AMERICA "DE ARTE POETICA,"* IT is difficult to reckon aright

with the great Republic beyond the seas. There is the impress of novelty and audacity on all her doings and undertakings ; and every day the feeling grows how inextricably all the world's future is bound up with her.

On literature, as on politics, she lays down laws that are her own. Her addresses appeal in our own language to senti- ments which, nevertheless, we cannot understand; and even with all our better knowledge, we still, in our insular narrow- ness, cannot refrain from wonder at the bursts of amazingly tall talk which decorate the pages of a work like that before us, which embodies the serious utterances of the Percy Turn- bull Memorial Lecturer on Poetry, at Johns Hopkins Uni- versity. Percy Turnbull was a child of great promise, who died at nine, and his parents founded the Lectureship to keep his name alive. The poetic impulse, as Mr. Stedman assures us, has seldom been more forceful than it is at this moment at the Johns Hopkins University. That impulse is defined as the sentiment which, for ages long before the era of scientific reductions, imparted vital energy to the minstrel's song, and has now raised Mr. Stedman to the Johns Hopkins Turnbull Lectureship :- " Our American establishments [he says in his opening lecture], our halls of learning and beauty and worship, are founded, as you know, for the most part not by governmental edict : they usually take their being from the sentiment, the ideal impulses, of individuals. Your own institute, still renewing, like Milton's eagle, its mighty youth, owes its existence to an ideal sentiment, to a most sane poetic impulse, in the spirit of its founder, devoted though be was, through a long and sturdy life- time, to material pursuits."

Mr. Stedman goes on to tell us that this, the first-endowed lectureship of poetry in the United. States, and, as far as he knows, the second among English-speaking Universities (the Birkhead Chair at Oxford, endowed in 1708, being the first), is one of the most " gracious and noteworthy evidences thus far calendared" of the ideality which, from time to time, awakes among the more generous spirits of the material workers. A calendared evidence of an ideality has, to us, an artificial and not too English ring; but we must not allow our- selves, by phrase-making of this kind, to be diverted from the fact that a poetical chair of this nature among the working Americans is a desirable and a gracious thing, and that its first occupant is a man who has a right to be heard. In studies of what he calls elemental matters—such as scientific truth or human ideality—the lecturer detects a return to the notion of the antique and the medhuval schools, and the attempt to restore a balance between the arbitrary and fundamental methods of education. That the mission of the Universities is to decorate) and lighten the tasks of science—to enhance the use and the joy and the worth of existence—and to give to youth its share in every study that can engender a power or a delight—to be institu- " The Nature and Moments of Poetry. By Edmond Clarence Stedman. London and Now York Cana. and Co, tions both human and humane—only inevitable as schools for conduct and advancement—these are the theses of Mr. Sted- man's text. And, first amongst all these supplementary studies, as under modern and material pressure the lecturer seems to admit that all the gentler arts must be, stands Poetry as the most ideal and comprehensive of all. But alas ! we read his statement that Poetry has more readers to-day than it ever had, with the painful qualification that Englishmen believe directly the reverse. That a great deal more is written is quite true. Also, that far more of it comes up to what we may call the "lower standards" than in past times, But that Poetry is steadily read and studied, save by a very few, it seems to us impossible to believe. Even as regards Shake- speare, Mr. Irving's intensely poetical and moving presenta- tion of King Lear—really in suggestiveness even more than in performance a piece of acting which should rank high indeed—has served to illustrate on all hands, amongst the people whom we meet, a curious ignorance. The general impression of those who "never read it, you know," that it is altogether too gloomy a story for the stage, is oddly suggestive of the frame of mind which nowadays expects Tragedy to be lively. " That," we heard one exquisite say to another at the Lyceum, as he pointed out a bust of Shakespeare, "is the old gentleman who invented this." Poetry, said Wordsworth and Coleridge, is the anti- thesis of science. The modern's sun, adds the lecturer, is " an incandescent material sphere, alive with magnetic forces, engirt with hydrogenous flame, and made up of constituents more or less recognisable through spectrum analysis." "The rainbow itself, that prismatic thing," has been reduced to its elements in a way to test what Mr. Stedman rather sadly calls "both the pagan and biblical legends" concerning it :— " We know her woof, her texture. She is given

In the dull catalogue of common things."

And as for such a poetic dream as " idle tears," has not Balzac's chemist " decomposed them P They contain a little phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium, mucin, and water." In another place, the lecturer gives us as an illustration the following amusing contrast of descriptions, which we print side by side, as a proof how wisely our instructor desipit in loco:—

" In area of extreme low pressure is rapidly moving up the Atlantic Coast, with wind and rain. Storm centre now off Charleston, S.E. ; wind, N.B.; velocity, 54 ; barometer, 29.6. The disturbance will reach New York on Wednesday, and pro- ceed eastward to the Banks and Bay St. Lawrence. Danger signals ordered for all North Atlantic ports."

" I accept Reality, and dare not question it, Materialism first and last imbuing," is Walt Whitman's statement of his view of poetry, which is certainly after a receipt of his own ; and we all of us on this side are well acquainted with Tennyson's poet-acceptance of the spirit of the age, which after his manner Wordsworth could realise too. Thus, too, do we remember an unknown poet's moralising on the first railway engine :— " Time's last and youngest child, from birth The infant monarch of the earth."

The poets must surrender, though they like it not. A quaint comment upon another side of the Abstract and Concrete is supplied by an amusing anecdote of Emerson, summoned from a deep discussion upon the Abstract in his library to inspect a farmer's load of wood. "Excuse me a moment, my friends ; we have to attend to these matters just as if they were real."

An effective summary of this enmity in alliance—or alliance in enmity—between the two methods, or the two schools, call it which you will, may be found where the lecturer quotes these lines from Lowell, whom in another place he regrets as the man above all others best fitted to have filled the first American chair of poetry " Science was faith once : Faith were science now, Would she but lay her bow and arrows by, And arm her with the weapons of the time."

"Theology," adds Mr. Stedman in comment, " teaching immor- tality, now finds science deducing the progressive existence of the soul, as an inference from the law of evolution." And he cites Professor Hardy of Dartmouth College as at once an abstruse mathematician and a poetic novelist. Mr. Stedman seems to

"The East Wind gathered, all unknown, A. thick sea-cloud his course before : [zone, He left by night the frozen And emote the cliffs of Labrador ; [hand, He lashed the coasts on either And betwixt the Cape and Newfoundland Into the bay his armies pour."

have interviewed in the modern fashion various authorities with the difficult question, " What is Poetry ?" before composing his lectures. Professor Hardy answers that it is akin to physicism—though the physical discoverer is for the moment the necessary man—when man may be, they think, beginning " by searching to find out God." " What a chapter," he says, "the Oriental poet could give us to-day in a last edition of Job, founding our conception of the Unknown on what we know of his works, instead of our ignorance of them. I want a new Paul to rewrite and restate the doctrine of immortality." But the poet loses nothing in the end by the enlargement of his field of imagination, and the final ground is still his own. "'Till he and the scientist become one, Poetry' takes her grave brother by the hand, and cheers him with immortal laughter." What our own learned Professor means by that we must leave amongst his many characteristic ambiguities. The rank which the sacred writings take in the lecturer's view is curious to note throughout. At one point he takes as his contrasted instances of old and new fable—the first durable and the last perishing, by strict poetic rule,—the stories of "Ruth" and " Esther " on the one hand, and "Anna Karanena " on the other I As to the main question, " What is Poetry P " we cannot find that Mr. Stedman has received or devised any very new or satisfying answer. Nor do we suppose that even the man of science ever will. " Can we take up poetry as a botanist takes up a flower, and analyse its components P Can we make visible the ideas of its protoplasm, and recognise a something that imparts to it transcendency, the spirit of the poet within his uttered work ? " It is certain that to make visible ideas out of the protoplasm of Poetry does sound a task to puzzle greater men than Eddison ; and we take the truest answer to be one which Mr. Stedman quotes, that "one element must forever elude researches, and that is the very element by which poetry is poetry."

" Forever ! 'tis a single word—

Our rude forefathers deemed it two !"

—looks now like Calverley's summary at once of certain modern spelling and modern inquiry. That a poem is a poem, as a flower is a flower, is mach where the lecturer leaves the inquiry, and we may leave it with him.

As to what we may call the second purpose of the lectures, the history of Poetry in its bearing upon its nature and elements, we fail to find that Mr. Stedman has imported any great novelty into the world-old subject. He has his say about the Hebrew poets and the prominent classics—he discusses Browning as a dramatist in whom a Victorian Shakespeare has possibly been lost to the stage, through the inefficient ignorance of modern managers and modern audiences—(poor people ! what a time they have of it, though surely those who speak so can scarcely understand how very comprehensive the word " audiences " is) and he finds in Swinburne's' "Atalanta in Calydon " imaginative music unequalled since the "Prometheus Unbound." He is not far wrong, perhaps, in his general estimate of this, our great surviving poet. " Poetic splendour" is Swinburne's truest differentia—and that his vogue has suffered from the very excess of it we doubt not to be perfectly true. And that his "metrical genius is too enthralling to be over-long endured," is a saying which is happier in the thought than in the expression. In Matthew Arnold, Mr. Stedman discovers his chief instance of a poet constrained by his temperament to write out of accord with his own critical judgment, in that he believed action to be the purpose of the best poetry. While his own cast of mind led him into the subjective form, he still had a preference for his own " Sohrab and Rust= " over the subtle reflection of his more characteristic verse. The general failure of modern poetry in respect of passion, when it succeeds in simplicity and sensuousness, is the keynote, according to the lecturer, of all minor verse, whether English or new English.

We hope that we may have said enough to induce the carious Upon this good old theme to turn for enlightenment to Mr. Stedman's pages, allowing him to describe his own pur- pose as, " in good faith, what his title indicates, elementary."

He has attempted, as he says, to consider the essence and the incarnation of Poetry as directly as those of the less inclusive and more palpable fine arts, and to discern what he considers essentials, rather than the much-vexed question of schools and fashions on the one hand, or of rhythms and dictions on the other. We honestly own that we fail to follow his preface much more exactly. It is almost as elusive at times as his spirit of Poetry itself. But there are passages of in- teresting reading scattered through the volumes, and many a quotation which recalls pleasant thoughts. It is singularly suggestive that Mr. Stedman—speaking evidently with authority as a recognised American critic—should without hesitation include Victor Hugo among the greater Gods of Poetry, in the great rank with Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe, with the latter of whom he especially contrasts and compares him. The final place of the famous Frenchman on the ladder of Poetry has not yet been found, as his peculiar and undeniable charlatanism must for the present conflict with his higher qualities ; but his undoubted possession of "the massive " in his work must tell the other way. It is a figure to be seriously dealt with. In concluding, we hope with Mr. Stedman that the best age of imaginative production is not past, and that poetry will yet, from time to time, prove itself a force in national life. His "words along the way," as he himself calls them, upon an inexhaustible theme, are aided by a careful analytical index, which ranges from " Alastor " to " Wuthering Heights," and from " Vera de Societe " to " Volapiik."