ture.

what the nineteenth century represents in English literaThere is not a single poet of importance in it belonging to the classic school in the real sense of the word. The first group of great poets are all of them romantic,-Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; Byron (classical in form at times, yet altogether romantic in feeling and expression), Shelley, and Keats; Tennyson, Swinburne, Rossetti, Browning, even Matthew Arnold, in spite of classical training, yielded to romantic tendencies. Or go back to the eighteenth century—the very age of classicism. There you have indeed two great classic figures in poetry, Dryden and Pope; but I should doubt very much whether these could justly be estimated at the level of Gray, Cowper, Burns, or in some respects of Blake. And a greater poetical influence than any of the classical school really wielded was exerted in the close of the century by the work of Scott, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Even among the writers of the early part of the nineteenth century the only poet of classical sympathies, Byron, is the only poet whose work seems likely to disappear from memory; and whatever of it may survive is certainly that part which shows least sympathy with classic tradition of any sort.

On the other hand, though the romantic spirit has produced almost all the great marvels of English literature, from 'Shakespeare onwards, and although there appears every possible reason for giving all our sympathies to it, since it represents supreme genius in its highest expression, it certainly has its dangers. The great genius can afford to dispense with any discipline which impedes its activity; it can be excused for the breaking of the rules, because it has something better to give in return for what it breaks. But not every man is a genius; half a dozen men out of a million represent perhaps the proportion. So that a great multitude of writers, without genius, even without marked ability of any kind, may do much mischief by following the example of genius in breaking rules, without being able to

atone for this temerity by producing anything of a respectable order. The fact is that thousands of young men in Europe want to be romantic merely because romanticism represents for them the direction of least resistance. Even to do anything according to classical rules requires considerable literary training and literary patience. And these men forget that the great romantics have mostly been men, who, although breakers of rule, could make new rules of their own. I mean that in Europe at present, both in France and in England, the romantic tendency is to throw all rules aside. without reason, and without good results. The persons who wish to do this, mistake romance for self-license, and they can only succeed in bringing about a general degradation of literature. As that comes, it will evidently be almost a duty of every lover of good literature to help a classic reaction-because a classic reaction is the only possible remedy for literary decadence through license. On the other hand a romantic reaction is the only possible remedy when too much classic discipline has brought about a petrifaction or stagnation of literary utterance of emotion-as happened in the middle of the eighteenth century. So you will see that the same man might very consistently be at one period of his life in favour of classicism, and at another in favour of romanticism. You will understand clearly hereafter what is meant by those terms in a general way. And as for what they signify in the literature of your own country, you are much more competent to judge than I.

CHAPTER IV

NOTE ON CRABBE

NOTWITHSTANDING the great variety of Crabbe's subjects, there is very little variety in his method of treating them, and a few examples will serve just as well as a hundred. This is a literary fact characteristic of nearly all realistic art. Wherever you find realism—true realism—you will find little or no variety in style. Style is then reduced to its simplest possible expression, because the author must never suffer himself to become personal,-and, as I have told you long ago, style is personality. Style expresses each man's way of feeling and thinking, each man's conception of the music and beauty of language-necessarily different from every other man's way of feeling, because there are no two human beings who can think and feel exactly alike. So every different style is the expression of some difference in character. But the object of the realist is never to express his own character or feeling in any way, but to represent things, exactly as they are. Whatever style he has, can be little marked by those qualities which color and make melodious the prose or poetry of romanticism. And he must always write in pretty much the same way, because his object requires no help in the way of ornament. I suppose that among modern writers-I mean writers of our own. time-the most perfect examples of realistic art are furnished by the short stories of the great French conteur, Guy de Maupassant. Now in the hundred and fifty-odd stories which he has written, there is no variety of style whatever, no departure from the severest possible simplicity of expression. When he made a voyage to Africa, however, he displayed astonishing qualities of style in his little book entitled "Au Desert." But the traveller ceased to be the

realist. He thought that the realistic method was the best for the portraiture of human life, but that, when he had to describe seas of sand, and naked rocks, and burning sunshine, and oases, then he needed the art of the word-painter, the art of the romantic. So he described nature, in that one book only, by the romantic method. Perhaps Crabbe might have attempted something brilliant if he had travelled a little. But he was no traveller; he described only human life and its immediate surroundings in his own neighbourhood, and he tried to describe these exactly as he saw them. He is a pure realist; he has no variety of style, and such. variety would have been of no use to him. Thus a few examples of his method will serve us-though I believe that we would privately find not a little pleasure in reading the whole of his poems from beginning to end. The more one reads him, the more one likes him, notwithstanding the fact that it is impossible to like the horrible subject which he often chooses. What we like in him is his great force and truth, and his surpassing pithiness of expression.

Let us begin with a few extracts from one of his earlier compositions, "The Village," said to have been revised by Dr. Johnson. What do you think of this early protest against the artificial poetry of Crabbe's own time? He complains that poets have been foolishly writing about the joys of country life, the romance of peasant love, and the innocent charm of country girls-all of which, he declares, is utter nonsense. And he proceeds to tell the truth roughly:

Fled are those times, when, in harmonious strains,
The rustic poet praised his native plains:

No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse,
Their country's beauty or their nymphs' rehearse.
Yet still for these we frame the tender strain,
Still in our lays fond Corydons complain,

And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal,
The only pains, alas! they never feel.

How much bitterness of meaning in that last line!—the assertion that the only pains which the modern shepherd does not feel are the pains of love! Of course the writer refers to those English poets who were still composing English imitations of Theocritus or Virgil, and it must be confessed that his protest was much needed. Let us hear him a little further:

Yes, thus the Muses sing of happy swains,
Because the Muses never knew their pains:

They boast their peasants' pipes, but peasants now
Resign their pipes and plod behind the plough;
And few, among the rural tribe, have time
To number syllables, and play with rhyme.

I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms
For him that grazes or for him that farms,
But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace
The poor laborious natives of the place,
And see the mid-day sun with fervid ray
On their bare heads and dewy temples play;
While some, with feebler heads and fainter hearts,
Deplore their fortune, yet sustain their parts—
Then shall I dare these real ills to hide

In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?

And he goes on to picture, in all its naked misery, the cottage of the poor farm labourer, the dirt, the misery, the disease—the country girl, once pretty, then seduced by some heartless rascal, and abandoned; the exceeding strain of the labour exacted in the fields, and the exhausted state of the men and women at night; the rapid decay of strength among them, their total inability to save any money, and the hopelessness of their old age, when they are too weak to work any more and have to be supported by public charity. Then he describes the poorhouse:

Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor,
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;-