worse. of the material. Instead of allowing the myth to develop in imagination until it has assumed the meaning and shape natural to the modern poet, he may introduce into it ready-made modern ideas, and force it to express them. And it will be able to express them only through a highly symbolical or even allegorical treatment. In this case only half the problem is solved, and the half by itself is worth little. The idea has an interest for us, but its expression is not the natural expression. Matters may be even We may feel that its expression is the form appropriate to some other idea or experience; and consequently we become aware of an incongruity fatal to poetic enjoyment. Or, worse still, it may be that the idea presented to us has not a poetic interest for us at all, but a directly moral or religious one; and in this case we complain that a beautiful story has been spoilt for purposes not poetical. But, whether this be so or not, the idea introduced by the allegory almost always has this in common with moral ideas, that it is not produced by the poetic imagination, and therefore inseparable and indistinguishable from its embodiment, but is a current idea, due in a greater or less degree to abstraction, and therefore capable of only an artificial connection with the myth which is supposed to express it. The consequences of this procedure can be best explained by illustration. Here we may at once state our second requisite for this kind of poetry :-in the new poem, as in the old myth, the meaning and the form should be completely harmonious, and form a natural unity. The species of verse which seems to offer the greatest obstacle to success of this kind is the pure lyric. For here the poet, instead of writing about a myth, has to speak the language of it, to utter as the direct outcome of his own personal feeling what he nevertheless puts into the mouth of some mythological figure. Yet this is what Goethe has actually done in more than one instance. I am thinking of that series of unrhymed lyrics of which Ganymed, Prometheus, and Mahomet's Gesang are the most famous. Let us dwell for a moment on the first of these and ask, for the purposes of our subject, what Goethe has accomplished. On the basis of a subject unpromising enough for a modern poet he has produced a lyric which hardly stands second to any even of his own songs in its glowing ardour and passionate directness. The reason is that, paying no regard to historical exactness, he has seized in the myth what is of lasting import, the idea (if we must put it in a theoretical shape) of a yearning towards the life or love or spirit that is in nature and beyond it. It is not that in his mind the idea has this meagre form, and that he forces the myth to express it; but the myth means that to him, is that to him; that and the myth are one and the same thing. Probably it was so when first he heard the story. Perhaps, as time went on, its old shape died more and more out of his mind, until at last, under the influence of some special occasion, this essence of it took a new shape in that song of Ganymed, which certainly would have been astonishing to a Greek, but which is none the worse for that. The song gives utterance to an idea or mood which, in Wordsworth and Shelley, produced poems of the most various kinds. It was a mood which coloured a whole period of Goethe's life and some of his best verse; the mood which during his year's sojourn in Italy seemed to bathe his whole nature in sunlight; the mood which produced poems so perfect, yet so different, as the seventh of the Roman Elegies and the Proœmion to Gott und Welt. in the first of these Goethe has given the feeling a strictly classical form; and in the latter the classical associations have quite disappeared. earlier time the ancient form was not yet natural to him, and the meaning he divined in the legend found a more purely lyrical expression. It melted so completely into his own joy and But At this longing that it could not be described, it could only sing itself out. It was no dead and soulless prospect that met his eye, no "senseless gust that called to him in the wind. One spirit was moving within him and without him, panting for union, incarnate in light and sound and in the eye and ear. It is at such moments that for men of all times the earth in spring seems to thrill towards her lover the sun; possibly some such feeling may have underlain the original myth; and, however that may be, it found in Goethe's case no utterance so natural as words which he could connect with the memory of Ganymed: Hinauf, hinauf strebt's. Neigen sich der sehnenden Liebe. In eurem Schoose Umfangend umfangen! The sign of excellence in a poem like this is that it gives us a single total impression, and that a purely poetic one. For this means that the meaning and form are completely fused. Our first thought of Ganymed is not that it is historically exact or inexact, moral or immoral, full of religious meaning or destitute of it; that it is wonderfully clever or that we have had a new pleasure: our first thought is that it is beautiful. Other qualities may be there, second thoughts may dwell on them; and, if we have faith in human nature, we shall be slow to suppose that a completely satisfactory poem can be really immoral or irreligious. But before the religion, the morality, the spiritual significance can enter into it, they have to pass through imagination, to lose their individuality, and to issue as sublimity or pathos or loveliness. If they have not suffered this change, well, doubtless they retain their original value and it may be a value greater than any æsthetic worth-but æsthetic worth they have not. And in so far as their prominence in a poem interferes with the purely poetic impression, so that our judgment expresses itself in words which are not æsthetic, their effect is as perverting as considerations of beauty would be in a judicial sentence or in the giving of alms. It is the same with political and with simply intellectual interests. That political feelings sometimes produce fine poetry is certain, but they cannot do so without losing their directly practical character: it is no praise to say of a poem that it is on the right side. Purely intellectual ideas and processes, again, only enter into art by being subordinated to imagination and "touched with its emotion: we do not commend a poem when we say that it is philosophical, or pay it a compliment when we call it clever. It is no æsthetic merit in the second part of Faust that moral and metaphysical truths can be dug out of those large portions of it which give no poetic pleasure. And it is because Ganymed, in spite of or in addition to all its other interest, does produce a complete æsthetic effect, that it offers in some respects an ideal example of the use of an old myth. One Our view may perhaps gain in clearness if we apply it to a series of poems now widely popular. In the whole history of English verse Greek mythology has never been so systematically treated as in the Epic of Hades. of its critics has spoken of the author's "enterprise of connecting the Greek myth with the higher and wider meaning which Christian sentiment naturally finds for it;" and the description is just, if the word "Christian" is allowed a wide enough sense. Whether this enterprise is poetically justified depends entirely on the manner in which the "connection" is effected. But before we try to answer this question, let us say at once that the author of the Epic of Hades has done literature a service of a kind especially needed. He has at all events this great claim on our welcome, that he does not despair of mythology. His book is a practical refutation of the idea that the myths of any people can be arbitrary inventions which happened to please a particular race, but which sprang from no abiding tendency, and have no more significance than a brightly-coloured dream. This idea stands on a level with the old notion that religions are the invention of priests, and laws the invention of kings. Yet, however absurd it may seem to us when we state it baldly, our practical attitude corresponds to it. Most of us look on religious myths very much as we do on the stories of Sindbad or Jack the Giantkiller. And the result is that we deprive ourselves not only of an immense aesthetic material, but also of some valuable elements of culture and possibly even of religion. In the Epic of Hades the Greek stories are at least supposed to embody ideas neither transitory nor absurd. In another respect, too, the author seems to have taken the right course: he has treated the stories freely. So much confusion prevails on this subject that I venture to return to it for a moment. If the myths of any people are to have an æsthetic value for us, and possibly a religious value also, they must be treated as mere materials without historic scruple. What the origin of the story of Ganymede may have been, what different shapes it takes, these are questions of interest for science, historical, linguistic, philosophical. But for the imagination they matter no more, they matter even less, than does the question as to the real character of Egmont or Don Carlos. Don Carlos was not a high-souled enthusiast, but a ruffian; but for the purpose of the dramatist the problem is not what Don Carlos was, but what can be made of him. It is true that the freedom of art in this point has its limits, and that it would be better if historical truth could be preserved. But that limit is to be looked for, not in scientific knowledge, but in the information No. 259.-VOL. XLIV. possessed by the general literary public. Historic truth, as such, is no canon of æsthetic truth; but it would be bad art to represent Washington as a rogue, or Richard III. as a benevolent man, because a definite breach would be made between the knowledge or belief of the general public and the artistic representation offered to it; a breach which the imagination could not ignore or fill up, and which would therefore impede its enjoyment. In the same way it would perhaps be better for Schiller's play in the end if it were not so historically inaccurate; for although most of his readers do not now know what kind of a person Don Carlos was, it is possible that some day historical knowledge may be so widely extended that a disagreeable collision between fact and the drama may be generally felt. But when so much as this has been allowed, the claims of scientific truth on art seem to be satisfied. What is of moment to the imagination is the truth which appeals to it; and "facts," as such, are not of moment to it. may safely deny that there ever was a Wandering Jew, or that the Greek gods existed or exist; of the real originals of Achilles, of Arthur, of Don Juan, of Faust, we know nothing, or next to nothing. And for the purposes of imagination we desire to know nothing of all this. It is not the facts asserted in these myths or legends that have value for us, but the living spirit, the human soul, that mirrors its nature in them. It may be that but for the existence of a real Doctor Faustus the legend would not have arisen. But we have the legend and the poem that sprang from it; and, for poetry, it matters absolutely nothing now whether he was ever born or not, and whether he was torn to pieces by the devil or died quietly in his bed. We The author of the Epic of Hades is therefore, as it seems to us, not going beyond the unwritten laws of verse when he refuses to treat the Greek myths as facts, and invests them with D a meaning which they did not originally possess. But has he succeeded in so fusing together the old form and the new spirit that the effect is poetically right? If not, then it must be maintained that however much our other feelings may be moved, the poetic worth of this emotion is at best mixed. No one can read this book without being struck by the enthusiasm which seizes on a moral or religious meaning in the myths, and often enforces it with real eloquence. And sometimes the effect is successful poetry, as, for instance, in the case of myths which obviously spring from a moral experience not seriously affected by time, such as those of Tantalus or Sisyphus. But too often the story and its "meaning" refuse to combine; the experience which should be the soul does not form for itself a body in which it lives and through which it speaks to us, but a certain material is given us and we have to be told what it signifies. And this "meaning" is something with which we are already more or less familiar in an abstract shape. On the one side stands the story; on the other we have reflections obviously belonging to the present time and impossible to a Greek, and these are placed with very little ado in the mouths of gods and heroes. The result is not satisfactory. How ever eloquent the reflections may be, it is not these lips that should utter them. The right place for the sections about Zeus and the Unknown would be a modern symposium in the Nineteenth Century. It is not Psyche who should explain to us that we have seen in the series of divinities only "Those fair forms Which are but parts of Him, and are indeed Attributes of the Substance which supports The Universe of Things." (P. 274.) Orpheus and Eurydice ought not to tell us (if I understand them rightly) that they typify a mistaken marriage, owing to which a man of genius has renounced his higher place to walk in the comfortable plain of household affection (pp. 145-154). It is most distressing that Acteon should "sometimes think" that "all his days were shadows, all his life an allegory" (p. 116), and should deliberately suggest various answers (and good ones) to his own riddle. What Medusa says of nunneries and seduction (p. 195) is sound doctrine, but surely she is not the person to enforce it. In these cases, and in others, we feel that violence has been done to myths which have a meaning more impressive, if vaguer, than that given to them. In them, too, the meaning is one thing with the tale, and therefore they are beautiful. But here we have moral and religious ideas which, however truly felt, have not been able to transform themselves into sensuous life. They themselves have not become imagination, and therefore they do not satisfy imagination. It is this very fact, this prominence of an enthusiasm directly moral and reflective, which suits the Epic of Hades to the taste of so many readers. No great poetic demand is made on us, far less than is made by Goethe's or Mr. Tennyson's poems on these subjects. At the same time we are standing on solid ground. Our moral and religious beliefs have a strength and value which, fortunately, in most cases far exceed the strength and requirements of our imagination. We seem to have much more offered to us when they are put before us in a clear and independent form, than when the vital experience from which they spring is incorporated in a shape apprehensible only by poetic insight, and is refused a distinct theoretical expression. Most of us, to put an extreme case, get more from practical eloquence on free will and irresolution illustrated by the tragedy of Hamlet than by reading the tragedy itself. If the effect we desire is a practical effect, we do well to prefer the exhortation. And, even in the interests of poetry, if we cannot apprehend Hamlet without the eloquence, if we cannot appropriate the myths without an allegory, it is better that we should have it. But it remains none the less true that eloquence is eloquence, and pcetry poetry; and that, when we use poetry as a stimulant to moral feelings, we do not use it as poetry. A glance at the notices of the press appended to the Epic of Hades and the Songs of Two Worlds will show how much of the pleasure which these works give is only partly æsthetic. We read sentence after sentence praising the author (quite truly) for qualities which are not poetic at all. An ecclesiastical paper may talk of "that particularly imaginative lustre which belongs to the truly poetic mind," but journals not ecclesiastical take up the position thus basely deserted. It is "the depth and truth of its purgatorial ideas that really attracts them to the Epic of Hades. Does any one take the Bishop of Gloucester's declaration that he has "derived from it a deep pleasure and refreshment such as he never thought modern poetry could give" for a judgment on the poetic merits of the poem? Something at least nearer the point might be expected from the Saturday Review. But that champion of our spiritual welfare is absorbed in the "noble purpose and high ideal" of the author, and, carried into higher spheres by an ode in his volume of lyrics, bursts forth-" We cannot find too much praise for its noble assertion of man's resurrection.” The author of the poems is not responsible for this irrelevant approval, but it is invited by that defect in his works which I have criticised. Whether the criticism is well founded in this particular case or not, the grounds on which it is based have a general application, and I hope they have been 1 I do not say, nor in the least mean to imply, that they are anti-poetic. On the contrary-we are so often told that the subject of a work of art is a matter of indifference, that it may be as well to add this-it is surely the fact that deep and true ideas have a natural affinity to poetry which shallow and false ideas have not. But they ought to show it by becoming poetry; if they do not, their depth and truth are not poetic qualities at all. made distinct. The cause of failure is not that a Greek myth is treated without historical respect; nor that its forms are used for the expression of ideas different from, and in many respects superior to, those of the Greeks. If our poetic ideas are capable of so revivifying these forms. that the impression they make on the imagination is aesthetically right, a real achievement has been effected, a real addition of the greatest value to the world of our imagination and possibly also to our moral and religious life. We may go farther. It is not even the gross historical incongruity of the substance of a poem with the figures in which it is worked out, that is fatal or even greatly harmful to the aesthetic result; for then these figures are really mere accessories, and we treat them as such. But the problem takes quite another shape when a poet, instead of using an ancient form as a mere accident, attempts to make it the real embodiment of his ideas. In this case he may express what modern experience he chooses, so long as he can make it live in its mythical embodiment; but that he cannot do, if he leaves it in the form of a conscious current idea and merely inserts it into the story. The first requisite is that the impression given should be æsthetically right; and no impression is so which is double, not single, and the double elements of which refuse to give up their separate existence. If we examined the many successful poems which have been written on mythical and legendary subjects during the last hundred years, I think we should find this point of view confirmed. But, we may be told, there is a very great difference between a lyric like Ganymed, and the poems we have criticised. What Goethe has expressed is only a relation of our minds to nature, a relation which has not been materially altered in the course of 2,000 years. (I do not accept this statement.) There is no difficulty, it will be added, in pro |