the general public may perhaps be best ascertained by observing that if a man happened to be a poet and a novelist, a poet and a politician, a poet and a frequent dinner-giver, it would be the novelist, the politician, or the host, not the poet, that would be the object of the most interest and the subject of the most frequent discussion. Wordsworth says it is melancholy to reflect how few people there are who care for poetry. Wordsworth took himself and his high calling perhaps a little too seriously; and there might be more melancholy, not less, in this world, if many people really cared for poetry, especially for much of the poetry that has been offered them in this somewhat lugubrious century. But the fact is not to be contested, that the world generally cares for nothing so little as it cares for poetry. Yet, though the demand for poets is so small, the supply of poets has always been abundant. At all times it has been true, as Garin d'Apchier wrote in the days of the Troubadours, Il y en a tant que de lapins dans une garenne. What is it, it may therefore fairly be asked, that impels people to write poetry? Is it merely a bad habit, a conventional trick fostered by nursery rhymes and the rocking-chair? Is it the swaying to and fro of the cradle that develops in the unconscious babe the disposition to ring rhyme against rhyme, which receptive boys and girls begin doing as soon as they acquire the use of language? And is it in this sense that the Muses may truly be said to preside, if not over a poet's birth, at least over his cradle? One would like to think, if this be so, that the best and truest poets are not rocked in cradles at all, but rather on their mother's breast, so that the inspiration of their music should come direct from Nature herself. But though the cradle theory may perhaps commend itself to the physicists and psychologists of this generation as an efficient explanation of that interesting phenomenon, the frequent tendency to lisp in numbers, those who are creatures of an older and less scientific time will, I imagine, not feel themselves to be much helped by it in the investigation into the genesis of poets and poetry. For who invented nursery rhymes, and why were they needed? Who first found rocking to be soothing to the nerves and ancillary to slumber? and wherefore is it that it has that effect? It has that effect because, being what we may call poetry in an elementary or germinal condition, it helps to subdue the Chimæra, the Chimæra with which we all find ourselves confronted the moment we enter this world; the Chimæra of a Universe terrible because not understood. Our first utterance is a wail that, with our growing strength, swells into a cry. Why is this? Platonists will, perhaps, say that the wail is a wail of regret for the loss of a previous and a higher form of existence. That is a beautiful speculation we may well leave unchallenged; for it harmonizes perfectly with the suggestion which would seem to be more pertinent and more demonstrable, that the wail is one of distress at new, unexplained, and, therefore, perturbing conditions. In the language of two rather prosaic lines that occur in one of the most poetical and splendid of poems, the wailings of the new-born babe are Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realised. Intimations of Immortality, Wordsworth. They are not mere fanciful misgivings, misgivings without a cause. They express the dread of ignorance at cold and heat, at darkness and light, at sound and touch, the dread of being alive, the dread of what metaphysicians call the ego and the non ego equally; in a word, dread of so much of the Chimera as is yet apprehended. How are these misgivings to be dispelled? They are to be dispelled, as the Chimera, when fully apprehended, is to be finally slain, by Poetry; but as they are primitive and limited fears, poetry of a limited and primitive character suffices for the moment to assuage them. Hush a bye, baby, On the tree top! That is a long way removed from— Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, Macbeth, act. v., scene 5. But the as far removed from it as the mollusc is from the man. nursery rhyme is the predecessor and progenitor of Macbeth. Both have the same origin and the same end. The moving cause and final purpose of each is, to cite a fine phrase of Mr. Leslie Stephen, to harmonize the sorrow of the universe. For though Poetry is necessarily compounded of Music, Sentiment and Thought, and though that poetry is the greatest in which Thought, Sentiment, and Music are present in exact proportions, so that the three find an exact equivalent in each other; yet there may be poetry in which Sentiment and Music are much in excess of Thought, and all poetry, even the simplest, when addressed to sufficiently simple ears, helps to ward off the Chimæra for the moment. Hence it is that, though our mothers and nurses scold us in prose, they try to soothe us in verse and with rhythm rhythm of the voice, rhythm of language, rhythm of the cradle, rhythm of their dandling arms. Here we have a somewhat shapeless Bellerophon riding a Pegasus barely fledged, with the aid of very primitive goddesses of wisdom. But here, too, is the germ and foreshadowing of that fully-developed and heavenly courser, firmly bestriding whom a Shakespeare or a Goethe, commingling blood and judgment, blending and balancing thought with music, faces the spectres of the mind and lays them. The Chimæra of physical strangeness and terror, in so far as it is felt by us on coming into the world, is soon conquered; conquered by the simple melodies we all know by heart. But, with the expansion of the bodily frame, and its gradual accommodation to the conditions of life, we become aware of other sensations; and side by side with the development of each of these, there broadens the shadow of the Chimæra. The capacity to learn brings with it the obligation of learning; and though some kindly souls have fancied there may be "reading without tears," words of more than one syllable are not commonly mastered without much trouble and some terror. When further advance has to be made, and picture-books are exchanged for the Latin grammar and the elements of Logic, the Chimæra begins to figure as a monster indeed. It was a happy thought to versify the rules of the Gradus ad Parnassum and the mysteries of Barbara Celarent; and teachers who are wise use the works of the poets, rather than of the prosewriters, as text-books for the young. But while domestic or scholastic tutors are thus earnestly engaged in familiarizing the young mind with the history and products of human thought, the young mind, and the young heart, are vaguely and dimly beginning to wonder what is the answer to questions professional teachers rarely, if ever, propound. The Chimæra propounds them. What is the meaning of this subtle irrepressible something, which germinates in us as we emerge from childhood into youth, and is designated by the somewhat indefinite name of Love? What means this preference for one face, for one voice, for one companionship, over another? Whence comes, and whither tends, this tremulousness, this solicitude, of the boy in the presence of some slip of a girl, or of the girl in the vicinity of some masterful, indifferent boy? In the more sensitive natures this universal trouble is accompanied by other sources of discomfort and unrest. What is the strange feeling that dawns towards sunset, deepens through twilight, settles under the stars into awe, and with the rising of the moon ferments into longing? Again it is the Chimera; and the young Bellerophon wants to close with it. Instinctively he turns to the poets; for grammar, mathematics, logic, and even what we call natural science, provide no answer. Perhaps in the course of his studies, he has made some acquaintance with botany, and can give every familiar flower and tree its proper designation. But the botanists do not tell him why this flower moves him in one way, this flower in another way, and that flower not at all; neither do they explain to him how it is that he cannot choose, but go Unto the woodlands hoar, Longfellow's Prelude. or why, when he finds himself there, the trees affect him differently when they are bare of all but bark and lichen and glimmering buds, when they are burgeoning into leaf, and when they have acquired the gold they will soon have to part with. Perhaps he goes down solitary to the sea, and speaks with it; and the sea answers him. But as it seems to give the same answer to all, it is an oracle whose utterance is useless to him. The streams too perpetually bound and talk, if he cares to converse with them; but as his heart leaps and pulses more tumultuously and erratically even than they, they offer him no interpretation of his unrest. He has heard of, and assented to, the invisible but universal force of gravitation; and the stately uniform method of the heavens is an integral part of his way of thinking. But the planets ask him questions for which astronomy provides no reply; and in the summits of the sky, as in the depths of the sea, he is confronted by the Chimæra. The further he advances into the labyrinth of life, the more numerous become the questions that perplex him. After having been troubled, first by his own existence, and next by external Nature, he ultimately finds himself troubled by Man, not by this man or that, but by all men who have ever lived, and by the generations yet unborn that will surely follow. The rise and fall of States, the raging of wars, famines, pestilences, creeds and their cruel conflicts, schemes of government, schemes of philosophy, rival rituals, competing altars, explanations of the Universe, all equally confident and absolutely irreconcilable, crowd upon his attention and bewilder his conscience. Life, as he sees it before him and around him, men with their passions and their sufferings, astound and embarrass him; and History, with its compendious record of mankind in the past, presents phenomena similar in kind, and equally perplexing in character. The Chimæra is beside him, behind him, before him, and seems not only to have the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent, but to be a medley of every strange beast that can ravage and torment. In his perplexity, I say, he turns to the poets, and naturally he turns to those he can best understand. For it is all very well to say, "Close your Byron, open your Goethe," but it is useless to open your Goethe till you can understand Goethe. Youth, menaced by the Chimæra, has recourse to the poets in whom the lyrical note predominates; to the poetry in which music and sentiment are in excess of thought. Such poetry comforts for the moment, but for the moment only; and when we awake from the sleeping draught, the Chimæra is there, more formidable and complex than ever. The Pegasus bestridden is winged, it is true; but the Goddess of Wisdom has had little share in bridling it. Lyrical poetry is either an inspiriting stimulus or a delicious lullaby, and let none decry it. But alone, it can never subdue the Chimæra. It can drive the Chimæra away; but back again comes the monster, when the effervescent anodyne has exhausted its effect. I shall perhaps be told that this Chimera of which I speak is a chimera indeed, and has no existence and no terrors for sane and healthy natures. I have a great respect for sane and healthy natures; the Goddess of Wisdom being necessarily the Goddess of Sanity. But sanity, at least in its highest manifestations, not only is compatible with delicacy of mental structure and sensitiveness of spiritual organization, but is unattainable without these. When a poet declares that he is Not altogether of such clay As rots into the souls of those whom I survey, Childe Harold, canto iv., s. cxxxv. it may be that he gives evidence of unwise disdain, but he does not thereby announce his insanity. True it is that, for the bulk of mankind, the Chimera perhaps exists not after childhood, or at any rate after youth, save in the shape of Other-World terror in its crudest and coarsest form. Even if, after men are free to fling school-tasks to the winds and regulate their life according to their own fancy, the Chimæra still attempts to beset them, they avert their gaze, and concentrate their attention on the practical concerns and materially profitable interests of life. They dedicate their powers, not as Shelley vowed he would dedicate his, to "heaping knowledge from forbidden mines of lore," but to heaping up money from mines accessible to all. Their morning and evening prayer is a petition for wealth, power, rank, vulgar advancement in some shape. They devote keen intellects to promoting the escape of criminals from justice, eloquent tongues to the adulation of the multitude, possibly a talent for pure mathematics to the manipulating of loans. So occupied, it will be said, they are not much harassed by the Chimæra. Thus they have no need of poetry, in any form; and for them there are no |