Later Poems and Flower of the Mind | Page 4

altogether a repetition. The
general consent of criticism does not stand still; and moreover, a mere
accident has until now left a poet of genius of the past here and there to
neglect or obscurity. This is not very likely to befall again; the time has
come when there is little or nothing left to discover or rediscover in the
sixteenth century or the seventeenth; we know that there does not lurk
another Crashaw contemned, or another Henry Vaughan disregarded,
or another George Herbert misplaced. There is now something like
finality of knowledge at least; and therefore not a little error in the past
is ready to be repaired. This is the result of time. Of the slow actions
and reactions of critical taste there might be something to say, but
nothing important. No loyal anthologist perhaps will consent to
acknowledge these tides; he will hardly do his work well unless he
believe it to be stable and perfect; nor, by the way, will he judge
worthily in the name of others unless he be resolved to judge intrepidly
for himself.
Inasmuch as even the best of all poems are the best upon
innumerable
degrees, the size of most anthologies has gone far to decide what
degrees are to be gathered in and what left without. The best might
make a very small volume, and be indeed the best, or a very large
volume, and be still indeed the best. But my labour has been to do
somewhat differently--to gather nothing that did not overpass a certain
boundary-line of genius. Gray's Elegy, for instance, would rightly be
placed at the head of everything below that mark. It is, in fact, so near

to the work of genius as to be most directly, closely, and immediately
rebuked by genius; it meets genius at close quarters and almost
deserves that Shakespeare himself should defeat it. Mediocrity said its
own true word in the Elegy:
"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness
on the desert air."
But greatness had said its own word also in a sonnet:
"The summer flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only
live and die."
The reproof here is too sure; not always does it touch so quick, but it is
not seldom manifest, and it makes exclusion a simple task. Inclusion,
on the other hand, cannot be so completely fulfilled. The impossibility
of taking in poems of great length, however purely lyrical, is a
mechanical barrier, even on the plan of the present volume; in the case
of Spenser's Prothalamion, the unmanageably autobiographical and
local passage makes it
inappropriate; some exquisite things of
Landor's are lyrics in blank verse, and the necessary rule against blank
verse shuts them out. No extracts have been made from any poem, but
in a very few instances a stanza or a passage has been dropped out. No
poem has been put in for the sake of a single perfectly fine passage; it
would be too much to say that no poem has been put in for the sake of
two splendid passages or so. The Scottish ballad poetry is represented
by examples that are to my mind finer than anything left out; still, it is
but represented; and as the song of this multitude of unknown poets
overflows by its quantity a collection of lyrics of genius, so does
severally the song of Wordsworth, Crashaw, and Shelley. It has been
necessary, in considering traditional songs of evidently mingled
authorship, to reject some one invaluable stanza or burden--the original
and ancient surviving matter of a spoilt song--because it was necessary
to reject the sequel that has cumbered it since some sentimentalist took
it for his own. An example, which makes the heart ache, is that burden
of keen and remote poetry:

"O the broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom,
The broom of
Cowdenknowes!"
Perhaps some hand will gather all such precious fragments as these
together one day, freed from what is alien in the work of the restorer. It
is inexplicable that a generation resolved to forbid the restoration of
ancient buildings should approve the eighteenth century restoration of
ancient poems; nay, the architectural "restorer" is immeasurably the
more respectful. In order to give us again the ancient fragments, it is
happily not necessary to break up the composite songs which, since the
time of Burns, have gained a national love. Let them be, but let the old
verses be also; and let them have, for those who desire it, the
solitariness of their state of ruin. Even in the cases--and they are not
few-- where Burns is proved to have given beauty and music to the
ancient fragment itself, his work upon the old stanza is immeasurably
finer than his work in his own new stanzas following, and it would