LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO . *"%^x LONDON : GEORGE BELL AND SONS PORTUGAL ST. LINCOLN'S INN, W.C. CAMBRIDGE : DEIGHTON, BELL & CO. NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN CO. BOMBAY : A. H. WHEELER & CO. STUDIES IN POETRY AND - CRITICISM BY JOHN CHURTON COLLINS (PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM) a'xvf Si TraAcyKoroig fyfdpog PINDAR LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS 1905 CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND co. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. \ TO SIR OLIVER LODGE, WHOSE SYMPATHIES EXTEND EVEN TO TRIFLES LIKE THESE, THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED. PREFACE THOUGH the essays here collected have, with one exception, appeared in current periodicals and reviews, they are not merely reprints. Most of them have been much enlarged, one or two have been almost re-written and all have been carefully revised. Though the subjects of which they treat are various, I venture to hope that a certain unity may be discerned in them, arising from an en- deavour to regard both criticism and poetry more seriously than is at present the fashion. The first seems to be resolving itself almost universally into a loose record of personal impressions, the second to be regarded as little more than a medium of aesthetic trifling. In the wretched degradation into which belles lettres have fallen we seem to be losing all sense of the importance once attached to them, when critics were scholars and poets something more than aesthetes. In the essay on Longinus an attempt has, therefore, been made to recall criticism to its old sources and traditions, and thus to illustrate how, if it is to be what it is of power to be, it must rest on far more solid foundations than undiscip- lined and uninstructed susceptibility, on the found- ations, that is to say, laid by its classical masters. vii viii PREFACE So, too, in the essay on the True Functions of Poetry I have ventured to re-state and bring home what once were truisms, but what will now appear and to too manyparadox and extravagance. How far my estimates of the poets whom I have passed in review will recommend themselves to others I know not, but this I should like to say : I hope emphasis will not be mistaken for dogma. Such estimates, even were they those of a critic entitled to far more authority than I can pretend to possess, must be experimental, and can have no approximation to finality. But it is right that when well-weighed they should be attempted. Thus only can the literary product of each age be sifted and proved, thus only the balance at last adjusted. My thanks are due to the proprietors of the North American Review for permission to use the articles on the Poets and Poetry of America; to Mr. John Murray for permission to use the articles on Long- inus which appeared originally in the Quarterly Review, and on Byron ; to the editor of the Con- temporary Review for permission to reproduce that on the poetry of Mr. Gerald Massey; to the editor and proprietor of the National Review for allowing me the use of that on Miltonic Myths. The original sketch of the essay on Mr. William Watson's poetry appeared in the Westminster Gazette, but it has been much enlarged and, indeed, almost re- written. The paper on the True Functions of Poetry has not been printed before. CONTENTS PAGE THE POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA ... i THE COLLECTED WORKS OF LORD BYRON . 78 THE COLLECTED POEMS OF MR. WILLIAM WATSON 124 THE POETRY OF MR. GERALD MASSEY . . 142 MILTONIC MYTHS AND THEIR AUTHORS . . 167 LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM .... 204 THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF POETRY .... 263 APPENDIX 293 INDEX 297 IX ERRATA Page 205, for Gerald read Gerard. Page 214, for Walton read Wotton. Page 2ig,for Kames' read Kames's. Page 297, for William Hall read John Hall. ESSAYS i THE POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA r I A HERE goes a story I had it, if I remember J_ rightly, from the late Professor Nichol that the editor of the Golden Treasury of English Poetry was asked by an American lady why he did not supplement that work by a Golden Treasury of American Poetry. "American Poetry!" he ex- claimed with supercilious surprise. ' ' Why, who are your poets?" "Well, among others," she replied, "we have Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton." It was a retort as fair as it was wise ; no paradox, though it seems one; not wit, but truth. And although a review of American poetry is necessarily concerned only with the " others " referred to, we cannot insist too strongly on the relation of those others to the patriarchs of Anglo-Saxon song on the essential unity of almost all of what finds expression in the poetry of England and in the poetry of America, in the genius which inspires both, in the art which in- forms both. The great schism of 1776 was our own mad work. A war, as purely internecine as that in which the Roundheads and Cavaliers confronted each other at Marston Moor and at Naseby, was c 2 POETRY AND CRITICISM forced on the descendants of both in another hemi- sphere. The sword, once drawn, was not sheathed till England was humiliated and America independent. What followed, followed inevitably. With the Atlantic intervening, with the Puritan and republican elements in overwhelming ascendency, with colossal potentialities of expansion and development, with much that was irreconcilable with subordination to the Mother Country rapidly defining itself, reunion under a common flag, even had it been desired, be- came impossible. But, if the effect of the great schism was, during many years, to alienate, and to canker; if it sowed the seeds of all that has since resulted from mutual mistrust and jealousy, from conflicting interests, from rival aims and competitive ambition, it has never extended to what constitutes the bond of bonds the inheritance of common blood, of common creeds political as well as religious, of a common language, of a common literature. O Englishmen ! in hope and creed, In blood and tongue our brothers ! We too are heirs of Runnymede ; And Shakespeare's fame and Cromwell's deed Are not alone our mother's. " Thicker than water," in one rill Through centuries of story Our Saxon blood has flowed, and still We share with you its good and ill, The shadow and the glory. Joint heirs and kinsfolk, leagues of wave Nor length of years can part us : Your right is ours to shrine and grave, The common freehold of the brave, The gift of saints and martyrs. POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 3 In these words, Whittier gave expression to senti- ments which perhaps appealed more directly to his fellow countrymen generally fifty years ago than they do to-day ; but to-day and for all time will they find response, will they be very creed, wherever, in our mutual relations, the humanities prevail. In estimating the achievement of America in poetry, it is very necessary to bear all this in mind. It is not by regarding it as a rival counterpart of our own, which in some respects it is, and by continu- ally instituting, either directly or tacitly, comparisons and parallels with its English archetypes and ana- logues, which it necessarily does invite, that we can possibly do it justice. For by such a method the whole focus of criticism is deranged. We expect more than it is reasonable to expect, and are dis- appointed ; we find much for which our criteria are insufficient, and are perplexed. And the English people have assuredly not done justice to the poetry of America. Our leading critics have always regarded it pretty much as the Greek critics regarded the poetry of the Romans ; for what was indigenous in it they had no taste, from what reminded them of their own artists they turned with contemptuous in- difference. The silence of Dionysius and Longinus about the poems which are the glory of Roman lit- erature, is not only exactly analogous to the silence of Arnold, Pater, and their schools about the poems which are the pride of Transatlantic literature, but it sprang from the same causes. Where originality existed, it was originality which did not appeal to them ; where comparison with the genius and art with which they were familiar, and from which their 4 POETRY AND CRITICISM own touchstones and standards were derived, was challenged or could be instituted, sensibly or insen- sibly it was instituted, and inferiority stood revealed. A Greek who expected from Horace what he found in Sappho and Pindar, and an Englishman who ex- pects from Bryant and Longfellow what he finds in Wordsworth and Tennyson, might be forgiven for being disappointed. But, for all that, Horace is Horace, and Bryant and Longfellow are true poets. Two other causes have contributed to the under- estimation of American poetry in England, and for one of them the Americans themselves are, I fear, responsible. I mean the prominence which has un- happily been given to what is essentially mediocre and inferior, sometimes by indiscreet and absurd eulogy, and sometimes by associating it in Antho- logies and Critiques with what is excellent. We find, for instance, in Mr. Tyler's otherwise admirable Literary History of the American Revolution a lamentable want of balance wherever poetry is in question. Ballads and political songs, bad enough for the bellman, are described as "worthy of Tyr- taeus " ; lyrics and other poems which never, even at their best, have any other than historical interest, are praised in terms which would be exaggerated if applied to the poetry of great masters. No critic could mention the name of Mr. Stedman without respect for his immense knowledge and his catholic taste; but I venture to think that the scale on which his justly celebrated Anthology is planned has been signally unfortunate for the promotion of his object namely, to bring home to the English-speaking POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 5 race the merits of American poetry. Most people will, I fear, lay it down with something of the im- pression with which the weary scholar closes thank- fully the tomes of the Poetae Latini Minores, so im- mensely does what is commonplace and of every degree of mediocrity predominate over what has merit and distinction. Had Mr. Stedman confined his plan, I cannot forbear adding, to the inclusion of the best, and the best only, he would have had no difficulty in finding material for a charming volume. As it is, his collection is only likely to confirm the impression which it was his idea to correct. Another cause affecting the reputation of American poetry in England, is the prominence which has been given, not to what represents it at its best or in rela- tion to its finer qualities, but to what appeals to the multitude. The Raven and The Bells are anything but typical of the peculiar genius of Poe; but The Raven and The Bells have overshadowed every- thing else which he has written in verse. Neither Bryant nor Whittier has fared any better; what is most commonplace in them has been most popular. Lowell's fame rests almost entirely on what is most broadly humorous in the Biglow Papers. Holmes is associated with comical trifles like The One Horse Shay, as Bret Harte is with Truthful James and The Heathen Chinee. Longfellow has been described as the "Laureate of the Middle Classes," and every one knows what that implies. Nor is this all. In many, and perhaps in many more than we suspect, the impression made by the aggressive eccentricities of Whitman and his school, on the one hand, and the florid extravagance of the school of Joaquin 6 POETRY AND CRITICISM Miller, on the other, has so predominated over the impression made by the true masters of American song, that work as little representative of what is best in American poetry as it is of what is best in our own poetry has come to be regarded as essenti- ally typical. And so it is, and from these causes chiefly, that England, as a nation, has not done jus- tice to American poetry. To a survey of that poetry, a brief sketch of its origin and early history is a necessary prelude ; for its characteristics are to be traced to conditions and circumstances long preceding its articulate expres- sion. Schiller, in a famous lyric, has described the austerities amid which the German muse was cradled and nurtured, and attributed its lofty spirit to their severe discipline; but austerities sterner still tem- pered the infancy of the American muse. In the zenith of our own Golden Age of poetry and letters, when Shakespeare had just finished King Lear and Bacon was meditating the Instauratio Magna, the first pioneers of American civilization landed at Jamestown. Michael Drayton in a hearty and spirited ode had bade them Godspeed, and blended with his blessing a prophecy that the New World would not be without its bards. But upwards of a hundred and sixty years were to pass before that prophecy was even partially to be fulfilled. During those years, it would be scarcely possible to conceive conditions more unpropitious to the production of poetry, or more propitious to the development of those heroic virtues which poetry loves to celebrate, and of that "character," as Emerson calls it, which is the noblest substratum of poetry itself. The frag- POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 7 ment of Percy, and the narratives of Captain John Smith and of William Strachey, record the storm and stress of the early part of this period, the period which witnessed the settlement of Virginia. Then came the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, and, amid hardships unspeakable, preceding and ensuing, the foundation of New Plymouth. With the foundation of Massachusetts which followed, began the history of all that is implied and involved in the establish- ment and constitution of New England. In the South, also, there had been the same activity. The colonization of Virginia had been succeeded by the foundation of Maryland and the two Carolinas. Round the Delaware, New York, and Chesapeake Bays, the Middle States had been gradually formed. All this had been a work of Herculean labour, ab- sorbing every energy, and taxing to the uttermost man's powers of effort and endurance. Forests had to be cleared ; marshes to be drained ; the savage aborigines to be kept at bay. Carrying their lives in their hands, inured to privation and distress in their severest forms, these hardy and dauntless ad- venturers lived daily face to face with the grimmest realities of life. The toil of the pioneer accomplished, other toils not less arduous and incessant awaited them in the duties incumbent on the citizens of in- fant States, the duties of the builder, the agriculturist, the legislator. Then came the wars with the Indians. Incessantly harassed by the raids of these murderous enemies, always on the watch for mischief and assas- sination, in 1637 they brought the first of these wars to a climax, by the annihilation of the Pequots, men, women and children, a scene of almost unparalleled 8 POETRY AND CRITICISM horror. 1 Still more terrible was the second war in 1674, which lasted two years, and in which Massa- chusetts was overrun by the savages, some eighty towns raided, some twelve totally destroyed, and ten in every hundred of the men of military age either killed outright, or dragged off to a death of agony by torture. 2 Nothing in history is more thrilling than some of the contemporary narratives which place us in the midst of these frightful experiences of the Fathers of Virginia and of New England. In this iron school was tempered the character of the forefathers of those who were to create American literature. Nor must we forget who these men origin- ally were. However mixed was the population of the States in the South and of the middle group, the founders of New England were almost entirely what that name implies Englishmen: but they were Englishmen of a peculiar type. The first emi- grants had quitted Europe because of their dissatis- faction with the regulations and ritual of the Estab- lished Church. The successive emigrants between 1630 and 1640 consisted of those who, despairing of the causeof religious and civil liberty under Charles I, had left the Mother Country in impatient indigna- tion, to realize what they desired in a community of their own founding. In spite of many differences of opinion, these men, like their brother Puritans in England, had a common character. In their re- ligious convictions enthusiasts and fanatics, with the Bible and the Bible only as their guide and rule, 1 See Street's spirited poem, The Settler, Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America, pp. 399-410. 2 See Dwight's poem. Ibid., pp. 14-17. POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 9 they sought in its precepts and in its examples all that they desired to learn and all that they aspired to become. Almost everything they did, almost everything they meditated, took its ply and its colour from this enthusiasm. But the gracious philanthropy of the New Testament appealed to them far less than the sterner teachings of the Old. Here they found justification for the fierce intoler- ance which, in their uncompromising creed, ranked with the cardinal virtues, for the rancour with which they regarded the enemies of God, and for the many ruthless deeds which were, no doubt, forced upon them, but which appear to have cost them so little compunction. And here, too, they found the patterns on which their lives were fashioned, individually as well as collectively. Never since the days of the Patriarchs did men live, in a sense so literally true, "as ever in their great Task-master's eye," or find such sustainment in the sense of duty fulfilled, and in simple faith. To enter their homes is recalling the world of the Chosen People. Each busy day, each frugal meal, opened and closed with prayer. Next to God, in a child's eyes, stood his parents, and next to his parents, his elders. Frivolity, irreverence were al- most unknown, and anything approaching to their expression, either in word or act, was set down with a severity strangely out of proportion to the offence. To be abstemious and chaste, to speak the truth at any cost and under any stress, to regard the world's gauds and the world's honours with contempt, to be patient in tribulation and sober in prosperity, to re- cognize in conscience the veritable voice of the Al- io POETRY AND CRITICISM mighty and the obligation to obey that voice as man's paramount duty all this was of the essence of their ethics. Public life had the same cast. Their very government was a theocracy. At the head of it the God of Christian faith, its magistrates His servants, its citizens those only who had been initiated through Baptism and the reception of the Lord's Supper. In Virginia, indeed, the other dis- tributing centre of the English race, becoming as it did an asylum for Cavaliers, broken aristocrats, and Church of England men, society and the temper of those who composed it presented a remarkable con- trast to all this. But, mighty as the part has been which Virginia has played in politics, in war, and in commerce, she has been no factor in the spiritual and intellectual life of America, which was to take its bent from her austerer sons in the North. Thus was produced, partly from what was in- herited from their forefathers, and partly from what was the result of the long probation and discipline of those iron times, a race of men the like of which this world has never seen. Indelible is the im- pression which they have made on all who have contributed, and on all which has been contributed, either in politics or in literature, to the glory of America. We trace their lineaments in every great statesman and in every great soldier who has suc- ceeded them in the Western World, whether from the South or from the North. Their purity, their earnestness, their simplicity, the noble ardour of their love of liberty, their God-fearing spirit and profound sense of man's religious and moral re- sponsibilities, permeate, or if they do not permeate, POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA n at least colour, almost every characteristic contribu- tion, both in verse or prose, to American literature. Even where their theology had ceased to appeal, and the light had faded out of Puritan orthodoxy, Puritan ethics and the Puritan temper still pre- vailed. Franklin, Emerson, and Hawthorne were as essentially the offspring of these men as William Bradford and Thomas Hooker were their repre- sentatives. When poetry awoke, and it was long before it awoke, it was their soul which suffused it. Their soul has suffused it ever since. To the influence of these silent forefathers, Ameri- can poetry owes its distinguishing notes it has them in common with the characteristic poetry of Ger- many its simplicity, its purity, its wholesomeness. No American poet has ever dared, or perhaps even desired, to do what, to the shame of England and France, their poets have so often done what is mourned by Dryden: O gracious God ! how oft have we Profan'd Thy heavenly gift of Poesy, Made prostitute and profligate the muse Debas'd to each obscene and impious use. We should search in vain through the voluminous records of American song for a poem by any poet of note or merit, with one exception who is an ex- ception in everything, glorifying animalism or blasphemy, or attempting to throw a glamour over impurity and vice. But the men to whom American poetry was in- directly to owe so much contributed, as might have been expected, nothing to its treasures. There came over with them more than one distinguished scholar, 12 POETRY AND CRITICISM and many who either were, or were to become, theologians of eminence; men, too, full of en- thusiasm for education, to whom America owes her first schools, her first libraries, her first university; but no one, with the solitary exception of George Sandys, who carried in him the seeds of poetry. Nor was the period which succeeded the establish- ment of the new communities more propitious to literary activity. Constant friction with England, chiefly in connection with the royal governors, con- stant disputes among the States about boundaries, and with the aborigines about commercial affairs these were their occupations. Then came the co- alition with Great Britain against the French and their Indian allies a momentous crisis, culminating in the conquest of Canada and the preservation of the Colonies from subjection to France. Seven years afterwards followed the epoch-making Revolution which transformed Anglo-America from a congeries of scattered communities into a mighty nation, and which for a time effectually hushed everything ex- cept the voice of the orator, the tumult of debate, the roar of cannon, and the myriad clamour of the popular press. That story need not be told here ; it is a story no Englishman will ever love to tell or to remember. To America, it was all that Marathon and Salamis were temporarily to Hellas; all that the loss of her Continental possessions was, per- manently, to England. Regarded in relation to its effects, immediate and subsequent, and in relation to its examples and its lessons, it is perhaps the greatest single event in the history of mankind. That it should not have awakened the American POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 13 muse seems at first sight surprising, for it opened every spring of poetic inspiration. It appealed, and appealed thrillingly, to passion, to sentiment, to imagination. In no lyric ever burned more fire than glowed in the speeches of Patrick Henry, of James Otis, of Richard Henry Lee, of Alexander Hamilton. No epic has celebrated scenes which surpass in im- pressiveness and picturesqueness the scenes which America witnessed between 1775 and 1782, or ideal- ized heroes of nobler and grander moral temper than most of those who shaped the destinies of the West- ern World at that tremendous crisis. Still lyric, still epic, still poetry in every form of its genuine expression, slept. But, if we reflect, this need not surprise us. Wordsworth has admir- ably defined poetry as emotion recollected in tran- quillity. As men who make history seldom write it, so, when poetry is expressing itself in action, it has little need to express itself in words. The achieve- ments and character of those who welded America into a nation were of a piece with all that had origin- ally fashioned, moulded and preserved the several communities now federated. Both were works to which every citizen contributed, and in which every citizen took absorbing interest. As a rule, the Puritan despised poetry, even when he had leisure for it. Hymns and Biblical paraphrases, indeed, he tolerated, patronized, and, if he had the ability, produced ; but when it went beyond these it became vanity, and his sympathy with it ceased. What need of poetry to inspire, when the voice of Duty, when the voice of God Himself, was calling? Of what worth the tribute of song to " live battle odes, 14 POETRY AND CRITICISM whose lines were steel and fire"; the homage of mere aesthetic appreciation to virtues so practical, to achievements so real? But there was another reason, and perhaps the chief one, for the silence of song. The triumph of the warrior and of the statesman could have seemed no triumph to the poet. To him England was all that Athens, all that Rome, had been to his brethren in ancient times, the object of his profoundest reverence, of his fond- est affection, the consecrated home of the lords of his art, and fraught with memories inexpressibly dear. Before, an exile, he was now an alien. No- thing, then, can be more natural than that this re- volution should have failed to awaken poetry. The poetry which the Revolution could not in- spire was not likely to be inspired by the period which immediately succeeded. The history of America between 1782 and 1820 is the history of the most distracted time in her annals. All was fever, all was tumult. The old world was passing away, the new world had not defined itself. While the fierce conflicts between Federalists and De- mocrats tore and perplexed her central councils, dividing the whole Republic into hostile camps, feuds and disputes peculiar to themselves kept the separate States in constant turmoil. The alliance against England, instead of conducing to permanent harmony, seemed only to have the effect of aggra- vating their differences. To all these distractions were added the distractions involved by America's association with that mighty European revolution, the torch of which had been lighted by her own ; by the relations with Napoleon, by the second war POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 15 with Great Britain. The termination of that war in 1814 marks no epoch in American history, but it ushered in the period which witnessed the birth of her Poetry, not in the historical for she had al- ready produced much but in the true sense of the term. Nothing more deplorable than the verses which have come down to us from the earliest colonists and from the ante-Revolutionary age could be conceived. They consist chiefly of paraphrases of the Psalms, such as find expression in such doggerel as the Bay Psalm-Book, of descriptive poems and of miscel- laneous trifles of a serious cast, and were the work, generally speaking, of Puritan divines, school- masters, and scribbling governors. They may be dismissed without ceremony; for to settle the rela- tive proportion of worthlessness between Benjamin Thomson, " punning" Byles, Michael Wiggles- worth, who, " when unable to preach by an affection of the lungs, In costly verse and most laborious rhymes Did dish up truths right worthy our regard," Nathaniel Evans and Mrs. Anne Bradstreet, the "mirror of her age," as, unhappily, in poetry she was, would indeed be a futile task. A little later we find a group of versifiers who, in their several ways, almost rise to the dignity of mediocrity. Such would be John Trumbull, who began his career with a poem bearing the ominous title of the Progress of Dulness, but whose McFingal is a very respectable imitation of Hudibras, containing original touches not unworthy of its model. Timothy Dwight, who, 16 POETRY AND CRITICISM under the guise of independence, sometimes echoes Pope, sometimes Beattie, sometimes Cowper, but who in another strain produced a spirited lyric Columbia, which long endeared his name to his countrymen, and in one of his poems, The Con- quest of Canaan, an epic in eleven books, stumbled on a few lines which pleased Cowper. 1 No such exploit enlivens the intolerable epic and the still more intolerable mock heroic, the Colum- biad and Hasty Pudding, of Joel Barlow, in the first of which he certainly disputes the palm of som- niferousness with our own Blackmore. Nor can any- thing be said for the smooth platitudes of Alsop, of Honeywood, and of Clifton. One poet only in this period had a touch of genius; and he was, as his J Cowper reviewed the poem in the Analytical Review when it was reprinted by T.Johnson in 1788. See Southey's Co-wper, vol. vii. 314-319. The lines which he pronounced to be " highly poetical," are: Now Night in vestments robed of cloudy dye, With sable grandeur clothed the orient sky, ImpelPd the sun obsequious to her reign, Down the far mountains to the Western main ; With magic hand becalmed the solemn even, And drew day's curtain from the spangled heaven. At once the planets sail'd around her throne : At once ten thousand worlds in splendour shone ; Behind her car the morn's expanded eye Rose from a cloud, and looked around the sky : Far up th' immense her train sublimely roll, And dance and triumph round the lucid pole. Faint shine the fields beneath the shadowy ray, Slow fades the glimmering of the west away ; To sleep the tribes retire : and not a sound Flows through the air or murmurs on the ground. POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 17 name implies, of French extraction. In the too vol- uminous poetry of Philip Freneau there are a few flowers, somewhat wan and frail it is true, but, like his Wild Honeysuckle t worth the gathering. There is a note of distinction in the verses To Neversink Heights, To the Dying Indian, The Indian Bury ing- ground, a line from which, as Professor Nichol points out, Campbell condescended to appropriate, and in the verses to The Hurricane, but he is never sure and generally trivial. The numerous patriotic songs inspired by the struggles with England and the realization of Ame- rican nationality, such as Robert Treat Paine's Adams and Liberty, Hopkinson's Hail Columbia, the anonymous Yankee Man-of-War and Key's Star-spangled Banner, are not without ring and lilt, but owe their charm chiefly to their sentiment. To one of them higher praise than this is due. The American Flag of Joseph Rodman Drake is effective rhetoric, a little strained, perhaps, but instinct with true enthusiasm. And now, with surprising rapidity, these matin chirps became full quire. As we advance in the 1 Freneau's stanza is : By midnight moons o'er moistening dews In vestments for the chase arrayed, The hunter still the deer pursues, The hunter and the deer a shade. In O'Connors Child, Campbell writes : Now on the grass-green turf he sits, His tasselPd horn beside him laid, Now o'er the hills in chase he flits, The hunter and the deer a shade. C i8 POETRY AND CRITICISM second quarter of the century, our ears are almost deafened by the chorus of songsters which greet us on all sides, some from the Southern, some from the Middle, some from the Northern States. This activity is, no doubt, to be traced mainly to the pro- gress of education and culture, for which there was more leisure, and which had flourishing centres at the universities. The result of this was that the poetry of England was studied with sympathy and enthusiasm, and the natural consequence was imi- tation. Young men acquired the same facility in composing English verses, almost indistinguish- able, so far as form was concerned, from their origin- als, as clever undergraduates at Oxford and Cam- bridge composed Ovidian elegiacs and Virgilian hexameters. As these imitations were occasionally produced, not merely by men of talent and of such accomplishments as memory and industry can ac- quire, but by men of sensibility, with some of the qualities of genius, and even a spark of genius itself, some of this poetry, if only just rising above medi- ocrity, is far from contemptible. It is most interest- ing when it is touched with what is essentially native, with ancestral moral enthusiasm, with character, with the impressions made by American tradition, scenery and life ; in other words, where it differen- tiates itself from English models. Mere imitation, with nothing superinduced, is perhaps most con- spicuous in Hillhouse's stilted and wretched concoc- tion in travesty from Milton, Young and Pollock; in Sprague's bombastic Pindarics and parrot echoes of the heroics of Pope's school ; and in others, who need not be specified. In Allston, in Pierpont, in POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 19 Brainard, and in Percival, we have the most con- spicuous and most comprehensive representatives of the poetry of the best culture, though the last two are unconscionably careless and diffuse in style, while the best poem of the first, The Sylphs of the Seasons, is too much an echo of Burns's Vision. Carlos Wilcox, though his blank verse, which is a bad imitation of Thomson's, is intolerable, deserves notice for his minute and accurate description of na- ture, closely recalling, as Street did afterwards, our own Richard Jefferies's prose studies. In Paulding, Halleck, Drake and John Howard Payne, the author of the world-famous lyric, "Home, Sweet Home," native elements predominate over external ; and they all, in their several ways, assisted the development of the Home school. Paulding is better known by his prose writings; but his Backwoodsman, written in smooth and musical heroics, contains very pleasing descriptions of American scenery, and his Old Man's Carousal has long been, and justly, a favourite. Halleck's spirited historical ballad, Marco Bozzaris, recalls Byron, his Alnwick Castle Scott, but worthily and in no servile way; while his Burns, his Redjacket, his ballads written in conjunction with Drake, his vigorous vers de societe and his Fanny at least prove his versatility; but we can hardly feel with Whittier that he has "consecrated New York," and that "shady square and dusty street are classic ground for him." The American Flag will long preserve the memory of Drake, and his Culprit Fay, though too evidently showing the blended influence of Scott, Coleridge and Moore to be entitled to the 20 POETRY AND CRITICISM praise of originality, was considered at the time of its appearance a remarkable production. Dana's wild poem the Buccaneer struck a new note of the Monk Lewis order, and there was originality, though of a somewhat tawdry kind, in Maria Brooks's Zophiel) a poetess so unaccountably pronounced by Southey to be "the most impassioned and the most imaginative of all poetesses." Of the many disciples of Mrs. Hemans and Miss Landon flourishing at this time, Lydia Sigourney stands alone. It is not fashionable to praise Mrs. Hemans in these days ; but I will have the courage to say that higher praise could scarcely be given to a poetess of the secondary order than to say, what may be said with truth of Lydia Sigourney, that she stands beside Mrs. Hemans. Nothing more simply touching was ever written than her Widow's Charge, and if her threnody on her mistress and model is too ambitious, it is both noble and pathetic. Nor was the South silent. Edward Coate Pinkney has no pretension to genius, and he was too close in imitation of Byron and other English poets; yet he had a very pleasing lyrical gift, and such lyrics as A Healthy A Serenade, and A Picture Song tremble on excellence, while Richard Henry Wilde has left one lyric, "My Life is Like the Summer Rose," which, if falsetto, has one line which a true poet might envy: On that lone shore loud moans the sea. And yet, in spite of all this activity and achieve- ment, De Tocqueville could say in 1835 that America had not produced a single poet of a high order. POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 21 Certainly, he could not have been refuted by citing any of the poets of whom I have spoken ; but we have now come to a poet who could be triumphantly produced to falsify the statement. In William Cul- len Bryant, America produced her first poet of dis- tinction, the first who has some pretension to ori- ginality. Griswold tells us that when Thanatopsis, Bryant's first characteristic poem, was submitted to Dana, then editor of the North American Review, Dana and one or two critics whom he consulted were satisfied that a poem so finished and so noble could not have been written by an American. Their wonder was, no doubt, increased when they learned that it was not only written by an American, but by an American scarcely out of his teens. It is no figure of speech to say that the American muse found her first voice in Bryant. He has been called a disciple of Wordsworth ; it has been pointed out that his favourite measures haveall been borrowed from ours; that in Young's Night Thoughts and in Dyer's Ruins of Rome had been sounded the note which he struck with more power and impressive- ness in the poems peculiarly characteristic of him, and that his blank verse is but a variation of the blank verse of English masters. This is true only in the sense in which it is true that, but for Ennius we should never have had Virgil, and that, but for his classical predecessors in ancient Greece and Rome and in modern Italy, we should never have had Milton. Bryant's relation to Wordsworth may be more accurately indicated by calling him, in virtue of his own native genius, and not by virtue of imita- tion, the "American Wordsworth"; his relation to 22 POETRY AND CRITICISM Young and Dyer, by distinguishing between what is accidental and what is essential ; and of his blank verse it may be said, with literal truth, that in struc- ture and rhythm it is his own. Nature, and Nature only, was his inspirer and teacher ; and pure and sim- ple and wholesome as herself was her disciple and prophet. From his Puritan ancestors, he had in- herited his moral temper and cast of mind, his purity, his simplicity, his earnestness, his love of liberty, his reverent piety, his profound seriousness; and with all this some good genius had blended the aesthetic tem- perament, and bestowed on him the gifts of the poet. And so he went out among the wonders and beauties of the New World, "the rolling prairies," The gardens of the Desert, The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name, under The thick roofs Of green, and stirring branches all alive And musical with birds that sing and sport In wantonness of spirit, while, below, The squirrel, with rais'd paws and form erect, Chirps merrily; through the great solitudes with their Myriads of insects, gaudy as the flowers They flutter over, gentle quadrupeds, And birds that scarce have learn 'd the fear of man, .... and sliding reptiles of the ground Startlingly beautiful ; or heard from Dim woods the aged past Speak solemnly; POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 23 or stood and gazed on The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun : the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between: The venerable woods, rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks That make the meadows green ; and, poured round all, Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste ; or lay and listened to Earth's voice: A voice of many tones sent up from streams That wander through the gloom, from woods unseen Swayed by the sweeping of the tides of air, From rocky chasms where darkness dwells all day, And hollows of the great invisible hills, And sands that edge the Ocean, stretching far Into the night. In his nature poems, there is at times an almost magical note, as in the first two stanzas of The Water Fowl'. Whither, 'midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue Thy solitary way? Vainly the fowler's eye Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, As, darkly painted on the crimson sky, Thy figure floats along. And how fine are the lines in the next stanza but one: There is a Power, whose care Teaches thy way along that pathless coast, The desert and illimitable air, Lone -wandering, but not lost. And The Gladness of Nature pulses with the ecstasy which it describes. " O Fairest of the Rural 24 POETRY AND CRITICISM Maids" may remind us a little too closely of Words- worth, but this exquisite lyric, as well as The Even- ing Wind, could only have been written by one whom Nature had initiated. Mr. Stedman speaks of the "elemental quality" of Bryant's poetry: it is a most happy expression, as anyone will feel after read- ing such poems as The Prairies, A Winterpiece, The Evening Wind, The Hunter of the Prairies, Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood, The Painted Cup, A Hymn to the Sea, A Forest Hymn, A Hymn to the North Sea, Among the Trees, A River by Night. But to this exquisite susceptibility to the power and charm of nature, and to this inspired faculty for catching and rendering them, he brought other quali- ties. He was not, like our own Wordsworth, a pro- found philosopher, but he was deeply impressed with the mystery, solemnity, and sadness of life, and also with the momentous importance of the moral re- sponsibilities resting on all on whom the gift of it has been conferred. This element is sometimes dis- tinct from his nature studies, and sometimes blends itself with them. It is seen in its distinctness in such poems as the Hymn to Death, The Past, Life, The foumey of Life, The Crowded Street, The Future Life, Blessed are They that Mourn, and that noble poem, The Return of Youth; but it is when blended with his nature studies that it is most impressive. In what majestic threnody does he contrast the eternity of nature and the transitoriness of man in Thanatopsis, and again in The Fountain, and again, with tenderer pathos, in The Rivulet. With what eloquence does he enlist Nature in the service of POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 25 man's spiritual and moral instruction, as in the Forest Hymn, The Old Man's Gospel, and an Even- ing Revelry ; or make her bring balm for the wounds of life and solace and comfort, in such poems as the Walk at Sunset, Green River, Inscription foi the Entrance to a Wood, A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson, Lines on Revisiting the Country, A Slimmer Wind. In the beautiful City Hymn he leads her from her solitudes to irradiate the sordid and crowded life of the street and of the mart, while in June and The Burial-place he would have her wreathe the dishonours of death with her loveli- ness. The dominant note in Bryant is, certainly, thren- ody; but it is threnody without gloom. He had in- herited from his Puritan ancestors the faith that illu- mines life and looks through death, and it never fails him. To his Puritanism is probably owing also his absolute freedom from any traces of a mystic or pan- theistic tendency in his treatment of Nature. His diction, his style, his versification, if the result of the study of English models, are, in the main, his own, and seem to be the spontaneous utterance of what they convey. Never when he is at his best were con- ception and expression in more absolute harmony. It has been observed that his vocabulary is a limited one, and that the measures in which he writes were few and simple ; the reason is, because the sphere in which his genius moved is limited, and because he only employed such measures as were most appro- priate for his few and simple themes. It is as difficult to associate art with his poetry as it would be to associate art with the vibrations of an Aeolian lyre. 26 POETRY AND CRITICISM Perhaps such a stanza as this and how haunting it is owed something to the file: I sat and watched the eternal flow Of those smooth billows to the shore, While quivering lines of light below Ran with them on the Ocean floor ; but, if it did, it is art indistinguishable from nature. Perfect simplicity is the note of Bryant, and absolute sincerity, yet how magical, now with the note of pathos, now with the note of the sublime. He realized what he wrote in The Poet: . . . Let no empty gust Of passion find an utterance in thy lay, A blast that whirls the dust Along the howling street, and dies away; But feelings of calm power and mighty sweep, Like currents journeying through the windless deep. Seekest thou, in living lays To limn the beauty of the Earth and sky? Before thine inner gaze Let all that beauty in clear vision lie ; Look on it with exceeding love, and write The words inspired by wonder and delight. He moved, it must be conceded, in a very limited sphere, and had comparatively few notes ; but, with- in that sphere how admirable ; of those few notes, how true a master! II In Bryant America produced her first poet whose work approaches classical merit. But for many years he stood alone, mediocrity surrounding as mediocrity POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 27 had preceded him. His influence was great on the later works of some of the poets who have already been mentioned, and he had many disciples among the younger men, but they were all mere imitators. Among the poets, if they can be dignified with such a title, intervening between the period marked by the appearance of Bryant's first volume and the appear- ance of the characteristic work of the great New Eng- land group in the latter part of the century, a few may be noticed as, in different ways, typical. Street, the author of Nature and of the Gray Forest Eagle, is interesting; for, though his work has very little poetic quality, his descriptions of Nature are remark- ably minute and accurate, and he is certainly the best representative of the Nature school. How faithful and vivid, for example, are pictures and his poetry abounds in them like these: The hemlock stands, an ivory pyramid, And the link'd branches gleam, like silvery webs, Trac'd on the glittering azure of the sky ; and The last butterfly, Like a wing'd violet, floating in the meek, Pink-colour'd sunshine, sinks his velvet feet Within the pillar'd mullein's delicate down, And shuts and opens his unruffled fans. 1 In versatile and voluminous Charles Fenno Hoff- man, we have Byron and Moore and Dibdin and Miss Landon, variously and vigorously diluted, without a line of any distinction ; and Hoffman is typical of a then flourishing school. Lunt has vigour and mettle, as his Lyre and Sword testify. In Pike's "Hymns 1 See, for Street, Griswold, pp. 395-401. 2 8 POETRY AND CRITICISM to the Gods," we have an excursion into classical themes, suggested, no doubt, by Keats's Endymion, on which they are plainly modelled, and which they echo as faithfully as his Lines "written on the Rocky Mountains echo Shelley's Stanzas -written in Dejec- tion at Naples. Southey's intolerable epics found an imitator in Sands, who also paid the same tribute to Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming. But it is unnecessary to particularize further; and, per- haps, we may take N. P. Willis as most compre- hensively representative of this period. Traveller, journalist, playwright, novelist, essayist, man of the world a readier and defter pen and more versatile talents were probably never possessed by man. And all these qualities and accomplishments are reflected in his poetry. It has no depth ; it has no concentra- tion ; it has no distinction ; but it is always readable, and it is generally pleasing. His genius resembled those light, friable soils where every seed that falls takes root, shoots up, bursts readily into leaf and flower, and ends in producing a fruit, which is indeed fruit, but which is hardly worth picking. To origin- ality Willis had no pretension. Every note he struck had been struck before with far more vigour in Eng- land, and with vigour equal to his own in America. In a word, if we except the poetry descriptive of native scenery, and that was modelled on Bryant, the verse of this period is merely the English poetry of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with in- ferior variations, over again in feeble echo. " I am tired," wrote Judge Story to his son, " of the endless imitations of the forms and figures and topics of British poetry." And what Judge Story complained POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 29 of in prose, Paulding bewailed in verse. Apostro- phizing the muse of his country, he asks: How long in servile imitative rhyme Wilt thou thy stifled energies impart, And miss the path that leads to every heart? But this prodigious multiplication of mediocrities, and this tardy development of true poetry are not difficult to explain. All national poetry of a high order must have its root in life, in the propitious soil of such social and political conditions as are con- ducive to its inspiration and nutriment. It must have a past rich in tradition behind it ; it must have a present throbbing with what appeals to imagination, to sentiment, to passion ; its energy must be concen- trated, that spark may catch from spark, and flame from flame : it must have touchstones and standards, derived primarily from what was best in preceding achievement, mutually applied and mutually exacted by rival competitors for fame: it must have enlight- ened patronage: it must have response and sym- pathy from those to whom it appeals. None of these conditions existed in America; it would be more true to say that conditions the very opposite to these ob- tained everywhere. Where energy was concentrated, it was concentrated almost entirely on commercial and industrial pursuits. The extraordinary facility which the country afforded for the accumulation of wealth, was soon discovered and utilized. With ma- terial prosperity, came all that such prosperity carries in its train. The attainment of much, inflamed the passion for more. Each year increased the fever ; and America, speaking generally, rapidly assumed the 30 POETRY AND CRITICISM gross features so familiar to us in Emerson's por- trait of her. National life there was none. Between the several States, which had each its own character- istics and its own interests, there was almost as little unity as there was between the Italian republics of the Middle Ages. Nor were other conditions more favourable to the development of poetry. As there was everything to depress it in social and political life, so there was no bond of union, no common centre; poets had no stim- ulus from mutual enthusiasm and mutual emulation. Without enlightened patrons, without public sym- pathy, without responsibility to any critical tribunal, each poet went his own way. There was nothing to encourage him to excel. He was in a country which had no literary tradition of its own, and where critic- ism was in its infancy. And this was not all. In every- thing relating to the humanities, he was an English- man. He spoke as his native tongue the English language, he was nourished on the English literature. The schism which had severed all other bonds with the Mother Country only drew this intellectual bond the closer. England was, indeed, to America all and much more than ancient Greece was to ancient Rome; and, like Rome, America gloried in her servitude. The genius of Bryant had, aswe have seen, succeeded in breaking these shackles, but only so far as extended to the treatment of Nature. Beyond this, the move- ment had not progressed ; at that point it was ar- rested. And so remained, unexplored and unworked, all those rich mines which were to yield so much precious ore to Whittier and to Longfellow, to Lowell and to the other poets of the Revival. POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 31 American poetry presents the extraordinary anom- aly of having no infancy. Like the portentous child in Hesiod, it was born with gray hairs. Decrepit from its birth, it had in itself no principle of vigor- ous life. By re-creation only could that life inspire it. The process had been commenced by Bryant, it was now to be completed. America was to have a poetry of her own. On the 3ist of August, 1837, Emerson delivered an Address at Cambridge which sounded a trumpet note. Thus rang the thrilling strain : "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The mil- lions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that Poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years? . . . We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe. The spirit of the American is suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and priv- ate avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. Young men of the fairest promise who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in union with these. . . . We will walk on our own feet : we will work with our own hands : we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall no longer be a name for pity, for doubt and for sensual indulgence. A nation of men will, for the first time, exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men." 32 POETRY AND CRITICISM Noble words; as Holmes justly says, " Nothing like them had been heard in the halls of Harvard since Samuel Adams supported the affirmative of the question, ' Whether it be lawful to resist the Chief Magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise be preserved.'" It was, he says, the American intellectual Declaration of Independence. The response to this appeal was so immediate and enthusiastic that it must have fallen on sympathies prepared to meet it more than half way. And that, indeed, was the case. A reaction had begun to set in : a stir was already in the air, Channing's similar but less eloquent appeal, delivered fourteen years before, had sunk into many minds. Everett's Ora- tions and writings had struck, and very powerfully, a native note in prose, as Bryant and, in a minor degree, Whittier had done in poetry. If we glance at those who were to create the poetry of the next generation, and, where they had been already active, compare what they produced before 1837 with what they produced afterwards, we shall have some idea of what the movement, defining itself in that year, meant. Whittier and Longfellow were in their thirty-first year; the first had produced nothing of any value except Mogg Megone ; the second, nothing at all but a few trifles contributed to magazines. Holmes, some two years younger, had given to the world a thin volume, which would have been for- gotten long ago had it not been for his subsequent fame. Poe, an anomaly in everything, had pro- duced some fine poems, but he was almost unknown. Lowell, in his nineteenth year, as yet guiltless of verse, was an undergraduate at Harvard. Whitman, of the same age, and equally silent, was a wandering schoolmaster. Bayard Taylor was a child of thirteen, and Miller and Bret Harte were not born. The history of American poetry, till quite recently, centres round these names. With Emerson is associated the tran- scendental school ; with Whittier, the purely native school. Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell are the centre of what may be called the academic and eclectic group; Poe stands alone; so, happily, does Whitman. Taylor represents the cosmopolitan school: Miller, the poetry of the Pacific slope: Lanier, the poetry of the South, and Bret Harte was the founder and representative of what Mr. Stedman calls the transcontinental school. In some respects, Emerson is among the greatest of American poets; but it is not by virtue of his poetry, but by virtue of his prose and by virtue of what in his verse is independent of the form of verse. If we take Wordsworth's definition of a poet as exhaustive, namely, that he is "an inspired philosopher " ; or if we estimate the quality of poetry by a criterion furnished us by Emerson him- self, that it is to be judged by "the frame of mind which it induces," then there can be no question about Emerson's eminent place among poets. But these criteria are not sufficient. Poetry must have other qualities, even those indicated by Milton; it must be "simple, sensuous, impassioned." Simple, Emerson never is, except in touches. Where his poetry does not move in a world of symbolism, it moves in a world of riddles; and what it discerns it so encumbers with the laces and jewels of recondite fancies and phrases, that we dwell rather on the D 34 POETRY AND CRITICISM ornaments than on what they adorn. He seems to think and feel in aphorisms. Some of his poems resemble necklaces of crystals, and have all the hard, cold glitter of crystals. They abound in passages of which the following is typical: The kingly bard Must smite the chords rudely and hard, As with a hammer or with mace; That they may render back Artful thunder, which conveys Secrets of the solar track, Sparks of the super-solar blaze. He seems to have modelled his style on that of the poets of our Metaphysical School, particularly on that of Donne, of whom he has many reminiscences. His predominating characteristics as a poet are, if we may use the expression, intellectualized fancy and transcendental enthusiasm. But he had no attribute of the born singer. His verse, even where the themes are simple and natural, as in the touching Threnody and in May Day, has a constrained awk- ward movement, and, what is worse, leaves us with the impression that it has only been by the greatest labour that such an effect has been produced. We feel that what Milton said of himself in composing prose, namely, that he had only the use of his left hand, Emerson might have said of himself in com- posing verse. Occasionally, he can be most felicit- ous, as in Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake; POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 35 or in Though love repine and reason chafe, There came a voice without reply; 'Tis man's perdition to be safe When for the truth he ought to die; or in the justly famous So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, / can. But such felicities are so rare that they come upon us, as Matthew Arnold remarks, with a sort of sur- prise, just as the Concord Hymn in point of com- position stands almost alone among his poems. He was not a born singer. The moment we place his Dirge, excellent as the first part of it is, beside Wordsworth's parallel Extemporary Stanzas on the Death of the Ettrick Shepherd, or the Fourth of July Ode and the Boston Hymn beside Whittier's lyrics in a similar strain, we see at once the difference between Emerson and those who, in Juvenal's phrase, have ''bitten the laurel." His ear, more- over, is so defective that, the moment he leaves the simplest measures, or attempts any variations on them, his verses become intolerably dissonant. Nothing could be more unmusical than his blank verse. But his poetry is absolutely original ; and, if we seek in it what we find in his prose, it is interesting and precious. There is enough thought in it, illu- mining and inspiringly suggestive thought, to set up a dozen poets. An intense lover of Nature, natural description is a very prominent element in 36 POETRY AND CRITICISM his poetry. And his pictures and touches are always fresh, vivid, and accurate, though he has nothing of the clairvoyance and magic of Bryant. Speaking of sea-shells, he says in one of his poems: I fetched my sea-born treasures home, But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the shore, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar. It was so always with him : as a philosopher he could read Nature, and he was poet enough to de- light in her and to describe her, but he was not poet enough to steal her beauty and catch her magic. He wooed, but she jilted him. Among the most remarkable poems produced by the disciples of Emerson and he had many, notably Alcott, Cranch, Ellery Channing, and Thoreau are the sonnets of Jones Very, which, though not of the highest order, deserve to be better known than they are ; and Cranch has written one or two strik- ing poems in the same metaphysical strain. These, for example, deserve, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, an asterisk, and would have pleased Donne: We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen. All our deep communing fails To remove the shadowy screen. Heart to heart was never known : Mind with mind did never meet: We are columns left alone Of a temple once complete. Like the stars that gem the sky Far apart though seeming near; In our light we scatter'd lie, All is then but starlight here. POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 37 In passing to Whittier, we pass to a poet of a very different order. Of Quaker descent and of the Quaker persuasion, his early surroundings, those of a New England farmstead, his later, the storm and stress of the abolitionist struggle, with the Bible, the Pilgrim's Progress, the poems of Burns, and the current political journalism of his time as the chief sources of his literary education, he rapidly rose to eminence, some insisted to pre-eminence, among the poets of his country. His long life falls into two eras, the first closing with his sixtieth year in 1865, up to which time, he says, his poetry was some- thing episodical, something apart from the real object and aim of his life; the second with his death, in his eighty-fifth year, in 1892. But in both these eras his genius moved in the same sphere, and was bounded by the same horizons. He improved in technique; his note grew mellower; and, as the cause to which his life had been so nobly devoted was won, he passed out of the fierce turbulence of aggressive polemics into a serener atmosphere. He said himself, when at the height of his fame, " I set a higher value on my name as appended to the Anti- Slavery Declaration of 1833, than on the title-pages of my books " ; and the remark gives us the key to his character. His noble enthusiasm as a philan- thropist cost him dear as a poet. It left him no leisure, from early manhood till past the prime of life, to do justice to his powers. It forced him to give to journalism and controversy what he might have given to fame, and to consider of secondary importance everything which was not subservient to the moment. The result was that the habits and 38 POETRY AND CRITICISM defects peculiar to those who devote themselves to the production of ephemeral literature became con- firmed in him. What was characteristic, and neces- sarily characteristic of the work which he produced under pressure and when he had no time for medi- tation and labour, is equally characteristic of the work which he produced when he had ample time for both. Whittier has left abundant proof that Nature had qualified him to take a much higher place among poets than the place he holds; and the reason for his failing to attain it may obviously be traced to what I have described, his monotonous insistence on the themes inspired and suggested by the cause to which he devoted his life, his too easy acquiescence, as an artist, in commonplace stand- ards of aim and attainment, and his want of broad generous culture. His facility of expression and his deft and wonderful skill in spinning poems became a snare to him. Sensitive and restless, he knew no repose. Lowell describes him as having A fervour of mind that knows no separation 'Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration. And, unfortunately for his fame, we owe almost as much of his poetry to "simple excitement" as to "pure inspiration." But when under this inspira- tion, his lyrics have a verve, swing and fire which are irresistible, and which fill us with responsive en- thusiasm. The cause to which his Anti-Slavery lyrics were dedicated has long been won, and the incidents of the great struggle to which they refer are dim traditions now. But who can read, unmoved, such lyrics as The Paean, Stanzas for the Times, To POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 39 Englishmen, The Song of the Free, The Farewell, Massachusetts to Virginia, The New Year; or listen, unthrilled, to the crashing joy-bells of Laus Deo? There is great power in The Slave-Ships, and true pathos in The Farewell, while Barbara Frietchie is a little masterpiece. In his narrative poems his great infirmities as an artist are most conspicuous. Mogg Megone and The- Bridal of Pennacook, though in- teresting as anticipating Longfellow in dealing with Indian legends, are crude, diffuse, cumbrous; and The Tent on the Beach, which is among his maturest works, has no pretension to unity. Heavily drags also The Pennsylvania Pilgrim. But of his ballads and ballad-lyrics the very least that can be said for some of them is, that they are among the best of their kind. Maud Midler is justly famous, and Skipper Ireson's Ride will always be among the classics of humorous song. But his most pleasing poems are those which fairly entitle him to be called the Burns of New England. His pictures of its rural scenery and life, such as we find in Miriam, Hamp- ton Beach, in The Tent on the Beach, in Summer by the Lakeside, in The Old Burying-ground and above all in Snowbound, which is his masterpiece as a poet, are indeed delightful, and can never lose their charm. Mr. Stedman tells us that Horace Greeley pro- nounced Whittier to be the best of American poets. It would surely be more correct to say that, among the eminent poets of America, he stands lowest. The profound respect which must be felt for him as a man ; the noble object to which so much of his poetry was directed; its high moral and religious tone; its wholesomeness, its purity and its other 40 POETRY AND CRITICISM most unquestionable merits must not seduce us into mismeasurement. Whittier's very best work is not work into which any high poetic quality enters. His average work is essentially commonplace, and scarcely rises to mediocrity. His studies from Nature, truthful, fresh, and most pleasing as they generally are, are too diffuse, and produce their effect, not as the touch of genius pro- duces it, but by the commonplace process of a faith- ful accumulation of superficial details. His style, even at its best, has little distinction, abounding in such feeble pleonasms as "The tear on her cheek was not of rain," and such grotesque lapses into prose, and they are not unfrequent, as this: In him brain-currents, near and far, Converged, as in a Leyden jar. His versification is correct and musical, and at times has real charm ; but it has few notes, and on these notes it harps too monotonously. He owed nothing to study and books, had no touch of classical cul- ture. In tone, in temper and in sympathies, for good and for detriment, spiritually, morally, and intellectually, he was a New England Quaker on whom Apollo had smiled, not ungenially, but with something of the constraint and reserve likely to be evoked by the homage of so unwonted a votary. But the annals of poetry would be poorer, had such a name as Whittier's not been inscribed on their pages. Noble example is nobler than the noblest poem, and the tradition of a life which was a poem, an inheritance more precious than a poem which is written. And therefore poetry itself, the poetry of POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 41 the world, has room for Whittier's, for, impressed on what he wrote is the character of the man who wrought, his purity, his simplicity, his philanthropy, his uncompromising loyalty to conscience and duty, his cheerful piety, all that speaks in The letter fails, the systems fall, And every symbol wanes ; The Spirit, overbrooding all, Eternal love remains ; all that speaks in the beautiful verses which he addressed to those who had less confidence than him- self in the faith which sustained him : I walk with bare, hush'd feet the ground Ye tread with boldness shod : I dare not fix with mete and bound The love and power of God. . . . And so, beside the Silent Sea, I wait the muffled oar : No harm from Him can come to me On ocean or on shore. I know not where His islands lift Their fronded palms in air, I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care. O brothers, if my faith is vain, If hopes like these betray, Pray for me that my feet may gain The sure and safer way. And Thou, O Lord ! by whom are seen Thy creatures, as they be, Forgive me, if too close I lean My human heart on Thee ! Whittier was not the only poet inspired by the 42 POETRY AND CRITICISM Abolitionist struggle and the events preceding and resulting from the great war of 1861. Of the in- numerable lyrics, anonymous and appropriated, in- spired by them, some became famous. The catch song, John Brown's Body, has little to recommend it but the sonorous music to which it was set, and Randall's My Maryland, as well as the anonymous Blue Flag, have mettle and fire; but higher merit belongs to Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic, which has the power and enthusiasm of something more than rhetoric. BrownelPs war lyrics have vigour, not distinction ; but distinction cer- tainly belongs to Mrs. Lynn Beer's vivid and pathetic lyric, All Quiet along the Potomac, and to Forceythe Willson's most touching and dramatic picture of the death of The Old Sergeant. But to return to the main stream. If Whittier is the most purely native of American poets, Poe is the most purely alien. In no touch has he anything that recalls the temper and genius either of the North or of the South ; in no feature can the features of his fellow countrymen be traced. Of morality, or of any- thing pertaining to morality, he has nothing; of patriotism he has nothing; of any concern or inter- est in the world around him, nothing. An anomaly absolutely unique, the poetry characteristic of him might have been produced in any country and at any time. As he was an American citizen, and the de- scendant of American citizens, though his mother was an Englishwoman, America has a right to claim him. And, need it be added, America has a right to be proud of him, but for reasons very different from those which make her proud of her other poets. POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 43 Poe is to her literature what Keats, in an infinitely higher sense and measure, is to ours an artist for art's sake, to whom little appealed but the Beautiful, and whose poetry, at its best, is the expression of exclusive homage to it. He was the first American poet to disassociate poetry from nature and life, from the world of men, and to transport it into a world of imagination and fantasy. An artist more consummate never existed; and, although the fascination and witchery of much of his poetry had its origin from mystic sources of genuine inspiration, and cannot be resolved into triumphs, into miracles of conscious art, yet, as we know from himself, he revelled in the display of mere mechanical craftsmanship. This he did in The Bells and The Raven obviously, and, almost as ob- viously, in Ulalume ; and in this consists the in- sincerity of his poetry, " the two-fifths sheer fudge " of Lowell's well-known sarcasm. Of no poet may it be said with more truth that he was the slave of music ; hence some of his poems, like Israfel, and the poem just mentioned, Ulalume, resolve them- selves into mere music; but it is a music which had never before been heard on earth. It is in such poems as The Haunted Palace, The Conqueror Worm, The City in the Sea, Lenore, Dreamland, that, in his fan- tastic vein, he is at his best, because his magical power as an artist and musician is employed legiti- mately to body forth the genuine conceptions of imagination, weird and in various degrees touched with insanity as that imagination is. But the poems which come most home to us are the love lyrics and threnodies, whether represented by such a classic 44 POETRY AND CRITICISM gem as ' ' Helen thy Beauty " or by A nnabel Lee, with its pathos in quintessence and haunting harmony, or the magic of Eulalie, and The Sleeper, or the utterly unanalyzable fascination of the verses For A nnie. The contrast between Poe's lawless and turbid life and the purity and serenity of the world in which he moved as a poet, is not more striking than an- other contrast presented by his constitution and temper. With the aesthetic sensibility, imagination and enthusiasm of a poet he united a precise, cold, logical intellect, in the exerciseof which he delighted. His analysis of the rationale of The Raven is well known and is most significant. Of what may be traced to this characteristic there is too much in his poetry. Its enthusiasm, we often feel, is not wholly pure : its passion has not always the note of sincerity, nor is it always on the wing of inspired imagination that he soars to his weird realms. To this character- istic may be traced, also, his precise and clear-cut style, so lucid, so coldly chaste, so deliberately, so exquisitely finished. His marvellous tact as an artist taught him to blend most harmoniously and effect- ively the opposite extremes of studied simplicity and studied preciosity. The poetry of Poe was a new creation. It owed something to Coleridge, something to Shelley, and something to Tennyson, but nothing like it as a whole had appeared before. If The Raven and The Bells are little better than tours de force they are absolutely original: if Ulalume and Israfel are tuneful nonsense, no such tuneful nonsense had as yet been heard. Every note which he struck he POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 45 struck for the first time, and every note which he struck has since vibrated in the lyric poetry of Ame- rica and England. It would be idle to institute any comparison between him and the other lyric poets of the English-speaking race whose immortality he will share, for he stands absolutely alone. Every generation will delight in his poetry, but it will never come home to men like the poetry of his brethren. They will be fascinated with the weird witchery of its music, and with the mystic beauty of its strange, wild fancies. They will wander with mingled emotions through its wonderful Dream- land, now radiant with the light of heaven, now lurid with a light which is the light in delirium's eyes. They will be touched with its pathos, so sim- ple, yet so intense. They will marvel at its miracles of technical triumph. But they will draw no inspi- ration from it. It has nothing of the influential virtue of vital poetry: it carries no balm for the heart's wounds, no solace for life's cares. It never kindled a generous emotion or a noble thought. To rise from its perusal is like waking from a dream, a dream that haunts, but a dream that finally fades, leaving no traces, from memory. Not his the song that in its metre holy Chimes with the music of the eternal stars : Humbling the tyrant, lifting up the lowly, And sending sun through the soul's prison bars. And now we come to that eminent and gifted trio in whose work the transatlantic poetry of the last century may be said, in many important respects, to culminate. It would be difficult for any critic, unless he wishes to be paradoxical, to say anything new 46 POETRY AND CRITICISM about poets so long and so widely discussed as Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell. Each has his place assigned, and, no doubt, rightly assigned, to him, both in his native country and in Great Britain ; and it is a proof of the intimacy of the relationship in all that pertains to the humanities between America and ourselves, that the estimate formed of them by their countrymen should differ so little from the es- timate formed here. I am not speaking of the aca- demic school of criticism which has ignored them, nor of the modern preciosity school which has af- fected, and still affects, to despise them, but of the audience and tribunal to which they appeal and by which they would desire to be judged general readers of culture and intelligence, and competent critics with catholic tastes and sympathies. The correctness of the estimate formed of their work is due to the instinctive good sense which has not expected more from them than they had to give, and thus allowed no discontent or querulousness to in- terfere with generous appreciation of what they did give. These three poets have very much in common. All professors in the same university, they were es- sentially scholars and men of manifold accomplish- ments, profoundly versed in English literature and intimately acquainted with all the chief languages and literatures of Europe, where all had resided, not as casual travellers, but as students. They were thus men of cosmopolitan culture and of cosmopoli- tan tastes and sympathies. All delighted in society, and were almost as distinguished by their social qualities as by their literary accomplishments. For POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 47 all, the composition of poetry was mere recreation, subordinate, in the case of Holmes, to the duties of a busy practising physician ; in the case of Long- fellow, to the duties of a Professor of Belles-lettres ; in the case of Lowell, to vocations more various than had ever before, perhaps, fallen to the lot of one man. Their lives were easy and prosperous; two of them were humorists, delighting in such trifles as amuse good-natured flaneurs, and the third, if not a humorist, had the tastes of a refined dilettant. Nothing less like bards or prophets could possibly be imagined than these genial, polished, and most accomplished men. No great poetry ever appeared under such con- ditions, and from men so constituted and tempered great poetry we cannot hope to find. We find what we might expect, not a poetry rooted in contempor- ary national life and drawing its inspiration and nu- triment from that life: not intensity, not passion, not enthusiasm, nothing of that homogeneousness and originality characteristic of a poetry which has the note of the Zeitgeist, and is the unforced and common product of propitious social and political conditions; but a poetry academic, eclectic, occa- sional, having its models in many literatures, de- riving its material and inspiration from what hap- pened accidentally to appeal to the poet as an in- dividual, either in his private or social life, or in his studies. Thus, when it took an objective form, it ransacked the annals legendary and historical, not of America only, but of almost every country in the world, without, however, transferring them, after the manner of inspired poetry, into symbols and 48 POETRY AND CRITICISM analogues of the life pulsing round it. When it took a subjective form, it resolved itself into a series of fragments, as various in expression as in matter, sometimes serious, sometimes trifling, seldom ori- ginal, never profound. It is a poetry which plays on the surface of life, catching its lights and shadows; dealing with its ordinary experiences, and giving musical utterance to such reflections and senti- ments as those experiences are wont to evoke from normally and healthily constituted men and women. But, being essentially composite, it has many tones and many notes, and ranges over a wide field. Now it is academic, and, seeking its themes in subjects dear to the scholar and student, affects classicism and the grand style, and here, as a rule, it is not successful; now, as in Lowell's Commem- oration Ode, it kindles with noble moral fervour; now it is the perfection of simple idyll, pure nature with pure nature's note: A certain freshness of the fields, A sweetness as of home-made bread, and here it has often inexpressible charm. Occa- sionally, it surprises us, as in the Btglow Papers and in other humorous and semi-humorous pieces, not only by its raciness, vividness and power in comedy and satire, but by its inimitable presenta- tion of the idiosyncrasies of national character. A very long life may fairly be predicted for Parson Wilbur, Hosea Biglow and Bird o' Fredom Sawin. But its excursions into such realms as these are the exception, not the rule. Its favourite sphere is the sphere which has been indicated, the sphere of POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 49 Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea, of Schiller's and Heine's lyrics and legends, of Wordsworth's "bal- lads " and nature poems, of Tennyson's home idylls and In Memoriam, of Prior's and Praed's vers de societe. And this realm it, too, made its own, en- riching and permanently enriching the poetry of the English-speaking world. I have associated Holmes with Longfellow and Lowell. Had he been living, that most modest of men would probably have asked with surprise how any one who presumed to talk critically of poetry could have so mismeasured him. It would have been necessary to explain that he stood beside them rather for the convenience of tabulation than for any inten- tion of assuming his equality. But even then he would have shaken his head. And, indeed, Holmes's most striking characteristics are those of the impro- msatore, his extraordinary versatility and his not less extraordinary facility in composition. He has fire and mettle, witness his Bunker-hill Battle and his Old Ironsides and Lexington : his fancy can be ex- quisite, with a touch of magic, as the Chambered Nautilus testifies ; and equally exquisite and magic- touched his pathos, as in Under the Violets. He can be impressive to sternness as in The Two Streams a really fine lyric and The Living Temple: he can catch the deep religious fervour of his Puritan fore- fathers, as in his Hymns. His humour can be de- lightful, as in The One-Horse Shay and in Parson Turell's Legacy. His tact and grace and his felicity of charming and appropriate expression as a poet of social functions, of anniversaries, and of all such occasions as call for the wreath of the moment, are E 50 POETRY AND CRITICISM quite unsurpassed. But we love him best as the poet of the changes and chances of man's life, and as the tender laureate of the memory-consecrated past ; as the cheerful optimist, when night is nigh as the poet of such poems as The Last Survivor, The S/tadotvs, All Here, and of that poem which for all time deserves to be bound up with its sister poem in prose, Cicero's De Senectute, I mean The Iron- gate. We love him, as we love Horace, for his genial humanity, his mellow wisdom, such as find expression, for instance, in an unforgetable quatrain like this: Man judges all : God knoweth each: We read the rule, He knows the law; How oft His laughing children teach The truths His prophets never saw. And this is typical of much more. In passing from Holmes to Lowell, we pass from charm to power. In originality, in virility, in many- sidedness, Lowell is the first of American poets. He not only possessed, at times in nearly equal measure, many of the qualities most notable in his fellow poets, rivalling Bryant as a painter of Nature, and Holmes in pathos, having a touch too of Emerson's tran- scendentalism, and rising occasionally to Whittier's moral fervour, but he brought to all this much be- side. The first part of the Legend of Brittany in its sensuous richness reminds us of Leigh Hunt at his best: The Sirens and Irene recall Tennyson too nearly, perhaps, but they are no discredit to their model. In one vein he produced such a masterpiece of mingled pathos and nature painting as we find in the tenth Biglow letter of the second series: in POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 51 another, such a lyric gem as The Fountain', in an- other, The First Snow-fall and After the Burial: in another, again, the noble Harvard Commemoration Ode. And the author of these poems was the creator of Parson Wilbur, Hosea Biglow, and Bird o' Fre- dom Sawin, as well as the author of A Fable for Critics. This is a wide range; but we must distin- guish between the degrees of success with which it has been attempted. No work produced before a poet has found his natural level, has found himself, can form any factor in an estimate of his work as a whole, in an estimate of his place among poets. At least two-thirds of Lowell's earlier poems, however pleasing and eloquent, have something of the note of falsetto. Many of them are simply eclectic ex- periments. The more ambitious poems, Prometheus, J?/wecusand Columbus, are little more than academic exercises, and not of a high order even among such compositions. Sir Launfal, except for the beautiful nature pictures, scarcely rises above the level of an Ingoldsby Legend. The truth is, that Lowell was in constitution and temper a humorist and moralist touched with aes- thetic sensibility, with the fancy not with the imagi- nation, with something of the fervour, not with the enthusiasm, of the poet. Much which, as a poet, he should have owed to Nature, he owed to culture and to the sympathetic study of preceding masters, notably Keats and Tennyson. A cultivated taste is a poor substitute for instinct ; for the one is as fall- ible as the other is infallible. Hence, we are never sure of Lowell. He deserts Keats in A Legend of Brittany to collapse into melodrama expressed in 52 POETRY AND CRITICISM the language of melodrama, just as the Indian Summer Reverie, with its exquisite nature pictures, trails off into flat bald prose. Except in his earlier poems and in his pictures from nature, his poetry has little sensuous charm. He had plainly a most defective ear for rhythm and verbal harmony. Ex- cept when he confines himself to simple metres, we rarely find five consecutive lines which do not in some way jar on us. His blank verse and the irre- gular metres which he, unfortunately, so often em- ploys, have little or no music, and are often quite intolerable. Of the distressing effect of clogged con- sonants, sibilants and cacophonies of all kinds, he appears to be as unconscious as Browning. Some of these defects, or, at least, their exaggeration, are perhaps to be attributed, like his jumbled metaphors and other faults of expression, to carelessness and impatience of the work of correction. No poetry owes so little to the file. But, after all the deductions which the most ex- acting criticism can make, it still remains that, as a serious poet, Lowell stands high. As a painter of Nature, he has, when at his best, few superiors, and, in his own country, none. Whatever be their aesthe- tic and technical deficiencies, he has written many poems of sentiment and pathos which can never fail to come home to all to whom such poetry appeals. His hortatory and didactic poetry, as it expresses it- self in the Harvard Commemoration Ode, is worthy, if not of the music and felicity of Milton and Words- worth, at least of their tone, when that tone is most exalted. As a humorist he is inimitable. His humour is rooted in a finer sense of the becoming and in a POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 53 profounder insight into the character of his country- men than that of any other American writer. The Biglow Papers will live as long as Hudibras; and, as long as Butler's crystallizations of shrewd wisdom and ethic truth, will live and appeal the similar aphorisms with which Lowell's poems are studded. Ill Sydney Smith, having occasion to discuss some subject with Lord Melbourne, and knowing that great man's habit of indulging very liberally in a certain expletive, proposed that they should save time by assuming that the said expletive had been applied to everything, and proceed to business. I propose to deal similarly with Longfellow's hostile critics. Let it be conceded at once that he had little, if any, originality; that he would have been nowhere without the lyric poetry of Germany, of which his own is often merely an echo, without the literatures of Europe generally, to which almost everything he has written can be traced ; that he had no depth of thought; that he had neither sublimity nor passion ; that*he failed egregiously when he attempted any- thing ambitious; that he succeeded most when he was most modest; that he never composed a line beyond the comprehension of the bourgeoisie, nay, of intelligent boys and girls, and very much which was dedicated and intimately appealed to them. And yet, it remains that, to thousands, whose tastes have been formed by the sympathetic study of the aristocrats of classical poetry, and who are com- pelled to acknowledge the justice of these allega- 54 POETRY AND CRITICISM tions, they come, like those grating truths which we wish were falsehoods. It is like listening to re- proaches on those we love ; distressed and irritated, we long to retort on those who utter them. And, indeed, there is something almost sacred in the fame of Longfellow; for to how many thousands, to how many hundreds of thousands, is his poetry conse- crated by its associations. As Froude beautifully says of the silvery cadences of our liturgy, that they " chime like church-bells in the ear of the English child," and haunt his memory with their music long after childhood has passed, so, like church-bells have chimed for our children another music as sil- very and as haunting the music of Longfellow. To how many a death-darkened household, to how many a life, clouded with the cares or bending under the burdens which few escape, has his poetry brought balm and sunshine and encouragement. Such poetry as is characteristic of him is no more intended for critics than the Bible was intended for theologians, or the spring that gushes forth and refreshes the toil-worn traveller, to supply material for analytical chemistry. And yet is there much satisfaction in showing that, even on the application of strict and exacting critical standards, even if we accept Sainte-Beuve's dictum that the question for us is not whether we admire any given work but whether we ought to admire it, even from this point of view, Longfellow's admirers have nothing to fear. He is almost always sound in quality and sound in style. Even where sentimentally he is thinnest and most trite, as in The Footsteps of Angels, The Rainy Day, The Bridge, POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 55 The Reaper and the Flowers, Children, we are touched and rightly touched ; for the pathos, though simple, is genuine, and its expression exquisite in its pro- priety. The Psalm of Life, I am not speaking of it as a work of art, is a noble poem, and all the mouth- ings of it in Infant Schools and in Young Men's Christian Associations, and all the strummings of " middle class " pianos will never make it other than noble. Though his themes are so often the themes so dear to Eliza Cook and her circle, his refinement and tact often enabled him to maintain a level above commonplace. He was never trivial ; his style sel- dom lacks distinction. His range and power as a lyric poet and balladist would be best seen by placing beside the poems which have just been referred to, The Skeleton in Armour and Victor Galbraith, which have a fire and verve rare with him; the impressive and noble quatrains in the Arsenal at Springfield', the ex- quisitely pathetic verses entitled Weariness, and the Bells of Lynn, with its finely-cadenced lilt and swing. The Building of the Ship cannot bear comparison with Schiller's Das Lied von der Glocke, which was its model, but the concluding lines, the apostrophe to the Union, have all the fervour and strength of Whittier's lyric when at its very best, and must go to the heart of every true American. Of his longer poems, The Tales of a Wayside Inn will scarcely add to his reputation ; but the Saga of Olaf shows how faithfully he could catch and render the notes of the Eddas. The Golden Legend, whatever excep- tion may justly be taken to its infirmities of structure and want of unity and concentration, contains, frag- 56 POETRY AND CRITICISM mentarily, some of his very best and most impressive work: Elsie's chant, in the fifth part, beginning ' ' The night is calm and cloudless," is one of the most ex- quisite lyrics to be found in American poetry: The night is calm and cloudless, And still as still can be, And the stars come forth to listen To the music of the sea. They gather, and gather, and gather, Until they crowd the sky, And listen in breathless silence To the solemn litany. It begins in rocky caverns, As a voice that chants alone To the pedals of the organ In monotonous undertone ; And anon from shelving beaches, And shallow sands beyond, In snow-white robes uprising The ghostly choirs respond. And sadly and unceasing The mournful voice sings on, And the snow-white choirs still answer, Christe eleison ! His most powerful work, from a dramatic point of view, is the Courtship of Miles Standish, but the works in this group on which his fame will rest are of course Evangeline and Hiawatha. Of Evangeline, it would be impertinent to say anything more than that it is the crown and flower of American Idyll, a poem belonging, like our own Goldsmith's Deserted Village, to the poetry which a nation enshrines in its heart of hearts. As a work of art it will not, of course, bear comparison fora moment with the Ger- man masterpiece on which it is obviously modelled, POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 57 but in its simple pathos it comes more nearly home to the affections than Hermann and Dorothea. If anyone wished to make out a case for Long- fellow's claim to what is almost universally denied him, originality, he would do well to take his stand on Hiawatha. He may have borrowed his form and metre from the Kalevala, his material from books in his library, and have failed, as he always does fail, in concentration and unity; yet he at least broke new ground, and produced a work which is often of singular charm, and which had no prototype in art. As a translator, he is all but unrivalled. I am not speaking of the hideous fidelity of his version of Dante, but of such masterpieces as his version of the Coplas of Manrique, of Salis' Silent Land, of Mul- ler's Beware, of Uhland's Castle by the Sea, and the versions from the Swedish and Danish. Perhaps the only poems of Longfellow's to which, generally speaking, justice has not been done are his Son- nets; but some of these Sonnets are among the finest ever written in any language; such would be Dante, and the first and second of those on the Divina Commedia ; excellent, also, if in a less degree, are the three others, as well as Nature, Giotto's Tower, and Chaucer but nearly all have distinction. Many would no doubt dispute Longfellow's title to be considered America's greatest poet; probably no one would dispute his title to be considered her greatest poetic artist. His supremacy there is con- firmed alike by the range of his attainment and by its quality. It is a long way from the most exquisite of his lyrics to such lyrics as the Saga of KingOlaf 58 POETRY AND CRITICISM and Victor Galbraith, from the Voices of the Night and Birds of Passage to the Courtship of Miles Standish) from the Sonnets to Hiawatha, from The Golden Legend to Evangeline] and in every one of these experiments his success has been universally acknowledged. It is no small achievement to have been able to sound again the note of the Sagas and the Kalevala, the note of Manrique, the note of Dante, the notes of Goethe, of Schiller, of Uhland and of Heine, not as a mere imitator, but as a kins- man and copartner in inspiration ; to have created a style admirable alike in lexis and in rhythm, the perfection of purity, lucidity, and propriety, with a music all its own, equably harmonious but never monotonous, because in gracious and exquisite har- mony with every conception and every emotion that inspired it. And so, having conducted him to where he is safe from hostile criticism, we will reverently and grate- fully leave him, without adding to the impertinences of that criticism by any attempt to settle his relative place among modern poets. From the great New England trio we come to the most versatile of American men of letters, Bayard Taylor. Sensitive, receptive, finely touched and finely tempered, with a faculty of fluent expression and production, which few, even of his own country- men, have rivalled, he dedicated a life of crowded experience and of almost limitless industry to literary work. In serious poetry, there was scarcely any note which he did not strike. Studies from the Greek, studies in Oriental life, studies in Italian life, studies in Pennsylvanian, in California!!, in POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 59 Norse life: lyrics in every key and in almost every measure, Pindaric, Hafizian, Shelleyan; threnody and dithyramb, love-song and war-song, state-song and ballad : narratives and idylls of equal range and variety: drama, ideal, realistic, lyrical. And if it be said, as it may with justice be said, that he failed conspicuously in nothing except when he became metaphysical, we must not grudge him the tribute to which such gifts and such achievements are en- titled, the tribute of admiration. But no poetry of a high, or even of any permanent, value at all has ever had its root in what we admire in Taylor. He is, like Willis, little more than an impromsatore. His poems, having no unity and no enthusiasm, either moral or spiritual, are mere studies in song. He has neither depth nor distinction, neither sub- tlety nor power in reserve. At his best, he is above mediocrity, but, with very rare exceptions, below excellence. How incomparably inferior, for example, is the Bedouin Song, praised so highly by Mr. Stedman, to Shelley's Lines on an Indian Air which it so nearly recalls, and which apparently inspired it. The rich and noble but somewhat extravagant poem, The Metempsychosis of the Pme, and the very exquisite verses from Euplwrion on the death of a friend's child, seem to me to stand absolutely alone in his poetry: For, through the crystal of your tears, His love and beauty fairer shine ; The shadows of advancing years Draw back, and leave him all divine. And Death, that took him, cannot claim The smallest vesture of his birth, 60 POETRY AND CRITICISM The little life, a dancing flame That hover'd o'er the hills of earth, The finer soul, that unto ours A subtle perfume seemed to be, Like incense blown from April flowers Beside the scarred and stormy tree, The wondering eyes, that ever saw Some fleeting mystery in the air, And felt the stars of evening draw His heart to silence childhood's prayer ! And more exquisite verses never came from a poet's pen. There is pathos too and power also in Under the Stars, in Sunken Treasures, and in The Mystery, which last has a memorable line : Death may not keep what Death has never made. An achievement far more valuable than any of his original poems except, indeed, fortouches and frag- ments, is his admirable version of Goethe's Faust. With Taylor are associated four poets, one of whom is justly distinguished, while the other three have at least individualized themselves Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Richard Henry Stoddard, George Henry Boker and Thomas Buchanan Read. As a writer of vers de societe, as a balladist, lyrist, and descriptive poet, Aldrich is among the most ac- complished and pleasing of American poets, as such poems as his Palabras Carinosas, Babie Bell, and Lynn Terrace amply testify. Stoddard is the author of some pretty lyrics, of some respectable blank verse, and of a threnody on Lincoln which unfortunately invites comparison with Marvell and Tennyson; Boker of some dramas which have gone POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 61 the way of W. H. Wills's, and of some pleasing lyrics and ballads. Read produced a good descrip- tive poem, The New Pastoral, at least one pretty lyric, Drifting, and a war song of real merit, Sheri- dan's Ride. With this group of poets may be classed Dr. Thomas William Parsons, a scholarly and ac- complished poet, whose lines On a Bust of Dante, if perhaps overpraised, have real merit, and John James Piatt, a representative poet of the Middle West, who holds no undistinguished place both in idyll and in reflective lyric. In singular contrast to the poetic activity of the New England and Pennsylvanian schools was the sterility of the South. It had only produced three poets whose names are worth recording. Henry Timrod, the author of The Cotton Boll, had a touch of genius; and of merit also is the work of Paul Hamilton Hayne, who, like our own Southey, was a good man and not a bad poet: his lyrics, A Little While I Fain would Linger and In Harbour are very pleasing. But by far the most distinguished poet of this group was Sidney Lanier. Lanier is plainly a disciple of Poe, whose music he often closely recalls, but he was a man of rich and fine genius, over which, however, he had no control and which seems to have intoxicated him. "The very inner spirit and essence of all wind-songs, passion- songs, sex-songs, soul-songs, and body-songs " so he wrote of himself "hath blown upon me like the breaths of passions, and sailed me into a sea of vast dreams, whereof each wave is at once a vision and a melody." So it is with him in such poems as the really superb Marshes of Glynn, Sunrise, Corn, 62 POETRY AND CRITICISM Psalm of the West, Nirvana, in such lyrics as The Sun has Kissed the Violet Sea, the verses to Neilson, and in the less intense but most charming Song of the Chattahoochee. But Lanier failed to do justice to his genius as a poet, by deliberately fettering himself with a most mistaken theory. He endea- voured to blend and reconcile what is peculiar to music with what is peculiar to poetry, so that his poetry tends to confine itself to the expression of what is more appropriately expressed by the sister art, too often resolving into mere sensuous melody and vague dreamy suggestiveness; but his poetry is full of beauty and charm ; and it is original. Very different were the strains coming from the Pacific slope. There a poet appeared who at one time promised to be among the most eminent, as he is certainly among the most remarkable, whom America has produced. Of the genius of Joaquin Miller there can be no question. His Songs of the Sierras struck a new and powerful note. Full of fire and passion and colour, with all the race and flavour of the wild, rich world of their nativity, they swept along, like his own Vaquero, On stormy steed, His gaudy trappings tossed about and blown About the limbs as lithe as any reed, and the woods, where Birds hang and swing, green rob'd and red, Or droop in curved lines dreamily, Rainbows reversed, from tree to tree, and monkeys run through the leaves Like shuttles hurried through and through The threads a hasty weaver weaves. POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 63 And, the long days through, from blossom'd trees There comes the sweet song of sweet bees, With chorus tone of cockatoo That slides his beak along the bough, And walks and talks and hangs and swings In crown of gold and coat of blue, and the land of the tornado, when The tasselled tops of the pines are as weeds, And the redwoods rock like to lake-side reeds, And the world seems darkened and drowned forever, the land of sun-maids " tawny-red like wine " with "rivers of hair and hearts of gold" all this had found its poet. But Miller never got beyond the Songs of the Sierras', to the themes of which, or to themes kindred to them, he always returned, when he had anything distinctive to say. What seemed, therefore, a work of splendid promise included the fulfilment of that promise. Shallow-rooted and with- out buds, his poetry flaunted into full life a gaudy, broad-blown flower. But it was of native growth and no exotic. Of native growth, also, and no exotic was the pro- digious product of transatlantic genius which we have now to inspect. One of the most accomplished and scholarly of English critics, the late John Ad- dington Symonds, told us that we were to see in Walt Whitman "A Behemoth, wallowing in prim- eval jungles, bathing at fountain heads of mighty rivers, crushing the bamboos and the cane-brakes under him, bellowing and exulting in the torrid air; a gigantic elk or buffalo trampling the grasses of the wilderness, tracking his mate with irresistible energy ; an immense tree, a kind ofYgdrasil, stretch- 64 POETRY AND CRITICISM ing its roots deep down into the bowels of the world, and unfolding its magic boughs through all the spaces of the heavens ; the circumambient air, in which float shadowy shapes, rise mirage towers and palm groves; the globe itself, all seas, lands, forests, climates, storms, snows, sunshines, rains of uni- versal earth; all nations, cities, languages, religions, arts, creeds, thoughts, emotions; the beginning and the grit of these things, not their endings, lees and dregs." 1 The most distinguished of living English poets, on the other hand, sees in the touches which awaken these astonishing elemental melodies only " the dirty and clumsy paws of a harper whose plectrum is a muck-rake," and whose Muse may be resolved into "a drunken apple-woman indecently sprawl- ing in the slush and garbage of the gutter, amid the rotten refuse of the overturned apple stall. 2 These have not the accent of impartial criticism. It may, perhaps, assist us to a more balanced estimate, if we assume the truth of three proposi- tions; namely, that if a man six feet high, " of striking masculine beauty and of venerable appear- ance," chooses to stand on his head in the public streets, and proceed to other improprieties of which the police take cognizance, he will at least attract notice, and create some excitement; secondly, that the law of reaction in literature, as in everything else, will assert itself, that, when poetry has long attained perfection in form and has been running smoothly in conventional grooves, there is certain 1 A Study of Walt Whitman, pp. 155-6. 2 Swinburne's Whitmania, POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 65 to be revolt both on the part of poets themselves and in the public taste, and the opposite extreme will be affected and welcomed ; and, thirdly, that if a writer has the courage or impudence to set sense, taste and decency at defiance, and, posing sometimes as a mystic and sometimes as a mountebank, to express himself in the jargon of both, and yet has the genius to irradiate his absurdities with flashes of wisdom, beauty and inspired insight, three things are cer- tain to result. Those who sympathize with the re- action of which he is the representative will dwell with ecstasy on the very little which is the salt of his work, will either ignore the rest, or, coming to it with judgement prejudiced by their admiration for what is vital and excellent, invest it with factitious merits. Those of conservative tastes will dwell only on what disgusts and offends them, and have no eyes for anything else; and those who belong to neither party, but are quite willing to judge what they find on its own merits, will be perplexed, and probably misled, by the conflicting opinions so im- portunately vociferated, with all the heat of partisan- ship, by the others. This is precisely what has happened in the case of Whitman. There can be little doubt that he em- ployed the style which he affected, as well as the shameless obscenities of such pieces as The Children of Adam, to attract attention. It was a cheap and easy means of attaining a unique position as a poet. Nor was his mode of expression his only expedient for securing singularity. Since Rousseau, no man had presented himself absolutely nude to the public gaze. That edifying spectacle was now repeated, F 66 POETRY AND CRITICISM and all who were interested in such exhibitions could inspect and contrast them at their leisure; and, cer- tainly, the stalwart and virile American showed to great advantage beside the puny and emasculated Frenchman. Having thus succeeded, as might have been expected, not indeed in gaining respect, but in drawing all eyes upon him, he proceeded to pile eccentricity upon eccentricity and extravagance up- on extravagance. A celebrated statesman once ob- served, on being informed that the English people would not " stand " a certain measure which he was preparing to carry, that his experience had shown him that the limits of what they would " stand " had never yet been discovered. But what they would "stand " in art the American people, it must be re- membered, were never hoodwinked by him Whit- man resolved to try. He gave them page after page of mere jabber, of twaddle so absolutely drivelling that it fascinated by its sheer audacity. Sometimes it assumed the form of inanities and platitudes, such as any man of average intelligence would, even in familiar conversation, be ashamed to express ; some- times it strung together long lists of names tran- scribed from maps and gazetteers, introduced with a "What do you see, Walt Whitman?", extracts from Natural Histories, travels, scientific treatises, and even from newspapers; more often it vented itself in transcendental or political ravings. Alto- gether, it presented a phenomenon the like of which had not only never been seen before, but the like of which would have seemed to any sane man impossi- ble outside the cells of a lunatic asylum. But Whit- man was no lunatic, and well knew what he was POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 67 after. All this was merely, in his own words, " Drum-Taps " the arts of the astute showman, to collect a crowd for a show which, in some respects, was well worth seeing. But when we come even to Whitman's serious and genuine work, large deductions have to be made for what it would be unduly harsh to call charla- tanry, but which certainly comes very near it. His " chants " for that is the term he affected have been called poetry in solution, but what is in solu- tion in them is not poetry of his own but the poetry of others. This " most original of American writers " is, in truth, more indebted to his predecessors and contemporaries than any other American writer. He simply resolved into his own diffuse jargon, and revoked in his own "barbaric yawp," what had been expressed legitimately, in the true form of poetry, or in simple prose, by Burns and Blake, by Words- worth, by Goethe, by Shelley, by Tennyson, by Carlyle, by Emerson, by Thoreau and by many others. Whether his appropriations were conscious and deliberate, or whether they were the result of what was in the air, so to speak, scarcely affects the point of importance. He was not, what by a trick of expression he affected to be, original in anything that was sane in his philosophy and propaganda. One illustration will suffice, for it is typical. Words- worth wrote, and wrote as a poet : The stars of midnight shall be dear To her : and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place, Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of neighbouring sound Shall pass into her face. 68 POETRY AND CRITICISM Whitman writes, more suo: There was a child went forth every day : And the first object he looked upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day, or A certain part of the day, or for many years, or Stretching cycles of years. . . . The horizon's edge, the flying sea-crow : the fragrance of salt marsh and shore-mud : These became part of that child who went forth Everyday, and who now goes and will always go forth everyday. " Plainly," as Mr. Stedman naively observes, " there are some comparative advantages in Words- worth's treatment of this idea." It is pitiable to see a critic like Addington Symonds exalting Whitman into a bard and prophet, and dwelling fondly on the inspired power and beauty of chants, or portions of chants, which, he must have known, were simply centos, with Whitmanian dilutions or extravagances, from Goethe, or from Wordsworth, fromThoreau, or from Emerson. It was this sort of homage which con- firmed Whitman in his megalomania, in that mon- strous and ludicrous egotism which led him to preach, and finally no doubt to believe, that, to employ his own jargon, he was all, and that all was he. To speak quite plainly, Whitman began by being in some re- spect a charlatan, and paid the penalty by becoming at last something very like a madman. He had to pay also another penalty mortifying to his vanity, and, to do him justice, to a nobler instinct. He aspired to be the poet of the democracy, but the democracy would have nothing to do with him ; and it was right, as it almost always is, in its judgment of what directly appeals to it. He has been com- pared to our own Blake, whom in some respects he POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 69 nearly resembles; but, as Professor Nichol admir- ably put it, Blake was a prodigious genius marred by almost insane violence, Whitman a writer of almost insane violence occasionally redeemed by touches of genius. 1 How, then, are we to explain the fascination which his work has undoubtedly had, and still has, for so many? Making all due deductions for what has been explained already, there can of course be no question about Whitman's genius. Had he been true to it, he might have stood high among genuine poets; for, on the rare occasions when he is true to it, he has lyric notes of thrilling power, he has pathos, he has passion, and in his nature-pictures he has often a magical touch. At times, true enthusiasm pos- sessed and inspired him, and there is no mistaking its accent. A poem like Pioneers, firm-blown and from the heart, rings like a clarion. The poem When Lilacs Last, and the shorter piece O Captain, My Captain, are noble threnodies. Out of the Cradle endlessly Rocking is at times beautiful alike for its pathos, nature-painting, and rhythm. A poem, again, like the Vigil on the Fields came from the heart and goes to the heart. In Sea Drift there is more which reveals him at his very best, for he is generally at his best when the sea and elementary forces are his themes. Nor can it be denied that the strange uncouth mode of expression which he adopted had at times curious propriety. Another secret of his fascination is his impressive and imperious personality and his cosmopolitan sympathies and gospel. If, in the first, there is 1 American Literature, p. 214. 70 POETRY AND CRITICISM much which is grotesque and disgusting, there is more which justly commands admiration. Every inch a man, big-brained, big-hearted, fearless, re- solute and robust, he is not only the incarnation of strength, but he is the soul of independence and philanthropy. Art and the humanities may look askance on him, as he on them ; but mother Nature, to whom alone he did homage, had every reason to regard with pride one of the loyaljst and most stal- wart of her children. And, indelibly as his vices, follies, and infirmities, is all this and it is very at- tractive impressed on his writings. Though there is nothing original, either in his propaganda or in his prophecies, yet, however ragged and dissonant the note of his trumpet, he is among the heralds of the mighty future before America, before mankind of the Republic of Republics, of world federation, of universal brotherhood, of the religion of humanity, of the " one God, one law, one element " of Tenny- son's vision. No one can read unmoved such poems as By blue Ontario's shore, Thou Mother -with thy Equal Brood, Song of the Broad Axe, and The Mystic Trumpeter. I have spoken of his herald- trumpet's ragged notes; let us listen to one of his clear notes : Marches of victory man disenthral'd the conqueror at last. Hymns to the Universal God from universal man all joy ! A re-born race appears a perfect world, all joy ! Women and men in wisdom, innocence and health all joy ! War, sorrow, suffering gone the rank earth purg'd nothing but joy left ; The ocean fill'd with joy the atmosphere all joy- Joy, joy in freedom, worship, love! joy in the ecstasy of life ! Joy ! joy ! all over joy ! 7' This is at least worth translating into poetry. But Whitman's virtues will be of no more avail, and all he has left will inevitably fall " into the portion of weeds and outworn faces." The world never respects a man who does not respect himself, and to bawl out indiscriminately what should be said and what should not be said (6 fara xai appyra jSowv) was a syno- nym with the Greeks for a blackguard. Of this offence, Whitman was guilty, not accidentally but on principle, not morally only, but intellectually and aesthetically. He was, no doubt, what he was fond of calling himself, a child of Nature, and his admirers have called him the poet of nature: but no poet can be true to nature who is not true to art. We now pass to a poet as essentially native as Miller and Whitman, but standing in remarkable contrast to both. If Miller is the most diffuse, and Whitman the most extravagant and lawless of the native school, Bret Harte is the most concise and restrained. His reputation as a humorist has eclipsed his reputation as a serious poet, and he will no doubt live mainly by his prose stories; but his serious poetry has scarcely had justice done to it. Much, indeed the greater part, of his verse was, no doubt, produced as mere journeyman work, and cer- tainly does not rise above the level of what a skilful craftsman could, in the course of that work, easily turn out. With this we need not trouble ourselves. It is in a narrow sphere that his distinction lies; it lies in the clairvoyant vividness and thrilling power with which he realizes and presents a pathetic scene or incident, in his faculty of piercing to the heart of some dramatic situation or circumstance, and repro 72 POETRY AND CRITICISM ducing it with corresponding nearness and truth, and in the nerve and grip of his narrative. Nothing could well exceed the power and pathos of The Sta- tion-master of Lone Prairie, or the charm and pathos of Dickens in Camp. Even such waifs a.sjim and In the Tunnel smite, the tears into our eyes. Guild's Signal may owe its pathos and what pathos there is in it! to the fact, but how admirably is that fact presented; in Grandmother Tenterden he is again at his best. The exquisite little poem The Mountain Hearts-ease is in another vein, but it deserves a place beside Burns' Daisy. In Ramon, The Hawk's Nest, Dow's Flat, and in The Old Camp-fire, we have leaves from a life which no one has painted as he has done. Miss Blanche Says and For the King are spoilt by too great fidelity to a bad model, Browning, and Concepdon de Arguello by a fault very rare with Bret Harte, diffuseness. His style, terse, lucid and sinewy, "with its sabre-cuts of Saxon speech," is all his own, and has set American realistic poetry to a new tune. Bret Harte has great versatility. When he strikes the notes which other poets have struck, it is often with added charm. In spite of Longfellow there is room for such a poem as The Angelus, and in spite of Praed and Owen Meredith, room for Her Letter. As a humorist in verse he stands on a much lower level, and whether, as Professor Nichol opined, he must often have wished " to hang that Heathen Chinee, and to give the lie to Truthful James, and wring the neck of the Emeu, and ' cave in ' the heads of the whole Society on the Stanislaus," I cannot, of course, say, but it is very certain that they have intervened between POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 73 the lower reputation which they have given him and the higher reputation to which he is justly entitled. Nor can it be denied that they are, quantum valeat, perfectly original, and have, like one or two of Mark Twain's kindred strains, a most provoking fascina- tion. But Bret Harte, even where he was strongest, had a powerful rival in the author oijim Bludso of the " Prairie Bell " and of Little Breeches. All lovers of poetry, both in England and in America, must re- gret that Colonel Hay's crowded life did not leave him more leisure to cultivate a genius which, within its range, is as rare and fine as it is virile. It is not given to many minor poets to strike such notes as we hear in the two poems referred to, in such a sonnet as The Haunted Room, and in such a lyric as Remorse. How exquisite is the following: Sad is the vague and tender dream Of dead love's lingering kisses To crush'd hearts, hallow'd by the gleam Of unreturning blisses ; Deep mourns the soul, in anguished pride, For the pitiless death that won them ; But the saddest wail is for lips that died With the virgin dew upon them. And now we descend to the levels where it be- comes impossible to distinguish. During the last few years, there have been at least a hundred and fifty poets and poetesses, of very many of whom even the indulgent Catholicism of Mr. Stedman has not taken cognizance. And in the case of the majority of these, so uniform is the standard of merit, so es- sentially similar in quality the work, that distinction 74 POETRY AND CRITICISM depends, not on any application of critical tests, but purely on the accidents of personal taste. Nor has this poetry, throughout its whole range, any land- marks or eminences; whether we regard it compre- hensively, or in relation to those who have individ- ually contributed to it, nothing stands out in striking singularity. In the minor poetry of almost all periods and of almost all nations, there are particular poems with which everyone is familiar, and in the writings of most minor poets there are particular poems with which we instantly associate them. But this cannot be said of any of these poets. Even the best of them remind us, I fear, of what Dr. Johnson said of the Giant's Causeway it was worth seeing, but it was hardly worth going to see. If their volumes happen to come in our way, the chances are that we turn over their pages with real pleasure. We are pretty sure to find a pure and wholesome tone, refinement, grace, often charm, all the marks of careful culture based in many cases on a sympathetic acquaintance with European belles-lettres, and a power of expression and a skill in technique, generally, which fifty years ago would only have been found in the work of masters. But it is, we feel, the poetry of accomplished artists, who do not sing because they must, but be- cause they can. Eclectic and cosmopolitan, or trivially native, it is essentially the work of art, and too often of nothing but art, with no root in life, national or individual ; in its themes, a weary same- ness; in its tone and spirit, a certain insincerity, or at all events a lack of genuine enthusiasm where enthusiasm is affected. Here and there, particular poems and particular poets may be found whose POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 75 work would, in justice, require some modification of this criticism. The most deservedly eminent of living American critics, Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman, has, like our own Matthew Arnold, confirmed his title to speak with authority on poetry by his own contributions to it. The too facile and voluminous poetry of James Whitcomb Riley, an essentially native product, though in no way comparable to the Btglow Papers, is full of humour, vivid life, and graphic nature painting, but it is hardly likely to travel further than the country of its birth. And, certainly, an honourable place must be claimed for more than one poetess; Mrs. Thaxter's lyrics have at times true inspiration and great charm, particu- larly when her themes are the sea, and bird life. The lyrics and sonnets of Mrs. Helen Jackson Hunt dis- play great technical skill, and have often much beauty. Emily Dickinson is, in her jerky transcend- entalism and strained style, too faithful a disciple of Emerson, but much of her work has real merit. The refined and thoughtful sonnets of Mrs. Chandler Moulton can never lack grateful appreciation, and more than one of her simple and tender lyrics will long be gems in every anthology. But a higher place, perhaps, than belongs to any of these poetesses must be assigned to Miss Helen Hay, whose sonnets and lyrics have both subtlety and power, and whose last work, The Rose of Dawn, in its rich picturesque- ness, dramatic intensity, and sustained power, seems to me, in spite of its occasional collapses in style, one of the most brilliant contributions which has recently been made to American poetry. 76 POETRY AND CRITICISM But it is time to conclude. The future of Ameri- can poetry is as dark as that of our own, and criti- cism is not concerned with prophecy. The imme- diate prospect is, it must be owned, not encouraging on either side of the Atlantic. In the sphere of in- tellectual activity, nothing is seriously energetic but Science, or vitally influential but the scientific spirit ; and, what that spirit has engendered the spirit of investigation, analysis and criticism is ubiquitous. Under this deadly solvent of the spiritual and ima- ginative faculties of man, their two creations, poetry and theology, seem to be melting away, the one re- solving itself into an aesthetic appeal to the senses, the other into a code of ethics. Materialism and wealth-accumulating labour and luxury, with all that accompanies and all that follows in their train, have and must inevitably have the effects which Wordsworth, Emerson and Ruskin attributed to them. Literature generally will degenerate, as it has degenerated, into little more than a means of affording recreation and amusement to those whose serious interests and occupations are elsewhere ; and poetry will cease to appeal, or will share, as it now shares, in this degradation. But Man's finer and nobler energies can only be depressed, they can never be extinguished or even lose their vitality. Unerring and inevitable as the law of gravitation in the physical, is the law of reaction in the spiritual, world. Materialism and let us understand the word in its most comprehensive sense has still a long course to run, of that we may be quite sure. But all that poetry represents and vindicates can never fail at last to assert itself. Very different, however, POETRY AND POETS OF AMERICA 77 from the poetry of the past must be the poetry of the future. It will not imp its wing from the myth- ology of Olympus and Hippocrene, or seek inspira- tion from Siloa's brook that flowed Fast by the Oracle of God. Of that there can be no doubt. It must have other inspiration, other themes. It is more likely perhaps to find the first in the immense, emancipated, un- developed life, with its infinite potentialities and possibilities, which is unfolding itself in the New World, than in the more contracted, tradition-tram- melled life of the Old. Its themes, we may be sure, will be the themes in the treatment of which Whit- man fumbled and stammered, its religion and ethics the religion and ethics of which Emerson was the prophet. In a word, it is likely to be a poetry the features of which have been more clearly, if still dimly, adumbrated in the genius typical of America, than in the genius typical of any of the European nations. A reaction against the restless, hollow, degraded life at present characteristic of the great centres of business and fashion is inevitable, and with that reaction poetry may awake, the poetry of a fuller day, and the famous prophecy find its realization, not politically only, but in another and nobler sense as well : Westward the course of Empire takes its way; The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time's noblest offspring is the last. THE COLLECTED WORKS OF LORD BYRON. 1 THE completion of what may be regarded as a final edition of Byron's writings both in poetry and prose is surely a notable event in literary his- tory. Nothing indeed is likely to modify very ma- terially either the estimate which has been formed of his character since the appearance of Moore's work, or the verdict which his countrymen have long since passed on him as a poet. But we are now in a position to understand much in the man himself, and more in his work as an artist, which it was not possible to understand fully and clearly before; we are enabled to review both, if not in any absolutely new light, at least in the light of testi- mony and illustration so ample, nay, so exhaustive, that probably nothing of any importance will ever be added to it. These thirteen volumes form, in truth, a contribution to biography and criticism to which it would be difficult to find a parallel in 1 i. The Works of Lord Byron : Letters and Journals. Edited by Rowland E. Prothero. Six vols. London: Murray, 1898- 1901. 2. The Works of Lord Byron: the Poetical Works. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. Seven vols. London: Murray, 1898- 1904. WORKS OF LORD BYRON 79 modern times. There is no corner, no recess, in Byron's crowded life, from boyhood to manhood, from manhood to the end, into which we are not admitted ; we know him as we know Pepys and as we know Johnson. To say nothing of a correspondence in which his experiences and his impressions, his idiosyncrasies and his temper, are reflected as in a mirror, records intended for no eyes but his own reveal to us his most secret thoughts. He is exhibited in all his moods and in all his extremes. We can watch every phase which, in its rapid and capricious alternations of darkness and light, his extraordinarily complex and mobile character assumed. The infirmities, the follies, the vices which revolted Wordsworth and Browning and degraded him at times to the level of fribbles like Nash and Brummell, and of mere libertines like Queensberry and Hertford ; the sud- den transitions by which, in the resilience of his nobler instincts and sympathies, he became glorified into the actual embodiment of what at such mo- ments he expressed in poetry; the virtues on which those who admired and those who loved him de- lighted to dwell, and which could transform him momentarily into the most heroic, the most gener- ous, the most attaching of men ; the strange ano- malies for which the perpetual conflict between his higher and baser nature, and between his reason and his passions, was responsible; his mingled charlatanry and sincerity, refinement and grossness, levity and enthusiasm ; the magnanimity and dig- nity which could occasionally be discerned in him ; the almost incredible paltriness and meanness of 8o POETRY AND CRITICISM which at times he was capable ; his sanity, his good sense, his keen insight into men and life, his ad- mirable literary judgements, so singularly and glar- ingly contrasted with the childishness, the obliquity, the extravagance which he displayed when under the influence of prejudice or passion all this makes his autobiography, in other words, his correspond- ence, memoranda, and journals, a psychological study of the profoundest interest. Nor is this all. His poetry is so essentially the expression of his character, and was so directly in- spired by his personal experiences, that these records form the best of all commentaries on it. From a still more important point of view, they, or at least the greater portion of them, are equally remarkable. Byron's letters will probably live as long as his poems. Voluminous as they are, they never weary us. Social sketches dashed off with inimitable hap- piness; anecdote and incident related as only a con- summate raconteur can relate them ; piquant com- ments on the latest scandal or the latest book ; the gossip and tittle-tattle of the green-room and the boudoir, of the clubs and the salons, so transformed by the humour and wit of their cynical retailer that they almost rival the dialogue of Congreve and Sheridan; shrewd and penetrating observations on life, on human nature, on politics, on literature, dropped so carelessly that it is only on reflection that we see their wisdom, keep us perpetually amused and entertained. Of the conscientiousness and skill with which Mr. Prothero has performed a most difficult task it is impossible to speak too highly. In the first place, WORKS OF LORD BYRON 81 he has spared no pains to make the correspondence complete. With what success, a comparison of the number of letters which have appeared in preceding collections with the number printed by him will at once show. If he has, to some extent, fared as those who glean after the full harvest must necessarily fare, he has not only preserved much which was worth preservation, but he has been able to add substantially to what was of most interest and value in preceding collections. 1 Mr. Prothero has not only given us an exhaus- tive edition of the letters, journals, and memoranda, and settled what must henceforth be their standard text, but he has done much more. No man entered more fully into the social and literary life of his time, or took keener interest in the incidents of the passing hour, than Byron. The consequence is that the letters and journals teem with allusions and re- ferences to individuals and to current topics, as well as to the literature of the day, which the lapse of nearly a century has made unintelligible without continual elucidations. This Mr. Prothero has given us, and given us in a measure pressed down and overflowing. We have memoirs and notices of all the persons, many of them long since forgotten, to whom the letters are addressed, or of whom they 1 For the ample material at the disposal of Byron's editors, without which the present edition both of the letters and of the poems would have been impossible, the world is indebted to the diligence and enthusiasm of the second and third John Murray, who during eighty years spared no time or expense in collecting it. If they and their house owe much to Byron they have certainly endeavoured to repay their debt in a manner which their creditor would most have appreciated. G 82 POETRY AND CRITICISM make mention ; and rare indeed it is to find any- thing requiring explanation which is left in ob- scurity. His notes are in themselves delightful reading, and we are not at all inclined to quarrel with their occasional diffuseness. But important as this edition is as concentrating all that throws light on Byron as a man, it is still more important from the light which it throws on his work. If, in editing the correspondence, journals, and miscellaneous prose writings, Mr. Prothero had a difficult task imposed on him, a still more diffi- cult task was imposed on his coadjutor, the editor of the poems and dramas. When we say that Mr. Coleridge's edition contains, not only every com- plete poem and drama written by Byron, but every fragment of the smallest interest which can be gleaned from authentic sources; that his text has been formed by collation with the early printed copies and with the original manuscripts where they are extant, as in most cases they are, every variant and erasure being carefully noted ; that every poem is furnished with elucidatory notes explaining allu- sions and citing parallel passages to which Byron was, or may have been, indebted; that to each of the chief poems and collection of poems is prefixed a more or less elaborate bibliographical, critical, and generally illustrative introduction some esti- mate may be formed of the immense labour ex- pended on his work. A poet more troublesome to a conscientious editor than Byron could hardly be found, and this for three reasons the multiplicity of the sources of his text, the large space which topics of ephemeral interest WORKS OF LORD BYRON 83 fill in his poetry, and the difficulty of identifying or even of explaining the innumerable reminiscences and references which his loose and desultory but immense reading supplied in such profusion. A very superficial acquaintance with Byron's writings will enable any one to understand what the adequate annotation of such poems as the Hints from Horace, The Vision of Judgment, The Demi's Drive, The Blues, to say nothing of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and, above all, The Age of Bronze and Don Juan, must imply. No doubt the labour was somewhat lightened, as Mr. Coleridge acknow- ledges, by that great work, which has lightened so much editorial labour, the Dictionary of National Biography; but all that the Dictionary could afford represents only a fraction of what was necessary for the elucidation of these poems. Mr. Coleridge has brought to his task an extensive knowledge of general literature, and a still more extensive know- ledge of the literature immediately preceding and contemporary with Byron. Memoirs, correspond- ence, "ana," novels, travels, periodicals, news- papers, and all such publications as are known to have been in Byron's hands, have been explored by him ; and with the happiest result. For he has thus been enabled, not only to explain the innumerable references and allusions in the poems which the lapse of time has, for the present generation, rend- ered obscure or even unintelligible, but, in conjunc- tion with the notes on the text, to furnish us with the best of commentaries on Byron's methods and technique. The chief infirmity of the notes lies in the parallel passages. Mr. Coleridge, very rightly, 84 POETRY AND CRITICISM attaches importance to them as illustrating a strik- ing characteristic of Byron the union of originality with an indebtedness to his predecessors and con- temporaries so considerable as to be not a little sur- prising, particularly in a poet of his temper. But many of the most remarkable of these reminiscences are not noticed by Mr. Coleridge, though a place is found for many which might easily be resolved into mere coincidences. To this, however, we shall re- turn presently. To pass to the contents of these seven substantial volumes, which represent all that has been given, or probably ever will be given, to the world in verse from Byron's pen. The first question which every reader will naturally ask is: do they add anything of importance to what we already have, any poem which deserves permanence, any poem which strikes a new note? This may be answered, with some little reserve perhaps, in the negative. Of the thirty poems published here for the first time, the insertion of at least two thirds could only be justified by the consideration that it was desirable to make the col- lection complete. The eleven early poems printed from the Newstead manuscripts are much below the level of the verses comprised in the Hours of Idle- ness', the lines beginning "I cannot talk of love to thQQ," Julian, The Duel, the Ode to a Lady, in volumes iii and iv, have no distinction; few of those printed in volume vii are, so far as intrinsic merit goes, worth preserving. Every one will turn with interest to the seven stanzas, with the prose note, containing the savage attack on Brougham, which WORKS OF LORD BYRON 85 were to follow stanza clxxxix in the first canto of Don Juan, and to the fourteen stanzas opening the seventeenth canto of Don Juan , found in Byron's room at Missolonghi. But no one can read them without feeling how little, even as a satirist, his re- putation gains by the first series, and how pain- fully, in their flaccid diffuseness, the second series illustrates his decadence. Nor is the fragment of the third part of The Deformed Transformed likely to gratify anything but curiosity. The most remark- able of these pieces is the fragment of a poem on Aristomenes, dated Cephalonia, September loth, 1823, in which he certainly struck a new note, and, what is not a little surprising, a note closely recall- ing Keats. The fragment is short and it may be transcribed: The Gods of old are silent on their shore Since the great Pan expired, and through the roar Of the Ionian waters broke a dread Voice which proclaimed "the Mighty Pan is dead." How much died with him ! false or true the dream Was beautiful which peopled every stream With more than finny tenants, and adorned The woods and waters with coy nymphs that scorn 'd Pursuing Deities, or in the embrace Of Gods brought forth the high heroic race Whose names are on the hills and o'er the seas. On a general review of these poems it is impos- sible not to be struck, as in the case of the letters, with the admirable judgement which Moore dis- played both in what he published and in what he suppressed. We can quite understand Mr. Cole- ridge's desire to make this edition of Byron as com- plete as possible, but one is glad to learn that he 86 POETRY AND CRITICISM has not extended his editorial discretion beyond the limits of what is here printed, for, in giving per- manence to some of these pieces the extreme limits of such discretion have been reached. The lees even of Byron are not exhilarating, and as we gather from Mr. Coleridge that lees still remain, it is to be hoped that no less discreet successor of Mr. Cole- ridge will be permitted to allow vulgar curiosity to regale on them. But it is as affording more copious material than has hitherto been collected for a critical estimate of Byron's work as a poet that this edition is perhaps of most interest and importance. We are now en- abled, thanks to Mr. Coleridge, to distinguish be- tween what Byron owed to nature and what he owed to predecessors and contemporaries, and, following him into his workshop, to study his methods and to be admitted into all the secrets of his technique. It will certainly come as a surprise to many to learn how often the most vehement and impetuous of poets, in what appears to be the full tide of im- passioned inspiration, is, at the same time, the most patient of artists; how, with so much originality in essence, his poetry is, in expression and often in imagery and sentiment, almost as much indebted to assimilative memory as that of Gray or Tennyson. Among Byron's many affectations was his almost morbid anxiety to have it supposed that composi- tion cost him no labour; and of this he was always boasting. " Like Edie Ochiltree," he said, "I never dowed to bide a hard turn o' wark in my life." That he composed, as a rule, with great rapidity seems certain, but that he took immense pains in preparing WORKS OF LORD BYRON 87 himself for composition, and in revising what he composed, is abundantly apparent, not only from the elaborate accuracy of his realism, when realism was his aim, but from the testimony afforded by the variants and deletions in his manuscripts and proofs. Of the first, we have two very striking illustrations in Don Juan, namely, the shipwreck and the inci- dents succeeding it in the second canto, and the siege of Ismail in the seventh and eighth. Of the shipwreck, he himself said there was " not a single circumstance of it not taken from fact; not indeed from any single shipwreck, but all from actual facts of different wrecks." The fidelity with which this part of the poem was compiled, in other words, con- structed out of passages dovetailed from Dalzell's Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea, Hartford's Re- markable Shipwrecks, Bligh's Narrative of the Mu- tiny of the Bounty, and his own grandfather's Nar- rative, shows to what patient drudgery Byron could sometimes submit. Most of the passages borrowed by him have been duly recorded in Mr. Coleridge's notes, but one of the most interesting and remark- able appears to have escaped his notice. The mag- nificent stanza And first one universal shriek there rush'd, Louder than the loud ocean, like a crash Of echoing thunder ; and then all was hush'd, Save the wild wind and the remorseless dash Of billows; but at intervals there gush'd, Accompanied with a convulsive splash, A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry Of some strong swimmer in his agony. was plainly based on the following passage in the 88 POETRY AND CRITICISM wreck of the " Pandora " (Ship-wrecks and Disasters, vol. iii, p. 129): Within a very few minutes of the time when Mr. Rogers gained the rock an universal shriek, which long vibrated in their ears, . . . announced a dreadful catastrophe. In a few minutes all was hushed except the roaring of the winds and the dashing of the waves. . . . The cries of men drowning were dreadful in the extreme, but died away by degrees as they became faint. It would indeed be quite impossible to exceed the scrupulous particularity with which, even to the most trifling minutiae, Byron has drawn on these narratives, owing literally nothing to invention. In his account of the siege and capture of Ismail he has drawn in the same way, and almost to the same extent, on the Marquis Gabriel de Castelnau's Essai sur VHistoire ancienne et moderne de la Nouvelle Russie. And this drudging industry was not more remarkable than the labour expended on successive editions of some of his poems, notably English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, the Hints from Horace, and The Giaour. What trouble composition sometimes cost him will be plain to any one who will turn to the record of the variants in stanza ix of the first canto of Childe Harold, and in cxxxiv of the fourth canto. How re- vision could at times transform his poetry is illus- trated by the passage which every one knows in The Giaour, " He who hath bent him o'er the dead." The lines which now run : The first dark day of nothingness, The last of danger and distress, WORKS OF LORD BYRON 89 (Before Decay's effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,) And mark'd the mild angelic air, The rapture of repose that's there; The fix'd yet tender traits that streak The languor of the placid cheek; originally ran : The first dark day of nothingness, The last of doom and of distress, Before Corruption's cankering fingers Hath tinged the hue where beauty lingers, And marked the soft and settled air That dwells with all but spirit there. The line " Where cold obstruction's apathy," which occurs later, and originally appeared as " Whose touch thrills with mortality," illustrates what is often perceptible in Byron's variants. A reminiscence of Shakespeare's "cold obstruction " occurring to him as he corrected the proofs, suggested it; just as, in the apostrophe to the ocean in Childe Harold, the memory of a couplet in Campbell's Battle of the Baltic enabled him to transform These oaken citadels which made and make Their clay creator the vain title take, into The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make, etc. Again, the lines in The Giaour, Yes, love indeed is light from heaven, A spark of that immortal fire With angels shared, by Allah given, To lift from earth our low desire. were evolved thus: 90 POETRY AND CRITICISM Yes 1 f doth s P r ' m S } If j Lovemdee< M descend V from heaven, I be born J c immortal ^ A spark of that \ eternal I fire. I celestial J The couplet in The Bride of 'Abydos, The evening beam that smiles the clouds away And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray. took final form from And tints to-morrow with ( a fan< ; ied I ray . I an airy J And ! & l S > the hope of morning with its ray. And gilds to-morrow's hope with heavenly ray. There is a variant in the description of the thunder- storm in the third canto of Childe Harold which, poor as it is, is certainly preferable to the ludicrous line for which it is substituted: The glee Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth, As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth ; namely, As they had found an heir and feasted o'er his birth. There is one characteristic of Byron's variants which is very significant: they rarely improve the rhythm, and were apparently seldom designed for that purpose. So incurably bad was his ear that occasionally they are, from this point of view, alter- ations for the worse, as here (Childe Harold, iii, lix): Wild but not rude, awful yet not awstere, Is to the mellow earth as autumn to the year. WORKS OF LORD BYRON 91 In the MS. this was softened by reading Rustic, not rude, sublime, yet not austere. So in the Siege of 'Corinth , the dissonant and lum- bering line, The vaults beneath the mosaic stone, ran in the MS., The vaults beneath the ( chequered j. stone> I inlaid J where, had " chequered " been chosen, the rhythm would have been faultless. In another passage of the same poem after three experiments he chooses the turn which is best indeed, but which in no way improves the rhythm : The wild dogs fled And left their food the unburied dead And left their food the untasted dead And howling left the untasted dead but finally And howling left the unburied dead. To a variant in the eighteenth stanza of the third canto of Childe Harold an interesting history is at- tached. Byron wrote the stanza in a lady's album just after he had composed it, and one of the couplets ran: Here his last flight the haughty eagle flew, Then tore with bloody beak the fatal plain. This being shown to oneReinagle, an artist, he drew a pencil sketch of a chained eagle which was, how- ever, represented as grasping the earth with his talons. The vignette was forwarded to Byron, who wrote in reply: " Reinagle is a better poet and a better ornithologist than I am; eagles and all birds 92 POETRY AND CRITICISM of prey attack with their talons and not with their beaks, and I have altered the line: Then tore with bloody talon the rent plain. Carlyle's definition of genius as an infinite capacity for taking pains is certainly not refuted by what we know of Byron. But the combination of a capacity for drudging industry with a genius and temper which seem scarcely compatible with the practice of so humble a virtue, is not the only anomaly in Byron's con- stitution. In three respects he bears a remarkable resemblance to a class of poets with whom he would, at first sight, appear to have nothing in common. Neither Virgil nor Horace in ancient times, neither Milton or Gray or even Tennyson in modern times, has been more indebted to preceding and contem- porary literature. An extraordinary wide range of reading, a memory remarkable alike for its tenacity and its ready mastery over its acquisitions, and a not less remarkable power of assimilating and of re- producing in other forms what was thus acquired, are quite as characteristic of Byron as of the poets to whom we have referred. It may sound paradoxi- cal to say that Byron owed more to reading and books than he owed to independent observation of nature and life ; that what in his poetry was directly inspired by his own experiences and impressions bears a very small proportion to what was suggested to him by others; that, in all that relates to form, his poetry, so far from having any pretension to originality, is essentially imitative. And yet this is certainly the case. We have already remarked that WORKS OF LORD BYRON 93 the least satisfactory part of Mr. Coleridge's com- mentary is its illustration of these very remarkable characteristics of Byron, and we shall therefore make no apology for dealing with them at some length. Nothing could illustrate more strikingly Byron's method than Childe Harold and the Eastern tales. It is generally supposed that in the Childe Byron simply painted himself, and so in some touches and in certain details he undoubtedly did ; but the char- acter was plainly suggested to him by Madame de Stael's Lord Nelvil in Corinne, in whom every trait of Byron's hero is defined and described. In the fourth canto Corinne is followed very closely, as in the descriptions of the Coliseum and St. Peter's, and in the reflections on the ruins of Rome. Nearly the whole of two of the finest stanzas (clxxix, clxxx) in the apostrophe to the ocean is taken from the novel (i, iv): . . . Cette superbe mer, sur laquelle 1'homme jamais ne peut imprimer sa trace. La terre est travaill^e par lui . . . mais si les vaisseaux sillonnent un moment les ondes, la vague vient effacer aussitot cette l^gere marque de servitude, et la mer reparait telle qu'elle fut au premier jour de la creation. The famous stanza in Julia's letter, in the first canto c>i Don Juan, st. cxciv, "Man's love is of Man's life," etc., is little more than a translation of Corinne, xviii, v: Que les hommes sont heureux d'aller a la guerre, d'ex- poser leur vie, de se livrer a 1'enthousiasme de 1'honneur et du danger! Mais il n'y a rien au dehors qui soulage les femmes; leur existence, immobile en presence du malheur, est un long supplice. 94 POETRY AND CRITICISM The character of Conrad, in the The Corsair, was apparently concocted, as Alaric Watts pointed out, from that of Malefort Junior, in Massinger's Un- natural Combat, and Mrs. Anne Radcliffe's typical heroes. The Giaour is simply Mrs. Radcliffe's Schedoni in The Italian. In Lara Byron no doubt analyzes his own character; but, for the rest, the whole poem is concocted from Mrs. Radcliffe's Italian and Mysteries ofUdolpho, and from Scott's Marmion. How closely Mrs. Radcliffe is followed will be ap- parent to any one who compares the combat between Lara and Otho, and that between Mrs. Radcliffe's Morano and Montoni in the second volume of the Mysteries of Udolpho. Compare, for instance, with Mrs. Radcliffe, the passage in section iv of the second canto of Lara, beginning "Demand thy life !" . . . For Lara's brow upon the moment grew Almost to blackness in its demon hue. The Count then fell back . . . while Montoni held his sword over him and bade him ask his life. . . . He yielded at the interruption, but his countenance changed almost to blackness as he looked. Indeed, we continually trace the influence of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels on Byron's poetry; he has bor- rowed from her hints, as Alaric Watts pointed out, for two of his most striking passages, the compari- son of modern and ancient Greece to the features of the dead and the living: Beyond Milan the country wore the aspect of a ruder de- vastation ; and though everything seemed now quiet, the repose was like that of death spread over features which WORKS OF LORD BYRON 95 retain the impression of the last convulsions (Udolpho, ii, 29). Compare with this, The Giaour, 68-98; and the description of Venice at the beginning of the fourth canto of Childe Harold: Nothing could exceed Emily's admiration on her first view of Venice, with its islets, palaces, and towers rising- out of the sea ... its terraces, crowned with airy yet majestic fabrics, . . . appeared as if they had been called up from the ocean by the wand of an enchanter (Id., ii, 59). I saw from out the wave her structures rise, As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand. She looks a sea Cybele fresh from ocean, Rising with her tiara of proud towers At airy distance with majestic motion. There can be little doubt that, in the remarkable poem entitled Darkness, Byron was greatly indebted, as Herr Kolbing and Mr. Coleridge have pointed out, to a once popular but long forgotten novel published in 1806, entitled The Last Man, or Ome- garus and Syderia; but what neither Herr Kolbing nor Mr. Coleridge has noticed is that he was almost equally indebted to Burnet's Telluris Theoria Sacra, 1 which he had certainly read, and from which he has borrowed details of singular picturesqueness not found in the novel, for example, the lines: Ocean all stood still, And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths ; Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea, . . . They slept on the abyss without a surge ; The waves were dead which are simply a paraphrase of, " Et quoad 1 See particularly lib. iii, cap. xii. 96 POETRY AND CRITICISM mare, hoc dudum deseruerunt nautae, stagnum puti- dum sine motu." l The plot of Werner, " the char- acters, plan, and even the language," were taken, as he himself acknowledged, from the German's Tale in the Canterbury Tales by the Misses Lee; as the plot of The Deformed Transformed^?^, borrowed mainly, also by his confession, from a long forgotten novel, entitled The Three Brothers, by one Joshua Pickersgill. The indebtedness of Byron in Manfred to Goethe's Faust, the greater part of which Lewis translated for him, and to the Prometheus of Aeschylus, is of course notorious, and is duly noted by Mr. Coleridge. But what Mr. Coleridge does not notice is the in- fluence exercised on it by the romance oiAhasuerus, by Southey's Curse ofKehama, by Schiller's Robbers and Death of Wallenstein, both of which were ac- cessible to Byron in translations, 2 and by Maturin's Bertram, to say nothing of innumerable passages suggested by Paradise Lost. Nor has Mr. Coleridge noticed for how much of Don Juan Byron was in- debted to Casti's Novelle, which, beyond all doubt, suggested the poem to him. He had been introduced to the Novelle by Major Gordon at Brussels, in 1816; and in a letter written from Geneva, not long after- wards, he says, " I cannot tell you what a treat your gift of Casti has been to me. I have almost got him by heart." 3 He began Don Juan about two years 1 Lib. iii, cap. xii. 2 See the English translation of the first, published in 1795, and Coleridge's well-known version of the second, published in 1800. 3 Letters and Journals, iv, 217, note. WORKS OF LORD BYRON 97 afterwards. Don Juan is full of reminiscences of the Novelle. The novel which brings us nearest to Byron's poem is the one entitled La Diavolessa (Novella iv). This suggested to him his hero. I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan We all have seen him, in the pantomime, Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time. So Casti : Ma voi piu volte, O Donne mie, vedeste Sovra le scene pubbliche e private Di don Giovan le scandalose geste. (St. xv.) In Casti's story one Don Ignazio (who is his hero) and Don Juan wander over Spain in quest of licentious adventures, to meet afterwards in the in- fernal regions, whither, as we know from himself, Byron intended finally to conduct his hero. Ignazio, like Don Juan, was born in Seville, and Traced his source Through the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain. La nobil sua famiglia Drittamente scendea fin dai re Goti. (St. ix.) Both are extraordinarily precocious and addicted to the same frailties, Julia, the wife of Don Jose, stand- ing in the same relation to Don Juan as Ermene- gilda, the wife of his friend, to Ignazio, the one, however, voluntarily, the other involuntarily. Ig- nazio, like Don Juan, is shipwrecked; and each hero is the sole survivor. It is quite clear that Byron modelled his style, not on Berni, as he implied, but on Casti. To Casti, then, undoubtedly belongs the honour of having suggested and furnished Byron H 98 POETRY AND CRITICISM with a model for Don Juan. In point of distinction and merit, in brilliance, picturesqueness and power, there is, of course, no parallel between the two poets. To accuse Byron of plagiarism for the per- fectly legitimate use of material or suggestion afforded by others would, we hasten to say, be as absurd as to bring a. similar charge against Shake- speare for the use which he has made of Plutarch and Holinshed, or against Milton for the use which he has made of the ancients. As Swift well ob- serves, " If I light my candle from another, that does not affect my property in the wick and tallow"; and of wick and tallow Byron had infinitely more than the majority of his creditors put together. Byron's reading, if desultory, was unusually ex- tensive and curious; and his memory, like that of Tennyson, extraordinarily assimilative and tena- cious. To scholarship he had of course no preten- sion. The fact that, in his last years at school, we find him scribbling on the margins of his Xeno- phon and Greek plays the English equivalents for vsoi y <7 1 5- I SB> P art ii, 233-236, 243-246, 299-300, 318-321. The couplet in the Temple of Fame, describing Homer: A strong expression most he seem'd to affect, And here and there disclosed a brave neglect, was plainly suggested by a similar remark in section xxxiii. 3 See the commentators on the words ii lft H^wc Ti in section ii. 216 POETRY AND CRITICISM But the cult of Longinus had now passed into a sort of cant, and we find Swift writing in his Rhapsody on Poetry : A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsous, And if we have not read Longinus Will magisterially outshine us. But worthier homage was paid him, both then and afterwards, than that offered by fribbles and criti- casters. The noblest passage, or perhaps it would be more correct to say the one noble passage, in Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination, is little more than a paraphrase of the thirty-fifth section of the Sublime, 1 while another fine passage in the third book is the expansion of a remark in the second section. 2 Throughout Akenside's poem we frequently indeed catch the note of Longinus. That Young had read him is clear from his Conjectures on Original Composition, where he quotes him, 3 and there can therefore be little doubt that what appear to be reminiscences of the Treatise in the Night Thoughts are not simply accidental, or derived from other sources. Take the following lines in Night IX. Pagan tutors taught, he says: That mind immortal loves immortal aims : That boundless mind affects a boundless space : That vast surveys and the sublime of things The soul assimilate, and make her great : That, therefore, heaven her glories, as a fund Of inspiration, thus spreads out to man. 1 From 1. 151, " Say, what was man," to 1. 221, "close the scene," in book i. 2 Cf. Longinus, ii, 2, compared with Akenside, book iii, 535 et seqq. 3 Works, ed. 1774, vol. iv, p. 321. LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 217 This is little more than a summary of section thirty- five of the Treatise ; and of that section, as well as of the forty-third, we are constantly reminded in The Relapse (Night V) and The Infidel Reclaimed (Night VII). In his Resignation (Part II, st. 46), he has in the couplet: Nothing is great of which more great, More glorious is the scorn little more than translated part of the opening sen- tence of section two of Longinus: EJ&VJ %f> Ka6a7TEf> KO.V ru xoivu @tta ovdev VTrap^i (Jtsytz, ov TO Ka &oero$ot os oudxfjwi). To this it may be added that tradition, his own fragments, and the titles of his lost treatises unite in showing that he was a devoted student of Plato. Fourthly, every- thing seems to point to the fact that he was not only a scholar, and a scholar of attainments very uncom- mon with professors of rhetoric, but that he was a man of affairs and of the world. He could never have filled the place which he did fill at the court of Zenobia had this not been the case. Fifthly, what we know from Zosimus and Vopiscus about the circumstances under which the letter to Aurelian was written, about the letter itself, and above all about the closing scene of his life, places it beyond doubt that he possessed, in a degenerate age, a soul worthy of Socrates and Demosthenes. Lastly and this surely ought especially to be noted and em- phasized that he had Oriental blood in his veins. That all these are characteristics which we should 1 See Ruhnken's correction of the reading in Porphyry's Life of Plotinus ; p. 116, in which he had been anticipated by Fabricius ; possibly the old reading isthe rightone, see Vaucher, Etudes Critiques^ pp. 27 and 283, and the word is not an epi- thet for Longinus, but the title of a treatise. 236 POETRY AND CRITICISM expect to find in the author of the De Sublimitate for unmistakably and deeply are they impressed on it, no one can deny: and they are characteristics which can hardly be said to distinguish, and which most assuredly are not united in, any other claimant. And now let us see what can be advanced in answer to the chief objections raised to the Lon- ginian authorship. Amati and others contend that there is no proof that Longinus was ever called Dionysius, which is true but deny the possibility of such a combination of names as Dionysius Cas- sius Longinus, which is absurd. Nothing was com- moner than for Greeks who had obtained the privi- lege of Roman citizenship to adopt the gentile and family names of the patron who had obtained it for them, while retaining their own. Thus, to go no further than Cicero, we find Aulus Licinius Archias and Quintus Lutatius Diodorus; and although it was commoner for the Greek name to stand as the agnomen, its position was sometimes reversed, as in the case of the historian Dio Cassius. 1 In the third century this was particularly common. It may, there- fore, be assumed, with a high degree of probability, that the name of Longinus was Dionysius, and that, obtaining possibly through the influence of the young Roman to whom the Sublime is addressed the privilege of citizenship by means of one of the Cassian family, he adopted the names of his patron. But, it may be urged, the Treatise is, before the 1 For ample information on this point, see Henricus Can- negieterus, De Mutata Romanorum Nominum sub Principibus Ratione, and the exhaustive note of Reimarus in his edition of Dio Cassius, vol. ii, pp. 1534-5. LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 237 tenth century, nowhere attributed to him. To this it may be replied that the only catalogue of his writ- ings which has come down to us, namely, the notice in Suidas, is confessedly incomplete, ending with the words " and many others " (*i atea TroMa), which may not only cover the Sublime but the other lost treatises. Nor must we forget that the scribe of the Paris archetype, in assigning the Treatise to Lon- ginus, must have had authority for doing so, and it seems to us far more reasonable to suppose that in the unmistakable reference in John of Sicily to the passage about Moses, in the ninth section of the Sublime, he was following, not a tradition originat- ing from a conjecture of the Paris copyist, but an independent tradition. 1 It is, moreover, quite pos- sible to attach far too much importance to the alter- native title found in the Paris manuscript, and its supposed confirmations. That title, we must re- member, is found only in the index, and is not in the handwriting of the copyist of the Treatise. The second manuscript, in the Bibliotheque Nationale, agrees exactly with the Codex Vaticanus 285, which is probably a transcript of it, and neither of them can reasonably be cited as independent testimony; 1 In his Commentary on Hermogenes, John of Sicily observes that Longinus and Demetrius, 'EXXWW oi api<;) to the ninth section of the Sublime. But, as the date of John of Sicily was the twelfth century, and that of the Paris manuscript the tenth, no im- portance, says the anti-Longinus party, can be attached to the passage ; besides, they add, Longinus may have quoted it somewhere else. 238 POETRY AND CRITICISM while in the manuscript at Florence the title ' is given only on the cover, the title at the top of the first page for traces of it are distinctly visible being the old one. All, then, that this evidence amounts to is, that the writer of the index in the Paris manuscript, for some reason, doubted the authorship of the Treatise, attributing it to one of the two most distinguished critics known to him, namely, Dionysius of Halicar- nassus and Longinus; that the next copyist of the Treatise reproduced the alternative title, and was fol- lowed by a third, and that this led, not unnaturally, to the Florentine manuscript being tampered with. In a word, this evidence simply resolves itself, so far as can be ascertained, and so far as is in the highest degree probable, into a doubt expressed by a single individual of whom nothing is known. The fact that the Treatise was suggested by a work written in the Augustan age, and refers to no writers subsequent to that age, surely presents little difficulty. Caecilius, the author of that work, was one of the classics of criticism, and nothing, there- fore, could be more natural than that Longinus and Posthumius should, even at the distance of more than two centuries and a half, be studying and dis- cussing him. In not referring to later writers he was only following the custom of authors of rhe- torical treatises, who very properly confined their illustrations and references to writers of classical repute. If I am not mistaken, there is not a single reference to a post-Augustan writer either in Her- mogenes or in Apsines, either in Demetrius or in Aphthonius. LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 239 This brings us to the last point. The remains of Longinus which are undoubtedly genuine have, it is alleged, no resemblance in any of their charac- teristics of style to those of the Sublime, and yet among them are fragments bearing on literary criti- cism and a considerable section of a Treatise on Rhetoric. We may begin by remarking that argu- ments based on analogies of style will sometimes lead to very erroneous conclusions. What analogy could there have been in this respect between those dialogues of Aristotle which Cicero praises for the " golden flow of their diction," 1 and the works of Aristotle which have come down to us? What reasonable doubt can there be that Tacitus was the author of the Dialogue on Oratory, and yet what could possibly be more unlike the style of the Agri- cola or of the Histories and of the Annals'? If our criterion of the genuineness of Carlyle's French Re- volution and Latter-Day Pamphlets were derived from any analogy drawn from his Essay on Mathe- matics and his Life of Schiller, we should certainly arrive at a very absurd result. And now, putting aside for a moment the Treatise on Rhetoric, let us see of what the remains of Lon- ginus the Palmyrene consist. We have a portion of a letter to one Marcellus giving an account of contemporary philosophies; a short extract from a letter to Porphyry asking him to send him some books and come and visit him ; another short ex- tract from some letter or treatise protesting against the opinion that the soul was corporeal and perish- 1 " Flumen orationis aureum fundens Aristoteles." Acad. Prior, xxxviii, and cf. De Fin. i, 5. 2 4 o POETRY AND CRITICISM able; and lastly, three extracts about metre from a commentary on Hephaestion, the authorship of the first of which is simply assumed from the fact that Longinus is known to have been an authority on metre and prosody, the authorship of the two last from the fact that they are ascribed to him in mar- ginal notes on the manuscripts, written in Latin by a modern hand ! Of the Treatise on Rhetoric it may suffice to say that it originally formed part of the text of Apsines, from which it was disengaged by the sagacity of Ruhnken. But where it begins and where it ends, what may still belong to Ap- sines and what to Longinus, has only been deter- mined, and can only be determined, by mere con- jecture. 1 1 The circumstances of its discovery are singularly interest- ing. In 1765 Ruhnken was reading the Rhetoric of Apsines when he was struck, he tells us, with a sudden change in the style, which began to remind him strongly of the style of the De Sublimitate. Continuing his reading he came upon a passage which he remembered to have seen cited by Maximus Planudes and John of Sicily, and cited as belonging, not to the TE^V puTopjjtw of Apsines, but to the TE^W pVropoui of Longinus. In great delight at having recovered a work by Longinus which was supposed to have been lost, he announced that it was his intention to edit it. But to the surprise of every one he did nothing of the kind, nor could any one get him to say where he believed the Longinus portion to begin and end. On that subject he maintained an obstinate, and perhaps discreet silence, to the end of his life. Wyttenbach told Bast that Ruhnken attributed to Longinus the whole portion extending from p. 709 to p. 720 in the Aldine edition of Apsines. Spengel, Walz, and Egger give him much more from p. 707 to p. 726 in the Aldine. Finckh would reduce him to even narrower dimensions than Ruhnken is reported to have done. Mean- while, all the confirmation of these conjectures rests on an LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 241 It is, therefore, surprising, nay more, amusing, to find Professor Vaucher gravely tabulating the words in these fragments, for the purpose of ascertaining which of them appear and which do not appear in the De Sublimitate ; instituting elaborate compari- sons between the style, the diction, the character- istics generally of these scanty and most question- able relics with those of the Treatise, and then proclaiming that the Longinus of the one could not possibly have been the Longinus of the other. There is no conclusion, however preposterous, at which criticism could not arrive if Professor Vaucher's method were applied to such materials as the mater- ials to which Professor Vaucher applies it. These fragments are, in truth, too meagre, too irrelevant when genuine, too unauthenticated when analogous, to make any comparison with the Sublime of the smallest use. I have no wish to appear paradoxical, but I cannot but think that, such dim and fitful light Abstract of the Rhetoric of Longinus, discovered at Moscow about 1782, and on a manuscript in the Laurentian Library at Florence, containing twenty-four notes on rhetoric, derived, as the title of the manuscript indicates, from the Rhetoric of Lon- ginus. The chief value of the Abstract is that, if it does not confirm Ruhnken's conjecture that the treatise of Longinus, or rather a portion of it, had got mixed up with the treatise by Apsines, it makes the theory highly probable, because much of it corresponds in a remarkable way with the portion of Apsines restored, through Ruhnken's conjecture, to Longinus. But the manuscript at Florence is anything but conclusive. Short and scanty as it is, it contains much which is not found either in Apsines or in the Abstract at Moscow. It will be seen, there- fore, how little confidence can be placed in arguments drawn from the phraseology, the style, or even the general character of this most rickety and unsatisfactory relic. R 242 POETRY AND CRITICISM as they do cast on the subject, flickers in favour of the claims of Longinus to the authorship of the Treatise. The fragment, for example, numbered vii in Weiske, vindicating the immateriality of the soul, has, particularly at the conclusion, quite the note of the De Sublimitate. Professor Vaucher has himself drawn attention to a very remarkable parallel pas- sage in the Rhetoric. In the Treatise (sect, ii) the author finely calls " beautiful words the very light of thought " (?><$ ycif> TO) ovri i'dtov roS vou TO, tia^a. oyo/uara) : in the Rhetoric we find n. JjXiSiiTtjov pa-^tutent] ol jua TOV A. LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 245 In the Periclean age the criticism which has its counterpart in our popular press found, no doubt, voluminous expression. What Punch and the weekly reviews are to us, Aristophanes and the poets of the Old Comedy were to Athens. Before this irresponsible tribunal was dragged every prominent candidate for literary fame. How he fared depended partly on the personal prejudices of his censor, partly on the clique or faction to which he belonged, and partly to what could be got out of him in the way of amusement. We have excellent and no doubt typical specimens of this criticism in the Frogs, in the Acharnians, in the Thesmophoriazusae, and in the fragments of Antiphanes and Epicrates. Of the sys- tematic treatises on criticism produced during the Periclean age not one remains, and, judging from the remarks quoted from them, the loss is not to be regretted. No greater calamity has befallen letters than the fact that Plato gave to metaphysics and politics what he might have given to criticism in its application to the fine arts. Scattered up and down his writings are passages in which may be found the germs of the profoundest truths on which philosophical criticism rests. He was the first to discern and maintain that the fine arts are modes of imitation that what they represent is not the particular and accidental, but the universal and essential, and that the breath of their life is divine inspiration, without which they are of no avail. But, like our own Ruskin, Plato was wilful and fanatical, and his most elaborate contributions to literary criticism express opinions so contradictory to what he has maintained elsewhere and are so 246 POETRY AND CRITICISM singularly unintelligent and perverse that they might almost be mistaken for irony. Whether criticism advanced under the other dis- ciples of Socrates we have no means of judging. We know that Crito and Simon wrote treatises on poetry and on the beautiful, Simmias a treatise on the epic, and Glauco a dialogue on Euripides. Of Plato's own disciples the most distinguished, after Aristotle we are speaking, of course, of criticism was Heraclides of Pontus, the author of several treatises, the loss of one of which, a treatise on poetry and the poets, is for many reasons greatly to be re- gretted. The criticism of pre-Alexandrian Hellas culminated in Aristotle and in his most distinguished disciple Theophrastus, of whose once voluminous critical writings all that remain are a few short frag- ments, and one entire work. Aristotle concerned himself with criticism, not be- cause of any special aptitude and taste for such studies, but simply because, as a departmentof human knowledge, it was comprehended in his survey. He brought to it what he brought to everything else, a most powerful and logical intellect, subtle discrimi- nation, immense erudition, and a mania for method- izing; and he brought nothing else. In all the finer qualities and instincts of the critic, in all that is im- plied by aesthetic sensibility, he was more signally deficient than our own Johnson. He narrowed and reduced criticism to an exact science ; but such prin- ciples in the theory of rhetoric and poetry as are capable of precise definition and direct application he deduced and fixed for ever. Thus the Poetic and Rhetoric are in some respects the most precious LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 247 contributions which have ever been made to critic- ism ; in others, and especially to modern readers, dis- appointing even to exasperation. How far Aristotle was original, and how far indebted to his predecessors and contemporaries, is a question which cannot be answered now. The germ of much in his Poetic he certainly owed to Plato, and his Rhetoric had been preceded by numerous treatises issuing from the schools of Athens, of Sicily, of Pergamus, and of Rhodes. We know, for example, that in his de- finition of rhetoric he had been anticipated by Corax and Tisias; that he was original neither in his method nor in his analysis, and that by far the greater part of his practical precepts had long been common- places. Aristotle either directly, or through his dis- ciples, left his mark on every department of criticism. In his recension of the Iliad and the Odyssey, in the commentaries on Homer, Hesiod, and other classics, and in the Didascaliae compiled under his directions, he initiated studies which were to occupy the chief attention of critics during several generations. With the Alexandrian age Greek criticism may be said to have entered on its third stage. It passed out of the hands of dilettants and of philosophers into those of pedants and grammarians, and confined it- self almost entirely to philology and antiquities. To the Alexandrian scholiasts our debt is certainly a considerable one, and, had they confined themselves to the sphere in which they were qualified to excel, our gratitude would have been without reserve. But unfortunately they did not. They confounded what should be distinguished. They mistook the means 248 POETRY AND CRITICISM of exegesis for the ends; and they taught others to make the same capital mistake. Criticism ceased to be associated with its higher functions, either being directed entirely to such points as are of interest to mere grammarians and philologists, or dissolving itself, as Bacon puts it, " into a number of idle, un- wholesome, and, as I may call them, vermiculate questions." In the long list of critical treatises com- posed during the Alexandrian age it is remarkable that there is, I believe, not one which certainly in- dicates that the treatment of the subject was other than either philological or historical. So completely, indeed, was the distinction between criticism in its higher aspects and in the sense in which these scholars understood it lost, that, though Crates of Pergamus denied that a grammarian was a critic, and maintained that grammar was subordinate to criticism, he confined the term to illustrative com- mentary. On critical literature these men left an indelible impress. They became the founders of a dynasty which has remained unbroken to the present day, and which has its representatives wherever letters have been studied. When Swift facetiously traced to Aristarchus the pedigree of those critics whom his friend Pope described as possessing every ac- complishment except spirit, taste, and sense, and whom he has himself delineated with so much truth and humour in the Tale of a Tub, he may have been unjust to that particular scholar, but he was certainly not unjust to most of that scholar's disciples. There was always a tendency in the Greek mind to frivol- ousness, to attach undue importance to trifles, to LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 249 peddle with nice distinctions, and to waste itself on the mere exercise of ingenuity. While Greece was in her glory all this had been kept in check, for a great community makes great citizens, but the ex- tinction of their national life, and the loss of every- thing which was involved in it, threw the Greeks on themselves, and developed this their innate infirmity. What before was a tendency now became a habit, and soon grew into a distinguishing characteristic. In nothing is this more conspicuous than in criticism. Of its degeneracy during the Alexandrian age we have just spoken ; its degeneracy in the ages succeeding is equally apparent. And this degener- acy is the more striking when we compare it with what Rome produced between about B.C. 60 and A.D. 1 20 the brilliant treatises of Cicero, the Ars Poetica and two epistles of Horace, the Dialogue on Oratory, the great masterpiece of Quintilian, works in some cases and in some portions as severely technical as the treatises of Demetrius and Hermo- genes, but impressed with the stamp of a large and liberal intelligence, and pregnant with energy and life. Of this there is nothing discernible in what the Greeks of that age have left us. In the treatises of Dionysius, the contemporary in early life of Cicero, we are in the class-room of a professor of rhetoric, mechanically imparting what has been mechanically acquired; we are in the dissecting- room of a philological anatomist. There lies the composition a history it may be, or an oration, or occasionally a poem. Every bone, every nerve, every artery is traced out and laid bare, everything is demonstrated but what constitutes its charm, 250 POETRY AND CRITICISM everything discovered but the secret of its life. There appears to be no sense of anything which cannot be submitted to precise analysis, and which cannot be defined as legitimate deductions from the application of conventional canons. Of the principles of criticism, of the philosophy of taste, of the philosophy of the beautiful, of the relation of Nature to Art and of Art to Nature, of the influence exercised by individual temperament and social and historical conditions on the activity of a literary artist, not a word is said. The masterpieces of Homer, of Thucydides, of Plato, of Demosthenes, are contemplated merely as models of composition. But within this contracted sphere the analytical subtlety displayed is indeed extraordinary. It is seen in its perfection in the two treatises of Diony- sius on Composition and on the Attic Orators, in the De Inventions and the De Formis Oratoriis of Her- mogenes, and, above all for the work is a model of terseness and lucidity, and, a little peddling ex- cepted, of good sense in the De Elocution* of Demetrius. 1 However much we may regret the purely scholastic character of these works, criticism would have been poorer for their loss, for of their kind they are classics. 1 It is extraordinary that this admirable treatise should not have found a modern editor ; it is perhaps the best practical manual on composition ever written ; even a popular transla- tion of it would be most useful and entertaining, for it is as applicable to the various forms of composition in English as it is to those in Greek. [Since this was written the Treatise has been translated and edited as a companion volume to his edi- tion and translation of the Treatise on the Sublime by Dr. Rhys Roberts.] LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 251 But, if we except the treatise of Hephaestion on metres, which has, however, nothing but a technical value, the De Sublimitate, and an essay to which we shall presently refer, this cannot be said for the numerous other contributions to criticism which have survived from the first, second, and third centuries. It would be absurd to dignify with this name the loose and desultory observations of Plu- tarch, which are exactly on a par with those of Strabo. Lucian has some excellent remarks scattered up and down his works, particularly in the Lexi- phanes, in The Teacher of Orators, and in the HOTO History Should be Written, but his place is among satirists rather than among critics. Apollonius Dyscolos, and Aelius Herodianus were mere gram- marians. Apsines, like the Anonymi before and after him, simply thrashes the straw. But one writer, at the end of the first and the beginning of the second century A.D., deserves particular notice. Egger has drawn attention to the remarkable example of philo- sophical criticism which is to be found in one of the orations of Dion Chrysostom * the Olympicus. Pheidias is there represented as explaining how he formed the conception of his great statue, the Olym- pian Zeus. Tracing Art and Religion to the same source Divine Truth Dion dwells on the close alliance between them, as embodiments of divine ideas, ideas innate in man's soul. He then goes on to compare the plastic arts with poetry, and contrasts as well as laments the limitations necessarily im- posed on the sculptor with the freer scope of the poet It contains, it will be seen, the germ of Lessing's 1 Oral., xii. Works, Ed. Arnim, vol. i, 155 seqq. 252 POETRY AND CRITICISM thesis in the Laocoon, and it is written with extra- ordinary enthusiasm and eloquence. Of all the critiques which have come down to us from an- tiquity, this, and this alone, has the note, or some- thing of the note, of the work at which we have now arrived. The De Sublimitate, like the Poetic of Aristotle, has not reached us in its entirety. About nine hundred lines, or more than a third of it, have been lost, but as the lacunae are occasional, and occur, with the exception apparently of a few words, in the body of the work, they are comparatively unimportant, and in no way obscure either its method or its scope. The author addresses it to a young Roman, apparently his pupil, who had been studying with him a treatise on the sublime written by Caecilius of Calacte. Both of them had found it most unsatisfactory. It had neither shown how the sublime could be attained nor had it even defined what the sublime is, to say nothing of other serious defects. At the request of the pupil the master had, out of kindness and respect for a desire of knowledge, been persuaded to give his views on the subject, and he exhorts his fellow- student for so he courteously regards him to join in an investigation which should, with both of them, have truth, and truth only, for its object. " For he answered well " the reference is to Pythagoras 4 'who, when asked in what qualities we resemble the Gods, declared that we do so in benevolence and truth." 1 With this charming prelude the treatise opens. We may begin by remarking that ''sublimity," 1 Chap, i, 3. LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 253 in the Greek sense of the term, and as it is employed here, is by no means synonymous with " sublimity" in the English sense of the term, though it has some affinity with it. It is here used, partly as a synonym for a technical term in rhetoric, and partly perhaps in a sense peculiar to the writer. Among the various species or styles of composition, which the ancient critics have distinguished and defined, is one which appears under different names but with a common character this is the "grand" or "magnificent" style. It is described by Aristotle and defined by Demetrius as " magnificent," or " befitting a great man " (ntya^oTrpt'nys) ; by Cicero under the title of " grandiloqua" ; by Dionysius under the title of a style blending the characteristics of the "harsh" (y<7Tpov) and the "polished and elegant" (yiatpupov), and by Hermogenes as indicative of "greatness" (/u7E0o$). Caecilius appears to have been the first to apply the term t/^oj, " height" or " elevation," to it, though the adjective corresponding to i^oj, i.e., i4" x V> had already been used by Dionysius to describe it. 1 In this treatise the word which gives it its title sig- nifies all that was included in the qualities indicated by these technical terms, and, to judge from what may be gathered from the extant analyses of them, much more besides. Its elasticity, indeed, perplexed Gibbon and was ridiculed by Macaulay. If we take our stand on two remarks, and on what may be deduced directly from them, we shall have the key to the meaning of " sublimity " as here interpreted ; it isacertain "loftiness and excellence in expression" 1 ic^nXfl J uttl jusyaXaTTpSTP:? oix If TIM n Ava-iov Xeij. De xiii, 10. 254 POETRY AND CRITICISM %oxn rig Koyuv l ev 1 Dugald Stewart, Works, vol. v, p. 381. 2 De Sub., vii, 4. 3 I cannot but think, in opposition to the editors and com- mentators, that fl-uvflsmj here means, not what it generally means, simply composition, but the combination of all the qualities just specified in the general composition of the work, so that it may be paraphrased as tout ensemble, "general LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 257 It is in dealing with the first of these sources that the great note of the Treatise is struck, namely, that grandeur in composition and style can neither be simulated nor induced. It must be in the soul of the artist, the expression of the man himself. To write nobly we must think, we must feel, we must live nobly. It is not possible, says this great critic, that men with mean and servile ideas and aims prevailing throughout their lives should produce anything which is admirable. In a passage which might have been written by Ruskin he thus accounts for the degradation of art and literature: The love of money, a disease with which we are all of us now insatiably infected, and the love of pleasure, make us their slaves or rather, I should say, plunge us, body and soul, into the abyss of degradation : the one a malady that dwarfs men, the other a malady that makes them ignoble. Nor, on reflection, can I discover how it is pos- sible for us, if we honour so highly, or, to speak more correctly, make boundless wealth a God, to guard our souls from the entrance of those evils which are insepar- able from it. For wherever wealth is immoderate and unrestrained, extravagance, in close conjunction, follows it, so to speak, step by step ; and as soon as the former opens the gates of cities and houses the latter straight- way enters in and dwells there. And after a while these two build nests in the lives of men, as philosophers have expressed it, and very soon propagate, breeding char- latanry and vanity and luxury, no bastard progeny of their parents, but quite legitimate. Should these children of wealth be allowed to come to maturity, they speedily beget inexorable tyrants in the soul, insolence, lawless- effect." It is precisely Horace's " totum." Cf. Ars Poet., 34, 35, " Infelix operis summa quia ponere totum Nesciet." S 258 POETRY AND CRITICISM ness, and shamelessness. And so it will be, necessarily, that men will no longer lift up their eyes, or have any regard for fame, but the complete ruin of such lives will gradually be wrought, the nobler faculties of the soul pining and fading away, and becoming despicable. . . What wastes and consumes the geniuses of the present age is the apathy in which, with few exceptions, we pass our lives, merely working and striving to get applause and pleasure, never to do what is useful and what would secure the praise which is worth having and worth our effort. 1 Thus, all that constitute the vitality, the power, the glory of literature are enervated and corrupted at their very source. No one is in earnest, no one is serious. What is wanted can be obtained, the per- fection of cleverness and trifling, brilliant speeches, pretty poems, charming disquisitions all, in fact, that slaves and fribbles of parts and accomplish- ments are likely to demand and competent to supply. And is this, he asks in scorn, what poetry, what oratory, what criticism have come to? The only salvation lies in getting back to the demi-gods of happier times ol iaofeoi SHEIVOI, to Homer, to Thucy- dides, to Plato, to Demosthenes, and in making them our companions, our guides and teachers, our standards, and our touchstones. For, as he beauti- fully says : The Priestess of Apollo, when she approaches the tripod, is inspired by the divine vapour exhaling from the rift beneath it, so from the great natures of the men of old there are borne in about the souls of those who emulate them, as from sacred caves, what we may describe as 1 De Sub., xliv. LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 259 effluences, so that they who seem little likely to be pos- sessed are thereby inspired, and become great with the greatness of others. ' We should live as in their presence. We should ask ourselves, when writing, how would Homer, or Thucydides, or Plato, or Demosthenes have ex- pressed themselves, and what would be their verdict, if we submitted what we were writing to them. Such was the spirit in which the author of this Treatise approached the study of the Old Masters, a study as profound and minute as it was passion- ately sympathetic ; and from this study were derived his criteria of literary excellence. These criteria are not infallible. If the Treatise has not been inter- polated which is, by the way, extremely likely, 2 they sometimes produced, or at least were com- patible with, most unsatisfactory results. But they revealed to him and enabled him to reveal to others the real secret of literary immortality, of genuine greatness, of genuine excellence, and they furnished him with a very Ithuriel's spear for the detection of 1 See De Sub., xiii, 5. There is no indication that Ben Jonson was acquainted with Longinus, but there is a close parallel to this passage in his Discoveries, Section De Stylo et Optimo scrib- endigenere\ "Such as accustom themselves and are familiar with the best authors shall ever and anon find somewhat of them in themselves, and in the expression of their minds, even when they feel it not, and be able to utter something like theirs which hath an authority above their own." Works, Ed. Cun- ningham, vol. iii, 411-412. 2 It is difficult to suppose that the author of the rest of the Treatise could have written some of the stupid remarks about the Odyssey in sect, x, and the criticism of the noble simile in Iliad, xv, 624-628, in sect. x. 2<5o POETRY AND CRITICISM their counterfeits. No false note escapes him; he has no mismeasurements. Apollonius, who never trips, is separated from Homer, who is often trip- ping, and badly tripping, by the impassable barrier which divides talent from genius. The all-accom- plished Hyperides may be proved categorically to unite innumerable virtues to which Demosthenes has no pretension : but Demosthenes remains with- out equal or second: "Bacchylides and Ion," he observes, "are faultless and in the polished school eminently elegant and beautiful, while Pindar and Sophocles often become unaccountably dull (tr&enwrau aAo'yaj) and fail most deplorably. But would anyone in his senses regard all the works of Ion put to- gether as an equivalent for the single drama of the Oedipusl " 1 The four sections * in which the author discusses whether the palm should be given to works which are without flaws and defects, but deficient in grandeur, or to works which are marked by grandeur but full of faults, and whether, in estimating comparative excellence, we should prefer quantity to quality, or quality to quantity, are of singular interest. There is certainly nothing more noble in criticism than the passage in which, while maintaining the superiority of the faulty sublime to faultless mediocrity, he de- duces the reasons for such preference from the innate nobility of man, from the instinct which attracts him to the "thoughts beyond the reaches of his frame," to immensity and grandeur. Of the pellucid streamlet, he says, which quenches our thirst, of the tiny, clear, burning flame which our hands have 1 Sect, xxxiii, 2025. * Sect, xxxiii xxxvi. LONGINUS AND GREEK CRITICISM 261 kindled, we gratefully avail ourselves, for they are of use. But our admiration is reserved not for what is serviceable, but for what expands and thrills our souls, for the stupendous phenomena of nature, for the overwhelming magnificence of mighty rivers and of ocean, for the great luminaries of heaven, though so often overshadowed, for the awe-com- pelling splendours of the rock-belching desolating Etna. 1 And so he goes on to say, that what constitutes the superiority of a writer who possesses sublimity to a writer who has every gift and accomplishment without sublimity, in other words, what measures the distance between Homer and Apollonius, be- tween Demosthenes and Hyperides, between Plato and Lysias is in no way affected by the absence or presence of errors and blemishes. When sublimity is present, they are mere spots on the sun. When sublimity is absent, of what concern in the absence of the sun is the absence of the spots? All other qualities, he continues in his enthusiasm, prove their possessors to be men, but sublimity raises them near the majesty of God. Immunity from errors relieves from censure, but sublimity alone excites admiration. 3 There is much more in this most suggestive and we may truly say inspiring Treatise over which every critic would gladly linger. It would have been a pleasure to dwell on the many other admirable critical canons which it has laid down, and on its equally admirable illustrations of them; on the judge- ments passed in it on the great classics, at once so 1 Sect. xxxv. a Sect, xxxiii. 262 POETRY AND CRITICISM discriminating and so eloquent; on the parallels be- tween Demosthenes and Hyperides, and Demos- thenes and Cicero; on the magnificent criticism of the Iliad) and the sublime comparison of Homer to the sun and to the sea ; and above all, on the general characteristics of one who may be described as an almost ideal critic alike in aim, in method, in cul- ture, in temper. But it would be superfluous to comment on what must be obvious to every student of this noble Treatise. That a work which has been so influential, and which has had so many authoritative testimonies to its great value as a text-book in criticism should not only have no place in the curricula of our Univer- sities, but be practically unknown in their schools, is surely matter for very great surprise. Let the hope be indulged that Professor Rhys Roberts's edition, which, with all its deficiencies, has at least the merit of being sound and helpful, will have the effect of removing this reproach: for a reproach it is. THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF POETRY f^ESSERNsollen uns alle Gattungen der Poesie: 1 J es ist klaglich, wenn man dieses erst beweisen muss; noch kldglicher ist es wenn es Dichter giebt die selbst daran zweilfeln. "Every kind of poetry ought to improve us ; it is deplorable if this has to be demonstrated, it is still more deplorable if there are poets who themselves doubt it. " ' So wrote Lessing. Matthew Arnold also was never weary of telling us that we ought to conceive of poetry worthily, to con- ceive of it, that is to say, as capable of higher uses and called to higher destinies than those which in general men have, at least in modern times, hitherto assigned to it; and that to this end we must in conceiving of poetry accustom ourselves to a high standard and a strict judgement. Let us not forget that the dis- tinction between poets of the first order and poets of the secondary order is not a distinction in degree but a distinction in essence. As Browning expresses it, 2 "In the hierarchy of creative minds it is the presence of the highest faculty that gives first rank, in virtue of its kind, not degree; no pretension of a lower nature, whatever the completeness of development or variety of effect, impeding the precedency of the 1 Hamburgische Dramaturgic, Jan. 26, 1768. Essay on Shelley, printed in Furnivall's Bibliography of Robert Browning, p. 18. 264 POETRY AND CRITICISM rarer endowment though only in the germ." Let us then in conceiving of poetry conceive of it as repre- sented by those whose title to pre-eminence no one would dispute, the authors, say, of the Psalms, Isaiah, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth. Let us ask ourselves what ends poetry, as represented by them, is designed to serve, what gospel it delivers to us, what truths it opens out to us, what lessons it teaches us. And in this inquiry we have the good fortune to be assisted by excellent guides. If the poet is the interpreter of God to mankind, the critic is the interpreter of the poet to individual men. For what Bacon observes of studies is, in a great measure, true also of poetry, "it teacheth not its own use," and especially at that time in our life when it may be of most use to us. To how many of us did the study of such works as Sidney's Defence of Poesie and Wordsworth's two prefaces come as a revelation. Howinadequately and imperfectly was Shakespeare's message to mankind understood till it found an in- terpreter in Coleridge, and in those who have since lighted their torches from his! How dim in the eclipsing radiance or under the mighty shadow of Christianity, as we choose to express it, had grown that gospel, it, too, divine, which finds its embodi- ment in the Odyssey, in Pindar, in Aeschylus, in Sophocles, till in our own time Matthew Arnold and others, re-interpreting, re-illumined it. Who of us can forget the hour when Carlyle's burning words made the Divine Comedy become articulate to us, and revealed to us what solace, sustainment, and in- spiration might be found in its stern gospel? THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF POETRY 265 These, surely, are the poets, these the critics who will teach us best the true functions of poetry, teach us to understand that the chief office of poetry is not merely to give amusement, not merely to be the expression of the feelings, good or bad, of mankind, or to increase our knowledge of human nature and of human life, but that, if it includes this mission, it includes also a mission far higher, the revelation, namely, of ideal truth, the revelation of that world of which this world is but the shadow or drossy copy, the revelation of the eternal, the unchanging and the typical which underlies the unsubstantial and ever-dissolving phenomena of earth's empire of matter and time. It was this function of poetry which was indicated by Matthew Arnold when, with so much subtle truth, he defined it as " the applica- tion of ideas to life," and it was with this conception of it that he pronounced its future to be immense, and prophesied that, as time went on, mankind would find an ever surer and surer stay in it. Here then let us, for a while, take our stand ; let us say of poetry that it is " the application of ideas to life." But, as in thus describing it, we are really using technical language, I must ask you to bear with me while I explain a little more fully what we mean by "ideas," and what also was meant by "that world of which this world is the shadow or drossy copy." It was the habit of the ancients to clothe and convey truths in symbolic fictions, and pre-eminent among those who have chosen such media stands Plato. Plato, speaking in the person of Socrates, fables, as we all know, that there are two worlds, the material world, the world of matter, 266 POETRY AND CRITICISM which is perceptible by the senses, but which is purely phenomenal, having no real existence, per- petually decaying, perishing, changing, the mere wax on whose ever-melting matter form is eternally impressing itself to be eternally obliterated. The other is a world not perceptible by the senses, per- ceptible only by voVij, pure intelligence, the world of form, of ideas, of essence, and this is the world of what really not phenomenally exists, the world of what is. Eternal are those ideas, self-existent and uncreate, the only real entities. What exists in the world of matter, in the world perceptible by the senses has only a sort of quasi-existence, exists only in so far as it reflects or participates in those real essences, is a mere copy, and not merely a perish- able copy but a wretchedly imperfect copy or image of the divine, eternal and perfect archetypes there. The One remains, the many change and pass ; Heaven's light for ever shines, Earth's shadows fly. Here on earth are fleeting objects reflecting dimly and brokenly Beauty, Justice, Truth, but there is Beauty itself, Justice itself, Truth itself, "clear," as Plato puts it, " as the light, pure and undefined, not daubed with human colouring nor polluted with human fleshliness and other kinds of mortal trash." Now, how comes it to pass that we in this world have any perception of what the senses could never have revealed to us : how comes it that, when we see the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, we recognize them, recognize them in the faint and dim copies which is all we have here, in this poor world, of their Divine originals, and not merely recognize them, but are instinctively attracted to them.~~'Why, be- THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF POETRY 267 cause we have seen the originals, have been in communion with the Good and the True and the Beautiful; because our souls, before they became imprisoned in these walls of flesh and corrupted with matter, were denizens of the world of Reality, of the world of which this world is but the shadow, of the world of essences and forms: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ; The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home. And hence, too, come Those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, Are yet a master-light of all our seeing, Uphold us, cherish us; come Those echoes from beyond the grave, Recognized intelligence. In that world what we can see now only brokenly and by glimpses, by glimpses only in our highest moments, in "our seasons of calm weather," we saw steadily, habitually, and in perfection, saw not in drossy semblance but in essential integrity. There, too, man's soul, in harmony with the har- monies of Heaven, not only heard but vibrated in unison with them, understanding that music which, as Sir Thomas Browne puts it, sounds intellectually 268 POETRY AND CRITICISM in the ears of God the music of the spheres, the music of the ordered Universe. And this is the meaning of Shakespeare's famous lines: There 's not the smallest orb which thou beholdst But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins ; Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. But we hear it sometimes, as Browning's Abt Vog- ler, in his ecstasy, heard it; and then with him we come to understand how There shall never be one lost good ; what was shall be as be- fore, The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound. What was good shall be good, with for evil so much good more. On the earth the broken arcs : in the heaven a perfect round. But to return to Plato. In one celebrated passage l he compares the estate of man on earth to that of dwellers in an underground den, who, from child- hood upward, have had chains on their legs and their necks, and who are sitting with their backs to the light, unable to move by reason of their shackles, and can see nothing save the shadows of things passing before them on a wall in front. In another place 2 he describes the earth as being far larger and more beautiful than is generally supposed, "the surface being above the visible heavens," I give a paraphrase of the passage "while we who think we occupy the upper parts really dwell in a mere cavity, being pretty much in the position of men 1 Republic, vii, ad init. 2 Phaedo Steph., p. 109. THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF POETRY 269 living at the bottom of the sea, or like frogs round a marsh. Surrounded we are by a dull and heavy atmosphere, through which we ignorantly suppose the stars to move: round us are clefts and sands and endless sloughs of mud." But, could we come to the surface, as fish come to the surface of water, what a wondrous world would meet our eyes a world whose mountains are of precious stones, our emeralds, and sardonyxes, and jaspers being but chips from them a sun ever-shining, never dimmed. All that is most beauteous imagined there, In happier beauty, more pellucid streams, An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams, Climes which the sun who sheds the brightest ray Earth knows is all unworthy to survey the world, in fine, of the unfallen soul where, as Plato expresses it, are " Temples and sacred places in which the Gods really dwell, and the denizens of this radiant world hear the voices of the Gods, and receive their answers, and are conscious of them and hold converse with them"; and they see, con- tinues Plato, "the sun, moon, and stars, as they really are, and their other blessedness is of a piece with this." We must not, as I need scarcely say, press these myths too closely. We must not understand them literally, but we must accept them as it was designed we should accept them, as allegories, as parables. And they symbolize, as we must all feel, immortal truths, so intelligibly and clearly, that when we say, fancifully, that the keys of this world of Ideas are in the hands of the poet, and that it is his chief mission 270 POETRY AND CRITICISM to unlock and reveal this world of Ideas, we are us- ing language which everyone will understand. But two quotations, one from Shakespeare and one from Wordsworth, may form an appropriate transition from the rarified region in which we have been wandering with Plato, to that more familiar region in which criticism is more at home. And they will show us at the same time how short is the distance from figurative to literal truth in these matters. Wordsworth describes the poet's highest mood, and the poet's highest capacity and mission, as The gift Of aspect more sublime : that blessed mood In which the burden of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lightened : that serene and blessed mood In which the affections gently lead us on, Until the breath of this corporeal frame, And e'en the motions of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body and become a living soul: While with an eye, made quiet by the power Of harmony and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of thing's. 11 We see into the life of things ": that is it, almost you will observe the exact expression of Plato, while in that "eye made quiet with the power of harmony" we are brought still nearer to him. Now let us turn to Shakespeare's famous lines : 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. THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF POETRY 271 He seems to be translating, even to minute points of technical phraseology, the very language of Plato : and neither Shakespeare nor Wordsworth of that we may be almost sure had Plato's myth in their mind when they were thus expressing themselves. And so it will always be with essential truth, whether it speak indirectly in symbols or outright in plain speech, whether it be draped in gorgeous fictions or embodied in baldest aphorism : no variety of vesture can disguise it. It is curious and interesting to note how the notion of the functions of poetry which we are thus tracing up and defining in relation to Platonism, has repeated itself age after age, often without any reference to the doctrine of Ideas, without any conscious reference to Platonism at all. Let us take first Bacon's famous definition of poetry: Poesy is a part of learning which being not tied to the laws of matter may at pleasure join that which Nature hath severed, and sever that which Nature hath joined. It is feigned history, and the use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of thing's doth deny it, the world being- in proportion inferior to the soul, by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness than can be found in the nature of things. . . . And therefore poetry was thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of thing's. 1 1 Advancement of Learning, bk. ii. 272 POETRY AND CRITICISM We have it there. "Truth narrative and past," writes Sir William Davenant in his deeply interest- ing Prefatory Letter to Hobbes, " is the idol of his- torians who worship a dead thing, and truth, oper- ative and by effects continually alive, is the mistress of poets who hath not her existence in matter, but in mind." 1 We have it there. It was this, this asso- ciation of poetry with the ideal and the typical, not exactly indeed in the sense in which we have been speaking of the ideal and the typical, but in a sense cognate to it, which made Aristotle say that poetry was more philosophical and important, as being more universal and essential than history. 2 Coleridge, in a striking passage in the Biographia Literaria^ has finely applied to the poetic faculty what Sir John Davies in his Nosce Te-ipsum has said of the soul : She turns Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange, As fire converts to fire the things it burns, As we our food into our nature change. From their gross matter she abstracts the forms And draws a kind of quintessence from things, Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings. Thus doth she, when from individual states She doth abstract the universal kinds, Which then, re-clothed in divers names and fates, Steal access through our senses to our minds. And here I cannot but quote what Browning ex- presses so eloquently in his Essay on Shelley. The poet, he says : 1 Works, Fol. Ed., p. 5. a Poetic, ch. ix. 3 Chap. xiv. THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF POETRY 273 Is impelled to embody the thing he perceives, not so much with reference to the many below, as to the one above him, the supreme Intelligence which apprehends all thing's in their absolute truth, an ultimate view ever aspired to if but partially obtained, by the poet's own soul. Not what man sees, but what God sees the Ideas of Plato, seeds of creation lying burningly in the Divine Hand it is toward these that he struggles. Not with the combination of humanity in action but with the primal elements of humanity he has to do. . . . He is rather a seer than a fashioner, and what he produces will be less a work than an effluence. 1 And there are two other characteristics which essentially associate themselves with this conception of the highest office of poetry. The one is the old doctrine of the Greeks, so frequently insisted on by Plato, that the poetical faculty, when genuine, is innate, the immediate gift of Heaven, simple inspira- tion (pavia), holy madness, having as an impulsive power no connection at all with art, not to be learnt, nor in any other way than by divine transmission to be attained. And so Plato speaks of the poet as ex war^of mo-Tux^, marg. p. 71-72. 2 A Defence of Poetry, concluding paragraph. Ji TTOIDTOU jTi at/vs^suxTai Tnvfj avflpiTro;;, xai oJjf !Tai xpa&'w axa^jMEVo?, avtaf aoiSSc fj.ova-a.uiv 0paw)' jtxaxapaf TE 6et>v$ ct "OXiijUWov ep^otwi, aiVj/' oy buo-tyovioiw lwiXii0Tai, oLSi TI xq&wv (For if anyone having grief in his newly-stricken soul, pines with sorrow in his heart, and a minstrel, the henchman of the muses, chants the glorious deeds of the men of old time, and the blessed Gods whose home is in Heaven, straightway he 1 Theogony, 98-102. THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF POETRY 283 forgets his sorrows and remembers not his griefs, so quickly beguiled are they by the gifts of the goddesses of song.) Of all the evils which can befall poetry, the worst are to link it with sensuality and obscenity, to con- strain its heavenly voice to express or attempt to consecrate the grosser instinctsand appetites of man's mortal nature, and to link it with pessimism. To link it with pessimism is to repeat the horrid crime of Mezentius, to bind the living to the dead ; to link it with sensuality and obscenity is blasphemy in the most repulsive form which man's blasphemy can assume. Perhaps nothing can illustrate more strikingly the difference between ancient and modern conceptions of the functions of poetry than the attitude of con- temporary criticism towards such poetry as the poetry of Keats on the one hand and that of Wordsworth on the other. Of the first no one can deny that the eulogies of Matthew Arnold, now commonplaces which need not be repeated, express nothing further than literal and measured truth, and that when Tennyson said that there "was something of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything Keats had written," he said what every discriminating critic of poetry would concede. But is the corollary of this the superiority of the poetry of Keats to the poetry of Wordsworth, his admission into the ranks of the lords of his art? Are we to say of a poet whose most characteristic work may be described as Othello describes Desdemona Thou art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet That the sense aches at thee 284 POETRY AND CRITICISM are we to say of the poet of the Ode to Autumn, the Odes To a Nightingale and On a Grecian Urn, of the Eve of Saint Agnes, and of the sonnet " Bright Star," etc., that he has enriched poetry with contri- butions more precious than the Ode on the Intima- tions of Immortality, the Ode to Duty, Laodamia, Tintern Abbey, the best of Wordsworth's lyrics and sonnets? Compare the note of: What care, though striding Alexander past The Indus with his Macedonian numbers? Julia leaning Amid her window-flowers, sighing, weaning Tenderly her fancy from his maiden snow, Doth more avail than these ; the silver flow Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen, Fair Pastorella in the bandit's den Are things to brood on with more ardency Than the death-day of Empires with this note : Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee : air, earth, and skies, There 's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee : thou hast great allies : Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind or the note of: " Beauty is truth, truth beauty" that is all Ye know on earth and all ye need to know with the note of: Stern Lawgiver ! yet thou dost wear The Godhead's most benignant grace Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face : THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF POETRY 285 Flowers laugh before thee in their beds And fragrance on thy footing treads ; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong or the note of: Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath And so live ever or else swoon to death with the note of: E venni dal martirio a questa pace. Keats, with his magical faculty of presentation and expression, his unerring artistic tact and bewitching power of piercing into the innermost soul of sensu- ous beauty, to represent it in a thousand forms of loveliness and radiance, has been the very Lorelei of modern poetry, and has done more than any of the . divine brotherhood to which he undoubtedly be- longed to vindicate, in the judgement at least of in- ferior disciples and critics, the disastrous separation of aesthetic from ethic and metaphysic. It is not difficult to understand what Ruskin meant when he said that "he dare not read Keats," or to apply Newman's lines to what is most entrancing in his work: Cease, stranger, cease, those piercing notes, The craft of Siren choirs; Hush the seductive voice that floats Across the languid wires. Music's ethereal fire was given Not to dissolve our clay, But draw Promethean beams from Heaven And purge the dross away. It cannot, therefore, be urged too insistently that 286 POETRY AND CRITICISM we must go to poetry, not for what poetry of this kind can give us, not for what much poetry of a high order of artistic and aesthetic merit does not contain and appears to have no concern with; we must go to it in its higher manifestations, go to it for illumin- ation and furtherance spiritually and morally. When we rise to a conception of what should constitute the education of our citizens, which partly owing to the narrow esotericism of our scholastic systems, and partly in consequence of the necessar- ily preponderating claims of scientific and technical instruction, we have not yet done, then poetry will come to fill the same place in our systems of civil culture as it filled in that of the Ancients. Then, for the barren and repulsive word-mongeringand phrase- splitting which too often represents what is supposed to constitute the only serious method of dealing educationally with it, we shall have the counter- part of what Plato has described for us in the Pro- tagoras : When the boy has learned his letters and is beginning to understand what is written, as before he understood only what was spoken, they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads at school : in these are contained many admonitions, and many tales and praises and encomia of ancient famous men which he is required to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate or emulate them, and desire to become like them. Then, again, the teachers of the lyre take similar care that their young disciple is temperate and gets into no mischief; and when they have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the poems of other excellent poets who are the lyric poets ; and these are set to music and make their THE TRUE FUNCTIONS OF POETRY 287 harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children's souls, in order that they may learn to be more gentle and harmonious and rhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action. 1 We shall employ poetry, the best poetry, as an instrument of moral and political discipline, making its study as delightful as profitable. And then we shall perhaps understand what Xenophon meant when he made Nikeratus say, " My father, anxious that I should become a good man, made me learn all the poems of Homer by heart; for if any of us, he said, wants to become a prudent ruler of his house, or an orator, or public servant, let him know Homer well " ; 2 what Plutarch meant when he said that poetry must initiate us in philosophy; 3 what the Roman anecdotist meant, when hesaid that poetry was of more benefit to the young than all the lectures of the Greek philosophical schools, and even attri- buted to its influence the virtues of Camillus and Fab- ricius ; 4 what Lord Chatham meant when he wrote to his nephew at Cambridge. 5 1 Protagoras, p. 326, Jowett's version. And with what Plato saysabout the importance of poetry asaninstrumentof education should be compared the excellent remark of Quintilian, Inst. Orat., I, viii. See also Lucian, Anacharsis, 21, 22. * Symposium, cap. Hi, 5. 3 Iv ittnnfjuuri wpo/0s$fi*a.Tt> is not, as the context shows, "displays the power 294 POETRY AND CRITICISM (of an orator) in all its plenitude" but "all at once," "at a stroke." In section viii, ydi(ra rote (co\\f\fia, of i//v^pon/c, of dpoc and acp7r/;/3o\oc, of >j/\0c, and r)\o, of cialpeiv and the terms derived from it, of and avffypoc, of jjfloc, and the like. This can only be done by careful deduction and illustrations from the Greek critics with the collateral interpretation afforded by the Latin. All that represents this in Dr. Roberts' work is a very meagre glossary, correct as a rule, so far as it goes, but too indeterminate and jejune to be of much use to serious students. In one respect, Dr. Roberts may be praised without reserve, and that is in his rigid conservatism and in his refusal to corrupt his text with unnecessary conjectural emendations, such as Tucker's absurd 6 M/cw Xtrwg in xxxiv. He has thus uttered a silent protest against the most odious and mischievous pest now epidemic among inferior classical editors. His translation may fairly be pronounced to be the best which has yet appeared in English, for it is as a rule both spirited and accurate. INDEX Accio, T., 206. Adams, Samuel, 32. Addison, Joseph, influence of Longinus on, 214-5, 2I 9> 22 7- Aelius Herodianus, 251. Aeschylus, 96, 112, 115, 230, 264, 289. Aikin, Dr., 100. Akenside, Mark, influence of Longinus on, 216. Alcott, A. B., 36. Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 60. Alfieri, Vittorio, 115. Allston, Washington, 18. Alsop, Richard, 16. Amaltheus, 100. Amati, Jerome, 222, 236. Amelius, 232. Anaxagoras, 244. Anderson, Henry, 200. Andreae, Johaniv Valentin, 129. Angelo, Michael, 218. Antiphanes, 245. Aphthonius, 238. Apollonius, 261. Apsinesof Gadara,23i, 238,240, 241 note, 251. Apuleius, 178, 184. Aquinas, Thos., 279. Ariosto, L., 115. Aristarchus, 248. Aristides, 226, 279. Aristophanes, 229, 245, 276, 279. Aristotle, 209, 212, 213, 214,219, 222, 239, 246, 247, 252, 253, 272, 279. Arnold, Matthew, 3, 35, 75, 107, 124, 128, 129, 136, 137, 263, 264, 265, 283. Ascham, Roger, 194, 211, 233. Aspland, Brook, 175. Aubrey, John, 190. Aulus, Gellius, 100. Aurelian, 234, 235. Ausonius, 199. Bacon, Lord, 6, 178, 197, 198, 248, 264; his definition of poetry, 271. Barclay, John, 178, 197, 200. Barlow, Joel, 16. Beattie, James, 16, no, 112, 114. Becket, Thomas a, 134. Beer, Mrs. Lynn, 42. Beets, Nicolaes, 123. Begley, Rev. Walter, his trans- lation of the N(n>a Solytna, 176; credit due to him for an interesting discovery, 177; his arguments for ascribing it to Milton examined, 188; their untenable character, 190; proofs, 190; discrepancies be- tween Milton's known opin- 298 POETRY AND CRITICISM ions and those in Nova Solyma, 191; opinions on edu- cation, 191 ; Arian doctrines, 192; divorce and polygamy, 192; comparison between Mil- ton's Latinity and that of the Romance, 192-3; Mr. Begley's errors, 194-9; Milton's Latin poetry, 199; its errors and de- fects, 200 and note; compari- son of Milton's Latin poetry with that of his contempora- ries collapse of Mr. Begley's case, 202-3. Berni, Francisco, 97. Best, Paul, 175. Bilderdijk, Willem, 123. Birch, Dr., 168 note. Blackmore, Sir Richard, 16. Blake, William, 67, 68, 69. Bligh, Lieut. Wm., 87. Blue Flag, 42. Boccaccio, 141. Bodoni, 206. Boileau, Nicolas B. D., 206, 207, 21 1 ; effect of his version of Longinus on the Sublime, 212-3. Boker, George Henry, 60. Boswell, James, 229. Bouhours, Dominique Abb, 219. Boyd, Alexander, 200. Boyd, Robert, 200. Bradford, William, n. Bradstreet, Anne, 15. Brainard, John, G. C., 19. Brooke, Maria, 20. Brougham, Lord, 84. Browne, Sir Thomas, 36, 267. Brownell, Henry Howard, 42. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, I2 5. 1 5- Browning, Robert, 52, 72, 79, 120, 263, 268, 272; on Shelley, 2 75- Brummell, George, 79. Bryant, William Cullen, 4, 5; the American Wordsworth, 21 ; his characteristics, 22-4; dominant note of his poetry, 25; his simplicity, 26; his in- fluence, 27, 28; his genius, 30, 31, 32, 36, 50. Buchanan, George, 172, 194, 198, 201, 233. Bunyan, John, 183. Burke, Edmund, 227. Burnet, Bp. G., 95. Burns, Robert, 19, 37, 39, 67, 72, 102, 118, 148, 149. Burton, Robert, 103, no. Butcher, S. H., 279. Bute, Lady, 106. Butler, Samuel, 53, 212. Byles, Mather, 15. Byron, Hon. John, 87. Byron, Lord, 19, 20, 27; con- tributions to his biography and criticism, 78; character, 79; his letters, 80; his keen interest in daily events, 81; completeness of Mr. Cole- ridge's edition, 82-4; The De- formed Transformed, 85 ; his assimilative memory, 86; the shipwreck in Don Juan, 87; the siege, 88; his careful re- INDEX 299 ^ vision as instanced by the va- riants, 88-92; his indebted- ness to preceding and con- temporary 7 literature: ChiJde Harold, 93, 95; Don Juan, 93, 96; Lara, 94; Darkness, 95; Manfred, 96; his indebted- ness to La Diavolcssa, 97-8; his extensive reading, 98; his knowledge of. Latin, 99-100; his appropriations from the moderns, 100-107; his relative position among poets, 107; his insincerity, 108-11; Man- fred, 1 1 2-3 ; where Byron's power lay, 114-6; Childe Har- old and Don Juan, \ 16-9 ; his deficiencies, 119-20; his popu- larity on the Continent, 121; his remarkable personality and influence, 122-3, 2 7%- Caecilius, 238, 252, 253. Camillus, 287. Campanella, T., 178. Campbell, Thomas, 17, 28, 89, 101. Canna, G., 206. Cannegieterus Henricus, 236 note. Carew, Thomas, 105. Carlyle, Thomas, 67, 92, 239, 264. Casaubon, I., 206. Casti, Giovanni Battista, 96-7, uS- Catullus, 99, 118, 289. Chamisso Adalbert, 122. Channing, Ellery, 32, 36. I Chapman, George, 107, 196. Charles 1,8, 168 note, 179. I Chatham, Lord, 287. I Chaucer, G., i, 101, 141, 278. j Chrysippus, 279. i Churchill, Charles, 101. | Cicero, 50, 214, 220 note, 229, 236, 239, 249, 253, 262, 276. Claudian, 99. Clifton, William, 16. j Coleridge, Mr. Ernest Hartley, 78 note, 83-7, 93, 95-6, 99, 101, 105. j Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 19, 44, 102, no, 129, 130, 138, 264; on poetry, 272. i Collins, William, 141. j Colton, C. C., 220. Comenius, 180, 191. Conde 1 , Jean, 255. Congreve, W., 80. Cook, Eliza, 54. Cooper, Thomas, 144, 153. Corax, 249. Cowley, Abraham, 100, 194, 197, 199, 200. Cowper, William, 16, 278. Crabbe, George, 278. Cranch, Christopher P., 36. Crantor, 279. I Crashaw, Richard, 175. ! Crates of Pergamus, 248. ' Crichton, the Admirable, 200. j Cromwell, Oliver, 2. \ Curran, J. P., 105. ! Dalzell, Sir George, 87. ! Dana, Richard Henry, 20, 21. POETRY AND CRITICISM Dante, A., 57, 58, 103, 115, 138, 264, 281. Darmesteter, M., 105. Davenant, Sir William, 272. Davies, Sir John, 272. Dawes, E. A. S., 195. de Castelnau, Gabriel, Marquis, 88. de Costa, Isaac, 123. Demetrius of Alexandria, 225, 237 note, 283, 249, 250, 253. Demosthenes, 122, 214, 22onote, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235, 243, 250, 254, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262. de Musset, Alfred, 123. de Quincey, Thomas, 133. de Stael, Madame, 93. de Tocqueville, A., 20. Dibdin, Charles, 27. Dickinson, Emily, 75. Dio Cassius, 236. Dion Chrysostom, 251. Dionysius, his silence about Roman poetry, 3, 249, 250, 253- Dionysius Longinus, 222. See Longinus. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 225, 227, 238. Dionysius of Miletus, 226. Dionysius of Pergamus, 226. Dionysius of Phaselis, 226. Disraeli, Isaac, 112. Donne, Dr. John, 34, 36, 105, 196. Douglas, Rev. John (Bp. of Salis- bury), 170, 171.1 Drake, Joseph Rodman, 17, 19. Drayton, Michael, 6, 196. Dryden, John, u, 104, 114, 172, 214. Du Bartas, G. Saluste, 170. Dwight, Timothy, 8 note, 15. Dyer, John, 21, 22. Dyscolos, Apollonius, 251. Eckermann, J. P., 229, 277. Edward I, 134, Egger, A. Emile, 240 note, 251. Eliot, George, 148. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 6, n, 30; his Address at Cambridge, 3 J > 335 his position among American poets, 33 ; his char- acteristics, 34 ; his originality, 35; his disciples, 36, 50, 67, 68, 75 > 7 6 > 77- Ennius, 21. Epicrates, 245. Erythraeus, Janus Nicius, 179. Espronceda, Don Jose", 123. Euhemerus, 244. Eunapius, 223, 232, 234. Euripides, 230, 246. I Eusebius, 242. Evans, Nathaniel, 15. Everett, Edward, 32. Fabricius, Georgius, 201, 235, 287. Fe"nelon, F. on Longinus on the Sublime, 213. Fielding, Henry, 219. I Fiocchi, Fr., 206. Fletcher, Phineas, 169, 194, 200, 201. | Fox, Charles James, effect of INDEX 301 Longinus on the Sublime on, 220. France, Anatole, 255. Franklin, Benjamin, n. Freneau, Philip, 17. Froude, J. A., 54. Furnivall, Dr. F. J., 263 note. Garibaldi, 146. Gibbon, Edward, on Longinus \ on the Sublime, 219-20, 221, 234 note, 253. Giles, H. A., 210. Gilfillan, Rev. George, 244. Glauco, 246. Glennie, Dr., 101. Godwin, Francis, 178. Goethe, J. W., 49, 58, 67, 68, 96, 112, 113, I2O, 122, 128, 264, 277. Goldsmith, Oliver, 56, 217, 278. Gordon, Major, 96. Gori, A. F., 206. Grabbe, Christian, 122. Grattan, H., 220 note. Gray, Thomas, 86, 92, 100, 114, 128, 133, 136, 137, 138, 141, 278. Greeley, Horace, 39. Greene, Robert, 195. Griswold, R. W., 8 note, 21, 27 note. Grotius, Hugo, 170. Hall, Bp., 178. Hall, Jno., 207. Halleck, Fitzgreene, 19. Hamilton, Alexander, 13. Harrington, J., 178. Harte, Bret, 5, 33; where his power lies, 71 ; his style, 72; as a humorist, 72-3. Hartford, 87. Hartlib, Samuel, 188, 189, 190, 191. Havell, H. L., his version of Longinus on the Sublime, 210. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, n. Hay, Colonel, 73. Hay, Helen, 75. Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 61. Hazlitt, W. C., 105 note. Heine, Heinrich, 49, 58, 122. Heinecken, Henry, 206. Hemans, Mrs., 20. Henry II, 134. Henry, Patrick, 13. Hephaestion, 240, 251. Heraclides of Pontus, 246. Hermogenes, 211, 225, 237 note, 238, 242 note, 249, 250, 253. Hertford, Lord, 79. Hesiod, 31, 247, 282-3. Hillhouse, James, A., 18. Hobbes, Thomas, 197, 207, 212, 272. Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 27. Holinshed, R., 98. Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 5 ; on Emerson's Address, 32, 33; character, 46; comparison with Longfellow and Lowell, 46-9; characteristics of his work, 49; his genial human- ity, 5- Homer, 169, 208, 211, 213, 215 note, 218, 220, 243, 244, 247, 302 POETRY AND CRITICISM 250, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 279, 287, 288. Honeywood, St. John, 16. Hood, Thomas, 142, 148, 149, 159- Hooker, Thomas, n. Hopkinson, Joseph, 17. Horace, 4, 50, 92, 99, 214, 219, 249, 257, 276, 279, 288. Howe, Julia Ward, 42. Howell, Elizabeth, 176. Hudson, John, 206. Hugo, Victor, 123. Hume, David, 200. Hunt, Helen Jackson, 75. Hunt, Leigh, 50. Hurd, Bp., 219. Hyde, Dr. Thomas, 206. H) r perides, 261, 262. Immermann, 122. Isaeus, 226. Jefferies, Richard, 19. John Brown's Body, 42. John of Sicily, 211, 223, 237, 240 note, 242. Johnson, Samuel, 74, 79, 167, 170, 171, 200 note, 208 and note, 217, 246. Johnston, Arthur, 167, 168, 200. Jones, Ernest, 144. Jones, Sir William, 103. Jonson, Ben, 114, 196, 211, 259; on the functions of a poet, 275, 278. Juvenal, 35, 99. Kames, Lord, 219. Keats, John, 28, 43, 51, 85; his description of Byron, 112, 115, 119, 128, 129, 131, 134, 139, 142, 278, 283, 285. Keble, John, 175. Key, Francis Scott, 17. Kingsley, Charles, 153. Kolbing, Prof. Eugen, 95. Kossuth, L., 146. Lamartine, A. de, 123. Landon, Miss, 20, 27. Landor, W. S., on Gerald Mas- sey, 142-3, 149, 200 note. Lane, John, 124. Langbaine, Gerard, 205. Lanier, Sidney, 33, 61, 62. La Rochefoucauld, F. de M., 118. Lauder, William, 167, 169, 170, i/i. !95- Lebrecht, Karl, 122. Le Clerc, Peter, 206. Lee, the Misses, 96. Lee, Richard Henry, 13. Le Fevre, Tanneguy, 206. Legat, John, 177. Leigh, Mrs., 112. Lemon, 173. Lermontoff, M. I., 123. Lessing, G. E., 251, 262. Lewis, C. T., 96. Libanius, 223. Linacre, Dr. Thos., 197. Livy, loo. Longfellow, H. W., 4, 5, 30, 32, 33, 39 ; character of his work, comparison with Holmes and Lowell, 46-8; defects, 53; the INDEX beauty of his poetry, 54-5 ; as a lyric poet, 55 ; his dra- matic poems, 56 ; as a trans- lator, 57 ; America's greatest poetic artist, 57-8, 72. Longinus, his silence about Roman poetry, 3 ; on Demos- thenes, 122; strange silence of antiquity on his Treatise, 204 ; the several editions, 205 ; translations, 206-7; English translations, 208 ; Smith's translation, 208 ; Spurden's translation, 209 ; Havell's ver- sion, 210; influence of the Treatise, 210; its neglected existence, 211-2; effect of Boileau's version, 212-3; Fnelon on the work, 213; influence in England, 214-6; influence on Akenside, 216; on Goldsmith, Johnson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, 217-8; on Gibbon, 2 19-20; authentic- ity first questioned, 221-2; difficulties in the way of identi- fying the author with Long- inus of Palmyra, 223-6 ; other theories, 226-9 ; Professor Vaucher's theory, 229-31 ; birth and early life of L., 231- 2; settles at Palmyra, 233; becomes adviser to Queen Zenobia, 233; death, 234; his greatness as a critic, 234 ; his high opinion of the an- cient classics, 234 ; including Plato, 235; his high attain- ments, 235 ; a soul worthy of Socrates, 235; his Oriental blood, 235 ; objections raised by the anti-Longinians dis- cussed, 236-9 ; the remains of Longinus of Palmyra, 239-40 ; Professor Vaucher's methods, 241-2; what the general evi- dence leads us to, 243 ; history ofitscomposition,252; mean- ing of the title, 253-5; sources of the Sublime, 256; the great note struck by the Treatise, 257; the work re- viewed, 258-62. Lowell, Jas. R., 5, 30, 32, 33; on Whittier, 38 ; on Poe, 43 ; character of his work, com- parison with Holmes and Longfellow, 46-9; his power and originality, 50; as a humorist, 51-52; his defects, 52 ; as a serious poet, 52 ; the Biglow Papers, 53. Lucan, 99, 194, 226. Lucian, 226, 251, 287 note. Lucretius, 99, in. Lyly, John, 195. Lysias, 261. Macaulay, Lord, 253. Macpherson, James, 102. Manrique, Jorge, his Coplas, 57. 58- Manutius, Paulus, 205,222,223. Marcellus, 239. Marlowe, Christopher, 1 16, 195. Marston, John, 195. Marvel), Andrew, 60, 194. Masenius, Jacobus, 169. 304 POETRY AND CRITICISM Massey, Gerald, Lander's opin- ion of, 142-3; his services to the cause of liberty, 144; his revolutionary lyrics, 145; his ballads, 146 ; his satirical poems, 147-8 ; his sympa- thetic character shown in his poetry, 148-9 ; his history, 150-2; his first volume, 152; The Ballad of Babe Christabel, 153 ; his aspiration, 154; War- ivaits, 155; HavelocK's March, 155; A Tale of Eternity, 155; My Lyrical Life, 155 ; his history and his work in- separable, 156; The Ballad of Babe Christabel, 156-7; some of his gems, 158-60; The Haunted Hurst, 160-6, 175. Massinger, Philip, 94. Maturin, Rev. Chas. R., 96. Maurice, F. D., 144, 148, 153. Maximus, Tyrius, 226. May, Thos., 194, 200. Meeres, Francis, 211. Melbourne, Lord, 53. Menander, 229. Meredith, Owen, 72. Metrodorus of Lampsacus, 244. Mezentius, 283. Miller, Joaquin, 6, 33, 62-3, 71. Milman, Rev. Francis H., in. Milton, John, 18, 21, 33, 34, 52, 92, 96, 98, 112, 114, 115, 128, J 33 ! myths concerning M., 167-76; the Nova Solyma, 176-203; his probable ignor- ance of Longinus' Treatise on the Sublime, 211, 264, 274; on poetical abilities, 275-6, 278, 279, 282. Mitford, John, 100 note. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 105. Montemayor, Jorge de, 186. Moore, Thomas, 19, 27, 78, 85, 101. More, Henry, 184. More, Sir Thomas, 178, 198. Morley, Henry, 174, 175. Morris, William, 131, 278. Morus, Sam. F. R. Nathan, 206. Moses, 237. Moulton, Mrs. Chandler, 75. Muller, Wilhelm, 57, 122. Murphy, Arthur, 200, 208. Murray, John, 81 note, in, 176. Napoleon, 14. Napoleon, Louis, 147, 155. Nash, Thomas, 79. Newman, Cardinal, 285 ; on classical poetry, 288-9. Newton, Isaac, 194. Nichol, Prof., i, 17, 69, 72. Nonius, Marcellus, 100. North, Christopher, 244. Nova Solyma, Mr. Begley's dis- covery of, 176-7; comparison with other romances, 178-9] account of, 180-8 ; arguments against the Miltonic author- ship, 188-203. O'Brien, James, 144. O'Connor, Feargus, 144. Odenathus, 233. INDEX 305 Oldisworth, William, 208. Olympiodorus, 243. Origen, 232. Otis, James, 12. Ovid, 99, 195, 276. Paine, Robert Treat, 17. Parsons, Dr. Thomas William, 61. Pater, Walter, 3 ; on poetry, 279. Paulding, Jas. K., 19; on American poetry, 29. Payne, John Howard, 19. Pearce, Zachary, 206, 208. Peck, Rev., Francis, his Mil- tonic "discover}'," 171-3. Peele, George, 195. Pepys, Samuel, 79. Percival, James G., 19. Perrault, Charles, 212. Persius, 99. Petrarch, 133. Petronius, 178, 184. Pheidias, 251. Phillips, Edward, 189. Philo, Judaeus, 230. Philostratus, 226, 231. Photius, 223. Phrontis, 231. Phronto, 232. Piatt, John James, 61. Pickersgill, Joshua, 96. Pierpont, John, 18. Pike, Albert, 27. Pindar, 4, 120, 140, 213, 264, 282, 289. Pinelli, 206. Pinkney, Edward Coate, 20. Planudes, Maximus, 240 note. Plato, 228, 230, 235, 243, 245, 246, 247, 250, 258, 259, 261 ; on the " two worlds," 265-71 ; on poets, 273-4, 277, 286-7. Plotinus, 226, 232, 235. Plutarch, 98, 229, 230, 251, 287. Poe, Edgar Allan, 5, 32, 33; his alien genius, 42; char- acter of his poetry, 43-44; its originality, 44 ; excellences and defects, 44-5, 61. Poetae Latini Minores, 5. Poetry, true functions of, 263; importance of the didactic element in, 264; transcend- entalism of, 266-73; inspira- ration the breath of its life, 273-4 ; moral function of, 275-7; abuse of poetry, 278; its relation to theology, 280; difference between ancient and modern conceptions of, 283, 286; proper place of poetry in education, 286-90. Pollock, Edward, 18. Polybius, 227. Pope, Alexander, 16, 18, 102, 114, 116, 140, 168, 172, 208, 215, 248, 278, 289. Porphyry, 223, 226, 232, 233, 234. 235, 239. Portus, Fr., 223. Posthumius, 238. Poucshkin, A. S., 123. Praed, W. M M 49, 72. Prior, Matthew, 49, 289. Proclus, 242, 243. Prothero, Mr. Rowland C., 78 note, 80, 8 1 -2. 306 POETRY AND CRITICISM Pseudo-Musaeus, 99. Pseudo-Ossian, no, 115. Pujol, 206. Pulteney, William, 207. Punch, 245. Puteanus, Erycius, 178. Puttenham, George, 211. Pythagoras, 252. Queensberry, Lord. Quintianus, Johannes Francis- cus, 170. Quintilian, 214, 225, 249, 287 note. Radcliffe, Anne, influence on Byron's poems, 94, 113. Ramsay, Andrew, 170, 200. Randall, Jas. R., 42. Read, Thomas Buchanan, 60, 61. Reimarus, 236 note. Reinagle, R. R., 91. Reiske, 227 note. Reynolds, Sir Joshua, similar- ity of his sentiments with Longinus on the Sublime, 217-9. Richardson, Samuel, 106. Riley, James Whitcomb, 75. Roberts, W. Rhys, his Longinus on the Sublime, 204 note, 206, 210, 221, 243, 250 note, 262; defects of his edition, 293-5 ! errors, 294; merit of his trans- lation, 295; conservatism as an editor, 295. Robinson, R., 206. Robortello Fr. 211, 222, 223. Rogers, Samuel, in, 281. Rollin, Charles, 213. Ross, Alexander, 170, 200. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 129. Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 65. Ruhnken, David, 235, note, 240 and note, 241, note. Ruskin, John, 76, 156, 245, 257, 285. Sadler, John, 189. Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 54. Sallust, 100. Salmasius, 233. Sands, Robert Charles, 28. Sandys, George, 12. Sannazzaro, 178, 202. Sappho, 4, 140, 228. Schiller, 6, 49, 55, 58, 96, 112. Schlosser, J. G., 206. Schoel, Fredk., 226. Scott, Sir Walter, 19, 102, in, 115, 116. Scotus, John, 279. Seneca, 99, 225." Shakespeare, William, i, 2, 6, 89, 98, 114, 115, 120, 121, 122, 123, 142, 195, 264, 268, 270, 271, 282. Shelley, Mrs., 100. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 28, 44, 67, 108, 112, 119, 129, 130; on poets, 274, 275, 280, 287, note. Shenstone, William, 100, 108, 114. Sheridan, Richard B., 80. Sidney, Sir Philip, 168, note, 178, 186, 211, 264. Sigourney, Lydia, 20 INDEX 307 Silvester, Joshua, 170. Simmias, 246. Simon, 246. Skinner, Cyriac, 173. Smiles, Dr. Samuel, on Gerald Massey, 153. Smith, Edmund, 208. Smith, Captain John, 7. Smith, Sydney, 53. Smith, William, his version of Longinus on the Sublime, 208-9. Socrates, 235, 246, 265, 273. Sophocles, 230, 264. Southey, Robert, 16 note, 20, 28, 61, 96, 112, 200 note. Spengel, Leonard, 240, note. Spenser, Edmund, 102, 180, 196 and note, 264, 279, 280, 282, 290. Sprague, Charles, 18. Spurdens, William Tylney, his translation of Longinus, 209. Staphorstius, Caspar, 170. Stebbing, T. R. R., 209. Stedman, Edmund C., his An- thology, 4-5, 24, 33, 39, 67, 73 75- Sterne, Laurence, 219. Stesimbrotus, 244. Stevenson, Robert Louis, 255. Stewart, Dugald, 256 note. Stoddard, Richard Henry, 60. Story, Judge, on American poetry, 28. Strabo, 226, 251, 274. Strachey, William, 7. Street, Alfred B., 8 note, 19, 27. Suidas, 223, 237. Sumner, Dr. C. R., 193 note. Swift, Jonathan, 98, 118, 140, 147, 148, 210, 215, 216, 248. Swinburne, Algernon C., 131. Symonds, John Addington on Walt Whitman, 63-4, 67. Tacitus, 100, 225, 226, 239. Tasso, Torqunto, 115. Taubman, Frederic, 170. Taylor, Bayard, 33; his versa- tility, 58; his defects, 59; his best work, 60. Tennyson, Lord, 4, 44, 49, 50, 51, 60, 67, 70, 86, 92, 98, 114, 120, 128, 129, 131, 133, 138, 146, 149, 281, 283. Terentius, Maurus, 195, 220. Terentius, Varro, 100. Thackeray, William Make- peace, 148, 149. Thaxter, Mrs., 75. Theophrastus, 246. Thomson, Benjamin, 15. Thomson, James, 19. Thoreau, H. D., 36, 67, 68. Thucydides, 227, 228, 230, 250, 258, 259. Tibullus, 99. Tickell, Thos. 102. Timaeus, 230. Timrod, Henry, 61. Tipaldo, Em., 206. Tisias, 247. Titus, Colonel, 106. Todd, Rev. H. J., 196. Tollius, Jaques, 206. Tolmer, John, 194. Toup, Jonathan, 206. 308 POETRY AND CRITICISM Trumbull, John, 15. Twain, Mark, 73. Twining, Thomas, 209. Tyler, Prof. M. C, 4. Tyrtaeus, 4, 146. Uhland, L., 57, 58. Underbill, Thomas, 177. Valerius, Flaccus, 99. Valerius, Maximus, 287 note. Van Lennep, Jacobus, 123. Vaucher, Lewis, 206, 226 ; his theory on the authorship of the Treatise on the Sublime, 229-31, 235 note, 241, 242. Very, Jones, 36. Vida, 201, 202. Vigne, Cashnir de la, 123. Virgil, 21, 92, 99, 139, 169, 195, 2OI, 264, 288. Von Platen, Count, 122, 128. Vopiscus, 235. Wai pole, Horace, 117. Watton, William, 214. Walz, Chr., 240 note, 242. Watson, William, the Poems published by Mr. John Lane, 124-5; the jewelled aphorisms in his poetry, 126; compari- son with the poetry of pre- ceding masters, 127-8; his treatment of Nature, 129-30; the good judgment of his editor, 131-2; Mr. Watson's careful revision, 133-4, an< ^ his felicitous corrections, 134-5; a true Classic, 135-6; his limitations, 136-9; the characteristics of great poetry, 140; depressing conditions under which poetry is now developing, 141. Watts, Alaric, 94, 101, 105. Weales, Thomas, 209. Webbe, William, 211. Weddigen, Otto, 123 note. Weiske, Benjamin, 206, 222, 226, 242. Welsted, Leonard, 207. Wesley, John, 290. West, Richard, 100. Wetstein, H., 206. Whitelock, Bulstrade, 207. | Whitman, Walt, 5, 32, 33; Symond's criticism of, 63-4 ; Swinburne's opinion of, 64; conflicting opinions of, 65; his eccentricity, 66-7 ; his or- iginality, 67 ; extravagant homage paid to him, 68; se- cret of his success, 69-70; where he fails, 71. j Whittier, John G., 3, 5, 19, 30, 3 2 33. 35 ! early life and.char- acteristics, 37, 38; his place among American poets, 39; his excellences and his defects, 40; character of his poetry, 41, 42, 50, 55, 146. Wigglesworth, Michael, 15. I Wilcox, Carlos, 19. Wilde, Richard Henry, 20. | Willis, Nathaniel P., his %-ersa- tility, 28. Wills, W. H., 61. j Will son, Forceythe, 42. Winstariley, William, 167. Wolf, Lucien, 180. Wordsworth, William, 4; his definition of poetry, 13, 21, 24, 33. 35. 49> 5 2 . 67, 68, 76, 79, 109, no, 115, 119, 122, 127, 128, 129, 130, 133, 140, 264, 270, 271 ; his defect as a poet, 277, 280, 283, 284, 289. Wordsworth, Bishop, 200 note. INDEX 309 Wyttenbach, Daniel, 240 note. Xenophon, 98, 224, 244, 287. Yankee Man-qf-War, 17. Young, Edward, 18, 21, 22, 102, ii i ; influence of Longi- nus on, 216-7. Zenobia, 233, 234, 235. Zosimus, 235. CHISWICK PRESS : CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. A 000 966 396 4