radiation. Dante always speaks of Virgil as “Il Saggio.” Tennyson puts it well where he says of the poet, “He saw through good, through ill; He saw through his own soul.” Architecture, sculpture, music, the kindred of his own art, must be appreciated by him; and nothing that affects mankind is alien to him.

[Pg 24]

I should like to say, incidentally, and I hope I may do so without giving offence, that I have sometimes thought that, in an age much given to theorising and to considering itself more “scientific” than perhaps it really is, the diminution of practical wisdom, somewhat conspicuous of late in politics and legislation, is due in no small measure to the neglect of the higher poetry, in favour, where concern for poetry survives at all, of brief snatches of lyrical emotion. Hence legislation by emotion and haste.

If we ask ourselves, as it is but natural to do, what are the chief causes that have brought about this change in public taste and sentiment, I believe they will be found to be mainly as follow. (1) The decay of authority already mentioned. (2) The perpetual reading of[Pg 25] novels of every kind, many of them of a pernicious nature, but nearly all of them calculated to indispose readers to care for any poetry save of an emotional lyrical character. (3) The increase—be it said with all due chivalry—of feminine influence and activity alike in society and literature; women, generally speaking, showing but a moderate interest in great issues in public life, and finding their satisfaction, so far as reading is concerned, in prose romances, newspapers, and short lyrics. (4) The febrile quality of contemporaneous existence; the ephemeral excitements of the passing hour; and the wholesale surrender to the transient as contrasted with the permanent, great poetry concerning itself only with this last—a circumstance that makes the Odyssey, for instance, as fresh to-day as though it had been published for the first time last autumn; whereas the life of most prose romances, like the lady’s scanty attire, commence à peine, et finit tout de suite.

[Pg 25]

I hope no one will imagine—for they would be mistaken in doing so—that these pages have been prompted by a disposition to depreciate the age in which we are living, and just as little to manifest disdain of it, though one need not conceal the opinion, in respect of the lower literary taste so widely prevalent, that, as Shakespeare says, “it is not and it cannot be for good.” My object has been something very different from this. It has been to recall canons of 

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