FOOTNOTE:

Yet would we not disturb him from his tomb,Thus sleeping in his Abbey's friendly shade,And the rough waves of life for ever laid.

Yet would we not disturb him from his tomb,

Thus sleeping in his Abbey's friendly shade,

And the rough waves of life for ever laid.

But what if this vast and sounding funeral should prove to have really been the entombment of English poetry? What if it should be the prestige of verse that we left behind us in the Abbey? That is a question which has issues far more serious than the death of any one man, no matter how majestic that man may be.

Poetry is not a democratic art. We are constantly being told by the flexible scribes who live to flatter the multitude that the truest poetry is that which speaks to the million, that moves the great heart of the masses. In his private consciousness no one knows better than the lettered man who writes such sentences that they are not true. Since the pastoral days in which poets made great verses for a little clan, it has never been true that poetry of the noblest kind was really appreciated by the masses. If we take the bulk of what are called educated people, but a very small proportion are genuinely fond of reading. Sift this minority, and but a minute residue of it will be found to be sincerely devoted to beautiful poetry. The genuine lovers of verse are so few that if they could be made the subject of a statistical report, we should probably be astounded at the smallness of their number. From the purely democratic point of view it is certain that they form a negligible quantity. They would produce no general effect at all if they were not surrounded by a very much larger number of persons who, without taste for poetry themselves, are yet traditionally impressed with its value, and treat it with conventional respect, buying it alittle, frequently conversing about it, pressing to gaze at its famous professors, and competing for places beside the tombs of its prophets. The respect for poetry felt by these persons, although in itself unmeaning, is extremely valuable in its results. It supports the enthusiasm of the few who know and feel for themselves, and it radiates far and wide into the outer masses, whose darkness would otherwise be unreached by the very glimmer of these things.

There is no question, however, that the existence in prominent public honour of an art in its essence so aristocratic as poetry—that is to say, so dependent on the suffrages of a few thousand persons who happen to possess, in greater or lesser degree, certain peculiar qualities of mind and ear—is, at the present day, anomalous, and therefore perilous. All this beautiful pinnacled structure of the glory of verse, this splendid position of poetry at the summit of the civil ornaments of the Empire, is built of carven ice, and needs nothing but that the hot popular breath should be turned upon it to sink into so much water. It is kept standing there, flashing and sparkling before our eyes, by a succession of happy accidents. To speak rudely, it is keptthere by an effort of bluff on the part of a small influential class.

In reflecting on these facts, I have found myself depressed and terrified at an ebullition of popularity which seems to have struck almost everybody else with extreme satisfaction. It has been very natural that the stupendous honour apparently done to Tennyson, not merely by the few who always valued him, but by the many who might be supposed to stand outside his influence, has been welcomed with delight and enthusiasm. But what is so sinister a circumstance is the excessive character of this exhibition. I think of the funeral of Wordsworth at Grasmere, only forty-two years ago, with a score of persons gathering quietly under the low wall that fenced them from the brawling Rotha; and I turn to the spectacle of the 12th, the vast black crowd in the street, the ten thousand persons refused admission to the Abbey, the whole enormous popular manifestation.[1]What does it mean? Is Tennyson, great as he is, a thousand times greater than Wordsworth? Has poetry, in forty years, risen at this ratio in the public estimation? The democracy, I fear,doth protest too much, and there is danger in this hollow reverence.

The danger takes this form. It may at any moment come to be held that the poet, were he the greatest that ever lived, was greater than poetry; the artist more interesting than his art. This was a peril unknown in ancient times. The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were scarcely more closely identified with the men who wrote them than Gothic cathedrals were with their architects. Cowley was the first English poet about whom much personal interest was felt outside the poetic class. Dryden is far more evident to us than the Elizabethans were, yet phantasmal by the side of Pope. Since the age of Anne an interest in the poet, as distinguished from his poetry, has steadily increased; the fashion for Byron, the posthumous curiosity in Shelley and Keats, are examples of the rapid growth of this individualisation in the present century. But since the death of Wordsworth it has taken colossal proportions, without, so far as can be observed, any parallel quickening of the taste for poetry itself. The result is that a very interesting or picturesque figure, if identified with poetry, may attract an amount of attention and admirationwhich is spurious as regards the poetry, and of no real significance. Tennyson had grown to be by far the most mysterious, august, and singular figure in English society. He represented poetry, and the world now expects its poets to be as picturesque, as aged, and as individual as he was, or else it will pay poetry no attention. I fear, to be brief, that the personal, as distinguished from the purely literary, distinction of Tennyson may strike, for the time being, a serious blow at the vitality of poetry in this country.

Circumstances have combined, in a very curious way, to produce this result. If a supernatural power could be conceived as planning a scenic effect, it could hardly have arranged it in a manner more telling, or more calculated to excite the popular imagination, than has been the case in the quick succession of the death of Matthew Arnold, of Robert Browning, and of Tennyson.

Insatiate archer! could not one suffice?Thy shaft few thrice; and thrice our peace was slain.

Insatiate archer! could not one suffice?

Thy shaft few thrice; and thrice our peace was slain.

A great poet was followed by a greater, and he by the greatest of the century, and all within five years. So died, but not with this crescent effect, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Raleigh; so Vanbrugh,Congreve, Gay, Steele, and Defoe; so Byron, Shelley, and Keats; so Scott, Coleridge, and Lamb. But in none of these cases was the field left so exposed as it now is in popular estimation. The deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron were really momentous to an infinitely greater degree than those of Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson, because the former were still in the prime of life, while the latter had done their work; but the general public was not aware of this, and, as is well known, Shelley and Keats passed away without exciting a ripple of popular curiosity.

The tone of criticism since the death of Tennyson has been very much what might, under the circumstances, have been expected. Their efforts to overwhelm his coffin with lilies and roses have seemed paltry to the critics, unless they could succeed, at the same time, in laying waste all the smaller gardens of his neighbours. There is no doubt that the instinct for suttee lies firmly embedded in human nature, and that the glory of a dead rajah is dimly felt by us all to be imperfect unless some one or other is immolated on his funeral pile. But when we come to think calmly on this matter, it will be seen that this offering up of the live poets as a burnt sacrifice to the memory of their deadmaster is absurd and grotesque. We have boasted all these years that we possessed the greatest of the world's poets since Victor Hugo. We did well to boast. But he is taken from us at a great age, and we complain at once, with bitter cries—because we have no poet left so venerable or so perfect in ripeness of the long-drawn years of craftsmanship—that poetry is dead amongst us, and that all the other excellent artists in verse are worthless scribblers. This is natural, perhaps, but it is scarcely generous and not a little ridiculous. It is, moreover, exactly what the critics said in 1850, when Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson had already published a great deal of their most admirable work.

The ingratitude of the hour towards the surviving poets of England pays but a poor compliment to the memory of that great man whose fame it professes to honour. I suppose that there has scarcely been a writer of interesting verse who has come into anything like prominence within the lifetime of Tennyson who has not received from him some letter of praise—some message of benevolent indulgence. More than fifty years ago he wrote, in glowing terms, to congratulate Mr. Bailey on hisFestus; it is only yesterday that we were hearingof his letters to Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. William Watson. Tennyson did not affect to be a critic—no man, indeed, can ever have lived who lessaffectedto be anything—but he loved good verses, and he knew them when he saw them, and welcomed them indulgently. No one can find it more distasteful to him to have it asserted that Tennyson was, and will be, "the last of the English poets" than would Tennyson himself.

It was not my good fortune to see him many times, and only twice, at an interval of about twelve years, did I have the privilege of hearing him talk at length and ease. On each of those occasions, however, it was noticeable with what warmth and confidence he spoke of the future of English poetry, with what interest he evidently followed its progress, and how cordially he appreciated what various younger men were doing. In particular, I hope it is not indiscreet to refer to the tone in which he spoke to me on each of these occasions of Mr. Swinburne, whose critical conscience had, it must not be forgotten, led him to refer with no slight severity to several of the elder poet's writings. In 1877 Mr. Swinburne's strictures were still recent, and might not unreasonably have been painfullyrecollected. Yet Tennyson spoke of him almost as Dryden did two hundred years ago to Congreve:

And this I prophesy—thou shalt be seen(Though with some short parenthesis between)High on the throne of wit, and, seated there,Not mine (that's little), but thy laurel wear.

And this I prophesy—thou shalt be seen

(Though with some short parenthesis between)

High on the throne of wit, and, seated there,

Not mine (that's little), but thy laurel wear.

It would never have occurred to this great and wise man that his own death could be supposed to mark the final burning up and turning to ashes of the prophetic bays.

These are considerations, however—to return to my original parable—for the few within the Abbey. They are of no force in guiding opinion among the non-poetical masses outside. These, dangerously moved for the nonce to observe the existence of poetry, may make a great many painful and undesirable reflections before the subject quits their memory. There is always a peril in a popular movement that is not founded on genuine feeling, and the excitement about Tennyson's death has been far too universal to be sincere. It is even now not too early for us to perceive, if we will face it calmly, that elements of a much commoner and emptier nature than reverence for a man of genius have entered into the stir about the Laureate's burial. The multitude so stirred into an excitedcuriosity about a great poet will presently crave, of course, a little more excitement still over another poet, and this stimulant will not be forthcoming. We have not, and shall not have for a generation at least, such another sacrifice to offer to the monster. It will be in the retreat of the wave, in the sense of popular disappointment at the non-recurrence of such intellectual shocks as the deaths of Browning and Tennyson have supplied, that the right of poetry to take precedence among the arts of writing will for the first time come to be seriously questioned. Our critics will then, too late, begin to regret their suttee of the Muses; but if they try to redeem their position by praising this living poet or that, the public will only too glibly remind them of their own dictum that "poetry died with Tennyson."

In old days the reading public swept the literature of its fathers into the dust-bin, and read Horace while its immediate contemporaries were preparing works in prose and verse to suit the taste of the moment. But nowadays each great writer who passes out of physical life preserves his intellectual existence intact and becomes a lasting rival to his surviving successor. The young novelist has no living competitor so dangerous tohim as Dickens and Thackeray are, who are nevertheless divided from him by time almost as far as Milton was from Pope. It is nearly seventy years since the earliest of Macaulay'sEssaysappeared, and the least reference to one of them would now be recognised by "every schoolboy." Less than seventy years after the death of Bacon hisEssayswere so completely forgotten that when extracts from them were discovered in the common-place book of a deceased lady of quality, they were supposed to be her own, were published and praised by people as clever as Congreve, went through several editions, and were not detected until within the present century. When an age made a palimpsest of its memory in this way it was far easier to content it with contemporary literary excellence than it is now, when every aspirant is confronted with the quintessence of the centuries.

It is not, however, from the captious taste of the public that most is to be feared, but from its indifference. Let it not be believed that, because a mob of the votaries of Mr. Jerome and Mr. Sims have been drawn to the precincts of the Abbey to gaze upon a pompous ceremonial, these admirable citizens have suddenly taken to readingLucretiusorThe Two Voices. What their praise is worth no one among us would venture to say in words so unmeasured as those of the dead Master himself, who, with a prescience of their mortuary attentions, spoke of these irreverent admirers as those

Who make it seem more sweet to beThe little life of bank and brier,The bird who pipes his lone desireAnd dies unheard within his tree,Than he that warbles long and loud,And drops at Glory's temple-gates,For whom the carrion-vulture waitsTo tear his heart before the crowd.

Who make it seem more sweet to beThe little life of bank and brier,The bird who pipes his lone desireAnd dies unheard within his tree,

Who make it seem more sweet to be

The little life of bank and brier,

The bird who pipes his lone desire

And dies unheard within his tree,

Than he that warbles long and loud,And drops at Glory's temple-gates,For whom the carrion-vulture waitsTo tear his heart before the crowd.

Than he that warbles long and loud,

And drops at Glory's temple-gates,

For whom the carrion-vulture waits

To tear his heart before the crowd.

If this is more harsh reproof than a mere idle desire to be excited by a spectacle or by an event demands, it may nevertheless serve us as an antidote to the vain illusion that these multitudes are suddenly converted to a love of fine literature. They are not so converted, and fine literature—however scandalous it may sound in the ears of this generation to say it—is for the few.

How long, then, will the many permit themselves to be brow-beaten by the few? At the present time the oligarchy of taste governs our vast republic of readers. We tell them to praisethe Bishop of Oxford for his history, and Mr. Walter Pater for his essays, and Mr. Herbert Spencer for his philosophy, and Mr. George Meredith for his novels. They obey us, and these are great and illustrious personages about whom newspaper gossip is continually occupied, whom crowds, when they have the chance, hurry to gaze at, but whose books (or I am cruelly misinformed) brave a relatively small circulation. These reputations are like beautiful churches, into which people turn to cross themselves with holy water, bow to the altar, and then hurry out again to spend the rest of the morning in some snug tavern.

Among these churches of living fame, the noblest, the most exquisite was that sublime cathedral of song which we called Tennyson; and there, it is true, drawn by fashion and by a choral service of extreme beauty, the public had formed the habit of congregating. But at length, after a final ceremony of incomparable dignity, this minster has been closed. Where will the people who attended there go now? The other churches stand around, honoured and empty. Will they now be better filled? Or will some secularist mayor, of strong purpose and an enemy to sentiment, order them to be deserted altogether? We may, at any rate,be quite sure that this remarkable phenomenon of the popularity of Tennyson, however we regard it, is but transitory and accidental, or at most personal to himself. That it shows any change in the public attitude of reserved or grumbling respect to the best literature, and radical dislike to style, will not be seriously advanced.

What I dread, what I long have dreaded, is the eruption of a sort of Commune in literature. At no period could the danger of such an outbreak of rebellion against tradition be so great as during the reaction which must follow the death of our most illustrious writer. Then, if ever, I should expect to see a determined resistance made to the pretensions of whatever is rare, or delicate, or abstruse. At no time, I think, ought those who guide taste amongst us to be more on their guard to preserve a lofty and yet generous standard, to insist on the merits of what is beautiful and yet unpopular, and to be unaffected by commercial tests of distinction. We have lived for ten years in a fool's paradise. Without suspecting the truth, we have been passing through a period of poetic glory hardly to be paralleled elsewhere in our history. One by one great luminaries were removed—Rossetti, Newman, Arnold, Browning sank,each star burning larger as it neared the horizon. Still we felt no apprehension, saying, as we turned towards Farringford:

"Mais le père est là-bas, dans l'île."

Now he is gone also, and the shock of his extinction strikes us for the moment with a sense of positive and universal darkness.

But this very natural impression is a mistaken one. As our eyes grow accustomed to the absence of this bright particular planet, we shall be more and more conscious of the illuminating power of the heavenly bodies that are left. We shall, at least, if criticism directs us carefully and wholesomely. With all the losses that our literature has sustained, we are, still, more richly provided with living poets of distinction than all but the blossoming periods of our history have been. In this respect we are easily deceived by a glance at some chart of the course of English literature, where the lines of life of aged writers overlap those of writers still in their early youth. The worst pessimist amongst us will not declare that our poetry seems to be in the utterly and deplorably indigent condition in which the death of Burns appeared to leave it in 1796. Then the beholder, glancing round, would see nothing butCrabbe, grown silent for eleven years, Cowper insane, Blake undeveloped and unrecognised; the pompous, florid Erasmus Darwin left solitary master of the field. But we, who look at the chart, see Wordsworth and Coleridge on the point of evolution, Campbell and Moore at school, Byron and Shelley in the nursery, and Keats an infant. Who can tell what inheritors of unfulfilled renown may not now be staining their divine lips with the latest of this season's blackberries?

But we are not left to these conjectural consolations. I believe that I take very safe ground when I say that our living poets present a variety and amplitude of talent, a fulness of tone, an accomplishment in art, such as few other generations in England, and still fewer elsewhere, have been in a position to exult in. It would be invidious, and it might indeed be very difficult and tedious, to go through the list of those who do signal honour to our living literature in this respect. Without repeating the list so patiently drawn up and so humorously commented upon by Mr. Traill, it would be easy to select from it fifteen names, not one of which would be below the fair meridian of original merit, and many of which would rise far above it. Could so much have been said in 1592, or in 1692, or in1792? Surely, no. I must not be led to multiply names, the mere mention of which in so casual a manner can hardly fail to seem impertinent; yet I venture to assert that a generation which can boast of Mr. Swinburne and Miss Christina Rossetti, of Mr. William Morris and Mr. Coventry Patmore, of Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. Robert Bridges, has no reason to complain of lack of fire or elevation, grace or versatility.

It was only in Paradise, so we learn from St. Basil, that roses ever grew without thorns. We cannot have the rose of such an exceptional life as Tennyson's without suffering for it. We suffer by the void its cessation produces, the disturbance in our literary hierarchy that it brings, the sense of uncertainty and insufficiency that follows upon it. The death of Victor Hugo led to precisely such a rocking and swaying of the ship of literature in France, and to this day it cannot be said that the balance there is completely restored. I cannot think that we gain much by ignoring this disturbance, which is inevitable, and still less by folding our hands and calling out that it means that the vessel is sinking. It means nothing of the kind. What it does mean is that when a man of the very highest rank in the profession lives to an exceptionally great age, andretains his intellectual gifts to the end, combining with these unusual advantages the still more fortuitous ones of being singular and picturesque in his personality and the object of much ungratified curiosity, he becomes the victim, in the eyes of his contemporaries, of a sort of vertical mirage. He is seen up in the sky where no man could be. I trust I shall not be accused of anything like disrespect to the genius of Tennyson—which I loved and admired as nearly to the pitch of idolatry as possible—when I say that his reputation at this moment is largely mirage. His gifts were of the very highest order; but in the popular esteem, at this moment, he holds a position which is, to carry on the image, topographically impossible. No poet, no man, ever reached that altitude above his fellows.

The result of seeing one mountain in vertical mirage, and various surrounding acclivities (if that were possible) at their proper heights, would be to falsify the whole system of optical proportion. Yet this is what is now happening, and for some little time will continue to happenin crescendo, with regard to Tennyson and his surviving contemporaries. There is no need, however, to cherish "those gloomy thoughts led on by spleen" which the melancholy events of the past month haveawakened. The recuperative force of the arts has never yet failed the human race, and will not fail us now. All theTit-BitsandPearson's Weekliesin the world will not be able to destroy a fragment of pure and original literature, although the tastes they foster may delay its recognition and curtail its rewards.

The duty of all who have any influence on the public is now clear. So far from resigning the responsibility of praise and blame, so far from opening the flood-gates to what is bad—on the ground that the best is gone, and that it does not matter—it behoves those who are our recognised judges of literary merit to resist more strenuously than ever the inroads of mere commercial success into the Temple of Fame. The Scotch ministry preserve that interesting practice of "fencing the tables" of the Lord by a solemn searching of would-be communicants. Let the tables of Apollo be fenced, not to the exclusion or the discomfort of those who have a right to his sacraments, but to the chastening of those who have no other mark of his service but their passbook. And poetry, which survived the death of Chaucer, will recover even from the death of Tennyson.

1892.

FOOTNOTE:[1]See Mr. Hall Caine's interesting article in theTimesfor October 17th, 1892.

[1]See Mr. Hall Caine's interesting article in theTimesfor October 17th, 1892.

SHELLEY in 1892

Centenary Address delivered at Horsham, August 11, 1892

We meet to-day to celebrate the fact that, exactly one hundred years ago, there was born, in an old house in this parish, one of the greatest of the English poets, one of the most individual and remarkable of the poets of the world. This beautiful county of Sussex, with its blowing woodlands and its shining downs, was even then not unaccustomed to poetic honours. One hundred and thirty years before, it had given birth to Otway; seventy years before, to Collins. But charming as these pathetic figures were and are, not Collins and not Otway can compare for a moment with that writer who is the main intellectual glory of Sussex, the ever-beloved and ethereally illustrious Percy Bysshe Shelley. It has appeared to me that you might, as a Sussex audience, gathered in a Sussex town, like to be reminded, before we go any further, of the exact connection of our poet with the county—of the stake, as it is called, which his family held in Sussex, and of the period of his own residence in it. You will see that, although his native province lost him early, she had a strong claim upon his interests and associations.

When Shelley was born, on the 4th of August, 1792, his grandfather, afterwards a baronet, Sir Bysshe Shelley, was ensconced at Goring Castle, while his father, the heir to the title, Mr. Timothy Shelley, inhabited that famous house, Field Place, which lies here at your doors. Mr. Timothy Shelley had married a lady from your nearest eastern neighbour, the town of Cuckfield; he was M.P. for another Sussex borough, Shoreham; in the next Parliament he was to represent, if I am not mistaken, Horsham itself. The names which meet us in the earliest pages of the poet's biographies are all Sussex names. It was at Warnham that he was taught his earliest lessons, and it was in Warnham Pond that the great tortoise lurked which was the earliest of his visions. St. Irvine's, in whose woods he loved to wander by moonlight, has disappeared, but Strode is close to you still, and if St. Leonard's Forest has shrunken somewhat to the eastward since Shelley walked and raved in its allies, you still possess it in your neighbourhood.

Until Shelley was expelled from Oxford, Field Place was his constant residence out of school and college hours. Nor, although his father at first forbade him to return, was his connection with Sussex broken even then. The house of his uncle, Captain Pilfold, was always open to him at Cuckfield, and when the Duke of Norfolk made his kind suggestion that the young man should enter Parliament, as a species of moral sedative, it was to a Sussex borough that he proposed to nominate him. Shelley's first abortive volume of poems was set up by a Horsham printer, and it was from Hurstpierpoint that Miss Hitchener, afterwards known as the "Brown Demon," started on her disastrous expedition into the lives of the Shelleys. It was not until 1814, on the eve of his departure for the Continent, that Shelley came to Sussex for the last time, paying that furtive visit to his mother and sisters, on which, in order to conceal himself from his father, he buttoned the scarlet jacket of a guardsman round his attenuated form.

If I have endeavoured, by thus grouping together all the Sussex names which are connected with Shelley, to attract your personal and local sympathy around the career of the poet, it is with no intention to claim for him a provincial significance.Shelley does not belong to any one county, however rich and illustrious that county may be; he belongs to Europe—to the world. The tendency of his poetry and its peculiar accent were not so much English as European. He might have been a Frenchman, or an Italian, a Pole, or a Greek, in a way in which Wordsworth, for instance, or even Byron, could never have been anything but an Englishman. He passes, as we watch the brief and sparkling record of his life, from Sussex to the world. One day he is a child, sailing paper boats among the reeds in Warnham Pond; next day we look, and see, scarcely the son of worthy Mr. Timothy Shelley of Field Place, but a spirit without a country, "a planet-crested shape sweeping by on lightning-braided pinions" to scatter the liquid joy of life over humanity.

Into the particulars of this strange life I need not pass. You know them well. No life so brief as Shelley's has occupied so much curiosity, and for my part I think that even too minute inquiry has been made concerning some of its details. The "Harriet problem" leaves its trail across one petal of this rose; minuter insects, not quite so slimy, lurk where there should be nothing but colour and odour. We may well, I think, becontent to-day to take the large romance of Shelley's life, and leave any sordid details to oblivion. He died before he was quite thirty years of age, and the busy piety of biographers has peeped into the record of almost every day of the last ten of those years. What seems to me most wonderful is that a creature so nervous, so passionate, so ill-disciplined as Shelley was, should be able to come out of such an unprecedented ordeal with his shining garments so little specked with mire. Let us, at all events, to-day, think of the man only as "the peregrine falcon" that his best and oldest friends describe him.

We may, at all events, while a grateful England is cherishing Shelley's memory, and congratulating herself on his majestic legacy of song to her, reflect almost with amusement on the very different attitude of public opinion seventy and even fifty years ago. That he should have been pursued by calumny and prejudice through his brief, misrepresented life, and even beyond the tomb, can surprise no thinking spirit. It was not the poet who was attacked; it was the revolutionist, the enemy of kings and priests, the extravagant and paradoxical humanitarian. It is not needful, in order to defend Shelley's genius aright, to inveighagainst those who, taught in the prim school of eighteenth-century poetics, and repelled by political and social peculiarities which they but dimly understood, poured out their reprobation of his verses. Even his reviewers, perhaps, were not all of them "beaten hounds" and "carrion kites"; some, perhaps, were very respectable and rather narrow-minded English gentlemen, devoted to the poetry of Shenstone. The newer a thing is, in the true sense, the slower people are to accept it, and the abuse of theQuarterly Review, rightly taken, was but a token of Shelley's opulent originality.

To this unintelligent aversion there succeeded in the course of years an equally blind, although more amiable, admiration. Among a certain class of minds the reaction set in with absolute violence, and once more the centre of attention was not the poet and his poetry, but the faddist and his fads. Shelley was idealised, etherealised, and canonised. Expressions were used about his conduct and his opinions which would have been extravagant if employed to describe those of a virgin-martyr or of the founder of a religion. Vegetarians clustered around the eater of buns and raisins, revolutionists around the enemy of kings, social anarchists around the husband of Godwin'sdaughter. Worse than all, those to whom the restraints of religion were hateful, marshalled themselves under the banner of the youth who had rashly styled himself an atheist, forgetful of the fact that all his best writings attest that, whatever name he might give himself, he, more than any other poet of the age, saw God in everything. This also was a phase, and passed away. The career of Shelley is no longer a battlefield for fanatics of one sort or the other; if they still skirmish a little in its obscurer corners, the main tract of it is not darkened with the smoke from their artillery. It lies, a fair open country of pure poetry, a province which comes as near to being fairyland as any that literature provides for us.

We cannot, however, think of this poet as of a writer of verses in the void. He is anything but the "idle singer of an empty day." Shelley was born amid extraordinary circumstances into an extraordinary age. On the very day, one hundred years ago, when the champagne was being drunk in the hall of Field Place in honour of the birth of a son and heir to Mr. Timothy Shelley, the thunder-cloud of revolution was breaking over Europe. Never before had therebeen felt within so short a space of time so general a crash of the political order of things. Here, in England, we were spectators of the wild and sundering stress, in which the other kingdoms of Europe were distracted actors. The faces of Burke and of his friends wore "the expression of men who are going to defend themselves from murderers," and those murderers are called, during the infancy of Shelley, by many names, Mamelukes and Suliots, Poles and Swedes, besides the all-dreaded one ofsansculottes. In the midst of this turmoil Shelley was born, and the air of revolution filled his veins with life.

In Shelley we see a certain type of revolutionist, born out of due time, and directed to the bloodless field of literature. The same week that saw the downfall of La Fayette saw the birth of Shelley, and we might believe the one to be an incarnation of the hopes of the other. Each was an aristocrat, born with a passionate ambition to play a great part in the service of humanity; in neither was there found that admixture of the earthly which is needful for sustained success in practical life. Had Shelley taken part in active affairs, his will and his enthusiasm must have broken, like waves, against thecoarser type of revolutionist, against the Dantons and the Robespierres. Like La Fayette, Shelley was intoxicated with virtue and glory; he was chivalrous, inflammable, and sentimental. Happily for us, and for the world, he was not thrown into a position where these beautiful qualities could be displayed only to be shattered like a dome of many-coloured glass. He was the not unfamiliar figure of revolutionary times, thegrand seigneurenamoured of democracy. But he was much more than this; as Mr. Swinburne said long ago, Shelley "was born a son and soldier of light, an archangel winged and weaponed for angel's work." Let us attempt to discover what sort of prophecy it was that he blew through his golden trumpet.

It is in the period of youth that Shelley appeals to us most directly, and exercises his most unquestioned authority over the imagination. In early life, at the moment more especially when the individuality begins to assert itself, a young man or a young woman of feeling discovers in this poet certain qualities which appear to be not merely good, but the best, not only genuine, but exclusively interesting. At that age we ask for light, and do not care how it is distributed; formelody, and do not ask the purpose of the song; for colour, and find no hues too brilliant to delight the unwearied eye. Shelley satisfies these cravings of youth. His whole conception of life is bounded only by its illusions. The brilliancy of the morning dream, the extremities of radiance and gloom, the most pellucid truth, the most triumphant virtue, the most sinister guilt and melodramatic infamy, alone contrive to rivet the attention. All half-lights, all arrangements in grey or russet, are cast aside with impatience, as unworthy of the emancipated spirit. Winged youth, in the bright act of sowing its intellectual wild oats, demands a poet, and Horsham, just one hundred years ago, produced Shelley to satisfy that natural craving.

It is not for grey philosophers, or hermits wearing out the evening of life, to pass a definitive verdict on the poetry of Shelley. It is easy for critics of this temper to point out weak places in the radiant panoply, to say that this is incoherent, and that hysterical, and the other an ethereal fallacy. Sympathy is needful, a recognition of the point of view, before we can begin to judge Shelley aright. We must throw ourselves back to what we were at twenty, and recollect how dazzling, how fresh, howfull of colour, and melody, and odour, this poetry seemed to us—how like a May-day morning in a rich Italian garden, with a fountain, and with nightingales in the blossoming boughs of the orange-trees, with the vision of a frosty Apennine beyond the belt of laurels, and clear auroral sky everywhere above our heads. We took him for what he seemed, "a pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift," and we thought to criticise him as little as we thought to judge the murmur of the forest or the reflections of the moonlight on the lake. He was exquisite, emancipated, young like ourselves, and yet as wise as a divinity. We followed him unquestioning, walking in step with his panthers, as the Bacchantes followed Dionysus out of India, intoxicated with enthusiasm.

If our sentiment is no longer so rhapsodical, shall we blame the poet? Hardly, I think. He has not grown older, it is we who are passing further and further from that happy eastern morning where the light is fresh, and the shadows plain and clearly defined. Over all our lives, over the lives of those of us who may be seeking to be least trammelled by the commonplace, there creeps ever onward the stealthy tinge of conventionality, the admixture of the earthly. We cannot honestlywish it to be otherwise. It is the natural development, which turns kittens into cats, and blithe-hearted lads into earnest members of Parliament. If we try to resist this inevitable tendency, we merely become eccentric, a mockery to others, and a trouble to ourselves. Let us accept our respectability with becoming airs of gravity; it is another thing to deny that youth was sweet. When I see an elderly professor proving that the genius of Shelley has been overrated, I cannot restrain a melancholy smile. What would he, what would I, give for that exquisite ardour, by the light of which all other poetry than Shelley's seemed dim? You recollect our poet's curious phrase, that to go to him for common sense was like going to a gin-palace for mutton chops. The speech was a rash one, and has done him harm. But it is true enough that those who are conscious of the grossness of life, and are over-materialised, must go to him for the elixir and ether which emancipate the senses.

If I am right in thinking that you will all be with me in considering this beautiful passion of youth, this recapturing of the illusions, as the most notable of the gifts of Shelley's poetry to us, you will also, I think, agree with me in placing only second to it the witchery which enables this writer,more than any other, to seize the most tumultuous and agitating of the emotions, and present them to us coloured by the analogy of natural beauty. Whether it be the petulance of a solitary human being, to whom the little downy owl is a friend, or the sorrows and desires of Prometheus, on whom the primal elements attend as slaves, Shelley is able to mould his verse to the expression of feeling, and to harmonise natural phenomena to the magnitude or the delicacy of his theme. No other poet has so wide a grasp as he in this respect, no one sweeps so broadly the full diapason of man in nature. Laying hold of the general life of the universe with a boldness that is unparalleled, he is equal to the most sensitive of the naturalists in his exact observation of tender and humble forms.

And to the ardour of fiery youth and the imaginative sympathy of pantheism, he adds what we might hardly expect from so rapt and tempestuous a singer, the artist's self-restraint. Shelley is none of those of whom we are sometimes told in these days, whose mission is too serious to be transmitted with the arts of language, who are too much occupied with the substance to care about the form. All that is best in his exquisite collection of verse cries out against this wretched heresy.With all his modernity, his revolutionary instinct, his disdain of the unessential, his poetry is of the highest and most classic technical perfection. No one, among the moderns, has gone further than he in the just attention to poetic form, and there is so severe a precision in his most vibrating choruses that we are taken by them into the company, not of the Ossians and the Walt Whitmans, not of those who feel, yet cannot control their feelings, but of those impeccable masters of style,

who dwelt by the azure seaOf serene and golden Italy,Or Greece the mother of the free.

who dwelt by the azure sea

Of serene and golden Italy,

Or Greece the mother of the free.

And now, most inadequately and tamely, yet, I trust, with some sense of the greatness of my theme, I have endeavoured to recall to your minds certain of the cardinal qualities which animated the divine poet whom we celebrate to-day. I have no taste for those arrangements of our great writers which assign to them rank like schoolboys in a class, and I cannot venture to suggest that Shelley stands above or below this or that brother immortal. But of this I am quite sure, that when the slender roll is called of those singers, who make the poetry of England second only to that of Greece (if even ofGreece), however few are named, Shelley must be among them. To-day, under the auspices of the greatest poet our language has produced since Shelley died, encouraged by universal public opinion and by dignitaries of all the professions, yes, even by prelates of our national church, we are gathered here as a sign that the period of prejudice is over, that England is in sympathy at last with her beautiful wayward child, understands his great language, and is reconciled to his harmonious ministry. A century has gone by, and once more we acknowledge the truth of his own words:

The splendours of the firmament of timeMay be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;Like stars to their appointed height they climb.

The splendours of the firmament of time

May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;

Like stars to their appointed height they climb.

SYMBOLISM AND M. STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

The name which stands at the head of this essay is that of a writer who is at the present time more talked about, more ferociously attacked, more passionately beloved and defended, and at the same time less understood, than perhaps any other man of his intellectual rank in Europe. Even in the ferocious world of Parisian letters his purity of motive and dignity of attitude are respected. Benevolent to those younger than himself, exquisitely courteous and considerate in controversy, a master of that suavity and reserve the value of which literary persons so rarely appreciate, M. Mallarmé, to one who from a distance gazes with curiosity into the Parisian hurly-burly, appeals first by the beautiful amenity of his manners—a dreamy Sir Launcelot riding through a forest of dragons tohelp the dolorous lady of Poesy from pain. In the incessant pamphlet-wars of his party, others seem to strike for themselves, M. Mallarmé always for the cause; and when the battle is over, and the rest meet to carouse round a camp-fire, he is always found stealing back to the ivory tower of contemplation. Before we know the rights of the case, or have read a line of his verses, we are predisposed towards a figure so pure and so distinguished.

But though the personality of M. Mallarmé is so attractive, and though he marches at the head of a very noisy rabble, exceedingly little seems to be clearly known about him in this country. Until now, he has published in such a rare and cryptic manner, that not half a dozen of any one of his books can have reached England. Two or three abstruse essays in prose, published in theNational Observer, have lately amazed the Philistines. Not thus did Mr. Lillyvick understand that the French language was to be imparted to Morleena Kenwigs. Charming stories float about concerning Scotch mammas who subscribed to theNational Observerfor the use of their girls, and discovered that the articles were written in Moldo-Wallachian. M. Mallarmé's theories have been ridiculed and travestied, his style parodied, his practice gravelyrebuked; but what that practice and style and theories are, has scarcely been understood. M. Mallarmé has been wrapped up in the general fog which enfolds our British notions of symbolists and impressionists. If the school has had a single friend in England, it has been Mr. Arthur Symons, one of the most brilliant of our younger poets; and even he has been interested, I think, more in M. Verlaine than in the Symbolists and Décadents proper.

It was in 1886 that the Décadents first began to be talked about. Then it was that Arthur Rimbaud's famous sonnet about the colours of the vowels flashed into celebrity, and everybody was telling everybody else that

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