Ah, no! when once the mortal yields to fate
The blast of Fame's sweet trumpet sounds too late—
Too late to stay the spirit on its flight
Or soothe the new inhabitant of light,
with its later address to Fame herself:
Thou music, warbling to the deafened ear!
Thou incense, wasted on the funeral bier!
There is Akenside's still finer Epistle to Curio, which Macaulay laughed at rather ignobly as unpractical. Well, Akenside, like Macaulay himself, was a Whig, and I am a Tory; nor are the ideals expressed in the following lines by any means mine. But if they are not fine lines, if they are not, though in one of the outer provinces no doubt, poetical, I will acknowledge that I know nothing at all about poetry:
Ye shades immortal, who by Freedom led,
Or in the field or on the scaffold bled,
Bend from your radiant seats a joyful eye,
And view the crown of all your labours nigh.
See Freedom mounting her eternal throne,
The sword submitted, and the laws her own;
See public power chastised beneath her stand,
With eyes intent and uncorrupted hand,
See private life by wisest arts reclaimed,
See ardent youth to noblest manners framed,
See us acquire whate'er was sought by you,
If Curio! only Curio! will be true.
Well, once more, Curio, alias Pulteney, was not true, but deserted Akenside's party and became Earl of Bath and possessor of no small part thereof. And private life and ardent youth were not reclaimed much in the days of the historic Charteris and the fictitious Lovelace. And the practical realisation of something like Akenside's undoubted principles and aspirations was the French Revolution fifty and the Russian Revolution nearer two hundred years later. But all this has nothing to do with the question whether in this passage also rhetoric, which hardly anybody will deny to it, has not passed under the influence and received the transforming force of poetry. I say it has, though I am perfectly willing to admit that it is not the best or the most poetical form of poetry, and that it is very far indeed from the forms that I myself like best. But one of the cries which the critic should never be tired of uttering, whether in the streets or in the wilderness, is that nothing is bad merely because it is different from another thing which is good, and that in this world there is no equality or fixed standard to which everything must be cut down or stretched out. The best rhetorical poetry of the eighteenth century is not the best poetry, but it is poetry in its own way, exhibiting the glow, the rush, the passion, which strict prose cannot, and which poetry can, give.
There is less specific prejudice against "light" poetry on the part of poetical highfliers than there is against poetical rhetoric, but there is some. Once more I venture to disallow this prejudice in toto as far as kind is concerned, though, of course, each individual specimen of that kind must pass its individual muster as a piece of intenser thought or feeling, expressed in appropriate language and inspired by the charm of verse-music. For that, though no one ever has defined or will define poetry, is one of the divers good approaches to a description of it. Now here, as was briefly said above, the eighteenth century possessed, for nearly the whole of its first quarter as an actual living practitioner, and for the whole of the rest of it as a past contemporary of still living persons, an unsurpassed general of light verse in Matthew Prior. On the whole I know few English poets who have so seldom had full justice done to them. No competent judge, indeed, has ever denied Prior's excellence in pure lightness, but there have been frequent failures to allow for that undercurrent of seriousness, sadness, and almost passion—that "feeling in earnest while thinking in jest," according to the best definition of humour—which characterises him. Thackeray has, indeed, equalled, but in obvious and even frank following, the great lines written (or not written) in Mézeray's History of France; but hardly anyone else has come near them in irony and melancholy and music, blended as three appeals in one. There is even a touch, though more than a touch would have been out of place, in the famous Child of Quality, and a great deal more, not quite so perfectly expressed, in the Lines to Charles Montague. If the touch of sadness be for the moment unwelcome, there is Daphne and Apollo or the famous English Padlock, with a dozen or several dozen others ready to hand. And to go to yet another nuance, the recent discovery at Longleat of Jinny the Just, with its touches of sincere sorrow and the three unequalled stanzas of kindly irony:
Thus still, while her morning unseen fled away,
In ord'ring the linen and making the tea,
That she scarce could have time for the psalms of the day—
And while after dinner the night came so soon
That half she proposed very seldom was done,
With twenty "God bless me's, how this day has gone!"
While she read, and accounted, and paid, and abated,
Ate and drank, played and worked, laughed and cried, loved and hated,
As answered the end of her being created,