oo well-known sentence from Macaulay: "In an enlightened
age there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy,
abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit
and eloquence, abundance of verses and even of good ones; but little
poetry. Men will judge and compare, but they will not create." It is a
fashion nowadays to make little of Macaulay as a thinker, to damn him
with faint praise as a brilliant rhetorician. It is not to join
unreservedly in that censure, if we remark that Macaulay pronounced his
dictum on poetry when he was very young. But, young or not, he utterly
misses a sound view of the nature and scope of poetry. He asserts that
"men will judge and compare, but they will not create"; and
particularly, he meant, create epics and romances. If Macaulay is to be
taken literally, poetry is to him mainly the creation of stories; it is
summed up in _Iliads_, _AEneids_, _Orlandos_, _Faerie Queenes_. Let us
for the moment suppose--what, however, there is no ground in fact or
reason for supposing--that creations such as these, at least in verse,
will engage enlightened men no more. Is there no room for lyrics and for
the poetical expression of great truths? "But little poetry!" What else
should this imply, except that there will be but little feeling or
emotion, but little ecstasy, hope, grief, loveliness, awe, or mystery in
all the "wide gray lampless deep unpeopled world" of the future? It is
these things which are the most copious and most stimulating
subject-matter of poetry, and Macaulay surely never meant to say, and
never did say, that these would some day fail.

The poets of the last generation are dead--Tennyson, Browning, Arnold,
Morris, Swinburne. The great "makers" have passed away, and there remain
to us but certain highly dexterous word-artificers and melodists, a
varied chorus of dainty, musical, scholarly, but mostly uninspired,
writers of verse. We have passed the crest of the poetical wave, and are
sunk into its trough. It is not unnatural, therefore, that we should, at
this particular juncture, feel some misgivings. Finding no immediate
successor worthy to fill the place of those great departed, we cry out
in our haste that "science" is killing poetry, or that "democracy" is
crushing out poetry, or that we are "living too fast" for poetry. Poetry
was dead in England for a century and three-quarters between Chaucer and
Spenser; in a large sense it was dead for four g