ais, hier comme aujourd'hui,
Se cabrer vers le Jour et ruer vers la Nuit."

HENRI DE REGNIER.

In venturing this afternoon to address an audience accustomed to listen
to those whose positive authority is universally recognised, and in
taking for my theme a subject not, like theirs, distinct in its
definitions or consecrated by tradition and history, I am aware that I
perform what you may, if you choose, call an act of blameworthy
audacity. My subject is chimerical, vague, and founded on conjectures
which you may well believe yourselves at least as well fitted as I am to
propound. Nevertheless, and in no rash or paradoxical spirit, I invite
you to join with me in some reflections on what is the probable course
of English poetry during, let us say, the next hundred years. If I
happen to be right, I hope some of the youngest persons present will
say, when I am long turned to dust, what an illuminating prophet I was.
If I happen to be wrong, why, no one will remember anything at all about
the matter. In any case we may possibly be rewarded this afternoon by
some agreeable hopes and by the contemplation of some pleasant
analogies.

Our title takes for granted that English poetry will continue, with
whatever fluctuations, to be a living and abiding thing. This I must
suppose that you all accede to, and that you do not look upon poetry as
an art which is finished, or the harvest of classic verse as one which
is fully reaped and garnered. That has been believed at one time and
another, in various parts of the globe. I will mention one instance in
the history of our own time: a quarter of a century ago, the practice of
writing verse was deliberately abandoned in the literatures of the three
Scandinavian countries, but particularly in that of Norway, where no
poetry, in our sense, was written from about 1873 to 1885. It almost
died out here in England in the middle of the fifteenth century; it ran
very low in France at the end of the Middle Ages. But all these
instances, whether ancient or modern, of the attempt to prove prose a
sufficing medium for all expression of human thought have hitherto
failed, and it is now almost certain that they will more and more
languidly be revived, and with less and less conviction.

It was at one of the deadliest moments in the life of the art in England
that George Gascoigne remarked, in his _Epistle to the Reverend Divine_
(1574) that "It seemeth unto me that in all ages Poetry hath b