To have attempted in former times a work of this description, would have
seemed, we cannot deny, to savour either of presumption or of idiotcy,
or more probably of both. And rightly. But we live in times of progress.
The mystery of yesterday is the common-place of to-day; the Bible, which
was Newton's oracle, is Professor Huxley's jest-book; and students at
the University now lose a class for not being familiar with opinions,
which but twenty years ago they would have been expelled for dreaming
of. Everything is moving onward swiftly and satisfactorily; and if, when
we have made all faiths fail, we can only contrive to silence the
British Association, and so make all knowledge vanish away, there will
lack nothing but the presence of a perfect charity to turn the
nineteenth century into a complete kingdom of heaven. Amongst changes,
then, so great and so hopeful--amongst the discoveries of the rights of
women, the infallibility of the Pope, and the physical basis of life, it
may well be doubted if the great fathers of ancient song would find, if
they could come back to us, anything out of the way or ludicrous in a
recipe-book for concocting poetry.
Some, indeed, object that poetry is not progressive. But on what grounds
this assertion is based, it is not possible to conjecture. Poetry is as
much progressive as anything else in these days of progress.
Free-thought itself shews scarcely more strikingly those three great
stages which mark advance and movement. For poetry, like Free-thought,
was first a work of inspiration, secondly of science, and lastly now of
trick. At its first stage it was open to only here and there a genius;
at its next to all intelligent men; and at its third to all the human
race. Thus, just as there is no boy now, but can throw stones at the
windows which Bishop Colenso has broken, so there is scarcely even a
young lady but can raise flowers from the seed stolen out of Mr.
Tennyson's garden.
And surely, whatever, in this its course of change, poetry may have lost
in quality, is more than made up for by what it has gained in quantity.
For in the first place it is far pleasanter to the tastes of a
scientific generation, to understand how to make bad poetry than to
wonder at good; and secondly, as the end of poetry is pleasure, that we
should make it each for ourselves is the very utmost that we can desire,
since it is a fact in which we all agree, that no man's verses please
him so much as his own.