LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Class Oxford and Poetry in 1911 2, I9H BY *T. Herbert Warren, M. 1911 BY Herbert Warren ', M.*A^ Hon. D.C.L. PRESIDENT OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE PROFESSOR OF POETRY OXFORD THS 191 1 HENRY FROWDE, M.A. PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK TORONTO AND MELBOURNE OXFORD AND POETRY IN 1911 Allora e buono ragionare lo bene quando ello e ascoltato. DANTE, Convivio, iv. 27. MR. VICE-CHANCELLOR, To be given the right, and therefore the duty, to speak in this place, and from this Chair ; to speak for Oxford and on the high theme of Poetry, is indeed to be accorded a position which might well overweight even the most competent and confident. Only to aspire to be Professor of Poetry is, as an old friend said to me a short time ago, an honour. Oxford has given me many honours. Some here may remember the 'smooth-tongued scholar* in Marlowe, who says my gentry I fetch from Oxford, not from heraldry. Without adopting these words in their literal sense, I would say assuredly that Oxford has given me all the best honours I have, and those I would most care to have. To strive to serve her is my privilege. May her own inspiration aid me and the traditions of this Chair ! The traditions of this Chair. What are they ? It has many, some old, some new. There is one, a lost tradition, which I have been asked to revive, and to address you in Latin, to shroud, shall I say ? my deficiencies in the ' decent obscurity of a learned language '. And for certain reasons I might feel tempted to revive 225899 4 ; , ; i TffO&tions of the Chair Latin or English? ' Not to be a Poet' it. There are some things which can be said so much more neatly and easily, without fulsomeness or flattery, in Latin than in English. But I doubt if to-day the suggestion is a practical one. Whatever may have been the feeling in Keble's own time, I think it has been admitted since that the fact of his lectures being in Latin has prevented their finding that vogue which they deserved, or producing that effect which they might well have produced. 1 Keble himself, in criticizing Cople- ston's lectures, condemned the practice and in strong terms. 'A dead language/ he said, 'is almost a gag to the tongue in delivering ideas at once so abstract and so delicately distinguished/ He afterwards returned to Latin himself on the ground that it would make him more careful in pronouncing judgement. I do not think, after reading his lectures, that he of all men needed that added terror, and I hope I may not. Another tradition of the Chair I know not if I have broken. I should like in some small measure to have done so, and you will sympathize when I tell you what it is. I will give it you in the words of a poetess to a poet, of Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning. In one of those delightful early letters, she writes under the date of January, 1848. 'You of the "Crown" and of the " Lyre " to seek influence from the " Chair of Cas- siopeia" ! I hope she will forgive me for using her name thus. I might as well have compared her (as a Chair . I suppose) to a Professorship of Poetry in the University of Oxford according to the last election. You know the qualification there is not to be a poet! But to come to traditions of the Chair more recent and more living. I think naturally first, as you will be 1 See p. 36. Mackail ; Bradley ; Court hope ; Palgrave ; 5 Shairp ; Doyle thinking, of him who filled it last. I take to-day ' this laurel ', the phrase is now so trite we hardly give due credit to the admirable poet who coined it for us some sixty years ago, from the brow of one who uttered not only 'nothing base', but nothing that had not, to my mind at any rate, in his utterance of it, an indescribable grace. Ipsa mollities, a certain ' Dorique delicacy ', such as the scholarly old diplomat and Provost of Eton who has recently been made to live again for us so fully, Sir Henry Wotton, found in the youthful Milton these phrases seem to me to describe more aptly than any others the utterance of Professor Mackail. His criticism of poetry was in itself a kind of poetry. Nor can I forget, who could forget ? the recent tenure of another, a friend from my undergraduate time, and of the same Society, Professor Bradley, who in his five years surely made an enduring mark, who reconciled that ancient, ever recurrent, but ever reconcilable feud of two great forces of the soul and departments of the mind, and showed us how philosophy can handle poetry. I think, too, as my mind turns backward, of the author of that delightful ' play of the youthful spirit ', the ' Para- dise of Birds ', who in later years, amid the routine of office conscientiously discharged, accomplished that vast task which Pope projected, with which Gray dallied, which Warton left half told, and has given us a definitive History of English Poetry. The Editor of that Golden Treasury which was so much for my generation I knew and have heard, and I have heard too the serious and gravely generous author of the ' Bush aboon Traquair '. The author, gallant and urbane, of the ' Private of the 6 Arnold and 'the Oxford Movement* Buffs' I never heard, but some here have doubtless done so. And some few have even greater memories. When we think of this Chair and its tradition in the last cen- tury, two names stand out before all others, those of Matthew Arnold and of Keble. To the superficial observer they seem to stand out in sharp contrast. They seem as far apart as the grave and the gay, the sacred and the secular, the saint and the Voltairian. In truth Arnold was no mere Voltairian. Keble again was no stiff or bigoted divine, no believer ' because it was impossible*. It is not sufficiently remembered that Keble was the old college friend of Dr. Arnold and that he was Matthew Arnold's own godfather. It was not only Clough of whom it could be said The voice that from St. Mary's thrilled the hour, He could not choose but let it in though loth. Matthew Arnold, as an undergraduate, fell like Stanley, like Froude and Pattison and Jowett, like Coleridge and Temple, who indeed of that time did not fall ? under the influence of the Tractarians. Many here will re- member Arnold's moving description of Newman at St. Mary's, given in the Lecture on Emerson delivered in America, beginning, 'Forty years ago when I was an undergraduate at Oxford voices were in the air then which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that susceptible season of youth hears such voices! They are a possession to him for ever.' And the debt was not only spiritual or moral, it was aesthetic also. They had as a common possession a deep love and reverence for Wordsworth, and it is worth while to compare Keble's studied yet happy dedication of his Lectures, with Arnold's Memorial Verses on Doyle; Milman ; Copleston ; Trapp 7 Wordsworth. Attention has often been called to the somewhat surprising title prefixed by Keble to these same Lectures, De Poeticae Vi Medica. Is it fanciful to suggest that Arnold's well-known expression about Wordsworth's { healing power* is borrowed from this heading ? But I have said enough and more than enough for the present moment on these two great names. They are not the only great narrfes of the last century. Keble was preceded by a name not quite so memorable in the history of the Church or of sacred poetry, but still memorable in regard to these interests, and in relation to Church History and sacred scholarship certainly of first-rate eminence, that of Dean Milman. And there is yet one more name belonging to the century which ought not to be forgotten, that with which it opens. Two of the three I have mentioned are Oriel names. So pre-eminently is this other name, that of Edward Copleston. There are few to which Oriel or Oxford owes more. The Chair has been in existence for just two hundred years, and its history falls exactly within the bounds of two delimited centuries, the eighteenth and the nine- teenth. I have mentioned, omitting living persons, four names of special note in the nineteenth century. Oddly enough the eighteenth presents exactly the same number, those of the first Professor, Joseph Trapp, of Joseph Spence, of Robert Lowth, and Thomas Warton. Trapp was of Wadham. There is another debt to that most poetical College, which has, I think, never been properly recognized or put on record. The Chair owes its first tradition to one Wadham man, it owes its very existence to-day to another, a recent Head of that House, Mr. G. E. Thorley. 8 Spence ; Lowth ; IVarton The third Professor was of New College, Joseph Spence. He is certainly memorable. His Literary Anecdotes are still agreeable and suggestive reading, and form also a valuable repertory of literary history. His Pofymetis, in the fine edition to be found in Col- lege Libraries, is a noble book. It had a deserved and far-reaching influence. One special debt we owe it. It was from an abbreviated school edition of Spence's Polymetis that Keats derived sonte of his early inspira- tion. We think too little, in these days of exact and exhaustive scholarship and archaeology, of those de- lightful, traditional, gossiping literary works, literary rather than scientific, of Lempriere, Tooke, and Spence. Without Spence we might never have had the ' Ode on a Grecian Urn '. Of Lowth there is also much to be said. He was a man of mark and character both in letters and affairs. I may be pardoned for quoting at least one testimony. Every one knows the scathing criticism, couched in his inimitable style, which was passed by the great historian of my Society upon his University and his College. The two or three exceptions are not always noted. In the well-known passage in which he advocates the value of public lectures, the historian himself concludes, 1 1 observe with pleasure that in the University of Oxford, Dr. Lowth with equal eloquence and erudition has exe- cuted this task in his incomparable Praelections on the Poetry of the Hebrews/ Thomas Warton certainly calls for a lecture to himself, and it may perhaps peculiarly be due from one who is like him a resident. His burly features still look down on us in the Hall of Trinity and suggest his love of beer Browning a possible Professor; Beddoes 9 and bargees, mingled with his pioneer love of black-letter poets. But it is not generally known that more than once, a greater than all these came within measurable distance of being Professor. In 1867 Robert Browning was given the M.A. degree with the idea, in some quarters at any rate, that he might succeed Matthew Arnold as Professor. Arnold's own comment on the matter is to be found in his Letters (vol. i, p. 350). 1 You will have been interested/ he writes, ' by the project of putting Browning up for the Chair of Poetry ; but I think Convocation will object to granting the degree just before the election, for the express purpose of eluding the statute. If Browning is enabled to stand I shall certainly vote for him; but I think Doyle will get in/ The degree was carried, as we have seen, but whether for this reason or for any other the project of the Professorship was dropped, and Oxford and England lost a great opportunity. It is on record, on the authority of Mr. Edmund Gosse, that Browning said, that had he been elected Professor, his first lecture would have been on Thomas Lovell Beddoes, ' a forgotten Oxford poet/ Beddoes had as it happened already been noticed from this Chair, though not, it is true, very favourably. Writing from Pembroke in 1825 to his friend Kelsall, he says, ' Mr. Milman, our Poetry Professor, has made me quite unfashionable here by denouncing me as one of a villainous School/ I, too, might be tempted to lecture on Beddoes, for he is a Bristol, as well as an Oxford poet. But his story, if not so sad as the better known story of Chatterton, is a sad one, and the study of it would savour some- what of morbid pathology, however much Browning's 10 William Morris a possible Professor animating vigour might have given it a new health, and would certainly have touched it sanely. Ten years after Browning's possible candidature, another and quite a different possibility arose. In 1877 overtures were made from Oxford to William Morris to stand. His reply, which is given at length in Mr. Mackail's Biography, is illuminating to all who are interested in poetry. It is very like the well-known letter in which Gray gave his reasons for declining the office of Poet Laureate. Morris thought, he said, that the practice of any art rather narrowed the artist in regard to the theory of it. He doubted whether the Chair was more than an ornamental one, and whether the Professor of a wholly incommunicable art was not rather in a false position. ' Nevertheless/ he concludes, 1 1 would like to see a good man filling it, and if the critics will forgive me, somebody who is not only a critic.' The letter, like Gray's, was a little hard on persons less gifted than himself. Is the Chair more than an ornamental one? Is the art wholly incommunicable? What is the relation of a University to poetry? Many Universities, all in a sense, but some in a special sense, would seem to have much about them that may be called poetical. It is a commonplace that Oxford is herself poetical. So are other Universities, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Heidelberg. They are poetical in their history, their buildings, their amenities, their associations, their free and inspiring life. And yet the milieu of a University is not, in the general sense, the milieu of poetry. It is the business of Oxford to criticize, not to create ; to prepare, not to practise. It is with few exceptions by going out from her, not by lingering within her walls, Universities not the abiding home of Poets n that her sons achieve greatness in the field of letters as well as in the field of affairs. It is a hard saying for a resident, but I would say this to any son of Oxford. If you want before all to be a poet, if that is your first object, don't stay in Oxford. Why not ? you will reply. Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt. Surely Oxford is die Stille. Yes, but in Poetry talent is only half the battle, character is needed not less. Ah, two desires toss about The poet's restless blood, One drives him to the world without And one to solitude. I hasten to add that there have been exceptions, and that they are becoming every day more common because the Universities are every day becoming so much more open and various. I would say also that this counsel is not for those whose natural home is Oxford. For them it is like any other home, except that it is unlike any other and better than most. But the academic life does not suit very well with the writing of poetry or indeed of original literature. It is true that the author of the Cloister and the Hearth and of Peg Woffington had been a Fellow at my College when I first joined it for about forty years, and remained so for some ten more. But he preferred the London hearth to the Oxford cloister, and his life was more of the town than the College. Keble, again, wrote the poems which form the Christian Year while he was a young resident Fellow and Tutor, but at the time when his poetic powers were quickest he liked Oxford least. ' I begin to be clear/ he 12 Keble; Gray and Walpole wrote when he was seven-and-twenty, ' that I am out of my element here/ and again a little later, ' I have made up my mind to leave Oxford, I get fonder and fonder of the country and of poetry and of such things every year of my life/ Shortly after, at the age of thirty, he left. Dodgson and Pater, again, have been partial excep- tions, and there are some living exceptions to-day whom I could name. The great exception, the great example is Gray. What does Gray himself say about the academic life and the great world ? In a letter to Thomas Wharton, he writes as follows:- 'DEAR DOCTOR, You may well wonder at my long taciturnity. I wonder too, and know not what cause to assign, for it is certain I think of you daily. I believe it is owing to the nothingness of my history, for except six weeks that I passed in town toward the end of spring and a little jaunt to 'Epsom and Box Hill, I have been here time out of mind in a place where no events grow, though we preserve those of former days by way of Hortus Siccus in our libraries. My slumbers were disturbed the other day by an unexpected visit from Mr. Walpole who dined with me, seemed mighty happy for the time he stayed and said he would like to live here : but hurried home in the evening to his new gallery which is all Gothicism and gold, and crimson and looking-glass. He has purchased at an auction in Suffolk ebony chairs and moveables enough to load a waggon/ Yet Gray, from those College rooms which we may still see at Pembroke, indited the most popular poem in the language. Gray, it has always seemed to me, would have been an ideal Professor of Poetry. For though, like all critics, he makes his mistakes, he is one of the best critics of Poetry, and equally strong in learning and in taste. Duties of the Professor 13 The functions of a University are just these, to pre- serve in its Hortus Siccus those events of former days, and to grow in its Botanical Garden the typical plants of the world : to compare their blossoming and their fruit- age, to dissect their anatomy, to analyse them, to learn their law, to know the best that has been thought and written in all ages and places, to view things sub specie aeternitatis, to provide a real standard. It is this power that our study of the ancient classics has given us in the past and that the modern classics added to the ancient must still further give us, with a larger induction, in the future. This presentment of the classics fortunately coincides with the special duties of the Professor. For what are they ? When I was elected Professor I naturally read the statute relating to the Chair. I found to my pleasure that the Professorship was established for two reasons, firstly because the reading of the ' old poets ' conduces to ' sharpening and making ready and nimble the wits of the young', secondly because this same read- ing conduces ' to addition being made to more serious literature, whether sacred or profane '. My duties are then to lecture on the ' old poets ' with this twofold end in view. As to the sharpening of the undergraduates' wits I am not sure that that is what they most want. I remember how sharp they were in my day. Still I gladly recognize that part of my duty is to speak to the young. It is they after all who care most about poetry, though they generally have their own opinions pretty well made up at any rate for the next few months. But here I find a difficulty which apparently my pre- decessors did not in the early days. Who are to-day the old poets ? Down to Arnold's time my predecessors 14 The Old Poets in 1711 seem to have confined themselves, though with increas- ing liberty of allusion and digression, to the Greek and Latin Classics. Keble, however, allowed himself con- siderable latitude, and Arnold of course set an example of absolute freedom, not only as regards period but as regards subject. He tells us ingenuously in one of his letters that he threw in the famous lectures on translating Homer because he was supposed, and indeed I think we may say with some reason, not to have lectured enough on poetry. It was natural that the early Professors should be thus limited. They were so by the custom of the University. They were so by natural causes. Two hundred years ago when Professor Trapp began to lecture, who were the old poets in England and in France ? We can best answer that by asking who were the new poets ? In 1711, the year in which Trapp began, Louis XIV was still reigning in France and Queen Anne in England. The recent poets in France were Corneille and Mo- liere, Lafontaine, Racine, and Boileau. In England, Milton and Dryden were hardly old, Pope and Addison were still living and at work. As for modern German poetry it simply did not exist. A hundred years later these had become really old writers. Who in turn were the recent and the new? Voltaire and Rousseau had been dead just a generation, but they were still recent. Madame de Stael and Cha- teaubriand were in middle age. Beranger was thirty-one. Lamartine had just come of age. Hugo was a boy of nine. Schiller had died at the age of forty-two in 1805, but Goethe was still active. Burns was still recent, Scott as a lad had seen him, Scott who was now just between his poems and his novels. The Lyrical Ballads had been published some fifteen years, and followed up The Old Poets in 1811 and to-day 15 by the Poems with their famous Prefaces. Byron had come of age, had published English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and then dashed off on Childe Harolds Pilgrimage. Keats was a surgeon's apprentice among his gallipots, but reading Spenser and translating the Aeneid. Shelley had just come up to University Col- lege and was just going to get himself sent down again, after two terms' residence. Landor had been sent down from Trinity for an explosion of a different kind a few years before. Tennyson and Mrs. Browning were babes in arms, and Robert Browning was not yet born. Now these in their turn, are ' souls of poets dead and gone '. To-day another hundred years have passed by. The Victorian Age itself is now classic, or is rapidly becoming so. It will soon be as classic as the age of Queen Anne. Two years ago, in two successive months, its last representatives vanished from this scene, Swinburne in April, Meredith in May, of 1909. They seemed to pass at once, as the poet says, sideris in numerum, and to be added to the great glittering constellation of the Victorian Era. We are beginning then to be in a position to deal with the Victorian Age as a whole, and I think we may do so with some advantage. We stand now sufficiently far off to treat it to some extent historically, yet near enough to be aided by living tradition, and to be saved by this tradition from many of those mistakes to which the hypotheses of a later age, after the facts have been forgotten, must always be liable. But the situation has changed for the Professor of Poetry in Oxford in two hundred years in another and not less important way. Two hundred years ago, even one hundred years ago, there was very little public lecturing in Oxford on the 1 6 The Professor of Poetry and other Professors poets. Gibbon in his later life made it a complaint that the Professors did not lecture either at Oxford or at Cambridge. 'The silence/ he says, 'of the Oxford Professors, which deprives the youth of public instruc- tion, is imperfectly supplied by the Tutors as they are styled, of the several Colleges/ But, for the most part, there were very few Professors to lecture, even if they had all discharged their duty in this regard. To-day the field of English, both in literature and in language, is covered by a brilliant band of Professors, Readers, and Lecturers. The Times, in a leading article on the day of the election to this Chair, said, and justly, that my friend Professor Raleigh has written books which are just such as any Professor of Poetry might have written if he could. But, Mr. Vice-Chancellor, it is not only the Professor of English Literature who divides the field with and raises the standard against the unfortunate Professor of Poetry of to-day. The Professor of Greek does just the same. So again does the Professor of Latin and the Professor of German, and the Lecturers in French and Italian and Spanish. All these gentlemen are so many Professors of Poetry. They are so partly by their own gifts, and partly also by the nature of their office. It may happen, it does happen, that some of them are also in no mall degree, but in a very marked degree, poets. The same is true of the keen-witted scholar whom the sister University has just annexed to herself, the author of the Shropshire Lad who is the Cambridge Professor of Latin. Need I say how largely it is true too of Dr. Verrall ? But in point of fact the same has been true for a long time both here and at Cambridge, and true not only of the Professors but of the College Poets and Critics 17 Lecturers. It was true of Sir Richard Jebb. It was eminently true of that vivid younger scholar, critic, and poet, Walter Headlam. You may see the same phenomenon in Scotland, and no less strikingly in poetic Ireland. You may see it in London University, and in the provincial Universities and Colleges. Meanwhile, it is all the more important to ask what room there is left for the Professor of Poetry as such. What ought he to be, and to do? It has been said, 'You should obtain for your Professor a practising poet/ Is that in order that he might speak from ex- perience about the technique of his art, shall I say the tricks of his trade? I imagine not. You will find it, I think, difficult to persuade him to do so, and few would be either competent or prepared to follow many lectures of such a kind. But it is very true that the best criticism of the poets has been written by the poets, whether in prose or in verse. The popular saying which finds expres- sion in so many forms, that a critic is a poet, or a creative artist, who has failed, contains at best only half the truth. The good poets have seldom failed as critics. On the contrary, so far as they have touched it, they have signally succeeded. I am inclined to think that the truth is rather that the critics have failed as poets than that the poets have failed as critics. I had already written this when I found that it had been anticipated by the poet Shen- stone, who says, ' Every good poet includes a critic : the reverse will not hold/ Some of the greatest critics are indeed not known as poets, but it will, I think, generally be found that they have at one time or another written poetry, from the days of Plato and Aristotle to those of Sainte Beuve, who always declared that when the ' integrating molecule in himself was reached, it would c i8 Poets as Critics be found to have a poetical character '. Matthew Arnold, the most original and memorable critic among my pre- decessors, was also undoubtedly the best and most memorable poet. It was when he tried to pass directly from the critic to the poet that he failed. He wrote Merope, his least known and his least successful long poem, just after he became Professor. He said himself, ' She is calculated rather to inaugurate my Professor- ship with dignity than to move deeply the present race of humans? His best work in poetry was all done before he filled this Chair. The same was true, though less strikingly, of his predecessor, Keble. The reason in both cases, no doubt, is partly natural. The best poetry of both was written by both in their younger and less critical days. Where the poet and the critic coexist, the critic tends, as years go on, to gain upon the poet, partly from the influence of the world outside, partly from internal causes. But these examples, and many others, go to prove that the practice of poetry is the best preparation for the practice of criticism. Of the great critics in our own language, some have been poets hardly less great, like Dryden, Pope, and Coleridge. Others, while not so excellent in verse, like Addison and Johnson, must still rank among the poets. The same has continued true in our own time. There are no more suggestive and illuminating lights of criti- cism, even if they are only rare intermittent flashes, than the obiter dicta of excellent poets, whether those of Sophocles or Goethe, of Ben Jonson or Gray, of Tenny- son or Meredith. One of the best of critics notwith- standing his occasional caprice, his prejudice against persons as dissimilar as Euripides and Byron, ' George Eliot* and Walt Whitman, was Swinburne. You re- quire, it is true, to know how to read, and if necessary The Spirit of the Age 19 to transpose, his notation. He reminds me of an examiner with whom I once acted, long since dead, whose marking was admirable, if you only understood his scale, and could translate it into normal usage. Swinburne estimated in superlatives or the opposite. His marks were all a+ or 8 . Meanwhile the diffi- culty of filling the Chair in the way suggested is the familiar one. ' First catch your poet/ We have seen how Morris declined; others nearer in time and space have done the same. How then does poetry stand at the present moment, more particularly in England? Where are we in its evolution ? Have we any data either of dead reckoning, or of sounding, or of observation, by which we can determine our bearings ? Let us look at the poetic history of the past century. In 1825 Hazlitt, that brilliant and sincere, if too pungent and polemic writer, gave to the world a series of portraits which he collected under the title of The Spirit of the Age. About a score of years later the author of Orion, Richard Hengist Home, thought the time had come to issue a New Spirit of the Age. 2 The criticisms are still interesting; yet more in- teresting is it to see who are the personages criticized. Who were Hazlitt J s figures ? He begins with Jeremy Bentham and William Godwin, he ends with Lamb and Washington Irving. Between these come Coleridge, Edward Irving, Scott, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth, Sir James Mackintosh, Malthus, Canning, Gifford, Jeffrey, Lord Brougham, Sir Francis Burdett, Lord Eldon, Wilberforce, Cobbett, Campbell, Crabbe, Tom Moore, and Leigh Hunt. It will be remarked that neither Shelley nor Keats finds a place. In the account of Byron it is noted that the news of his death arrived even while the paper on him was being composed. Of See p. 36. 20 The New Spirit of the Age the figures selected by Hazlitt as typical of the Age of 1825, only two survive in Home's book as typical of the Age of 1844. These are Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt, 'two laurelled veterans/ 'links between the past and the present' as he describes them. Who are Home's other figures ? It is interesting to recall the names of the men and women who in 1844 appeared to the critic to embody the spirit of the era. The list is a very long one. I will not give it you in full. It may suffice to say that it begins with Charles Dickens (Thackeray significantly does not appear), the Earl of Shaftesbury, ' Thomas Ingoldsby,' and Landor : that it contains Dr. Pusey and Captain Marryatt, Tennyson, Macaulay and his victim Robert Montgomery, Mac- ready, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, and Carlyle, and ends with Sir Henry Taylor and the author of Festus. There is this difference be- tween the two. Hazlitt in* 1825 is pessimist and looks backward. His essay on Coleridge opens with this striking statement : ' The present is an age of talkers and not of doers, and the reason is that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect and doat on past achievements/ Was this how the age really appeared to a perspica- cious mind in 1825 ? ' Far advanced in the Arts and Sciences ! " Figure it to yourselves," as the French say. Five years before the opening of the first railway, five years off from 1830.' Home, on the other hand, is optimist and looks for- ward. What has intervened ? A gigantic stirring and awakening alike spiritual and material. They were, indeed, in 1825, in the small hours, in the dead, weary night before the dawn. When Byron died, Tennyson Matthew Arnold's 'New Age* 21 and his friends, as you remember, thought the world was at an end. Our world was only just beginning. The era ran its well-known course. We have another picture of it. A little more than twenty years later again, Matthew Arnold, in a volume styled New Poems, included a remarkable and characteristic piece entitled ' Bacchanalia, or The New Age '. May I be allowed to make rather a long quotation from the middle of this poem? ' The epoch ends/ he writes : The epoch ends, the world is still. The age has talk'd and work'd its fill The famous orators have shone, The famous poets sung and gone, The famous men of war have fought, The famous speculators thought, The famous players, sculptors, wrought, The famous painters fill'd their wall, The famous critics judged it all. The combatants are parted now Uphung the spear, unbent the bow. The puissant crown'd, the weak laid low. And o'er the plain, where the dead age Did its now silent warfare wage O'er that wide plain, now wrapt in gloom, Where many a splendour finds its tomb, Many spent fames and fallen mights The one or two immortal lights Rise slowly up into the sky To shine there everlastingly, Like stars over the bounding hill. The epoch ends, the world is still. Thundering and bursting In torrents and waves Carolling and shouting Over tombs, amid graves See on the cumberd plain Clearing a stage, Scattering the past about Comes the new age. 22 1850 and the death of Wordsworth Bards make new poems, Thinkers new schools, Statesmen new systems, '\ Critics new rules. All things begin again; Life is their prize; Earth with their deeds they fill, Fill with their cries. The passage is applicable, that is part of its merit, to any marked and sundering change from an old to a new era. But it seems indubitable that Arnold was thinking of his own era, of the end and break-up of the old political regime, culminating in 1848, of the death of Wordsworth in 1850 (preceded by Coleridge and Southey), in other words of the ' new age ' heralded by Home in 1845. This becomes yet more clear if we read the Memorial verses, headed 'April, 1850', and first published in Eraser's Magazine at the time of Wordsworth's death, which took place on April 23 of that year. It is not perhaps easy to say exactly what Arnold held to be the true limits of Wordsworth's ' period ', for, like every other critic, he regarded him as having outlived his day. He ranks him, however, with Byron and Goethe as a poet of ' the iron age ', ' the iron time ', ' Europe's dying hour '. That had been the time of Wordsworth's real impact. His influence gradually grew with the age which he formed. Home's prose says again the same as Arnold's poetry : 'After twenty years of public abuse and laughter William Wordsworth is now regarded by the public of the same country as the prophet of his age.' Arnold's poetic treatment of the New Age, it will be noticed at once, is far more general and wide in its scope than that of Home's prose volumes. But this is accidental. The ir(*>v (f>6ia0' 3 01 oi TrpocrOev dfj,a rpdfav r)8' tytvovro kv But at last Nestor too went to join Antilochus, and yet a new generation appeared. We are now nearly twenty years again from Tenny- son's death. We may again look out for yet a newer spirit, for the ' newest spirit ' of the ' newest age '. Were we to set ourselves once more the task of Home, who are the men and what are the forces we should have to describe ? They are not wanting, I think, and many of them are 'Pye, Petro Pindar, Parvo Pybus ' 25 not far to seek. The statesmen, the soldiers, and the jurists, all the men of action ; the divines and the men of science, the novelists, the actors, are all round us. And the poets? It is usual indeed to say that we have no poets, at any rate no great poets, among us. It is true that in all the arts and activities of the soul and mind we have lost in the last twenty or five-and-twenty years great names and great figures, not in poetry alone, but in painting and sculpture, in creative prose literature, in history, in science and philosophy. Only here and there a solitary figure like that of Sir Joseph Hooker or Dr. Alfred Wallace links us to the intellectual past. But neither science nor literature nor even poetry is dead. Despite the absence of conspicuous and house- hold names of poets pure and simple, I would con- fidently assert that we have still poets among us who have written pieces which have as good a chance of living in the Anthologies of the future as many of the pieces which appear in the Anthologies of the present. There has always been this complaint of the dearth of good new poets. Somewhere about 1880 it must have been that I met Browning for the first time, and I remember the talk turned on this very topic. Browning said, ' Well, anyhow we are not worse off than they were at the beginning of the century/ and he quoted the doggerel Latin lines which I had never heard before, which are attributed to Porson : Poetis laetamur tribus Pye, Petro Pindar, parvo Pybus, Si ulterius ire pergis, Adde his Sir James Bland-Burges. The hundred years which have elapsed since the beginning of the Romantic movement have enormously enlarged the resources of poetry. Its modes have been D 26 New Models and Metres many times multiplied both in France and in England. We too have had our Romanticists, our Parnassians, and our Symbolists. Whatever may be thought of Tennyson, Morris, Swinburne, Bridges, or Kipling, as poets, they have, whether in the revival or modification of the old, or in the addition of the new, added signally to the range of English metrification, and to our con- ception of the possibilities of music and harmony in English verse. Now for the first time we are beginning systematically to teach our students their own language and literature. France has long done it. Greece always did it. Who shall say what the effect will be on the English literature of the future ? Who can say again what may not be the effect of such a vast Thesaurus as will be, when it is completed, the New English Dictionary ? Certainly the young English poet of to-day ought to be better equipped than the young poet of the past in technique. And I believe he is. It is, I think, the abundance of models and the diffusion of education which account for the diffusion of technical skill of a very creditable excellence. But it is asked, Why are there no new great poets ? For my part I do not doubt that they too will by and by again arrive. Great men are always scarce, and to be a really great poet you must be a great man. It may indeed be that the present age is not one whose first or second preoccupation is with poetry. Politics, science, business, affairs, activities, the preparation for war, the contests with the elements, exploration, commerce, all these may predominate. But all this only points to the fact that the world is moving and living, if it is not at the moment meditating or singing in an equal degree. That a new age is arriving we all feel, some with A new 1830 27 optimism, some with pessimism, some with mingled hope and apprehension. There have been, no doubt, in the past, tracts and periods of literary sterility. The present condition of the United States of America certainly does not seem to favour literary production. But both there and in Germany, where it cannot be doubted that great changes, intellectual as well as material, in the condition of a vast and powerful nation have been, and are, in process, a revolution in this regard may rapidly occur. You young people, who have the whole of the next new age before you, you, I hope, are optimistic, resolute, and prudent, but optimistic; critical I am sure you are, for you would not be young if you were not, but criticism of others' enthusiasms or of past ideals may go with a great deal of enthusiasm and new ideals of one's own. The world surely was never more interesting for young or old, perhaps never more achingly interesting, with an intensity half pleasurable, half painful, than at present. We are reminded of the lines which the young poet wrote in the dawn of the Victorian Era : Ev'n now we hear with inward strife A motion toiling in the gloom The Spirit of the years to come Yearning to mix himself with Life. A slow developed strength awaits Completion in a painful school ; Phantoms of other forms of rule, New Majesties of mighty states. The warders of the growing hour, But vague in vapour, hard to mark; And round them sea and air are dark With great contrivances of Power. Are we not to-day nearing a new 1830, pregnant with change? We see new nations in either hemisphere D 2 28 New Themes of Poetry and in every portion of the globe; Canada a nation, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa nations, United Italy, United Germany, solid established historical facts, the Germanic and the Slavonic combinations growing and coming together, Turkey and Egypt feeling after modern efficiency, Japan broad awake, and China awakening, the United States an active and expansive world-power, South America with its immense physical riches one of the great potencies of the com- mercial world; the constant attrition of privilege, the growth of democracy, confronting this strengthening of nationality ; freedom and order everywhere competing, science with its illimitable vistas alike of theory and of application, always at work upon both the moral and material life; these are some of the main factors of the new momentous age. Religion in many forms is certainly not less alive to-day than formerly ; indeed, I trust it is more alive than ever. The theatre is vigor- ous, full of leaders and ideas. The novel, which was thought to be nearing exhaustion of subject thirty years ago, shows at least no sign of extinction. How poetry will deal with these new themes, how it is beginning even now to deal with them, I may perhaps attempt to discuss in future discourses. Meanwhile where are the English poets of the next age ? Perhaps in Oxford. Perhaps here to-day. And yet, it may also be, not here, even though they belong to Oxford. That they may belong to Oxford I think not unlikely. Oxford, it is true, has not always had her share of the poets of the country. It is certainly strange that while even Cambridge men like Dryden and Wordsworth and FitzGerald have admitted that Oxford is herself full of poetry, and at least not less so than her sister, she has in' the past produced far Oxford and. Cambridge 29 fewer of the great poets than Cambridge. What the reason of this may be it is not easy to pronounce. Partly it is a matter of accident. I remember well in younger days, when I had more of the spirit of schoolboy rivalry, my amusement and pleasure too when I came on the passage in a letter to Murray in which Byron describes his experiences and feelings when he began his under- graduate career. ' I was wretched ', he says, ' at leaving Harrow, to which I had become attached during the last years of my stay there, wretched at going to Cam- bridge instead of Oxford because there were no rooms vacant at Christ Church/ The whole letter, which contains the famous passage in which the ' Tutor ' advised Byron's friend, to whom his rooms were lent in his absence, not to damage any of the furniture, 'for Lord Byron, Sir, is a man of tumultuous passions/ is exceedingly entertaining. It was then an accident that Byron did not come here, and similar accidents may have determined the choice of others of the long list. But it must be admitted that it is too long to be all due to accident. It is more interesting to inquire whether it is in any way con- nected with our studies. Mr. Gladstone, in the very interesting personal recollections of Arthur Hallam which appeared in the Daily Telegraph some thirteen years ago, and which, I think, have still never been republished, enters with characteristic thoroughness into the speculation of what would have been the effect on the intellect of Arthur Hallam if he had been sent, as Mr. Gladstone, like a good Oxonian, clearly indicates he thinks he ought to have been, by his father, to Oxford instead of to Cambridge, and in place of devoting him- self or rather failing to devote himself to the studies of Cambridge, had read for the Final 'Greats' School. 30 Youthful Coteries Whatever the reason the fact remains that at that time, and for a few years longer, Cambridge was certainly predominantly the University of English Poetry, as Oxford was predominantly the University of English Prose. In the last fifty years the balance has perhaps con- siderably shifted. Certainly the University of Matthew Arnold himself, of William Morris and others well known, need not hide its head, and to-day we have not to look very far from Oxford, or to search very deeply amongst living Oxford men, to see that we have still less reason to complain. Who the next generation of Oxford poets will be I will not attempt to pronounce. They will not perhaps be discovered by the Professor of Poetry. The wind of the spirit bloweth whither it listeth and the new princes of Poetry come not usually ' with observa- tion '. They will more probably be discovered by the young for themselves, by their own contemporaries, in some youthful coterie or camaraderie. Such little circles appear from time to time in Oxford. Silently, stealthily they come together, like fairy rings in the night, sometimes only leaving a mysterious mark upon the morning grass, and afterward melting away even as they came ; sometimes growing into more lasting strength of flower and fruit. Such was the little coterie of Birmingham schoolboys, who, coming to Oxford in the 'fifties', gathered new friends and forces to themselves, and by and by, as we have seen, merged in the still more famous * brother- hood* of London which turned the world of art and taste upside down. A more recent example was that later friendship to which my immediate predecessor belonged, which, when the ' seventies ' were passing into the ' eighties ', sent flying to and fro those ' Waifs and The Gift of Verse widely diffused 31 Strays ' of poesy, fresh and fragrant, if immature, like the green, fluttering leaves and seedlets which blow about the quadrangles and strew the College lawns in May-time, or coined those merry epigrams which by and by found their way into the great world. Such, in another spring, a dozen years later, were the four friends who put forth a shy little volume so happily entitled Primavera. Twenty years have again gone by and yet another Primavera may be due. But I do not count on finding its authors here. They do not invariably attend lectures even on poetry. Ite hinc inanes, ite rhetorum ampullae, Inflata rore non Achaico turba! Away, haunt not thou me, Thou vain Philosophy! Little hast thou bestead, Save to perplex the head, And leave the spirit dead. Such has very often been the language of the poetic undergraduate. But even if they are not here I may perhaps offer to them, in their absence, a few words of practical advice. Do not think, any of you, because you have a turn for versification, even a very pretty turn, that you are necessarily poets. The gift for versification is very widely diffused. It is perhaps hardly less widely diffused than the gift for drawing or music. Few clever men, with a literary turn at any rate, are quite without it. Statesmen, divines, judges, architects, artists, have always had it. Half the great men in letters and affairs of the last generation possessed it. They were not quite poets, though some of them came very near it. The same has always been the case and is doubtless the case to-day. But if you have the gift, cultivate it, at any rate in youth. It is 32 Can Poetry be taught? at least a delightful and also an educative exercise. I think that the art of versification, and even of poetry, might be more taught than it is, as part of a literary and mental training. You will soon find out, life will teach you, whether poetry is your vocation. It is that only for one in a hundred thousand. Some people seem to think I ought to be prepared to give lessons in poetry. They write and solicit my advice. They ask to be recommended some manual of poetry. They invite me to correct their verses. I am not saying that this instruction could not be given at all. One of the greatest of poets gave it, or some- thing very like it ; Dante, who was, as it pleases me to think, a Professor of Poetry at the University of Bologna. A lesser poet of more recent times, de Banville, offered, I believe, to teach poetry in so many lessons. I do not propose to follow his example. Poetry is not to be regarded as a profession amongst professions. Parents and guardians have always said the same thing about it, and they are right what Tennyson's grandfather said to Tennyson and Pope's father to Pope, and Cowper to poetry itself, what Ovid's father long before said to Ovid. Maeonides nullas ipse reliquit opes. 1 Even Homer left no fortune/ or as I suppose we ought to put it, to be up to date, the syndicate for pro- moting the rise of the Greek Epic did not pay its share- holders. If you merely want fame and fortune for their own sakes, seek them in other lines, but if indeed poetry is your vocation, then walk worthy of it. If the magic gleam does glance on your path, ' follow the gleam ! ' Art thou poor yet hast thou golden slumbers, Oh, sweet content! Oxford's Opportunities 33 Meanwhile is the Oxford of to-day a favourable ground for the production of poetry or poets? The Oxford of sixty years ago, says a living poet, speaking of the time of Burne-Jones and Morris, was singularly unsympathetic. And as regards direct teaching this would seem to have been so. Oxford herself was perhaps at that time more beautiful than to-day. The whisper of the last enchantments of the ' Middle Age ' was less mingled and confused with the whirr of modern science and modern commerce. But on the other hand the ideas of modern science were also wanting. The opportunities of studying both science and art were meagre and scant. Ruskin had not enriched the Galleries with his gifts or with his Drawing School. Morris and Burne-Jones went toward the end of their undergraduate time as a favour to see the Combe Collection of Pre-Raphaelite art at the private house of the owner at the University Press. Now any undergraduate can go and study it for him- self, excellently displayed as it is to-day, in the Ash- molean Buildings. There was then no exhibition of plastic art of any educative kind in Oxford. We remember how much Keats owed to the Elgin Marbles, savagely denounced as their transference to London had been by Byron. The student at Oxford had no equivalent oppor- tunity. To-day he has the whole range of Professor Gardner's Department and of the Ashmolean Col- lections. Music, it is true, had never quite died out. Like architecture and with architecture it had maintained its living continuity in Oxford under varying changes of fortune and taste. But Music in England, especially in the last fifty 34 The Oxford Spirit years, has made great advance, and is to-day an influence far more present and energetic than it then was. I am inclined to believe more in these indirect influences than in any direct education of the poet. And yet I am doubtful whether influences more indirect still may not be yet more potent. The chance-blown seed lighting on the happy corner may produce blooms which 'outredden', and ' out- perfume ' too, ' all voluptuous garden roses '. The free intercourse of quick, youthful minds in College and University life, the stimulus of original and enthusiastic teachers these all, history tells us, have been powerful if not to produce, at least to foster- original and creative minds. I said the world was never more interesting than to-day. Nor I think was there ever a greater call for the intuition of the poet to interpret the new age to itself, and Oxford should surely contribute her share toward this end. What is her inspiration ? How did Matthew Arnold fifty years ago, from this place, define her spirit ? ' Sweetness and light/ The harmonizing of poetry and of truth ; the search for truth, guided by the splendour of beauty. If I had to rewrite after fifty years this formulation of the Oxford spirit and say how it lives and appears among us to-day, for that it does live and appear I believe and hope, I would say that the best spirit of Oxford is shown in the combination, in every field, of research with reverence. Oxford has a unique opportunity in her history and her material incarnation, in her old studies supplemented as they are to-day by her new. To her Humanities she has at last added Science, to her Metaphysics the Physics she so much needed, and for which for so long she cared too little. But let her be careful now in Research with Reverence 35 adding the new to keep the old. Let her recognize that in the things of the spirit the human element enters in. You cannot treat men and their actions, either those of to-day or those of yesterday, as if they were only automata responding to a mechanical stimulus. You cannot so interpret hjstory or language, or so work upon human nature. We see. the Oxford spirit perhaps best in some of our leading workers in that region where it is needed most, but it is needed in every field of learning, and I think I would fain think we see it, and not seldom, in each in turn. Oxford has been in time past a far-famed home of Theology; she has been a far-famed home of Philosophy; she has been a famed school of the historian, the economist, and the statesman ; she is beginning to be a school of Natural Science; let her become more than of yore I think she is beginning to become that also a nursery, a training ground, a home, of poets. For it is just here that that special power can help us, that first and finest of the Fine Arts, that Muse which is, as we know, more philosophical than History, more potent with mankind in general than Philosophy, more penetrating in its eloquence, and in its influence more permanent, than Rhetoric the Muse, the ' divine ' Muse, of Poetry. NOTES 1 p. 4. I am glad to think that this drawback is about to be removed. The Oxford Press will before long produce, with the aid of the Warden of Keble, a translation of these Lectures by Mr. E. K. Francis. 2 p. 19. Hazlitt's Spirit of the Age has been republished in Bohn's Standard Library. Home's New Spirit of the Age is in- cluded in the World's Classics (Henry Frowde. Oxford Univer- sity Press. Price is.). Oxford : Horace Hart, M.A., Printer to the University