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June, 1922

HE death of Sir Walter Raleigh removes a figure of some dignity from a post of some importance. I use both phrases with responsibility. I have never seen and heard the late Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and have never read a line of his writings. But he occupied the post of some importance, and though he may have left it no more important than he found it, he never, so far as I know, made it ridiculous. As for the post, I know well enough that such positions are not for the absolutely first-rate men, but their importance does not depend upon being held by the absolutely first-rate men; it is perhaps not even desirable that they should be held by the first-rate men. It is only a limited range of originality, like that of Anatole France, that is appropriate to be rewarded by the Académie Française. But the Académie stands for something valuable; and so should the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. It is not to the interest of English literature that the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford should pass to the servile, the indefinite, or the sluggish. And we may as easily get a less worthy Professor of Poetry than Sir Walter Raleigh, as a less worthy Laureate than Robert Bridges.

Dr Bridges is a much more valuable personage, it must be said, than was Raleigh. He is the best living specimen in England of the good academic poet; and the word "academic" is not to be read in a pejorative sense. His Milton's Prosody is a piece of work well done. If I were to nominate his successor, the choice would be, I think, Mr Sturge Moore; also a conscientious, sensitive, and scholarly poet with a respect for the English language. But to find a successor for Sir Walter Raleigh I should be at a loss.

The requirements are difficult: the good academic mind is as rare in England as the good revolutionary mind; there is an originality about the good academic mind, as essential to it as another originality is to the creative mind. The good critic of poetry cannot be merely an astute specialist, like Sir Sidney Lee, or an able biographer, like Sir Sidney Colvin, or a polite essayist, like Mr Edmund Gosse, or a polite moralist, like Mr Clutton-Brock. All of these gentlemen may be accused of seriousness if one is seeking mirth: