MR. COTTERILL ON THE STUDY OF POETRY.* TIMM is much

that is true, and true without being common- place, in these lectures on poetry ; there is much, also, likely to make the reader question the author's judgment and critical sagacity. A wise statement upon one page is damaged by a doubtful one on another, and when we close the volume, it is with the conviction that, while giving Mr. Cotterill credit for earnestness of purpose and for breadth of acquisition, his In- troduction to the Study of Poetry is neither likely to be of much service to the student, nor of much interest to the general reader. We say this with reluctance, for the author evidently loves his subject, and has expended much labour upon it. Some allowance must be made for the difficulties of the lec- turer. He has not the freedom of a writer sitting at his desk ; and he knows, too, that to retain the attention of his hearers he must express himself strongly, and to some extent rhetorically.

The opening chapter, on the " Origin and Nature of Litera- ture," contains not a little that is superfluous, but the author's principal argument—that the poet is indirectly a teacher, and that poetry is profitable trot in a meagre, utilitarian sense, but in a sense of the word that would satisfy Plato himself—may be accepted without discussion. We agree, too, with his re- marks on what is called "imitative art," but which in truth is not art at all ; and he quotes with aptness the remark of Wordsworth, that " the appropriate business of poetry is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear, not as they exist of themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses and to the passions." A great imaginative painter is not a slave of Nature, but uses her as the medium through which he can re- present what he sees and feels, and in so doing, adds to Nature ; the imitator, on the contrary, however clever he may be, is don- tent to give an exact transcript of natural objects, or endeavours

An Introduction to the Study of Poetry. By H. B. Cotterill, M.A. London : Hozon Paul and Co. 1882.

still less worthily to copy the defects and beauties of earlier artists. A time work of art, in Mr. Cotterill's judgment, is no less a reality than natural objects :—

" Is an isolated fact of history," he asks, is the appearance of a natural object necessarily more of a reality to one than an event, or character, or scene, presented to us by Shakespeare, or Sophocles, or Wordsworth P What can be more real to us, in this sense of the word, than the events (whether or not historically true) of the Iliad, of Shakespeare's plays, of Wilhelm Tell, of .the Electra, or the (Eclipue Rex ? Who is it that is more real to us than Cordelia, or Hamlet, or Coriolanns, or Raphael's Gran Duos and Sistine Madonnas, or many another creation of art ? What scenes of nature are more real to us than those which we find in the Ohilde Harold or in Turner's pictures ? What flowers and stars are more real than those which Wordsworth has recreated for us P"

This is true in a measure ; and no doubt there are creations of the imagination which we love more than the creatures of real life, loving them all the more, perhaps, because we cannot see them in the flesh. Few if any of us know a peasant-girl comparable to Jeanie Deans ; we have never met a Colonel Newcome ; we have known, perhaps, many an antiquary, but none like Jonathan Obibuck ; many a fussy, kind-hearted old maid, but none to match with Miss Bates ; many a charming girl, but none quite so charming as Perclita and Rosalind, as Imogen and Miranda, or even as Miss Austen's Elizabeth, or George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver. No doubt, too, Wordsworth's cuckoo, Shelley's skylark, and the nightingale of Keats have an immortality denied to the real birds ; and many a lovely scene in nature depicted by poetical landscape-painters like Mr. Walton, Mr. Inchbold, and the late Mr. Cecil Lawson lays hold of the mind. more strongly than the actual scenes depicted.

At the same time, " we receive but what we give," and for the larger number of minds the characters, the birds, and the land- scapes we have mentioned have no reality at all. Many an epicure would, it is to be feared, prefer a dish of larks upon the table to the joy of listening to their palpitating bursts of song far up in the blue sky.

In the chapter on "Art Creation," Mr. Cotterill distinguishes with some skill the work of the painter, of the sculptor, and of the poet. He protests, as we have said, against the old and new belief that Art is imitation ; he objects to the assertion of Edgar Poe that, unless accidentally, poetry has no concern with duty or truth, and that its sole arbiter is taste; and observes, on the contrary, that our higher reason is the arbiter. The crea- tion of the beautiful is, he tells us, the end of poetry, the " aspiration towards supernal loveliness," the only true motive, and that the poet's object is " to reveal the secret of Nature, for that secret is ideal loveliness, beauty, and harmony lying at the heart of all existence,"—remarks which, in other and pro- bably simpler language, most of us have heard before. Mr. Cotterill's illustrations drawn from Homer, Dante, and Milton are very apt, and after showing the range of the painter and sculptor, he adds with truth that the supremacy of poetry lies in her extension. "There is no continent of knowledge, no ocean, sea, or streamlet of emotion, over which her empire does not extend." Readers of Goethe, of Schlegel, of Coleridge, and of Carlyle, will find the source of much of Mr. Cotterill's criticism, We need not find fault with it on this account, if the writer has made their thoughts his own, and produced them in a living form ; but too often there is an effort to say something pro- found which is, in reality, obvious or commonplace ; and the remarks upon the ancient spirit as compared with the modern,

recall a statement in the preface, that much which may be allowable in a lecture may be superficial in a book. Other re.- marks have the merit, if such it be, of singularity; as, for instance, when the writer states that " Christianity, by teaching man to turn his eyes from the most perfect of material things to a

divine perfection, quenched his love of truth."

Mr. Cotterill's theories, however, are less remarkable than his literary criticisms. He finds George Eliot's characters "mean- ingless and lifeless ;" he agrees with Mr. William Rossetti in thinking Walt Whitman a great poet, and in proof of it quotes a passage which does not bear out the assumption, for a great poet would suggest by a word or two what it takes Whitman many unmusical lines to utter. In his strange fashion, but not without some power,he associates a plank of wood, "measured, sawed, jacked, joined, stained," with the shape of a coffin, of a baby's cradle, of "the floor-planks for the dancers' feet," of the roof over "the well-married young man and woman," of the shape of the liquor-bar leaned against "by the young rum-drinker and the old. rum-drinker." No doubt, there is some poetical suggestiveness here, but it is the suggestiveness of a prose writer who has imagination enough to produce imagery, but cannot mould it in poetic form. We venture to think that a line like that of Keats',—

" So the two brothers and their murdered man Rode past fair Florence,"—

has more in it of poetical suggestiveness than the clumsy lines of Whitman ; and for the faculty of exciting an emotional feeling by association with material things, they will not bear

a comparison with the Lied yon, der Blocks of Schiller,—a poem as imaginative in conception as it is perfect in execution.

Mr. Cotterill's taste in literature cannot be called catholic.

Atidison's and Steele's "little elegancies " in The Spectator have evidently no charm for him; and it is equally evident that Dryden and Pope have few attractions. We may remind Mr.

Cotterill, by the way, that Dryden was not called "glorious John" either by his contemporaries or successors, but that it is

simply the appellation given to the poet by Claud Haler° in The _Pirate,. The mention of Pope leads the critic to Thomson, whose Seasons, we are told, " consists mostly of mere description of country scenery during the four seasons of the year. As poetry, it is worth little." In reply to which, we say either that Mr. Cotterill has read The Seasons superficially, in order to say

something about the poem, or else that the undoubted imperfec- tions of this great work of genius—which was at one time the most popular volume of poetry in the language—have blinded him to its merits. He is infinitely more just to Wordsworth, and 'perhaps the most significant and truthful comment in his volume is the following :-

" Wordsworth's poems have this characteristic above all others, that they appeal, if they appeal at all, to feelings that each one possesses exclusively for himself,—feelings that one cannot, if one would, communicate to others. There aro, as all lovers of Words- worth's poetry well know, many passages in his writings that seem, ever since we first read them, to be our own special property. Probably each one of us could name a certain year of his life when his feelings were becoming peculiarly sensitive to the beauty of the external world, and struggling into a higher vitality, when faint gleams of some groat glory filled him from time to time with myste- rious longings and joys. At such a time it was, probably, that Wordsworth's poems came like the warm breath of spring, to burst the bud and unfold it to the sun,—to reveal the full glory to his inmost heart He reveals to us the real inner meaning of things ; and to grasp and set before one this meaning is a creative act of the imagination, for though the object may be a natural, common thing, it has been recreated for us.

The chapter upon Wordsworth contains sound criticism, ad- mirably expressed for popular service, and if the whole work were equal to it, we should have little to find fault with. But Mr. Cotterill's range, as we have said, is limited, and in his re- marks upon Keats he fails to appreciate the perfection at which he arrived in his latest work, and forgets the few brief years of life in which he was permitted to labour at all. And in object- ing to the luxuriance of his descriptions, to his love of material rather than of spiritual beauty, it should be remembered that this youth, for such he was, touches the most difficult sub. jests--as, for instance, the presence of Porphyro in Madeline's chamber—with such exquisite delicacy, that not a thought of evil crosses the reader's mind. Keats is sensuous, but never sensual; and considering the strength of his passions and the apparent absence of spiritual aspirations, the essential purity of his art becomes, as the critic admits, all the more remarkable.

Mr. Cotterill denounces the idea that the purpose of a poet should be didactic; he allows that he may sing for the mere joY of singing; and yet after quoting or alluding to some of Keats's loveliest lines, he turns round and asks what they all mean. " The picture of Ruth, in tears, amid the alien corn," he writes," is in itself very tender, beautiful, and pathetic ; yet I do not see what true meaning it has ;" and this, judging from a remark on page 255, seems to be his opinion of Keats's poetry generally, while further on he observes that Keats seems to him almost wholly wanting in the true poetic or creative faculty. Neither can he assign a high value to Byron's poetry, although his poetic abilities are " indescribably great." However, Mr. Cotterill is good enough to allow that Byron may be to others what he is not to him. On the other hand, he finds Shelley " the most spiritual, and, in this sense at least, the greatest of poets;" and as he never asks what his poetry means, no doubt finds it wholly intelligible. Perhaps the most curious part of the volume is the chapter upon Coleridge. In one place, he writes

of " the invariable feeling of dissatisfaction which allegorical poems produce," and of allegorical art as " a contradiction in terms ;" yet in writing with evident admiration of Christabel,

which he justly calls a wonderful fragment, be discovers that it is an allegory throughout.

It would be difficult to sum up the purport of this volume, which is far from obvious. Mr. Cotterill endeavours to write philosophically about poetry, and also to write critically. The book displays, as we have said, knowledge and enthusiasm, and yet on closing it we fail to find—as the author Fails to find in: Keats, and Byron, and George Eliot—a true meaning. The point which he seems concerned to state most strongly, for he does it with frequent iteration, is that poetry is only poetry when we feel it to be so, and that " in each of us lies the supreme arbi- trament,"—which is very much like a new application of the old argument against Dr. Fell.