Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/93

Rh in the average of modern literature than in Homer or in Sophocles, in Wordsworth's Laodamia or Keats's Hymn to Pan? What proportion of our late poetry is Christian either in spirit or in subject—nay, in traditions and associations? Admirable as much of it is, it is not for its spiritual tendencies that it can be commended. Commonly it shares the material character of our age, and smells of the earth; at other times, recoiling from the sordid, it flies into the fantastic.... It is our life which is to be blamed; our poetry has been but the reflection of that life."

This is valuable, not only for its suggestion, but because it sums up and speaks out plainly the protest which is implicit in all this criticism. The æsthetic lover of beauty, the artist who is satisfied with feats of poetic craft, will not find anything to his liking in Aubrey de Vere's essays. They are presided over by a severe Platonism intellectually, by an exacting and all-including Christianity when the subject touches upon man's life, and they will prove somewhat difficult reading, perhaps, because the thought continually reverts to great ideas, to that doctrine of life which the author seeks for in the poets,