of the
literary heavens. To judge of a generation's capacity for poetry, we
must compare, not a Shakespeare with a Shelley or a Wordsworth, but the
_average_ spirit, the average power of insight and expression, of
Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, with those of
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats. And who will maintain,
that in force of imagination, in truth of vision, in grasp of the ideal
side of things, in beautiful expression of elusive thoughts, in lyric
rapture, the Elizabethans are equal to the Georgian and Victorian poets?

Our own day is, we boast, the age of light and reason. The days of
Chaucer were times of childlike ignorance, credulity, _naivete_. Yet who
will tell us that Tennyson looks out on nature or on man with a colder,
less imaginative, eye than Chaucer? That the advances of science have
made him gaze less lovingly, less wonderingly, upon any created thing?
That the progress of philosophy has hardened Browning's heart to
accesses of passion, or cramped his creative imagination? And yet it
should be so, if enlightenment means decay of poetry.

Science, we are told, and philosophy are but an inclement atmosphere for
poetry to thrive in. Their spiteful frost nips the young buds and tender
shoots of imagination, of fancy, of "sentiment." Well, at what date was
modern science born? At what date philosophy? Does philosophy date from
Kant, or from Bacon, or from Plato? Does modern science begin with
Darwin, with Newton, with Copernicus, or with Aristotle? Let us, for
argument's sake, accept the common account that the age _par excellence_
of science and philosophy began in England, in France, in Germany,
somewhere about the end of the seventeenth century. Since that time we
have doubtless discovered and elaborated many a detail. None the less
the air of all the eighteenth century was full of scientific inquiry and
mechanical invention, full of philosophical discussion, full of
religious and moral scepticism. If ever there was an age when it looked
to the pessimist as if science and philosophy would change the aspect of
nature and the heart of man, it was that eighteenth century. Now note
that, if some holder of Macaulay's view had risen up in the year 1770
or thereabouts, he might have addressed his contemporaries to great
effect in words like these: "The age of philosophy and science is upon
us all, and poetry is dead. See how in Germany not a single worthy note
of a poet's s