other gentlemen that it was time for them to disappear from theirs. He gave his mother the last news of Winterbourn; and he told Sir Thomas that a division was expected, and that he ought to be in the House. "The poor sufferer" was sinking slowly, Markham said. It was quite impossible now to think of the opera tion which might perhaps have saved him three months since. His sister was with Nelly, who had neither mother nor sister of her own; and the long-expected event was thus to come off decorously with all the proper accessories. It was a very important matter for two at least of the speakers; but this was how they talked of it, hiding, perhaps, the anxiety within. Them Markham turned to the other group. "Have you got all the feathers and the furbelows ready?" he said. "Do you think there will be any of you visible through them, little Fan?" "Don't frighten the child, Markham. She will do very well. She can be as steady as a little rock, and in that case it doesn't matter that she is not tall." 66 'Oh, tall, as if that were necessary! You are not tall yourself, our mother; but you are a very majestic person when you are in your war-paint." "Nobody is going to fight a duel, if that is what you mean," said Markham, quietly turning round. "Gaunt has, for as simple as he stands, beaten me at billiards: and I can't stand under the affront. Didn't you lick me, Gaunt?" "If "It was an accident," said Gaunt. that is all, you are very welcome to your revenge." "Listen to his modesty, which, by-thebye, shows a little want of tact; for am I the man to be beaten by an accident?" said Markham, with his chuckle of selfridicule. "Come along, Gaunt." Lady Markham detained Sir Thomas with a look as he rose to accompany them. She gave Captain Gaunt her hand, and a gracious, almost anxious smile. "Markham is noted for bad hours," she said. "You are not very strong, and you must not let him beguile you into his evil ways." She rose too, and took Sir Thomas by the arm as the young man went away. "Did you hear what he said? Do you think it was only billiards he meant? My heart quakes for that poor boy and the poor people he belongs to. Don't you think you could go after them and see what they are about?" "I will do anything you please. But "There's the queen herself, for that what good could I do?" said Sir Thomas. matter," said Sir Thomas. "See her in" Markham would not put up with any ina procession, and she might be six feet. I feel a mouse before her." He had held once some post about the court, and had a right to speak. "Let us hope Fan will look majestic too. You should, to carry off the effect I shall produce. In ordinary life," said Markham, "I don't flatter myself that I am an Adonis; but you should see me screwed up into a uniform. No, I'm not in the army, Fan. What is my uniform, mother, to please her? A deputy lieutenant, or something of that sort. I hope you are a great deal the wiser, Fan." terference from me; nor the other young fellow either, for that matter." "But if you were there, if they saw you about, it would restrain them; oh, you have always been such a true friend. If you were but there." "There! Where?" There came be fore the practical mind of Sir Thomas a vision of himself at his sober age dragged into he knew not what nocturnal haunts, like an elderly spectre, jeered at by the pleasure-makers. "I will do anything to please you," he said helplessly. • But what can I do? It would be of no use. You know yourself that interference never does any good." "People always look well in uniform," 'said Frances, looking at him somewhat doubtfully, on which Markham broke forth into his chuckle. "Wait till you see me, my little dear. Wait till the little boys see me on the line of route. They are the true tests of personal attraction. Are you coming, Gaunt? Do you feel inclined to give those fellows their re-said. "Of course, we can do nothing. venge?" Markham had spoken rather low, and at some distance from his mother; but the word caught her quick ear. Revenge? What do you mean by revenge? Who is going to be revenged?" she cried. Frances stood by aghast, listening to this conversation. What did it mean? Of what was her mother afraid? Presently, Lady Markham took her seat again with a return to her usual smiling calm. "You are right, and I am wrong," she Perhaps, as you say, there is no real reason for anxiety." (Frances observed, however, that Sir Thomas had not said this.) "It is because the boy is not well off, and his people are not well off - old soldiers, with their pensions and their savings. That is what makes me fear." "Ob, if that is the case, you need have the less alarm. Where there's not much to lose, the risks are lessened," Sir Thomas said calmly. When he too was gone, Frances crept close to her mother. She knelt down beside the chair on which Lady Markham sat, grave and pale, with agitation in her face. "Mother," she whispered, taking her hand and pressing her cheek against it," Markham is so kind - he never would do poor George any harm." "Oh, my dear," cried Lady Markham, "how can you tell? Markham is not a man to be read off like a book. He is very kind which does not hinder him from being cruel too. He means no harm, perhaps; but when the harm is done, what does it matter whether he meant it or not? And as for the risks being lessened because your friend is poor, that only means that he is despatched all the sooner. Markham is like a man with a fever; he has his fits of play, and one of them is on him now." as what are known in religion by the names of the Methodist and Tractarian movements, and in politics by the names of the Liberal and Radical movements. However much Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats may differ from each other in their individual characteristics, no one, I imagine, who considers the subject will deny that in many important respects they were moved by common external impulses, and united by a common spirit of antagonism to their immediate predecessors. In the next place, it is scarcely more open to dispute that this movement was a party movement. The present age is quick enough to recognize the fact that criticisms such as that in the Edinburgh Review on Coleridge's "Christabel," or that in the Quarterly on Keats's "Endymion," were founded on purely party principles, that the critics, starting as they did from certain axioms of their own as to the requisites of poetry, were quite insensible to the essential beauties of the poems they were considering; but it is not sufficiently remembered that Wordsworth and Coleridge were no less dogmatic and no less narrow in their depreciation of such a poet as Gray, or that the perception of Keats was dead to the merits of the famous writer whom he ridiculously speaks of as "one Boileau," and whom with equal absurdity he regarded as the progenitor of the English poets of the eighteenth century. Besides, it is easy enough to separate the critics of the first thirty years of the present century into two groups, one containing such men as Gifford, Sir Walter Scott, George Ellis, Campbell, Jeffrey, and Macaulay, all of whom (though two of them certainly speak THE LIBERAL MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH with very little gratitude of those from LITERATURE. whom they had learned the most) had evidently formed their taste on eighteenthcentury literature; the other including writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Leigh Hunt, and others who were bitterly opposed to the eighteenth century and all its works. Once more. Whereas sixty years ago the critical principles of the eighteenth century were still in the ascendant, and the apostles of the new departure were suffering martyrdom or struggling with a hostile public opinion, the balance of taste has so entirely shifted that the writers whom our grandfathers regarded with the greatest esteem are now spoken of at most with tolerance and often with contempt, Thus Mr. Swinburne, wishing to disparage Byron in comparison with Shelley, classes the former with Pope, and is so kind as to allow both to be "poets after a | sessing the exclusive hall-mark of "high fashion," while Mr. Arnold goes still far- beauty, worth, and power." He makes ther, and loftily decides: "Though Dry- not the slightest attempt to explain why den and Pope may write in verse, though the two writers whom he allows to be they may in a certain sense be masters of "classics of our prose" should in ninethe art of versification, Dryden and Pope tenths of their best-known work have are not classics of our poetry, they are chosen to express themselves in a metriclassics of our prose." cal form. Now considering that nearly two hundred years have passed since the birth of Pope, and that, from his death up to the present time, he and Dryden have unanimously been accounted "classics of our poetry," we have a right to expect that Mr. Arnold should support his paradoxical judgment with corresponding strength of demonstration. And at first sight it appears as if he were ready to satisfy our requirements. His reasoning is deduced from axioms and postulates almost Euclidean in their absoluteness. The poetry of Dryden and Pope, he says, lacks that "high seriousness" which is the mark of the true poetical classic, and which is to be found in a number of isolated passages from the poets selected by him as examples of the classical style. But when we ask him further to define this "high seriousness," he declines to do anything of the kind. So long as Mr. Arnold restricted himself to judgments on writers who, whatever may be their exact position in our literature, are allowed to be classics of some kind, his paradoxes might only have excited amusement. But he has determined to apply his test to poets whose merits have from the very first been the subject of fierce controversy; and happening to decide that Shelley is not to be reckoned among our poetical "classics," he has naturally aroused the wrath of Mr. Swinburne. Mr. Swinburne tells him roundly that his moral canons are good for nothing, and then makes as if he were about to establish an impregnable position of his own by reasoning and argument. He declines, he says, to discuss a question of poetical taste with any man who will not grant the assumption that "the two primary and essential qualities of poetry are imagination and harmony." Many of us would be very glad to concede thus much; but, oddly enough, when this new critical method comes to be tested by application, the standard of "imagination and harmony" is found to be of just as much practical use as the standard of 'high poetic seriousness" - that is to say, for controversial purposes it is of no use at all. The characters [says he] of a high quality of poetry are what is expressed there. They are far better recognized by being felt in the verse of the master, by being perused in the verse of the master, than in the prose of the critic. Nevertheless, if we are urgently pressed to give some critical account of them, we may safely," perhaps, venture on laying down, not, indeed, how and why the characters arise, but where and in what they arise. They are in the matter and substance of the poetry, and they are in its manner and style. Both of them, the substance and the matter on the one hand, the style and manner on the other, have a mark, an accent of high beauty, worth, and power. But if we are asked to define this mark and accent in the abstract, our answer must be: No, for we should thereby be darkening the question, not clearing it. The mark and accent are as given by the substance and matter of that poetry, by the style and manner of that poetry, and of all other poetry which is akin to it in quality. The test of the highest poetry [we are informed] is that it eludes all tests. Poetry in which there is no element at once perceptible and indefinable by any reader or hearer of any poetic instinct . . . is not poetry-above all, it is not lyric poetry of the first water. And then Mr. Swinburne quotes two lines from Wordsworth, which, as I have said, removed from their context, are absolutely devoid of meaning, and declares in his own manner: "If not another word of the poem was left in which these two lines It must, I should think, be apparent to occur, those two lines would suffice to every reader that, after delivering himself show the hand of a poet differing not in of the disparaging judgment that two of degree but in kind from the tribe of Bythe greatest metrical writers in our lan- ron.' No doubt; but differing also from guage are "not classics of our poetry,' ," the tribe of Homer, Virgil, and Milton, Mr. Arnold has chosen to maintain his whose most sublime passages can readily thesis simply by proving that they do not be analyzed into their elements, though write in the same manner as other poets the life and genius that inspires them is, of a totally different order, whose style of course, beyond the reach of analysis. commends itself to his perception as pos- All that Mr. Swinburne proves by his argument is that the poetry of Byron is genius of great poets as something orig. inal and per se, yet any one who considers the matter will see that all genuine poetry springs out of the imagination of the people. If it be, as it is, the function of the poet to show "the very age and body of the time his form and pressure," he must, in order to do this, first receive into his own mind the influences that are operat Neither Mr. Arnold nor Mr. Swinburne justifies the absolute test of poetry which they respectively propose. Their principles of "high poetic seriousness," and of "imagination and harmony," do not carrying on his age and time. These he rethem a single step in advance of their own perceptions: stat pro ratione voluntas. Must we, then, give up all hopes of arriving at a general agreement about the nature of poetry and the merits of individual poets, and be content to acquiesce in the anarchical maxim, De gustibus non est disputandum? I think not. Poetry, as I have already said and I believe that for controversial purposes it is the only working definition that can be found produces in an ideal form, and hence And thoughts of men do as themselves de- To understand, therefore, the genius of classical poets, their relations to each other, as well as to the whole course of their nation's literature, and the causes that made them write in metre in the way they did, we ought to be historically acquainted with the general laws that seem everywhere to determine the progress of popular imagination. is the art of producing pleasure for the imagination by means of metrical language. The test of poetry, therefore, is the extent and quality of the pleasure it produces - -a relative standard of judg. ment, no doubt. The man who can, by his metrical writing, produce pleasure in the mind of any reader is pro tanto a poet. But since we are all constituted more or less after the same fashion, metrical writing, if it is worth anything, must be capa In the paper with which I opened this ble of exciting general pleasure, and series I examined the assertion of Mapleasure in the minds of good judges. If caulay that "as civilization advances poit can do this it is presumably good poetry almost necessarily declines." The etry. But, again, since contemporary proposition is contradicted, as I showed, judgment is liable to be distracted and by universal experience, since the greatconfused by transitory currents of feeling, it is impossible to decide certainly whether metrical writing has in it the qualities that please permanently and generally until it has been tested by time. When it has secured the approval of generations of good judges, then we may be sure that the writer, whatever be the kind of pleasure which his verse excites, is a classic poet. Nor is it open to any critic, however distinguished, to challenge the position which these poets have acquired, because his opinion can weigh nothing against the verdict of time and common sense. All that he can do usefully is to observe and record the methods which the poet, whatever his kind, has employed, and to apply these as a test to the contemporary metrical writers who attempt composition of an analogous order. But if there be one element in all classical poetry which is relative simply to the sense of the individual, there is another which is relative solely to the sense of the nation. We are apt to think of the est poems of the world, the "Eneid," the "Divine Comedy, "Paradise Lost," the plays of the Greek dramatists and of Shakespeare, were all produced in the maturity of national life, while even the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" argue a high degree of refinement in the surroundings of the poet. The fact is indisputable, and the explanation of it is simple. Early society lacks the power of expression. Language is then wanting in precise and philosophical terms, as well as in rhyth mical harmony, and these no less than the mental qualities which they imply, judgment, design, the power of selection and rejection, in a word, all that is involved in the word "taste," are essential to the composition of a really great poem. But in so far as what Macaulay is think. ing of is poetical conception, I hold that his opinion is entirely right. The early ages of a nation's life are the ages of belief, and belief is the parent of poetry. It is then when primitive and warlike habits prevail; when there are few facilities for communication and comparison of ideas; | through the earlier and greater period of before men have begun to observe and our literature, the period between Chaucer inquire into the nature of things, that and Milton, we see these two apparently the unconscious life and liberty of imag- conflicting elements harmoniously fused ination are largest and fullest. Monarch and blended in the work of the poets, of all it surveys, it employs its incompara- though, as our literature develops, each ble myth-making powers in investing the element appears mixed there in very dif various appearances of nature with an ferent proportions. atmosphere of marvel and mystery. As Let me dwell on this point with a little society becomes more orderly and refined, more detail. Take the poetry of Chaucer, it is recognized that many of the phenom- for instance. With him romance, in our ena hitherto ascribed to supernatural agen- sense of the word, is reality. He writes cies are the effects of uniform causes; from within a system or order of society and wherever this scientific observation which has long ceased to exist, and he extends there is so much territory con- reflects all the ideas and sentiments proper quered from the unconscious creative im- to that system with complete naïveté and agination. Poets of genius at the same good faith. In "The Parson's Tale," for time arise who, perceiving the extraor-instance, he speaks like a good Catholic in dinary wealth of material created for them approval of auricular confession; "The by the unconscious imagination of their fathers, utilize this for the purposes of their own sublime inventions. It cannot be denied, for example, that all the great poems I enumerated in the last paragraph have their roots in national belief. But the subject matter of imagination, already encroached upon by science, is thus largely appropriated by the poets themselves, so that for the purposes of creation, the opportunities of the late poet being much diminished, his genius is naturally turned towards the ethical, didactic, and satiric orders of metrical composition-all of which have their origin in the religious instincts of the people; and in this sphere he strives to compensate for the lower the Renaissance. range of his thought by the polish and In Spenser all this is changed; the roperfection of his language. It would ap-mantic in his work predominates over the pear, then, that, if Macaulay's proposi- real. The feudal system is no longer part tion be amended so as to assert that as civilization advances the matter for poetical creation diminishes, while the powers of poetical expression are multiplied, we shall have a correct description of an invariable phenomenon in the history of the art. Applying this general law to the course of English literature, it seems to me we may arrive at some very definite conclusions. Throughout its history the genius of our poetry exhibits itself in two aspects. Viewed in one light, it is seen to be mystical, picturesque, romantic; in the other, it appears real, positive, natural. The sources of English poetry are, on the one hand, the Catholic Church and the feudal system, those" Gothic and monkish foundations," as Burke calls them in his vivid manner, of our national life; and on the other the spirit of the Renaissance which has done so much to modify the form of the literary superstructure. Moreover, Flower and the Leaf" is full of the mys tical morality of the age; while of the thirty Canterbury pilgrims themselves, the names of at least two-thirds express some ecclesiastical relation which has no longer any meaning for English society. And yet the mystical atmosphere in which he breathed has had no power to obscure the clear imagination of the poet. The figures and characters of his imperishable pilgrimage stand out before us with as much distinctness as if five hundred years had not intervened. In this power of looking through social fashions and institutions at nature, as she really is, we see the first traces in our literature of the genius of and parcel of the national life; it has become an allegory, a philosophical ideal to be aimed at by every gentleman who desires to cultivate inward perfection. Throughout the allegory pagan myths lie oddly jumbled with medieval dogmas, and legendary forms are employed to cloak political allusions; yet all is somehow blended so as to seem natural and harmonious in the fairy land of Spenser's fancy. In spite of the Protestantism of the poet and the nation, we feel, as we read the splendid description of the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins in the House of Pride, how deeply Catholic theology had colored the English imagination, and can readily understand that, though much of the sense of the allegory is lost to the modern world, the knightly virtues of Prince Arthur possessed a real significance for men like Sidney, Raleigh, and Essex. When we come to Shakespeare we |