And sheep unruled by shepherds;
Hares, lizards, hedgehogs, badgers, mice,
Snakes, squirrels, frogs, and butterflies.
And birds that live there in a crowd,
Horned owls, rapt nightingales,
Larks bold with heaven, and peacocks proud,
Self-sphered in those grand tails;
All creatures glad and safe, I deem.
No guns nor springes in my dream!
And yet the whole has something of the character of a despatch from a divinely gifted special correspondent. And the same thing may be said sometimes even of so spiritually immaculate a writer as Christina Rossetti. Goblin Market is a masterpiece, conceived out of a lovely nature and flawlessly executed, but if our minds go from it to Drayton or Herrick, with whom it has some affinity, we are aware not of a surer touch in the older poets but of a stricter visitation. Under the Rose, a triumph of delicately controlled power, has, very elusively here, the same suggestion of something occasional in its character. Perhaps the most notable instance of all is Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat,[20] and here we are on delicate ground, since we are speaking of not only one of the most celebrated poems of the age, but of one of the most remarkable. At first thought it might seem that of no poet could it less justifiably be said that in his principal lifework he was allowing any occasional or even any external influence to play upon his creative mood. Fastidious in judgment, of lonely intellectual pursuits, having not the slightest regard for contemporary fame, indolent rather than eager in creation and, far from seeking occasion for poetry, relieved when he could pass it by, as he generally could, and wholly unconscious of anything like a mission, FitzGerald might well have been the last poet in whom to look for the accidental quality of which we are speaking. And yet it is this accidental quality that keeps his Rubaiyat, so rich in memorable excellence, so splendidly contrived and so often universal in its nature, from being among the very greatest moral poems in the language. The circumstance that it took its form from FitzGerald’s Oriental studies and is Persian in its machinery is of no consequence; Shakespeare was equally Shakespeare in the Roman world and mediæval legend and his modern England, and as much might be said for Morris in FitzGerald’s own time. Here was a poem that was essentially religious in character—that its doctrine was one of agnostic hedonism notwithstanding. For such a poem to come to the highest achievement possible to its kind, the first indispensable condition is an uncompromising faith, and this is what Fitzgerald had not even in his own dolce far niente. There had once in English poetry been an age of faith, and there had once been an age of reason, but FitzGerald was of an age in which faith and reason were, in the life of the nation, for the moment inextricably confused, and when poetry addressed itself to rhapsodical belief—or unbelief if you will—as it did in the Rubaiyat, the seductions of reason were ever-present and the fervour of confession was embarrassed by the insinuations of argument. This did not much matter in In Memoriam or in the great part of Browning’s work that was religious in texture, because here speculation was, for good or ill, very largely the explicit province of the poetry. But FitzGerald’s design was not speculation, it was disclosure, and when this is so poetry should breathe the spirit of the labourer addressing his wife, “I’m not arguin’, I’m a-tellin’ of yer.” If the reader should think it worth while, for comparative purposes, to turn up a forgotten but splendid poem, Memorials of Mortality, by Joshua Sylvester,[21] he will find an admirable example of faith in somewhat lugubrious but trumpet-toned poetic assertion. There is no arguing in Sylvester, it is all rhetorical and solemn revelation, wholly indifferent to its audience and unconscious of the possibility of denial. With FitzGerald there is an undertone always of anxiety to carry opinion with him, very indefinite in expression and yet present clearly enough if our attention is close. We do not complain about it; to do so would be at once foolish and ungenerous. But we are aware of it and we know that it is in some subtle way, and perhaps unconsciously, a concession to a mood of the time, which, as we have seen, was a little antagonistic to the most commanding kind of poetic fulfilment. When we read—