to

pressions of a single spirit may denote or produce an indifference all forms, which soon passes into the loss of the central experience itself; but the best of gifts may be misused by weakness or frivolity. And, even if we dispute the value of this mobility in life itself, it is a first necessity for poetry, and particularly for poetry of the kind which we have been discussing. Without it an old myth or a myth revived must either remain something remote and external, or be interpreted by an allegorical treatment which cannot give poetical satisfaction.

That we spontaneously make this transference in reading St. Simeon Stylites or Lucretius thus means really that they are good poetry. The same thing is true of a slighter but not less perfect work of Mr. Tennyson's-St. Agnes' Eve. Here the poet has taken the legend according to which

"upon St. Agnes' Eve

Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honeyed middle of the night,
If ceremonies due they did aright."

He has boldly turned it in a new way, and has given us the impassioned hymn of a nun to the heavenly bridegroom. Here we have the exact counterpart of the main idea of Goethe's Bride of Corinth. There the old faith which sanctified youth and nature is contrasted with the desolation of the new, which has torn the young Athenian's bride from him to devote her to Christ :

"Sacrifice is here

Not of lamb or steer

But of human woe and human pain.”

But from the grave itself she rises to still the unquenched longing, to satisfy the offended gods, and to destroy her lover with her kisses :

"Fearful is the weird that forced me hither, From the dark-heaped chamber where I lay: Powerless are your drowsy anthems, neither Can your priests prevail, howe'er they

pray.

Salt nor lymph can cool Where the pulse is full; Love must still burn on, though wrapped in clay."1

In Mr. Tennyson's poem the love that was cast out has returned in a spiritual form; mere renunciation has become a consuming desire:

66

Deep on the convent-roof the snows
Are sparkling to the moon:
My breath to heaven like vapour goes:
May my soul follow soon!"

I need not quote more; we all know the poem by heart, and know what a masterpiece of painting it is, coloured in every detail by the feeling of the whole! And who ever found it less beautiful, who-it is the same question - ever failed to identify himself with its spirit, because it could no more serve as the common expression of his religious feelings than could a prayer to Zeus ?

There are two of Mr. Tennyson's poems which must have occurred to any reader who has followed me so farTithonus and Ulysses. I will take as the last of my illustrations the Ulysses, a poem which would have gladdened Goethe's heart. Most of us know the

Ulysses of Homer; and it is to be

hoped that Mr. Butcher and Mr. Lang will be able to print their translation in such a form that the Odyssey may become as accessible to Englishmen as Shakespeare or the Pilgrim's Progress. But no one can compare Mr. Tennyson's Ulysses with the Homeric hero without being struck by the completeness of the change. We may try to lessen it by saying that in both cases we have the type of endurance, of experience, of skill united with strength. But, in so far as this is

1 From Aytoun's and Martin's translations of Goethe's Songs and Ballads.

2 Or rather, this ecstasy of soul hardly admits even the memory of a past renunciation or of a storm that has given place to peace. For a rendering of such a contrast of feelings, called up by the very same situation as that described in Mr. Tennyson's poem, the reader will turn to Schubert's wonderful song, Die junge Nonne.

true, it only shows how differently this type is realised at different times. In the whole Odyssey there is hardly a trace to be found of the idea or passion which gives its unity to Mr. Tennyson's poem-the idea of a hunger after new experience and knowledge, unstilled by any labour or age. It is a commonplace that that word, which to us is associated with all that unites human nature with the divine, the word "infinite," seems to have suggested to the Greek disorder and even evil. Faust's unrest, the passion of his words,

"Und was der ganzen Menschheit zugetheilt ist

Will ich in meinen innern Selbst geniessen, Mit meinem Geist das Höchst' und Tiefste

greifen,

Ihr Wohl und Weh auf meinen Busen haufen,

Und so mein eigen Selbst zu ihrem Selbst erweitern,

Und, wie sie selbst, am End' auch ich zerscheitern!"

this, if he could have made any sense of it at all, would have seemed to the Greek (what indeed it is shown to be in Goethe's poem) the source of insolence and impiety; and probably he would. not so readily have recognised that this "feeling of the infinite" is also the spring of great achievement. To his mind too, accustomed to a Ulysses who would gladly have spent a quiet old age in Ithaca, how strange the speech would have sounded:

"I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravelled world, whose mar-
gin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life. Life piled on
life

Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard
myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human
thought."

This, I say, would have sounded

strange to Greek ears; but there is not a grander passage in modern verse. And more than this: though the words come from a Greek hero, they give us a sense of perfect fitness. The whole legend lives again in them, and it lives in a new shape. And, while more than two thousand years lie between the two poems, and the change of those twenty centuries finds free utterance, the one still seems to us the right conclusion of the other, and a strange solemnity gathers around our memory of the Homeric world as we read of the great chances of the last voyage:

"It may be that the gulfs will wash us down It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew."

How has it come about? It is not a successful imitation of the Greek that moves us. It is not that Mr. Tennyson has told us the old story, and then shown us how our conscious beliefs, or hopes, or experience may find a meaning in it. What Ulysses was to Homer we know; and we do not want it bettered or interpreted. But what does Ulysses mean to us? How can the heart that beats in our own time find expression in the legend, as the spirit of the old Greeks was mirrored that which for them expanded into the in it ages ago? In what form does story of the much-enduring wise man of many wanderings, clothe itself for us, within the limits indeed of the old idea, but yet freely and naturally? If we can answer that question, we have not lost the myth, although we change its outward feature; the myth itself has developed. And this is the question which Mr. Tennyson has answered for us, not in an exposition or an allegory, but by re-creating; so that he gives us a poem on an ancient subject," as we roughly say, yet modern to the core, and human, a Ulysses with that new light in his eyes which we can understand without a word.1

1 It would be interesting to trace the story of Ulysses from Homer to Mr. Tennyson through its various changes, whether in the way of

In choosing illustrations from Goethe and Mr. Tennyson my main object has been to contrast the successful use of myths or legends with that particular misuse of them which culminates in conscious allegory. Doubtless the names of great poets may be pointed to in justification of this form of verse; and it would be absurd to deny that it is capable of producing fine results. I will not plead in answer that Dante or Spenser are great in spite of their allegorising and not in consequence of it; nor that much which, owing to our labour in understanding it, we regard as allegory, is really more like the unconscious symbolism to be found in all poetry. Nor can I attempt to analyse the conditions under which an allegory may be successfully employed, or do more than ask the reader to remember the weakness of those passages in Milton, where the reflection that explains and argues gets the better of the imagination that sees and embodies. We are speaking only of the last century of poetry, and maintaining that for a time like our own, when reflection is strong and imagination somewhat at a loss, when we are forced to realise our beliefs and are apt to attach a fictitious value to the theoretical form we give them, conscious symbolism and allegory become a temptation to us, and produce poor results in works of art. Few who care for poetry more than for the art of interpretation will deny the deplorable effects of this tendency on Goethe's later verse; and I find it difficult to believe that Mr. Tennyson had the abstract ideal of a blameless character, or theoretical beliefs as to the fortunes of the soul before his mind when he wrote the Morte d'Arthur or Guinevere. It is quite another matter to say that in those poems the imagination gives shape to a vital body of spiritual experience, which may be afterwards gathered from the poems and

ex

distortion or development. The middle point is no doubt the great passage in Dante (Inf. xxvi. 85 ff.), which may have suggested Mr. Tennyson's poem, and to which the above remarks, mutatis mutandis, would apply.

But

pressed as a theory or doctrine. that may be done with Hamlet or Faust, with Ganymed or Ulysses, as well as with the Idylls of the King.

But perhaps it may be felt that a great deal is being made of a trifle; that, after all, the works composed on subjects like these are few in number, and only interest a small circle. The opposite is the case. These poems are a kind of conquest over time. Ours is an age of investigation. We ransack the religions, the legends, the fairy tales of all the world, to find food not merely for science but for imagination; the result may be that in the end we shall find food for life itself. Ideas which were religious and have ceased to be so, are preserved in a new form and for a less serious end. Where a Greek could express himself only through the traditions of his own people, we can find a body for our thought not only in English lives and English ideas, but in the shapes left us by Indian and Egyptian, Greek and Roman, old German and Icelandic civilisations. Is this a fact of no significance ?

Again, poems of this kind are neither few nor esoteric. We have taken our examples from Goethe and Mr. Tennyson. If we take the English verse of the last hundred years, and cut away from it everything written on mythological and legendary subjects, we shall find they have played a great part. Let us merely refer to some names. Keats drew his inspiration. mainly from Greek mythology. In his first work, feelings intensely modern and characteristic of youth throw the strangest light on the story of Endymion, and a passion essentially unGreek seems to find in the Greek world a refuge from the apparent prose of modern life.' Lamia is a Greek

1 I will merely allude to the considerable body of poetry to which a feeling of this kind has given rise. The "hellenische Sehnsucht" was common in Germany at the end of the last century. By far its most splendid outcome was, of course, Schiller's Götter Griechenland's. It reached its extreme in the life and writings of Hölderlin, the college friend of

legend; the Eve of St. Agnes is based on mediæval tradition; the odes To a Grecian Urn and To Psyche speak for themselves. In the fragment of Hyperion Keats chose a subject comparatively untouched and of imperishable interest;1 and he showed that he had reached the power of treating a myth with his whole heart and yet without sentimentality.

How different again, and how significant is the spirit in which Byron, whose discontent went straighter to its mark and found little rest in the Greek world, uses a legendary material. He sees in Cain a far more adequate hero than he could create in his Laras or Corsairs. In the story used in Heaven and Earth he has the fairest field for that description of the mixture of sea and sky in which the storm within him passed away. Or again, instead of the beginning of the world he takes the current notion of its ending, and in the most perfect of all his poems, the Vision of Judgment, uses this notion, as decaying religious ideas are often used at first, as a vehicle for satire and burlesque. Or, lastly, he ventures on the great fellow-legend to Faust, Don Juan; and, however little he might have been able to mould it into a unity, he at least handles it with a freedom as unhesitating as Goethe's. It is this freedom and sincerity of imagination which never Schelling and Hegel, and author of the Schicksalslied set by Brahms; and it still coloured the verses he produced at intervals during the melancholy madness into which he early sank. The effect of such feelings on the greater writers is naturally transient, and in England they do not seem to have much affected any considerable poet except Keats. The reader will recall the lines in Lamia, "There was an awful rainbow once in heaven," &c., the sonnet " Glory and loveliness have passed away," and Wordsworth's sonnet, "The world is too much with us." But I suppose the revolt against certain Christian ideas, and the new revolutionary Renaissance, not glad but defiant, which has produced some of Mr. Swinburne's finest lyrics, is distantly allied to these feelings, and they may be traced, in a modified and more scientific form, in Mr. Symonds's essays on Greek poetry.

1 Comp. John Keats; a Study. By F. M: Owen.

fails him, let his material come from where it will; which, be the spirit of his work high or low, at least admits no halfness, no vexed ghost of reflection that cannot find a body; which, wherever Byron is at his best, is imaged in a style unsurpassed since Shakespeare for concentrated energy. Other instances will occur to every reader. Wordsworth's main poems sprang from a more direct contact with nature and human life; but every one will recall Laodamia and Dion, and the sonnet "The world is too much with us." If Mrs. Browning had never touched these subjects elsewhere, the one lyric, A Musical Instrument, would be enough. Who can forget Shelley's Arethusa, and how in it the humanised tale and its natural foundation are dissolved together into the brightest music English words ever made; the "sweet pipings of the Hymn of Pan; the higher strain of the Hymn of Apollo, at whose sound we too seem to "stand at noon upon the peak of Heaven;" the Adonais, the Prometheus Unbound, the fragments of the prologue to Hellas?

Mr.

But, instead of adding names to a list we could hardly finish, let us merely call attention to three points of interest. The first is the attempt, repeated in various degrees, to reproduce the Greek dramatic form as a vehicle for Greek subjects. Secondly, within the last twenty years, chiefly in Mr. Arnold's Balder and Morris's Story of Sigurd, we have been brought face to face with northern mythology that mythology, the scenery and spirit of which appeals to us in some ways more directly than the Greek can, and of which we have been too long ignorant. And, lastly, those we should do well to notice works which deal with subjects having an historical relation, more or less close, to our own religious ideas; such poems (and they are among the best of our days), as Mr. Browning's Saul, Cleon, Epistle of Karshish, Death in the Desert, and Christmas Eve and Easter-day; such a work of partial fiction as Philochristus; such a picture

as the Shadow of the Cross; such a phenomenon as the Ober-Ammergau Passion-play, to which the peasants doubtless listen as our ancestors once listened to miracle-plays, but which many of the English visitors must have looked at with very different eyes. It is possible that the future historian of our religion and poetry may see in these works of imagination a significance, which we who enjoy them hardly discern.

And this leads me to a few words on the last part of my subject. Why do our poets turn to foreign legends and half-forgotten religious myths, while they seldom make any attempt to deal with the religious ideas of their own age?

I do not pretend to be able to answer this question fully, but I may suggest some points for reflection. Current religious ideas are unsatisfactory subjects because the artist's relation to them is not free; it is hampered either by his direct religious interest in them or by his theological disbelief in them. It is the first of these alternatives that is the hardest to explain. Why, if these ideas are believed in, should they not be fit subjects for art; when it was just such a state of things that produced the best painting and some of the best poetry the world ever saw ? The reason must lie somewhere in the different meanings that the words "believe in " had at that time and have now. We may say that it is just the glory of Protestantism to have so spiritualised the central ideas of Christianity, that a directly sensuous representation of them is no longer possible. Thus, although the Gospel history is accepted as absolutely true, it is regarded not as a mere fact but as the symbol of a purely spiritual relation between God and man; and the purely spiritual character of this relation, in distinction from the historical facts, has become much clearer than it was to the Catholic painters. Hence these facts are not "believed in " in

quite the same way. There is much truth, we may hope, in this, and can

only wish there were more. Again, when we think of Dante, it occurs to us that Protestants disbelieve in purgatory and scarcely believe in hell: and, when we think of Raphael, we remember that the commonest subjects of his religious pictures were the Madonna and Child or passages in the lives of the saints. These are no longer the natural expressions of an Englishman's faith, and so the amount of possible material is most seriously diminished. What remains to him? He cannot paint the process of atonement in men's souls, or their love to God. God. A fine lyric or two may be inspired by these thoughts (e. g. Wesley's "Jacob Wrestling" or "Jesu, lover of my soul," and these belong to the last century), but not an epic or a drama. There remains scarcely anything but the story of Christ's life on earth; and there are obstacles to the treatment of this subject, over and above the change of position to which I have already alluded. There seems to be a downright inartistic element, a kind of stupidity, in the Protestant or, perhaps, in the northern mind, a literalism which prevents it from distinguishing between the artistic and the religious use of a subject, and makes it take the former for an expression of fact. Hence comes what may easily be observed, the half-acknowledged dislike which many English people feel to pictorial representations of Christ, and even to any really dramatic treatment of his life in music. And hence also an objection is felt to enlargements of the Gospel story, and a still greater objection to invention; and yet poems on the subject, if they are to be worth anything, must involve at any rate the former. Yet, when all this has been admitted, a further question must present itself. None of these difficulties ought to affect Catholics; and yet Catholic countries are as powerless as Protestant to produce any great religious art. I admit the fact and know of no further explanation than this good art or poetry require a high class of mind, and they require a sensuous form; and the sensuous forms which