apart from the historic tales and foreign romances with which it is usually and not altogether incorrectly classed. While not a work of high genius, it is far beyond the reach of writers of talent. Moore, like his greater countryman, Goldsmith, had the genial art of making lasting friends of his readers; the impulsive tenderness, the intermingled humour and pathos, the entrance of the Irish accent are irresistible. The epicurean element in Moore weakens his poetry while it lends to it a certain attractiveness. The absence of any attractive graces, despite the purity of style and motive in Campbell, will effectually prevent his longer works from becoming again what they once were— popular favourites. Campbell's career well illustrates the poetic revolution of the century. The 'Pleasures of Hope' is refined pseudo-classic verse, untouched by the warm airs of spring that broke up the frost that bound English poetry, and had nearly wrought a complete silence by congealing its very sources; 'Gertrude of Wyoming' has the romantic flavour of the foreign novel; but in the ballads, the war lyrics, and in 'O'Connor's Child,' the new spirit flashes out its passionate flames, and lifts Campbell at once from an imitator of Goldsmith to a rank which entitled him to his rest in Westminster Abbey. These distinctions literary schoolmen, In that corner of Perhaps Moore was the greater poet. matter not; they are questions for the or for wit-combats on winter evenings. a nation's heart, which it keeps closest from view, but cherishes the more jealously, the corner which holds its filial love for the mother-land of its traditions and history, Campbell and Moore have their rightful place. Our Lares and Penates may not be the greatest gods, but they are the gods of our hearths and homes. CHAPTER VII POETRY AND ITS JUST LIMITATIONS Shelley THE wide-sweeping movement of thought, of which the French Revolution was the most striking product, the movement towards a reconstruction of society with the watchword 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,' gives us the key to the motives and substance of the greater portion of English poetry written since the time of Burns. Beginning as an abstract theory, the result of philosophic observations on existing social conditions, it spread to the masses, and became a creed based upon emotional conviction, and ultimately blazed, in France, into revolutionary action. England, a country slower to act, as well as, perhaps, to be convinced, did not afford so rich a soil for a theory in germ; and the progress of the ideas which had been circulating in European literature for a hundred years, was here very gradual. A few of the more imaginative English minds, like that of Wordsworth, were inflamed with the hope that these ideas would bring in their train the supreme renovation of society, and usher in the golden age for which mankind had so long and so eagerly and so vainly looked. With the collapse of the Revolution in France came to most of these minds, among others to Wordsworth's, disillusion; he was the great 'lost leader' of the democratic cause. Some few of the disappointed hopers possessed their souls in peace, and did not altogether despair that out of evil might come good; believing that although Utopia could not be built in a day, the generous impulses awakened, the enthusiasm aroused in the cause of a nobler social and political life could not altogether die away or be expended in air, but would in time, like the little leaven, work out the lofty ideal of a perfected society. Shelley, perhaps alone of all the higher minds of the time, was unmoved by the failure of abstract theory in the sphere of practice; and he was so unmoved because he was not born until after the Revolution, and never came face to face with its convincing realities. For this reason, and because recorded facts never weighed appreciably in the balance with him against a theory to which he was emotionally drawn, he stands out conspicuous not only as an embodiment of the pure revolutionary spirit, but of that spirit victorious in defeat, a phoenix arising from its own ashes. As we look back upon that time, a time of which Wordsworth cried, 'Joy was it in that dawn to be alive, we find it hard to realise the passionate expectation, the strong and almost childlike trust that filled the minds and hearts of its more thoughtful and earnest men. We, certainly, have experienced no such wave of joyful emotion, lifting us by anticipation into an earthly paradise; rather we have felt the recoil of defeat, the hopelessness of indulging in dreams. We, in our most sanguine moments, are sceptical of the reality of our progress towards higher and better things; and the most representative poet of the latter half of this century, Tennyson, so far from feeling that the goal of human progress is at hand, comforts himself, saves himself from despair, by the thought that the race is yet in its infancy, that it is the dawn of better things we see, 'Dawn not day! Is it shame, so few should have climbed from the dens in the level below, Men, with a heart and a soul, no slaves of a four-footed will? But if twenty million of summers are stored in the sunlight still, We are far from the noon of man, there is time for the race to grow. 'Red of the dawn! Is it turning a fainter red? The ghost of the brute that free? So be it, but when shall we lay is walking and haunting us yet, and be In a hundred-a thousand winters? Oh, what will our children be, The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?' A different gospel this from that preached by the poets of the Revolution! the fire and flame have gone out of it; we are not summoned here to the festival that celebrates victory, but to a long and weary campaign, the end of which we can never hope to see. It is natural for us —who have not felt the power of the movement of which we have been speaking, but on the contrary, have realised the terrible slowness of the advance, the bewildering difficulties, the inevitable delays that must accompany it — it is natural that we should regard with some impatience the songs in anticipation of triumph sung by the poets, to the sentiments of which our minds are not attune, and that we should treat with a certain contemptuous scorn their childlike optimistic philosophies political or social. In the effort to estimate aright the worth of the poetry of Shelley, it must be remembered, if we are to do justice, that it is the voice of a singularly intense and simple nature that the fervour and the passion which speak in it were very real, and that its creed was felt with entire conviction. Though we may be in a sense sadder and wiser, we must be on our guard against a summary dismissal of Shelley as a philosophic teacher. Why deal at all, someone may ask, with the philosophic value of his poetry? Why not treat it simply as an art-product? Critics there are who consistently disregard a poet's teaching, critics who are the advocates of 'art for art's sake;' but if we are willing to abide by Plato's decision and make the chief enquiry regarding a poet's work not 'Is it pleasurable ? ' but 'Is it useful to states and to human life?' an examination of Shelley's poetry as 'art' will not content us. Opinions differ, however, as to the value of Shelley's poetry, not only in relation to life, but even as regards form and the qualities that give pleasure. Opinions, indeed, differ upon the precise rank to be assigned to most poets; opinions are guided by taste, and will differ more or less while the world lasts. But in spite of divergences of taste, and the existence of what we may term 'preferences,' when we come to look closely into the matter we find that most thoughtful and cultivated men are agreed respecting the merits, the striking qualities, the worth for life, of the work of the world's best poets. With Shelley it is not so. There is no poet, perhaps, about whom critical opinions are so divergent, and so widely divergent. The mass of opinion is indisputably in his favour, the majority is with him; but the minority is a strong minority, and famous names appear in it. The more enthusiastic |
