already, when the immanence of the divine principle in the soul is once recognized, the extension of the idea to the acknowledgement of that principle as the soul of the world is natural; but there the mystic stops. To push it further is to run the risk of confounding the spiritual with the material; and Swinburne's verse is simply the triumphant hymn of a materialism which is the negation of mysticism, and is as far removed from it as was the hymnody of the later eighteenth century. The eternal quest of the mystic is to remove the barrier which separates the apparent from the real, to reach a state of mind in which he no longer has to cry:

I am I, thou art thou,

I am low, thou art high.

But in this state he is enfolded and absorbed by a conception of reality which is beyond human terms. If he can convey it in language at all, it must be by inadequate symbols or in the phrases of some esoteric system which has more value as a memoria technica than as verse. To absorb his conception in himself and to avow, with Swinburne, that there is nothing real but what is apparent, is to abandon the quest.

The attempt of this essay has been to indicate the chief lines which have been pursued by mystical poets in English verse, and the discussion of their development in modern times would do little more than amplify what has been said of the distinction which marks off genuine mysticism from a sensitiveness to mysterious influences. The degree of true mysticism in Christian poetry is always hard to appreciate, so easy is it for the religiously-minded poet to appropriate the mystical language of Holy Scripture to his own emotions. Assuredly, the mere asseveration of religious convictions in verse, or the mere expression of a calm satisfaction in a settled theory, have little to do with mysticism. The sense of a future state which makes all amends for the troubles of life may well be a source of content and happiness; and The Christian Year, pervaded as it is by a Wordsworthian joy in the common things of every day and by the knowledge of their power to quiet and alleviate fitful impulses, has been

a strong influence in fostering and strengthening a type of character which it has admirably described:

There are in this loud stunning tide
Of human care and crime,
With whom the melodies abide

Of th' everlasting chime;
Who carry music in their heart

Through dusky lane and wrangling mart,
Plying their daily task with busier feet,

Because their secret souls a holy strain repeat.

This is the strain which we hear in the verse of Christina Rossetti, ever living in the shelter of the will in which is our peace, and turning from the sorrows of the world to visions of 'Light above light, and Bliss beyond bliss', in which the divine Sufferer welcomes those who have known His griefs. To her brother's question:

to all

Oh! what is this that knows the road I came,
The flame turned cloud, the cloud returned to flame,
The lifted shifted steeps and all the way?

Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,

she has her confident answer. Yet, in Christina Rossetti, much as she owed to mystical influences, there is perhaps too strong a tendency to differentiate the human from the divine, and to make the raptures of another world an easy solution for the doubts and aspirations of this. To raise mortals to the skies is a less difficult task than to draw an angel down.

It is this harder task which the mystic finds means to perform. It is not so much in moments when the soul is 'whirl'd about empyreal heights of thought' and rises superior to the world, as in the constant search for a peace that transfigures the ordinary emotions and activities of life that the mystic finds the joy of permanent attainment. The prayer of Matthew Arnold:

Calm soul of all things! make it mine

To feel, amid the city's jar,

That there abides a peace of thine,

Man did not make, and cannot mar,

108 MYSTICAL ELEMENT IN ENGLISH POETRY

is the cry of one who stands upon the threshold of a retreat of the soul in which things human and divine assume a novel meaning and our seeing is illuminated by a master-light from the fountains of eternal splendour. In such a security there is no clear line of division between the apparent and the real, the material and the immaterial: it is in this transformed aspect of the simplest things that the presence of the divine is found:

The angels keep their ancient places;-
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

The discovery may reveal itself in divers forms. It may be, as to Wordsworth, a quiet effulgence of glories to which he does not give a name, lighting up the path of life and compelling music and fragrance from all on which it shines. It may come in the sense of a supernatural companionship, guiding and shepherding unconscious souls, and disclosing itself to those to whom it lends 'the vision of a seer', as in Miss Underhill's lines upon

The one who walked with starry feet the western road by me.

This is the companionship to which the soul yields in The Hound of Heaven after long evasion; and nowhere are the struggles of the soul in its efforts after mystical happiness so strikingly and so variously described, or with such wealth of personal experience as in the verse of Francis Thompson, now starting on his journey to 'the land of Luthany, the tract of Elenore', a region as unsubstantial as Edgar Allen Poe's mystic Aidenn, now finding his wanderings about the London streets lit up by visions which unite time with eternity. But whatever be the form which the revelation assumes, life to the initiated seer is no longer the dome of many-coloured glass which death shatters to fragments: the material impediment still exists, but no longer hides, and the white radiance streams through it unchecked.

A. HAMILTON THOMPSON.

ROMANTICISM IN THE MODERN

WORLD

THE term 'Romanticism' has the air of a faded shibboleth echoing the outworn literary controversies between 'classic' and 'romantic' of a hundred and more years ago. But old-fashioned weapons, rusty with disuse, may be called into play by the stress of living issues, and thus acquire a seeming relevance to our current aims and notions which they did not originally, and do not it may be properly, possess. In academic America, in particular, 'Romanticism' has been adopted by several very able and distinguished writers, as a comprehensive label for a whole complex of writings and tendencies in modern literature of which they profoundly, and in a great degree justly, disapprove. Mr. Paul Elmer More, for instance, formerly editor of the New York Nation, and sometimes described as the Sainte-Beuve of America, supplemented the admirable series of his Shelborne Essays' with a comprehensive survey of the degenerate tendencies of modern society, which he called 'The Drift of Romanticism'. And Mr. Irving Babbitt, professor of French at Harvard, has published four volumes of powerful argument and serried erudition, all devoted, in substance, to an indictment of Romanticism'." The last of them, which couples with it the name of Rousseau, it is proposed to consider in the present essay.

6

In the first place, it is to be observed that we have to do in this indictment with something much weightier and more important than a mere discussion of literary ideas. Any one who opens 'Rousseau and Romanticism' expecting an academic

1 The Drift of Romanticism (Constable), 1913.

2 Literature and the American College (1908); The New Laokoon (1910); The Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912); Rousseau and Romanticism (Houghton and Mifflin, 1919).

discussion of literary origins will be entirely mistaken. The gravamen of the polemic is that the ideas of Romanticism, and of Rousseau their principal source, are not merely vicious in literature, but morally insidious and destructive in life. Mr. Babbitt believes that these ideas are at work, under a host of specious disguises, fostering disintegration of principle and ethical standards in the vast half-educated population of America, and yet more in the American colleges and universities, where moral contagion through intellectual media is peculiarly easy, direct, and influential. He even proposes to make conduct the court of final adjudication upon the worth of the ideas. By their fruits ye shall know them,' The history of theological controversy abundantly illustrates the hazards incident to this procedure. But as the present essay will be mainly occupied with criticism, I desire at the outset to recognize with sincere respect the concern for vital moral issues, and for the future of America-now, in common with the entire Occident, tending, in his view, 'rather away from than towards civilization '-which informs this book.

I.

The More-Babbitt polemic bears a certain resemblance, on the surface, to the redoubtable performances of the Giffords and Crokers of a century ago against the 'Romantic' revolutionary heresies of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, They too saw the established standards of classic taste and, as they commonly and not always wrongly added, of orthodox morality, outraged and set aside. These great poets are usually supposed to have long since won a complete triumph over Gifford and his fellows at the bar of criticism. We are not so sure. For Mr. Babbitt the intervening nineteenth century has no claim to have taught us anything of profound and lasting value. It was an age with 'a great peripheral richness and a great central void'. Philosophy and poetry alike have done little but follow misleading lures. Philosophy is bankrupt' since Kant, nay since Descartes; almost all modern writers are tinged, if they are not steeped, in Romanticism'; and the accepted masters of the present