VI.

CONCLUSION: THE PROSPECTS OF POETRY.

AN attempt has been made in the foregoing papers to ascertain by an historical inquiry the origin of the movement described in the above title. Now that I am on the point of arriving at a conclusion, I may be permitted to dwell for a moment on the meaning of that title-since its propriety has been more than once ques tioned to justify the critical method that I have pursued, and to recapitulate the general course of my argument.

And, in the first place, I think I need not waste many words in proving that during the present century there has been a movementwhatever we choose to call it-in literature, as distinct and definite as what are known in religion by the names of the Methodist and Tractarian movements, and in politics by the names

of the Liberal and Radical movements.

How

ever much Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats may differ from each other in their individual characteristics, no one, I imagine, who considers the subject, will deny that in many important respects they were moved by common external impulses, and united by a common spirit of antagonism to their immediate predecessors.

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In the next place, it is scarcely more open to dispute that this movement was a party movement. The present age is quick enough to recognize the fact that criticisms such as that in the Edinburgh Review' on Coleridge's 'Christabel,' or that in the Quarterly' on Keats' Endymion,' were founded on purely party principles, that the critics, starting as they did from certain axioms of their own as to the requisites of poetry, were quite insensible to the essential beauties of the poems they were considering; but it is not sufficiently remembered that Wordsworth and Coleridge were no less dogmatic and no less narrow in their depreciation of such a poet as Gray, or that the perception of Keats was dead to the merits of the

famous writer whom he ridiculously speaks of as one Boileau,' and whom with equal absurdity he regarded as the progenitor of the English poets of the eighteenth century. Besides, it is easy enough to separate the critics of the first thirty years of the present century into two groups, one containing such men as Gifford, Sir Walter Scott, George Ellis, Campbell, Jeffrey, and Macaulay, all of whom (though two of them certainly speak with very little gratitude of those from whom they had learned the most) had evidently formed their taste on eighteenth-century literature; the other including writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Leigh Hunt, and others who were bitterly opposed to the eighteenth century and all its works.

Once more. Whereas sixty years ago the critical principles of the eighteenth century were still in the ascendent, and the apostles of the new departure were suffering martyrdom or struggling with a hostile public opinion, the balance of taste has so entirely shifted that the writers whom our grandfathers regarded with the greatest esteem are now spoken of at most

with tolerance and often with contempt. Thus Mr. Swinburne, wishing to disparage Byron in comparison with Shelley, classes the former with Pope, and is so kind as to allow both to be 'poets after a fashion,' while Mr. Arnold goes still farther, and loftily decides: Though Dryden and Pope may write in verse, though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose.'

Now considering that nearly two hundred years have passed since the birth of Pope, and that, from his death up to the present time, he and Dryden have unanimously been accounted 'classics of our poetry,' we have a right to expect that Mr. Arnold should support his paradoxical judgment with corresponding strength of demonstration. And at first sight it appears as if he were ready to satisfy our requirements. His reasoning is deduced from axioms and postulates almost Euclidean in their absoluteness. The poetry of Dryden and Pope, he says, lacks that high seriousness' which is the mark of