Poets 
 
 m 
 
 '^V<^^c>- 
 
 B.T»Hiii!i»Bwis«MM«»aBg!«i»a!i^yg:''.i:i!i:i:':ii.K'i;y,i: 
 
 fiKtmhi. L^'NCH-.
 
 Q^^J^i^^^ 
 
 ..-^
 
 OU R POETS ! 
 
 r 
 
 /
 
 OUR POETS ! 
 
 ARTHUR LYNCH 
 
 Author of 
 
 Modern Authors," 
 
 "Approaches: The Poor Scholar's Quest of a Mecca," 
 "The Koran of Love." 
 
 'Neither is viy hlood ditch-water" 
 
 Bonaparte 
 
 REMINGTON & Co., Limited, 15, King Street, Covent Garden 
 London, and Sydney 
 
 1S94 
 All Rights Reserved
 
 PR 
 
 L97 
 
 6^ 
 
 To 
 
 The British Public 
 
 The Author 
 
 Begs to Dedicate 
 
 This Book. 
 
 81 6687
 
 IXDEX 
 
 Proem . . . . / 
 
 Oscar Wilde .... 7 
 
 Le GalUennc - - - - 11 
 
 Siiinhuyne . ... 14 
 
 Andi'CiV Lang - - - - 17 
 
 William Morris . - . - 19 
 
 Len'is Morris - - - - 21 
 
 Sir Edii'iit Arnold . ... 23 
 
 Austin - . - ' 27 
 
 Dobson . ... 30 
 
 William Watson - - . - 33 
 
 Buchanan - - - - 37 
 
 Rudyard Kipling - - - - 41 
 
 NOTES 
 
 Fame - - - • - 45 
 
 Cliques, Coteries, and Critics - . - 48 
 
 Criticism . . . , 50 
 
 Sin - - - - 53 
 
 Bric-a-Brac - - - - 54
 
 INDEX 
 
 Research - - - - 55 
 
 Contemporary Irish Literature - - - 56 
 
 Narcissus - . . . qq 
 
 The "Nciv" Rclii^iuit . . . et 
 
 Metre .... 54 
 
 The " Pride of the School " - - . 68 
 
 Cabinet Poetry .... 70 
 
 Type of Poets - - - - 73 
 
 Honoured Poetry - - - - 75 
 
 The Razzias of a "Chaste''' Poet - - 77 
 
 Polished Verse ■ - - - 7S 
 
 The Force of Kipling - - - S3 
 
 The \'ice in Grain - - - - S5 
 
 Byron and Keats - - - - 91
 
 Our T^oets ! 
 
 PROEM. 
 
 I. 
 
 I'll tell the truth, the hardest thing to do, 
 
 And most original of all the arts 
 By which we trick out in their vestnres new 
 
 Our thoughts all trim for literary marts. 
 The truth is not the mode, 'tis very true, 
 
 And lacks the charm familiar Cant imparts, 
 And though it leave each fault and blemish bare 
 
 Is yet the costliest garment one can wear. 
 
 II. 
 
 Not for the first cost, that indeed is nought, 
 
 And nought for stitching, tagging, and repair, 
 But for the penalties of being caught 
 
 Sporting in public such outrageous wear ; 
 Yet Pride, or PiqUe, or Virtuous Scorn has brought 
 
 (That last phrase smacks so well, please leave it there) 
 Myself to that condition when I cry 
 
 The truth must out ; and " here goes ; do or die ! " 
 
 B
 
 Our Poels ! 
 
 III. 
 
 Ah, not indeed that I have told no Hes, 
 
 Audacious, silly, frivolous, cowardly things. 
 To catch some mean advantage on the rise, 
 
 To give my vanity some new decked wings. 
 Or hide from very proper ohs ! and fies ! 
 
 The wretched situations folly brings ; 
 But after all a man may lie austerely, 
 
 Yet judge himself and all things else sincerely. 
 
 IV. 
 
 I want a hero next ; the common want 
 
 ^If from supply we may infer demand — 
 Ye gods, what sickly puppets steeped in cant 
 
 Our novelists can give us out of hand. 
 — I want no hero ; nor that wretched rant 
 
 Of " influencing the lives " of some choice band 
 Of tender maids or young prigs' precious ring ; 
 
 So without more ado, " myself I sing — 
 
 " Myself I sing, a single separate person " — 
 
 So starts Walt Whitman, with the touch sublime, 
 A mighty ode with not a single verse in 
 
 Which the critic can detect a crime 
 More grave to wreak his literary curse on 
 
 Than that its wisdom is not wrapped in rhyme ; 
 — A theory of his which, right or wrong, 
 
 A little hurt the acceptance of his song.
 
 Proem 
 
 VI. 
 
 And eke my theory some tender j-ears 
 
 In which I wrote without " the wretched jingle 
 Of similar endings," or the troublous fears 
 
 That stir the poet's soul when in a single 
 Point he stands alone against his peers, 
 
 And so becomes a mark for the epingle. 
 Well dipped in poison, that the critic wields 
 
 To kill his chance for the Elysian fields. 
 
 VII. 
 
 But now at length I'm reconciled to rhyme, 
 
 And less content with reason than of yore. 
 For, partly, 'tis the fashion of the time, 
 
 And something that I had not seen before 
 — The subtle ringing of a constant chime 
 
 Links line to line with all that's gone before. 
 And holds the sense like jewels in a casket, 
 
 Or, if you like, your eggs all in one basket, 
 
 VIII. 
 
 And there is still another point to note. 
 
 The most important, possibly, this latter, 
 That rhyme is a protection, cloak, or coat. 
 
 That tricks off passably the meanest patter, 
 A sort of penitence, a bard's scape-goat, 
 
 To take away the sins of faulty matter ; 
 In short, with rhyme we may be half sincere, 
 
 While naked truth is serious, severe. 
 
 B— 2
 
 Ouy Pods ! 
 
 IX. 
 
 But touching now that quoted line of Walt, 
 
 With which I ended stanza number iv, 
 To keep the substance fresh with that rare salt, 
 
 Of his good nature, wholesome to the core, 
 'Twas mainly to suggest that half the fault 
 
 Of egotism's gone whene'er we soar 
 Beyond our petty selves to that calm air, 
 
 Where even to ourselves we may be fair ; 
 
 X. 
 
 And with reflective mien regard the world, 
 
 And measure clearly all the eye can see ; 
 Yet feel the throbs of passion high upwhirled, 
 
 And boiling round us in their ecstasy — 
 A pinnacle amid life's waters, swirled, 
 
 And fretted by an everlasting sea ; 
 A barque that beats on to an unknown port. 
 
 And spreads its white wings to the storm-wind's sport ; 
 
 XI. 
 
 An " anything you please " that holds the type : 
 
 A single soul, amid the march of man, 
 Separate, submerged ; a harsh and feeble pipe, 
 
 To swell the mighty music of old Pan ; 
 But doubtless now the thought is fairly ripe. 
 
 At which these various metaphors began. 
 To swallow like a cherry at a bite, 
 
 Or pack within a nutshell snug and tight.
 
 Pi'oeii! 
 
 XII. 
 
 'Tis that I use a plain, unvarnished '• I," 
 
 As being, then, least egotistical, 
 Perhaps of all the tricks of style, whereby 
 
 We furbish up the art linguistical ; 
 And so, unfamed, unknown, and careless, I 
 
 Leap in the arena, poet-fistical — 
 My only skill is truth — die sara sara, 
 
 I feel, I write — for good or bad — voila ! i 
 
 XIII. 
 
 Hola ! what crude, unsacramental words, 
 
 To sound a signal in that cultured plain, 
 Where browse the sacred literary herds, 
 
 That claim by right hypocrisy's demesne. 
 And yet press on I must, howe'er absurd's 
 
 My scant equipment for the high campaign, 
 And e'en though these Republicans of Letters 
 
 Be stuck on high, just like their ancient " betters. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 Each on his throne they sit like little pagods, 
 
 All snuffing incense and retailing verse. 
 That not an age of poetry since Hesiod's, 
 
 Has ever known more copious, or worse 
 Or if they wake at times — as Homer nods, 
 
 'Tis to hear Rudyard rowdily rehearse. 
 His banjo breakdowns for the Music Halls, 
 
 Or silly Swinburne puff his verbous squalls.
 
 Oity Poets ! 
 
 XV. 
 
 Yet they hedge in the Heliconian spring, 
 
 Where I, a pilgrim, fain would quench my thirst. 
 And while their myrmidons the incense swing, 
 
 Protest their wrath in many a snorting burst, 
 Or mounting Pegasus, with damaged wing, 
 
 Charge, broken-windedly, where'er they durst ; 
 " And minions " hidden from my view the while, 
 
 Shower petty darts, in most chivalrous style. 2 
 
 XVI. 
 
 But even the worm will turn, and so will I, 3 
 
 Much like the soldier of Lucullus, who, 
 Robbed of his dinner, charges at full cry 
 
 His meal to capture, and the city too ; * 
 And if I perish, better fighting die, 
 
 Than creep to honours like that wretched crew. 
 Whose pimping verse by bourgeois souls admired, 
 
 Sounds the loud timbrels of the uninspired. 
 
 ♦ A story related in verse by Martial. He gained such fame by this feat 
 
 that he was afterwards marked out for a " forlorn hope." "Get a man 
 
 who has lost his dinner," he said.
 
 OSCAR WILDE. 
 
 "Who's he that sits upon a velvet throne, 
 That slow, lymphatic, rather vacuous man, 
 
 Who pipes his trivial ditties of no tone * 
 As if the listening world were hearing Pan ; 
 
 With every note the silly mawkish mien 
 Of some gauche school-girl drenched in vanity, 
 
 The while one vainly strives the sense to glean 
 Of what at first seems sheer inanity. 
 
 But mark how, near the throne, a bevy sits 
 Of strange young men, and sickly to the view, 
 
 Who chirp in minim key, like fledgling wits. 
 Whene'er their Sultan utters something " new." 
 
 I say a Sultan, just to give the hint 
 
 Of that exotic air I can't explain. 
 As if the poppy's bloom, the emerald's glint. 
 
 Should ornament that richly enwrought train. 
 
 * "Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone." — Keats.
 
 S Our Poets ! 
 
 As if the scent of attar-giil and musk, 
 
 And thick aroma of Arabian spice, 
 Bore on tlie loaded wings of shadowing dusk, 
 
 The dear rencherissemcnt of cultured vice, 
 
 As if the mind should stray an idle hour. 
 In that sweet realm of the Arabian Nights, 
 
 Where 'mid the courts of withering Moslem power 
 There flickered but the flame of warm delights. 
 
 'o' 
 
 A gross, but soft and flaccid luxury, 
 
 The morbid fancies of a race effete, 
 Strong now in nothing but their uxory. 
 
 But fascinating to our dear aesthete,* 
 
 Then that is he — the famous Oscar Wilde, 
 
 The darling choyt of our high iilite. 
 High priest of Art, aesthetic, undefiled, 
 And esoteric culture's Paraclete. 
 
 Poet of dainty, trinket verses, wrought 
 
 With patient skill of pretty filigree, 
 Vendor of rather far-fetched gems of thought, 
 
 — Fetched mainly from the mines of French tsprit 
 
 And yet, and yet, this very brainless man. 
 By spangly epigrams and tricks of stage. 
 
 Contrives to shine the tinselled Sheridan, 
 Of our most exquisite but crimping age. 
 
 * Vide the latest masterpiece. — The Sphinx': 
 " Get hence you loathsome mystery ! hideous animal get hence 
 You wake in nie each bestial sense. . . . Vou wake fond dreams of 
 sensual life."
 
 Oscar Wylde 9 
 
 Turn to his "serious works," pardy ! whence flows 
 The limpid stream of shallow, forceless prose, 
 "Where wit's but common-place turned round about, 
 And thought is mainly used to keep thought out.* 
 
 And yet betimes he deepens with his theme. 
 And grows quite earnest in that last, supreme 
 And crowning effort of the cultured mind, 
 That still in lowest depths its joys must find. 
 And sounds the paeans to that "power " of sin, i 
 Like some Te Deum of a perverse kin. 
 
 With what fond zest he tells the varied mood 
 Of this new " Evil, be thou still my good." 
 How that the best fruits of the artists' creed. 
 Flourish in nations going fast to seed, 
 As witness that noteworthy love of green, 
 That in lost states and artists' souls is seen.f 
 
 Or how the lack of any guiding will 
 
 Tests the true poet even better still. 
 
 And how contempt of merely vulgar truth 
 
 Marks out infallibly the inspired youth ! J 
 
 Such is the culture of these latter days 
 
 — Knick-knacks, glitter, farce, or passing craze 5 
 
 * " Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind."— The Decay 
 of Lying. 
 
 + " He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the 
 sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a 
 laxity, if not a decadence of morals,"— Pf", Pencil and Poison. 
 
 J "The only form of lying that is absolutely ibeyond reproach is Lying 
 for its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already 
 pointed out, Lying in An."— The Decay of Lying.
 
 10 Our Poets ! 
 
 Or else in search of deeper mysteries, 
 
 The dilletante turns the musty tome 
 That hides from grateful sight the histories 
 
 Of days obscure of old degenerate Rome ; 
 And as Petronius Arbiter found Nero 
 
 A patron who made " swans of all his geese," 
 Just so Tiberius interests Oscar's hero 
 
 And Capri gives the cue to his caprice, 6 
 But what the final secret, who shall say, 
 ^ And inward drop of that sad pilgrimage ? 
 
 — From silly Bunthorne up to Dorian Gray, 
 f The new Petronius of a "squalid village."* 7 
 
 * Grant Allen calls London a squalid village.
 
 // 
 
 LE GALLIENNE. 
 
 And of the bevy of the " younger men," 
 
 Who there sat at the feet of Oscar Wilde, 
 (Meet nurse indeed for this aesthetic child), 
 
 Distinguished from his comrades even then, 
 By all the tricks that mark the sycophant, 
 
 Predestined yet to be the parvenu. 
 One favourite minion of that Hierophant, 
 
 Loved even to kiss the Master's very shoe; 
 But thus we creep to ignominious fame. 
 
 And popinjays usurp the place of men ; 
 As witness, you've already guessed the name, 
 
 That sugar-coated prig, Le Gallienne. 
 
 Yet, all the " factors of success " were there, 
 
 The skill to turn a nice, log-rolling screed, 
 The poesies that languish in the air, 
 
 From feeble pipe and " sweet," but forceless reed, 
 The " precious " style that everything excludes, 
 
 By which the reasoning instinct may be caught. 
 While treacle out his sweet ineptitudes, 
 
 To join the " tendencies of modern thought "
 
 12 Our Poets ! 
 
 A certain taste, from Wilde, for things exotic. 
 
 The symptom of this dear " decadent " age. 
 That manner perverse, puerile, but neurotic, 
 
 That now enjoys a sort of languid " rage." 
 'Tis this, perhaps, that gives Le Gallienne 
 
 The itch to dub himself — ye gods ! — Narcisse, 9 
 And make that lovely youth renasce again, 
 
 Erotic as a green-sick nasty miss, 
 
 And yet, as doubtless Pasteur could expound, 
 
 The virus, by being re-inoculated, 
 At length is relatively harmless found, 
 
 (The proper term, I think's "attenuated."') 
 And so, where Oscar threatens to destroy 
 
 " The very frame- work " of our bourgeoisie, 
 Le Gallienne's sickly verses merely cloy. 
 
 With only detriment to poesy. 
 
 " I am as beautiful," Narcissus cries, 
 
 " lam," {sic — fact !) as beautiful as that * 
 And so the poem languishes and dies, 
 
 As silly as Narcissus, and as flat. 
 Narcissus dies, but John the Baptist lives. 
 
 At least a voice, though in a minim key. 
 Pipes somewhere in the West and mildly gives 
 
 The straight solution of earth's mystery, — 
 By Faith, I think, if not Authority, 
 
 For though he speaks like other minor scribes. 
 He deals with common-sense most furtively, 
 
 And smothers Reason in his diatribes. 
 
 * Actually a line in this young man's poems ! — See Note 9.
 
 Le Gallic nne 13 
 
 St. John the Baptist ! No, it cannot be ! 
 
 Ye sons of men ! what went ye for to see ? 
 A man ! and found a weak and shaken reed, 
 
 A gospel spun out in a windy screed 
 Of spangled thoughts and nebulous suggestions, — 
 
 A Bible peptonised for weak digestions, 
 Spinoza's subtlety or Sartor's style 
 
 Trimmed, tamed, dilute, with dilletante wile. 
 And finally to '* perfect manners" brought. 
 
 Fit for the tenderest invalid of thought. 
 
 'Tis but our friend the Beauty once again. 
 And marks the progress of Le Gallienne, 
 
 This namby-pamby prophet who can dare 
 To flutter (in translations) on Voltaire ; 
 
 For Narcisse rescued from the shadows stygian 
 
 Has brought us back " A Love of a Religion ! " lo 
 
 And means to live a little longer yet, 
 
 The Angel Gabriel of a " precious " set.
 
 14 
 
 SWINBURNE. 
 
 I turn my head, and suddenly a swirl 
 
 Of words, words, words, astounds my struggling brain 
 I vain I seek some meaning to uncurl, 
 
 Some purport or ulterior aim — in vain. 
 
 I try to seize on every passing line. 
 
 My mind keeps slipping from its wonted sense. 
 Even though I now laboriously incline 
 
 To puzzle out each separate mood and tense. 
 
 But still the words elude my comprehension, 
 Though now I hear that rap-tap of the rhymes. 
 
 Which had at first escaped my dull attention. 
 Intent on finding sense within the chimes. 
 
 '» * 
 
 It seemed to me as if a silly girl. 
 
 Pattering the music of a " gallop false 
 
 Had caught me round the waist in giddy whirl, 
 By way of invitation to a waltz. 
 
 A waltz is good, and rich round notes divine ; 
 I love a waltz, with long sequacious swell 
 
 Of billowy sounds, whose cadences incline 
 
 The soul to swoon with music's passioned spell, 
 * " This is the very false gallop of verses."— Shakspeare.
 
 Swinburne 15 
 
 But even waltzing may be out of place, 
 
 When metres, not adapted to the theme, 
 And rhj'mes exasperate, conceits lack grace. 
 
 And Swinburne verses utter nonsense seem. 
 
 This beating on the ear of rhyme is seen 
 To be a trick, and neither rich nor rare, n 
 
 An obligate on the tambourine 
 To force the music of a dulcimer. 
 
 You doubt it ? then I'll prove it on the spot. 
 
 And beg you to observe each verbal feat. 
 The consonance, the rhythm, tricks, what not. 
 
 That make a Swinburnespasm quite complete : 
 
 Though the sound of the syllables jingle 
 
 In the flight of a frivolous song, 
 Yet, Swinburne, not in a single 
 
 Sentence is common sense strong. 
 
 The why of the words, or the which 
 
 Of the meanings thy muse may intend, 
 Is ne'er to be notched in a niche. 
 
 Or bound in a brain with a bend. 
 
 Then, wherefore, O word-spinner spend 
 
 (Roses are red on a rainy day). 
 Time's treasures in trying to tend 
 
 The measures thy Muse may amend
 
 16 Our Poets ! 
 
 By sweeping, or swopping away 
 
 (Daisies deck the dells in May), 
 The word that restricts for the tricks that reward, 
 
 The meaning that mars for the chimes that accord ? 
 
 Better roar and rant at your ease, 
 Or puff and preen as you please, 
 
 With tum-ti-dee, dum-di-dee, dees. 
 Of fiddlestick-fired-Coryphees ; 
 Or daring the dazzling days 
 
 Crash the upper-crust crass with a craze 
 For the faddle-dy, fuddle-dy, phase 
 
 Of the haze !
 
 n 
 
 LANG. 
 
 Next Andrew of the tactile fingers comes, 
 
 And claims the throne where Jeffrey sat as king, 
 
 Survej's his realm from Arcade to Thrums, 
 And knows the gloss at least of everything. 
 
 And, sooth to say, by perfect right he rules. 
 For Andrew's most distinguishedly clever. 
 
 And seldom has the training of the schools 
 Produced a finer triumph — perhaps, never. 12 
 
 And yet, alas ! 'tis always thus, and ever 
 
 Shall be in this faulty world of ours, 
 A task too hard the union to dissever 
 
 Of cultured taste and dissipated powers. 
 
 His mind diftuses some illumination 
 To every theme he merely glances on. 
 
 And yet with all this fine appreciation, 13 
 The primal impulse to create is gone. 
 
 That learning has been won at too great cost, 
 
 And others' thoughts his lively powers o'ervvhelm, 
 
 The precious cargo, rich, and varied's lost. 
 The while the ship drifts on without a helm. 
 
 C
 
 18 Our Poets! 
 
 That's Lang, sans doute — a dilletante first, 
 A student, then an amateur of sport, 
 
 Who flies from books with all their glare accurst. 
 And takes up, golf say — as a health resort. 
 
 And so to Haggard or Robustious Kipling 
 Pays warm and somewhat ostentatious court, 
 
 — He, the connoisseur of shades and stippling, — 
 Just as a dear old lady needs " support." 
 
 One can't but smile when languid Lang elects 
 To find a sort of Home*r-like solidity 
 
 In horrid Haggard of the " big effects," 
 Upholstered into broad, but flat, rigidity, 
 
 Or when he finds some recondite ability 
 In Rudyard's ballads of the barrack-room, 
 
 And much impressed by all their rude virility, 
 Repays the entertainment by a " boom." 
 
 But after all, perhaps, he's more at ease. 
 When subtler thoughts and finer fancies please. 
 Or when he bends assiduous to explore 
 Some ancient myth, or curious folk-lore, 
 A graceful essay turns, or bubble blows 
 Of lustrous, shining, light and airy prose, 
 , Or changes once again, perhaps for worse. 
 
 And fashions out a vase of fictile verse, 
 Or China ballade — well described as " nice," 
 That goes off fairly, at a fancy price.
 
 19 
 
 WILLIAM MORRIS. 
 
 " Through thick Arcadian woods a hunter went, 
 
 Following the beasts up ! " That's a brilliant touch ! 
 And just so Morris follows his scent 
 
 Up, of tale or legend, fired (though not too much), 
 By mediaeval rage and some wild hope, 
 
 That p'r'aps even he (good easy man) might catch 
 The Muse's eye, and with the Olympians cope, 
 
 — The " white-haired boy " of this half-century's batch. 
 
 O persevering, striving, luckless Will, 
 
 Unknown in Paradise, though you have served it 
 Well (v. Paradise, the Earthly) still 
 
 Though you'venot gained success, yet you've deserved it. 
 A poet ? No. I think you half suspect 
 
 That after all your forte is good intentions, 
 And, mayhap wisely, do not yet reject 
 
 The art of renovating old conventions. 
 
 " I can't create — I can at least upholster, 14 
 
 And build the lofty furniture, artistic ! 
 And pad, and puff, and ornament, and bolster, 
 
 And teach my Pegasus a circus trick 
 Or two, or three, to hide his broken wings. 
 
 While Betty (that's my Muse) coquets, you know. 
 Hops, flirts (she's really not a flirt, good soul) and sings. 
 To bring the British public round the show." 
 
 C — 2
 
 20 Our Poets ! 
 
 I don't quite understand that wilder move, 
 That makes you such a red-hot SociaHst ; 
 
 Think you, dear William ? Can the muse approve 
 
 Such carryings on ? F"rom you ? Mon Dicu ! An Artist I 
 
 Think you the British Workman cares a — well, 
 I will not use the British Workman's phrase, 
 
 For you or Lewis, Paradise, or Hades, 
 Art, poetry, " culture," or this later craze 
 
 For mediaevalries " and all that rot," * 
 Of mummies from the middle ages dug ? 
 
 He's quite content with all the ills he's got. 
 And thinks these things — and now, don't you too? — 
 
 humbug. 
 
 * The British Workman passim.
 
 21 
 
 LEWIS MORRIS. 
 
 O bring me beef and beer that I may write 
 
 Even as Lewis Morris, think as he ; 
 For Lewis doth a poesy indite, 
 
 Not like brave Rab, inspired with barley bree. 
 
 Nor Byron fired by gin, nor Keats by Beauty, 
 Nor Shelley, like chameleon, fed on air, 
 
 But in the way of tough and downright duty. 
 
 Sustained, so I should guess, by beef and beer. i5 
 
 There's body there, there's meat for tough digestion. 
 Good wholesome fare for simple-minded men. 
 
 Who take, and thank the Lord, without a question. 
 Eat, drink, and stuff, and cut and come again. 
 
 " O dura Ilia messorum," Horace cried 
 
 In admiration of the reaper's maw ; 
 With asinornm be the phrase applied 
 
 To all who sustenance from Lewis draw. 
 
 I've read his epic — rightly named of Hades, 
 I've read, — no, no, be truthful — I have tried 
 
 To trace the details of that crime he made his 
 Name by, and his fame of — Epicide.
 
 22 Ouv Poets ! 
 
 " O, why did Lewis do this thing ! " I cried, 
 
 " The crime so great, so light the provocation ! " 
 
 " You don't know Lewis ! " thus the Saga replied, 
 " Nor that fierce motive — lack of inspiration." 
 
 School-girls read Lewis, with no small delight, 
 
 He introduces them to the elite, 
 Of those high circles under earth ypight. 
 
 Yet ne'er discourses but in terms discreet. 
 
 An easy, affable, familiar way 
 
 Of talking with these people, Lewis takes ; 
 And they, in turn, say all their little say 
 
 Vernacularly — with poetic breaks. 
 
 Therein they show a sort of gracious flattery. 
 As if to rise to Lewis' lofty heights 
 
 They must commit infraction, verbal battery, 
 And gasp, and pant, in broken-winded flights. 
 
 But courage, Lewis, poets worse than you 
 
 Have written, and not failed to please the ladies. 
 
 They are not known on earth, 'tis very true, 
 But live, piXrhUu — like you — in epic Hades.
 
 23 
 
 SIR EDWIN ARNOLD. 
 '• The immemorial East " once more in view ! 
 
 — What magic, when the very word avails 
 A thousand crowding fancies to renew, 
 
 Of leafy backgrounds of old tragic tales. 
 
 O balmy land of love and mellow rhyme, 
 
 Whose very thought bears odours on its wings, 
 
 'Twould seem that only in that Eastern clime 
 Our life its joys to fuller compass brings. 
 
 O for a poet ! some sweet plastic wight, 
 A brilliant, gold-clad, purple charioteer. 
 
 To flash each perfect symbol on my sight 
 
 That reeks with that deep Eastern atmosphere. 
 
 To pant it out in all its glowing verve. 
 Its burning colours and its swelling tone, 
 
 And make it smart upon my tensioned nerve, 
 And flower with thousand wild hopes of my own. 
 
 And sing of life, and war, and love, and death, 
 As if each word in all its present sense 
 
 Were raised to finer puissance by the breath, 
 Of subtle pleasure, swelling, pressed, intense.
 
 24 Our Poets! 
 
 Or give to languour and dear idleness 
 
 Their own rich colouring and the poppied strength 
 Of thoughts that rise in unforced perfectness, 
 
 And throb to slow and rounded joy at length, 
 
 But hark the cry is Arnold, and the great 
 
 Sir Edwin lumbers heavily in view ; 
 No chariot, but a sort of coach of state. 
 
 Lacqueyed and liveried in most gorgeous hue. 
 
 A literary juggernaut, whose wheels, 
 
 Crush out the spirit of each hapless wretch 
 
 Whose faith persists even after instinct feels 
 The linked dulness of that Epic's stretch. 
 
 Ponderous indeed ! as he who runs may read, 
 But he who reads must find it hard to run. 
 Burdened like Christian ere his soul was freed 
 Of grievous faults and misdeeds lightly done. 
 
 Lord Byron used to laugh at Southey's muse, 
 
 " Whose annual strains like armies take the field," 
 
 But Arnold seems to stand in Southey's shoes, 
 And certainly in volume need not yield. 
 
 The Muse — can she be really on the side 
 
 Of big-battalioned Epics, serial ? 
 No, no, but Arnold hopes to over-ride 
 
 Her laws, by dint of sheer material.
 
 'Sir Edtvin Arnold 25 
 
 Mere size, of course, may boundless fame bestow, 
 'Tis that that makes the Sun so talked about, 
 
 The Wall of China, Barnum's Greatest Show, 
 And Arnold's " Light of Asia " too, no doubt. 
 
 A massive, bulky, square solidity. 
 
 Is deemed the triumph of the National, 
 Or Saxon, type, and even stolidity 
 
 Is prized beyond its value rational. 
 
 And why ? Because it's so respectable. 
 And after all, what's genius ? What is wit ? 
 
 Mere dubious quantities neglectable, 
 By honest bourgeois or aspiring cit. 
 
 The average man, perhaps rightly, has an instinct, 
 
 To look on poetry with deep aversion. 
 And even those cases where he's rather blinked 
 
 But serve to prove the truth of my assertion. 
 
 For, fearful of that vulgar eye askance 
 
 That aught original especially- shocks, 
 Our present poets know their only chance 
 
 Consists in being ultra-orthodox. 
 
 One smells the fusty broadcloth in the rant 
 Of stertorous poets pumping up " afflatus," 
 
 One smells the savour of the sickly cant 
 When inspired humbugs seek to " elevate " us.
 
 26 Our Poets! 
 
 Apollo decked in that distressing gear, x,/ 
 
 A " tall hat," turns our verses at command, / 
 
 And irreproachably contrives, I fear, 
 
 To look, and think, and talk, like Mr. Chadband. 
 
 Nor from these sins is our Sir Edwin free — 
 
 At least, I do not wittingly asperse 
 His poems, when I say they seem to me 
 
 The " Daily Telegraph " turned into verse. 
 
 One gets the sense, in reading him, at length, 
 — To give the proper smack, I will not rob 
 
 The graphic, terse, vernacular of its strength — 
 Sir Edwin Arnold, Poet, " on the job." 
 
 The business aptitude for planning work. 
 
 The laboured theme, heaped up by word on word, 
 
 And eke the misplaced " pluck " that does not shirk 
 Poetic dangers, howsoe'er absurd. 
 
 The poetry of unpoetic souls 
 
 — I daresay Mr. Stead enjoys that stuff. 
 
 At least that's just the sort he most extols, — 
 
 I've given tv.'o extracts, perhaps, you'll think, enough.16
 
 27 
 
 A USTIN. 
 
 Bon join' ! dear, gentle Austin, not too soon 
 After these strenuous toils dost thou appear, 
 
 With that soft solace of thy " night in June," 
 Wrapped round in hazy, peaceful atmosphere. 
 
 O not one stirring of the air, or pulse. 
 
 Intrudes upon that dusk, but discreet " song : " 
 
 A sort of passive calm, and little else, 
 
 To that good aunt, thy muse, doth well belong. 
 
 'Tis sweet to sit beneath the leafy shade, 
 When still not dark — ^just after dinner hour, 
 
 And feel, while yet the sky's with crimson ray'd, 
 That soft-bloomed quietude's digestive power. 
 
 And then, ere yet a single throb of blood 
 Should rebel prove to that fine influence. 
 
 Rise, dust your knees, smile amiably, be good, 
 In dear, wise, gentle, meek, mild innocence. 
 
 But then, love-making — fie ! you wicked thing ! 17 
 Nay, nay, forgive me ; 'did not mean to hurt 
 
 Your feelings, but you know, when poets " sing," 
 They often stutter, pant, or stretch, or blurt.
 
 28 Our Poets! 
 
 That love of yours is just about's lukewarm 
 As any tender passion yet confessed 
 
 In stealing, furtive, words, devoid of harm, 
 By Psyche, pinafored and governessed. 
 
 A sort of winnowed, swept, and garnished love. 
 Strained, clarified, dilute, and thrice refined, 
 
 As sweet as barley-sugar, soft as dove, 
 
 But somewhat unconvincing to one's mind. 
 
 At least to my mind, for I cannot think. 
 
 Those Burne-Jones attitudes reality. 
 Nor tapestry knights, that like dead fishes blink. 
 
 The golden peak of ideality. 
 
 Your air to me's too thin, it's vacuo, 
 I famish on your very tenuous screeds. 
 
 Those blanc-mange sonnets, the unleavened dough 
 Of epics, and the odes' thin stirring reeds. 
 
 No, no ! dear Austin, it is not convincing. 
 
 These mere lo\e measles with their weak sequelae, 
 
 These languours decked in phrases worse than mincing- 
 Your women ! — can they like it ? that is, really ? ! 
 
 Perhaps ; our " serious Angles," Byron says, 
 Are somewhat cold in love and stiff in dance, 
 
 And, therefore, possibly enjoy these lays. 
 That do at least respect les convenances.
 
 Austin 29 
 
 Stiff dames and tepid verse — I'll leave it then, 
 And till my soul becomes a dusty cinder, 
 
 Must own my tastes rebelliously prefer 
 
 The girls of Spain, the soaring songs of Pindar. 
 
 Ah yes ! the fire of Andalusian eyes, 
 
 The grace and verve that lives in the bolero, 
 
 " When castanets awake their bright surprise," 
 The roll and rhythm of the soft salero, 
 
 That makes their Spanish walk a thing unique 
 'Mid all the charms that madden womankind 
 
 To that sweet dangerous creature born to wreak 
 Her beauty's havoc on the witched mind. 
 
 These things, I know, are foreign to thy theme. 
 May even grieve thy tame and guarded Muse, 
 
 That skim-milk She of yours, whose flights supreme 
 Mild flutters round the family-board infuse. 
 
 I must away — my nerves are fairly set 
 To find revanche in some wild dithyramb, 
 
 (If only, like Grant Allen, I were let) — 
 But "fault of that," I can but flatly damn, 
 
 Or faintly praise — 'tis pretty much the same. 
 And find in you the " Tennysonian note,'' 
 
 Diluted, small, occasionally lame. 
 
 But very good — for a suburban throat.
 
 30 
 
 DOBSON. 
 
 Next dainty Dobson, delicately decked 
 
 With various trifles from the Frenchy school, 
 
 A school, moreover, half-forgotten — wrecked 
 Amid the downfall of the ancient rule. 
 
 But some faint echo of that old regime 
 
 Our Dobson's caught, for instance, the tonrnme 
 
 Of Frenchy mode, the polish, and 'twould seem, 
 A little spice of their desinvolture. 
 
 In rondeau, sonnet, trivial virelay 
 
 He might be called — he seems to know so 
 
 Many little tricks of fine display — 
 A sort of dilletante virtuoso. 
 
 A connoisseur of Watteau painted fans, 
 
 Bonbonnieres, I think by Petitot, 
 And all that trinket lore by which a man's 
 
 Supposed his " culture" nowadays to show. 
 
 I called not long ago and lingered where 
 He keeps his modern ancient curio-shop, 
 
 And really that choice della-cruscan ware 
 Amused me for the time I had to stop.
 
 Dohson 31 
 
 He's worked some i%ory carvings, cameos, 
 
 And table ornaments, and statuettes. 
 Not badly, and unquestionably shows 
 
 Himself an artist in blue china sets.* 
 
 His forte, if such a word's not out of place. 
 
 Is saying nothings very daintily. 
 Lending inanities a sort of grace, 
 
 And tricking silly things out paintily. 
 
 You know that in the " best society " 
 — I do not know myself, I've only heard. 
 
 So' 11 tell the tale with that propriety 
 
 Due to '■ superior " things that seem absurd. 
 
 Well, then, you know the very highest " tone " 
 Disdains the heart, the brain, the pulse of life. 
 
 And seems ostensibly as cold as stone 
 To any stirrings of a deeper strife. 
 
 Then what remains ? — a Brahmin-like refinement, 
 
 Metallic lustre, and the tenuous spell 
 Of winnowed Nature's high accomplishment, 
 
 Expressed in all that's artificielle. 
 
 Now of this caste is Dobson laureate. 
 
 And freely through the high demesne doth roam. 
 
 And with his versicles appropriate 
 
 Wins laurels at my Lady J's "At-Home." 
 
 • Mr. Dobson himself applies the term " porcelain " to" some of his 
 verses, and, certainly, in reading, one has the sense in quite a peculiar 
 degree of that appropriateness.
 
 32 Ouv Poets ! 
 
 And reigns the lion of the drawing-room,^ 
 That is to say before the men come in 
 
 From dinner, and the literary boom 
 Is voted vienx jcu, unconvincing, thin. 
 
 But still the poet often gets a chance, 
 
 Not before men to strew his priceless pearls, 
 
 But to display them to the ennuied glance 
 
 Of "sweet," but thin, affected, gim-crack girls.
 
 33 
 
 WILLIAM WATSON. 
 
 And next translucent Watson doth appear. 
 
 And brings us lilies grown on Wordsworth's grave 
 
 — A Mecca where he worshipped many a year, 
 And learnt the trick of Wordsworth's minor stave. 
 
 Or rather, let's say something more in taste, 
 Instead of " trick " — a sacred influence 
 
 Hath moved his Muse to utterance most chaste. 
 And given her fervours temperately intense. 
 
 And eke is " Mecca " totally out of place ; 
 
 The name suggests fierce passions, war, and death. 
 The pulse of blood, the flower of Moslem race, 
 
 The deep-ensanguined banner of their Faith. 
 
 But we, the cultured ones of this fair isle, 
 Appropriate Heaven in a cooler strain. 
 
 Are others fervid ? Well, we can but smile 
 In supercilious and fine disdain. 
 
 Our fire is quenched, our Faith has oozed away, 
 And rapture marks a merely lower tone 
 
 Than we permit ourselves in this choice day. 
 That precious priggishness hath called its own. 
 
 D
 
 34 Our Poets! 
 
 Our poetry lacks force, and \erve, and fire, 
 Most fittingly— that is to say, at length. 
 
 When we've been trained to dear delights t' aspire. 
 Of nerves depleted, fibre sapped of strength. 
 
 No more the Muse must wing her daring flight. 
 No more ha\e colour, warmth, dynamic force, 
 
 Or fresh exuberance, or genial light. 
 
 Or wit to cheer a dull grey barren course. 
 
 But languid, pale, and bound to dull " correctness," 
 Dream like a school Miss, like a Curate talk. 
 
 And reach at length th' anaemic perfectness 
 And spotless virtue of a celer}- stalk. 
 
 Yes, Wordsworth's good ; I worshipped Wordsworth once, 
 " Thought not of any severance of our loves," 
 
 Fed on his meagre " thought," like many a dunce, 
 And edified egregiously his "groves." 
 
 But Wordsworth's not summed up the whole of life, 
 
 Nor Cumberland the total Universe, — 
 His odes are excellent, the ideas rife, 
 
 The music good, the " thought '' is bad ; nay, worse. 
 
 But then those masses of most dismal prose, 
 The veriest (I must say it) flattest twaddle! — 
 
 As should the Muse, what time an East wind blows, 
 Drink tea, and gossip like a Molly Coddle.
 
 William Watsoii 35 
 
 You don't touch Wordsworth's depths, I must concede, 
 Dear William, but you do not touch his heights, 
 
 Your Muse is of a smaller, finer breed, 
 Content with mediocre, safe delights. 
 
 A bijou Wordsworth of the calmer mood 
 Of that great demi-god of Rydal Mount, 
 
 Your verse doth show — I think this notion's good — 
 A smaller, clearer, even chillier fount : 
 
 A deep, secluded, cold Wordsworthian tarn, 
 
 Where is that " tarn " — you know — in Scotland, is it ? 
 
 Well, all the same, to quote the guide-book's yarn, 
 " A local treasure — well repays a visit," 
 
 That's very like your Heliconian spring, i3 
 Calm, deep, and faintly tinged— diaphanous, 
 
 Free from all turbid, turgid thoughts that bring 
 The sense of life, and strife, cacaphonous. 
 
 O life, O poetry, what notes of power 
 
 Sound while I utter them now carelessly, 
 
 And ring within me this awakened hour 
 Emotions surging up, tumultuously. 
 
 The myriad passions of the human heart. 
 
 The airy fancy, delicatest thought. 
 Fine emanations of that nobler part 
 
 Deep in the Man essentially enwrought. 
 
 D — 2
 
 36 Our Poets ! 
 
 I touch them all, these things of human life, 
 Each like a note of some loved instrument, 
 
 And seek the harmony within that strife, 
 That first o'erwhelmed me in bewilderment. 
 
 A harmony in life, and not apart 
 
 Secluded, hidden, cloistered from the view, 
 
 Refining some mere dainty thing of art — 
 Nay, let me find the deeper import true. 
 
 The feeling's clad in purple and in gold, 
 
 The joys that shake the heart and fire the soul. 
 The sheer delight of primal impulse bold. 
 Whose instinct breaks the bond of false control. 
 
 To taste of life, this thing that steals away, 
 To see its depth, its high magnificence. 
 
 To feel its broad sweep, and the magic play 
 Of all its diverse shapes of thought intense ! 
 
 We live, then let us live, I cry again. 
 Though not in joys of sensual lethargy. 
 
 But wakened by the high, resounding strain 
 Of enterprise and sweeping energy. 
 
 And finer than content, the strange unrest 
 That buffets ever to a distant goal. 
 
 As were this life a march of endless Qonquest, 
 To new dominions of the passioned soul.
 
 37 
 
 BUCHANAN. 
 
 "Sing Heigho ! " — cries Buchanan — " sing heigh — 
 But what, O tell me, Muse! what shall I sing ? " . . 
 
 Le lulli, tumti, tiddle turn, ti-die ! 
 
 Sing that ! sing anything ! at least sing something I 
 
 Keep lilting at that tune, and do not talk, 
 
 But take my arm — keep humming on that air — 
 
 And let's down Edgware Road, say, take a walk, 
 It's like enough we'll drop on something there, 
 
 " You do not feel the inspiration yet ! " — 
 
 No, but who does — Oh, do please keep the tune — 
 
 Of all our present literary set ? — 
 
 I'm almost sure we'll get a subject soon, 
 
 You do not know, in fact you'd not believe, 
 
 How badly off I am. these latter days, 
 I who've known Burns and Byron — ^just conceive ! 
 
 Reduced to deck L. Morris with my bays. 
 
 'Tis hard, it is, you're right, it's very hard — 
 The tune ! keep up ! a bard should always " sing," 
 
 Sing bold ! — especially a minor bard — 
 
 Sing bold ! ! we women like that sort of thing.
 
 38 Our Poets ! 
 
 You do not lack at least audacity, 
 
 ' Tis pity that you lack the finer gifts, 
 But still with Scottish pertinacity 
 
 You'll peg along where Genius often drifts. 
 
 And now I tell you this in confidence, 
 
 My gifts are seldom passports to success — 
 
 Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, furnish evidence * 
 And though the case of Byron, I confess, 
 
 Seems rather adverse to this argument. 
 
 His Lordship's other influence outweighed mine, 
 
 Else had my favours proved a detriment — 
 Especially in his tempestuous line. 
 
 Think for a moment of your cUentHe, 
 
 Our friend the stolid, honest, average man ; 
 
 Say what for him did poetry avail. 
 
 Or wit, or genius, since his day began ? 
 
 He cannot feel a fine inspired touch, 
 
 He does not see a point too exquisite. 
 He's not endowed with Fancy over much, 
 
 And knows not " Art," or just enough to quiz it, 
 
 But thump away, and strike him at his level, 
 And he'll not grudge a certain meed of praise, 
 
 But like a tolerant, good-natured devil. 
 Respect even poetry, when once it pays. 
 
 * We are always apt to read history backward. Keats and Shelley met 
 with but the scantiest recognition during their lifetimes ; Coleridge had no 
 wide popularity, and Wordsworth was fortunate enough to enjoy a certain 
 fame only by virtue of length of days.
 
 Buchanan 39 
 
 So hammer out, whene'er you get a chance, 
 
 A plain, but, if you can, a catchy, ditty. 
 And, Heaven knows, your name may yet enhance 
 
 The hundred grades of mediocrity, 
 
 And not the least ; why take Grant Allen's* rhymes. 
 Or Lecky's lucubrations, Gladstone's " Horace," 
 
 Or even that inner temple where betimes 
 Austin to Austin speaks, Morris to Morris. f 
 
 Or, then again, where perverse Oscar poses, 
 
 Swinburne swirls, and Rudyard drums his heels, 
 
 Le Gallienne minces, Watson rather dozes, 
 And Arnold boredom's mighty power reveals. 
 
 Then give's a ballad, something stirring, swinging. 
 To show that Scotia never lacked for long 
 
 A bard, adept, say, more or less, at stringing 
 Good words to decent music for a song. 
 
 Then, heigh-ho ! once more, and crowd on sail, 
 And, light equipped, at peradventure steer. 
 
 And fling the breezy pennant to the gale 
 
 Of Buchanan, the bold, bad, Balladeer ! . . , . 
 
 *" I am one of the few men " (as an American said to Longfellow, apropos 
 of his " Evangeline") who have ever read Grant Allen's Physiological 
 iEsthetics — an excellent book. But really Mr. Grant .\llen should be 
 more loyal to his former ideals. A few more verses like the last, and he 
 will be included among the minor poets ; while by virtue of his post- 
 prandial philosophisings, I fear he may yet be dubbed " a thinker." 
 
 t Tnimpet to trumpet spake, thunder to thunder. — Drayton.
 
 40 Our Poets ! 
 
 But now methinks the name's not Buchanan, 
 But Scotch Buchanan ; yet that touch will serve 
 
 To point out what he lacks, — the dash, Han, 
 The brilliancy, the flash, the burning verve, 
 
 Tlie swing, Je ne sais qiioi ! perhaps the wing, 
 The spell at least, the something not of earth. 
 
 That stirs, when minor bards forget to "sing " 
 And some true feeling finds poetic birth." 
 
 * " The leaven, 
 Tliat spreading in this dull and clodded earth, 
 Gives it a touch ethereal — a new birth." 
 
 Keats.
 
 41 
 
 KIPLING. 
 
 Next Rudyard Kipling bounds into the ring 
 With " Kello ! here we are at last ! " 
 
 And kicks the sawdust in the spangliest fling, 
 Of ground and lofty tumbling unsurpassed. 
 
 " The Star of India in his daring feat," 
 
 — Yells the ring-master with a sounding crack — 
 
 " Of driving elephants down Regent Street, 
 Or doing Hyde Park on a tiger's back." 
 
 Or if not that, he does the ne.Kt best thing, 
 And serves us up " the immemorial East," 
 
 In extracts, essences, with taste and sting, 
 And savour of reality at least. 
 
 The born yarn-spinner of the lazy nights, i9 
 Of idle days in India's fervent clime. 
 
 The gossip's* gusto's felt, even as he writes, 
 Or flings in "colour," thick, from time to time. 
 
 His " local colour " glitters from afar, 
 With bmnua, khttmafgar, or ryot blent 
 
 With current English, each word like a star. 
 Set brilliantly in India's firmament. 
 
 * My old friend and gossip (Scotch).
 
 42 OuY Poets ! 
 
 The East, the West, the Old World and the New 
 Have yielded laurels to his conquering spear, 
 
 Prose, poetry, and much between the two, 
 
 Have brought fresh wreaths with every mellowing year. 
 
 Yet, in the end, methinks, his forte is prose. 
 
 And that mysterious East his habitat, 
 He has his fling there — right or wrong, who knows ? 
 
 Whereas in Whitechapel, Sims* finds him flat. 
 
 As Poet, nae, nae, — not of the elect. 
 
 No depth, no atmosphere — good verse, however, 
 
 As if he rhymed because " it is expect- 
 
 Ed, don't you know ; " that is, in one so clever. 
 
 And yet some verse of his the other day 
 
 Reminded me, a certain spice, of Byron, 
 What time his Lordship undertook to flay 
 
 And roast Bob Southey on a moral gridiron. 20 
 
 I mean the " Vision of Judgment " ; Kipling's theme 
 Seemed pretty much the same, and though his rhyme 
 
 Lacked Byron's wit, and point, or salt, or cream, f 
 His humour sometimes touched on the sublime, 
 
 At least, I thought, but now comes Sir Criticulus, 
 Who gives the meaning quite a serious phase. 
 
 Which rather makes sublimity ridiculous — 
 
 Curious. . . . But I know not. Here's the phrase : 
 
 * George R. Sims gave an amusing parody of his " BJdalia Herods- i-^i 
 foot." ' 
 
 \ Attic salt seems to be much the same as French cream.
 
 Kipling 43 
 
 " Hanging with the reckless seraphim 
 
 On the reins of red-maned stars " — Ah, that's a speech 
 For mere articulate words to sound ! Though too supreme 
 
 For mere articulate men, perhaps, to reach ! 21 
 
 And so "upon Soracte's ridge we part," 
 
 On one side, bathos ; t'other, highest Art ; 
 And midway — such is man ! weak, vain, pretentious — 
 
 A spice of humbug, shallow, but sententious. 
 
 And yet I'll say that in my irksome duties 
 
 Of reading up my men in search of " beauties," 
 
 And wading through the mass of English prose, 
 
 That flat, and narrow, dull, and pasty flows, 22 
 
 And travelling over wastes of barren verse, 
 
 (A lesser penance might my sins amerce,) 
 
 I found in Kipling that uncommon treasure, 
 
 A modern author one can read with pleasure 
 
 Without being wheedled, whipped, or forced to read 
 
 By "culture's" calls, logs rolled, or critic's screed, 
 
 Good, vigorous work of humorous utterance, 
 
 A billowy style, a fund of fresh exuberance, 
 
 That wondrous knowledge of all mortal things, 
 
 That some few weeks of press-work always brings. 
 
 That knack of writing in all climes with ease,* 
 
 If not with insight, yet with journalese, 
 
 A real " live man," of whom it will be said. 
 
 He lived the while he lived, and died when dead. 
 
 * ■' He had like Alcibiades 
 The art of hviiig in all climes with ease." 
 
 Byron.
 
 45 
 
 I FAME. 
 What is fame? To penetrate the provinces; to be read 
 in foreign tongues, to be mentioned casually. And the 
 siftings herein implied make the ultimate product remark- 
 able. For example, it has been said that this century may 
 hereafter yet be called the era of Darwin ; but what was 
 Darwin in his day ? To all, except a narrow coterie, a 
 rustic recluse innocently amusing himself with doves and 
 butter-cups ; afterwards a blasphemous and dangerous old 
 cynic, who scoffed at Genesis and derived men from monkeys. 
 
 Again, in far-off Australia, the living men 
 
 whose intellectual proportions loomed vastest to my mind 
 were Herbert Spencer and Bain of Aberdeen. With what 
 profound devotion, earnestness, conviction, I read, analysed, 
 and re-studied their works, I am now hardly able to realise ! 
 In Berlin, I found Spencer well-known but not often very 
 pointedly referred to, whereas Bain was generally, for good or 
 bad, regarded as the most prominent figure in the psychological 
 world. The reason was simply that with the high specialism 
 of Germany, and their methodical systems of work, that man 
 alone was likely to be esteemed very noteworthy who had 
 added some definite links to the chain. Spencer's time has
 
 46 Our Poets ! 
 
 hardlj' yet comp, for his work, vast as it is, lies outside the 
 realm of what may be called technical psychology. Again 
 in physics, the names of Thomson, Tait, Clerk Maxwell, 
 and Joule were as familiar, perhaps more so in Berlin than 
 in London; and while a hundred professors here well-known 
 were there absolutely ignored, the name of an optician 
 like Dollond would crop up as one who had done good and 
 decisive work. 
 
 En revauelie, the men of "culture," of "light and leading," 
 " the leaders of thought," the popular historians — the Greens, 
 Matthew Arnolds, Mark Pattisons, the Newmans, the Glad- 
 stones, have made no impression. Both in France and 
 Germany the work of Darwin is appreciated in a higher spirit 
 than in England ; the researches which have supplemented 
 it are conducted with enormously greater activity. 
 
 When I came to London, what was my veritable amaze- 
 ment to find for how little the great thinkers counted, that 
 it was considered a wonderful honour for one of them to be 
 allied to an aristocratic family, and that the greatest of 
 them were weighed in a sort of shopkeeper's balance, and 
 dismissed as eccentric and scarcely reputable personages. 
 Nor was my astonishment less on finding my ears besieged 
 by the names and the fames of a host of lesser individuals, 
 shrieking fanatics, shallow praters, third-rate novelists, 
 fourth-rate historians, tenth-rate thinkers, and a perfect sea 
 of popular propagandists, 'midst whose blatant utterances 
 any clear note of reason seemed absolutely drowned. 
 
 Yet, is this not in the nature of the case ? From Galileo to 
 Descartes, to Darwin, the story is the same. 
 
 Galileo's book was burnt ; in our day it would simply be 
 banned from the bookstalls ; Galileo was imprisoned ; but in
 
 Notes. 47 
 
 our day, what prison is worse than that po\-erty to which the 
 unorthodox student is necessarily condemned ? And in Eng- 
 land, in matters of thought, I think one can say, without 
 being querulous, the condition of affairs is especially grievous. 
 In the free and genial air of France all intellectual progress is 
 in the van, a quarter of a century ahead of the rest of Europe ; 
 in Germany, as a sort of escape-valve to their fearful political 
 system, an admirable freedom of scientific work and all 
 speculation is permitted, and, as a consequence, the great 
 thinkers, Kant, Fichte, Herbart, Lotze, Biichner, Ebbinghaus 
 and the rest, are all University products ; in England, the 
 thinkers have all been rebels, Locke, Hume, Mill, Spencer, 
 Darwin, Bain, and have found in the miserably provincial 
 spirit of our great Universities their most formidable difti- 
 culty.
 
 48 
 
 2 CLIQUES, COTERIES, AND CRITICS. 
 
 When I first came to London, I was introduced to W. B, 
 Yeats, who showed me some kindnesses, for which I feel, to 
 this day, indebted — matters of no moment, but which showed 
 at least a genial disposition in himself. One of these little 
 courtesies, however, ruined me. He introduced me to the 
 Rhymers' Club, a small assemblage of poetically pious young 
 men, who met in a little room upstairs in a tavern in Fleet 
 Street, I believe it was, to imbibe strong liquors and to read 
 each to the others, their latest effusions. 
 
 Now, most of this poetry was of that kind which, while not 
 approaching mediocrity in any real force of movement or feel- 
 ing, yet, again, in its elusive way, attained some upper Empy- 
 rean — mainly of nonsense — in which it vibrated its tenuous 
 v.-ings. Or, when not in this mood, the poetry was Words- 
 worthian in its calmness and coldness, as was the case with 
 one sonnet on an Irish lake — the best thing of the evening. 
 Valiantly, indeed, did I try to keep up my spirits and look ap- 
 preciative, but to me it was breathing in vacuo ; nor had I the 
 chance of escape in sliding out of sight under the mere mask 
 of stupidity, for one of the party was a witty man, and with 
 jokes, frequently blasphemous, and mainly indecent, sought to 
 exhilarate the evening and win appropriate kudos. It seemed
 
 Notes 49 
 
 to me a curious commentary on the exquisite refinement of 
 culture obviously solicited, for these medical student-like 
 pleasantries were the only valid, durable things of the enter- 
 tainment. However, the most ridiculous part of all was 
 that when Le Gallienne was in the very act of reading 
 and swooning away on his own flowers of poesy, the waiter 
 came in with the strong liquors previously mentioned, and 
 kept advancing and retreating in trepidation, scarcely know- 
 ing whether to be cheerful or overawed — finally much puzzled 
 as Le Gallienne concluded his incredible verses with the 
 touch of sublimity in which he declared 
 
 " I am as beautiful 
 
 As that !" 
 
 I could conceal it no longer ! The waiter and myself were 
 the only outcasts of this Elysium. 
 
 Now it so happened that nearly every man in the room was 
 not only a poet, but a critic, nay they were a ring of critics, 
 bent on "booming" and "log-rolling" each other's produc- 
 tions, and of course correspondingly truculent in stamping 
 out others ; and when I published my own little " Modern 
 Authors " I was not long in discovering that they " had their 
 knife " in me.
 
 50 
 
 3 CRITICISM. 
 
 I do not say, in so many terms, that criticism is absolutely 
 venal, but it is corrupt in insidious manners, that finally and 
 virtually reach to that condition. I have referred to one 
 little system of log-rolling ; but there is another form of a 
 wider scope wherein critics attack all books of a certain class ; 
 just as Keats' poems were attacked, less on their own merits, 
 or demerits, than because Leigh Hunt was detested in 
 authoritative quarters. One of the criticisms that amused 
 me most and, possibly, injured me most, appeared in 
 the Saturday Rcviciv. It was, as Byron said of Brougham's 
 ridicule of his own poems, " a master-piece of low wit" — 
 that sort of wit of which a cynical club man gets a kind of 
 "knack," and which can be retailed at measure after reading 
 the title page, the preface, and the index of a book, with 
 a couple of pages of random. From a perusal of this 
 anonymous bludgeonry — a sort of dentated guffaw — I con- 
 cluded that its author was a Tory, a lawyer, a belle-lettrist 
 of limited intelligence and feeble grasp of mind — the type of 
 the literary, narrow, cultured little cynic, who had once been 
 drilled in Horace. He made great play of my habit of 
 introducing foreign words, especially hunt and derh, — not bad 
 words at all, supplying, as they do, terms not easily re-
 
 Notes. 51 
 
 presented in English. Be that as it may, these two appa- 
 rently insignificant words slew my " Modern Authors." 
 Another point that incensed my critic — for he turned his 
 attention only to what he considered demerits — was that I had 
 after an appreciative discourse, averred that Sir Walter Scott 
 seemed to me like a " Great Boy." I beg to return to that 
 epithet — for consider his delight in field sports, in single com- 
 bats, in the pom-pom and fanfarronade of war and greatness, 
 in mere muscular strength, and his absolutely puerile glorifi- 
 cation of the Feudal system, and the heats, passions, sorrows 
 — as vital and personal as if referring to something that hap- 
 pened yesterday — over this lumber of an outworn age ; an d 
 withal the disproportion of his emotional qualities to his 
 powers of thought. 
 
 My book, "Approaches: the Poor Scholar's Quest of a Mecca," 
 fared even worse than " Modern Authors." The causes were 
 not very hard to find. It was brought out as a novel, whereas 
 it was not a novel at all. Further, it was full of faults, for 
 though the most ambitious, it was the first of my writings. 
 Finally, the passages of real power were excised, altered 
 emasculated, at the urgent request of my publishers, and 
 in deference to the dictates of that thoroughly immoral 
 standard — the Cant of the day. My object was to describe 
 the development of a mind, or, to adopt the sort of catch- 
 words that seem to be popular — the Pilgrimage of a Soul ; 
 in other words, observing how harsh and sterile were the 
 usual presentments of ethical questions, I undertook to dis- 
 play a theme in which the problems of thought and conduct 
 should be worked out in the stuff of life itself. I wanted to 
 make the motives, temptations, vicissitudes of a man something 
 felt, rather than pointed out. Hence the damage done to the 
 
 E — 2
 
 52 Our Poets ! 
 
 book by diluting its power. I selected as a hero, one of a 
 certain complexity of character, prone to all manner of error, 
 of a deep and passionate nature, but having, as a sort of 
 saving principle, the qualities of energy and inward truth- 
 fulness. I still believe, although it has been a failure, that 
 there was merit in the book, and the central idea continually 
 appeals to me as the right line of guidance, so that even now 
 I have some inclination to return to the same project. As 
 to criticism, the final word is not always said by an 
 unhappy scribbler who reviews perhaps 13 books for a 
 guinea ! (Fact, have known that as rate of pay ! )
 
 53 
 
 4 SIN. 
 
 In the exquisite little study, entitled " Pen, Pencil, an 
 Poison," the word Sin occurs incessantly. It is the key-note, 
 always struck in with such fine intensity, that its delicate tin- 
 tinnabulation is heard at last ringing throughout the entire 
 theme. This is "artistic," and therefore admirable. It 
 is always artistic, but I must say at times absolutely amusing — 
 the etiquette, the sense of circumstantiality, of consideration, 
 with which he ushers in this potent syllable. Here are some 
 of his gems of thought : 
 
 " One can fancy an intense personality being created out 
 of sin." 
 
 " It may have been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous 
 sense of power that was in him, or because she suspected 
 something, or for no reason.'' 
 
 " Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices." 
 
 Mr. Wilde speaks like an arbiter elegaiitiarinm on the subject. 
 Let us hear him on another point, interesting to those who 
 make study of subtle problems of Psychology, it will be 
 unnecessary to say Pathology of mind. 
 
 "Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond of cats, and with 
 Gautier, he was fascinated by that ' sweet marble monster 'of 
 both sexes that we can still see at Florence, and in the Louvre " 
 The Sphinx ? — quoi !
 
 54 Our Poets! 
 
 5 BRIC-A-BRAC. 
 
 Culture is no sinecure. Here are a few things, to take them 
 at random, in which those who would enter the temple must 
 be versed : Fictile vases, (preferably Greek), Florentine 
 majolica. Trays of Tassie's gems. Rude Lamps from Roman 
 Tombs, Persian carpets, the Italian and eke the English 
 Renaissance, Blue china, Japanese paintings by Hokusai and 
 Hokkei, Early editions, Wide-margined proofs. Blank pages, 
 Venetian bindings, Hypnerotomachia, Bonbonnieres with 
 miniatures by Petitot, the Private Lives of Tiberius and 
 Heliogabalus, of the Court of Madrid, with its love of the 
 grotesque, Baudelaire, Gautier, and, especially, Paul Ver- 
 laine, all the modern French Symbolists and Decadents ; 
 and wi excelsis, (oris it, inprofundis?) that basic rock, whose 
 green-edged vein is for ever cropping out — SIN ! 
 
 6 RESEARCH. 
 
 In one of his books, he is at no small pains to give an 
 idea of the sinister occupations of that Emperor, "half 
 blood, half mud,"— with predilections for the latter part of 
 his character. The stories related of Tiberius are too 
 monstrous to be credible, nor are they, as a matter of fact (a 
 fact, however, of which this dilletante of research does not 
 seem to be aware) , true. 
 
 In the fifteenth century— a great century for forgery— 
 a continuation of the Annals of Tacitus was forged by Poggio 
 Bracciolini, in whose delectable imaginations the more cul- 
 tured of our youth have ever since been piously instructed. 
 The forgeries are so gross, that Voltaire, not suspecting the 
 real explanation, but by simple force of insight into character,
 
 Notes 55 
 
 declared that Tiberius could never have been such a per- 
 sonage as represented in history. 
 
 7 Few things in literature are so saddening as the spectacle 
 of Oscar Wilde's career, and nowhere is this regret more pro- 
 foundly expressed than in one of his own sonnets : 
 
 " To drift with every passion, till my soul 
 
 Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play, 
 Is it for this that I have given away 
 
 Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control ? — 
 Methinks my life is a twice written scroll 
 
 Scrawled over on some boyish holiday 
 With idle songs for pipe and virelay 
 
 Which do but mar the secret of the whole. 
 Surely there was a time I might have trod 
 
 The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance 
 Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God : 
 
 Is that time dead ? lo ! with a little rod 
 I did but touch the honey of romance — 
 
 And must I lose a soul's inheritance ? " 
 
 A remarkably well-expressed sonnet, I beg to think. In 
 fact, as a sonnet writer, he has few superiors in the language, 
 and it is the impression of his fine gifts and his weak fibre 
 that has made me temper the terms of my characterisation.
 
 56 
 
 8 CONTEMPORARY IRISH LITERATURE. 
 
 The pei'fcrvidum ingenium Scotorum is not doing itself justice 
 in these latter days. . . . The Irish mind is distinctl}' literary. 
 Glance at an Irish newspaper or listen to a thorough-going 
 Irish orator, you will observe the love of words not merely as 
 expressive of meanings, but for their own peculiar values. 
 In fact, sometimes, or rather but too often, the flow and the 
 dash of a rhetorical period is obtained at the utter expense 
 of common-sense, or even of meaning. Again, that the Irish are 
 an extraordinarily witty and humorous people is generally con- 
 ceded, but cannot be realised except in their own country 
 and in the freedom of intercourse. Again, the Irish are a 
 vigorous, passionate, impetuous people, with a perfect 
 diablerie of movement, whether in a charge at the bristling 
 files of an enemy's ranks, or in the mental rush at brilliant, 
 impulsive ideas. 
 
 Now, it is precisely these qualities that are absent in our 
 latest developments of representative Irish Literature. 
 Douglas Hyde has mainly contented himself with his re- 
 searches into the bardic period of Irish Literature, but the 
 product he has brought to light is not altogether convincing. 
 It is melodious, beautiful, intricate, curious — parallel, in fact, 
 in literary workmanship, to the elaborate carvings, tracery,
 
 Notes 57 
 
 and all manner of ornamentation to be seen, for instance, on 
 
 an ancient Irish cross There is always something 
 
 insincere and factitious in the admiration of the past, even 
 the past of magnificent civilizations like those of Italy, 
 Greece, the Moslem Empire, Spain ; but the true records of 
 Irish history make painful reading even, or rather especially, 
 to an Irishman. 
 
 However, to continue the theme, Oscar Wilde, at his best, 
 is a somewhat tinselly Sheridan (himself inclined to too much 
 surface glitter), but originally interpenetrated with inspi- 
 rations from a far deeper and more vital source than Sheridan 
 ever knew — John Keats. Some of Oscar Wilde's sonnets are 
 hardly surpassed in the language, except by Keats him- 
 self. 
 
 In his " A House of Pomegranates " he outvies Keats in the 
 luxuriance of the beautiful images he heaps up, and, therein 
 doubtless, he runs to fault ; his ideas do not flow spontane- 
 ously, there is too much artificial building up and overlaying, 
 too much suggestion of the close luxury of an over-stuffed 
 chamber, redolent of musk and sandal wood. At his worst, 
 Oscar Wilde sinks into the abysses of degeneracy. 
 
 George Moore is an Irishman, " but a bad one." I know 
 but little of his writings. 
 
 Downey is an Irishman, and a good one ; but I do not know 
 that he (as others I could mention) considers himself in the 
 " movement." His humour is as original, delightful, and 
 "kindly," as the peat-browned potheen of the valleys that 
 never saw an excise man. 
 
 Katharine Tynan (to give her the name with which she won 
 her reputation), when I first had the honour of knowing her, 
 was " under the influence of Rosetti," and it seemed tome
 
 58 Our Poets ! 
 
 curious that this daughter of Erin, a lady so essentially Irish 
 in characteristics, should strain after an ineffective imitation 
 (for all imitations are ineffective) of a product of " special 
 culture," not to say sophistication, in a world so remote from 
 her own. Latterly, she has centred more on herself and her 
 own native inspirations, and with happier results. 
 
 Hannah Lynch has won for herself a distinct position, but I 
 cannot speak definitely of her qualities. 
 
 W. B. Yeats has, in one sense, " more in him " than any of 
 the other Irish writers, even in the volatility, or elasticity, with 
 which he presses on through the quagmires of his affectations, 
 perversities, and shallow theories. He is said to have a fine 
 lyric strain, but I have been unable to detect it satisfactorily ; 
 on the contrary, he often seems to me to break down in the 
 baldest fashion on the mere rudimentary ground of metre. 
 I find the pious task of reading Yeats very irritating, for the 
 reason that his own native quality never seems to appear at 
 all, except in occasional passages in his prose. Again, is it 
 not curious that this young man of eminently Irish quality, 
 born in beautiful and breezy Sligo, must needs slay all that 
 has come best to him as his very birthright, and turn the 
 indomitable Irishman into some far off Hindoo, effete through 
 a hundred generations of atony. 
 
 Yeats will do good work, brilliant work, yet, but he must 
 jetcy sa goiirme. And probably he will do his best work in 
 prose, well spiced with humour. 
 
 Finally, in all contemporary Irish literature, there is a 
 lamentable lack of calibre, of masculine energy, of intellectuality 
 not identified with dilletante appreciations. The outlook of 
 Ireland's present writers is a very narrow one ; their training 
 or any enduring work of literature too meagre ; their thoughts.
 
 Notes 59 
 
 both restricted and shallow, and utterly ignoring the vast in- 
 tellectual movements, which, in future times, will be seen to be 
 the main features of the present day.
 
 60 
 
 9 NARCISSUS. 
 
 Byron speaks of "a handsome man, that human miracle," 
 and even Byron's countenance, though to me it is a very 
 agreeable one, has not escaped the cavils of the critics. 
 Leigh Hunt said that his nose looked as if it were stuck on. 
 Others averred that his eyes had a suspicious and sinister 
 expression, something like the sidelong, louche, regard (ac- 
 cording to Taine) of the young Bonaparte. Finally, his 
 countenance was not particularly masculine, and he seems to 
 have been guilty ( vide Gronow) of the peculiarly misde- 
 meanant action of curling his hair — putting it in curlpaper ! 
 
 Still, Byron was a very handsome fellow. I like Keats' 
 face even better; and in another fashion, Bonaparte's. They 
 show genius in their \ery look. By-the-way, there is a 
 beautiful little picture of Bonaparte as First Cousul (by 
 Gerard) in the Museum at Antwerp, which is Keatsian in 
 outline and fineness. 
 
 In the flesh, I have only seen two or three countenances which 
 combined a fine masculine quality of energy and intelligence 
 with well-formed features. One of them was a young German 
 professor, whose pale face was a little worn by his constant 
 vigils, and whose rough, uncombed, tawny hair, was generally 
 singed a little by the flame of a gas jet. His eyes were
 
 Notes 61 
 
 yellowish. Yet when animated (as, for instance, in describing 
 the progress of Thermo-dynamics), his whole manner be- 
 came so energetic and brilliant — " electrified," in short, to use 
 the hackneyed phrase — that even his tawny hair took cha- 
 racter, his pale and slightly freckled face glowed like St. 
 Michael's, his eyes became as lustrous as an angry tiger's. 
 Another handsome countenance I remember was that of a 
 French cavalry officer, who rode a white Arab steed, and 
 looked like the Cid Campeador. 
 
 I mention these things, because beautiful images have a fas- 
 cination for me ! Le Gallienne's conceit in comparing him- 
 self to Narcissus is very laughable. He has, (since he really 
 invites the comment) good eyes, a fine forehead, and dark, 
 hyacinthine locks; his mouth is that of a prim and mean 
 parlour-maid ; and the expression of his countenance has 
 much in it of the same quality. The countenance is, indeed, 
 of one who has never engaged in manly occupations, not even 
 in manly sports ; it lacks all that fine, bold and masculine, re- 
 sistant quality, which is mainly what one looks for even in 
 an Adonis. 
 
 ^o THE -NEW" RELIGION. 
 
 Le Gallienne's " Religion of a Literary Man," is in the 
 true spirit of the delicate man of " culture." Naively ignorant 
 not merely of any research into the historical aspect of 
 Christianity, but ignoring even the most prominent and 
 popular of the works of Biblical students, he launches his
 
 62 Our Poets ! 
 
 little bark upon the safe waters of platitude ; shallow, incon- 
 sistent, but not ill-expressed, as far as verbiage is concerned, in 
 his style of sugared limpidity. Not one original thought, not 
 one note of power, not one deep, grave utterance, or stirring 
 of nervous force ; neither grasp, calibre, nor purpose ; nothing 
 but his treacled stream of acceptable phrases, livened here 
 and there by touches of feminine malice. 
 
 Let us consider for a moment the style of the thinker, and 
 the man of " culture," — and when I point the word culture in 
 this fashion, it is because the name is generally arrogated to 
 mere dilletantism, at best a virtuosity in trifles. 
 
 That being so, let us, like the two poets at the Court of 
 Haroun Al Raschid, select ahorse as the subject of discussion. 
 The thinker knows his horse, through and through, but his 
 knowledge rests within that limit. The man of culture has 
 read a hundred books on the horse, and emphasises, or 
 rather adorns, every mark by an apt quotation, astounding 
 the ears of the bystanders by his learning. But at the same 
 time he cannot tell the pastern from the hock. 
 
 I have known one of this " precious "set, at a small suburban 
 assembly, dispose of Darwin with a mere wave of the hand, 
 pointed by a contemptuous expression about "materialism"; 
 and thereupon this young man, exceptionally shallow even for 
 a popular lecturer, launched out upon the high seas of Theo- 
 sophy ! He had never read two consecutive pages of Darwin. 
 
 , . . . " The Trinity, the Atonement, 
 
 Infant Baptism, Baptismal Regeneration, the Immortality 
 of the Soul, the Life Hereafter — these and many other 
 dogmas are now seen to be matters of symbolism or 
 personal intuition " — Voila, Le Gallienne. He quotes Spinoza. 
 Do you think he has read Spinoza ? — He gets even his
 
 Notes 63 
 
 quotation second hand, hangs on to it a piece of spangly 
 rhetoric — in which he misses the point of Spinoza's rea- 
 soning — and passes to some new gilded feat.
 
 64 
 
 II METRE. 
 
 The mention of Swinburne naturally leads one to con- 
 sider the questions of rhythm, metre, and the thousand 
 and one points that arise in the technique of poetry. I say 
 thousand and one, because the subject has hitherto been but 
 barely trenched upon, and that in spite of the voluminous and 
 pedantic treatises which discourse upon " English Versifica- 
 tion." It would be impossible in a slap-dash note or two to 
 bring much conviction to the mind as to what may be 
 conceived to be the development of this matter, but I shall 
 at least, if only in a few hints that may be suggestive of 
 thought, ask the reader to consider the question from a new 
 point of view. 
 
 In the first place, then, our familiar rules for estimating 
 metre are so meagre and so wide of the mark as to be almost 
 ridiculous. The basis of our system is the separation into 
 accented and unaccented syllables, these taking the place of 
 the long and short of the classic models. But this method 
 ignores what after all cannot be eliminated by any mere 
 conventions from the appreciation of effects — the vital
 
 Notes 65 
 
 qualities of long and short sounds, in their finely distinguished 
 grades. It ignores also the exquisite but very appreciable 
 differences of weights of accent — even to the twelfth degree, 
 and it ignores, or rather very inefficiently recognises, the 
 pauses, the sequences, the speeds, and forms of movement of 
 the measures. 
 
 The reader will find appended to this note a couple of 
 themes, framed ostensibly upon the same metre, in which, 
 though the sounds themselves have no particular meaning, 
 the effect is very widely different. One may suitably be 
 called, " An early Spring Morning ; " the other, " A Dirge for 
 a Young Wife." 
 
 As another example, Pope has spoken of the " needless 
 Alexandrine " that "ends the song," 
 
 "And, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along." 
 
 Yet a very great variety of effects can be produced by 
 the Alexandrine. Compare : 
 
 " Skim in the living wave, and 'neath the sunlight dance." 
 
 " And EI Mamun ? " " ' Good grass ! but not the Saadan.' " 
 
 " Or saddle horse ev'n now, and speed the flying race." 
 
 In fact, the Alexandrine can be made a spirited, and even 
 dashing, metre. 
 
 Again — to show the inadequacy of our system of metres — a 
 line or a stanza is never read (if, indeed, it be not read in the 
 painful collegiate fashion) in the formal metrical measure ; or
 
 66 Our Poets ! 
 
 usually, if one wish to look to the metre, the passage must be 
 read again. 
 
 Further, no poem, (except, again, a very dull one), has ever 
 been composed according to the requirements of our metrical 
 notations ; and Byron, though many of his lines descend to dog- 
 grel, has yet produced some fine effects (as, for instance, those 
 in the opening of the " Bride of Abydos") by his disregard of 
 metre, and his half-conscious searching for the forms that in- 
 terpret his verve and changing mood. 
 
 If the whole question of metre and rhythm were analysed, 
 it would be seen to be extremely complex ; and though, I think 
 a command of metrical form exceeding anything yet within 
 the compass of our poets could be taught to everyone of 
 ordmary intelligence ; yet the quality of poetic taste, and the 
 force of poetic inspiration, would still be essential in the 
 choice of words, in the subtle estimation of their weights, of 
 their movement, in the appreciation of the vowel and con- 
 sonantal effect, and the adaptation of all these qualities to the 
 sense, not only of the line, but of the stanza, and of the whole 
 poem. 
 
 Yet no poet could build up a poem, a stanza, or even a line 
 in this elaborate fashion. By continual observance and 
 by natural taste, his appreciation should become so satu- 
 rated with all these matters of poetic technique, that the right 
 -words come by instinct, (for instance, Keats, whose poetry is 
 distinguished b)- every word having its exquisite \-alue, was 
 rapid in composition). The whole line should come at once, 
 not the separate words ; and so, even in the sonnet, the form, 
 the weight, the distribution of impulses, and the proportions 
 should be, if not clearly impressed, yet, at least, adumbrated 
 at the first blush, the inspirational seizing of the poem.
 
 Notes 67 
 
 Hence it happens that it is the uninspired poets, the poets of 
 careful technique, of cuUure, of "correctness," who are so 
 wretchedly faulty even in verbal points. I could prove this 
 up to the hilt by a thousand examples. (Vide note,) 
 
 Tlie early spring morning. 
 
 Li lille tan le tanty pool eteese, 
 
 Enum etenny tinne dar, 
 Elan eleese, 
 
 Arate ekedax icar 
 Asote ikedum elixedeese ! 
 
 Dirge for a young wife. * 
 
 Ve thave daght, edothy doom athyse, 
 Adrum, aphroni, dumme doth 
 Aphreen athryse, 
 
 Arame ethedax acroath, 
 
 Pharsove hathidoom athyrse t'mgryse. 
 
 It may be interesting to search for the original of the metres 
 employed. 
 
 F — 2
 
 68 
 
 12 THE PRIDE OF THE SCHOOL:' 
 
 Diligently have I read a number of Mr. Andrew Lang's 
 books, not altogether liking him, expecting, even maliciously 
 •wishing, to find something on which to base my instinctive 
 aversion, but being continually disappointed, even by the 
 flow of his geniality — exasperated thereby — more than once 
 compelled to admiration by some felicitous manner of ex- 
 pression or fine, even recherche, feat of criticism. I could 
 cite, for instance, his wonderfully well-balanced estimation of 
 Dickens. 
 
 13 Wide indeed are the ranges of Mr. Andrew Lang's appre- 
 ciation ; from Rider Haggard's barbarosity to the finest 
 feathery stir of a Theocritus phrase ; from learned tomes on 
 Ritual and Myth to a game of cricket ; from rollicking Lever 
 to Tacitus. He can enjoy in imagination the quoit throwing 
 of the Homeric Games as much as, in reality, the golf play of 
 Kirkaldy. He has beheld with equal pleasure the whirling 
 wheels of Sophocles' chariot, the leaping of a trout to his own 
 fly in a Highland burn, or the marvellous catch at Lords by 
 which George Ulyett disposed of Bonner. Yet, since I must
 
 Notes 69 
 
 have my cavil, the appreciation is always Lang-like. He is 
 not 
 
 " The man who with a man 
 
 Is an equal, be he King 
 
 Or poorest of the beggar-clan." 
 
 He writes of cricket like a bad player and dilletante 
 spectator who finds his delight not in the game but in his 
 literary allusions. He glorifies Tennyson and disparages 
 Byron. He is a genial, exquisite, literary man, sensitive to 
 the delicate finger-tips of his feminine nature, learned and 
 thoughtful beyond most of his brethren ; but he gives me 
 the idea that he would not read my own books, and that he 
 would assassinate me with a knitting-needle.
 
 70 
 
 M CABINET POETRY. 
 Select William Morris, at haphazard, in his most famous 
 poem 
 
 " A king there was in days of old, 
 Who ruled wide lands, nor lacked of gold, 
 Nor honour, nor much longed-for praise, 
 And his days were called happy days." 
 
 This is as slow and respectable as the family brougham. 
 Note too the wretched metre of the last line, its absolute 
 ineffectiveness. It is the more necessary to call attention to 
 these frequent breakdowns in our most " correct" poets, be- 
 cause it is the redoubt behind which they continually shelter 
 themselves, after making a sally, say upon Byron or 
 Keats ! Let us take, for the sake of comparison, the fol- 
 lowing line : — 
 
 " A thing of beauty is a constant joy : " 
 
 That is a " correct " line, and so it was originally written by 
 Keats. So it would have contented for ever any of these 
 perfect poets of " taste." Keats himself, however, from the
 
 Notes 71 
 
 start knew that it was deficient, that there was something 
 rigid and Ufeless in it, and so, taking a second cast, wrote : 
 
 A thing of beauty is a joy foy ever. 
 
 At once the line awakens, blooms, and throws off its subtle 
 atmosphere. 
 
 Yet what the advantage of these fine flights, these efforts 
 of genius, if we are continually to have forced upon us for 
 admiration the passages and lines where they are conspicu- 
 ously absent ? That is the impression I get from reading 
 the Morrises, the Austins, the Arnolds. They irritate me 
 like a note of music that just fails of striking true. Poetry 
 has no mean. It is either Heaven or Hell, and these gentle- 
 men give not often a glimpse of Paradise. Nor — for I will 
 speak my mind, even if it cost me my literary life — nor does 
 their great Tennyson. It is on his art, his ttxltniqiic, his 
 " faultlessness " that I should be well content to wage the 
 battle. He has some villainous lines. So has Keats, you 
 may retort. True, for every virtue has its fault, but of its 
 own peculiar quality. Keats would have torn up the proof 
 sheets of most of Tennyson. 
 
 Nothing is to me more certain than the inspirational 
 motive of all true poetry. Every great thought rises with 
 its own afflatus, and announces itself in its very coming as 
 something genial and divine. There are times when in a 
 few moments the mind can behold the very work of 
 months, and when it would seem that if one had a thou- 
 sand tongues the whole poem might thereupon be uttered 
 forth. Then, too, everything is seen in true proportions, in 
 its true atmosphere, and endued with its odours and its tints. 
 The word comes with certitude. It is this inspiration that
 
 72 Our Poets ! 
 
 is wanting to the heavy stylists. They do not see the 
 vision before their eyes, and with their eyes fixed altogether 
 upon that, translate it. They sit them at their desks con- 
 scientiously, and cudgel their brains for ideas, allusions, 
 descriptions, metaphors. Their lines come barrenly, with 
 none of that impalpable air of delicate associations. 
 Yet line by line they build up their poem like a wooden 
 cabinet.
 
 73 
 
 15 TYPE OF POETS. 
 
 The type of poets, the children of Apollo, — to cite the 
 hackneyed phrase — is that of Byron, Shelley, Keats and Burns. 
 There is a distinct " family likeness " between them all. 
 They are geniuses, one could say at a glance ; their very 
 countenances have the glow of inspiration — swift spirits, 
 •'beautiful as pards," with fire, imagination. Turn from 
 these to Lewis Morris, William Morris, Arnold, or any of the 
 highly respectable gentlemen who give us ponderous tomes 
 of unalleviated rhyme. Is Lewis Morris a child of Apollo ? 
 Does Lewis Morris even look like a child of Apollo ? Is such 
 a putative paternity probable ? e\en plausible ? The methods 
 of these masters are plain, direct, conscientious, and if the 
 truth must be said, generally as flat as ditch-water. And 
 this is nowhere more poignantly felt, than in those examples 
 where they attempt to rise to poetic flights, because there is 
 forced upon one the sense that " of such is the kingdom of 
 Heaven," to the class of aspiring young men who band them- 
 selves together for Mutual Perfection. 
 
 Take this from Lewis Morris : — 
 
 " And when the laughing girls 
 To some fair stripling's oaten viehdy. 
 Make ready for the dance."
 
 74 Oiiv Poets I 
 
 Or this : 
 
 " They cut with knives 
 The taper girHsh throat." 
 
 Or this (I could cite a thousand instances) : 
 
 " When the swift fire takes 
 A woman's heart, and burns it out, and leaps 
 With fierce fofkcd tongue aivund it. 
 
 I could easily imagine Mr. Stead, to cite a type at hazard, 
 dancing fandangos of ecstasy over these performances. They 
 are thespasmodic leaps of a poor, fagged, essentially "ornery " 
 Pegasus. 
 
 No one, unless he has to write his little piece, thinks of the 
 passion of love as leaping with forked tongues around iheheart. 
 Nor do the ideas of any man flow naturally in the series of 
 the following passage, which is poetry (after the fashion of M. 
 Jourdain) simply because it is not prose — thecomposition, the 
 sequence, the selection of ideas, are not good enough for 
 prose : 
 
 ' ' Then it was again 
 A woman whom I saw, pitiless, stern, 
 Bearing the brand of blood — a lithe dark form, 
 And cruel eyes which glared beneath the gems 
 That argued her a Queen, and on her side 
 An ancient stain of gore, which did befoul 
 Her royal robe." 
 
 This is poetry of the kind that makes one feel the hopeless- 
 ness of arguing it ridiculous. 
 
 "Gegen Diciniiiheit kdmpfen vergebens die Cotter."
 
 15 
 
 i6 HONOURED POETRY. 
 
 All of the passages I have quoted for reference in the pre- 
 ent book are from the best parts of the best poems of the 
 authors (see " Poets and Poetry of the Century ") ; therefore, 
 Sir Edwin Arnold cannot feel aggrieved — perhaps, indeed, in 
 the security of his complacence, he would be astonished to 
 learn that there were any occasion for grief, if I give the fol- 
 lowing as a specimen of his " work." 
 
 " Come, 
 Sweet son ! and see the pleasaunce of the Spring, 
 And how the fruitful earth is wooed to yield 
 Its riches to the reaper ; how my realms — 
 Which shall be thine when the pile flames for me — 
 Feeds all its mouths and keeps the King's chest filled." 
 
 A true poetic movement is surely never expressed in this 
 stilted style. " The fruitful earth wooed to yield its 
 riches," is unworthy of a second-rate provincial sermon : no, 
 on reflection, it is worthy of that altitude. " When the pile 
 flames for me," I presume means, "when I am dead." There 
 is a complete directness and truer poetry in, " Poor old Jeff 
 has gone to rest." 
 
 The feeding all the mouths and keeping the King's chest 
 filled, is too ridiculous.
 
 75 Our Poets ! 
 
 As another example : 
 
 " And night and day served there a chosen band 
 Of nautch girls, cup-bearers, and cymballers. 
 Delicate, dark-browed ministers of love, 
 Who fanned the sleeping eyes of the happy Prince." 
 
 The last three lines contain metrical faults, the second and 
 the fourth being especially bad. 
 
 It would appear that some of the dark damsels (why dark- 
 browed merely ?) fanned the sleeping Prince. Observe the 
 characteristic mark of the would-be poet, "they fan the sleep- 
 ing eyes of the Juippy Prince." It may be blank prose, but it 
 amounts to the same thing, and is a shade less absurd, to 
 say, the happy eyes of the sleeping Prince.
 
 17 THE RAZZIAS OF A -CHASTE" POET. 
 
 Mr. Austin has the reputation of being among the most 
 chaste and fastidious of writers. Yet in one of his best 
 sonnets we find such Hnes as these : 
 
 " Thy absence exiles sunshine from the sky : " 
 
 A most forced manner of expression, which leaves one cold 
 by reason of its very artificiality. 
 Or again : 
 
 "And thou 
 With orient eyes dawnest on my distress." 
 
 What meaning to attach to the phrase, " orient eyes," I 
 hardly know, but by no manner of interpretation am I able 
 to make it anything but a far-fetched conceit. 
 
 Besides, the line is indefensible according to the metrical 
 rules dear to this school of poets. 
 
 These examples have not been selected by virtue of their 
 badness. On the contrary, they have been taken from one 
 of Mr. Austin's best poems.
 
 rS POLISHED VERSE. 
 
 I have devoted to Mr. Watson perhaps more space than 
 his acknowledged position among contemporary poets would 
 seem to warrant ; but, in spite of the strictures of my verses, 
 it may be permitted to me to say that this consideration seems 
 to be due to the virtuosity of his literary style. I believe 
 that there is no writer, with the possible exception of Oscar 
 "Wilde, so delicate in the choice of language, and none so de- 
 sirous of preserving a certain fine spirit of classicism, in the 
 clearness of conception of a poem, and in the conduct of the 
 thoughts. In short, Mr. Watson might be a poet if he would 
 get rid of, once for all, that thin savouring, brass-tasting, thrice 
 accursed Ca)it iviglais. 
 
 But now to enter more particularly into the question of 
 technique. I mean to show, in all fairness, that even this most 
 correct of poets, this shining light (I say it here with no 
 touch of malice) of chaste and distinguished diction, is capable 
 of falling into sheer faults, that I do not think even the 
 "slap-dash," "haphazard" Byron would ha\e tolerated for 
 a moment. Of course the reader will not expect to be con- 
 fronted with "shocking examples" of verbal solecism, but 
 rather will be required to sharpen up his critical appreciation, 
 and to give his judgment with fine discrimination; for the
 
 Notes 79 
 
 instances will be selected from the choicest parts of Mr. 
 Watson's masterpieces : * 
 
 " ' Tis human nature's happiest height to be 
 A spirit melodious, lucid, poised, and whole." 
 
 — A good thought, a good verse, in fact one of his best. 
 But first note that the second line has a distinct metrical fault, 
 which will be apparent in observing that the line would run 
 better by saying sprit for spirit. 
 
 Then the first line is awkward in syntax, and has an ending 
 altogether too feeble. It is awkward in syntax, because of the 
 repetition of the forms of the verb, " to be," The sense is, that, 
 a spirit melodious is the height of human nature, (how a 
 spirit can be a height, we may pass over as a point of hyper- 
 criticism) but Mr. Watson makes it, that to be the spirit is the 
 height. 
 
 The verse is continued : 
 
 " Second in order of felicity 
 
 I hold it to have walked with such a soul." 
 
 The metre is lame in the first line ; there is quite a halt after 
 "second," and that halt is detrimental to the effect, as it 
 makes the words " in order of /elieity," sound flat. 
 
 In another poem, a very short one, and selected for its per- 
 fect workmanship) he uses the e.xpressions : 
 
 " Towers to a lily, reddens to a rose." 
 
 This is a piece of prkiositi. 
 
 * Those selected in illustration of his quality in " Poets and Poetry of 
 the Century."
 
 so Ouy Poets ! 
 
 Again, let us consider one of his most admired sonnets. 
 
 " Our greatness is become a tale 
 To tell our children's babes when we are old. 
 They shall put by their playthings to be told 
 How England once, before the days of bale, 
 Throned above trembling, puissant, grandiose, calm, 
 Held Asia's richest jewel in her palm ; " 
 
 The third line is really too weak to be pardonable. 
 The idea is already contained in the first two ; we have in 
 the first line a tale, in the second that it is to be told to our 
 children's babes (note the affectation) ; and then in the third 
 line, the only thing added to take away the flatness of mere 
 repetition is that they shall "put by their playthings to be 
 told. ' ' — This is simply laughable. Why not tell them at porridge 
 in the morning, or after saying their prayers at night ? Then 
 again they are to be told of these things in very stilted lan- 
 guage — that " days of bale " would puzzle a wise child. I can 
 only guess what it means myself. The " throned above 
 trembling " is an absurd way of speaking of a nation. The 
 mind involuntarily flies to the idea of an earthquake to find 
 a vindication of such a manner of expression. The " gran- 
 diose " is a little daring, but (me judice) happily so. I cite it 
 to show that I do not desire a mere grammatical or con- 
 ventional criticism. And, to give point to what I have 
 already asserted respecting Keats and Byron, if the word 
 grandiose should be esteemed a fault, then I say it is at 
 least a fault of a Keatsian quality, and the difference of its 
 effect may be well compared with that of the others. By the 
 richest jewel, I presume, is meant India, but when a poet 
 really thinks of England holding India, does he form the
 
 Notes 81 
 
 image of her holding " AsitVs richest jewel in her palm." I say a 
 poet, with good intentions, for I can easily imagine the glorious 
 moods of an ambitious journalist (I am afraid I am thinking 
 of the deplorable Mr. Stead again) arriving with rare self- 
 complacency at "imagery" of this kind. The sonnet 
 continues : 
 
 " And with unnumbered isles barbaric she 
 The broad hem of her glistering robe impearled, 
 Then when she wound her arms about the world, 
 And had for vassal the obsequious sea." 
 
 The first is a bad line ; mainly by its weak ending in she, and 
 secondly that the words barbaric and unnumbered should 
 change places ; barbaric isles unnumbered makes a good 
 sequence, for the thought must be first in reference to the 
 isles, and then the idea of their multiplicity arises, and they 
 are disposed of in the contemplation as, unnumbered. But to 
 call them unnumbered, and then to call them barbaric, is to 
 make a mental false step. Then again, the she is so weak, 
 and the previous arrangement so awkward, that at first reading 
 one is apt to conjoin the barbaric with she — "barbaric she." 
 The " imagery " of the succeeding phrase is altogether too 
 strained and artificial. It is poeticising of the type that made 
 Byron exclaim in impatience to Tommy Moore, expatiating, 
 according to poetical etiquette on the moon : Oh damn the 
 moon, it gives me the ague. 
 
 Lines like this go far to explain the aversion of the 
 " average man " for poetry, and also the humour of the 
 comic journals in dealing with the irritable race. Does any 
 reasonable being find his mind braced, or is a grander idea 
 given to him, by speaking of England embracing the world 
 
 G
 
 82 Our Poets ! 
 
 and wearing isles (even barbaric isles) impearkd upon her 
 glish'siiig robe. The average man's plain, common-sense idea 
 of the situation, capable of being expressed in terse prose, is 
 infinitely more vigorous, convincing, truer than this manner 
 of phrasing. The average man says " fudge," " slumgullion." 
 "rot," or whatever contemptuous expletive may be familiar 
 to him ; and forthwith the genial poet raves at him for his 
 " Philistinism," his lack of soul. 
 
 The average man is really nearer that ■' white of truth,'' 
 -which should characterise all poetry, as well as prose. Poetry 
 that cannot be analysed, that will not bear to be shaken to 
 pieces, and to be tried by the same test of common sense as 
 prose, has something in it of radical falsity. Poetry should 
 differ from prose in its greater power of expression, in its con- 
 densed and irrefragable force. To talk about having "for vassal 
 the obsequious sea," is sheer ruhhish. It does not impress. One 
 can understand the obsequious Matabele, the obsequious Sub- 
 lime Porte, or the obsequious half-brother to the Sun and 
 Moon ; but the obsequious sea — stuff! 
 
 There is, in this sonnet, the weak ecstasy of an aspiring 
 school-girl, a clarified enthusiasm that jets out as coldly as 
 soda-water. Compare it for an instant with the gravity, the 
 vnile tristcssc of Bonaparte, speaking of big interests.
 
 83 
 
 19 THE FORCE OF KIPLING. 
 
 To omit Kipling would be like reserving the bust of 
 Brutus from the funeral procession. Therefore he is included 
 by way of good fellowship ; though, if I were to profess to be 
 unappreciative of the power of his writings, as indeed of 
 one or two of the others herein mentioned, I should but 
 succeed in defining pretty closely my own limitations. It 
 would not be easy to parallel Kipling's good qualities — 
 his abundant exuberance, extent of superficial observation, 
 and firm, strong control of his subjects. Byron has the 
 range of a world above anything yet shown by Rudyard, 
 and a fine spirit of wit unmatched in English litera- 
 ture ; but our own man is more solid, more strongly set, 
 and could have taught the tempestuous bard many a 
 thing, good to know. In fact, he has an utterance of wisdom 
 beyond his years — perhaps beyond his capacity. 
 
 20 Southey's " Vision of Judgment," it may be presumed, is 
 never looked at except to give point to the reading of Byron's. 
 
 21 The passage quoted, however, and even the "red 
 
 G — 2
 
 84 Ony Poets ! 
 
 maned stars " themselves pale their ineffectual fires before 
 this burst of glory ; 
 
 " And ofttimes cometh our wise Lord God, master of every 
 trade, 
 
 And tells them tales of His daily toil, of Edens newly made ; 
 
 And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen un- 
 afraid." 
 
 There is in that an " infantine familiar clasp of things 
 Divine," which is highly gratifying. The original of the 
 " wise Lord God " is not very far to seek — a hard working, 
 omniscient craftsman, genial withal, a great story-teller, 
 the delight and the pride of the Junior Constitutional Club 
 in " Elysium."
 
 85 
 
 22 THE VICE IN GRAIN. 
 
 "Fade, pateux, et delaye dans le vide,"— such is a 
 Frenchman's description of the leading articles of our 
 leading journal. 
 
 I beg the reader's indulgence to consider the matter a 
 moment, if not with the desire to conciliate, at least with the 
 endeavour to state unbiassed impressions. 
 
 One of the finest proofs of an author's power is when he 
 exercises a " spell" over his readers, and draws them on to 
 read even against their original intentions, and by virtue of 
 no persuasion or duty, nor by any discoverable " artistic " 
 trickery, but by sheer force of interest. Byron has such ; 
 charm for me ; Keats, also, i^ a finer realm ; Shelley had 
 and has now at his best, Of English prose writers, Carlyle 
 
 seems to me to be one of the few The Germans, 
 
 to turn to them for a moment before speaking of the French, 
 possess but a disappointing literature. Even Goethe has 
 written masses of stuff, flat, tedious, and thoroughly, 
 Teutonically dull, such as would be tolerated in no other 
 language. I should greatly desire the opportunity of entering 
 more fully into this matter, but meanwhile I expect to be 
 called an ignoramus, a fool, a prig, an impertinent, etc., etc. 
 by every clever little critic who has never read a line of 
 " Faust."
 
 86 Our Poets ! 
 
 Into French literature, I entered with a certain kind of 
 prejudice, — the absurd idea, that there is a certain finical 
 manner in all they produce. Nothing could be more false and 
 even ridiculous. The French are the most virile people in 
 Western Europe, and their literature gives abundant evidence 
 of the fact, apart from the artistic force and expansion that carry 
 them beyond the range of all other moderns. It has been my 
 own experience to find in the ordinary French daily news- 
 papers, (and in most of them,) writing that for brilliancy, 
 point, and at times, vigour and energy, is not surpassed by 
 our present literature at its own highest water mark. ... I 
 read Walter Besant. I have heard him read out to me by an 
 enthusiast, and a very intelligent man, who seemed to think 
 that he was " sufficient for the day," nay, for all time ! The 
 sentences brought home their meanings, but they sounded 
 flat, wooden, — destitute of atmosphere, of the thousand 
 subtle, indefinable things that make good literature. And 
 similarly, I confess, there are few English writers who give 
 me delight in reading, proportionate to the time I spend 
 upon them. I read tenaciously, from a sense of resolution, of 
 duty. I turn to a French writer, from Zola to Hervieu, from 
 Adam to d'Esparbes, and am immediately animated, delight- 
 ed, refreshed ; I insist, reinvigorated. The principle is not 
 isolated. It crops up in a thousand different forms. Read the 
 leading articles of any of our "organs of public opinion." The 
 Frenchman's characterisation of the Tmw shows the effect, the 
 cause is hidden in that veil of hypocrisy and pretence which 
 interpenetrates every phase of national life. Our articles, even 
 articles in the Magazines, are written as if the writers had a 
 hundred little conventions to respect, a hundred different inte- 
 rests to conciliate.
 
 Notes 87 
 
 The great art of journalism, it has been asserted, is to 
 write all round a theme without striking it ; and in the best 
 journals, this requirement seems often to be secured by 
 " turning on " to a subject some graceful, dilletante writer 
 who knows virtually nothing of the matter in hand. I once 
 had occasion to propose to an accomplished journalist, one of 
 the best in every way in London, a project for a paper which 
 should speak, if not the truth, yet as much of it as men 
 utter familiarly in their Clubs, or in the street in ordinary con- 
 versation. "My dear sir," said he, in complete seriousness, 
 "you know nothing of the situation. Hypocrisy is the saving 
 grace of our intercourse in Society." 
 
 Yet in France they manage things better. The leading 
 article in a French sheet seems always to be written by a 
 man who knows and feels his subject, and who has no 
 other desire than to " write himself out," to drive home his 
 points. Even for this pleasure one could read a French 
 newspaper in mid-Sahara, whereas we take all other journals, 
 like the wine of the country, only in their own province. 
 Again, newspaper literature is by popular repute the most 
 fugitive and trivial of all ; and after a year's reading how 
 many leading articles are remembered, even if it be simply 
 on account of a fine phrase ? Yet, without effort, I can recall 
 the delight it has given me to read mere ephemeral articles 
 in Parisian halfpenny sheets, and could repeat their exquisite 
 turns of expression. 
 
 These matters hang together, I aver, with the standards of 
 our morality. We have made the girl of sixteen the arbiter 
 of the moral " strength " of our literature ; consequently the 
 intellectual power, the scope, the depth of our work is reduced 
 to the same injurious criterion. It is easy enough to fire off
 
 88 Our Poets ! 
 
 some cheap witticisms upon myself, for instance, for asserting 
 this position, but my object in thus writing is not to 
 'depreciate our literary power, but to break a lance 
 for its complete emancipation. Our writers, moved, half un- 
 consciously perhaps, by the influence of the environment, 
 seek shelter in some little coins de la vie, where they produce 
 exellent but limited work ; but the final result is, that our 
 literature is becoming provincialized, and, if it must be driven 
 home, ridiculous. Mr. Hardy e.xplores his Wessex, Mr. Hall 
 Caine his Isle of Man, Rudyard Kipling his tract in India. 
 The refuge is in mere story-telling ; there is no literature 
 that surveys e\en our own local world with regard to the 
 characteristics that mark our own day as distinct. Where 
 there is an escape at all from the provincializing tendency it is 
 in some merely bizarre and outrageous feats of originality, 
 principally by women writers ; and the upshot of the tyranny 
 of the girl of sixteen is, that there find their way into the novels 
 of the circulating library amazing and ill-digested ideas that 
 are far better discussed — with saner handling and immensely 
 greater knowledge and calibre— in the medical journals. 
 
 In protesting, then, against the emasculating tests of our 
 literature, I protest also against being understood to be an 
 advocate of licence, " realism," hysterics, or an)- particular 
 form that the literary tarantula may develop. I say only, let 
 us have fresh air and a clear draft through the stuffy 
 cloisters of convention. Let us see everything in daylight. 
 Virtue is superior to Vice, let us say. Then what is virtue 
 that it must be wrapped in hypocrisies and cant, that it 
 trembles at the onslaughts of its rival, that it must resort to 
 every subterfuge of lying, of cowardice, of petty oppression, 
 of all manner of sham and fraud ; that it is continually shriek-
 
 Notes 89 
 
 ing out in horror against the idea of an impartial tribunal 
 and a fair trial. Is not this the " excremental virtue " spoken 
 of in scorn by Milton ? 
 
 Again, go to the Academy, and admire every separate 
 painting and the careful technique of our excellent artists ; 
 then sum up the total impression. Is it not one of insuffici- 
 ency, of restriction, of provincialism, of originality exhibited 
 only in caprice ? Go to the Salon, and bear away in your 
 mind the magnificent impression of the world of art therein 
 revealed. What force, what quality, what refinement, what 
 mastery of the painter's art ! Originality is found often 
 enough there, no doubt, in something bizarre, but also in 
 those astonishing works of power that rest upon a founda- 
 tion of truth. The modern French painters surpass any 
 thing the world has ever known. 
 
 It may be said that English artists exhibit successfully in the 
 Salon. Precisely ; they are the rebels to our schools, just as 
 the Herbert Spencers and the Bains are rebels in matters of 
 thought. 
 
 Again, consider the drama. I have seen, in one of the best 
 theatres in London, one of the greatest, and perhaps the most 
 poetical of all the plays of our representative dramatist, — 
 played, too, by the most famous, possibly, of our actresses. 
 
 The audience exhibited warmth only upon two occasions : 
 once when an interpolated ballet was introduced and danced 
 with that mechanical and meaningless strutting out of legs, 
 which we have been content to admire as the summit of the 
 " Terpsichorean Art;" and again, when a chariot was driven 
 on to the stage with two real white horses, which seemed to 
 have been pollarded over with flour to bring them that efiec- 
 tive colour.
 
 90 Ony Poets ! 
 
 Of course it may be rejoined that it is scarcely fair to take 
 Shakspeare as a popular English playwright, and the critic 
 may bid us look to H. A. Jones and George R. Sims. Still, 
 I maintain that, upon his own merits, however out of touch 
 with a modern audience, Shakspeare has qualities that do 
 not yield even to the most successful of our modern drama- 
 tists. 
 
 Further ; in order to make his play — it was Antony and 
 Cleopatra— passable, it had been cut to pieces (all the 
 poetry evaporated) and exhibited as a succession of specta- 
 cular effects. Can any one imagine a great play of Moliere 
 acted in Paris, by the Comedie Fran^aise, falling as flatly ; 
 yet I insist the comparison is perfectly fair. 
 
 Now, to impute all these deficiencies to the girl of sixteen is, 
 perhaps, to overrate even her malign imputed influence, but it 
 certainly is bound up with " the whole system of things." In 
 short, I mean to say that the drawing closely the limits of 
 provincialism, the shutting out ideas of expansion, and the 
 apotheosis of the idea of smug domesticity, is working like 
 a ferment of corruption in the national life, and not only in 
 art, literature, and science, and all manner of" thought," but 
 (as could be shown in the most practical affairs, and in the 
 most curious ways) of prestige, material power, and enter- 
 prise. In other words, I mean to fight neither for " Vice," 
 nor for " Sin," (these interests are ably enough championed) 
 but merely for Freedom, and, as I understand it. Virtue.
 
 91 
 
 23 BYRON AND KEATS. 
 
 Byron dismisses Keats' case somewhat loftily, as though he 
 were the superior being, without question. His cynicisms at 
 Keats' expense, however, proceeded, I feel convinced, not so 
 much from a mean disposition, but from ignorance of the real 
 circumstances, for Byron at the core in spite of all his ex- 
 travagances, vanities, and susceptibilities, was a " sweet 
 fellow." He boasts that when he was attacked, he did not 
 perish, but drank a couple of bottles of claret, and dashed 
 soon afterwards into his brilliant lampoon. Valiant, indeed, 
 to a man of title, wealth, and cntri^e into any path he 
 should care to choose ! He had but to overcome a cutting 
 personal pique, and his revenge was at hand. But with 
 Keats ! With all the spirit and gallantry of Keats' character, 
 and the intellectual power that enabled him rightly to gauge 
 the qualities of his own work, and the value of the reviews, 
 with all that fine truthfulness in him that was the very 
 essence of his nature — yes, knowing all this, I still believe 
 that the Reviews killed John Keats. They did not kill him 
 by direct consequence of their attack, especially in its imme- 
 diate effect ; but as time passed on, Keats needs must have 
 found, as he himself relates, that between him and fame, be- 
 tween him and even the ear of the public, there was a barrier 
 of prejudice, ill-will, and immense authority ; that even such a
 
 92 Our Poets ! 
 
 revenge as Byron availed himself of — if Keats' fine soul 
 could have stooped to it — uas denied vogue and acceptance ; 
 that the Reviews meant a definite bound to his career, and that 
 the final issue must be either the abandonment of his poetic 
 dreams, or heart-breaking delay to their realization ; that even 
 the meanest questions of subsistence and work were affected 
 by these hostile Reviews. That was all involved in his 
 thoughts and survey and speculations, when he declared, "I 
 have no depth to strike in" — the feeling that his poetic gift 
 was, after all, except to himself, something unreal. 
 
 FINIS.
 
 By the same Author 
 
 MODERN AUTHORS: 
 
 A Review and A Forecast. 
 
 Ward and Downey, York Street, Covent Garden.
 
 By the same Author : 
 
 APPROACHES: 
 
 The Poor Scholar's Quest of a Mecca. 
 
 Remington and Co., Limited, King Street, Covent Garden.
 
 By the same Author : 
 
 A KORAN OF LOVE: 
 
 The Caliph and Other Poems. 
 
 Remington and Co., Limited, King Street, Covent Garden.
 
 V >"! 
 
 This book IS DUE on the last 
 date stamped below.