although I have suggested elsewhere that technique is the mistress of invention,[Pg 48] and that changes in the medium make possible the discovery of new themes, yet an opposite theory might as easily be maintained, with perhaps equal truth, that social and intellectual changes create demands, in satisfying which an intelligent artist will find his most genial inspiration, and will modify his technique until it becomes a fit instrument for expressing his new material. But though for these reasons it would be unwise to indulge in prophecy, we may at least take a survey of the main possibilities.

[Pg 48]

To begin with, the innumerable and infinite output of personal lyrics, good, bad and indifferent, is certain to continue, so long as human beings are subject to passions and sentimentalities, and can enjoy the varying moods of nature, and the pleasures of poetic pastiche. However capriciously the winds of literary fashion may blow, the countless flock of minor lyricists will always be with us, while the truly great[Pg 49] will be few and far between. One danger indeed we have little reason to fear. I mean the sterilising tyranny of some dominant lyrical form, such as the Greek elegiac couplet, or the late-classical Chinese stanza. Our poetry is already so abundantly rich in types, and so fertile in breeding new varieties, that neither the spirit of a new Age, nor genius however individual need be at a loss for appropriate forms of lyrical self-expression. A twentieth-century Catullus or Heine would have no cause for complaint if he were to be born an Englishman.

[Pg 49]

It is with regard to lyrics on a larger, more elaborate scale, that English poets have hitherto shown least ambition and enterprise. The Pindarics of Gray are a poor substitute for Pindar; while the Odes of Keats and Matthew Arnold’s Thyrsis and Scholar-Gipsy are elegiac rather than lyrical in mood and form. Shelley and Goethe, and at times Swinburne, have shown themselves[Pg 50] to be more truly the successors of the greater Greek lyric poets; and if they be rightly understood, their example may yet bear fruit for our delight of altogether unimaginable quality. But the tendency of the moment seems to be towards poems on a small scale, of a somewhat anæmic delicacy, or else of an artful and piquant quaintness, rather than towards the sustained movement, and elaborate yet highly organised form, which is necessary for the greatest lyrical poetry.

[Pg 50]

Another province of literature, which we have seldom as 

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