Guillotined; and the following is the only quotable portion of a composition describing the embalming of a dead woman's body: "To snatch the dead one, fair as an angel, from the cruel kisses of the worm, I caused her to be embalmed in a strange box. It was a night in winter." Then the whole process of embalming is minutely painted.

One more example will suffice. All great classic poetry reflects in an ideal way the active life of the society in which it is composed. The Iliad breathes in a heroic style the spirit of Greek warfare. Eschylus, who fought at Marathon, Sophocles, who served as a general with Pericles, fill their tragedies with the patriotic sentiment of their age: the old Attic comedy found its matter in contemporary social interests: Shakespeare's chronicle plays popularise half the history of England: the satires of Dryden and Pope are the monuments of once living manners. But the French symbolists—whose aim it is to evoke moods of the soul-dread nothing so much as any

form of social activity.

"Art for Art's sake!" is their cry. There is something pathetic in the earnestness with which M. Charles Morice, the chief philosopher of the school, utters his lamentations over the exacting tyranny of public duties. "To think," he cries, "that the poet should be obliged to break off in the middle of a stanza in order to go and complete a period of twenty-eight days' training in the army!" Poor fellow! And again: "The agitations of the streets; the grinding of the Government machine; journals; elections; changes

of administration-never has there been such a hubbub; the turbulent and noisy autocracy of commerce has suppressed in public preoccupations the preoccupation of Beauty; and trade has killed whatever might have been allowed by politics to live on in silence." One feels sad as one thinks of the happiness and quietism which might have been the lot of this forlorn soul in some other period of poetical decadence. We imagine, for example, that he might have obtained from one of the Ptolemies, say in the second century B.C., the post of sublibrarian at Alexandria, and we fancy him composing some afternoon, in a cool portico, without any interruption from the drill-sergeant, the pentameter of the epigram which he had begun in the morning. Or he might have lived at Rome under the placid reign of Domitian, free from all such disturbance as the clamour of a vulgar newsboy, bawling over the Palatine the latest stages of a ministerial crisis, and breaking in on his preoccupation, as he put together some tuneful trifle on a Greek subject, or prepared for public recitation a flattering elegy on Cæsar's pet bear.

I have confined my observations to the modern French School of Poetry, because I find there the philosophy of a widespread movement put forward in the most frank and lucid form. But, in fact, the features which this school presents are repeated with variations in the contemporary literature of every country in Europe. For the moment, at least, life in poetry is no longer looked for in that per

fect balance between the universal and individual elements which is the essence of all classical art. The aim of the poet is not now to create the natural in the sphere of the ideal, the image of

Nature to advantage dressed,

What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed.

The essence of Life in Poetry and in all the arts, according to the new philosophy, is Novelty. And whence are the sources of this new life to be derived? The answer is, that each of the arts is to borrow some principle from the others; the painter aims at effects which have hitherto been attempted only by poetry; the poet devotes his efforts to imitate in words ideas which are more naturally expressed by means of forms and colours, or indefinable emotions like those which are aroused by the notes of music; the musician tries to combine with the resources of his own art the beauties peculiar to poetry and painting. I do not deny that, when these experiments are made by men of genius, the artistic result produced is often striking, and for a time even pleasurable. But when it is claimed by the pioneers of the new movement-by the brotherhoods, the societies, the coteries, which organise their efforts to impose the new doctrines on the taste of a bewildered world-that this confusion of the boundaries of art is the beginning of a fresh and vigorous outburst of artistic life, experience says, No! The things that are being attempted are as old as civilised society. The poet - musician who endeavours to

create a new kind of pleasure, by combining on the stage the principles of poetry, painting, and music, is only doing what was done two thousand years ago by Agathon and the late Attic tragedians. The poet who exalts the element of painting inherent in his art above the principle of action is following the example of Apollonius Rhodius. The poet who tries to attract attention to himself by an ideal representation of extravagant and unnatural passion is modelling himself upon Seneca. And Agathon, and Apollonius Rhodius, and Seneca, are all poets of decadent ages.

Now, if we are living in an age of poetical decadence, it is a very serious matter, and questions arise which urgently demand an answer. Is this decadence confined to the genius and methods of the poets themselves? or does it extend to the taste of that portion of society which the poets are specially anxious to please? or does it imply a failure of the sources of life in the nation at large? These are problems of the profoundest interest, and I shall attempt to deal with them in the lecture with which I propose to conclude this series- namely, on the relations that exist between the Life of Poetry and the Life of the People.

IV

POETRY AND THE PEOPLE

HAVING noted the symptoms that universally accompany poetical decadence, and having observed the appearance of many of these symptoms in the poetry of every country of modern Europe, I asked, with practical reference to the contemporary poetry of England, whether this decadence had its sources merely in the art itself; whether it was the result, as Herr Nordau seemed to think, of the decay of society; or whether it was due to some transitory conditions of taste which might be removed by the influx of fresh elements of imaginative life. Before I attempt to answer these questions, let me consider an initial objection which has been made to my treatment of the subject. A writer in the Spectator-whom I take to be the same courteous, but somewhat unsympathetic critic who previously censured, without understanding, my use of the word "imitation" in defining Poetry-says: "We may say that the very