Introduction

IN recent years, the aims and ideals of Poetry have moved so far from the Classical spirit, that, in passing from the study of an ancient poem—an ode of Horace or an eclogue of Virgil—to almost any poem of the twentieth century, we are conscious of a difference not merely of degree but of kind. The present generation has, in fact, to make an effort unknown to its predecessors, if it is to obtain from Roman poetry a satisfaction, equal, or at least comparable, to the enjoyment which it obtains from the imagination of its own age. The eighteenth century found no such difficulty in adjustment. Educated in a Roman rather than a Greek tradition, it regarded Latin literature as its own inheritance. Horace was nearer, more akin, more sympathetic, than Chaucer or even Spenser. His verses were on the lips of every English gentleman, not merely because familiarity with the Classics was the sign of good breeding, but because English culture was in a real sense Horatian. Poetry obeyed the laws of the Ars Poetica; society affected the note of ease and simple refinement which pervades the Epistles and Odes; and Addison had been called not only the interpreter but the re-embodiment of Horace. ¹ Even after the Romantic 2movement, the early nineteenth century could pass, backwards and forwards, from Latin to English literature without a sense of discontinuity. Although the splendid poetic outburst from Wordsworth to Tennyson so greatly extended the Roman and even the Greek vision of poetry, yet the classic spirit, in its broadest sense, was still dominant. Landor, Tennyson, and Arnold are largely Graeco-Roman; and the impulse which drove poets like Swinburne beyond the Romans to the fountain-head of Greece was itself Roman.