Again, in the beautiful stanzas on the Second Sunday after Trinity, he sees "the manytwinkling smile of ocean up the glade. only thought is:

Such signs of love old Ocean gives

We cannot choose but think he lives.

His

An agreeable view, but hardly consistent with the vast and barren cruelties which are as natural to the ocean as his genial presence.

We do not mean that a poet is bound to insist on the harsher aspects of the case, but in a poet like Keble, who made so much of close communion with Nature, of intimate musings, it is mere blindness not to take these things into account. The fault, with Keble, was entirely in man's corrupt heart; further than that he did not care to follow it; he deliberately ignored the bewildering anomaly, the law of failure and suffering that runs through Nature, as surely as through the history of nations. How different a view it was from the view that Tennyson found grow more and more intense with advancing years —that the world was, as it were, the creation of some vast poetic heart, with its necessary concomitant of failure and incompleteness.

Keble himself, in his "Prælectiones Academicæ," or lectures delivered as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and in his review of the "Life

"

of Sir Walter Scott" (British Critic, 1838), enunciated a theory of poetry which it will be well to examine. Dean Church said of the former work, that it was "the most original and memorable course ever delivered from the Chair of Poetry in Oxford"; but the statement does not imply any very extravagant claims. Again, Bishop Moberly said that the book exhibited "a power and delicacy at once so original and so just, as to make these lectures one of the most charming and valuable volumes of classical criticism that have ever issued from the press.' Allowing for all possible partiality, this is strong praise; but it is difficult to see how it is justified. As to its critical value we may say at once that no one was ever less fitted to be a critic than Keble. "What Keble hated instinctively," says Newman, "was heresy, insubordination, resistance to things established, claims of independence, disloyalty, innovation, a critical and censorious spirit." That is an indifferent outfit for a poet, and an impossible one for a critic. And even granting to Keble a certain submissive acumen, a certain relish for masterpieces, criticism which deals only with the panegyric of great masters, or the classification of established reputations is surely the most valueless of all criticism. If it is presented in attractive literary form it merely diverts to itself the attention it professes to direct elsewhere! If it is elucidatory,

it is excusable: but Keble is not elucidatory. The only true function of criticism is the judicial and tentative selection of contemporary excellence. Artistic impulse, literary progress, poetical production, have orbits of their own. Depreciative criticism is nothing more than a kind of attendant umbra, and has never done more than retard, if it has done even that, the popular verdict. Dr. Johnson was perfectly right when he said, "Depend upon it, sir, no man was ever written down but by himself." The criticism of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, brilliant in form, retrograde in spirit, made a few writers uncomfortable and gave a malicious pleasure to a great number of readers: but poetical creation continued its calm advance quite independently. Nay, they even overshot their mark and called attention to the very writers they professed to crush. Had the reviewers had their way, we should have heard no more of Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Tennyson. The only valuable criticism is the unprejudiced republican criticism, that dares to see what is good and give instant encouragement to it. And Keble's is just the opposite, as might be expected from the whole tone and habit of his mind. A cautious appeal to authority, predetermined canons of taste and propriety-these are his characteristics.

He enunciates the theory which would divide all poets into primary and secondary poets.

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" Primary poets, according to Keble," says Principal Shairp," are they who are driven by overmastering enthusiasm, by passionate devotion to some range of objects, or line of thought, or aspect of life or Nature, to utter their feelings in song. They sing because they cannot help it.. This is the true poetic pavía of which Plato speaks. Secondary poets are not urged to poetry by any such overflowing sentiment: but learning, admiration, choice and a certain literary turn have made them poetic artists." Of the former kind are Homer, Eschylus, Lucretius, Virgil, Pindar, Shakespeare, Burns, Scott of the latter, Sophocles, Milton, Dryden, Horace, and Theocritus. This, in itself, is a somewhat singular selection of names.

But what

absence of insight is there in Keble's judgment that the Iliad and Odyssey are the work of one hand, the former in youth, the latter in later life. "The overmastering feeling of Homer," he says, "is a sad regret for the decay of the heroic age, with its common national feeling, its reverence for its leaders." What a fantastic judgment! Homer the poet of a sad regret ! Surely it is the very absence of all critical or introspective or even latent thought which gives the poems their overwhelming charm.

The truth is that Keble's theory of poetry is practically an expansion of Aristotle's Poetics, and is a narrow generalisation on wholly insuffi

N

cient grounds.

Poets cannot be swept off the board entire, like chessmen. There are many writers of verse, whose impulse to sing was certainly original, and, according to Keble's definition, primary; yet their work was essentially second-rate. Take such a poet as Southey : The composed in a mood which he mistook for solemn inspiration; his poetry was written in obedience to a high and sacred sense of vocation; he-in a letter which cannot be called conceited, for it is written with a serene and stately consciousness of greatness-placed his own poem of Madoc second only to Milton's Paradise Lost. Wordsworth again - writing sometimes from a large and grave inspiration, sometimes from a sense of duty-was he always a primary poet? The fact is that it is almost entirely a matter of expression and style. Many men are poets at heart, and have a vivid and eager consciousness of beauty, but only a small percentage of these have the gift of transmuting it into language. The truth is that secondary poets are mere literary men, dilettanti versewriters; and all poets who establish a real hold on the minds of others, if it be, as Lovelace, by two lyrics only, or Shirley by one, are primary poets. The thing cannot be done at all without a genuine inspiration; but granted the inspiration, even the mood, the expression is not always there.