to repeat what had
been said before him, and in his horror of the trite and the
superficial, he will achieve effect and attach interest _obscuris vera
involvens_--wrapping the truth in darkness. The "darkness" will be
relative, as his own contemporaries, being more instructed and
sophisticated than we are, will find those things transparent, or at
least translucent, which remain opaque enough to us. And, of course, as
epithets and adjectives that seem fresh to us will smell of the inkhorn
to him, he will have to exert his ingenuity to find parallel
expressions which would startle us by their oddity if we met with them
now.

A danger, therefore, which the poets of the future will need all their
ingenuity to avoid, will be the cultivation of a patent artificiality, a
forcing of the note until it ceases to rouse an echo in the human heart.
There will be a determination to sweep away all previously recognised
impressions. Affectation, that is to say the obtaining of an effect by
illegitimate means, is an offence against the Muses which they never
fail to avenge by oblivion or by a curtailed and impeded circulation. We
may instructively examine the history of literature with special
attention to this fault, and we find it in all cases to have been fatal.
It was fatal to the poetry of Alexandria, which closed, as you know, in
an obscurity to which the title of Lycophrontic darkness has been given
from the name of its most extravagant exponent. It was fatal to several
highly-gifted writers of the close of the Elizabethan period, who
endeavoured to give freshness to an outworn scheme of poetic ornament; I
need only remind you of the impenetrable cloud or fog, by Cyril
Tourneur, called _The Transform'd Metamorphosis_, and of the cryptic
rhymed dramas of Lord Brooke. It has not been fatal, I hope, but I think
desperately perilous to a beautiful talent of our own age, the amiable
Stephane Mallarme. Nothing, I feel, is more dangerous to the health of
poetry than the praise given by a group of irresponsible disciples to
verse which transfers commonplace thought to an exaggerated, violent,
and involved scheme of diction, and I confess that I should regard the
future of poetry in this country with much more apprehension than I do,
if I believed that the purely learned poet, the prosodical pedant, was
destined to become paramount amongst us. That would, indeed, threaten
the permanence of the art; and it is for this reason that I look