Late Lyrics and Earlier | Page 4

prospects of English verse at the
present day. Verily the hazards and casualties surrounding the birth and
setting forth of almost every modern creation in numbers are ominously
like those of one of Shelley's paper-boats on a windy lake. And a
forward conjecture scarcely permits the hope of a better time, unless
men's tendencies should change. So indeed of all art, literature, and
"high thinking" nowadays. Whether owing to the barbarizing of taste in
the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed
cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of
knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom, "a degrading
thirst after outrageous stimulation" (to quote Wordsworth again), or
from any other cause, we seem threatened with a new Dark Age.
I formerly thought, like so many roughly handled writers, that so far as
literature was concerned a partial cause might be impotent or
mischievous criticism; the satirizing of individuality, the lack of
whole-seeing in contemporary estimates of poetry and kindred work,
the knowingness affected by junior reviewers, the overgrowth of
meticulousness in their peerings for an opinion, as if it were a
cultivated habit in them to scrutinize the tool-marks and be blind to the

building, to hearken for the key-creaks and be deaf to the diapason, to
judge the landscape by a nocturnal exploration with a flash-lantern. In
other words, to carry on the old game of sampling the poem or drama
by quoting the worst line or worst passage only, in ignorance or not of
Coleridge's proof that a versification of any length neither can be nor
ought to be all poetry; of reading meanings into a book that its author
never dreamt of writing there. I might go on interminably.
But I do not now think any such temporary obstructions to be the cause
of the hazard, for these negligences and ignorances, though they may
have stifled a few true poets in the run of generations, disperse like
stricken leaves before the wind of next week, and are no more heard of
again in the region of letters than their writers themselves. No: we may
be convinced that something of the deeper sort mentioned must be the
cause.
In any event poetry, pure literature in general, religion--I include
religion because poetry and religion touch each other, or rather
modulate into each other; are, indeed, often but different names for the
same thing--these, I say, the visible signs of mental and emotional life,
must like all other things keep moving, becoming; even though at
present, when belief in witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian
theory and "the truth that shall make you free, men's minds appear, as
above noted, to be moving backwards rather than on. I speak, of course,
somewhat sweepingly, and should except many isolated minds; also the
minds of men in certain worthy but small bodies of various
denominations, and perhaps in the homely quarter where advance
might have been the very least expected a few years back--the English
Church--if one reads it rightly as showing evidence of "removing those
things that are shaken," in accordance with the wise Epistolary
recommendation to the Hebrews. For since the historic and once august
hierarchy of Rome some generation ago lost its chance of being the
religion of the future by doing otherwise, and throwing over the little
band of neo-Catholics who were making a struggle for continuity by
applying the principle of evolution to their own faith, joining hands
with modern science, and outflanking the hesitating English instinct
towards liturgical reform (a flank march which I at the time quite

expected to witness, with the gathering of many millions of waiting
agnostics into its fold); since then, one may ask, what other purely
English establishment than the Church, of sufficient dignity and footing,
and with such strength of old association, such architectural spell, is
left in this country to keep the shreds of morality together?
It may be a forlorn hope, a mere dream, that of an alliance between
religion, which must be retained unless the world is to perish, and
complete rationality, which must come, unless also the world is to
perish, by means of the interfusing effect of poetry--"the breath and
finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression of science," as
it was defined by an English poet who was quite orthodox in his ideas.
But if it be true, as Comte argued, that advance is never in a straight
line, but in a looped orbit, we may, in the aforesaid ominous moving
backward, be doing it pour mieux sauter, drawing back for a spring. I
repeat that I forlornly hope so, notwithstanding the supercilious regard
of hope by Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and other philosophers down
to Einstein who have my respect. But one dares not prophesy. Physical,