MR. STOPFORD BROOKE ON THE RELIGION IN MODERN POETRY.*

THEOLOGY, which, to quote Hooker's language, "is the science of things divine," is not, we think, an accurate phrase as applied here by Mr. Brooke. The religious feeling of the four poets -whose works form the subject of these lectures is no doubt strongly expressed in their verse, but only in the case of Cowper do we find anything like a system of doctrine,—and what we do meet with in Cowper that has this character is essentially and necessarily unpoetical. However, it is not worth while to quarrel with a term under cover of which Mr. Brooke has given to a Sunday-afternoon audience so much thoughtful criticism, so many -fine suggestions, such varied and copious knowledge. And all this is delivered, not as mere literary criticism, but with a definite and distinctly religious aim that gives a character to the work. It is worth while, before making some _remarks upon these admirable lectures, to allow Mr. Brooke to state the purpose he endeavoured to accomplish in their delivery. It is one with which it is impossible not to sympathise :— "When I made this experiment," he writes, "I had long desired to bring the pulpit on Sunday to bear on subjects other than those com- monly called religious, and to rub out the sharp lines drawn by that false distinction of sacred and profane. If what I believed were true, and God in Christ had sanctified all human life ; if every sphere of man's thought and action was in idea, and ought to be in fact, a channel through which God thought and God acted, then there was no subject which did not in the end ran up into theology, which might not in the end be made religions. I wished, then, to claim, as belonging to the province of the Christian ministry, political, historical, scientific, and artistic work, in their connection with theology ; and to an extent greater than I had hoped for, the effort, so far as I have carried it has succeeded. The blame of many accustomed to hear nothing but sermons from the pulpit has been wholly outweighed in my mind by the fact of the attendance of many persons who were before uninterested in religions subjects at all. And then, neither the blame nor the praise of the present is any proof of the goodness or badness of a thing."

$o far as we can see, there is but one objection of the slightest weight that can be urged against a noble effort like this to throw spiritual light upon a so-called secular subject. The Christian

• Theology in the English Poets,—Cowper, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Burns. By the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, MA. London : Henry S. King and 00. 1874.

minister, it may be said, has so many claims upon his time and study, so much to learn, and so much to do, that he has no leisure for pursuits that lie outside the groove of his profes- sional life. We do not doubt that there are conscientious clergy- men who feel oppressed by the amount of intellectual and physical work demanded of them, and are conscious that it requires their whole energy ; but, on the other hand, many men grow all the stronger and better by sending their mind out, as it were, in different directions ; and to men like these, the extent of the range only adds to the joyous consciousness of power. This is evidently the case with Mr. Brooke, and there is in these lectures a spring and buoyancy which show that the writer is performing no per- functory labour, but has put his heart into the work.

A critic who takes an original view of his subject, looking at it Wholly from his own standing-point, is likely to say a good many things which are open to dispute. In the first lecture, we meet with more than one remark from which the reader may dissent. Mr. Brooke's statement, for example, with regard to Dr. Isaac Watts, will not bete examination. He observes that his hymns express that pleasant devotion to God which arises from piety and comfort, that we have in them no special tendency in doc- trine, no passionate or personal feeling of devotion ; and he con- trasts the quiet and sober religion of his hymns with the impas- sioned and storm-tossed religion of the hymns of Cowper. We do not deny that some of Watts's hymns are of this " sober " character, but in the best the passionate and personal feeling of devotion is conspicuous ; and in the worst, the writer's doctrinal views are pronounced with emphasis, and in language which, to all who believe in a God of love, is singularly offensive. It is high Calvinism put into verse. The chosen race is represented as rejoicing in its safety, and adoring the just vengeance of the Almighty, who has heaped up "vast magazines of plagues and storms" wherewith to destroy His foes. In one hymn God is said tolly on wings of vengeance "to pay the long arrears of blood ;" in another, the poet's -thoughts " roll " on damnation and the dead, and he describes the spirit swept down to the fiery coast amongst "abominable fiends," where endless crowds of sinners lie waiting for fiercer pains,— " Not all their anguish and their blood

For their old guilt atones, Nor the compassion of a God Shall hearken to their groans."

He seems at times to delight in picturing the fierce anguish of devils nailed "fast to the racks of long despair," and in contrast- ing the stedfast joys of heaven with the ever-increasing torments of the damned :—

" Eternal plagues and heavy chains, Tormenting racks and fiery coals, And darts t'inflict immortal pains Dyed in the blood of damned souls."

Verses such as these are surely far removed from the quiet, sober, moral religion for which Mr. Brooke gives Watts credit, and such verses are to be met with frequently in his com- positions. Some of Dr. Watts's hymns are really fine ; but, at the same time, no writer has produced more miserable specimens of hymnody, and it is impossible to say of these that "they present no special tendency in doctrine." Cowper held the same views as Dr. Watts, but no such gross and pain- ful expression of them is to be met with in the Olney Hymns. Mr. Brooke describes with great felicity the course of English poetry from Pope to Cowper, and much that he has to say about the latter poet is well worthy of attention. Thomson, who was the contemporary of Pope, lived his poetical life in a world of which Pope knew nothing. He is the first poet of that age who finds his natural home in the country, and his devotional feelings are entirely called forth by the aspects of nature. In the really fine hymn with which he concludes "The Seasons" there is no allusion to Christianity. Cowper, on the other hand, sees little in Nature apart from God, and as Mr. Brooke observes, he makes Christ himself as the Eternal Word, as the acting Thought of God—the ruler of the universe, and the author of its forms. There are, moreover, passages in his poems, as the writer points out, where he ceases to interpose laws between Nature and God, and conceives of Nature as a living Being to whom affection was due. "It is this conception which unconsciously in Cowper began to tremble into being. It sprang into full being in Wordsworth, and then, when Nature was conceived of as alive, its theology took a new form, or rather several forma—each modified by the personal theology or philosophy of the Poet—in the poetry of England."

To this affectionate sympathy with Nature was added an interest in humanity such as we do not meet with in the earlier poets of the century. The idea of brotherhood permeates Cow- per's poetry ; " there was no man, he thought, who ought not to feel himself allied to all the race." The variety of Cowper's gifts is remarkable. One he possessed, namely, a fine sense of humour, of which his great successor, Wordsworth, was destitute ; but it is worthy of note that this did not save him from writing, as Wordsworth wrote, much that is utterly prosaic and common- place.

The lecture on Coleridge hardly does justice to his exquisite gifta as a poet. It is easy to say, of course, that in this depart- ment of work, as in others, he did little, compared with what he might have done ; but then what he has done is perfect of its kind, and belongs to a high order of poetry. Such poems as the "Ancient Mariner," " Christabel," "Love," and the "Hymn before Sunrise in the Valley of Chamouni " are enough to prove that Coleridge not only possessed in a rare degree the .highest faculty of the poet, imagination, but that he had also a sense of melody which has been surpassed only by one or two of our greatest poets. He has left us little, but then how priceless is its value 1 And if the poet were right in believing that he had neglected his great gift, we, at least, may be thankful that what he did produce is the pure gold of poetry. The follow- ing passage would apply better, we think, to Coleridge as a man than as a poet :—There is no lesson so solemn in the whole range of modern poetry as that given by Coleridge's poetry,—genius without will, religion without strength, hope without persever- ance, art without the power of finish." Nine lectures are de- voted to Wordsworth. The theme is a fruitful one, and it is one upon which Mr. Brooke must have dwelt long and earnestly, before he could have produced this elaborate and often subtle criticism. We cannot attempt to follow the writer as he wanders leisurely through this wide field of poetry. All we can do is to make a few remarks suggested to us by the writer's method of observation. Truly does he say that scarcely too much time can be spent on Wordsworth, and that "if only a few are induced not to glance over, but to study his work, more good may be done than by a hundred sermons." Wordsworth's view of Nature, Mr. Brooke observes, differed from the mechanical view held to a large extent by some earlier poets. He looked on her as alive, having her own personal pleasures, emotions, thoughts, plans, such as we might have :— "We are in contact with a person, not with a thought. But who is this person ? Is she only the creation of imagination, having no sub- stantive reality beyond the mind of Wordsworth ? No, she is the poetic impersonation of an actual Being, the form which the poet gives to the living spirit of God in the outward world, in order that he may possess a metaphysidal thought as a subject for his work as an artist.

It may be the fashion to call this pantheistic, but it is the true and necessary pantheism which affirms God in all, and all by Him, but which does not affirm that the All includes the whole of God. It is true a certain amount of what is called the personality of God seems to slip away from Wordsworth when he speaks of God being in nature ; but we must separate, in speaking of his theology, his idea of God in relation to man, which he conceived of as distinctly a personal relation, from his idea of God in relation to nature, which he could not conceive of as an absolutely personal relation."

This distinction may be of service to readers who, while enjoying the wonderful flow of poetry in the "Lines Written on the Banks of the Wye," have found in some of them what seemed like an attempt to put Nature in the place of God. One of the charac- teristics of Wordsworth's poetry is the joy which he sees in Nature ; another—and this Mr. Brooke calls the loveliest idea which Wordsworth introduced into English poetry—is the love and intercommunion of all things; and he points out how Colmidge's thought that "in our life alone does, Nature live" is entirely opposed to the healthier thought of Wordsworth, who separates the life of Nature and Man, so that "it is not the reflection of ourselves which we have from Nature, it is the friendship of another than ourselves." Nature only mocks us, exclaims the lecturer, when we try to find in her the reflection of our own souls, and he adds beautifully :—

" Turn to the trees and waves as to friends, in that sudden expansion which one feels at times to human friends, and in which all barriers melt, and there will not be a blade of grass nor a drift of cloud which will not partake its life with you, teach you its lesson, interpose between your heart and yourself its kindness, whisper to you infinite secrets, and fill you with joy and calm."

By the help of "The Prelude," a poem which is far from being as well known as it deserves to be, the poet's course is traced from boy to man, and the different influences are noted which helped to form his character. This remarkable autobiography tells us more about the poet than we can learn from any other source, far more, certainly, than we gain from the clumsy and wearisome memoir written by his nephew. Mr. Brooke makes large use of it, and he goes on to show how in Wordsworth the love of Man followed the love of Nature, and how much the poet's character was moulded by the stirring incidents of his age. This will indeed have been evident to all students of his poetry, but there is, never- theless, much that is fresh and suggestive in the writer's remarks.

Disappointed though Wordsworth was with the results of the French Revolution, he ever afterwards retained, as 3Ir. Brooke observes, the revolutionary idea "that each man was to have the freest room for self-development, to be considered separate from the rest, not lost in a class." He even sees the influence of Wordsworth's republicanism in the poems he wrote "about the common people of the fields and hedge-rows,—the daisy, the celandine, the daffodils, the primrose, and the snowdrop," and notes how, though living apart from the world, the poet threw himself with the passion of a poet into the fate of Continental States, and how he was actuated throughout by the love of liberty. Time, no doubt, produced a change in his wishes and aspirations ; he began to regard as licence much which he had before treated as liberty. He gave up, too, his theories about the future of man, but in the words of his biographer, "he did so too completely, and the end thereof was prose."

The three lectures on Burns with which the volume concludes must be passed over very briefly. The character of the Scottish poet's genius is so well known, that it would seem as if a lecturer, viewing it, as Mr. Brooke does, from a single standing-point, could have little fresh to say upon the subject. No one, however, can accuse these lectures of being trite or common-place. On the contrary, some of the criticism upon Burns is not only put in an attractive form, but shows the working of an original mind. Mr. Brooke observes, by the way, that the poetry of Burns did not spring out of a cultivated garden, which is quite true, but he adds, "it was nnderived from other poets, for Burns read nothing but a collection of English songs." If we accept the statement of his biographer, it is a mistake to say that the reading of the poet was thus limited. Before the end of his sixteenth year he had read, Lockhart tells us, besides a number of prose works, some plays of Shakespeare, Pope, including his Homer, and the works of Allan Ramsay. Afterwards, it is said that the perusal of Ferguson probably determined in a large measure the Scottish character of his poetry. It does not in the least detract from Burns's just fame to say that he owed the bent of his genius to the works of his predecessors. Mr. Brooke, indeed, allows this, for he observes that all the characteristics of the earlier Scottish poets belobg to him, especially their love of nature, a feeling that found expression in Scottish poetry far earlier than in the Southern part of the kingdom. Mr. Brooke observes that the poor of the north-western part of England on the border, and of the west border of Scotland, are lovers of Nature, while the poor of midland and southern England are not ; and he suggests that among the men of the west border, the higher appreciation of Nature may be partly owing to the grandeur of the scenery, and partly—since this will not account for a similar love of nature among the dwellers in the quiet scenery of Ayr and Lanark—to some far-off admixture of Celtic blood. To this it may, perhaps, be replied that there is no necessary connection between grand scenery and poetry— witness Switzerland, which has never produced a distinguished poet—and that the "Celtic element of natural love of the beauty of this world," if there be such an element, has not yielded much poetical fruit in Ireland. This, however, is true,—" that Scotland has always been a land where poets loved Nature, and that she first sent that love down to England."

We are glad to learn from the preface that Mr. Brooke proposea to publish a second volume of lectures before the close of the year, on Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Byron.