lisation.

Now no one will, we presume, be silly enough to say that humanity has
gained nothing by all the very beautiful poetry which has been poured
out on it during the last thirty years in England. Nevertheless,
when we see poetry dying down among us year by year, although the age
is becoming year by year more marvellous and inspiring, we have a
right to look for some false principle in a school which has had so
little enduring vitality, which seems now to be able to perpetuate
nothing of itself but its vices.

The answer so easy twenty years ago, that the new poetry was spoiled
by an influx of German bad taste, will hardly hold good now, except
with a very few very ignorant people. It is now known, of course,
that whatsoever quarrel Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe may have had
with Pope, it was not on account of his being too severe an artist,
but too loose a one; not for being too classical, but not classical
enough; that English poets borrowed from them nothing but their most
boyish and immature types of thought, and that these were reproduced,
and laughed at here, while the men themselves were writing works of a
purity, and loftiness, and completeness, unknown to the world--except
in the writings of Milton--for nearly two centuries. This feature,
however, of the new German poetry, was exactly the one which no
English poet deigned to imitate, save Byron alone; on whom,
accordingly, Goethe always looked with admiration and affection. But
the rest went their way unheeding; and if they have defects, those
defects are their own; for when they did copy the German taste, they,
for the most part, deliberately chose the evil, and refused the good;
and have their reward in a fame which we believe will prove itself a
very short-lived one.

We cannot deny, however, that, in spite of all faults, these men had
a strength. They have exercised an influence. And they have done so
by virtue of seeing a fact which more complete, and in some cases
more manly poets, did not see. Strangely enough, Shelley, the man
who was the greatest sinner of them all against the canons of good
taste, was the man who saw that new fact, if not most clearly, still
most intensely, and who proclaimed it most boldly. His influence,
therefore, is outliving that of his compeers, and growing and
spreading, for good and for evil; and will grow and spread for years
to come, as long as the present great unrest goes on smouldering in
men's hearts, ti