Art. 5. THE ESSENTIALS OF GREAT POETRY.

THE decay of authority is one of the most marked features of our time. Religion, politics, art, manners, speech, even morality, considered in its widest sense, have all felt the waning of traditional authority, and the substitution for it of individual opinion and taste, and of the wavering and contradictory utterances of publications ostensibly occupied with criticism and supposed to be pronouncing serious judgments. By authority I do not mean the delivery of dogmatic decisions, analogous to those issued by a legal tribunal from which there is no appeal, that have to be accepted and obeyed, but the existence of a body of opinion of long standing, arrived at after due investigation and experience during many generations, and reposing on fixed principles or fundamentals of thought. This it is that is being dethroned in our day, and is being supplanted by a babel of clashing, irreconcilable utterances, often proceeding from the same quarters, even the same mouths.

In no department of thought has this been more conspicuous than in that of literature, especially the higher class of literature; and it is most patent in the prevailing estimate of that branch of literature to which lip-homage is still paid as the highest of all, viz. poetry. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, have not been openly dethroned; but it would require some boldness to deny that even their due recognition has been indirectly questioned by a considerable amount of neglect, as compared with the interest shown alike by readers and reviewers in poets and poetry of lesser stature. Are we to conclude from this that there is no standard, that there exist no permanent canons by which the relative greatness of poets and poetry can be estimated with reasonable conclusiveness? It is the purpose of this essay to show that such there are.

The expression of individual opinion upon a subject so wide, no matter who the individual might be, would obviously be worthless; and I have no wish to do what has been done too often in our time, to substitute personal taste or bias for canons of criticism that have stood the test of time, and whereon the relative position

of poets, great, less great, and comparatively inferior, has reposed. The inductive method was employed long before it was explicitly proclaimed as distinct from and more trustworthy than the merely deductive; and it is such method that will, if indirectly, be employed in this paper. Finally, I shall carefully abstain from the rhetorical enthusiasm or invective that clouds the judgment of writers and readers alike, and invariably degenerates into personal dogmatism, together with intolerance of those who think otherwise. After indicating, to the best of my ability, the laws of thought and the canons of criticism on which should repose the estimate of the poetic hierarchy, I will then ask the reader to observe if the conclusions leave the recognised Masters of SongHomer, Eschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil, Lucretius, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byronunassailed and unshaken in their poetic supremacy.

There must perforce be certain qualities common to all poetry, whether the greatest, the less great, or the comparatively inferior, and whether descriptive, lyrical, idyllic, reflective, epic, or dramatic; and, so long as there existed any authority or body of generally accepted opinion on the subject, these were at least two such qualities, viz. melodiousness, whether sweet or sonorous, and lucidity or clearness of expression, to be apprehended, without laborious investigation, by highly cultured and simple readers alike. Melodiousness is a quality so essential to, and so inseparable from, all verse that is poetry, that it often, by its mere presence, endows with the character of poetry verse of a very rudimentary kind, verse that just crosses the border between prosaic and poetic verse, and would otherwise be denied admission to the territory of the Muses. Some of the enthusiasts to whom allusion has been made have, I am assured, declared of certain compositions of our time, 'This would be poetry, even if it meant nothing at all' a dictum calculated, like others enunciated in our days, to harden the plain man in his disdain of poetry altogether. It would not be difficult to quote melodious verse published

our time of which it is no exaggeration to say that the words in it are used rather as musical notes than as words signifying anything. In all likelihood such compositions, and the widespread liking for them,

arise partly from the prevailing preference for music over the other arts, and in part from the mental indolence that usually accompanies emotion in all but the highest minds. Nevertheless it cannot be too much insisted on that music, or melodiousness, either sweet or sonorous, is absolutely indispensable to poetry; and where it is absent, poetry is absent, even though thought and wide speculation be conspicuous in it. As Horace put it long ago in his 'Art of Poetry,'

'Non satis est pulchra esse poemata: dulcia sunto.'

Almost as essential to poetry, and equally as regards poetry of the loftiest and poetry of the lowliest kind, is lucidity, or clearness of expression. No poet of much account is ever obscure, unless the text happens to be corrupt. When essays and even volumes are issued, since deemed indispensable for the understanding of a writer labelled as a poet, one may be quite sure that, however deep a thinker, he is not a poet of the first order, and not a poet at all in the passages that require such explanation. When one hears a well-authenticated story to the effect that a great scholar said of an English paraphrase of a well-known Greek poem, that he thought he had succeeded in gathering its meaning with the help of the original, one ought to know what to think of the work. Yet, though much of its author's verse is of that non-lucid character, it is habitually saluted by many critics as great poetry. With all respect, I venture to affirm that in such circumstances the designation must be a misnomer. I remember a poem being read to me, in perfect good faith, by its author, a man of great mental distinction and no little imagination, of which, though I listened with the closest attention, not only did I not understand one word, but I had not the faintest idea, as the colloquial phrase is, what it was about. When it was published, I asked three ardent admirers of the author to explain to me its meaning. They failed entirely to do so. The saying, concerning the orator, clarescit urendo, is even yet more applicable to the poet. He brightens as he burns. Yet, of recent times, verse fuliginous, clouded, and enshrouded in obscurity, has been hailed in many quarters, not only as poetry, but poetry of an exceptionally superior sort.

If it be urged that Dante, and even Shakespeare, do not always yield up their meaning to the reader at once, the allegation must be traversed absolutely. The immediate apprehension of the meaning of the Vita Nuova' and the Divina Commedia' presupposes an intimate acquaintance with the various dialects of the Italian language existing in Dante's time, and likewise with the erudition he scatters so profusely, if allusively, throughout his verse. But to the Italian readers of Dante, even superficially acquainted with those dialects, and adequate masters of the theology and the astronomy of Dante's time, those poems present no difficulty. Of Shakespeare, the greatest of all the poets in our language, let it be granted that he is not unoften one of the most careless and even most slovenly; but rarely is he so to the obscuring of his meaning, and never save casually, and in some brief passage. Yet let it not be inferred that I am of opinion that the full meaning of the greatest passages in the greatest poems is to be seized all at once, or by the average reader at all. That is 'deeper than ever plummet sounded,' though Tennyson's indolent reviewer' apparently imagines that he at once fathoms the more intellectual poetry of his time. There can be but few readers, and possibly none but poets themselves, or persons who, to quote Tennyson again, ‘have the great poetic heart,' who master the full significance of 'Hamlet' or of the tersely told story of Francesca da Rimini. But the whole world at once understood the more obvious tenor of both, and is not puzzled by either. There is a sliding scale of understanding, as there is a sliding scale of inspiration. 'We needs must love the highest when we see it'; but 'when we see it' is an important qualification in the statement.

I do not know that there are any qualities save melodiousness, sweet or sonorous, and lucidity, that are absolutely essential to whatever is to be regarded as poetry. In order to preclude misapprehension, let it be added that, while both are essential to poetry, they will not, by themselves, go far towards endowing verse with the poetic character. As an example of this, let me cite verse which is not unmelodious, though not specially remarkable for melodiousness, and not obscure, yet is not poetry, and hardly on the border of it:

'I have a boy of five years old;

His face is fair and fresh to see;
His limbs are cast in beauty's mould,
And dearly he loves me.

One morn we strolled on our dry walk,
Our quiet home all full in view,
And held such intermitted talk

As we are wont to do.

My thoughts on former pleasures ran;
I thought of Kilve's delightful shore,
Our pleasant home when spring began,
A long, long year before.

A day it was when I could bear
Some fond regrets to entertain;
With so much happiness to spare,
I could not feel a pain.'

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This blameless, correct, harmonious, and thoroughly lucid verse is by a poet who has written poetry of the noblest quality, no less a poet than Wordsworth. Yet he sorely tries his readers by page after page no more poetical than the foregoing; and he offered, on the first appearance of every volume of his, ample matter for such critics as would rather be sweepingly censorious than discriminating, to depreciate and even to ridicule him. His reverent admirers, who comprise all true lovers of poetry, are acquainted with, and probably possess, a copy of Matthew Arnold's Selection, entitled Poems of Wordsworth'-a small volume which that gifted Wordsworthian, who knew and acknowledged with his usual sense of humour how many unpoetical 'sermons,' as he called them, Wordsworth had written, deliberately considered to contain all the real poetry he has left us. If I may refer for a moment to my own copy of it, this is scored with brief observations in pencil, the upshot of which is that the small fraction of his work, which Matthew Arnold too liberally wished to be regarded as digna Phobi, would have again to be materially reduced by a dispassionate criticism.

The most generous critic, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of poetry. But on a very thin thread of meaning