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Return to Masterpieces

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A year ago, 1n this very city, and to an audience much the same as this, I made a plea for a catholic taste in reading. I urged my hearers not to be too academic in their selection, not to keep only to the main roads of letters, but to amuse themselves in the by-paths. I still adhere to that view. It is enormous fun to browse at large over the wide domain of literature, and one may pick up some surprising treasures in unlikely places. In the last two centuries, for example, there have been many minor poets who wrote. the Scots vernacular, most of them uncommonly bad. But even in the worst of them you can find an occasional verse of singular beauty. I have tried to collect some of these unexpected jewels in an anthology, which I prepared some years The Northern Muse.

Let me give you two other illustrations. There was a fifteenth century English poet called John Lydgate, a disciple of Chaucer and one of the prosiest of God's creatures. But Lydgate in a love poem could write a verse like this .

"And as I stoode myself alloone upon the Nuwe Yere night, I prayed unto the frosty moone, with her pale light, To go and recomaunde me unto my lady dere. And erly on the next morrowe, kneling in my cloos I preyed eke the shene sonne, the houre whane he aroos, To goon also and sey the same in his bemys clere."

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I propose to take the narrower definition of poetry. Poetry and prose are not antithetical words, for there may be great poetry in great prose. The French word poésie is frequently applied to prose compositions. You remember Sir Philip Sidney's words, "It is not rhyming and versifying that maketh poesy. One may be a poet without versing, and a versifier without Poetry". The true differentiation is between prose on the one hand and verse or metre on the other. But for our purpose today I propose to take poetry in the narrower sense, as involving some kind of ordered rhythmical pattern - which, if printed in the ordinary prose fashion, would lose something of its effect.

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Listen to this also. lt is on the subject of Lady Jane Grey -

"Like her most gentle, most unfortunate, Crown'd but to die - who in her chamber sate Musing with Plato, though the horn was blown, And every ear and every heart was won, And all in green array went chasing down the sun."

That is the work of Samuel Rogers, a banker and a minor poet, at the beginning of last century, whom Lord Rosebery has described not unfairly as a "hedgehog soul".

But tonight I want to emphasise the other side. The backwaters have their charm, but we must not forget the main stream, the central tide of poetry. My plea is for a return to a proper respect for, and a more intimate knowledge of, the great masterpieces, the work of the primary creative minds.

How shall we define a masterpiece, a classic? I suppose by its enduring charm, for age does not wither it, and by its universal appeal, which is not limited by race or nationality. To take only the great literatures, I mean by master poets, Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles; I mean Lucretius and Horace and Virgil; I mean Dante and Racine and Corneille and Victor Hugo; I mean Chaucer Shakespeare; Milen or Dryson; Wordsworth, Coleridge ; Shelley and Keats; Matthew Arnold (though some of my hearers may differ from me), and Tennyson and Browning.

My plea is timely, I think, for today there is a tendency to forget about the masters, or to treat them disrespectfully. Too many of our contemporaries are like impudent little boys who amuse themselves by cock snooks at their betters. For this fashion there are several reasons. One is that today, while there is an inordin-

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ate number of clever writers, there is a remarkable and admitted dearth of great ones, both in English and in French literature. I am old enough to remember Tennyson's death. When I was a young man we had Swinburne and Robert Bridges alive in England, and Hardy and Meredith and Ruskin. Less than two years ago with Kipling died the last of the writers of the larger stature. It is the same in France since the death of Proust and Anatole France. There may be stupendous geniuses growing up in the world, but they have not yet revealed themselves. We live in a day of small things. We fail in respect to the bigger things, because we are not producing them.

Another reason is the impatience, the natural impatience, of our somewhat disinterested youth. This inevitably tends to a kind of sansculottism. I am not inclined to describe these young men in the words of the poet.

"Feeble and restless youths, born to inglorious days". Feeble is not the right word for them, and there is both pathos and promise in their disquiet, but they are indubitably restless.

In their attitude to the great things of the past they have what is called in the jargon of today, an inferiority complex, with its inevitable converse, a superiority complex. They are perturbed by the spectacle of something beyond their compass and find consolation in affecting to despise it, like some Greek of the decadence who chipped away the nose of a marble statue in order to make the Goths laugh. We have many cases to-day of an easy notoriety won by belittling great reputations. If you declare that Wordsworth as a poet was much inferior to some hitherto unknown person called

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Snooks, whom you have discovered, you make people stop to listen to you and you: flatter your own vanity, for you know that while you are a long way from Wordsworth, you are pretty much on a level with Snooks. So the attitude of these unfortunates to the masterpieces in poetry is much that described in the first lines of Browning's "Grammarian's Funeral"

"Let us begin and carry up the corpse, Singing together."

They are like the French Romantics at the beginning of last century whose cry was "Qui nous delivra des Grecs et des Romains?" - Who will deliver us from the tyranny of the great classics? They want to get rid of them, to bury them ceremonially, for their calm perfection is a standing reproach.

There is a third reason, and a more honourable one. Those iconoclasts are not as a rule very well educated, and therefore they have not the just perspective which is given by a wide acquaintance with great literature. But they feel acutely. They are highly sensitive to the difficulties and discontents of our time. They demand in poetry a personal and topical note, an immediate contemporary appeal. They see no value in what they call the poetry of "escape". So we find in our younger school of poets at home two interesting features. We live, they say, in a mechanical age, so they crowd their verse with technological phrases and exult in the complexities of machinery. Again they say we live in an age of social unrest, and unless a poet has on this point a direct message, a new gospel of social regeneration, he is a mere cumberer of the ground.

I feel a good deal of sympathy with their view. No great