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of the change which English poetry underwent in the age of Keats and Shelley, of Byron and Coleridge, of Wordsworth and Landor. It is rather my purpose to consider the personalities and the works of these six poets, and of the six other poets, Arnold and Browning, Tennyson and Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne, whose influence has been dominant in the English poetry of the latter half of the century. The death of Wordsworth, in 1850, marks the exact division of the century into halves, and each of these halves has its group of six poets. The fact that Landor outlived by some fourteen years the first of these terms, does not seriously interfere with the division that has been made, for the bulk of his work was done before the mid-year of the century, and his associations were almost wholly with the earlier group of poets. While it is true that he is in a measure linked to the later period by his relations with Browning, and still more by the reverent affection toward him of Mr. Swinburne, expressed in many a tribute from

"The youngest to the oldest singer
That England bore,"

the fact remains that he was essentially a poet of the age over which the storm-cloud of the Revolution had passed, leaving its new bow of promise in the skies. The twelve poets that have been named are, then, "The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century," and constitute the subject of the present

volume. The century had many other poets of importance, no doubt, but, after weighing carefully the claims of all other possible candidates, it has seemed to me that the best of those remaining belong distinctly to the second rank. Even the great name of Scott, when we think of him as, a poet, is overshadowed by the names already mentioned of his contemporaries, and we cannot but approve of the resolution which led him to give up the attempt to compete with the growing popularity of Byron, and to devote himself to that series of prose romances in which his wizardry is most manifest and most potent. The names of Southey, Moore, and Hood are not to be considered very seriously in this connection, and, coming down nearer to our own times, I feel no marked compunctions of conscience, except in the cases of the two women whose work will be forever memorable in the history of English song. But for neither Mrs. Browning nor Miss Rossetti is it quite justifiable to advance the claim that should place them fully upon the level of the six greater names— the dii majores-of the later Victorian period. Fine as is their work, we may hardly say that Mrs. Browning was the poetic equal of her husband, or Miss Rossetti of her brother. My subject, then, seems marked out with reasonable clearness by the facts of the situation, and, in the case at least of all but the most recent of our greater poets, by a consensus of critical opinion too definite and pronounced to be at this day open to revision,

Mr. Mallock, in "The New Republic," makes one of his characters attribute this opinion to John Stuart Mill: "When all the greater evils of life shall have been removed, he thinks the human race is to find its chief enjoyment in reading Wordsworth's poetry." What Mill really did say was that from the poems of Wordsworth he "seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed." This serious view of the function of poetry finds many expressions in English literature, all the way from Sidney to Arnold. It is in Sidney's "Apologie for Poetrie" that we find these words:

"Sith the ever-praise-worthy Poesie, is full of vertue-breeding delightfulness, and voyde of no gyfte, that ought to be in the noble name of learning: sith the blames laid against it, are either false, or feeble: sith the cause why it is not esteemed in Englande, is the fault of Poet-apes, not poets: sith lastly, our tongue is most fit to honor Poesie, and to bee honored by Poesie, I conjure you all, that have had the evill lucke to reade this incke-wasting toy of mine, even in the name of the nyne Muses, no more to scorne the sacred misteries of Poesie: no more to laugh at the name of Poets, as though they were next inheritours to Fooles: no more to jest at the reverent title of a Rymer: but to beleeve with Aristotle, that they were the auncient Treasurers, of the Græcians Divinity. To beleeve with Bembus, that they were first bringers in of all civilitie. To beleeve with Scaliger, that no Philosophers precepts can sooner make you an honest man, then the reading of Virgill."

Sidney's faith in the fitness of the English tongue "to honor Poesie," was destined to receive ample

justification almost during his own lifetime. When Shelley, in similar strain, undertook a new and less needed "Defence of Poetry," he had for inspiration not only the achievements of the English past, but also the resurgent poetic impulse of his own day and generation. "It is impossible," he said,

"to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

This view of the high seriousness of poetry is the one which I wish to emphasise in the following discussions. It is the view which Arnold emphasises when he calls the future of poetry "immense," and tells us that "we should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto.” He invokes Wordsworth's definition of poetry as "the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," and echoes Mill's sentiment when he says that "more and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sus

tain us." The function of poetry as the interpreter of life was, as we all know, given too great a relative importance by Arnold, for it found its final expression in that famous and much-discussed dictum to the effect that poetry is a "criticism of life,” than which no definition could be more inadequate. So far from being merely a critical commentary upon life, poetry is the most intense and direct expression of life itself; as Shelley says, it is "the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth." To the extent to which the critical element enters into poetry, we may almost say that its real appeal becomes weakened. Speaking particularly of lyrical poetry, Pater tells us that its very perfection "often seems to depend, in part, in a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding." Every art, poetry as well as the others, "constantly aspires towards the condition of music," which is "the true type or measure of perfected art." And W. J. Stillman goes so far as to say that all elements of representative art which have no analogies in music, are necessarily non-artistic elements.

These considerations might seem upon first thought to lead us directly into the company of those who preach the doctrine of "art for art's sake." But I would not be understood as accepting this principle, for it is the broader principle of “art for life's sake” that this work is intended to illustrate. The advocates of "art for art's sake" have exerted a marked

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