A danger, therefore, which the poets of the future will need all their
ingenuity to avoid, will be the cultivation of a patent artificiality, a
forcing of the note until it ceases to rouse an echo in the human heart.
There will be a determination to sweep away all previously recognized
impressions. Affectation, that is to say the obtaining of an effect by
illegitimate means, is an offence against the Muses which they never fail
to avenge by oblivion or by a curtailed and impeded circulation. We may
instructively examine the history of literature with special attention to
this fault, and we find it in all cases to have been fatal. It was fatal
to the poetry of Alexandria, which closed, as you know, in an obscurity to
which the title of Lycophrontic darkness has been given from the name of
its most extravagant exponent. It was fatal to several highly-gifted
writers of the close of the Elizabethan period, who endeavoured to give
freshness to an outworn scheme of poetic ornament; I need only remind you
of the impenetrable cloud or fog, by Cyril Tourneur, called _The
Transform'd Metamorphosis_, and of the cryptic rhymed dramas of Lord
Brooke. It has not been fatal, I hope, but I think desperately perilous to
a beautiful talent of our own age, the amiable Stephane Mallarme. Nothing,
I feel, is more dangerous to the health of poetry than the praise given by
a group of irresponsible disciples to verse which transfers commonplace
thought to an exaggerated, violent, and involved scheme of diction, and I
confess that I should regard the future of poetry in this country with
much more apprehension than I do, if I believed that the purely learned
poet, the prosodical pedant, was destined to become paramount amongst us.
That would, indeed, threaten the permanence of the art; and it is for that
reason that I look with a certain measure of alarm on the excess of
verbiage about poetry which attends not merely criticism, which matters
little, but the actual production and creation. I am confident, however,
that the common sense of readers will always bring about a reaction in
favour of sanity and lucidity.

One great objection to the introduction of a tortured and affected style
into verse-writing is the sacrifice which has to be made of that dignity
and sweetness, that suave elevation, which marks all successful
masterpieces. Perhaps as difficult a quality to attain as any which the
poetry of the future will be called upon to study is sta