Stopford A. Brooke

Page 7

Well, we are left, so far as poetic literature is concerned, as we were in the days of Keats, in a world almost destitute of leading ideas, of ideas which have growth in them.  Poetry has no captains who give it a steady direction.  No master ideas, such as Tennyson and Browning had, urge its course towards a clear end, or fill its sails with a steadfast wind.  Nor does it represent, as Arnold and Clough did, or as Morris and Rossetti and Swinburne did after them, the main conditions of the age in which we are living.  It only represents (with the exception of the work of a few men who are scarcely read) the helpless wavering of a class in society which has no clear ideas as to what it ought to do with its life, and none with regard to its future.  It takes up now one subject and now another, and drops them without finishing them.  It tries sensuality, and rebellion, and mysticism, and supernaturalism, and imperialism, and spiritual religion, and nature-poetry, and hospitals, and crude coarseness, and crime, and sentimental love, and pessimism, and it composes hosts of little lyrics about nothing.  Everything by turns, and nothing long.  It amuses itself with difficult metres, and surprising rhymes, and elaborated phrasing, and painting in words, and scientific tricks of versing.   It has no great matter, no fine thinking, and no profound passion, and it is the reverse of simple.  And the world is becoming tired of it, and longs for the advent of youth, originality, joy, hope, and the resurrection of vital ideas, in poetry.   Along with this, and always accompanying this prolific littleness, is a terrible recrudescence of criticism.  Every magazine, all the daily papers, every publishing house, is filled with essays and articles and books about poetry, carping, or denouncing, or satirizing, or praising without knowledge, and in astonishing excess.  I cannot tell how often I have lately seen in the papers and in books that a poet, if not superior, then equal to Shakespeare, has appeared on the stage.  And all this overwhelming shower-bath of criticism has chilled the world, which wants, nay, hungers, for some warm and living creation.  Moreover, we are still, like Arnold, wearied by endless discussions, by the shouting of people who want nothing said which cannot be proved, who replace sentiment by materialism, who will not allow us to love nature except in accordance with science, who, pinning us down to this world only, forbid us to overclimb the flaming walls and go wandering, like gypsies, into the infinites of love and beauty, because we cannot be as certain of such infinites as we are certain that two and two make four.  Were these folk to succeed in infecting the whole world with their theories--fine literature would die of disgust, and poetry be drained of its life-blood.

The first thing we want for the sake of a great literature and a great poetry is a noble religion which will bear, by its immaterial truths, our intellect, conscience, emotions, imagination, and spirit beyond this world; and yet, by those very truths, set us into the keenest activity in the world for the bettering of the world; making every work, and, above all, literature, full of a spiritual and a social passion, weighty and dignified by spiritual and social thought.  Such a religion must not contradict any established scientific or historic truth; it must be capable of easily entering into all the honest business of the world as a spirit of life and love; it must be freed from every shred of exclusiveness, so that not one of its doctrines or its rites should shut out any man whatever from union with God; its ideas must be as universal as God Himself, and their application to men as universal; it must claim man as akin to God in a relationship which never can be broken, and is eternal; and it will say to itself, in our hearts, "God has not given to me the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind."  Such a religion is contained in a few large ideas.  Universal fatherhood, universal childhood, therefore universal brotherhood. 

God, thus akin to us, our nearest relation, cannot leave us to evil or death.  All sin is, therefore, finally, if slowly, rooted out of us, and we are made at one with Him in eternal life.  This is universal forgiveness.

Then, too, immortal love destroys all death in us.  Our personality is secured for ever.  This is universal immortality.

Our life on earth is made up of two duties, our duty to live in harmony with the character of our Father, our duty to love and live for our brothers.

But beyond these duties ranges the infinite love and righteousness of God.  And the last and highest idea of religion in life is the struggle towards infinite perfection.

What we want, secondly, along with such a religion, for the sake of a noble literature, and especially for the sake of a lasting school of poetry, is a great social conception, carrying with it strong and enduring emotions, appealing to the universal heart of man and woman--a great social conception of the duties of mankind, of the true aim, end, and foundation of human life; of the future of mankind in a regenerated civilization, with all the hopes and aspirations of this conception like the winds of spring in our hearts; and lastly a clear idea of how man's happiness is to be established.  The basis of such a conception is the Brotherhood of Man, and that is made religious when it is founded on belief in the Fatherhood of God.

Such a conception is now struggling into light, labouring by a thousand experiments into its practical and ideal form. We call it by many names, and everyone knows in how many and diverse, even contradictory, shapes it appears.  Nevertheless, there are a few common thoughts and feelings underneath its varying sects, and these are growing firmer and securer day by day.  Steady thought, well-founded feeling, collect around them; and in time the right, noble, lucid shape of the conception will be found.  Some day the mastering form which will attract all men, will emerge, as it were of itself, and leap forth all-victorious in wisdom, like Athena from the head of Zeus.

That will impassionate the world.  The civilization based on self-interest will go down before it.  That civilization is really barbarism.  The root of that higher civilization will be self-forgetfulness in love, and that is Christ's religion.  When these two come together, when such a social idea is married to a universal religion, of which unlimited Love is lord and king, we shall have the greatest of literatures.  Its full realization may be far off.   But, even at the present time, it is nearer than when we first believed.

One form of that socialist conception, after centuries of travail, was born at the end of last century, and its emotions created a new poetry in our land.  Another form of it arose in 1832, and its emotions created again a new poetry.  And we are now on the verge of a new and passionate form of it, to be bound up, I trust, with a universal religion.  I hope to see it before I die, and then this great country, borne into higher realms of thought and feeling than it can conceive at present, will create out of its fresh excitement an original literature and a poetry, as great, it may even be greater, than any it has yet produced.

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