ART. III. The English Poets: Selections, with Critical Introductions by various Writers, and a General Introduction by Matthew Arnold. Edited by Thomas Humphrey Ward, M.A., late Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. 4 vols. London, 1880.

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HE poetry of England is the bloom of her national life. It contains the essence, expressed in the most beautiful form, of whatever is highest and deepest, most vivid and most pathetic, in the thoughts and sentiments which have swayed our countrymen during the successive ages of their history. But just because our poetry is so deep in meaning, so vast in its range, so varied in its manifestations, embodying so many impulses and speaking so many tones, even the careful student, not to say the ordinary reader, might well lose himself amid its labyrinths, and miss that which is most worth finding. To thread these mazes a clue is needed, and many attempts have been made to supply it by means of epitomes, constructed on various plans. Chalmers, Anderson, and Thomas Campbell the poet, have, each in their own way, made selections from the English poets, arranged in chronological order. The work of Mr. Ward, the title of which heads this article, is the most recent attempt to bring the long panorama of our Poets before us, compressed within a reasonable compass. The selections which Mr. Ward makes from each of the Poets are not fuller than those made by some of his predecessors, nor more representative. But his work has this new and distinctive feature, that before the selections from each poet there stands an essay, giving a critical estimate of the poet's genius and of the work he left behind; and these essays are not all from one hand, but each is the work of a separate writer, who has some instinctive preference for and special knowledge of the poet on whom he comments. The Editor, himself an Oxford man, has secured as coadjutors in his work a number of the most eminent men of letters whom Oxford has in our time produced. Of the older generation of Oxonians, there are the late Dean Stanley, the Dean of St. Paul's, Mr. Mark Pattison, Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Thomas Arnold, Mr. Goldwin Smith; of the younger, Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Courthope, and others; while some of Mr. Ward's contributors, like Mr. Gosse, bear names which, though not Oxonian, are in themselves guarantees for good work.

With such an array of able men to introduce the several poets, Mr. Ward's work provides for less experienced students, not only fair samples from the whole field of English Poetry, but the best

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and most recent knowledge to guide them in forming their judgment. Not that any one should bind himself over to the pronounced opinion of any critic, however eminent. But the opinions of experienced critics may be taken by less experienced minds as provisionally true, as finger-posts directing them what to look for in each poet. If any reader after fair study discovers in a poet some beauty which the critic has passed unnoticed, or fails to find the merits on which the critic dwells, he will have done something to increase his own literary experience.

Mr. Matthew Arnold opens the whole work with an Introductory Essay, in which, in his own characteristic way, he dwells on the duty of learning to feel and to enjoy deeply the best, the truly classic, in poetry. And he adds suggestively certain notes by which we may learn to discover this for ourselves. At the same time he speaks somewhat slightingly, we cannot but think too slightingly, of the historic method of regarding poetry, and shows how misleading, as he thinks, such a method is. But in an epitome such as these four volumes contain, an historic survey of the various phases, through which English poetry has passed from first to last, would have been both appropriate and instructive. It would have shown how the mind and spirit of the English people in each age is reflected in the poetry of that age, as it is nowhere else reflected. Adequately to gauge the historic import of each successive phase of our poetry, to show how fully it answers to the events and passions which were swaying each age, would be a task for which few critics are competent For so limited are the powers of all but the rarest genius, that often those, who by their knowledge of history would seem most fitted to make such a survey, lack that poetic feeling, that sensitiveness of eye, which can catch the lights and shadows that fleet over each age, and reflect themselves in its poetry. It will be something, however, if we can make but a step or two in this direction, and show in only a few instances how truly England's poetry has mirrored the historic condition of the several ages which produced it. In making this attempt we can only hope to touch a few of the great mountain peaks of English song, and thence to glance in passing at the lower heights, and the valleys that intervene.

It was a fortunate thing for the poetry and literature of England that by the middle of the 14th century, when the national instinct was throwing aside the French language which had so long confined it, and was shaping for itself that new and composite speech which we speak to this day, there was born into the world a genius so broad and beautiful as that which dwelt

in him whom Caxton called 'that worshipful man Geoffrey Chaucer, who ought eternally to be remembered.' It was not only that he shaped for his countrymen a speech which, in spite of archaisms, we can still delight in for its freshness, its richness, and its music. This he did, and more than this. Out of the materials which the past had bequeathed him, nor less from the human characters he saw around him, he moulded creations which stand out imperishable, alike for their poetic beauty, and for their vivid truthfulness as social portraits. No English poet has more historic value than Chaucer, for none more faithfully reflects all the mingled influences that swayed his time. Though belonging by birth to the middle class, Chaucer's sympathies, as those of Shakspeare and of Walter Scott, were with the aristocrats. He soon became a gentleman and a courtier, and saw life from that side, though his vision was not confined within any conventional limits. During the greater part of his life he was in easy circumstances, and lived with the great, so that his soul was not narrowed by poverty and its cramping cares, but was free to range sympathetically through all orders of society. If he lived with the knight, the squire, and the wealthy ecclesiastic, he was familiar also with the franklin, the miller, the weaver, and the ploughman.

Critics have always noted three distinct stages in his poetry: the earliest, in which French influence is predominant ; the second, in which he came under the power of the Italian Renaissance, Petrarch and Boccaccio; the third and last, in which his true English feeling, though enriched by all the wealth of foreign contributions, fully declared itself. During his two earlier periods Chaucer was learning the perfect mastery of his instrument, shaping for himself a language and a style which he could wield at will, acquiring his wonderful art of story-telling, in which he still remains unsurpassed, and forming that mobile and musical ten-syllable verse, in which the lines glide freely and naturally, and with varied pauses, into each other a style of verse which is suited before all others for narrative, but which was allowed to lie for centuries unused, till Keats and other poets of this century revived it. When Chaucer had thus attained full mastery of his art, he entered on his own third or English period, and addressed himself to his great creation, the Canterbury Tales '-from A.D. 1381 to 1390. He had now left behind him the influences of French and Italian fable and allegory and sentimental romance, and laid hold of the facts of life which he saw around him with a firm grasp. If the hint of the plan of his work was got

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from Boccaccio's Decameron,' the framework Chaucer devised for his tales is entirely English. He seized the very heart of that English life which had been growing up during the late reigns, and represented it truthfully and vividly, as only the greatest poets can. Poetry nowhere contains a gallery of more living portraits, than those of the company which Chaucer gathers together that April morning at the Southwark Hostelry. All readers since have felt about it as Dryden felt, when he says, 'I see all the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, their humours, their features, their very dress, as distinctly as if I had supped with them at the Tabard in Southwark.' It is the peculiar felicity of Chaucer, that by a few strokes he has placed before us the outward semblance and the inward character of some thirty representative men and women of his day, in colours that can never fade. 'A dramatist before there was a drama,' as he has been called, he has so rendered his characters that not even the best in Shakspeare stand out more vivid and lifelike. And the tales, though taken many of them from Boccaccio and other foreign sources, are yet so touched in passing through the mind of Chaucer, that they bear his fresh impress, and serve to bring out personal traits of character in the men and women who relate them. All the chief historical aspects of the time are present in that motley yet genial company. Chivalry is there, if not yet in decay, certainly past its prime, as seen in the Knight's gentle but somewhat old-fashioned character. The Church of that age, far gone in corruption, is portrayed in the jolly hard-riding monk, and in the loose easygoing friar, yet not wholly vile, as shown in the saintly life of the Parson who

"Christes love and his apostles twelve

Taught, and ferste he folwed it himselve.'

The rising respectability of the middle class is represented in the well-to-do merchant; while the lower orders of the people are seen, on their good side, in the ploughman, honest, hardworking, and neighbourly; on their baser side, in the miller, coarse and truculent.

It was in this, his later and vernacular stage, that Chaucer struck that keynote of English poetry, which has never ceased to vibrate down through all its changes. Freeing himself from what was allegorical and fantastic, he touched with sure firm hand the actual phases of life and character, and employed his maturest powers in so rendering these, that they stand out at once real, and yet radiant with an ideal beauty. The combination of a solid English framework with tales from many lands,

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some of romance and glamourie, others of graceful pathos, gives that intermingling of the ideal with the real, which belonged to Chaucer's time, and which is the great charm of poetry, as it is of life.

But wide as was Chaucer's genial humanity, he still looked at life through the eyes of the well-to-do, even of the aristocratic class, with whom he was so much associated. No one would guess from his poems that he lived in what a modern historian has called a time of shame and suffering such as England had never known, when her conquests were lost, her shores insulted, her fleet sunk, her commerce destroyed, her people exhausted by the long and costly wars with France, and by the ravages of pestilence." None would guess from his poems that his was the day, when the Black Death swept off half the population of England, and when the peasant revolt threatened revolution. But these things, unnoted by Chaucer, found a voice in the work of a contemporary poet, William Langland, a man of the people, and author of the Vision of Piers Plowman.' The difference of social view between Chaucer and Langland may be likened to that which we of a later day have seen between Walter Scott and Burns. Both described the Scottish peasantry to the life; but the one viewed them with the eye of a generous and sympathizing superior, the other spoke from the very midst of them, with the voice of one who knew all their feelings and was himself a sharer in their sufferings. In Mr. Ward's first volume we have a masterly sketch of Langland's work and aim from the hand of Professor Skeat. Langland's poem, he tells us, was begun in 1362, during the second of those plagues, which thrice devastated England in the latter half of the 14th century. It was the sight of the miseries then endured by the peasantry that stirred the earnest and sombre heart of Langland. The real subject of the poem,' Professor Skeat tells us, 'is the religious and social condition of the poorer classes in England during the reigns of Edward III. and Richard II.' The poem has thus a marked historical value, apart from its literary merits. It is the voice through literature of that deep discontent, which found vent in the insurrection of Wat Tyler and his Kentish men. Langland had keenly observed and deeply felt the miseries under which poor men were groaning; he saw the need of reform, and tried to represent to his own mind the coming Reformer, in the person of one from among the people themselves, Piers the Plowman. But as the poem proceeds, this homely form disappears, or rather is transfigured into a more spiritual vision, till at last the longed-for Deliverer is none other than Christ Himself. The author spent his life upon

the