this felicity of movement. Though Enoch Arden and The Ring and the Book are as interesting as novels, they fali like novels also, the one by lack of the distinction that an utter sincerity gives, the other by lack of the conciseness that the love of beauty dictates. Keats's Lamia, Arnold's Empedocles, though less absorbing, more nearly marry a considerable interest to a proportionate beauty; Sohrab and Rustum, which perhaps does more, yet remains too conscious of Homer's example to escape a certain flavour of pedantry. Again, Mr Yeats's dramas succeed in mingling interest and beauty better than any of those by the Victorian poets; though several, like Browning's Strafford, are more powerful, or like Swinburne's Atalanta, more original, or like Tennyson's The Cup, more theatrical.
We, like the folk of many previous ages, have it dinned into our ears that poetry, to be great, must treat of actual preoccupations, and not harp on any which are as notably neglected as was the ideal of justice in Dante's day. Well, well, let us allow that a most worthy kind of people at present discuss plans for mitigating the evils of social inequality. How does the best poetry treat this problem?
Not in Lloyd George's way, nor yet like Mr and Mrs Webb, nor even like Bernard Shaw. Their ways are, of course, aimed at and achieve a different kind of success. But do they as grandly allay our passions and restore us to as propitious a frame of mind?
The opinions of Byron and Shelley took their cue from the advanced political thinkers of that day, but failed to inspire their loftiest verse. Such themes as personal guilt and loneliness, or some woman, some cloud, a skylark or the healing power of night inspired their happiest flights. They chanted freedom, indeed, but are on this theme outclassed by Wordsworth, who was soon to become a hopeless reactionary. However, a poet never praised for thought conceived our problem in very lovely verse, almost as we realise it to-day.
