Letters on Literature | Page 6

But he has none of the creeping
prose which, to my poor mind, invades even "Tintern Abbey." He is, as
Mr. Swinburne says, "the surest-footed" of our poets. He can give a
natural and lovely life even to the wildest of ancient imaginings, as to
"these bright and ancient snakes, that once were Cadmus and
Harmonia."
Bacon speaks of the legends of the earlier and ruder world coming to us
"breathed softly through the flutes of the Grecians." But even the
Grecian flute, as in the lay of the strife of Apollo and Marsyas, comes
more tunably in the echo of Mr. Arnold's song, that beautiful song in
"Empedocles on Etna," which has the perfection of sculpture and the
charm of the purest colour. It is full of the silver light of dawn among
the hills, of the music of the loch's dark, slow waves among the reeds,
of the scent of the heather, and the wet tresses of the birch.
Surely, then, we have had great poets living among us, but the
fountains of their song are silent, or flow but rarely over a clogged and
stony channel. And who is there to succeed the two who are gone, or
who shall be our poet, if the Master be silent? That is a melancholy
question, which I shall try to answer (with doubt and dread enough) in
my next letter. {1}

OF MODERN ENGLISH POETRY

My dear Wincott,--I hear that a book has lately been published by an
American lady, in which all the modern poets are represented. The
singers have been induced to make their own selections, and put
forward, as Mr. Browning says, their best foot, anapaest or trochee, or
whatever it may be. My information goes further, and declares that

there are but eighteen poets of England to sixty inspired Americans.
This Western collection of modern minstrelsy shows how very
dangerous it is to write even on the English poetry of the day. Eighteen
is long odds against a single critic, and Major Bellenden, in "Old
Mortality," tells us that three to one are odds as long as ever any
warrior met victoriously, and that warrior was old Corporal
Raddlebanes.
I decline the task; I am not going to try to estimate either the eighteen
of England or the sixty of the States. It is enough to speak about three
living poets, in addition to those masters treated of in my last letter.
Two of the three you will have guessed at-- Mr. Swinburne and Mr.
William Morris. The third, I dare say, you do not know even by name. I
think he is not one of the English eighteen--Mr. Robert Bridges. His
muse has followed the epicurean maxim, and chosen the shadowy path,
fallentis semita vitae, where the dew lies longest on the grass, and the
red rowan berries droop in autumn above the yellow St. John's wort.
But you will find her all the fresher for her country ways.
My knowledge of Mr. William Morris's poetry begins in years so far
away that they seem like reminiscences of another existence. I
remember sitting beneath Cardinal Beaton's ruined castle at St.
Andrews, looking across the bay to the sunset, while some one repeated
"Two Red Roses across the Moon." And I remember thinking that the
poem was nonsense. With Mr. Morris's other early verses, "The
Defence of Guinevere," this song of the moon and the roses was
published in 1858. Probably the little book won no attention; it is not
popular even now. Yet the lyrics remain in memories which forget all
but a general impression of the vast "Earthly Paradise," that huge
decorative poem, in which slim maidens and green-clad men, and
waters wan, and flowering apple trees, and rich palaces are all mingled
as on some long ancient tapestry, shaken a little by the wind of death.
They are not living and breathing people, these persons of the fables;
they are but shadows, beautiful and faint, and their poem is fit reading
for sleepy summer afternoons. But the characters in the lyrics in "The
Defence of Guinevere" are people of flesh and blood, under their chain
armour and their velvet, and the trappings of their tabards.
There is no book in the world quite like this of Mr. Morris's old Oxford
days when the spirit of the Middle Ages entered into him, with all its

contradictions of faith and doubt, and its earnest desire to enjoy this life
to the full in war and love, or to make certain of a future in which war
is not, and all love is pure heavenly. If one were to choose favourites
from "The Defence of Guinevere," they would be the ballads of
"Shameful Death," and of "The Sailing of the Sword," and "The Wind,"
which