XXXVI EOYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA. 



tatorship have been injurious rather than helpful to thought. In our own country dictators have 

 sought to ignore or to crush, successively, every one who from time to time introduced new literary 

 forms that were but the clothing of new forms of idealism or larger conceptions than the old. Jef- 

 frey's critique of Wordsworth's " Excursion " is not a solitary example in England of the incapacity 

 of the old to understand the new, any more than the Academy's " Sentiments sur le Cid" is a solitary 

 example in France. In a volume of the Camelot series, entitled "Early Reviews of Great Writers," 

 we find instances equally astonishing, all tending to prove that great literary men, like great paint- 

 ers, or the greatest masters of music, must make up their minds to form their own constituencies. If 

 they live long enough, they may triumph over the regular and the commonplace and receive due 

 appreciation. If they die young, they can only hope that posterity will do them justice. " Dissent- 

 ers from the established systems in poetry and criticism," as the ' Edinburgh Eeview ' called the 

 lake school, must exjiect no mercy from men who believe in fixed literary standards. The ' Quar- 

 terly Eeview' understood Keats no better than the 'Edinburgh' understood the lake school. 

 ' Blackwood ' was as hojjelessly dense when dealing with what it called the " cockney school of poetry," 

 of which Leigh Hunt was declared to be the head and Shelley and Keats disciples. The ' Monthly 

 Eeview,' in criticizing Burns, is able to discern merit in the " Cottar's Saturday Night," but gives an 

 anglified version of what it calls " this little performance," explaining, with calm consciousness of 

 superior merit, "We have used the freedom to moderoize the orthography a little, wherever the 

 measui'e would permit, to render it less disgusting to our readers south of the Tweed." These 

 reviews, we must remember, combined the highest literary talent of the time, and generally meant 

 to be honest and impartial. They were far ahead of any journals that had ever been attempted in 

 England before, yet how helpless they are in the presence of any new force ! They do not understand 

 it, and as it is their business to stamp it with an authoritative label, they can only damn with faint 

 praise or condemn. This is bad enough, so far as misleading the public and wounding the spirit or 

 suppressing — so far as it can be suppressed — the genius of a Byron, a Carlyle, or a Browning is 

 concerned. Admittedly there is power enough on the side of injustice when Jupiter is only a leading 

 journal. Fortunately, however, in that case, another organ of opinion can be started, and the disciples 

 of the new master may find their way into the old journal, and gradually change its voice. Butwhen 

 Jupiter is an organization venerable by age, and representing what is supposed to be the whole liter- 

 ary iudgment of the country, from which there is no appeal, the injustice is apt to be overpowering. 

 The true teachers of every epoch are the men who have most thoroughly absorbed all its light and its 

 questionings, as well as its deepest convictions, who are in sympathy with its ideals and unexpressed 

 faith, and who, because of deeper insight than the established teachers possess, have found some solu- 

 tions, even though they may be only partial, for the problems with which it is wrestling. Whether 

 they wx'ite in prose or verse matters nothing. They may express themselves in dramas, epics or 

 lyrics; in novels and essays ; in lectures and criticisms ; in biographies and histories; in sermons or 

 in maxims of piety and Christianity ; but according to their insight into the open secret of the 

 world and their knowledge of the best that has been thought and said by the best minds, they are 

 literary men and the formative forces of their day. What they write is accepted by the age as the 

 expression of its heart and the guide of its life. Therefore their works follow them. It is not given 

 to every ej)Och to have one man who sums uj) in himself its characteristic spiritual forces and who 

 can reflect them in perfect literary forms that shall be sources and instruments of culture for all time. 

 How many dead centuries Homer represents we know not; but Dante voices "in mystic, unfothom- 

 able song" ten silent centuries; and Shakespeare interprets to us the same epoch from the practical 

 side of life, and reflects the Eenaissance and that modern fulness of thought of which it was the dawn. 

 " From 1780 to 1830, Germany," says M. Taine, " produced all the ideas of our historical age, and 

 one man, Goethe, summed them up in himself" In due time we shall have a man great enough to 

 rethink them with a power equal to Dante's and a range equal to Shakespeare's. Such a supreme 

 literary man is what our complex age is waiting for. So far we have had only an earnest — an ear- 



