poetry is essentially catholic and affirmative, dealing only with the permanent facts of nature and humanity, and interested in the events and controversies of its own time only so far as they evolve manifestly abiding fruits. but the abiding fruits of such events and controversies are very rarely manifest until the turmoil in which they are produced has long since subsided; and therefore poets, in all times before our own, have either allowed the present to drift unheeded by or have so handled its phenomena as to make them wholly subsidiary to and illustrative of matters of well-ascertained stability. the many occasional poems of past times, of which temporary incidents have been the subjects, in no way contradict this assertion in the main; and the casual example of a poet like dryden affords only the confirming exception. dryden was fond of protesting, especi{63}ally when he was a catholic; and there is no doubt but that this habit added greatly to his popularity in his lifetime, as it does to the favour in which some of the most distinguished of our modern poets are now held; but all those points which probably constituted the high lights of dryden’s poetry to his contemporaries have suffered in course of time a change like that which has come over the whites of many of sir joshua reynolds’ pictures; and it is much to be feared that a similar fate awaits a large proportion of what has been written by several of the best poets of the generation which is now passing away. most of our recent poets, even while condemning political revolution, have shared in the ideas or feelings which are at the bottom of revolutions, a hope which the facts of nature do not justify, and a disbelief in what those facts do justify—namely, the ineradicable character of moral evil, with its circumstantial consequences. the heart of the modern poet is, as a rule, always vibrating between the extremes of despondent grumbling at the present conditions and hasty and unreasonable aspirations for the improvement of his kind; his tragedies and hymns of rejoicing are alike void of the dignity and repose which arise from a sound confession of the facts of humanity and a cheerful resignation to its imperfections; and he whose true function is{64} to stand aside as the tranquil seer too often now becomes the excited agent in matters which concern him least of all men, because of all men he is the least fitted to meddle with them. it is hard to say which is more wonderful—the clearness of the true poet’s vision for things when he is contented with looking at them as they are, or his blindness when he fancies he can mend them. famous statesmen have marvellously drivelled in verse, but not more marvellously than famous poets have drivelled in what pertains to statesmanship. it is scarcely without a feeling of amazement that a man of ordinary good sense contrasts the power of poetic vision in writers like victor hugo and carlyle with the childishness of their judgments when they propose antidotes for evils which they so clearly see, but for which they do not see that there are no antidotes, but only palliatives. looking for what they fancy may be, when their vocation is to proclaim with clearness that which is, one poet will shriek to us (for untruths cannot be sung) that all will be well when king log is down and king stork reigns in his stead; another that niagara may yet be dammed if country gentlemen will hire drill-sergeants to put their gardeners and farm-labourers through the goose-step; another says the world will be saved if a few gentlemen and ladies, with nothing better to do,{65} will take to playing at being their own domestics; a fourth, in order to save morals, proposes their abolition; a fifth proclaims that all will have good wages when there remains no one to pay them; a sixth discovers in the science of the future a sedative for human passions instead of a wider platform for their display; and so on. others, who have no patent medicines on hand, impotently grumble or rage at evils in which, if they looked steadily, they might discern the good of justice, or that of trial, or both (as great poets in past times always have done); and, instead of truly singing, they sob hysterical sympathy with such sufferings in others as, if they were their own, they either would bear or know that they ought to bear with equanimity.
the statesman, the social reformer, the political economist, the natural philosopher, the alms-giver, the hospital visitor, the preacher, even the cynical humorist, has each his function, and each is rightly more or less negative; but the function of the poet is clearly distinguished from all of these, and is higher though less obtrusive than any. it is simply affirmative of things which it greatly concerns men to know, but which they have either not discovered or have allowed to lapse into the death of commonplace. he alone has the power of revealing by his insight and magic words the{66} undreamt-of mines of felicity which exist potentially for all in social relationships and affections. the inexhaustible glories of nature are a blank for many who are yet able to behold them reflected in his perceptions. his convincing song can persuade many to believe in, if they do not attain to taste—as he, if indeed he be a poet, must have tasted—the sweet and wholesome kernel which the rough shell of unmerited suffering conceals for those who are patient. and he can so contemplate the one real evil in the world as to give body and life and intelligibility to that last and sharpest cry of faith, “o felix culpa!”
the temptations which our time offers to the poet in order to induce him to forsake his own line are very great, and poets are human. the conceited present craves to have singers of its own, who will praise it, or at least abuse it; and it pays them well for pandering to its self-consciousness, lavishing its best honours upon them as leaders of the “liberal movement,” and scoffing at those, as “behind their time,” who stand apart and watch and help those abiding developments of humanity which advance “with the slow process of the suns.{67}”
