Shelley as the fellow of Shakespere we go near losing all standard of criticism altogether; we do wrong, not only to the poets with whom he is mentioned in the same breath, but we do wrong to Shelley also. Sanity before all things in criticism, no less than sanity before all things in life. We of the minority do not desire that criticism should be a matter of praising or blaming, but we say we do not find in Shelley what above all else we seek in art -spiritual succour, or spiritual peace.

But when that has been said, what remains? What, indeed, but to be reconverted to Shelley? to be reconverted to him in order that we may take in him a more temperate and a wiser joy. And as Professor Dowden truly said, when speaking lately in conversation about him, to be reconverted to Shelley, one only needs to read the 'Ode to the West Wind.' When its swift splendour meets our eyes, we forget the unreality of Shelley's world, his metaphysics, and all his 'gossamery affectation.' We are borne by verse like this to the verge of recantation of all our words :

'Make me thy lyre even as the forest is ;
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth,
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O, wind,
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?'

L

This, too, may be said, that some minds there are of a type not common, indeed, but not rare, to whom Shelley will always be more stimulating than poets of less ethereal genius. We bid them hail, for they are pilgrims, though their way is not our way, on the same journey that we ourselves would make to the country of a truer freedom and a fuller light.

I cannot more fittingly close what I have space to say than by a quotation from Mr F. W. H. Myers, who pleads eloquently for Shelley while he admits that all is not well with him. If I have made a petty attempt to practise the trade of the poisoner, here is the antidote.

In answer to the case, as he himself well states it, against Shelley, Mr Myers pleads wisely Shelley's youth and immaturity, and concludes thus :

'The common religion of all the world advances by many kinds of prophecy, and is spread abroad by the flying flames of pure emotion as well as by the solid incandescence of eternal truth. Some few souls indeed there are -a Plato, a Dante, a Wordsworth-whom we may without extravagance call stars of the spiritual firmament, so sure and lasting seems their testimony to those realities which life hides from us as sunlight hides the depth of heaven. But we affirm that in Shelley, too, there is a testimony of like kind, though it has less of substance and definition, and seems to float diffused in an ethereal loveliness. We may rather liken him to the dew-drop of his own song, which

"Becomes a winged mist,

And wanders up the vault of the blue day,
Outlives the moon, and in the sun's last ray
Hangs o'er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst."

For the hues of sunset also have for us their revelation. We look, and the conviction steals over us that such a spectacle can be no accident in the scheme of things; that the whole universe is tending to beauty, and that the apocalypse of that crimsoned heaven may not be the less authentic because it is so fugitive-not the less real because it comes to us in a phantasy wrought out of light and air.'

With such a sane and eloquent advocate we cannot but sympathise more than a little.

CHAPTER VIII

AN EPIC REVIVAL

Southey-Scott-Hogg

To seek inspiration in a past age, to essay a revival of life that is gone, is admittedly an almost hopeless poetic task. The mental environment of the present accompanies every man as closely as his shadow in the sun. It seems, too, as if the poetic forms of each age are vitally suitable only to the points of view that were exclusively its own, that to attempt a resuscitation of distinctive poetic forms is to court as certain failure as to attempt a revival of the body of thought to which they served as appropriate garment. The form of the Elizabethan drama is as unsustainable by a poet to-day as is that of Attic tragedy. The epic manner of Homer died with his heroic age, the ballad or the chaunt of the Trouvère, the refrains of early English songs are no longer producible though they may be imitated. But a careful survey of the world's literature makes this manifest, that while no period of history can ever have its exact counterpart, epochs which display similar habits of mind, whose environment approximates in some or in many respects to that of former epochs, produce a like literature, a literature approximating in tone and in external feature to that of the former epochs which they resemble.

A scrupulous regard to form, for example, is an unfailing sign of a weakness in substance-of a Neo-Alexandrian epoch, like that of Pope, or of the successors of Tennyson. A seeking abroad for an inspiration which the present time and place fail to afford is equally significant of an era of decadence. He who runs may read such marks as these which connect every wave of literature with some predecessor, which betray the same impulse as it rises and gathers strength and volume, or as it breaks and is finally lost in feathery froth and spray.

To speak of an epic revival is to speak of what is only possible with serious limitations, and even then only possible under conditions approximating to those under which the great epics of the world were composed. Epic poetry is the product of primitive civilisations, unable or unaccustomed to express their thoughts in writing. The traditions of a race preserved in song and ballad, and handed down from father to son, are the material upon which the epic poet works. Usually the greatest national event, the subject of numberless short poems, is appropriated and shaped into a consecutive narrative, which thus becomes the record, the only possible record when writing is unknown, of a nation's early history. Of this kind of national epic, the Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' of Homer, and the 'Niebelungenlied' are examples. Such poetry, true national epic poetry, giving a picture of primitive society as it appeared to the generation, which, just about to cross the threshold of what we call civilisation, looked back upon the early history of the race-this true national epic poetry is not to be confused with the poetry written in the epic manner by poets in an age of learning and culture, who, by an effort of imagination, transfer themselves to times long