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Sept. 30, 1893.  The Country as “Copy”.

The case of a certain small volume of verse in which I take some interest, and its treatment at the hands of the reviewers, seems to me to illustrate in a sufficiently amusing manner a trick that the British critic has been picking up of late.  In a short account of Mr. Hosken, the postman poet, written by way of preface to his Verses by the Way (Methuen & Co.), I took occasion to point out that he is not what is called in the jargon of these days a “nature-poet”; that his poetic bent inclines rather to meditation than to description; and that though his early struggles in London and elsewhere have made him acquainted with many strange people in abnormal conditions of life, his interest has always lain, not in these striking anomalies, but in the destiny of humanity as a whole and its position in the great scheme of things.

These are simple facts.  I found them, easily enough, in Mr. Hosken’s verse—­where anybody else may find them.  They also seem to me to be, for a critic’s purpose, ultimate facts.  It is an ultimate fact that Publius Virgilius Maro wore his buskins somewhat higher in the heel than did Quintus Horatius Flaccus:  and no critic, to my knowledge, has been impertinent enough to point out that, since Horace had some experience of the tented field, while Virgil was a stay-at-home courtier, therefore Horace should have essayed to tell the martial exploits of Trojan and Rutulian while Virgil contented himself with the gossip of the Via Sacra.  Yet—­to compare small things with great—­this is the mistake into which our critics have fallen in Mr. Hosken’s case; and I mention it because the case is typical.  They try to get behind the ultimate facts and busy themselves with questions they have no proper concern with.  Some ask petulantly why Mr. Hosken is not a “nature-poet.”  Some are gravely concerned that “local talent” (i.e. the talent of a man who happens to dwell in some locality other than the critic’s) should not concern itself with local affairs; and remind him—­

    “To thine orchard edge belong
     All the brass and plume of song.”

As if a man may not concern himself with the broader problems of life and attack them with all the apparatus of recorded experience, unless he happen to live on one bank or other of the Fleet Ditch!  If a man have the gift, he can find all the “brass and plume of song” in his orchard edge.  If he have not, he may (provided he be a bona fide traveller) find it elsewhere.  What, for instance, were the use of telling Keats:  “To thy surgery belong all the brass and plume of song”?  He couldn’t find it there, so he betook himself to Chapman and Lempriere.  If you ask, “What right has a country postman to be handling questions that vexed the brain of Plato?”—­I ask in return, “What right had John Keats, who knew no Greek, to busy himself with Greek mythology?” And the answer is that each has a perfect right to follow his own bent.