DECADENCE IN POETRY.

PROFESSOR COURTHOPE, in the lecture which he delivered this day week at Oxford on " Life in Poetry," began to consider the causes of decadence, or in other words, want of life in poetry, and asked whether the rise of a school of poetry which is evidently artificial and wanting in force and spring, is due to a failure in the genius and methods of the poets themselves, or to the failure of vitality and freshness in that section of society to which they belong, or to a drying up of the sources of ideal life in the nation at large. Surely it may well be due to any one or all three of these causes, and it would be more complete in those cases in which all these causes were combined. There are many cases in which a decadent poet lives in an age in which he might hive found, had he had the larger social sympathies in him- self, a new spring of ideal life, but failed to find it from the want of elasticity and spiritual force within himself, jest as Byron, in spite of his magnificent powers and genius, was, in the exhaustion of lie ideal life, a decadent poet in the very same age in which Wordsworth struck new and rich sources of poetio inspiration. Again, we may say that the very same poet, and sometimes even a great poet like Goethe, has had both a fresh and a decadent epoch in his own poetry. In Goethe's case it was a vital period in which he wrote his lovely lyrics, and his "Goetz 17011 Berlichingen," and the first part of Faust, and a de- cadent period in which he wrote his "Elective Affinities," and his " Roman Elegies," and the second part of Faust, when not only the sources of his ideal life as a poet were evi- dently drying up, but his sympathies with the most vivid hopes of his own people were narrowing and giving way to his somewhat supercilious acorn for the deeper and stronger impulses of his country, and when he was becoming hopeless of German national life and out of sympathy with the purest sources of moral inspiration. And, again, we may see in such a poet as the late William Morris, one whose sympathies quite outran, as it were, his finer tastes, and who became "the idle singer of an empty day," even at the very time at which he was eagerly seeking to extend the range of the moral life of his own class and to lead it to drink at new springs of thought and action. While he eagerly desired to make the life of cultivated thought richer and deeper and more in keeping with the aspirations of the people at large, his poetical genius did not find any natural outlet in the direction in which his moral sympathies led him. As a poet he remained a laudator temporis acti, a singer whose imagination dwelt in one world, while his heart and hopes were in another.

Decadence in poetry, indeed, as often perhaps betrays a purely personal as a social or political origin, but it may betray any one of these sources. We do not suppose Fletcher, the poetical ally of Beaumont, to have been a poet of the decadent type, for he was a great dramatist, but evidently he had seen and studied those who were decedents in his own time. It would be hard to find a poem of more definitely decadent a type than the little poem on "Melancholy," which Mr. Palgrave in his "Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics," has placed immediately before Sir Walter Scott's lines, "To a Lock of Hair," in which Sir Walter shows us how he himself was led to open up a region of poetry in which he was not only very great, but the leader of a great school of vigorous life and genius, by the very same causes which have so often betrayed feebler and fainter spirits into the poetry which we should all call more or less decadent. Here is Fletcher's praise of melancholy "Hence, all you vain delights.

As short as are the nights Wherein you spend your folly

There's nought in this life sweet

If man were wise to see't, But only melancholy, 0 sweetest melancholy !

Welcome, folded arms, and fug(' eyes,

A sigh that piercing mortifies, A look that's fasten'd to the ground, A tongue chain'd up without a sound!

Fountain heads and pathless groves, Places which pale passion loves !

Moonlight walks, when all the fowls Are warmly housed save bats and owls!

A midnight bell, a parting groan!

These arc the sounds we feed upon ; Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley; Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."

That is very delicate die-away poetry, bat, except as a pure dramatist, no one could ever have written it who was not more in sympathy with that which was dying out of life, than with that which was coming into being. Now turn to Sir Walter Scott's lines which Mr. Palgrave has placed in imme- diate sequence to Fletcher's poem, lines which show us not only how melancholy had bred in Scott a reaction into the eager life which kindled his genius and made him the most buoyant of poets, but which had planted a new literature amongst us, and spread, as it were, "a forest on the hills,

fast as the seasons could make steps":— "To A LOCK OF Min. Thy hue, dear pledge, is pure and bright As in that well-remember'd night When first thy mystic braid was wove, And first my Agnes whisper'd love.

Since then how often bast thou prest The torrid zone of this wild breast, Whose wrath and hate have sworn to dwell With the first sin that peopled hell; A breast whose blood's a troubled ocean, Each throb the earthquake's wild commotion !

O if such clime thou canst endure Yet keep thy hue unstain'd and pure, What conquest o'er each erring thought Of that fierce realm had Agnes wrought!

I had not wander'd far and wide With such an angel for my guide ;

Nor heaven nor earth could then reprove me

If she had lived, and lived to love me.

Not then this world's wild joys had been To me one savage hunting scene, My sole delight the headlong race And frantic hurry of the chase ; To start, pursue, and bring to bay, Bush in, drag down, and rend my prey, Then—from the carcass turn away !

Mine ireful mood had sweetness tamed.

And soothed each wound which pride inflamed :— Yes, God and man might now approve me

If thou hadst lived, and lived to love me !"

This passionate outpouring of Scott's momentary despair should show us how dangerous it is to trace what seems to be decadence in any one poet to general social and political causes. We never know whether that which drives one poet into artificial and morbid strains, into histrionic attempts to simulate passions which he does not really feel, may not drive another into those " fresh woods and pastures new " which renew a decadent world. Scott became the originator of a great and healthy literature through an attack of melancholy which was due to a purely personal grief.

Critics would generally, we suppose, be inclined to call the poetry of Crashaw and Cowley decadent poetry. There is a fondness for languid conceits about both of them which certainly suggests a half-exhausted ideal life. Here, for instance, is a portion of Crashaw's reflections on that "not impossible she " in whom, if he ever encountered her, his soul would delight :—

" Till that divine Idea take a shrine Of crystal flesh, through which to shine: —Meet you her, my Wishes, Bespeak her to my blisses,

And be ye calrd, my absent kisses.

“.A. SUPPLICATION.

Awake, awake, my Lyre!

And tell thy silent master's humble tale

In sounds that may prevail ; Sounds that gentle thoughts inspire : Though so exalted she, And I so lowly be Tell her, such different notes make all thy harmony.

Hark ! how the strings awake : And, though the moving hand approach not near, Themselves with awful fear A kind of numerous trembling make.

Now all thy forces try ; Now all thy charms apply ; Revenge upon her ear the conquests of her eye.

Weak Lyre! thy virtue sure

,Is useless here, since thou art only found

To cure, but not to wound, And she to wound, but not to cure.

Too weak too wilt thou prove My passion to remove ;

Physic to other ills, thou'rt nourishment to love.

Sleep, sleep again, my Lyre ! For thou cane, never tell my humble tale

In sounds that will prevail,

Nor gentle thoughts in her inspire ; All thy vain mirth lay by, Bid thy strings silent lie,

Sleep, sleep again, my Lyre, and let thy master die."

That surely is fall of conceits and as unreal as the poetry of a man of a certain genius could possibly be. Yet the age when Crashaw and Cowley flourished, if they ever really flourished, was the age of Milton, and the age in which Dryden began his work, and where could we find the promise ef new kinds of poetical life and genius, if not in the age of Milton and Dryden P We shall often find poets with signs of decadence, poets who are strained and artificial in their effort to be sublime, contemporary with other poets who are as natural and fresh as if they came straight from the heart of Nature. Perhaps the poetry of Gay was as poor, manufactured, and artificial as that of any poet in our litera- ture, for with his liveliness there was hardly any kind of true idealism, and his sentimentality was ostentatious. Nothing, for instance, could be in worse or more artificial taste than the metaphor in which he likens the sailor lover in his ".Black-eyed Susan" to a lark, because he dropped so quickly from the shrouds of the ship to the side of his mistress :— 41 William, who high upon the yard

Rock'd with the billow to and fro, Soon as her well-known voice he heard He sigh'd, and cast his eyes below : The cord slides swiftly through his glowing hands, And quick as lightning on the deck he stands.

So the sweet lark, high poised in air, Shuts close his pinions to his breast

If chance his mate's shrill call he hear, And drops at once into her nest:—

The noblest captain in the British fleet

Might envy William's lip those kisses sweet."

Yet Gay was the contemporary of Pope, who, though certainly not a poet whose mind was in any high sense ideal, still had a buoyancy of satiric life in him which furnished a whole generation with a rich stock of keen and piercing poetic wit such as we could ill spare from English literature. Whatever may be said in depreciation of Pope's poetry, no one could.justly call him a decadent. Indeed, decadence is hardly consistent with the brighter kind of intellect. ,It always implies that want of deep sagacity which disposes a writer to dwell at disproportionate length on an unhealthy

I wish her beauty That owes not all its duty To gaudy tire, or glist'ring shoe-tie : Something more than Taffeta or tissue can, Or rampant feather, or rich fan.

A face that's best By its own beauty drest, And can alone command the rest t

A face made up

Out of no other shop Than what Nature's white hand sets ope."

That surely, with all its elegance, or rather by virtue of its elegance, is decadent in spirit. There is no real life or spring in it. It is long-drawn and sickly. And here, again, is Cowley asserting that the strings of his lyre themselves make "a kind of numerous trembling" though "the moving hand approach not near," when he is proposing to sing of the object of his love :—

clue of thoughts. And from any habit of that kind, so keen' and scimitar-like an intellect as Pope's effectually diverted him. Decadent poets are more often decadent because they have not had the judgment, or the breadth of sympathy, for find out the healthier instincts of their age, than because they live in a society which is deeply infected with a morbid taint.