teliness, what the
French call 'la vraie hauteur'. This elevation of style, this dignity, is
foreign to democracies, and it is hard to sustain it in the rude air of
modern life. It easily degenerates, as Europe saw it degenerate for a
century and a half, into pomposity relieved by flatness. It is apt to
become a mere sonorous rhetoric, a cultivation of empty fine phrases. If
we examine the serious poetry of the end of the seventeenth and the
greater part of the eighteenth century,--especially in the other countries
of Europe, for England was never without some dew on the
threshing-floor,--if we examine it in France, for instance, between Racine
and Andre Chenier, we are obliged to recognize that it was very rarely
both genuine and appropriate. The Romantic Revival, which we are beginning
ungratefully to decry, did at least restore to poetry the sense of a
genuine stateliness of expression, which once more gave it the requisite
dignity, and made it a vehicle for the vital and the noble sentiments of
humanity.

Let us now turn, in our conjectural survey, from the form to the subjects
with which the poetry of the future is likely to be engaged. Here we are
confronted with the fact that, if we examine the whole of history, we see
that the domain of verse has been persistently narrowed by the incursions
of a more and more powerful and wide-embracing prose. At the dawn of
civilization poetry had it all its own way. If instruction was desired
upon any sphere of human knowledge or energy, the bard produced it in a
prosodical shape, combining with the dignity of form the aid which the
memory borrowed from a pattern or a song. Thus you conceive of a Hesiod
before you think of a Homer, and the earliest poetry was probably of a
purely didactic kind. As time went on, prose, with its exact pedestrian
method, took over more and more completely the whole province of
information, but it was not until the nineteenth century that the last
strongholds of the poetry of instruction were stormed. I will, if you
please, bring this home to you by an example which may surprise you.

The subject which I have taken the liberty of discussing with you this
afternoon has not often occupied the serious attention of critics. But it
was attempted, by no less a person than Wordsworth, more than a hundred
years ago. I make no excuse for repeating to you the remarkable passage in
which he expressed his convictions in the famous Preface of 1800:

If