efforts, with no ancestral fine designing to appeal to, with his pecuniary interest almost directly opposed to his sense of what is right and what is lovely. If achievement is made still harder and languid acquiescence easier by the exhortation to copy, to copy, moreover, admirable art confessedly beyond the power of living artists to equal, and capable of giving great delight to the student of its characteristics, modern art is deprived of its one remaining chance. The best of these derivative and archæological styles of art is to living art very nearly as copying pictures by great masters is to painting pictures of one's own. And this copying of pictures, however good for practice, and however necessary to one who would feel the whole power of the master, tends but very slightly to produce good original painters. Modern criticism is of incalculable importance; the whole fabric of the future, its knowledge and its original achievement, is to be built up according to the dictates of this criticism, and may be expected to assume extraordinary, novel, and splendid forms of perfection under this new influence. But in itself it is destructive, not creative, and knocks to pieces the showy bits of finery we set up with little consideration of how we are to replace them. There are unbounded possibilities for art in that great civilization of the future which is dimly to be seen forming itself out of the present chaos of half-understood tradition and half-digested schemes; but the immediate horizon is dark. Whether any light of hope can be descried by careful scrutiny, and what, if anything, lies with this generation to do, is another part of our inquiry. RUSSELL STURGIS, JR. IN 1675 Edward Phillips, the elder of Milton's nephews, published his Theatrum Poetarum. In his Preface and elsewhere there can be little doubt that he reflected the æsthetic principles and literary judgments of his now illustrious uncle, who had died in obscurity the year before.* The great poet who gave to English blank verse the grandeur and compass of organ-music, and who in his minor poems kept alive the traditions of Fletcher and Shakespeare, died with no foretaste, and yet we may believe as confident as ever, of that "immortality of fame " which he tells his friend Diodati he was "meditating with the help of Heaven" in his youth. He who may have seen Shakespeare, who doubtless had seen Fletcher, and who perhaps personally knew Jonson,† lived to see that false school of writers whom he qualified as "good rhymists, but no poets" at once the idols and the victims of the taste they had corrupted. As he saw, not without scorn, how they found universal hearing, while he slowly won his audience fit though few, did he ever think of the hero of his own epic at the ear of Eve? It is not impossible; but however that may be, he sowed in his nephew's book the dragon's teeth of that long war which, after the lapse of a century and a half, was to end in the expulsion of the usurping dynasty and the restora-* tion of the ancient and legitimate race whose claim rested on the grace of God. In the following passage surely the voice is Milton's, though the hand be that of Phillips: "Wit, ingenuity, and learning in verse, even elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, are one thing; true native poetry is another, in which there is a certain air and spirit, which, perhaps, the most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly apprehend; much less is it attainable by any art or study." The man who speaks of elegancy as coming nearest, certainly shared, if he was not repeating, the opinions of him who thirty years before had said that "decorum " (meaning a *This was Thomas Warton's opinion. † Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and twenty-ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Fletcher (1625), and B. Jonson (1637) died. higher or organic unity) was "the grand masterpiece to observe" in poetry.* It is upon this text of Phillips (as Chalmers has remarked) that Joseph Warton bases his classification of poets in the dedication to Young of the first volume of his essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, published in 1756. That was the earliest public and official declaration of war against the reigning mode, though private hostilities and reprisals had been going on for some time. Addison's panegyric of Milton in the Spectator was a criticism, not the less damaging because indirect, of the superficial poetry then in vogue. His praise of the old ballads condemned by innuendo the artificial elaboration of the drawing-room pastoral by contrasting it with the simple sincerity of nature. Himself incapable of being natural except in prose, he had an instinct for the genuine virtues of poetry as sure as that of Gray. Thomson's "Winter" (1726) was a direct protest against the literature of Good Society, going as it did to prove that the noblest society was that of one's own mind heightened by the contemplation of outward nature. What Thomson's poetical creed was may be surely inferred from his having modelled his two principal poems on Milton and Spenser, ignoring rhyme altogether in the "Seasons," and in the "Castle of Indolence" rejecting the stiff mould of the couplet. In 1744 came Akenside's "Pleasures of Imagination," whose very title, like a guide-post, points away from the level highway of commonplace to mountain-paths and less domestic prospects. The poem was stiff and unwilling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births, and without it the "Lines written at Tintern Abbey" might never have been. Three years later Collins printed his little volume of Odes, advocating in theory and exemplifying in practice the natural supremacy of the imagination (though he called it by its older name of fancy) as a test to distinguish poetry from verse-making. The whole Romantic School, in its germ, no doubt, but yet unmistakably foreshadowed, lies already in the "Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands." He was the first to bring back into poetry something of the antique fervor, and found again the long-lost secret of being classically elegant without being pedantically cold. *In his Tractate on Education. A skilled lover of music,* he rose from the general sing-song of his generation to a harmony that had been silent since Milton, and in him, to use his own words, "The force of energy is found, And the sense rises on the wings of sound." But beside his own direct services in the reformation of our poetry, we owe him a still greater debt as the inspirer of Gray, whose "Progress of Poesy," in reach, variety, and loftiness of poise, overflies all other English lyrics like an eagle. In spite of the dulness of contemporary ears, preoccupied with the continuous hum of the popular hurdy-gurdy, it was the prevailing blast of Gray's trumpet that more than anything else called men back to the legitimate standard.† Another poet, Dyer, whose "Fleece" was published in 1753, both in the choice of his subject and his treatment of it gives further proof of the * Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony, were all musicians. ↑ Wordsworth, who recognized forerunners in Thomson, Collins, Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition about Chatterton, is always some. what niggardly in his appreciation of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray's tune in his ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modulation which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray his verse sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion of one of his own finest lines, was due to Gray's ("The light that never was on land or sea,") "Orient hues unborrowed of the sun." I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray's "Sonnet on the Death of West," which Wordsworth condemns as of no value, the second "And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fires is one of Gray's happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects greater than either of them: Jamque rubrum tremulis jubar ignibus erigere alte LUCRET., iv, 404, 405. Gray's taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp, he did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only the witch Imagination had cast her spell there. Wordsworth loved solitude in his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was the readier to find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the pleasure of being a first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses a sonnet to John Dyer. But Gray was one of "the pure and powerful minds" who had discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the discovery of poets is more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Walpole : "Mr. Dyer has more poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but rough and injudicious." Dyer has one fine verse, "On the dark level of adversity." tendency among the younger generation to revert to simpler and purer models. Plainly enough, Thomson had been his chief model, though there are also traces of a careful study of Milton. Pope had died in 1744, at the height of his renown, the acknowledged monarch of letters, as supreme as Voltaire when the excitement and exposure of his coronation-ceremonies at Paris hastened his end a generation later. His fame, like Voltaire's, was European, and the style which he had carried to perfection was paramount throughout the cultivated world. The new edition of the "Dunciad," with the Fourth Book added, published the year before his death, though the substitution of Cibber for Theobald made the poem incoherent, had yet increased his reputation and confirmed the sway of the school whose recognized head he was, by the poignancy of its satire, the lucidity of its wit, and the resounding, if somewhat uniform march, of its numbers. He had been translated into other languages living and dead. Voltaire had long before pronounced him "the best poet of England, and at present of all the world." It was the apotheosis of clearness, point, and technical skill, of the ease that comes of practice, not of the fulness of original power. And yet, as we have seen, while he was in the very plenitude of his power, there was already a widespread discontent, a feeling that what "comes nearest," as Phillips calls it, may yet be infinitely far from giving those profounder and incalculable satisfactions of which the soul is capable in poetry. A movement was gathering strength which prompted "The age to quit their clogs By the known rules of virtuous liberty." Nor was it wholly confined to England. Symptoms of a similar reaction began to show themselves on the Continent, notably in the translation of Milton (1732) and the publication of the Nibelungen Lied (1757) by Bodmer, and the imitations of Thomson in France. Was it possible, then, that there was anything better than good sense, elegant diction, and the highest polish of style? Could there be an intellectual appetite which antithesis failed to satisfy? If the horse would only have faith * MS. letter of Voltaire, cited by Warburton in his edition of Pope, Vol. IV. p. 38, note. The date is 15th October, 1726. I do not find it in Voltaire's Correspondence. |