That is perhaps the truest as well as the finest thing poetry has yet said about Napoleon. But, as it tells us itself, it will not be the last. There is much that we may condemn in Napoleon, much that we may hate, some things, even, that we may despise. But ignored or forgotten he never can be. We may think of him as a Satan, but as 'less than Archangel ruined' we cannot think of him. So glorious a promise cannot be altogether extinguished by any afterdisappointment: so prodigious a human miracle can never undergo the oblivion which is the fate of common men.

Of such a man poetry can never have said her last word. Perhaps she has not yet got far enough away from him to see him as he will be seen by an ultimate posterity. The Giant and his victims are still too near her; and terror, hate and righteous indignation make him seem only a Monster. But a day may come when distance will have dissolved terror and compelled even the justest indignation to yield at least a little to the enchantment of the Giant's strength and beauty, and sometimes to forget the use which he too often made of them.

R

POETRY AND COMMONPLACE1

My distinguished predecessor in the office of Warton Lecturer to the Academy took as his subject 'Poetry and Time'. Nervous persons when they saw that title announced may have feared that he was intending to enter the fiercely contested lists in which the combatants pound each other with rival definitions and contradictory assertions— all alike declared to be the obvious truth-about metre and rhythm, stress and pause and quantity, and the like. But their alarms proved needless. Sir Henry Newbolt was too conscious of the genius loci, of the Olympian or Elysian dignity of the British Academy, to come to metrical fisticuffs with any one in its presence. What he gave us was a discourse on the relation of poetry to the ideas of Time and Eternity. It is not for his successor to praise his lecture: it may be excusable for him to lament that it set a standard which one who has not the smallest pretensions to be either poet or philosopher finds it impossible to follow. I do not know whether it is or was my duty to try to follow it but some cynic said that one's duty is the thing which it is one's nature not to do; and on this occasion, if that is my duty, I confess I am not going to try to do it.

I am going to attempt to say something on a humbler topic, the relation of poetry to commonplace. At first sight it might seem that there can be no relation at all between them; that one is exclusive of the other. For is it not of the essence of poetry to possess distinction and rarity, that subtle heightening of thought, emotion, and of the language expressing them, which arrests the mind and quickens the imagination? Is not poetry the finest of the fine arts, and

1 This was the Warton Lecture on English Poetry delivered before the British Academy 26th November 1919. A very few corrections and additions are now inserted.

is it not the very business of the fine arts to do something which has to be done in such a way that the doing of it becomes a delight to the doer and a wonder as well as a delight to the spectator; to make something which is useful in such fashion that its use is almost forgotten in its beauty: or, if we come closer to the exact work of poetry, to say something worth saying with such perfection that there is in it music as well as truth, a vision as well as a fact, eternity as well as time: to say it in such a way that in its wisdom there is a felicity, half sensuous and half spiritual, which, transcending joy and deeper than sorrow, is capable of transmuting both into itself. All this is as unlike what we mean by commonplace as anything can be. Of the history of that word there is no need to say much. It was the translation of the Latin locus communis and meant a theme or truth of general application. And so it naturally came to be applied in two ways, in a good sense and in a bad, not distinguished so clearly as they should be in the Oxford Dictionary. In the good sense it meant a great saying of universal application, such a saying as was worth setting down in what was called a commonplace book. In the bad or depreciatory sense it meant universality without greatness: it meant something trite and obvious: such a saying as 'strength diminishes in old age', or 'life and property are safer in peace than in war'. This is the ordinary use of the word to-day. And in that restricted sense commonplace can have very little to do with poetry. But if the word be taken in its other sense I venture to assert that it would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that the greater the poet the fuller he is of commonplace. For, as Aristotle knew and Wordsworth reasserted, poetry deals above all with truth, and, of all sorts of truth, with that which is most universal, which is precisely the stuff of commonplace. That death is certain and friendship uncertain are commonplaces of the baser sort when Shakespeare intends them to be so, as when

he makes Shallow say 'Death is certain' without really thinking about death at all: or when Byron allows them to be so, as when he writes in one of his earlier poems such poor stuff as:

But Friendship can vary her gentle dominion;

The attachment of years in a moment expires.

Born as wisdom or poetry on the lips of some primitive poet, they have been worn to death by the generations of men, and leave those who now hear them as cold as themselves. But when Shakespeare applies his power to them they rise again and their resurrection is life and immortality:

Thou common friend, that 's without faith or love;
For such is a friend now;

I dare not say

I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me.
Who should be trusted now, when one's right hand
Is perjured to the bosom ?

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end.

Where is the commonplace when we hear that voice? And yet what can be a greater platitude than that every moment of our lives brings us nearer to death? The truth then must be that both the word commonplace and the thing it represents have more in them than we at first sight allow. To get the whole truth about them we need the old good meaning of the word as well as the later bad meaning. A commonplace may be obvious, but it may be also a universal truth, and as great as universal; only that its universality and universal acceptance have now blinded us to its greatness. Often enough the obviousness which we see is an accident, an excrescence, an obscuring overgrowth: the essence is life for him who can discover it. And what I am going to suggest is that one of the functions of poetry is just this, to discover the life that lies concealed in what are called commonplaces to take a commonplace in the later sense

of the word and turn it into one in the earlier and finer sense : to take a platitude and make of it an aphorism: to rub off the accumulated rust of time and familiarity which prevents our seeing the fresh and vital truth underneath to speak of a mother's love, or of the sadness of autumn, in such a way that we may feel them as we may suppose them to have been felt by those who first put such feelings into words, words which for them were as fresh and forcible as the feelings, but have now for us become stale and lifeless.

Some of the great poets have themselves recognized something of this sort. Keats remarked that the finest passages in the poets impress us as being both known before and for the first time. Wordsworth says that the business of poetry is not so much the discovery of new truths as the giving of new life to old ones. This is perhaps going too far. It is half the truth, not the whole. Poetry has, it would rather seem, two functions with regard to truth: its discovery and its re-discovery. The great poet, that is, is sometimes creating and inventing, giving us new thoughts or pictures; and sometimes restating old ones in such a way that it appears as if we were hearing them for the first time. His originality is of this double kind; an originality of substance and an originality of form. The one originates something new, the other re-creates something old. Now we think of invention as the central and dominant quality of a poet, and so perhaps it is. Yet it is seldom employed, especially by the greatest men, in the finding out of any new substance either of story or of thought. We see the same thing wherever we look. Pindar, the most splendid of Greek poets, is essentially a teller of old stories and a repeater of old saws. The Greek tragedians in the building of their dramas ring the changes on the legends of a few famous families. Virgil is often said by those who do not understand poetry to have nothing of his own because his story is all taken from Homer and other Greek writers. The wisdom of Dante is often