268 Right Rev. W. Boyd Carpenter [March 15, 



descend into a green glade, softened in sweet shadow and musical 

 with running water. 



The fault of the century lay rather in the fastidiousness of taste 

 which became too burdensome for Nature. The age was too deter- 

 minately genteel. The writers were afraid to laugh — they only 

 simpered ; they gently pressed the delicate cambric across their eyes, 

 because it was not good taste to show emotion. " Fear of being 

 vulgar, fear of being singular, these were the real nightmares that 

 sat upon 18th Century poetry." 



Against this conventionality the new school revolted. It claimed 

 the right to be natural. It entered once more into closer connexion 

 with the world of Nature. It no longer treated Nature as a beautiful 

 thing, but a thing outside— a treasury of images and tropes. It 

 sought to get into the heart of Nature. It loved simplicity. As 

 was to be expected, it overdid it. In striving for simplicity it some- 

 times assumed a simplicity like that of the dear little country-girl 

 on the stage, who is artfully simple, who is self-consciously straining 

 after naturalness of manner, and whose affectations are contradicted 

 by the elaborate daintiness of her sham rural costume. 



Are Wordworth's little girls and peasants always truly natural ? 

 Do they not sometimes look up to us with a certain theatrical pert- 

 ness ? The very effort to avoid the conventional betrays people into 

 another kind of conventionality. And here I may make a remark 

 which you will laugh at as quite absurd. The only way of writing 

 naturally is to be natural while you write. The poet who has his 

 theories too fixedly in his mind as he writes will miss that happy 

 naturalness w^hich only comes to those who do not look for it. 



But nevertheless the determination to be natural and simple was 

 good. There were things which needed to be done, and the w^orld 

 was going to do them. There were things which needed to be said, 

 and men rose up to say them. We shall no longer hear Pope or 

 Addison or Goldsmith. Instead we sliall hear Collins and Gray, 

 Byron and Shelley. The heroic couplet will give place to a freer 

 fashion of verse. The ponderous novels of Fielding and Richardson 

 will be superseded h\ the ardent romances of Sir Walter Scott. And 

 even the most devoted admirer of the Classic age will admit that 

 English literature has gained hy the movement. 



I am not here to discuss Wordsworth's theories of poetry. I 

 have said — what I believe — that a poet's theories of poetry are 

 probably w^orse than a critic's, and that Wordsworth did his best 

 work when he left his theories alone and wrote in happy abandon- 

 ment and forgetfulness of his self-made rules. But whatever be the 

 value, or want of value, of these theories, the movement which is 

 called Romantic was the dawn of a period of song which was sweeter, 

 full-throated, more varied, more widely appealing than any which had 

 ))een heard for a hundred years. 



I decline to enter into the question whether Pope was a greater 



