Late Lyrics and Earlier | Page 3

have never tried to co-ordinate) as is complacently
assumed. Surely it embodies a too human fallacy quite familiar in logic.
Next, a knowing reviewer, apparently a Roman Catholic young man,
speaks, with some rather gross instances of the suggestio falsi in his
article, of "Mr. Hardy refusing consolation," the "dark gravity of his
ideas," and so on. When a Positivist and a Catholic agree there must be
something wonderful in it, which should make a poet sit up. But . . . O
that 'twere possible!
I would not have alluded in this place or anywhere else to such casual
personal criticisms--for casual and unreflecting they must be- -but for
the satisfaction of two or three friends in whose opinion a short answer
was deemed desirable, on account of the continual repetition of these
criticisms, or more precisely, quizzings. After all, the serious and truly
literary inquiry in this connection is: Should a shaper of such stuff as
dreams are made on disregard considerations of what is customary and
expected, and apply himself to the real function of poetry, the
application of ideas to life (in Matthew Arnold's familiar phrase)? This
bears more particularly on what has been called the "philosophy" of
these poems--usually reproved as "queer." Whoever the author may be
that undertakes such application of ideas in this "philosophic"
direction--where it is specially required--glacial judgments must

inevitably fall upon him amid opinion whose arbiters largely decry
individuality, to whom IDEAS are oddities to smile at, who are moved
by a yearning the reverse of that of the Athenian inquirers on Mars Hill;
and stiffen their features not only at sound of a new thing, but at a
restatement of old things in new terms. Hence should anything of this
sort in the following adumbrations seem "queer "--should any of them
seem to good Panglossians to embody strange and disrespectful
conceptions of this best of all possible worlds, I apologize; but cannot
help it.
Such divergences, which, though piquant for the nonce, it would be
affectation to say are not saddening and discouraging likewise, may, to
be sure, arise sometimes from superficial aspect only, writer and reader
seeing the same thing at different angles. But in palpable cases of
divergence they arise, as already said, whenever a serious effort is
made towards that which the authority I have cited--who would now be
called old-fashioned, possibly even parochial--affirmed to be what no
good critic could deny as the poet's province, the application of ideas to
life. One might shrewdly guess, by the by, that in such recommendation
the famous writer may have overlooked the cold-shouldering results
upon an enthusiastic disciple that would be pretty certain to follow his
putting the high aim in practice, and have forgotten the disconcerting
experience of Gil Blas with the Archbishop.
To add a few more words to what has already taken up too many, there
is a contingency liable to miscellanies of verse that I have never seen
mentioned, so far as I can remember; I mean the chance little shocks
that may be caused over a book of various character like the present
and its predecessors by the juxtaposition of unrelated, even discordant,
effusions; poems perhaps years apart in the making, yet facing each
other. An odd result of this has been that dramatic anecdotes of a
satirical and humorous intention (such, e.g., as "Royal Sponsors")
following verse in graver voice, have been read as misfires because
they raise the smile that they were intended to raise, the journalist, deaf
to the sudden change of key, being unconscious that he is laughing with
the author and not at him. I admit that I did not foresee such
contingencies as I ought to have done, and that people might not

perceive when the tone altered. But the difficulties of arranging the
themes in a graduated kinship of moods would have been so great that
irrelation was almost unavoidable with efforts so diverse. I must trust
for right note-catching to those finely-touched spirits who can divine
without half a whisper, whose intuitiveness is proof against all the
accidents of
inconsequence. In respect of the less alert, however,
should any one's train of thought be thrown out of gear by a
consecutive piping of vocal reeds in jarring tonics, without a
semiquaver's rest between, and be led thereby to miss the writer's aim
and meaning in one out of two contiguous compositions, I shall deeply
regret it.
Having at last, I think, finished with the personal points that I was
recommended to notice, I will forsake the immediate object of this
Preface; and, leaving Late Lyrics to whatever fate it deserves, digress
for a few moments to more general considerations. The thoughts of any
man of letters concerned to keep poetry alive cannot but run
uncomfortably on the precarious