Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/147

 is the matter with bad poetry? Can we fix on any. quality or lack of a quality which accounts in the main for the badness? If we contemplate the mass of stuff involved—bad lyrics, bad dramas, bad heroics—we shall find the answer. It is a want of reality. But reality is a word more easy to pronounce than to define; we apprehend its presence or its absence without formulating it. Thus much may, however, be affirmed. A want of reality always means a want of true feeling; it means also a want of precision: of precision in experience and expression. Good poetry is neither vague nor sentimental; bad poetry is both. And what is sentimentality but the professional language of emotion without emotion to inspire it? The blur of trite images and generalities in which bad lyrics indulge means no less than the lack of that grasp, that realization of details compelled by the sincere love of a subject. And sentimentality is not confined to one age or another. It is the same in whatever different shape it appears—the conceits of the Elizabethans, or the elegant vapours of 1810; the eloquent platitudes of Young, or the suave platitudes of Lewis Morris. They strike equally cold and dead, for the truth is not in them, and they try to hide absence of feeling by strained images or tricked-up emotions, or exalted commonplace, as the case may be.

Sentimentality has, in this disguise or that, existed and poisoned English poetry at all times since the sixteenth century. But, for its fellow vice, vagueness, this is otherwise. For vagueness there has indeed been no time so fertile as the first forty years of the nineteenth century, the time embracing the insipidities of Keepsakes and Albums, of the imitators of Byron and of the flaccid early Victorians the time when the Lake poets had grown old, before Browning and Tennyson had arisen with fresh ideas and fresh music on their lips. The doctrine then current that poetry must be hazy and exalted is amongst the most per-