46 Hartley Burr Alexander 



Lyric Muse is versatile, " capable of adapting herself to the 

 sprightly and ludicrous, equally with the tender and pathetic," to 

 the even calm of thought as to the fitful flame of passion. 



A kind of mental heaviness is, perhaps, the conspicuous char- 

 acteristic of modern verse (most of all with the best poets) — a 

 heaviness not due so much to the weight of the ideas as to the 

 doubtfulness of the thought : there is lack of conviction, and with 

 it loss of the old poetic buoyancy. In English poetry this is 

 doubtless intensified because of that quality of reserve which is 

 the conspicuous trait of English character. In our tongue we 

 have no " confessions," no soul's day-book, really worth study ; 

 and every publication of a great mind's private expression, in 

 letters and the like, induces critical sniffings, as if the thing were 

 indelicate. Puritanism may have been an effect rather than a 

 cause of such instinctive reserve, but it was an effect enhancing 

 in its after-issue the quality that occasioned it : with passing years 

 we have not become less hermit-like. It is asked why America has 

 produced no world-literature, and I venture that a partial answer 

 is the fact that Puritanism took deepest and strongest root in 

 America and especially in that section first to find literary voice. 

 Poetic power is not to be attained without some sacrifice of self, 

 some immolation of spiritual privacy. A comprehension of the 

 New England character portrayed in contemporary prose will 

 yield fair account for our poetic poverty ; American genius is still 

 too awkwardly conscious of the soul's garmenting. I imagine 

 that the excess of Walt Whitman's revolt is measure of the effort 

 necessary to the attainment of freedom. Always the danger with 

 the English mind is imaginative dissipation after the barriers are 

 once broken down. We see it in the coarseness of the Restora- 

 tion, and, in another bent, in those lapses into sentimentalism 

 which sometimes tainted even the finer minds in the early years 

 of last century's romantic revolt. 



Yet if repression sometimes weakens, and sometimes, through 

 excessive reaction, leads to fault, it is still the trait which endows 

 our poetry with finest quality in the more perfect attainment. It 

 gives dignity and control, chastity and sweetness, tact in ex- 



388 



