic influence itself, which is so 
 patent, and which was so powerful that Keats himself 
 rebelled against it and deliberately resolved to break 
 away from it. 
 
 This Dantesque influence is strongest in Book I. of 
 Hyperion. The whole mise-en-scdne there has clear 
 traces of Dante's Inferno the City of Dis, the Cen- 
 taurs, Malebolge, the Giant-rimmed embankment be- 
 tween the eighth and ninth Circles. But the influence 
 is not only general, it is now and then specific ; there 
 are at least a dozen passages where it may be clearly 
 discerned, in points of substance and style. 
 
 A few may be named as instances. When Keats 
 makes Oceanus say to Hyperion, 
 
 " Seize the arrow's barb, 
 Before the tense string murmur," 
 
 there is a reminiscence, hardly uncertain, of Virgil's 
 words to Dante : 
 
 " Disse : Scocca 
 L'arco del dir, che infino al ferro hai tratto." 
 
 Or take these lines : 
 
 " By her in stature the tall Amazon 
 ! Had stood a pigmy's height : she would have ta'en 
 Achilles by the hair and bent his neck." 
 
 That is exactly Dante's manner of pictorial exemplifi- 
 cation, and his manner of using the classical mythology 
 for imaginative purposes. Or again, take this passage : 
 
 " She went 
 
 With backward footing through the shade a space : 
 He follow'd, and she turn'd to lead the way 
 Through aged boughs, that yielded like the mist 
 Which eagles cleave upmounting from their nest." 
 
KEATS 305 
 
 That is Dante's manner of visualisation, reinforced by 
 a characteristically Dantesque simile. Only two poets 
 have written in just this manner ; and they are 
 Dante and Keats. 
 
 Here too we may again clearly recognise the 
 Dantesque simile : 
 
 "As with us mortal men, the laden heart 
 Is persecuted more, and fever'd more, 
 When it is nighing to the mournful house 
 Where other hearts are sick of the same bruise ; 
 So Saturn . . ." 
 
 Another instance of striking affinity, combined with 
 and partly due to actual suggestion, occurs at the 
 beginning of Book II. of Hyperion, in the description 
 of Saturn's arrival at the " sad place " (this phrase 
 itself is Dante's and is very characteristic of him), 
 when the fallen Titans are huddled together : 
 
 " Where their own groans 
 They felt, but heard not, for the solid roar 
 Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse 
 Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where : 
 Crag jutting forth to crag." 
 
 This cannot fail to remind us of the description of the 
 central chasm in the last canto of the Inferno : 
 
 " Che non per vista, ma per suono e noto 
 D' un ruscelletto, che quivi discende 
 Per la buca d' un sasso, ch' egli ha roso 
 Col corso ch' egli avvolge : e poco pende." 
 
 Even in single lines there is now and then an 
 accent, new in Keats, but in no way Miltonic, indeed 
 essentially un-Miltonic, which bears the closest affinity 
 to Dante's. Take lines like these : 
 
 " There was a listening fear in her regard." 
 
 " To the level of his ear 
 Leaning with parted lips." 
 
 U 
 
306 KEATS 
 
 " While still the dazzling globe maintained eclipse." 
 " And plunged all noiseless into the deep night." 
 
 The manner is so exactly Dante's that one finds one's 
 self as it were involuntarily trying to remember what 
 the Italian of them is. It is a more intimate and 
 subtler link between Keats and Dante than that which 
 the Miltonic inversions and Latinisms of Hyperion 
 create between Keats and Milton. For that is a like- 
 ness of manner, and sometimes only of mannerisms ; 
 this is something deeper, a likeness of mind. The two 
 poets have a subtle kinship in manner of visualisation, 
 in evolution of thought and in use of ornament ; but 
 also, and even more vitally, in the way in which their 
 imagination works. The resemblance is not imitative ; 
 it comes naturally and unconsciously from a spiritual 
 affinity; from a similar height and outlook having 
 been reached on the mountain of poetry. 
 
 Not in Hyperion only, but throughout the work of 
 this year, we have this increased height, this widened 
 outlook." There is a firmer and larger handling, as we 
 see in the Odes, and also very remarkably in Lamia 
 and the Eve of St. Agnes as compared with the Isabella 
 of the year before. And as Keats ascends, his horizons 
 expand : they begin to give large prospect into new 
 worlds of poetry. In the remodelled Hyperion he is 
 moving towards that final height of poetry which 
 transcends both romance and epic by transforming and 
 merging! both into direct vision. In the Belle Dame 
 Sans Merci he goes straight, without apparent effort 
 and by pure instinct of genius, to the centre of 
 romanticism. In the lovely fragment of the Eve of St. 
 Mark he divines and anticipates the later movement 
 which, originated by Rossetti and Morris forty years 
 
KEATS 307 
 
 later, has given poetry a new language and profoundly 
 affected its progress. 
 
 Poetry still moves within the horizons to which Keats 
 saw. It is 'quite possible to understand how Rossetti, 
 in one of his moods of brilliant and imperious paradox, 
 should have told Morris to give up poetry and take to 
 painting, because in poetry Keats had done everything, 
 while in painting what there was to do had been hardly 
 begun. This was a paradox of course ; obviously so even 
 then, and much more obviously now when we look back 
 on the progress and achievements of poetry since that 
 advice was given. For what Keats does is just this, that 
 he points and urges poetry forward. His horizon is still 
 unreached. For it extended to a point at which, as 
 he writes in one of his letters, " every human being 
 might become great, and humanity, instead of being a 
 wide heath of furze and briars, with here and there a 
 remote oak or pine, would become a grand democracy 
 of forest trees." And this means that, in the full 
 sense, poetry would become co-extensive with life. 
 So too he had already written, in one of those passages 
 of profound thought and prescient insight which make 
 Endymion so remarkable : 
 
 " But this is human life ; the war, the deeds, 
 The disappointment, the anxiety, 
 Imagination's struggles, far and nigh, 
 All human ; bearing in themselves this good, 
 That they are still the air, the subtle food, 
 To make us feel existence." 
 
 This is the task of poetry; a task for ever being 
 accomplished and never accomplished. Progress is 
 the condition of existence. 
 
 " He ne'er is crowned 
 With immortality, who fears to follow 
 Where airy voices lead." 
 
308 KEATS 
 
 In another mood, Keats himself can speak otherwise: 
 " The count of mighty poets is made up ; the world 
 has done its duty ; the sun of poesy is set." But it 
 is not so, and it will not be so while the world lasts. 
 He himself has taken his place ; he is 
 
 " One of those 
 
 Who, when this planet's sphering time doth close, 
 Will be its high remembrancers : who they ? 
 The mighty ones who have made eternal day 
 For Greece and England." 
 
 Not for Greece and England only, but for the whole 
 world. Poetry is a function of life, and while life 
 continues, poetry lives with it, creates, interprets life. 
 So long as the sun rises, the Muse will be found as of 
 old " dancing before the morning gates of heaven." 
 Only when this planet's sphering time has closed 
 indeed, will the roll of the poets be made up; and 
 then at last, in the words of Keats' majestic couplet, 
 
 v \ o \ x 
 
 " No tongue shall ask, whence come ye 1 but ye shall 
 
 Be gods of your own rest imperial." 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 THE lectures I have given during the last five years 
 have all dealt in one way or another, and in one or 
 another of its many complex aspects, with the progress 
 of poetry; and I may now be allowed to recapitulate. 
 
 Poetry is a function of life ; and life being the con- 
 tinuous operation of a force or a complex system 
 of forces, poetry must like all other vital functions 
 share this quality of movement, of existing in and 
 manifesting itself through movement. Poetry is an 
 interpretation of life ; and the interpretation must, like 
 the thing interpreted, be organic and in continual pro- 
 gress, taking form from point to point, from moment 
 to moment. 
 
 But poetry is also a pattern of life ; in a phrase 
 which I have already more than once quoted, and to 
 which I would once more return, it condenses out of 
 the flying vapours of the world an image of human 
 perfection. In all its shapes, in the hands of all the 
 poets, it has for a moment caught some such image of 
 perfection. And it has not only caught the image, 
 but fixed it. This is its quality as art. For that is 
 the function which art alone can perform : not only 
 to apprehend a pattern which subsists behind life, 
 out of which life is created and towards which life 
 moves ; but also to make that apprehended pattern 
 permanently visible, to fix and record the momentary 
 image as it flashes and disappears. 
 
 30!) 
 
310 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 Thus the movement of poetry, while in one aspect, 
 and that the more obvious, it is irregular, interrupted, 
 seemingly unaccountable, is, if we regard it in another 
 aspect, continuous and organic. The pattern with 
 which it is concerned, which it seeks, finds and re- 
 cords, manifests itself here and there, now and then; 
 glimpses of it are caught and withdrawn. The poets 
 appear irregularly, now in groups and again singly, 
 sometimes clearly following some development, some 
 line or current of imaginative advance, sometimes 
 seemingly in isolation or in opposition. They come 
 before or behind their age, or dropped into their age, 
 as it were, out of another. Poetry brightens and 
 dwindles : now it burns with a wide steady glow, now 
 it concentrates into a brilliant point. Sometimes for 
 a whole age, and in a whole area or period of civilisation, 
 it seems to disappear : only after it has rekindled else- 
 where can men, looking back, realise that its life was 
 in fact continuous; that the unpoetical periods were 
 those in which the life of poetry was undergoing a 
 change, and that in that change the movement, which 
 is its life, then consisted. But while fragments of the 
 pattern are successively made visible by the poets, the 
 pattern itself is one ; it is the single perfection attain- 
 able by the single thing to which we give the name of 
 life. Only the pattern itself is not a fixed and imposed 
 pattern ; it also, no less than life, is alive. To put it 
 into words is like drawing a flame; it can never be 
 drawn alike twice, because it never looks the same 
 twice, although it is the same flame. 
 
 Poetry, on its formal and technical side, is patterned 
 language; and language likewise, being one of the 
 ways of giving expression to life, is alive and perpetually 
 in movement. Each race has its own language ; and 
 within a single race the language alters, changes 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 311 
 
 colour, shifts its outline, with each generation. Even 
 this is understating the case ; for within the same 
 country and the same period, the language of no two 
 people is quite the same, if they each use language 
 imaginatively, if, that is to say, it is alive in their 
 hands and a function of their own live personality. All 
 poets use language thus ; and so it is, that alike in its 
 substantial and its formal character, poetry presents 
 this double aspect. On the one hand, it is a single 
 continuous vital movement, being the pattern and 
 expressive function of a single thing, life ; and its form 
 is similarly a single continuous creation of pattern in 
 a single material, language. On the other hand, it is, 
 in substance, the aggregate of an infinite number of 
 luminous spaces, as one might say, in which for a 
 moment some point or aspect of life is caught, takes 
 shape and is thus fixed for record and in some sense 
 made permanent ; and in form, an endless tissue of 
 patterned language, in which, as it flows off the loom, 
 the pattern is perpetually varying, not only from 
 country to country and from age to age, but in the 
 same age and country from poet to poet, and in the 
 same poet from moment to moment. 
 
 To the historian, it is the movement, the progress 
 and flux of poetry, that is most prominent, that most 
 engages attention and invites appreciation ; and thus 
 we have histories of poetry, in which the poetical 
 product of some country or period is methodically 
 arranged, enumerated, and criticised ; in which the 
 growth, culmination, and decay of some particular 
 form of poetry are traced and examined ; in which, for 
 the space under survey, we are given a reasoned cata- 
 logue of poets and their works. 
 
 The theorist or analyst approaches poetry in a 
 different spirit. Working on the material arranged for 
 
312 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 him by the historian, he classifies the extant product 
 of poetry under heads, assigning to each its particular 
 mark and quality; he collects and disposes metrical 
 forms, methods of handling, styles of composition ; 
 he makes those generalisations which are afterwards 
 erected into laws, and rule, or are thought to rule, the 
 practice of poets, until it is found that they are not 
 laws at all, but merely provisional theories or con- 
 venient summaries of facts; that they have become 
 obsolete or useless, that poetry has moved away from 
 them, and that the laws of poetry are like the laws of 
 life, a secret. 
 
 To a larger and more profound view, however, poetry 
 appears not only as a movement, but as a substance, 
 solid, continuous, and in a sense unchangeable. We 
 may be reminded of the majestic passage of Lucretius l 
 in which he sets forth, with unsurpassed force and 
 impressiveness, the double doctrine of the perpetual 
 movement, the racing speed, of the atoms and the 
 worlds, and the eternal balance and peace of the 
 whole universe, and illustrates it by one of his 
 noblest similes, that of the great army filling a whole 
 plain with the glitter and thunder of its movement ; 
 " Yet there is some place on the mountain heights from 
 which they seem to stand still, a steady brightness 
 upon the plains." 
 
 " Et tamen est quidam locus altis raontibus unde 
 Stare videntur, et in campis consistere fulgor." 
 
 That steady brightness, the sum total of a complex, 
 multitudinous and ceaseless movement, also belongs to 
 poetry. Subtle and ethereal as it is, fragile and fleeting 
 as its incarnations appear to be, poetry is neverthe- 
 less more real, more substantial than those flying 
 
 1 De Rerum Natura, ii. 308-332. 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 313 
 
 vapours which constitute what we call the real world, 
 and which in poetry are condensed and acquire per- 
 manence ; which in poetry, and in poetry alone, become 
 real in the highest sense. Though it is perpetually in 
 movement, though indeed it is movement, one might 
 say of it, as of the ether of the physicists, that I 
 quote Clerk Maxwell's words it " is certainly the 
 largest, and probably the most uniform body of which 
 we have any knowledge." The analogy is fertile ; it 
 becomes still more impressive if we turn to the state- 
 ment of the most recent physical doctrine. " I am 
 now," Sir Oliver Lodge writes in his treatise on the 
 Ether of Space, " able to advocate a view of the ether 
 which makes it not only uniformly present and all- 
 pervading, but also massive and substantial beyond 
 conception. It is turning out to be by far the most 
 substantial thing perhaps the only substantial thing 
 in the material universe. Compared to ether the 
 densest matter, such as lead or gold, is a filmy gossamer 
 structure, like a comet's tail." More than that ; ntatter 
 is composed of ether ; what we call solids are composed 
 of the one fluid. Anything which we call material, be 
 it an atom or a world, is a specifically modified portion 
 of ether : it is the ether doing something. And the 
 ether, so far as we can define it, is itself an energy, 
 a movement ; and yet that movement is, in its sum, 
 rest. " Matter seems to have no grip of it," Sir Oliver 
 Lodge goes on to say : " all potential energy exists in it. 
 It may vibrate and it may rotate, but it is stationary 
 the most stationary body we know ; our standard of 
 rest." In some such way wo may regard poetry like- 
 wise ; and it will add a new force and meaning to what 
 has been said about poetry by great thinkers, and by 
 the poets themselves, when they have assigned to 
 poetry a greater permanence, a more solid reality, than 
 
314 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 can be claimed for anything else made or handled by 
 mankind. 
 
 This is the transcendental aspect of poetry, regarded 
 as a permanent essence, an universal energy. But 
 poetry in that sense is, like the universal ether, in- 
 cognisable to our senses; we can only see and feel 
 it, we can only know of it, through the matter which 
 it creates, and in which it manifests itself. Poetry 
 as materialised in poems, in the actual product of 
 poets, is what we can actually see and handle. This 
 matter, this embodiment of poetry in poems, is always 
 changing, and we can realise that in its changes it 
 follows certain lines of force, certain streams of vital 
 progress. The idea of progress involves the ideas of 
 space and time; in the sense in which poetry is a 
 spiritual ether, an all-pervading energy, it is inde- 
 pendent of space and time; but poetry as we know 
 it is the progressive manifestation or materialisation, 
 in poets and their poems, of part after part of the 
 total perfection. The images in which poetry consists 
 are always being woven and unwoven, condensing and 
 disappearing. The work of the poets is only to be 
 realised and appreciated in the light of this move- 
 ment ; and conversely, the movement itself, the pro- 
 gress of poetry which has throughout and from first 
 to last been the subject of our consideration, is only to 
 be realised through acquaintance with the work of 
 the poets. To understand what poetry in itself is, 
 we must understand the actual poems or some of 
 them at least in which poetry has found progressive 
 expression. 
 
 Such understanding is not a merely intellectual 
 process; it is imaginative, and as such creative. It 
 is the interpretation of poetry, to ourselves or to 
 others, in some such way as poetry itself is the in- 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 315 
 
 terpretation of life. Poetry does not merely interpret, 
 it effectually creates the world : and so by a strict 
 and real analogy, the reading of poetry, to be effective, 
 must re-create the poetry read, must re-poetise it. 
 The image of perfection, once materialised in words 
 by the imaginative force of the poet, has to be relit 
 or rekindled by the sympathetic imagination of the 
 lover of poetry. 
 
 This process can be perpetually repeated ; it has 
 to be perpetually repeated. And though repeated, 
 it is always with a difference. The new mind brings 
 with it to the recorded image a new imaginative 
 quality, new associations, new experience. Thus it 
 is, that while the stimulus, the quickening power, 
 of the poet is potentially permanent, is capable, even 
 in a distant age, and to people speaking a different 
 language, of renewing its effective power as an in- 
 terpretation of life, the interpretation of poetry is 
 equally endless, and the next word always remains 
 to be said about any poet and any poem. 
 
 Whether we regard poetry transcendentally as an 
 universal essence, or historically as a progress mani- 
 fested in the extant work of poets, from Homer or 
 the predecessors of Homer down to the present 
 moment, it is alike true that poetry is one thing, 
 just as life itself is one thing. Wherever we touch 
 it, we find it, at that point, in that concrete instance 
 or manifestation, organically connected with all other 
 poetry. Our study of its progress may be taken up 
 at any point ; for, at any point, it is in the line of 
 historical descent and ascent, and connected vitally 
 with other poetry, not merely that of the same 
 poet or the same school, or the same nation and 
 language, but with all poetry from first to last. We 
 cannot stop anywhere, and separate any poet from 
 
316 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 his environment, both the more immediate environ- 
 ment of his own time, and the larger environment 
 of the times which together with his own constitute 
 one single movement, one pattern endlessly woven. 
 
 It is useful, however, in studying poetry either as 
 an essence or as a movement, to concentrate upon the 
 great poets. We may thus escape being bewildered by 
 multiplicity of detail ; we shall be dealing with poetry 
 at its highest power and in its clearest manifesta- 
 tion ; in them we shall find centres of force in relation 
 to which the streams of tendency group themselves, 
 fixed points which signal to one another. 
 
 In dealing with our own poetry, I have attempted 
 to deal with it in this spirit. In my opening lecture, 
 I went back to Gray's Ode, as the classical text of 
 a doctrine and practice which are still applicable. 
 The actual progress of poetry, regarded from our 
 point of view, as it falls into perspective when seen 
 from the place we occupy, followed certain main 
 historical lines. 
 
 The statement of the progress of poetry given by 
 Gray, " from Greece to Italy, and from Italy to Eng- 
 land," is almost baldly simple. It is true, and we 
 shall always find occasion to go back to it for guid- 
 ance. But it is not the whole truth, as he himself 
 knew, and as we, with an immensely widened range 
 of knowledge, cannot for a moment fail to realise. 
 On all sides, at every point, it must be enlarged 
 and amplified. Even of the progress of poetry in 
 Europe it gives a very incomplete account ; and 
 Europe is not, and never was, separate from the 
 other continents which reach down upon the Medi- 
 terranean basin. Extra-European influences have 
 gone largely towards determining the progress even 
 of strictly European poetry; and of much poetry 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 317 
 
 written in Europe it would be either untrue, or all 
 but meaningless, to say that it is strictly European. 
 This applies to Greek poetry itself, although Greek 
 poetry approximates more nearly than most others 
 to being a native and indigenous growth. Ipnia ;, 
 was in direct touch with that Asiatic East to which 
 it geographically belongs. The Iliad is not without 
 significant traces of a non-European element. The 
 Greek lyric, the Greek drama, both incorporate 
 Asiatic factors, and represent an outgrowth of poetry 
 quickened by foreign fertilisation. The later Alex-*--' 
 andrian schools of Greek poetry, as their very name 
 implies, sprang up in an environment where East 
 and West interacted upon one another: Egypt and 
 Syria, even when under Greek rule and even where 
 most largely Hellenised, remained essentially what they 
 had been, provinces of an Asiatic Empire. After the 
 central life of poetry had passed to Italy, the Africary 
 poets of the fourth century had an important, possibly 
 a decisive share in effecting the movement of trans- 
 formation by which the germs of Romance poetry, as 
 distinguished from Latin poetry, were created, and in 
 thus initiating the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages 
 themselves, a wholly foreign influence, that of Arab and 
 Arabo-Persian poetry, acting through Provence and 
 Sicily as well as more directly, infused new blood, new 
 forms, a new imaginative interpretation of life, into 
 both the earlier French and the later and more 
 centrklly classic Italian poetry. As we approach 
 nearer modern times, we can see the movement of 
 poetry widening, its progress becoming more multi- 
 plex. It passed from Italy to England as Gray says : 
 but that passage took place very largely through 
 France; and the affiliation of English to French 
 poetry is now recognised as a fact on which full 
 
318 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 stress must be laid alongside of the direct main 
 movement of poetry from Italy to England. It is 
 so with Chaucer; with whom indeed the risk is of 
 over- stressing the French and under-stressing the 
 Italian parentage. It is so with the whole Elizabethan 
 age : it is so with Dryden and the Augustans. The 
 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have gone on 
 further towards the merging of separate streams of 
 progress into an oecumenical movement. It has been 
 
 becoming more and more the case that aU_poetry js Jn._, 
 touch with all other poetry. Any new poetical move- 
 ment now, through the diffusion of knowledge and the 
 intercommunication of ideas, almost at once affects 
 the whole movement of poetry as a common art and 
 a common inheritance throughout the world. 
 
 This integrating process in poetry itself as a human 
 
 /art, and a function of human life, has been reflected 
 in a corresponding integration of criticism. The great 
 poets still remain, as they always have been and always 
 will be, unique, apart, and individual. But the art of 
 poetry is felt as one art and not many; its progress 
 is the progress, through many poets, each in his own 
 time and manner sharing a single inspiration, of an 
 impulse and an achievement belonging to the whole 
 human race. 
 
 The integration of criticism is the task which any 
 exponent of poetry must now keep before him as a 
 guiding and controlling motive. In fuller terms the 
 
 _inatter may be expressed thus. Any poem, or more x 
 
 i largely, any work of art, is the projection and materi- 
 
 alisation, upon a particular point and in a particular 
 
 manner, of the vital and universal imagination, which 
 
 Ljs the essence or soul of art : the making visible, in ^ 
 
 a recorded and thus in some sense a permanent shape, 
 
 of some part of that pattern of life towards which all 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 319 
 
 art is directed. In all art there is a common element ; 
 for all life, the whole vital process and progress of 
 existence, bears to some extent the same interpreta- 
 tion, though in variable perspective, in a multiplicity 
 of colours and tones. Yet the interpretation is always 
 different, because it is always personal and individual. 
 Poetry can be regarded either as a process of historic 
 evolution, or, apart from the forms of time and space, 
 as the invisible movement visible, that is to say, not 
 in itself but only in the matter which it creates 
 which one can only define by saying that it underlies 
 all else, that it is substance, energy, life. 
 
 We stand now at a point following the end of a 
 century of extraordinary poetical production. That 
 century includes great names in the poetry of other 
 countries and languages ; but the main life, the cen- 
 tral current of poetry, has throughout it been in 
 England and the English-speaking world. The won- 
 derful outburst of poetry which began with the Lyrical 
 Ballads of 1798 opened a period during which the 
 progress of poetry was as visible as it was splendid. 
 The last of the great Victorian poets have now passed 
 away. There is a feeling that the progress of poetry 
 has come to a pause, that poetry is for a time ex- 
 hausted by its own fertility. But more than that : 
 there is a feeling, in some quarters at least, that poetry 
 itself is exhausted, that it has said its word, given 
 its interpretation, fulfilled its progress. 
 
 This at least is a mere fallacy. \ Poetry, as thei 
 imaginative interpretation of life, is a function of life 
 which must continue its movement so long as th$ 
 movement of life itself continues. The world cannot 1 
 live on the art of the past. That art is indeed not 
 of the past only; it is an existing and living force. 
 It has become, in a sense, part of life. But just as 
 
320 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 the patterns of life which it created call for continu- 
 ally fresh interpretations, so life calls to be rewoven 
 in continually fresh patterns. 
 
 Criticism, in the highest sense of that ambiguous 
 word, that is to say, the interpretation and re-creation 
 of extant and inherited poetry, new or old, can never 
 exhaust itself so long as poetry exists. Poetry, the 
 interpretation and re-creation of life, can never ex- 
 haust itself so long as life exists. Both, each in its 
 own sphere, are a perpetual progress, an endless 
 integration. And there is, as I have elsewhere in- 
 dicated, another reason why there must always be new 
 poetry. It is this ; that poetry will always be, some- 
 where and by some minds, neglected or misunderstood ; 
 and it is just this neglect or this misunderstanding 
 which new poetry is needed in order to correct. For 
 the same imaginative effort and impulse which enter 
 anew into past poetry and thrill to it vitally, likewise, 
 and as part of the same process, create poetry afresh. 
 If at any time past poetry fails from the living virtue 
 which it once had, a new poetical instinct must arise 
 to redeem the failure : and that instinct not only 
 vivifies the old poetry, but creates new. The two 
 movements are theoretically distinct, but actually in- 
 separable. 
 
 A time in which poetry as a creative vital pro- 
 cess should cease, and a future age find all its wants 
 in that direction satisfied by continuing to read 
 Wordsworth, is only thinkable if the creative instinct 
 were to cease likewise. It can hardly be made more 
 grotesque by being put in different language : that 
 the affairs of the Muses should be wound up, and the 
 shareholders live on the capital realised by the liqui- 
 dation as long as it lasted. That could not be long ; 
 it would very soon be used up, would dissolve and 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 321 
 
 disappear. But indeed it is not thinkable even thus : 
 for if the creative instinct ceased, the appreciative 
 instinct, which is the same thing working on a 
 different plane, would cease likewise, at the same 
 time, by one and the same movement. Poetry would 
 be dead in both senses. Poetry is not a thing, it is 
 an energy : as Aristotle defined it, a productive energy : 
 and when a productive energy ceases to produce, it 
 ceases to exist at all. If the art of the living poet 
 became extinct, the poetry of past ages would become 
 dead art. The dead praise thee not, neither any that 
 go down into silence. 
 
 Nor is it true that criticism and poetry are in some 
 way hostile to one another. Criticism in its true sense 
 is simply appreciation, and it would be plainly absurd 
 to say that art cannot live or thrive when it is ap- 
 preciated. The progress of poetry has its periodic 
 movement, as all vital functions have. So has the 
 progress of criticism ; and the two periods do not 
 coincide : but neither do they alternate. It is nearer 
 the truth to say that, when poetry is at a low vitality, 
 poetical criticism also tends to lower its lights, to 
 stiffen and become mechanical. But it is just at that 
 period of its declension that it turns from its higher 
 function to another which, though useful and even 
 necessary, is lower, that of analysing and classifyukg, 
 of accumulating and assorting facts. It spreads ijBfep 
 out over this occupation ; and thus its bulk may be 
 largest, and its seeming importance greatest, when it 
 is doing its work least powerfully and least effectually. 
 
 The feeling, so often expressed, that the present 
 time is in the sphere of poetry a critical and not a 
 creative age, is partly the expression of the fact that 
 we have behind us, extending over the first three** 
 quarters of the nineteenth century, a period of 
 
322 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 immense and brilliant poetic production which makes 
 the periods both before and after it pale by com- 
 parison ; partly the result of another fact which 
 perhaps receives insufficient notice, that the appre- 
 ciation of poetry, poetical criticism in its higher and 
 truer sense, has in the last generation enormously 
 increased, both in width and in depth. Neither of 
 these facts is in the least to be lamented; both on 
 the contrary are grounds for gratitude and satisfac- 
 tion. We are too apt to forget that nearly all the 
 great poets of the past reached, in their own time, 
 but a small audience, and often met with neglect 
 where they did not meet with abuse. The decay of 
 poetry, like the degeneration of mankind, is one of 
 those illusions which seem eternal and unconquerable. 
 Despondency over the actual case of poetry, gloomy 
 apprehensions for its future, are no peculiar feature 
 of this age. The golden past merely means the 
 luminous haze over a horizon which shifts with our 
 advance. 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the 
 view. Our own dull foreground will in time take on 
 the same enchantment. 
 
 Again and again, as we shall find if we take the 
 pains to look, the cry over the decay of poetry has 
 been raised most piercingly when poetry was in point 
 of fact taking a new advance, achieving a new perfec- 
 tion, opening out a new world ; not in times of decay, 
 but in times of germination, or even of full flower. 
 TV? Se KGV a\\ov CLKOVO-OU ; " What new poetry is worth 
 listening to ? " is the murmur of Theocritus when he 
 was creating, and bringing to perfection, a new and 
 far-ranging type of poetry, of extraordinary beauty, 
 and of no less extraordinary influence : for the Theo- 
 critean pastoral at once became, and has ever since 
 remained, one important mode of the poetical inter- 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 323 
 
 pretation of life. Omnia iam volgata, " poetry is used 
 up," is the echoing complaint of Virgil, when, at the 
 point of junction between the old and the new world, 
 he was consummating the one, looking forward into 
 and opening out the other. Spenser's Tears of the 
 Muses is one long wail over the degradation and dis- 
 solution .of poetry in England. 
 
 " Heaps of huge words uphoartled hideously, 
 With horrid sound though having little sense, 
 They think to be chief praise of poetry, 
 And thereby wanting due intelligence 
 Have marred the face of goodly Poesy 
 And made a monster of their fantasy." 
 
 So he wrote just at the time when, in his own hands 
 and those of his followers or colleagues, poetry was 
 creating itself anew and breaking out into the full 
 splendours of the Elizabethan age. Milton never failed 
 in his own sublime arrogance ; yet even he, when 
 Paradise Lost was more than half written, doubted 
 whether " an age too late " might not have damped 
 his wing and be fatal to his ascent. Blake's lovely 
 lines on the disappearance of the Muses not only con- 
 tradict what they purport to convey, but are one of 
 the early preludes to a chorus which soon began to 
 swell and deepen. 
 
 " Whether on Ida's shady brow, 
 Or in the chambers of the East, 
 The chambers of the Sun, that now 
 From ancient melody have ceased : 
 
 Whether in Heaven ye wander fair, 
 Or the green corners of the earth, 
 Or the blue regions of the air 
 Where the melodious winds have birth ; 
 
324 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 Whether on crystal rocks ye rove, 
 Beneath the bosom of the sea, 
 Wandering in many a coral grove, 
 Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry ! 
 
 How have you left the ancient love 
 That bards of old enjoyed in you ! 
 The languid strings do scarcely move, 
 The sound is forced, the notes are few." 
 
 Nothing of languor here at least; no scantness of 
 notes, no forcing of the sound. And before Blake 
 died, there had been added to English poetry all 
 Byron, all Shelley, all Keats, all that is most precious 
 of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Among modern poets 
 we can see that the complaint has almost become 
 common form, much as the invocation of the Muse 
 used to be. It is recurrent in Tennyson from first to 
 last, from the time when as a boy he thought Byron's 
 death meant the extinction of poetry, to the old age 
 in which he gracefully and half humorously complained 
 that we were made poor by the mass of our own riches, 
 that the love of letters, overdone, had swamped the 
 sacred poets with themselves. It is most marked of 
 all in our own Oxford poet, Arnold. His volume of 
 1867 includes pieces which are among the permanent 
 treasures of English poetry Thyrsis, Dover Beach, the 
 Stanzas from the Grrande Chartreuse. But it also con- 
 tains those verses entitled The Progress of Poesy which 
 may claim to be the most dismal of English lyrics ; 
 and he prefixed as a motto to the whole volume the 
 less dismal but almost as melancholy quatrain : 
 
 " Though the Muse be gone away, 
 Though she move not earth to-day, 
 Souls, erewhile who caught her word, 
 Ah ! still harp on what they heard." 
 
 Coming still closer, M. Maeterlinck, in the days, now 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 325 
 
 receding into distance, when he was a poet, of small pro- 
 duction indeed but of strange newness and intangible 
 charm, uttered his musical wail over the imagined 
 disappearance of poetry : 
 
 " J'ai cherche trente ans, mes sceurs, 
 
 Et mes pieds sont las : 
 II ^tait partout, mes sceurs, 
 Et n'existe pas." 
 
 But there is another source likewise of this pathetic 
 fallacy : it arises from this, that poetry, like the life of 
 which it is a function, moves in a different orbit from 
 the life of the individual. It is rare, if it ever happens 
 at all, that any one preserves into mature and declin- 
 ing years the receptiveness of youth or more than 
 receptiveness, for it is an active quality, the instinct 
 which leaps to meet new poetry half-way. With many, 
 the sensibility to poetry dwindles, dries up, almost 
 if not wholly disappears. With many more, probably 
 with nearly every one, it can only move along channels 
 already familiar. We return to our first loves, but we 
 cannot take up with new ones. The language of the new 
 poetry is strange to us, and we cannot or will not learn 
 it. Our own poetry, the poetry which we have known 
 and to which we have responded, retains or reassumes 
 much of its old power to move and thrill us. We 
 appreciate it in many ways better. We enter into it 
 more deeply because we bring to it an added depth of 
 experience ; and it brings with it a new and perhaps 
 a still more precious power, to uplift, to calm, to con- 
 sole. But upon the newer poetry the older generation 
 is apt to look with a mixture of bewilderment and 
 prejudice. You may remember a striking passage in a 
 letter of Horace Walpole when he was retiring from 
 Parliament in 1768. Public affairs, he writes to 
 
326 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 George Montague, have ceased to interest him, and 
 can never again have the charm or the dignity that 
 they once had : " Could I hear oratory beyond my 
 Lord Chatham's ? Will there ever be parts equal to 
 Charles Townshend's ? " In poetry the complaint is 
 as old as Simonides : Kovpaw e^eXeyxei veos on/o? ov TO 
 irepvcri Swpov a/ATreXou, " the new wine of boys cannot 
 rival last year's gift of the vine " : the new poetry, like 
 the new wine, OVK e^e\ey^et, " is not convincing." 
 
 This is the more so with poetry, because the earlier- 
 known poetry stirred in us not only intelligence and 
 admiration, but passion. Youth looked on it like a lover. 
 Mr. Bradley, in a lecture given from this Chair and 
 now published, on Shelley's view of poetry, summed up 
 that view in a single phrase : " Love talking musically is 
 poetry." And to the lover his own love is the love of 
 beauty at its culmination, of a perfection from which 
 all variations must be for the worse. In all love there 
 is a tinge of jealousy: the personal note tends to 
 become exclusive. "Say, how has thy beloved sur- 
 passed so much all others ? She was mine." For 
 the lover, in all ages, the object of his love seems, and 
 indeed is, something unique and incomparable. 
 
 " me, what eyes hath love put in my head, 
 Which have no correspondence with true sight ? " 
 
 Love's eyes see the beloved, but to other beauties are 
 blind. 
 
 "When she and I shall be lying 
 
 Dust at your feet, 
 Hours such as these shall be flying, 
 
 Life be as sweet, 
 Women as lovely hereafter, 
 
 Tender and wise, 
 Born with her bloom and her laughter 
 
 Not with her eyes." 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 327 
 
 The progress of poetry passes away from us, and we 
 fancy that poetry itself is passing away. Poetry 
 indeed, as I have insisted, has a periodical movement 
 of its own ; its visible progress is intermittent, not 
 continuous ; looking back on its past course, we can 
 see easily how it has here and there, now and then, 
 blazed out in a great poet, and has grown languid and 
 thin in times when there has been no poet of the first 
 order. But looking forward we can see nothing ; and 
 even looking on what is immediately about us, after 
 the quick receptiveness of youth is gone and the 
 weariness of weakening life has set in, we must recog- 
 nise that our eyesight has become imperfect, and that 
 the power of appreciating a new art is a power which 
 has passed, or is passing, from us to a new generation. 
 
 For this as well as for other reasons, I have not in 
 the lectures which I have given from this Chair set 
 myself to deal with the poetry which is being produced 
 at the present day, and still less to offer any conjecture 
 as to the line which the central progress of poetry is 
 now taking, or as to its future development. It will 
 not be expected of me, and if it were, it would be idle, 
 to say whether or not we have among us, here in 
 England now, any one who is, actually or potentially, 
 a great poet, one whom a later age will look back upon 
 as belonging to the choir of Helicon and will place 
 on the shining roll which holds the names of five 
 centuries, from Chaucer's to Swinburne's. Time will 
 show that ; and " so to him we leave it." But some 
 general considerations may be offered, which rise 
 naturally out of the central view of poetry as a move- 
 ment, expressing itself in patterns of language which 
 are also moving and alive. And these considerations 
 do not lead to discouragement. 
 
 When people speak, as they do, of the increasing 
 
328 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 complexity of modern life, the phrase bears two senses, 
 both of them justified by facts. Modern life has, in 
 the first place, a larger bulk of realised. past behind it. 
 All that past in some way lives in, is integrated into, 
 the present. Life thus necessarily becomes more com- 
 plex by the mere efflux of time. 
 
 But its realised complexity the complexity of 
 which we are conscious, and which acts directly on 
 the intellect and imagination has been increasing 
 with multiplied speed owing to the enormous expan- 
 sion of knowledge. Apart from the fact that there is 
 more of the past for us to know, we know more of it 
 at any given point than was ever known before. In 
 poetry alone, whole provinces have been added to our 
 knowledge ; the stream has widened into a flood. 
 
 And again, life is more complex in the sense that 
 we apply to it a larger and more intricate machinery. 
 Our armament for dealing with it our calculus, in 
 the phrase of the mathematicians has expanded 
 almost as fast as the material with which it deals. 
 The aggregate complexity over the whole of life is 
 enormous, just as it is in a particular art like that of 
 poetry, or a particular science like that of astronomy. 
 Again, when they speak of the increasing stress of 
 life, and of its increasing haste, this is only the same 
 thing from another aspect. The increased stress 
 means that more and more of latent force is released 
 and converted into actual energy. The increased 
 haste means that the progress and evolution of life is 
 going on at a quicker pace. Now if poetry be, as it 
 is, a function of life, life at great complexity means 
 poetry of great range ; life at high stress means poetry 
 at high tension : life at great speed means poetry in 
 rapid movement. All three together mean that the 
 task set before poetry is larger and higher than ever. 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 329 
 
 Will poetry prove unequal to it ? Will it be evermore 
 a life behind ? Rather may we believe that the day's 
 work will be done in the day ; that the progress of 
 poetry will follow and sustain the progress of life. 
 Browning, the most keen-sighted and deep-minded, 
 when at his best, of modern poets, has taught us 
 this : indeed it may be called the sum and substance 
 of his teaching. In a well-known passage of One 
 Word More he enforces it by an image of unsurpassed 
 splendour, that of the moon turning a new side to her 
 chosen mortal : 
 
 "Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman, 
 Blank to Zoroaster on his terrace, 
 Blind to Galileo on his turret, 
 Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats him, even ! 
 
 There will always be the one word more. 
 
 Can there then be poets, now or in the future, so con- 
 summate and satisfying, so high in the sphere of poetry, 
 as the great poets of the past, as Homer and Virgil, as 
 Shakespeare and Milton ? Rossetti, in a graver mood 
 and with a truer insight than when he spoke of Keats 
 having done everything, gave the real answer in his 
 Sonnets on Old and New Art. 
 
 " Were thine eyes set backwards in thine head, 
 Such words were well ; but they see on, and far. 
 Unto the lights of the great Past, new-lit 
 Fair for the Future's track, look thou instead." 
 
 We can never go beyond perfection ; but a new perfec- 
 tion is always before us. 
 
 " Though God hath since found none such as these were 
 To do their work like them, because of this 
 Stand not ye idle in the market-place. 
 Which of ye knoweth he is not that last 
 Who may be first by faith and will 1 yea, his 
 The hand which after the appointed days 
 And hours shall give a Future to their Past 1 " 
 
330 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 To this great end the interpretation of poetry, which 
 is the office of this Chair, is ancillary. It helps, after 
 its measure, to light anew the lights of the great past, 
 to brush away dimness that has crept between, to turn 
 clearer eyes towards them. 
 
 Whatever reason there may be for doubt as to the 
 present position of poetry, there are two things to be 
 noted which are encouraging. 
 
 The first of these is a notable and widespread ad- 
 vance, both in mastery over the formal technique of 
 patterned language, and in the apprehension of what 
 great poetry really is, and of what all poetry ought to 
 be. BouAercu TTOICIV TroAAd/a?, aAA' ov &WTGU, says 
 Aristotle of Nature : " She often wishes to make " 
 yes, or to make poetry, for the word may bear that 
 meaning also " but cannot." And so too we may say 
 of the poetical instinct, the shaping power of imagina- 
 tion working in patterns of language. But if with the 
 will to make is coupled the knowledge of how to make, 
 the trained skill and sound instinct of the craftsman, 
 the power to make becomes nearer to realisation. 
 
 The second encouraging thing is the advance, also 
 widespread and notable, in the standard and quality of 
 poetical criticism in its highest sense, that is to say, in 
 the appreciation of poetry. Increased technical skill 
 and increased appreciation are preparing a way before 
 the feet of poetry. Amid whatever confusion and dis- 
 traction, beneath whatever apparent languor or decay, 
 this is a time of manifold and rapid germination : the 
 ferment is not that of dissolution, but of quickening. 
 For the flowering and fruitage, for the actual creation 
 of a new and great poetry, it awaits, as it did before 
 Homer, before Virgil, before Milton, the incalculable 
 and unprevisible individual genius. But a future age 
 may look back to the clouded lights which we are apt 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 331 
 
 to regard as a Dusk of the Gods, as the coming of dark- 
 ness over poetry, and see in them the first flushings of 
 a splendid dawn. 
 
 Above all, no inference, and least of all any inference 
 of discouragement, can be drawn from the enormous 
 masses of minor poetry, or what purports to be poetry, 
 which are now being produced ; and the greater part of 
 which is, as artistic product, as poetical achievement, 
 worthless. This is no new thing ; it is common to all 
 times, and at the times of the greatest poets the output 
 of inferior or bad poetry has very probably been the 
 largest. The uses of minor poetry would make an 
 interesting subject for discussion; but this is not the 
 time and place to enter upon it. It is one of the 
 many tasks I must leave to some successor : spatiis 
 exclusus iniquis praetereo atque aliis post me memoranda 
 relinquo. It is one of the doubtful joys of a Professor 
 of Poetry that he is called upon to read, and often 
 asked to give an opinion upon, a great deal of minor 
 poetry. One thing however I may mention as interest- 
 ing. Here in Oxford, among the " younger gown," the 
 compositions sent in for the Newdigate Prize during 
 my tenure of office have been on a much higher level, 
 both of technical skill and of imaginative value, than 
 they used to be when I acted as an examiner between 
 twenty and thirty years ago. This seems to indicate 
 I think it does a larger and better appreciation of 
 poetry among the newer generation. A better appre- 
 ciation means, economically, a larger demand. But 
 demand creates supply. Artistically, it means a truer 
 and deeper instinct for poetry. But the instinct for 
 poetry is the same instinct which makes poets. 
 
 In any case, the production of minor poetry, how- 
 ever excessive we may think it, whatever disadvantages 
 may attach to it, is, in a larger view, only one instance 
 
332 THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 of the enormous wastefulness of Nature. " Of fifty 
 seeds she often brings but one to bear " : the rest she 
 casts as rubbish to the void ; or rather, resumes them 
 into herself to be used again. She has the inex- 
 haustible patience of one who has all time and all 
 material at her disposal ; to her failures as to her 
 successes she comes with the one inflexible order; 
 materies opus est, ut crescant poster a secla. And to the 
 minor poets also, Poetry herself comes by glimpses. 
 
 " We have gone by many lands and many grievous ways, 
 And yet have we not found this Pleasure all these days. 
 Sometimes a lightening all about her have we seen, 
 A glittering of her garments among the fieldes green, 
 Sometimes the waving of her hair that is right sweet, 
 A lifting of her eyelids or a shining of her feet, 
 Or either in sleeping or in waking have we heard 
 A rustling of raiment or a whispering of a word, 
 Or a noise of pleasant water running over a waste place, 
 Yet have I not beheld her nor known her very face." 
 
 To any among my audience who feel in them an in- 
 stinct for poetry I have only one word to say. Do 
 not spend life indefinitely on school exercises. Re- 
 member that to be an art-student is no life in itself, 
 but only as it leads to being an artist, a creator. Do 
 not sink into the barren work of copying or inventing 
 or elaborating ornament, which is not poetry, but only 
 material for poetry, only has meaning or value in rela- 
 tion to constructive and imaginative design. Study, 
 but produce. Design, create, execute. And when 
 you have done this, it will not be amiss to remember 
 Horace's advice about suppression until the ninth 
 year. 
 
 And for the rest, for those who are not actual or 
 potential poets, but who love poetry, I would say this ; 
 if we fix our minds firmly on the Progress of Poetry, on 
 poetry as a thing perpetually moving, living, reincar- 
 
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 333 
 
 nating, we shall not only hold the central clue to 
 its meaning, but be assured of its immortality, and 
 of our own. 
 
 " That one face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
 And decomposes but to recompose, 
 Become my universe that feels and knows." 
 
 This is the last lecture which I give as Professor 
 of Poetry. 1 cannot quit the office to which the 
 favour of the University appointed me five years ago 
 without some word of farewell. He that putteth off 
 his harness is seldom, if ever, under any temptation to 
 boast ; and it is in no boastful spirit, but in humility 
 and gratitude, that I may speak to-day of the honour 
 and the responsibility of the position from which I 
 now retire. The quinquennate seems, at the end of 
 it, a mere swallow-flight through a lighted hall from 
 darkness into darkness. A son of Oxford must needs 
 feel towards that elderly but irrepressible enchan- 
 tress an affection which he hardly asks or expects 
 her to reciprocate. He murmurs to her with his last 
 breath, 
 
 " But thou, O mother, 
 
 The dreamer of dreams, 
 Wilt thou bring forth another 
 
 To feel the sun's beams, 
 
 When I move among shadows a shadow, and wail by 
 impassable streams 1 " 
 
 The reply of Oxford to this agonised question is a 
 quiet but emphatic affirmative. A generation ago, or 
 
334 ,THE PROGRESS OF POETRY 
 
 less, there was indeed, or so the rumour has reached 
 me, some project or suggestion a vapour which floated 
 on the skirts of more massive schemes of reform for 
 extinguishing the Poetry Professorship, and devoting 
 its modest endowments to scientific purposes. Cer- 
 tainly it would be ground for a sharper pain than 
 that of regret if I thought that any such project 
 were likely to he revived, and that colour might be 
 given to it by the ineffectiveness or inadequacy of 
 the Professor who is now laying down his office. But 
 I hope and believe that the University will show her- 
 self, as ever, generous to the weakness of her children 
 and servants, and constant to the ideals which they, as 
 well as she, try to the best of their ability to inculcate 
 and to pursue. The exponents of letters pass away ; the 
 Republic of Letters is immortal. It is in this belief 
 that I make way for a twenty-fifth occupant of the 
 Chair which the University of Oxford, for its own 
 honour and for that of poetry, has maintained for 
 two hundred years. 
 
 Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co. 
 Edinburgh & London 
 
URN 
 
 CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 
 
 202 Main Library 
 
 N PERIOD 1 
 >ME USE 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 
 5 
 
 6 
 
 L BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 
 
 lewals and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due date. 
 
 >ks may be Renewed by calling 642-3405 
 
 DUE AS STAMPED BELOW 
 
 ' 9 1994 
 
 
 
 '!< DISC CIRC 
 
 SEP15.-83 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 A NO. DD6 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY 
 
 BERKELEY, CA 94720 
 
 <8s 
 
YC 52959 
 
 U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF f CALIFORNIA LIBRARY