AN OLD QUESTION.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 13, 23 December 1911, Page 15

AN OLD QUESTION.

A popular lecturer in one of the North- , crn towns (writes an English critic) is i reported to have said the other day that t there were no great poets now, and that , possibly thero would be no more great English poets. They are familiar con- ' tenuous, but as tho lecturer was dis- 1 cussing the piiotry of Longfellow he was = probably not interested to distinguish too curiously between two things which, however, are very different—a poet's greatness and his pomilarity. That a poet may bo popular without being great the case of Longfellow vory clearly shows. Jlo won tho hearts of a whole generation ot readers, yet even those who came m> powerlully under his snell that to this nay they cannot effect a detachment comP.-° f t no "g'< ,'o enable them to judge r critically of his work would hardly claim tor him the quality of greatness, ',11c did , not. think deeply and he did not feel strongly. His thoughts and feelings are ] tho thoughts and feelings of the average [nan, and his music i.s written on the 1 lines and spares of tho average man's 1 experience, neither soaring nor sinkiii" 1 to the ledger lines abovo or beneath the ordinary stnvo. His art is simple and J gracctul, and that, coupled with the flow ol a tlun but quite authentic vein of pnetry, carried h:s work into the hearts - of readers to whom the Virgilian perfection ol Tennyson did not appeal, arid who were repelled by tho ruggedness of Jiobort Browning. Greatness, however, is not determined by a show of hands Here votes must bo weighed as well a: ' counted, and it is only when the- informal academy of men with a laTge knowledge hto and a conversance with the masterpieces of many literatures has ex- ' anuned his work and sanctioned it that a poet may ho spoken of as really great. As to whether there aro to bo any •iirire great poets, in tho absence of data to go upon it is rather a question for the prophet than the critic. The latter will answer according to his temperament; if ii<> is a pessimist he will sav so, if an optimist yes. Certainly (here is an off i chance that the poet of tho future may . to one of two classes, either on- . joying a wido popularity with his own generation and perishing with it, or ' pleasing bounteously the ears of . a small coterie, and, perhaps, surviving. If so it is n dreary outlook, and tlio-e may well continuo to congratulate lliem- : selves part of whose lives has svncliron- , ised with part of the lives of sucli mas- : tcrs as Tennyson and Hubert (frowning. , There is, however, nothing in Ihe pre- ! sent state of poetry to compel a moro cheerful view. When ono looks across the field of poetry nf to-dny what one finds is a raco of poets each cultivating a corner of bis own, glorying in the exercise nf his.:nwn fastidious, art. and ,

gathering about him a group of admirers who find in his work a satisfaction which they cannot elsewhere find. The poets ask no more. Tho finger of tho passersby is nothing to them, and the love of tho public is not tho mark at which they ' shoot. fPhey are not, therefore, popular poets. Aro they great poet?? If challenged to name ono who might lie spoken of as great, a critic would be nut to it. Nevertheless, nowhere aro judgments likely to be uncertain moro than upon the imaginative workers of one's own timo, as may bo illustrated by a remark made by Hazlitt in 1818. In that year Hazlitt concluded a series of lectures upon the classic English poets with a lecture on the poets of his own day, and ho warned his hearers that lu3 opinions would ho less authoritative on his contemporaries than upon their predecessors, for this exquisite reason, that he could not be "absolutely certain that anybody, twenty years hence, will think anything about any of them." Now, even giving duo weight to tho word ' absolutely," this pronouncement is a remarkable one. Tlie second decade of last century is a period when, to us looking back, England seems to have been a nest pf singing bards. The stars of Bvron and Moore have, ibdeed, gone a bit down the sky since, but Campbell is still what Swinburne called him, the Callimachns of English literature, the maker of its war songs; and at the time Hazlitt wrote Keats and Shelley had both begun their poetic careers, whilo Coleridge and "Wordsworth had done the work by which they stand or fall. Each of those names now stands upon a pinnacle of its own, and now, close upon a hundred years after 1818, men are not tired of thinking about them. The fact that it was not a mere average man who uttered this judgment, but a critic, and, if we.may believe some of his admirers, the greatest of English critics, leads to tho reflection that often, even if a generation knows that its poets are poets, their greatness may bo hidden from it.