infinitely above all human achievement, the glorious and everliving Word. And He, as found in the Scriptures, and as apprehended and interpreted by the common Christian consciousness of each successive age, will be, as He should be, the ultimate criterion of all truth.

NORWICH TOWN, CT.

Asher H. Wilcox.

THE EFFECT OF THE SCIENTIFIC TEMPER IN MODERN POETRY.

(Concluded.)
IV.

For, more and more, as time hastens by, our poetry takes its stand on the stern and sacred ground of fact. Modern science has ruthlessly destroyed the greater part of the subject-matter of our older poetry. The sweet old classic myths, the dew-drenched mediaval epic with its dragons and gnomes and fair bewitched ladies, they have vanished, not only from our faith but from our verse. Our heroes no longer slash off each other's heads in the charming old fashion, and wander about in search of a convenient wizard to put them on again; mermaids do not abound in the British Channel or the Atlantic; and even the dear fairies have ceased to trip through our verse in dainty guise. Our poetry that rings true ignores such subjects utterly. If we wish to find them treated we must turn to the poetry which is but a morbid though often a powerful effort to reconstruct the past. In whatever direction we look we find evidence that modern poetry has consecrated itself to the study of actual conditions. What is the difference between the loftiest poem and the crudest naturalistic romance? Not that one studies fact while the other rejects it, but that the one photographs while the other interprets. Both insist on literal and accurate truth; both exclude the adventitious elements of interest which were once considered essential. Preternatural and improbable incidents are as rigidly ruled out by a Wordsworth as by a Zola; they are ruled out through the whole extent of modern poetry.

To substantiate this assertion in detail would be interesting; but the exclusion is, perhaps, most remarkable, as it is certainly most complete, in one special direction. In the solemn moments

when they approached the nearest to the secret of existence, and dealt with the elemental passions of the human heart, the older poets almost invariably sought to add depth and sacredness to their creations by the introduction of an objective supernatural force. Even the poet of unlimited resources and most free from any taint of morbidness has not shrunk from this expedient. In his most intense situations, where the emotions are strained to the utmost, and the real is separated from the apparent, Shakespeare emphasizes most strongly the supernatural element. The mysterious hags surround Macbeth upon the blasted heath; the gray ghost of the murdered Dane still walks his castle ramparts; the spirit of Cæsar seals the fate of Brutus. In the crisis of the drama, when the actual life of actual man is most intensely portrayed, come these strange visitants of pity or terror.

But to us they appear no more; or, if they appear, it is but as faint allegorical attractions, as interesting subjective illusions, or at best as the ornament of a graceful mediæval revival, employed in the same spirit as obsolete words, or the quaint customs of a dead chivalry. Where in modern poetry shall you find a genuine, vigorous, effective ghost? Where, indeed, except in the morbid imaginings of a solitary Yorkshire girl, cut off from the current of modern life; and even in that wonderful study of " Wuthering Heights" the ghastly horror of the conception lies in the fact that the spirit of Catharine is neither visible nor mentioned, and is realized only as reflected in the awful bearing of the man possessed. Even in Browning, the lover of abnormal types and diseased conditions, this element is entirely absent. His interest and ours no longer centres in the spirit summoned back to earth; it centres in the twisting and turning of the mind of the so-called medium, his tricks, his whines, his clever sophisms, his halfbeliefs. The most effective of the older methods of exciting awe has been lost to us.

"I look for ghosts- but none will force
Their way to me; 't is falsely said

That ever there was intercourse

Between the living and the dead."

This is the conclusion of our serious thought, reflected in our serious poetry.

Surely there has been seen, in the whole history of poetic development, no so radical and remarkable a change as has occurred to-day; and to all lovers of poetry the change must seem at first, I think, a very doleful one. We look about those of us whose

enthusiasm is not aroused by the stupid parts of nature, by worms and sticks and the articulation of cockroaches' tails with a mournful expectation of finding life very prosaic. Our childhood's paradise, the sphere in which the imagination lived and worked, has seemingly been hurled away into space; it is no wonder that we gaze after it with sorrowful hearts, and feel that the power of poetic vision will droop and die, deprived of its natural atmosphere.

Yet, after the first, we begin to see that there may be compensations for our loss. We suspect dimly that the mystery of light may be as suggestive as the mystery of darkness; that men and women, aglow with passion, radiant with thought, wondrous in personality, may prove as interesting as the most delightful of nymphs and griffins; that, in short, the truest idealism may rise from the most genuinely realistic basis. In the midst of our regret for the charming elements of old romance we remember Landor:-"The human heart is the world of poetry; the imagination is only its atmosphere. Fairies and genii and angels themselves are at best its insects, glancing with unsubstantial wings about its lower regions and less noble edifices." As we fear lest the rejection of the supernatural imply denial of spiritual agencies, we feel, in listening to Carlyle, that perhaps we are only beginning to look for those agencies no longer without us but within us: "Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen on it, ere thy watch ticks once." There comes to us a deepening sense of the mystery and solemnity of actual life, and we begin dimly to surmise that the true function of the imagination may be to work, not in subservience to capricious speculation, but in harmony with perceived reality.

But the true significance and scope of this change can be definitely apprehended only when we consider it, not as an isolated phenomenon, but in relation to the other great movements in the historical development of poetry. The briefest summary of these movements will suffice.

Till the end of the Elizabethan period English poetry hardly knew how to deal with the mass of material presented to it. A world of marvel pressed in upon the poet on every side; and the strange romance of actual existence blended with the ungoverned creations of fancy to produce in his mind a shifting phantasmagoria as confused as it was beautiful. His personality was literally swamped in the flood of passion and beauty that surged

around him. Choice was a matter of accident, not of method; order and arrangement were hardly thought of.

Then came the reaction. A generation arose which felt keenly the incoherent and disorganized character of this extraordinary poetry; and it went to the other extreme. Harmony and proportion were its watchwords. It introduced law into methods of form, control into methods of thought. Its work was necessary, but the effect on poetry was narrowing; for it rejected all phenomena which it could not classify; it restricted scope while they perfected method; and the laws under which it worked were inferred, not from reverent study of the controlling principles of nature, but from self-centred speculation.

Thus the romanticists ignored law, while the classicists despised fact; and the world of the one is incoherent, while the world of the other is artificial. Before the revolution the classical spirit was, on the whole, predominant, though new forces were beginning to appear. The poet still felt that if any phenomenon refused to be assigned some special place in his neatly arranged scheme, the world and not himself was responsible for the confusion. And as the subjects which could be utilized by a literary method of so narrow a scope were practically exhausted, the outlook for poetry was not encouraging. The emptiness, not only of poetry but of all knowledge, was indeed clearly recognized by the keenest minds at almost the beginning of this period. Wrote Cowley in a panegyric on Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation:

"Thou, Harvey, sought for Truth in Truth's own book,
The creatures; which by God Himself was writ;

And wisely thought 't was fit

Not to read comments only upon it,

But on th' original itself to look.

Methinks in art's great circle others stand

Locked up together, hand in hand.

Every one leads as he is led,

The same bare path they tread,

And dance, like fairies, a fantastic round,

But neither change their motion nor their ground."

Nothing could better describe the condition of poetry during part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was obvious that unless some renovating and enlarging impulse from without should infuse fresh vigor into poetic thought, that thought was doomed. The direction in which such an impulse would most efficiently work, was also obvious. It should unite the essential power of the two opposing schools. It should recognize as the

central point of the universe a controlled and even will; yet it must also open itself to the full to every revelation from the outer world.

The influence came; and it came from the most improbable quarter. The scientific temper, falsely conceived, had seemed to be drying up the very roots of our poetry; the scientific temper, rightly apprehended, was to infuse into its veins a fresh and vigorous sap. We cannot here trace the development of science during the long transition from speculation to observation; but the end is known to all. The characteristic of the scientific thought of the century has been the union of a profound recognition of law with a passionate reverence for fact. The scientific temper has permeated in all conceivable directions our modern life; it has therefore come in direct contact with the instincts of the poet. Now this union presented the very elements for the lack of which, as we have tried to show, poetry was withering away. It retained and encouraged the orderly methods which had become almost a law of thought; but it invigorated them by bringing them into harmony with the formative principles of nature. It taught that true harmony lay back of human invention in the very constitution of the universe, and that man was not to evolve it from his own imaginings, but to discover it in the workings of objective and eternal law. Thus it at once sanctioned and exalted the classical love of method. And, on the other hand, it has shown us the legitimate use of these thoroughly disciplined faculties; for it has taught us to devote them to the interpretation of the wonderful world around. This world had been practically ignored from the time of Elizabeth to that of Cowper; it had never indeed been studied with critical yet wakeful eyes. It has been reserved for the scientific spirit to rediscover it for us, and to proclaim that there is without us an inexhaustible wealth of poetic material never systematically explored. And the more our poetry listens to this summons, the more clearly it perceives the truth of the message. It discovers a world so rich in wonder and beauty that the loftiest poetic power finds full scope in its interpretation, and need never be tempted to seek within itself a creation more full of spiritual significance; and, realizing with amazement the infinite breadth and depth of the revelation that awaits it without, it inevitably rejects with impatience, and almost with scorn, the spurious, strained, and unreal fancies with which its childhood was pleased.

It is really wonderful, when one considers, to see how few and