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 http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924013264738 
 
PR 504.H5r*"""''^'''">"-""^'T 
 ™imE,!!SJ,K.!i:.°!.En9lish poetry. 
 
 3 1924 013 264 738 
 
ip^ermanent iC)ower 
 
 ^i^na tie b iP>octr\> 
 
 C H. HERFORD 
 
 Litt.D. 
 
 SHERRATT & HUGHES 
 MANCHESTER 
 
THE PERMANENT POWER OF 
 ENGLISH POETRY 
 
The Permanent Power 
 
 OF 
 
 English Poetry 
 
 BY 
 
 C. H. HERFORD 
 
 Litt.D. 
 
 SHERRATT & HUGHES 
 
 MANCHESTER 
 
 1902 
 
 J) 
 
The Permanent Power of 
 English Poetry. 
 
 A T a time when our commemoration of the first great 
 English king is still fresh in memory, it is scarcely 
 unseasonable to take a text from two old English poems which 
 Alfred may have read ; the less so, since in their case a 
 ' millennium ' is not altogether that vivid reminder of the 
 abysmal changes which thirty generations bring about in the 
 civil and political life of a great people, which when all is said it 
 is in his ; but rather a new illustration of the fact, that in some 
 deep and significant, as well as in some elementary and 
 commonplace, things, the remote time is in touch with the 
 present, and ' a thousand years ' in truth but ' as yesterday 
 when it is past' Whoever takes up the old lays picturesquely 
 entitled by modern editors the 'Wanderer' and the 'Seafarer' 
 must feel in them something of the same strange, half-pathetic 
 interest that belongs, for each of us, to the unconsciously 
 prophetic scribblings of our own childhood. In the ' Seafarer' 
 we hear a young man discourse with an old. The 
 young man already breathes the Wanderlust of the Eliza- 
 bethans, their joyous eagerness to taste the perils of the sea, 
 and achieve something worthy of note before they are called 
 across the wider sea from which no traveller returns : 
 
 ' The woods are in bloom (he cries), the hamlets grow 
 
 fair, 
 The meadows are gay, the world is alive : 
 They are all calling the youth of spirit 
 Forth on his way, whoever meaneth 
 To wander afar on the paths of ocean. 
 
8 PERMANENT POWER OF 
 
 For the best renown to be won by a man 
 On the lips of the after-world is this : 
 That ere he went hence he manfully strove 
 By deeds of valour with fellness of foes. ' 
 
 The hero of the Wanderer, like the 'old man' in the Seafarer, 
 lacks this zest of adventure, but he has other qualities as fine, 
 and as significant for the future. Solitary amid the wintry 
 waters of the Northern seas, he succumbs to sorrow and sleep ; 
 and in his dreams sees the beloved lord in whose hall he 
 sat, and seems to embrace him, and kiss him, and lay his head 
 and hand on his knee, as he had done of old. Then he starts 
 up, and sees the gray waves breaking drearily as before, and 
 the sea birds dipping and darting around, heedless as ever that 
 man is ' full of care.' Then he longs the more bitterly for his 
 dear ones ; the memory of his kindred courses thro' his 
 heart, he greets them with joy and eagerly scans them, but 
 the phantom faces float again away ; and of the old familiar 
 words but few they utter ! 
 
 We easily recognise in such passages as this, the passion 
 for the home, for the kindred, which has lived in heroic 
 breasts at all times beside the passion of adventure ; — the two 
 sometimes making terms with each other as best they can, some- 
 times harmoniously fused, as in Wordsworth's ' Happy Warrior,' 
 who, though 
 
 • endued as with a sense 
 And faculty for storm and turbulence, 
 Is yet a soul whose master-bias leans 
 To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes.' 
 
 In poetry, too, we can distinguish the counterparts of these 
 passions. There is the poetry of the wing, which soars and 
 roves, and the poetry of the/co/, which grasps and holds. In 
 a somewhat different sense from Plato's, we may ascribe ' the 
 power of the wing ' to the poetry which seemingly emancipates 
 
ENGLISH POETRY. 9 
 
 itself from reality to wander in regions of visionary beauty or 
 strangeness ; while the ' strength of the foot,' in a sense 
 different from Ruskin's, belongs to the poetry which lays hold, 
 primarily, of the fact, of the common stuff of experience, of 
 the concrete thing. No poetry worthy of the name is without 
 some degree of both qualities. Perhaps it may appear that 
 part of the permanent worth of the poetry of the English 
 race lies in the frequent possessing of both in a high 
 degree ; so that it has reached extraordinary heights of 
 romance without losing touch with earth, and moved securely 
 upon the surface of common things without ceasing to be 
 inspired. 
 
 I. 
 
 No modern literature can compare, in serene perfection of 
 attainment, with the Greek. But, as in the realm of ethics, so 
 in the realm of art, the harmony at which we wonder was 
 facilitated by limitations partly inevitable. As the high 
 individual culture of the Athenian citizen was founded upon 
 the labour of slaves, so the harmonious grace of his poetry 
 was won by rejecting from its habitual province whole spheres 
 of life. Beauty was won by eliminating the uncomely things, 
 not by winning them into the sphere of art. An ideal image 
 of the world was gained by ignoring that part of the world 
 which does not lend itself to ideality. In the drama no vast 
 ethical gulf yawns between the antagonists. Prometheus and 
 Zeus, Orestes and the Eumenides, Antigone and Creon, are 
 mighty opposites, but each stands for a principle, each is 
 battling, in his own eyes, for right, each is carrying out some 
 element of the moral ideal. Aristotle refused to admit the 
 perfect villain as a subject of tragedy. Greek tragedy was 
 the completest artistic expression of a people whose ethical 
 thinking starts from the conviction that no man willingly does 
 wrong, that evil-doing is a form of ignorance ; — an analysis 
 
lO PERMANENT POWER OF 
 
 unsatisfactory not only to the worldly conscience, which 
 testifies with Ovid that we often know the better and do the 
 worse, but also to the deeper modern mind, which feels with a 
 Hebraic intensity unknown to the Greeks the evil of evil, the 
 sinfulness of sin. 
 
 Hebraic we have come to call this intense ethical conviction, 
 and it is certainly the fundamental inspiration of Hebrew 
 poetry. 'Hebraism' is not altogether favourable to poetry ; it 
 runs easily into an ascetic Puritanism which revolts against 
 the loftier joys of a poet as well as against his more sensuous 
 luxuries of image and song. It makes against all deliberate 
 structure and elaborated form ; its poetry sweeps us along in a 
 rustling wind of lyric indignation, it does not put on the 
 semblance of life in ordered organisms of epic and drama. It 
 gives the poet at once his problem and his opportunity by 
 laying bare before him black abysses of evil through which 
 he has to find his way. Yet while it discourages an easy 
 optimism, it lends a note of sublimer joys to the triumph of a 
 valiant faith. So that poets less than a Dante or a Milton, 
 confronted with the world-warfare of good and evil, have 
 reached that note of sublime assurance which came from 
 Hebrew and Greek alike in the great crises of national peril ; — 
 whether it rested on faith in a great divine champion : 
 
 ' Then they called on the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered 
 them out of their distresses,' 
 
 or whether it rested on faith that duty is more than death, — as 
 in the great epitaph of Simonides upon those who fell at 
 Thermopylae : 
 
 ' Wayfarer, tell the Spartans that we died doing their bidding.' 
 
 At all times and among all peoples, when a man turns, in 
 the midst of need and stress, to calm reflection, and utters it, 
 there is, as Hegel finely says, an approach to poetry ; and 
 
ENGLISH POETRY. II 
 
 Hebraism, by as it were canonising and consecrating that 
 mood which looks from the transient to the permanent 
 relations of things, has made that approach to poetry more 
 accessible and more frequented. Sometimes the vision of 
 things in their eternal relations has overpowered the vision of 
 their transient ones ; sometimes it lifts these into a higher 
 and more eloquent lustre, as the meanness and squalor of 
 Jewish poverty are lifted into grace by the coming of the 
 Princess Sabbath, when 
 
 ' every Friday evening, 
 In the twilight, suddenly. 
 The charm is broken, and the dog 
 Grows anew a human creature.' 
 
 In Christian times the Hebrew poet has always been more 
 prone to the rapt, averted than to the open, irradiating, gaze : 
 to a poetry of wistful romance, not of lofty realism. Far-off 
 Jerusalem, ruined and desolate, dominates the dreams of 
 Jehuda ben Halevy, and his pearls of poetry are like those 
 Thrdnenperlen wept over the fall of Jerusalem, — pearls 
 which, as Heine sings, strung upon the golden thread of 
 rhyme, became that famous song which is sung in all the 
 scattered tents of Jacob, the world over, on the anniversary 
 of its destruction. It is only when the Hebraic passion for 
 goodness has been fused with classic inspiration of poetry, that 
 this rapt, averted gaze becomes the piercing scrutiny of the life 
 near by, such as we find in Dante. Of him, yet more truly 
 than of Milton, it could be said that he passed the flaming 
 walls of space and time — -flammantia moenia mundi — not ' the 
 secrets of the abyss to spy,' but to lay bare the more 
 momentous secrets of the heart of man. 
 
 But Dante's Hebraic intensity was moulded by the art of 
 Rome, — the third of the ancient nations whose literary bequest 
 was of capital moment for modern poetry. Virgil, his master 
 
12 PERMANENT POWER OF 
 
 and fountain head, was the most national, as well as the greatest 
 of Roman poets, — the loftiest embodiment of the mind and 
 ideal of Rome at the height of her power. He was the 
 first European poet of the Empire ; the first who uttered 
 the proud self-consciousness of a i"uling race. No other 
 Roman poet found so mighty a disciple as Virgil found 
 in Dante ; but almost all Roman poetry which counted in 
 the making of Europe bore, like Virgil's, the imperial stamp ; 
 it breathes the stir and stress, the refinement and affectation, 
 the magnificence and the squalor, the weariness and the 
 satiety, of a great world-city. Satire always claimed to be of 
 Roman birth ; certainly in the hands of Horace it became an 
 instrument of urbane and ironical castigation, and in the hands 
 of Juvenal a weapon of invective, which the genius of the 
 Roman state might seem to have shaped for itself, and which 
 every modern polity as it reached the civic maturity and the 
 urban corruption of Rome, has sought to wield. But even its 
 derivative poetical forms acquired, in the Roman world, a 
 metropolitan flavour. The blithe open-air pastoral of Theo- 
 critus, full of the blaze and perfume of the Sicilian noontide, 
 became the Virgilian Eclogue, with its literary shepherds and 
 its uncertain scenery, touched with the sentiment of a poet 
 inured, like Theocritus, to court and city, but far more inwardly 
 mastered by their spell. And the luxuriant myth-lore of 
 Greece and Rome, when the warm vitality had almost left it, 
 acquired the immortality of art in the brilliant mosaics of Ovid, 
 - — exempt thenceforth from the decay which befalls every 
 legendary faith, but also desiccated of all that gives a faith hold 
 upon the blood, and of all that betrays the naive instinctive 
 fancy whence it sprang. Thus upon the mythic tale, as upon 
 the rustic shepherd and the rustic satirist, Roman poetry 
 wrought a transformation into something sumptuous, superb, 
 and brilliant, but hard, — the wild acanthus culled from its shy 
 haunts along the forest glades to flash in marble from Corin- 
 thian capitals for the adornment of the Roman Forum, where 
 
ENGLISH POETRY. 1 3 
 
 the ways of all the world met, and the ends of the earth 
 came together. 
 
 II. 
 
 For many centuries, as we know, the influence of the 
 whole ancient world, Greek, Hebrew, or Roman, in literature, 
 was communicated through the medium of the metropolitan 
 and, in the strict sense, secular atmosphere of Rome. For 
 Homer, there were Dares and Dictys, for the Hebraism of early 
 Christianity the Vulgate and the metropolitan church of Peter. 
 Hardly before Herder gathered the treasures of old Hebrew 
 song, hardly before Goethe and Byron and Shelley, in their 
 several ways, rediscovered the Prometheus-legend, did Greek 
 or Hebraic poetry count among the forces making for the 
 elemental, the urspriinglich, in humanity, not for its complex 
 culture and civilised convention. In the poetic, as in the 
 political, world the dream of the Roman empire lingered, an 
 ineluctable memory, a presence not to be put by, mingling 
 with and transforming the traditional poetry as well as the 
 traditional polity of the Germanic tribes, turning the Frankish 
 king into an emperor of Rome and building upon the basis of 
 his exploits against Saxon and Saracen cycles of epic lays, 
 significantly called 'romances' and 'chansons de geste' — the 
 imagined record of the res gestae of a new Roman people. 
 The hero of romance is a last reverberation of Roman heroism ; 
 the germ of the romantic world is the fable, the legend, of 
 Rome. In its most magnificent form the dream of Rome took 
 shape in the great work of Dante, for whom the empire of 
 Caesar was the temporal fabric divinely appointed to receive 
 the Church of Christ, guarded by miraculous intervention 
 from the ruin threatened by the Gaul and by Hannibal, and 
 destined, as he thought, to save his distracted country from 
 the evil rule of that Church itself Yet the legend of Rome 
 which he so prominently pursued was the least vital element 
 
14 PERMANENT POWER OF 
 
 of his work, hardly more vital than the legendary Rome of the 
 romances. The imperialism of Virgil imposes still ; it ran in 
 the blood of his race ; it was not his personal creed, but one, 
 if I may adapt Matthew Arnold's famous phrase, which 
 History wrote with her sheer and penetrating power upon his 
 page. But Dante's imperialism was a phantom, passionately 
 clasped but ever eluding him, like the shade of Anchises. It 
 was not that way that the genius of modern poetry beckoned. 
 
 ' How comes it, Dante,' cries the greatest of living Italian 
 poets, Carducci, in his eloquent sonnet, — ' How comes it that I 
 lift adoring vows and tongue to thy haughty image, and bend 
 over the verse by which thou wast once outworn, and see the 
 sun go down and again the young dawn rise ? . . . . 
 I hate thy ' Holy Empire ' ; and I would have plucked the 
 crown with my sword from the brows of thy good Frederick. 
 Church and empire are become a mournful wreck ; but over 
 these soars thy song, and rings this message to heaven : ' Jove 
 passes, and the poet's hymn abides.' "* 
 
 It was, then, from other sources than the memory of Rome, 
 however heightened by romance, that the true greatness of 
 modern poetry was to spring. Italy, Spain, France, Germany, 
 England, and the Celtic fringe of Ireland and Wales, have 
 each developed some special insight or some special skill, have 
 made some province of poetry peculiarly their own, beside 
 the broad domain which the whole Western world, as com- 
 pared with India or Persia, cultivates in common. Italy, which 
 had listened with but half an ear to the romances of chivalry, 
 won her highest triumphs in poetry by touching the spirit of 
 chivalry to finer issues ; transfixing its exalted love with the 
 wonderful imagery and melody of Petrarch, or gaily travestying 
 its prodigal heroics with the radiant wit and laughter of Ariosto. 
 Even Dante's stupendous work has its roots in a Troubadour's 
 love-song : it is the maiden adoration of the Vita Ntiova 
 expanded and articulated into a passionate apprehension of the 
 
 * G. Carducci : Bime Nuove. 
 
ENGLISH POETRY. I 5 
 
 divinely animated Cosmos in all its concrete infinity of good 
 and evil, of love and hatred, of laughter and tears. But even 
 Dante suggests the point at which Italian poetry must be held 
 to have always fallen short : in the ideal imitation of a great 
 human action in epic or drama. The Divine Comedy has no 
 plot ; Dante himself passes on through scenes of ever-varying 
 circumstance and complexion, rich in incidental drama and 
 pathos ; but their succession is determined by no human will 
 or passion, — by no indignant Achilles, by no vengeful Satan, — 
 but by the rigid and inflexible order of the universe through 
 which he makes his way. The dynamics of his poem are 
 derived not from humanity, but from dogma. To epic action 
 Ariosto hardly made pretence ; and Tasso, who did, produced, 
 when all is said, not so much an epic as a beautiful romance 
 garnished with epic machinery. And Italian drama has, with 
 rare exceptions, crossed the bounds of prose only to fall into 
 the Scylla of the frigidly antique or the Charybdis of the 
 operatic, incapable of that ideal imitation of life which is more 
 real than actuality and more poetic than romance. 
 
 III. 
 
 And something of this incapacity must be said, with all 
 reserves, to attach, on the whole, to the poetic achieve- 
 ment of the other Romance peoples. How vast the debt 
 of European culture is to the accomplished singers of 
 medieval France need not be told : but their greatest services 
 to literature lay in providing picturesque material to which 
 poets of more virile faculty elsewhere communicated the 
 breath of life. The melodies of Provence wakened the spirit 
 of Dante ; the busy versifiers of Troyes prepared the way for 
 a Wolfram, a Benoit for a Boccaccio, a Jean de Meung for a 
 Chaucer. With all their fascinating and unfailing grace the 
 early French romancers rarely caught the finer breath of 
 
1 6 PERMANENT POWER OF 
 
 romance. On the other hand, their realism was the realism 
 of the esprit gatilois, — gay, malicious, intelligent, full of verve 
 and wit, but fastening with zest on weakness and folly, 
 indifferent to beauty, incredulous of virtue, fundamentally 
 hostile to romance. For a moment the esprit gau lots appears 
 in Villon, invested in that lurid flame of poetry which cynicism, 
 pushed to the furthest verge, will sometimes engender, — when 
 the solid world becomes evanescent under the disintegrating 
 eye, and death and decay acquire a haunting pathos from 
 the merciless analysis which discerns them everywhere. A 
 generation later, a mightier realist than Villon, with nothing 
 of the cynic but his hatred of shams, poured forth in fantastic 
 disguise the huge joy of life, the inexhaustible vitality of sense 
 and thought, the riotous humour, which in an Aristophanes, in 
 a Shakspere, found expression in poetic laughter. But 
 Rabelais's laughter is not poetic, nor is Moliere's, — and in 
 these two the French spirit made its nearest approach to the 
 wonderful realism of Shakspere. Nor, on the other hand, did 
 the more choice and idealistic vein of French literature lead, 
 for the present, to first-rate achievement in poetry. French 
 classicism, under the guidance of Scaliger, tended to im- 
 poverish as well as to refine ; and when all is said, the 
 sublimity of Corneille and the pathetic beauty of Racine 
 must be held to fall something short of full poetic vitality. 
 They used, in their highest flights, a language almost nothing 
 of which would have been impossible in prose ; and up to the 
 close of the i8th century there remained, as Gray noticed, no 
 distinction between the French of prose and verse, — a most 
 significant fact. But when Gray made that acute remark, the 
 train was already laid for a wonderful expansion of the scope 
 and horizon of French poetry, such as nothing in its history 
 foretold. Rousseau is the true starting-point of this re- 
 juvenescence. For our purpose, which is concerned with 
 results, not with causes, it is needless to touch the history of 
 that movement which, under the name of Romanticism, first 
 
ENGLISH POETRY. 1 7 
 
 brought the French genius into vitalising contact with the 
 well-springs of poetry which had begun to flow in Germany, 
 England, in the North ; and then sent it back to recover the 
 infinite treasures of speech-material which an academic 
 fastidiousness had allowed to decay. From the days when 
 Hugo led the Cdnacle of 1827 and defied classicist Paris with 
 Cromwell and Hernani, until to-day, French poetry has held 
 its own, on at least equal terms, with the poetry of England, 
 Germany, and America ; and many persons who do not echo 
 the dithyrambs of Mr. Swinburne hold Hugo himself to have 
 been, since the death of Goethe, the first of European poets. 
 It may be said at least that the French contribution to the 
 world's poetry appears concentrated and focussed in Hugo. 
 What Musset, Gautier, Prud'homme and the rest, have done, 
 then or since, is included broadly speaking in the same circle 
 of achievement, occupies particular provinces of the same 
 broad domain. Obviously, as with all the greater poetry of 
 the time, it is with lyrical, not epic or dramatic, genius that 
 we here have to do. Hugo's dramas owe whatever effect 
 they exerted or retain, to their lyric splendour ; his magnificent 
 Ldgetide des Siecles, under the semblance of a vast epic of 
 humanity, is a sequence of symbolic chants, — utterances of the 
 poet's vague but grandiose enthusiasms and animosities through 
 mythic imagery. The range of Hugo's lyric is, in spite of 
 the slender stock of ultimate ideas from which it springs, 
 immense. The specific limitations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 Shelley and Keats do not touch him ; Nature and Humanity, 
 the common and the wonderful, Hellenism and Gothic, 
 are equally vocal to him, and with the backward gaze 
 of the Romantics which made the Schlegels and Tieck, 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge, reactionaries in politics, he 
 united the revolutionary passion of Byron. The Chdti- 
 ments have no parallel in modern literature save the 
 Vision of Judgment. But his wide susceptibility was 
 strikingly defective at various points where theirs was strong. 
 
I 8 PERMANENT POWER OF 
 
 Marvellously alive to all the sense-delights of the natural world, 
 he was no lover of nature, like Wordsworth; she was a magazine 
 of images and metaphors, which he rifled with the utmost skill, 
 to weave them together in gorgeous phantasmagorias of his 
 own. Hence, while nothing can exceed the grandiose splendour 
 of his landscape, it wants those unobtrusive flashes which 
 Wordsworth, in a quiet phrase, so often conveys. More than 
 any English Romantic he is emancipated from the bondage of 
 the world he lives in, compels the tumult of nature's forms 
 and lines to fall into the harmonies he imposes, to dance to the 
 music of his rhythms, and polarise itself in his incessant 
 antitheses. His fundamental inspirations, the vague, im- 
 passioned ideas about which all his imagery gathers and 
 revolves, are drawn from humanity rather than from nature, 
 — progress, compassion, duty, heroism, misery ; — humanity 
 rather than nature evokes in him the recognition of the 
 mysterious, the divine ; his radically anthropomorphic 
 imagination obliterates the natural form with the human 
 symbol. Like Shelley he is a great myth-maker; but Shelley's 
 myth world has something of the naivete of primeval nature 
 worship ; Hugo's is the voluptuous Olympus of a romantic 
 Homer, alive with pageant and drama, with war and counsel, 
 mingling the sublime and the grotesque, splendour and 
 deformity, mystery and squalor, the spiritual and the bourgeois. 
 It is worth while pausing a moment to compare the ways in 
 which these two great myth-making imaginations of France and 
 England bodied forth the visions which possessed and trans- 
 ported each. 
 
 The ' fated hour ' arrives. The soul of the universe 
 asserts its supremacy, in a sudden cataclysm, over tyranny 
 and evil ; the old gods fall, and man rises to his ideal height, 
 emancipated from superstition and sin ; the clashing discords 
 melt into harmonious accord. In Shelley's imagination all this 
 takes shape as a lyric drama in which earth and air and ocean, 
 and moon and stars, break forth in song which seems only 
 
ENGLISH POETRY. 1 9 
 
 to set to music their pulsing life, their melting colours, their 
 undulating loveliness of profile, their bright evanescence of 
 cloud and foam. Hugo's dream finds vent through a more 
 astonishing though less beautiful symbolism. In the wonderful 
 Satyre of the first L^gende des Siecles, we remember how the 
 faunlike Pan discourses to the listening gods of the beginning 
 of the world, and the nascence and evolution of man. As his 
 tale advances, he is gradually transformed. His shaggy 
 deformity grows beautiful, they feel its charm ; don't look out 
 at his eyes, they grow uneasy and bodeful. At last he 
 prophesies their overthrow at the hands of that dark final god 
 whom man calls ' No more!' "And as he spoke the Satyr 
 became enormous ; greater first than Polypheme, then greater 
 than Typhon, then greater than Titan, and than Athos ; 
 boundless space entered into his shadowy form ; he grew 
 before their eyes as a promontory grows to the approaching 
 sailor's ; upon his brow lay the pallor of a strange dawn ; 
 his hair was a forest, the waves, rivers, lakes, rushed from 
 his deep thighs ; his horns became peaks of Caucasus and 
 Atlas ; thunders rolled about him with heavy crash ; plains 
 and meadows trembled on his sides, and his protuberances 
 grew mountains ; tigers and stags climbed along his face ; 
 Aprils flowered along his limbs ; Decembers lurked in his 
 armpits ; and wandering people asked their way forlorn in the 
 palm of his hand ; eagles fought in the gaping mouth ; the 
 lyre, became gigantic at his touch, sang, wept, murmured, 
 thundered, shrieked ; hurricanes were entangled in its seven 
 strings like flies in a cobweb; his terrific breast was full of 
 stars. He cried : " The future, as made by the heavens, is 
 the escape into the boundless infinite, it is the spirit from all 
 sides penetrating the thing. Make place for the divine atom, 
 that is fire and dew, place for the radiation of the universal 
 soul ! A king means war, and a god means night. Liberty, 
 life and faith, on the ruins of dogma ! Everywhere one 
 light, one genius everywhere ! Place for the All ! I am Pan ! 
 Jupiter, to thy knees ! " 
 
20 PERMANENT POWER OF 
 
 This transformation, in its magnificence and its audacity, 
 its sublimity trembling on the verge of the grotesque, fairly 
 represents, if not the supreme achievement of French Roman- 
 ticism, yet the qualities which distinguish the greatest 
 Romantic poetry of France from that of Germany or of 
 England. Here above all is the Lyrisme, the irresponsible 
 Titanic fancy, building up the world and breaking it down 
 at will, symptom of emancipated genius, joyously shaking off 
 the classic bondage of centuries. Here the animalism and 
 the spirituality tossed together, the satyr's gross body expanded 
 into a universe which yet palpitates with harmony and love, — 
 symptom of a national intellect which has oscillated, as no 
 other, between the heights of idealism, the fulness of sense, 
 between Villon and St. Louis, Rabelais and Pascal, Goncourt 
 and Lamennais. In French Romanticism these two strands of 
 the national life, till then severed, met and blended, with 
 results of almost unequalled splendour for the imagination, 
 however chaotically vague to the intellect. And through the 
 tumultuous splendour of the unique organ of expression thus 
 created there glowed that passion for humanity which no 
 other people has so continuously felt or so energetically 
 characterised and promoted ; and which, if it cannot alone 
 create its poetic instrument, yet, wherever it touches an 
 instrument already tuned, wakens it more surely than any 
 other passion to prophetic notes, — makes it the trumpet of a 
 prophecy to unawakened earth. 
 
 IV. 
 
 It was from very different points of view, and under the 
 stress of very different instincts, that the German people 
 approached the problems of poetry. Alone among the peoples 
 of the West, the Germanic tribesman never learned per- 
 manently the lesson of Rome, though his imagination never 
 
ENGLISH POETRY. 21 
 
 ceased to be haunted by the Roman dream. A German king 
 received the imperial crown, and for centuries the world saw 
 the strange spectacle of a Roman empire, nominally the 
 supreme temporal power in Europe, and wielded by Germans, 
 but of which no part so little recalled the imperial Roman rule 
 as Germany itself. The brilliant originality of the French 
 mind has always tended to work along the lines which make 
 for social cohesion and logical consistency ; the profounder 
 and more complex originality of the German has continually 
 borne him aloof into ideal particularities of his own, while 
 still haunting him with the dream of harmony and wholeness. 
 No people has felt so keenly the differences, ultimately un- 
 fathomable, among men ; the mysterious depths of character ; 
 the regions of being which lie deeper than expression, deeper 
 than consciousness. None has been checked by such persistent 
 instincts of kinship and unity from accentuating individuality 
 into isolation. The Leibnitzean monad, with its resolute 
 identity, was German ; so was Fichte's, with its all-embracing 
 totality. Hence it was reserved for the Germanic peoples 
 to express in their poetry the individuality of character, which 
 the Greeks had cared to seize only under broad outlines, and 
 to recur again and again, with the fascination of inborn sym- 
 pathy and racial experience, to those conflicts of character 
 with itself, from which the Greeks had on the whole turned 
 away, and which, in the poetry of the Romance peoples 
 present themselves mainly in the more superficial form of a 
 debate between contending motives in the forum of the intellect. 
 In Germanic poetry character is apt to be less easily inter- 
 pretable to intelligence ; after all analysis has done its work, 
 insoluble residua are left ; forces are felt struggling for the 
 mastery, and obscurely moulding conduct and colouring speech 
 before they become explicit in consciousness ; character, in 
 short, has a history, and its end is shadowed in its first 
 beginnings, its first beginnings in its end : Parzival through 
 the naive errors of the ' fool ' gradually works out the wisdom 
 
22 PERMANENT POWER OF 
 
 of the pure-in-heart ; Wilhelm Meister, seeking his father's 
 asses, finds at last his kingdom ; Faust, led by the spirit which 
 denies through the pleasures which destroy, emancipates himself 
 by the energy which creates and affirms. Development of 
 character is a field of literature which has been cultivated 
 more brilliantly elsewhere, but nowhere so consciously and 
 ardently as in Germany. In general we may say that the 
 Greek conception of organic growth, which the scientific 
 and philosophic intellect of Germany did so much to elaborate 
 and expound, has been, from Goethe onwards, and in Goethe 
 pre-eminently, an idde mere of German poetry. The idea of 
 an organism, where each part is vital and shares in and 
 contributes to the vitality of the whole, that seemed to 
 reconcile those two conflicting instincts of individualism and 
 community before which German intellect through its whole 
 history had oscillated. It provided an expressive formula for 
 the strength and the limitations of the poetry which centres in 
 Goethe. Bold and rapid movement, energetic action, whatever 
 detaches and isolates men from the community in which they 
 live or the soil of which they are sprung, are alien to it : it 
 has its moments of greatness even here, but they are gifts of 
 fortune, not of nature. How poor is the action of Faust 
 compared to its thought and passion ! On the other hand, 
 with what exquisite instinct Goethe renders the life which 
 draws directly from the community in which it moves and 
 from the soil in which it springs ! Hermann and Dorothea 
 may be called types, if we will ; but Goethe's types are never 
 the abstractions denuded of individual colouring, which we 
 associate with the term ; they are individuals in whom all that 
 is characteristic and expressive in the race, all that recalls its 
 history, or foreshadows its future, bears the stamp of its habits 
 or its haunts, meet together in one luminous point. Hermann 
 and Dorothea are such luminous points, in which the life 
 history of an endless vista of German manhood and woman- 
 hood may be read. All the business of life comes into the 
 
ENGLISH POETRY. 23 
 
 Story, quite naturally ; we discuss the whole economy of the 
 little country-town, — we get to know how it lives, we see its 
 orchards, gardens, vineyards, and reckon their yield. Here 
 was, once more, a true epos, where, to recall Hegel's phrase 
 once more, ' everything that a nation is in deed finds utterance.' 
 Goethe's wonderful epic feeling for the springs of story 
 had its counterpart, as we know, in a not less wonderful lyric 
 feeling for the springs of song. And here he was only the 
 most perfect of a throng of singers whose collective song is not 
 to be matched by the Volkslied of any other people. Of the 
 German Volkslied, as it lives on all German lips to-day, a 
 great part is of known origin ; the work of accomplished and 
 famous poets, — Heine, Lenau, Storm, Goethe. But they all 
 sang with the music of an immemorial tradition of impersonal 
 Volkslied ringing in their ears, and set their first notes with 
 sympathetic instinct in tune to its vibrations. In intense 
 utterance of the cry of passion the German Volkslied 
 at its best does not surpass the greatest songs of Burns ; 
 but it utters it through a far wider range of mood and 
 key ; and the emotions which gather about myth and folklore 
 are expressed with a simple intensity only to be paralleled in 
 the finest Scandinavian ballads. How poor is the super- 
 natural part of Tam o' Shanter beside Erlkonig ! On 
 the other hand, neither in the Volkslied nor elsewhere has 
 German poetry excelled in the creation of myth, in the bold 
 and free imagination of a Hugo or a Shelley. Faust and 
 Mephisto, and the spectres of the Brocken, arrest us yet; but a 
 deadly chill has fallen upon the symbolic population of the 
 Second Part, brilliant as the rhetoric is with which they are 
 furnished forth ; and even Prometheus and Pandora are 
 mortal beside Hermann and Dorothea. The province of 
 Germany in poetry is in a peculiar sense that which German 
 aesthetic theory has been apt to define as the province of 
 poetry at large,— to express the ideal consciousness of the 
 people ; — not the towering fabrics of romantic fancy, but the 
 
24 PERMANENT POWER OF 
 
 native growth of heath and forest, wild flowers of song, whose 
 most ethereal loveliness is fragrant of the soil, and here and 
 there some more massive trunk of a Faust, in which the same 
 strong sap of Germanic passion and idealism rises into 
 spreading boughs that overshadow humanity. 
 
 It must suffice to mention in one word, finally, that Celtic 
 poetry of legend and romance which has played a part still so 
 indeterminate in the literature of Europe and of England. 
 Here we have no longer to do with the literature of a great 
 and organised polity, of a united nation, of a capital ; hardly 
 with an ethical ideal ; the substratum of common legend 
 which the Celt shared with other Aryan peoples he touched 
 the issues of his own ; emphasising whatever in it was 
 romantic, dreamy, wistful, mysterious, withdrawing it further 
 from prosaic actuality. 
 
 V. 
 
 We have thus passed in summary review the leading 
 European developments of national poetry, apart from our 
 own, to which by common consent some permanent power 
 attaches. It is one of the most obvious, and not the least 
 significant, distinction of English poetry to have stood, either 
 by natural kinship, or by capacity of assimilation, in more or 
 less close relation to them all. Almost every great English 
 poet has manifested his Germanic kinship by some form of 
 poetic realism ; many have betrayed, or suggested, the Celtic 
 by glamour of romance. The greatest of the Elizabethans, 
 ignorant of Greek, evoked the purifying pity and terror of the 
 Greeks from the vaster complex of modern life ; the greatest 
 of the Puritans wrought the sublime Hebraic warfare of God 
 and Devil into a world-epic. Dryden, to a large extent, and 
 Pope, in the main, were genuine Augustans ; exponents of 
 that hard, positive, unromantic, urban element of the English 
 spirit which has made the Anglo-Saxons, in some sense, the 
 
ENGLISH POETRY. 25 
 
 Romans of the modern world. At no period of English history 
 has the positive strain been suppressed or obscured. Yet its 
 presence has not prevented the high-wrought symbolism and 
 delicate music of the Petrarchan sonnet from finding its most 
 congenial home and haunt on English soil ; the revolutionary 
 Romanticism of Hugo was inspired by Byron, heralded by 
 Shelley ; and the legend of Celtic Arthur never ceased to haunt 
 the imagination of English poets, as his name, a cloud wreath, 
 clung to the mountain peaks of Britain, until it was enshrined 
 in the ' enchanted reverie ' of Tennyson. 
 
 In all these cases English poetry has shown, not mere 
 imitative aptness, which is not a characteristic English or 
 Germanic excellence at all, but some latent kinship of faculty. 
 Nevertheless it is easy to see underlying this kinship a certain 
 controlling bent which, in spite of all those various affinities, 
 gives to English poetry, as a whole, something of the detach- 
 ment, the insularity, which marks English nationality as a 
 whole. Shakspere apart, how many of the voices which stir 
 us most deeply waken no response on the continent, or are 
 heard with half-comprehending good-nature as illustrations of 
 our eccentric genius. Henri Beyle devoted an article to 
 Milton in his Dictionnaire ; but it was to Milton the regicide 
 and defender of the English people, a formidable pam- 
 phleteer who dabbled amiably in poetry in his leisure hours. 
 Even Hegel, whose judgment of the matter of poetry is 
 usually so penetrating, describ'fes Milton as a praiseworthy 
 example, for his age, of classical culture and elegant correct- 
 ness of expression.* Chaucer, Spenser, Wordsworth, how- 
 ever high we may place them in the pantheon of the world's 
 poetry, are deities of the tribe ; and the foreign and native 
 critical judgments of Byron are to this day irreconcilably 
 opposed. I am concerned here not with the qualities in 
 English poetry which have most successfully overcome the 
 impediments of alien blood and traditions, but with those 
 
 'Hegel: Aesthetik, 3,416. 
 
26 PERMANENT POWER OF 
 
 through which it has won most lasting hold upon minds 
 naturally or by sympathetic culture accessible to it. To put 
 the matter first in the most general and abstract terms, I find 
 among the sources of this permanent power a capacity for 
 what I may call waking vision,— for seeing with an eye at 
 once imaginative and sane, romantic and alert, visionary and 
 precise. The Greeks were masters here, Dante no less ; no 
 Englishman but Shakspere has this quality in supreme degree, 
 with all that it implies. But English literature and biography 
 are full of approximations to it from either side, as well as, 
 what is equally significant, of excesses in either direction. 
 Never for long, never without more or less violent reaction 
 and recantation, has English poetry cut itself adrift from the 
 world of common experience in which ordinary folks move, 
 and which, denuded of the ideal affinities which to every 
 seeing spirit it discloses, we call the world of prose. Chaucer 
 laughing the insipid romances out of court, Shakspere putting 
 to flight the pale elegiac heroines of Greene and Lodge with 
 the radiant womanhood of Rosalind and Perdita ; Jonson, 
 indignantly summoning the audiences which had so long 
 graced monsters, to see men ; Pope, rejecting the arabesques 
 of the school of Cowley in the name of Reason and common 
 sense, Wordsworth repelling the glossy sentimentalities of the 
 landscapists in the name of Nature as it is seen, and language 
 as it is spoken ; Browning proclaiming through the lips of the 
 dying Paracelsus that the poet must know as well as love : — 
 all these calls renewed, in changing accents, generation after 
 generation, announced varying forms of the same common 
 demand, not ior prose, but for the poetry which shall take in 
 and interpret that world of common experience of which prose 
 is the mutilated abstraction, the bald epitome. For almost 
 everyone of these proclaimers of Nature and realism does so 
 take in and so interpret that world. English poetry has been 
 in a certain sense republican, as became the poetry of the 
 oldest commonwealth in Europe. The most imperious and 
 
ENGLISH POETRY. 2/ 
 
 profound passion for poetry has not prompted, often or for 
 long, those Hegiras to far-off Meccas of romance which have 
 marked poetic enthusiasts elsewhere. Rousseau fled to the 
 mountains from the world of convention in a mood of savage 
 isolation quite unlike the quiet self-consecration to his life's 
 work with which Wordsworth made his home among his 
 native hills ; the French and German Romantics fled to the 
 studio from the world of prose, defying the profane and the 
 philistine with long hair and eccentric waistcoats ; Shelley, 
 far from shutting himself up in those enchanted caverns of 
 beauty which his fancy so prodigally bodied forth, was con- 
 spicuous for the quixotic heroism which impelled him to 
 intervene, ignorant of fear, in the world of prose when any 
 wrong was to be righted or any suffering to be relieved. 
 ' Thou wouldst not be saved alone ! ' was Arnold's noble 
 tribute to his father. And an instinct somewhat akin has 
 continually withdrawn English poetry from the barren 
 splendour of the Palace of Art. So that even in that Pre- 
 raphaelite school which has most exalted the supremacy of 
 art, the artist's passion for beauty has gone along with the 
 deeper sense of its needfulness in all human life, and of the 
 fellowship of all who labour, in the meanest craft, to create it. 
 The poet has not abandoned his ' Palace of Art,' but he has 
 turned it into a workshop. He would not be saved alone, 
 and it was the saving of him that he would not. 
 
 With all its persistent recurrence to " Nature," however, 
 English poetry has obviously not been as a whole, or largely, 
 in the vulgar sense, realistic. On the contrary, no poetry in 
 the world has soared to higher heavens of invention or burst 
 into more silent seas of romance. 
 
 But, in an important sense, we may say that there are 
 ladders to its heaven, and ships for its romantic seas. 
 The weird sisters and Caliban, for all their unearthly 
 remoteness, are more accessible to us than Hugo's Satyr and 
 his three-eyed Jupiter. Coleridge's Mariner is burnt in upon 
 
28 PERMANENT POWER OF 
 
 our imagination ; for, however we may disbelieve his 
 marvellous experiences, no question he has had them. 
 The only way to faeryland is after all by the ladder 
 of psychological truth ; and if Shakspere's supernaturalism 
 and Coleridge's are more vital than that of Hoffmann or 
 Fouque, it is because the dim survivals of primeval instinct 
 in our blood which make us respond to faery and to the 
 mysteries of the sea are there more completely and sympa- 
 thetically completed and fulfilled. So again, in the momentary 
 romance of simile and imagery, English poetry has, together 
 with a vast amount of what is daring and false, or true and 
 tame, produced in scarcely paralleled degree those images 
 which, amazingly fresh and novel, yet thrill us as only that 
 can which strikes chords deep in our hearts and implicit in all 
 our experience. 
 
 ' But look, the morn in russet mantle clad. 
 Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill' 
 
 How irresistible is the breath of dawn communicated by 
 these simple words ! It is not morn alone who walks there, 
 but we and the unnumbered generations before us whose feet 
 have brushed the sparkling dew of the uplands as they watched 
 the daily triumph of light over darkness, symbol of the help 
 which comes from the hills, as light from the east.* In this 
 kind of romance, so boldly individual and yet so universal in 
 its appeal, so brilliant and yet so human, so adventurous and 
 yet so homely, English poetry is peculiarly rich. It springs, 
 one may say, from a coincidence of two lines of poetical 
 feeling which in most of the other great poetry of modern 
 Europe have run apart. The Romantic poetry of modern 
 France is unsurpassed in faculty of expression, unequalled in 
 that last development of it, the art of suggesting the un- 
 
 * The illustration and comment are suggested by a striking passage in 
 Mr. Edmund Holmes' essay : ' What is Poetry ' (1900). 
 
ENGLISH POETRY. 29 
 
 expressed. But its brilliance is, like the brilliance of Rome, 
 somewhat exotic, somewhat technical, somewhat derivative, 
 wanting in that note of primeval affinities, in those tones which 
 stir the faint affections, the shadowy recollections, which, if they 
 are not the • master-light of all our seeing ' yet lie about the 
 root of all our vision and all our passion. 
 
 In the tenacity of primeval instincts, on the other hand, 
 lies as we saw much of the characteristic strength of Germany 
 in poetry. In the direct lyric utterance of the simple 
 emotions which never grow dim, of love which is born of the 
 home and of which homes are born, of the simple tears and mirth 
 of Mother Earth, she is incomparable. But German poetry is 
 wanting in magic of expression. Together with the exuberant 
 inventiveness of France, it lacks that subtle unreason of the 
 imagination which pierces deeper than thought and sentiment 
 and stirs inexplicably the hidden currents which vibrate in 
 both. It is the characteristic power of the greatest English 
 poetry to touch this region more intimately by a poetic speech 
 more poetic, more hardy, more expansive, more impossible, 
 more inevitable, on the whole, than any other. It is by virtue 
 of that hold upon an ideal which lies in the blood that English 
 poetry has been drawn so persistently and recurrently to what 
 it has called Nature. Its ideal lay not beyond the horizon or 
 beyond the sky, or before the beginning of things or beyond 
 their end, but near by, in the world of things where primitive 
 man found his fetish. From that world, whether the infinitely 
 complex detail of human life as in Shakspere, or the breathing 
 vitality of the meanest flower that blows, as in Wordsworth, 
 it wrings forth the ideal world ; in the pageant of drama, or in 
 thoughts that lie too deep for tears ; now climbing by the 
 ladder of the impossible, now by the steeper ladder of the 
 commonplace. Shakspere and Wordsworth I hold to be, not 
 necessarily the two greatest of English poets, but the two 
 whose work, utterly unlike as it seems to be, is most penetrated 
 with that kind of power which I have ascribed, at its best, to 
 
30 ENGLISH POETRY. 
 
 English poetry. Sanity and vision, the eye set on the thing, 
 and the imagination which reads all humanity in a tale or in a 
 flower, these were in them both ; and the works of both, 
 devoid of explicit morality or definable dogma, are permanent 
 rallying-points of those benign forces of which morality and 
 dogma are passing formulations. So, in a different sense, 
 that simple dialogue of the Old Seafarer and the Young finds 
 its solution, the springtime glory of adventure and the 
 autumnal longing for return come together, and the poet, in a 
 more spiritual sense than Wordsworth's Skylark, becomes true 
 to the kindred points of heaven and love, by disclosing that 
 they are the same. 
 
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