In any intermediary lyrical period its effect upon the listener is apt to be one of experiment and vacillation. It is true that much correct verse is written with out inspiration, and as an act of taste. The makers seem artists, rather than poets: they work in the spirit of the graver and decorator; even as idyllists their appeal is to the bodily eye; they are over-careful of the look of words, and not only of their little pictures, but of the frames that contain them,-book-cover, margin, paper, adornment. That lyrical compositions should go forth in attrac tive guise is delectable, but not the one thing needful for the true poet, whose strength lies in that which distinguishes him from other artists, not in what is common to all. While making a fair presentation of the new modes and tendencies of the now somewhat timorous art of song, a guess at what may come out of them is far more difficult than were the prognostications of thirty years ago. Each phase has its own little grace or effect, like those of the conglomerate modern piano-music. Among those less rational than others I class attempts to introduce values absolutely exotic. The contention for a broad freedom in the chief of arts is sound. It may prove all things, and that which is good will stay. Owing to our farther remove from the European continent, foreign methods are essayed with us less sedulously than by the British minor poets. Both they and we were suc cessful in a passing adoption of the "French forms," which, pertaining to construction chiefly, are common to various literatures. In attempting to follow the Gallic cadences and linguistic effects our kinsmen were bound to fail. Our own craftsmen even less have been able to capture graces quite inseparable from the specific rhythm, color, diction, that constitute the highly sensuous beauty of the modern French school. A painter, sculptor, or architect-- his medium of expres sion being a universal one can utilize foreign methods, if at a loss for something of his own. But there has not been an English-speaking captive to the bewitchment of the French rhythm and symbolism who has not achieved far less than if he had held fast to the resources of his native tongue. Literatures lend things of worth to one another, but only as auxiliaries and by gradual stages. Between the free carol of the English lyric, from the Elizabethan to the Victorian, and the noble variations of English blank verse in its every age and vogue, our poets have liberties enow, and will rarely go afield except under suspicion of reinforcing barren invention with a novel garniture. The technique of the lyrical Symbolists, for instance, is at best a means rather than an end. Though pertinent to the French language and spirit, it is apt, even in France and Belgium, to substitute - poetic material for creative design. That very language is so constituted that we cannot transmute its essential genius; those who think otherwise do not think in French, and even an imperfect appreciation of the tongue, and of its graces and limitations, should better inform them. Titles also are misleading: every poet is a symbolist in the radical sense, but not for the sake of the symbol. The glory of English poetry lies in its imagination and in its strength of thought and feeling. Deliberate artifices chill the force of spontaneity; but at the worst we have the certainty of their automatic correction by repeated failures. Even as concerns the homely, slighted shepherd's trade, there is a gain in having our escape from provincialism indicated by distrust of inapt models, and through an appeal to our own constituency rather than to the outer world. The intermingling of peoples has qualified Binney Wallace's saying that "a foreign nation is a kind of contemporaneous posterity." The question as to a British or American production now must be, What is the verdict of the English-speaking world? To that vast jury the United States now contributes the largest contingent of intelligent members. Our poets who sing for their own countrymen will not go far wrong, whether or not they bear in mind the quest for "local color," as to which it can be averred that our elder group honestly expressed the nature, life, sentiment, of its seacoast habitat, the oldest and therefore most American portion of this country. Younger settlements have fallen into line, with new and unmistakable qualities of diction, character, atmosphere. Our kinsmen, in their pursuit of local color, more or less deceive themselves; with all its human zest, it is but a secondary value in art, though work surcharged with it is often good of its kind, while higher efforts are likely to fall short. When found, we sometimes fail to recognize it, or care no more for it than for those provincial newspapers which are so racy to native readers and so tedious to the sojourner. What foreigners really long for is something radically new and creative. In any case, praise or dispraise from abroad is now of less import than the judgment of that land in which a work is produced. The method and spirit peculiar to a region make for "an addition to literature," but a work conveying then must have the universal cast to be enduring, though its author waits the longer for recognition. But this was always so; the artist gains his earliest satisfaction from the comprehension of his own guild. Time and his measure of worth may do the rest for him. A public indifference to the higher forms of poetry is none the less hard to bear. A collective edition of an admired poet's lifework, with not a line in its volumes that is not melodious, or elegant, or imaginative, or all combined, and to which he has applied his mature and fastidious standards, appears without being made the subject of gratulation or extended review. A fresh and noble lyric, of some established order, gains small attention, while fetching trifles are taken up by the press. If a fair equivalent of the "Ode to a Nightingale" were now to come into print, a reviewer of the magazine containing it doubtless might content himself with saying: "There is also a poem by Mr. ." But this, after all, in its stolid fashion may betoken a preference for something revelatory of the infinite unexplored domain of poetic values; a sense that we have a sufficiency of verse which, however fine, is conformed to typical masterpieces; a desire for variants in creative beauty to stimulate us until they each, in turn, shall also pass into an academic grade. In offering this final volume of a series that has diverted me from projects more in the humor of the hour, I feel a touch of that depression which follows a long task, and almost ask whether it has been worth completion. Would not the labor have been better expended, for example, upon criticism of our prose fiction? The muse sits neglected, if not forspent, in the hemicycle of the arts: Yet after this verification of my early forecast, why should not the subsidiary prediction that of poesy's return to dignity and favor no less prove true? As it is, having gone too far to change for other roads, I followed the course whether lighted by the setting or the rising sun. Concerning the nature and survival of poetry much is said in view of the apparent condition. Song is conceded to be the language of youth, the voice of primitive races, whence an inference that its service in the English tongue is near an end. But surely poetry is more than the analogue of even those folk-songs to which composers recur in aftertime and out of them frame masterpieces. Its function is continuous with the rhythm to which emotion, age after age, must resort for a supreme delivery, the vibration that not only delights the soul of infancy, but quavers along the heights of reason and intelligence. - If the word "lost" can be applied to any one of the arts, it is to poetry last of all. Not so long ago it was linked with sculpture, now the crowning triumph of a world's exposition. We must be slow to claim for any century supereminence as the poetic age. Our own country, to return, has not been that of a primitive people, colonial or under the republic; and among all peoples once emerged from childhood modes of expression shift in use and favor, and there are many rounds of youth, prime, and decadence. Spring comes and goes and comes again, while each season has its own invention or restoration. The new enlightenment must be taken above all into account. The world is too interwelded to afford many more examples of a decline like Spain's, in whose case the comment that a nation of late-players could never whip a nation of machinists was not a cynicism but a study in ethnology. Her lustration probably was essential to a new departure ; while as for America, she has indeed her brawn and force, but is only entering upon her song, nor does a brood of minor poets imply that she has passed a climacteric. It will be long before our people need fear even the springtime ener ration of their instinctive sense of beauty, now more in evidence with every year. More likely they have not yet completed a single round, inasmuch as there has been thus far so little of the indubitably dramatic in our rhythmical production. The poetic drama more than once has marked a culmination of imaginative liter ature. Constructively, it is the highest form of poetry, because it includes all others metrical or recitative; psychologically, still the highest, going beyond the epic presentment of external life and action: not only rendering deeds, but setting bare the workings of the soul. I believe that, later than Shakespeare's day, the height of utterance in his mode and tongue is not of the past, but still to be attained by us. Thus poetry is indeed the spirit and voice of youth, but the thought of sages, and of every age. Our own will have its speech again, and as much more quickly than after former periods of disuse as the processes of action and reaction speed swiftlier than of old. To one bred to look before and after this talk of atrophy seems childish, when he bears in mind what lifeless stretches preceded the Miltonic and the Georgian outbursts. A pause, a rest, has been indicated, at this time especially innocuous and the safeguard against cloying; meantime our new-fledged genius has not been listless, but testing the wing in fields outside the lyric hedgerows. In the near future the world, and surely its alertest and most aspiring country, will not lack for poets. Whatsoever the prognosis, one thing is to be gained from a compilation of the songs of many this or that singer may be humble, an everyday personage among his fellows, but in his verso we have that better part of nature which overtops the evil in us all, and by the potency of which a race looks forward that else would straggle to the rear. Compact Biographical Notes upon ali the poets represented, as in "A Victorian Anthology," follow the main text of this book. They have been prepared by various hands, and revised by the editor- occasionally with a brief comment upon some name too recent to be found in the critical volume, "Poets of Amer ica." For texts I have depended upon my own shelves, the public libraries, and the private stores of Mr. R. H. Stoddard and other colleagues. Acknowledgment is made to Mr. C. Alexander Nelson, of Columbia University, and to Mr. Robert Bridges, for repeated courtesies. Important aid has been derived from the Librarian of Brown University, Mr. Harry Lyman Koopman, and from the Harris-Anthony collection of American poetry within his charge. There is an enviable opportu nity for the friends of this notable collection to place it beyond rivalry by filling in many of its gaps, and by making copious additions from the output of the last twenty years. Throughout two years occupied with the main portion of the compilation, a time of frequent disability, I have owed much to the unstinted and competent service of Miss Ella M. Boult, B. L., who has been in every sense my assistant-editor, not only as to matters of routine, but in the exercise of literary judgment. In correspondence, proof-reading, and textual revision, Miss Laura Stedman has been a zealous subordinate, and has paid special attention to the Biographical Notes. Many of the latter have been written by Miss Lucy C. Bull (now Mrs. Robinson) and Miss Beatrix D. Lloyd. At the inception of my task, I was aided by Miss Mary Stuart McKinney and Miss Louise Boynton, A. B. Miss McKinney, who had previous experience in connection with the Victorian Anthology, was the valued assistant-editor of the opening division of the present collection. The attention of compilers and others is directed to the list of proprietary books and writings, under the copyright notices which follow the title-page. This anthology could not be issued without the friendly cooperation of American pub lishers, and pains has been taken to conserve their rights by legal specification at the outset, and in some instances by notices elsewhere. Where it has been donbtful whether rights exist, and, if so, under what ownership, the editor relies upon the indulgence of all concerned. My thanks are due to living authors, and to the heirs of the dead, for placing works at my disposal without restriction as to the character or extent of citations. The verse of one American writer, now living abroad, has been omitted at his own request. One or two Canadian poets, whose residence and service are now on this side of the border, are justly in such favor that I would seek to represent them here were not their songs and ballads already a choice portion of a Colonial division in the British compilation. LAWRENCE PARK, BRONXVILLE, NEW YORK, August, 1900. E. C. S. |