is a very difficult lady, is the Heavenly Muse, not easily won, and never allowing you, if you want to remain in her good graces, to approach her, that is to say, in dressing gown and slippers. She is the noblest and most gracious lady in the world, and the best, the most refined, the most elevating of companions. Therefore you must come into her presence and win her favour, not with free-and-easy gait and in slovenly attire, but arrayed in your very best, and with courtly and deferential mien. When poets wrote of gods and goddesses, of mighty sieges, and of the foundation and fall of empires; when their theme was the madness of princes, and the tragic fate of kings, when their hero was Lucifer, Son of the Morning, nay, even when they discoursed of free will and fate, or of the drawing-room intrigues of persons to whom powder, patches, billets-doux were the chief things in existence, there was no need to remind them that their style must be as lofty, as dignified, as refined, or as finished as their subject. No doubt, they sometimes waxed stilted and fell into excess, whether in rhetoric or in conceits, but they never forgot themselves so far as to be slovenly or familiar. Stella, you know, said Swift could write beautifully about a broomstick. Possibly he could; but note the concession, that if a man writes, at least if he would write poetry, he must write beautifully. Both Cowper and Wordsworth set the example of writing verse that is not beautiful, though indeed Young in his Night Thoughts, and Thomson in The Seasons, had already done something of the same kind. But they have not the authority of Cowper, much less the authority of Wordsworth. Let who will be the authority for it, prosaic utterance in verse, realism in rhyme, no matter what the subject, is an incongruity that cannot be too severely condemned. A very large proportion of the verse of Crabbe, once so popular, but now, I fancy, but little read, is of little value, by reason of the presence of this defect. Yet while I indicate, and venture to reprove, the feebleness into which the feminine note in English poetry has too often declined and deteriorated, never let us forget that it has contributed lovely and immortal poetry to the language, poetry to be found in Wordsworth, poetry such as melts us almost to tears in Hood’s Song of the Shirt, or in Mrs. Barrett Browning’s The Cry of the Children. Horace, who was a great critic as well as a great poet, said long ago that it is extremely difficult to express oneself concerning ordinary everyday facts and feelings in a becoming and agreeable manner; and to do this in verse demands supreme genius. As a set-off to the example of feebleness I just now cited in Wordsworth, listen how, when the mood of inspiration is on him, he can see a Highland girl reaping in a field – surely an ordinary everyday sight – and threw around her the heavenly halo of the divinest poetry:
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts, and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
So sweetly to reposing bands
Of Travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o’er the sickle bending; —
I listened till I had my fill,
And when I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
But there is another manifestation of the feminine note in English poetry, distinct from, though doubtless akin to, the one we have been considering; a note which likewise was not heard in it till about a hundred years ago, but which has been heard very frequently since, and which seems at times to threaten to become its dominant and all-prevailing note, or at any rate the only one that is keenly listened to. Instead of the note of interest in and pity for others, it has become the note of interest in and pity either for oneself, or for one’s other self; a note so strongly personal and suggestive as to become egotistic and entirely self-regarding. This is the amatory or erotic note, which I think you will all recognise when I give it that designation; the note which appears to consider the love of the sexes as the only important thing in life, and certainly the only thing worth writing or singing about. More than two thousand years ago, a Greek poet wrote a lyric beginning, “I would fain sing of the heroes of the House of Atreus, I would fain chant the glories of the line of Cadmus; but my lyre refuses to sound any note save that of love.” In these days the poet who expressed that sentiment and acted on it would have a great many listeners; and no doubt Anacreon, too, had his audience in ancient Greece. But he was not ranked by them side by side with their great poets who did take the tragic story of the House of Atreus for their theme. It can only be when feminine influence is supreme in society and in literature, and when the feminine note in poetry has become, or threatens to become, paramount, that the sentiment and practice of Anacreon is viewed with approbation and favour. Byron has said in a well-known passage:
For love is of man’s life a thing apart;
’Tis woman’s whole existence.
If I know anything about women, that is a gross exaggeration, unless in the term love be included love of parents, love of brothers and sisters, love of children, in a word, every form and manifestation of affection. Still it is not necessary to deny – indeed if it be true it is necessary to admit – that love, in the narrower if more intense signification of the word, does play a larger part in the lives, or at any rate in the imagination, of most women than it does in the lives and the imagination of most men; and it is not to be denied that practically all women, and a fair sprinkling of men, now take an almost exclusive interest in the amatory note in poetry. Nor let any one say that this was always so, and that poetry and poets have from time immemorial occupied themselves mainly with the passion of love. Indeed they have not done so. It would be to show an utter ignorance of the genius of Homer, of the great Greek dramatists, of Virgil, of Dante, of Spenser, of Shakespeare, of Milton, and of the temper of the times in which they lived, to say that they could sound only notes of love. They sounded these sometimes, but seldom and rarely, in comparison with their other and more masculine notes, and always in due subordination to these. I will not go so far as to say that they thought, with Napoleon, that love is the occupation of the idle, and the idleness of the occupied, but they knew that however absorbing for a season the passion of love as described by many poets and by nearly all modern novelists may be, it is a thing apart; and, as such, they dealt with it. They did not ignore its existence, or even its importance, but they did not exaggerate its existence and its importance, relatively to other interests, other occupations, other duties in life. It was because of the high fealty and allegiance which Spenser declared he owed to all womankind that he did not represent women as perpetually sighing or being sighed for by men. It was because Shakespeare had such absolute familiarity, not with this or that part of life, but with the whole of it, that even in Romeo and Juliet, in Othello, in Measure for Measure, and again in As You Like It, he represented the passion of love at work and in operation along with other sentiments and other passions; and, in the greater portion of his dramas either does not introduce it at all, or assigns to it a quite subordinate place. In Romeo
