ture of our race. Apart from the work of Shakespeare, who after all is but the highest peak in an innumerable and tremendous mountain chain, the Drama of the great age is never seen on our stage. And no long time since our Lyric Poets also were unknown to the mass of the English people. The Aldine Poets, the Muses' Library, the Anthologies of Mr. Palgrave, Mr. Henley, and Mr. Bullen have taken away that reproach from us, and to-day it is possible to obtain the work of almost any Lyric Poet at a small cost. But that extraordinary fear of beauty that has led us in the past to forget that which alone will give us immortality is by no means dead. I number among my acquaintances a parson, a good Church of England man, full of good works, a man of the public schools and a graduate of the University of Oxford; and the same man is the father of a family, so that I find in him all the echoing virtues of our race. So characteristic is he of a people which has given the beautiful Masques of Ben Jonson to oblivion that he will tell me, without hesitation or shame, that he cannot read Shakespeare because he wrote in Verse. Now, since it is a commonplace of the schools that there is no virtue without music, this Master of Arts, who might seem to be so bourgeois, so excellently rectitudinous and harmless, is, it might seem, in reality anarchical in his influence, disorderly at least in the higher morality, and an enemy to those profound laws that govern that perfect state which lieth in the heavens seen there by Plato, and that St. Paul has told us is there eternal. No one knows better than I that, as a people, we are now indifferent to beauty. This little book, which is all of gold with scarcely enough alloy to make it current, will almost certainly become just a gift book from lover to lover, in which exquisite office may it be blessed, but how many, think you, will love it for its own sake, for its Beauty, its Verse, its Poetry, apart from its Love? Not the beauty of the words, nor the perfection of the expression, the Art of Poetry, but its subject, so banal, so outworn, one might think will be the reason of its popularity should it attain to that throne, so inevitably vulgar, that awaits success. But perhaps I am wrong; unlike some other less catholic collections of Love Poems, there is in this little book an element of profound passion that may frighten the philistine, who, while he sentimentalises the beautiful Sonnet of Cowper, cannot read with patience Andrew Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress," and who, while eager to agree with Tennyson that "the happy bridesmaid makes the happy bride," will by no means read "Fatima ". "Hard and abstract moralities," writes Pater, in that strangely suggestive essay on Coleridge, in which he considers rather the philosophical than the poetical qualities of his work, "Hard and abstract moralities are yielding to a more exact estimate of the subtlety and complexity of our life. ... Man is the most complex of the products of nature. Character merges in temperament: the nervous system refines itself into intellect." And, indeed, when we compare the earlier centuries of our Poetry with the work of to-day, it is perhaps just that change that we find, a transformation of character into temperament; a profound complexity; the nervous system under our very eyes as it were re fining itself into intellect, so that when we come to read the work of Shelley and Keats, or of the Brownings, or of the Rossettis, or of Patmore, or of Meredith, we find there a kind of truth and sincerity altogether different from the sincere but fantastic artificiality of the seventeenth century lyrists, or the grave insincerity of the poets of the eighteenth century. In those modern poets, weighed down, for all their boasted freedom and licence, by century after century of tradition, we find a very real sadness beyond anything to be found in our earlier literature outside the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Beginning with Wyatt (1503-1542), who has not yet received his due as the first modern English Poet, we find the Lyric, in which our Poetry is so incomparably rich, already of a perfect beauty, with an early freshness as of the dawn upon it, and with a certain indistinctness that belongs to the hour before the sunrise. If in the Earl of Surrey (1517-1546) a finer ear, a more subtle sense of rhythm may be discerned than in the more natural and human verse of Wyatt, it is yet to Wyatt rather than to Surrey that we shall return again and again, finding in his verse that personal note that may be heard in all English Poetry since his day; but that has grown, how wonderfully in intensity and strength, ever since. The influence of Italy and Italian work that has always been present in our literature, in Chaucer as in Wyatt and Surrey, in Spenser as in Milton, in Crashaw as in Byron and Browning and Rossetti and Swinburne, which to-day we feel so profoundly in the work of Dante for instance, has been as it were a shadow of the great classical ages over a land and a language which naturally had little or nothing of the temperance and order so characteristic of the old great masters. Everywhere I find Italian influence bringing with it a certain order and regularity into English work that, without it, might have produced in the translation of the Bible, for instance, a literature as uncouth and chaotic as the work of Walt Whitman, but that, under the guidance of the Latin genius, has given us an everlasting foundation of orderly beauty and strength which will endure for ever, and, together with the literature which has been built upon it, will remain the immortal monument of a great people when England must lie down with Greece and Rome. The sun of English Poetry that at last rose upon a world that might seem to have been composed all of beautiful cities and of the country was Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). Profoundly influenced by the classical spirit that was just then so pedantically exultant at Cambridge (where Gabriel Harvey and Abraham Fraunce, whose names are enshrined in Spenser's work-while Fraunce has left us a fine poem in Hexameters called Emmanuel-carried away by the new-born enthusiasm for the classics and imperfectly understanding the genius of English, tried, not without a good hope of success, to force the Hexameter upon him ;) Spenser composed his own immortal stanza, escaping the calamity they sought to heap upon him, giving us in the Epithalamion the finest love song, irresistible, exultant, victorious, in the language. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), the traveller, the lover of Stella, the beautiful and noble figure who died at Zutphen, did not so fortunately escape the pedantry of his day. Nevertheless his work remains exquisite in purity and strength. Thomas Lodge (1556?-1625), in whom we seem to discern here and there a faint suggestion of the earlier euphuistic manner of Shakespeare, has left us at least one perfect song in Rosalynd's Own Madrigal, while he, like Greene and Constable, seems to play with the spirit of the Renaissance as a child might play with a beautiful flame ignorant of its power and strength, conscious only of its beauty. And if in Daniel or Drayton we seem to find certain notes of the profound music of Shakespeare's Sonnets, it is rather as a far-away rumour of the splendour that will be, coming into the unconscious beauty and pleasure of early morning, than as anything which is really felt or understood in those years of sweet sounds. But with the advent of Marlowe (1564-1593) all is changed; an immense music has suddenly scattered the song of the birds, and at last the spirit of man, with a magnificent ease and strength, begins to speak as of old. With an energy and vitality never surpassed, he conceived and created the immortal English Line as splendid as the Greek or Roman, and in words that will live for ever proclaimed the advent of a third Literature. If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, |