DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE. 



547 



darkness of the unknown into which 

 his eyes cannot pieree. 



There is another phase of the ques- 

 tion that must not pass unnoticed. As 

 the region of the unknown widens it 

 offers more objects of interest and may 

 thereby more fully absorb attention. 

 When reality is sufficiently rich in ex- 

 perience we do not care to indulge in 

 dreams. When the present satisfies us 

 and answers all our needs we are less 

 inclined to look forward to the future, 

 whether that glows before us with the 

 hues of promise or darkens with the 

 threat of coming storm. But the full- 

 est life may weary at times and wish, 

 for the mere rest of change, to go out- 

 side of itself and find in the strange- 

 ness of something new and not yet 

 known a relaxation and recreation for 

 the tired hand and brain. And so the 

 strenuousness of modern life with its 

 ceaseless outreaching for new pleasures 

 and new truths will be ready always 

 for the soothing restfulness of a poetry 

 that gives the form of beauty to things 

 just beyond the wonderland of the 

 known. 



But how to make poetry of these 

 things is the perplexing problem. Truth, 

 whether of the world of fact or of the 

 world of imagination reaching out into 

 the spiritual realm, is not poetry until 

 in some fashion it is made beautiful in 

 its appeal to our sensibilities. A hun- 

 dred years ago the things that were 

 fitting subjects for poetic treatment 

 were much more elementary and as 

 emotional stimulus they reached con- 

 sciousness in a much more immediate 

 and direct fashion than the themes that 

 are fitted for poetry now. The poet who 

 would achieve distinct success in the 

 higher walks of poetry to-day must be 

 master of an art surpassing that of all 

 but a few of his brethren of the craft 

 who have gone before him. The world 

 of the known is so large, comparatively, 

 now, and the individual is so far re- 

 moved from the boundaries of the un- 

 known, save, perhaps, at one point, that 

 more art is required to induce him to 

 travel the longer distance out of the 



world of cold fact into the borderland 

 of strangeness where suggestions of new 

 truth and new beauty may come to 

 quicken aspirations. 



It is true that there are themes that 

 were new a thousand years ago and will 

 be new a thousand years hence, but a 

 poet to achieve distinct success must 

 strike a note not only individual, but 

 one closely attuned to the thought and 

 feeling of his time. Milton we know 

 rather as a voice of Puritan England 

 than as a poetic genius. We call Words- 

 worth a great poet and are conscious 

 as we do so, that he deserves the dis- 

 tinction rather because he interpreted 

 to men a new phase of thought and 

 feeling, than because he knew how to 

 make his verse wholly pure poetry 

 rather than bald prose. Even poets of 

 such spiritual elevation as Shelley and 

 Coleridge caught the feeling and the 

 tone of their time, and the revolution- 

 ary spirit and the love of nature that 

 was molding Wordsworth finds a dis- 

 tinct voice in them as well. Even 

 Burns, isolated as he was, is not alto- 

 gether an anomaly, and no one need be 

 told that Byron was in an extreme de- 

 gree the voice of the reactionary spirit 

 of post-revolutionary Europe. William 

 Morris, retelling old legends of Greek 

 and Saxon, none the less informed his 

 verse with the humanitarian and 

 aesthetic spirit of modern life, and ap- 

 plied his sense of the beautiful to the 

 problems of nineteenth century exist- 

 ence. Swinburne, too, is democratic 

 and in his vision the world moves on to 

 new glories even though the old be not 

 wholly faded from the earth. 



Robert Browning is first and funda- 

 mentally a painter of character, a stu- 

 dent of the more subtle moods that 

 dominate the individual, and toward 

 this the reader of English fiction would 

 hardly fail to see that the development 

 of literature has steadily been advanc- 

 ing for two centuries. Even Mrs. Brown- 

 ing through the somewhat morbid and 

 mawkish sentimentality and the over- 

 strained art of "Aurora Leigh," in the 

 vague and uncertain way of a woman 



