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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 Song—Homer, Æschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil, Lucretius, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—unassailed 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 in 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.

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 Phœbi, 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 poetry, or a very fair imitation of it, may be hung by the aid of musical sound. Without going so far as Arnold again, who once wrote to me that Shelley’s “My soul is an enchanted boat” seemed to him “mere musical verbiage,” that poem might serve as an instance of verse which, in spite of tenuity of meaning, becomes poetry by sheer magic of exquisite music.

My soul is an enchanted boat,

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float

Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;

And thine doth like an angel sit

Beside a helm conducting it,

Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing

It seems to float ever, for ever,

Upon that many-winding river,

Between mountains, woods, abysses.

A paradise of wildernesses!

Till, like one in slumber bound,

Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,

Into a sea profound of ever-spreading sound.

There is a magic of sound in the verse so enchanting to a reader that he may be pardoned for failing to observe at once that it is mainly musical fancy. Many may remember a line of Tennyson:

Like a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.

And are we not compelled to feel, on second thoughts, if we have any capacity for discrimination, that here we have poetry of little meaning, though the verse is exquisitely melodious? This is, I conclude, what Arnold meant when he designated it, with a little exaggeration, “musical verbiage.”

I have been obliged to linger somewhat on the threshold of my subject in order to emphasise the essential importance and inseparable quality of metrical melodiousness and lucidity in poetry, in order that, in whatever follows in this paper, these indispensable conditions may not be lost sight of; and also because of late each of them has been ousted from consideration by those who have striven, and still strive, to induce literary opinion to accept not only as poetry, but as great poetry, what is conspicuously lacking in both. That I shall have the assent, however, of the weight of authority on this point, and likewise that of the ordinary unaffected lover of poetry, I can scarcely doubt; the more so, as the conclusions thus far reached leave undisturbed upon their seats those mighty ones, of all tongues and all nations, whose universally recognised greatness has received the seal and sanction of many generations.

What may be called the first principles of poetry having thus been propounded, without any necessity for reaffirming them in the investigation of other conclusions yet to be reached, I may move on to what I imagine will be less familiar and perhaps more original in the search for “The Essentials of Great Poetry.” If we carefully observe the gradual development of mental power in human beings, irrespectively of any reference to poetry, but as applied to general objects of human interest, we shall find that the advance from elementary to supreme expansion of mental power is in the following order of succession, each preceding element in mental development being retained on the appearance of its successor: (1) Perception, vague at first, as in the newly born, gradually becoming more definite, along with desires of an analogous kind; (2) Sentiment, also vague at first, but by degrees becoming more definite, until it attaches itself to one or more objects exclusively; (3) Thought or Reflection, somewhat hazy in its inception, and often remaining in that condition to the last; (4) Action, which is attended and assisted by the three preceding qualities of Perception, Sentiment, and Thought or Reflection. In other words, human beings perceive before they feel, perceive and feel before they think, perceive, feel, and think before they act, or at least before they act reasonably, though it may be but imperfectly, and though the later or higher stages may in many cases scarcely be reached at all.

Now let us see if, in poetry, the same order or succession in development and expansion does not exist. Never forgetting the essential qualities of melody and lucidity, do we not find that mere descriptive verse, which depends on perception or observation, is the humblest and most elementary form of poetry; that descriptive verse, when suffused with sentiment, gains in value and charm; that if, to the foregoing, thought or reflection be superadded, there is a conspicuous rise in dignity, majesty, and relative excellence; and finally, that the employment of these in narrative action, whether epic or dramatic, carries us on to a stage of supreme excellence which can rarely be predicated of any poetry in which action is absent? If this be so, we have to the successive development of observation, feeling, thought, and action, an exact analogy or counterpart in (1) Descriptive Poetry; (2) Lyrical Poetry; (3) Reflective Poetry; (4) Epic or Dramatic Poetry; in each of which, melody and lucidity being always present, there is an advance in poetic value over the preceding stage, without the preceding one being eliminated from its progress.

Once again let us have recourse to illustration, which, when fairly chosen, is probably the most effective method for securing assent. Wordsworth presents us with an ample supply of illustrations in three out of the four different kinds of poetry; and therefore to him let us have recourse. In reading the first stanza of The Pet Lamb, and two or three stanzas that follow, we have descriptive verse which may be regarded as very elementary poetry, but to which it would seem to many to be hypercritical to refuse that designation. It is too well known to need citation. The opening lines of The Leech-Gatherer display the same elementary descriptive character.

There was a roaring in the wind all night;

The rain came heavily and fell in floods;

But now the sun is rising calm and bright;

The birds are singing in the distant woods;

Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;

The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;

And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.

All things that love the Sun are out of doors;

The sky rejoices in the morning’s birth;

The grass is bright with rain-drops; on the moors

The Hare is running races in her mirth;

And with her feet she from the plashy earth

Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,

Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.

I was a traveller then upon the moor;

I saw the Hare that raced about with joy;

I heard the woods and distant waters roar;

Or heard them not, as happy as a boy:

The pleasant season did my heart employ;

My old remembrances went from me wholly,

And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy.

I perceive that, in my copy of the volume of Selections made by Matthew Arnold from the poems of Wordsworth, already alluded to, I have written at the end of Margaret, “If this be poetry, surely many people may say they have written poetry all their lives without knowing it.” But as Matthew Arnold’s critical opinions will carry more weight than mine, and he has included Margaret in his Selection, let me quote a dozen lines or so from its opening passage:

’Twas Summer, and the Sun had mounted high:

Southward the landscape indistinctly glared

Through a pale steam; but all the northern downs,

In clearest air ascending, showed far off

A surface dappled o’er with shadows flung

From brooding clouds; shadows that lay in spots

Determined and unmoved, with steady beams

Of bright and pleasant sunshine interposed;

Pleasant to him who on the soft cool moss

Extends his careless limbs along the front

Of some huge cave, whose rocky ceiling casts

A twilight of its own, an ample shade,

Where the Wren warbles.

But there is, it must not be overlooked, merely Descriptive Poetry of a much higher kind than the foregoing, though Wordsworth may not be the best source from which to draw it. Perhaps its highest possibilities are to be found in Byron, and conspicuously in the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold. Many of the passages of the kind that one remembers there are, however, either too much suffused with the poet’s personal feeling, or too closely connected with great incidents in history and the fall of empires, to be quite pertinent examples. A minor but sufficient example taken from Childe Harold may suffice for illustration:

It is the hush of night, and all between

Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,

Mellow’d and mingling, yet distinctly seen,

Save darken’d Jura, whose capt heights appear

Precipitously steep; and drawing near,

There breathes a living fragrance from the shore,

Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear

Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,

Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more.

Far finer instances of poetry essentially descriptive in the same poem may be referred to, e.g. Canto IV., stanza xcix., beginning “There is a stern round tower of other days”; stanza cvii., beginning with “Cypress and ivy, weed and wallflower grown”; stanza clxxiii., descriptive of Lake Nemi; and even—for it also is strictly descriptive—stanza cxl., opening with the well-known line “I see before me the gladiator lie.”

It could not be allowed that any of these, considered separately, satisfies the conditions or essentials of great poetry, though, in company with others, they contribute to that character in a very great poem indeed. Moreover, they serve to show that even mere Descriptive Poetry, which I have spoken of as the “lowest” or most elementary kind of poetry, may rise to striking elevation of merit, and has its counterpart in the sliding scale of observation in various individuals.

Let us now take a step, and a long one, in the scale of importance attained by the various kinds of poetry, and consider the classics of Lyrical Poetry. Here extensive quotation will be less necessary, partly by reason of the wide ground Lyrical Poetry covers, and partly because of its relative popularity in our time, and the familiarity of so many readers with its most enchanting specimens. There is ample room for personal taste and individual idiosyncrasy within the vast boundaries of this fruitful field. Many persons are sadly wanting in observation; and to only a minority can real, serious thought be ascribed. But we all feel, we all have visitations of sentiment; and therefore to all of us is Lyrical Poetry more or less welcome.

The causes, personal and social, that have given to Lyrical Poetry in our time almost exclusive favour in public taste will be dealt with presently. It will distract less from our main purpose to confine ourselves for the present to the recognition of the fact, and to seek to show how very various are the degrees of eminence in Lyrical Poetry. The lyrical note is so natural to poets and poetry that we may expect to find it in the verse of all poets, though in a minor degree in didactic verse; while in some poets it almost monopolises their utterance. Though perhaps not obvious to many ears to-day, it lurks in no little of Pope’s Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, and is unmistakably present in his Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day. If I am asked if the lyrical note is to be found in Chaucer, the reply must be that, though Chaucer has left nothing which the modern reader would recognise as lyrical, what is called his iambic or five-foot metre is far more anapæstic and lyrical than is the case with any subsequent poet, except Shakespeare. There is a lilt in it equivalent to the lyrical note, which those who read as Chaucer wrote recognise at once. One has only to read the opening lines of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales to perceive this. Not quite to the same extent perhaps as in Chaucer, but withal very noticeably to the ear, the lyrical note is frequently to be caught in Spenser, even where he is not obviously offering the reader Lyrical Poetry; as, for instance, in this stanza in the first canto of the Fairy Queen, beginning:

A little lowly hermitage it was,

Down in a dale, hard by a forest’s side.

This is not Lyrical Poetry proper, as now understood. But Spenser has left us in his Epithalamion a lyrical poem with which only one other English lyric can be placed in competition for the first place. It is too long for more than one brief excerpt to be cited here:

Wake now, my love, awake! for it is time;

The rosy Morne long since left Tithones bed,

All ready to her silver coche to clyme;

And Phœbus gins to shew his glorious hed.

Hark! how the cheerefull birds do chaunt theyr laies

And carroll of loves praise.

The merry Larke hir mattins sings aloft;

The Thrush replyes; the Mavis descant playes;

The Ouzell shrills; the Ruddock warbles soft;

So goodly all agree, with sweet consent,

To this dayes meriment,

Ah! my deere love, why doe ye sleepe thus long,

When meeter were that ye should now awake,

T’ awayt the comming of your joyous make,

And hearken to the birds love-learned song,

The deawy leaves among?

For they of joy and pleasance to you sing

That all the woods them answer, and theyr eccho ring.

One is sorry to think that this long, lovely, and varied lyric is less known than it ought to be to the modern readers of Lyrical Poetry. I can only say to them, “Make haste to read it.”

In Shakespeare’s plays the lyrical note is so often to be heard in the blank verse that the poet’s natural aptitude and inclination for singing were amply exercised there; and he gives most voice to it in such plays as As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet. But it recurs again and again throughout his dramas. Such lines as:

All over-canopied with lush woodbine,

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,

Under the shade of melancholy boughs,

are illustrations of what I am pointing out.

Without dwelling on the excellent lyrics written in the reigns of Charles I. and Charles II., and confining ourselves to the di majores of poetry, we may pass on to Milton, whose Allegro and Penseroso as likewise the lyrics in Comus, are too familiar to every one to be more than mentioned as evidence of the persistence, in the past as in the present, of the warbling impulse in all poets. Heard but fitfully during the greater part of the eighteenth century, yet most arrestingly in Gray, Collins, and Burns, Lyrical Poetry from the last onward without intermission, to our own time, in Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson, is almost the only poetry that has in recent days been much listened to, or much written and talked about. This circumstance is far from being conclusive as to whether, during the same period, poems higher and greater than mere Lyrical Poetry have or have not been produced. But it is absolutely certain that, if produced, they have been, so far, more or less ignored; and that, if the same poets have written such and Lyrical Poetry as well, they will have been considered and estimated by the latter only.

But the domain of feeling and emotion in which Lyrical Poetry has room to display its power and versatility is so extensive that lyrics are very various in their themes and in the treatment of them. Love, religion, patriotism, cosmopolitan benevolence, being, as I have shown in The Human Tragedy, the most elevated and most permanent sources of human sentiment and emotion, there will necessarily be in Lyrical Poetry, even considered by itself, and apart from all the other forms of poetry, a scale of relative elevation and importance.

The love of individuals for each other, whether domestic, romantic, or sexual, is much more common than any of the other three, being practically universal; and it has given birth to so many well-known lyrics that it is unnecessary to cite any of them here. Some of them are very beautiful; but none of them, by reason of the comparative narrowness of their theme, satisfies the essentials of great poetry. Not even Tennyson’s Maud, which is perhaps the most ambitious and the best known of long poems dedicated mainly to the subject, though it contains lovely passages, approaches greatness.

Though what is understood as religious sentiment comes next to the love of individuals for each other in the extent of its influence, it has produced much verse, but, it must be allowed, little poetry, the reason probably being that the religious sentiment of the few who are endowed with the gift of writing poetry differs from that of the average “religious” person. Nor can the fact be overlooked that there is a certain character of reserve in Protestantism which has operated since the Reformation against the growth of religious Lyrical Poetry. For that we must go either to pre-Reformation days, or to the poetry of those who, like George Herbert and the poetic kin of his time, clung to the Roman Catholic creed after the modification of belief and ritual in the Anglican Church; or to the poets in our own time trained in the Roman Catholic faith, and to that extent, and on that ground, debarred from wide popularity among a Protestant people. The De Veres, Faber, Coventry Patmore, and Newman, the last notably in his Dream of Gerontius, may be named as instances of what has been done in recent times in the sphere of religious poetry. Scott’s lovely “Ave Maria” in The Lady of the Lake, and Byron’s stanza beginning:

Ave Maria! ’tis the hour of prayer,

are briefer specimens of what may be, and has been contributed in later times to religious poetry; much smaller in bulk and volume than poetry dedicated to the love of individuals for each other, but higher in the rising scale of greatness, because of the greater dignity of its theme.

Patriotic Lyrical Poetry need not detain us long. Most patriotic verse, however spirited, is verse only, nothing or little more, though exceptions could be cited, such as Drayton’s Agincourt, Tennyson’s Relief of Lucknow, and The Ballad of the “Revenge.” But if in patriotic Lyrical Poetry we include, as I think we should, poetry in the English tongue, but not concerning England or the British Empire, I may name Byron’s “Isles of Greece” in Don Juan, which I had in my mind when I observed that there is in our language only one lyrical poem that can compete for the first place in Lyrical Poetry with Spenser’s Epithalamion.

3. Reflective Poetry. Over Reflective Poetry, in itself a stage of advance beyond Descriptive Poetry and Lyrical Poetry in themselves, we need not linger long, for the reason that, though Reflective Poetry is ample in quantity, it is, outside the Drama, very limited in quality, most of it being of so prosaic a character as not only not to be ranked above average Lyrical Poetry, but far below it. Wordsworth furnishes us, for the purpose of illustration, with both kinds, the higher and the lower Reflective Poetry. As regards the latter, I would rather let Matthew Arnold, than whom there is no warmer admirer of Wordsworth, be the spokesman:

The Excursion abounds with Philosophy [I prefer to call it Thought or Reflection]; and therefore The Excursion is to the Wordsworthian what it never can be to the disinterested lover of poetry, a satisfactory work. “Duty exists,” says Wordsworth in The Excursion; and then he proceeds thus:

... Immutably survive,

For our support, the measures and the forms

Which an abstract Intelligence supplies,

Whose kingdom is where time and space are not.

And the Wordsworthian is delighted, and thinks that here is a sweet union of philosophy and poetry. But the disinterested lover of poetry will feel that the lines carry us really not a step farther than the proposition which they would interpret; that they are a tissue of elevated but abstract verbiage, alien to the very nature of poetry.

Merely observing that I wholly agree with the foregoing estimate, I pass to the higher Reflective Poetry, of which Wordsworth has given us such splendid but comparatively brief instances. The Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, his best Sonnets, the Character of the Happy Warrior, the Ode to Duty, and, finally, the Ode on Intimations of Immortality seem to me to place Wordsworth above all other English Poets in the domain of exclusively Reflective Poetry. I do not forget much noble Reflective Poetry in Childe Harold; but it is too much blent with other elements, and into it the active quality enters too strongly, for its more reflective features to be separated from them. Moreover, it generally falls far short of the intellectual note so strongly marked in Wordsworth’s best Reflective Poetry, into which, be it added, both the descriptive and the lyrical notes, in accordance with the general law I am seeking to expound in this paper, enter very largely, if, of course, subordinately. It will be obvious, however, to any dispassionate lover of poetry, that a merely reflective poem of any great length cannot well be entitled to the designation of a great poem. Had such been possible, Wordsworth would have bequeathed it to us. The Excursion is the answer; which, notwithstanding a certain number of fine passages, is, for the most part, what Matthew Arnold says of it, “doctrine such as we hear in church, religious and philosophical doctrine; and the attached Wordsworthian loves passages of such doctrine, and brings them forward as proofs of his poet’s excellence.”

If the reader has followed me so far, with more or less assent, he will be prepared not only to allow, but of himself to feel, that there must be yet another kind or order of poetry, in which the greatest poems are to be found, poems that are neither exclusively nor mainly either descriptive, lyrical, or reflective, but into which all three elements enter subordinately, though none of them gives it its distinctive and supreme character.

4. Epic and Dramatic Poetry. That supreme kind of poetry is Epic and Dramatic Poetry, though there may be very poor Epics, and Dramas in which true poetry is scarcely to be observed, just as we have seen that there is very inferior Descriptive, Lyrical, and Reflective Poetry. All that is asserted is that great epic and dramatic poems must be greater than the greatest poetry of the preceding kinds by reason of their wider range and (as a rule) the higher majesty of their theme, and of their including every other kind of poetry.

It will perhaps have been noticed that Epic and Dramatic Poetry are here placed in conjunction, not separately; and their being thus conjoined needs a word of explanation. Though there is a radical distinction between the two, this provisional union of them has been adopted in order to afford an opportunity of pointing out what I think is generally ignored—that poems which are essentially epical, or merely narrative, may be written in dialogue or dramatic form, and so mislead incautious readers into inferring that they are offered as dramas, in the acting sense of the term. It is because, while remaining substantially epical or narrative in character they may contain, here and there, dramatic situations, dramatic rhetoric, and dramatic converse. The Iliad is a conspicuous example of this; the movement in the earlier portion of it being full of debate and defiance among its characters, and these dramatic elements recurring, if less frequently, throughout the entire work. To many persons the episodes in the narrative of the Divina Commedia that give rise to converse, whether tender, terrible, or pathetic, are the most delightful portions of it. What is it that makes the first six books of Paradise Lost so much more telling than the later ones? Surely it is the magnificence of the speeches emanating from the mouths of the chief characters. Childe Harold is ostensibly only descriptive, reflective, and narrative; but the personality and supposed wrongs of Byron himself, so frequently introduced, confer on it, beyond these characters, certain features of the drama and of dramatic action. Moreover, the magnificent ruins bequeathed to the seven-hilled city by the fall of the Roman Empire enter so largely into the fourth canto that this includes in it every species of verse, from the descriptive to the dramatic. To cite a much smaller example, I once said to Tennyson, “Do you not think that, had one met in a tragedy with the couplet from Pope (Ep. to the Sat. ii. 205)—

F. You’re strangely proud ... P. Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see Men not afraid of God, afraid of me

—one would be right in regarding it as very fine, dramatically?” and he replied, “Yes, certainly.” I recall the circumstance because it is an extreme illustration of the momentary intrusion of one style into another.

By slow but successive stages we have reached conclusions that may be thus briefly stated. (1) The essentials of great poetry are not to be found in poetry exclusively descriptive. (2) They are rarely to be met with in poetry that is lyrical, and then only when reflection of a high order, as in Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality, or what is equivalent to action operating on a great theme, as in Byron’s Isles of Greece, largely and conspicuously enters into these. (3) That they are to be met with in Reflective Poetry of the very highest character, but never throughout an exclusively reflective poem of any length. (4) That they are chiefly to be sought for and most frequently found in either epic or dramatic poetry where description, emotion, thought, and action all co-operate to produce the result; that result being, to adduce supreme examples, the Iliad, Paradise Lost, the Divina Commedia, the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth.

Many years ago, in a couple of papers published in the Contemporary Review on “New and Old Canons of Poetic Criticism,” I propounded, as the most satisfactory definition of poetry generally, that it is “the transfiguration, in musical verse, of the Real into the Ideal”; and I have more than once advocated the definition. The definition applies to poetry of all kinds. But, while this is so, the transfiguration must operate on a great theme greatly treated, either lyrically, reflectively, epically, or dramatically, in order to produce great poetry.

I fancy I hear some people saying, “Quite so; who ever denied or doubted it?” The answer must be that, for some time past, it has been tacitly, and often explicitly, denied by critics and readers alike; reviewers to-day criticising poetry in utter disregard and contravention of any such canons, and readers in their conversation and practice following suit, apparently without any knowledge or suspicion that such canons exist. Had it been otherwise, an inquiry into the essentials of great poetry would have been unnecessary.

The permanent passions of mankind—love, religion, patriotism, humanitarianism, hate, revenge, ambition; the conflict between free will and fate; the rise and fall of empires—these are all great themes, and, if greatly treated, and in accordance with the essentials applicable to all poetry, may produce poetry of the loftiest kind; the underlying reason being what, as usual, has been better and more convincingly stated by Shakespeare than by any one else:

We [actors on the stage] are not all alone unhappy:

This wide and universal theatre

Presents more woeful pageants than the scene

Wherein we play.

For the great treatment of great themes in Epic, and yet more in Dramatic, Poetry, think of what is required! Not mere fancy, not mere emotion, but a wide and lofty imagination, a full and flexible style, a copious and ready vocabulary, an ear for verbal melody and all its cadences, profound knowledge of men, women, and things in general, a congenital and cultivated sense of form—the foundation of beauty and majesty alike, in all art; an experience of all the passions, yet the attainment to a certain majestic freedom from servitude to these; the descriptive, lyrical, and reflective capacity; abundance and variety of illustration; a strong apprehension and grasp of the Real, with the impulse and power to transfigure it into the Ideal, so that the Ideal shall seem to the reader to be the Real; in a word, “blood and judgment,” as Shakespeare says, “so commingled.” These are the qualifications of the writers that have stirred, and still stir, in its worthier portion, the admiration, reverence, and gratitude of mankind.

Even this does not exhaust the requisite endowments of those who aspire to write great poetry. Their sympathy with all that is demands from them a fund of practical good sense, too often lacking in merely lyrical poets—a circumstance that may render their work less attractive to the average person, and even make it seem to such to be wanting in genius altogether. Sane they must essentially be; and their native sanity must have been fortified by some share in practical affairs, while their robustness of mind must have received aid from the open air. They will be found to be neither extravagant optimists nor extravagant pessimists, but wise teachers and indulgent moralists; neither teaching nor preaching overmuch in their verse, but unintentionally and almost unconsciously communicating their wisdom to others by radiation. Dante always speaks of Virgil as “Il Saggio.” Tennyson puts it well where he says of the poet, “He saw through good, through ill; He saw through his own soul.” Architecture, sculpture, music, the kindred of his own art, must be appreciated by him; and nothing that affects mankind is alien to him.

I should like to say, incidentally, and I hope I may do so without giving offence, that I have sometimes thought that, in an age much given to theorising and to considering itself more “scientific” than perhaps it really is, the diminution of practical wisdom, somewhat conspicuous of late in politics and legislation, is due in no small measure to the neglect of the higher poetry, in favour, where concern for poetry survives at all, of brief snatches of lyrical emotion. Hence legislation by emotion and haste.

If we ask ourselves, as it is but natural to do, what are the chief causes that have brought about this change in public taste and sentiment, I believe they will be found to be mainly as follow. (1) The decay of authority already mentioned. (2) The perpetual reading of novels of every kind, many of them of a pernicious nature, but nearly all of them calculated to indispose readers to care for any poetry save of an emotional lyrical character. (3) The increase—be it said with all due chivalry—of feminine influence and activity alike in society and literature; women, generally speaking, showing but a moderate interest in great issues in public life, and finding their satisfaction, so far as reading is concerned, in prose romances, newspapers, and short lyrics. (4) The febrile quality of contemporaneous existence; the ephemeral excitements of the passing hour; and the wholesale surrender to the transient as contrasted with the permanent, great poetry concerning itself only with this last—a circumstance that makes the Odyssey, for instance, as fresh to-day as though it had been published for the first time last autumn; whereas the life of most prose romances, like the lady’s scanty attire, commence à peine, et finit tout de suite.

I hope no one will imagine—for they would be mistaken in doing so—that these pages have been prompted by a disposition to depreciate the age in which we are living, and just as little to manifest disdain of it, though one need not conceal the opinion, in respect of the lower literary taste so widely prevalent, that, as Shakespeare says, “it is not and it cannot be for good.” My object has been something very different from this. It has been to recall canons of poetry and standards of literary excellence which I believe can never be destroyed though for a time they may be obscured, and which have of late been too much ignored. That such neglect will in the very faintest degree prevent those whose instinct it is to say, with Virgil, “paulo majora canamus,” from following their vocation, without a thought of readers or reviewers, I do not suppose. It is good for poets, and indeed for others, not to be too quickly appreciated. It is dangerous for them, and sometimes fatal, to be praised prematurely.

The great stumbling-block of literary criticism, alike for the professional critic and the unprofessional reader, is the tacit assumption that the opinions, preferences, and estimates of to-day are not merely passing opinions, preferences, and estimates, but will be permanent ones; opinions, preferences, and estimates for all future time. There is no foundation, save self-complacency, for such a surmise. What solid reason is there to suppose that the present age is any more infallible in its literary judgments than preceding ages? On the contrary, its infallibility is all the less probable because of the precipitation with which its opinions are arrived at. Yet past ages have been proved over and over again, in course of time, to be wrong in their estimate of contemporaneous poetry, in consequence of their mistaking the passing for the permanent. The consequence in our time of this error has been that one has seen the passing away of several works loudly declared on their appearance to be immortal. The only chance a critic has of being right in his judgments is to measure contemporary literature by standards and canons upon which rests the fame of the great poets and writers of the past, and, tried by which, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron have been assigned their enduring rank in the poetic hierarchy. “Blessings be with them,” says Wordsworth (Sonnet xxv.):

Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,

Who gave us nobler lives and nobler cares,

The Poets who on earth have made us heirs

Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.

It is only the great poets, the poets in whom we can recognise the essentials of greatness, who can do that for us. They are not rebels, as are too many lyrical poets, but reconcilers; and they offer to external things and current ideas both receptivity and resistance, being not merely of an age, but for all time. It is their thoughts and the verse in which their thoughts are embodied that are enduringly memorable. For great poetry, as Wordsworth teaches us in a single line, is not mere emotion, not mere subtle or sensuous singing, but

Reason in her most exalted mood.

A still greater authority than Wordsworth, no other than Milton, has immortalised in verse the principles for which I have ventured to contend in prose. In Paradise Regained (iv. 255-266) he says:

There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power

Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit

By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,

Æolian charms and Dorian lyrick odes,

And his who gave them breath but higher sung,

Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called,

Whose poem Phœbus challenged for his own;

Thence what the lofty grave tragedians taught

In Chorus or Iambick, teachers best

Of moral prudence, with delight receiv’d,

In brief sententious precepts, while they treat

Of fate, and chance, and change in human life,

High actions and high passions best describing.