J. Morley.
Of Englishmen now living (1888), Mr. John Morley has the best equipment for a literary influence upon his countrymen; because he is at the same time a born writer and a man versed in affairs. Unfortunately a political career like his must have the effect of limiting a writer’s influence to a single political party. John Morley might be useful to all Englishmen at the present time because he unites complete intellectual freedom with a vigorous moral sense. In this he is the Englishman of the future, the Englishman who will be intellectually emancipated, yet who will preserve the moral sense of his forefathers and hate, let us hope, as they did, “that horrid burden and impediment on the soul,” as Morley describes it, “which the Churches call Sin, and which, by whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature of man.”
Poetry.
Office of Poetry in the Modern World.
Of the literary influences which consist chiefly in giving æsthetic pleasure, that of poetry maintains itself more than was expected in the middle of the century, and it is better understood now than it was then that poetry must remain itself and not get entangled in the actual. A poet may, like Victor Hugo and William Morris, be in sympathy with advanced radicals, but in his verse he is likely to go back to the past as in the Earthly Paradise and the Légende des Siècles, or to pure mythology with Lewis Morris in the Epic of Hades, or to dim traditions as Tennyson to the Court of King Arthur, or even project himself into the future state like Sully Prudhomme in Le Bonheur. The office of poetry in the modern world is still its ancient office of deliverance. It delivers us from the actual by the imagination, and the older we get the less completely satisfactory does the actual become for us, and the more we need poetry to help us out of it. Those who do not read verses may receive their poetry through other channels. They may receive it in great purity and strength through religion, which is always successful in exact proportion to the sum of poetry that it contains, and unsuccessful in proportion to its rationalism. Or, if not consciously religious, men may get their poetry through music, architecture, and painting, of which it always was and always will be the mysterious vital principle, the immortal soul.
Victor Hugo.
Lamartine.
Musset.
Young Philosophers.
Renan.