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CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE. 
 
 PART I (For All). 
 
 1. Modern Thought and Modern Poetry - - i 
 
 2. The Poet as Moralist - - - - - ii 
 
 3. Anno Domini and the Exotic - - - - 19 
 
 4. The New Movement and New Standards - - 23 
 
 PART II (For Philosophers). 
 
 5. The Function of the Arts - - - - 29 
 
 6. The Poetic Method 42 
 
 7. The * Art for Art's Sake' Dilemma - - 50 
 
 8. Symbolism and the ' Ghost ' Theory - - - 57 
 
 9. Uses and Abuses of Metre - - - - 68 
 
 10. Poetic Architecture - - - - - - 82 
 
 11. Poetic Suggestion ------ gi 
 
 12. The Poet and his Audience - - - - loi 
 
 PART III (For Missionaries). 
 
 13. Poetry and Education - - - - - iii 
 
 14. Poetry and the Child - - - - - 120 
 
 15. Learning to read Poetry - - - - - 131 
 
 16. Learning to write Poetry - - - - - 142 
 
 PART IV (For Critics). 
 
 17. The Function of Criticism ----- 156 
 
 18. The Vices and Virtues of the Old Critics - 166 
 
 19. The Vices and Virtues of the New Critics - 189 
 
 20. Parodies, Satires and Epigrams - - - 200 
 
 PART V (For Readers). 
 
 Short Studies of some Modern Poets : — D. H. 
 Lawrence— Robert Graves^ — Sturge Moore^ — iGor- 
 don Bottomley — W. J. Turner — Vachel Lindsaiy 
 — The Sitwellsi — ^John Masefield — Walter de la 
 Mare — Arthur Waley — Edward Shanks^ — Amy 
 Lowell — Charlotte Mew — Edmund Blunden — ^J. C. 
 Scjuire^ — ^Flecker — Rupert Brook — Robert Nichols 211 
 
NOTE 
 
 Certain portions of this book have appeared from 
 time to time in The Spectator, 
 
 The author acknowledg-es the courtesy of the authors 
 and publishers in g"iving- her permission to quote excerpts 
 from the following books : A. D. Waley's Japanese 
 Poetry (Milford) and More Translations from the Chinese 
 (Allen and Unwin) ; Mr. Masefield's works (Heinemann) ; 
 Charlotte Mew's The Farmer's Bride (Poetry Bookshop) ; 
 E.; V. Lucas's Parodies Regained (Methuen) ; Edward 
 Shanks' s The Island of Youth (Collins) and The Queen of 
 China (Seeker) ; Augustine Rivers's The Death of Mer- 
 cury (Daniel) ; W. W. Gibson's works (MacMillan) ; 
 Osbert Sitwell's De Luxe (Leonard Parsons) ; Rupert 
 Brooke's 1914 and other Poems, and Edmund Blunden's 
 Waggoner (Sidgwick and Jackson) ; Robert Nicholls's 
 Aurelia (Chattoi and Windus) ; D. H. Lawrence's Amores 
 (Duckworth) ; J. E. Flecker's Collected Poems (Seeker) ; 
 Sturge Moore's works (Grant Richards) ; Aldous Huxley's 
 Crome Yellow (Chattoi and Windus) ; and Walter de la 
 Mare'si Collected Works and The Veil (Constable). 
 
 A. W.-E. 
 
 June, 1922. 
 
PART I 
 
 (FOR ALL) 
 
Chapter I 
 
 MODERN THOUGHT AND MODERN 
 POETRY 
 
 I 
 
 Who was it who was inspecting a Board School 
 and, — talking about Byron, — mentioned the word 
 ' Athens ? ' He turned to the class of children, 
 and said : ' Where is Athens ? ' There was dead 
 silence. When he added impressively, ' This is 
 geography,' a dozen hands at once went up. 
 
 In almost every field of knowledge people are 
 at work now trying to bring about the end of what 
 we may call the age of bulkheads. It was, of 
 course, a tremendous advance when the bulkheads 
 were set up, when in the seventeenth century, 
 Philosophy, which had once stood for any sort of 
 knowledge that was not divinity or history, began 
 to be divided up into Natural Philosophy, Rhe- 
 toric, Grammar, Metaphysics, and so on. It was 
 all gain when in ' natural philosophy,' Botany 
 separated itself from Geology. But we have all felt 
 lately that the time had come for the pendulum 
 to swing back again. Knowledge was beginning 
 to suffer from the fact that the man who studied 
 cryptogams would hold firmly aloof from phanaro- 
 gams. The supply of facts kept up, but we were 
 
4 MODERN THOUGHT AND MODERN POETRY 
 
 beginning to lack a ifew fresh general principles. 
 Moreover, as each scientist pushed along his par- 
 ticular line of enquiry, it began gradually to appear 
 that knowledge, like art, was one. This seemed at 
 first rather a shocking discovery. For as soon as 
 he got to the higher regions of the conical hill of 
 knowledge each scientist, however conscientious, 
 observed that he seemed to be trespassing on some- 
 body else's ground. Professor Einstein, Mr. Bert- 
 ram Russell, Professor Whitehead, and Professor 
 Keynes, for instance, a little while ago appeared to 
 spend half their working lives in explaining how 
 innocently they found themselves (a) poaching on 
 each other's preserves, and (d) wandering on to the 
 arch Tom-Tiddler's ground. Human psychology. 
 And what is more, these gentlemen really were as 
 innocent as babes, and had, as they averred, been 
 landed in these questionable regions while each fol- 
 lowing perfectly legitimate lines of enquiry in their 
 own subjects. It all came of the peculiar shape of 
 the hill of knowledge. 
 
 At last it occurred to somebody to wonder if the 
 overlapping of scientists might not be as harmless 
 as the overlapping of tiles. Then it was that 
 everybody suddenly found out what a fascinating 
 game this synthesis was, and humble investigators 
 on the lower slopes began to ape their betters. 
 Captains of Industry began to study Psychology, 
 Psychologists began to study Factories or Meta- 
 physics, Metaphysicians began to study Astro- 
 nomy, Astronomers learnt Logic and Psychology. 
 And now the arts have been drawn into the vortex. 
 
MODERN THOUGHT AND MODERN POETRY 
 
 Psychologists and students of comparative religion' 
 have, of course, necessarily long concerned them- 
 selves with primitive art. At last we have all, 
 poets, critics, and psychologists, begun to wonder 
 whether a study of modern and civilised art, rather 
 from the same point of view, might not yield inter- 
 esting results. 
 
 Why do people paint pictures ? Why do people 
 buy pictures ? Why do people write poetry ? Why 
 do people read poetry.^ They always have, and 
 they apparently always mean to. How is aesthetic 
 experience related to other experiences and to life 
 in general.'^ Is the poet a maker of beauty or a 
 prophet of the laws ? These are some of the ques- 
 tions that we have begun to ask ourselves, — to ask 
 with a certain shame for they seem so indecently 
 fundamental. 
 
 Now the modern poetic movement has been 
 defined as being among other things a movement 
 which is bringing poetry closer to everyday life. 
 Here then is a sort of natural movement toward 
 synthesis for us to study. Perhaps therefore before 
 we try to consider the alarmingly large, vague 
 question, ' What is poetry for ? ' we shall find it 
 easier if we first ask the smaller question, ' What 
 is modern poetry for ? ' 
 
 What shall we actually find if we look at the 
 new poetic movement as contrasted with other 
 poetic movements of other epochs .^^ What is its 
 nature and how does it function.^ If we try to 
 study the relations between poetry and life as they 
 exist at the moment, we at any rate find that we 
 
6 MODERN THOUGHT AND MODERN POETRY 
 
 know something of one factor. We are all of us 
 bound to have to some extent a first hand knowledge 
 of what we mean when we say ' Modern Life.' It 
 is for this reason that before attacking any of the 
 fundamental questions of psychology and aes- 
 thetics, I first propose to consider the modern poetic 
 movement and its antecedents. 
 
 At any rate I like to think that this is the reason. 
 Perhaps the real reason is that the main question, 
 * What does poetry do, and how does it do it ? ' is 
 so difficult that I prefer to conceal my attempt to 
 deal with it in the comparative privacy of the middle 
 of the book. 
 
 II 
 
 It is sometimes very difficult to be sure that 
 there is such a thing as a homogeneous mass which 
 we can conveniently call poetry in general. 
 
 What is curious about poetry is that rather 
 more definitely than the other arts it laminates. 
 It divides itself into strata corresponding with 
 epochs. Really it is the epoch-made likeness 
 between such pairs as Chaucer and Gower : Green 
 and Webster : Crashaw and Donne : Pope and 
 Young : Wordsworth and Coleridge : Tennyson 
 and Browning, not their individual diversity, Vv^hich 
 is surprising. If v/e do not press the distinction 
 too far, we can quite easily distinguish the verse of 
 any age from that of any other age and, inciden- 
 tally, modern verse from the verse of any other 
 period whatever. It is in vain to plead that 
 
MODERN THOUGHT AND MODERN POETRY 7 
 
 modern poetry has no definite characteristics, be- 
 cause of two facts. First, there certainly exist 
 poems which are definitely non-modern. No 
 critic, however inexperienced, could pick up new 
 editions of The Song of the Shirt, Enoch Arden, 
 or The Highland Reaper and take them to be 
 modern poems. They might all have been written 
 yesterday, of course, but obviously much verse 
 produced at the moment is non-modern. Secondly, 
 there exist poems — Flecker's ' Santoria,' Mr. Sas- 
 soon's 'Every One Singing,' Mr. Masefield's 
 sonnet sequence from ' Enslaved,' Mr. Robert 
 Graves's ' Blackhorse Lane ' — which have some- 
 thing in them which makes it clearly impossible 
 that they should have been produced in any literary 
 period but the present. 
 
 The three poems that I have instanced as defi- 
 nitely non-modern are, of course, all drawn from 
 the immediate past of poetry, but though it is 
 conceivable that we might be deceived by a line 
 or two from some individual poem by Donne or 
 Marlowe or from one of Shakespeare's sonnets, we 
 shall not really find any difficulty in distinguishing 
 any complete non-modern poem even from 
 examples of such modern verse as are either imita- 
 tions or derive pretty directly from ancient 
 originals. 
 
 If we can distinguish the characteristic verse 
 of this age from the verse of any other age, then we 
 have succeeded in dividing our subject-matter into 
 two rough heaps. There is a heap of moderns and 
 a heap of non-moderns. The heaps are adjacent, 
 
8 MODERN THOUGHT AND MODERN POETRY 
 
 and there are poems from each which have slipped 
 down, and these almost cover the debatable ground 
 in the middle. In John Clare's, Donne's, Blake's, 
 Mr. Freeman's, and Mr. Sturge Moore's poems we 
 are conscious of this slipping tendency. But it is 
 easy enough to find plenty of typical examples 
 from either pile. 
 
 What shall we find if we examine a handful 
 of specimens from the top of the modern heap, all 
 poems, let us say, written since the war ? To take 
 the broadest characteristics first, we shall find that 
 these poems are the expression of an attitude of 
 mind which is strongly contrasted with that of the 
 Victorians. These modern writers were, we are to 
 remember, brought up in an atmosphere in which 
 the validity of certain truths and the admirableness 
 of certain virtues were assumed to be self-evident. 
 Those who had the breeding of them taught them 
 unquestioningly the value of such qualities as 
 courage, discipline, patriotism, and the subordina- 
 tion of self to the good of the State. They lived 
 to see these virtues, embodied in the Prussian 
 citizen, produce the late war. Some of them are 
 now maimed or blind. They thus learned pretty 
 forcibly the horrors of a taken-for-granted morality. 
 
 They had been further brought up to a belief 
 in the efficacy of certain literary doctrines. For 
 instance, the suitability of certain poetic form.s to 
 the treatment of certain subjects; the suitability of 
 a special sort of poetic diction or, alternatively, of 
 ' dialect ' to poetic subjects in general ; the abso- 
 lute fatality to the success of a poem of the presence 
 
MODERN THOUGHT AND MODERN POETRY 9 
 
 of certain poetic solecisms (rhymes like ' morn ' and 
 ^ dawn,' for example). They lived to see these taken- 
 for-granted poetic formulae produce — absolutely 
 nothing. The late Victorian and Edwardian Muse 
 was quite efficaciously buried beneath a vast heap 
 of ' thou shalts ' and ' thou shalt nots.' She was 
 scarcely able to emit a squeak. If moral right and 
 wrong had been obscured by formulae, was it not 
 possible that so had aesthetic right and wrong? 
 Again they asked themselves, had the poetic canons 
 which they found to be now accepted ruled all 
 writers in the past.^ They read a few of the old 
 examples of vers litre. They read poems like 
 ' When that I was and a little tiny boy ' and felt 
 inclined to doubt it. Anyhow, all this had to be 
 very carefully investigated, and the age of the 
 * tradition of the elders ' carefully ascertained. It 
 was thus in a spirit of conjecture, experiment and 
 doubt that the new poetic age began. For the first 
 time for fifty years poets — like other people — 
 began to believe it was possible that their instinc- 
 tively-held ideas might be mistaken ones, that it 
 was just possible that the main canons of aesthetics 
 and morality were not — as had been previously 
 supposed — as plain as pike-staffs. 
 
 I do not, of course, mean that there was no 
 whisper of this questioning spirit before the war 
 or even that under the Tennyson oratorio the 
 attentive might not discern the strains of an illusive 
 little obligato by Matthew Arnold. Human events 
 never happen with the diagrammatic clearness that 
 I have suggested. Some Bernard Shaw or A. E. 
 
lO MODERN THOUGHT AND MODERN POETRY 
 
 Housman will always write without proper regard 
 for our systems of chronology either in morals or 
 aesthetics, but it is sometimes convenient for the 
 sake of suggesting a point clearly, to regard as the 
 causes of certain effects events which were in fact 
 only their precipitants, or even merely circum- 
 stances that convinced a great number -of people of 
 the truth or utility of doctrines which a small 
 number of people had long enunciated. 
 
Chapter II 
 
 THE POET AS MORALIST 
 
 But the failure of any system of taken-for-granted 
 morality which the War brought to light, had, of 
 course, a much more direct result than that of 
 merely making the younger poets reconsider their 
 technical creeds. The ethical upheaval had the 
 strongest possible direct influence upon modern 
 verse. What was the old attitude ? Milton set out 
 ' to justify the ways of God to Man/ Tennyson 
 was even surer about the facts of morality than he 
 was about the facts of poetry, because, we should 
 now say, he was a good poet and an amateur 
 moralist. It is also arguable that the Byron- 
 Baudelaire-Maupassant-Wilde type of poet was 
 just as sure about moral principles as he, only that 
 their assurance took them the other way; they 
 praised the flowers of evil. Wilde might be said 
 to be, therefore, as it were, the obverse of Tenny- 
 son. Each of them was quite sure of what was 
 right and what was wrong, and therefore bandied 
 about moral ' claptrap ' with freedom and gusto. 
 The difference between both of them and the 
 modern poet is that he regards the facts of morality 
 from the other end, not as things to be defended or 
 attacked, but as things to be ascertained. Hence 
 a great deal of the alleged impropriety and absorp- 
 tion in questions of sex of the modern poet. Hence 
 
12 THE POET AS MORALIST 
 
 also much of the realism of such writers as Mr. 
 Masefield and Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. Ugly 
 facts of the material world, or of the poet's or his 
 characters' natures, must not have a blind eye 
 turned to them. If we never look at them, how 
 can we know if they are good or bad ? We should 
 have only a tradition instead of evidence. 
 
 With many lapses because he is human, the 
 modern poet desires to call nothing common or 
 unclean, not even smug self-satisfaction. The one 
 thing which he fears, to which he cannot avoid 
 hostility, is the aforesaid ' claptrap,' for he is aware 
 of the fearful efficacy w^ith which talk disguises a 
 man's notions — from himself as much as from the 
 rest of the world. He is for the truth at all costs ; 
 and, as all modern poems are obviously not suc- 
 cesses, he sometimes sacrifices the unity of a con- 
 cept, the harmony of a phrase, or even his sense of 
 humour to this hunger for exactness. Very often 
 he will limit himself to a puritanical plainness of 
 phrase. This is indeed a very marked characteris- 
 tic of much modern work. I should like to give 
 the reader two examples of the effects of these 
 apparent verbal returns to nature. One is by Mr. 
 Joseph Campbell, and one by Mr. D. H. Lawrence. 
 The first shows the Puritanical method applied to 
 the elegiac mood : 
 
 The Old Woman. 
 
 As a white candle 
 
 In a holy place, 
 So is the beauty 
 
 Of an SLghd face. 
 
THE POET AS MORALIST I3 
 
 As the spent radiance 
 
 Of the winter sun, 
 So is a woman 
 
 With her travail done. 
 
 Her brood gone from her, 
 
 And her thoughts as still 
 As the waters 
 
 Under a ruined mill. 
 
 Here again is verbal Puritanism applied to a mood 
 of burning passion : 
 
 And if I never see her again? 
 
 I think, if they told me so, 
 
 I could convulse the heavens with my horror. 
 
 I think I could alter the frame of things) in my agony. 
 
 I think I could break the system with my heart. 
 
 I think, in my convulsion, the skies would break. 
 
 Poetry has come back to what is something like 
 a Wordsworthian care and meticulousness in the 
 matter of language. 
 
 Wordsworth's confessed aim was ' to bring my 
 language near to the real language of men.' The 
 moderns are no more afraid than was Wordsworth 
 of the type of criticism embodied in Dr. Johnson's 
 famous lines which Wordsworth quotes in con- 
 nexion with his own defence of simple language : — 
 
 * I put my hat upon my head 
 And walked into the Strand, 
 And there I met another man. 
 Whose hat was in his hand.' 
 
 They do fear — to quote Wordsworth again — ' What 
 is usually called poetic diction, a language differing 
 
14 THE POET AS MORALIST 
 
 materially from the real language of men in any 
 situation . . . and characterised by various degrees 
 of wanton deviation from good sense . . . With 
 the progress of refinement this diction became more 
 and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain 
 humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of 
 tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics, and enigmas.' 
 He proceeds to give several instances of poetic 
 diction, among them Prior's : ' Did sweeter sounds 
 adorn my flowing tongue,' which that poet in a 
 paraphrase substituted for : ' Though I speak 
 with the tongues of men and of angels.' Again, 
 there is, he says, the ' hubbub of words,' in which 
 Dr. Johnson versified Proverbs — ' Go to the ant, 
 thou sluggard, consider her ways, and be wise : 
 which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, pro- 
 videth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her 
 food in the harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, O 
 sluggard.^ Wilt thou arise out of thy sleep .^ Yet 
 a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the 
 hands to sleep. So shall thy poverty come as one 
 that travaileth, and thy want as an armed man.' 
 
 * Turn on the prudent ant thy heedless eyes, 
 Observe her labours, sluggard, and be wise ; 
 No stern command, no monitory voice, 
 Prescribes her duties, or directs her choice; 
 Yet, timely provident, she hastes away 
 To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day ; 
 When fruitful summer loads the teeming plain, 
 She crops the harvest and she stores the grain. 
 How long shall sloth usurp thy useless hours, 
 Unnerve thy vigour, andi enchain thy powers? 
 While artful shades thy downy couch inclose, 
 And soft solicitation courts repK)se, 
 
THE POET AS MORALIST I 5 
 
 Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight, 
 Year chases year with unremitted flight, 
 Till Want now following, fraudulent and slow. 
 Shall spring to seize thee, like an ambushed foe.* 
 
 Wordsworth brought speech and verse together 
 again after a separation of a hundred and fifty 
 years, but, inevitably, they again diverged, and by 
 i860 the poets were at it again, having substituted 
 the influence of ' Romance ' for that of Cicero. In 
 considering the modern and Wordsworthian revolts, 
 we are to remember that Wordsworth was reacting 
 from the late unworthy followers of Pope and 
 Dryden, and that the moderns are on the rebound 
 from a less nonsensical use of verbiage. Conse- 
 quently they are able to allow gorgeousness of 
 language its true place which Wordsworth could 
 not. They, in fact, demand no more than that 
 every word should be used with intention and a 
 sense of its meaning, colour, and associations, 
 and that words should not be slopped about. 
 
 This sounds very simple, and we might think 
 that, whatever their practice, all poets in theory 
 used words with a sort of double nicety, with regard 
 to overt meaning and also to symbolic or associa- 
 tive meaning. That this is not the case can be 
 proved by five minutes' perusal of such a book as 
 Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, where the highest 
 place is intentionally given to matters of rhythm 
 and an extraordinary number of rhetorical sylla- 
 bles can be found — words whose everyday mean- 
 ing is even slightly inappropriate. The poet 
 hasn't bothered about this, but has relied entirely 
 
1 6 THE POET AS MORALIST 
 
 Upon the music and colour of his words and the 
 momentum of his metre. A modern writer will 
 almost always handle his words with extrem.e re- 
 spect, however great the levity with which he may 
 confront his subject. 
 
 This desire for exactness and truth has another 
 aesthetic effect. If the poem be a subjective one, 
 it may lead the poet to what may seem to most 
 readers a disagreeable or perhaps a boring degree 
 of self-revelation. If it is objective, it will lead to 
 great detachment. We do not, of course, mean to 
 imply that the objective poem possesses detachment 
 in contrast to the subjective one, for a moment's 
 reflection will show that to write an extremely sub- 
 jective poem demands an even higher degree of 
 detachment than the complete suppression of self. 
 Consider some of Mr. Aldous Huxley's subjective 
 poems, one particularly in which he speaks with 
 half-grim, half-humorous despair of the boring 
 insistence of sex : — 
 
 'Love — was there no escape? 
 Was it always there, always there, 
 The same huge dominant shape. 
 Like Windsor Castle leaning over the plain? * 
 
 Or, as an instance of the objective type, Mr. Blun- 
 den's poem, ' The Pike,' of which the follov/ing is 
 the second half : — 
 
 * still as the dead 
 
 The great pike lies, the murderous patriarch 
 Watching the waterpit sheer-shelving dark, 
 
 Where through the plash his lithe bright vassals thread. 
 
THE POET AS MORALIST 1/ 
 
 * The rose-finned roach and bluish bream 
 And staring ruffe steal up the stream 
 Hard* by their glutted tyrant, now 
 Still as a sunken bough. 
 
 * He on the sandbank lies, 
 
 Sunning himself long hours 
 With stony gorgon eyes : 
 
 Westward the hot sun lowers. 
 
 * Sudden the gray pike changes, and quivering poises for 
 slaughter ; 
 Intense terror wakens around him, the shoals scud awry, 
 
 but there chances 
 A chub unsuspecting ; the prowling fins quicken, in fury 
 he lances; 
 And the miller that opens the hatch stands amazed at the 
 whirl in the water.' 
 
 Or, if both types be sought from the same poet, 
 Mr. Siegfried Sassoon's or Mr. W. J. Turner's v/ork 
 would afford them. 
 
 It will easily be seen how% under the influence 
 of this desire to state facts rather than to draw 
 conclusions, writers are led to an elusiveness and 
 detachment which in unskilful hands becomes in- 
 human. Miss Charlotte Mew, for instance, has 
 great qualities of restraint and intellectual grasp, 
 but her work would be very much improved if she 
 could be a little less just and indifferent. Not, of 
 course, that modern poets never draw morals. 
 They often do so in the heat of the moment, but 
 never with the satisfaction of a Pope, a Dryden or 
 a Milton. 
 
 A new ' Man of Ross ' and a new ' The Hind 
 and the Panther ' are inconceivable. Mr. Ralph 
 
1 8 THE POET AS MORALIST 
 
 Hodgson, preaching kindness to animals, is as near 
 as we come to ' The Man of Ross,' and I can think 
 of nothing better for an ' opposite number ' for the 
 religious teaching of ' The Hind and the Panther,' 
 than Francis Thompson's ' The Hound of Heaven.' 
 And this is neither, strictly speaking, a modern 
 poem nor does it preach any but the universal doc- 
 trine of mysticism. 
 
 It might seem at first sight as though Mr. Mase- 
 field draws morals, and indeed so he does after a 
 fashion, but if we examine them carefully, we shall 
 not find that they are very explicit. Mr. Masefield 
 is really moved only by the faith of Keats and 
 Shelley, a mystic belief in Beauty, the Holy Grail 
 of the poets. But this fact in itself well illustrates 
 the balanced temper of the age, for one of the 
 popular accusations levelled against his work is 
 that it is unnecessarily ugly. So scrupulous is Mr. 
 Masefield in stating the case against himself. 
 
Chapter III 
 
 ANNO DOMINI AND THE EXOTIC 
 
 We saw in the last chapter how a desire for frank- 
 ness and an open mind have lead the modern poet 
 to treat a good many subjects which have either 
 never before been treated in verse at all, or have 
 not been so treated for a couple of centuries. To 
 these factors also, of course, are due a good deal 
 of what some people complain of as the exotic 
 element in modern poetry. But, of course, some 
 of this ' oddness ' is due to actual facts of Anno 
 Domini. In 1922 the poet finds that most of the 
 obvious similes have been made, most of the clearly 
 appropriate phrases coined and passed from hand 
 to hand till they are too much effaced for the poet's 
 treasury. This has bred a fastidiousness which, 
 acting on different minds, has had opposite results. 
 To find instances among some of the few long 
 poems of to-day, its effect upon Mr. W. J. Turner 
 in ' Paris and Helen,' upon Mr. Shanks in ' The 
 Queen of China,' and ' The Island of Youth,' upon 
 Mr. Squire in ' The Birds ' and ' Rivers,' upon Mr. 
 Sturge Moore in ' Danae ' has been to produce a 
 certain charming attenuation and rem.oteness. 
 
 Let us try to imagine to ourselves a sort of 
 synthetic Victorian poem which will have somxCthing 
 in it of ' Maud,' of ' Two in a Gondola,' of ' Woke 
 Hill,' of ' Christmas Rose,' of The Golden Market,' 
 
20 ANNO DOMINI AND THE EXOTIC 
 
 of * Sonnets from the Portugese/ and the tradition 
 both of 'Paradise Lost' and 'The Prelude.' 
 Imagine this composite creature moving along in 
 the middle of the road. Mr. Squire, Mr. Sturge 
 Moore, Mr. Shanks and Mr. Turner were, in the 
 poems Vv^e have cited, endeavouring to pass it on 
 
 ^ihe right — that is to say, by means of greater 
 elegance, by means of less obvious effects, by the 
 avoidance of cliches, by being, as it were, more 
 civilised. Mr. Masefield, on the other hand, in 
 ' Reynard the Fox ' and ' Dauber,' and Mr. Las- 
 celles Abercrombie, in almost all his works, have 
 
 .tried to pass on the left; that is to say, they have 
 tried to be more fundamental, stronger, to achieve 
 more force and drive, to show beauty and idealism 
 (if they show them at all) as rising not only from 
 man's most elegant emotions, but from their most 
 primxitive passions. The many failures of the 
 right-hand group suffer from anaemia ; those of the 
 left-hand group are only too full of blood, — of 
 curses and ' thick ears.' The two following pieces 
 of verse are, to my mind, successful examples 
 respectively of the right and the left-hand groups. 
 The first is from ' The Queen of China ' and the 
 other from a poem by Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. 
 
 * Oh, woe, woe, woe on China. Now is all 
 The fabric of the high-arched kingdom gone 
 And the fair Provinces', the Mountain Province, 
 The Province of the Plain, the River Province, 
 Tlie Border Countries and the teeming Port, 
 The Cities where the wise old Viceroys rule. 
 Shaking their honoured governmental heads . . .* 
 
ANNO DOMINI AND THE EXOTIC 21 
 
 ' A little brisk grey slattern of a woman, 
 Pattering along in her loosie-heeied clogs, 
 Pusht the brass-barr'd door of a public house. 
 The spring went hard against her; hand and knee 
 Shoved their weak best. As the door poised ajar, 
 Hullabaloo of talking men burst out, 
 A pouring babble of inflamed palaver, 
 And over-ridinj3f it and shouted down 
 High words, jeering' or downright, broken like 
 Crests that leap and stumble in rushing water. 
 Just as the door went wide and she stept in, 
 *' She cannot do it ! " one was balling out : 
 A glaring hulk of flesh with a bull's voice. 
 He finger 'd with his neckerchief, and stretcht 
 His throat to ease the anger of dispute. 
 Then spat to put a full stop to the matter. 
 
 * The little woman waited, with one hand 
 Propping the door, and smiled at the loud man. 
 They saw her then ; and the sight was enough 
 To gag the speech of every drinker there : 
 The din fell down like something chopt off short. 
 Blank they all wheel' d towards her, with their mouths 
 Still gaping as though full of voiceless words. 
 She let the door slam to ; and all at ease. 
 Amused, her smile twinkling about her eyes, 
 Went forward : they made room; for her quick enough. 
 Her chin just topt the counter : she gave in 
 Her bottle to the fK)tboy, tuckt it back. 
 Full of bright tawny ale, under her arm, 
 Rapt down the coppers on the planisht zinc. 
 And turned : and no word spoken all the while. ' 
 
 I think it is almost certain that to a great extent 
 these opposite effects, or if you will affectations, of 
 style, have sprung from a single cause; Anno 
 Domini. If these poets had lived in the time of 
 Chaucer, Gower, and Dunbar, they would probably 
 
2 2 ANNO DOMINI AND THE EXOTIC 
 
 have begun every poem, as did those writers, with 
 an invocation to Spring : — 
 
 * In May as that Aurora did upspring: 
 With crystal eye chasing the cloudes' sable.' 
 
 And this with great satisfaction to themselves and 
 their readers. It is, of course, perfectly untrue 
 to say ' It is too late to be ambitious.' The Child- 
 ren of the Muses are a nomadic tribe and when they 
 have exhausted the fertility of one region, it is easy 
 for them to fold their tents and move on across what 
 are, it seems, the endless tracts of human know^ledge 
 and conjecture. All those of a conservative turn 
 of mind, those v/ho are temperamentally inclined to 
 regard the words * fickleness ' and ' movement ' as 
 synonyms must try to take into consideration the 
 fact that there are more reasons for departure from 
 the old ways than the one for which they are forever 
 on the watch — Lack of respect for the Traditions 
 of the Elders. 
 
Chapter IV 
 
 THE NEW MOVEMENT AND NEW 
 STANDARDS 
 
 I HAVE said that at the beginning of the modern 
 poetic movement a good deal of hesitancy, of intel- 
 lectual modesty, and of experimentalism was to be 
 found in poetic technique. One month a poet 
 would employ an elaborate rhyme scheme and throw 
 about a profusion of brightly-coloured syllables; 
 the next he would confine himself to words of one 
 syllable and lines of one v/ord. He would be 
 minutely introspective and meticulously objective 
 by turns. Mr. W. J. Turner began by writing 
 obscure, difficult lyrics about paleolithic cave-men 
 or the cave-man that lurks within us. Mr. Graves, 
 to ease a war-harassed mind, wrote fantastic bucolic 
 poems. Mr. Robert Nichols, confronted by the 
 war, showed, in spirit and technique, the journalistic 
 reaction of the reporter ; so did Mr. W. W. Gibson. 
 The Sitv/ells (Messrs. Osbert and Sacheverell and 
 Miss Edith) endeavoured, like Mr. Graves, to 
 escape, but this time into an atmosphere of com- 
 media de arte. But Mr. Turner's latest consider- 
 able piece of work is ' Paris and Helen,' a smooth 
 classical narrative poem. Mr. Graves has lately 
 tried to get back to the atmosphere of real life. 
 Mr. Nichols' best work is now generally reflective 
 
24 THE NEW MOVEMENT AND NEW STANDARDS 
 
 and written in a flowing style, and Mr. Osbert Sit- 
 welFs output is often one of ' reasonable ' poems. 
 The new movement, now feeling more secure in the 
 needlessness of v/orship, dares a glance at the 
 merits of the more regular of its predecessors. 
 
 Psychologists tell us that love and hate, or blind 
 reverence and violent self-assertion, . are opposite 
 manifestations of the same emotions. This is cer- 
 tainly true in the case of such group psychology as 
 we encounter in the consideration of aesthetic move- 
 ments. At first the poets of the new movement 
 Vv^ere, like the rest of the world, inclined to feel a 
 strong love-hate emotion in regard to such writers 
 as Tennyson, and to feel the obverse of the general 
 reverential attitude in regard to his mxoral attitude 
 and technical methods. Now that the exaggerated 
 love and reverence have disappeared, so have the 
 violent hate and self-assertion. For though the 
 influence of these emotions on the new movement 
 has been greatly exaggerated, they did exist, at 
 least, in certain writers. For example, Mr. Ezra 
 Pound, one of the brilliant but somewhat negative 
 and sterile precursors of the modern movement, 
 felt them overwhelmingly. 
 
 The new movement seems, in fact, in the last 
 two years to have reached som.ething of a state of 
 equilibrium. There was a charming, invigorating 
 freshness about the spring, and in som.e cases we 
 may regret the ^ early manner ' of this or that writer. 
 But on the whole the modern tradition has probably 
 grown to a state more promising for the production 
 of good work than it was, say in 191 8 or 19 19. 
 
THE NEW MOVEMENT AND NEW STANDARDS 25 
 
 ) It is very difficult to say in what this state of 
 equilibrium consists, or how the present varies from 
 the earlier state of the poetic movement. The 
 obvious thing would be to say that the new poets 
 have become less extreme and that they now appre- 
 ciate the value of ' centralness' This no doubt is 
 in part true, but it is also probably true that our 
 — the reader's — conception of the poetic ' centre ' 
 has slipped more than a little. For when we come- 
 to examine the facts, there are plenty of ultra- 
 modern poems being written. Is it that the poets 
 are more urbane, or that even the most timid of us 
 have grown accustomed to them? At any rate, we 
 believe that poets and critics have reached a stage 
 in the movement where they have achieved the 
 judgment of a modern poem on its mxcrits. 
 
 We do not love or hate ' Wheels ' or ' Coterie ' ; 
 we distinguish between the bad and good poems 
 which they contain. This is largely because the 
 volume of modern verse now enables us to guess 
 by a comparative process what the poet is trying 
 to do, and to expect of a given poem only the par- 
 ticular qualities for which the poet has striven : — 
 
 * When they said, ^* Does it trot?'* 
 He said, *' Certainly not, 
 It's a Mopsican-Flopsican bear ! " ' 
 
 We no longer say : ' This poem is unlike '' The 
 Dream of Fair Women," therefore it is good ' (or 
 ' bad,' as the case may be). A poem may have 
 noble qualities which, to pursue the analogy, are 
 incompatible with trotting. This critics and fellow- 
 
26 THE NEW MOVEMENT AND NEW STANDARDS 
 
 poets recognize. The poet is now absolutely free 
 to write ' Mopsican-Flopsican ' poetry, but with this 
 warning, that we know to what heights such a poem 
 ought to rise. Being let off the trotting we expect 
 of the creature performances of equal difficulty. 
 We have, in fact, achieved pretty generally a 
 new standard of criticism — flexible, liberal — well 
 adapted to its purpose. Alas ! that it must ossify 
 like its unlamented predecessor, and, after 
 strangling a few promising infants of the next, the 
 unborn poet generation, be carted away amid public 
 rejoicings. 
 
 Is there positively no cure for human fallibility? 
 If not, let us at least not fall into the error of the 
 Victorians who would honestly have declared that 
 they suffered from no such malady. 
 
PART II 
 
 (FOR PHILOSOPHERS) 
 
* That's the test for the literary mind/ said Denis, * the 
 feeling- of magic, the sense that words have power. . . . 
 With language man created a whole new universe; what 
 wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them ! 
 With fitted, harmonious words the magicians summoned 
 rabbits out of empty hats and spirits froim the elements. 
 Their descendants, the., literary men, still go on with the 
 process, morticing theii^* verbal formulas together, and before 
 the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and 
 awe. Rabbits out of empty hats ? No, their spells are more 
 subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds. 
 Formulated by their art, the most insipid statements become 
 enormously significant. For example, I proffer the constata- 
 tion, ** Black ladders lack bladders." A self-evident truth, 
 one on which it v/ould not have been worth while to insist, 
 had I chosen to formulate it in such words as Les echelles 
 moires manquent de vessie. But since I put it as I do, 
 ** Black ladders lack bladders," it becomes, for all its self- 
 evidence, significant, unforgettable, moving. The creation 
 by word-power of something out of nothing — ^what is that but 
 magic? And, I may add, what is that but literature? Half 
 the world's greatest poetry is simply Les echelles noires man- 
 quent de vessie, translated intoi magic significance as *' Black 
 ladders lack bladders." and you can't appreciate words. I'm 
 sorry for you.' 
 
 Mr. Aldous Huxley. 
 
Chapter V 
 THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 
 
 I 
 
 It is very difficult to define a work of art, or to say 
 that Pythagoras was labouring under a misunder- 
 standing when he sacrificed a yoke of oxen to the 
 \ Muses on working out the Forty-seventh Proposi- 
 tion. A fairly acceptable notion is that in creating 
 a work of art we are trying to make something 
 beautiful. This applied to the arts of literature 
 would connote that we were not only trying to 
 express a mxCaning, but that we were trying to 
 express beauty as well. Or the emphasis might 
 even be reversed and the artist might affirm that he 
 was trying to create beauty and that the meaning — 
 the overt content — of his work was only incidental 
 to its beauty. But this contrasting of ' meaning * 
 and beauty by no means covers the whole ground. 
 There are mxany beautiful episodes in ' Macbeth/ 
 but we do not feel that a statement that what Shake- 
 speare was trying to express was the tragedy of the 
 murdering of Duncan by the Thane of Caw^dor and 
 Lady Macbeth, plus beauty, would satisfactorily 
 define the play. 
 
 We shall find that our definition will cover a 
 much wider range of facts if Vv^e say that Art is the 
 effort to express, alongside a rational meaning, 
 something of those forces which lie in that great 
 
30 THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 
 
 hinterland of consciousness, the inexpressible. It 
 would be possible to treat the story of Macbeth 
 (this has indeed been done on more than one occa- 
 sion) scientifically as a psychological ' case/ but 
 the appeal here is shifted from the reader's emotions 
 to his intellect. The beauties of Shakespeare's 
 treatment are, as it were, the feathers which wing 
 the arrow of the tragedy till it is carried straight 
 through the intellect into the substructure of our 
 consciousness. In Macbeth's account of the 
 murder — the speech w^hich ends : 
 
 * I had most need of blessing- 
 But Amen stuck in my throat.' 
 
 we are moved and shaken in a way which would 
 be beyond any intellectual statement of the dangers 
 of Macbeth's position. The peculiar atmosphere 
 which pervades the Courtyard Scene, and which 
 closes in upon us as soon as Lady Macbeth strikes 
 her signal on the bell, is one that cannot be pro- 
 duced except by means that we should all readily 
 grant were artistic. A so-called plain statement of 
 the facts would obviously fail to acquaint the reader 
 Vv^ith the outstanding fact — that is the peculiar 
 emotional tension — which made Macbeth's act 
 differ absolutely from murders like that of Hare and 
 Burke. 
 
 Mme. Tamara Karsavina, in an interview with 
 
 a reporter a year or so ago, put the case of the arts 
 
 in a nutshell. The reporter asked her what she 
 
 meant by a particular fas seul that she danced ; to 
 
 .-^ which she replied, ' But if I could tell you in a 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 3 1 
 
 sentence, do you think I should take the very great 
 trouble of dancing it ? ' There are, of course, many 
 other notions besides artistic ones; there are, for 
 example, many scientific facts — chemical reactions, 
 mathematical equations — which cannot be put into 
 two words, but that is a different proposition ; they 
 could in time be explained to any sufficiently intel- 
 ligent person. But if Mme. Karsavina had talked 
 to the reporter for a month, she could not have put 
 into so many words what she meant by her dance, 
 for the meaning was, we may be sure, concerned 
 with curves of m.otion — a flowing undulated move- 
 ment constantly interrupted by an effect of rigidity, 
 an impression perhaps of the balance of muscular 
 force supporting a weight, succeeded by a pose 
 expressing lassitude — a sort of liquification of the 
 body, — staccato movements alternating with flow- 
 ing legato ones. If dancing was barred, notions 
 of this sort could only obviously have been 
 expressed through some other aesthetic form. She 
 might conceivably have written for that reporter a 
 poem which, though of course not describing the 
 dance, would have conveyed to him similar truths 
 about form and motion. She might more easily 
 have said what she meant on the piano, or have 
 expressed it in the inter-actions of light and shade, 
 voids and solids, tension and relaxation, of a pic- 
 ture or a building. 
 
 The fact that there are many things that can- 
 not be dealt with by any sort of direct statement 
 is again rather well illustrated in the domain of 
 architecture. A working drawing, perfectly accu- 
 
32 THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 
 
 rate in every detail, of an unfamiliar building will 
 give even a trained architect very little idea of 
 what the building looked like; whereas a charcoal 
 sketch in perspective, in which perhaps all sorts 
 of non-existent incidentals had been introduced — 
 a floating cloud to cast an emphasising shadow, an 
 imaginary tree, a group of onlookers to give the 
 scale — ^will make a picture from which it is per- 
 fectly easy to gain a notion of the appearance of 
 the building and the intentions of the architect. 
 The fact is that communication betw^een one human 
 being and another ceases to be simple directly v^e 
 go beyond the desire to impart to our neighbours 
 the fact that w^e are experiencing such things as 
 hunger, thirst, love or hate. 
 
 The most superficial study of metaphysics 
 brings home to us the fact that every one of us is 
 shut into his own private consciousness. None of 
 my experiences can ever be exactly your experi- 
 ences, for an experience is a compound made up of 
 that which is perceived and certain qualities of the 
 perceiver. This is, of course, perfectly obvious in 
 the case of a colour-blind man and a man of normal 
 vision seeing the same landscape. Or again, if 
 two persons of different temperament chance to 
 have shared an experience, to one it may prove a 
 joke, to the other a tragedy. Let us, as an example, 
 suppose D'Artagnan and William Cowper together 
 in a street fight in which a man is killed. To one 
 it would be a slightly exhilarating everyday affair, 
 to the other a terrible spiritual experience. 
 
 All literature and a great many other ' non-pro- 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 33 
 
 ductive ' human activities can be likened to the 
 efforts of a prisoner — shut into the cell of his separ- 
 ate consciousness — to communicate with his fellows. 
 We have an instinct, as strong as it is sound, to share 
 each other's experiences and to pool any knowledge 
 that any of us may have gained. Though we are each 
 thus separately confined, we are aware that we are so 
 enclosed and we can allow for differences in the 
 aspect of life as seen from another cell. The more 
 sophisticated of us can even allow for the modifi- 
 cations in our own point of view in a given matter 
 made by our own acknowledged opinions on 
 similar affairs. For instance, I was the other day 
 discussing the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas with 
 a man who said that he was somehow rather hostile 
 to them. He had tracked his hostility down to his 
 dislike of Gilbert's attitude towards women. He 
 is a strong feminist. Being now aware of the 
 source of his prejudice, he is, of course, able to 
 a great extent to discount it and give Gilbert the 
 credit for jokes which dp not amuse my friend be- 
 cause of his bias. 
 
 But there is a much more difficult problem. It 
 would appear that our consciousness and its know- 
 ledge of our own motives very much resembles our 
 ordinary sense perceptions. For example, let us 
 take as an analogy our ordinary perception of 
 sound. Our ears only give us knowledge of a com- 
 paratively short section out of the middle of an 
 entire range of sounds. There are a great number 
 of sound vibrations that are too deep in tone for us 
 to hear, and there are a proportionate number that 
 
34 THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 
 
 are too shrill. The world is certainly echoing with 
 sounds that we cannot hear. We are in very much 
 the same position in the matter of self-knowledge. 
 We are constantly actuated in our conduct by 
 motives which are not in the least clear to our- 
 selves. Proverbial wisdom is well aware of this 
 fact. 
 
 * I do not like thee, Dr. Fell, 
 The reason why I cannot tell, 
 
 But this I know, and know full well, 
 I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.' 
 
 We are reading, a vague sense of uneasiness 
 and restlessness comes over us, but very likely 
 except with the help of some outside agent, such 
 as the clock, we cannot tell whether it is a 
 change of author, or our lunch that we want. To 
 take another very simple case, a young man may 
 find in himself a sudden enthusiasm for a 
 particular career, or a particular line of study, and 
 be honestly unconscious that he is inspired neither 
 by industry, nor a love of learning, but the hope 
 that in the pursuit of this work or study he may 
 constantly meet a particular young woman. Again 
 we can probably many of us with an effort recall 
 likes and dislikes founded on some incident of our 
 childhood. Few of us, for example, can revisit the 
 scenes of a happy childhood without a definite 
 emotional recollection. The tree up which we 
 climbed with the kitten and crowned him Duke of 
 Catoria with oak leaves will, as long as we can 
 remember the incident, never be quite a common 
 tree to us. There are probably qiiite as many of 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 35 
 
 those childish incidents that are still valid enough 
 to be acted upon, but whose actual occurrence we 
 have quite forgotten. Professor Freud would say 
 that they were not forgotten, but repressed because 
 they were unpleasant. Mr. Bertram Russell, 
 bearing in mind the unpalatable theories of the 
 Behaviourists, would tell us that they are uncon- 
 scious because it was natural for all our impulses 
 to be unconscious, and that it was only about certain 
 very clear and obvious mental processes that we 
 were able to reason at all. According to him the 
 process would be that Man when he began to 
 reason had caught himself performing some action 
 and had then promptly begun to wonder why he 
 was doing it. Sometimes he hit upon the right 
 reason, sometimes upon a ludicrously wrong one. 
 When in one case he hit upon the wrong reason, and 
 in a second case proceeded to act rationally upon 
 his assumptions, it becomes easier to understand the 
 very curious embrolios into which Man's thinking 
 and conduct have got him from time to time. 
 Primitive society's marvellously effective mutual 
 arrangements for the cutting of throats and the 
 general making of life intolerable, — becomes, so 
 regarded, — a little less amazing. But whether we 
 hold Professor Freud's doctrine of the suppressed 
 subconsciousness or prefer the theory of the ocean 
 of subconscious action out of which Man has 
 managed to rear little islands of consciousness, or 
 whether glancing at the experiences of our friends 
 and our own conduct and the history of mankind, 
 we merely conclude generally that man is a very 
 
36 THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 
 
 odd and a far from rational creature, we must come 
 to the conclusion that for each person there is a 
 region of being — a spring of conduct, which is 
 doubly hidden away. Our brother's conscious 
 experiences are hidden from us, how much more 
 his subconscious experiences, which in the natural 
 course of things are hidden even from himself? 
 
 Human converse and the whole body of literature 
 and science are concerned to speak across the first 
 barrier. It is a more especial function of the arts — 
 painting, music, sculpture, architecture, poetry — to 
 deal with the obscure but potent forces that lie 
 behind the second : — 
 
 * Fallings from us, vanlshings ; 
 Blank misgivings of a creature 
 Moving about in worlds not realised. ' 
 
 As to which of the Arts fulfils this function most 
 successfully, or, as we have been accustomed to say, 
 which Art is the ' best ' there has been never- 
 ending, but I am inclined to think quite needless 
 discussion. There is no more a stock ' best art ' 
 than there is a stock ' best ' human being. Your 
 consciousness and subconsciousness may be best 
 approached visually, the next man's through the 
 ear, and mine by the most intangible way of all — 
 the w^ay of literary art in general and of poetry in 
 paricular. 
 
 Every poet and every critic is agreed that the 
 emotions ar(e especially the province of poetry. 
 Now the emotions would seem to be in a special 
 degree psychological amphibians, sometimes mov- 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 37 
 
 ing, that is to say, on the plane of the conscious, 
 sometimes on the plane of the unconscious. 
 Beauty, love, hate, anger, pity, and terror, are the 
 devices we use in poetry. They are not only the sub- 
 ject matters of poetry, but are also its instruments. 
 The double function fulfilled by beauty and 
 emotion has led to a great deal of confusion of 
 thought. Round this question, whether the beauty 
 of a poem was its aim and end or a means to some 
 ulterior aim or end, and, if so, what the ulterior aim 
 or end might be, has centred a great deal of circular 
 thinking. ' Beauty ' and ' Rapture ' are like the 
 little steering propeller on an aerial bomb — at once 
 a means of directing the missile and itself part of 
 what is projected. Or if the reader prefers a more 
 traditional metaphor, the poet's thought becomes 
 through beauty and rapture like a feathered arrow 
 which is able to transfix at once the intellect, the 
 emotions, and the deeper consciousness which lies 
 below these regions. 
 
 II 
 
 The need for expresson is so implanted in our 
 nature that the reader has probably hardly put to 
 himself what might be supposed to be the natural 
 question, ' Why all this fuss about expression, why 
 should (as you and the psychologist seem to put it) 
 *' Deep call unto deep" in this gratuitous way.'^' 
 The answer is that we are gregarious creatures, and 
 this deep-seated desire for expression is in itself a 
 
38 THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 
 
 non-conscious piece of reasoning. There is some- 
 thing horrible to the human mind in the idea of 
 complete loneliness and solitude. The desire for 
 companionship has the compulsive strength of a 
 biological necessity. 
 
 As Mr. Harold Child somewhere very justly 
 says, a man who had grown up alone on a desert 
 island could have extraordinarily little knowledge 
 of himself, for he would possess no standard of 
 comparison. In comparison and the subsequent 
 ranging of opinions or events into categories, lies, 
 the metaphysicians tell us, the entire and only 
 method by which man acquires knowledge. You 
 cannot have a category of one, you cannot compare 
 unity. The man on the desert island, however 
 ingeniously introspective, could only compare his 
 reactions on Tuesday with his reactions on Monday, 
 and know that on one day he v/as good humoured, 
 but on the next took a pessimistic view of things. 
 This would obviously not take him very far. A 
 man's method of finding out about himself is in fact 
 to discover that he is cleverer than Jones, but not so 
 clever as Smith, lazier than Robinson, but a better 
 walker than Snooks, better at dominoes than 
 Brown, though Green is cleverer when it comes to 
 Bradshaw. And so on, till we come to consider the 
 most subtle attributes of mind and character. Not 
 only does each generation, by means of books and 
 tradition, to some extent, stand on the shoulders, 
 or, at least, the toes of the generation that comes 
 behind it; it learns through contemporary minds. 
 The world is like the laboratory of some great scien- 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 39 
 
 tist, whose ten pupils each experiment for a year 
 along converging lines, each with special aptitude or 
 special knowledge, each contributing a factor to 
 the discovery of some scientific law which would 
 have taken any one of them at least ten years to 
 work out alone. Each of them is thus able, because 
 he can communicate with his fellows, to add to his 
 mind the complete piece of knowledge ; he gets the 
 result of ten years' work at the price of one year's 
 work. If our minds are to fulfil their powers of 
 growth it must, v/e realise, be through co-operation 
 with other minds. Not only is there this individual 
 need to be satisfied, but we all instinctively feel both 
 edges of the proverb, ' Tous comprendre, c'est tons 
 pardonner.' We have the double feeling that our 
 profound ignorance of each other is dangerous. 
 ' Will he understand my motives ? ' asks Timidity, 
 on the one hand, and, on the other. Suspicion, 
 ' What does the man mean by all this ? ' The 
 shrewdest and most practical people, people who 
 have as little love as is possible in any human being 
 of abstract knowledge, will almost always admit 
 that as a means to success, or, as a recreation, their 
 one study is Human Nature. In order that they 
 may not be misunderstood, and in order that they 
 may understand it is absolutely necessary for them 
 to have some idea of how other men's minds work. 
 In a comparatively primitive state of society some 
 such study is necessary to an individual in order 
 that the other man may not fly at his throat. In 
 civilised society where our relations with our fellows 
 become more and more subtle, and as we come to 
 
40 THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 
 
 deal with more and more complicated ideas, we more 
 and more feel the necessity of understanding our 
 fellows and ourselves as well as we can. We begin 
 to feel subconsciously uneasy at the idea of all this 
 loose dynamite, this uncomprehended human nature 
 — our own and other people's — which lies scattered 
 about the world ready to be ignited. We probably 
 read the works of a poet for our pleasure in the 
 beauty or the emotion that he gives us, and we shall 
 probably never be reduced consciously to reading 
 his works in order to gain some light upon our own 
 or other people's motives. But I believe a great 
 deal of our pleasure in poetry really comes from 
 this source. A very simple phenomenon has prob- 
 ably puzzled miost of us at one time or another. 
 Why is it that we apparently experience the same 
 little shock of pleasure in reading a beautiful poem, 
 or learning a scientific fact.'^ Probably to a 
 great extent because the two things are the 
 same. In acquiring the fact and in reading 
 the poem,, we are conscious of a little increment 
 of power to ourselves. The beauty of the 
 poem has revealed something to us, we are 
 conscious probably only of the beauty, the revela- 
 tion perhaps never reaches the reasoning plane at 
 all, it is something quite intangible. We should 
 describe it (if we were not checked for a moment 
 by the paradox that it has perhaps come to us 
 through a poem), as ' something that you cannot put 
 into words.' 
 
 Let him who feels that all this talk of 
 understanding, this stressing of the notion of 
 
THE FUNCTION OF THE ARTS 4 1 
 
 communication is gratuitous nonsense, remember 
 that the reasons for a number of grave industrial 
 disputes, a quantity of divorces, and the late War 
 are still matters of debate and conjecture. Suppose 
 that to understand everything were in fact the 
 ending of hatred? 
 
Chapter VI 
 
 THE POETIC METHOD 
 
 That the functions I have tried to outline in 
 the last chapter are in fact those which we do 
 demand that poetry shall fulfil, is I think borne 
 out by our dissatisfaction with a great deal 
 of what we are compelled to admit is very good 
 verse. It is the vague uneasiness which objects to, 
 say, Pope's ' Characters of Women,' and feels that 
 this is not really poetry at all. And if this express- 
 ing of the inexpressible is indeed one of the chief 
 functions of poetry, we have to admit that Pope's 
 Epistle hardly fulfils these functions at all, but re- 
 mains as clear and logical as prose. It has only one 
 thing in common with ' real poetry,' its great com- 
 pression. Compression is, I believe, one of the 
 expedients by which poetry is enabled to fulfil its 
 special function. One of the technical characteris- 
 tics of poetry and music is obviously that the whole 
 work of art is not presented to the mind in an in- 
 stant. In this they differ from the figurative arts, 
 we take in the main lines of statue, building, or pic- 
 ture, in a single coup d'oeil. Music, drama, 
 poetry, narrative, and the dance are all what 
 we might call progressive arts; we may sometimes 
 speak in a picture of certain effects leading up 
 to certain other effects, but what we really mean 
 is only that certain expedients are used to lend 
 
THE POETIC METHOD 43 
 
 force and emphasis to the elements of the com- 
 position upon which the artist desires that we 
 should concentrate. But in the progressive arts we 
 may have a genuine leading-up. The whole is a 
 succession of parts, and it is easy to see that the 
 rate at which these parts are presented to us may 
 make all the difference to our perception of them. 
 An incompetent executant, who, unable to deal with 
 a chord in a piece of music, plays it note by note, is 
 not playing the chord at all, but something different. 
 The superimposing of one sound upon another 
 gives us a whole that is different from and has an 
 existence independent of the parts from which it is 
 made up. Now a use of words in a state as it were 
 of compression, so that this choral or super-imposed 
 effect is produced, is one of the devices by which 
 very special effects are made in poetry. In prose 
 the interposition of the smaller parts of speech 
 between the main words produces what, to pursue 
 our musical analogy, is something like an arpeggio. 
 Mr. Roxburgh in his essay, ' The Poetic Proces- 
 sion,' points out how remarkable is the effect of the 
 compression in Keats's ' Ode to a Nightingale.' 
 
 * O for a draught of vintage ! that hath been 
 
 Cooled a long age in the deep-del vedi earth, 
 Tasting of Flora and the country green, 
 
 Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth ! 
 
 * O for a beaker full of the warnii South, 
 
 Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, 
 With beaded bubbles winking at the brim 
 And purple-stained mouth ; 
 That I might drink and leave the world unseen, 
 And with thee fade into the forest dim ... * 
 
44 THE POETIC METHOD 
 
 Mr. Roxburgh adds that he tried to translate 
 this to a clever Frenchman who could make nothing 
 of it. ' How could wine taste of mirth/ he said, 
 'and how could mirth be sunburnt?' Mr. Rox- 
 burgh had necessarily played the passage to him 
 in arpeggio, and the effect was perfectly different. 
 
 In prose the passage would have to go some- 
 thing like this : — 
 
 ' A stoop of wine. Calling up a white sunlight, a 
 grey powder of dust on the leaves of vines and olives on 
 the hillside. 
 
 * Very cool it w^ould be that Provencal wine, in a 
 chianti flask, perhaps, or an earthenware pitcher, that 
 had been buried in the earth, the digging spade you 
 fancy, buried toi half its length. O for a draught of 
 such a vintage ! It would taste of flowers ; there would 
 be an aroma of the green country about it — 
 nympths, the dance under the trees in the evening 
 after the w^arm Southern day, something of the songs 
 of Provence about it. Is not the wine the work of 
 such sun-burnt merry-makers? Indeed, such a beaker 
 would be full, not of vvine, but of the very spirit of 
 the South itself; the wine, the true ruby Hippocrene, 
 and at the brim of the cup there would be winking 
 bubbles, paJe sky-reflecting beads on the flush of the 
 wine, that should presently stain the mouth of the 
 drinker. And so I would drink, and so I would leave 
 the world unseen and like thee, O Unseen Nightingale, 
 fade into the dimness of the forest.' 
 
 The reader will notice that with my prose, not 
 only does he miss the metre, but the total effect of 
 the passage is one of wordiness and dilution. And 
 with all this lost, he will feel that the thing is 
 after all only a bastard poetic sort of prose. 
 
THE POETIC METHOD 45 
 
 Miss Amy Lowell, that diligent experimenter, 
 has endeavoured to get extreme compression into 
 words arranged in a prose rhythm. Take this 
 passage from the voyage to Japan of the paddle- 
 steamer ' Mississippi : — 
 
 * Break out her sails, quartermasters, the wind will 
 carry her faster than she can steam, for the trades have 
 her now, and are whipping her along- in fine clipper 
 style. Key-guns, your muzzles shine like basalt above 
 the tumbling waves. Polished basalt cameoed upon 
 malachite. Yankee-doodle-dandy ! A fine upstanding 
 ship, clouded with canvas, slipping along like a trot- 
 ting filly out of the Commodore* s own stables. White 
 sails and sailors, blue-coated officers, and red in a star 
 sparked through the claret decanter on the Commo- 
 dore^ s luncheon table.* 
 
 The net result of this sort of treatment is that 
 most of the book, ' Can Grande's Castle,' looks like 
 prose, but the whole of it reads like poetry. Note 
 again the effects of compression in a very different 
 poem : — 
 
 * Flavians a wit has too much sense to pray 
 To toast ** our wants and wishes ! " is her way. 
 Nor asks of God but of her stars to give 
 That greatest blessing " While we live, to live." 
 llien all for Death, that opiate of the soul, 
 Lucretia's dagger, Rosamunda's bowl. 
 Ah ! what could cause such impotence of mind, 
 A spark too fickle, or a spouse too kind? * 
 
 This is one of poetry's indirect devices — and 
 among the rest are periodicity, rhythms, rhymes, 
 symbolism, and a particular employment of word 
 association. Mr. Robert Graves, in his book on 
 
46 THE POETIC METHOD 
 
 criticism, has worked out the theory of what he calls 
 ' the incantational aspect of poetry ' very completely. 
 Just as the rhythmic song, dance and gesture 
 of the witches' celebration were intended to induce 
 a hypnotic state in participants and audience, so the 
 rhythms or repetitions of a poem are ,used by the 
 poet to soothe himself and his reader into a recep- 
 tive condition, a state in which it is possible to get 
 through the purely intellectual reasoning layer of 
 our minds to its deeper tissues. It will be realised 
 how important this periodic or incantational element 
 in poetry has always been deemed, when we 
 consider the amount of time and learning that have 
 been expended on the study of metres and rhyme 
 schemes and the whole stock-in-trade of prosody. 
 So important in fact was this side of poetry felt to 
 be, that a good many people have run away with the 
 idea that this was poetry, and that the art of poetry 
 lay in fitting some sort of meaning to a rhyme 
 scheme. 
 
 As for symbolism and word association, associa- 
 tion as well as the effects of a marked rhythm and 
 repetition is very well illustrated by a poem which 
 is also an incantation : — 
 
 Third WrrcH : * Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf, 
 Witches' mummy, maw and gulf 
 Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark, 
 Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark. 
 Liver of blaspheming Jew, 
 Gall of goat, and slips of yew 
 Silvered in the moon's eclipse, 
 
 Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips. 
 Finger of birth-strangled babe 
 
THE POETIC METHOD 47 
 
 Ditch-delivered by a drab, 
 
 Make the gruel thick and slab ; 
 
 Add thereto a tig-er's chaudron, 
 
 For the ingredients of our cauldron. 
 All : Double, double toil and trouble ; 
 
 Fire burn and cauldron bubble. 
 Second Witch : Cool it with a baboon's blood. 
 
 Then the charm, is firm and good.' 
 
 These notions are not so much horrible in them- 
 selves, as horrible because we, or rather the 
 Elizabethan audience for whom the charm was 
 intended associated each item in the stew with the 
 most awful malpractices of which they could 
 conceive. 
 
 There is, of course, a more subtle aspect of 
 word association. It is among other things the 
 moss which is gathered by the word-stone as it 
 rolls down the ages, and a further discussion of 
 association in this aspect will be found in 
 Chapter VIIL 
 
 Lastly, I spoke of symbolism. One of Mr. 
 Graves' own poems, ' The Sewing Basket,' is a very 
 good and simple instance of a poem in which the 
 overt content is loosely used to convey secondary 
 ideas : — 
 
 THE SEWING BASKET. 
 
 (A wedding present from Jenny Nicholson to Winifred 
 Roberts). 
 
 To Winifred 
 
 The day she's wed 
 
 (Having no gold) I send instead 
 
 This sewing basket, 
 
 And lovingly 
 
48 THE POETIC METHOD 
 
 Demand that she, 
 
 If ever wanting^ help from me, 
 
 Will surely ask it 
 
 Which being gravely said, 
 
 NoW; to go straight ahead 
 
 With the cutting of string, 
 
 An unwrapping of paper, 
 
 The airs of a draper, 
 
 To review 
 
 And search this basket through. 
 
 Here's one place full 
 Of coloured wool 
 And various yam 
 With w^hich to darn, 
 Tve worked for you 
 Lettered fromi A to Z, 
 The text of which 
 In small cross-stitch 
 Is Love to Winifred. 
 
 Here's a rag-doll wherein 
 
 To thrust the casual pin. 
 
 His name is Benjamin 
 
 For his ingenuous face ; 
 
 Be sure I've not forgotten 
 
 Black thread or crochet cotton ; 
 
 While Brussels lace 
 
 Has found a place 
 
 Behind the needle-case. 
 
 (But the case for the scissors? 
 
 Empty, as you see. 
 
 Love must not be sundered 
 
 Between you and me.) 
 
 Winifred Roberts, 
 
 Think of me, do. 
 
 When the friends I am sending 
 
 Are working for you. 
 
THE ART FOR ART S SAKE DILEMMA 49 
 
 The song of the thimble 
 
 Is, * O forget me not.* 
 
 Says the tape-measure, 
 
 * Absent, but never forgot . . .* 
 
 If we do not try to read too much into the poem 
 its meaning is, of course, perfectly clear and 
 obvious. There is a double meaning, and two 
 concurrent means of expression. Mr. Graves has 
 amused himself with the use of the things in the 
 basket as messengers and with a study of a feminine 
 mind embarked on a piece of phantasy. It will be 
 seen that in this double thread is a method of 
 conveying notions almost entirely peculiar to 
 poetry. Sometimes the poet gives us what we 
 might call the prose as well as the poetic version of 
 his thought. It would be difficult to find a better 
 example of this treatment than the first and last 
 verses of Herrick's most famous lyric : — 
 
 * Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, 
 Old Time is still a-flying ; 
 And this same flower that smiles to-day, 
 To-morrowi will be dying .... 
 
 Then be not coy, but use your time; 
 
 And while ye may, ^o marry ; 
 For having lost but once your prime, 
 
 Ye may for ever tarry.' 
 
 Neither the language nor thought are here very 
 profound, but their simplicity at least serves to 
 increase their clarity. The reader will see how 
 almost absurdly the direct statement narrows the 
 meaning of the first indirect one. 
 
Chapter VIL 
 
 THE ' ART FOR ART'S SAKE ' DILEMMA. 
 
 RusKiN, Tennyson, Swinburne, Rossetti, and 
 Stevenson were all of them in their several ways 
 deeply affected by a controver3y which came to be 
 known as the ' Art for Art's Sake ' question. Was 
 an artist to be, as Stevenson, for example, held, 
 a maker of beautiful things and to follow beauty 
 wherever or into whatsoever company it might lead 
 him.^ Or was he, as Tennyson affirmed, to be the 
 noble teacher who should inspire the citizen and 
 help struggling humanity on its w^ay ^ 
 
 Almost every writer for half a century took 
 sides upon this question, and the v/ork of many of 
 them was profoundly affected by their conscious 
 attitude upon it — the decorative painters, the deco- 
 rative writers on the one hand, and Tennyson and 
 his like thinkers, who still would ' Justify the ways 
 of God to man,' on the other. And now apparently 
 the years have brushed the question aside. In all 
 our modern criticism, in all the many diverse 
 aesthetic creeds that are set forth, it finds no place. 
 Which way has it been settled then? Is the poet to 
 be Sheherazada, the amiable and ingenious narrator 
 of the Arabian Nights, or a seer and prophet who is 
 to lead mankind along the right road ? This ques- 
 tion seems at first a difficult one, as it is so 
 
\ 
 
 THE ' ART FOR ART S SAKE DILEMMA 5 1 
 
 abundantly obvious that no sort of tacit assent has 
 been given to either proposition. How, then, has 
 the problem for the moment solved itself? Yet, I 
 think we shall find that it really has solved itself, 
 and that in a not unusual way. We have shifted 
 unconsciously on to another plane of thought about 
 the arts and the ethics which belong to them. 
 
 Behind the ' Art for Art's Sake ' controversy 
 was, I believe, a tacit assumption that we all, the 
 poet included, knew instinctively in' any given 
 instance what was right and what was wrong. ' Be 
 good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever ' was 
 the reduciio ad absurdum of this point of view. 
 It was in vain for Stevenson to say that honesty was 
 not as easy as blindman's-buff. His hearers inter- 
 preted this, I fancy, as meaning that the flesh was 
 weak, not that the understanding was dim. 
 
 But we have gradually come to realize — some of 
 us only gropingly on the unconscious plane, that 
 there is some sort of catch here. Sir Thomas More 
 believed unhesitatingly in the rightness of burning 
 heretics. A fellow-don, in urging compulsory 
 chapels upon Jowett, said, to clinch the argument, 
 ' Well, Mr. Jowett, as far as I can see, it is a choice 
 between a compulsory religion and no religion at 
 all ' ; to which Jowett gave his celebrated reply, 
 * My mind is not of sufficient subtlety to distinguish 
 between two such alternatives.' 
 
 The reader will easily recall for himself a dozen 
 instances of what we might call the changeability 
 of morals, or rather of the necessary evolution of 
 our outlook upon morals. We have at last a long 
 
52 THE ART FOR ART S SAKE DILEMMA 
 
 enough history behind us to realise that, though 
 there may be the Platonic Ideas — the sealed 
 patterns — of Truth, Honesty, Right and Wrong laid 
 up in Heaven, their manifestations compounded 
 with the shifting stuff of human life are very 
 variable. Something of this truth is popularly 
 expressed in the colloquialism that the old people 
 acted ' according to their lights,' and this is where 
 we have begun subconsciously to feel that the poet 
 comes in. His work is to increase the illuminating 
 power of the said ' lights.' We dare not say off- 
 hand, any more than can a judge who has not heard 
 the evidence, what is right or what is wrong in a 
 given case. Who knows, we may all at this moment 
 in some matter — sexual morality, perhaps — be 
 acting upon ethical principles as mistaken as were 
 those of the heretic burners, who were often, like 
 Sir Thomas More, the most conscientious of men, 
 acting from the sternest sense of duty. Such or 
 such a line of conduct is accused of being wrong; 
 the man who would stop the poet or the writer from 
 defending the accused line of conduct is acting in 
 the spirit of a judge who refuses to hear the counsel 
 for the defence. The analogy between the function 
 of a poet, or at least one of his functions, and that 
 of the advocate is a very close one. If the poet, by 
 taking thought or by inspiration, is visited with a 
 gleam of understanding of the motives of some 
 other human being in performing a certain action, 
 he is very much in the position of the briefed 
 advocate. It is his business to put the point of view 
 up for what it is worth. This was a matter which 
 
THE ART FOR ART S SAKE DILEMMA 53 
 
 Browning thoroughly understood. Take for 
 example ' The Statue and the Bust/ and the 
 poem about the lady who throws her glove into 
 the lions' den. Let those who say, ' Ah ! but the 
 poet must not defend what is contrary to right and 
 decency/ remember heretic-burning and compul- 
 sory religion and be humble. Not perhaps right 
 and wrong, but certainly our knowledge and grop- 
 ing understanding of them and their applications 
 are in the highest degree mutable. Tennyson 
 knew that : 
 
 * The hills' are shadows, and they flow 
 From: form, to form, and nothing* stands.' 
 
 But neither he nor Milton — to instance two of our 
 greatest didactic poets — realized that this was as 
 true of our comprehension of ethics as of the 
 facts of geography. Systems of ethics we must 
 obviously have, for it is impossible for men to live 
 in a community together without a pretty strict 
 code. Civilized life is a tapestry woven of such 
 codes. To take an apparently ridiculous instance, 
 could twenty-two men amuse themselves for three 
 days on a patch of green grass with two bats and a 
 ball and six sticks if it were not for the M.C.C. 
 rules of cricket.^ A system of ethics, enforced as 
 rigidly as circumstances allow, is absolutely essen- 
 tial if men are to live together. It is difficult to 
 over-estimate the harm done by a system of ethics 
 which no longer fits the temper of the time, and 
 whose decrees are consequently often broken, and 
 these breaches visited now with severity, now with 
 
54 THE ART FOR ART'S SAKE DILEMMA 
 
 leniency. We are tempted to wish that some such 
 device could be employed in morals as is used 
 in certain minor questions of the code by which 
 we live together; to long that the standard of 
 morality to which the community expects us to 
 conform were published every day in the news- 
 paper like Lighting-up Time. Thus we should 
 always know how to frame our own conduct in 
 matters that affect our fellows and how we might 
 expect our fellows to act in relation to us. 
 
 Perhaps so ridiculous an illustration will make 
 the reader agree that this publication, this mere 
 enunciation of what the community may from time 
 to time agree shall be its working code of ethics, 
 could clearly never be the prime work of the poet. 
 Yet such is the sort of task which the didactics were 
 inclined to believe was theirs. 
 
 The didactic poet, the poet who regards ' Art 
 for Art's Sake ' as the ' chief est Lord of Hell,' has 
 conceived his function to be that of helping to 
 enforce the existing rules, and is apt to neglect his 
 true function of devising, or of providing data for 
 the devising of new and better rules. (Dr. John- 
 son, for instance, has a long passage in his preface 
 to Shakespeare blaming him because he misses so 
 many didactic opportunities.) That this was an 
 unfortunate limitation of function the decorative 
 artist saw. ' The chosen children of beauty,' the 
 artists who conceived of their function as that of 
 making human life endurable, of gladdening, if it 
 might be, men's passage ' between a dark and a 
 dark,' were uneasy at such a petrification. 
 
THE ART FOR ARTS SAKE DILEMMA 55 
 
 But in repudiating the idea that the function 
 of the poet was that of a judge, or, as they 
 themselves v/ould perhaps have said, of a kind of 
 hortatory policeman, they went too far. They 
 dissociated themselves completely from ethics. 
 This weakened their position, and as consolers and 
 makers of beauty they took rank below the makers 
 of laws. For man is an intensely ethical animal; 
 in the end ethics are among the three or four things 
 he cares about most. And necessarily so, for 
 ethics are the code by which he adapts himself to 
 the extremely- ticklish business of reconciling his 
 inner biological needs with the circumstances of 
 living in a community. The least mistake in this 
 all-important sphere of the code and he feels that 
 he may be seized and burnt at the stake or con- 
 demned to lifelong celibacy. So in dissociating 
 themselves from all traffic with this absorbing affair 
 the Decoratives cut themselves adrift from the main 
 current of human life. Stevenson, a man of pecu- 
 liarly clear vision, saw that such was the result 
 of their creed, but he saw no way out of the decora- 
 tive position except by joining with the Didactics 
 whose tenets he could not accept. So he frankly 
 said with a sigh that it must be acknowledged that 
 the writer or the artist is but the fille de joie of the 
 community. But the highest and the most serious 
 function of the poet is to teach the law-makers — 
 we are all in a smaller or greater degree law-makers 
 — something about the human soul, sometimes to 
 see beauty where before we had only seen shame 
 and meanness, sometimes to tear the mask off pre- 
 
56 SYMBOLISM AND THE ' GHOST ' THEORY 
 
 tension. This idea of the poet's function is not a 
 new one. Certainly much of this simple doctrine 
 of the poet or the prophet as the ' forth-teller/ 
 though dark to Tennyson, was plain, for example, 
 to the author of Ecclesiastes; he is as much con- 
 cerned to give us a moving, sympathetic picture 
 of the old man to whom the grasshopper is a 
 burden and in whom desires have failed as he is 
 to give us direct ethical instruction. 
 
Chapter VIII 
 
 SYMBOLISM AND THE XHOST' 
 THEORY 
 
 Directly we begin to deal with words, we begin 
 to realise how shifting a thing is human language. 
 The architect builds with square calculable stones, 
 the musician with clear-cut, definite notes, but the 
 poet has to use a stuff for his buildings which 
 sometimes in a frenzy of despair he feels inclined 
 to think will never stand still to be handled. A 
 word is not only an extremely indefinite thing, but 
 it is invariably also a composite thing. Look up 
 any word in the dictionary, and you will find that 
 it trails clouds of something or other behind it 
 in its derivation from the Latin, Sanskrit, 
 Greek, or Anglo-Saxon. You will probably 
 find that the original word did not mean in the 
 least what we mean by the word as we have 
 it now, and we may find a whole string of 
 meanings through which the word passed in the 
 course of its handing down to us. Sometimes the 
 derivations of a word give a sardonic comment 
 upon human nature. It is always amusing, for 
 instance, to think how typical it is of mankind's 
 
58 SYMBOLISM AND THE ' GHOST ' THEORY 
 
 ways that ' presently ' to Shakespeare and to 
 Marlowe meant ' this moment.' But man is a 
 procrastinating anim'al, and now the word openly 
 means what it meant all along. 
 
 Ghosts of these former uses cling about words. 
 Further, words pick up private family or class 
 associations of their own on their way to us. We 
 can all of us easily think of class Shibboleths. For 
 example, there is nothing intrinsically shocking in 
 the exchange of the phrases, ' Oh, beg pardon,' and 
 ' Granted,' but in certain people the words will 
 produce their shudder none the less, while to others 
 they will appear completely harmless. Place 
 names appear to be peculiarly sticky, I mean, to 
 pick up associations particularly easily. The name 
 of Vallombrosa, for instance, irresistibly calls up a 
 train of its own, that is to anyone who is fond of 
 ' Paradise Lost.' Perhaps a consideration of this 
 train will illustrate the complexity of the associa- 
 tions with which words entangle themselves. To 
 anyone with a visual imagination, the image called 
 up by ' Vallombrosa ' will probably first of all be a 
 shallow stream with rounded boulders in it, and 
 floating on it a glowing red-brown scum of leaves, 
 each leaf curled up a little at the edge. Behind 
 this image, there is another one, not so clear, and 
 probably differing very markedly in the minds of 
 different individual readers of Milton. This time 
 it is a design, which might be in bas relief or might 
 be in Chiaroscuro, of a landscape in which is a lake. 
 The light is fitful, like that which we see just before 
 a thunderstorm. Out of the lake half emerge figures 
 
SYMBOLISM AND THE ' GHOST * THEORY 59 
 
 in Roman armour — there are spears, helmets, 
 bucklers, body armour, and short Roman swords, 
 sometimes in the hands or on the persons of their 
 wearers, sometimes piled along the side of the 
 lake in great Baroque trophies. Somewhere in the 
 middle of the lake reclines a gigantic shadowy 
 figure, again in classical armour ; a huge staff, ' fit 
 for the mast of some high Amiral,' is the clearest 
 of his attributes. A sense of despair and uneasiness 
 hangs over the scene. 
 
 I do not mean that whenever the word ' Vallom- 
 brosa' is mentioned I stop and gaze for half an 
 hour at these two super-imposed m-ental images. 
 In reading a passage where the word occurred, I 
 should be conscious of such pictures rather as one 
 is conscious of decorations in a corridor down which 
 one is passing. We see such pictures as we walk, 
 the effect they produce may be sharp, but it is 
 transitory. Their presence makes itself felt, how- 
 ever, and may colour our impressions of our other 
 surroundings. 
 
 But the reader may ask : Why have you called 
 such associations private ? I have done so, because 
 I suppose the mental image of a person who had 
 visited Vallombrosa and had not read Milton would 
 be completely different to mine, for instance, and 
 this brings us to one of the points from which 
 considerable complication springs. The association 
 called up by a word may be, so to say, the associa- 
 tion belonging to the word itself, or may belong 
 to the thing expressed by the word. ' Municipal ' 
 may call up ' Mummy ' from the position of the two 
 
6o SYMBOLISM AND THE ' GHOST ' THEORY 
 
 words in the dictionary, or it might call up thoughts 
 and images in connection with the word * election/ 
 or water supply, or tram system, or images allied 
 with half a dozen other associations. 
 
 Some people again have a colour sense con- 
 nected with words. Certain vowel and consonant 
 sounds represent certain colours. To someone 
 whom I know the sound of ' Ch ' is red-brown, and 
 the sound of ' S ' represents yellow and gold. This 
 fact emerged because this lady embroidered the 
 names of my two daughters on a sash. Susan's 
 embroidery was in yellow and gold, and Charlotte's 
 in pinks, red and russets. She seemed surprised 
 Vv^hen I asked her why she had chosen these colours. 
 The reason for using the silks seemed to her self- 
 evident. 
 
 Miss Bryher, a young novelist who wrote a book 
 called ' Development,' possesses something like the 
 same sensory peculiarity. When such people read 
 poetry, as far as I can make out, they experience, 
 in addition to what the poet has set down for them, 
 a sort of running accompaniment of colour patterns 
 evoked not by the symbols employed by the poet — 
 the green fields, the ' wine dark sea ' — but by the 
 sounds of the words employed. 
 
 We do not all re-act in quite such a complicated 
 way, but to everybody each word necessarily 
 becomes a kind of conglomeration or rather grows 
 to be like an atom with its little court of electrons 
 clustered round it. We are all, in writing prose or 
 verse, in the case of our native language, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously roughly aware of these 
 
SYMBOLISM AND THE ' GHOST ' THEORY 6l 
 
 associations that words carry with them, and we 
 treat the words accordingly. Sometimes when we 
 hear a foreigner talk, the fact that words do have 
 very marked secondary characters of their own is 
 brought home to us by the mistakes he will make 
 through having apprehended only the obvious top 
 meaning of a word. Nor is this all. Metaphy- 
 sicians say that all knowledge is comparative, and 
 our statements about things when analysed are 
 found to consist in a placing of the thing spoken of 
 into a category. Sometimes these categories are 
 very exactly, sometimes very roughly conceived. 
 We are confronted, say, by four material facts, a 
 group of white daisies, a red geranium in a pot, a 
 terrier asleep on the garden path, and a white 
 pigeon pecking about for grains of corn amid the 
 stones of the gravel. The most elaborate scientific 
 classification of these creatures into vegetable and 
 animal, bird and mammal, animate or inanimate, 
 and so on through all the exactitudes of species, 
 family and genus, are really only exact ways of 
 saying that the geranium and the white daisies are 
 more like each other than either is like the pigeon, 
 or conversely that the dog and the pigeon are more 
 alike than either is to the geranium or the pot. 
 However far we push knowledge it never ceases to 
 be relative. 
 
 This fact sometimes has curious consequences 
 in the case of words. The most northerly county 
 in Scotland, for instance, is called Sutherland, 
 and, therefore, we can never speak or see its name 
 without that word trailing after it some sort of 
 
62 SYMBOLISM AND THE ' GHOST ' THEORY 
 
 image of the men who gave it that name, and of 
 the country from which they came, and the black 
 ships that brought them. Or, take the words 
 * kitten ' or ' puppy,' which mean like a cat or like a 
 dog, but less big and less mature. The words, 
 because they are comparative, carry about with 
 them a kind of back reference to cats and dogs. 
 This is, of course, entirely obvious in words where 
 a mere diminutive or superlative is formed — super- 
 man, duckling. This reference to something on 
 one side or the other of the actual thing meant by 
 the word is another of the electrons clustering 
 round the word-atom. 
 
 But we have a third trick of the human brain 
 to reckon with, and that is our primitive habit of 
 personifying. At one time or another, man seems 
 to have personified everything under the sun — the 
 seasons, his own emotions, the sea, colds in the 
 head, all the different aspects of the forces that play 
 upon him (destinies, furies, devils, mystery gods, 
 and so forth). This personification or symbolism 
 was in fact probably the only process by which 
 primitive minds were able to deal with abstract 
 thought at all. Personification, though it seems 
 natural and easy enough to us even now (that is, if 
 we are careful not to stop to consider the mental 
 processes that it involves), in primitive society was 
 probably a process which seized upon any more or 
 less abstract idea which happened to enter a man's 
 mind, — just in the same way that the process of 
 digestion seized upon any article of food that 
 entered his body. 
 
SYMBOLISM AND THE ' GHOST ' THEORY 6^ 
 
 Such then are words. Here is the sort of 
 stuff which writers have to use. But the electrons 
 do not have the same value in poetry and prose, 
 alike. In the case of prose, the reader is to a certain 
 extent hurried on by the sense of the passage that 
 he is reading past the comparative implications 
 which the word may carry with it, past the symbolic 
 meaning. In prose the v/ord is much more a 
 vehicle than it is in poetry. Nothing is commoner 
 than for a quick reader in the case of prose to read 
 a passage and to take in the sense of it clearly, but 
 not to be able to recollect one phrase or word in 
 which that meaning was conveyed to him. It is 
 hardly to be supposed that anyone has ever read 
 poetry like that. In the case of a quick, inattentive 
 reader, it is more likely to be the other way about.. 
 He may know the colour and flavour of the poem,, 
 but not necessarily be very clear what its subject 
 was. 
 
 It comes about, therefore, that the prose writer's 
 task, so far as purely verbal expression is con- 
 cerned, is the easier one. Half these elusive, 
 shifting, secondary meanings, implications and 
 associations are in his case, slurred over and almost 
 ignored. Thus he makes his patterns with more or 
 less straightforward material, and has done with it. 
 But the poet is always making a pattern in two 
 or three dimensions at once, and the clash in the 
 sub-pattern made by the under-tones, under- 
 meanings, under-associations of his words and 
 phrases may, by some effect of bathos, or through 
 some other cause, completely ruin his apparently 
 
64 SYMBOLISM AND THE ' GHOST ' THEORY 
 
 excellent and sensible top meaning. And this 
 having to consider four or five things at once, of 
 course makes his task difficult. There is, however, 
 obviously a credit side to this account. One may, 
 in fact, to some extent liken a poem to a kaleido- 
 scope picture, most of whose grand effect is made 
 not by the little bits of glass which the shake of our 
 hand has arranged, but from the reflections of these 
 pieces of glass in the mirrors which form its sides. 
 So in a great number of poems it is the symbolism 
 and under-tones and implications when combined 
 and contrasted with its obvious straightforward 
 meaning that give the piece of verse all its 
 richness. Too great a reliance upon the symbolic 
 and * ghost ' sides of poetry is, however, as we 
 should expect, not without its pitfalls. Psycho- 
 logists seem to think that there does exist a small 
 group of words to which all people, using the same 
 language, attach the same symbolic meaning, but 
 the number of such words is small, and may grow 
 smaller as varied reading replaces original images 
 with acquired ones. Consequently it sometimes 
 happens that a word to the poet may bring up a 
 perfectly different train of ghosts to the one which 
 it brings up to the reader (as in the case of 'Vallom- 
 brosa '). The result is, of course, if his top meaning 
 is negligible, that the poet talks in a kind of private 
 cypher of his own. The most obvious case of this 
 is Blake's Books of Prophecy. There do appa- 
 rently (or least there might) exist people to whom 
 the mystical meaning of what Blake wrote is as 
 clear as it was to Blake, but to most people the 
 
SYMBOLISM AND THE ' GHOST ' THEORY 65 
 
 key to Blake's thought is lost, because his meaning 
 was expressed exclusively in the shifting, ghostly, 
 shadowy mediums of association and symbolism. 
 
 The consideration of this side of poetry is 
 further complicated by the fact that symbol 
 * allegory,' ' metaphor,' * simile,* and * comparison,' 
 all seem to be words which in practice are used as if 
 ithey shaded into one another. The distinction 
 between them is far from clear in my own mind, 
 but the situation seems to me roughly to be that all 
 these things are methods of indirect statement. 
 We might perhaps define a symbol as a statement 
 by indirect means which the reader does not 
 mentally translate back into * plain English.' In 
 the case of allegory, on the other hand, most of the 
 effect is produced by the fact that he does. When 
 we go to see ' Everyman ' acted, a great deal of 
 our pleasure appears to me to spring from the fact 
 that we are continuously engaged in a mental 
 process of translating back ' Mankind,' ' Sin,' 
 ' Good Deeds,' and ' Death ' into little concrete 
 statements. ' Good Deeds ' is a piece of religious 
 allegory. We translate it back. The Christian 
 symbols of the Lamb or the Cross, the Pagan 
 symbols of Proserpine and Balder, the Universal 
 symbol of the woman with the infant on her knee, 
 wo do not translate back. Is it perhaps possible 
 that a symbol is an allegory so well known, so 
 firmly accepted, and hence so obvious that we can 
 think in its terms as easily as in any other .'^ 
 Metaphor, simile, and analogy seem to me to be 
 methods of expression rather than methods of 
 
66 SYMBOLISM AND THE ' GHOST ' THEORY 
 
 thought. Such devices are most frequently used 
 to reduce the general to the particular, the abstract 
 to the concrete. They are ways of making the 
 general easier of apprehension to the minds of the 
 reader or the listener. Only those who have 
 habitually to employ them know what untrustworthy 
 servants they sometimes prove. 
 
 In Professor Whitehead's opinion words are in- 
 variably slightly misleading. He, considering 
 language from the point of view of the mathema- 
 tician, is, in fact, so appalled by the amount of 
 back meanings, associations, and generally by the 
 ' ghosts ' which we have tried to show in this 
 chapter that he rejects words altogether as not 
 being fit for the expression of exact ideas at all. I 
 cite Professor Whitehead because I do not want 
 the reader to suppose that all this business is a sort 
 of feverish dream, a figment of the brain of neurotic 
 poets, and that language is really pretty exact and 
 four square after all. It w^as his complete convic- 
 tion of the unstableness and above all of the ' vital ' 
 character of words that induced Professor White- 
 head to evolve his system of symbolic logic. He 
 was in a region where figures would not altogether 
 serve his turn, but rather than use such myriad- 
 faceted, ungovernable things as words in the state- 
 ment of nice and exact shades of logical meaning, 
 he substitutes dots, dashes, pluses, and equals — any 
 material, however humble, that he can trust to stand 
 still to be manipulated. But Professor Whitehead 
 is not the only scientist to react from the tyranny of 
 words. There is a whole School of Science — Mr. 
 
SYMBOLISM AND THE GHOST THEORY 6/ 
 
 Sanderson of Oundle is the spokesman through 
 whom it was expounded to me — ^who, whenever 
 possible, substitute charts, graphs, and tables for 
 the written word. 
 
 Of this school of thought I shall speak in a later 
 chapter. 
 
Chapter IX 
 
 USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 
 
 As far as our intellects are concerned, the pleasure 
 we take in Metre has, I fancy, to do with our 
 pleasure in the familiar. The difference between 
 prose and metre has been stated graphically as the 
 difference between a line which is constantly 
 curving back upon itself and a line which goes 
 forward all the time. The whole point of most of 
 the devices of metre is the recurrence of particular 
 thoughts or rhythms either exactly, or with a small 
 change. The rhyme itself is, of course, a perfect 
 example of this. What the reader enjoys is the 
 return to a similar sound, and a different sense. 
 
 But really the main function of metre is the 
 hypnotic one which I tried to analyse three chapters 
 ago. But why should the well-marked repetitions 
 of the dance, the recurrence of a refrain, or the 
 more subtle backward curving of rhyme and 
 antithesis have this lulling and soothing effect upon 
 us, quite apart from any symbolism in the dance, 
 or any meaning in the words .^ Is it possible that 
 these rhythms make some subtle union with the 
 natural rhythms of our bodies.^ For the life of the 
 body is full of rhythms — there are the alternations 
 of sleeping and waking, the ebb and fiov/ of cur 
 
USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 69 
 
 breathing, the intricate heart pattern of systole and 
 diastole, the motion of our legs in walking, the 
 dozen internal rhythms of contraction and relaxa- 
 tion of which we are not conscious, and lastly that 
 curious rhythmic agony of the birth pangs which 
 have brought each of us into the world. The 
 human race seems to have a natural passion for 
 recurrence and rhythmic curves, and is always 
 looking out for them. Our clocks and watches 
 really go along straightforward tick-tick-tick, but 
 most of use to please our rhythm-hunger, hear the 
 sounds as tick-tock. There are dozens of every- 
 day sounds that we conventionalise and regularise 
 for our pleasure, the sound of the wheels of trains 
 and trams, the ripplings and murmur of brooks 
 and rivers, the beat of waves. Without rhythm and 
 its effect upon the subconsciousness, and its power 
 of direct non-intellectual command over the body, 
 most drill and all concerted music and dancing 
 would be impossible. The unaided will could 
 never time a muscular contraction within half a 
 breath as will a rhythmic cycle : 
 
 * Let your feet 
 Like the g-alleys when they row 
 Even beat.* 
 
 But to return to the actual problems set us by 
 our use of these rhythmic powers in poetry. There 
 are, of course, a whole set of arguments for and 
 against regularity of poetic metre. Let us first 
 consider the objections to the use of strict forms. 
 In the first place, from being capable servants, 
 
70 USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 
 
 rhyme and metre may obviously become the most 
 tyrannical masters, entirely intractable to the poet's 
 will, the implacable enemies of the mot juste. 
 Especially is metre apt to become the enemy of 
 thought : 
 
 *Fof rhymes the rudders are of verses 
 By which like ships they steer their courses. ' 
 
 If he embarks on too elaborate a metrical 
 scheme, the poet will often find himself unable to 
 call his soul his own. All this business of prosody 
 and metre also has been complicated by the 
 frantic attempts of scholars to fit Latin forms 
 of prosody and scansion on to English. As far 
 as I can understand this most complicated con- 
 troversy, what has been proved is that they very 
 nearly fit, but not quite. The Prosodists are much 
 in the position of somebody who tries to put the 
 left boot on to the right foot. He justly pleads 
 that the boot is of the right size, that it is the right 
 sort of boot, and that surely it ought to fit and can 
 be made to do so. Even to this day a great many 
 scholars and experts have not discovered what is 
 wrong. 
 
 Many a young person has been for ever 
 frightened off any consideration of poetry by his 
 complete inability to understand the difference — 
 except in the isolation of ' examples ' — between 
 iambs, trochees, anapaests, and dactyls. I remem- 
 ber quite well how when I was about sixteen, I strug- 
 gled with this very business, and how a kind mentor 
 wrote me out syllables in longs and shorts, and 
 
USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 7 1 
 
 how I faithfully pinned them over my washstand 
 and conned them until I knew them. Then I tried 
 to fit them on to the poetry I knew by heart ; I never 
 dared confess that it seemed to me possible to scan 
 most of it at least in two ways. I tore my 
 hair and then and there grimly decided that poetry 
 was not for me, as I apparently could not under- 
 stand, or, at any rate, could not apply what appeared 
 to be universally acknowledged as the very founda- 
 tion of poetic technique. It was not till years 
 afterwards that I discovered that the great majority 
 of English poems can in sober fact be scanned in 
 two or three ways, and that there is much to be said 
 for the theory that the whole of this elaborate 
 science of prosody is just(but how completely!) 
 beside the point in the case of English verse. If 
 only it had occurred to somebody to reveal the 
 simple fact to me that almost all beginners write 
 first by ear and then ' dress ' their syllables by the 
 primitive method of counting them up on their 
 fingers, and that this habit was no unique shame of 
 mine ! Also that not till I came to the stage of this 
 counting-on-fingers process would I necessarily be 
 sur^ where the beginning of the lines and the capital 
 letters came. However, enough of my youthful 
 sorrows. I am quite ready to agree with the reader 
 that if my poetic impulse was stifled by this sort of 
 mechanical difficulty it was not of very strong 
 growth and not particularly well worth preserving. 
 A study of formal Prosody seems to breed very 
 much the same temper in its students as do acrostics 
 or jig-saw puzzles. We mark the same glittering 
 
72 USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 
 
 eye, the same absorption, the same enthusiasm. 
 But I do beg the enthusiasts to remember that their 
 pastime is a game, and not to confuse it with the 
 study of poetry. 
 
 The following passage will serve to remind the 
 reader of the immense volume of literature of which 
 it is typical. When written in America, this sort of 
 analysis is apt to go one further in abstraction 
 and to take the form of some sort of chart or graph. 
 This particular passage was written by a man with 
 a real power of appreciating poetry. Its subject is 
 Tennyson's Tithonus : 
 
 * As in Ulysses, the movement is slow and regular ; 
 but it is varied in a different manner. Inversions are 
 fewer ; there are but 7 beginning' inversions, an 
 average of 9 per cent., and there is i caesura! in- 
 version. Weak measures are slightly more abundant, 
 48 per cent., and the failure of the stress in the fourth 
 measure amounts to a characteristic of the rhythm. 
 One-half of the weak measures, 18, fall in this 
 place; there are 9 in the third pvosition, 4 in the 
 fifth, and 3 and 2 in the first and second, respectively. 
 There are 21 spondees or 28 per cent., and the frequency 
 of these in the second measure constitutes another 
 characteristic of the rhythm. The second position, with 
 9, is followed by the first with 6; the third has 4, and 
 the fourth and fifth, i each. There is less than average 
 frequency of run-on, 26 per cent. But one of the most 
 striking characteristics of the rhythm is the extra- 
 ordinary number of lines without interior pause, 35, or 
 46 per cent. So that while the proportion of end-stops 
 is usually great there is still an unusually high expK>nent 
 of fluency, 3.37.' 
 
 It was chiefly in its capacity as the enemy of the 
 mot juste that the Imagists fell foul of regular metre 
 
USES AND ABUSES OF METRE JT^ 
 
 and endeavoured to set up in its stead their 
 cadenced verses, but it is amusing to see the way 
 in which their cadences immediately became almost 
 as tyrannical as a strict form like the sonnet. We 
 have rather a good instance of this in Miss Amy 
 Lowell's Patterns : — 
 
 * I walk down the garden paths, 
 And all the daffodils 
 
 Are blowing-, and the bright blue squills. 
 
 I walk down the patterned garden paths 
 
 In my stiff brocaded gown. 
 
 With my powdered hair and jewelled fan, 
 
 I too am a rare 
 
 Pattern. As I wander down 
 
 The garden paths. 
 
 * My dress is richly figured. 
 And the train 
 
 Makes a pink and silver stain 
 
 On the gravel, and the thrift 
 
 Of the borders. 
 
 Just a plate of current fashion, 
 
 Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes. 
 
 Not a softness anywhere about me, 
 
 Only whalebone and brocade. 
 
 And I sink on a seat in the shade 
 
 Of a lime tree. For my passion 
 
 Wars against the stiff brocade. 
 
 The daffodils and squills 
 
 Flutter in the breeze 
 
 As they please. 
 
 And I weep ; 
 
 For the lime tree is in blossom 
 
 And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom. ' 
 
 This is the opening of the poem and the threads 
 are caught up and repeated at the end. Mrs. Wil- 
 
74 USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 
 
 kinson gives an interesting analysis of it in her 
 book New Voices : — 
 
 * This poem is designed in cadences, and in spite of 
 its great variety, the symmetry is to be found, first of 
 all, in the repetition, at more or less regular intervals, 
 of the typical or pattern cadence of the poem, ** In my 
 stiff brocaded gown." (It is the cadence that is re- 
 peated, not the words.) The cadence is reiterated in 
 lines like the following : — 
 
 ** Makes a pink and silver stain '' 
 ** Only whalebone and brocade '* 
 ** Underneath my stiffened gown '* 
 ** But she guesses he is near'' 
 *' With, the weight of this brocade " 
 ** By each button, hook and lace " 
 *^ Aching, melting, unafraid." 
 
 * In other lines we find this cadence varies just a 
 little bit. Perhaps an accent will be changed, perhaps 
 a word with two short-sounding syllables will be sub- 
 stituted for a word with one long-sounding syllable, 
 thus giving the line a new effect with the same time 
 value as the typical cadence. (For there is certainly 
 such a thing as quantity in English poetry, and the 
 greatest poets have felt it and used their knowledge 
 of it, although they have not argued about it overmuch.) 
 Such slightly varied lines are like the following : — 
 
 ** Just a plate of current fashion " 
 And the sliding of the water ' 
 Bewildered by my laughter 
 Underneath the fallen blossoms 
 Fighting with the Duke in Flanders." ' 
 
 Is not the tyranny of the cadence apparent? No 
 poet not bitterly constrained by his form, would 
 write such a line as : — 
 
 * Just a plate of current fashion . . .' 
 
 or use that shocking word ' tripping.' The phraseo- 
 
USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 75 
 
 logy of the whole poem is an outrage ! But we do 
 not feel all the indignation with Miss Lowell that 
 we might feel, because we realise that she is not 
 really writing poetry at all, but making a metrical 
 experiment. But such technique is a curious result 
 of all the protestations of the vers librists ! 
 
 Mr. Maurice Baring is a poet who has written 
 very elaborately-constructed vers libre. His beau- 
 tiful rhymed poem ' In Memoriam ' to Lord Lucas 
 is a good example of the technique of this 
 form. The poem is very carefully tied together. 
 He often uses verbal repetition to fulfil the function 
 of regular metre, for example : — 
 
 * I brushed the dream away, and quite forg-ot 
 
 The nightmare's ugly blot. 
 
 So was the dream, forgot. The dreami came true. ' 
 
 Here is the Hebrew device, only both sense and 
 words are repeated, not sense alone, as in ' A man 
 of sorrow and acquainted with grief,' which repre- 
 sents the usual Hebrew form. But the best 
 passage in the poem comes with the climax of the 
 narrative : — 
 * And after days of watching-, days of lead, 
 
 There came the certain news that you were dead. 
 
 You had died fighting-, fig-hting against odds, 
 
 Such as in war the gods 
 
 Aethereal dared when all the world was young; 
 
 Such fighting as blind Homer never sung, 
 
 Nor Hector nor Achilles never knew; 
 
 High in the empty blue. 
 
 High, high, above the clouds, against the setting sun. 
 The fight was fought, and your great task was done.' 
 
 There is one inconvenience which haunts all 
 
76 USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 
 
 irregular metre, and that is that, no normal having 
 been established, the reader does not always know 
 how the poet wants his quantities and emphasis 
 arranged. For in a regular poem the general beat 
 of the lines serve as implied stage directions to the 
 reader in any doubtful passage. If. in vers libre 
 the quantities are understood wrongly the result 
 may be the accidental changing round of accented 
 and unaccented parts of the line, and this may 
 make a considerable difference even in the sense, 
 But, of course, the whole question of free or strict 
 metre is one of balance. There are certain grea:t 
 obvious advantages in the use of rhyme and of 
 strict metre. Besides its wonderful power of clinch- 
 ing and emphasising a statement rhyme is delightful 
 in itself. Frankau's ' One of Us ' or Byron's ' Don 
 Juan ' would be stripped as bare by the omission 
 of female rhymes as by the omission of female 
 characters. 
 
 This business of rhyme and metre has, of course, 
 also got to be considered in conjunction with poetic 
 architecture. The proper choice of the pattern of 
 the poem will obviously be affected by the scale. A 
 villanelle is charming, but imagine a long narrative 
 poem in a succession of them? When we consider 
 this balance, this choice between the exact thought 
 and beautiful word and the regularity of metre, let 
 us never forget one thing — that is, not to sell our 
 souls to the devil and then not get the price. 
 Which brings us back again to the consideration of 
 prosody. There are certain principles concerning 
 the reader which the writer must never forget. Many 
 
USES AND ABUSES OF METRE "JJ 
 
 rhyme schemes have been worked out by prosodists, 
 many arrangements of caesuras, pauses, of emphatic 
 and unemphatic syllables which the reader will 
 never in this world detect. Most readers cannot, 
 for instance, carry a rhyme in their heads for more 
 than four lines, and there are a thousand and one 
 systems of chain rhymes, hidden alliterations, and 
 so on, which can be at the same time extremely 
 crippling to the poet's sense, and null and void to 
 the reader. Of course there exist many poems 
 which are valuable and beautiful solely on account 
 of their rhythms and of their actual physical sound 
 arrangements, poems in which sense and niceness 
 of vocabulary are both secondary. Such poems 
 have been written at all dates, and they are 
 common to all countries — Persian literature is full 
 of them, the Elizabethans constantly wrote them, 
 Tennyson delighted in them. Such poems are not 
 much written nowadays though search would reveal 
 instances of this pure ' singing ' in Mr. Graves' 
 and Mr. de la Mare's work, and I think the fol- 
 lowing three verses from a war poem by Mr. Brett 
 Young (a poet, alas ! now turned novelist) will 
 justify the labour that we may choose to give to 
 the study of rhythm : — 
 
 * Through Porton village, under the bridge 
 
 A clear bourne floweth, with grasses trailing, 
 Wherein are shadowis of white clouds ssailing, 
 And elms that shelter under the ridge*. 
 
 * Over the bridge where the shallow races, 
 Under a clear and frosty sky ; 
 
 And the winterboume, as we marched by. 
 Mirrored a thousand laughing faces. 
 
78 USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 
 
 * By stagnant waters we lie rotten. 
 On windless nights, in the lonely places, 
 There, where the winter water races, 
 O, Porton river, are we forgotten ? ' 
 
 The images are not particularly good, in fact we 
 are not very much convinced that the marching 
 battalion could be reflected in ' racing shallows.' 
 The sky seems to be both cloudy and clear at the 
 same time, whilst the contrast between the English 
 and the Flemish countryside has been made many 
 times. Again * floweth ' is a disagreeable archaism, 
 and so is ' wherein.' But how obviously silly and 
 beside the point are such criticisms ! The poet has 
 not been aiming at perfection along these lines; 
 he has been trying to make a lovely piece of music, 
 and he has made it. The reader will probably find 
 the tune and rhythm running in his head apart from 
 the words. 
 
 II 
 
 There is one last minor point that I should like 
 to consider here, and that is the relations of voice 
 and verse, of musical and poetic rhythms. I pro- 
 pose to consider it exclusively from the poet's 
 point of view because ignorance of music makes me 
 apprehend their combination from this standpoint 
 naturally, and also because it is a point of view 
 which has been too little considered. I think that 
 all critics, literary and musical, are of opinion that 
 there is something wrong with such a setting as say 
 ' Rule Britannia ' : — 
 
 * The na-tions no-o-o-0K>t so blessed a-a-as thou 
 Shall i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-in their turn to ty-y-y-y-rants fall.* 
 
USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 79 
 
 Some modern poets are of opinion that music is 
 always more or less inimical to poetry when it is 
 coupled with it. They would have us say our lyrics 
 and sing ' Do, Ray, Me,' or in an uncomprehended 
 foreign language which is the same thing. On the 
 other hand, the Hammersmith production of The 
 Beggar's Opera undoubtedly shows us examples of 
 music and words which are insignificant apart, but 
 which joined together form a whole that is irre- 
 sistible. When we come to print it, there is really 
 
 nothing in such a song as this without its melting 
 
 01 *• » 
 
 ^^ ' * If the heart of a man is oppressed with cares, 
 
 The mist is dispelled if a woman appears ; 
 , Like the notes of a fiddle, she sweetly, sweetly 
 Raises our spirits and charms our ears.* 
 
 But musicians say that there is very little in the 
 melting air without the seductive words. Together 
 they are, as the young lady in Fielding would say, 
 
 * pure.' 
 
 That is why I don't think that I can quite agree 
 with Mr. Vachel Lindsay, who does not consider 
 that words and music can ever make a whole satis- 
 factory to a person who cares for poetry. But to 
 consider some modern songs. Lord Berner's set- 
 ting, for instance, of a pleasing, undistinguished 
 
 * Lullaby ' of Dekker's makes too much of the 
 words. He kills them with over-emphasis. 
 
 Mr. Eugene Goosens has tried to be onomato- 
 poeic with Richard Barnefield's ' Philomel ' ; the 
 beginning of it alone is effective : 
 
 * As it fell upon a day 
 In the merry month of May, 
 
8o USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 
 
 Sitting in a pleasant shade 
 Which a grove of myrtles made, 
 Beasts did leap and birds did sing, 
 Trees did grow and plants did spring.' 
 
 So far, SO good — a delightful tripping tune. 
 
 * Everything did banish moan 
 Save the nightingale alone : > 
 She, poor bird, as all forlorn, 
 Lean'd her breast up till a thorn 
 And there sung the dolefulPst ditty, 
 That to hear it was great pity.' 
 
 All this woe Mr. Goossens took far too seriously, 
 and later on when the poet mourns with her : — 
 
 * Ah ! thought I, thou mmim'st in vain. 
 None take pity on thy pain : 
 Senseless trees, they cannot hear thee. 
 Ruthless beasts they will not cheer thee ; 
 King Pandion he is dead, 
 All thy friends are lapp'd in lead ' ; 
 
 he takes the affair almost an grand iragique. The 
 fact is, of course, that the rhythmical changes of the 
 verse itself are quite emphasis enough for the mild 
 academic passion of the poem. Sir Thomas 
 Wyatt's ' Appeal ' has real passion, and of this Mr. 
 Eugene Goossens in his setting has made full use. 
 Was it not also partly successfully wedded to the 
 music because, like the lyrics in The Beggar's 
 Opera, it has a rather unsatisfactory flat rhythm of 
 Its own . : < p^^^ ^ji^ ^j^^^ j^^^^ ^^ ^j^^g^ 
 
 That hath given thee my heart 
 Never for to depart. 
 Neither for pain nor smart : 
 And wilt thou leave me thus? 
 Say nay ! Say nay ! ' 
 
USES AND ABUSES OF METRE 8l 
 
 Miss Frances Cornford's delicate ' The Rag- 
 wort ' is largely swamped by Mr. Arthur Bliss's 
 music, but ' The Dandelion ' (by the same author 
 and set by the same composer) is an admirable 
 example of a happy alliance between voice and 
 verse : — 
 
 * The children with their simple hearts, 
 
 The lazy men that ride in carts, 
 
 The little dogs that lollop by, 
 
 They all have seen its shining- eye ; 
 
 And every one of them would say 
 
 They never saw a thing so gay.' 
 
 Here again the rhythm is not intrinsically strong, 
 and therefore the poem proves ductile to the music. 
 Mr. Bliss has even been bold enough to introduce 
 repetition into the words : this, instead of being dis- 
 agreeable, proves delightful. ' The Dandelion,' 
 of which I have quoted the second verse, is a very 
 tightly packed short poem, and we are glad to 
 have ' simple hearts, simple hearts/ and ' little dogs 
 that lollop by, lollop by, lollop by! One would say 
 at a venture that Mr. Bliss was fond of poetry, for 
 even in this very well finished little poem there are 
 weak places, and he does not, with the usual fiendish 
 pleasure of musicians, pounce upon these, dwell 
 upon them, and draw them out until the unfortu- 
 nate listener squirms with the verbal infelicities. 
 No, he covers them up almost as would an intelli- 
 gent reader. 
 
Chapter X 
 
 POETIC ARCHITECTURE 
 
 Perhaps the thing that has been most often 
 remarked about modern poetry is the fact that, 
 except by Mr. Masefield, very few long poems have 
 been written. There has been some discussion as 
 to the cause of this, those who do not like modern 
 poetry of course saying that it is because the present 
 age lacks the strength for sustained inspiration. 
 Perhaps a study of some of those long poems of the 
 past which have not been wholly successful will give 
 us the best notion of why the modern poet, for the 
 most part, writes short poems. 
 
 Every poet, as Mr. Sturge Moore has observed, 
 when he comes by a bit of the true gold, has to 
 piece his treasure out with a greater or less propor- 
 tion of ' any material that comes handy ' before he 
 can make a poem out of it, because we do not 
 demand that a poet should be a jeweller. We want 
 an architect or sculptor. But there is something in 
 the very nature of poetic inspiration which makes 
 it improbable that, unaided by a more pedestrian 
 faculty, it should be capable of producing a whole 
 at all. Shelley in his ' Defence of Poetry ' gives 
 
POETIC ARCHITECTURE 83 
 
 a very good account of the ' afflatus ' and its neces- 
 sary succession by a secondary faculty : — 
 
 * The mind in creation is as a fading' coal, which some 
 invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to 
 transitory brightness; this pov/er arises from within, 
 like the colour of a flower which fades- and changes as 
 it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature 
 are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. 
 Could this influence be durable in its orig-inal purity 
 and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of 
 the results ; but when composition begins, inspiration 
 is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry 
 that has ever been communicated to the world is pro- 
 bably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of 
 the poet ... 
 
 ' The toil and the delay recommended by critics, can 
 be justly interpreted to m.ean no more than a careful 
 observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial 
 connection of the spaces between their suggestions, by 
 the intertexture of conventional expressions ; a necessity 
 only imposed by the limitedness of the poetical faculty 
 itself. ' 
 
 The modern poet must still add his bits here and 
 there, and piece out the results of his first poetic 
 impulse with his ' intertexture of conventional ex- 
 pressions.' But whereas Wordsworth, often almost, 
 so to say, buried his gold idol under its feet of clay, 
 the modern poet, even where his gold is rather 
 scanty, adds as little as possible, and — when his 
 poem is a failure — often produces an idol not only 
 with no feet at all, but without anything whatever 
 to stand upon. On the whole, however, the impulse 
 — a horror-struck flying from the long and the tire- 
 some — is a good one. It certainly enables a poet 
 to speak to a larger audience. The vast tomes of 
 
84 POETIC ARCHITECTURE 
 
 what we may call secondary material produced by 
 some of our greatest poets, form a serious barrier to 
 many readers. It is often a barrier which the most 
 careful anthologizing cannot surmount, for the gold 
 and the clay may be absolutely inextricable. On 
 the other hand, of course, the modern poet's self- 
 denying ordinance cuts him off not only from cer- 
 tain aesthetic effects but from a certain sort of 
 reader who desires narrative. It is probably as 
 much because he writes narrative poems as because 
 on the whole he remains the best modern poet that 
 Mr. Masefield is the most widely-read of his con- 
 temporaries. 
 
 What are these aesthetic effects which can only 
 be achieved by means of a long poem ? The reader 
 will remember the climax of ' The Everlasting 
 Mercy ' when the hero walks out on a fresh 
 February morning and watches the man plough- 
 ing, hears the birds and sees the sunrise and the 
 first light glittering on the cobwebs, and turns and 
 praises God. Detached from its context, this is a 
 beautiful passage, but its effect is incomparably 
 heightened by its being used as the climax to the 
 realism and often brutality of the earlier part of the 
 narrative. 
 
 Another effect of the mere length of a poem 
 is that the reader gets into the mood of it. The 
 poet dare attempt to be more strange or subtle in 
 his atmosphere in a long poem. This effect be- 
 comes pretty obvious if we try reading such a poem 
 as ' Endymion ' through and then dipping into it 
 and taking selected passages. In reading solidly 
 
POETIC ARCHITECTURE 85 
 
 through it we cannot help being caught in the 
 glamour of that whole magic world, our mood is a 
 pale shadow of Keats' when he wrote it. In this 
 life of enchantment the weaknesses of the poem 
 are forgotten : our spirit is melted by its soft 
 beauties : we no longer want to blame, hardly to 
 criticise, hardly to think which are the passages of 
 greatest merit. But open the poem here and there 
 and you will find yourself turning on to some of the 
 more splendid passages — the description of Adonis' 
 bower, where a Cupid kneels playing a harp, 
 ' Muting to death the pathos with his wings,' or the 
 description of Circe and the ^ haggard scene ' when 
 she taunts and torments her train of beasts and the 
 poor elephant pleads vainly for release from the 
 gross flesh in which she has imprisoned him. 
 
 Take again another kind of atmosphere, the 
 effects that Mr. Masefield gets in ' Dauber ' — the 
 fatigue and weariness of the terrible weeks off Cape 
 Horn, the pitiless iteration of the storm, the 
 wretchedness, exhaustion, and peril. All this could 
 not possibly have been brought before us in a few 
 lines. The work is done cumulatively, the effects 
 are elaborately led up to, our minds are prepared 
 for the restless desolation, the strain and agony of 
 this prolonged physical wretchedness. 
 
 If Chinese or Japanese conciseness could not 
 possibly give us these effects, obviously on the other 
 hand certain notions gain tremendously by shortness 
 and simplicity of statement. Take the following — 
 one of Mr. Waley's incomparable ' Translations 
 from the Chinese.' The effects which the poet, 
 
86 POETIC ARCHITECTURE 
 
 Po Chii-I, is aiming at here, appear to me to be, 
 first, that which painters often try to get in rendering 
 an interior, a feeling of being shut in, of enclosure, 
 of intimacy. With this is connected the psycholo- 
 gical introvertion caused by illness; the sick man 
 by reason of the illness is necessarily concerned 
 with his own body, and this inevitably leads him to 
 the consideration of his own mind. Then this 
 notion of physical and spiritual ' shut-in-ness ' is 
 to be shown giving way to a larger vision, but the 
 reader is to keep the tranquillity of the Quietist 
 with his consciousness that ' The world is too much 
 with us.' 
 
 Sick Leave. 
 
 * Propped on pillows, not attending to business ; 
 For two days I've lain behind locked doors. 
 I begin to think that those who hold office 
 Get no rest, except by falling ill ! 
 For restful thoughts one does not need space ; 
 The room, where I lie is ten foot square. 
 By the western eaves, above the bamboo twigs, 
 From my couch I see the White Mountain rise, 
 But the clouds that hover on its far-distant peak 
 Bring shame to a face that is buried in the World's dust.* 
 
 The shortness of the poem exactly suits the 
 nature of the ideas which the poet intends to convey. 
 An extra line or two, further descriptions of sensa- 
 tions, room, or landscape, would have weakened the 
 sharpness of the impression. 
 
 Japanese poems are shorter still. The ' tanka,' 
 of five lines, is the form in which almost all 
 Japanese poetry is written, and for centuries the 
 poetic inspiration of this language has been con- 
 
POETIC ARCHITECTURE 87 
 
 fined to a plot of ground far narrower than that of 
 the sonnet. There are many poems in Japanese 
 consisting of three lines only. Here are three 
 examples, again from Mr. Waley's translations : — 
 
 FujiwARi No Okikaze. 
 
 * With voice unceasing 
 Sing, O nightingale ! 
 In one year 
 
 Even as much as twice 
 Can Spring come? ' 
 
 HiTOMARO (?). 
 
 * My thoughts are with a boat 
 Which travels island-hid 
 
 In the morning mist 
 
 Off the shore of Akashi — ■ 
 
 Dim, dim ! ' 
 
 Anon. 
 * O cuckoo. 
 Because the villages where you sing 
 Are so many, 
 
 I am estranged from you, even 
 In the midst of my love ! * 
 
 This last poem the commentator says ' He 
 speaks in a parable to a girl that had many hearts.' 
 This explanation brings us to the consideration of 
 some of the qualities which shortness will make us 
 value in a poem. Only in a short poem could the 
 anonymous writer's little frail ' touch and go " alle- 
 gory have been stated just so, and only by an 
 audience who realised the double entendre that is 
 intended can the five lines be properly enjoyed. It 
 is nearly always a small, close, highly-civilised 
 
88 POETIC ARCHITECTURE 
 
 literary society that produces such poems. Such a 
 poem is really the half word addressed to the right 
 hearer. It relies upon allusion, upon the double 
 meaning which must not be pressed too far. 
 
 Japanese and Chinese poetry and the poems of 
 the Greek anthology have all of them 'something of 
 the quality of attar of roses ; the poet's thought and 
 intention has been distilled down. The tiny size 
 of the poem makes us conscious of an immense 
 work of selection and self-denial — the poet had 
 a great deal to say, but not choosing to leave 
 his reader with a blurred image, chose only this, 
 the very essential oil of his thought. But being 
 poetry, and therefore unlike a direct statement in 
 ' tw^o words,' this potent drop spreads by implica- 
 tion its aroma — bitter or sweet — over a wide tract. 
 
 II 
 
 Let us consider the case of the poet who, 
 desiring to produce a given effect, express a given 
 thought, sits down to consider whether it shall be 
 expressed in an epic or an epigram. In all prob- 
 ability, of course, no poet has ever done such a 
 thing, for, as Shelley says somewhere, ' every artist 
 worth the name is something of an artificer ' ; in- 
 spiration and a general sense of its proper technical 
 expression should be simultaneous births. But if a 
 poet ever did find himself in this impossible situa- 
 tion of knowing very w^ell what he wanted to say, 
 but having no idea of how to say it, he w^ould, as far 
 as length is concerned, find himself pulled by two 
 
POETIC ARCHITECTURE 89 
 
 different impulses. Earlier in the book, in trying 
 to define poetry, I said I believed that we should 
 find that one of its essential characteristics is com- 
 pression, and gave as an example Keats' ' Ode to a 
 Nightingale,' together with a most unsuccessful 
 prose rendering of two verses of it, which expressed 
 half as many ideas in twice as many words. The 
 poet would find then on the one hand that the fact 
 that he intended to express his thoughts in verse 
 would tend to shorten them, they would automa- 
 tically, to borrow a metaphor from the kitchen, 
 ' reduce ' and ' thicken.' On the other hand, In 
 writing poetry ideas have a tendency to shoot like 
 a twig in the spring. ' Lo fresh Flora has flourished 
 every spray ! ' The dry stick of a concept is apt to 
 double its size by putting forth leaves and flowers, 
 often flowers of illustration. We can see these two 
 processes at work very clearly in the case of 
 eighteenth century writers — indeed, the period has 
 an inestimable dissecting-room value — Poets were 
 then often quite consciously engaged in the pursuit 
 of writing alternate epigrams, i,e. a couplet or, at 
 most, two couplets of intensely reduced matter — 
 and then throwing out a sort of bow window of a 
 metaphor beginning probably ' Thus when ' or ' As 
 thus.' Young will afford the diligent reader capital 
 examples of what I mean. He would write such 
 lines as : — 
 
 * Autumnal Lycie carries in her face 
 Memento mori to each public place * ; 
 
 and then next moment would let an idea shoot and 
 blossom out from a ' So have we seen ' like so much 
 
90 POETIC ARCHITECTURE 
 
 Bindweed, until it half covered the garden plot of 
 his page. 
 
 This question of length is very often one upon 
 which young writers stumble. Till he becomes a 
 true craftsman, when inspiration and the technique 
 which expresses it will rise entwined into his con- 
 sciousness, we shall often find the 'young poet 
 expressing a pleasing, simple concept in a diluted 
 rambling form and producing a bad poem.; some- 
 times all such a poem wants is to be boiled down and 
 made into an essence. Many a piece of metred 
 prose could be restored to a state of poetry by a 
 mere process of condensation. Again we some- 
 times see — these cases are rarer — inexpert poets 
 w^hose thoughts are subtle, but who feel their 
 energies flagging over sustained work, and who 
 therefore — (unwilling to sacrifice their subtlety) — 
 produce short poem^s either of incomprehensible 
 crabbedness or poems which are, so to speak, 
 hollow. The reader is conscious that the poet is 
 trying to give him something, but the thought has 
 escaped from the cage in which he tried to put it. 
 The reader has a sensation which he may very 
 very likely express by saying that there is 
 ' nothing in ' the poem. This is a trouble which is 
 specially apt to occur in a case where the poet has 
 tried to use symbolic phraseology. 
 
Chapter XI 
 
 POETIC SUGGESTION 
 
 A WORK of art, may, besides being considered as a 
 thing in itself, be regarded as an instrument with 
 which to affect the minds of others. If my theory 
 that poetry is primarily a subtle, communicating 
 medium is a correct one, a careful consideration of 
 what we may call the ' receiving end ' of the poem is 
 obviously worth while. But thought for the reader 
 is just what poets are occasionally apt, with a bean 
 geste to refuse to take, at any rate, consciously. 
 When I say poets in this instance, I really mean 
 English poets, for the poets of the classical tradition, 
 the tradition of the greater part of French, Spanish, 
 and Italian prose and verse, have always kept this 
 side of their business well in mind. Flaubert, in 
 writing of the novel enlarges on the point. As 
 long as he is reading, the reader's emotions are 
 to be controlled, his mind is to be canalised. His 
 powers are to be directed in a certain way, the pace 
 of his reading is to be regulated, he is to become 
 the creature — the puppet — of the artist to whose 
 suggestion he, in the act of reading, submits 
 himself. 
 
 The reader should just as much become the ser- 
 vant of the poet, a fact which was perceived by 
 
92 POETIC SUGGESTION 
 
 Dryden when he wrote Alexander' s Feast, Here 
 Timotheus . _ ^ ^^^^^ ^^ ^^^^^ 
 
 Amid the tuneful quire/ 
 
 seems to regard the resources of his art rather as a 
 doctor might regard the British Pharmacopoeia. 
 Here is a drug, a strain of the lyre, by means of 
 which he can quicken the patient's pulse, here an- 
 other by which he can retard it. Here is a stimulant 
 by which he can rouse him to energy. Here is a de- 
 pressant (a sort of poetical salycilate) by which he 
 can plunge him into the depths of pessimism. Here 
 is opium which ^can make the victim slough off in 
 a drowsy ecstasy all care for this world and the 
 next. Here is an aphrodisaic by which he can 
 make him believe ' the world well lost for love.' 
 
 So Timotheus — apparently by means of classical 
 allusions in whose efficacy we do not quite believe — 
 first brings Alexander to believe himself a second 
 
 J^^'^- * With ravish M ears 
 
 The monarch hears, 
 Assumes the gfod, 
 AfFects to nod, 
 And seems to shake the spheres.' 
 
 Next Timotheus sings of Bacchus, the beautiful, 
 the light of heart, in triumphant jollity : — 
 
 * Bacchus, ever fair and youngf. 
 Drinking joys did first ordain ; 
 Bacchus' blessings are a treasure, 
 Drinking is the soldier's pleasure : 
 
 Rich the treasure, 
 
 Sweet the pleasure ; 
 Sweet is pleasure after pain.' 
 
POETIC SUGGESTION 93 
 
 * Soothed with the sound, the king grew vain; 
 Fought all his battles o'er again ; 
 And thrice he routed all his foes, and thrice he slew the slain. * 
 
 But the King grew tiresome in his synthetic cups, 
 and Timotheus, choosing a mournful muse, switches 
 him off and sings of poor Darius, who, though great 
 and good, was ' overcome by fate ' : — 
 
 * Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen, 
 Fallen from his high estate. 
 And weltering in his blood.' 
 
 Alexander's mood again responds, and he grows 
 ' the joyless victor,' and sighs in pity at the blind 
 turns of chance. Timotheus smiles to see his charm 
 work, and holding that love is next to pity, 
 
 * Softly sweet, in Lydian measures. 
 Soon he soothed his soul to pleasures. 
 
 War, he sung, is toil and trouble ; 
 
 Honour, but an empty bubble; 
 Never ending, still beginning. 
 
 Fighting still, and still destroying ; 
 *^ If the world be worth the winning, 
 
 Think, O think it worth enjoying ! 
 Lovely Thais sits beside thee. 
 Take the good the gods provide thee ! " 
 
 The many rend the skies with loud applause ; 
 
 So love was crownM, but music won the cause.' 
 
 After this, however, Alexander apparently got 
 thoroughly drunk, and in the rest of his vicissitudes, 
 Timotheus was unfairly assisted by Bacchus. 
 
 Of course, the modern poet is met at once with 
 a difficulty, unknown to the old experimenter. 
 Timotheus had his Alexander before him, and could 
 watch the effects of his enchantment, or, to resume 
 
94 POETIC SUGGESTION 
 
 the medical metaphor, could be sure that his patient 
 v/as taking his medicine regularly, and reacting 
 normally. It is in the matter of this closeness of 
 relation between poet and audience that the coterie 
 is so useful. A coterie is really formed by any 
 company of people who have read the same books 
 and seen the same plays, and among whom are to 
 be found auditors and performers. If the poet 
 believes himself to be appealing chiefly to a par- 
 ticular circle, whose antecedents and tastes he to 
 some extent understands, he is able in his poetry to 
 use many means which are, in the case of audiences 
 who are an unknown quantity, impossible to him. 
 As I said in the chapter on Poetic Architecture, 
 Greek, Japanese, and Chinese lyric poetry are cases 
 in point. Most of such poems are very brief — the 
 Japanese tanka is only five lines long — and the poet 
 produces a great part of his effects by allusion. 
 Now allusion is one of the most useful of poetic 
 devices; it is to be classed as an overt sort of 
 symbolism. If you say the four names ' King Lear, 
 Jehu, Robinson Crusoe, Mr. Greatheart,' to me, 
 and if you know that I have been brought up in 
 England, you can calculate that such and such 
 images will be called up in my mind. 
 
 We may not know each other personally, but from 
 the fact that you are pretty sure that I have read that 
 v/hich will enable me to take your meaning, you and 
 I are in a comparatively good position to communi- 
 cate with one another. If you knew nothing about 
 me at all except the fact that I was able to read 
 English, in trying to affect my emotions, you v/ould 
 
POETIC SUGGESTION 95 
 
 be very much in the position of a doctor who had 
 to prescribe for a patient he had never seen. You 
 would only be able to use a very limited range of 
 drugs, drugs to which all human beings were known 
 to respond. 
 
 Now it might be that it would do just as well 
 in your poem if you said that a lady was more chaste 
 than Dorigen, or more voluptuous than Aquilina, 
 that a philosopher was more sophistical than Dr. 
 Pangloss, an architect another Halvard Solness, 
 but you could not be sure that I as ' the general 
 reader,' should know what you meant and, there- 
 fore, these excellent comparisons would be useless 
 as a means of conveying your meaning to me except 
 possibly as pleasantly bemusing scraps of rhetoric. 
 
 If then you are am.bitious, and are not content 
 to write for a minority of knov/n cultivation, if 
 you aspire to an almost universal comprehension, 
 you will have in the case of all your secondary 
 material to go rather far back and consider what 
 are the images, allusions, metaphors and associa- 
 tive stimuli that ' everybody ' understands. You 
 m.ust constantly envisage a type of reader if 
 you v/ant to play your tunes on his heart strings. 
 How carefully Sheherazada, whose head depended 
 upon it, studied her audience of one ! How care- 
 fully the lady in Shaw's ' Man of Destiny ' studies 
 first the Lieutenant and then Napoleon, and fits her 
 cozening tales to their psychology. It is so she 
 makes her puppets dance. 
 
 But, says the poet, you admit I can only do this 
 as far as the bits are concerned that I add to my 
 
96 POETIC SUGGESTION 
 
 poems. Now I write lyrics and so add very little, 
 so your advice is worthless. But this is only in 
 part true. Technical devices which in one poem 
 have been employed by the conscious part of the 
 poet's creative mechanism, in the next will probably 
 have been handed on to his unconscious part. That 
 is ; the cunning of every artificer becomes in the end 
 second nature. If this were not a fact, aesthetic 
 theories would not be worth the ink in which they 
 were set down. 
 
 Memory is apparently to a great extent under the 
 jurisdiction of the subconscious part of our nature. 
 What to-day we do with our wills, if it does not 
 contradict some deep-seated desire in the subcon- 
 scious, will to-morrow find itself adopted by the 
 subconscious and coming out of it automaticallly. 
 This is of course the foundation of all habit and of 
 most sorts of technical skill. 
 
 It is, I think, in giving a reason for the considera- 
 tion of his audience by the poet that the theory of 
 art as communication developed in this book is 
 chiefly useful. English literature has really suf- 
 fered because we have always held a false aesthetic 
 theory concerning the relations of poet and 
 audience. The notion that the poet was there to 
 create beauty, to pour forth his soul, has been the 
 cause of a great deal of the gratuitous Goethic wild- 
 ness that has spoiled so much of our literature. 
 Writers of the Latin races have of course hardly 
 suffered from this malady at all. 
 
 I have quoted Mr. Hueffer on this. As a student 
 of Continental literature, he is acutely aware of the 
 
POETIC SUGGESTION 97 
 
 terrible way in which this lack ot consideration for 
 the reader has led English poets into a thousand 
 faults. They maunder on through pages of dull- 
 ness, they build ' huge heaps of littleness ' in long 
 meandering poems, they hide their treasure in a per- 
 fect jungle of false starts, bad similes, and dis- 
 cursive interludes, a jungle which a false aesthetic 
 creed has made them too proud to prune. Consider 
 Spenser's ' Faerie Queene,' consider the ' Duchess 
 of Malfi,' consider ' Hamlet,' consider ' Clarissa,' 
 consider ' Tristram Shandy,' and half of Scott's 
 novels, and then think what a little Racineism, a 
 little Volaireism in the way of form would have 
 done for these half-buried pyramids of genius. 
 
 But, of course, once the poet has embarked on 
 the idea that all he has to do is to create beauty and 
 to express his soul, it is quite jiatural that he should 
 turn with scorn from the idea of making his sublime 
 creation agreeable to a reader. We cannot help 
 feeling that there is something magnificent in this 
 Gothicism, this turning from filthy lucre. Steven- 
 son, who deliberately wrote to please, and learnt 
 to subordinate his soul to that end, shows a little 
 meanly by comparison with Wordsworth or Emily 
 Bronte. But if we consider art as a means of com- 
 munication, if we think how Spenser's or Richard- 
 son's literary self-indulgence has hindered the 
 conveyance of their message, we shall I think, get 
 a just view of the arts. The ' best-seller ' Steven- 
 sonian point of view is a bad one because it is one 
 that denies the value of the message to be conveyed, 
 and we may compare the works of such writers to 
 
98 POETIC SUGGESTION 
 
 telephones in the hands of men who have nothing 
 to say. On the other hand, the man who considers 
 his inspiration as a thing holy and untouchable is 
 like a man who has a message, but scorns the prac- 
 tical sordid telephone by which he might deliver 
 . it, and merely shouts it to the empty air. 
 
 If the reader thinks that this making of a fetish 
 of the fruits of inspiration is a thing of the past I 
 can, alas, assure him from personal experience that 
 he is wrong. Every Editor of a Poetry Depart- 
 ment will believe me when I say that I often get 
 letters from writers in whose works I have ventured 
 to suggest emendations, saying that they are aware 
 that the passage complained of is a blemish, but 
 that as it was part of the original inspiration, it is 
 sacred and cannot be interfered with. I have two 
 recent instances in mind. It is often difficult to con- 
 vince such writers that the message to be conveyed 
 may be sacred, but that the form in which it is to be 
 conveyed is a matter, not of principle, but of com- 
 modity. It is not the form of words which is divine. 
 Often a verbal formula will be inspired to its writer, 
 when to a reader it is patent nonsense. Our dreams 
 have surely allowed most of us to experience both 
 sides of this. We have been both poet and auditor. 
 The classical example is, of course, that of the 
 philosopher who woke up in the middle of the night 
 feeling that he had discovered the secret of the 
 universe. Not trusting his memory in so vital a 
 matter he took pencil and paper and wrote down 
 the inspiration, feeling that in the morning the 
 whole face of the world would be changed. When 
 
POETIC SUGGESTION 99 
 
 he woke up he found that he had written the fol- 
 lowing sentence, ' There are no differences but 
 differences of degree between different degrees of 
 difference and no difference.' After prolonged 
 cogitation he was chagrined to have to admit that 
 the statement was (Completely circular, and led 
 nowhere. This, to my mind, does not, in itself dis- 
 prove that he had for a moment in the middle of 
 the night known the secret of the universe. What 
 it does prove is the value of having as far as possible 
 an efficient vehicle in which to convey ideas. His 
 form of words proved a sieve incapable of con- 
 taining the meaning which he had entrusted to it. 
 There are quantities of poems like that. For poems 
 for the most part deal with subtler things that are 
 differences of ' degree.' However, in the literary 
 works which we are considering, as ' Polyolbion,' 
 or Spenser's ' Faerie Queene,' or ' The Excursion,' 
 the problem is not quite like that of the dream 
 formula, for the content has not here exactly leaked 
 away (this is more characteristic of lyric poetry), it 
 is merely that a jungle has made it impossible for 
 the reader to get at it. To return to our original 
 medical metaphor, the drug has been administered 
 right enough, but in such a form, the opium em- 
 bedded in such pounds of dough, the caffeine in 
 such pints of milk, that it will probably pass through 
 the body of the patient without affecting him in any 
 way. The poet has got to consider what are the 
 subsidiary drugs which, made up in the prescrip- 
 tion, will enable his patient to digest and assimilate 
 the principal drug. These assistant drugs are, of 
 
lOO POETIC SUGGESTION 
 
 course, all the poetic devices which I have enume- 
 rated in previous chapters. First come recurring 
 rhythyms, repetition, the alternate balancing and 
 contrasting of allied but different ideas, and so on. 
 All these are the rhythmic and incantational stock- 
 in-trade of poetry, the devices by which certain 
 too-insistent mental elements in the reader can be 
 lulled to sleep. Secondly, we have the images, 
 direct or associative, the symbols and comparisons 
 by which the poet's ideas are conveyed to the system 
 prepared by his rhythms. 
 
 Now though the reader is the more strongly 
 affected and modified person of the two, he being 
 the passive agent in the interchange of ideas, we 
 shall find that the poet, largely because he is (or 
 he would not be a poet) the more sensitive party, 
 is very much affected by his audience and its 
 attitude, and this side of the exchange I shall 
 consider in the next chapter. 
 
Chapter XII 
 THE POET AND HIS AUDIENCE 
 
 It has been the complaint of the old-fashioned 
 of all ages that the young of their generation are 
 addicted to coteries. Chaucer, Gower, and Dunbar 
 were no doubt dubbed members of a Frenchified 
 clique. Marlowe, Greene, Nash, and the rest 
 formed a typical mutual admiration society. Dr. 
 Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds were the leaders 
 of a small urban club. The Lake poets were a close 
 intimate corporation. The pre-Raphaelites wrote 
 and painted for each other. The Georgians desire 
 the praise of other Georgians; half the Cubists 
 painted for Matisse or Piccasso, the other half for 
 Mr. Roger Fry. Now this is as natural and as 
 desirable as the division of the various portions of 
 the human race into ' nations and languages.' Of 
 all the inhabitants of the globe, there are at this 
 moment perhaps about two hundred million 
 people who read the English language. But the 
 book which could be voluntarily read by them all 
 would probably not be one which reached a very 
 high level of art. Only a very simple love-story or 
 cookery-book could in fact achieve half-an-hour's 
 tolerance from such an audience, and a cookery- 
 book which would please human beings from 
 
I02 THE POET AND HIS AUDIENCE 
 
 Sutherlandshire via Sherry's in New York to the 
 Malay States; woiilcf not be likely to thrill even one 
 individual. 
 
 Misunderstanding is the begetter of dullness. 
 The pound of butter would find five o'clock insuf- 
 ferably tedious. The best talk is the talk which 
 springs up between intimates who have the same 
 tastes, have seen the same places, and are familiar 
 with the same authors. To the ill-informed upon any 
 given subject you must speak of what is obvious — 
 hence the penny Press. Therefore the artist who 
 at all times seeks to pierce beyond the obvious may, 
 nay, must address himself to the ' good listener ' 
 to whom the ' half-word,' the single stroke of the 
 brush, which is sometimes all of the vision that he 
 can bring back with him, will be significant. 
 
 Consider once more the case of Sheherazada. 
 How curious it must have been to weave fancies for 
 one only. If she knew what books the King had 
 read, how allusive she could have been, how quickly 
 have given him the shades of meaning she wanted, 
 how easily have made him catch her points. 
 
 It would have seemed delightful for perhaps the 
 first hundred of the thousand and one nights to 
 address this coterie of one, for after the first five 
 or six, she must have been thorough en rapport 
 with him. But I should guess that after the first 
 hundred, perhaps she began to find out the dis- 
 advantages of the coterie. For we cannot reduce 
 even so good a thing as a coterie to the absurdity of 
 a membership of one, without discovering that is has 
 latent defects. Suppose the King was colour blind, 
 
THE POET AND HIS AUDIENCE IO3 
 
 or had never been any good at geography, or had a 
 horror of insects, and utterly refused to listen to any 
 similes about busy-bees and industrious ants? 
 Sheherazada with her resourceful subtle mind must 
 often have found that Pegasus flew with wings 
 clipped, have longed for a wider public than the 
 insatiable monarch provided — have felt a little as 
 Henry James might have felt if he knew that his 
 only auditors were the members of an Agricultural 
 Workers' Union by whom his work was to be read 
 and then burnt. 
 
 But if a coterie be of a fair size — a coterie to pos- 
 sess whose ear means that you must print your 
 books, not circulate them in MS — then the poet can 
 be perfectly happy in making use of all the know- 
 ledge that he may happen to possess. If Jones 
 does not take his erudite comparison of the action 
 of love to an ebb-tide with an off-shore wind, or 
 alternatively to the action of Streptococcus, to a 
 two-year-old filly in her first race, or to an a priori 
 assumption, he can be sure that Smith or Robinson 
 will. There will be someone in his audience who 
 knows as much pathology as he does, who knows as 
 much metaphysics as he does, who is even more of 
 a nautical expert, or a racing man. 
 
 But, says the reader, now you are in effect argu- 
 ing against the stifling effect of the coterie, and 
 saying that the larger the audience the better, to 
 which I reply that you have missed the point. 
 These comparisons that our resourceful poet has 
 made are only the trimmings on his poem. They 
 are not absolutely essential to the comprehension 
 
I04 THE POET AND HIS AUDIENCE 
 
 of the word. What is essential is a certain standard 
 of education, The poet must know that his audi- 
 ence are used to certain ideas. The more sensitive 
 he is, the more he is likely to approximate his work 
 to his estimation of his audience's intelligence, 
 though not, of course, only to that of hi-s immediate 
 audience. An appeal to Posterity complicates the 
 case of the poet. Mr. Lloyd George, the typical 
 orator, catches the tone of whatever audience he 
 may happen to be addressing. His Limehouse 
 style was perfectly distinct from the style in which 
 he addresses the House of Commons. That again 
 is unlike that in which he speaks in Welsh to his 
 local Welsh admirers. If we were to isolate him on 
 several occasions before certain different types of 
 audiences, by telling him that there were no re- 
 porters present, we should find that the character of 
 those to whom he spoke affected his utterances still 
 more markedly. So in a lesser degree is it with the 
 poet. If he has a friend who he knows will read 
 his work and this friend has an exquisite fancy and 
 a fine taste, he will polish up the secondary con- 
 scious portions of his production with great care. 
 The knowledge of this critical element in his audi- 
 ence will also, if his friend be kind and appreciative, 
 at once restrain and enliven his subconscious 
 creative process. 
 
 But, the poet may object : ' As a matter of fact, I 
 do not write for any audience at all. I write be- 
 cause I have a sort of desire to write, or rather am 
 conscious of acute discomfort if I do not write. I 
 experience a kind of headache and write it off, much 
 
THE POET AND HIS AUDIENCE IO5 
 
 as I might try to walk off its physical counterpart. 
 In practice, I never think of my audience. Your 
 arguments are specious, but they do not accord with 
 facts.' 
 
 Here I come to what is a little mental experiment 
 with which I think I can prove rhy point that the 
 audience does matter, even to the most superior and 
 high-sniffing poet. Consider for a moment what 
 would happen if, as a poet sat at his desk, there 
 entered to him an old gentleman who offered to buy 
 his entire output from now on for ever, and to pay 
 a price more than generous for lyric, sonnet, epic, 
 triolet and epigram, provided that he might burn 
 every poem as he bought it, and that the poet pro- 
 mised to keep no copy. Suppose the poet was very 
 hard up, and suppose that he agreed to this bargain. 
 What would be the effect on his work } According 
 to the theory that art is the highest form of self- 
 expression and that the artist cares only for the 
 finished product and nothing for potential readers, 
 we should be obliged to say that it would have no 
 effect at all and that the poet would continue to 
 write and to polish with all his former care. He 
 would probably console himself by showing each 
 of his productions to a friend or two before the old 
 gentleman called on Monday morning for the last 
 week's output. But supposing one day the old 
 gentleman discovered the poet's habit of Sunday 
 night readings and — finger shaken in reproof of 
 such subterfuge — refused to buy unless it were 
 stopped. Suppose the poet to be still very poor. 
 Suppose he again agrees. Would not the quality 
 
I06 THE POET AND HIS AUDIENCE 
 
 of his work very soon deteriorate ? It would begin 
 by his leaving an inappropriate epithet here and 
 there, a discursive passage, an ill-thought out 
 simile, but I think it would end with a rhyming dic- 
 tionary and very little care except for the old gentle- 
 man's price. And supposing after a week or two of 
 this, the old gentleman changed his terms a little 
 and explained the purpose of his eccentric conduct 
 to the young man. He held the belief that poetry 
 was pernicious, that although produced by a set of 
 worthy young men, yet it did in the world all the 
 harm that the little boy had up before the magis- 
 trate attributes to the cinema. Hence he conceived 
 himself as doing the greatest possible service to 
 mankind in buying up and burning the products of 
 a hundred facile pens. He yisited in half a hun- 
 dred houses round Oxford, was known to the 
 porters of half-a-dozen colleges. What would the 
 poet say to a contract ? It must be a great deal of 
 trouble to write so much verse and write it only to 
 be burned, and his, the old gentleman's, end would 
 be equally well served by a promise not to write any 
 more. 
 
 * I have no objection to subsidising you. It is to 
 your art, not your character that I object. Con- 
 tract with me for a weekly sum, therefore, not to 
 write any poetry. I demand nothing but your pro- 
 mise. Such an arrangement . I may point out, my 
 young friend, would bring in the same financial re- 
 turn, and would give you leisure for those rational 
 occupations for which the exercise of your poetic 
 faculties at present gives you so little opportunity.' 
 
THE POET AND HIS AUDIENCE lO/ 
 
 Do you not think that after three weeks of indignant 
 refusal the poet would agree? I think he would, 
 and I think that if he were a real poet he would very 
 soon retract his promise, repudiate the old gentle- 
 man and all his theories, refuse ever to see him 
 again and begin to send his verse round to editors 
 once more. 
 
 Now, if we accept the theory of art as a form of 
 communication we shall not be bound, in believing 
 this, to believe that the poe^t was not a sincere 
 maker of beauty or that he was in search of praise 
 or that he was in any way actuated by vain-glorious 
 motives. The fact is that the poet is perpetually 
 engaged in conjugating a transitive verb. He is 
 an active agent in an exchange of ideas, but he and 
 his readers ought never to forget that he is also a 
 special, sensitized human being. Inevitably for 
 different companies he will be a different person, he 
 will write better for a wise than for a silly public. 
 His audience, therefore, has a responsibility to-^ 
 wards him. Not to take the trouble to understand 
 his good work is as unfriendly in them, as it is to 
 praise him when he writes badly. But this matter 
 of praise and blame belongs more properly to the 
 chapter on criticism, for, in my opinion, one of the 
 chief duties ot the critic is to act as spokesman for 
 the else dumb public. 
 
PART III 
 
 (FOR MISSIONARIES) 
 
* Often the sexual instinct has a vast power over a boy's, 
 mind, because it means mystery and romance in a thoroug^hly 
 prosaic world; and the world has become prosaic to him 
 because all the desires of his spirit have been suppressed. * 
 
 Dr. Crichton Miller. 
 
Chapter XIII 
 
 POETRY AND EDUCATION 
 
 A Committee, among whose members were Sir 
 Henry Newbolt, Mr. John Bailey and Sir Arthur 
 Quiller-Couch, was recently appointed by the 
 President of the Board of Education 
 
 * To inquire into the position occupied by English 
 (Languag-e and Literature) in the educational system of 
 England, and to advise how its study may best be pro- 
 moted in schools of all types, including Continuation 
 Schools, and in Universities and other Institutions of 
 Higher Education, regard being had to : — 
 
 (i) The requirements of a liberal education; 
 
 (2) The needs of business, the professions, and public 
 
 services, and 
 
 (3) The relation of English to other studies.' 
 
 The Committee issued a report ((The Teaching 
 of English in England. London: H.M. Stationery 
 Office, 1/6 net). This is a most enlightened docu- 
 ment and really embraces the consideration of in 
 how far the English language will serve as a vehicle 
 for the humanities. 
 
 We all — except apparently Mme. Montessori — 
 know the part which fairy tales and nursery rhymes 
 play in the education of little children. They 
 
1 1 2 POETRY AND EDUCATION 
 
 satisfy the child's appetite for beauty. In such 
 things most children find their first aesthetic plea- 
 sure, and at the same time learn about such things 
 as cats, cows, weddings and funerals, high moun- 
 tains and deep rivers. But the same needs in the 
 older child at school have not been very well under- 
 stood or catered for. 
 
 But to return to the Committee. So wide were 
 their terms of reference, that they came to the con- 
 clusion that they must decide what was meant by 
 the term * A liberal education,' and pronounce at 
 large upon what were to be the aims of such a 
 breeding : 
 
 * Education is not the same thing as information, nor 
 does it deal with human knowledge as divided into so- 
 calle3 subjects. It is not the storing of compartments 
 in the mind, but the development and training of facul- 
 ties already existing. ... It is, in a word, guidance in 
 the acquiring of experience. Under this general term 
 are included experiences of different kinds; those which 
 are obtained, for example, by manual work, or by the 
 orderly investigation of matter and its qualities. The 
 most valuable for all purposes are those experiences of 
 human relations which are gained by contact with human 
 beings. . . . Education is complete in proportion as it 
 includes within its scope a measure of knowledge in the 
 principal sciences and a measure of skill in literature, 
 the drama, music, song, and the plastic arts ; but not 
 all of these are equally useful for the training of the 
 young. We recognise fully, on the one side, the mora], 
 practical, educational value of natural science, on the 
 other side the moral, practical, educational value of the 
 arts and of all great literatures ancient or modern.' 
 
 What subject or what arrangement of curriculum 
 will give us the best value.'* 
 
POETRY AND EDUCATION II3 
 
 * We make no comparison, we state what appears to 
 us to be an incontrovertible primary fact, that for Eng- 
 lish children no form of knowledge can take precedence 
 of the English Language and Literature : and that the 
 two are so inextricably connected as to form the only 
 basis possible for a national education/ 
 
 Most of those who are taking the trouble to read 
 this book will probably not want to be persuaded 
 that it is good for a child to be brought up in the 
 love of good poetry, but in case one of the uncon- 
 verted should have penetrated so far, I should like 
 to say that I believe with the Committee who 
 reported to the Board of Education that English 
 literature is one of the best subjects for a child to 
 study. But I also believe that a perfectly clear 
 and reasoned case can be made out for the solemnest 
 and most official inclusion of a study of the arts in 
 any curriculum. 
 
 And here, as it seems to me, is one of the singu- 
 larly few blemishes in an otherwise admirably- 
 contrived treatise. The Committee never once 
 quite face the arguments put forth by those who 
 prefer music, one of the plastic arts, or perhaps the 
 sciences as a means to culture. They seem par- 
 ticularly rather to forget that there are those who 
 believe that the mind of a child is more easily 
 approached through science. Mr. Sanderson^ for 
 example, shows in his flourishing public school at 
 Oundle the complete working-model of a curricu- 
 lum arranged from the opposite standpoint. Mental 
 balance, clear thinking and intellectual disin- 
 terestedness are best taught through a study of the 
 
114 POETRY AND EDUCATION 
 
 palpable wonders of the material world. Through 
 Darwin, Pasteur, Newton and Einstein, say the 
 advocates of this school, we can more easily widen 
 a boy's horizon and teach him to think, than 
 through Euripides, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats and 
 Shaw. This is to many a new, and even a some- 
 what puzzling point, for it 4s only lately that the 
 scientist has admitted the fact that his aims and 
 those of the advocate of the Humanities are iden- 
 tical. Science has only just ceased to avow 
 materialistic ends. To hear such a teacher as Mr. 
 Sanderson enlarging almost in the words of the old 
 pedagogues, upon the advantages of ' a sound, for- 
 tifying, scientific curriculum ' merely for the for- 
 mation of mind and character and for no immediate 
 material end, is apt to prove a little bewildering. 
 
 The scientist has yet another point to niake as 
 far as literary expression is concerned and in bring- 
 ing out Professor Aydelotte's theory he meets the 
 humanist on his own ground. Professor Aydelotte, 
 criticizing the curricula of a good many American 
 Universities, protests vigorously against giving boys 
 and girls what he calls ' the abstract gift of the gab.' 
 Make boys and girls think, he urges, and in nine 
 cases out of ten, if their thoughts are burning 
 enough, the gift of expression will be added unto 
 them. 
 
 This is, of course, our old friend the Owl and 
 the Egg dilemma come back to haunt us. Is it the 
 desire to express something that gives us the pov/er 
 of expression, or is it desire for self-expression that 
 makes us seek for something to ' express .'^ I be- 
 
POETRY AND EDUCATION 1 1 5 
 
 lieve, however, that this will not be found, on 
 examination, to be quite so real a dilemma as it 
 seems at first. The solution of it is, I think, to be 
 sought in the region of a concept of the arts such 
 as I tried to outline in Part II, that is as a very 
 subtle form of communication between man and 
 man. The reader may remember that the theory 
 there expounded is roughly this : 
 
 We are each one of us shut into our private cell 
 of individual sense perception. What may be 
 called a direct statement — it may be conveyed in a 
 statement in words, in a chemical formula, or in an 
 algebraical equation — is a communication between 
 one conscious intelligence and another conscious 
 intelligence. An artistic statement — it may be one 
 of Beethoven's posthumous Quartets, it may be a 
 passage from Early Intimations of Immortality — is 
 a communication both between one mind and an- 
 other, and also between one subconsciousness and 
 another. The arts are not, I believe, so much an 
 expression of emotion as has been formerly thought 
 — (the emotions are amphibious and may be con- 
 scious or subconscious)— but of the deeper sub- 
 structure of the human mind. The artist's state- 
 ment is the statement of what cannot be put ' into 
 so many words.' 
 
 Though, therefore, it is conceivable (I am far 
 from immediately admitting it) that the exact 
 sciences form the more perfect medium by which 
 one mind can understand another mind, yet in a 
 curriculum based on the sciences the whole mental 
 substructures are left out of account, and it is only 
 
Il6 POETRY AND EDUCATION 
 
 in the domain of the arts that we find the entire 
 nature of man brought into play. 
 
 A boy who has had a purely scientific education 
 may find his will and mind beautifully trained, but 
 I believe that he will find it much more difficult to 
 manage his own character than the boy who has had 
 his irrational impulses humanised through the arts. 
 The scientifically brought up boy may have a noble 
 conception of duty, a fine grasp of the theory of 
 relativity, but some day he will fall in love, or suffer 
 some other tremendous disturbance of the sub- 
 conscious part of his nature. The whole of the cur- 
 riculum which has educated his mind and his will 
 has only served further to enslave, repress, and put 
 out of sight the subconscious part of his being, and 
 when it suddenly springs upon him like an armed 
 man, he will not know what to do with it. Nothing 
 in what he has learnt during the time when, for 
 instance, the sex impulse was reasonably manage- 
 able has now any bearing upon the struggle which 
 he has to go through. At best his training will have 
 given him such tremendous control over his sub- 
 conscious powers — will have so stiffened the repres- 
 sing element in him — that his character will not 
 suffer shipwreck, but even in this case, he will be 
 losing his energies in a conflict which, if he had 
 humanised the forces within him, might have been 
 unnecessary. Mr. Sanderson is well aware how 
 necessary it is that a school curriculum should, 
 above all, fit a boy to live with his fellows and to 
 understand them, and a very good understanding 
 his scholars get of the whole of the rational side of 
 
POETRY AND EDUCATION 1 1 7 
 
 human nature. If strikes were always caused by 
 low wages and bad houses; if wars were always 
 caused by the tyranny of a ruler, or some purely 
 economic condition; if the laws of political 
 economy were not eternally cut across by the laws 
 of human psychology, then Mr. Sanderson's pupils 
 would be well-equipped indeed. But let us take 
 a fantastical example, I think that a child brought 
 up exclusively on Mr. de la Mare's poetry would 
 have a better chance of understanding his fellows' 
 rare rational behaviour, than a boy educated solely 
 through science would have of understanding their 
 irrational behaviour. 
 
 It is on such grounds that the humanist should, 
 I hold, base his claim against the scientist. It 
 is on these grounds that he can maintain that 
 through the humanities men can best reach that 
 state of mutual understanding, sympathy and co- 
 operation which, were it achieved, would so nearly 
 bring us to the state of an earthly paradise. But 
 upon this side of the question the compilers of 
 the Report have not touched even briefly, and those 
 who are inclined to believe in the approach to a 
 civilised character and a developed intelligence 
 through the sciences may find themselves a little 
 antagonised by a merely tacit assumption that 
 everyone acknowledges that we can approach cul- 
 ture best through the arts; by being brought into 
 contact, that is, with other and great minds rather 
 than with marvellous and stimulating facts. 
 
 But in this book we are not considering the case 
 of the arts or even literature in general, but of 
 
1 18 POETRY AND EDUCATION 
 
 poetry in particular, and there still remains the 
 minor question of why we should try to teach chil- 
 dren to love poetry rather than one of the other 
 arts. Here I should like to put forward one argu- 
 ment and one only, which is the argument of sheer 
 brute convenience. There is only one- art of which 
 we can be sure that its practice and enjoyment can 
 be pursued by all the children whom we endeavour 
 to equip for the world, in whatever situation they 
 may find themselves. Life on a South Sea Island, 
 or in an oasis in the Sahara, or at sea, or in Hull, 
 or in Pernambuco, will make it impossible for the 
 painter, the musician, the amateur of ballet or the 
 drama to enjoy his particular form of art. A Medici 
 print and a gramophone enable him to practice with 
 but sadly ' maimed rights.' But the man who loves 
 poetry can nearly everywhere contrive a pencil, a 
 pad of paper and a shelf of books. 
 
 Again from the teaching aspect in the case of 
 national education (the aspect dealt with in the 
 Report) — the argument of brute convenience — 
 comes in once more. We have to deal with 
 millions of children, we cannot, alas, just now 
 afford to supply them with elaborate tools and 
 instruments : we cannot even easily give them the 
 necessary space in which to cultivate such arts as 
 painting and dancing, therefore the arts of litera- 
 ture and poetry again seem our readiest tools. 
 
 How can we best give children cause to love 
 poetry.^ For in the words of Ben Jonson, ' A youth 
 should not be made to hate study before he know 
 the cause to love it.' There are, of course, a number 
 
POETRY AND EDUCATION I IQ 
 
 of admirable text books to be had on teaching 
 children to write English, in which the reasons for 
 the condemnation of the * composition ' and the 
 school ' essay ' are set out. We are here to seek 
 for the forms of literary expression along the lines 
 of what young children would choose for them- 
 selves if left alone. Some quite primitive form will 
 please them best, and it is now usual to begin the 
 young author with that most primitive form of all — 
 the story, not written, but told. The composition 
 and the essay both have their counterpart in the 
 companion art of learning to read good literature. 
 It used to be — alas ! it still is in many schools — the 
 custom to go through a play of Shakespeare's a 
 term. By the old system the soul-shaking, breath- 
 taking story of Macbeth is interrupted for the pars- 
 ing of special passages, or a discussion as to 
 whether the crow flew to Rooky or to Rocky Woods. 
 This method is of course absolutely fatal. The 
 modern method is to let children in school read as 
 grown-up people do, quickly and currently, with 
 occasional skipping and occasional ignoring of diffi- 
 cult passages. But granted a common-sense 
 method, there still remains a practical question, 
 What poetry should be put into the hands of 
 children? This question I propose to discuss in 
 the next chapter. 
 
Chapter XIV 
 POETRY AND THE CHILD 
 
 * Adult life is the antithesis of the nursery in many 
 respects, but it resembles it in this : that it is still a narrow 
 territory of familiar things on the edge of a great expanse 
 of unknown country.* 
 
 Dr. Crichton Miller. 
 
 In body, mind and desires the child of six differs 
 completely from the child of eleven, and the child 
 of eleven from the boy or girl of sixteen. These 
 differences are not superficial, they seem to extend 
 down to the depths of the child's nature. Poetry is 
 concerned with fundamental things, and, therefore, 
 if we are trying to provide a child with a poetic 
 diet, it is no good ignoring or slurring over these 
 universal age-made differences. In its relation to 
 poetry I think we might divide childhood into four 
 ages — the Age of Enchanment up to about seven 
 or eight; the Age of Reason from eight to twelve 
 or even fourteen. This merges into the Ethical 
 Age lasting till adolescence brings the Age of 
 Love. 
 
 Would any poetic missionary who reads this 
 chapter please note that he will find plenty of adults 
 whose poetical appreciation has stuck in one or 
 other of these categories. 
 
POETRY AND THE CHILD 121 
 
 I 
 
 How early can we begin to read poetry to 
 children, how soon will they be ready? The 
 answer, of course, depends on your definition of 
 poetry. Mine emphatically includes ' Hey, diddle, 
 diddle,' and '' Pat a cake, pat a cake,' and ' Leg 
 over, Leg over,' also ' Over the Hills and Far 
 Away ' and ' Here we dance. Looby.' I therefore 
 should give the age as about nine months to a year. 
 The child seems to find in this sort of poetry, in 
 pure colour and simple tunes, its first aesthetic 
 experiences, and poetic rhythms are often popular 
 before the child can speak or apparently under- 
 stand. But leaving Nursery Rhymes aside — in a 
 proper house the child will absorb them naturally — 
 I found that my two daughters when aged two and 
 three and a half, developed a taste for Mr. de la 
 Mare's poems, three and a half repeating : — 
 
 * Ann, Ann ! 
 
 Come ! quick as you can, 
 There's a fish that talks 
 In the frying^ pan, 
 
 Out of the fat, 
 
 As clear as glass 
 
 He put up his mouth, 
 
 And moaned ** Alas I '* 
 
 Oh, most mournful, 
 
 ** Alas, Alack,'' 
 
 Then turned to his sizzling, 
 
 And sank him back.* 
 
122 POETRY AND THE CHILD 
 
 Two years old was almost overcome by the pathos 
 of this. Rather to my surprise no less popular was 
 the highly metaphysical : — 
 
 * Do diddle di do, 
 
 Poor Jim Jay 
 Got stuck fast 
 
 In Yesterday. 
 Squinting" he was, 
 
 On cross-legs bent^ 
 Never heeding 
 
 The wind was spent. 
 Round veered the weathercock, 
 
 The sun drew in — 
 And stuck was Jim 
 
 Like a rusty pin . . .' 
 
 I always dreaded a day when I should be asked 
 for a rational explanation of this poem, but I am 
 thankful to say that the glamour of the conception, 
 or the swing of the metre carried us all over the 
 danger. 
 
 In poems of pure imagination, I noticed a marked 
 difference between two and three, three-years-old 
 being immensely impressed by : — 
 
 * Someone came knocking 
 
 At my wee, small door; 
 Someone came knocking, 
 Pm sure-sure-sure; . . .* 
 
 while two-years did not care for it. The poems in 
 Miss Rose Fyleman's The Fairy Flute were en- 
 joyed by three years old. She insisted upon having 
 the whole book read to her backwards and forwards, 
 over and over again — swallowing the good and the 
 bad together. There are some very bad poems in 
 Miss Fyleman's book, poems that are all that verse 
 
POETRY AND THE CHILD . 1 23 
 
 for children ought not to be, to set off the charm of^ 
 ' If you meet a Fairy/ 
 
 On the whole, however, traditional poems or 
 poems by very ' expert ' mystics will be what chil- 
 dren up to six or seven will like best. Who has not 
 noticed the imaginative child's preference for the 
 ' old favourites,' i,e. the traditional fairy tales. 
 This, I believe, is neither fortuitous nor the result 
 of conservatism. The child, even if it has not got a 
 definite racial memory (the assertion that it has is 
 often made but seems to me not proved), at least 
 responds distinctly, more readily to primitive than 
 to ' made-up ' symbolism. The traditional fairy 
 tale and nursery rhyme employ the real dream 
 symbolism. We shall come across the magic Bull, 
 the Cross-road, the Bridge, the Serpent, the Deep 
 River, the Dark Forest. Wolf and Witch stand for 
 the powers of evil; the Prince or Princess suffer 
 metamorphorsis into small impotent creatures; 
 space is subject to such devices as seven league 
 boot; the chronology is dream chronology. Then 
 in * The Tanglewood Tales ' the seasonal gods and 
 nature myths seem to strike an easy response. But 
 now and then the modern expert mystic obviously 
 manages to ' strike on the same matchbox.' Edward 
 Lear's Nonsense Book, ' Peacock Pye,' and ' Alice 
 in Wonderland ' would, 1 think, be instinctively 
 classed with ' The Three Sillies,' ' The Sleeping 
 Beauty ' and ' Childe Roland ' by any intelligent 
 child. Mr. de la Mare's poems, some of Blake's 
 Songs of Innocence, Stevenson's Child's Garden of 
 Verses, and every sort of legend and traditional 
 tale is the diet for this age. 
 
124 POETRY AND THE CHILD 
 
 II 
 
 The child ultimately emerges from the Age of 
 Enchantment — the age of 'The King of Spain's 
 Daughter/ ' The Seven Champions of Christen- 
 dom/ ' Bre'er Wolf/ of Dis, Prosepine and Pan- 
 dora. When it is between eight and twelve, shades 
 of the prison house will have begun to close — the 
 age of reason has set in, to last till adolescence 
 brings a fresh age of vision. We shall not only 
 have to feed the child on different poetic food, but 
 we may very likely have to justify our own aesthetic 
 creeds before the child's understanding. He or she 
 has begun to ratiocinate, and we generally find that 
 a developing reason is employed like the new three- 
 bladed knife — it is tried upon every substance with 
 which its owner comes into contact. It is a rather 
 destructive, or, if you prefer it, an efficient analy- 
 tical weapon. 
 
 Who was it who said that both the aim and the 
 method of education could be summed up as 'the 
 effort to make a child inquisitive and keep it so? ' 
 If the child has been properly brought up, and has 
 a rightly enquiring mind, he will, as soon as he 
 enters this, the angular age, begin to ask awkward 
 fundamental questions about aesthetics. One 
 hideous point he is sure to bring up, probably 
 towards the latter part of this period, ' How can 
 you prove that it is " better " to admire Leonardo, 
 Augustus John and Flecker, rather than Leader, 
 Landseer, Longfellow, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox? ' 
 I am not sure that the cross-examined elder had 
 
POETRY AND THE CHILD 1 25 
 
 not better admit at once that he cannot prove the 
 superiority of good art, but can only make it seem 
 probable. How? It is no good to talk about com- 
 munication and the subconsciousness to an urchin. 
 The most effective set of arguments that I know in 
 the favour of good art is that summarised by Mr, 
 John Bailey, in an Eton Ephemeral which appeared 
 during the War, called, I think along with several 
 rivals or successors, ' The Red Cross.' He began 
 by saying that in cricket or in football we were 
 ready to take the word of those who had given the 
 most serious attention to the game. In matters of 
 style, if we were not ourselves notable players we 
 deferred to acknowledged experts. Would readers 
 grant to him the same principle in the arts ? — grant 
 that on the whole and in all probability, those who 
 gave most time and attention to aesthetics, that is, 
 poets, painters, critics, and connoisseurs were likely 
 to understand more about the subjects of their 
 studies than could those who gave the arts a thought 
 now and then that they could spare from other 
 business.^ If the evidence of these expert witnesses 
 were to be given the special weight that we should 
 give to that of professionals in any other sphere 
 then we had very good evidence on which to base 
 the assertion that Beethoven was a better musician 
 than the composer of * Where my caravan has 
 rested.' It would probably be difficult to find one 
 lifelong student of music to come forward and 
 uphold the superiority of the latter, whereas it 
 would be easy enough to produce a dozen expert 
 witnesses in favour of Beethoven. 
 
126 POETRY AND THE CHILD 
 
 Also, good art, be it music, painting, or poetry, 
 produces a very vivid sort of pleasure in its votaries. 
 This pleasure has not got a very satisfactory name. 
 It has often been called aesthetic ecstacy. When 
 we are at the ' receiving end ' of a good piece of 
 art we experience an intense, vivid delight, we are 
 lifted out of ourselves, our stature is increased, the 
 beauty of a picture may half intoxicate us, the 
 poignancy of a play or of a poem may be almost 
 unbearably vivid. But those who burn candles at 
 lesser altars, never experience anything more in- 
 tense than a slight feeling of pleasure and grati- 
 fication. They know a passing satisfaction in their 
 Hawaian walse, their ' Monarch of the Glen,' their 
 ' Beautiful Valley of Death,' their ' Chu Chin 
 Chov/,' but that is all. Only the best art can ulti- 
 mately ' deliver the goods.' 
 
 Mr. Bailey, therefore, leaves us, if not with an 
 absolute proof of the superiority of ' good art,' at 
 least with two strong arguments to make in its 
 favour. First, the claims of expert witnesses, 
 secondly, the argument of degrees of pleasure. 
 
 I , personally think that in putting all this 
 forward to the enquiring child, we ought to qualify 
 and hedge to the extent of saying that it is often 
 in pratice difficult to divide art into true and 
 spurious. We must beware of aesthetic snobbery. 
 If we look close enough, the difference between 
 good and bad is here of degree, not of kind. We 
 are presented with a white shading to black, and 
 it is perhaps doubtful if we can find any absolute 
 white works of art while absolute black works of 
 
POETRY AND THE CHILD 1 27 
 
 art are also rare. It is especially no condemnation 
 of a tune or verse or picture that it is popular. Sir 
 Edwin Lutyens' cenotaph is a case in point. There 
 were a dozen songs that were intensely beloved in 
 the War which had considerable elements of charm. 
 I refuse to take up a superior attitude to ' I do like 
 to be beside the seaside.' I consider * Pack up your 
 troubles ' keeps well this side of sentimentality, 
 and I find something rather splendid in its simpli- 
 city. 'I want to go home ' is patchy, but strikes in 
 general a note of satire and melancholy humour 
 most effectively. And if we must discriminate in 
 favour of what are generally esteemed as ' black 
 works of art/ we must do the same for the white 
 pieces. A good many readers are intensely bored 
 by Tennyson and Wordsv/orth, and in nine cases 
 out of ten, they have much reason on their side. 
 They have probably been introduced to these poets 
 in the wrong way, and have started upon the wrong 
 poems. They do not know of the existence of the 
 kernel, and can hardly be blamed for finding the 
 shell hard and tough. The child from eight to 
 twelve or fourteen is a natural iconclast. Let us be 
 frank with him, and give him leave to make an Aunt 
 Sally of dull or pretentious poems whoever may 
 have written them. 
 
 I said we should have to change the child's poetic 
 food about this time. What shall we find will now 
 best satisfy his appetite? His mental change has 
 been towards rationalism, and away from imagina- 
 tive things. We shall find, therefore, that when he 
 desires to experience the pleasures of the fancy as 
 
128 POETRY AND THE CHILD 
 
 he Still will, he will need enormous doses of those 
 anodynes with which in poetry we lull the too-insis- 
 tent logical and analytical faculties. 
 
 I, at about twelve or thirteen years, and a boy 
 whose poetic mentor I was, had, I remember for 
 our favourites, ' The Lady of Shalott,' * When we 
 Two Parted in Silence and Tears,' ' Come not when 
 I am dead,' ' Break, break,' some of the songs 
 from ' The Faithful Shepherdess,' ' The Isles of 
 Greece,' ' Tears, Idle Tears,' and passages from 
 Milton such as * Whom the Almighty Power.' This 
 choice showed, I think, that what we wanted were 
 insistent rhythms, melodramatic or slightly sugary 
 sentiment, and the greatest possible gorgeousness 
 of language. 
 
 This was our choice in matters of lyrics. By way 
 of long poems we used to read modernisations of 
 the Icelandic Sagas, we tolerated ' Hiawatha,' we 
 liked ' The Siege of Lucknow,' and ' The Revenge.' 
 I think ' The Charge of the Light Brigade ' slightly 
 stuck in our throats, but perhaps we were rather 
 sophisticated children. In narrative, next to our 
 love of fighting and battles came our love of any- 
 thing that made our flesh creep. I remember 
 learning Browning's ' In a Laboratory ' by heart 
 and acting it, also most of Rossetti's ' Sister 
 rielen : , q^^ ^j^^ waxen knave was plump today, 
 Sister Helen ; 
 
 How like dead folk he has dropped away ! * 
 
 Nay how, of the dead what can you say, 
 Little Brother? 
 
 (Oh, Mother, Mary Mother, 
 
 What of the dead, between Hell and Heaven?) ' 
 
POETRY AND THE CHILD 1 29 
 
 I think that ' Christabel ' was a little too good for 
 us, though we delighted in the shorter and more 
 rhythmically insistent ' Kubla Khan.' But I re- 
 member how the age of reason boggled at ' The 
 Toothless Bitch ' who bayed so punctually — like the 
 cook's alarm clock. During the dry, Voltairian age 
 of reason and curiosity, the only form of sustenance 
 powerful enough to reach the almost buried imagi- 
 nation is, in fact, generally melodrama — that is 
 violent emotion set to insistent rhythms. 
 
 Ill 
 
 After this most children go through a meta- 
 physical stage, the transition is marked by taking to 
 ' Macbeth ' and ' Samson Agonistes.' We become 
 priggish and read ' Marcus Aurelius.' Then is the 
 time for the missionary to introduce the young 
 person to Emily Bronte's * The Old Stoic,' to 
 Wordsworth's ' Happy Warrior,' to ' Early Intima- 
 tions of Immortality,' * Ode to Duty,' and perhaps 
 to ' Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman.' 
 
 Some boys and girls like Crabbe at this age, and 
 about now I should introduce a little Masefield into 
 the diet, for instance, ' The River ' and ' The 
 Wanderer.' With some young people and the 
 children of some parents, also ' Daffodil Fields ' 
 and ' The Everlasting Mercy.' Mr. Gordon Bot- 
 tomley's * King Lear's Wife,' and ' Britain's 
 Daughter ' would please this age, a great deal of 
 Dryden, and perhaps Pope. The amount of didac- 
 ticism that I could then lap up amazes me. 
 
130 POETRY AND THE CHILD 
 
 IV 
 
 Not till adolescence is complete should we try to 
 get the girl or boy to enjoy love poetry. There will 
 come spring when you will find your pupil spon- 
 taneously deep in it. 
 
 * All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
 All are but ministers of Love, 
 And feed his sacred flame.' 
 
 His soul will tremble to the enchantment of 
 ' Endymion.' If your pupil is a girl don't let her 
 at this stage read for the first time ' Hero and 
 Leander,' ^ Venus and Adonis,' Mr. Aldous 
 Huxley's ' Leda,' or even ' The Maid's Tragedy.' 
 If she has read them before, and is familiar with 
 them, it will be all right, but I solemnly believe 
 and aver that there are two or three years at least 
 in a girl's life when these poems read for the first 
 time, possess a real power to wound and to freeze 
 the opening flower. 
 
 Let the girl be as sentimental as she likes about 
 love. If a girl child is a great reader, and will not 
 be warned, and has a library at her command, then 
 look ahead and see to it that she reads Don Juan 
 early. Such poems act on many natures not pro- 
 vocatively, but like a cold wind. Such a wind may 
 be harmless when the tree is in bud, and whole- 
 some when the fruit is set, but there is a short time 
 when the blossom may be hurt by it, when only the 
 ^ soft airs of Keats and Spencjer should blow. 
 
Chapter XV 
 LEARNING TO READ POETRY 
 
 I THINK most children understand what they are to 
 expect from poetry almost automatically, and if we 
 try explanation and poetical theory with them, we 
 shall probably only darken counsel and make puzzl- 
 ing what was before perfectly clear. But in the 
 case of grown-up beginners, or even beginners in 
 their late teens, the missionary ought, I think, to 
 give the Reason a general sort of idea of what it is 
 that we expect from poetry. As we get older our 
 appreciative faculties decrease and our analytical, 
 critical and comparative faculties increase. Thus 
 (as long as we have not been bored by long dis- 
 courses) of all the things we have learned as adults, 
 we enjoy best what we understand best. 
 
 Mr. J. F. Roxburgh's 'Poetic Procession' is a 
 brilliant little pamphlet intended as a beginners' 
 introduction to English poetry, and made up from 
 two lectures delivered to working men. The 
 pamphlet consists of about fifty pages of fairly large 
 printing, and not only does Mr. Roxburgh have to 
 give in it a sort of lightning impression of half a 
 dozen individual poets and as many epochs, but 
 from the method he has employed he is obliged to 
 
132 LEARNING TO READ POETRY 
 
 set out very briefly what are the qualities which we 
 look for in poetry. This is obviously not only a 
 thing which it is impossible to do completely, but 
 which it is difficult to do even partially without re- 
 course to talk of over and upper meaning and the 
 hypnotic effects of recurring rhythms and of 
 rhymes, and of the metaphorical basis of language. 
 All these ' aids to reflection ' were denied him by 
 the nature of the audience to which he was 
 addressing himself; but he does remarkably well 
 with what is left to him, saying very simply that 
 * what poetry does for us is to give us new ideas, 
 clearer visions, stronger emotions, and also to 
 express as we could not have done for ourselves 
 what we have already thought and seen and felt.' 
 Incidentally the pamphlet is full of amusing 
 epigrams about poets and periods : — ' Milton is,' 
 he says ' the poet of black and white/ Wordsworth 
 appealed to the heart and the senses ; Coleridge to 
 the imagination. ' With Wordsworth it is always 
 Sunday : with Byron it is never Sunday.' 
 
 Had I an audience of adults to convince — an 
 audience not stupid, but bred, say, as commercial 
 travellers or analytical chemists — I should be 
 very much inclined to make an experiment. I 
 should begin by trying to express partly in words 
 of one syllable, partly in parable, the theories set 
 out in this book about poetry as a means of com- 
 munication between two subconsciousnesses, stress- 
 ing especially the notion that by means of art you 
 can express just those things that you cannot put 
 into so many words, and in this connection I should 
 
LEARNING TO READ POETRY 1 33 
 
 relate an anecdote — quoted as a matter of fact by 
 Mr. Roxburgh in a different connection : — ' When 
 Byron was at Trinity, Cambridge, it is said that he 
 bought a large black bear, dressed it in cap and 
 gown, and introduced it to the Dean/ Imagine the 
 miserable crudeness of an attempt to express this 
 piece of satire by direct statement ! Then I should 
 give some examples of satiric and comic poetry and 
 of epigrams, pointing out the conciseness given by 
 the poetic form, and the way in which a poet is able 
 to direct the reader's attention to particular points 
 by means of the devices of emphasis which he is able 
 to wield (such as rhyming on a word the reader is to 
 notice, using the accented part of the line, and so 
 forth). Presently, after my audience were soothed 
 in their reasons by so much that sounded ' sensible ' 
 I should go on to speak of true poetry, and here I 
 should be very much inclined not so much as to 
 mention the ' old masters ' at all — Keats, Milton, 
 Shelley, Shakespeare, and the rest. It is possible 
 even probable that the child's mind is really most 
 familiar with what is most remote, but I should first 
 try to win adults to an appreciation of modern 
 poetry, and I should consider the usual ' standard 
 poets ' purely as an advanced course. I should 
 nurse my hearers up on Brooke, Shanks, Masefield, 
 Robert Nicholls, Siegfried Sassoon, the Sitwells, 
 and so on. All this modern work is near to them, 
 for, as Mr. Roxburgh remarks, ' among other things 
 the modern movement is a movement which is 
 bringing poetry considerably closer to everyday 
 life.' Now an adult beginner would probably start 
 
134 LEARNING TO READ POETRY 
 
 in what we might call a utilitarian frame of mind : 
 the attitude that asks * What will poetry do for me ? * 
 and therefore this nearness to everyday life might 
 be a very valuable quality in our ' didactic 
 material.' 
 
 Take the case of love poetry, for .instance. I 
 believe it is a comparatively mature taste that wants 
 to read of the loves of Aeneas, of the face that 
 launched a thousand ships, of Cleopatra and her 
 worm, and a still maturer that can bear the abstrac- 
 tion of Chloe, Daphnis and Strephon. 
 
 I w^ould far sooner confront my commercial 
 travellers and my ' tired business men ' with Mr. 
 D. H. Lawrence's * If I never see her again ' or 
 Miss Mew's ' Madeleine in Church,' or some love 
 poem of Rupert Brooke's. One of the easiest 
 methods of showing what poetry is and what it does, 
 4S to contrast it with prose, and for this purpose it 
 is very much easier to use Miss Sitwell's poem about 
 the tram, than a passage, say, from Tennyson's 
 ' Princess.' 
 
 I should regard some of Mr. Masefield's poems 
 as very strong cards. Take, for example, some of 
 the passages in * Right Royal,' describing the racing 
 crowd : The groom with the face like yellow parch- 
 ment, the bookies, the wagonette from ' The Old 
 Pier Head,' or this charming neat piece of work : — 
 * The costermongers as smart as sparrows 
 Brought their wives in their donkey barrows. 
 The clean-legged donkeys, clever and cunning, 
 Their ears cocked forward, their neat feet running, 
 Their carts and harness flapping with flags, 
 Were bright as heralds and proud as stags. 
 
LEARNING TO READ POETRY 1 35 
 
 And there in pride in the flapping banners 
 
 Were the costers' selves in blue bandanas, 
 
 And the costers' wives in feathers curling, 
 
 And their sons, with their sweet mouth-organs skirling.' 
 
 From this I should be able to bring them on insen- 
 sibly, a feeling of firm ground still under their feet, 
 to more imaginative passages in ' Dauber ' and 
 perhaps even to the climax of * The Everlasting 
 Mercy.' For the purpose of general leading on, 
 war poems are very useful, the violence of Mr. 
 Sassoon's war poems not less than Mr. Masefield's 
 beautiful elergy, ' August 19 14.' Perhaps here one 
 might begin with William Wilfred Gibson's dying 
 soldier who goes on planning his allotment : — 
 
 * Two rows of cabbages, 
 Two of curly-greens, 
 Two rows of early peas. 
 Two of kidney beans.' 
 
 or perhaps the following, from ' Neighbours ' : — 
 
 * Stripped mother-naked except for a gold ring. 
 Where all day long the gaping doctors sit 
 Decreeing life or death, he proudly passed 
 In his young manhood ; and they found him fit. 
 
 Of all that lustiness of flesh and blood 
 The crash of death has not left anything, 
 But tumbled somewhere in the Flanders' mire 
 Unbroken lies the golden wedding-ring.* 
 
 Then one might go on with one of Mr. Sassoon's 
 rather horrific verses, and round all off with ' Every- 
 one Singing ' or a verse or two from ' August 19 14.* 
 Such examples, so treated, would I honestly believe 
 
136 LEARNING TO READ POETRY 
 
 prove the conversion of many, for we all know 
 some aspect of the emotional significance of the 
 war. We all know that this emotion is no hoax of 
 the poets, but something which we ourselves 
 know — something which, moreover, could not 
 be expressed in a telegram. So .that in the 
 instance of war poetry our task is made easier by 
 the fact that wejiave only got to sort the good from 
 the bad. We shall here find our main argument, 
 * Say it in verse,' accepted, and we have left remain- 
 ing only the less nebulous and therefore easier task 
 of leading our scholars on to a preference for good 
 verse. 
 
 It is at this stage that I should introduce some of 
 my examples of how not to do it, for this is a 
 weapon in whose efficiency I have great faith. 
 Heaven knows, there is no lack of bad war poetry ! 
 We shall easily find bellicose verse about the Hun 
 being at the gate and our sword being unsheathed 
 (here the rhymes will be gate, fate, hate). We 
 could quote sentimental verses on the non-return of 
 Daddy (mild, child, fay, play); verses about 
 ministering angels in hospitals, about ' cheery ' 
 wounded (fag will rhyme with flag). There will be 
 verses to remind us of Campbell's ' Wounded 
 Hussar.' Does the reader recollect this } It is one 
 of the best pieces in my private ' Tin Treasury ' : 
 
 * Alone to the bank of the dark-rolling- Danube 
 Fair Adelaide hied when the battle was o*er : — 
 ** Oh, whither," she cried, '' hast thou wandered, my 
 
 lover ? 
 Or here dost thou welter and bleed on the shore? 
 
LEARNING TO READ POETRY 1 37 
 
 What voice did I hear? 'Twas my Henry that sighed?*' 
 All mournful she hastened, nor wandered she far, 
 When bleeding, and low, on the heath she descried, 
 By the light of the moon her poor wounded Hussar ! ' 
 
 With this ' explosion of all the upholsterers ' I 
 should contrast another ' humanitarian ' war poem : 
 
 * Ah, were I King of Spain, 
 Or better. Pope of Rome, 
 Vd have no fighting men abroad, 
 No weeping maids at home. ' 
 
 I am sure that the old-fashioned advertisers were 
 right. There is nothing so effective as the two pic- 
 tures of the man ' Before taking Nurse Trumping- 
 ton's word-famed drops, and after.' Particularly 
 is the method useful in the arts. For in trying to 
 pass on our own pleasure, we must never forget the 
 limitations of criticism, and chiefly that prime 
 limitation which I have tried to prove — the fact that 
 the whole point of the content of the arts is that you 
 cannot express it in a direct statement. That is 
 why, especially to a non-adept audience, example is 
 finally worth more than precept. Though I believe 
 that, adult man being a rational creature, precept 
 also has its place because it meets the interruptions 
 and objections of the ratiocinating part of his 
 nature. Again, if you teach largely by giving 
 examples, the reader has not got to take all the 
 points on your ' say so.' The almost infinite bad- 
 ness of ' fair Adelaide ' sticks out quite obviously. 
 But \ve must be ambitious and take popular 
 fayourites in this way. We may find it rather more 
 difficult to explain what is wrong with some of Ella 
 
138 LEARNING TO READ POETRY 
 
 Wheeler Wilcox's poems. They have a curious un- 
 nerving vigour. Perhaps the best way of exposing 
 her faults is to contrast some poem of hers with a 
 good poem, if possible upon the same subject, or, 
 her subjects being most strangely chosen, if the 
 missionary's ingenuity does not run to this, then at 
 any rate with a poem which strives to attain the 
 same emotional effect. 
 
 II. 
 
 There is a question which is sometimes asked by 
 those who would like to like poetry, and that is 
 whether it is a good thing to learn by heart .^ I 
 think most emphatically that it is, but the learner 
 mu^t be very careful in the choice of his piece. It 
 must be something that he really likes, that has 
 really struck his imagination; he must feel that 
 he would like to live with it, must choose it as if he 
 were choosing a wife. 
 
 Another conundrum. We may be asked to define 
 poetry, to draw the line between poetry and prose. 
 This is, of course, quite impossible, but the question 
 at least gives us a text for impressing on our 
 readers that it is the spirit, the intention, that makes 
 poetry, not the letter, and that a metrical arrange- 
 ment of words is only the method by which poetry 
 usually seeks to attain certain ends. But verse is 
 no more necessarily poetry than a non-metrical 
 arrangement is necessarily prose. 
 
LEARNING TO READ POETRY 1 39 
 
 * Thirty days hath September, 
 April, June, and November, 
 All the rest have thirty-one 
 Excepting February alone. 
 
 Which has but twenty-eig-ht days clear 
 And twenty-nine in each Leap Year.* 
 
 Vers libre, polyphonic prose and prose proper,, 
 are all forms which shade into one another. There 
 is no question of merit — Abraham Lincoln's 
 Gettysburg speech and Second Inaugural are 
 both true prose; 'Dream Fugues,' 'Urn Burial,' 
 ' Can Grande's Castle ' we might take as 
 representing polyphonic prose. Some of Mr. 
 Richard Aldington's Free Verse or Mr. Squire's 
 poem about the football match are both in the next 
 stage, and though here and there using a prose 
 rythm, have begun to be printed like verse. And 
 so on, and so on, until we get by minute stages to 
 such verse as : 
 
 * There be none of Beauty* s daughters 
 With a magic like to thee. 
 
 And like music on the waters 
 Is thy sweet voice to me : ' 
 
 We might here indeed take an analogy from the 
 kitchen. The nature of the poem, as of the jelly 
 or the blanc-mange, remains unchanged whether it 
 is put into a mould representing a hedgehog, or 
 turned out of a pudding basin, or broken up into 
 glasses. Some people complain that if, in shape, it 
 is to represent a bird or an elephant, the cook is 
 likely to make it too stiff. On the other hand, the 
 non-expert guest, who does not know what excellent 
 
140 LEARNING TO READ POETRY 
 
 things have gone into the mixture, may be dis- 
 tressed by having it served to him in a form to 
 which he is not accustomed. 
 
 Last of all, I should try and warn my audience 
 against what I believe to be a pernicious fallacy, 
 and that is that the object of cultivating the taste is 
 to become more austere. Austerity is at best a 
 negative virtue. Matthew Arnold says : ' We must 
 accustom ourselves to a high standard and to a 
 strict judgment, and thus learn to recognise the best 
 in poetry.' Mr. Sturge Moore agrees with him. 
 ' We must maintain,' he says, ' a determination to 
 become only intimate with verse that stands the test 
 of our most active moods, instead of letting the 
 luckless day, with its relaxed temper, console itself 
 with something that we have perceived to be second- 
 rate. For in proportion as we are loyal to our taste, 
 it will become more difficult to please, until at last 
 a really sound judgment is acquired.' He goes on 
 still further to identify good taste with being hard 
 to please and its cultivation as an eradication of bad 
 habits of mind. I believe that this is all nonsense. 
 Try and find out what is liked by people whose 
 judgment you trust, if at first you don't like it your- 
 self ; try to find out what they see in the particular 
 author or passage, but never set out to try and dis- 
 like even fustian. I believe there is something 
 automatically ' refining ' in the best examples of art, 
 and that if we can care for two or three really good 
 poems for themselves and not for any adventitious 
 reason, that will automatically make us dissatisfied 
 with ' fake poetry.' And after all, what if we were 
 
LEARNING TO READ POETRY I4I 
 
 to get pleasure from the second-rate? True the 
 public has a duty to the poets who write for it, and 
 we ought to try to distinguish between the good and 
 the bad; but admiration is to some extent a For- 
 tunatus' purse, and in admiring something which 
 is perhaps not strictly worthy of admiration, we are 
 not necessarily robbing some other poet of his right- 
 ful heritage. In this matter of praise and apprecia- 
 tion it is as true as it is in the world of law, that it is 
 better to let off two or three guilty prisoners, than 
 to condemn one innocent one. It is better to over- 
 praise a few earnest but mediocre souls than to 
 underpraise one Keats. 
 
Chapter XVI 
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE POETRY 
 
 In these days of poetic liberty we desire an oblique 
 glimpse of something exquisite rather than the 
 flawless statement of the commonplace. But even 
 in this happy epoch there remains the yard-stick. 
 Mr. Munro and Mr. Squire, and in a less degree 
 Mr. Middleton Murry, are exceedingly sure of the 
 complete accuracy and efficacy of their measures. 
 They are also quite sure that below a certain rather 
 high standard of proficiency it is better not to write, 
 and it is sinful to publish. Possibly they are right. 
 The standard of technical ability, both in prose and 
 verse, is low in England — much lower than in 
 France, for instance. Our young poets — those who 
 are most promising — are often the better for a good 
 ' head-masterish ' talking to. Many of them need a 
 fright which will lead them in future to take greater 
 pains with their verses before they ask the durability 
 of printers' ink for them. But let us remember the 
 parable of the Wheat and the Tares. The house- 
 holder was so anxious that the good seed should not 
 be rooted up and spoilt that he was very lenient with 
 the weeds. Such, it seems to me, should be the atti- 
 tude of the critic. The stream of bad verse which 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE POETRY 1 43 
 
 pours Weekly from a thousand pens is, after all, 
 a negative evil. Keats said the last word about 
 a beautiful thing. One beautiful poem is a positive 
 good — a palpable new jewel for the public treasury. 
 It more than cancels out the ninety and nine. 
 
 Poets are as various as their works, and there is 
 probably no general piece of advice as to the 
 writing of verse that can be given even to young 
 poets. Perhaps a few concrete examples of do's 
 and dont's illustrated by poems sent in in the 
 ordinary way to The Spectator may be of use to the 
 beginner — to whom alone this chapter is addressed. 
 
 Two or three poets have been kind enough to 
 allow me to give, as samples of several varying 
 grades in the art of poetic proficiency, verses which 
 they have submitted to The Spectator for publica- 
 tion. The first is a slight lyric, ' Moon ' : 
 
 * Long- years ago the moon, 
 When earth was flame, 
 Left his embrace and came 
 Out to the arms of space, 
 Hiding for shame her face. 
 
 Earth, when she fled, grew cold, 
 Mourned her with tears in vain, 
 
 But still as the seasons pass, 
 Love draws the twain : 
 
 Earth strives ag'ain to hold 
 
 Moon, till she hides her face, 
 Fearing love's pain. ' 
 
 The first verse is agreeable and the notion attrac- 
 tive, but in the second verse we feel that the ex- 
 pression of the thought is manufactured. Now the 
 first verse could not stand alone, so the poet 
 
144 LEARNING TO WRITE POETRY 
 
 completed his work as best he could. All poets 
 inevitably fill up faults or cracks with inferior 
 material to some extent. But we have to consider 
 the proportion of primary and secondary matter 
 and the workmanship of the pedestrian parts. In 
 ' Moon ' there are seven clay lines to five golden, 
 and the f aultiness of the last two lines is obvious. 
 
 A poem on autumn by the same author has very 
 good points, despite a line which necessitates ' sad- 
 denmg' But it has good lines in it — for example, 
 despite its more than doubtful ornithology : — 
 
 * All birds are silent, crouching in their nests, 
 Rain-soaked and tossed unending* by the wind.' 
 
 An effect of dripping melancholy is well achieved 
 and maintained. 
 
 There is another poem on autumn in the collec- 
 tion. The first fault I have to find with this is that 
 it consists of seven verses, while the idea of the 
 thing could have been expressed in about four. In 
 the second verse we find ' 'tis autumn.' Then in 
 verse three : — 
 
 * The leaves fall softly, red and brown. 
 And now and then a chestnut ripe 
 Few of God's choir seem now to pipe. 
 The yearly sands are running down. 
 And all is beautiful ..." 
 
 ' Few of God's choir seem now to pipe ' is obviously 
 bad. It is quite out of keeping with a poem which 
 set out to be a visualization — a fairly realistic pic- 
 ture. To call birds ' God's choir ' belongs to a 
 different imaginative ' layer ' ; and though it might 
 conceivably be introduced effectively where a com- 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE POETRY 1 45 
 
 pletely fresh turn was to be given to a poem, it cer- 
 tainly must not be vaguely set in like that. ' The 
 yearly sands are running down ' ' And all is beauti- 
 ful ' are two disconnected ideas very unhappily 
 married. Later on ^the poet asks, What is the 
 meaning of all this gentle beauty.^ 
 
 * . . . Need we ask? 
 To answer is an easy task. 
 Earth hears Death's footstep on the stair.' 
 
 We thought we were out of doors — what stair .'^ As 
 for verse seven, it is too weak to endure the torture 
 of dissection. I pass on to a more robust victim. 
 Here is another long poem, ' Legerdemain.' Its 
 author is about eighteen : — 
 
 * The Old Man of Dreams bore me, pickaback, 
 Clasping his shoulders bent with magic sack.* 
 
 The Old Man takes the narrator in this metre to 
 the end of the world where stars are made. There 
 sits Time, mighty, on a throne of fire : the Hours 
 frolic round him. The Hours sing : — 
 
 * Men shall always woo us 
 (We care not for their love or hate). 
 They think that they may bind us 
 (We fashion their sorry fate) ... * 
 
 The jolt is really atrocious, for the object of intro- 
 ducing short line lyrics into the middle of a narra- 
 tive poem is surely to produce a musical effect; to 
 edge, as it were, further away from the prose- 
 characteristics that the narrative necessitated. 
 Limping lines are here, therefore, unforgiveable, 
 
146 LEARNING TO WRITE POETRY 
 
 and in this lyric, which consists altogether of eight 
 lines, there are no fewer than four lame ones. But 
 to continue. An Hour goes weeping to Time, say- 
 ing she is lost : she has not performed her appointed 
 watch on earth and has missed her turn. Then 
 the poet commits the hideous mistake of making 
 Time rise from his throne, whereas before, his de- 
 scription had given us quite a pleasing, Blakeian 
 idea of Time as a vast elemental creature whose 
 top reached to the heavens and his feet to the ends 
 of the earth. But when he stands to address the 
 meeting he dwindles. There follows an obscure 
 verse in which the poet, prompted by the Old Man 
 of Dreams, consents to take the Hour for his bride, 
 and we end with the poet somewhat entangled in his 
 metaphor. It is impossible to make sure whether 
 the Hour does or does not change from a personifi- 
 cation to a subdivision of Time during which the 
 poet may consider the charms of an earthly beloved. 
 I apologize to the authors of these poems for 
 dissecting their mistakes and disregarding their 
 virtues. 
 
 Young poets very often write to me for advice. 
 They send me their entire life's work, or their rela- 
 tions do, and ask me ' to class these 60 poems in 
 order of merit. A, B or C I don't know that my 
 advice is ever any good. As a rule I refer them to 
 some good books of criticism — very often Mrs. 
 Wilkinson's ' New Voices ' and Mr. Sturge Moore's 
 ' Some Soldier Poets,' and, if I think their work is 
 inclined to be ' soppy,' to Mr. Harold Munro's 
 ' Some Contemporary Poets, 1920.' To the more 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE POETRY 1 47 
 
 intelligent and promising I should now also, of 
 course, always recommend Mr. Graves' new book 
 ' On English Poetry.' 
 
 I have been looking through the rather dreary 
 records of the advice that I have given. A good 
 m.any people I seem to have accused of sitting 
 down to write poetry, rather than trying to express 
 any very vivid thought or emotion, the consequence 
 being the production of a mild type of work without 
 any very active faults, but which does not seem par- 
 ticularly worth writing. A poet who got a certain 
 amount of emotion into his verse was not careful 
 of his words, and at regular intervals introduced a 
 cliche which acted as a complete non-conductor to 
 the reader's emotion. From this poem I collected 
 ' winging a thought,' ' a-thrill,' ' 'tis,' ' scarce,' ' the 
 great White Ray,' ' things that matter.' Another 
 poet put ' knew ' and ' too ' in such a position in a 
 vers libre poem that they sounded as if they were 
 meant to rhyme. Another seems to have sent a 
 villanelle. But I object that I don't know what the 
 ' starry stream ' is, or believe in ' a song made from 
 a sigh.' Another poet calls his verse, ' The Mirror 
 of the Spirit ' and uses ' thee ' and ' thou ' through- 
 out — ' beauteous ' and ' majestic quiver ' appear to 
 have been expressions that I found fault with say- 
 ing ' I think that perhaps you felt that your 
 thoughts and form were becoming a little prosaic 
 and hoped to increase the poetic effect by using a 
 diction which we usually associate with poetry. I 
 do not think this device is ever a success.' (The 
 readers of Mrs. Wilkinson's New Voices will re- 
 
148 LEARNING TO WRITE POETRY 
 
 member her remarks about what she calls the 
 ' Hath-doth ' school.) 
 
 — '' You ask for criticism of your poems. I think 
 perhaps the best criticism is contained in your own 
 title for them — you call them * Bird Poems.' That 
 is to say that you do not seem even to be ambitious 
 of being more than a writer of minor verse. The 
 first one, ' The Blackcap/ is pretty, but I don't like 
 — in the second and third lines of the first verse — 
 ' clap ' and ' blackcap ' being so near together. It 
 is all right visually, but try and say it aloud and you 
 will notice the awkwardness — " 
 
 A lady I accuse of not being careful about words 
 and employing the phrase * mystic hush.' 
 
 Another uses ' throb ' as a transitive verb. 
 
 Another poet is not careful enough of sense in 
 his sonnet, in that he brackets ' 'dust and mold.' 
 ' Mold is damp and clinging and dust flies about.' 
 When the " dust-and-mold " further proceeds to 
 '* engulf in its strife," the reader feels you have 
 got tangled up in your meaning, or are writing on 
 a purely verbal plane. I do not fancy the three 
 last lines really mean anything. The reader sees 
 what you mean, but you have not expressed it. I 
 should imagine that you read rather too much 
 Wordsworth and even perhaps Young's '' Night 
 Thoughts " or Thompson's '* Seasons." ' 
 
 Another sonneteer apparently rhymed * flock ' 
 and * awoke,' he then proceeded to *feel a rumbling' 
 and to ' hear a struggle.' Afterwards somebody — 
 the dawn, I think, — was * clothed in beams of ruddy 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE POETRY 1 49 
 
 light/ but continued to throw ' a pale vagueness/ 
 ' Haply ' also occurred. 
 
 I have quantities of poems by children sent me. 
 Fourteen seems a favourite age at which to aspire 
 to publication. The chief fault of these poems is 
 that they are either very stilted and read like verse 
 essays by Dr. Johnson — the result of having been 
 obliged to take a country walk, — or else they are 
 about elves and birds and are conveyed in a horribly 
 tinkling metre. These are apt to have such titles 
 as ' The Song of the Hill-top Sprite.' 
 
 I never feel a great conviction that my letters of 
 advice are much good — little squalid scraps of rule- 
 of-thumb empiricism, that is what they amount to. 
 However, they apparently give pleasure and en- 
 couragement. The only real advice that one can 
 give to a poet is that he must try to read the right 
 stuff and to try and acquire the right attitude of 
 mind towards his work. Especially I should advise 
 young poets not to despise theory, or to go off with 
 the idea that rules will stop the fine flow of inspira- 
 tion. To argue like this shows no psychological 
 knowledge and very little commonsense, for the 
 whole of human practice in acquiring skill, es- 
 pecially, of course, manual skill, is based on the fact 
 that what you do consciously to-day, to-morrow and 
 the next day, you will do in a week's time automati- 
 cally. To practise your music, or service at tennis, 
 or off-drive at cricket is really the process of teach- 
 ing tricks to your subconsciousness. Just so you 
 can get into the habit of writing skilfully. If you 
 at first consciously seek certain merits and try to 
 
150 LEARNING TO WRITE POETRY 
 
 avoid certain faults, you will find yourself working 
 automatically on a much higher level of skill, — 
 you will find that you will have educated the aff- 
 latus. I do not mean to say that the young poet 
 must write quantities of practice poems, I should 
 think in most cases this would be as great as mistake 
 as for an athlete to train by rushing as hard as 
 possible every day up a very steep hill carrying a 
 heavy load, both processes would be likely to strain 
 the heart — both are in fact too arduous and dis- 
 agreeable. But every poet, indeed every writer, 
 goes about turning phrases to himself, just as every 
 painter goes about making compositions out of 
 what he sees. Here is the medium in which to 
 practise. 
 
 Another thing in which the poet can help himself 
 is in seeing to it that he has good conditions for his 
 work. If possible he ought to be in constant con- 
 tact with other poets, or at any rate with other 
 artists of some sort. If this is really impossible (it 
 seldom is), at least let him read a great deal, to 
 counteract the suggestion which is then sure to be 
 to some extent present in his environment, that * all 
 this is great nonsense.' 
 
 But perhaps the most difficult problem of all that 
 many young poets have to face is the financial one. 
 I think for most imaginative writers, especially 
 when they are young, it is extremely bad absolutely 
 to be obliged to write in order to pay for meat, 
 bread and washing. Such a goad produces a sort of 
 f everishness and self-consciousness that makes work 
 a torture. For most writers it is far better to have 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE POETRY I5I 
 
 a mechanical profession, even if such a profession 
 gives him disagreeably little time for his real work. 
 The more mechanical that profession is the better; 
 — I mean that to be a schoolmaster or to keep a 
 shop does not at all meet the case. It would be 
 far better to be a tram-conductor. Agricultural 
 labour, navvying and boiler-rivetting, of course, 
 on the other hand, would be no good. A poet is 
 not likely to do good work whose mind is drugged 
 by the deadly physical fatigue which overcomes the 
 amateur at such tasks. 
 
 And one more tip. Though a young writer must 
 read a great deal, let him beware of poetic authors 
 who have the sort of effect that Sir Thomas Browne 
 has upon prose writers. Sir Thomas Browne's 
 style is more catching than the plague; it is an 
 extremely beautiful style, but it is almost always 
 highly unsuitable for the business that the modern 
 writer has in mind. 
 
 But I don't think that the young poet ought ever 
 to be afraid of reading too much in general lest he 
 should find that all the good songs have been sung. 
 We live in the early time of a new phase and, unless 
 the poet knows himself to be incurably imitative, it 
 does not matter to him very much how often a 
 thing has been said as long as it has not been said 
 within the last fifteen years. For, if he has a 
 modern mind, he will find that he approaches his 
 subject so completely from a new angle that it will 
 not matter in the least if he has tried to express the 
 same things as some older poet. This is, of course, 
 not only true of this age. It is obvious that it would 
 
152 LEARNING TO WRITE POETRY 
 
 not matter at all to Dryden that he and Gower had 
 both written about Cressida; it would not have 
 mattered to Dr. Johnson if Massinger had treated 
 the subject of ' Irene,' it would only have been an 
 obstacle to his writing his tragedy if Pope had 
 done so. 
 
 ' But/ says the poet, ' it is the moderns I fear. I 
 don't want to cramp myself by knowing how Robert 
 NichoUs has treated a theme of which I propose to 
 write.' My advice to him is, however, to be ready 
 to know the worst. If he has any contradictious- 
 ness in his nature the fact that Robert NichoUs has 
 treated it in one way, will immediately suggest to 
 him an alternate method. 
 
 Besides it is essential that he should read a great 
 deal of modern poetry. Only, I think, by reading 
 verse of their own epoch can writers or readers learn 
 anything about the essence of poetry. As it is 
 exemplified in the contemporary verse of any age, 
 poetry shows stripped of a great deal of the adven- 
 titious glamour which surrounds the products of a 
 different epoch. We are almost all of us in danger 
 of liking obsolete words and poetic diction too much 
 or too little. It is everything for the young person, 
 and especially the young writer to have a chance 
 of seeing the essential qualities of poetry without 
 the slight muddle which this complication intro- 
 duces. 
 
PART IV 
 
 (FOR CRITICS) 
 
Chapter XVII 
 
 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 
 
 Mr. Flint, in an amusing essay in one of the Poetry 
 book-shop's Chapbooks, declared that the critic and 
 the reviewer not only never are, but never can be of 
 any use in the republic of letters. Critics are, he 
 and Mr. Harold Monro hold, nothing but middle- 
 men who snatch an unearned profit, both of money 
 and applause, by coming officiously between con- 
 sumer and producer. But of all critics he arraigns 
 the reviewer especially. The reviewer, he says, 
 with his summaries too often gives the reader the 
 impression that to have perused his review is almost 
 the same as to have read the book reviewed, while 
 as a rule, except in the case of negligible literary 
 productions, a summary gives a maimed and dis- 
 torted view of the author's real achievement and a 
 misleading impression of his views. It is almost 
 bound, in any case, to be a version which, jn the 
 case of an argument, is a resume with all the sub- 
 tlety left out, and in the case of a work of art, is 
 a skeleton with all the beauty gone. This is, he 
 says, particularly true in the case of poetry. 
 
 * The only proper motive of the review is to call 
 attention to something" good and new. And this is 
 exactly the motive which least often animates the re- 
 
156 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 
 
 viewer. That it should be so is not wholly the reviewer' s 
 fault. For reviewing; is, unfortunately, a means of 
 livelihood ; though it is known to be one of the most 
 corrupting, degrading, and badly-paid means of liveli- 
 hood that a writing man can ply. The reviewers are 
 merely the lowest wage^slaves in the modern literary 
 system. Many intelligent men find themselves in this 
 condition ; it is part of the social organisation or dis- 
 organisation that writers who have honest work of their 
 own to do find that this is the only work for which they 
 can be paid. Consequently, it is hardly to be expected 
 that the reviewer, unless he has become so depraved as 
 to have no other function, should enjoy reviewing. 
 From the point of view of any man with the slightest 
 intellect or taste, there is not enough good verse to 
 occupy a reviewer one week out of the year. There is 
 not enough pernicious work worth attacking to occupy 
 him another week. So that twenty-five twenty-sixths of 
 the reviewer's time must be occupied with books that 
 are perfectly colourless. And the dilemma is this : 
 either a reviewer is a bad writer and bad critic, and he 
 ought not to be allowed to intervene between books 
 and the public ; or he is a good writer and a good critic, 
 and therefore ought not to be occupied in writing about 
 inferior books. * 
 
 Reviewing, he goes on, is only valuable in so far 
 as it is discreet advertisement : ' It cannot be too 
 often insisted that the purpose — not of writing 
 poetry, but of publishing it — should be primarily 
 to give pleasure ; and that the purpose for which we 
 suppose reviewing was divinely intended was 
 primarily to indicate such works as can give the 
 best pleasure to the people who otherwise may fail 
 to hear of their existence.' 
 
 Here Mr. Flint is beginning to perceive what is 
 the true, if humble, function of the critic and of the 
 
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 1 57 
 
 reviewer. Hitherto, be it noticed, he has spoken 
 entirely from the point of view of the ' producer,' 
 never from that of the 'consumer/ But con- 
 sider, for instance, the debt owed by the public 
 to Mr. Edmund Gosse, that incomparable sleuth- 
 hound. But for him, how many treasures would 
 have been lost.^ We should have cause to be 
 grateful to him, if only as the preserver and dis- 
 coverer of the half-dozen first-rate stanzas that 
 Torn Dutt had to give to the world. With the 
 analytical critic Mr. Flint will have no truck at 
 all; if the work criticised is a good work of art, 
 he says the critic should just tell us shortly that 
 this is his opinion; if it is bad, let him say so 
 briefly. We can imagine Mr. Flint reducing the 
 whole affair to a matter of plus and minus signs. 
 
 But certain objections will immediately present 
 themselves in the reader's mind to Mr. Flint's 
 line of argument. In the first place, he divides 
 poetical output into good verse, pernicious verse, 
 and colourless verse, and complains that the re- 
 viewer's time will be chiefly occupied with colour- 
 less verse. Here we have an instance of what I 
 said before, i,e, that the difficulty about the school 
 of criticism to v/hich Mr. Flint, Mr. Elliot, Mr. 
 Pound and Mr. Munro belong is that they do not 
 envisage the common facts of life; they live in a 
 world of their own. What are the facts? Not 
 very much like Mr. Flint's picture of them. For 
 the last two or three years, the entire output of pub- 
 lished English verse has passed through my hands, 
 and it is the most rough and ready analysis, the most 
 
158 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 
 
 bald inaccuracy that would divide the books which 
 actually come under a critic purview into good, per- 
 nicious and colourless. Let us, for the sake of 
 clarity, take the good books first, and let us take 
 the word ' criticism ' as meaning ' blame.* In the 
 first place, directly we come to , consider any 
 actual book of verse — even if it be a long narrative 
 poem like ' Right Royal ' or ' Paris and Helen,' we 
 find that it can hardly ever be treated as an entity. 
 In all ' good books ' we shall find a passage where 
 the poet achieves what we will, for convenience, call 
 absolute excellence, but he will not achieve it 
 throughout the book. This fact, that the book 
 does not always come up to the level of the best 
 passages — or, if you prefer it, is always adorned by 
 passages of outstanding merit — will be perceived by 
 the person who is generally called the ' general 
 reader,' but whom I should prefer to call ' the non- 
 professional reader.' But he will apprehend the 
 inferior parts rather as a sufferer from slight tooth- 
 ache perceives his discomfort; he realises that 
 there is something wrong, but cannot locate his 
 trouble as the malice of any particular tooth. When 
 he goes to his dentist, the dentist probably says, 
 ' Which tooth is it that is hurting you ? ' and he 
 confesses that he does not know, and can only 
 vaguely indicate its whereabouts. The dentist, as 
 a man of science, who deals with nice concrete 
 things like inflamed nerves, abscesses, or gumboils, 
 is able to tell the enquirer exactly what is wrong, 
 and, if he wants to, to put a little cross against the 
 tooth on a chart. The non-professional reader of 
 
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 1 59 
 
 poetry is apt to appeal to the critic in the same sort 
 of way, but now we are dealing with the world of 
 ideas, a world in which the dentist's mark on a 
 chart and Mr. Flint's plus and minus signs are 
 seldom appropriate. But even in this compara- 
 tively nebulous region, practice and a certain 
 faculty of selective attention, natural or acquired 
 in the professional critic, will make him able to put 
 his finger at least on the grosser errors. He will 
 be able to point out, say, the long passage which, 
 postponing the crisis of a narrative poem, has acted 
 as a non-conductor to the reader's emotion and sent 
 him away with a sense of puzzle and bafflement. 
 He will ' show up ' the borrowed or cliche-filled 
 opening lines, which made it impossible for the 
 reader to enjoy the remaining excellence of the 
 sonnet. Or again, to resume our metaphor, the 
 enquirer's discomfort may not have been from an 
 aching tooth at all ; it may not have been alto- 
 gether the poet's fault that his reader was dissatis- 
 fied. Misunderstandings between poet and reader 
 occur and can sometimes be remedied by a word of 
 explanation. In every work of art the artist has 
 probably more than once been obliged to choose be- 
 tween two alternative excellences — to steer between 
 Scylla and Charybdis. He has wanted to express 
 some very subtle idea, and there seemed no way of 
 expressing it except by an oddity — some eccen- 
 tricity of expression. The fact of the eccentricity 
 will perhaps be the first thing to catch the non-pro- 
 fessional reader's attention. He will very likely 
 be upset by it and deprecate it so extremely that he 
 
l6o THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 
 
 may be unable to perceive the reason for its em- 
 ployment. If the poet's notion is explained to him 
 in prose in a roundabout way, and it is pointed out 
 that under the circumstances the oddity, though de- 
 precated by the poet, was the only way of intro- 
 ducing the thought or the image, then he maj be- 
 come reconciled to it. A good many words or 
 phrases have achieved general acceptance in some 
 such way as this, and the language has thus been 
 enriched by being made more capable of expressing 
 some concept with sharpness and subtlety. 
 
 In fine, if in the ' good book ' what has been ex- 
 plained away is a particular fault, its isolation and 
 a frank admission of its existence will leave the 
 reader freer to enjoy the excellence of the work. 
 It may also have an effect upon the writer. We are 
 noi to treat the books we have under censure as the 
 last products of their makers, a piece of criticism 
 is often as helpful to an author, especially a young 
 one, as it is to his reader. I remember when I was 
 about seventeen I wrote a sort of historical pageant 
 which was acted by amateurs and then published. 
 It illustrated the history of British naval power. I 
 liked it when it was done, but I could see that there 
 was something wrong about it. I shall not easily 
 forget my gratitude to one reviewer — I think of the 
 VV estminster Gazette — who put his finger on one of 
 the blemishes that had puzzled me. I had not intro- 
 duced a single sailor into any one of my five naval 
 episodes ! It can be believed that this had given 
 a somewhat detached, not to say dessicated flavour 
 to my production. But older and better writers 
 
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM l6l 
 
 than I have sometimes been puzzled exactly to 
 locate the faults of their productions, even when 
 these productions came distinctly under the cate- 
 gory of 'good' works- For it is a commonplace that 
 no work of a poet quite equals his original concep- 
 tion or completely bodies forth what he had to say. 
 If then even good books may sometimes be helped 
 to more appreciative readers or better successors 
 by an exposition of their faults, how much may not 
 be done with the books which Mr. Flint classes as 
 colourless or pernicious. Here the critic is most 
 needed in his capacity as gardener. He must shoo 
 off readers whose taste might be corrupted by the 
 futilities of the pernicious books ; he must examine 
 the weedy patches of the ' colourless ' books in the 
 hope of giving a chance to some genuine, if at the 
 moment feeble poetic rootlet. AH this is work 
 which the critic can perform even in the most re- 
 stricted view of his powers. Of his real function of 
 praise, synthesis and explanation, I have as yet said 
 nothing. 
 
 But all the same, Mr. Flint has some reason on 
 his side. In a perfect world it may well be that 
 there will be no need for the critic. Perfect reader 
 and perfect poet may reach a perfect understand- 
 ing. I for one shall mildly regret my office though 
 I realise that in saying so I lay myself open to the 
 accusation which Mr. Flint levels against the con- 
 tented critic — that he has become so depraved as 
 to have no other function. But in the world as it 
 is, neither readers nor writers are perfect, though 
 it makes a consideration of the functions of the 
 
l62 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 
 
 critic easier if we assume that they are generally 
 both sufficiently well-intentioned and honest. Their 
 mutual incomprehension will give the critic work 
 enough without considering the case of the male- 
 factors. 
 
 What are the causes that make ior misunder- 
 standing? Let us take first the question of the 
 progress, or to be more strictly neutral and not to 
 confuse the issue by a statement that can in any 
 way be held controversial, let us say the movement 
 of the arts. Poetry is almost certain, from the 
 nature of things, to move more quickly from phase 
 to phase than the public for whom it is intended. 
 The main preoccupation of poets is their work, and 
 poetic movements are always, therefore, in the posi- 
 tion of flying columns. They travel in three years 
 through a space which it will take the general reader, 
 who is encumbered with the baggage of many other 
 interests — politics or poultry-keeping — ten to ac- 
 complish. It is the function of the critic to act as 
 a sort of connecting file between the two parties. 
 
 Though the public may be slow, there is no ques- 
 tion that poets are often precipitate. If, as I main 
 tain, the function of the arts is to provide the best 
 and subtlest kind of expression and communication 
 between one human being and another, it is obvi- 
 ously a great loss if the poet writes in some sort of 
 cipher which only the adept can understand. Per 
 contra there is no doubt that the plain man will 
 have to enlarge his vocabulary now and then if he 
 is to get the full benefit of the poet's expositions. 
 It is in this work that the critic can be of use. 
 
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 1 63 
 
 There is, of course, a curious historical instance 
 of the ' time lag ' between the poet and his audience. 
 In this instance — because it occurred at a time when 
 the language was in a fluid state, the lag worked, 
 paradoxically enough, the other way round. Dur- 
 ing the period of about fifty years which elapsed 
 between Chaucer's death and the work of Barclay, 
 Skelton and Surrey, the language in which Chaucer 
 wrote had become so completely obsolete — final e's 
 had been dropped, French pronunciations anglicised 
 — that even the proper scansion of ' The Rhyme 
 Royal ^ was lost, and in their rough, often unscan- 
 able work, the Tudor poets honestly believed them- 
 selves to be following exactly in the footsteps of 
 their master Chaucer, whose work they couldn't 
 make scan in the least. Such, however, was their 
 ' Heart of Oak ' loyalty to him, that they patiently 
 copied what surely even to them must have seemed 
 blemishes. There was here no connecting file be- 
 tween the poet and his audience. (Readers who 
 desire to pursue this curious point will find it set 
 out in Professor Berdan's ' Early Tudor Poetry, 
 1485 — 1547/ published in 192 1.) 
 
 But even these expository functions, almost 
 essential though they are, are subordinate to the 
 critic's real function towards the poet. I have 
 tried in a former chapter to prove partly on com- 
 monsenise lines, partly in view of the theory of the 
 arts as a subtle form of communication, that a poet 
 needs a public almost as much as a public needs a 
 poet. He needs to know that he has an audience. 
 To shout the inmost secrets of your soul down a 
 
164 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 
 
 tunnel and not to be sure that the person at the 
 other end is listening, or even that he has not gone 
 away, is so depressing as to be an almost impossible 
 task. Now all the people who read a poet's verse 
 cannot write to the poet and tell him what they 
 think about it. If we knew that the penalty for 
 reading a book of verse was a long letter to its 
 author, we should most of us give up reading poe- 
 try at all. But the public need not do that, for it 
 has, or should have, a functionary at hand who can 
 act as its spokesman — that functionary is the re- 
 viewer, who speaks from ' the receiving end ' of the 
 poem. He tells Mr. Bays that his verse is being 
 read, he describes, or should describe, the reac- 
 tion of a reader to the poem, and last, and most 
 important of all, he praises. He does not neces- 
 sarily eulogise, some kinds of blame can be a 
 subtle and stimulating form of praise. A poet, 
 say, has written two little volumes of verse into 
 which he has put his whole heart, he has torn 
 pieces out of his live flesh to put into the books. 
 Then in a mood of reaction, or because he wants 
 to make a little money, he perhaps contemptuously 
 offers a third to the public — the leavings of the 
 first two, patched-up stuff where the clay hope- 
 lessly outbulks the gold. If nobody sees the 
 difference between the two first books and this 
 third, the poet will probably become completely 
 disheartened. Nobody has noticed ! If he ever 
 should do a good piece of work again and should 
 it evoke praise from the critics, that praise will 
 now be tainted and savourless to him because he 
 
THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 1 65 
 
 knows that such commendation falls on the just 
 and the unjust. In fact, we might almost say that 
 he publishes his bad book hoping and praying that 
 someone will notice the difference between it and 
 its predecessors and will take the trouble of trounc- 
 ing him. But whenever a good poet seems to be 
 really trying his utmost, whenever he produces even 
 a few lines that are obviously excellent, he ought to 
 be praised for it. Praise is necessary to him, for 
 the act of composition has after-effects like those 
 that follow on any state of exhilaration; he has 
 been in travail with his thought and, unlike the 
 mother of a child, he is apt to look at the product 
 of his pain, and w^onder if it is good enough. 
 And if it is good enough, if the fruit of his labour 
 is a beautiful thing which we have enjoyed, the 
 least we can do is to tell him that it was worth it, 
 to cheer him up, to pat him on the back and to tell 
 him of the pleasure that his striving with his 
 material gave us. But why labour an elementary 
 point .^ It is clear in every other field of human 
 endeavour that, if we are decently humane, we 
 shall get more out of our ' profitable servant.' Why 
 should this be deemed to be less true in the case of 
 the artist, who is the most sensitive of the servants 
 of the community, the man who above all others 
 will value the intangible gratifications of praise 
 and prestige ? 
 
Chapter XVIII • 
 
 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD 
 CRITICS 
 
 If we are now inclined to hold that the functions 
 of a critic of one of the arts are those which we 
 endeavoured to outline in the last chapter, i.e. a 
 sort of cross between that of a missionary and matri- 
 monial agent, it becomes not uninteresting to con- 
 sider how the critics of a past age regarded them- 
 selves. 
 
 Let us take as typical some of those who wrote 
 most agreeably. We shall find that Dryden, Dr. 
 Johnson and Peacock, for example, have one or 
 two characteristics in common which differentiate 
 them considerably from modern critics. In the first 
 place — and here we must emphatically include 
 Spenser — they wrote very much better for the most 
 part. To say this is at once to praise and to blame, 
 for in their work we are often conscious that they 
 are not really offering us criticism at all, but have 
 gone off and done a little piece of creative work on 
 their own. A thousand tim^es the better, of course, 
 if a critical product be both a good intrinsic work 
 of art and also a good piece of reasoning, analysis 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 1 67 
 
 or appreciation. But the old critics are apt to 
 sacrifice the purpose of their work for the sake of 
 charming the reader, or rather in a fit of irresistible 
 enthusiasm, they take part in the game which they 
 should umpire. Again, Johnson, Dryden and Pea- 
 cock take a great deal more ' as read ' than the 
 modern critic does. Their own position, that of 
 art, and that of the reader, seem to them so obvious 
 as not to need any particular exposition. Last of 
 all — and this is to my mind their chief est virtue — 
 they all possess gusto. They love beauty, they 
 love learning, they enjoy their tasks. 
 
 This love of his subject, combined with his cap- 
 tivating style and his exquisite freshness, makes 
 Sidney's Defence of Poesie one of the most en- 
 chanting of books. In reading it we seem to have 
 ecaped into a sort of Paradise. In the delicious 
 atmosphere that he creates all need for the pedan- 
 tries of comparison and analysis, the tedious 
 w^eighing of poetry in the scales of aesthetic value, 
 drop away from us. The spirit of lyric poetry 
 seems to walk by us and infuse us with her delight. 
 And all the time, though he never quite openly tells 
 us what it is he knows, we are sure that this divine 
 child has penetrated to a knowledge of the inner 
 poetic truths. We feel, as we walk with Sidney 
 down these flowering meadows, like the youth in 
 the ^ Romaunt of the Rose.' He, rising early on a 
 sunny May morning and crossing through the fields 
 and past the brooks, finds a high garden wall in 
 front of him with its green door ajar, and suddenly 
 enters into that fresh place of birds, flowers, foun- 
 
1 68 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 
 
 tains and of grass, where later, Love is to shoot at 
 him, and where he finds the crimson rosebud. 
 
 Let me recall this divine treatise to the reader. 
 He will perhaps forgive me if I quote rather at 
 length from a book which he may have at hand on 
 his shelves. If I merely give him , chapter and 
 verse he will not take it down I will wager, so if 
 for the purposes of the contentions of this book I 
 want him to know two or three passages which are 
 contained in it, I must set down all of Sidney that 
 he is to know. My purpose in dealing thus at 
 length with a past critical age is to bring out two 
 points. 
 
 First I want to show that many of the conten- 
 tions as to the nature of poetry which I have tried 
 to prove here are not invented either by me or by 
 any other present-day critic. Look carefully at 
 what I have quoted from Sidney's Defense, and 
 you will see the germs of most of the modern aesthe- 
 tic beliefs which I have attempted to state. The 
 only nev/ element is that we have endeavoured to 
 make as much as possible of an old poetic faith, 
 conscious and explicit. Sidney asserts. We have 
 endeavoured to support similar assertions by argu- 
 ment. 
 
 Secondly, I want to exemplify what I believe, 
 that is, that criticism is not as Mr. Flint tries to 
 persuade us, necessarily dull to read nor ' degrad- 
 ing ' to write. 
 
 Sidney's book opens with the praises of that band 
 of poets who of old were the first ' that made 
 pennes deliverers of their knowledge to posteritie/ 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 1 69 
 
 These were the poets who ' with their charming^ 
 sweetness drew wild, untamed wits to an admira- 
 tion of knowledge.' 
 
 * So as Amphion, was said to moove stones with his 
 Poetry, to build Thebes, and Orpheus to be listned to 
 by beasts, indeed; stonie and beastly people.* 
 
 The philosophers of Greece, he goes on, for a 
 long time concealed themselves under the mask of 
 poets and sang their philosophy in verse, ' or rather 
 they being poets, did exercise their delightful 
 vaine in those points of highest knowledge.' 
 
 All others, such as actors and players, astrono- 
 mers, geometricians, arithmeticians, grammarians, 
 rhetoricians and logicians, natural and moral philo- 
 sophers, are all men who only build upon the depth 
 of nature, and ' without the works of nature they 
 could not consist.' 
 
 * Only the Poet disdeining" to be tied to any such 
 subjection, lifted up with the vigfor of his own invention, 
 doth grow in effect into an other nature : in makings 
 things either better than nature bring-eth foorth, or 
 quite a new, formes such as never were in nature : as 
 the Heroes, Demigfods, Cyclops, Chymeras, Furies, and 
 such like; so as he gfoeth hand in hand with nature, 
 not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but 
 freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit. 
 Nature never set foorth the earth in so rich Tapistry as 
 diverse Poets have done, neither with so pleasaunt 
 rivers, fruitful! trees, sweete smelling flowers, not what- 
 soever els may make the too much loved earth more 
 lovely : her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a 
 golden. But let those things alone and goe to man, for 
 whom as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her 
 uttermost cunning is imploied : and know whether she 
 have brought foorth so true a lover as Theagenes, so 
 
I/O THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 
 
 constant a friend as Pylades, so valiant a man as 
 Orlando, so right a Prince as Xenophon's Cyrus, so 
 excellent a man every way as Virgil's Aeneas/ 
 
 Sidney will have his poets defined and confined 
 by no rules of rhyme or of metre. 
 
 * There have been most excellent poets that never 
 versified : as Xenophon or Heliodorus in his sugared 
 invention of that picture of love in Theagenes and 
 Chariclea. It is not ryming and versing that maketh a 
 Poet, (no more than a long gown maketh an Advocate, 
 who though he pleaded in Armour, should be an Ad- 
 vocate and no souldier) but it is that faining notable 
 images of vertues, vices, or what els, with that de- 
 lightful teaching, which must be the right describing 
 note to know a Poet by. Although indeed the Senate 
 of Poets hath chosen verse as their fittest raiment : 
 meaning as in matter, they passed all in all, so in maner, 
 to go beyond them : not speaking table talke fashion, 
 or like men in a dreame, words as they chanceably fall 
 from the mouth, but peasing each sillable of cache word 
 by just proportion, according to the dignitie of the 
 subject. ' 
 
 The end of all philosophy, of music, of mathe- 
 matics and of astronomy is, he continues, ' but to 
 draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate 
 selves might well be capable of.' 
 
 The end of all earthly learning is virtuous 
 action, those ' whose skill most serves to bring forth 
 that have a just title to be Princes over all the rest.' 
 Are we to give this title to the poet or to the man 
 of ethics? Forth steps, says Sidney, the moral 
 philosopher, 
 
 * whom me thinkes I see comming towards me, with a 
 sullain gravitie, as though they could not abide vice by 
 day-light, rudely cloathed, for to witnesse outwardly 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 17I 
 
 their contempt of outward things, with bookes in their 
 hands against glorie, whereto they set their names : 
 sophistically speaking against subtilitie, and angry with 
 any man in whom they see the foule fault of anger. 
 One that hath no other guide but a phylosopher shall 
 wade in him till he be olde, before he shall finde suffi- 
 cient cause to be honest. For his knowledge standeth 
 so upon the abstract and generall, that happie is that 
 man who may understand him, and more happie, that 
 can apply what he dothe understand. On the other 
 side, the Historian wanting the precept, is so tied, not 
 to what should be, but to what is, to the particular 
 truth of things, and not to the general reason of things, 
 that his example draweth no necessarie consequence, 
 and therefore a lesse f ruitfull doctrine. Now doth the 
 peerlesse Poet performe both, for whatsoever the Philo- 
 sopher saith should be done, he gives a perfect picture 
 of it by some one, by whom he presupposeth it was 
 done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the 
 particular example. . . . For as in outward things to 
 a man that had never seene an Elephant, or a Rinoceros, 
 who should tell him most exquisitely all their shape, 
 cullour, bignesse, & particuler marks, or of a gorgious 
 pallace an Architecture, who declaring the full beawties, 
 might well make the hearer able to repeat as it were 
 by roat, all he had heard, yet should never satisfie his 
 inward conceit, with being witnesse to it selfe of a true 
 lively knowledge.' 
 
 For there are many infallible grounds of wisdom 
 
 which 
 
 * lie darke before the imaginative and judging power, if 
 they be not illuminated or figure forth by the speaking 
 picture of Poesie. . . . Certainly even our Saviour 
 Christ could as well have given the morall common 
 places of uncharitablenesse and humblenesse, as the 
 divine narration of Dives & Lazarus, or of disobedience 
 8t mercy, as that heavenly discourse of the lost childe 
 and the gracious Father, but that his through searching 
 wisedome, knew the estate of Dives burning in hell, & 
 
172 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 
 
 of Lazarus in Abraham's bosome, would more con- 
 stantly as it were, inhabit both the memorie and judge- 
 ment. Truly, for my selfe (me seemes) I see before 
 mine eyes, the lost childs disdainful prodig-alitie, turned 
 to envy a Swines dinner : which by the learned Divines 
 are thought not Historical acts, but instructing Parables 
 . . . But the Poet is the food for the tendrest stomacks, 
 the Poet is indeed, the right populer Philosopher.' 
 
 We shall not find such insight till we come to the 
 epoch of Matthew Arnold, and nowhere else in the 
 world, I think, shall we find the case for poetry 
 stated w4th such magical beauty. 
 
 If Sidney gave to poets in general their proper 
 place in the scheme of things, Johnson admirably 
 fulfilled the critic's other task of putting a particu- 
 lar writer and his public en rapport. He made 
 many mistakes. A man so didactic, so fond of a 
 positive assertion could not fail to do that. For 
 instance, he levelled against Gray's ' Ruin seize 
 thee, ruthless king ' — I forget in what words — 
 the sort of accusation that many critics now apply 
 to the work of poets like the Sitwells. He de- 
 clared that the poem being merely odd, though 
 very popular at the moment, could obviously not 
 possibly live. There was a great deal of Shake- 
 speare that Johnson could not understand, but to 
 the merits that he did perceive, even when they 
 were not merits that he personally valued very 
 much, he was scrupulously fair. His sense of jus- 
 tice was always indeed one of the outstanding 
 features of his dealings with the poets whom he 
 criticised. A perfect example, of course, at once 
 of his humour and of his candour is found in 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 1 73 
 
 The Lives of the Poets in his phrase about the 
 minor poet whose work he felt he ought to like 
 better : ' I had rather praise him than read him.' 
 What reviewer has not echoed that saying ! Once 
 brief Dr. Johnson for a poet, and he would gener- 
 ally search out every possible merit in him. 
 
 His most amusing criticisms are generally 
 allowed to be contained in the various things that 
 he wrote about Shakespeare, notably The Proposals 
 for Printing the Dramatic Works of William 
 Shakespeare, and the Preface to this edition, when 
 executed. In 1756, when the book was published, 
 Shakespeare still required a great deal of ' explain- 
 ing away ' and suffered then, as now, alike from 
 absurd adulation and from stupid misunderstand- 
 ing. The intellectual bloods of the day reacted as 
 surely to the adulation then current as did Mr. 
 Shaw or as do still a dozen young people of light 
 and leading to the present atmosphere of Stratford- 
 on-Avon. Dr. Johnson opens his remarks with a 
 right and left at both unthinking admirers and 
 mechanical disparagers : 
 
 * That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, 
 and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to 
 antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued 
 by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope 
 for eminence from the heresies of paradox.* 
 
 Johnson was always careful to point out that 
 
 Shakespeare must pot be judged by the standard of 
 
 modern poets, because 
 
 * his allusions are so often undiscovered, and many 
 beauties, both of pleasantry and greatness, are lost with 
 
174 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 
 
 the objects to which they were united, as the figures 
 vanish when the canvass has decayed. ' 
 
 How are we, he asks, to rank time tests? In the 
 passage in which he states his views we have one of 
 the best examples of the peculiarly vigorous pov/ers 
 of Dr. Johnson's mind, and perhaps of its curious 
 limitations. 
 
 * What mankind have long possessed they have often 
 examined and compared; and if they persist to value 
 the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have 
 confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the works 
 of nature no man can properly call a river deep, or a 
 mountain high, without the knowledge of many moun- 
 tains, and many rivers ; so, in the productions of genius, 
 nothing can be styled excellent till it has been compared 
 with other works of the same kind. Demonstration 
 immediately displays its power, and has nothing to hope 
 or fear from the flux of years ; but works tentative and 
 experimental must be estimated by their proportion to 
 the general and collective ability of man, as it is dis- 
 covered in a long succession of endeavours. Of the 
 first building that was) raised, it might be with certainty 
 determined that it was round or square; but whether 
 it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to time. 
 The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once dis- 
 covered to be perfect ; but the poems of Homer we yet 
 know not to transcend the common limits of human 
 intelligence, but by remarking, that nation after nation, 
 and century after century, has been able to do little 
 more than transpose his incidents, new-name his charac- 
 ters, and paraphrase his sentiments. 
 
 * The reverence due to writings that have long sub- 
 sisted arises therefore not from any credulous confidence 
 in the superiour wisdom of past ages, or gloomy per- 
 suasion of the degeneracy of mankind, but is the conse- 
 quence of acknowledged and indubitable positions, that 
 what has been longest known has been most considered, 
 and what is most considered is best understood.' 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 1 75 
 
 Dr. Johnson not only knew how to praise, but he 
 knew how to frame his eulogies so that we should 
 be eager to read them. 
 
 * It was said of Euripides, that every verse was a 
 precept; and it may be said of Shakespeare^ that from 
 his works may be collected a system of civil and 
 economical prudence. Yet his real power is not shown 
 in the splendour of particular passages, but by the 
 progress of his fable, and the tenor of his dialogue; 
 and he that tries to recommend him by select quotations, 
 will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when 
 he offered his house for sale, carried a brick in his 
 pocket as a specimen. ... 
 
 * The theatre, when it is under any other direction, 
 is peopled by such characters as were never seen, con- 
 versing in a language which was never heard, upon 
 topicks which will never arise in the commerce of 
 mankind. 
 
 * Upon every other stage the universal agent is love, 
 by whose power all good and evil is distributed, and 
 every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover, 
 a lady, and a rival into the fable ; to entangle them in 
 contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions 
 of interest, and harass them with violence of desires 
 inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in 
 rapture, and part in agony; to fill their mouths with 
 hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow ; to distress 
 them as nothing human ever was distressed ; to deliver 
 them as nothing human ever was delivered ; is the 
 business of a modern dramatist. For this, probability 
 is violated, life is misrepresented, and language is 
 depraved. . . . 
 
 * Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyper- 
 bolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and un- 
 exampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of 
 barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant 
 and a dwarf ; and he that should form his expectations 
 of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would 
 be equally deceived. Shakespeare has no heroes ; his 
 
176 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 
 
 scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as 
 the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or 
 acted on the same occasion ; even where the agency 
 is supernatural, the dialogue is level with life. ... It 
 may be said that he has not only shown human nature 
 as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found 
 in trials to which it cannot be exposed.' 
 
 Shakespeare's drama 'is the mirror of life.' 
 There we may read ' human sentiments in human 
 language,' witness ' scenes from which a hermit may 
 estimate the transactions of the world, and a con- 
 fessor predict the progress of the passions.' 
 
 Dennis and Rymer think his Romans not suffi- 
 ciently Roman; and Voltaire censures his kings as 
 not completely royal. A senator, say they, should 
 not be made to play the buffoon, and it is indecent 
 to represent the Danish usurper as a drunkard. 
 
 * Shakespeare's story requires Romans or Kings, but 
 he thinks only on men. He knew that Roniey like every 
 other city, had men of all dispositions ; and wanting a 
 buffoon, he went into the senate^house for that which 
 the senate-house would certainly have afforded him. He 
 was inclined to show an usurper and a murderer not 
 only odious, but despicable ; he therefore added drunken- 
 ness to his other qualities, knowing that kings love 
 wine like other men, and that wine exerts its natural 
 power upon kings. These are the petty cavils of petty 
 minds; a poet overlooks the casual distinction of country 
 and condition.* 
 
 Here and there, however, Johnson dates himself 
 and shows the narrow grooves in which con- 
 temporary morals had contrived to make even his 
 vigorous mind run. He is entirely persuaded, for 
 instance, that it is the duty of a poet to be didactic, 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 1 77 
 
 to play the ' hortatory policeman.' He takes this 
 as basic and axiomatic, and arraigns Shakespeare 
 because 
 
 * he sacrifices virtue to convenience and is so much more 
 careful to please than to instruct, that he seems to 
 write without any moral purpose. From his writings 
 indeed a system of social duty may be selected, for he 
 that thinks reasonably must think morally ; but his 
 precepts and axioms drop casually from him ; he makes 
 no just distribution of good or evil, nor is always careful 
 to show in the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked ; 
 he carries his persons indifferently through right and 
 wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further 
 care, and leaves their examples to operate by chance. 
 This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate; 
 for it is always a writer*s duty to make the world better, 
 and justice is a virtue independent of time or place.* 
 
 It is in the section devoted to blaming Shake- 
 speare that we shall find the famous passage on 
 quibbles : 
 
 * A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours 
 are to the traveller ; he follows it at all adventures ; it 
 is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf 
 him in the mire. It has some malignant power over 
 his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. What- 
 ever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, 
 whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, 
 whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or 
 enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up 
 before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A 
 quibble is the golden apple for which he will always 
 turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. 
 A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such 
 delight, that he was content to purchase it, by the 
 sacrifice of reason, propriety, and truth. A quibble was 
 to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, 
 and was content to lose it.* 
 
178 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 
 
 But this vigorous attack is followed by as warm 
 a defence of Shakespeare's neglect of unities, 
 especially of the unity of place. In this Johnson 
 completely pulverises the wretched critics, who, he 
 says, have hitherto exulted ' over the miseries of an 
 irregular poet.' Dr. Johnson is ready to assure 
 them that they are assuming, ' as an unquestionable 
 principle, a position, which, while their breath is 
 forming it into words, their understanding pro- 
 nounces to be false/ The spectator of drama is 
 not deluded, he does not believe ' that his walk to 
 the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt,' or if he 
 does (Johnson is ready with the butt end of his 
 pistol), ' surely he that imagines this may imagine 
 more.' 
 
 * Delusion has no certain limitations ; if the spectator 
 can be once persuaded that his old acquaintances are 
 Alexander and Cmsar, that a room illuminated with 
 candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, 
 he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, 
 or of truth, and from the heights of empyrean poetry 
 may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature.' 
 
 The truth is, of course, ' that the spectators are 
 always in their senses,' and if it be asked how the 
 drama moves if it is not credited, the answer is that 
 * it is credited with all the credit due to a drama.' 
 We believe in what we read in much the same way, 
 and ' are agitated in reading Henry the Fifth. Yet 
 no man takes his book for the field of Agincourt' 
 
 But when Dr. Johnson goes on to speak of imita- 
 tions, he wanders far from the truth after that will- 
 o'-the-wisp, and supposes that the arts please 
 because they bring realities to the mind. 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS I 79 
 
 There are, I think, not many -more elements to be 
 found in Johnson's literary criticism. 
 
 He wrote amusingly, he possessed immense 
 volumes of commonsense which he discharged upon 
 the public with unexampled vigour. But of Mere- 
 dith's ' fine shades and nice feelings ' he knew 
 hardly anything, and so was always a better critic 
 of the dramatic or narrative elements of literature 
 than of the poetic. 
 
 When we turn from him to Peacock, or rather to 
 that side of Peacock which the malign creature 
 chose to display for the discomfiture of poor 
 Shelley in his ' Four Ages of Poetry,' we shall find 
 somxcwhat similar powers and similar limitations. 
 The instruments — bludgeons both — are alike, 
 though they are v/ielded to such different ends. 
 
 Peacock's ' Four Ages of Poetry ' is, perhaps, 
 the wittie3t thing that that very v/itty writer ever 
 wrote, and is the only piece of criticism which, for 
 hilarious verve and the power to make the reader 
 chuckle, can compare with Dr. Johnson's work. 
 Much of it is very like ' Candide ' in tone. That 
 Shelley should have taken the attack as being a 
 serious one, or as in the least representing the 
 writer's opinion, is but one more proof of Shelley's 
 inordinate ethical preoccupations and his uncon- 
 querable seriousness. 
 
 The four ages of poetry are, says Peacock, the 
 ages of iron, of gold, of silver, and lastly of brass. 
 In the iron age ' rude bards celebrate in rough 
 num.bers the exploits of ruder chiefs.' This, he 
 goes on, ' is the age of society, when the maxim, To 
 
l8o THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 
 
 keep what we have and to catch when we can, is not 
 yet disguised under names of justice and the forms 
 of law/ This is the age when there are only three 
 trades flourishing, ' those of king, thief and beggar : 
 the beggar being for the most part a king deject 
 and the thief a king expectant.' In such society 
 every man not only desires to engross to himself as 
 much power and property as possible, but he is 
 affected by a longing for publicity. That is : 
 
 * The no less natural desire of making- known to as 
 many people as possible the extent to which he has 
 been a winner in this universal game. The successful 
 warrior becomes a chief; the successful chief becomes 
 a king*; his next want is an org-an to disseminate the 
 fame of his achievements and the extent of his posses- 
 sions ; and this orgfan he finds in a bard, who is always 
 ready to celebrate the strength of his arm, being first 
 duly inspired by that of his liquor.* The bard will 
 * tell us how many battles such an one has fought, how 
 many helmets he has cleft, how many breastplates he 
 has pierced, how many widows he has made, how much 
 land he has appropriated, how many houses he has de- 
 molished for other people, what a large one he has built 
 for himself, how much gold he has stowed away in it, 
 and how liberally and plentifully he pays, feeds, and in- 
 toxicates the divine and immortal bards, the sons of 
 Jupiter, but for whose everlasting songs the names of 
 heroes would perish.' 
 
 He goes on to describe the process by which the 
 golden age is reached. Though the object of the 
 bards be nothing more than to secure a share of the 
 spoil, they achieve their ends by different means; 
 they are observing and thinking while others are 
 robbing and fighting. They are not only his- 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS l8l 
 
 torians, but theologians, moralists and legislators, 
 and very soon gain the reputation of 
 
 ' building cities with a song^ and leading brutes with a 
 symphony, — ^which are only metaphors for the faculty 
 of leading multitudes by the nose. ' 
 
 It is not until we come to the age of silver, the 
 age of recasting and of giving an exquisite polish to 
 the poetry of the age of gold, the age of which Vir- 
 gil is the most obvious and striking example, that 
 we can pierce the perfect armour of Peacock's rail- 
 lery, and catch him out in a sentiment at once genu- 
 ine and absurd. He seems to agree with Macau- 
 lay, who said, * We think that as civilisation ad- 
 vances, poetry almost necessarily declines/ As 
 the light of reason grows clearer, says Peacock, 
 poetry, the language of passion and feeling, 
 approaches its extinction. 
 
 ' Pure reason and dispassionate truth would be per- 
 fectly ridiculous in verse, as we may judge by versifying 
 one of Euclid's demonstrations. This will be found 
 true of all dispassionate reasoning whatever, and all 
 reasoning that requires comprehensive views and en- 
 larged combinations. It is only the more tangible 
 points of morality, those which command assent at once, 
 those which have a mirror in every mind, and in which 
 the severity of reason is warmed and rendered palatable 
 by being mixed up with feeling and imagination, that 
 are applicable even to what is called moral poetry : and 
 as the sciences of morals and of mind advance towards 
 perfection, as they become more enlarged and compre- 
 hensive in their views, as reason gains the ascendancy 
 in them over imaginations and feeling, poetry can no 
 longer accompany them in their progress, but drops 
 into the background, and leaves them to advance alone.* 
 
1 82 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 
 
 We in this age are inclined instead to agree with 
 Renan who, half serious, half whimsical, said that 
 as he grew older he more and more inclined to the 
 belief that many of the most profound truths were 
 so subtle as to be incapable of being conveyed from 
 one mind to another, except by such a vehicle as 
 opera, a vehicle which brought all our sources of 
 apprehension — our senses — into play. But Pea- 
 cock is not at home among fundamentals. If we 
 want to enjoy his full powers we must seek him in 
 the top, in the sparkling, even the frothy regions 
 of his subject. Apropos of the dramatic unities, 
 he resumes his best Voltairian vein : 
 
 * Shakespeare and his contemporaries used time and 
 locality merely because they could not do without them, 
 because every action must have its when and where : 
 but they made no scruple of deposing a Roman Emperor 
 by an Italian Count and sending him off in the disguise 
 of a French pilgrim to be shot with a blunderbuss by 
 an English archer.* 
 
 But perhaps the most fascinating passage in the 
 whole essay is the following tiny satiric picture of 
 the Lake poets. These men, Peacock says, have 
 argued thus : 
 
 * All that is artificial is anti-poetical. Society is 
 artificial, therefore we will live out of society. The 
 mountains are natural, therefore we will live in the 
 mountains. There we shall be shining models of purity 
 and virtue, passing the whole day in the innocent and 
 amiable occupation of going up and down hill, receiving 
 poetical impressions, and communicating them in im- 
 mortal verse to admiring generations.* 
 
 Peacock affirms that he burns with impatience at 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 1 83 
 
 the sight of poets, all of whom, more or less, as 
 science and philosophy advance, still ' wallow in the 
 rubbish of departed ignorance, raking up the ashes 
 of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the 
 grown babies of the age/ 
 
 Poor Shelley writhed under all this like a lost 
 soul under the sly, red-hot prods of a small, mali- 
 cious devil. But he could think of adequate 
 answers to none of the impish jibes, and his 
 ' Defence of Poetry ' is a document to bring 
 despair to the heart of the logically-minded. He 
 commits all the crimes. He never defines, he uses 
 the same word in two or three different senses, 
 builds toppling pyramids of argument on founda- 
 tions of gratuitous assumption, and, emerging giddy 
 from the mazes of a circular argument, takes refuge 
 in a page or two of unsupported ex cathedra state- 
 ment. But with all its absurdities and faults there 
 is something splendid about Shelley's ' Defence.' 
 We feel the warmth and light of the authentic 
 poetic fire. 
 
 He fully realises Renan's argument, but has, as 
 usual, given no very clear utterance to it or to what 
 he wants to say, particularly about metre, and has 
 mixed it up with another point, i.e, the value of 
 translations. 
 
 * The language of poets has ever affected a certain 
 uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without 
 which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less 
 indispensable to the communication of its influence than 
 the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar 
 order. Hence the vanity of translation : it were as wise 
 to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover 
 
184 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 
 
 the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek 
 to transfuse from one language into another the crea- 
 tions of a poet.' 
 
 He tries again. The following beautiful passage is 
 the result : 
 
 * Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure ; all spirits 
 upon which it falls open themselves to receive the 
 wisdom which is mingled with its delight. In the 
 infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their 
 auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry : 
 for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, be- 
 yond and above consciousness.' 
 
 Poets are looked for in ages of change and reform. 
 
 * We live among such philosophers and poets as sur- 
 pass beyond comparison any who have appeared since 
 the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty. 
 The; most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of 
 the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial 
 change in opinion and institution, is poetry. At such 
 periods there is an accumulation of the power of com- 
 municating and receiving intense and impassioned con- 
 ceptions respecting man and nature. The persons in 
 whom this power resides may often, as far as regards 
 many portions of their nature, have little apparent cor- 
 respondence with that spirit of good of which they are 
 the ministers.' 
 
 * Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended in- 
 spiration ; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which 
 futurity casts upon the present : the words which express 
 what they understand not : the trumpets which sing to 
 battle and feel not what they inspire : the influence which 
 is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged 
 legislators of the world.* 
 
 Umpire, you have put off the white coat of 
 neutrality and are trying your hand at the game ! 
 This is not criticism, this is poetry. 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 1 85 
 
 In the same volume of the Percy Reprints as 
 * The Four Ages of Poetry ' and Shelley's Defence* 
 Mr. Brett Smith has bound up Browning's Essay 
 on Shelley, an essay unfortunately written, like 
 Shelley's, in a rather lofty poetic-prose style. In 
 spite of this unpromising medium, Browning has 
 nevertheless been able to imprison in the essay 
 some of his wonderful gift for psychology. Buried 
 under the verbiage are some extremely interesting 
 observations on the difference between objective 
 and subjective poets. In speaking of Shelley, 
 he generalises and speaks of the subjective poet in 
 general : 
 
 * He is rather a seer, accordingly, than a fashioner, 
 and what he produces will be less a work than an efflu- 
 ence. That effluence cannot be easily considered in 
 abstraction from his personality, — being" indeed the very 
 radiance and aroma of his personality, projected from it 
 but not separated.* 
 
 If we desire to understand his poetry, we must 
 know something of the subjective poet's character : 
 
 * Both for love's and for understanding's sake we 
 desire to know him, and as readers of his poetry we 
 must be readers of his biography also.' 
 
 Very remarkable seems to me the passage which 
 I like to take as prophetic, — a statement of the rela- 
 tive position of the Victorian and the modern poet : 
 
 * There is a time when the general eye has, so to speak, 
 absorbed its fill of the phenomena around it, whether 
 spiritual or material, and desires rather to learn the 
 exacter significance of what it possesses, than to receive 
 any augmentation of what is possessed.' 
 
l86 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 
 
 And in this passage we see the beginnings of the 
 new spirit, a spirit which we find full-fledged in 
 Matthew Arnold, a writer who but for the facts of 
 chronology, I should certainly have included in the 
 next chapter, and have considered with the new 
 critics. In turning the pages of Matthew Arnold's 
 critical essays, we find that vvc are in touch with a 
 man with a modern outlook. There are differences 
 between his writings and the writings of Mr. Heuf- 
 fer and Mr. Flint — we cannot see either of these 
 WTiters turning the famous passage whose refrain is 
 * Wragg is in custody.' But if I may allow myself 
 for once to use what I have throughout this book 
 studiously tried to avoid — the jargon of psycho- 
 analysis — Matthew Arnold for the first time gives 
 us the peculiar sort of introvertism that we get in 
 modern writers. In the midst of the whirlwind of 
 Victorian activity, he pleads for reflection, for a dis- 
 interested mode of looking at life and facts. Let 
 us, he says, return to the serener life of the mind. 
 
 * Let us think of quietly enlarging^ our stock of true 
 and fresh ideas, and not, as soon as we get an idea or 
 half an idea, be running out with it into the street, and 
 trying to make it rule there.' 
 
 It is the detachment which he expresses here which 
 enables him to see the world of literature, not as 
 consisting of ' English bards and Scotch reviev/ers ' 
 —that is, of two opposing camps of creative and 
 critical minds, but as a body of people attempting 
 by various but still somewhat similar methods to 
 attain ends in the world of ideas. And in this 
 larger vision he is easily able to pass from the critic 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 1 87 
 
 to the creative writer and back again and apply the 
 same general principle to theni both. 
 
 * Judging- is often spoken of as the critic*s one busi- 
 ness ; and so in some sense it is ; but the judgment which 
 almost insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, 
 along with fresh knowledge, is the valuable one; and 
 thus knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the 
 critic's great concern for himself; and it is by commu- 
 nicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgment 
 pass along with it — ^but insensibly, and in the second 
 place, not the first, as a sort of companion and clue, not 
 as an abstract lawgiver — that he will generally do most 
 good to his readers/ 
 
 If, he goes on, the reader is disappointed because 
 he does not speak directly of the critics and of the 
 criticisms of the current English literature of the 
 day, he is sorry, 
 
 * but I am bound by my own definition of criticism : 
 a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best 
 that is known and thought in the world, * 
 
 He goes on to suggest that every critic of current 
 English literature ought to try and possess one 
 great literature besides his own, and the more unlike 
 his own, the better. 
 
 * Europe must be regarded as being, for intellectual 
 and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound 
 to a joint action and working to a common result ; and 
 members must have, for their proper outfit, a knowledge 
 of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one 
 another. That modern nation will, in the intellectual 
 and spiritual sphere, make most progress, which most 
 thoroughly carries out this programme.* 
 
 Perhaps some of us at this date would prefer to 
 substitute for the critic's knowledge of antiquity, 
 
1 88 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE OLD CRITICS 
 
 nay, even for his knowledge of another European 
 literature,* a knowledge of some aspects of those 
 new facts about the human mind which psychology 
 and metaphysics have recently made plain. Of 
 course, the critic cannot know too much, and per- 
 haps it is a personal idiosyncracy which makes me 
 believe that a knowledge of, or at least an interest 
 in, the facts which seem to underlie the apprehen- 
 sion and creation of literature, are likely to be of 
 more value to the critic than a knowledge of another 
 great literature, i.e, of a still larger number of 
 instances of the phenomena of poetry. 
 
 It seems to me too that in working partly on 
 psychological and metaphysical lines, not only has 
 the critic the best chance of understanding the par- 
 ticular literature which he is studying, but he will 
 perform another function, that of increasing the 
 bonds which unite literature and life. For litera- 
 ture, and especially poetry, may be likened to the 
 earth giant who fought with Hercules. He, the 
 reader will remember, renewed his strength every 
 time that Hercules' knock-down blow brought him 
 into contact with the life-giving earth. When Her- 
 cules hit upon the device of detaching him from 
 this revivifying contact with reality, his vigour 
 withered away. 
 
Chapter XIX 
 
 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE NEW 
 CRITICS. 
 
 Suppose a new critic anH an old were to be asked 
 to deliver a lecture upon the Pictorial Arts in 
 Verse. The old critic would begin by collecting 
 all the instances he could think of — ' Pope, Now ! 
 How did the passage run ? ' 
 
 * Come then the colours and the ground prepare ! 
 Dip in, the rainbow, trick her off in air.' 
 
 and then : 
 
 * Beauty frail flower that every season fears 
 Lives in thy canvas for a thousand years. ' 
 
 Then Browning's ' Tobias and the Angel.' He 
 would search the Chaucerians — all those ' Temples 
 of Fame.' There was so much about architecture 
 and sculpture, surely he could dig out something 
 about painting too. Browning again, Fra Lippo 
 Lippi and Raphael ; then Wordsworth's ' The 
 Light that never was on Sea or Land,' then various 
 passages from ' Hero and Leander.' The modern 
 critic, though he might very likely end by choosing 
 out the same examples, would set to work quite dif- 
 ferently. He would begin by trying to think out 
 
igO THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE NEW CRITICS 
 
 an abstract theory. How can the peculiar qualities 
 of a thing which paint gives us — its degree of lumi- 
 nosity or the interaction of its curves, be treated in 
 poetry? Apart from direct reference to painting, 
 what poems are written from the painting point of 
 view, with the visual qualities of the material ob- 
 jects uppermost? Would it be absurd to say that 
 a poem about a picture will be at one removed 
 from the natural object because it is a copy of a 
 copy? A picture is ding an sich, an object just as 
 a flower is, and indeed, in that it is to some extent 
 a pre-digested object, it may be arguable that it is 
 a better subject for a poet than a crude natural ob- 
 ject. And so on. I am not concerned to pit these 
 two methods against one another. I know, of 
 course, to Vv^hich extreme I incline, but I can see the 
 dangers of both. The older critics, especially those 
 of the era through which we have just passed, 
 critics who wrote later than any of those whose 
 views I have tried to set forth in the last chapter, 
 were apt to become very much too concrete. They 
 got interested in phenomena and in collecting more 
 and more examples of phenomena, and often lost 
 sight of the causes for which they studied. On the 
 other hand, the analytical critic is apt to become too 
 detached. It is, alas, so fatally easy to construct a 
 self-supporting aesthetic theory which turns out to 
 bear no relation whatever to the facts. 
 
 Mr. Squire, of course, began as an analytical 
 critic, but his vivid interest in technique, his learn- 
 ing, and an admirable faculty for parody prevented 
 his floating off too much into the vague. His later 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE NEW CRITICS IQI 
 
 work shows him getting more and more to resemble 
 writers of the older school. I personally share the 
 view of a good many of his readers and see the 
 change with regret, but on the other hand he used 
 the modern method better — I do not want to call it 
 the analytical method, for that unduly narrows my 
 meaning — and carried analysis further than most 
 of his contemporaries, and it may be that he has 
 good reason for the gradual change in his attitude. 
 One great blessing attends Mr. Squire. He writes 
 amusingly. His remarkable gift for parody is, 
 of course, a great asset here, enabling him, for 
 example, to adorn and illustrate his remarks with 
 mock examples. How will Prohibition affect the 
 poet.^ Mr. Squire sees him struggling with a con- 
 vivial song. 
 
 * Come, chemist, fill the silver box 
 With morphia or with ether. ' 
 
 He has further the valuable knack of conveying 
 criticism without condemnation, as witness the fol* 
 lowing remarks about Mr. Drinkwater's ' Abraham 
 Lincoln ' : 
 
 * I saw — at least I thought I saw — all sorts of defecta 
 in characterisation, interpretation, machinery ; from the 
 absence of that humour which always clung- about the 
 hero to the fact that the whole seven scenes took place 
 indoors; from the melodrama of Mr. Hook to the un- 
 convincing and overdone pathos of the condemned sentry, 
 who was so handsome, so brave, spoke such perfect Eng-- 
 lish, and had committed his offence under such extremely 
 palliating circumstances that it was unbelievable that 
 anyone can have meant to execute him. But the fact 
 remains that my eyes and ears were glued to the actors 
 throughout; that in places I was profoundly moved j 
 
192 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE NEW CRITICS 
 
 that I was as sorry when Lincoln was shot as I should 
 have been had I been present at the event; and that I 
 went away saying- that not even the ban on smoking 
 would keep me away from the theatre if there were many 
 plays which appealed as this one had done to both my 
 intelligence and my emotion. There is no poetry about 
 Mr. Drinkwater*s verse choruses, but there is a good 
 deal in his prose-play. 
 
 * He partially escapes, in fact, the radical defects of 
 the modern theatre. There is an immense amount of in- 
 terest in the theatre. Books are written about its pos- 
 sibilities; societies are founded to explore and exploit 
 them ; everyone hopes that the theatre will in our time 
 be as g-ood as it was in the days of Shakespeare and 
 Aeschylus ; and thousands of persons with intellects 
 write for the stage. But it is commonly overlooked that 
 Shakespeare and his contemporaries, like Aeschylus and 
 his contemporaries, were poets.' 
 
 I think a certain quality of tolerance, fairminded- 
 ness and kind-heartedness, combined with a search- 
 ing faculty for stripping away clap-trap, are the 
 qualities that have given Mr. Squire his unique 
 position. He reigns a sort of king in Literary 
 London, because he knows how to be both kind 
 and severe to young writers. He is willing to take 
 infinite trouble over work submitted to him and 
 will labour with the author to improve and amend. 
 Almost every young author who comes into contact 
 with Mr. Squire feels first, that he must put his best 
 foot foremost, and secondly that Mr. Squire still has 
 the elasticity to give him appreciation. 
 
 Mr. Harold Monro has all the qualities of head 
 that go to make a critic, but to my mind few of the 
 qualities of heart. His ' Contemporary Poets ' is 
 practically a bitter attack upon the two or three 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE NEW CRITICS I93 
 
 dozen poets whose work he criticises. The reader 
 closes the book with the impression that Miss 
 Charlotte Mew is the only modern poet worth 
 reading, an impression grotesque enough for him 
 to be sure that this was not what Mr. Monro in- 
 tended. What has happened apparently is that 
 Mr. Monro has taken a dislike to poetry and wishes 
 that people would stop writing it. As for the 
 Founder of the Poetry Bookshop's indictment of 
 the modern poetical coterie, it is as savage as it is 
 amusing. 
 
 * It is related of one of our younger poets that he 
 declared he would not publish a First Book until he 
 knew sixteen critics personally, and had dined with 
 each. . . . Verse-writing in the year 1920 is a profes- 
 sional occupation.* 
 
 Young men and women, he goes on, enjoy the 
 practice of making rhymes, putting down their 
 feelings in loose sentences which they call ' free 
 verse.' Newspapers and magazines have a large 
 demand for such work, but many as are the niches, 
 the competition is great, and so the young poet's 
 eye must ever be trained on the main chance. His 
 first book will be a great event. It does not matter 
 whether people read him or not, but at least twenty 
 thousand people must talk about him. 
 
 Then, as soon as he gets to know a few people, 
 he must talk to them of the Great Ones whom he 
 does not know, ' for present acquaintance must be 
 the stepping-stones to future ones ' : — 
 
 * He must learn how to joke cynically about the Great, 
 and, if obliged to admit that he has not actually met 
 Mr. H., Mr. N., or Sir S. G., must be able to imply 
 
194 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE NEW CRITICS 
 
 skilfully that he will probably be dining- with each of 
 them next week. All this time, however, he must not 
 cease to ** write poetry.** * 
 
 He must attach himself to some group which 
 will quickly teach him to talk cleverly about modern 
 painting, and books which he has not read ; also it 
 will publish a periodical or anthology in which his 
 poems will be printed. His position must, in fact, 
 be made before the verses which might warrant it 
 have been written .... And so on in a heartfelt 
 satiric vein. However, we are a little cheered 
 when we read at the end of the book that Mr. 
 Monro considers that ' verse is undoubtedly in^ 
 ferior to prose as a medium, but it is easier to 
 write.' We begin to see daylight. 
 
 If he feels like this about poets, what will he 
 have to say about fellow critics and reviewers ? We 
 feel that it is only too likely that he is going to 
 agree with Mr. Flint, whose denunciation of my 
 tribe I quoted tremblingly in the chapter before 
 last: 
 
 * As for the professional critics, is it, I wonder, a 
 revelation to anybody that in the majority of editorial 
 offices preference is given to books whose publishers are 
 advertisers in the paper? * 
 
 Mr. Harold Monro must keep uncommonly bad 
 journalistic company. The Spectator, whose patient 
 drudge I confess myself, is surely not in the posi- 
 tion of lonely virtue that Mr. Monro's words would 
 imply ? He speaks again of ' tired critics, some- 
 times too hungry to object to writing what they are 
 told,' of insipid critics who have ' two or three 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE NEW CRITICS T^J 
 
 hundred cliche phrases at their command/ Every 
 time a ' good ' author publishes a book, 
 
 * a trained person has merely to jot down a series of the 
 conventional phrases : ** sustained inspiration/' ** finished 
 craftsmanship/* ** essential quality of high poetry,*' 
 ** splendid and virile,'* ** amongst the finest achieve- 
 ments of our age,** ** sounds depths only possible to a 
 master,*' ** never been surpassed,*' ** noble," ** notable," 
 *' felicitous " — ^we all know them so well that we do not 
 trouble to pay the slightest attention to them." 
 
 These opinions show clearly that a good many of 
 Mr. Monro's generalisations are due to the exag- 
 geration of exasperation. I also examine ' a very 
 large proportion of current books of poetry.' The 
 chief difficulty of the honest critic is to keep his 
 critical head above water and not to be submerged, 
 or rather rolled out perfectly flat by the weight of 
 books which pour on top of him. That is surely the 
 chief, the simple reason for the many failures and 
 ineptitudes ot current reviewing. The critic may 
 have to examine sixty or seventy poems in a morn- 
 ing, and by the time he has done thirty it requires 
 a considerable exercise of self-discipline and con- 
 centration to keep the critical standard flying, not 
 to condemn a good piece of work because it con- 
 tains one or two atrocious lines, not to approve a 
 competent poem which suffers only from the dis- 
 ability of having no reason for existing at all. . As 
 Mr. Monro himself says, the honest reviewer is 
 kept up to his task by the one thought above all 
 others : — 
 
 * Perhaps, high up on some shelf, neglected by the re- 
 viewers and by myself (a patient searcher), stands that 
 
196 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE NEW CRITICS 
 
 ominous volume, a Paradise Lost, or Songs of InnocencCy 
 or Prometheus Unbound of this ag"e, accumulating 
 dust.' 
 
 That is the carrot. 
 
 The total impression of the book is one of 
 hostility. Mr. Monro holds it a scandal and shame 
 that there are so many bad poets and so many bad 
 reviewers. Surely his attitude should be one of 
 thankfulness that there are a very few good poets 
 and a very few good reviewers. Poetasters and 
 puffers are not a unique product of this age or of 
 this country. It is significant that Mr. Monro never 
 praises a poet for being readable, seemingly because 
 he dislikes reading poetry. But we assure him that 
 there are a great many people — the present writer 
 included — ^who do like reading poetry, and there- 
 fore, notwithstanding any holes that can be justly 
 picked in them, are extremely grateful for such 
 poems as * Daffodil Fields,' ' The Queen of China/ 
 and ' The Moon.' Why not think of poetry as like 
 cheese or apples, as being something necessary, 
 instead of adopting the attitude of the man who has 
 given five shillings for a cigar .'^ However, the 
 book is tonic to the system as well as bitter to the 
 tongue. It will be splendid reading for a great 
 many of the poets mentioned in it. 
 
 Mr. Monro knows what poetry ought to be made 
 of, as witness the following passage : — 
 
 * Accurate observation, close inquiry, a respect for 
 detail; selection, condensation, rejection of the unneces- 
 sary ; choice of image, phrase or rhythm ; aesthetic 
 honesty, literary candour, local truth, psychological ac- 
 curacy; prudent management of rhyme, economy of 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE NEW CRITICS I97 
 
 epithet, love of the true substantive, pleasure in the right 
 verb; imaginative curiosity, the joy of new philosophic 
 discovery, the adventure of metaphysical speculation, 
 the humility or courageous ardour of religious doubt, 
 and finally toleration for these qualities or attributes 
 when exemplified in his contemporaries. * 
 
 But to me this most true and excellent summary 
 is spoilt by the fact that all these qualities are 
 (typically) enumerated under the heading ol The 
 qualities which Mr. Alfred Noyes has not got. 
 Now I hold no brief for Mr. Alfred Noyes, and 
 I am not sure that I do not from time to time 
 agree with Mr. Monro's opening paragraph about 
 him : 
 
 * Of Alfred Noyes nothing can be written in extenuation.* 
 
 but Mr. Monro's bitterness defeats its own object 
 and the reader, of course, begins to sympathise 
 with Mr. Noyes. 
 
 A very different critic is Mrs. Marguerite Wilkin- 
 son, an American. wShe, like Mr. Sturge Moore, 
 never mixes up criticism and controversy. Her 
 book ' New Voices ' is intended as a. more or less 
 elementary introduction to modern poetry. It is 
 all suavity and good sense. Mrs. Wilkinson can 
 blame without being severe, can see faults and 
 virtues in the same set of verses, and is an admir- 
 able analyst. The reader will find an extract from 
 her book in the chapter on Metre. The passage 
 consists of some observations on Miss Amy Lowell's 
 ' Patterns,' and will, I think, display Mrs. Wilkin- 
 son's virtues as well as her one vice. This vice is 
 that she is so interested in technique, she under- 
 
1 98 THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE NEW CRITICS 
 
 Stands the poets she is criticising so well, that she 
 is apt to be a little too charitable, and in the 
 case of a good many American writers she is 
 apt to take the will Jor the deed, and to treat 
 mediocrity with a respect only due to first-rate 
 powers. This, of course, weakens her book. But, 
 as I have said, she possesses in a high degree the 
 power of analysis; she really knows how to con- 
 centrate on a poem and to consider it under several 
 headings, which is, as anyone who has tried it 
 knows, as difficult as trout-tickling. She also pos- 
 sesses the faculty for putting a book together and 
 knows when to give the reader ample quotations 
 and to allow him to judge for himself. 
 
 Mr. Hueffer's ' Thus to Revisit,' though it is not 
 solely concerned with poetry, will in many passages 
 give the reader a very good idea of one tendency 
 of modern criticism. Mr. Hueffer has, of course, 
 a considerable acquaintance with French and 
 German literature, and therefore brings back to the 
 study of his countrymen very useful detached 
 judgment. I think that the main lesson he has to 
 teach English writers is the central notion of the 
 classical writer — I mean consideration for the 
 reader. 
 
 Mr. Robert Graves represents perhaps the newest 
 type of critic of all. He analyses, but he is also a 
 mystic, and to my mind his book ' On English 
 Poetry ' is one of the most valuable and suggestive 
 critical essays that has ever appeared. Unlike 
 many poets, he writes prose delightfully, and his all 
 too short book is extraordinarily readable. 
 
THE VICES AND VIRTUES OF THE NEW CRITICS I99 
 
 It suffers perhaps from one fault : it is too much 
 a series of hints, and too little a sustained state- 
 ment, but Mr. Graves himself disarms this criticism 
 by saying that his book is material for critics to work 
 upon, not a ready-made criticism. It is an effort to 
 display the workings of a poet's mind, rather than 
 the exposition of a critical theory. Really, of 
 course, the whole standpoint of the book, the mating 
 of criticism to psychology, is in itself a contribution 
 to aesthetic theory. 
 
 No one interested either in psychology or poetry 
 ought to miss Mr. Graves' book. His readers will 
 see that it has a good many points in common with 
 the present work. This, is in most cases the result 
 of coincidence, but in the case of certain notions in 
 the chapter on Symbolism and in the general con- 
 ception of Metre and Rhythm as intellectual 
 anodynes, I gratefully own myself Mr. Graves' 
 debtor. 
 
Chapter XX 
 PARODIES, SATIRES AND EPIGRAMS. 
 
 I WISH that a course of good parody were compul- 
 sory for aspirant poets. Parody has the advantage 
 over criticism that all art has over didactics. By 
 reading parodies or witnessing Macbeth a dissatis- 
 faction either with murders or cliches, as the case 
 may be, is made to spring within the breast of the 
 would-be poet or murderer. The preacher and the 
 reviewer only apply pressure from without and are 
 generally met by an exactly equivalent internal re- 
 sistance. Luckily we have a very flourishing 
 modern tradition in this kind. Not all the vitu- 
 peration in the world could deal with what we might 
 call the ' Classical Inadequate School ' as finally as 
 did 'J.B.M.,' author of ' Georgeous Poetry,' in 
 half-a-dozen lines : 
 
 * The blackbird's gay November song 
 And the primroses scattered far 
 Fill all the sky with lutes and bells 
 From star to frosty star. 
 Beside the pond the pipit cries, 
 The heather's all abloom, 
 The winter sun among the sedge 
 Weaves and unweaves its loom.' 
 
 Or consider Mr. Squire and the ' exquisite ' son- 
 net. There is Time's acolyte palely frustrating the 
 
 sunset. 
 
 * No purple mars the chalice ; not a bird 
 Shrills o'er the solemn silence of thy fame.' 
 
PARODIES, SATIRES AND EPIGRAMS 20I 
 
 But, of course, the robuster the poet the more ex- 
 hilarating the parody. There is ' J.B.M/s ' notion 
 of — I suppose — Mr. Chesterton. It begins like 
 this : 
 
 * Babies have such little toes, 
 So soft and pink and small : 
 ** Four by six,*' said the master-plumber, 
 
 And I worked at my wall. 
 Babies have such innocent ways, 
 
 So quiet and nice and sweet ; 
 ** Get that pipe laid down there, 'Arry," 
 
 I work that they may eat. 
 Babies and I will be dust one' day, 
 
 What's the g-ood of it all? 
 ** One yard out," said the master-plumber, 
 Leaning against the wall. * 
 
 Then there are Mr. Vachel Lindsay and Mr. 
 Masefield. Mr. E. V. Knox conceived the pleasant 
 notion of writing about Lord Northcliffe first in the 
 style of one and then of the other. 
 
 * Old Man Alf was an ink proprietor ; 
 
 His voice was loud and never grew quieter; 
 
 He kept rude scribes in a monstrous den 
 
 To hammer on a gong at Cabinet men. 
 Hark to Mail-horn, rail-horn,, sale-horn, 
 Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom ! 
 Listen to the Times-horn, chimes-horn, crimes-horn, 
 Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom ! 
 Pom, bing, pom ! 
 
 (With a touch of ** Alexander's Ragtime Band *').* 
 
 Upon which the parodist turns to Mr. Lloyd George 
 as ' Daniel ' in the same vein. 
 
 The huntsman, Alfred, rode The Mail, 
 A bright bay mount, his best of prancers, 
 Out of Forget-me-not by Answers, 
 
202 PARODIES, SATIRES AND EPIGRAMS 
 
 A thick-set man was Alf, and hard, 
 He chewed a straw from the stable-yard : 
 He owned a chestnut, The Dispatch, 
 With one white sock, and one white patch ; 
 He bred the mare called Comic Cuts ; 
 He was a man with fearful guts. 
 
 So, too, was Rothef, the first whip, 
 Nothing- could give this man the pip ; 
 He rode The Mirror, a raking horse, 
 A piebald full of points and force. 
 All that was best in English life. 
 All that appealed to man or wife, 
 Sweet peas or standard bread or sales 
 These two men loved. They hated Wales 
 
 The Lloyd George motive is again heard, this 
 time he is, of course, under the fox's mask. I have 
 quoted this Masefieldian essay because it provides 
 an instance of a thing which not uncommonly hap- 
 pens in this sort of writing. Can the reader see 
 what is wrong with this parody.'^ If not, here is 
 another example of the trouble, also by Mr. E. V. 
 Knox. This time Mr. de la Mare is to be paro- 
 died : 
 
 * ** Won*t you look out for your Fleet, Mr. Bull? ' 
 Quoth the Navy, nig-ging*, nagging in the papers : 
 ** Can't you look out for your Fleet, Mr. Bull? '' 
 Quoth the Navy, shouting madly in the papers.* 
 
 The fact is that in neither of these two cases has 
 Mr. Knox written a parody at all. The poems are 
 really both of them direct satires about English 
 public events, and not indirect comments on the 
 style of two poets. The poems have transmuted 
 themselves. The centre of interest has shifted 
 
PARODIES, SATIRES AND EPIGRAMS 203, 
 
 from manner to matter. Not but what Direct 
 Satire can be a very good thing : 
 
 * Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wing's, 
 This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings ; 
 Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys, 
 Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne*er enjoys : 
 So well-bred spanielsi civilly delight 
 In mumbling of the game they dare not bite. 
 Eternal smiles his emptiness betray. 
 As shallow streams run dimpling all the way. 
 
 His wit all' see-saw, between that and this, 
 Now high, now low, now master up, now miss, 
 And he himself one vile antithesis. 
 Amphibious thing ! that acting either part, 
 The trifling head or the corrupted heart, 
 Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board. 
 Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord. 
 
 Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust ; 
 Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust. ' 
 
 It is rather odd, I think, that the present age does 
 not produce more and better verse in this manner. 
 Mr. Kipling's very striking ' Gahaizi ' and Mr. 
 Squire's ' Survival of the Fittest ' seem almost the 
 only successful modern poems in this tradition. 
 War satires, of course, we have had in plenty, but 
 these I count as too impersonal to come into this 
 category. On the whole, however, perhaps Indirect 
 Ironical Satire is a better weapon. Consider, for 
 instance, the last lines of the ' Dunciad,' when, her 
 speech at an end at last, the Goddess nods : 
 
 * The all-composing hour 
 Resistless falls : the Muse dbeys the powV. 
 
204 PARODIES, SATIRES AND EPIGRAMS 
 
 She comes ! she comes ! the sable throne behold 
 Of Night primeval and of Chaos old ! 
 Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay, 
 And all its varying rainbows die away. 
 Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, 
 The meteor drops, and in a flash expires. 
 As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, 
 The sick'ning stars fade off th' ethereal plain; 
 
 See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, 
 
 Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her head ! 
 
 Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before, 
 
 Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. 
 
 Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, 
 
 And Metaphysic calls for aid on sense ! 
 
 See Mystery to Mathematics fly ! 
 
 In vain ! they gaze, turn giddy, rave and die. 
 
 Religion, blushing veils her sacred fires, 
 
 And unawares Morality expires. 
 
 For public flame, nor private, dare to shine ; 
 
 Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine ! 
 
 Lo : thy dread empire. Chaos ! is restored ; 
 
 Light dies before thy uncreating word ; 
 
 Thy hand, great Anarch ! lets the curtain fall; 
 
 And universal darkness buries all. ' 
 
 Again here the present age has not so far done 
 much. Mr. Augustine Rivers essayed a little in 
 the Dunciad vein in the Sixth Cycle of Wheels, 
 calling his poem, * The Death of Mercury.' The 
 goddesses Dullness and Mediocrity are progressing 
 slow and magnificent to their thrones : 
 
 * And as, in state, they to their temple go, 
 They hymn ** Praise Squire from whom all blessings flow, 
 Oh, may he prosper ! May his brood increase, 
 And death to all who are not Dull as he is ! " 
 Up from glad Earth the chorus swells again, 
 ** Praise Squire, Praise Squire," we hear the swift refrain 
 
PARODIES, SATIRES AND EPIGRAMS 20$ 
 
 That leaps like fire from every school and college, 
 
 From stately London home or Cotswold Cottage 
 
 Wherever poet meets a poet brother 
 
 (Or makes an income by reviewing each other.) 
 
 The echo alters to ** We never tire 
 
 Of hearing Squire on Shanks and Shanks on Squire.** * 
 
 The goddesses (pursues the satirist) are indeed 
 merely showing a proper sense of gratitude. For 
 i if was for them that he cast aside, 'The gift of 
 parody his only art,' for them that in secret lair he 
 fashioned * the gummy, muddy " Lily of Malud." ' 
 He and his * foursquare ' henchmen. Freeman, 
 Turner, Graves, Shanks and ' reckless ' Rickword, 
 are eternally vowed to her service — and so on. 
 None of it is quite as well polished, either in point 
 of satire or of versification, as it ought to be. For 
 Messrs. Turner and Graves may have faults, they 
 might be accused of being unduly obscure, mystic 
 and rhapsodical, but to lump them all together as 
 dull reminds us of the angry aimlessness of the 
 banderlogue. 
 
 The fact is, that when we turn from Parody to 
 Satire we are too often obliged to turn away from 
 humour. I am not going here to attempt to define 
 humour, but I believe with Mr. Robert Graves, that 
 it is somehow pretty closely allied to the subcon- 
 scious, mystical element in aesthetics. I should 
 fancy that humour was, in fact, like the arts, a chan- 
 nel by which two subconsciousnesses were able to 
 communicate. In nonsense and in jokes we are 
 often aware of the same sort of sense of libera- 
 tion and pleasure as in reading good poetry. And 
 that is why I think that the more amusing and the 
 
206 PARODIES, SATIRES AND EPIGRAMS 
 
 less severe Parody, Satire and Epigram can re- 
 main, the nearer they are to poetry. Savage, 
 denunciatory satire should stick to prose forms. 
 ' Gulliver's Travels ' would have lost a great deal 
 by being written in verse. But, of course, neither 
 Parody nor Epigram need altogether divorce them- 
 selves from malice. Only the jeu (T esprit should 
 on the whole leave a pleasant flavour, and there 
 should remain to the reader a slight sense of adven- 
 ture. 
 
 * Bees and epigrams should 
 
 If they are not to fail 
 
 Have honey, small frames, 
 
 And a sting in the tail. * 
 
 Quite pleasant examples of this classical type of 
 epigram are to be found among the works of Mr. 
 C. L. Graves. For instance, here is one which 
 depends on verbal felicity : 
 
 * The grocer who has made his pile 
 Does he grow nicer? No, sir. 
 
 He does not change his heart or style, 
 And grows a grosser grocer. * 
 
 Mr. Graves' work is, of course, in direct descent 
 from the excellent school of epigram that flourished 
 in Oxford about forty years ago and included so 
 vast a literature on Mr. Jowett. I have always 
 liked the verse about the pathetic Don who — un- 
 willingly — helped Jowett with an immense transla- 
 tion : 
 
 # * Oh, I say ! I once was Forbes, 
 
 Now the^ Master me absorbs 
 Me and many other me*s 
 In his vast Thucydides. * 
 
PARODIES, SATIRES AND EPIGRAMS 20/ 
 
 But there are Gothic as well as Classic epigrams. 
 And in their wild fashion they are quite as difficult 
 to write : 
 
 * Edward the Confessor 
 Slept under the dresiser, 
 When that began to pall 
 He slept in the hall. ' 
 
 That is perhaps the archetypal Gothic epigram. 
 Now observe a classic mind struggling to use the 
 form : 
 
 * The Emperor Nero 
 Was not a Christian Hero 
 He used Communicants 
 As illuminants. '» 
 
 Brilliant, but too intellectual ! It lacks abandon 
 and reminds the reader of the river front of the 
 Houses of Parliament. 
 
 But with the Gothic epigram the reader will per- 
 ceive that we have almost got round to poetry again. 
 Our actual way of return would, of course, be via 
 Nursery Rhymes, Edward Lear and Messrs. 
 Robert Graves and Walter de la Mare. 
 
 Will the reader allow me two more modern in- 
 stances of the art of Parody; the first is by Ezra 
 Pound and mocks generally at the grandiloquents : 
 
 * When I behold how black, immortal ink 
 Drips from my deathless pen — ah, well-away ! 
 Why should we stop at all for what I think ? 
 There is enough in what I chance to say. ' 
 
 The second is another of Mr. Knox's efforts. It 
 is from a poem called ' Glamour.' I beg the reader 
 to turn to the end of the book where, under Mr. 
 
208 PARODIES, SATIRES AND EPIGRAMS 
 
 W. J. Turner's name, he will find quotations from 
 
 the original, ' Paris and Helen/ 
 
 * Hug^e was the hall, and principally made 
 Of porphyry, alabaster, bronze and jade, 
 And noteworthy for its large dining--room. 
 Paris, a guest within the oblonged gloom, 
 Where all the cups were carved with cold pure shapes 
 Of boys and maidens eating unripe grapes. 
 Gazed upon Helen. All Troy's hope was pawned 
 In that one love-look. Menelaus yawned.' 
 
 And those who are familiar with Mr. Turner's 
 poem will enjoy another couplet : 
 
 * Hoary with age and antique with old Time 
 The walls of Troy stood difficult to climb. ' 
 
 Nor shall we like it the less because by it we are re- 
 minded of a really admirable passage in the original. 
 Did anyone ever enjoy his Wordsworth or a 
 ballad the less because of Canning or Calverley.^ 
 It is a great thing that the new school of poetry 
 should have bred so likely a school of parody. 
 No Government can exist without an Opposition. 
 Poets fall into absurdities unless they are criticised, 
 and of all criticism parody is probably the most 
 effective and the least offensive. It is like the par- 
 able in the world of ethics — it does not rouse a 
 spirit of opposition in the individual criticised. 
 The study it shows of the poet's work even turns 
 it into a kind of wry compliment. A poet can 
 accept its hints without loss of amour-propre. Many 
 of us dislike being told that we are getting fat, but 
 few of us are so ill-tempered that we should frown 
 at the distorting glass that tells us so with disarm- 
 ing exaggeration. 
 
PART V 
 
 (FOR READERS) 
 
SHORT STUDIES OF SOME 
 MODERN POETS 
 
 D. H. LAWRENCE 
 
 In Mr. Lawrence the novelist, and still more the 
 philosopher, was always inclined to shoulder out the 
 poet. Of late the poet had seemed entirely ousted, 
 but in a poem which appeared in The Mercury in 
 the Autumn of 1921, called 'The Snake,' he re- 
 asserted himself. Mr. Lawrence has had consider- 
 able influence upon other modern writers, and it is 
 therefore not uninteresting to try and estimate his 
 contribution to modern lyrical poetry. 
 
 In reading Mr. Lawrence's poems we shall 
 probably in the first place be struck by their vigour. 
 The emotional stress is often tremendous. We feel 
 that the content is always bursting out of the skin 
 of the poem. The inspiration was apparently, as a 
 rule, too white-hot to submit to the bonds of a 
 regular metre. Often there was not even time for 
 any symbolism. The poem is a naked, direct state- 
 ment. Take the following, 'Lot's Wife.' It seems 
 devoid of every quality that we expect in verse, 
 except emotion, and yet who can deny it the title of 
 poetry ? 
 
 I have seen it, felt it in my mouth, my throat, my chest, 
 my belly, 
 
212 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 Burning of powerful salt, burning, eating through my defence- 
 less nakedness, 
 
 I have been thrust into white sharp crystals, 
 
 Writhing, twisting, superpenetrated. 
 
 Ah, Lot's wife. Lot's wife ! 
 
 The pillar of salt, the whirling, horrible column of salt, like 
 a waterspout 
 
 That has envelo{>ed me ! 
 
 This directness often gives to the poems a curious 
 flavour that we associate with very different pro- 
 ductions — Mr. Waley's exquisite translations from 
 the Chinese. They have the same naked simpli- 
 city, but the Chinese poets have come to it not from 
 stress and agony of emotion, but from niceness and 
 satiety, and a taste purged and refined through the 
 centuries. 
 
 What do we have to pay for this tensity, this 
 veritable vibration, in Mr. Lawrence.^ As we 
 should expect, his poems, or rather his mental 
 attitude, seem to be without sense of proportion. 
 
 He is, of course, a psychologist of great merit, 
 but when we find him in the sickroom of suffering 
 humanity, his role seems to be that of the patient 
 rather than that of the physician or the enquiring 
 scientist. But before we condemn his methods of 
 expression, we must remember how difficult are the 
 things which he is trying to express and how 
 tremendous to him is their emotional stress. Sex 
 is a subject upon which few of us — Councillor Clark 
 or Mr. Lawrence — can write calmly. Mr. Lawrence 
 is struggling so hard to give utterance to some burn- 
 ing emotion that his verse often becomes tortured 
 and harsh — a contortion rather than a poem. The 
 
D. H. LAWRENCE 213 
 
 more violent the emotion of which he writes, the 
 more we are conscious of a febrile quality in the 
 verse. He can never stand back from his passion. 
 Therefore we often find that his most passionate 
 love poetry, remarkable as it is, is so feverish as to 
 be pathology, not literature. We have perhaps been 
 moved and duly caught into the swing of the poet's 
 mood, and then Mr. Lawrence allows his high tem- 
 perature to get the better of him, and lets himself 
 slip into what is something very near to delirium — 
 too near, at any rate, to be expressed in half a dozen 
 lines. I wonder if he would be able to say what 
 he wanted in an epic or a poetic drama? It is not 
 impossible. As it is we find the paradox that Mr. 
 Lawrence often writes best upon what are to him 
 emphatically secondary subjects. Two poems about 
 children in Amores, for instance, are extraordinarily 
 beautiful and well observed, especially perhaps the 
 one which begins. — 
 
 * When the bare feet of the baby beat across the gfrass 
 The little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind, * 
 
 and which ends. — 
 
 * I long- for the baby to wander hither to me 
 Like a wind-shadow wandering over the water. 
 So that she can stand on my knee 
 With her little bare feet in my hands, 
 Cool like syringfa buds, 
 Firm and silken like pink youngf peony flowers.* 
 
 ' The Snake ' not only contains fine lines but is 
 most effective as a whole. 
 
 But whatever may be Mr. Lawrence's faults, this 
 poem of the baby illustrates his chief virtue. He is 
 rarely negligible. His poems have an intense 
 
214 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 objective existence. To borrow a most repulsive 
 expression from the jargon of the stage, they are 
 always * strong/ There appears to be no civilised 
 expression which gives the notion conveyed by the 
 phrase, ' Punch back of it/ And yet this is a quality 
 of which we are particularly conscious in poetry. 
 There are delightful poets whose works are singu- 
 larly wraith-like. Their poems may be admirable 
 and charming, but we feel that they are akin to 
 Herrick's daffodils and fade away so fast that we 
 must use a sort of cunning in relation to them — 
 must stalk them. Per contra, there are poems which 
 we may like much less; they are often dull or 
 unsubtle, for instance, but which are irrevocable. 
 This vigorous life belongs, in a high degree, to Mr. 
 Lawrences poetry. It is this lesson of strength 
 that he has to impart to younger writers. 
 
 ROBERT GRAVES 
 
 I AM not going to say very much in this book about 
 Mr. Robert Graves as a poet. There are two Mr. 
 Robert Graves', and they now both stand revealed 
 in his books. When I say that there are two, I 
 merely mean that you can like his poetry for its 
 under or its upper meaning. You can like the 
 work of the writer of nursery rhymes with a sneak- 
 ing or a patronising affection, as you prefer ; or you 
 can be repelled or attracted by the mystic and the 
 prophet and the impish, fantastic humourist. For 
 Mr. Graves' real character I must refer the reader 
 
ROBERT GRAVES 21$ 
 
 to ' The Pier Glass,' ' Country Sentiment/ and the 
 book to which the present volume owes so much, 
 ' On English Poetry.' 
 
 I propose to say nothing of his real attitude 
 towards poetry, an attitude with which I am in 
 fundamental, indeed almost in detailed agreement. 
 This attitude is more accurately shown in the texture 
 of this book where it is displayed in many of its 
 applications, than it would be possible to express 
 it in a sentence or two. There is only one piece of 
 advice that I should give to the reader, and that is 
 (contrary to the wise procedure with most poets), 
 to read Mr. Graves' theory before his practice. 
 This because, like other writers, he has published 
 a good many bad poems. He has not alvv^ays 
 realised in writing and publishing his verse the 
 cases in which an individual poem proved to have a 
 leak, where the mystical contents which he put into 
 it has run away, and only appears to him to be still 
 there because he know^s he put it there. Now a 
 reader looking for beauty easily ' spots ' an ugly 
 poem — a failure — but to look in a perfectly dark 
 room for a symbolical black cat which isn't there is 
 proverbially disillusioning. Then he is occasionally 
 obscure, giving us enough plot to distract us from 
 the writing, but making that plot indecipherably 
 involved and fantastic. An example to my mind of 
 this sort of failure is ' The Gnat.' I got that poem 
 expounded to me by Mr. Graves, and when you are 
 given a clue, you find it is far from being the un- 
 satisfactory affair that the unaided reader is likely 
 to find it. But there it stands in ' The Pier Glass ' 
 
2l6 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 anexplained, and, I honestly believe to most people, 
 incomprehensible. 
 
 But Mr. Graves does not often fail, for he is a 
 very good poet indeed. I should like to quote to 
 the reader ' Black Horse Lane ' as an excellent and 
 typical example of Mr. Graves' genius. Here we 
 have the top meaning of nursery rhyme, and the 
 fantastic under-meaning bringing with it wide impli- 
 cations, — ^generalising the message of the poet as 
 only works of art which employ the symbolic method 
 can. Dame Jane is a music mistress and Sharkie is 
 the baker. One day a fiddle tunes up, Starkie 
 catches up Jane and they fly out of the lane ' like 
 swallows.' But nobody knew what he said to her, 
 nobody saw how she looked. 
 
 No neighbooir heard 
 One sigh or one word, 
 Not a sound but the fiddling* in Black Horse Lane, 
 The happy noise of music — 
 Again and again. 
 
 Where now be those two old 'uns, 
 
 be those two old *uns, 
 Sharkie the baker run off with Jane? 
 
 Hark ye up to Flint Street, 
 
 Halloo to Pepper-Mint Street, 
 Follow by the fells to the great North Plain, 
 
 By the fells and the river — 
 
 To the cold North Plain. 
 
 How came this passion to them, 
 
 this passion to them, 
 Love in a freshet on Blackl Horse Lane? 
 
 It came without warning 
 
 One blue windy morning 
 
STURGE MOORE 21 J 
 
 So they scarcely might know was it joy or pain, 
 With scarce breath to wonder — 
 Was it joy or pain. 
 
 Took they no fardels with them, 
 
 no fardels with them. 
 Out and alone on the ice-bound plain? 
 
 Sharkie he had rockets 
 
 And crackers in his pockets, 
 Ay, and she had a plaid shawl to keep off the rain. 
 
 An old Hig-hland plaid shawl — 
 
 To keep off the rain.* 
 
 When you have read Mr. Graves' critical book, 
 then patronise that poem if you still dare. But 
 indeed only the pedant would desire to do that. 
 There is something as fresh and disarming in Mr. 
 Graves' fantasy as there is profound in his 
 psychology. 
 
 STURGE MOORE. 
 
 To me Mr. Sturge Moore is a source of perennial 
 interest as being an endless experimentor in form. 
 His resource in this one respect seems infinite. 
 
 The amphibious form, the book, which is written 
 half in verse, half in prose, is one with which he 
 is always toying. It is always an attractive form 
 to the writer, though most poets are, not unwisely, 
 afraid of its too great freedom. By employing 
 this style the poet can suit his form to the several 
 parts of his theme. He has a sense of the elas- 
 ticity of a mixed medium. But I am not quite 
 sure if such a mixture is often a success from the 
 reader's point of view. The Pilgrim's Progress 
 
2l8 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 gains immensely by the careful skipping of its for- 
 tunately infrequent verse. Alfred's Boethius is 
 little adorned by its metrical portions. Sir James ^ 
 Barrie's The Tmth about the Russian Dancers — ■! 
 half play, half ballet — proved dramatic cross-breds 
 to be not less difficult creatures to manage than 
 literary amphibians. There are conventions in our 
 enjoyment of every art. Convention prevents our 
 even desiring to encircle with a finger the pillars in 
 a Claude. We feel no disappointment because we 
 cannot satisfy toucTi. But let parts of a landscape 
 be modelled in high relief and the flat portions 
 which are left will annoy us. 
 
 We do not resent, we scarcely apprehend, as un- 
 natural, the metric speech of the characters in a nar- 
 rative poem. But let some of the persons speak in 
 prose and we are critical where we should have 
 acquiesced. So perhaps it comes about that the 
 reader has a feeling that he is not being quite fair 
 to the scholarly spirit and many beauties of Mr. 
 Sturge Moore's The Powers of the Air, For not 
 only is The Powers of the Air half in verse and 
 half in prose, but it is half image and half argument. 
 It is a Socratic dialogue in which the scene — light, 
 shade, colour, gesture, sound and scent — is as pro- 
 minent as the exposition of general principles. The 
 visualization is excellent, the dialogue well knit, 
 even if the argument is not very masculine; the 
 characterization is clear, the verse generally melo- 
 dious, the prose often beautiful. The ensemble is 
 interesting without for a moment touching the heart 
 or the imagination. The effects are somehow dis- 
 
STURGE MOORE 219 
 
 sipated. We trip over the several conventions. In 
 another volume, ' Danae and Blind Thamyris,* he 
 tells the story of Charon's ' select academy for the 
 sons of heroes.' It is pleasing, but I for one do not 
 feel that Mr. Moore has even here proved that verse 
 and decorative prose can make up a whole. But 
 this is only one of Mr. Moore's formal experiments. 
 In another volume, ' Tragic Mothers,' ' Three short 
 plays for chamber presentation,' he makes a gallant 
 effort to write a drama for ' three voices heard be- 
 hind a screen.' It begins well, but Niobi's long 
 soliloquy would probably be intensely dull from an 
 invisible speaker with no help of gesture. 
 
 But Mr. Sturge Moore has the merits of his de- 
 fects. If his work occasionally drops into listless- 
 ness, it does not descend further into inadequacy. 
 It is mellow and reflective, and is always easy^ 
 agreeable reading. He has a pretty eye for colour,, 
 for landscape, and an understanding of one aspect 
 of the female mind. With his mildness he always 
 retains a certain scholarly distinction — he does not, 
 in Jenny Pearl's phrase, become ' soppy.' He has 
 a mind which in many ways resembles that of Mat- 
 thew Arnold, only he is without much of the Vic- 
 torian's irritation at a world full of vulgar num- 
 skulls. 
 
 The dedication of a narrative poem, ' Afore- 
 time,' to Mr. Gordon Bottomley gives a capital pic- 
 ture of a mellow and reflective mind at work 
 fashioning verses with a sort of cool affection : 
 
 * Dear exile from the hurrying- crowd, 
 At work I muse to you aloud ; 
 
220 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 Thought on my anvil softens, glows, 
 
 And I forget our art has foes ; 
 
 For life, the mother of beauty, seems 
 
 A joyous sleep with waking dreams. 
 
 Then the toy armoury of the brain 
 
 Opining, judging, looks as vain 
 
 As trowels silver gilt for use 
 
 Of mayors and kings, who have to lay 
 
 Foundation stones in hope they may 
 
 Be honoured for walls others build. 
 
 I, in amicable muse. 
 
 With fathomless wonder only filled. 
 
 Whisper over to your ear 
 
 Listening two hundred odd miles north, 
 
 And give thought chase that, were you here, 
 
 Our talk would never run to earth. ' 
 
 Perhaps he is at his best when, as in Danae, he is 
 turning a sometimes lewd old story to ' favour and 
 to prettiness.' To borrow his own words, 
 
 * Leaves wet with dew in lettuce-hearts confined, 
 Are not more dainty or more clear of hue. * 
 
 Such is this tale. Perhaps the best thing he ever 
 wrote is another play from 'Tragic Mothers,' called 
 ^ Medea.' I am not quite sure of its absolute merit, 
 part of its attraction to me being its ingenuity. 
 
 'A curtain bearer and two curtain folders' play the 
 ingeniously conceived parts of mediums at a seance 
 and Chorus. Medea has sacrificed her two sons to 
 appease Artemis, who was wroth at her broken vow 
 of chastity. She hunts once more in the train of the 
 goddess, but is haunted by the thought of the two 
 boys for whose forgiveness she longs. She invokes 
 them, and they speak to her through the lips of the 
 entranced chorus. She begs them to understand 
 
STURGE MOORE 221 
 
 her deed. She killed them that they might escape 
 bondage, but her heart is torn at the thought of her 
 cruelty. The voices are silent, and she fears that 
 grief or anger keeps them so. But she has for- 
 gotten that they are children. They are playing^ 
 hide-and-seek : 
 
 ' Mermeros : 
 
 I said : ** Novv we must hide,'* but Pheres said : 
 ** She cannot see us, there's no need to hide.'' 
 Then I said : ** Hide from hearing, hide in silence, 
 We'll not be found there till she makes us laugh." 
 Pheres : 
 
 That's the new hide-and-seek we play at now. 
 
 Medea (incredulously) : 
 
 But are you really there? You move about? 
 
 Both Boys : 
 
 Yes, we are here, and run and leap and laugh. 
 
 Medea (kneeling on one knee and holding out her arms) :: 
 Come, I have much to whisper, heart to heart. 
 
 Mermeros : 
 
 What a beautiful bow you've got. 
 
 Pheres : Bend it, mother. 
 
 Medea : 
 
 I want your pardon, you can only give it 
 
 When you shall know how cruel were the wrongs . . .. 
 
 Both Boys (interrupting) : 
 Shoot, mother, shoot.' 
 
 Again she tries to ease her heavy conscience, but 
 only succeeds in making the children cry, and when 
 she desists, hopeless, they tell her how the rabbits 
 do not fear them now. They talk of childish 
 things and break her heart afresh. Well played,^ 
 the little scene might be extremely poignant. 
 
222 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 GORDON BOTTOMLEY. 
 
 Mr. Gordon Bottomley is the only serious Eng- 
 lish exponent of the verse drama, and in his best 
 productions he follows the lead neither of Maeter- 
 linck, nor of the Irish school. There is always a 
 danger in the Maeterlincken drama of the sort of 
 thing that Mr. Squire parodies so attractively (in 
 * Collected Parodies '). 
 
 * From the forest on the left SIX OLD MEN enter. 
 The five of them are blind and deaf and dumb, but the 
 sixth is not dumb. He is only blind and deaf. They 
 walk very slowly and stumbling-ly. The first feels his 
 way with his staff. The others also feel their ways with 
 their staffs, tripping^ over sticks and dead leaves as they 
 
 The ' Belgian Shakespeare ' has much to answer 
 for. 
 
 In bad examples of the Celtic school we get 
 another sort of absurdity, a kind of stark, tremend- 
 ous heroism all about nothing, and both schools are 
 apt to suffer from that besetting trouble of the 
 poetic drama — a lack of vigour. Mr. Gordon Bot- 
 tomley has his faults, but in two or three plays he 
 has avoided these pitfalls. The best of his dramas 
 have a strength and a vigour which is immediately 
 striking to the reader, and — in the only one that I 
 have had the pleasure of seeing acted, ' King Lear's 
 Wife ' — these qualities were equally apparent to a 
 theatre audience. 
 
 Two of Mr. Bottomley's plays are concerned 
 with the past of Shakespearian characters — ' King 
 
GORDON BOTTOMLEY 223 
 
 Lear's Wife ' and ' Grauch.' King Lear is shown 
 us as a still vigorous, middle-aged man; his wife 
 is dying. 
 
 In M. Komisarjevsky's production of the play a 
 great bed was mounted on a platform, its head 
 against the back of the stage, and six or eight steps 
 on the three sides led up to this couch. It was an 
 admirable symbolic device. The queen, isolated 
 and alone, yet dominates the situation. The King 
 has fallen in love with one of her young waiting 
 women who should be nursing her. But Lear is 
 always luring the willing Gormflaith from her sleep- 
 ing mistress. The Queen does not quite know 
 what is going on, but she suspects, and we are given 
 a wonderful picture of her despair largely through 
 the mouth of the doctor who attends her. 
 
 * Physician : We cannot die wholly against our wills ; 
 And in the texture of women I havei found 
 Harder determination than in men : 
 The body grows impatient of enduring, 
 The harried mind is from the body estranged, 
 And we consent to go : by the Queen's touch. 
 The way she moves — or does not move — in bed. 
 The eyes so cold and keen in her white mask, 
 I^ know she has consented. ' 
 
 The characters of the two elder daughters, 
 
 Goneril and Regan, are also admirably portrayed. 
 
 Goneril draws her ov/n portrait at length for us — 
 
 cold, pure, ruthless — and then shows us the sordid 
 
 Regan : 
 
 * I dreamt that I was swimming, shoulder up. 
 And drave the bedclothes spreading to the floor : 
 Coldness awoke me ; through the waning darkness 
 I heard far hounds give shivering aery tongue, 
 
224 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 Remote, withdrawing, suddenly faint and near, 
 I leapt and saw a pack of stretching- weasels 
 Hunt a pale coney in a soundless rush. 
 Their elfin and thin yelping pierced my heart 
 As with an unseen beauty long awaited ; 
 Wolf-skin and cloak I buckled over this night-gear,. 
 And took my honoured spear from my bed-side 
 Where none but I may touch its purity, ' 
 And sped as lightly down the dewy bank 
 As any mothy owl that hunts quick mice. 
 They went crying, crying, but I lost them 
 Before I stept, with the first tips of light. 
 On Raven Crag near by the Druid Stones . . .' 
 
 * Does Regan worship anywhere at dawn? 
 The sweaty half-clad cook-maids render lard 
 Out in the scullery, after pig-killing. 
 And Regan sidles among their greasy skirts, 
 Smeary and hot as they, for craps to suck. 
 I lost my thoughts before the giant Stones . . . 
 And when anew the earth; assembled round me 
 I swung out on the heath and woke a hare 
 And speared it at a cast and shouldered it. * 
 
 But Mr. Bottomley has his faults. We can see 
 them large in ' Midsummer Eve.' Stage direc- 
 tions matter very much in a poetic drama. It is 
 difficult to lay down rules for their proper conceiv- 
 ing. Such plays, it must be remembered, are 
 intended both to be read and acted. But has the 
 poet clearly envisaged either group of his disciples 
 in the following? 
 
 * All is soundless again save for the cow's moaning. 
 The twilight deepens no farther, and presently its dead 
 gold brownness becomes cooler in tone ; the mist which 
 had been merged in the nightfalFs dimness, imper- 
 ceptibly becomes apparent again, being suffused by an 
 
GORDON BOTTOMLEY 225 
 
 oozing- of silveriness through the pervading brownness ; 
 moon-rise is evident, although the moon is hidden by 
 the permeating^ mist which it fills. Perhaps a crying of 
 bats is heard, but this is not certain. An owl cries some- 
 where — probably from one of the gable-holes, for it 
 sounds both inside and outside at once ; after many ten- 
 tative Tu-whits it launches a full Tu-whoo and swings 
 out far and low across the valley : a chirping of frogs 
 begins in the nearest ditches. . . . ' 
 
 The rest is obviously legitimate, for it consists 
 of directions as to the position of the characters. 
 But in the above passage, what purpose is achieved 
 or intended.^ It is surely neither a hint on inter- 
 pretation to the actors, a guide to the proper man- 
 agement of the limes and the conduct of the ' pro- 
 perty ' bats, nor is it a piece of prose whose cadence 
 is to vary the blank verse for the reader. 
 
 However, we very rarely find Mr. Gordon Bot- 
 tomley ' talking through his hat ' like this ; his plays 
 are usually models of economy and restraint. 
 
 ' Grauch,' like ' King Lear's Wife,' is an attempt 
 to reconstruct the past of one of Shakespeare's 
 characters. 
 
 This time he has chosen Lady Macbeth. She is 
 a girl and is to be married (because her lands march 
 with his) to the oafish but good-natured Thane of 
 Fortingall, the owner of ' a small, black stone castle 
 in the north of Scotland.' It is the eve of her 
 wedding to this bridegroom, whose state and char- 
 acter she views with equal contempt. The scene 
 opens with the wedding preparations, a device 
 which automatically answers the reader's question, 
 ' Why should she marry him unless she chose ? ' 
 
226 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 by showing the reiterated pressure of minor com- 
 monplace events on the strongest character. 
 
 The question of whether Grauch shall marry the 
 Thane of Fortingall is completely buried under the 
 question of how many guests are to be expected, 
 who is to skin the rabbits and pluck. the game for 
 the wedding feast, and how the embroidery of 
 Grauch's wedding-dress is to be finished in time. 
 All this is true. Who does not know in everyday 
 life the extraordinary power of the lesser to contain 
 the greater.^ 
 
 Exhausted by these small cares, the family are 
 just gomg to bed 'when the King's envoy, on his 
 way to Inverness, knocks and demands stable and 
 lodging. It is the young Macbeth. The envoy 
 and to-morrow's bride fall immediately in love with 
 one another, and in another sleep-walking scene this 
 love is declared. Almost at once the girl, though 
 she is never the mature, assured woman that Shake- 
 speare drew, begins to dominate the fiery but im- 
 pressionable Macbeth. He carries her off with 
 him, and her last act is to make him swear that one 
 day he will come back and burn the home that has 
 sheltered her in revenge for the fact that here her 
 will was nearly bent to that of others. 
 
 In ' Britain's Daughter ' Mr. Bottomley partly 
 re-tells the story of Trojan Women, except that 
 here the moral is not quite so plain as is Euripides'. 
 The Britons under their Queen, the mother of the 
 heroine, ' Nest,' have risen against the Roman rule. 
 Nest is an eaglet, a true primitive fighter with the 
 clear code of the warrior and the fierce virginal 
 
GORDON BOTTOMLEY 227 
 
 character of Mr. Bottomley's Goneril, but she is 
 ennobled by a real patriotic flame. Of the miseries 
 which this patriotism has brought about, the ' com- 
 mon people ' in the play complain. There are the 
 childless old women, the girls driven off as a prey 
 to the soldiers, the starving children, the spitted 
 babies of Troy and of Belgium and of Russia. As 
 in ' Trojan Women,' the stage is during a great 
 part of the action illuminated by the light of burn- 
 ing dwellings. 
 
 Psychologically the merit of the play is that it 
 shows us how the primitive virtues almost inevit- 
 ably bring this sort of thing about. 
 
 The play is full of life and interest. Mr. Bot- 
 tomley cares both for subtle psychological states 
 and the most primitive sensations of bodily wants. 
 Compare these two passages, which in the play 
 follow almost immediately upon one another : 
 
 * The Second Woman : 
 
 The cold strikes through my shoes ; even on the sands 
 The rime is thick. The rime will settle on us, 
 The frost will reach our bone-pith before dawn comes. 
 I shall have a stiff stomach for a week. 
 
 * The Third Woman : 
 
 You should have brought two* cloaks. 
 
 * The Second Woman : 
 
 My house is full of drunken Roman men 
 
 Who throw their arms around my empty mead-vat. 
 
 * The First Woman : 
 
 At the top of the street I passed a dead woman 
 Wearing good clothes. I pared off her skirt and leg- 
 cloths, 
 And donned them over my own. . . .* 
 
228 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 Madron is one of Nest's subjects, goaded by his 
 miseries into abuse of the young captive Queen and 
 an attack upon her as she stands bound to a post by 
 the quayside. She has defied him : 
 * Madron : 
 
 I have not seen such mettle in a girl, 
 My lasses are flinchers and wheedlers and all for them- 
 selves. 
 Delicate meats, soft clothing- and warm fur. 
 The eagerness of hunting, and gold that frees 
 From long toil and subservience, seemi to breed 
 A generous and daring of spirit 
 That more might share if more were favoured so. 
 Maiden, the keenness of your soul can hurt, 
 Though not your pride of state, not your steeled mind : 
 Life is fair and an opening wonder in you : 
 I will not touch you ; I will serve life in you, 
 Though not your state, if you will tell your need. ... * 
 
 I think that we should place the two dramas in 
 ' Grauch ' and ' Britain's DaugTiter ' after ' King 
 Lear's Wife,' but before ' The Riding to Lithend ' 
 and ' Midsummer Eve.' 
 
 Has the reader observed from the extracts I have 
 given how carefully he has been spared any mono- 
 tony in the run of the metre. How well Mr. Bot- 
 tomley has diversified his blank verse. His 
 metrical devices are never obtrusive, but almost in- 
 variably effective. I am not sure if Mr. Bottom- 
 ley's work (excepting ' King Lear's Wife ') has 
 great monumental value in itself. (Whether it will 
 be read in twenty years' time, for example.) I do, 
 however, think that it has great interest for his con- 
 temporaries as marking a definite stage in the eluci- 
 dation of the problems presented by the poetic 
 
GORDON BOTTOMLEY 229 
 
 drama. His work is valuable not only for its posi- 
 tive merits, but as a standing proof that it is possible 
 in poetic drama to avoid the chief faults of the 
 Irish and Maeterlinckian schools. Mr. Squire has 
 pointed out that essentially what Maeterlinck did 
 was to in,vent a dramatic version of the ' Fin de 
 Steele ' lyric. The Irish school have something 
 of the same taking tricks of method, the same 
 triviality of matter. Both are rather oppressed by 
 the solution of problems of technique and grow self- 
 conscious in the performance of what they feel to 
 be acrobatic feats. Mr. Bottomley seems to take 
 the writing of poetic drama quite naturally as a 
 perfectly obvious form of human activity. 
 
 A careful study of his work will save the young 
 dramatist from a great many errors and absurdities. 
 
 W. J. TURNER. 
 
 Most of Mr. Turner's shorter pieces have a cer- 
 tain quality which it is difficult to name. To me 
 they recall the image of a black opal. This simile 
 suggests itself pat^tly, because he does actually 
 often describe dark, sombre colours and burning 
 glowing lights, and partly because there is often the 
 same quality of fire in the poems themselves, a 
 quality at once elusive and a little menacing. All 
 the clear, everyday gaiety and charm of which Mr. 
 Turner is capable, he seems to have put entirely 
 on one side, and when he chooses to give it to the 
 
230 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 public, he gives it unadulterated by ' The Dark 
 Fire ' of his shorter pieces. 
 
 I am not quite sure that the definite separation 
 between his two styles is a good thing. ' Paris and 
 Helen ' is sometimes so clear as to produce an effect 
 of shallowness while the less successful of the short 
 pieces are occasionally tortured and incomprehen- 
 sible. At his best, however, Mr. Turner can make 
 a success of both methods. 
 
 ' Paris and Helen ' has one quality which I for 
 one esteem highly in a narrative poem. It is 
 agreeable and easy to read. The versification 
 carries you along like the easy current of a stream. 
 I have one grievance in the earlier part of the poem. 
 The reader is scarcely allowed a glimpse of the 
 affair of the apple. It is very disappointing, as 
 we had hoped for a fine set piece from Mr. Turner. 
 However, we are partly consoled by a capital 
 thunderstorm, during which two messengers come 
 up from Troy to tell Paris that he is wanted. Their 
 dark cloaks flap in the yellow light of the great 
 storm clouds. The ship and the fatal voyage which 
 take Paris to Greece are shown with an admirably 
 contrived sense of enchantment and mystery about 
 them. The ship has 'a painted Amor' carved on 
 her prow which is caressed by the ' sea-wandering 
 airs ' — a truly Homeric epithet. 
 
 When it comes to Helen herself, we are again 
 treated shabbily as in the matter of the Judgment. 
 ' The face that launched a thousand ships ' is 
 scarcely described : we see only her ' wild, calm 
 beauty' as it is mirrored in the eyes of the men 
 
W. J. TURNER 231 
 
 who gaze at her. But perhaps the best thing in the 
 book is the description of Troy set in its ramparts, 
 when Paris brings back his paramour. There stand 
 the huge outer walls of Troy, ' like some sublime 
 sea-wrack ' : — 
 
 * Enormous ag-e has smoothed her stones away, 
 And the soft, giant hands of Night and Day 
 Have crumbled mountain dust upon her walls.* 
 
 Then Priam and his lords sitting in council are 
 described:— ^ Not a sound 
 
 Disturbed the solemn, century-laden air.' 
 
 The Council Hall is magnificent and barbaric 
 with ' the spoils of ancient wars,' and the old lords 
 are on their seats of gold : — 
 
 * Who sat bejewelled grasping their jewelled swords.* 
 
 At last the doors are flung open : — 
 
 * There stood Prince Paris with his heavenly bride. 
 Upon King Priam and those silent lords 
 
 Then fell the glance that drew ten thousand swards 
 To flash on Ilion. Slowly in that blaze 
 The Phrygian Princes rose.* 
 
 The end of the story is told in the same sort of 
 way; all is made fair and mystical, a scene out of a 
 huge languid drama. 
 
 What could be in greater contrast to these large 
 clear prospects than a poem like ' The Caves of 
 Auvergne.' Primitive man back from the wars 
 carves with a sort of sombre exultation images of 
 deer and bull on the smooth walls of the cave. 
 
 * The stars flew by the cave's; wide open door, 
 The clouds wild trumpets blew, 
 
232 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 Trees rose in wild dreams from the floor, 
 Flowers with dream faces grew 
 
 Up to the sky, and softly hung 
 Golden and white and blue. 
 
 The red deer of the forest dark, 
 
 Whose antlers cut the sky, 
 That vanishes into the mirk 
 
 And like a dream flits by, 
 And by an arrow slain at last 
 
 Is but the wind's dark body. 
 
 The bull that stands in marshy lakes 
 
 As motionless and still 
 As a dark rock butting from a plain 
 
 Without a tree or hill ; 
 The bull that is the sign of life. 
 
 Its sombre, phallic will. 
 
 And from the dead, white eyes of them 
 
 The wind springs up anew. 
 It blows upon the trembling heart, 
 
 And bull and deer renew 
 Their flitting life in the dim past 
 
 When that dead Hunter drew. 
 
 I sit beside him in the night. 
 
 And, fingering his red stone, 
 I chase through endless forests dark 
 
 Seeking that thing unknown, 
 That which is not red deer or bull, 
 
 But which by them was shown : 
 
 By those stiff shapes in which he dfew 
 
 His souPs exalted cry. 
 When flying down the forest dark 
 
 He slew and knew not why, 
 When he was filled with song, and strength 
 
 Flowed to him from the sky. ' 
 
W. J. TURNER 233 
 
 Another highly characteristic poem is 'Contem- 
 plation of Life/ The poet perceives in a vision 
 that though life is mortal, yet Love is even more 
 the prey of Death and has a shorter span. 
 
 ' Upon a scene of endless transformation 
 I gazed unhappy, rivers came and faded, 
 Drag-ging a momentary brightness from the clouds 
 Into the monochrome of walling seas 
 Which leapt and fell with steady oscillation, 
 And in the crystal of eternity 
 Hung with a quivering wave-like repetition 
 The trees and mountains and the hollow valleys 
 With towns and peoples and a few fearful places 
 Where the soul hunted had leapt up and printed 
 On rock or tree or sheeted falling water 
 The sudden bright and diamond burning visage.* 
 
 Mr. Turner is, I hope, only at the beginning of 
 his poetical career. It will be interesting to see if 
 he ever amalgamates the two sides of his work — 
 ' Paris and Helen ' and the black opal. I feel 
 pretty hopeful that he will continue the mystical 
 side of his work. It would be a great loss to 
 modern poetry if he did not. The reader cannot 
 help fancying that he has a good deal still to say. 
 
 VACHEL LINDSAY. 
 
 If ever there was a poet who even in these sophis- 
 ticated days needed an interpreter, that poet is Mr. 
 Vachel Lindsay. His mission is to take poetry out 
 of the library; his poems are written for the enjoy- 
 ment of the Plain Man. In America, where the 
 Plain Man has less definite views of the proper 
 
234 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 habitat of poetry, it is immensely enjoyed. Pos- 
 sibly, unless its nature is a little explained, the 
 Plain Man in England may regard it as not so 
 much emancipated from the library as escaped from 
 the menagerie. 
 
 But I don't think that when we come to consider 
 his poems in detail we shall find them unduly 
 alarming, unless we are over-obsessed by ideas 
 about the dignity of literature, and we have 
 forgotten Bacchus and Dionysus and our child- 
 hood. It is a pity to let the reading of Mr. 
 Vachel Lindsay's poems make us feel scared and 
 prim. For once, before the years had made us shy, 
 there was a time when, in the right mood, we should 
 have revelled in them — over the fire of an evening, 
 or dabbling bare feet in a rock pool at the seaside. 
 Then their high spirits, their enthusiasm, their 'guts 
 and glow,' would have intoxicated us as they are 
 meant to. Mr. Vachel Lindsay is a poet who speaks 
 to our moods of freedom, to moods when we are 
 away from hostile criticism, when, most of all, we are 
 away from the odious spoil-sport who lives within 
 us all, and whose acid ' You are making a fool of 
 yourself has made drab the lives of some of us 
 for good and all. Those who have had the good 
 fortune to hear Mr. Vachel Lindsay recite ' The 
 Congo' will realise how much for its proper enjoy- 
 ment it demands a certain abandon, an ' out of 
 school ' feeling, which for the self-conscious is only 
 obtained in solitude or in carefully chosen society : 
 
 * Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, 
 Barrel-house kingfs, with feet unstable, 
 
VACHEL LINDSAY 235 
 
 Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, 
 
 Pounded on the table, 
 
 Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom, 
 
 Hard) as they were able. 
 
 Boom, boom, BOOM,, 
 
 With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom, 
 
 Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM. 
 
 THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision. 
 
 I co'uld not turn from their revel in derision. 
 
 THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH 
 
 THE BLACK, 
 CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A 
 
 GOLDEN TRACK. 
 Then along that riverbank 
 A thousand miles 
 Tattooed cannibals danced in files ; 
 Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song 
 And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong. * 
 
 There was no doubt that if the listener accepted 
 Mr. Vachel Lindsay's mood, his use of the grotesque 
 and the uncanny, there was something extraordin- 
 arily stirring and impressive about this passage as 
 he chanted it. These opening lines are followed 
 by an enlargement of the uncanny motif : — 
 
 * Death is an Elephant, 
 Torch-eyed and horrible. 
 Foam-flanked and terrible.' 
 
 Death is the servant of Mumbo-Jumbo, the ghost- 
 god of the Congo, — Mumbo-Jumbo, god of secret 
 and bloody rites. Then the mood of the poem 
 changes, and at once we are confronted with the 
 negroes in wild, childish high spirits. A ' Negro 
 Fairyland' swings into view, where an ebony palace 
 is guarded by a baboon butler, and the cake-walk 
 princes laugh down the witch men who have 
 
236 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 threatened them with the dark terrors of Mumbo- 
 Jumbo : — 
 
 ' Just then from the doorway, as fat as shotes, 
 Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats, 
 Canes with a brilliant lacquer shine, 
 And tall silk hats that were red asi wine. 
 And they pranced with their butterfly partners there. 
 Coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair ; 
 Knee-skirts trimmed with the jessamine sweet, 
 And bells on their ankles and little black feet. ' 
 
 They walk for a cake that is tall as a man, 
 defiant of the witch men who finally are unable to 
 resist the laughter and nonsense. But there is 
 another side of the negro character. As a revivalist 
 he can outdo Moody, Sankey, and General Booth. 
 The old preacher 
 
 ' Beat on the Bible till he wore it out 
 Starting" the jubilee revival shout.' 
 
 All along the valley of the Congo sweeps the 
 cleansing fire of Christianity, sweeping over ' the 
 vine-snared trees,' and the triumphant hymn goes : 
 
 * Mumbo-Jumbo will die) in the jungle ; 
 Never again will he= hoo-doo you. 
 Never again will he hoo»-doo you.' 
 
 * Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and the men. 
 And only the vulture dared again 
 By the far, lone mountains of the moon 
 To cry in the silence, the Congo tune : — 
 ** Mumbo-Jumbo' will hoo-doo you, 
 Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you. 
 Mumbo . . . Jumbo . . . will . . . hoo-doo . . . you.'* * 
 
 The last lines are almost whispered. 
 
VACHEL LINDSAY 237 
 
 When Mr. Vachel Lindsay repeats this poem 
 himself it has a swing, a pageantry, and a glamour 
 which are remarkable. 
 
 In nothing does Mr. Lindsay need the services 
 of the critic more than in the matter of his stage 
 directions. These are to be understood only by 
 those to whom he has explained his theories of 
 recitation, or rather as he prefers to call them, his 
 'habits.' When he recites he half sings and half 
 speaks. The spoken parts are given with the 
 orator's swing in a rhetorical passage; sometimes 
 the swing is exaggerated till he is chanting. Now 
 and then a lyrical piece will be crooned or sung 
 to a simple musical tune of a few notes. All this 
 may sound absurd, but I have had proof of this 
 pudding and it is admirable. The method is all 
 based on this theory : Mr. Lindsay thinks that 
 poetry has lost a good deal by being written chiefly 
 for the eye. On the other hand, he does not want 
 to go back to the setting of poems to music, as he 
 considers at the present day western music, even 
 that written for the voice, has become so mathe- 
 matical with its scales, tones and semi-tones, that 
 it is too elaborate to be used merely to enhance the 
 effect of the written word. There is another music 
 of a more primitive kind which is much more to 
 his purpose — that is, the music of the alphabet. A 
 good French or English Actor, M. Coquelin or Mr. 
 Henry Ainley, for instance, creates for any indi- 
 vidual piece of blank verse or Alexandrine that he 
 may be speaking, a beautiful pattern of sound, 
 something which is almost a tune; something to 
 
238 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 which it is a pleasure for a foreigner to listen even 
 if he cannot understand the words. This is the 
 music which Mr. Lindsay seeks to develop, and it 
 is with the accompaniment of a fairly elaborate 
 voice pattern that his verse must be judged. The 
 reader may object that it is no new thing to say that 
 verse should be read aloud ; this, of course, is per- 
 fectly true, but actually in practice both Mr. Lind- 
 say's writing and delivery carry the process of good 
 dramatic diction a little further. For instance, in 
 the matter of writing, in each poem there are pas- 
 sages almost purely rhetorical, written in order that 
 the speaker of them, the pattern-maker, may be able 
 to convey a sense of, say, tranquillity or, on the other 
 hand, of swift motion. For instance in 'The 
 Santa-Fe Trail ' the poet gives us a picture of a day 
 spent under the arched sky of the wide Kansas 
 Plain; he desires to give the reader a sense of the 
 racing motor : — 
 
 ' Butting through the delicate mists of the morning, 
 It comes like lightning, goes past roaring ' — 
 
 of the cars which stream all day out of the East 
 towards the brown sea-sands of the Pacific coast : — 
 
 * Ho' for the tear-horn,, scare-horn, darenhofn, 
 Ho for the ^ay-horn, barfe-horn, hay-horn. 
 Ho for the Kansas, land that restores us 
 When houses choke us, and great hooks hore us •' 
 Sunrise Kansas, harvester's Kansas, 
 A inillion men have found you hefore us.^ 
 
 The first lines of this are, of course, simply syllables 
 which, when properly spoken, will give a sense of 
 
VACHEL LINDSAY 239 
 
 swiftness and hurry. In their place they are effec- 
 tive and graphic. 
 
 It is very interesting to notice the effect of Mr. 
 Lindsay's poems on the poetically unsophisticated. 
 They prove a delight to the perfectly natural 
 person or to the child. The mixture of humour, 
 nonsense, and rhetoric, the high spirits, the go of 
 them, act like wine when the listener is entirely un- 
 selfconscious and unprejudiced. It is for the un- 
 self conscious and unprejudiced that they are 
 intended. Perhaps Mr. Vachel Lindsay is one of 
 the first people to do really good aesthetic work 
 which is intended for 'natural man.' It is not here 
 a question of 'writing down,' of words in one syl- 
 lable, it is a question of appealing, as does Edward 
 Lear's nonsense, to our simplest aesthetic tastes — 
 the tastes which all of us share, but which have 
 hitherto generally been appealed to so badly and so 
 shabbily, that even the simple have been rather 
 ashamed to acknowledge them and the sophisticated 
 have suppressed them altogether as unworthy. It 
 was not the tastes that were unworthy, it was the 
 stuff that was provided for their satisfaction. Nor 
 is the question of this satisfaction an academic or 
 even a literary one; it is one which probably has 
 more to do with human happiness than is as yet 
 well understood. 
 
240 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 MISS EDITH AND MESSRS. OSBERT 
 AND SACHEVERELL SITWELL 
 
 If you go to see the glass-blowers of Murano they 
 will sometimes give you little twisted blowings of 
 glass that are like dolls or toy dogs. You used 
 before the war to be able to buy this sort of toy, 
 made a little more elaborately, in old-fashioned 
 toyshops. They ended in a sort of spiral bit at 
 ankles and wrists, they were very smooth, very 
 bright in colour, very small and very brittle. 
 
 To the reader who comes unprepared upon the 
 works of the Sitwell family the poems in ' Wheels,' 
 ' the Wooden Pegasus,' and 'People's Palace' will 
 seem to bear a strong resemblance to these dolls. 
 For Messrs. Osbert and Sacheverell and Miss Edith 
 Sitwell possess, besides the tastes and aims of more 
 normal people, a genuinely fantastic imagination. 
 
 Those who dislike their poetry accuse them of 
 being affected, they say that their oddity is nothing 
 but a pose, that they are so effete that they can no 
 longer enjoy the simple things of the world, and 
 must have passed through a stage of mental de- 
 bauchery thus to return to the childishness of a 
 premature senility. All this sounds very plausible 
 if we only read the parodies of their poems. It is 
 easy and amusing to imitate their work, and we shall 
 find successful imitations of their style in almost all 
 the books of parodies that have appeared since the 
 
THE SITWELLS 24 1 
 
 war. As a matter of fact, the explanation of their 
 peculiarities is very much simpler than that. They 
 possess, all three of them, unnaturally sharp sense 
 perceptions and a habit of mind which is common 
 with those who have such abnormally good eyes and 
 ears. We see the same thing in Miss Dorothy 
 Richardson's work. For purposes of expression, 
 they translate sounds into sights and sights into 
 sounds. Let me give a simple example, a frozen 
 frost-rimed blade of grass is obviously a stiff ; tense 
 thing. Now tenseness translated into terms of 
 sound would give the idea of high-pitch, and this is 
 the mental process — not sheer devilry as some of 
 her critics would hold — that makes Miss Sitwell in 
 one of her poems speak of a blade of grass in the 
 cold being ' shrill.' Further, as a family, they 
 know a good deal about pictures, both ancient and 
 modern, and so are very used to seeing the world 
 through the eyes of a Tiepolo, a Paul Veronese, 
 an El Greco, a Nevinson or an Ingres. This 
 familiarity with the visual arts has very much in- 
 creased what must be a natural tendency in them, a 
 tendency to generalise what they see, — to see in 
 patterns. Further a taste for satire and humour 
 which is common to them makes them often see 
 exceedingly funny patterns. 
 
 Here is a description of a piece of coast near 
 Monte Carlo, by Mr. Osbert Sitwell : — 
 
 * Above from plaster-mountains, 
 Wine-shadowed by the sea, 
 Spurt white-wool clouds, as fountains 
 Whirl from a rockery. 
 
242 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 Through porous leaves the sun drops 
 
 Each dripping stalactite 
 Of green. The chiselled tree-tops 
 
 Seem cut from malachite. 
 
 Stiff lea,ves with ragged edges 
 
 (Each one a wooden sword) 
 Are carved to prickly hedges, 
 
 On which, with one accord 
 
 Their clockwork songs of calf-love 
 
 Stout birds stop to recite, 
 From cages which the sun wove 
 
 Of shade and latticed light. 
 
 Each brittle booth and joy-store 
 
 Shines brightly. Below these 
 The ocean at a toy shore 
 
 Yaps like a Pekinese.' 
 
 But Mr. Osbert Sitwell can be serious too. Here 
 is the first verse of another poem; again he con- 
 ceives in visual terms. The words are used chiefly 
 for their roundness of sound and their beauty and 
 colour : — 
 
 * Dusk floats up from the earth beneath, 
 Held in the arms of the evening wind 
 The evening wind that softly creeps 
 Along the jasper- terraces, 
 To bear with it 
 The old, sad scent 
 
 Of midsummer, of trees and flowers. 
 Whose bell-shaped blossoms, shaken, torn 
 By the rough fingers of the day 
 Ring out their frail and honeyed notes.' 
 
 Miss Edith Sitwell, with a slightly shorter range 
 than her brother Osbert, has besides her satires, 
 like him, written quite a number of ' straight ' poems, 
 
THE SITWELLS 243 
 
 many of them very successful. She is in her own 
 style a poet whose works have extraordinary finish. 
 She has always reminded me of a Vibrist painter. 
 The adherents of this school have, beside a number 
 of theories, one practice in common — they apply 
 their paint in blobs. A grey is produced by in- 
 numerable definite specks of many bright colours 
 so mingled as in totality to produce the effect of 
 grey. As for the drawing, it is not done with lines, 
 but is also done with blobs. Stand close to the 
 picture, and it is generally impossible to gather the 
 intentions of the painter either as to colour or form, 
 but retire a little from it and the pattern becomes 
 clear. Miss Edith Sitwell's work is like a Vibrist 
 picture in being made up of innumerable small 
 bright patches of colour — very clear, very bright, 
 often startling, sometimes pretty. It is not every- 
 body who can make little blobs of bright definite 
 colour with printer's ink. To do so requires con- 
 siderable artifice. 
 
 Take the following, which also contains some 
 good instances of sense interchange : — 
 
 * Across the fields as gfreen as spinach, 
 Cropped as close as Time to Greenwich, 
 
 Stands a high house; if at all, 
 Spring- comes like a Paisley shawl — 
 
 Patterning"s meticulous 
 And youthfully ridiculous. 
 
 In each roomi the yellow sun 
 Shakes like ^ canary, run 
 
244 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 On run, roulade, and watery trill — 
 Yellow, meaningless, and shrill. 
 
 Face as white as any clock's, 
 Cased in parsley-dark curled locks. 
 
 All day long you sit and sew, 
 Stitch, life down for fear it grow. 
 
 Stitch life down for fear we guess 
 At the hidden ugliness. 
 
 Dusty voice that throbs with heat, 
 Hoping with its steel-thin beat 
 
 Tot put stitches in my mind, 
 Make it tidy, make it kind ; 
 
 You shall not ! Til keep it free 
 Though you turn earth, sky, and sea 
 
 To a patchwork quilt! to keep 
 Your mind snug and warm in sleep.' 
 
 Another poem about trams in the same book 
 (' The Wooden Pegasus,' a very apt title), is as gay 
 and lively as a Lovat Fraser drawing : — 
 
 * Castlesi of crystal, 
 Castles of wood. 
 Moving on pulleys 
 Just as you should ! 
 See the g"ay people 
 Flaunting like flags. 
 Bells in the steeple. 
 Sky all in rags ^ . . . 
 
 Miss Sitwell can also write seriously. The last 
 poem in ' The Wooden Pegasus ' is on the theme of 
 the man, who for the sake of a cruel wanton, murders 
 his mother and is forgiven by her, the theme with 
 
THE SITWELLS 245 
 
 which Mme. Yvette Gilbert used to make our hearts 
 bleed with her whispered ' fai tu fait mal, mon en- 
 fant? 
 
 Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell can write in the family 
 satiric strain and write well, as, for example, in 
 ' Mrs. H. . . or A Lady from Babel,' or he can write 
 very charming ' straight ' verse as in ' Serenade ' : 
 
 * Sigh softly, sigh softly, 
 
 rain-thrilled leaves ! 
 Let not your careless hands 
 Stem the gold wind ! 
 Let not your green sleeves 
 Swim in its breath 
 As water flowing ! * 
 
 But he is a poet who very badly needs an annotator. 
 The ' Lady from Babel ' has been explained to me 
 by one of his family, and directly we are put en 
 rapport with it, is is obviously amusing and fulfils 
 its light satirical purpose very well. Or take again 
 ' Laughing Lions will come,' a very ' young ' 
 poem where, as in Mr. Vachel Lindsay's ' Golden 
 Whales of California,' the poet oscillates between 
 genuine and satirical gorgeousness. Here if the 
 different portions of the poem are carefully marked 
 off for us by someone who has got the key and it 
 is explained to us exactly what the pieces of parody 
 are intended to satirise, the poem becomes not 
 merely not ridiculous (I confess to have felt sure it 
 was ridiculous on first reading), but even mode- 
 rately attractive. 
 
 Now for a poet to need annotation is not so much 
 a proof of weakness in the poet, as a proof that 
 
246 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 there is something wrong somewhere. Who was it 
 said that when we experienced the sensation of 
 being bored we could only be sure of one thing — 
 that there was a bore in company? So it is with 
 this business of explanatory notes, either the reader 
 or the poet is at fault. I used to be quite sure 
 when a passage seemed obscure that it was Mr. 
 Sacheverell who was in the wrong, but though I still 
 tend to this opinion, I am by no means so sure of 
 it as I was. 
 
 JOHN MASEFIELD. 
 
 Dr. Johnson declared that when we judged a 
 poet we must grant him a certain amount of 
 credit for the actual bulk of his work. It is im- 
 possible to consider the case of Mr. Masefield with- 
 out believing that Johnson was to some extent 
 right. There is no question here of promise and 
 of hint. Mr. Masefield's poems unroll before us 
 in a bright, many-coloured pageant of accomplish- 
 ment. 
 
 He has plenty of faults. In every narrative that 
 he has ever written there can be found (indeed 
 there cry out) line upon line of mechanically con- 
 trived antithesis, line upon line of execrable 
 phraseology. He is one of the easiest poets to 
 parody ; especially as he shows himself in the often 
 crude thought and diction of the earlier poems. 
 Mr. Masefield seems to have hardly any power of 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 247 
 
 self-criticism, but will print the strangest piebald 
 pieces of work. Take 'Enslaved,' for example; 
 in the first seventeen pages, this poem ranges from 
 the mediocre to the fantastically bad. This sort 
 of beginning would, one would vhave thought have 
 been enough to ruin any poem. Such loss in the 
 attack must surely daunt any poet. Not at all ! 
 The whole of the rest of ' Enslaved ' is in a dif- 
 ferent metre and in Mr. Masefield's most admirable 
 narrative style. He is not a whit embarrassed or 
 depressed. Quotation is almost impossible, for it 
 is the quick breathlessness of the story and the 
 anxiety we feel for the event which are so remark- 
 able. His concern will not improbably make the 
 reader miss much of the beauty of the verse at first 
 perusal. The story, like an impatient guide, hur- 
 ries us along at a running pace, and we only get a 
 fleeting half-view of white toppling seas, of rigging 
 black in the moonlight, of the dripping walls of a 
 cave where the galley slaves are imprisoned, and 
 of the high, white-washed walls of the Khalif s 
 house of women at Marrakesh. 
 
 Mr. Masefield can always intrigue and excite his 
 reader; he much more often makes a mistake in 
 his capacity as a poet than as a story-teller, though, 
 curiously enough, this instinct for plot and the 
 arrangement of incident often deserts him when he 
 turns to drama. There is a curious langour, for 
 instance, about his 'Pompey the Great,' but this fault 
 I think we can partly trace to the difficulty which 
 I have tried to set out in speaking of Mr. Waley's 
 Translations of the Japanese No Plays. Our con- 
 
248 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 vention is at the moment in a very uncomfortable 
 state as far as the poetic drarna is concerned. We 
 have not yet found for it a form, a method of 
 narration which will prevent the auditor pining for 
 a realism which is rather beside the point in the 
 poetic drama. In the case of Pompey the author 
 vacillates too. I am not sure, though, that in one 
 play Mr. Masefield has not got round the difficulty, 
 and that is in ' Philip the King,' a one-act verse 
 play of great merit, in which King Philip of Spain 
 and the Infanta hear the news of the Armada, first 
 a rumour of victory and then the truth. This, with 
 its narration of physical events and our witnessing 
 on the stage of the psychological effects of these 
 physical events, seems to me to hit off very well the 
 proper treatment of incident for a poetic play. 
 
 But people are perhaps too apt to consider Mr. 
 Masefield only in his capacity as a writer of long 
 narratives, the fact being that he can hold his own 
 with most of his contempararies as a lyric and elegiac 
 poet. For example, his beautifully polished and 
 complete ' August, 1914/ is perhaps the best poem 
 that the War produced. ' Biography ' is another 
 poem of extraordinary charm — simple, tranquil and 
 extraordinarily individual and expressive. In the 
 same volume as ' Enslaved,' there are also two ex- 
 ceedingly good ballads — ' Cap on Head ' and ' The 
 Hounds of Hell.' The latter is one of the best 
 poems of the Gothic Supernatural that has been 
 writtence since ' Cristabel.' 
 
 Every night a ghostly huntsman, hunts living, 
 sometimes human, prey over the Weald. Night 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 249 
 
 after night the faint horn is heard, and some mis- 
 fortune to flock or herd is discovered in the morn- 
 ing. At last a shepherd is found on the Downs 
 with his throat torn, and no one dare any longer live 
 in the haunted countryside : 
 
 * Men let the hay crop run to seed 
 And the corn crop sprout in ear, 
 And the root crop choke itself in weed, 
 That hell-hound hunting year.* 
 
 At last St. Withiel, who lives not far thence, 
 resolves that he will stop the powers of evil. He 
 takes his stick and goes to this now desolated 
 country where no human creature stirs. He will 
 face the terror, whatever it may be. Night falls 
 and all the powers of nature seem in league to ter- 
 rify the saint : 
 
 ' The darkness cackled in his heart 
 
 The things of hell were there. 
 That the startled rabbit played a part 
 
 And the stoat's leap did prepare — 
 
 Prepare the stage of night for blood, 
 
 And the mind of night for death, 
 For a spirit trembling in the mud 
 
 In an agony for breath.' 
 
 At last, after an hour or two of such vigil, he hears, 
 far away, the quavering death note blown on the 
 devil's horn; another moment and he hears the 
 hounds casting for him close at hand. They are 
 in cry. Terror seizes him, he becomes a mere 
 ' screaming will ' to save his body from their jaws. 
 He runs till his heart is ready to burst, and at last 
 swings himself into a tree and so throws the hounds 
 off for the moment. He hears them casting under- 
 
250 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 neath him, ranging with softly padding feet. They 
 are completely at fault, and at last the huntsman 
 calls them off and silence falls again. Anguish at 
 his failure seizes the saint. Christ died on a tree 
 for him, but he has used a tree to hide. He comes 
 down and resolves that he will dare the hounds 
 again. But once more the cold note of the horn 
 and the sound of the Hell Hounds on the scent 
 turns his blood to water. This time, in his utter 
 panic, the saint swims across a river and finds him- 
 self in a sort of paradise, and so fortified, has at 
 last strength to go back to face Death and the 
 Hounds, over whom he at last triumphs. Here is 
 no botching work; every verse and every line is 
 telling. 
 
 Mr. Masefield also knows how to write a son- 
 net. There is, for instance, a sonnet sequence 
 called ' Animula ' in ' Enslaved ' that tells the story 
 of a husband and wife, and of the lover with whom 
 the wife will not fly. The woman, tormented by 
 the love to which she will not submit and by her 
 unhappiness with her suspicious, angry husband, 
 seeks escape and throws herself into the sea : 
 
 * So, when the ninth wave drowned her, haply she 
 Wakened, with merging" senses, till she blent 
 Into the joy and colour of the sea, 
 One with the purpose of the element. 
 And there, perhaps, she cannot feel the woe 
 Passed in this rotting house, but runs like light 
 Over the billows where the clippers go, 
 One with the blue sea*s pureness of delight ; 
 Laughing, perhaps at that old woe of hers 
 Chained in the cage with fellow-prisoners. * 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 25 1 
 
 It is in such poems as this and the curious set of 
 verses, called ' The Lemmings,' that the mystical 
 element of Mr. Masefield's work is displayed. We 
 realise something of the strength of this element 
 in him when we consider how vivid is the extro- 
 vertic part of his nature. For outward things are 
 never to him as we sometimes ifeel they are to Mr. 
 Turner and Mr. Graves — valuable only in as far as 
 they will serve as symbols by which it is possible 
 to externalise and make tangible the adventures of 
 the soul. Mr. Masefield is emphatically one who 
 loves colours, sounds and sights for themselves. 
 
 It is perhaps in this power of caring for objects 
 and events, both for themselves and as instruments 
 shaping the mind of man, that Mr. Masefield's 
 special strength lies. ' Reynard the Fox,* for in- 
 stance, will please two sorts of reader or the same 
 reader in two different moods. What we might call 
 the two layers of its meaning have been treated with 
 equal gusto by the poet. The result of this is that 
 the poem is extremely vital and in a subtle sense 
 — in spite of crude blemishes — harmonious. Soul 
 and body are never at variance, neither has to drag 
 a dead weight. It is perhaps in this remarkable 
 integration, rather than in great force of intellect 
 or fancy, that Mr. Masefield's strength lies. It 
 may be that a good proportion of his faults occurs 
 in passages in which he has tried to alter the 
 natural balance of the two elements. 
 
252 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 WALTER DE LA MARE 
 
 Perhaps no poet, except Shakespeare and Cole- 
 ridge, has ever written such good magic poetry as 
 Mr. de la Mare. There are, of course, a great 
 many different sorts of magic poetry. There is the 
 intimate bucolic rustic sort — Lobb and Puck bob- 
 bing for apples — there is the grand architectural 
 sort, of which Coleridge was a master : 
 
 ' But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted 
 Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover ! 
 A savage place ! as holy and enchanted 
 As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted 
 By woman wailing for her demon-lover ! ' 
 
 Or there is the arid horror of the witches in ' Mac- 
 beth ' and the horses that ' eat each other.' But 
 Shakespeare could do all kinds of magic. He 
 could write, ' Fear no more the heat of the sun,' or 
 the extremely advanced and Georgian, ' When that 
 I was and a little tiny boy,' both of which belong to 
 a very different kind of enchantment. Mr. de la 
 Mare's magic is, as a rule, of this last type. We 
 can parallel his prevailing mood in ' Full Fathom 
 Five ' or ' Come unto these yellow sands.' ^His 
 work has the same remote, passionless beauty : 
 
 * Not a wave breaks, 
 Not a bird calls, 
 My heart, like a sea, 
 Silent after a storm that hath died, 
 Sleeps withini me. 
 
/ 
 
 WALTER DE LA MARE 253 
 
 All the night's dews, 
 All the world's leaves, 
 All winter's snow 
 Seem with their quiet tO' have stilled in life's dream 
 All sorrowing now. ' ,^ 
 
 Some people — the present writer confesses to have 
 been long ago among them — find Mr. de la Mare's 
 verse a little unsatisfying, a little too limpid, and 
 inhuman. But now, since the ' collected edition ' 
 and the publication of ' The Veil,' his work can be 
 considered in the mass. In some curious way, the 
 short poems seem to reinforce one another and to 
 create a remarkable atmosphere with their subtle v 
 cadences, the niceties of their rhythm and the extra- 
 ordinary propriety of their vocabulary. These 
 poems are like silk threads which are individually 
 fragile, but which, woven together, make a fabric of 
 unmatched fineness and strength, and one capable 
 of taking on the softest, clearest colours. Here is 
 one more example of this — Mr. de la Mare's main 
 manner. It is ' The Sunken Garden,' perhaps after 
 ' The Listeners,' his best-known poem : v/ 
 
 * Speak not — whisper not ; 
 Here bloweth thyme and bergamot ; 
 Softly on the evening hour, 
 Secret herbs their spices shower, 
 Dark-spiked rosemary and myrrh, 
 Lean-stalked, purple lavender ; 
 Hides within her bosom, too, 
 All her sorrows, bitter rue. 
 
 Breathe not — trespass not ; 
 Of this green and darkling* spot, 
 Latticed from the moon^s beams, 
 Perchance a distant dreamer dreams ; 
 
254 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 Perchance upon its darkening air, 
 The unseen ghosts of children fare, 
 Faintly swinging, sway and sweep, 
 Like lovely sea-flowers in the deep ; 
 While, unmoved, to watch and ward, 
 Amid its gloomed and daisied sward. 
 Stands with bowed and dewy head 
 That one little leaden Lad.' 
 
 But Mr. de la Mare has three other well-marked 
 styles. I shall say nothing here of his poetry for 
 children, except that I think that, on the whole, it 
 is probably the best that has ever been written. 
 Two of his most attractive essays in this vein are 
 quoted on page 121 (Chapter 14). Then he knows 
 another sort of magic. It must be a difficult kind 
 to weave, because he seems only to bring off the 
 spell occasionally. The magic is the evocation of 
 one of Shakespeare's characters. Out of eight or 
 ten attempts at materialisation, he twice produces 
 the authentic personality. In ' Polonius ' and 
 ' Juliet's Nurse,* we feel sure — as Mr. Munro, I 
 think, says somewhere — that Mr. de la Mare has got 
 hold of some uncanny sort of private source of 
 knowledge. How did he know just how, 'gloomy 
 and wise and sly,' Juliet's nurse sat on in the old 
 deserted nursery, gossipping-to a young cousin from 
 the country. 
 
 * There's not a soldier but hath babes in view ; 
 There's not on earth what minds not of the midwife.' 
 
 Her mind is an anthill, and those eyes, ' arch, 
 lewd and pious,' that know so effectively how to 
 ^ paint disaster with uplifted whites ' ! And those 
 
WALTER DE LA MARE 255 
 
 fat, small hands, ' babied hands ' that pleat up or 
 smooth the dark, handsome silk of her dress. How 
 did he know? 
 
 What are Mr. de la Mare's faults.^ He has very 
 few and they are not of great moment. First, I 
 should put a tendency to use Thou and Thee with- \J 
 out very sufficient reason, also he has a good many 
 archaic words of which he seems rather over fond, 
 such as ' groat,' ' helm,' ' wondrous,' even ' eft- 
 soons.' Then some of his poems for children end 
 sadly. That the instrument upon which he gener- 
 ally plays is a sort of poetic clavicord I hold to be 
 no reproach. All art is to a great extent a process 
 of limitation and selection. Mr. de la Mare's 
 achievements more than justify him in the length to 
 which he has carried this process. There remains, 
 besides his rare ' vers de societe,' one more manner 
 to be considered. He has also written a few poems 
 — there are three of them in ' The Veil ' — ^which 
 show a remarkable depth of human feeling. ' The 
 Suicide * is one such poem, and another is ' The 
 Dock ' : 
 
 * Pallid, mis-shapen he stands. The world's grimed thumb 
 Now hooked securely in his matted hair, 
 Has haled him strugfg-ling from his poisonous slum 
 And flung him mute as fish close-netted there. 
 His bloodless hands entalon that iron rail. 
 He gloats in beastlike trance. His settling eyes 
 From staring face to face rove on — and quail. 
 Justice for carrion pants ; and these the flies. 
 Voice after voice in smooth impartial drone 
 Erects horrific in his darkening brain 
 A timber framework, where agape, alone 
 Bright life will kiss good-bye the cheek of Cain. 
 
256 SHORT STORIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 Sudden like wolf he cries : and sweats to see. 
 When howls man's soul, it howls inaudibly.* 
 
 Here speaks true compassion which knows that 
 the innocent hold no monopoly of suffering. 
 
 If Mr. de la Mare does go on to develop this 
 style, we shall see in his work a good example of 
 the difference between Magic and Mysticism. 
 Magic is mysticism externalised and personified. 
 An elf or an apparition is a detached being, the 
 personification of the oddness of some human crea- 
 ture. Therefore, the more oddness goes to the elf, 
 and the more definite existence he has the less odd 
 will be the human beings — actually and compara- 
 tively — ^with whom he is contrasted. The Mystic 
 is like the pantheist, ' Lift the stone and I am 
 there, gaze into the water, I am there.' The weaver 
 of magic has in his personifica.tion taken the first 
 step towards Olympianising the unknown. 
 
 All mystery gods, so Sir James Frazer tells us, 
 become objective and Olympianised in time. This 
 process, I fancy, we may be going to see reversed 
 in the case of Mr. de la Mare's imaginings. ' The 
 Veil ' seems to contain indications that he is going 
 to put the mystic element back into the very stuff 
 of his poetry. The reader should consider the last 
 two lines of ' The Dock ' from this point of view. 
 
SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 257 
 
 ARTHUR WALEY. 
 
 Mr. Waley is a translator, but it would be as absurd 
 to deny to him the title of poet as to refuse it to 
 FitzGerald. Like FitzGerald he appears to be an 
 interpretative artist of the finest sensibility, and — 
 perhaps from his contact with a literature more 
 delicate than the Persian — a metrical experimenter 
 of the utmost skill. Though not announcing his 
 theories in the matter of blank verse rhythms with 
 the vigour of the imagists or of the disciples of 
 polyphonic prose he has none the less perfected 
 one or tvv^o beautiful unrhymed measures. More- 
 over, he has evolved a curious limpid crystal- 
 line vocabulary and style, its perfect transparence 
 the result, the reader feels, in a high degree of the 
 process of polishing. Here is an instance of Mr. 
 Waley's method. The translation is from the works 
 of Po-Chu-i, and was written about a.d. 830. Po- 
 Chu-i, was, besides being a great poet, a high 
 official, the humane and enlightened governor of a 
 province : 
 
 * To A Talkative Guest. 
 The town visitor's easy talk flows in an endless stream ; 
 The country host's quiet thoug^hts ramble timidly on. 
 ** I beg you, Sir, do not tell me about things at Ch'ang-an, 
 For you entered just when my harp was tuned and lying 
 balanced on my knees. ' ' ' 
 
 But perhaps of an even higher quality is the fol- 
 lowing. Its eight lines surely express all the 
 tragedy of slavery : — 
 
258 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 * Losing a Slave-Girl. 
 
 Around my garden the little wall is low ; 
 
 In the bailiff's lodge the lists are seldom checked. 
 
 I am ashamed to think we were not always kind ; 
 
 I regret your labours, that will never be repaid. 
 
 The caged bird owes no allegiance ; 
 
 The wind-tossed flower does not cling to the tree. 
 
 Where to-night she lies nond can give us news ; 
 Nor any knows, save the bright watching moon. ' 
 
 Mr. Waley has also done another very interest- 
 ing piece of work. He has translated and ex- 
 pounded a number of the traditional No Plays of 
 Japan. Now these plays are chiefly interesting 
 because they employ a very striking dramatic form. 
 The time seems ripe in Europe for the revival of 
 poetic drama. But at the moment the difficulty 
 seems to be to hit upon a form in which w^e may 
 crystallise our impulse. 
 
 For our poetic drama has certainly got to run 
 concurrently with a realistic drama. Now the fault 
 of the ordinary dramatic forms for the purposes of 
 the poetic drama is that when a non-realistic drama 
 is cast in these lines, however wild the plot, how- 
 ever improbable the characters, the audience un- 
 consciously begin to miss the absent realism. In 
 plays which are consciously archaic or even in the 
 Elizabethan drama we are every now and then 
 brought back to earth by our longing for realism. 
 The music of Juliet's love lyrics is made a little 
 unreal to us by speculations as to whether a young 
 girl really would speak so, whether any passionate 
 
ARTHUR WALEY 259 
 
 lover could find similes so exact, phrases so musical. 
 The form adopted by the writers of the No plays is 
 one so formal that it at once rids us of this diffi- 
 culty. The plays are performed upon a stage 
 divided into two parts, inner and outer. Ballet 
 plays a considerable part in them. There are prac- 
 tically no properties and no scenery; the dress of 
 the actors is, however, often magnificent, and certain 
 of them are masked, and because there are no 
 realistic properties the author need not hesitate to 
 introduce into his drama boats, carriages, rocks, 
 rivers, or trees as he pleases. 
 
 But the chief point of the form is that nearly all 
 the action is both retrospective and yet at the same 
 tim.e of ' real ' import at the moment. 
 
 There are too many ways of treating a theme 
 according to No formulae for a summary here, but 
 Mr. Waley gives all the necessary recipes in his 
 preface, giving as an example the theme of the 
 Duchess of Malfi treated in this v/ay and reduced 
 to two short acts. 
 
 EDWARD SHANKS. 
 
 I THINK if a lover of the classics came to me, or a 
 man v/ho read Milton, Keats and Wordsworth, and 
 loved beauty and ' the grand style,' and told me 
 that he desired to increase his range by an appre- 
 ciation of modern poetry, and if he asked me how 
 he had best approach it, I should give him Mr. 
 
26o SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 Edward Shanks' poetry to read. There are per- 
 haps those who would say that in doing this I was 
 not giving him modern poetry at all, that Mr. 
 Shanks' work differs hardly perceptibly from the 
 old tradition; but I think they would be wrong. 
 Of course his methods perpetually remind us of 
 ' the old masters.' There is a great deal of ' The 
 Queen of China/ which reminds us, not perhaps of 
 any particular Elizabethan, but of the general body 
 of Elizabethan dramatic blank verse. Take the 
 following, for instance : 
 
 * First Traveller : How stands the prince 
 
 In this new turmoil of the wildered court, 
 Who when we last were here was next the throne, 
 His father's chosen son? 
 
 Chamberlain : He is grown grave. 
 
 Even as the king has waxed in youthfulness, 
 So he in gravity and the look; of years. 
 You were his friends before, but you'll be fortuned 
 If now he will exchange five words with you.' 
 
 Or again, the following is unmistakably Miltonic : 
 
 Gobi and Shamo and the salten waste 
 Beyond Bokhara and the lonely marshes 
 That lie beside the desolate Caspian . . .' 
 
 *The Island of Youth' is full of echoes of Endy- 
 mion, and here and there of Tennyson and Matthew 
 Arnold. There is something as definitely Vic- 
 torian in ' The Night Jars ' as there is definitely 
 Wordsworthian in the title, ' Stanzas Written in De- 
 jection.' But Mr. Shanks is always using the old 
 material for a new purpose, and that is why his 
 poetry makes such a good introduction to modern 
 
EDWARD SHANKS 26 1 
 
 verse for those brought up in the old tradition. He 
 nearly always gives the content and purpose of 
 modern verse, but he does not work with quite the 
 usual Georgian means, and it is the means, not 
 the end, that appear for the most part to frighten 
 conservative lovers of verse. 
 
 If the reader expects me to tell him in so many 
 words what the ends of modern poetry are, I am 
 afraid he must be disappointed. If they could be 
 stated m a sentence, it would not be necessary to 
 take the great trouble of stating them in sonnets, 
 epics or elegies. I am not sure that they are cap- 
 able of direct statement at all. It must suffice to 
 say here that they have something to do with human 
 psychology. We are all conscious that there are 
 elements within us — things in our outlook upon our- 
 selves and the universe — which are highly elusive 
 and difficult to express. The modern poet, like the 
 seventeenth century metaphysical poet, finds him- 
 self for the most part engaged in an effort 
 to show us some aspect or other of this irrational, 
 but, as modern psychologists tell us, most real and 
 most potent part of our make-up. Of course, all 
 poets in all ages have tried to display man to him- 
 self, and the difference between, say, Donne and 
 Tennyson, in this respect is one of emphasis. Both 
 Donne and Tennyson were concerned with beauty, 
 pattern-making, and the mind of man. Often 
 Donne grew tired of his hard sayings and tried to 
 express pure beauty : often Tennyson grew tired of 
 beauty or didactic exposition and tried to express 
 the inexpressible. But on the whole modern poets 
 
262 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 put the emphasis as Donne put it, and moreover 
 use a medium a little like his methods of ex- 
 pression. Mr. Shanks, however, goes rather to the 
 methods of Keats, Tennyson and Wordsworth. In 
 unsuccessful lines, that is, he is apt to fall into 
 such a phrase as : 
 
 * And longf, long- day added to long, long day 
 In summer's fragrant count . . .' 
 
 But the general conception of ' The Island of 
 Youth ' is entirely modern. It tells the familiar 
 story of how Thetis, by her enchantments, carried 
 her son, Achilles, to Scyros, and there hid him dis- 
 guised among the maidens of the island, and how, 
 (the Oracle foretelling that the Greeks could not 
 take Troy without Achilles' help) Ulysses was sent 
 to find him out, which he did by means of a trick 
 with a sword. Mr. Shanks has used the legend to 
 convey a sense of the irrevocable fate of Man. 
 Thetis has thought to cheat the Oracle, to cheat 
 Death, but her son is mortal like the rest of us, and 
 his fate cannot be gainsaid. The beginning of the 
 poem is concerned with the sweet enchantment that 
 Thetis — her son hidden — lays upon the island that 
 has consented to be his asylum : 
 
 * The simple island lords, 
 
 Who ruled a land as peaceful as themselves, 
 
 Gareful to have the granges full of corn, 
 
 The goat-skins plump with wine, the flocks and herds 
 
 Guarded and tended to a due increase, 
 
 Showed in their eyes, like a reflected light. 
 
 Serenity, and in their bearing peace, 
 
 And in their* speech a cadence) tranquiller 
 
 Than they had used before ' 
 
EDWARD SHANKS 263 
 
 Sun, soft airs and a mild sea, prosper the affairs of 
 Scyros as never before : 
 
 ' And in that summer, Thetis' blessing- lay 
 Especially upon her. Fishermen 
 Thanked the sea-g^oddess for continual calm 
 That lulled their storm-washed vessels near the rocks 
 And herded in their nets the plenteous fish. 
 The farmers watched their fields grow day by day 
 More fruitful, and the vines under the sun 
 More prosperously ripen toi the vintage, 
 Unvexed by creeping rot or summer tempest. 
 Nor wolf nor murrain did the shepherd plague 
 And on his thyme-grown hills he slept at night, 
 Close by the dew-pond's green and glimmering round 
 While all about him slept the peaceful flock 
 Like white stones under the distant, kindly stars.' 
 
 The psychology of Achilles, whose whole nature 
 has been changed to something of womanliness by 
 his mother's spell, is delineated with a sure, light 
 touch. The enchantment makes him unhappy, and 
 uneasiness broods upon him. At last his hour 
 comes. Ulysses' wile of the sword succeeds, not so 
 much in revealing the truth to its deviser, as in 
 teaching Achilles the truth about his own nature. 
 He climbs up the hill-side and realises a future : 
 
 * Dark to forsee, but heavy with a sense 
 
 Of weariness and blame and shame and tears.* 
 
 He throws aside his maiden's garments, and from 
 that eclipse the hero's body rises * sullen hued.' 
 All night he wanders over the mountains and at 
 last, sitting under an olive tree : 
 
 * Bowed his hot forehead into cramped hands, 
 Feeling a little world whose pulses beat 
 Like earthquakes or annihilating wars.' 
 
264 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 There are two very curious poems in the 
 same volume — ' The Emigration ' and ' The 
 End ' — two poems which incidentally are much 
 more modern in execution. One describes the 
 weary trek of a whole people from a valley which 
 their increasing numbers has made too narrow for 
 their support. The other is a vision.' In this the 
 poet stands in a tangled wood and sees a rider on 
 a rough, thin horse come slowly down an unused 
 track. He is followed by a crowd of people — men 
 and women of everyday, clerks, workmen and 
 tramps, young girls, children, all the cavalcade of 
 life ; after them come beasts, all the homely animals 
 that live about our houses. These in turn are fol- 
 lowed by strange, unknown tropical creatures and 
 strange birds that hover about the track. At last 
 these too pass, and the poet sees with a sort of 
 terror that the trees seem to be ' dragging their long 
 roots ' slowly out of the ground. The smaller plants 
 follow like a swarm of bees, and the poet is left 
 alone in a lifeless world. These two imaginings 
 show Mr. Shanks in a somewhat new light, and 
 when we take them in conjunction with the detach- 
 ment and objectivity of such a poem as ' The 
 Swimmers ' and the gaiety of ' Fete Gallante,' we 
 see what a wide range he possesses. 
 
 For ' Fete Gallante ' is a lively piece of Ver- 
 sailles country sentiment. Aristonoe, the fading 
 shepherdess, gathers the girls together — Celia, 
 Rosalind, Phyllis, Helen and Chloe : 
 
 * Teachingf them wisdom of love, 
 What to say, how to dress, 
 
EDWARD SHANKS 265 
 
 How frown, how smile, 
 
 How suitors to their dancingf feet to bring-, 
 
 How in mere walkings to beguile. 
 
 What words cunningly said in what a way 
 
 Will draw man*s busy fancy astray, 
 
 All the alphabet, grammar and syntax of Love.* 
 
 The garden is delicious and the high-heeled shoes 
 print a turf starred with daisies. Some of the girls 
 are not convinced that love is made of such crack- 
 ling things as Aristonoe would have them believe : 
 
 * Celia tells the lesson over. 
 Countings on her fingers — one and two . . . 
 Ribbon and shoe,' 
 
 Skirts, flowers, song, dancing, laug-hter, eyes, 
 Through the whole catalogue of formal g-allantry. 
 And studious) coquetries, 
 Counting to herself maliciously. ' 
 
 There is yet another dress which Mr. Shanks wears 
 with srrace. He can write an admirable ballad : 
 
 fe^ 
 
 * Oh, where are you, my own true love, 
 
 And why are you not here? 
 The nightingale amid the boughs 
 Is flattering his dear. 
 
 The night among the empty fields 
 
 Lies like a child at rest. 
 And empty, empty are my arms. 
 
 And light, too light, my breast. ' 
 
 The verses which we have quoted surely witness to 
 a very remarkable versatility, especially when we 
 remember that the volume of ' The Queen of 
 China ' alone contains essays in three or four 
 further distinct styles. 
 
266 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 But though he shows versatility, Mr. Shanks 
 shows curious faithfulness to poetic diction. He is 
 quite content to let the cloud be ' the sun's first 
 messenger,' he will say that a shell is ' rosy,' the 
 ocean ' wild,' his storms are apt to ' prolong their 
 turmoil.' Many modern poets would go miles to 
 avoid such phrases, but Mr. Shanks' choice of them 
 seems to me an interesting point in their favour, for 
 he obviously does not use them ignorantly, though 
 conceivably he may be a little too well read, and 
 they may sing themselves to him so that he cannot 
 avoid them. I do not think that is the case, how- 
 ever, for there are many poems in which he does so 
 avoid them, but these are not poems into which v/e 
 feel he has put his whole heart. ' Poetic language ' 
 seems to be his deliberate choice. 
 
 AMY LOWELL. 
 
 The writings of Miss Amy Lowell are looked at 
 rather askance in this country. This is perhaps not 
 surprising : she has a vigorous assertive personality 
 and a downright prose style, she is also rather apt 
 to follow up dogmatic critical statements with weak 
 lyrics written in accordance with her theories. Yet 
 the theories are often ingenious. Sometimes the 
 poems are not only weak, but prosy and academic, 
 or even vulgar. In any case, in reading most of 
 her verse, we are inclined to feel that, as a creative 
 artist, the root of the matter is not in her. But in 
 
AMY LOWELL 26) 
 
 my opinion she has written one book which com- 
 I pensates for any number of failures. It is called 
 * ' Can Grande's Castle.' 
 
 Of course she must needs go and alienate half 
 her readers by her preface ! In it she seems to 
 j indicate that the * polyphonic ' or many-voiced prose 
 \ in which she writes, — a free, elastic form, neither 
 metrical, nor cadenced verse — is practically a new 
 form which she has adapted from the French of 
 M. Paul Fort. It is based, she says, upon the long 
 flowing rhythms of oratorical prose. Really it 
 consists of the long flowing cadences of oratorical 
 prose ! Now and then we have a bout of rhyming, 
 but otherwise there is hardly anything of the book 
 which, as far as manner is concerned, might not 
 have been written by De Quincey, a forerunner 
 whom she never mentions. This is not to decry 
 * Can Grande's Castle,' for Miss Lowell's work will 
 easily bear comparison with his. De Quincey is 
 often her equal in inspiration, but he had little 
 except inspiration. The opium-eater had not 
 energy left either for the sustained patterns or for 
 the metaphysics of the American. 
 
 The second historical episode in the book tells 
 the story of the forcible opening up of trade be- 
 tween America and Japan by Commodore Perry, 
 who sails in the paddle-wheel frigate, ' The Missis- 
 sippi' of the United States Navy. It is one of the 
 best examples of her thought as apart from her 
 form, one of the oblique descriptions of which she 
 is so fond. (I guarantee that the passage m.ake^ 
 capital good sense.) 
 
268 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 * The Commodore writes in his cabin. Writes an 
 accxnint of what he has done. The sands of centuries 
 run fast, one slides, and another, each falling* into a 
 smother of dust. A locomotive in pay for a Whistler; 
 telegraph wires buying a revolution ; weights and mea- 
 sures and Audubon* s birds in exchange for fear. Yellow 
 monkey-men leaping out of Pandora*9 box, shaking the 
 rocks of the Western coastline. Golden California 
 bartering panic for prints. The dressing-gowns of a 
 continent won at the cost of security. Artists and philo- 
 sophers lost in the hour-glass sand pouring through an 
 open Gate.* 
 
 The reader must also be given a sample of her 
 powers of description. Shall it be the account of 
 the Carnival in decadent Venice ? Shall it be of the 
 great ' silver-white thunderheads ' rising up over the 
 rim of the sea off Aboukir Bay — Nelson going to 
 fight the French.^ or shall it be Lady Hamilton.^ 
 or the legionaries marching into Rome in the 
 triumph of Titus? It is impossible to choose, but 
 the book opens at the Roman incident. I accept 
 the omen : — 
 
 * Morning in Rome ; and the wholef city foams out to 
 meet it, seething, simmering, surging, sweeping. All 
 between the Janiculum and the Palatine is undulating 
 with people. Scarlet, violet, and purple togas pattern 
 the mass of black and brown . . . What is that sound? 
 The marble city shivers to the treading of feet. Caesar's 
 legions marching, foot — foot — hundreds, thousands of 
 feet. They beat the ground, rounding each step double. 
 Coming — comings — cohort after cohort, with brazen 
 trumpets marking the time. One — two — one — two, — 
 laurel-crowned each one of you, cactus-fibred, harsh as 
 sand, grinding the rocks of a treeless land, rough and 
 salt as a Dead Sea wind, only the fallen are left behind. 
 Blood-red plumes, jarring to the footfalls; they have 
 
AMY LOWELL 269 
 
 passed through the gate, they are in the walls of the 
 mother city, of marble Rome. Their tunics are purple 
 embroidered with gold, their armour clanks as they walk, 
 the cold steel of their swords is chill in the sun, each is 
 a hero, one by one, endless companies, the soldiers 
 come. Back, to Rome with a victor* s spoils, with a 
 victor's wreath on every head, and Judah broken is dead, 
 dead ! '' lo triumph e ! " The shout knocks and breaks 
 upon the spears of the legionaries. The God of the Jews 
 is overborne. He has failed his people. . . . Slowly 
 they come, the symbols of a beaten religion : the Golden 
 Table for the Shew-bread, the Silver Trumpets that 
 sounded the Jubilee, the Seven-Branched Candlestick, 
 the very Tables of the Law which Mbses brought down 
 from! Mount Sinai. Can Jupiter conquer these? Slowly 
 they pass, glinting in the sunlight, staring in the light 
 of day, mocked and exhibited. Lord God of Hosts, fall 
 upon these people, send your thunders upon them, hurl 
 the lightnings of your wrath against this multitude, raze 
 their marble city soi that not one stone remain standing. 
 But the sun shines unclouded, and the holy vessels pass 
 onward through the Campus Martins, through the Circus 
 Flamininus, up the Via Sacra to the Capitol.' 
 
 Then the refrain of the whole poem is repeated, 
 the Motif of the Bronze horses of St. Mark's, a re- 
 frain that sounds through the din of the chariot- 
 races of Constantinople; through the tinkling of 
 the Carnival in Venice, through the tramp of 
 Napoleon's armies of Italy. 
 
 * The bronze horses look into the brilliant sky, they 
 trot slowly without moving, they advance slowly, one 
 foot raised. There is always another step — one, and 
 another. How many does not matter, so that each is 
 taken.' 
 
 The passage I have quoted is surely an extra- 
 ordinary torn de force, but it is a tour de force of 
 
270 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 which, in a hundred variations, Miss Lowell seems 
 endlessly capable. The passages about Venice are 
 as distinguished and appropriate as those which 
 bring Rome before us : — < 
 
 * Beautiful, faded city. The sea wind has dimmed 
 your Oriental extravagance to an iris of rose, and amber, 
 and lilac. ... A tabernacle set in glass, an ivory orna- 
 ment resting upon a table of polished steel. It is the 
 surface of the sea, spangled, crinkled, engine-turned to 
 whorls of blue and silver, ridged in waves of flower- 
 green and gold.* 
 
 Has the reader noticed the interesting effect of 
 the rhymes in the longest of the three passages 
 quoted.'^ Miss Lowell says in her preface that she 
 is not yet satisfied that their printing as ordinary 
 prose is satisfactory; in this I entirely agree with 
 her. The effect is puzzling if an attempt is made to 
 read the passages aloud, and this is, of course, the 
 proper way to appreciate this type of bravura work. 
 
 ' Can Grande's Castle ' is an intoxicating piece of 
 writing and deserves to be better known. 
 
 CHARLOTTE MEW. 
 
 Those whom we may, with only a little exaggera- 
 tion call adherents of the ' Flat School' of Poetry 
 have gained a great deal by their renunciation. 
 Their effects are achieved by a great economy of 
 language — literal as v/ell as metaphorical, for their 
 poems are generally short — by a certain metrical 
 chastity, and by reliance on the poignancy of the 
 
CHARLOTTE MEW 271 
 
 t commonplace if the object be narrative, and by the 
 
 I beauty of the ordinary if the object be landscape or 
 
 I symbolical. 
 
 Miss Charlotte Mew is of this school, and her 
 
 [ work shows a wonderful degree of craftsmanship : 
 we shall hardly ever find a word out of place or 
 weak. She very rarely either uses an inversion or 
 allows her rhyme to steer the course of her ship. 
 Occasionally her emotion is exceedingly poignant, 
 especially when she treats the idea — it recurs in 
 several of the poems — of the dreamlike spell which 
 
 ■ hangs about the death of those we love or who 
 are familiar to us. The raw grave, the broken 
 
 I fragment of a flower, cannot be the reality and the 
 
 ' sense of continued companionship the illusion ! A 
 poem called ' Beside the Bed,' which is in some 
 
 \ sense a complement of another entitled ' In Nun- 
 head Cemetery ' will give the reader some idea of 
 her method : — 
 
 I * Someone has shut the shining" eyes, straig-htened andi folded 
 
 I The wandering hands quietly covering* the unquiet breast : 
 
 f So, smoothed and silenced you lie, like a child, not again to 
 
 be questioned or scolded ; 
 
 But, for you, not one of us' believes that this is rest. 
 
 Not so to close the windows down can cloud and deaden 
 The blue beyond : or to screen the wavering- flame subdue 
 
 its breath : 
 Why, if I lay my cheek to your cheek, your grey lips, like 
 
 dawn would quiver and redden. 
 Breaking into the old, odd smile at this fraud of death.* 
 
 Very often she writes as Crabbe might have 
 written if he had been born in an age when free 
 
272 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 verse had loosed the bonds of narrative poetry; 
 now and then as Pope might have written in the 
 twentieth century. 
 
 There is a poem called * Madeleine in Church' 
 which reminds one of the passages from his * Eloisa 
 and Abelard ' : — 
 
 * Here, even, in this corner where my little candle shines 
 And overhead the lancet-window glows 
 With gold and crimsons you could almost drink 
 To know how jewels taste, just as I used to think 
 There was the scent in every red and yellow rose 
 Of all the sunsets.' 
 
 * Oh ! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings ! 
 
 The temperate, well-worn smile 
 The one man gives you, when you are evermore his own : 
 And afterwards the child's, for a little: while, 
 
 With its unknowing and all-seeing eyes 
 So soon to change, and make you feel how quick' 
 The clock goes round. If one had learned the trick — 
 (How does one though?) Quite early on. 
 Of green pastures under placid skies. 
 One might be walking now with patient truth, 
 What did we care for it, who asked for youth. 
 
 When, oh ! my God ! this is going or has gone? ' 
 
 The whole poem is a remarkable one, full of 
 energy. Miss Mew seems to have caught exactly 
 the point of view of the sort of woman she describes, 
 and this is the more remarkable because in ' The 
 Farmer's Bride,' the name-piece of her book, she 
 has mastered and understood a very different type 
 of sex-reaction in a woman. The farmer — we are 
 given him in a few lines — a kind, busy, practical 
 
CHARLOTTE MEW 273 
 
 man, marries a very young girl who is as shy as a 
 levret : — 
 
 * When us was wed she turned afraid 
 Of love and me and all things human ; 
 Like the shut of a winter's day. 
 Hei^ smile went out, and 'twasn't a woman — 
 More like a frightened fay ... * 
 
 But Miss Mew does not take up a conventional 
 feminist ' gross male ' attitude. At the end of the 
 poem she contrives to show us the affair from the 
 farmer's point of view. The poem is full of 
 humanity and sympathy. The Nemesis of Miss 
 Mew's style is that she is apt to become prosaic. 
 Very often the reader feels that her thought could 
 have been more easily expressed in prose. But to 
 those who value strength, poignancy, and economy 
 her poems will always be interesting. Those who 
 already admire her enough to study and re-read her 
 verse are those who will find her most worthy to be 
 admired. To say this is neither to praise nor to 
 blame but to state a fact. For, though perhaps no 
 good art is easy, yet poets should remember that 
 beauty — in the narrow sense — remains the feather 
 on the arrow, or the cheese in the mouse trap. 
 
 J. C. SQUIRE. 
 
 If, which heaven forbid ! we had to characterise 
 with a single word the mental attitudes of poets, 
 I that word in the case of Mr. Squire would certainly 
 be detachment. Now, detachment is usually a 
 
274 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 secondary characteristic. It is caused by a quality 
 in the mind for which we have no name in the 
 intellectual sphere, but which in its social mani- 
 festation we call reserve or shyness. Some people 
 seem to have a hedge about them which keeps them 
 at a distance from their fellows and from direct 
 contact with life. When they are men of intellect 
 like Mr. Squire, and the quality is shown only in 
 the sphere of some art, they are perhaps to be com- 
 pared rather to men standing up on a little plat- 
 form, such as is used by the umpire at lawn tennis 
 or by the man who directs wanderers in the Maze 
 at Hampton Court. Such v/riters are tempera- 
 mentally onlookers, and we shall detect in their 
 works the typical faults and virtues engendered by 
 their position. Why such men find themselves on 
 their little detached points of vantage I do not 
 know, very often I think because of an unusual 
 sensitiveness and an early realisation of men's 
 follies and shortcomings. They shudder away from 
 the stupidity and insensitiveness and vulgarity of 
 such yahoos, and later, when wisdom has come to 
 them, they are never quite able to make contact 
 again. Such men obviously play a very valuable 
 part. If they are poets or artists of any sort it is 
 often they who acquire the greatest skill, for they are 
 not detached because they don't feel strongly, but 
 rather because they do. The difficulty comes in in 
 the expression of their emotion. Their drums are 
 apt to be muffled drums, and, realising how difficult 
 it is going to be for them to express themselves, 
 and passionately longing to do so, they are willing 
 
J. C. SQUIRE 275 
 
 to go to great pains in acquiring skill for the attain- 
 ment of their ends. 
 
 There will be another effect of this coolness and 
 detachment. It will very often make for pro- 
 ficiency in a certain sort of humour — Mr. Squire, 
 for instance, is perhaps the best living parodist — 
 and it will often produce a fine reasoning and 
 analytical critic. But the 'straight' expression of 
 emotion is to such temperaments difficult. When 
 they do succeed in breaking their bonds, however, 
 we get something exceedingly beautiful, like Mr. 
 Squire's ' You are My Sky.' We shall hardly, 
 however, get anything bad from such a writer, for 
 he will possess what his unconscious instinctive col- 
 league will not possess — the power of self-criticism. 
 He may possibly in secrecy write badly, but I 
 doubt if he does, I doubt if he even thinks badly; 
 the sloppy or the otherwise unworthy is nipped in 
 the very smallest bud. Actually, Mr. Squire's sole 
 lapse is, I think, ' The Lily of Malud.' 
 
 When Mr. Squire has a long poem in view how 
 does he set about his work ? Let us take for in- 
 stance ' The Moon,' as perhaps being on the whole 
 more typical than either ' Birds ' or ' Rivers ' and 
 certainly than the ' Lily of Malud.' 
 
 Mr. Squire seems to have sat down to think all 
 the things it is possible to think about the Moon 
 and then determined to embody those thoughts in 
 a form and style which would unify all the similes, 
 epithets, sense-impressions, parallels and pro- 
 phecies which had occurred to him. A reflective, 
 low-toned elegaic note is sounded throughout the 
 
276 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 poem. The first stanza acquaints the reader with 
 the atmosphere in which Mr. Squire proposes to 
 make his effects : — 
 
 * I waited for a miracle tonight. 
 
 Dim was the earth beneath a star-swept sky, 
 Her boughs were vague in that phantasmal light, 
 
 Her current rippled past invisibly. 
 No stir was in the dark and windless meadows, 
 Only the water, whispering in the shadows. 
 
 That darkened nature lived did still proclaim. 
 An hour I stood in that defeat of sight, 
 
 Waiting, and then a sudden silver flame 
 
 Burned in the eastern heaven, and she came.* 
 
 Mr. Squire has used his verse form with extra- 
 ordinary accomplishment and subtlety. Every 
 rhyme and assonance chimes upon the ear and 
 gives that sense of roundness and completeness, 
 that impression of a miniature refrain which {^ace 
 Milton, and Mr. Flint) is, after all, best produced 
 by rhyme. The sense is carried on from stanza 
 to stanza or from line to line just where it should 
 be ; it is broken when we feel the need of a pause. 
 Mr. Squire twists words and rhythms as he will, 
 the stubbornness they show in other hands has 
 gone. The phraseology of the poem never startles 
 the reader out of the tranquil mood that is to be 
 evoked, and yet never allows him to sink into 
 lethargy. 
 
 In many ways the poem is a pleasant and in- 
 tended reminder of Young's, Thomson's or 
 Cowper's elegaic style, especially, perhaps in the 
 ' Last Man ' motif at the end and the introduction 
 
J. C. SQUIRE 277 
 
 of historical pieces in simile or in episode. The 
 following verse, for instance, is an example of a 
 more successful evocation of history than can be 
 produced in what we may call the ' shrieks of an 
 agonising king ' style. 
 
 All our poor history, the poet says, has been 
 unrolled before the calm eyes of Selene. 
 Napoleon, alone in the night, felt rise above 
 him : — 
 
 * The ancient ccmqueror^s sloping, smooth, immense, 
 Moon-pointing- Pyramid *s enduring courses.' 
 
 * Restless, he knew that moon who watched him muse. 
 
 Had seen a restless Caesar brood on fame 
 Amid the Pharoahs* broken avenues. 
 
 And, circling round that fixed monition, came 
 Woven by moonlight, random, transitory. 
 Fragments of all the dim receding story : 
 
 The moonlit water dripping from the oars 
 Of triremes in the Bay of Syracuse ; 
 
 The opposing bivouacs upon the shores. 
 
 That knew dead Hector's and Achilles* wars.' 
 
 The poem concludes with an excellent ' end of 
 the world ' : — 
 
 * Pale satellite, old mistress of our fires, 
 
 Who has seen so much and been so much to men. 
 Symbol and goal of all our wild desires. 
 
 Not any voice will cry upon thee then ; 
 Dreamer and dream, they will have all gone over, 
 The sick of heart, the singer and the lover. 
 
 An end there will have been to all their lust, 
 Their sorrow, and the sighing of their lyres ; 
 
 O all this Life that stained Earth's patient crust, 
 Time's dying breath will have blown away like dust.' 
 
278 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 The poem, besides being a tour de force in its 
 sustained unity, is exceedingly agreeable reading. 
 
 As we might expect from a poet who is also a 
 scholar (almost a literary collector) Mr. Squire is 
 often very good at half-historical, half-scientific 
 effects. Take the following, for instance, from 
 ' Birds ' :— 
 
 * Oh let your strong imagination turn 
 
 The great wheel backwards until Troy unburn, 
 And then unbuild and seven Troys below 
 Rise out of death and dwindle and outflow, 
 Till all have passed and none has yet been there. 
 Back, ever back. » 
 
 'A Far Place,' one or two of his songs, and 'To 
 a Bulldog,' are some of the most attractive of Mr. 
 Squire's poems, but personally I have as favourite 
 the beautiful song ' You are my Sky ' : — 
 
 * You are my sky ; beneath your circling kindness 
 
 My meadows all take in the light and grow ; 
 Laugh with the joy you've given, 
 The joy youVe given, 
 And open in a thousand buds, and blow. 
 
 But when you are sombre, sad, averse, forgetful, 
 Heavily veiled by clouds that brood with rain. 
 
 Dumbly I lie all shadowed, 
 
 I lie all shadowed, 
 And dumbly wait for you to shine again.' 
 
 But Mr. Squire is nothing if not an experimenter. 
 His latest considerable poem is an account of the 
 Oxford V. Cambridge Rugby Football match. The 
 poem is a moment-to-moment diary of the sense 
 perceptions and fleeting emotions of an on-looker 
 
J. C. SQUIRE 279 
 
 at the match. It is written colloquially in an in- 
 formal measure with occasional rhyming. Some of 
 the best lines in the poem are about the crowd. 
 
 It might, by the way, be instructive to study the 
 differences between Mr. Squire's and Mr. Mase- 
 field's treatment of the onlookers at a sporting 
 event : 
 
 * Oh, Lord, ! What an awful crush ! There are faces pale 
 And strained, and faces with animal grins advancing. 
 Stuck fast around mine. We move, we pause again 
 For an age, then a forward wave and another stop. 
 The pressure might squeeze one flat. Dig heels into ground, 
 For this white and terrified woman whose male insists 
 Upon room to get back. Why didn't I come here at one? 
 Why come here at all? What strange little creatures we 
 
 are, • 
 
 Wedged and shoving under the contemptuous sky ! 
 •X- * -X- -x- -x- 
 
 All things have stopped ; the time will never go by ; 
 We shall never get in ! . . . Yet through the standing glass 
 The sand imperceptibly drops, the inexorable laws 
 Of number work also here. . . .' 
 
 The reader notes the detachment. Mr. Squire 
 does not in the least mind the accusation of being a 
 moralising Jacques, and has in this poem written 
 that which many modern poets would have been 
 afraid to write and will be shy to read. This in my 
 mind is a sign of strength in Mr. Squire, and of 
 weakness in those who will be shocked. Very effec- 
 tive in the poem is the alternate sense in the narra- 
 tor of identity with the crowd and of separation 
 from it. The onset of the early winter twilight, 
 with the air grown blue and misty and the players 
 
28o SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 only seen dimly as they drift away to a distant 
 corner, matches lit by men in the stands on the 
 opposite side of the ground beginning to show up 
 as little yellow spurts of flame — all this is admirably 
 L^iven, with its psychological consequences. 
 
 At the end of the poem I think Mr. Squire makes 
 a mistake. He takes the implicit comment of the 
 early part of the poem a step further, and gives us 
 not the fragmentary fleeting thoughts which were so 
 effective earlier, but a whole slab of comment. I 
 think he should have left this to the reader's 
 imagination and not stated it, for it was all se- 
 questered in what he had written before. We 
 should have got there all right, and now, by stating 
 his comment in so many w^ords, he has taken the 
 fine edges off it ; he has tried to state what is really 
 an attitude of mind too plainly, and has foregone 
 the magic of poetry which he had used fully in the 
 earlier part of the poem — its power of expressing 
 the inexpressible. 
 
 I wish space allowed me to draw the reader's 
 attention more fully to the fascinating qualities of 
 ' Winter Nighfall,' with its intriguing use of asson- 
 ance, rhyme and repetition, or ' Meditation in 
 Lamplight ' (a good example of the category type 
 of poem of which Mr. Squire is so fond), to the 
 beautiful Chinese effects of ' Fen Landscape,' and 
 to the perpetual delights of that most beautiful 
 poem, ' A Far Place,' 
 
EDMUND BLUNDEN 28 1 
 
 EDMUND BLUNDEN. 
 
 Mr. Blunden seemed so far one of those poets who 
 succeed largely by reason of their willingness to 
 limit their province. He gives us a kind of poetic 
 Petite Culture. No mixed farming for Mr. Blun- 
 den, he will not disperse himself here and there, 
 but will get all he can out of his one carefully-dug 
 patch. It would be almost possible to count Mr. 
 Blunden's subjects (and his unsuccessful poems, 
 too, be it noted) on the fingers of one hand. His 
 work is singularly direct. His landscape is that of 
 Kent and Sussex. Hops, mill-ponds, oast-houses, 
 streams, and, above all, fish are his themes, and 
 he almost invariably manages to make his readers 
 visualise these objects as he desires. 
 
 * The wild-rose bush lets loll 
 Her sweet-breathed petals on the pearl-smooth pool, 
 The bream-pool overshadowed with the cool 
 Of oaks where myriad mumbling wings patrol. 
 
 Up the slow stream the immemorial bream 
 (For when had Death dominion over them?) 
 Through green pavilions of ghost leaf and stem, 
 A conclave of blue shadows in a dream, 
 Glide on ; idola that forgotten plan, 
 Incomparably wise, the doom of man.* 
 
 Such is the note of most of his poems ; it is struck 
 with a sure, full chime in Almswomen. He de- 
 scribes how two old women love and depend upon 
 one another, ' like true loves in the spring.' 
 
282 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 * Long, long ago they passed threescore-and-ten, 
 And in this doll's house lived together then ; 
 All things they have in common, being so poor, 
 
 How happy go the rich fair-v^eather days 
 
 When on the roadside folk stare in amaze 
 
 At such a honeycomb of fruit and flowers 
 
 As mellows round their threshold ; what long hours 
 
 They gloat upon their steepling hollyhocks, 
 
 Bee*s balsams, feathery southernwood, and stocks.' 
 
 More rarely, but with as sure a touch, he evokes a 
 mood, as in Sickbed or in Leisure, where he writes : 
 
 * Of autumn half-asleep and idly playing 
 
 With fancies as they chance. 
 The feather's fall, the doomed red leaf delaying, 
 And all the tiny circumstance of peace.* 
 
 Lately, however — notably in Oxford Poetry, 1921 
 — he shows signs of extending his range and sub- 
 ject. Before Mr. Blunden writes perfectly of his 
 bit of country and grows a complete interpreter, he 
 must do what he seems to be striving for — catch 
 a little more of the wantonness, the caprice, the 
 wildness, that storm, sunrise, and moonset give 
 even to the quietest country-sides. He must per- 
 severe and develop the vein of waywardness that 
 is now nearly hidden. He has at present too much 
 of the Thomson — the Correct Pastoral attitude. 
 He might at any moment lapse into the gentle- 
 manly naturalist, the reader feels. We almost ex- 
 pect some phrase of * the market-place o'erspread 
 with poor.' Here is soil from which smugness 
 might grow; we miss a sub-acidity, a tartness. 
 
EDMUND BLUNDEN 28j 
 
 This, however, is to cavil. It is not fair to com- 
 mend Mr. Blunden for concentration and then 
 blame him for lack of diversity. And within his 
 self-imposed boundaries his work is satisfying, and 
 vigorously simple. Mr. Blunden is not only a 
 writer of a very high order of talent, he is a poet, 
 a man whose work illumines and interprets that of 
 which he writes, even to those who seemed to know 
 it best. 
 
 JAMES ELROY FLECKER. 
 
 James Elroy Flecker was what we might call an 
 early-modern. Superficially, or at any rate tech- 
 nically, he did not depart very far from the Vic- 
 torian tradition. In style his chief divergence was 
 one of diction, while in metre and construction he 
 often equals the Victorians in elaboration and sur- 
 passed them in subtlety. Even in diction the 
 changes he made were of omission. He denied 
 himself on the one hand those * poetic ' words which 
 his predecessor had overworked, and on the other 
 the many markedly prosaic expressions with which 
 his successors have made us familiar in poetry. 
 His ' Ballad of the Londoner ' may stand as an 
 example of his use of words — though indeed it is: 
 also typical of his work in a wider sense. 
 
 * Evening- falls on the smoky walls, 
 And the railing's drip with rain, 
 And I will cross the old river 
 To see my g-irl again. 
 
284 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 The great and solemn-gliding tram, 
 
 Lovers still mysterious car, 
 Has many a light of gold and white, 
 
 And a single dark red star. 
 
 L know a garden in a street 
 
 Which no one ever knew ; 
 I know a rose beyond the Thames, 
 
 Where flowers are pale and few. ' 
 
 In some respects how perfectly classical this is — 
 how consonant with tradition ! Indeed, the last 
 two lines are so almost comically Wordsworthian 
 that we feel the lady's name can only have been 
 Lucy. And yet could anyone mistake this for any- 
 thing but a modern poem.^ As to Flecker's use of 
 unpoetic objects and images — in this case the tram 
 — it is easy to see, but hard to define how his 
 lines differ from what Mr. Huxley on the one 
 hand, or Swinburne on the other, would have 
 written. Perhaps we notice, first of all, that 
 Flecker is obviously deeply interested in what a 
 tram at night is really like, its pictorial effect, and 
 in a brilliant line he gives it : 
 
 * The great and solemn-glidingt tram.* 
 
 But Flecker is a transitional, and he is therefore 
 self-conscious about his tram, and so tries to prove 
 its fitness to figure in a poem by calling it ' Love's 
 still mysterious car/ He is in fact still challenging 
 the people who see a tram, not as a fact, but as a 
 street nuisance, or per contra, as a democratic pub- 
 lic conveyance. But then his pictorial interest re- 
 
JAMES ELROY FLECKER 285 
 
 asserts itself and again one sees the wet sheen of 
 the streets : 
 
 * Has many a light of gold and white 
 And a single dark red star.' 
 
 But perhaps the boundaries of his interest are even 
 more significant. It is evidently no concern of his 
 whether the tram does good or harm. A Victorian 
 poet would have felt much less interest in what the 
 tram looked like than in his own conception of it as : 
 
 (i) A car of Juggernaut defiling God's beauti- 
 ful earth, or : 
 
 (2) The triumphant symbol of democracy. 
 
 Yet Flecker's reaction to the tram would not be in 
 the least that of one of the younger poets of the 
 present day — Mr. Golding, Mr. Rickward, Mr. 
 Hughes, Mr. Porter — they would never have put in 
 that line of apology, ' Love's still mysterious car,' 
 any more than they would write the internal rhyme 
 in the first line. Consider, for example, the perfect 
 sang ffoid with which Miss Edith Sitwell writes 
 about trams. But fortunately, the fact of standing 
 between two conventions never seriously hampered 
 Flecker. His genius was bold and copious, and 
 strong enough to sweep aside technical difficulties 
 that would have strangled a lesser man. Above 
 all. Flecker was one of those beings who seem to 
 possess a peculiar power over words. It is argu- 
 able that he did not understand life or psychology 
 as well as his successors or his critics, but he under- 
 stood the art of writing much more profoundly. 
 
286 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 Perhaps I can best illustrate his power over 
 words by quoting from one of his early poems, ' The 
 Bridge of Fire/ It is a poem easy to criticise for 
 its looseness of construction, its lack of overt mean- 
 ing, and it is not, of course, to be compared to his 
 mature work. 
 
 In this poem w^e seem to see a young mind turn- 
 ing over and caressing the rich and glorious jewels 
 of antiquity and tradition. Here are the materials 
 with which he will presently build. But for the 
 present he is content to let them run through his 
 fingers. He sees the Gods on Heaven's Bridge : 
 
 * Robed with faint seas and crowned with quiet stars 
 All g^reat Gods dwell to whom men prayed or pray. 
 No winter chills, no fear or fever mars 
 
 Their grand and timeless hours of pomp and play ; 
 Some drive about the Rim wind-golden cars 
 Or, shouting, laugh Eternity away. 
 
 The daughters of their pride. 
 
 Moon -pale, blue-water-eyed, 
 Their flame-white bodies pearled with falling' spray. 
 
 Send all their dark hair streaming 
 
 Down where the worlds lie gleaming, ... * 
 
 He tells of the Greek Gods : 
 
 * The Gods whose faces are the morning light, 
 Of they who love the leafy rood of song. 
 
 The Gods of Greece, dividing the broad night. 
 Have gathered on the Bridge, of all that throng 
 The fairest, whether he whose feet for flight 
 Had plumy wings, or she to whom belong 
 Shadows, Persephone, or that swan-white 
 Rose-breasted island lady, gentle and strong, . . .' 
 
JAMES ELROY FLECKER 28/ 
 
 But there are darker Gods : 
 
 * Belus and Ra and that most jealous Lord 
 
 Who ruled the hosts of Pharoah in the sea, . . .' 
 
 * Gods who take veng-eancc, gods who grant reward, 
 Gods who exact a murdered devotee, 
 
 Brahma the kind, and Siva the abhorred 
 And they who tend Ygdrasil, the big tree. 
 
 And I sis, the young moon, 
 
 And she of the piping tune, 
 Her Phrygian sister, cruel Cybele, 
 
 And Orpheus the lone harp-player 
 
 And Mithras the man-slayer. 
 And Allah rumbling on to victory, 
 
 And some, the oldest »>f them all, 
 Square heads that leer and lust, and lizard shapes that 
 
 crawl. * 
 
 Though perhaps we ought to deny to this the title 
 of ' great poetry/ because it has neither deep emo- 
 tion or particularly profound thought behind it, we 
 must yet admit that it is, like the more mature ' Pil- 
 lage,' the most gorgeous word magic. I suppose 
 ' Pillage ' is the most highly-finished and highly- 
 polished piece of decorative writing that the modern 
 movement has given us. Few of us who have 
 fallen under its spell will forget the sense of intoxi- 
 cation that first reading brought with it. Here is 
 the last verse : 
 
 * No more when the trumpeter calls shall we feast in the 
 
 white-light halls ; 
 For stayed are the soft footfalls of the moon-browed bearers 
 
 of wine, 
 
288 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 And lost are the statues of Kings and of Gods with great 
 
 glorious wings, 
 And an empire of beautiful things, and the lips of the love 
 
 who was mine.' 
 
 But perhaps more lasting, because perhaps more 
 subtle, are the opening lines of * Santorin,* one of 
 the few pieces of free verse that Flecker wrote : 
 
 * Who are you, Sea Lady, 
 And where in the seas are w^e? 
 I have too long been steering 
 By the flashes in your eyes. 
 Why drops the moonlight through my heart, 
 And why so quietly 
 Go the great engines of my boat 
 As if their souls were free? ' 
 
 Our wonder at the sense of glamour it has evoked 
 will perhaps be succeeded by surprise at the extra- 
 ordinary impression of smoothness which so free a 
 measure has been made to give us. It is easy 
 enough, of course, to see where the rhymes occur, 
 but they seem to be introduced according to no 
 regular scheme; there appears to be no fixed 
 cadence (compare the lines I have quoted of Miss 
 Amy Lowell's * Patterns '), there seems to be no 
 fixed plan in the length of the lines and the num- 
 bers of the syllables. It is, I think, a poem which 
 we might very well adduce as a proof of the truth 
 of some of the allegations that I made in the chap- 
 ter on Metre and Prosody. 
 
 I must in conclusion warn the new reader that 
 he must not form an opinion of Flecker's poems 
 from the fragments I have quoted. Flecker, much 
 
JAMES ELROY FLECKER 289 
 
 more than his successors, wrote his poems as wholes, 
 and to take an extract is usually an act of violence. 
 I hope, at any rate, that I have shown that 
 Flecker was not, as has sometimes been said, the 
 poet with the modern , content and the Victorian 
 manner. Perhaps his detachment is one of his 
 most marked characteristics. He excluded with 
 wonderful success all that had become impossible, 
 that had been worked to death in the Victorian 
 method, and yet wasted no time in ' breaking with 
 tradition,' being so sure of himself that he could 
 pass straight to creation, clear in his individuality, 
 fearing neither the old nor the new. I think that 
 his reputation will grow with the years as Keats' 
 reputation — probably even smaller at the time of 
 his death than Flecker's — grew, until they will both 
 be secure in the possession of all those minds which 
 can love the sheer beauty of words and word- 
 images for their own sakes, and without an arriere 
 pensee of regret for an absent psychological reve- 
 lation. 
 
 RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 Rupert Brooke was certainly at one time the most 
 discussed poet of the modern movement. A 
 romantic and untimely death cut him off from what 
 promised to be a sustained productiveness, and 
 every poem of his lamentably small output has been 
 thoroughly considered and commented upon — 
 turned this way and that — by poets and critics. 
 
290 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 Unlike that of the majority of modern poets, 
 Brooke s reputation has suffered from a good deal 
 of rather uncritical admiration, than which there can^ 
 be nothing more damaging, and consequently at 
 the moment there is perhaps a tendency to under 
 estimate his great powers and his greater promise. 
 For m spite of his scholarship and his remark- 
 able acomplishment as a versifier, immaturity seems 
 to me the outstanding characteristic of Brooke's 
 work. His was probably one of those minds and 
 certainly one of those characters which mature late. 
 Not only too was he personally young, but his work 
 was the product of the extreme youth of a move- 
 ment. Brooke had neither personal nor traditional 
 roots. We feel all the time that he is making an 
 effort to keep his balance. There is hardly a poem 
 of his which does not show, as well as the charm, 
 the self-consciousness of immaturity : 
 
 * Hot through Troy's ruin Menelaus broke 
 To Priam's palace sword in hand, to sate 
 On that adulterous whore a ten years' hate 
 And a king's honour. Through red death and smoke, 
 And cries, and then by quieter ways he strode, 
 Till the still innermost chambers fronted him. 
 He swung his sword, and crashed into the dim 
 Luxurious bower, flaming like a god. 
 
 High sat white Helen, lonely and serene. 
 
 He had not remembered that she was so fair, 
 
 And that her' neck curved down in such a way ; 
 
 And he felt tired. He flung the sword away. 
 And kissed her feet, and knelt before her there, 
 
 The perfect Knight before the perfect Queen.* 
 
 The choice of such a subject was vain, the poet has 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 29 1 
 
 no more got away from himself than he did in 
 ' Granchester ' or * Channel Crossing/ 
 
 Now self-consciousness in the poet is very 
 apt to have much the same effect upon the reader 
 as has shyness in an interlocutor. In some subtle 
 way it makes us not only restless and uncom- 
 fortable, but unduly critical. The poet, we feel, is 
 being self-assertive and mannered and, though we 
 know it is from fright, it has its effect nevertheless. 
 However, the fault luckily by no means spreads 
 itself over Brooke's entire output. For instance, 
 though the self-consciousness is there, it does not 
 obtrude itself in what I consider to be one of 
 Brooke's most delightful poems, ' Dining Room 
 Tea.' 
 
 A party of intimates are sitting at tea, laughing 
 and talking. Suddenly the poet experiences a 
 sensation of isolment, a sensation with which we 
 are all of us probably familiar in some form. The 
 whole scene suddenly becomes static, and at the 
 same time he becomes aware of a sort of inner 
 meaning in it all. What this inner meaning may 
 be he naturally does not state; that would be im- 
 possible, it can only be apprehended by a mind 
 illuminated by the vision : 
 
 * I saw the marble cup ; the tea, 
 Hungi on the air, an amber stfeaml; 
 I saw the fire's unglittering gleam, 
 The painted flame, the frozen smoke. 
 No more the flooding lamplight broke 
 On flying eyes and lips and hair ; 
 But lay, but slept unbroken there, 
 
292 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 On stiller flesh, and body breathless, 
 And lips and laughter swayed and deathless, 
 And words on which no silence grew. 
 Light was more alive than you. ' 
 
 Alas! that Brooke did not live so that his force 
 might have grown into strength, his irritability into 
 humour, his irony into wit, his charm into a majes- 
 tic beauty. Everything in the turn that the poetic 
 movement has taken would have served to ripen 
 and mature Brooke's genius. 
 
 ROBERT NICHOLS. 
 
 Mr .Robert Nichols' virtues are many. Oftener 
 than his reader has a right to expect — for every 
 poet has a fixed allowance of failures per successful 
 set of verses — he achieves limpidity, perfect poetic 
 fusion. In a great deal of the poetry that we are 
 quite ready to enjoy, the thought and the medium 
 remain as it were distinct. Throw a pinch of salt 
 into a tumbler of water, and for a moment the 
 grains sink visibly; there is salt, there is water, 
 but in another moment there is salt-water. Mr. 
 Nichols' ' The Sprig of Lime ' and ' Night Rhap- 
 sody ' are salt water. They and some fragments of 
 other poems approach perfection. Therefore it is 
 that Mr. Nichols' work must be judged by absolute 
 standards. When a poet has attained to a certain 
 mastery, we can no longer soothe our aesthetic con- 
 sciences by saying that his work is marvellously 
 good for, say, a first-lieutenant or a bombardier, 
 
ROBERT NICHOLS 293 
 
 excuses with which the critic — sated with blood — 
 is apt to disguise the lenient judgments of lazi- 
 ness. We must begin to ask ourselves why each 
 particular poem misses perfection. We must in- 
 quire why, though we read and re-read an individual 
 poem, the grains are still visible ; we must ask what 
 quality is it that keeps them in suspension. 
 
 What are Mr. Nichols' faults.^ They are many 
 and diverse. Sometimes the difficulty is that his 
 grains of salt belong to somebody else. For ex- 
 ample, in ' The Deliverer,' as they sink down to 
 the bottom of the tumbler, they spell ' John Mase- 
 field ' and ' Lascelles Abercrombie.' In the six- 
 teenth sonnet to Aurelia, the legend is ' Rupert 
 Brooke/ There has been very little assimilation. 
 We can find the very sonnet, ' Helen and Mene- 
 laus II ' : 
 
 * And you poor drivelling, disregarded crone, 
 Bide blinking at memory between drowsy fits.' 
 
 * Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent. ' 
 
 A different fault is his ability to write slovenly 
 verse. For example, in ' Two Friends, Two 
 Nights,' the thought is a sound one, but it has not 
 been hammered out. Mr. Nichols has been con- 
 tent with a poem before it was half forged. The 
 fault is not in individual lines, but in conception. 
 Perhaps the key to this trouble lies in a certain 
 vanity, a certain egotism which Mr. Nichols dis- 
 plays naively enough in some of his poems. Every 
 now and then he produces the impression of fling- 
 ing a piece of work at the reader and saying, ' This 
 
294 SHORT STUDIES OF SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 is a poem by Robert Nichols ; read and be thank- 
 ful/ It is a fault of taste, for it is arguable that 
 no one human bemg is much more egotistical than 
 another; merely some men have skill enough to 
 hide the long ears of our common nature. 
 
 Lastly, he has too little sense of hurriour, that last 
 fairest blossom of a sense of proportion. Satire in 
 his hands might, the reader imagines, become in- 
 vective — it would never become banter. It might 
 be terrible, but it would not be amusing. 
 
 But all these are the faults of youth, and, with 
 some of its faults, Mr. Nichols has all of its virtues. 
 He is adaptable, he is resourceful, he is restlessly 
 eager to try new methods, to pour his soul into an 
 unaccustomed vessel. He has force, eloquence, 
 fire, and passion, and he has a ternbiliia which will 
 remind the reader of Donne, in whose work Mr. 
 Nichols has obviously steeped himself, though he 
 does not imitate him. 
 
 He has considerable power of characterisation. 
 For example, the charming conversation between 
 the poet and his friend, Mr. Robert Graves, called 
 ' Winter Overnight.' 
 
 Very different, again, is ' The Flower of Flame,' 
 in the first two verses of which we have — to pursue 
 our original analogy — another salt-water poem, one 
 in which fusion is perfect : 
 
 * As round the cliff I came alone 
 The whole bay bared its blaze to me ; 
 Loud sung: the wind, the wild sun shone, 
 The tumbled cloudsi fled scattering on, 
 Light shattered on wave and winking stone.' 
 
ROBERT NICHOLS 295 
 
 ' The Sprig of Lime ' was among the first of 
 his reflective poems. Perhaps some readers may 
 feel that the later ' Night Rhapsody ' is almost more 
 exquisite : 
 
 * How beautiful it is to wake at nig^ht, 
 When over all there reigns the ultimate spell 
 Of complete silence, darkness absolute, 
 To feel the world, tilted on axle-tree. 
 In slow gyration, with no sensible sound. 
 Unless to ears of unimagined beings, 
 Resident incorporeal or stretched 
 In vigilance of ecstasy among 
 Ethereal paths and the celestial maze. 
 The rumour of our onward course now brings 
 A steady rustle, as of some strange ship* 
 Darkling with) soundless sail all set and amply filled 
 By volume of an ever-constant air. 
 At fullest night, through seas for ever calm, 
 Swept lovely and unknown for ever on. 
 
 How beautiful to wake at night. 
 
 Within the room grown strange, and still, and sweet, 
 
 And live a century, while in the dark 
 
 The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns. * 
 
 There never lived a poet who would not have been 
 proud to have written such lines. They have 
 achieved completeness, they have an independent 
 life of their own. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Titles of Poems and Books are in italics. 
 
 Abercrombie, Lascelles, 12, 20. 
 Abraham Lincoln^ 191. 
 Aforetime f 219. 
 Ainley, Henry, 237. 
 Aldington, Richard, 139. 
 Alexander's Feast^ 92. 
 AlmswomeUy 281. 
 AmoreSy 213. 
 Animula^ 250. 
 Ann, 121. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 9, 140, i86. 
 Augustf igi4i 248. 
 
 B 
 
 Bailey, John, 125. 
 
 Ballad of the Londoner ^ 283. 
 
 Baring, Maurice, 75. 
 
 Barnefield, Richard, 79. 
 
 Barrie, Sir James, 218. 
 
 Baudelaire, 11. 
 
 Beggar's Opera, The^ 79, 80. 
 
 Behaviourists, The, 35. 
 
 Berdan, Professor, 163. 
 
 Berners, Lord, 79. 
 
 Beside the Bed, 271. 
 
 Birds, The, 19, 278. 
 
 Black Horse Lane, 216. 
 
 Bliss, Arthur, 81. 
 
 Blunden, E., 16, 281-283. 
 
 Board of Education, The, iii. 
 
 Bottomley, Gordon, 129, 219, 222-229. 
 
 Bridge of Fire, The, 286, 287. 
 
 Britain's Daughter, 226. 
 
 Brooke, Rupert, 289-292. 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 151. 
 
 Browning, Robert, 53, 185. 
 
 Byron, Lord, 76, 132, 133. 
 
 Cadenced Verse, 73. 
 
 Campbell, J., 12. 
 
 Campbell, Thomas, 136. 
 
 Can Grande's Castle, 45, 139, 267. 
 
 Caves of Auvergne, The, 231. 
 
 Characters of Women, 42. 
 
 Chaucer, 163. 
 
 Claptrap, 11. 
 
 Cliches, 20. 
 
 Coleridge, 132, 252. 
 
 Collected Parodies, 222. 
 
 Come Unto These Yellow Sands, 253. 
 
 Congo, The, 234, 235, 236. 
 
 Contemplation of Life, 233. 
 
 Coquelin, M., 237. 
 
 Cornford, Francis, 81. 
 
 D 
 
 Danae, 220. 
 
 Dauber, 20, 85, 135. 
 
 Decoratives, The, 55. 
 
 Defence of Poesie, 167, 183. 
 
 De la Mare, Walter, 117, 121, 252-256. 
 
 De Luxe, 241. 
 
 De Quincey, 267. 
 
 Didactics, The, 55. 
 
 Dining Room Tea, 291. 
 
 Dock, The, 255. 
 
 Don Juan, 130. 
 
 Donne, John, 261. 
 
 Dream of Fair Women, The, 25. 
 
 Drinkwater, John, 191. 
 
 Dryden, John, 15, 17, 92, 166. 
 
 Dunciad, The, 203. 
 
 E 
 
 Edward the Confessor, 207. 
 Emigration, The, 264. 
 End, The, 264. 
 
298 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Endymion, 84. 
 
 Enslavedy 247. 
 
 Ethics, 53. 
 
 Euripides, 175. 
 
 Everlasting Mercy y They 84, 135. 
 
 Fife Gallantej 264. 
 
 Flat School, The, 270. 
 
 Flaubert, 91. 
 
 Flecker, James Elroy, 7, 238-289. 
 
 Flint, Mr. 155, 156, 157, 159, 161, 186. 
 
 Flower of Flame, 294. 
 
 Four Ages of Poetry , 179. 
 
 Frankau, Gilbert, 76. 
 
 Fraser, Sir James, 256. 
 
 Freeman, John, 8. 
 
 Freud, Sigmund, 35. 
 
 Full Fathom Five, 252. 
 
 Gahaiziy 203. 
 Gibson, W. W., 23, 135. 
 Glamour^ 207. 
 
 Golden Whales of California, The, 245. 
 Golding, Louis, 285. 
 Goossens, Eugene, 79, 80. 
 Gorgeous Poetry, 200. 
 Gosse, Edmund, 157. 
 Grauch, 225. 
 Graves, C. L., 206. 
 Graves, Robert, 7, 23, 45, 47, 49, 147, 
 198, 199,205,214-217,251. 
 
 H 
 
 Hebrew Form, The, 75. 
 
 Helen and Menelaus, 290, 293. 
 
 Hind and the Panther, 17, 18. 
 
 Hodgson, Ralph, 18. 
 
 Hound of Heaven, The, 18. 
 
 Hounds of Hell, The, 248. 
 
 Housman, A. E., 10. 
 
 Hueffer, Ford Maddox, 96, 186, 198. 
 
 Hughes, Richard, 285. 
 
 Huxley, Aldous, 16. 
 
 I 
 
 Island of Youthy The, 19, 260, 262. 
 
 J.B.M., 200. 
 Jim Jayy 122. 
 Johnson, Dr., 13, 14, 54, loi, 166, 172, 
 
 173, i74» i75» 176. 
 Jonson, Ben, 118. 
 Jowett, Mr., 206. 
 
 K 
 
 Karsavina, Tamara, 30, 31. 
 Keats, 18, 43, 85, 89, 130. 
 King Lear's Wife, 222, 228. 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 203. 
 Knox, E. v., 201, 202. 
 Komisarjevsky, M., 223. 
 
 Lawrence, D. H., 12, 211-214. 
 
 Lear, Edward, 123, 239. 
 
 Leisure y 282. 
 
 Lemmings, The, 251. 
 
 Lily of Malud, The, 275. 
 
 Lindsay, Vachel, 79, 201, 233-239, 245. 
 
 Losing a Slave Girly 258. 
 
 Lot's Wifey 211. 
 
 Lowell, Amy, 45, 73, 266-270. 
 
 Lord Lucas, In Memoriam to. 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulay, 181. 
 
 Machethy 29. 
 
 Macbeth, Lady, 225. 
 
 Madeleine in Church, 272. 
 
 Maeterlinck, 222, 229. 
 
 Man of Ross, 17, 18. 
 
 Marlowe, 58. 
 
 Masefield, John, 7, 12, 18, 20, 82, 84, 
 
 129, 134, 246-250. 
 Medea, 220. 
 
 Metaphysics, 3, 32, 61, 186. 
 Mew, Charlotte, 17, 193, 270-273. 
 Midsummer Eve, 224. 
 Milton, John, 11, 17, 53, 58, 59, 132. 
 Montessori, Mme, 11 1. 
 Moon, The, 275. 
 Moore, Sturge, 9, 19, 20, 82, 140, 146, 
 
 217-250. 
 Morality, 8, 11. 
 
INDEX 
 
 299 
 
 Munro, Harold, 142, 146, 192, 193, 
 
 194, 195, 196, 254. 
 Murry, Middleton, 142. 
 
 N 
 Nero, 207. 
 New Voices, 74. 
 Nichols, Robert, 23, 292-295. 
 Night Rhapsody, 295. 
 No Plays, The, 258. 
 Noyes, Alfred, 197. 
 
 Ode to a Nightingale, 43, 89. 
 Old Woman, The, 12. 
 Oxford V. Cambridge Rugby Foot- 
 ball Match, 278. 
 Oundle, 113. 
 
 P 
 
 Paradise Lost, 20, 58. 
 
 Paris and Helen, 19, 23, 208, 230, 231. 
 
 Patterns, 73. 
 
 Peacock Thomas, 166, 179, 181, 182. 
 
 Philip the King, 248. 
 
 Pictorial Arts, 189. 
 
 Pike, The, i6. 
 
 Pillage, 287. 
 
 PoChuI,86, 257. 
 
 Poetic Diction, 266. 
 
 Poetic Drama, The, 248, 258. 
 
 Pompey the Great, 247. 
 
 Pope, 15, 17, 42. 
 
 Porter, Alan, 285. 
 
 Pound, Ezra, 24, 207. 
 
 Powers of the Air, The, 218. 
 
 Prosody, 70, 76. 
 
 Psychology, 4, 6, 24, 64, 185, 188. 
 
 Queen of China, The, 19, 20, 260. 
 
 R 
 
 Realistic Drama, The, 258. 
 Renan, 182, 183. 
 Reynard the Fox, 20, 151. 
 Richardson, Miss D., 241. 
 Rickword, E., 285. 
 Right Royal, 134. 
 
 Rivers, Augustine, 204. 
 Roxburgh, J. F., 131, 133. 
 Rule Britannia, 78. 
 Ruskin, 50. 
 Russell, Bertrand, 4, 35. 
 
 S 
 
 Sanderson, F. W., 67, 113. 
 
 Santa F4 Trail, The^ 238. 
 
 Santorin, 288. 
 
 Sassoon, Siegfried, 7, 17. 
 
 Serenade, 245. 
 
 Sewing Basket, They 47. 
 
 Sex, II, 16, 212. 
 
 Shakespeare, 29, 30, 54, 58, 172, 175, 
 
 176, 177, 178, 182, 252. 
 Shanks, E., 19, 20, 259-266. 
 Shaw, G. B., 9, 95, 173. 
 Sheherazada, 95, 102. 
 Shelley, 18, 83, 88, 179, 183, 185. 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 167, 168, 170, 172. 
 Sit well, Edith, 23, 240-246, 285. 
 Sitwell, Osbert, 23, 24, 240-246. 
 Sitwell, Sacheverell, 23, 240-246. 
 Solecisms, 9. 
 Spencer, E., 97, 130, 166. 
 Squire, J. C, 19, 20, 139, 142, 190, 
 
 191, 192, 200, 273-280. 
 Statue and the Bust, 53. 
 Stevenson, 50, 51,55, 97. 
 Sunken Garden, The, 253. 
 Swinburne, 15, 50. 
 Symbolism, 46, 47, 62, 65. 
 Synthesis, 5. 
 
 Tanglewood Tales, The, 123. 
 
 Tanka, The, 86, 87. 
 
 Tennyson, 9, 11, 24, 50, 53, 261. 
 
 Thompson, Francis, 18. 
 
 Tithonus, 72. 
 
 To a Talkative Guest, 257. 
 
 Tragic Mothers, 219, 220, 227. 
 
 Trams, 244. 
 
 Translations from the Chinese, 85. 
 
 Truth about the Russian Dancers, 
 
 The, 218. 
 Turner, W. J., 17, 19, 20, 23, 205, 208, 
 
 229-233, 251. 
 
300 
 
 Venice^ 270. 
 Vibrist, 243. 
 Virgil, 181. 
 Voltaire, 176. 
 
 W 
 
 Waley, Arthur, 85, 212, 257-259. 
 Wheels^ 204, 240. 
 Whitehead, Professor, 66. 
 Wilcox, E. W., 124. 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Wilkinson, Marguerite, 73, 146, 147, 
 
 197. 
 Winter Nightfall, 280. 
 Wooden Pegasus, The, 240, 244. 
 Word Association, 46, 47. 
 Wordsworth, 13, 15, 83, 132. 
 Wounded Hussar, The, 136. 
 
 You Are My Sky, 278. 
 Young, Brett, 77. 
 
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