CHAPTER II.

CRITICISM AND CREATION.

WE are apt to fancy that the powers which poet and philosopher put forth are of a quite different order from those which we feel in ourselves, and that commonplace people and every-day life have nothing in common with their high functions. It is not so. The most unlettered peasant performs the same kind of mental acts as the poet and the philosopher, only in these last the powers work with a higher energy. Of all men it is true that they feel and energize first, they reflect and judge afterwards. First comes impulse, emotion, active outgoing; then reflection, analyzing the impulse, and questioning the motive.

Now these two moods of mind, which go on alternately in every human heart, go on in the poet not less, but more, the same powers are working in him, only in fuller, intenser energy. First comes his creative mood. He has given him a vision of some truth, some beautiful aspect of things, which for a time fills his whole heart and imagination; he seizes it, moulds it into words, and while he does so his soul is all aglow with emotion, so strong emotion, that the intellectual power he is putting forth is almost unconscious, almost lost sight of. Then, when the inspiring heat has cooled down, the time of judgment comes on: he contemplates the work f his fervid hours, criticises it, as we say, sees ke its sh ings, weighs its value.

This, which goes on in the 'minds of individual men, who have the creative gift, is seen reflected on a large scale in the literary history of nations and of the race. The world has had its great creative epochs more frethan quently it has had its great critical ones. The great creative epochs are not those in which criticism most flourishes, neither are the epochs which are most critical those which have most creative force. In nations as in men, the two moods seem to alternate, and, in some degree, to exclude each other.

What happened in Greece we all know. Her creative energy had spent itself, the roll of her great poets was complete, before there appeared anything which can be called criticism. When Aristotle came, and, in his prosaic, methodical way, laid line and plummet to the tragedians, took their dimensions, and drew from these his definitions and canons for tragedy, the tragic, indeed the whole poetic impulse of Greece had exhausted itself.

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Then followed the Alexandrian era, the first epoch of systematic criticism which the world had seen. hind it lay the whole land which Hellenic genius in its prime had traversed, and had covered with artistic monuments. Looking back on these, the Alexandrian men began to take stock of them, to appraise, arrange, edit them, to extract from them the forms of speech and rules of grammar, -and in fact to construct, as far as they could, a whole critical apparatus. Learned editors, compilers, grammarians, critics, these men were; but poets, makers, creators, that it was denied, them to be. Useful and laborious men, doing work which has passed into the world's mental life, but not interesting. stimulative, refreshing, as the true poets are.

A poet, no doubt, Arxandria had, the firstfruits of its literature, the most finished specimen of its spirit. In him we have a sample of what the most extensive learning and finished taste, without genius, can do. He wrote, we are told, 800 works, and poems innumerable. All that great talents, vast learning, unwearied industry, and great literary ambition could do, he did. The result is not encouraging. We do not in these latter days desire to see more Callimachi; one Callimachus is enough for the world.

I have alluded to Alexandria and Callimachus, because some seem to think that we in England, as far as poetry is concerned, have now reached our Alexandrian era, that it is in vain we shut our eyes to the fact, that our wisdom is to accept it, and to try to make the best of it.

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This is the subject I wish to consider to-day,. Whether, looking back on the course of our poetic history, and considering our present mental condition, there is good reason to believe that our creative, poetic energy has worked itself out, that our Alexandrian era has come..e

This rather depressing view of our poetical situation, as though it were the time of Alexandrian decadence, may perhaps seem to receive some countenance from an opinion put forth with much force by a living voice, which most Oxford men have probably heard, and which all are glad to hear, my friend and my fore runner in this chair, which he so greatly adorned. Mr. Arnold is never so welcome as when he speaks of poetry and literature. Even when we may not agree with all he says, his words instruct and delight us; for every word he speaks on these subjects is living, based on

large knowledge, and on a Kigh standard of excel

lence.

It must not therefore be supposed that I wish to engage in controversy with my friend, but rather to enter into a friendly conversation with him on subjects interesting to both of us, if I first remind you of his view, and then try to supplement what he has said by some other considerations which, in his zeal, for a larger, more enlightened knowledge, he has perhaps left unexpressed.

He holds that the one work to which we are at present called, both in poetry and in all literature, is the work of a better, higher, more world-wide criticism, than any we have as yet known in England. And-by criticism is meant not the old insular British prejudice, as it has been represented in the Edinburgh or, the Quarterly Review, but "the disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought

the world." Real criticism, he says, is essentially the exercise of "curiosity as to ideas on all subjects, for their own sakes, apart from any practical interest they may serve; it obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind, and to value knowledge and thought, as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other coùsiderations whatever."

This is a view of criticism which, if it has a bearing on poetry, has a still more obvious bearing on other forms of literature, and hardly less on science. Criticism in this sense is but one phase, perhaps I should rather say another name, of that great historic method, which in our time has entered into and transformed

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every province of thought. Taking its stand on the high eminence to which all the past has been leading up, and casting a wide-sweeping eye backward on universal literature, criticism, we are told, sees only two great creative epochs of poetry, one the age of Eschytus and Sophocles, the other the age of Shakespeare.

These two epochs were creative and fruitful, because in both a new and fresh current of ideas was let in on the world. There was a breaking-up of the old confining limitations, an expansion all round of the mental horizon, and this condition of things is the most stimulating and exhilarating of mental influences. This bracing intellectual atmosphere, this fresh movement of ideas, was caused, in the case of Greece, by the national exaltation of mind which followed the overthrow of the Persian, and by the sense of triumph, security, and expanding energy which every Athenian felt, while his country was building up her maritime empire, and Pericles was placing the copestone on the structure,

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In Shakespeare's time like causes were at work, and created a similar expansion of men's thoughts. Renaissance, after having done its work on the Continent, had at last reached the shores of England, and created there the "New Learning." The Mediæval Church fabric had been rent, and new light came in, as the barriers fell down. A new world had arisen beyond the Atlantic, on which the bravest of Englishmen were not ashamed to descend as buccaneers, and to draw fresh life from the wider ocean and larger earth opened to their adventure.

In these two epochs, when great poets were born into the lid, the time was propitious, and the result was the ingat poetic creations which we know. The "men"

the great