fter year, week
after week, by a myriad careful scribes, the possibilities of freshness
grow rarer and rarer. The obvious, simple, poignant things seem to have
all been said. It is not merely that the actual poems, like Gray's
'Elegy', and much of 'Hamlet', and some of Burns's songs, have been
manipulated so often, and put to such pedestrian uses, that they are like
rubbed coins, and begin to lose the very features of Apollo and the script
of the Muses, but that the road seems closed to future bards who wish to
speak with simplicity of similar straightforward things. In several of the
literatures of modern Europe--those which began late, or struggled long
against great disadvantages--it is still possible to produce pleasure by
poems which describe primitive emotions in perfectly limpid language. But
with us in England, I confess that it seems to me certain that whatever we
retain, we can never any more have patience to listen to a new shepherd
piping under the hawthorn-tree. Each generation is likely to be more
acutely preoccupied than the last with the desire for novelty of
expression. Accordingly, the sense of originality, which is so fervently
demanded from every new school of writers, will force the poets of the
future to sweep away all recognized impressions. The consequence must be,
I think,--I confess so far as language is concerned that I see no escape
from this,--that the natural uses of English and the obvious forms of our
speech will be driven from our national poetry, as they are even now so
generally being driven.

No doubt, in this condition, the originality of those who do contrive to
write strongly and clearly will be more vigorously evident than ever. The
poets will have to gird up their loins and take their sword in their
hands. That wise man of the eighteenth century, to whom we never apply
without some illuminating response, recommends that 'Qui saura penser de
lui-meme et former de nobles idees, qu'il prenne, s'il peut, la maniere
et le tour eleve des maitres'. These are words which should inspire every
new aspirant to the laurel. 'S'il peut'; you see that Vauvenargues puts it
so, because he does not wish that we should think that such victories as
these are easy, or that any one else can help us to produce them. They are
not easy, and they will be made more and more hard by the rubbed-out,
conventionalized coinage of our language.

In this matter I think it probable that the little peoples, and the