wholly organic development. No great poet ever owed any essential part of his genius to his age; at the most he may have owed to his age the opportunity of an easy achievement.

Take, for instance, Chatterton. Chatterton's 'masculine persuasive force' is one of the most genuine things in our literature, and is in no degree affected by the mask which it pleased him to put on. Chatterton required no 'needs of the public taste' to guide him into a 'channel of great poetical expression.' He found for himself that 'channel of great poetical expression'; he found accounts in black-letter and turned them into living poetry, and it has been made a crime to him that he was an alchemist of the mind, and transmuted base metal into gold. It was his whim to invent a language for the expression of the better part of himself, a language which came as close as he could get it to come to that speech of the Middle Ages which he had divined in Gothic architecture and in the crabbed characters of old parchments. In Chatterton the whole modern romantic movement began, consciously and as a form of achieved art; and it is not necessary to remember that he died at an age when no other English poet had done work in any degree comparable with his, at least for those qualities of imagination typical of him, in order to give him his due place in English poetry. The existence of Chatterton, at the moment when he happened to exist, proves as conclusively as need be that the man of genius is not of his age, but above it.

The poet who typifies for us the eighteenth century, in which Chatterton was an exception, is Pope; and Pope was not a poet in the true sense, a born poet who had the misfortune to be modified by the influence of the age into which he was born, but a writer of extraordinary prose capacity and finish, who, if he had lived in another age and among genuine poets, would have had no more than a place apart, admired for the unique thing which he could do, but not mistaken for a poet of true lineage. Pope's poetic sensibility may be gauged

by a single emendation which he made in the text of his edition of Shakespeare. Shakespeare had made Antony say to Cleopatra, 'O grave charm!' To Pope it seemed ridiculous that a light woman should possess gravity in charm. He proposed 'gay,' and nature seemed to be reasserted: 'O gay charm!' what more probable and sufficient?

The poetry of the eighteenth century has no fundamental relation with the rest of English poetry. The poets of every other age can be brought together under a single conception: they harmonise, for all their differences; but between the poets of every other age and the poets of the eighteenth century there is a gap, impossible to pass over. Here and there, as in the best work of Collins, we can distinguish some of the eternal signs of poetry. But, for the most part, the gap is so palpable that we find critics tacitly acknowledging it by their very efforts to bridge it over, and asking us, with Mr. Courthope, in speaking of Pope, to admit 'that it is on a false principle of criticism that Warton, and those who think with him, blame his poetry on account of the absence of qualities which they find in other poets.' If those qualities, which are to be found in other poets and not in Pope, are precisely the fundamental qualities which constitute poetry, why should these qualities be quietly laid aside for the occasion, and, the eighteenth century once over, taken up again as if nothing had happened?

The principles of poetry are eternal, and such divine accidents as Christopher Smart and Thomas Chatterton in an age in which the 'national taste' was turned persistently from those principles, are enough to show that no pressure of contemporary fashion can wholly hinder a poet from speaking out in his own and the only way. In the Preface to his 'Specimens of Later English Poets' Southey had the frankness to admit that 'the taste of the public may better be estimated from indifferent poets than from good ones; because the former write for their contemporaries, the latter for poster

ity. And he asks, naïvely enough: 'Why is Pomfret the most popular of the English poets? The fact is certain, and the solution would be useful.' Who is aware to-day of the existence of a poem called 'The Choice' or of a poet called Pomfret? Pomfret held his own for a hundred years, and now is extinct. Enquiry as to why he was the most popular of the English poets is, however amusing for the social historian, beside the question for the student of poetry. What matters to him is not that 'The Choice' was once considered by the public to be an incomparable poem, but that it was and remains a tame and mediocre piece of verse, never really rising to poetry, and that precisely similar material could be and had been lifted into poetry by the genius of a genuine poet, such as Herrick.

Again, the influence of one poet on another has its interest, its importance even; but all that seriously matters is that part which was not influenced, the poet himself. The personal contact of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Elizabethan reading of Keats, had their influence on the form and sometimes on the very impulse to existence of the poetry of each poet. But it was of the nature of a lucky or unlucky accident; it was at the most the equivalent of some natural excitement, a sunset or the face of a woman. Nor did the French Revolution create the poetry which gave it expression or moralised over it. King George the Third inspired the genius of Byron, but only better than the 'dark blue ocean,' because comic material was more valuable to Byron than heroic or sublime material. But that Shelley conceived himself to be atheist, philanthropist, or democrat; that Keats fell in love with Fanny Brawne and not with another woman; that Coleridge took opium and Wordsworth lived in the open air in Cumberland: these things go to the making of the man who is the poet; they touch or inspire him, in what is deepest or most sensitive in his nature; and though they will never explain to us how he came to have the power of creation, they will explain to us something more than his method.

To distinguish poetry, then, where it exists, to consider it in its essence, apart from the accidents of the age in which it came into being, to define its qualities in itself; that is the business of the true critic or student. And in order to do this he must cast aside all theories of evolution or the natural growth of genius, and remember that genius is always an exception, always something which would be a disease if it were not a divine gift. He must clear his mind of all limiting formulas, whether of milieu, Weltschmerz, or mode. He must disregard all schools or movements as other than convenient and interchangeable labels. He must seek, in short, only poetry, and he must seek poetry in the poet, and nowhere else.

III

The quality which distinguishes the poetry of the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poetry which we can roughly group together as the romantic movement, is the quality of its imagination, and this quality is seen chiefly as a kind of atmosphere, which adds strangeness to beauty. What is it in the atmosphere of an English landscape that seems at once to reveal and, in a sense, to explain that imaginative atmosphere which distinguishes the finest English poetry, and, in a special sense, the poetry of the nineteenth century, from almost all the fine poetry of the world? I was walking one afternoon along one of the slopes of Hampstead Heath, just above the Vale of Health, and I saw close beside me a line of naked autumn trees, every twig brown and separate: a definite, solid thing, beautiful in structure, sober and admirable in colour, just such branches as one would see in any clear country, where everything is distinctly visible, in Italy or in Spain. But, at some distance, on the higher edge of the heath, against the sky, there was another line of naked trees, and over their whole outline there was a soft, not quite transparent, veil of mist, like the down on fruit: you saw them and the general lines of their structure, but you saw them under a more exquisite

aspect, like an image seen in a cloudy mirror. Nothing that was essential in their reality was lost, but they were no longer the naked, real thing; nature had transformed them, as art transforms nature. So imagination, in the English poets, transforms the bare outlines of poetical reality, clothing them with an atmosphere which is the actual atmosphere of England.

Is there in Homer, in Dante, in the poet of any bright, clear land, where men and things are seen detached against the sky, like statues or architecture, a passage like that passage in Keats, those two lines:

'Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn' ?

In those two lines we get the equivalent of that atmosphere which, in England, adds mystery to the beauty of natural things. The English sense of atmosphere, this imaginative transmutation of reality, is to be found in all English poetry from the beginning. But it is found incidentally, it is found subordinated to other characteristics; it is the rarest but not the most regarded part of great poetry. The best poetry of the nineteenth century is identical, in all essential respects, with the best poetry of every other but the eighteenth century; it is strictly in the tradition; but there is, in what we call the romantic movement, a certain economy which we do not always find in other periods, a sense of the limits of poetry, of exactly what we can and cannot do. No one has ever written more lucidly or more tenderly than Chaucer, more nobly or more musically than Spenser; but to Chaucer poetry was exclusively the telling of a story, and to Spenser it was partly picture-making and partly allegory. To the supreme Elizabethan it was life, every action of the will, the mind, and the soul; and there is not so much poetry to be found anywhere in the world, but it is more often than not in scattered splendours and fragments severally alive. The 'metaphysical' poets of the seventeenth century brought all the gifts of the Magi, and