So spake glorious Hector, and stretched out his arms to his boy. But the child shrank back to the bosom of hisfair-girdled nurse, dismayed at his dear father’s aspect, and in dread at the horse-hair crest that he beheld nodding fiercely from the helmet’s top. Then his dear father laughed aloud, and his lady-mother; and forthwith glorious Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it, all gleaming, upon the ground; then kissed he his dear son, and dandled him in his arms.
So spake glorious Hector, and stretched out his arms to his boy. But the child shrank back to the bosom of hisfair-girdled nurse, dismayed at his dear father’s aspect, and in dread at the horse-hair crest that he beheld nodding fiercely from the helmet’s top. Then his dear father laughed aloud, and his lady-mother; and forthwith glorious Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it, all gleaming, upon the ground; then kissed he his dear son, and dandled him in his arms.
Surely everybody feels the poetic, the romantic character of the incident, founded on the loves of the household and the hearth. Turn to Chaucer, to Milton, to Shakespeare, to any great Poet, and you will find that, like Dante, they included simple duties in their poetic conception of woman. Only in an age sicklied o’er with lackadaisical or sensuous sentimentality could it be otherwise.
But a poet’s ideals of what women should be, and often are, is shown not only by what he extols, but by what he condemns, and, in this respect, Dante, poet-like, is sparing and reserved. Most—indeed, nearly all—of the persons whom he indicates by name as being eternally punished in the Circles of the Inferno are men; partly, perhaps, because Dante, who, it must be owned, would have been loved by Doctor Johnson as a good hater, had political and other scores of the kind to settle with those he describes as having a perpetual lease in the lower regions, but in part, also, because he could not bring himself to write harshly of any woman he had known. But to a few notorious female rebels against what he deemed womanly character and conduct, and who had lived many hundred years before his day, he is pitilessly severe. It would be difficult to quote lines from any Poet more so than those in which he describes Semiramis as among those whom
Nulla speranza gli conforta mai.
She has not even hope to fall back on as a mitigation of her endless torments. Of her offences against his ideal of woman he says:
A vizio di lussuria fu si rotta,Che libito fe lecito in sua legge,Per torre il biasmo in che era condotta.
She was so steeped in wickedness that she promulgated laws permitting others to act as she herself did, in order to annul the stigma that would otherwise have been attached to her. He is a little hard and unjust to Dido, whom Virgil treats with such exquisite tenderness, in naming her along with “lustful Cleopatra” in the same passage. To Helen he is more indulgent, in words at least, content with saying that she was the guilty cause of dire events, “per cui tanto reo tempo si volse”; but she does not escape endless expiation. Some of my readers will remember how much more damning of her conduct is Virgil in the Sixth Book of theÆneid, where Priam represents her as giving the signal to the Greeks to enter Troy, and having concealed his sword, that he may fall a helpless victim to the vengeance of Paris, whom the fair wanton wished to propitiate in the hour of her lord’s triumph.
But what is Dante’s attitude towards Francesca da Rimini, in the most beautiful passage, it seems to me, in the whole range of narrative Poetry? Many, I am sure, know it by heart, and have thereby fortified themselves against the modern less-refined treatment of it even by men aspiring to be regarded as poets. Often as one has repeated it to oneself, one has never felt that Dante had for Francesca any harsher feeling than sympathetic compassion. He casts around her the halo of the purest sentiment; he brings music of matchless verbal sweetness to the description of the hour, theplace, the circumstances of her disinterested and unselfish surrender. The very lines in which he leads up to her pathetic story, lines in which his feeling concerning frail and hapless love seems to be purposely expressed in general and wide-embracing language, are in themselves significant to those who observe their meaning. He says that when he heard Virgil name the numerous knights and fair dames who were suffering from having subordinated prudence to impulse, he only felt troubled for them and bewildered.
Pietà mi vinse, e fu quasi smarrito.
The first thing he notices in Francesca and her lover is their buoyancy in the air, as though they were the finest and most tenuous of spirits; and when he says to Virgil that he would fain have speech with them, the reply is that he has only to appeal to them by the love that still moves them, and they will draw nigh to him. Then follows that lovely simile of doves floating to call, and Francesca’s recognition of Dante with the words:
O animal grazioso e benigno!
who is sure to have pity on her hapless doom. When Francesca pauses in her narrative, and Dante bows his head for sorrow, Virgil shows what is his own feeling by the brief question addressed to Dante, “What think you?” Dante replies in a voice broken by emotion:
... O lasso,Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disioMenò costoro al doloroso passo!
and, turning to Francesca, he says that her fate fills his eyes with tears and his heart with anguish. Encouraged by the poet’s sympathy, she tells him what happened, “al tempo de’ dolci sospiri,” in the season of sweetsighs, in itself a preliminary and melodious appeal for indulgence, and that he must be patient with her if she tells her tale, sobbing as she speaks. Torn between sweet remembrance and regret, she cannot refrain from recalling
... il disiato risoEsser baciato da cotanto amante,
or intimating with supreme delicacy what ensued in the final line of her narrative:
Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.
The story she had been reading with Paolo Malatesta of Lancelot and Guinevere fell from their hands, and that day they read no further on. And Dante? All he says is that he felt like to die for grief, and fell to the ground even as a dead body falls. From the first line to the last he utters no word of blame or reproach. He would not have been a poet had he done so.
Let us now turn from the fifth book of theInfernoto the third of theParadiso, that we may add to our knowledge of Dante’s poetic conception of Woman. He there beholds Piccarda Donati, whom he had known in her lifetime on earth, but at first does not recognise, because, as she herself says with heavenly humility, she is now much fairer to look on than she was then. Withal, she adds, she occupies only an inferior place in Heaven, because she was forced, and sorely against her own will, to violate her vow of virginity. She begins her story by saying simply:
Io fui nel mondo vergine sorella,
that she was a nun dedicated to God, and goes on to tell how she was violently torn from her cloister by her brother, Forese Donati, and his accomplices, to furtherfamily ambition, and compelled to submit to the marriage rite. Dante, feeling, as it seems to me, that this did not detract from her merit, asks her if she is contented with the relatively inferior position in Paradise she says she is assigned among celestial denizens. I trust many readers know her reply, for it is one of the noblest and most beautiful passages in the whole of theDivina Commedia. Like all fine passages in Poetry, adequate rendering of it in another tongue is not attainable. But the best translation of it with which I am acquainted is that of C. B. Cayley—no Cary, mark you—interza rima, and of which I remember I availed myself when, many years ago, I was beginning to learn Italian, and read Dante for the first time among the then leafy-covered ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. Here is Piccarda’s reply:
Our will, O brother mine, is kept at restBy power of heavenly love, which makes us will,For nought else thirsting, only things possessed.If we should crave to be exalted stillMore highly, then our will would not agreeWith His, who gives to us the place we fill.For ’tis of our own will the very ground,That in the will of God we govern ours.
Then comes that supremely beautiful line, not to be surpassed by any line even in Dante:
In la sua voluntade è nostra pace.Our peace is in submission to His will.
Is it fanciful to think that in that line also Dante has betrayed and bequeathed to us, perhaps unconsciously, his main conception of Woman, as a gentle and adoring creature, who finds her greatest happiness in subordinating her will to those who are deserving of the trust she reposes in them?
But Piccarda does not end the dialogue with her own story. She tells Dante that the great Costanza, as she calls her, who married the German Henry the Fifth, was also torn from a convent where she had taken the veil, and forced into Royal nuptials. But when she was thus compelled to violate her vows,
Contra suo grado e contra buona usanza,Non fu dal vel del cuor giammai disciolta.She wore the vestal’s veil within her heart.
And, as if to indicate that the conduct of each was condoned by the Virgin of Virgins, Dante concludes by saying:
...AveMaria, cantando; e cantando vanio,She faded from our sight, singingAve Maria,
and once again he concentrated his gaze on Beatrice, Beatrice whom he regarded as his highest poetic conception of Woman. Fully to grasp what that was, we must descend from Heaven to earth and recall the origin and growth of his adoration of her, as described in theVita Nuova.
To some commentators on Dante, the narrative to be read there has suggested difficulties when, in reality, there are none, leading them to urge that a child of nine years of age could not feel what is therein described, and that, therefore, it is purely symbolic, and was written not about any human creature, but indicated Philosophy, or the desire for spiritual enlightenment and the search for heavenly wisdom, which was Dante’s overpowering impulse almost from the cradle. The answer to such an interpretation of the passage is that it betrays an utter ignorance of the emotional precocity of the poetic temperament, and of the vague but intense hold Love can acquire over Poets from their earliest years.
Of the reality underlying the idealism of theVita Nuova, we therefore need have no doubt whatever. Dante’s Beatrice was Beatrice Portinari, a Florentine maid first, a Florentine bride later, whose people lived in the Corso, near the Canto de’ Pazzi.
All that follows in the narrative of theVita Nuovamay be relied on just as implicitly; how, when she was eighteen years of age, he met her again walking in the streets of Florence between two noble ladies older than herself, and graciously, as Dante says, returned his salute; how, with the naïf shyness of a youth consumed with love, he tried to dissemble it by pretending to be enamoured of another damsel, which only made Beatrice look away when she met him; and how he contrived to convey to her indirectly, through a poem he wrote, that she had misjudged him; how, thereon, she looked on him graciously once more; and how, alas! in her twenty-fifth year, she was summoned from this world to the world above. Then theVita Nuovadraws mournfully to a close, ending with these significant words:—
After I had written this sonnet, there appeared to me a wonderful vision, in which I saw things that made me determine to write no more of this dear Saint until I should be able to write of her more worthily; and, of a surety, she knows that I study to attain unto this end with all my powers. So, if it shall please Him by Whom all things live, to spare my life for some more years, I hope to say that of her which never yet hath been said of any lady; and then may it please Him, who is the Father of all good, to suffer my soul to see the glory of its mistress, the sainted Beatrice, who now, abiding in glory, looketh upon the face of Him who is blessed for ever and ever.
After I had written this sonnet, there appeared to me a wonderful vision, in which I saw things that made me determine to write no more of this dear Saint until I should be able to write of her more worthily; and, of a surety, she knows that I study to attain unto this end with all my powers. So, if it shall please Him by Whom all things live, to spare my life for some more years, I hope to say that of her which never yet hath been said of any lady; and then may it please Him, who is the Father of all good, to suffer my soul to see the glory of its mistress, the sainted Beatrice, who now, abiding in glory, looketh upon the face of Him who is blessed for ever and ever.
For the fulfilment of that determination we must return to theDivina Commedia, written in the fullnessof the Poet’s powers. But there are three lines in theVita Nuovaabout the death of Beatrice that have haunted me ever since I first read them, and whose beauty, I am sure, all will feel:
Non la ci tolse qualità di gelo,Nè di color, siccome l’altro fece,Ma sola fu sua gran benignitade:
lines very difficult to translate, but the meaning of which is that she died neither from chill nor from fever, which carries off other mortals, but only of her great benignness, or excess of goodness, which rendered earth an unfitting dwelling-place for her, and Paradise her only true home.
It is not necessary to comment here on the First Canto of theDivina Commedia. That, one has done already before the Dante Society, and it is not requisite for one’s present theme. But in Canto the Second we meet with the Beatrice of theVita Nuova. She it is that sends Virgil, who dwells in the neutral territory of Limbo, to the Poet, saying:
Io son Beatrice, che ti faccio andare:Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare.
And not only does she say that she is animated by love, which has caused her, now in Heaven, to feel so compassionately towards him, but also because he loved her so while she was on earth, and continued to do so after she had quitted it, with a fidelity that has lifted him above the crowd of ordinary mortals, and made of him a Poet. Here, let it be said in passing, we get another indication of Dante’s poetic conception of Woman, which is, among other qualities, to co-operate in the making and fostering of Poets, a mission in which they have never been wanting.Where, indeed, is the Poet who could not say of some woman, and, if he be fortunate, of more than one, what, in the Twenty-second Canto of thePurgatorio, Dante makes Statius say to Virgil, “Per te poeta fui,” “It was through you that I became a Poet.”
Throughout the remaining Cantos of theInferno, Beatrice naturally is never mentioned, nor yet in thePurgatorio, till we reach Canto the Thirtieth, wherein occurs perhaps the most painful scene in the awe-inspiring poem. In it she descends from Heaven, an apparition of celestial light, compared by the Poet to the dazzling dawn of a glorious day. Smitten with fear, he turns for help to Virgil, but Virgil has left him. “Weep not,” says Beatrice to him, “that Virgil is no longer by your side; you will need all your tears when you hear me.” Then begins her terrible arraignment:
Guardaci ben: ben sem, ben sem Beatrice.Look on me well! Yes, I am Beatrice.
Confused, Dante gazes upon the ground, and then glances at a fountain hard by; but, seeing his own image trembling in the water, he lowers his eyes to the green sward encircling it, and fixes them there, while she upbraids him for his deviation from absolute fidelity to her memory, and his disregard of her heavenly endeavours still to help and purify him. Boccaccio says that Dante was a man of strong passions, and possibly, indeed probably, he was. But Beatrice seems to reproach him with only one transgression, and, if one is to say what one thinks, she has always appeared to me a little hard on him. Nor does she rest content till she has compelled him to confess his fault. He does so, and then she tells him to lay asidehis grief, and think no more of it, for he is forgiven. Perhaps, in mitigation of the feeling that her severity was in excess of the cause, one ought to remember, since it is peculiarly pertinent to my theme, that we are in the above harrowing scene presented with the crowning characteristic of Dante’s poetic conception of Woman, that, be the offence against her what it may, she forgets and forgives.
It might be interesting on some other occasion to inquire how far Dante’s poetic conception of Woman is shared by Poets generally, and by the greater Poets of our own land in particular. Meanwhile one may affirm that the inquiry would serve to show that it is in substance the same, though no other Poet, in whatsoever tongue, has extolled and glorified a woman as Dante did Beatrice. But Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, could all be shown, by apposite illustration, to leave on the mind a conception of woman as a being tender, devoted, faithful, helpful, “sweet, and serviceable,” as Tennyson says of Elaine, quick to respond to affection, sensitive to beauty in Nature and Arts, sympathising companion alike of the hearth and of man’s struggle with life—in a word, a creature of whom it is true to say, as, indeed, Byronhassaid, that “Love is her whole existence,” meaning by Love not what is too frequently in these days falsely presented to us in novels as such, but Love through all the harmonious scale of loving, maternal, filial, conjugal, romantic, religious, and universal.
Read then the Poets. They have a nobler conception of woman and of life than the novelists. Their unobtrusive but conspicuous teaching harmonises with the conduct of the best women, and has its deepfoundation in a belief in the beneficent potency of Love, from the most elementary up to an apprehension of the meaning of the last line of theDivina Commedia:
L’amor che muove il Sole e l’altre stelle.Love that keeps the sun in its course, and journeys with the planets in their orbit.
The term Pessimism has in these later days been so intimately associated with the philosophical theories of a well-known German writer, that I can well excuse those who ask, What may be the connection between Pessimism and Poetry? There are few matters of human interest that may not become suitable themes for poetic treatment; but I scarcely think Metaphysics is among them. It is not, therefore, to Schopenhauer’s theory of the World conceived as Will and Idea, that I invite your attention. The Pessimism with which we are concerned is much older than Metaphysics, is as old as the human heart, and is never likely to become obsolete. It is the Pessimism of which the simplest, the least cultured, and the most unsophisticated of us may become the victims, and which expresses the feeling that, on the whole, life is rather a bad business, that it is not worth having, and that it is a thing which, in the language used by the Duke inMeasure for Measure, in order to console Claudio, none but fools would keep.
Now, as all forms of feeling, and most forms of thought, are reflected in the magic mirror of Poetry, it is only natural that gloomy views of existence, of the individual life, and of the world’s destiny should from time to time find expression in the poet’s verse. There is quite enough pain in the experience of the individual,quite enough vicissitude in the history of nations, quite enough doubt and perplexity in the functions and mission of mankind, for even the most cheerful and masculine Song to change sometimes into the pathetic minor. What I would ask you to consider with me is if there be not a danger lest poetry should remain for long in this minor key, and if the Poet does not find ample justification and warrant—nay, should he be a true and comprehensive interpreter of life, of
All moods, all passions, all delights,Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
if he does not find himself compelled, in reply to the question, “What of the night?” to answer, “The stars are still shining.”
No survey of the attitude of Poetry towards Pessimism would be satisfactory that confined itself to one particular age; and I shall ask you, therefore, to attend to the utterances of poets in other generations than our own. But, since our own age necessarily interests us the most, let us at leastbeginwithIt.
I should be surprised to find any one doubting that during the last few years a wave of disillusion, of doubt, misgiving, and despondency has passed over the world. We are no longer so confident as we were in the abstract wisdom and practical working of our Institutions; we no longer express ourselves with such certainty concerning the social and moral advantages of our material discoveries; we entertain growing anxiety as to the future of our Commerce; many persons have questioned the very foundations of religious belief, and numbers have taken refuge from conflicting creeds in avowed Agnosticism, or the confession that we know and can know absolutelynothing concerning what it had long been assumed it most behoves us to know. One by one, all the fondly cherished theories of life, society and Empire; our belief in Free Trade as the evangelist of peace, the solution of economic difficulties and struggles, and the sure foundation of national greatness; all the sources of our satisfaction with ourselves, our confidence in our capacity to reconcile the rivalry of capital and labour, to repress drunkenness, to abolish pauperism, to form a fraternal confederation with our Colonies, and to be the example to the whole world of wealth, wisdom, and virtue, are one by one deserting us. We no longer believe that Great Exhibitions will disarm the inherent ferocity of mankind, that a judicious administration of the Poor Law will gradually empty our workhouses, or that an elastic law of Divorce will correct the aberrations of human passion and solve all the problems of the hearth. The boastfulness, the sanguine expectations, the confident prophecies of olden times are exchanged for hesitating speculations and despondent whispers. We no longer seem to know whither we are marching, and many appear to think that we are marching to perdition. We have curtailed the authority of kings; we have narrowed the political competence of aristocracies; we have widened the suffrage, till we can hardly widen it any further; we have introduced the ballot, abolished bribery and corruption, and called into play a more active municipal life; we have multiplied our railways, and the pace of our travel has been greatly accelerated. Telegraph and telephone traverse the land. Surgical operations of the most difficult and dangerous character are performed successfully by the aid of anæsthetics, without pain to the patient. We have forced fromheaven more light than ever Prometheus did; with the result that we transcend him likewise in our pain. No one would assert that we are happier, more cheerful, more full of hope, than our predecessors, or that we confront the Future with greater confidence. All our Progress, so far, has ended in Pessimism more or less pronounced; by some expressed more absolutely, by some with more moderation; but felt by all, permeating every utterance, and infiltrating into every stratum of thought.
Now let us see to what extent these gloomy views have found expression in poetry, and, first of all, in the writings of not only the most widely read but the most sensitive and receptive poet of our time, Alfred Tennyson. Tennyson came of age in 1830, or just on the eve of the first Reform Bill, when a great Party in the State, which was to enjoy almost a monopoly of power for the next thirty years, firmly believed, and was followed by a majority of the nation in believing, that we had only to legislate in a generous and what was called a liberal sense, to bring about the Millennium within a reasonable period. They had every possible opportunity of putting their belief into practice, and they did so with generous ardour. Now in that year 1830 there appeared what was practically Tennyson’s first volume; and save in the instance of the short poem beginning
You ask me, why, tho’ ill at ease,Within this region I subsist,
and the somewhat longer but still comparatively brief one, opening with
Love thou thy land, with love far-broughtFrom out the storied Past,
there is no reference in it to the political or social condition of the English people. The bulk of the poems had evidently been composed, so to speak, in the lofty vacuum created by the poet and the artist for himself, save where, in the lines,
Vex not thou the Poet’s mindWith thy shallow wit:Vex not thou the poet’s mind,For thou canst not fathom it,
he seemed to be giving the great body of his countrymen notice that they had nothing in common with him, or he with them. And, in the two exceptions I have named, what is his attitude? You all remember the lines:
But pamper not a hasty time,Nor feed with vague imaginingsThe herd, wild hearts and feeble wingsThat every sophister can lime.
And so he goes on, through stanzas with which, I am sure, you are thoroughly familiar, ending with the often-quoted couplet:
Earn well the thrifty months, nor wedRaw Haste, half-sister to Delay.
It would be difficult to find, in verse, a more terse or accurate embodiment of what, in no Party sense, we may call the Conservative mind, the Conservative way of looking at things, or a more striking instance of contemporaneous verse reflecting what had recently been the average public temper of the moment. The England of the years that immediately preceded 1830 was an England wearied with the strain and stress of the great war and the mighty agitations of the early part of the century, and now, craving for repose, was in politics more or less stationary. Therefore in this earliestvolume, of one of the most sensitive and receptive of writers, we encounter only quiet panegyrics of
A land of settled government,A land of just and old renown,Where Freedom slowly broadens downFrom precedent to precedent.Where Faction seldom gathers head,But, by degrees to fulness wrought,The strength of some diffusive thoughtHath time and space to work and spread.
Here we have none of the rebellious political protests of Byron, none of the iconoclastic fervour of Shelley, none even of the philosophic yearning of Wordsworth. It was a Conservative, a self-satisfied England, and the youthful Tennyson accordingly was perfectly well satisfied with it, evidently having as yet no cognizance of the fact that Radicalism was already more than muling and pewking in the arms of its Whig nurse, and that Reforms were about to be carried neither “slowly,” nor by “still degrees,” nor in accordance with any known “precedent.”
Tennyson’s next volume was not published till 1842. During the twelve years that had elapsed since the appearance of its predecessor, a mighty change had come not only over the dream, but over the practice, of the English People. It was an England in which the stationary or conservative tone of thought of which I spoke was, if not extinct, discredited and suppressed, and the fortunes of the Realm were moulded by the generous and hopeful theories of Liberalism. Tennyson meanwhile had been subjected to the influences of what he called the wondrous Mother Age; and harken how now—it scarcely sounds like the same voice—the eulogist of the “storied Past,” the deprecator of “crudeimaginings” and of a “hasty time,” confronts the dominant spirit and rising impulses of the new generation:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm;Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’dIn the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.
Did Optimism ever find a clearer, more enthusiastic, or more confident voice than that? I have sometimes thought that when the Historian comes to write, in distant times, of the rise, progress, and decline of Liberalism in England, he will cite that passage as the melodious compendium of its creed. You all know where the passage comes; for you have, I am sure, the firstLocksley Hallby heart.
But there is anotherLocksley Hall, theLocksley Hallwhich the Author himself callsLocksley Hall Sixty Years After, published as recently as 1886. You are acquainted with it, no doubt; but I should be surprised to find any one quite so familiar with it as with its predecessor. It is not so attractive, so fascinating, so saturated with beauty. But for my purpose it is eminently instructive, and I will ask you to listen to some of its rolling couplets.
Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! who can tell how all will end?Read the wide world’s annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend.Hope the best, but hold the Present fatal daughter of the Past,Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hour will last.Ay, if dynamite and revolver leave you courage to be wise:When was age so cramm’d with menace? madness? written, spoken lies?Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn,Cries to Weakest as to Strongest, “Ye are equals, equal-born.”Equal-born? O yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat.Charm us, Orator, till the Lion look no larger than the Cat.Till the Cat thro’ that mirage of overheated language loomLarger than the Lion,—Demos end in working its own doom.Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! once again the sickening game;Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.Step by step we gain’d a freedom known to Europe, known to all;Step by step we rose to greatness,—thro’ the tonguesters we may fall.
Was there ever such a contrast as between these twoLocksley Halls? The same poet, the same theme, the same metre, but how different the voice, the tone, the tendency, the conclusion! All the Liberalism, all the enthusiasm, the hope, the confidence, of former years have vanished, and in their place we have reactionary despondency. It is as though the same hand that wrote the Christening Ode to Liberalism, had composed a dirge to be chanted over its grave.
The genius of Tennyson needs no fresh panegyric. It is but yesterday he died, in the fullness of his Fame; and that his works will be read so long as the English language remains a living tongue, I cannot doubt. But if, while his claim to the very highest place as an artist must ever remain uncontested, doubts should be expressed concerning his equality with the very greatest poets, those who express that doubt will, I imagine,base their challenge on the excessive receptivity, and consequent lack of serenity of his mind. In the firstLocksley Hallthe poet is an Optimist. In the secondLocksley Hallhe is a Pessimist. And why? Because, when the first was written, the prevailing tone of the age was optimistic; and, when the second was composed, the prevailing tone of the time had become pessimistic.
It will scarcely be doubted, therefore, that there does exist a real and a very grave danger lest Poetry should, in these perplexing and despondent days, not only be closely associated with Pessimism, but should become for the most part its voice and echo. I am precluded from presenting to you illustrations of this danger from the works of living writers of verse. But in truth, the malady of which I am speaking—for malady, in my opinion, it is—began to manifest itself long before the present generation, long before Tennyson wrote, and when indeed he was yet a child in the cradle. The main original source of Modern Pessimism is the French movement known as the Revolution, which, by exciting extravagant hopes as to the happy results to be secured from the emancipation of the individual, at first generated a fretful impatience at the apparently slow fulfilment of the dream, and finally aroused a sceptical and reactionary despondency at the only too plain and patent demonstration that the dream was not going to be fulfilled at all. It is this blending of wild hopes and extravagant impatience that inspired and informed the poetry of Shelley, that producedQueen Mab,The Revolt of Islam, andPrometheus Unbound. In Byron it was impatience blent with disillusion that dictatedChilde Harold,Manfred, andCain, and finally culminated in the mockery ofDon Juan. Keats, while ostensibly holding aloof from the political and socialissues of his time, succumbed and ministered to the disease, even if unconsciously and unintentionally, more even than either Byron or Shelley; fortheywent on fighting against, whilehepassively submitted, to it. Keats found nothing in his own time worth sympathising with or singing about, and so took refuge in mythological and classical themes, or in the expression of states of feeling in which he grows half in love with easeful death, in which more than ever it seems sweet to die and to cease upon the midnight with no pain, and to the high requiem of the nightingale to become a sod that does not hear.
Now it is an instructive circumstance that, in recent years, a distinct and decided preference has been manifested both by the majority of critics and by the reading public for the poetry of Keats even over the poetry of the other two writers I have named in connection with him. In Byron, notwithstanding his rebellious tendency, notwithstanding the gloom that often overshadows his verse, notwithstanding his being one of the exponents of those exaggerated hopes and that exaggerated despondency of which I have spoken, there was a considerable fund of common sense and a good deal of manliness. He was a man of the world and could not help being so, in spite of his attitude of hostility to it. Moreover, in many of his poems, action plays a conspicuous part, and the general passions, interests, and politics of mankind are dealt with by him in a more or less practical spirit, and as though they concerned him likewise. Shelley, too, not unoften condescended to deal with the political, social, and religious polemics of his time, though he always did so in a passionate and utterly impracticable temper, and would necessarily leave on the mind of the reader,the conviction that everything in the world is amiss, and that the only possible remedy is the abolition of everything that had hitherto been regarded as an indispensable part of the foundation of human society. But Keats does not trouble himself about any of these things. He gives them the go-by, he ignores them, and only asks to be allowed to leave the world unseen, and with the nightingale, to fade away into the forest dim.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forgetWhat thou among the leaves hast never known,The weariness, the fever, and the fretHere, where men sit and hear each other groan;Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;Where but to think is to be full of sorrowAnd leaden-eyed despairs;Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
This is the voice, I say, which, during the last few years, has been preferred even to Shelley’s, and very much preferred to Byron’s. And why? You will perhaps say that Keats’s workmanship is fascinatingly beautiful. In the passage I have cited, and in the entire poem from which it is taken, that unquestionably is so. But I trust I shall not give offence if I say that the number of my countrymen and countrywomen who lay stress on the artistic manner, whether in verse or prose, in which an opinion is expressed, compared with the number of those who value poetry or prose chiefly because it expresses the opinions they value and the sentiments they cherish, is very small. No, Keats is preferred because Keats turns aside from the world at large, and thinks and writes only of individual feeling. Hence he has been more welcomed by recent critics, and by recent readers of poetry. Indeed, certain criticshave laboured to erect it into a dogma, indeed into an absolute literary and critical canon, that a poet who wishes to attain true distinction must turn his back on politics, on people, on society, on his country, on patriotism, on everything in fact save books—his own thoughts, his own feelings, and his own art. Because Byron did not do so they have dubbed him a Philistine; and because Pope did precisely the reverse, and the reverse, no doubt, overmuch, they assert that he was not a poet at all.
It is not necessary to dwell on the fatuousness of such criticism, more especially as one discerns welcome signs of a disposition on the part of the reading public to turn away from these guides, and a disposition even on the part of the guides themselves in some degree to reconsider and revise their unfortunate utterances. But I have alluded to the doctrine in question, in order to show you to what lengths Pessimism, which is only a compendious expression of dissatisfaction with things in general, in other words with life, with society, and with mankind, can go, and how it has culminated in such disdain of them by poets, that they brush them aside as subjects unworthy of the Muse. Surely Pessimism in Poetry can no farther go, than to assume, without question, that man, life, society, patriotism are not worth a song?
I should not wonder if some will have been saying to themselves, “But what about Wordsworth;Wordsworth, who was the contemporary, and at least the equal, alike in genius and in influence, of the three poets just named?” I have not forgotten Wordsworth. Wordsworth was of too pious a temperament, using the word pious in its very largest signification, to be a Pessimist; for true piety and Pessimism are irreconcilable.Nevertheless Wordsworth, as a poet, likewise experienced, and experienced acutely, the influence of the French Revolution. Upon this point there can be no difference of opinion; for he himself left it on record in a well-known passage. Everybody knows with what different eyes Wordsworth finally looked on the French Revolution; how utterly he broke with its tenets, its promises, its offspring; taking refuge from his disappointment.
But something akin to despondency, if too permeated with sacred resignation wholly to deserve that description, may be discovered in the attitude henceforward assumed by Wordsworth, as a poet, towards the world, society, and mankind. Not only did he write a long poem,The Recluse, but he himself was a recluse, and the whole ofThe Excursionis the composition of a recluse. Matthew Arnold, always a high authority on Wordsworth, has said:
But Wordsworth’s eyes avert their kenFrom half of human fate.
Indeed they did; turning instead to the silence that is in the sky, to the sleep that is in the hills, to the mountains, the flowers, and the poet’s own solitarymeditations. He declared that he would rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn than one of those Christian worldlings, of which society seemed to him mainly to consist. This is not necessarily Pessimism. But it goes perilously near to it; and the boundary line would have been crossed, but that Wordsworth’s prayer was answered, in which he petitioned that his days might be linked each to each by natural piety.
Of Matthew Arnold himself, as a poet, I am able to speak; for though he was not long ago one’s contemporary, he is no longer one of ourselves. In Matthew Arnold it has always seemed to me, the poet and the man,his reason and his imagination, were not quite one. They were harnessed together rather than incorporated one with the other; and, many years before he died, if I may press the comparison a little farther, the poet, the imaginative part of him became lame and halt, and he conveyed his mind in the humbler one-horse vehicle of prose. The poetic impulse in him was not strong enough to carry him along permanently against the prosaic opposition of life. Nevertheless, he was a poet who wrote some very beautiful poetry; and he exercised a powerful influence, both as a poet and as a prose-writer, on the thoughts and sentiments of his time. Now, what do we find him saying? Listen!
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,The other powerless to be born,With nowhere yet to rest my head,Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.Their faith, My tears, the world deride,I come to shed them at your side.There yet perhaps may dawn an age,More fortunate alas! than we,Which without hardness will be sage,And gay without frivolity.Sons of the world, oh haste those years!But, till they rise, allow our tears.
Hark to the words he puts into the mouth of Empedocles:
And yet what days were those, Parmenides!Then we could still enjoy, then neither thoughtNor outward things were closed and dead to us;But we received the shock of mighty thoughtsOn simple minds with a pure natural joy.······We had not lost our balance then, nor grownThought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy.
In another poem he declares:
Achilles ponders in his tent:The Kings of modern thought are dumb;Silent they are, though not content,And wait to see the future come.······Our fathers watered with their tearsThe sea of time whereon we sail;Their voices were in all men’s earsWho passed within their puissant hail.Still the same ocean round us raves,But we stand mute and watch the waves.
Last and worst of all, and in utter despondency and pessimism he cries:
Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead,Your social order, too!Where tarries He, the Power who said,See, I make all things new?... The past is out of date,The future not yet born;And who can be alone elate,While the world lies forlorn?
Can Pessimism in Poetry go farther than that? Many will perhaps think it cannot; but, unfortunately, it can. It is only from poets who are dead, if dead but recently, that one can draw one’s illustrations; otherwise I could suggest you should read to yourselves volume upon volume of verse, the one long weary burden of which is the misery of being alive. I daresay you will not be sorry that one is precluded from introducing these melancholy minstrels. But the spirit that imbues and pervades them is compendiously and conveniently expressed in a composition that Icanread to you, and which I select because it seems to express, in reasonably small compass, the indictment which our metrical pessimists labour to bring against existence.
I have confined my survey entirely to poets of our own land, and have said nothing to you of Giacomo Leopardi, the celebrated Italian Pessimistic Poet; nothing of Heine, whose beautiful but too often cynical lyrics must be known to you either in the original German, or in one or other of the various English versions, into which they have been rendered; nothing of the long procession of railers, sometimes bestial, nearly always repulsive, in French verse, beginning with Baudelaire, and coming down to thepetits crevésof poetry who are not ashamed to be known by the name ofdécadens, and who certainly deserve it, for if they possess nothing else, they possess to perfection the art of sinking. One would naturally expect to find in the country where occurred the French Revolution, the most violent forms of the malady which, as I have said, is mainly attributable to it; and surely it is a strong confirmation of the truth of that theory that it is in France poetic pessimism has in our day had its most outrageous and most voluminous expression.
I hope no one supposes that I am, even incidentally, intending to pronounce a sweeping and unqualified condemnation of the great movement known in history as the French Revolution. That would indeed be to be as narrow as the narrowest pessimist could possibly show himself. The French Revolution, as is probably the case with every great political, religious, or social movement, was in its action partly beneficial, partly detrimental. It abolished many monstrous abuses, it propounded afresh some long-neglected or violated truths; and it gave a vigorous impulse to human hope. But it was perhaps the most violent of all the great movements recorded in human annals. Accordingly, it destroyed over much, and it promised over much.In all probability, action and reaction are as nicely balanced in the intellectual and moral world as in the physical, and exaggerated hopes must have their equivalent in correlated and co-equal disappointment. I sometimes think that the nineteenth century now closed will be regarded in the fullness of time as a colossal egotist, that began by thinking somewhat too highly of itself, its prospects, its capacity, its performances, and ended by thinking somewhat too meanly of what I have called things in general, or those permanent conditions of man, life, and society, which no amount of Revolutions, French or otherwise, will avail to get rid of.
In truth, if I were asked to say briefly what Pessimism is, I should say it is disappointed Egotism; and the description will hold good, whether we apply it to an individual, to a community, or to an age.
For nothing is more remarkable in the writings of pessimistic poets than the attention they devote, and that they ask us to devote, to their own feelings. Far be it from me to deny that some very lovely and very valuable verse has been written by poets concerning their personal joys, sorrows, hopes, longings, and disappointments. But then it is verse which describes the joys, sorrows, hopes, longings, and disappointments common to the whole human race, and which every sensitive nature experiences at some time or another, in the course of chequered life, and which are peculiar to no particular age or generation, but the pathetic possession of all men, and all epochs. The verse to which I allude with less commendation, is the verse in which the writer seems to be occupied, and asking us to occupy ourselves, with exceptional states of suffering which appertain to him alone, or to him and the littleesoteric circle of superior martyrs to which he belongs, and to some special period of history in which their lot is cast. The sorrows we entertain in common with others never lead to pessimism, they lead to pity, sympathy, pathos, to pious resignation, to courageous hope. I wish these privileged invalids would take to heart those noble lines of Wordsworth:
So once it would have been—’tis so no more—I have submitted to a new control—A power is gone which nothing can restore,A deep distress hath humanized my soul!
I sometimes think these doleful bards have never had a really deep distress, that their very woe is fanciful, and that like the young gentleman in France of whom Arthur speaks inKing John, they are as sad as night, only for wantonness. But far from being rebuked by critics for their sea-green melancholy, they have been hailed as true masters of song for scarcely any better reason than that they declare themselves to be utterly miserable, and life to be equally so. Indeed by some critics it has been raised into a literary canon, not only that all Poetry, to be of much account, must be written in the pathetic minor, but that the poets themselves, if we are to recognise them as endowed with true genius and real sacred fire, must be unhappy from the cradle to the grave. If they can die young, if they can go mad, or commit suicide, so much the better. Their credentials as great poets are then firmly established. Even a pathetic phrase has been invented to describe the natural and inevitable condition of such sacred persons, a phrase that must be well known to you—the Sorrows of Genius.
Therefore, in the really sacred name of Genius, of Literature, of Poetry, I protest against this pitiable,this mawkish, unmanly, unwholesome, and utterly untrue estimate both of poetry and poets. No first-rate poet ever went mad, or ever committed suicide, though one or two, no doubt, have happened to die comparatively young. It is utterly dishonouring to poets, it is utterly discrediting to men of genius, to represent them as feeble, whining, helpless, love-sick, life-sick invalids, galvanised from time to time into activity by a sort of metrical hysteria. Because Shelley has truly said that
Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought
—and because inJulian and Maddalohe has represented Byron as saying that men
... learn in suffering what they teach in song
—are we to conclude that sadness and suffering are the only things in life, the only things in it deserving of the poet’s music? No one will ever be a poet of much consequence who has not suffered, for, as Goethe finely says, he who never ate his bread in sorrow, knows not the Heavenly Powers. But, if our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought, they are not necessarily our strongest or our greatest songs; and if we accept the assertion that men learn in suffering what they teach in song, do not let us forget the “learning” spoken of in the line. The poet, no doubt, has to learn by suffering, but having learnt, he has then, in my opinion, to help others not to be miserable, but to be happy.
I cannot here allude to well-known poets of other ages and other nations, avowedly great and permanent benefactors of mankind, all of whom alike were completely free from this malady of universal discontent. But let me at least take a cursory survey of our native poets; for, after all, to us English men and Englishwomen, what English poets have felt and said concerns us most and interests us most deeply. Let us see what is their attitude to external nature, to man, woman, life, society, and the general dispensation of existence.
You know how our modern pessimists cannot see a tree, a flower, or a mountain, but straightway they drop into what I may call a falling sickness, and all the beauty of the woods, fields, and sky merely suggests to them a picturesque background for their own superior sighs and sorrows. How differently Chaucer looks upon the panorama of this fair earth of ours! He is a great student, as men in the early days of the Renaissance were, and he tells us that he hath such delight in reading books, and has in his heart for them such reverence, that there is no game which can tear him away from them. But, when the month of May comes, and the birds sing, and the flowers begin to shoot, then, he adds, “Farewell my book and my devotion!” He wanders forth and beholds the eye of the daisy; and this blissful sight, as he calls it, softeneth all his sorrow. Elsewhere he describes how he cannot lie in bed for the glad beams of the sun that pour in through the window. He rushes out, and is delighted with everything. The welkin is fair, the air blue and light, it is neither too hot nor too cold, and not a cloud is anywhere to be seen. This disposition of content with and joy in external Nature, Chaucer displays equally when he consorts with his kind. It is very noticeable, though I am not aware if it has been pointed out before, how he portrays all the various pilgrims and personages in the famousPrologue to the Canterbury Talesas of cheerful and generally jovial spirits. There is not a melancholy person, not a pessimist, in the whole company. He describes himselfas talking and having fellowship with every one of them, and we may therefore conclude he also was pretty cheerful and genial himself. Even of his “perfect gentle knight,” whom he evidently intended to describe as the pink of chivalry, he says:
And though that he was worthy, he was wise.
And there never was, and never will be, wisdom without cheerfulness. As for the young Squire, the lover and lusty bachelor, that accompanied the Knight, Chaucer says of him, in a couplet that has always struck me as possessing a peculiar charm:
Singing he was or fluting all the day,He was as merry as the month of May.
He says of him, though he could sit a horse well, he could also write songs; and we can easily surmise what the songs were like. Chaucer’s Nun or Prioress is delineated by him as full pleasant and amiable of port, and as even taking trouble to feign the cheerful air of a lady of the Court. When the Monk rides abroad, men could hear his bridle jingling in a whistling wind as clear and loud as the chapel bell. Do not the words stir one’s blood to cheerfulness, and sound like a very carillon of joy? Of the Friar it is recorded that certainly he had a merry note, and well could he sing and play upon the harp, and that while he sang and played, his eyes twinkled in his head, like stars in the frosty night. The business of the Clerk of Oxenford was by his speech to sow abroad moral virtue; but Chaucer adds, “And gladly would he learn—” mark that word “gladly” “—and gladly teach.” The Franklin, a country gentleman, he declares, was wont to live in delight, for he was Epicurus’ own son. The Shipman draws many a draught of wine from Bordeaux;well can the wife of Bath laugh and jest; the Miller is a regular joker and buffoon; a better fellow you cannot find, he avers, than the Sumpnor; and the Pardoner, for very jollity, goes bareheaded, singing full merrily and loud. As for the Landlord of the “Tabard,” he is described as making great cheer, being a right merry man. He declares there is no comfort nor mirth in riding to Canterbury, even on pilgrimage, as dumb as a stone, and that they may smite off his head if he does not succeed in making them merry; and it all ends by Chaucer declaring that every wight was blithe and glad. Indeed, these are such a cheery, such a jovial set, that the only sorrow we can feel in connection with them is regret that we, too, were not of that delightful company.
I wonder if it has occurred to you, while reading these brief and cursory extracts from Chaucer, to say to yourselves, “How English it all is!” If not, may I say it for you? I am free to confess that I am one of those who think—and I hope there are some in this room who share my opinion—that the epithet English is an epithet to be proud of, an adjective of praise, a mark of commendation, and connotes, as the logician would say, everything that is manly, brave, wholesome, and sane. These latter-day melancholy moping minstrels are not English at all, they are feeble copies of foreign originals. Between them and Chaucer there is absolute alienation. About them there is nothing jolly or jovial, and there is not one good fellow among them.
Let us turn to the next great name according to chronological order in English Poetry; let us glance, if but rapidly, at the pages of Spenser. You could not well have two poets of more different dispositions thanChaucer and Spenser. One seems to hear Chaucer’s own bridle jingling in a whistling wind, to see his own eyes twinkling in his head like stars in the frosty night, and one thinks of him, too, as singing or fluting all the day long and being as merry as the month of May. In the gaze, on the brow, and in the pages of Spenser, there abides a lofty dignity, as of a high-born stately gentleman, deferential to all, but familiar with none. Indeed he resembles his own Gentle Knight in the opening lines of theFairy Queen, the description of whom I have always thought is none other than the portraiture of himself. If ever a poet had high seriousness it is Spenser. He never condescends to indulge in the broad jests dear to Chaucer, frequent in Shakespeare, common in Byron. Yet between him and Chaucer, between him and every great poet, there is this similarity, that he looks on life with a cheerful mind. It is a grave cheerfulness, but cheerfulness all the same; and, in truth, cheerful gravity, and high seriousness are one and the same thing.
Full jolly Knight he seemed, and fair did sit,As one for Knightly jousts and fierce encounters fit!
he says in the very first stanza of his noble poem. “Jolly,” no doubt, does not mean quite the same thing with Spenser as it does with Chaucer. There is the difference in signification, we may say, that there is, in character, between the Landlord of the “Tabard” and the Gentle Knight. But never does the latter lapse into melancholy, much less into Pessimism. He is too active, on too great adventure bound, and too impressed with its solemn importance, for that. Spenser himself significantly expresses the fear that his Gentle Knight
Of his cheer did seem too solemn sad,
as though he wished to let us know that even solemn sadness is a fault. But he soon enables us to discern that appearance is misleading, and reflects in reality only a noble, lofty, and serene temper, and that desire to win the worship and favour of the Fairy Queen, which he tells us, “of all earthly things, the Knight most did crave.” As soon as Spenser has described the lovely lady that rode the Knight beside, he says:
And forth they pass, withpleasureforward led.
And again
Led withdelight, they thus beguile the way.
There is no buffoonery, as in theCanterbury Tales, but a wise equable serenity that contemplates man and woman, beauty, temptation, danger, sorrow, struggle, honour, this world and the next, with a Knightly equanimity that nothing can disturb. But why should I dwell on the point, when Spenser himself has written one line which I may call his confession of faith on the subject?—
The noblest mind the best contentment has.
What a noble line! the noblest, I think, in all literature. Let us commit it to heart, repeat it morning, noon, and night, and it will cast out for us all the devils, aye, all the swine of Pessimism. What does this grave, this serious, this dignified English poet say of the Muses themselves?—
The Sisters Nine, which dwell on Parnass’ height,Do make them music for their more delight!
That is Spenser’s conception of the mission of poetry, and of the function of the poet—to make them musicfor their more delight—I acknowledge it is mine. I earnestly trust it is that of many.
There is no passion of the human heart, no speculation of the human mind, to which Shakespeare has not, in some passage or another, given expressive utterance; and since in life there is much sorrow, no little suffering, and ample sadness, chapter and verse can readily be found in his universal pages for any mood or any state of feeling. But what is the one, broad, final impression we receive of the gaze with which Shakespeare looked on life? A complete answer to that question would furnish matter for a long paper. But one brief passage must here suffice. In the most terrible and tragic of all his tragedies,King Lear, and in the most terrible and tragic of all its appalling incidents, the following brief colloquy takes place between Edgar and his now sightless father:
Away, old man; give me thy hand; away!King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta’en:Give me thy hand, come on.No farther, sir,
replies Gloster in despair,
No farther, sir! A man may rot even here.
What is Edgar’s answer?—
What! In ill thoughts again? Men must endureTheir going hence, even as their coming hither,Ripeness is all: come on!
If, at such a moment, and in the very darkest hour of disaster, Shakespeare puts such language into the mouth of Edgar, is it wonderful that he should, in less gloomy moments, take so cheerful a view of life, that Milton can only describe his utterances by calling them “woodnotes wild”?
And Milton himself? Milton almost as grave as Spenser and certainly more austere. Yet I do not think that Pessimism, that the advocates of universal suicide, since life is not worth living, will be able to get much help or sanction for their doleful gospel from the poet who wroteParadise Lostexpressly to
... assert Eternal ProvidenceAnd justify the ways of God to man.
Milton has given us, in two of the loveliest lyrics in the language, his conception of Melancholy and of Joy. Of hisL’AllegroI need not speak. But inIl Penseroso, if anywhere in Milton, we must look for some utterance akin to the desolation and the despair of modern pessimistic poets. We may look, but assuredly we shall not find it.
Then let the pealing organ blow,To the full-voicëd choir below.
In protesting, therefore, against Pessimism in Poetry, I am only returning to the oldest, soundest, and noblest traditions in English Literature, and in the English character. I trust no one supposes I am denying or that I am insensible to the existence of pain, woe, sadness, loss, even anguish and acute suffering, as integral and inevitable elements in life; and if poetry did not take note of these, and give to them pathetic and adequate expression, poetry would not be, as it is, coextensive with life, would not be the Paraclete or Comforter, with the gift of tongues. In poetry the note of sorrow will be, and must be, occasionally, and indeed frequently struck; it should not be the dominant key, much less the only key in which the poet tunes his song. There is much in our modern civilisation that is very unbeautiful, nay, that is downright ugly, whetherwe look on it with the eye of the artist or with the vision of the moralist. Moreover, I perceive—who could fail to perceive?—that we have in these days some very dark and difficult social problems to solve. Then let the poet come to our assistance by accompanying us with musical encouragement. For, remember, the poet has to make harmony, not out of language only, but out of life as well. I was once looking at a violin, a very lovely violin, a Stradivarius of great value and exquisite tone, and I asked the lady to whom it belonged of what wood the various parts of the instrument was composed. She told me, with much loving detail; but, she said, “I ought to add that I have been told no violin can be made of supreme quality unless the wood be taken from that side of the tree which faces south.” It is the same with the Poet. If he is to give us the sweetest, the most sonorous, and the truest notes, his nature must have a bias towards the sunny side.