Poor Thirty-nine Articles! Did they ever claim to contain poetry, or even religion? Were they ever meant to be more than a dry abstract of theological dogmas? Surely they never challenged comparison with Shakespeare. They are an index, a table of contents, they were a business-like agreement, if you like, between different parties in the Church of England. But to ask whether they will stand longer than Shakespeare is very much like asking whether the Treaty of Paris will last longer than Victor Hugo. There is stay in poetry provided that the prose which underlies it is lasting, or everlasting; there is no stay in it if it is mere froth and rhyme. Arnold always liked to fall back on Goethe. “What a series of philosophic systems has Germany seen since the birth of Goethe,” he says, “and what sort of stay is any one of them compared with the poetry of Germany’s _one_ great poet?” Is Goethe’s poetry really so sure a stay as the philosophies of Germany; nay, would there be any stay in it at all without the support of that philosophy which Goethe drank in, whether from the vintage of Spinoza or from the more recent _crues_ of Kant and Fichte? Goethe’s name, no doubt, is always a pillar of strength, but there is even now a very great part of Goethe’s “Collected Works” in thirty volumes that is no longer a stay, but is _passé_, and seldom read by any one, except by the historian. Poetry may act as a powerful preservative, and it is wonderful how much pleasure we may derive from thought mummified in verse. But in the end it is thought in its ever-changing life that forms the real stay, and it matters little whether that thought speaks to us in marble, or in music, in hexameters, in blank verse, or even in prose. Poetry in itself is no protection against folly and feebleness. There is in the world a small amount of good, and an immense amount of bad poetry. The former, we may hope, will last, and will serve as a stay to all who care for the music of thought and the harmony of language; the twaddle, sometimes much admired in its time (and there is plenty of it in Goethe also), will, we hope, fade away from the memory of man, and serve as a lesson to poets who imagine that they may safely say in rhythm and rhyme what they would be thoroughly ashamed to say in simple prose. Nor is the so-called stay or immortality of poetry of much consequence. To have benefited millions of his own age, ought surely to satisfy any poet, even if no one reads his poems, or translations of them, a thousand years hence. Denn wer den Besten seiner Zeit genug Gethan, der hat gelebt für alle Zeiten.[10]