The Criterion of Revelation mainly a Moral one. 45

knowledge, such as few possess. But when this principle is applied to the latest and completed revelation, Christianity can meet its requirements in their most exacting form. If precept or truth can elevate, what height of morality can be conceived which shall not find its complement in such precepts as this,Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect'? or in such announcements as these,-' God is love;' 'God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all'? Indeed it is only when the inner moral eye has been clarified that the meaning of these statements comes out at all, and evermore as the moral nature rises these great truths rise above it infinitely. And if it be said that after all these are but general announcements, void of content, and we still need to know what perfection, light, love, are, then there remains our Lord's own life, with His teaching, actions, character, to fill these general words with concrete meaning and substance.

It were well that those who have to teach religion should consider these matters more closely, make a study more searching than is commonly made of what there is moral in man,-what this longs for, with what alone it will be satisfied. The most thoughtful teachers know this, know that for want of thus meeting the moral needs of men,-thus grappling with the higher moral side of questions, there is danger lest the purest morality of modern time part company with the received religion. Men who are to teach cannot see too clearly, or seize too firmly the distinction between that which is really moral and that which is merely prudential in man; and though they may not altogether pass over notions drawn from the latter region, on the former mainly they must throw themselves, to it must be their chief appeal. They must cease to be content if they can raise men merely to the prudential level of a desire for safety, they must feel that their work is hardly begun till those they teach have come to desire righteousness for the love of itself. They must cease to meet moral yearnings by un-moral doctrines or expedients, for bread giving men a stone. They must keep steadily before them that nothing can permanently satisfy the moral being in man, but something not less, but more moral, more spiritual than itself. They must feel themselves, and make others feel, that in the Divine economy, though there is much which is mysterious, there is nothing which is not even now supremely moral, and which will not at last be clearly seen to be so. In ceasing to use so exclusively the weapons of merely earthly, and wielding more confidently those of pure spiritual, temper, they need not fear that the old armory of Christianity will fail them. In the old words, the old truths, the old facts, more vitally and spiritually apprehended, because brought closer to

the moral heart of man, they will find all they need. This close contact between Christian truths and the highest moral sentiment of the time, while it vitalizes and makes real the former, will react no less powerfully on the latter. There is no moral truth which is not deepened when seen in the light of eternity and of God. That which, regarded from the side of man, is felt merely as a yielding to his own sensual nature, when seen from the side of God as disobedience to a loving and righteous will, to which he owes everything, is deepened into a sense of sin. Character which, when regarded from a merely moral point of view, almost inevitably becomes a building up from our own internal resources, takes altogether another aspect when it is seen that what a man really is in the last resort is determined by the relation in which he stands to God. Then it comes to be felt that the rightness men search for cannot be self-evolved from within, that they must cease from attempting this, must go beyond self, must fall back on a simple receptivity, receiving the rightness and the right-making power which they have not in themselves, from out of the great reservoir of righteousness which is in God. Only on thus falling back on God, and feeling himself to be as of every other thing, so of righteousness, a recipient, is a man truly rightened. Thus the last moral craving and, the first upward look of religion agree in one,man can receive nothing except it be given him from above.'

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ART. II.-Lyra Elegantiarum. A Collection of some of the best Specimens of Vers de Société in the English Language. By deceased Authors. Edited by FREDERIC LOCKER. London, 1867.

IN publishing a collection of English vers de société, and in asking for compositions of this kind a distinct place in our literature, Mr. Locker no doubt expected to be met with Sterne's well-worn comment, 'They manage this matter better in France,' and such is the popular theory as regards these, the poems of elegance and of social life. Bnt how much better they do or did manage the matter in France, is a question we have asked ourselves. How far either has there ever been in England a school of writers of this kind? Is their poetry better or worse than the French equivalents? In what qualities does it fall short of the standard we have accepted? What helps and what hindrances does, it receive from the character of our language? Who writes it, and who reads it? These are points which have been little noticed, and yet not only might a curious comparison be made between French and English vers de société, but by looking a little more closely into the subject, we might see many marks of national and literary progress or decadence, and find there a whole history of manners, with traces of our political distinctions, and of the little rivalries of the age. We write and read vers d'occasion because we are social creatures, but in turning over the book before us, we have been tempted to think that such a collection of verses has more than a mere passing interest. These Englishmen, from Herrick to Thackeray, wrote as they were moved, not only by their personal fancy, their gallantry, their tenderness, or their pique, but also by the spirit of the age to which they belonged. Such as is the civilisation of any period, such will be that of its lesser poets. Dilettantis will sometimes, we know, persist in preserving a rococo style which their generation has agreed to discard; and great poets are generally teachers, anticipating or originating a school of which they are to be the masters; but assuredly the men of society, the men of letters, of office, and of polite education, reflect with accuracy the peculiarities of their age. Thus a world of religious, political, and social difference lies between the drawing-room verse of the Elizabethan age and that of the reign of Queen Anne, as it also does between the poets who preceded and those who followed that French Revolution which effected as great a change in the literary as in the political creed of Europe.

It may be profitable, then, using Mr. Locker's volume as a

text-book, to wander for a little in the byways of English verse, to leave the royal roads to fame, and to loiter in paths which are paths of pleasantness, where our guide will prove a good one, all the better because Mr. Locker is himself a poet of the kind Isaac Disraeli described as being polished by an intercourse with the world and with studies of taste, to whom refinement is a science and art a nature.'

The tone of his Preface (which is so pretty an essay, that a critic may well despair of saying anything new about it) is, we observe, slightly apologetic. It is that of a man who, in introducing a favourite protégé, is aware that the world may not view it with the same indulgence as he does. In short, Mr. Locker has pondered over the fact that though every man would be glad to write such verses, and would hold his head higher in society if he could, there is a prejudice against them; they are sometimes thought to be an affectation, and are often supposed to be unnational. We feel, or we have been told, that as a nation our forte does not lie in wit, but that we have a taste for the comic, if it is broad enough; we aver that our genius is practical, and we have a vague, though unaverred suspicion that we are clumsy. Yet this Lyra Elegantiarum would go far to prove the contrary, and the compiler might have taken higher praise to himself for having, as old Montaigne expresses it, thus provided the string with which to tie all these flowers together.'

Men are only unreasonable if they insist that this, the lighter or secondary kind of poetry, should have qualities to which it does not aspire, and which are in truth incompatible with its own standard of finished and ephemeral grace. Poems like these have often in a small compass many sources of pleasure. Brevity, we have been assured, is needful for wit; and here we have both. The charms of rhythm and alliteration are added, nor must we omit the element of surprise, as a delicate 'concetto' generally lurks somewhere, and we come upon it unawares. Finally, there is, or ought to be, the sense of completeness; that strange gratification so subtle of analysis, yet so essential to our pleasure, that we not only demand it in things good, but find that its presence gives a bitter sweetness to things painful, as we feel when we watch the outward-bound ship sinking beneath the verge, or see the last flickering spark die out of a heap of grey ashes that once were the letters of a mistress or of a friend.

All these elements are essential to the perfection of vers de société, but Mr. Locker is right when he demands for them the necessity of being elegant. Perhaps elegance in poetry is as difficult to define as elegance in manner and in dress; both have an inexplicable charm, both have vulgar caricatures made of

them which only result in being painfully 'genteel,' and both revenge themselves by being really and wholly impossible of imitation or of counterfeit. Poets are elegant when their minds are so, and when they have acquired by practice the art of expressing their thoughts in a pleasing and often in an apparently artless manner. Yet to no sort of composition does the old remark apply so well, that much art is required to be natural, and thus the pretty and apparently spontaneous verses we see in this collection have, and ought to have, all the care and finish of a miniature. They remind us of the delicate scroll work of the best Renaissance designs; like the arabesques in the Loggie of Raphael, they are beautiful from harmony and lightness of touch: like the sweet thinness of a Frenchwoman's voice in singing, the charm lies in the finish, not in the feeling; all are elegant, but not powerful, there is something to touch, much to please, but nothing to rouse one. The finish is the essential: to borrow another illustration from the sister art, Rubens might boast that he painted like a lion, and trust that his power would call off attention from his faults; but what are tableaux de genre without elaborate work? Satin dresses, onions, carrots, and dead game would soon be consigned to the limbo of the old-curiosity shops, did not the manner redeem the matter; and thus it is with vers de société,--the question is not so much what is done, but how it is done, how much curb the writer has put on himself that quaint rhymes shall not degenerate into doggrel, fancy run into grotesqueness, wit into coarseness, or feeling rise into passion, when the poem ceases at once to belong to the class of the poetry of the drawing-room. Mr. Locker says:

In his judgment, genuine vers de société should be short, elegant, refined, and fanciful. . . . The tone should not be pitched too high; it should be idiomatic, and rather in the conversational key. . . . The poem may be tinctured with a well-bred philosophy, it may be gay and gallant, it may be playfully malicious, or tenderly ironical, it may display lively banter, or it may be satirically facetious; it may even, considering it merely as a work of art, be Pagan in its tone, but it must never be ponderous or commonplace.'

Poetry that answers to all these demands is reproached for being artificial. In a certain sense it is. It belongs to an artificial state of society, and is prepared with great art, so as to show a little and not too much of what the author feels; and thus such verses seem to represent a great deal of what is best in our social life, its polish, its civility, and its self-control. It is easy at any time to indulge in platitudes against society, to describe the worldliness and the vulgarity of what has been well named Vanity Fair; but one seldom hears this from the men

VOL. XLVII.NO. XCIII.

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