'I- -mm'' THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES SOME CONTEMPORARY POETS (1920) To P. T. F. J. (Greatest of Critics) SOME CONTEMPORARY POETS (1920) BY HAROLD MONRO " Swans sing before they die — 'twere no bad thing Should certain persons die before they sing." Coleridge. LONDON LEONARD PARSONS PORTUGAL STREET O vous done, qui brulant d'une ardeur p^rilleuse, Courez du bel esprit la earriere 6pineuse, N'allez pas sur des vers sans fruit vous eonsumer, Ni prendre pour genie un amour de rimer ; Craignez d'un vain plaisir les trompeuses amorces, Et consultez longtemps votre esprit et vos forces. BOILEAU. First published November ig30. Leonard Parsons, Ltd. ^0\ CONTENTS PART I Some Characteristics of the Twentieth Century 7 PACB PART II A Glance Backward . . . . . .31 Robert Bridges — Thomas Hardy — Wilfrid Scawen Blunt — W. B. Yeats — Rudyard Kipling — Charles M. Doughty — AUce Meynell — Other elder poets PART III Poets and Poetasters of our time ... 45 SECTION I. A. E. Housman — John Masefield — Walter de la Mare — Ralph Hodgson — William H. Da vies — Charlotte Mew . . . - M II. Ford Madox Hueflfer — Ezra Pound — F. S. Flint — Richard Aldington — H. D. — Frederic Manning — Herbert Read — Susan Miles — Max Weber — John Rodker . . 82 in. Lascelles Abercrombie — Gordon Bottomley — Wilfrid Wilson Gibson— Ronald Ross, . in IV. Aldous Huxley — Siegfried Sassoon — Osbert Sitwell— Sacheverell Sitwell— Edith Sitwell 124 V 737185 SECTION PAGE V. G. K. Chesterton— Hilaire Belloc— J. C. Squire — ^W. J. Turner — Edward Shanks — John Freeman — Robert Nichols — Robert Graves — Gerald Gould — Fredegond Shove — Rose Macaulay — John Drink water — Alfred Noyes 143 VI. James Stephens — Padraic Colum — Joseph Campbell — Shane Leslie . . . .186 VII. D. H. Lawrence— Anna Wickham— John Middleton Murry — Helen Parry Eden — Frances Cornford . . • . .193 PART IV Some Concluding Observations .... 205 Note and Index ..... • . 217 PART 1 SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY It is related of one of our younger poets that he declared he would not publish a First Book until he knew sixteen critics per- sonally, and had dined with each. It is told of another that he prophesied his books would not begin to sell until he had obtained posts for at least a dozen of his friends on the reviewing staffs of prominent newspapers. It has been rumoured that a third was able to dispose of an edition of two thousand copies of his own book solely by means of his own personal recommendation. Verse-writing in the year 1920 is a professional occupation. Young men and women of education enjoy the practice of making clever rhymes or noting down their own feelings in loose sentences, vaguely termed " free verse." The periodicals and newspapers make a large demand for these exercises in rhyme and rhythm : it is not difficult to be accepted. The left eye of 9 the young poet must be sharply trained on the main chance. He must be abreast of competitors. He must be constantly printed in order that his name may be seen, and remain prominent. His First Book will be a great event. Every chance will have been considered. He must be talked about, whatever happens. Reviews are not much assistance ; unless they be long and confident. They must be such as to make that book an event of the literary season. Twenty thousand people must know about him, whether they read him or not. It is charming to be a well-known young poet : besides, it is of professional value. After all, he has his future to consider, and he must begin here and now to plant its attractive seed. Early in his career he will have made it his business to gain a technical acquaintance with London literary groups. As soon as he " gets to know " a few people, it will become im- portant that he shall be able to talk to these of Those, the Others he does not know, with a certain intimacy of detail. He will be a master of the important faculty of making 10 present acquaintances stepping-stones to future ones. He must learn how to joke cynically about the Great, and, if obUged to admit that he has not actually met Mr. H., Mr. N., or Sir S. G., must be able to imply skilfully that he will probably be dining with each of them next week. All this time, however, he must not cease to " write poetry." It will be well for him soon to attach himself to some group. Thus he may strengthen his position socially, besides ' intellectually, and be saved the trouble of reading. The Group will pass remarks on books it has not read, of which he will pick out the cleverest for his own use. The Group also will teach him quickly to talk extremely cleverly about modern painting. And it will publish a periodical, or anthology, in which his poems will be printed. His career, step by step, must lead upward. His position shall be made before the verses that might warrant it have been written — that is, in case he may write them. He will visit the country to study in quiet the poets most worthy of imitation, or adaptation. His II acquaintances must know that he is in the country " writing," so that they may expect something of him. Indeed, they must be kept alert for another book. Is he not a young man of promise? Mr. Z. has often said it at dinner to Sir C. S., and yet another gentleman, who now lives in the country but still occasionally visits London, has pro- nounced him ** very swagger." In the past he has read most of Keats, some Shelley, a little Wordsworth, and a certain amount of Byron. He knows the Shropshire Lad rather too well. Walter de la Mare's rhythm also handicaps his free- dom. He can understand French, has looked through Baudelaire and Verlaine, and is able to talk with respect of almost any one who wrote, or writes, vers libre. He likes Donne, but Chaucer, Milton and Campion he is still meaning to study. Long poems he hates — or imitates. Here and there, in cursory moments, he has picked up tags of Darwin. These he employs occasionally, in his psychological stuff, as aids to cynicism; with a touch of 12 Rupert Brooke added the}^ are invaluable to him. True : they help him not particularly with the Great, but they add a shade of difference to his promise : they are part of his stock-in-trade. His return from the country will be heralded by announcements of a Second Book and by hints of a trip to America — to lecture. Quite a number of fashionable women have by now, somehow or other, been drawn to his cause. The second-hand booksellers already list the half-sold thousand copies of his first volume as " 1st Edition." People who have only seen his photograph call him " good-looking " ; some say " beautiful "; others even that he is " like Keats." The ball rolls. He is asked to dine at Ladies' Clubs; Societies want him to take the Chair; his acquaintances think him worth real cultivation; some one calls him famous ; many repeat the word. "Such is; what is to be? " His sixteen reviewers have praised him ; his four hundred acquaintances have laughed with him (but at him behind his back) ; Mr. G., Mr. M., and a few Sirs have talked to him, or about him, 13 at dinner; the Ladies' Clubs have enjoyed the idea of him for an evening or two; schoolgirls have wondered if he is really like his photograph. And the poet ? So far, what is he ? A young man with a lively enjoyment of natural or artificial beauty, a sensitiveness for the right word, a vast instinct for self- advertisement. It will be, as his career progresses, the business of the young professional to maintain strict appearance of such an attitude of scorn for the common public as is supposed by that common public to be natural to those who write verse or paint. He must freely display all the typical characteristics of the role he has adopted. Actually he is much in love with that public and most desirous of its approval. Among his colleagues he will dis- cuss his sales almost as freely as the pro- fessional novelist. He is not satisfied with the anticipation of fame. He desires to grasp and to enjoy immortality while yet mortal. He dreams of the impression his poem will make on the public mind, until that dream becomes more absorbing than the creation of 14 the poem itself, and his desire to be thought a poet is stronger than his love of poetry. The object of the Group is generally the attainment of wider publicity by a combina- tion of forces. It is a support to individuals not strong enough to stand alone. It is at the same time a useful school for young poets. The custom has been imported from Paris with its factional acrimonies, jealousies and scandal-mongerings, but without its pleasant and private inner qualities. Most French groups are societies of friends, not Unions of Professional Poets. The members of English Cliques meet less at supper than in periodicals and anthologies, less in private than in public. The individual members of a group may profit, if they are observant, by learning to avoid the vices of their colleagues, or by imitating their virtues. Thus it may happen, and it generally does, that one, two, or more persons emerge out of a movement of several, stronger by reason of collaboration. They will " rise o'er stepping-stones of their dead " confreres, who, continuing inevitably to imitate themselves or each other, will sink 15 out of a temporary limelight into the literary obscurity to which they were predestined. The common claim of the modern group is to differ by the possession of a secret unknown to those outside its circle. The nature of the secret varies, but naturally it must be con- nected in some way with one of the following — 1. Choice of subject. 2. Method of treatment. 3. Idiosyncrasy of rhythm. 4. Style. Sincerity, as a primal quality, holds, in general, a lower place than might be expected among the essential characteristics that form the standard of the average group. The Rhymers' Club, which was the Adam of the modern system in England, and which included such writers as W. B. Yeats, Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson, and also for a time, and spasmodically, John Davidson, was a private affair, and little was heard of it at the time of its existence. Its attention was devoted rather to the creation of poetry than to the recruitment of a new Public. It met 16 for conversation, for mutual criticism, and for supper. The two volumes of " The Book of the Rhymers' Club " did not, either, exceed a circulation of one thousand copies. The poets of the Rhymers' Club, and certain others, as Henley, Stevenson, Wilham Watson, filled the transition period of the 1890's with dignity but no great distinction. The chief poets of independent creative genius who spanned the change of century were Robert Bridges, Thomas Hardy, Francis Thompson, "Michael Field," W. B. Yeats, Arthur Symons and John Davidson. About the beginning of the new century it was thought by many of the best-known critics that a dramatic poet of real import- ance had appeared in the person of Stephen Phillips. His plays were taken seriously by managers, and two of them had the rare distinction of being performed consecutively for long runs in London ; also a literary prize was awarded to his poems. Somewhat later Alfred Noyes was talked about. But neither of these began the new movement. Its roots are in one book, the influence of which can B 17 be heard ringing through the verse of more than half the younger Hving poets of the strictly English school, namely A. E. Hous- man's Shropshire Lad, published in 1896. About 1890 literary language had passed into a condition of the utmost stultification. A century filled with poets of every denomina- tion and of extreme productiveness had drained our poetic vocabulary to its lees. A few late-comers, such as Lewis Morris, were stirring the sediment. New poets of originality were little sought, and their prospects were not good, for the public was still satisfied with the achievements of the immediate past, and was tired and conservative. These circumstances, among others, provide a clue to the discovery of why A Shrop- shire Lad was immediately, and has been continuously, popular. It was the antithesis of that bulky pomposity of late Victorianism. Those jaded readers of good intention, on the verge of a desperate reaction against poetry, snatched eagerly at this tiny volume of some sixty lyrics. Its pure style, small bulk, con- densed sentimentality, and general appeal 18 rendered it the ideal book of popular poetry for the moment at which it was published. The ease with which it could be imitated, and the merit to be acquired by respectable plagiarism, were alike irresistible. The influence persists even into our own time. Glancing through a few volumes at random, the following corroborative verses can be picked out : — come not courting me, Good Sir, No use it is, and vain : Another lad was here before And will come back again. The batter>' grides and jingles. Mile succeeds to mile ; Shaking the noonday sunshine. The guns lunge out awhile. And then are still awhile. Blue skies are over Cotswold And April snows go by, The lasses turn their ribbons. For April 's in the sky, The men that marched and sang with me Are most of them in Flanders now : 1 lie abed and hear the wind Blow softly through the budding bough. 19 A-lying in the heather, Three miles from college tower, I heard the bells from college Tell out each sunny hour. II The first decade of the present century was extraordinarily barren. Few of the new generation of poets had as yet attracted attention, although some had published books. All the important work of Francis Thompson and Arthur Symons was already printed. Ernest Dowson died in 1900, W. E. Henley in 1903. The sudden fame of Stephen Phillips was rapidly declining. John Davidson did not kill himself until 1909, but his only notable new books, if we reject Mammon, were The Testament of John Davidson (1908) and Fleet Street and other Poems (posthumous) . W. B. Yeats had already published most of his best work, with the exception of some of the plays. Laurence Binyon did not succeed in adding to the interest of the decade. One literary event of supreme importance alone redeems that dreary period, namely the pub- 20 lication of Mr. Thomas Hardy's Dynasts. It should also be added that the year 1906 was brought to its knees by the vast load of Mr. Charles Doughty's epic The Dawn in Britain, and that in 1907 the publication of Mr. Herbert Trench's New Poems caused a small sensation. Mrs. Shorter still enjoyed a slight popularity. The chief newcomers were John Masefield, W. H. Davies, and Alfred Noyes. The two ladies who wrote under the joint pseudonym " Michael Field " remained, and remain, strangely unknown. By 1910 the numbing effect of the Victorian period seems finally to have relaxed its pres- sure on the brain of the rising generation. The new movement which then began was related neither to the Tennysonian era, nor to the brief epoch of reaction generally known as the " nineties," nor, indeed, to the com- paratively barren decade noted above. Let us trace some of the newer tendencies at work. In 1910 the expression //'e^ verse had hardly been used. The blank verse of Lascelles Abercrombie was a trial to many of the soberer judges who sought to " scan " it, and 21 failed. The new American movement had not been heard of in England. Of French poets Verlaine and Baudelaire were thought sufficiently new ; Mallarme, Gustave Kahn, and such of the vers libristes as were already practising their free verse were looked upon as curiosities. Certain periodicals, however, were now show- ing an intelligent interest in young poetry. Ford Madox Hueffer had founded the English Review ; several critics of discrimination were writing for the New Age ; men of a fresh generation were meeting like conspirators in obscure places. About this time Ezra Pound appeared from America, and simul- taneously published his two books Exultations and Personce, which were widely reviewed, and induced a slight disturbance in the cold hearts even of the established critics. In 191 1 Rupert Brooke's Poems were pub- lished. Their circulation was small, but they did not fail to cause excitement and irritation. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson made a decided im- pression with Daily Bread, a series of episodes in dramatic form from the lives of the poor, 22 and a fifth book by W. H. Davies appeared. Then in 191 1 the English Review, now under the Editorship of Austin Harrison, pubhshed " The Everlasting Mercy." Here was stuff that the general pubhc could appreciate with- out straining its intelligence. People who thought that Enghsh poetry had died with Tennyson suddenly recognised their error. The blank verse of Stephen Phillips was a mere echo of the Victorian manner, but the rapid free doggerel of " The Everlasting Mercy," its modernity, its bold colloquialism, and its narrative interest awakened the curiosity of the public of 191 1, and a revival of the dormant interest in poetry was at once assured. In January 191 2 the Poetry Review was founded. It was crude and tentative : never- theless it tried to maintain a standard of critical judgment, and it brought together several poets of the younger generation. F. S. Flint contributed some very fine essays on French poetry : to these partly can be traced the subsequent interest of certain groups in the idea of vers litre. 23 The Poetry Bookshop was opened in January 191 2, and the monthly Poetry Review was converted into the quarterly Poetry and Drama. In the previous November, prior to the formal opening of the Bookshop, volume one of Georgian Poetry had been published. This anthology was originally suggested by Rupert Brooke. It was discussed with Mr. Edward Marsh, who at once became its patron, and eagerly followed up the idea. It included poets, who, by the variety of their thought and manner, showed the diversity of existing talent. The first volume covered the years 1911-12. Three more years were allowed to elapse before the publication of a second; the third and fourth followed at intervals of two years. Already in Number 2 some of the " older " writers were allowed to drop out. This second is often considered the best of the series. The third introduces J. C. Squire, Robert Nichols, and the war poems of Siegfried Sassoon, and in the fourth a tendency towards a Georgian manner is noticeable. Some of the writers are imitating each other in choice of 24 subject, or treatment, or style. This volume, unlike the first, could not be taken for a haphazard selection from the poetry of the period. It is too like the compilation of a Group. Georgian Poetry set an example which was soon wideh' followed. Its success was the envy of groups, and of rival anthologists who did not sympathise with the taste, or agree with the choice, of Mr, Edward Marsh. While, on the right hand, there were many who deemed these poems coarse, daring, insincere, or even offensive to the traditions of EngHsh Literature, to those of the extreme left they sounded no more than the last faint re-echo of the Great Tradition. Between 1910 and 1915 the new movement rapidly acquired direction and force. Antho- logies multiplied. Besides Georgian Poetry there was Oxford Poetry, and Cambridge Poetry. There were the " Imagist " antho- logies ; later there was the annual anthology. Wheels. There were collections of children's poetry and of child-poets, of late Victorian verse, of nature verse, of sea verse, of mystical 25 verse, of " Catholic " verse (not in the ultra- montane sense), and in 1915 the English Association challenged the popularity of Georgian Poetry with its Poems of To-day, a book ostensibly compiled " in order that boys and girls, already perhaps familiar with the great classics of the English speech, may also know something of the newer poetry of their own day," and including, besides hving writers both of the older and younger genera- tions, others of the last century " still vivid memories among us," such as Meredith, Thompson, and Stevenson. The compilers of Poems of To-day adopted the standard of taste of an average Anglican Bishop. The book created no sensation : it has been an amazing success. New Numbers, a quarterly founded in 1914 by Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson for the publication of their own poems, just overlapped the declaration of war, and some Dean quoted Brooke's soldier-sonnets (in the last number) from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey. Meanwhile on the very morrow of the 26 declaration an uproar of song burst from the throats of our lyrical poets. The Times for August 5th gave prominence to verses by Henry Newbolt ; on the 6th to a sonnet by William Watson ; on the 7th R. E. Vernede occupied a large space, and on the 8th an expected but unfortunate poem by the Laureate took up its position. The names of all the well-known followed each other in ceremonial sequence into daily print. Kipling arrived somewhat late and breathless and obscure. William Watson panted through a series of preposterous threats and ejaculations, such as : — The Mill of Lies is loud, Whose overseer, Germania's Over-lord, Hath overmuch adored The Over-sword, And shall be overthrown, with the overproud. Mr. Hardy, not until September gth, printed in The Times his strong and dignified " March of the Soldiers." John Masefield wrote one poem only, and that of great beauty. A few others were able to keep their heads — and their reputations. 27 When the efforts of well-known writers had subsided some of their poems were at once reprinted in anthologies, and minor or un- known bards were allowed to take their places in the line. Thus many young authors acquired spurious reputations under the cloak of Patriotism : these might, in fact, be called War Profiteers. The danger of writing verse to fulfil a demand is well known. Manufac- tured poetry seldom withstands the test of analysis. It is an axiom that emotion must flow spontaneously into appropriate language, so that the poet who is aware of his public, and of what it expects of him, often passes through various stages of disastrous self- consciousness into artificiality or vacuity. An editor or publisher who plies his favourite authors for manuscripts too often has to endure the experience of receiving from them compositions much inferior to his expectations. This book is to deal with living poets of the younger generation, that is, with those who still have the power and the apparent wish to continue their career as writers. Poets like J. E. Flecker and Rupert Brooke 28 will only be mentioned as influences, though really they are more livmg than many another who still has breath in his body. As a treatise on current poetry it will attempt to provide the guidance necessary for the uninformed, and at the same time to offer certain facts and problems for the consideration of the informed. Flattery will be absent from its pages, and the fear of giving offence will not influence its composition. The intention is to supply the public with reasonable data on which to base its own preferences. It is not to be imagined that so many genuinely good poets as the large number that will be dis- cussed could possibly be living and writing contemporaneously at any period in any country, but it is conceivable that such a quantity of interesting writers may co-exist, a proportion of them possessing the originality and insight requisite to the good poet and the remainder forming a background, and in more senses than one completing (if only by contrast) the literary atmosphere of the moment, from which the more universal figures may emerge. , 29 PART II A GLANCE BACKWARD Round the margin of the plot we are about to explore stand, some rather still, or with unoccupied hands and contemplative eyes, others (we may imagine) with a light ironical smile playing on their lips, others perhaps with the jealous sneer of disappoint- ment, but most rather aloof now and pre- occupied with memories of the last century — they stand, the elder poets, who, whatever they may yet add to the roll of their works, have, by the existing scope of their produc- tion qualified for some, or no, place in the annals of English literature, and indicated clearly enough what they will probably be worth to the future. For quantity a few of these rival the masters of the past. The collected poems of Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Thomas Hardy, or Mr. Wilfrid Blunt are as bulky as the average library edition of a classic. This is not alone due to the long period of time c 33 which their works cover. It is partly ac- counted for by the fluency of self-confidence. If to the three mentioned above we add the names of Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and Mr. Charles Doughty, it will generally be agreed that we have named the six most important living poets of the older generation. With the exception of Mr. Doughty (who was already a literary veteran when his first poetical work was published) all these originally appeared in print some years before 1900, and the greater part of their poetry was conceived, if not written, before the reaction against long poems had attained its present vehemence — or shall we say, rather, before the generation had arisen that is tortured with self-con- sciousness and too uncertain of its own powers ever fully to use them ? These six great poets are men of strong and very different personality. Mr. Robert Bridges, we are told, accepted the Laureate- ship on his own terms, and it is certain that, in his almost complete abstention from the composition of ceremonial odes, or of artificial 34 complimentary poems, as by his continued concentration on the theory and practice of his own proper art, he has restored much dignity to the office, besides adding a sig- nificance which it had not previously pos- sessed. When a newspaper photographer called on Mr. Bridges, the Laureate leaned back in his easy chair and hfted his feet high on to the mantelpiece : in that pose he appeared on the front page of a daily picture- paper. After Horatio Bottomley, with customary impudence, had tried in Parlia- ment to cast ridicule on Mr. Bridges, the Laureate was again visited by the Press. His comment on the incident was said to be : " I don't care a damn." Nor need he. His poetry will be read and enjoyed as long as the English language is written and under- stood. Mr. Thomas Hardy has hved isolated in his native county. His attitude towards pressmen, critics, biographers, Americans and other inquisitive people is related to be even more overbearing than that of Mr. Bridges. He did not begin publishing poetry until 35 1895 • His ballads and lyrics are characterised by freedom from the poetic conventions of the English tongue, and by a certain awkwardness of style due to their emotional vigour. The Dynasts : A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars in Nineteen Acts and One Hundred and Thirty Scenes, is, he writes in his preface, *' a play intended simply for mental performance, and not for the stage." Whatever his intention, some critics have begged to differ with its author as to the dramatic potentialities of The Dynasts. As a poem, it is unique in English literature ; as a play it is undoubtedly the forerunner (if not in itself the first model) of a dramatic form that, before long, will be the preoccu- pation of European producers. In its en- tirety, it will probably first be presented in Germany. Mr. Hardy is more interested in content than in form. Assuming that a small amount of literary scandal may be admitted to enliven the pages of a work such as the present, we should like to retail the following tiny legend : " After having completed The Dynasts, Mr. Hardy 36 was seen at the British Museum studying various works on technique, prosody, and scansion/' Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's Esther : A Young Man's Tragedy together with his Satan Ab- solved : A Victorian Mystery and Griselda : A Society Novel in Rhymed Verse would alone entitle him to the respect due to a great writer. But he has also published hundreds of sonnets and lyrical poems, and several plan's, besides pastorals and translations [s/c] from the Arabic, including the well-known " Steahng of the Mare." Much of the minor poetry is that of an intellectual country gentleman, a lover of horses, nature and woman. Early in 1914 a band of poets journeyed to his country-seat to make a presentation. The following verses of address (we believe by Ezra Pound) were read : — Because you have gone your individual gait, Written fine verses, made mock of the world, Svs-ung the grand style, not made a trade of art. Upheld Mazzini and detested institutions ; We, who are little given to respect, Respect you, and having no better way to show it, Bring you this stone to be some record of it. 37 Acknowledging the presentation of a carved marble reliquary, Mr. Blunt is reported to have said that he felt, to a certain extent, an impostor. He had never really been a poet. He had written a certain amount of verse, but only when he was down on his luck and had made mistakes either in love or politics or in some branch of active life. He did not publish a single verse with his name until he was forty- three. When he had heard of the intended visit of the deputa- tion he had at first been rather puzzled and wondered whether he was to expect some of his horsey friends, or political admirers. When he found that the visit was connected with his poetry he was all the more flattered and astonished. Mr. W. B. Yeats is the antithesis of Mr. Blunt. His whole life has been devoted to his art. He is the most famous of living Irish poets, and is generally considered the most active force in what is known as the " Celtic Revival." In him is no trace of the distant and haughty attitude of the typical English poet. He is an expert and adept in 38 every branch of imaginative literature. Un- like the large majority of his contemporaries, he adds to the art of composing poetry the art, so rare to-day, of speaking verse. His lyrics are, in the original sense, l^Tical, which is to say, that in the nature of their rhythm and through their marked variety of stress they lead the reader to suppose, or imagine, an accompanying musical counterpoint. In the literal sense of that abused term, they sing. Mr. Yeats is a strong advocate of the application of the poet solely to his art, the difficulties of which he has never failed to indicate in his own frequent and scrupulous revision of his poems and dramas, also in his critical prose. With the verse of Mr. Rudyard Kipling we are not much concerned. Its sale far exceeds that of any other living verse-writer — except, perhaps, John Oxenham. Mr. Kip- hng's strong individuality has made itself felt throughout English-speaking lands. On ac- count of his political views he would, if the choice had been relegated to general suffrage, 39 undoubtedly have been offered the Laureate- ship on the death of Alfred Austin. His rhythms are of the popular type, and on account of the extreme ease with which they can be copied, they have provided a model for the plagiarism of many an ambitious poetaster incapable of cultivating, or too lazy to practise, an original manner of his own. Of Mr. Charles Doughty's Dawn in Britain it has been cynically conjectured that only one man in the whole world has read it through from beginning to end, and that — himself. It is doubtful whether such an epic be compatible with the literary taste of our own period, in expressing which very doubt we imply that some future age may wonder at our lack of attention. Mr. Doughty has avoided the pitfalls of post-Miltonic epic- writers. He has created a new epic language, which, in construction, its omission of articles and use of the pure genitive and conciseness of phrase, is akin to the classical languages; for vocabulary, he has borrowed wholesale from Spenser and the Elizabethans; and as 40 to atmosphere, he has made one admirably suited to the portrayal of those " antique wights " of " uncouth speech " with whom he is concerned. The reader could only wish that such frequent and clumsy inversion of the natural order of words had not been found necessary to the close-packed con- densation of his epic style. Wlien the same methods are applied in subsequent poems to other, and even, though in a minor degree, to modern subjects, a numbness creeps on the mind and a suspicion of wilful perversity. Such clumsiness as appears in the opening lines of The Titans is surely unwarrantable : — 'Neath Heaven's high stars, whereof we some see cease. Yet Mr. Doughty is a giant among poets, a fact only to be fully recognised as we approach the minor figures of the period at present under discussion. Alice Meynell pubhshed her first volume in 1875. She is an early example of the reticence that is now conspicuous in most branches of English poetry. Of the six great poets referred to above it cannot be said 41 of any that he is not, besides being a poet, a man of the world. Mr. Bridges was a Doctor of Medicine and has, we understand, been all his life a genial man-among-men ; Mr. Hardy was an architect, earned his reputation as a novelist, and acquired his experience outside the circles of literature; Mr. Blunt, admittedly, has always been more interested in horses than in poetry; Mr. Yeats has taken an active part through- out his life in the practical side of theatrical production; Mr. Kipling is a political pamphleteer; Mr. Doughty was an explorer of uncivilised countries. Mrs. Meynell, however, and other poets who will be mentioned in the course of this book, seem to have devoted themselves so exclusively to their art that they have not realised it as an outcome of the habit of Life that all poetry is intended to express. Among the less important living poets of the elder generation, Arthur Symons, Henry Newbolt and T. Sturge Moore should be designated as writers of strong personality. Mr. Edmund Gosse himself stated in the 43 preface to the collected edition of his poems that they " belong in essence to a period which has ceased to exist, to an age which is as dead as the dodo." It is impossible to overlook the virulent talent of Sir William Watson, or the persistent loyalty to all the main traditions of Mr. Laurence Binyon. The poems, however, of Arthur Symons, T. Sturge Moore, Henry Newbolt, Herbert Trench and Alfred Douglas are probably the most representative among those of this second category of the poets overlapping, or immediately following, the Victorian era. There remain to be mentioned : A. E., an Irish mystic of the Celtic School; Maurice Hewlett, a writer of several long poems, some of them of much psychological interest, and others of historic value ; Margaret L. Woods, whose dramas in lively exciting verse will probably be recognised as among the best specimens of the pure dramatic literature of the time ; Katharine Tynan ; Francis Coutts ; Richard Le GalHenne ; A. C. Benson ; Norman Gale; Arthur Quiller-Couch, and T. W. H. Crosland, a poet of occasional vigour. 43 It may be remarked of some of the above that they seem Hke people whose eyes, ears, and brains are closed in respect of the state of our general Humanity, or who behave as if they thought Parnassus had been enclosed within the walls of some Landed Proprietor. 44 PART III POETS AND POETASTERS OF OUR TIME Section I The style of A. E. Housman is built of a combination of all the principal elements of popular poetry. His subjects are those most common to human existence; friend- ship, love, character, heroism, homesickness, crime, death, the last figuring in excessive proportion to the others : at least a quarter of his book is solely about Death. He uses the traditional ballad-forms and song-forms; his rhythms are of the simplest kind ; many of his poems tell a story ; all contain at least the elements of a story, and all " sing." He very frequently rouses feelings of pity; he stimulates love of home and of the native- land ; he excites admiration for heroic action ; he touches constantly and ironically on the disappointments of young love. All the most ordinary things that people do, see or think in the course of their little lives are mentioned in his poems. Two salient characteristics 47 mark them as different from the rest of their kind : his philosophy of hfe and death, and some pecuhar personal method in his use of vocabulary and form. Some one has called A Shropshire Lad the " English Rubaiyat " — a suggestive com- parison. These English lyrics present a western version of that philosophy of life con- tained in Fitzgerald's beautiful fragment from the Eastern poet. Neither work is pessimistic : each offers a compensation for the certainty that death is a final end to personal existence. The western compensa- tion is Friendship, a word the true meaning of which clergymen and social workers try to confuse by spelling it " Brotherhood." Mr. Housman's style can be analj^sed with as much ease and more success than it can be imitated. It is coloured by the very frequent use of local names : Shropshire ; Severn ; Ludlow ; Shrewsbury ; Bredon ; Corve ; Teme ; Hughley. It is characterised by the persistent recurrence of a certain type of word or phrase, chiefly rustic : boys ; lovers ; lads ; wed- ding; fair; sweetheart; chap; friend; comrade; youth; one-and-twenty ; good 48 people ; my love and I ; the lads and the girls ; fortunate fellows ; country lover ; girls go ma^dng ; golden friends ; Dick and Ned ; rose-lipped maiden and lightfoot lad. It shows the greatest forbearance, contain- ing not a word too many and revealing a complete resistance to the common tempta- tion to add ornament, the yielding to which has ruined the style of so many a lesser poet. It conveys the appearance of ease, and the feeling of vigour. It is truly a style : not a manner. Lastly, where it includes poetical devices or the use of inversion, these are so discriminatingly managed as to render them either unobtrusive, or else noticeably and characteristically proper to their context. The compilation of A Shropshire Lad evidently covered a period of several years. Its poems appear to represent successive phases of a disciplined literary development : they are suggestive individually of a series of recreative holidays, of spasmodic escapes from the atmosphere of a scholarly routine. Their most inventive metrical innovation is best represented in that well-known lyric, " Bredon Hill." Here wc have an ordinary D 49 half-rhymed, three-stressed quatrain; the unrhymed Hnes with a feminine termination. The structure and rhythm of the stanza is such, according to the traditions of Enghsh verse, as to make the reader expect the certainty of a halt at the end of each fourth line. The device, therefore, of adding a fifth line, with a plaintive echoing cadence, to each quatrain is one which never fails to produce a pleasurable surprise both in the case of each stanza and on every new reading of the whole poem. Our complaint against A. E. Housman must be that he is not a genius. In the steady light of such talent, we others are able to sit down comfortably, and examine, joint by joint, the artificial structure that we suspect, while no flash interferes with the routine of our analytical speculations. Thus it has happened that his followers have developed a kind of school of designed pseudo-perfecti- tude, based vicariously upon, but uninformed by the native impulses that flow through the stanzas of that new intellectual folk-poetry he has so deftly invented. 50 The poetry of John Masefield is domin- ated and pervaded throughout by a reUgious behef in the idea of Beauty. An examina- tion of his lyrical poems reveals the gradual development of a crude instinct into a mature and conscious knowledge. The faith he has now reached is fanatical. His latest lyrics repeat and expand it to exhaustion. Salt Water Ballads (some of them written in boy- hood) are straightforward exercises in the precise metrical utterance of individual ex- perience. He was a mariner himself, which fact rings through such a refrain as : — Hear the yam of a sailor, An old yam leamed at sea. Behind this we have the real Masefield, consecrated to his cause from early youth : — Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth, The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth ; — Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth ! His poems and tales, whether lyric, ballad, or narrative, have a grip of fact and sense of reality combined with queer ironical pathos : — With anchors hungr}' for English ground, And the bloody fun of it is, they're drowned ! 51 Most of the early pieces are in sailor jargon, a shorthand of the sea, with a peculiar ab- breviation, " 'n' ", which conveys a dozen different words. A primitive salty mariner- folk rambles through them, dressed in red bandanas or tinted dungaree, and recites or explains, in a monotonous galloping metre with heavy beats, its raw belief in ghostly superstitions and its helpless indifference to cruelty, or to death. It is the old sailing- ship mariner with bad, but not vulgar, grammar, who, seen through the eyes of Masefield, is a beatific fellow with visions of a Golden City, or Blessed Isles, or a ** King- dom Come " which is "a sunny pleasant anchoring," or who, after he has become a " rusty corp " and been thrown overboard, easily adopts bird-like form, sailing above the rigging as a seagull. Also there are pirates : — Ah ! the pig-tailed, quidding pirates and the pretty pranks we played, All have since been put a stop-to by the naughty Board of Trade ; The poetry of John Masefield in its early stages was comparatively artless. He was a good story-teller with a strong sense of colour 52 and excitement, a limited lyrical capacity, and an obvious personal mission. As he comes inland, his art somewhat develops, but its subjects are connected principally with love of the sea, meditation on death, the worship of ideal Beauty. He returns with less frequency to those first galloping or chanty measures. "On Eastnor Knoll," "Fragments" and the famous and beautiful poem "Cargoes" show his lyrical powers in full development. Obviously the poet must be almost without self-criticism who can have allowed the first stanza of " Midsummer Night," besides many others equally absurd, to be reprinted through several editions : — The perfect disc of the sacred moon Through still blue heaven serenely swims, And the lone bird's liquid music brims The peace of the night with a perfect tune. He seems never to have reconsidered his bad verses. "My road leads me forth," he explains. In quest of that one beauty God put me here to find. His consecration is absolute : — O beauty on the darkness hurled, Be it through me you shame the world. 53 His idealisation takes many aspects; it was with him from infancy : — When the white clover opened Paradise And God lived in a cottage up the brook, Beauty you Hfted up my sleeping eyes And filled my heart with longing with a look. In the book called Lollingdon Downs he seeks in a series of poems to convey by inference the nature of that abstract presence : — Beauty, the ghost, the spirit's common speech, incarnated or represented over the whole earth, which is to him the pattern for all conduct and the measure of all values. It is, of course, that same Spirit of Beauty, the " awful shadow of some unseen Power " to which Shelley dedicated himself, and the most cogent remark we can pass on this particular book is that Shelley would certainly have carried it about in his pocket. The following hues are Hke an epitome of the " Hymn to Intellectual Beauty " : — that Beauty I have sought In women's hearts, in friends, in many a place, In barren hours passed at grips with thought. Beauty of woman, comrade, earth and sea. Incarnate thought come face to face with me. 54 In "A Creed/' the opening stanzas of which are here quoted, he expresses, with clarity, his behef concerning the Hfe of the individual : — I hold that when a person dies His soul returns again to earth ; Arrayed in some new flesh-disguise Another mother gives him birth. With sturdier limbs and brighter brain The old soul takes the road again. Such is my own belief and trust ; This hand, this hand that holds the pen, Has many a hundred times been dust And turned, as dust, to dust again ; These eyes of mine have bhnked and shone In Thebes, in Troy, in Babylon. In many other poems he enlarges on this faith, and he searches the horizons of history for its corroboration. He apparently admits free will and the personal power to control fate. All conquest is attained through realisa- tion of the spirit of Beauty. Neither his philosophy nor his science takes us very far beyond Tennyson. As regards individual immortality he is often specula- tive and contradictory. In " The Passing Strange " he adopts the measure of " The 55 Two Voices/' and in a sonnet he uses the expression " behind the veil." With a few exceptions, however, his lyrical is a more finished product than his narrative poetry. Curiously, he is more careful even of his prose than of his narrative verse, in which he seems to trust to instinct, or to luck. Being a raconteur on a large scale, he finds attention to detail irksome. He is apparently under the impression that a certain sufficient beauty is already established in the mere thrill of a good story, or that the critical reader, under the stress of excitement, will be disarmed of criticism, John Masefield has not allowed himself to be warned by the example of Byron, Words- worth, Southey, Scott and others. Like them he has written too carelessly and printed too often. He is the opposite of A. E. Housman. His best filters through long passages of the mediocre, and, on account of too little patience in himself, he has sorely tried the patience of an expectant and enthusiastic public. He shows to advantage in certain inter- mediate poems, neither quite lyrical nor 56 narrative, such as " Biography," '* Ships," and "August, 1914 " (his only war-poem). Some of the narratives, for instance " Rosas," "The Daffodil Fields," "Enslaved," "The Hounds of Hell " and the play " PhiHp the King," contain passages of surprising in- feriority. A few brief examples may be quoted. From " The Daffodil Fields " : — You'll say I've broken Maty's heart ; the heart Is not the whole of life, but an inferior part, From " The Hounds of Hell " :— A glow shone on the whitish thing, It neither stirred nor spoke : In spite of faith, a shuddering Made the good saint to choke. From " Phihp the King " :— The dead will rise from unsuspected slime ; God's chosen will be gathered in God's time. These instances are not the most shocking that could be found. In some cases the heat of the narrative has been apparently so violent that even grammar seems to have faltered. But let us turn our attention to the general value of the best of these longer poems rather than fix it on the defects of the worst. " The 57 ' Wanderer/ " for instance, is a lyrical narrative of exquisite beauty. I looked with them towards the dimness ; there Gleamed like a Spirit striding out of night, A full-rigged ship unutterably fair, Her masts like trees in winter, frosty-bright. '* The River " is a thrilling story of the terrible fate of a ship. " Dauber " is a long sea yarn in the author's favourite seven-line stanza, sad, realistic, with beautiful passages and few serious blemishes. " The Widow in the Bye Street," a tale of Black Country murder, is probably the best of all these poems. The characters are clear in every detail ; the atmosphere is registered by means of a run- ning descriptive commentary that harmonises at every point with the development of the action. Fate moves about like a living pro- tagonist prompting the persons of the story to play their part in strict accordance with his design. " Reynard the Fox " is a thriUing narrative with great descriptive passages, particularly in the second part. It was handed recently by some literary sportsman to the huntsman of one of the crack midland packs, to whom it 58 appealed strongh'. His criticism was as follows : "A damned good run — but a Bank Holiday Field." " The Everlasting Mercy " has already been referred to in Part I. The workmanship of " Enslaved " is so poor that, as a poem, it is hardly tolerable. The question may be raised whether this and some of the other narratives should have been written down in verse at all. The poetical material at the author's disposal has proved insufficient : padding of a most inferior kind has resulted. The perpetual recurrence of certain abstract epithets such as " perfect," or qualifying nouns, such as " queen " in reference to a ship, becomes very wearisome. Landscapes are dulled by too frequent descriptive repetition of their salient characteristics : streams, celandine, and smoke from cottage chimneys by day ; stars, stars, always stars by night. It is difficult, if not impossible, to " place " John Masefield. He differs widely from his immediate contemporaries, none of whom have ventured so extensive a range of production. H we survey the past, wc find that the fame of most narrative poetry has hardly survived 59 its own generation. Many of his lyrical poems, at all events, will be permanently embodied among the treasures of the English language. Very old are we men ; Our dreams are tales Told in dim Eden By Eve's nightingales ; We wake and whisper awhile, But, the day gone by. Silence and sleep like fields Of amaranth lie. Those people who are born by mysterious circumstances into an imaginative world foreign to their surrounding material world are often so bewildered by the incongruity of their state that they become neurotics. Some such condition is implied by Walter DE LA Mare in a poem called " Haunted." The deepest solitude can bring Only a subtler questioning In thy divided heart ; thy bed Recalls at dawn what midnight said ; Seek how thou wilt to feign content Thy flaming ardour's quickly spent ; Soon thy last company is gone, And leaves thee — ^with thyself — alone. 60 As for himself, he takes up the following atti- tude when possible : — Leave this vain questioning. Is not sweet the rose ? Sings not the wild bird ere to rest he goes ? Hath not in miracle brave June returned ? Bums not her beauty as of old it burned ? O foolish one to roam So far in thine own mind away from home ! The material world, as he knows it, is a gay cloak in which our dreams and tales wrap themselves. " Mrs. Earth " is not a par- ticularly redoubtable old lady : — Mrs. Earth the slenderest bone \Miitens in her bosom cold, But Mrs. Earth can't change my dreams No more than ruby or gold. He shows about the same interest in her characteristics as in those of the other old ladies he describes : Miss Loo, Old Susan, Miss T., or the " poor old widow " ; and any other beings, though they may happen to be witches, dwarfs, gnomes, fairies, impersona- tions, or even phantoms are no less familiar or more supernatural to him than " real " beings. One way of stating the truth about him is to say that he finds it almost impossible to distinguish between the two worlds usually 6i known as real and unreal ; another that the Real is so actually real to him that he abso- lutely fails to differentiate its legendary from its historical form. Thus when he begins a poem I spied John Mouldy in his cellar, Deep down twenty steps of stone ; In the dark he sat a-smiling, Smiling there alone. we have no idea at first that this same John will turn out to be what is commonly known as " abstraction," any more than we are ever able to determine whether the '* poor old widow in her weeds " who " sowed her garden with wild flower seeds " maybe a real widow- woman, subject to the calls of the Rate Col- lector, or than we care whether the " three jolly farmers " actually tried, or did not, to dance each other off the ground — for in the end, if we learn his poetry well enough, we become as careless as the poet himself in distinguishing between so-called ReaHty and Unreality. It should be observed that Walter de la Mare, unlike most poets, never boasts of the pleasures of the imagination, or of the wonders 62 it can call forth, by merel}^ naming them lor the editication of his readers. His series of " Characters from Shakespeare " describes Falstaff, lago, Polonius, Hamlet and others in such a manner as to lead us solemnly to wonder whether the poet has not some ulterior evidence for establishing them as authenti- cated historical persons ; but then we turn up such other characters as Martha, Mrs. Mac- queen, the Scarecrow, or that Englishman, of whom it may be read He said no more, that sailorman, But in a reverie Stared like the figure of a ship With painted eyes to sea. and, finding them just as " historical " in their essence, we understand the actual lack of difference between incarnate realit}^ and imaginative reality. The poem called " The Listeners " brings to a climax our incompet- ence to distinguish between men and ghosts, for here the " lonely Traveller " who knocks on the moonlit door, though able to ride up to the lone house, and to ride away again, and even to speak, is no more human than the " host of phantom listeners," and when he 63 leaves them silent and unstirring in their dwelHng-place we feel that the lack of inter- course has only been due to some failure to approach them in the correct manner, and we are not at all certain whether the traveller, who does speak, be not the unreaHty and the listeners, who fail to speak, the reahty in the episode. Walter de la Mare is a poet to whom form is mere outside appearance, acceptable only so far as it tends to convey some significant idea ; to whom the phenomena of life are symbols that can unfailingly be interpreted by the imagination. His references to Science are few. The following sonnet, though not among the maturer poems, is, nevertheless, an extra- ordinarily definite statement of the relation between Science and Poetry : — THE HAPPY ENCOUNTER I saw sweet Poetry turn troubled eyes On shaggy Science nosing in the grass. For by that way poor Poetry must pass On her long pilgrimage to Paradise. He snuffled, grunted, squealed ; perplexed by flies. Parched, weatherworn, and near of sight, alas ! From peering close where very little was In dens secluded from the open skies. 64 But Poetry- in bravery went do\\'n. And called his name, soft, clear, and fearlessly; Stooped low, and stroked his muzzle overgrown ; Refreshed his drought with dew ; wiped pure and free His eyes : and lo ! laughed loud for joy to see In those grey depths the azure of her own. His art needs little discussion. It depends chiefly on harmony, melody and rhyme. His style is fluid and his diction free from un- natural elevation, or rhetorical expansion. Inversions are frequent, intentional and seldom ineffective. He has certain definite rhyth- mical devices, but little would be gained by attempting to explain them. Quite half his verse is composed for children, and yet who shall say it is more adapted to the child than to the matured person ? All the best traditional poetry, nursery rhyme, song or ballad, has the same kind of inspired innocence. Nobody has succeeded, nor will succeed, in imitating Ralph Hodgson's style. A poem published a short time ago in a magazine was closely modelled on " The Song of Honour," and, though it contained fair passages, it made one laugh, as any mimicry will ; a star- E 65 ling, for instance, trying the blackbird's song, or a parrot making noises like the human voice. Ralph Hodgson does not seem, any more than John Masefield, to have prudently cultivated the art of poetry; he has no literary pose. But, unlike Masefield, he is endowed with natural discipHne. He is very witty and has a rare gift for turning an epigram. His poems are full of allusions to dogs and birds. Their phrase- ology resembles the careless offhand language of the ordinary man, and has the precision of detail noticeable chiefly among those who are little accustomed to reading books, and are, therefore, not hampered in their choice of words by dint of a memory packed with the cliches of literature. It also has a curious sporting ring. We come upon (and not usually for any reason inherent in the poems where they occur) phrases that belong to the vocabulary of dog-breeding, prize-fighting, hunting, coaching and the other native pastimes of England. The following are a few instances : Turn upon the cur. Now to get even. Put up your caravan. The song of pretty fighters. Tighten your rein. Start your whelps a-whin- 66 ing. I took my soul astray. In dream he hunts a furrow. Alert from top to toe. Little hunted hares. At odds with life and limb; and the poem entitled "The Bull," by reason of its subject, is full of such expressions : A thousand head. Bravely by his fall he came. A bull of blood. Hero of a thousand kills. It cannot be doubted that this sporting phraseology is contributive, in a way, to the popularity of Ralph Hodgson's poetr}^ While most poets glean their vocabulary from poetry itself, this one gathers his, as it were, raw from life. He owes little to the tradition of English literature, but very much to the traditions of English living. The education of the kennel and prize ring offers a fitter introduction to his style than any classical learning. Reading him we think : Here is a man who talks only a language of his own, and with such native purity does he use this tongue he knows so well, that he never utters a word of it in a wrong sense, nor fails to make himself clearly understood. The Housman influence is entirely absent. Indeed one is inclined to believe that Ralph Hodgson does not much read his contempo- 67 raries. " The Song of Honour " is in direct descent from the " Song of David," by Christopher Smart. We recognise no other influences. It is generally supposed that all the poems worthy of delight are contained in the small volume of twenty-five items issued in 1917, and the book published in 1907 under the title The Last Blackbird has been neglected by critics and depreciated (it is said) by its author himself in a manner not merited. If we cast aside the first volume on account of its obvious defects, we shall be depriving ourselves of the enjoyment of such poems as " The Hammers," and others. " The Bull," " The Song of Honour " and several other poems had been published, previous to their appearance in the 1917 volume, as broadsides and in small yellow chapbooks at sixpence each. This revival of an excellent old custom was carried out in collaboration with C. Lovat Fraser, an artist whose decorations admirably suited the enter- prise. For imprint the title Flying Fame was adopted. In this form the poems already gained that popularity they so well deserved, 68 and the precedent was again established of placing verse on the market, at first, in some cheap edition, testing, in fact, its selling poten- tialities by offering the public initial samples of its quality. It is not the scheme of this book to quote at any length, but rather, by pointing out their principal qualities, to convey some impression of the atmosphere of the works under discus- sion. Nevertheless we cannot better con- clude these remarks on the poetry of Ralph Hodgson than by reprinting two typical specimens of his shorter lyrics : — THE MYSTERY He came and took me by the hand Up to a red rose tree, He kept His meaning to Himself But gave a rose to me. I did not pray Him to lay bare The mystery to me, Enough the rose was Heaven to smell, And His own face to see. THE BELLS OF HEAVEN 'Twould ring the bells of Heaven The wildest peal for years, li Parson lost his senses And people came to theirs 69 And he and they together Knelt down with angry prayers For tamed and shabby tigers And dancing dogs and bears, And wretched, bhnd pit ponies, And httle hunted hares. Sing out, my Soul, thy songs of joy ; Such as a happy bird will sing Beneath a Rainbow's lovely arch In early spring. As a general rule modern poets should rather use the word mumble, drawl, or, at all events, write, than " sing." It is rare for an author of verse to be able to speak his verse, or even to read it aloud fluently and en- gagingly. But the little poems of William H. Davies sing themselves. They attract and attach to themselves stray melodies. Most of them can be memorised more as tunes than as combinations of words, and where the actual phrases have slipped from the memory, some mental association may often recall their melodious rhythms, just as the melody of a song may be remem- bered when the words are forgotten. 70 We learn in his poems much about him- self :— As long as I love Beauty I am young, Am young or old as I love more or less ; Indeed this is sweet life ! My hand Is under no proud man's command ; That " singing " of his depends on a tem- peramental condition favourably attuned to its natural surroundings. When I do hear these joyful birds, I cannot sit with my heart dumb ; I cannot walk among these flowers, But I must help the bees to hum. A temporary failure of that song in his own heart is one of his few causes of de- spondency : — Sweet Poesy, why art thou dumb ! I fear thy singing days are done ; The poet in my soul is dying. And every charm in life is gone ; \Vlien the mood occurs the poet is appar- ently able to make a song out of the very fact that he feels he cannot make one, and, in the intervals between, he is as forgetful of his occasional misfortunes as the birds them- selves : — 71 When on a summer's mom I wake, And open my two eyes. Out to the clear bom-singing rills My bird-like spirit flies. Contemplation and observation are his great delights, and the subjects of his poems arbitrarily occur to him while thus amusing himself. The habit evident among many of his contemporaries of consciously selecting their subjects is plainly absent in him. J. C. Squire's " The Moon," a poem of three hundred and twenty lines, is as the achieve- ment of a trained long-distance runner com- pared with Davies' lyric of twelve Hues on the same subject : — Though there are birds that sing this night With thy white beams across their throats. Let my deep silence speak for me More than for them their sweetest notes : His language is mostly that of ordinary speech. Where the inversion occurs, as in such lines as, A little boy Can life enjoy ; it is not through any lack of skill. It inter- feres therefore as little as in nursery rhymes or ballads with the quaint simpHcity of the 72 poet's diction. Sometimes it adds vivid- ness : — The Moon was dying with a stare ; Horses, and kine, and sheep were seen As still as pictures, in fields green. The " notes " that some poets compile as helps to the imagination appear to be in- corporated by W. H. Da vies wholly and directly into the body of his works, as in the foregoing quotation, and also in the two following : — WTien I came forth this mom I saw Quite twenty cloudlets in the air. And she is known as Jenny Wren, The smallest bird in England . . . His philosophy of life and of living is almost unimaginably simple. WTiat is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. Much have I thought of life, and seen How poor men's hearts are ever light ; The mind, with its own eyes and ears, May for these others have no care ; No matter where this body is, The mind is free to go elsewhere. 73 The statement that " poor men's hearts are ever Hght " does not appear entirely com- patible with some of the experiences trans- cribed elsewhere, but mental or material misery is traced to the influences of the town, and the voice of complaint is not raised, nor are earthly evils attributed directly to human or super- natural agency. What is known as " religious speculation " is apparently very rare to Davies. The fol- lowing is one of his few definite statements in this connection : — Lord, I say nothing ; I profess No faith in Thee nor Christ Thy Son : Yet no man ever heard me mock A true beheving one. It is not surprising that a temperament so little complicated by introspective or retro- spective moods should accept human existence at its face value. The child is always a fresh marvel to him. His sympathy is great for suffering children or women; for beautiful women, his adoration. He seems to worship them with his body more than with his mind. His tales are generally about the poor. His classical allusions are 74 few. He is powerfiilh^ attracted by the sea, by good company, and by ale. The Farmer's Bride is a book of forty pages containing seventeen poems. This at present is Charlotte Mew's only pubhshed work. The whole of Mrs. Browning's remains can hardly be compressed into five hundred pages of double column. Such poets would not, or could not, learn condensation or practise for- bearance. They shirked weeding their own gardens which thus fell to seed, and the flowers are now lost in a tangle of forsaken under- growth. Charlotte Mew will not burden futurity with an " Essay on Mind " in two long books of rhymed couplets and with notes, nor with a " Battle of Marathon " in four cantos, nor an " Aurora Leigh " in nine books. Her poetry reveals plainly that she is too modest a person and too authentic an artist. Her imagination could not wander through hundreds of lines of blank verse, or, if it tried, discretion would certainly laugh it back homewards. The story of The Farmer's Bride would 75 have resolved itself in the mind of Mrs. Brown- ing into a poem of at least two thousand lines ; Mr. Browning might have worked it up to six thousand; Meredith would not have been satisfied with a novel of less than five hundred pages. Here is Charlotte Mew's presentation of the subject — Three Summers since I chose a maid, Too young maybe — ^but more's to do At harvest-time than bide and woo. When us was wed she turned afraid Of love and me and all things human ; Like the shut of a winter's day. Her smile went out, and 'twasn't a woman — More like a little frightened fay. One night, in the Fall, she runned away. The story is told in forty-six lines, marred by no verbiage. It develops its own appro- priate rhythm as it proceeds. It passes with the certainty of Fate to the tragical concluding lines : — She sleeps up in the attic there Alone, poor maid. 'Tis but a stair Betwixt us. Oh ! my God ! the down, The soft young down of her, the brown, The brown of her — her eyes, her hair, her hair ! One of the peculiarities of the authoress of these poems is a projection of herself outside 76 herself, so that a kindred personahty seems walking with her through life, her own, yet not her own. " Fame " begins : — Sometimes in the over-heated house, but not for long. Smirking and speaking rather loud, I see mjself among the crowd, Where no one fits the singer to his song, Or sifts the unpainted from the painted faces Of the people who are always on my stair ; They were not with me when I walked in heavenly places ; She does not tire you with her personality ; but continually interests you in its strange reflections. There is a rumour through the whole book of Death (that favourite subject of all poetry), as of a fact in the background, not to be forgotten, yet not a reality. It involves the parting of friends : otherwise it is not important. Grief is more terrible, far more absorbing, than death. It is not a wringing of hands, or wailing. It quickens perception and excites compassion. Red is the strangest pain to bear ; In Spring the leaves on the budding trees ; In Summer the roses are worse than these. More terrible than they are sweet : A rose can stab you across the street Deeper than any knife : It is difficult to form any clear conception of the authoress of these poems. She only half surrenders the magic of her personality : — Give me the key that locks your tired eyes, And I will lend you this one from my pack, Brighter than coloured beads and painted books that make men wise : Take it. No, give it back ! Charlotte Mew's poem " The Changeling " is one of the most original of its kind in modern poetry. It has nothing in common with Christina Rossetti, Stevenson, Walter de la Mare, or any other writer of fairy poetry. It is neither written down nor up : it is factful, not fanciful. It is not quaint or sweet, but hard and rather dreary. You do not smile ; you shiver. This child has been born a changling just as another may have had the misfortune to have been born an idiot, and it tries rather blunderingly, apologetically, and with a touch of bitterness to explain its inevitable fate : — I meant to stay in bed that night, And if only you had left a light They would never have got me out ! Couldn't do my sums, or sing, Or settle down to anything. And when, for that, I was sent upstairs I did kneel down to say my prayers ; 78 " Ken," described in the poem of that name, who " fidgets so, with his poor wits," who seemed, " an uncouth bird," as he ploughed up the street, Groping, with knarred, high-Hfted feet And arms thrust out as if to beat Al\va}'s against a threat of bars. is another unfortunate. He is not taken by the fairies, but removed by human beings to the " gabled house facing the Castle wall." He has an unnatural understanding, and there is no possibility that he will ever con- form to the herd-idea of what a man should be. Ken's removal is little different from his death. No words are wasted on describing its emotional effect. The method of this poem is to stir the reader to great appre- hension and then abruptly leave his imagina- tion to follow its own natural course. These are the concluding lines : — So when they took Ken to that place, I did not look After he called and turned on me His eyes. These I shall see — The best poetry is the least poetical. The force of the imagination that has conceived 79 it drives forward our own imaginations, and we are often least conscious of it as Poetry precisely when we are most moved. We are spared the discomfort of having to exert that critical faculty which generally interferes with enjoyment. Need it be remarked that the language of the best poetry is the nearest to ordinary speech? We are not startled, but we cannot fail to be interested to find *' The Quiet House " open with the lines : — When we were children old Nurse used to say, The house was like an auction or a fair Until the lot of us were safe in bed. The poem makes no apparent effort to inten- sify our interest. It leads us, however, to such passages (conceived in the same sim- plicity of style) as : or or And if I like him now I do not know. He frightened me before he smiled — The room is shut where Mother died, The other rooms are as they were. The world goes on the same outside. And nothing lives there but the fire. While Father watches from his chair Day follow day. 80 The longest and least easy poem in the book is " Madeleine in Church." A first impression will be that it rambles, but closer examination shows that every detail is essen- tial to the main structure. The study of the type Madeleine has provided a subject, of course, for many novelists. Oh ! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings ! The temperate, weD-wom smile The one man gives you, when you are evermore his own : And aftenvards the child's, for a little while, With its unknowing and all-seeing eyes So soon to change, Swinburne in hundreds of flowing lines dropped few such stinging comments on the Gahlean as Madeleine in her halting phrases : — Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His ever- lasting wings — I do not envy Him his victories, His arms are full of broken things ! Her grievance is personal and bitter, being that of a believer : — I used to think it would not hurt me too, so terribly, If He had ever seemed to notice me Or, if, for once, He would only speak. No argument, or quotation, can prove that the poetry of Charlotte Mew is above the F 8i average of our da}^ She writes with the naturalness of one whom real passion has excited; her diction is free from artificial conceits, is inspired by the force of its sub- ject, and creates its own direct intellectual contact with the reader. Her phraseology is hard and concentrated. To praise her poetry is to offer homage where it is due; and to recommend it is to desire for others the enjoyment one has oneself experienced. Section II " I may really say that for a quarter of a century," writes Ford Madox Hueffer in the Preface to his Collected Poems, " I have kept before me one unflinching aim — to register my own times in terms of my own time." Mr, Hueffer forgets many things. He is always confessing, even in his poetry, to having forgotten something. For so pro- found a literary scholar he is remarkably inaccurate. Using two lines from Heine as a text for some of his musings on poetry, he misquotes them, in fact, distorts them. Nevertheless we fully believe that he has kept 82 that unflinching aim before him, for the fact is revealed in even^ phase of his development as a poet. He complains that we Enghsh " have a literary jargon in which we must write," while in France a poet " can write in a language that, roughly speaking, any hatter can use," and in Germany " the poet writes exactly as he speaks." " Is there something," he asks, " about the mere framing of a verse, the mere sound of it in the ear, that it must at once throw its practitioner or its devotee into an artificial frame of mind? " Throughout his career as a poet he has shaken off one after other of the artificialities of which he complains. Much of his earlier poetry is Pseudo-Pre-Raphaelite, but his latest poems are as far from the Pre- Raphaelites as Whitman, say, is from the Elizabethan lyrists. He hates Victorianism as a reformed drunkard may hate whisky. He has brain, style and vision. But he is an innovator, and the beauty of his poetry will not be fully recognised until it becomes possible, in the future, to look back upon it from a distance. It will be popular when 83 most of the Shropshire Lad is forgotten, we might say — only when most of it is forgotten. Moreover it will all be popular : the earlier as well as the later poems. To study his development we have to read his book of Collected Poems backwards, for the order of their collection is inverse to that of their composition ; and to understand his aims we should first study, besides the Introduction to this book, his essays published in a volume called The Critical Attitude. These were contributed to The English Review which he founded in 1909 for the express purpose, he would have us seriously believe, of printing a poem by Mr. Thomas Hardy. He likes these little jokes. They make people feel uncomfortable, which is good for them. He is too serious to take himself seriously. There is no pomp here. " Love in country lanes," he tells us, '* the song of birds, moonlight — these the poet, playing for safety, and the critic trying to find something safe to praise, will deem the sure cards of the poetic pack." So, as he does not himself enjoy playing for safety, he resigns these subjects to Mr. A. E. Housman, and others. 84 Nevertheless his early poems (which should properly be called songs) are mostly about the earth and its natural events. In those days he had little control of his subjects. *' From time to time," he tells us, " words in verse form have come into my head and I have written them down, quite powerlessly and without much interest, under the stress of certain emotions." In "A Night Piece " he suggests the process : — As I lay awake by my good wife's side, And heard the clock tick through a night in June, I thought of a song with a haunting tune ; To-dav, we venture to believe, he has much more control of his subjects. " It's an odd thing how one changes . . ." he remarks at the opening of " The Starhng." The com- plete change in his method and manner has produced such works as "To All the Dead," and that beautiful poem, with the absurd title, " On Heaven." " Vers Libre is a very jolly medium," he tells us in his latest Pre- face, " in which to write and to read, if it be read conversationally and quietly." The opening passages of "On Heaven " are rhymed and regular, as if for the purpose of 85 coming to an understanding with a possibly diffident reader ; we then drop the rhymes and settle down into an easy movement in slightly irregular blank verse, breaking off in the middle of a line to introduce the main subject of the poem, at which point regularity be- comes discarded, but in no methodless way. There are further passages of blank verse, and there is also a rich interspersion of the kind of galloping hexameter with which the main theme is introduced : — Until when the years were over, she came in her swift red car. The rhythm as a whole is of that conver- sational sort referred to in the Preface. Rhymes are introduced, quite irregularly as if to serve as occasional points d'appui for the attention, and the impression produced is of some one talking rather thoughtlessly and artlessly in a natural way of his own, so that it can be said of Ford Madox Hueffer, as of Ralph Hodgson, that he creates in a personal rhythm and language, and that his voice could not be mistaken for any one else's, nor the voice of any one else for his. So we find in these two writers, the same distinguishing 86 merits of the original poet, though their manner and method be totally different. The following is a specimen of one of Hueffer's shortest poems in vers lihre. The longer poems cannot easily be quoted, but should be read in their entirety. "WHEN THE WORLD CRUMBLED" Once there were purple seas — Wide, wide. ... And myrtle-groves and cyclamen, Above the cliff and the stone pines Where a god watched. . . . And thou, oh Lesbian . . . WeU, that's all done ! Ezra Pound, as far as we know, has come under the influence of only two living English poets — Ford Madox Hueffer and W. B. Yeats, neither of whom interfered noticeably with his style, whatever their temperamental effect on his personality. The sources of his inspiration are bookish, and they are undisguised. Original poems are printed side by side with translations, and some are half original and half transla- tion. After the issue of Personce and Exiilta- 87 tions in 1909 he wrote The Spirit of Romance : " An attempt to define somewhat the charm of the pre-renaissance hterature of Latin Europe." American, intelHgent and arrogant, a most careless scholar but imaginative thinker, he rambles through two hundred and fift}^ pages of loosely-connected notes on his favourite epoch in European literature. " I am interested in poetry," he writes in his Prcefatio ad Lec- tor em Electum. " I have attempted to ex- amine certain forces, elements or qualities which were potent in the mediaeval literature of the Latin tongues, and are, as I believe, still potent in our own." The intellectual perversity of Ezra Pound has disgusted many of his contemporaries. His influence on the younger poetry of our day is least admitted by many who have been most subject to it. The recognition of his genius will be gradual and tardy, its qualities being, few of them, apparent on the surface, and also because he voluntarily erects a barrier between himself and his readers, and that the standards he has set himself, and the literary obstructions he has himself raised against freedom of the imagina- 88 tion, have so interfered with his production as to reduce him in present appearance to a mere experimenter in unusual rhythms. He writes (it is as though he were describing himself) of Arnaut Daniel's " refusal to use the * journalese ' of his day," his " aversion to the obvious, familiar vocabulary," of his dis- content with " a conventional phrase, or with a word that does not convey his exact mean- ing " ; that he realised fully " that the music of rh^-mes depends upon their arrange- ment, not on their multiplicity." In the forms of his canzoni he finds an excellence that can satisfy " not only the modern ear, gluttonous of rhyme, but also the ear trained to Roman and Hellenic music to which rhyme seemed and seems a vulgarity." But his " temperamental sympathy " for the pre- renaissance literature of Latin Europe is little shared by his twentieth-century con- temporaries. He learnt his art in the school of the Troubadours. Recently under the title Umbra, he has selected all he now wishes to keep in circula- tion from his earlier books : Personcc, Exul- tations, Ripostes, etc. Glancing down the 89 table of contents we find, among others, the following titles : — La Fraisne ; Cino ; Na Audiart ; Villonaud for this Yule ; Marvoil ; Sestina : Altaforte ; Aux Belles de Londres; Alba; Planh; N. Y. ; Aoipta. Such internationalistic no- menclature will not fail from the outset to irritate the reader, however well-disposed. The beauties of his poetry are disguised among intricacies and wilful complications. Yet, read " Praise of Ysolt." Here is the open- ing :— In vain have I striven, to teach my heart to bow ; In vain have I said to him " There be many singers greater than thou." But his answer cometh, as winds and as lutany. As a vague crying upon the night That leaveth me no rest, saying ever. " Song, a song," Read " Aa.pia " or " The Return " : both finished specimens of the art of free verse. THE RETURN See, they return ; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet. The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering ! 90 See, they return, one, and b}^ one, With fear, as half-awakened ; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back ; These were the " Wing'd-with-Awe," Inviolable. Gods of the winged shoe ! With them the silver hounds, sniffing the trace of the air ! Haie ! Haie ! These were the swift to harry ; These the keen-scented ; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men ! In other books a strong influence of Chinese poetry takes its place. Among the Latins Catullus is a predominant source, among the Germans, Heine, and several modern French writers have been carefully studied. Further a " pact " with Walt Whitman releases his imagination for a number of Hvely poems in free verse in which he ridicules contem- porary habits and persons : — I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman — I have detested you long enough. I come to you as a grown child Who has had a pig-headed father ; I am old enough now to make friends. 91 The series of translations from the Chinese entitled Cathay is composed in plain lucid English running in harmonious rhythms, and conveys to the average western mind an extraordinarily clear picture of such a China as travellers and native art have led it to imagine. Ezra Pound peppers nearly all his writings with archaisms, exoticisms, foreign words ancient and modern, wilful obscurities, and gibes at people less gifted than himself. His very latest poems have the obscurity without the wit or natural intelligence of a Browning. He seldom misses an opportunity of casting a stone at the " old bitch gone in the teeth " — this " botched civilisation " of ours, or, figuratively, of pelting his contemporaries with paper darts, at which, when they do not laugh, but are irritated, he himself becomes the angrier. He seems to have made himself a permanent resident in England, and all his works have been published here, but his intellect has never become acclimatised. Nor, apparently, has he decided whether finally to consider himself a romantic or a reaUst. Miraut de Garzelas, the " grave 92 councillor " of his " La Fraisne " cast aside " the yoke of the old ways of men," finding comfort " by the still pool of Mar-nan-otha." But I have seen the sorrow of men, and am glad. For I know that the wailing and bitterness are a folly. And I ? I have put aside all folly and all grief. Ezra Pound himself has not learnt the folly of bitterness. It is related that when a young countryman of Pound's, arriving in England, visited the master with specimens of his work, Pound sat for long at the table in deep consideration of a certain poem, and at length, glancing up, remarked : "It took you ninety-seven words to do it ; I find it could have been managed in fifty-six." It has often been thought and said that Ezra Pound was the originator of the " Imagist " school, which has flourished better in the U.S.A. than in Great Britain. In 1913 we find him, side by side with F. S. Flint, contributing to an American magazine certain articles on the theories of the school. Pound's contribution is entitled " A Few Don'ts by an 93 Imagiste." They contain such useful advice as " Don't think any intelhgent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your com- position into line lengths." But F. S. Flint, in the Egoist for May 1915, produces facts and dates to show that the movement had its origin in the formation in 1908 of a certain " Poets' Club " (still in existence as a pseudo- fashionable dining-club), and in many sub- sequent conversations among T. E. Hulme, Edward Storer, F. W. Tancred, Joseph Camp- bell, himself, and some others, and that Ezra Pound, in fact, joined the group considerably later. For many years T. E. Hulme (who was killed in the European War), was one of the central figures of a fluctuating group of poets and philosophers. His " Complete Poetical Works," consisting of five poems, are printed at the end of Pound's Umbra. '' Autumn " may fittingly be quoted here, for it is said to have been one of the first strictly '* Imagist" poems produced, that is, without loss of imaginative impulse, it conforms to the 94 principles laid down at the early meetings of the group at a Soho restaurant : — AUTUMN A touch of cold in the Autumn night — I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer. I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like towTi children. F. S. Flint's first book of poems, In the Net of the Stars, precedes the movement so far as concerns its style. It is less studied and more poetical than his later volume. He writes : "I have grown tired of the old measures wherein I beat my song." Nevertheless he uses rhymed quatrains and rhymed couplets and several other conven- tional measures with striking originality. Like many young poets he is over-troubled with the burden of self-consciousness, and his writing is too much in the First Person. But he desires freedom from self : — I have a mind to be more simple than The twisted, racked, iUusioned mind of man. His love-poems are of great beauty and he has a cool, tender adoration for the natural 95 objects of earth and sky. These early verses are nearly cliche-free. The chief influences are Ezra Pound (shght), W. B. Yeats, and Solomon. He has a curiously profound under- standing of race-memory, the idea of Eternity, and the natural growth of human flesh out of the soil, and he prophesies a future in which " there shall be a greater concourse of the peoples," And they shall move along the banks of the rivers, And the shores of the seas. And they shall make a new Book of golden beautiful words, Wherein shall be set the spirit of all the flowers and grasses, And the many-summited trees. Ford Madox Hueffer early recognised Flint's talent and printed a considerable selection from his poems in The English Review. Since those days he has busied himself much with the theory of poetry, and has devoted himself to the study of modern French hterature, of which he has become an expert critic. It is not, therefore, surprising to find the poems in his second volume, Otherworld, preceded by a Preface, which opens with the startling sentence : — 96 There is only one art of writing, and that is the art poetry; and, wherever you feel the warmth of human experience and imagina- tion in any writing, there is poetry, whether it is in the form we call prose, or in rhyme and metre, or in the unrhymed cadence in which the greater part of this book is written. It should here be remarked that modern poets of the type of F. S. Flint are no longer " visited by the Muses " : they are not at home to them. It will be no use to say that their poetry " does not sing." It is not meant to. The word So7ig has been aban- doned and swept out with Ode, Sonnet, Quatrain and other similar verbal lumber. The test of Intellect is more important to them than the tests of prosody, or tradition. The passing event and its effect on the mind is everything to them. They prefer a single word or phrase that may accurately register an impression to a line that will be quoted for the loveliness of its verbal construction. Thus they think in terms of the whole poem rather than of the single hne, and thus they are often unquotable except in extenso. It would be only natural if the average reader of poetry should fail at first, and G 97 without certain definite application of the mind, to apprehend the beauty and profundity of these essentially modern poems, and to mistake them for " prose chopped into line lengths." It would be well for those who come to them with the rhythms and rhymes of such poets as Swinburne or A. E. Housman still ringing in their ears to bear in mind two points : — (i) In poetry, a new idea, or an individual method of thought, creates its own new form, style or cadence {e. g. The Faerie Queene ; Shakespeare's plays ; Paradise Lost ; Don Juan; Leaves of Grass). (2) The author of Otherworld, having no intention of " singing " his works should be explored with other objects than that of trying to force them to " sing." Their salient qualities are sincerity, naturalness, and a certain instinctive universal wisdom. Although Richard Aldington was a later addition to the Imagist group yet early in his own career he came under Imagist influences, and he has consistently used the 98 title " Image " in connection with his poct^^^ Like those of H.D. most of his poems have an Hellenic background. His rhythms do not seem to follow any specified rule or sequence ; they form irregular patterns dictated by the emotional impulse of any particular poem. The substance of his later poetry is deeply affected by long and horrifying experiences in the European War. Except Siegfried Sassoon, no " war-poet " has represented the torments of military life with such candour and so entirely without bombastic rhetoric : — DISDAIN Have the gods then left us in our need Like base and common men ? Were even the sweet grey eyes Of Artemis a he, The speech of Hermes but a trick, The glory of Apollonian hair deceit ? Desolate we move across a desolate land, The high gates closed, No answer to our prayer ; Naught left save our integrity, No murmur against Fate Save that we are juster than the unjust gods, More pitiful than they. Discussions concerning Form arc often interesting but, in general, supererogatory. 99 Many contend that a definite and recognisable form is essential to every metrical composi- tion. Others reply that the whole emotional significance of a certain kind of poetry depends on its freedom from the limitations of a fixed and imposed artificial pattern, or, if we refer the question, as we reasonably may, to sound- values, of a tune. Poetrj^ they say, is not the trick of fitting words to a certain pre- conceived sound-melody, but it is the expres- sion of personal emotion in a manner as nearly as possible corresponding to its own character and value. Like Flint, Richard Aldington has invented many devices aimed at expressing the sharp contrasts and incongruities of modern life. He has not by any means finally rejected the use of rhyme : in his Images of Desire it occurs often ; nor has he yet freed himself from early influences. Memories of Swinburne butt in rudely and unexpectedly in such phrases as. To feel her moving heart, to taste Her breath Hke wine . . . We hope he has the force of character to develop to its full a style at present scarcely 100 formed. His poverty of adjectival qualifica- tion is conspicuous. Simple, indeed, but insufficient, are such words as cold, lithe, silver, fier3% white, clear, dull, cruel, pale, delicate, glad, sombre, wan, slow, fierce, frail, thick, faint. He relies also to excess on the mere mention of colours. There is a brain behind his poetry, perhaps too much brain, too much " labour to appear skilful." Intellect is the servant of poetry, but a dangerous servant, apt to interfere. His rhythms mostly lack the " absolute music " so many readers desire and expect. The brain is too much a master and not yet sufficiently a comrade of the imagination. He is an intellectual cynic, yet he writes : — My spirit foUows after the gliding clouds, And my lips murmur of the mother of beauty Standing breast-high, in golden broom Among the blue pine-woods ! Discussion has centred hotly round H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). The Imagists one and all champion her verse, and never tire of repre- senting it as the perfection of this modern style, and contrasting it favourably with the lOI verse of many of her more prolific contem- poraries. Her production, indeed, is very slight and her subjects hardly extend beyond flowers, trees, gardens, orchards, Greek gods, and the sea. She resembles Aldington only in her selection of an Hellenic background; unlike him, she remains to outward appearance uninfluenced by French poetry, and no display of philosophy or cynicism interferes with the even tenour of her compositions. We are tempted to wonder what Swinburne would have thought of H.D. had he considered her worth his notice. If we compare him to a great moving ocean, then she becomes a still and narrow creek with wooded shores. Here is an example of excessive restraint. This poem, like the '' Autumn " of T. E. Hulme already quoted, may be considered an ideal specimen of Imagist theory and practice : — OREAD Whirl up, sea — Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks, Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir. 102 The word temperamental qualifies the whole manner and substance of her verse, and the degree of the reader's appreciation will depend on the amount of natural sympathy with which he temperamentally can approach it. H.D. has successfully avoided all commerce with that " literary jargon " of which Mr. Hueffer complains, but she is equally far from writing " in a language that, roughly speaking, anv hatter can use," and infinitely far from registering her own time in terms of her own time. Nor, so much as we know, has she ever used sonnet or stanza forms, and once or twice only has she dabbled in rhyme. Her art is to mould ideas and images into sequences of word-groups; it is an art of suggestion, of inference, seldom of direct statement : it is an art always, never a craft. Let us support these statements by quotation :— They say there is no hope — sand — drift — rocks — rubble of the sea — the broken hulk of a ship, hung with shreds of rope, pallid under the cracked pitch. • • • • • O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it to tatters. 103 Fruit cannot drop through this thick air — » . . • • The house, too, was Hke this, over painted, over lovely — the world is like this. The affinity of her art to the radical char- acteristics of her own time is to be found, then, not in choice of subject but in the following characteristics : She has rejected the traditional forms of Enghsh poetry in favour of a personal rhythm which derives its impulse from such rules as her own tem- perament may dictate. Poetry is to her an art to be cultivated, not an inspired message to be conveyed. Bulk of production is of no importance to her as compared with excellence of finish. She makes no apparent attempt to teach, or to proselytise. Before leaving her, the last lines of a beauti- ful poem called " Cities " should be quoted : — Though we wander about, find no honey of flowers in this waste, is our task the less sweet — who recall the old splendour, await the new beauty of cities ? 104 The French expression vers fibre is still often used to designate lines of uneven and arbitrary length though of regular structure, such as were employed in most of his later poetry by Verhaeren . Gustave Kahn widened the definition both in theory and practice; Mallarme stretched it several points further; Claudel and others have worked patiently on rhvthm structure ; with the late Guillaume Apollinaire and others a mischievous instinct for destruction set in : they exhibited a desire to smash up the whole idea of verse- form. Free Verse has not been clearly understood in England. It is the most difficult medium that a poet can employ : it has been used with success a few dozen times onty. Yet many dozens of incompetent persons have sought an appearance of originality by adopt- ing the practice of jotting down odds and ends of stray thought, and having them printed as though they were lines of free poetry. The idea also of creating a word-pattern has appealed to persons incapable of constructing a well-balanced hterary sentence. 105 Frederic Manning is a scholar and writer of fine ironical prose. His formal verse is chiefly commonplace, but where, under the stress of Imagist influence and war feelings, he has loosed the fetters and written simply as the mood dictated, he has at once become more genuine and less derivative. Yet he has not mastered the difficulties of free verse. Sing, thou great wind ; smite the harp of the wood. For in thee the souls of slain men are singing exultant, Now free of the air, feather- footed ! Yea, they swim therein Toward the green twihght, surging Naked and beautiful with playing muscles. Yea, even the naked souls of men Whose beauty is a fierce thing, and slayeth us Like the terrible majesty of the gods ; Blow, thou great wind, scatter the yellowing leaves. Herbert Read showed promise when deal- ing with war-subjects, and his poems, in spite of their jagged, halting style, are more vivid and readable than the sentimental rhymes of many of his contemporary soldier-poets. THE HAPPY WARRIOR His wild heart beats with painful sobs. His strained hands clench an ice-cold rifle, His aching jaws grip a hot parched tongue. And his wide eyes search unconsciously. io6 He cannot shriek. Blood\' saliva Dribbles down his shapeless jacket. I saw him stab And stab again A well-killed Boche. This is the happ}- warrior, This is he. . . . An examination of various attempts to compose free verse emphasises the general misunderstanding of its method and object. Susan ]\Iiles, however, has written a pleasant little book called Diinch, in which she de- scribes the queer characters and incidents of a village life, scenes from childhood, and psychological experiences, jotting them down in the following style : — I like the butcher being not " the butcher," But Tom Crisp, Old Crisp with the wooden leg's son ; And I like the baker's boy being not " the baker's boy," But Wag Fretter, Who was such a sickly babe That his mother never would have reared him, Not without she'd yummered him all roads. I like the driver of the Wheaisheaf brougham Being not " the driver," But Jonathan Arthur, 107 Whose five pretty daughters I have seen successively emerge From sturdy childhood Into slender, sedate and sHm-ankled modernity. That she can also write charming rhymes is proved in the second part of her book. Plainly she was wise not to select the style of a Crabbe or a Bloomfield for her modern rural poems. Yet does the following sentence gain by being " chopped " into apparent verse-lengths ? Boxes, outfits, passports, consuls, interviews, Medical examinations, sortings, storings, And all the multifarious externals of departure Have whirled me unintrospectively from point to vibrant point Through long, packed, urgent days. Novelty apart, is the style of any of her descriptive passages improved by her manner of writing them down ? The experiment may afford temporary amusement, for she is witty and observant. Yet the critical reader will only suspect her, and her like, of lacking the patience or leisure for mastering the difficult task of expressing themselves in clear and straightforward prose. io8 As we pass down the scale of " free verse," we note with progressive interest the modern passion for tearing to pieces, out of a spirit of obstinate mischief. Max Weber, in his Cubist Poems, tries many amusing experiments. He dismantles his own emotions, the feelings of others, landscapes, town-views, articles of domestic service, and finally language itself, as if all of these were various forms of mechanical toy. My doubts are my events, My events are my hopes. And events out of doubts happen, And doubt after doubt new events through hope happens. Repetition is my doubt. Again, A thought, a deed, a pause, a call, An hour, a year, A life A joy, a sorrow. All time, aU being, all mood. All is doubt for more hope, All is hope. And all that happens are but new doubts in new hopes. And finally John Rodker, poring over the town for subjects, discovers the London sparrow : — 109 TO THE LONDON SPARROWS Gamins. Drab and Cockney. Wavering but not much between feeding and . . . ! Thriftless. Laying up children. . . . Dung growing less too. What will become of you. Your four broods yearly. . . . (or is it oftener.) Will you go back to the country. . . . Corrupt poor relations. . . . Do not think, reader, that these last quotations are representative of modern ten- dencies in poetry, or meant as a free advertise- ment for their perpetrators. On the other hand, do beheve that their spirit is more re- presentative of modern civihsations than ever the studied rhymes of those young bloods who follow closely on the traditions of the best poetry, ignoring the trend of real life. Unsuccessful experiment is far more interest- ing than successful imitation. Seed grows to flower. Style and form and ** good taste " no are conspicuousl}^ avoided in the life and public works of to-day. Nor can literature be expected to abide closely by the rules of another age. Seriousness may be of several kinds, and a serious attempt to delineate the spirit of our own time will adopt no puritanical attitude toward the ugliness of that spirit. Nor will a work on the poetry of to-day over- look the tendencies of which an outline has been traced in the foregoing Section. Section III I would that to the world would come again That indignation, that anger of the Lord, Which once was kno^^Tl among us men. Lascelles Abercrombie is almost without lyrical impulse. A turgid blank verse is his medium. But in " Indignation : an Ode," from which the above lines are quoted, and in the " Ceremonial Ode, intended for a University," he displays a force of lyric and heroic ecstasy extremely rare in modern poetry. His normal moods are cloudy and specula- tive. His poems in narrative and dramatic form are long and frequently tedious. Every III detail is laboured into yet further detail. He has the imagination of a chess-player; he moves his dramatic characters through their parts with the cautious deliberation of one engaged in a long game of chess. Under these circumstances an equivalent patience and deliberation is required in his readers. A poem so dramatically vivid as his early " Sale of St. Thomas " presents few such difficulties. Its speed of psychological action has not been equalled in any of its successors. It led Abercrombie's admirers to attribute to him greater powers than he has since shown. Is he, then, himself a victim to that prudence against which Thomas is cautioned ? Now, Thomas, know thy sin. It was not fear; Easily may a man crouch down for fear, And yet rise up on firmer knees, and face The haihng storm of the world with graver courage. But prudence, prudence is the deadly sin, And one that groweth deep into a life, With hardening roots that clutch about the breast. For this refuses faith in the unknown powers Within man's nature ; shrewdly bringeth all Their inspiration of strange eagerness To judgment bought by safe experience ; Narrows desire into the scope of thought. 112 Deborah : a Play in three Acts is altogether stage-worthy, and shows that the author does actually possess vivid powers of dramatic presentation. No other of his dramatic pieces is written with the same sharp attention to the inevitable psychological development of each separate character. The persons of his literary plays argue introspectively about themselves, psycho-analytically about each other, and didactically about things outside themselves, at such length and with such verbosity and wealth of explanatory detail, that the dramatic interest too often disperses itself in a mere vapour of excessive verbiage. A sound qualifying knowledge of metaphysics and philosophy is required of his characters, however humble ; and they speak the intricate close-packed or overflowing verse which is their progenitor's sole language. They are made to wind their way through speeches as long as two hundred and fifty lines, and to utter sentences as complicated as the following : — Now what the Gods would make Of Man shatters, the subtle singleness, The new rare thing their skill, spanning all life, Had sometime won from its diverseness, as we H 113 From many wires a tune; and though Man stopt, In divine memories had linger'd on That wonder of humanity, at last A just psaltery, toucht into a song. The author shows a consciousness of his own defects when in Emblems of Love he makes King Ahasuerus exclaim to the Poet : — Thou hast a night, man, not a week to tell them. You men of words, dealers in breath, conceit Too bravely of yourselves ; Edward Thomas wrote of Abercrombie's blank verse that " the march or leap or stagger or crawl or hesitation of the syllables correspond to varying emotions with thrill- ing delicacy." Most of the competent critics have praised him. The public has shown a keen interest in him : yet his books remain in their first editions. It is surprising that he should not have arrived at a decision as to whether to turn his powers definitely to drama or to narrative, or indeed epic. It is clear that he is not, and will never become, a lyrical poet. His most striking characteristic, particu- larly as compared with others of his genera- tion, is a strong preference for objectivity. 114 I spoke of Life as one broad tissued thing, A whole, seamless and woven right across. You, when \oa speak of life, mean still — Yourself. His imagination is vigorous, but brain- fettered. It could move with more freedom, if allowed. He has a strong and learned mind. It overburdens his characters, but occasionally, in spite of his restraining in- fluence and the complexities of their verse, they express themselves freely and with dramatic intensity : — I made of my desires not ecstasy But lust ; as rooms of mere dehght I lived in passions, not seeing that they were Porches only into wonder, and made To be past through, but not inhabited. And like a deadly climate they have grieved And spoilt my nature, crept into my marrow, And made intolerable wrong in my soul. Perhaps he will become a dramatist. Most of Gordon Bottomley's plays have been locked up for many years in small expensive editions, some limited even to as few as 120 copies. Meanwhile such critics as Dixon Scott, Edward Thomas, Arthur Waugh, and Lascelles Abercrombie were writing en- "5 thusiastic descriptions of them in the Press. So that a reputation was founded on books that scarcely any people had read, and the well-informed spoke in hushed tones together of these mysterious inaccessible works of art. On the half-title of the collected edition that has now been issued the inscription appears, " Remember the life of these things consists in action." This reminder has a curious effect. If it be received as a dictum, the strange ghosts that move about Gordon Bottomley's stage become invested with an uncanny reality : they become Hving ghosts, and their old fierce world is half revived, at all events, as an artistic reality. Hallgerd in " The Riding to Lithend," while referring to the Irish, describes in general terms the existence of such characters : — that strange soil Where men by day walk with unearthly eyes And cross the veils of the air, and are not men But fierce abstractions eating their own hearts Impatiently and seeing too much to be joyful. . . . Also a passage in " Laodice and Danae " is typical of the haunted shadowy atmosphere in which all this action is cast : — ii6 Ah . . . h, nothing, nothing. Something will not happen, And let this life go on again. Nothing. Yet . . . yet . . . the air is beating on my temples As though a rabble murmured beyond hearing. Thus, again, Danae addresses a child : — the old silence of palaces Is settling on you steadily. Your crying Is shut within — and shall be farther enclosed. The action of this play is " In Smyrna, 246 B.C.," of " The Riding to Lithend," " In Iceland, a.d. 990 " ; " Midsummer Eve " takes place " a long time ago " : all of them belong to periods of rushlights and braziers, dark long shadows and vengeance by night. They present the spectacle of human beings playing their fated roles with unerring accuracy of detail, and in accordance with a sub-conscious knowledge of the issue. On the threshold of doom Hallgerd addresses his old mother : — Come here and hearken. Is there not a foot, A stealthy step, a fumbling on the latch Of the great door ? They come, they come, old mother : Are you not blithe and thirsty, knowing they come And cannot be held back ? Watch and be secret, To feel things pass that cannot be undone. Gordon Bottomley's invention of a sub- sidiary plot to the drama of Lear, a kind of prologue to Shakespeare's tragedy, was daring 117 but ingenious. In '* King Lear's Wife " he reaches his supreme achievement in the repre- sentation of primitive gloom. The persons are all groping backward and forward and round-about, in the web of a Fate they cannot possibly hope to understand. He weaves mysteriously into his elemental plots psychological intricacies that seem modern because they are ancient, and that are neither actually ancient nor modern, because they are universal. His plays are more definitely suited to the modern stage than any that the younger contemporary poets have written. But they need such a reformed stage as Craig and others have dreamed, but not had the executive power to create. Gordon Bottomley is not solely a dramatic poet. His " End of the World " and " Babel : the Gate of God," though amounting together to not more than 150 lines, have an emotional content proportionate to full-length epics. And the poems that are only lyrical, packed into their two slim tiny volumes, contain certain passages of striking beauty. Thus man is shaped to lift his arms on high And tends to adoration as to breathe. 118 But it is chiefly as a dramatic poet that he is conspicuous among the moderns. Doubt- less a reformed stage will soon discover him. Let us hope that, side by side with his shorter plays, it will produce the great dramas of Michael Field. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson has published a bewildering quantity of small volumes. He is more facile than most of his contemporaries, but his mind has not sufficient range to justify that facility. His vocabulary is not large, and his employment of such as he possesses not remarkably unusual. It is plain, however, that his purpose is to write simply and trul}^ and that experiments with fine-sounding words do not interest him. In 1902 the case was different. We have but to open The Queen s Vigil to find at once such lines as " Drank the rose-fragrant air hke wine," or " Dew-laden censers in the air," or " Your brimming rapture of deep peace to drink." In 1904 we find him writing intoler- ably dull blank verse. In 1907 an interesting development of his talent is beginning, and we can follow it, phase by phase, through 119 each of his books down to to-day. After Wordsworth's example, he is now taking as much pains to avoid what is usually called " poetic diction " as he had previously taken to produce it. His blank verse is dull as before, but the manner of its use redeems it somewhat, and its identifiable purpose helps us to read it. He writes little plays about Northumbrian shepherds and watermen, types that he had the full chance of studying through the earher years of his Hfe. They speak in this manner : — Nicholas. Is Ralph there ? Rachel. Nay, he's gone back to the fold. Nicholas. If only I might go with him ! It's strange The year's lambs should be born and I not there. The labouring ewes will miss my hand to-night ; Though Ralph's a careful fellow, he is young ; And six-and-fifty lambings have I seen. It's hard, it's hard that I sit crippled here When there's so much to do — so much to do! These dreariest of iambic pentameters are entirely unHke the talk of peasants. Their object may be to reproduce the sad monotony 120 of that shepherd hfe, but their effect is to duH the mind of the reader. Such blank verse as this cannot be a fit medium for dramatic speech. The author seems to have reahsed it himself, for in the similar but longer series of little dramas entitled Daily Bread he breaks up the dialogue into lines of uneven length. Here, for instance, a delirious stoker describes his furnace : — I feed, and feed, and feed it, And yet it's never full ; And always gaping, gaping, And licking its red lips. I feed it with my shovel, All night long. I shovel without ceasing ; And it just licks the coke up in a twinkling, And roars, and roars for more. For these plays he constructed a manner that he has often used again. In the series of tales published under the title Fires he returns to rhyme and employs an enlarged vocabulary, at the same time developing the rhythmical schemes of Daily Bread. As a writer of stories in verse he is not as accomplished as his contemporary John Masefield. Another of his contempo- 121 raries is charged with having described him as " Masefield without the Damns." The best of the poems in the story-teUing vein are probably those entitled " Solway Ford " and *' Wheels," which were printed in Thoroughfares (1914). Here economy and concentration are practised, quahties which had not hitherto been conspicuous. In this book also he returns to the lyric. Battle (1915) contains lyrical transcriptions of the individual experiences of fighting-men, partly based on tales brought back to him by people from overseas, or on newspaper accounts of such experiences, and partly on the deductions of a tortured imagination brooding on the conditions of modern fighting and the irony of the soldier's lot. Friends and other books have since ap- peared. But he has not increased his reputa- tion as a lyric poet. It is probable that his talent is rather dramatic than lyrical or narrative, but it is doubtful whether his mind has the freedom and impartiality necessary for dramatic characterisation. 122 Sir Ronald Ross hardl}' belongs to the younger generation of poets. But his develop- ment is late, and, being unknown among the elder, he may well be introduced briefly into this section. John Masefield wrote of his series of poems entitled Philosophies, "It is magnificent. . . . I know nothing like it. . . . ' Philosophies ' will, I feel sure, alter the direction of intellectual energy throughout the land." Such unintelligible errors of judgment are often committed by men of benevolent dis- position. The Philosophies are worthless. But lately Ronald Ross has published (with a promise of a further series) certain dramas in miniature entitled Psychologies. These are described as " Studies of character and emotion during brief, but intensely dramatic, moments." They are experiments of a most unusual kind in " potted drama." If their author can maintain the same level of interest in his further series he will take his place among the inventors of new and remarkable dramatic forms. Quotation would be like tearing out a few hairs from the head of a Fury. The inherent 123 difficulty of creating them, and, in contrast, the apparent ease with which these brief dramatic scenes are developed, can be appre- ciated alone by reading them in their entirety. They have not the detailed subtlety of Gordon Bottomley's plays, nor the laborious intricacy of Abercrombie's literary dramas, nor the ingenuous simphcity of W. W. Gibson : on account of their difference they are pre- eminently interesting in the development of dramatic literature. Section IV Aldous Huxley is among the most promis- ing of the youngest generation of contem- porary poets. He has a brilHant intellect, rare force of imagination, command of lan- guage, subtle penetration, irony and style; and the progress of his development has been rapid from the beginning. Keats has influenced him slightly : otherwise he owes little to any particular dead or living English poet. But his debt to French hterature is unmistakable, and we do also notice an occasional hint of German influence. Some 124 of the earlier poems, such as " The Canal " in The Burning Wheel, read more like trans- lations than originals, so effectually has the style of the best kind of French sonnet imposed itself on his temperament. The gloomy or sarcastic impatience of these first poems is gradually modified in later ones. I had been sitting alone with books, Till doubt was a black disease. We can sympathise with that. It is one kind of trouble. Another kind is expressed in " The Ideal Found Wanting." He shouts, " Damn the whole crowd of you ! I hate you all ! " and " I'll break a window through my prison ! " but, true child of his time, he finds there is nothing much to be done ; that he must tolerate more or less; that making a fuss is generally equivalent to looking ridiculous : — Is it escape ? No, the laugh's turned on me ! I kicked at cardboard, gaped at red limelight ; You laughed and cheered m}- latest knockabout. His third trouble is that he can't control his feelings : " And oh, the pains of senti- ment ! " It seems not quite decent, and truly not pleasant, to give way to natural 125 feeling in the disgusting surroundings of the present world. On the verge of becoming a lover he sud- denly calls in scholarship to provide him with an analogy : — And when I kissed or felt her fingers press, I envied not Demosthenes his Greek, Nor TuUy for his Latin eloquence. Creating an imaginary garden he exclaims : " I insist on cypresses," and adds quickly : " I'm terribly romantic." In the forest he notes the following : — And on the beech-bole, smooth and grey. Some lover of an older day Has carved in time-blurred lettering One word only : — " Alas." He takes Amoret with him to " live free," but she, as might have been expected, prefers the town, and tells him so. On the civilised mind he passes the following comment : — We're German scholars poring over life. As over a Greek manuscript that's torn And stained beyond repair. Our eyes of horn Read one or two poor letters ; and what strife, What books on books begotten for their sake ! 126 " The Walk " is a brilliant poem. Though not without indications of its writer's youth- fulness, it introduces a new style into English hterature. " The Defeat of Youth," the title poem of the second work, was apparently intended to form a narrative, but it is not more than a loosely united sonnet sequence. The fifth sonnet may be quoted in its entirety, in spite of a Wordsworthian flavour. It is a model of clarity and condensation. One spirit it is that stirs the fathomless deep Of human minds, that shakes the elms in storm, That sings in passionate music, or on warm Still evenings bosoms forth the tufted sleep Of thistle-seeds that wait a traveUing wind. One spirit shapes the subtle rhythms of thought And the long thundering seas ; the soul is wrought Of one stuff with the body — matter and mind Woven together in so close a mesh That flowers may blossom into a song, that flesh May strangely teach the loveliest holiest things To watching spirits. Truth is brought to birth Not in some vacant heaven : its beauty springs From the dear bosom of material earth. He is not now so afraid of giving Beauty (figuratively) a big B, nor so shy in the presence of trees, flowers and the other con- ventional properties of nature-poetry. He 127 need not fear to fall into the ordinary tricks of the poetaster. Much thought has rendered him proof against them. He can even use the words "illimitable," ** imperishable," "in- scrutable," " reverberated," " methinks " and " imperturbable " without much detriment to the force of his own style. Now he in- dulges in some pleasant free verse jottings. He also renders Mallarme and Rimbaud into his own language. " Leda " is the most finished poem that Huxley has yet written ; a sensual and brightly coloured representation of the episode from mythology. Here is a passage from the description of the god's survey of the earth from Olympus in search of lustful pastime : — There lay the world, down through the chasmed blue, Stretched out from edge to edge unto his view ; And in the midst, bright as a summer's day At breathless noon, the Mediterranean lay ; And Ocean round the world's dim fringes tossed His glaucous waves in mist and distance lost ; And Pontus and the livid Caspian Sea Stirred in their nightmare sleep uneasily. And 'twixt the seas rolled the wide fertile land. Dappled with green and tracts of tawny sand. And rich, dark fallows and fields of flowers aglow And the white, changeless silences of snow ; 128 \Miile here and there towns, like a Uving eye Unclosed on earth's blind face, towards the sky Glanced their bright conscious beauty. Yet the sight Of his fair earth gave him but small delight Now in his restlessness : its beauty could Do nought to quench the fever in his blood. Here he spies Leda : — Many a thousand had he looked upon, Thousands of mortals, young and old ; but none — \'irgin, or young ephebus, or the flower Of womanhood culled in its full-blown hour — Could please the Thunderer's sight or touch his mind ; The longed-for loveliness was yet to find. Had beauty fled, and was there nothing fair Under the moon ? The fury of despair Raged in the breast of heaven's Almighty Lord ; He gnashed his foamy teeth and rolled and roared In bull-like agony. Then a great calm Descended on him : cool and healing balm Touched his immortal fury. He had spied Young Leda where she stood, poised on the river-side. The art of Aldous Huxley is developing in three directions. The verse of " Leda " is orthodox, but the style of the poem is new, its diction original, and its language personal. Then he writes poetry of a very modern type : style and content both " shock- ing." Lastly he is using a condensed prose, intricately and cleverly fashioned; far more satisfactory than the free verse of most of his I 129 contemporaries. Of this the series entitled " Beauty " is perhaps the best example, especially Number VIII. The Muse in Arms, an anthology made by a well-known English journalist, contains war-poems by fifty-two different writers; another similar collection is made up of forty-seven, and a third (published in America) admits over one hundred and fifty names. The first of these includes only two poems by Siegfried Sassoon; the second, none, and the third again two. His war-poetry does not conform to the popular standard. It is not " patriotic " ; it is not in the tra- dition; it has no parallel. It blows no loud bugles, nor spouts any vapour of sentimental heroics. It accepts the European War at face value, records facts, disguising none, and in a positively insolent manner avoids the mode and style of the orthodox war-poets. Its language and diction are of this war only, the former including most of the new expres- sions (wangle; gone West; old son; dud; get a move on; blazing crump; dug-out; 130 Blighty wound) and the latter coinciding with the manner and rh3'thm of colloquial speech. Way Poems, as a book, is the product of violent disgust, which rises to a crisis of anger and then subsides into a mood of in- tolerant resignation. He describes soldiers at dawn : — Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky Haggard and hopeless. They, who ha\'e beaten down The stale despair of night, must now renew Their desolation in the truce of dawn, Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace, or Crouching in cabins candle- chinked with light. or Old soldiers with three winters in their bones or the soldier's circumstances and his attitude to them : — To-night he's in the pink ; but soon he'll die. And still the war goes on ; he don't know wh}'. He reports fighting : the " big bombard- ment . . . rumbling and bumping," or " volle^'ing doom for doom"; the "brist- ling fire " ; the barrage which " roars and 131 lifts " ; the tanks that " creep and topple forward to the wire," and the battle that " winks and thuds in blundering strife." He notes the attitude toward fighting : — To-morrow we must go To take some Cursed wood . . . O world God made ! He records the hopelessness of it : — And hope, with furtive eyes and grappHng fists, Flounders in mud. O Jesu, make it stop ! or again : — Rain had fallen the whole damned night. O Jesus, send me a wound to-day. And I'll believe in Your bread and wine. And get my bloody old sins washed white ! He depicts death : — none heeded him ; he choked And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom, Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans . . . Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned. Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed. He reflects on death : — Trampling the terrible corpses — blind with blood. German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud. He jokes about it : — Good-bye, old lad ! Remember me to God, 132 He is violently ironicall}' bitter about it : — " Hoxi' many dead ? As many as ever you wish. Don't count 'em ; they're too many. Who'll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny? " Then he asks the enlightened person to make quite sure it shall not happen again : — Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget. He is the personification of the intellectual attitude toward modern warfare. Those " low-jargoning men " who were temporary soldiers haunt him, and they swarm through his book querying every detail of that Fate which, against most of their feelings, made of them something new, incongruous, in every way at variance with intellectual ideals. He loves them passionately : — They smote my heart to pity, built my pride. He tries to revolt, and extract himself from the whole situation : — Love drove me to rebel. Love drives me back to grope vith them through hell ; And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven. He scourges the Staff, and the Press, and the Government, and sentimental women, 133 and vaguely charitable people, and the Church. In his sincerity he rises occasionally to such a high pitch of " bad taste " that we wonder he was tolerated by the almighty powers above him. Various plain-speaking books have ap- peared on the subject of that recent dis- gusting episode in European history. One of the nearest to Siegfried Bassoon's is a stirring volume, Men in Battle, by a Hungarian, Andreas Latzko. There is also the volume by Sir Philip Gibbs. Such books are a kind of journalism. They record passing events. We require of them that they may be so permanently excellent a record, that men will read them for a long period into the future and be so stirred that they will refrain from drifting again into the errors and horrors which the books so vividly depict. We have still to learn whether Siegfried Sassoon, with his red anger, his queer under- standing of men, his sensitiveness, his pride, his facility in spinning a song, the absurd ingenuousness of his rhythm, but the great force and interest of his present production, will be sufficiently inspired by other subjects 134 in the future to engage our sympathies in Peace as he has stirred our emotions in War. "Ancestors," "Morning Express," and certain other poems contained in the volume entitled The Old Huntsman suggest the probability that he will. \\'e must create and fashion a new God — A God of power, of beauty, and of strength ; Created painfully, cruelly, Labouring from the re\-ulsion of men's minds. Cast down the idols of a thousand years, Crush them to dust Beneath the dancing rhythm of our feet. But we are brave, Full of a fiery courage, And go onward Onward, Through the galloping trees. We shout Glowing phrases — Snatches of ineffable wit. The frenzy in our feet Must surely set the world afire. Ora mi sento un nuovo sole sovra il cuore, un canto stranissimo nel profondo. Per ci6 h bello cantare come fa il pazzo Numbers one and two of the above quota- tions are torn from Osbert Sitwell ; number three is from a certain " Hymn to the New Poetry," pubHshed ten years ago, by Paolo Buzzi, an Itahan Futurist. It is easy to sneer at all three, and those of a sneering disposition are only too glad to fix on snip- bits of the kind, which do no particular credit to their authors. An impartial examination of Osbert Sit- well's poetry reveals it as the product of a mind charged with wholesome indignation against the hypocrisies and abuses of civilisa- tion, but limited in its expression through an insufficiency of patience and discipline. His hatred of those responsible for or sympathetic with the European war is, one may believe, as strong as Sassoon's : — From out this damning dreadful dark (While history, thundering, rolls b}') They wait for an anaemic lark To sing from weak blue sky. Or if a dog is hurt, why then They see the evil, and they cry. But yet they watch ten million men Go out to end in agony ! 136 His poetry is hampered by an unfortunate tendenc}^ to sharpen his wits on the faults of others. Resisting the temptation to gibe, he shows himself equipped with a sense of appropriate irony :— JUDAS AND THE PROFITEER Judas descended to this lower Hell To meet his onl}- friend — the profiteer — \Mio looking fat and iiibicund and well, Regarded him, and then said with a sneer, " Iscariot, the}' did you ! Fool ! to sell For silver pence the body of God's Son, ^^'hereas for maiming men with sword and shell I gain at least a golden miUion." But Judas answered : " You deserve your gold ; It's not His body but His soul you've sold ! " His free verse is rendered partially success- ful by the mental excitement that dictates its rhythm. His imagery is up-to-date. He takes the over-civilised man's delight in artificial horrors, the result of strained nerves : — Fear magnified my senses, and my brain Could hear beyond the threshold of this world. He also imagines primitive cosmic happen- ings, and traces the threads of race-memory. Though his mind works in a painted over- heated atmosphere, it has a considerable 137 power of feeling its way back into the past or peering into the psychology of the present. It is convenient and not inappropriate to consider the three members of the Sitwell family as branches of the same little tree in the garden of poetry. Certain literary persons have so detested the mere colour of their fruits as to get a sour taste in the mouth even at a distance. These, then, have stood apart sneering together. The Sitwells have, however, introduced a novel imagery and a light-hearted spirit. Their claim to afford amusement is not in itself frivolous. But it is not backed by enough intellect : hence it has insufficient literary power. Sacheverell Sitwell, leaning over Brighton pier, watches Small waves roll gently forward Raise their tired heads And slowly break to foam — As sudden as you turn A page over in a book. He imagines trees in Tahiti Cut out like stage-trees carved in canvas ; — 138 He writes : — And now I fear The moon will gi\-e A show of sentiment, And splash the land With her maternal milk, His impression of the nightingale is much at variance with traditional poetry, and, of course, most un-Georgian : — And in the tufted trees Like wooden to}-s The nightingales begin to creak Their laboured song Grinding out run by run each spray, Till, wings relapsed, They stare in vacancy And listen to their neighbours. Of the same Milton wrote : — for beast and bird, They to their grassy couch, these to their nests Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale. She all night long her amorous descant sung ; Silence was pleased. But the long hard training of civilisation has staled a Sitwcll mind. Our lives are short, And do we differ but by our degrees of misery. 139 The parrot suits this mood better than the nightingale, but even that bird " gravely turns a somersault " Much as the sun performs his antics As he climbs the aerial bridge and his tiresome chattering produces the following sardonic comment : — The parrot's voice snaps out — No good to contradict — What he says he'll say again : Dry facts, like biscuits, — Edith Sitwell lives, apparently, in a distorted wooden world, a wrangling dis- ordered nightmare world, all striped, plumed, glassy, lustful; haunted by the ghosts of simian ancestors, paraded by freaks : — Turn, turn again, Ape's blood in each vein. The people that pass Seem castles of glass. The old and the good Giraffes of blue wood ; There are wooden faces, wooden fruits, wooden leaves, wooden fields, wooden carrots ; there is a wooden sun, a wooden sea; there are wooden ripples of smiles : this is only to 140 enumerate a few of the common objects that are now discovered by Miss Sitwell to be composed of that ubiquitous material. The trees themselves, however, are not necessarily wooden. In one place they are described as " iron trees," their leaves being qualified by the epithet " fat." If Edith Sitwell's style is pecuhar, that is because she finds the world and its people so incredibly amazing that she cannot use ordinary words to describe them. To meet these circumstances she has been obliged to invent a most peculiar diction and vocabulary. The process of invention being not yet com- plete, she often writes as a child still learning an immensely difficult lesson. The rhymed octosyllabics she so frequently uses are peculiarly illustrative of the process : — The fusty showman fumbles, must Fit in a particle of dust The universe, for fear it gain Its freedom from my box of brain. Yet dust bears seeds that grow to grace Behind my crude-striped wooden face As I, a puppet tinsel-pink, I.eap on my springs, learn how to think, 141 She is very uncomfortable among people, particularly County People. Under the stress of torture she writes : — I saw the County Families Advance and sit and take their teas ; I saw the County gaze askance At my thin insignificance : Small thoughts like frightened fishes glide Beneath their eyes' pale glassy tide : Thej^ said : " Poor thing ! we must be nice ! " They said : " We know your father ! " — twice. Her eyesight is not normal. She has the same faculty as many of our modern painters for seeing parts of things out of focus with the whole to which they belong, or are related. In a railway carriage she is puzzled by jolting human physiognomy : — No longer with the horny eyes Of other people's memories. Through highly varnished yellow heat, As through a lens that does not fit, The faces jolt in cubes, and I Perceive their odd solidity And lack of meaning absolute : For why should noses thus protrude, And to what purpose can relate Each hair so oddly separate ? Edith Sitwell moves with comparative comfort among the shrill flowers of hell, 142 through a spangled and plumed atmosphere infested with parrots, parokeets, apes, mando- Unes, and deluded Pantaloons, amid the boom of falling wooden fruits under a paper sky. It suits her in fact better than that unsatisfactory too real world in which most people drag out their troubled existence. She is more advanced in her art than the poets of the 1890's in theirs. A substratum of earnest philosophy underlies, and has doubtless dictated, her extreme artificiality. She need not, of course, expect to be intelligible to the general public — even through an ear-trumpet. Down the horn Of her ear-trumpet I convey The news that : " It is Judgment Day ! " " Speak louder; I don't catch, my dear." I roared : " // is the Trump we hear ! " Section V For the end of the world was long ago — And all we dwell to-day As children of some second birth, Like a strange people left on earth After a judgment day. If we don't look too closely into the absolute meaning of this stanza by G. K. 143 Chesterton extracted from The Ballad of the White Horse, it may impress us with a grave awe. It might be taken to refer in many different ways to man's present sinister con- dition, to convey the idea of a Nietzschean "final man" Hngering purposelessly on; or of a hopeless race, the refuse of a degraded and tired humanity chained in the fetters of its own civilisation ; or to a tribe over-burdened with a self-consciousness out of which it cannot succeed in passing to that last con- dition in which man will be super-conscious. But if we look closely into the stanza and its context, we find that Mr. Chesterton means only something natural and ingenuous. He belongs to that class of writers among which it is an instinct and a duty to glorify the events and the people of the past to the detriment of those of the present. He is also a neo-Christian, a Catholic of the new artificial cult that has recently estabhshed itself in England. When Mr. Chesterton laughs heartily and with a full voice, as in his definitely comic poems, we join with him, for that laughter is Falstaffian, but when in a serio-comic mood he writes of the donkey as 144 The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things, that is a very grave misconception of the asinine race, the more irritating when we reaHse the point to which he is leading. Says the donkey : — Fools ! For I also had my hour ; One far fierce hour and sweet : There was a shout about my ears. And palms before my feet. Such sentimental condescension towards a Httle ass is typical of the journalist mind, that is, the mind that seeks the shortest and most obvious track towards a popular effect. Much of G. K. Chesterton's verse is spoilt by his anxiety to make some point. To read him, one might almost believe that he solemnly imagines the pride of England to have been established by its drunkards : his contempt for the man who does not fear God and love Beer is the underlying sentiment of a large number of his poems. He has a flourishing gift of rhetoric. He writes : — Words, for alas my trade is words, a barren burst of rhyme, Rubbed by a hundred rhymesters, battered a thousand times, K 145 and, indeed, either he has not had the time, or, perhaps, the abihty, or maybe, the desire to mould his thought to an individual diction, but has contented himself with the use of ready-made forms, borrowed chiefly from Swinburne and Kipling. His serious verse, then, though of an efficient quality, is not likely to gain what is called " a permanent place in English poetry." Expert analysis could destroy it with, perhaps, one exception only, the immense Ballad of the White Horse, the most careful and least artificial of his poems. His comic verses are mostly in the nature of gibes and lampoons, but they are so candid and witty that nobody with any sense of humour can fail to enjoy them, and they certainly come up to the standard of Hood, Calverley, Gilbert and other modern humorists. HiLAiRE Belloc, well known, Hke G. K. Chesterton, as an untiring journalist (also as a war-expert, foot-traveller and Roman Catholic) has written some very pleasant verses, including ballads, poems of places, 146 drinking songs, satirical poems, epigrams, comic poems (particularly for children) and religious poems. Heretics all, whoever you be, In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea, You ne\er shall ha\-e good words from me. Caritas non conturbat me. But Catholic men that live upon wine Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine ; ^^'herever I tra\-el I find it so, Benedicamus Domino. He is quoted in many anthologies. " The South Country " and "To Night " are probably his best known pieces. He is a styhst, a witty and scholarly writer of the University type. Balliol made me, Balliol fed me. Whatever I had she gave me again ; And the best of Balliol loved and led me, God be with you, Balliol men. As a humorist he is unsurpassed among hving poets. The " Lines to a Don " are excellent fun. Remote and ineffectual Don That dared attack my Chesterton, With that poor weapon, half-impelled, Unlearnt, unsteady, hardly held, Unworthy for a tilt with men — Your quavering and corroded pen ; Their full flavour cannot be tasted in extract ; and the poem entitled " To Dives " should also be read in its entirety, to be duly appreciated. Hilaire Belloc makes a slighter but more deliberate contribution to modern poetry than G. K. Chesterton. " The Birds " is a pattern of the art of concentration : — When Jesus Christ was four years old The angels brought Him toys of gold, Which no man ever had bought or sold. And yet with these he would not play. He made Him small fowl out of clay, And blessed them till they flew away : Tu creasti Domine. Jesus Christ, Thou child so wise, Bless mine hands and fill mine eyes. And bring my soul to Paradise, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc are both journalists of the highest possible order. It is not to be thought that they invite us to take them very seriously as poets. The same remark would not apply to J. C. Squire, an excellent journalist too, and at one time a parodist and scribbler of humor- ous verse, but, according to every indication, a writer to whom poetry is a far more serious 148 matter than an}' of the other branches of his art. A reviewer of one of his works recently referred to " the impressiveness of the position which Mr. Squire has come to hold as arbiter and foremost representative of modern English poetry." He is, in fact, the editor of one of the most ambitious literary periodicals that the centur}'- has produced, namely, The London Mercury, and his influence also ex- tends to the literar}^ columns of many dailies, weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies, so that is has often been hinted, rightly or wrongh^, that such 3^oung poets as are blessed with his favour need not fear to be snubbed, drubbed or neglected by the Press. In J. C. Squire we have an interesting example of the modern professional poet. Those who have watched his career will not have failed to note the stages by which he has climbed to his present summit. His activities have included pohtics as well as journalism : he was for some time a member of the Com- mittee of the Fabian Society, and he has stood for Parliament. His verses were first issued chiefly in a 149 number of small books, of which the editions were sometimes limited, and the repetition of certain poems from volume to volume was so tiresome that it was with considerable relief that his admirers welcomed in 1918 the publication of Poems : First Series, a book containing, as stated in the Preface, all that he did ** not wish to destroy of four volumes of verse." The selection covers the years 1905-1917, and consists of fifty-one poems. A supplemental booklet. The Birds, covering the year 191 8, contains a further eight. Recent years have shown an acceleration in his production of serious poetry, and an increase of confidence in his own powers. Attention has already been drawn to the fact that in its infancy the " Georgian move- ment " was uncharacterised by evidence of design, that is, it did not, like other schools, preach or practise a special dogma of the poetic art. It was fortuitous and informal. But the poets subsequently included in the anthologies devoted much energy to narrow- ing and hardening what began as a spontane- ous co-operative effort. They sought to establish (according to a recent review) " a 150 form of literary tyranny, demanding of its own disciples a complete conformity to certain standards, and seeking to exclude altogether those who refuse to do homage to those laws." The serious poems of J. C. Squire are labours of conscious brain, supported by encyclopaedic investigation. Their rhyth- mical arrangement is founded on the known forms of his predecessors and contemporaries, artificially re-adjusted to produce an appear- ance of novelty. His subjects are often chosen with self-conscious deliberation. In his " Ode : In a Restaurant " he exclaims : — So, so of every substance you see around Might a tale be unwound He inquires into the state of his own mind : Beneath my skull-bone and my hair, Covered like a poisonous well, There is a land : The poetical programme upon which he has resolved he condenses into a sonnet be- ginning :— I shall make beauty out of many things : Lights, colours, motions, sky and earth and sea. The soft unbosoming of all the springs Which that inscrutable hand allows to me, But he is diffident concerning his real attitude : — When I see truth, do I seek truth Only that I may things denote, And, rich by striving, deck my youth As with a vain unusual coat ? and again, This firmness that I feel about my lips, Is it but empty pride ? " I have not lacked my certainties," he explains in extenuation of the statement that, on the other hand, he is " vague " and shrinks " to guess God's everlasting purposes." Comparing himself to a lake he exclaims : — I make no sound, nor can I ; nor can I show What depth I have, if any depth, below. He examines his own " processes of thought " : Sometimes I play with a thought and hammer and bend it, Till tired and displeased with that I toss it away, again. In bed I lie, and my thoughts come filing by. His various Selves are intensely curious regarding each other, not to say suspicious. Brain often makes wrong conjectures, and 152 then is corrected b\' Spirit or Heart. In an argument between the one and the other, the one exclaims, " No; for I swear . . ." I walked no nit with eyelids shut, my ears and eyes were never blind, Only m\' eager thoughts I bent on many things that I desired To make my greedy heart content ere flesh and blood I left behind. A short versicle describes how I and myself swore enmity. Alack, Myself had tied my hands behind my back. Thus introspection pursues its course. Until 1 9 17 he still seems to have wavered between the various methods which presented them- selves as feasible for the ultimate representa- tion of his personality in literature. Then finally he adopted the subject-poem scheme. " The Lily of Malud " was the first effort of the new period. Resignation to objectivity immediately brought an improvement in style. The three subject-poems that have followed are entitled respectively " Rivers," " The Birds," and " The Moon." The first of these is an attempt in a very grand style and a duly effective liquid 153 rhythm to catalogue, poetically, the principal rivers of the world : — All these I have known, and with slow eyes I have walked on their shores and watched them, And softened to their beauty and loved them Wherever my feet have been ; And a hundred others also Whose names long since grew into me, That, dreaming in light or darkness, I have seen, though I have not seen. The poet returns from Ebro, Guadiana, Congo, Nile, Colorado, Niger, Indus, Zam- besi, Volga to his more native Chagford, Tavy Cleave, and Vixen Tor : his imaginary wan- derings to the shores of the rivers of the world have only sickened him of foreign travel and convinced him of the superiority of his native country. Again in ** The Birds," we find him dealing with a large theme in a skilful manner. The encyclopaedic instinct has gained such a hold on the poet's imagination that it can hardly soar, and, in fact, it comes to grief, landing him into such an ornithological blunder and imaginative misconception as to state that A million years before Atlantis was Our lark sprang from some hollow in the grass. It is a function of the imagination to be scientifically precise. Imaginative statements that can be emphatically denied by science lay the whole art of the poet open to suspicion. The poem entitled " The Moon " does not bear any kind of analytic examination. It is rhetoric chiefly. The rh^'me device of the fifth and sixth lines of each stanza is an original feature. Except for the difference in verse-form, stanza 9 reads almost like a rejected passage from " Laon and Cythna," and stanza 20 might well be a suppressed version of something by Keats. The beauties of J. C. Squire's poetry are to be found where he is less artificial and least introspective as in the poems called " A Far Place," "Winter Nightfall," "Echoes," "The Ship," " The March," " A House," " Under," " A Generation," several of the " Songs," and that most deeply felt and sad record entitled " To a Bull-Dog." As an example of skilful craftsmanship the following " Song " (one of his most recent poems) may be quoted : — You are my sky ; beneath your circling kindness My meadows all take in the light and grow ; Laugh with the joy you've given, The joy you've given, And open in a thousand buds, and blow. But when you are sombre, sad, averse, forgetful, Heavily veiled by clouds that brood with rain, Dumbly I lie all shadowed, I lie all shadowed. And dumbly wait for you to shine again. About the time of the pubhcation of " The Lily of Malud," a new poet was launched on the market in the person of W. J. Turner. It was rumoured in literary circles that here was a genius. Opening The Hunter and Other Poems, we find " Romance " : When I was but thirteen or so I went into a golden land, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi Took me by the hand. We read to the last stanza : The houses, people, traffic seemed Thin fading dreams by day, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi They had stolen my soul away ! and we turn back gladly to Walter de la Mare's beautiful " Arabia," in which an emotion of this kind was recorded under a personal impulse and in the poet's own genuine rhythm. Turner has suffered from the disadvantage of learning the " tricks of the trade " in the neo-Georgian school, and he has acquired the 156 habit of apph'ing them with a certain crafti- ness to the particular subject in hand. We suspect that he has not read enough. It would not be just to anatyse his prentice work too searchingly. It is rich in beaut}^ and he has tried many and varied measures, even to the free verse of his " Ode to the Future." His progress has been rapid, and there are signs that he has many of the characteristics of a " real poet." Any one can see through his tricks; they are so artless that it is not possible to believe them inherent : — Bej'ond the blue, the purple seas. Beyond the thin horizon's line. Beyond Antilla, Hebrides, Jamaica, Cuba, Caribbees There lies the land of Yucatan. How Poe would have laughed at such verses ! The word " moon " and the word " trees," and simple monosyllabic epithets like cold, dim, dark, pale, wan, bright, grey, still, occur in all he has written to such excess that they cloy the reader's memory like some unwanted tune. His psychological observation is good, and when he is not representing mere moods, and is forgetting for the moment Keats, 157 Coleridge, de la Mare and all " tricks of the trade," he seems able to step aside from him- self, and his idiom and measure become at such moments unaffected and delightful. We would instance particularly the poems entitled " Ecstasy," '' The Sky-Sent Death," '' In the Caves of Auvergne," " Epithalamium for a Modern Wedding," and "The Shepherd Goes to War," from which the opening four stanzas are here quoted : — When Dawn drew near and tree or hill Stood slowly bright, and clear, and still, It lit the Shepherd, a dark rock Amid his wide, grey, tumbling flock : He stands as stand great ancient trees When streams leap loud about their knees; And he moves slow and tranquilly As clouds across a peaceful sky. There is no voice for him to hear. Save from men coming once a year Beyond that haze-blue mountain bar. Where the eastern cities are. In stiD repose his features sleep, He grows to look like his own sheep ; And priestlike at each dawn he stands, An ancient blessing on those lands. Edward Shanks began by writing pretty and refreshing lyrics in the style of the best 158 English folk-song but with an individual flavour ; also in his earlier verse the influence of the German classics is apparent, particu- larly Goethe. The latter influence would appear to have reached him partly from the originals and partly by way of the earlier poems of Ford Madox Hueffer, a roundabout way, indeed. If a majority of the influences should be mentioned that guided the first exercises of this poet, A Shropshire Lad would certainly be among the foremost. But what he owes to A. E. Housman is some- times indistinguishable from his debt to the tradition from which that poet also derived some of his inspiration. It was daring to transcribe the following stanza from a well- known traditional song in order to complete it with a new second stanza : — The cuckoo is a fine bird, She sings as she flies, She brings us good tidings And tells us no lies. She sucks the sweet flowers To make her voice clear And the more she calls : Cuckoo ! The summer draws near. The young writer is, however, obliged to 159 model himself on masters or masterpieces, and we are less likely to complain of his imitations if we discover in his personality sufficient strength to promise a future emer- gence into freedom. Passing over his second book, which is mostly prentice work, we approach with apprehensive interest his third much larger volume, published in 1919, for which he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize of one hundred pounds. On this volume, in fact, we must base our estimate of his powers. Its bulk is swelled chiefly by a poem ii dramatic form entitled " The Queen of China, > and by a narrative called '' The Fireless Town '■ The lyrical poems which precede these t\'^^ show a definite advance. We will quo ^>' for instance, three stanzas from "A Nigl ^' Piece":— Hark now ! So far, so far . . . that distant song . , Move not the rusthng grasses with your feet. The dusk is full of sounds, that all along The muttering boughs repeat. So far, so faint, we lift our heads in doubt. Wind, or the blood that beats within our ears. Has feigned a dubious and delusive note, Such as dreamer hears. 160 Again . . . again ! The faint sounds rise and fail. So far the enchanted tree, the song so low . . . A drowsy thrush? A waking nightingale? Silence. We do not know. " Fete Galante " is an ingenious piece of work. But we are inevitably disappointed to find that, though the poet has so developed his powers, he still has not the perspicuity to suppress such poems as the sonnet beginning with the lines, When in the mines of dark and silent thought Sometimes I delve and find strange fancies there, fhich are almost a parody of the opening aes of Shakespeare's XXXth Sonnet. Let us dwell for a moment on the title- 1. 3m, written in dramatic form, but clearly L intended for the stage. Directions re- 1. i