Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

ures of a very remarkable man, but, when all was said and done, left an incomplete impression of his taste and occupations on the minds of those who were not familiar with h

n full intellectual energy-he constantly devoted himself to the art of writing. His zeal, his ambition, were wonderful; but it was impossible to overlook the disadvantage from which that ambition and that zeal suffered in the fact that for the f

o those who knew Lord Redesdale intimately, it must always appear that his autobiography fails to explain him from what we may call the subjective point of view. It tells us of his adventures and his friendships, of the strange lands he visited and of the unexpected confidences he re

efore no difficulty, but pushed on with an extraordinary energy along many various lines of activity. But the two lines in which he most desired and most determined to excel, gardening and authorship, are scarcely to be discerned, except below the surface, in his Memories. Next to his books, what he regarded with most satisfaction was his wonderful garden at Batsford, and of this there is scarcely a word of record in the autobiography. He had always intended to celebrate t

ssion of others. The outbreak of the war, in which all his five sons were instantly engaged, was the earliest of a series of changes which completely altered the surface of Lord Redesdale's life. Batsford came once more into his personal occupation, and at the same time it became convenient to give up his London house in Kensington C

nce, and he seemed to clench his tooth in defiance of the assault on his individuality. It required on the part of so old a man no little fortitude, for it is easier to bear a great and heroic bereavement than to resist the wearing vexation of seeing one's system of daily occupation crumbling awa

his was an occupation which bridged over the horrid chasm between his old active life in London, with its thousand interests, and the uncertain and partly dreaded pro

e than perhaps any other haunt of the English sportsman, in complete eclipse. The weather was lovely, but there were no yachts, no old chums, no charming ladies. "It is very dull," he wrote; "the sole inhabitant of the Club besides myself was Lord Falkland, and now he is gone." In these conditions Lord Redesdale became suddenly conscious that the activity of the last two or three years was over, that the aspect of his world had

to any of his various moods. Here and there I find gems of thought, but one has to wade through a morass of blue mud to get at them. Here is a capital saying of his which may be new to you-in a

ll be able to get through a pile of work. Not a bit of it! I find it difficult even to wri

to undertake. "You make me dare, and that is much towards winning a game. You must sharpen my wits, which are blunt

" was the instant question; "what means can I find of occupying this dreadful void of leisure?" To which the obvious reply was: "First of all, you must exhibit to me the famous attractions of Cowes!" "There are none," he replied in comic despair, but we presently invented some, and my visit, which extended over several radiant days o

im to think about future enterprises. To tell the truth, I had regarded the Memories as likely to be the final labour of Lord Redesdale's busy life. It seemed to me that at his advanced age he might now well withdraw into dignified repose. I even hinted so much in terms as delicate as I could make them, but the suggestion was not well received. I became conscious that there was nothing he was so little prepared to welcome as "repose"; that, in

frankly demanded that a subject should be found for him. "You have brought this upon yourself," he said, "by encouraging me to write." What might prove the scheme of a very pleasant book then occurred to me, and I suggested to the fiery and impatient author, who had by this time retired for good to Batsford, that he should compose a volume of essays dealing with things in general, but bound to

tate on it. I will try to make a picture of the VELUVANA, the bamboo-garden which was the first Vikara or monastery of Buddha and his disciples. There I wi

of his life Lord Redesdale was eagerly set on the scheme of which a hint has just been given. The Veluvana was to be the crowning production of his literary life, and it was to sum up the wisdom of the East and the gai

ne that I could detect something resembling purpose in the movements of certain plants. I have jotted down a few notes, and you will see when I expand them that at any rate the idea calls attention to the movemen

, and he proposed to describe in what a monk of Hiyeisan differed from an Indian Buddhist monk. This was a theme of extraordinary interest, and

pan. He was a valuable asset to England, and to Sir Harry Parkes, who, with all his energy and force

nt, and no one could have wished him to be willing, to break abruptly all the cords of his past life. He was still a Trustee of the National Gallery, still chairman of the Marlborough Club, still occupied with the administration of the Wallace Collection, and he did not abate his interest in these directions. They made it necessary that he should come up to town every other week. This made up in some measure for the inevitable disappointment of finding that in Gloucestershire his deafness now completely cut him off from all the neighbourly duties w

y Mouse-even if the creature were able to scuttle back into the cellars of the great-would still be out of all communion wi

gh places of his bamboo-feathered rockeries, where little cascades fell with a music which he could no longer hear into small dark pools full of many-coloured water-lilies, his activity was like that of a boy. He had the appearance, the tastes,

e arrival of his eightieth year, his activity and curiosity of intellect were certai

by the Cambridge University Press. A much-needed book, for the previous dictionaries were practically useless except for courier's work. How splendid Dante is! But how sickening are the Commentators, Benvenuto da Imola, Schartazzini and the rest of them! They won't let the poet say that the sun shone or the night

th the eminent veteran of Dante scholarship, the Honourable W.W. Vernon, whom he mentions in t

rse, I knew the catch quotations in Dante, but I never

early in the Paradiso. He had no sympathy whatever with what is mystic and spiritual, and he was extremely bored by the Beatific Vision and the Rose of the Empyrean. I c

rs of his Memories, but it was another distraction. It took his thoughts away from Veluvana, although he protested to me that he could prepare his Ca

R's alone remain to me, and, indeed, of those only two-for owing to my having enjoyed an Eton education in days when arithmetic was deemed to be no p

ctively than he himself realis

who I believe has been most malignantly traduced by the third-rate English Colony in Paris-all his faults exaggerated, none of his good qualities even hinted at. T

tually fresh, ready for adventure and delighted with the pageant of existence. He found no fault at all with life, save that it must leave him, and he had squared his shoulders not to give way to weakness. Perhaps the only sign of weakness was just that visible determination to be strong. But the features of his character had none of those mental wrinkles, those "rides de l'esp

he set himself energetically to repair the damage. He was in his usual buoyant health when the very hot spell in May tempted him out on May 18th, with his agent, Mr. Kennedy, to fish at Swinbrook, a beautiful village on his Oxfordshire property, of which he was particularly fond. He was not successful, and in a splenetic mood he flung himself at full length upon a bank of wet grass. He was not allowed to remain th

s alone perceived that he was making a superlative effort. There followed a very bad night, and he went down to Batsford next day, going straight to his bed, from which he never rose again. His condition, at first, gave rise to little alarm. The disease, which proved to be catarrhal jaundice, took its course; but for a long time his spirit and his unconsciousness of danger sustained him and filled those around him with hope. There was no disturbance of mi

leurs complices. I know E.D., he is a brother of Alphonse, and is a competent historian. His book is most illuminating. Of course there are exaggerations, but he is always well documenté, and there is much in

unconscious state, dying peacefully at noon on August 17th, 1916. He w

POETRY OF

. Thackeray had published Ballads, and George Eliot had expatiated in a Legend of Jubal. No one thought the worse of Coningsby because its author had produced a Revolutionary Epic. It took some time for even intelligent criticism to see that the new Wessex Poems did not fall into this accidental category, and still, after twenty years, there survives a tendency to take the verse of Mr. Hardy, abundant and solid as it has

Mr. Hardy is completed, nothing, it is probable, will more strike posterity than its unity, its consistency. He has given proof, as scarce any other modern writer has done, of tireless constancy of resolve. His novels formed an unbroken series from the Desperate Remedies of 1871 to The Well-Beloved of 1897. In the fulness of his success, and unseduced by all temptation, he closed that chapter of his career,

vements of human character, and his eloquence in translating what he had observed of the tragedy and pain of rustic lives. No one, for sixty years, had taken so closely to heart the admonitions of Wordsworth in his famous Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads to seek for inspiration in that condition where "the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful forms of nature." But it may well be doubted whether Mr. Hardy's poems would have been received in the mid-Victorian age with favour, or even

r one another's work has already been revealed, and will be still more clearly exposed. But they were unknown to each other in 1866, when to both of them the cheap philosophy of the moment, the glittering femininity of the "jewelled line," the intense respect for Mrs. Grundy in her Sunday satin, appeared trumpery, hateful, and to be trampled upon. We find in Mr. Hardy's earliest verse no echo of the passionate belief

characterised the poet. In "Amabel" the ruinous passage of years, which has continued to be an obsession with Mr. Hardy, is already crudely dealt with. The habit of taking poetical negatives of small scenes-"your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree, and a pond edged with grayish leaves" ("Neutral Times")-which had not existed in English verse since the days of Crabbe, reappears. There is marked already a sense of terror and

wed as slave t

found apart, o

whom no high

rs could ever h

e. Perhaps of the poems certainly attributable to this earliest period, the little cycle of sonnets called "She to Him" gives clearest promise of what was coming. The sentiment is that of Ronsard's famous "Quand vous serez bien vieille,

e that cankers

d that kissed e

y of mind that Ronsard's

moment. Mr. Hardy was once more tempted to change the form of his work. He wished "to get back to verse," but was dissuaded by Leslie Stephen, who induced him to start writing The Return of the Native instead. On March 29th, 1875, Coventry Patmore, then a complete stranger, wrote to express his regret that "such almost unequalled beauty and power as appeared in the novels should not have assured themselves the immortality which would have been conferred upon them by the fo

s finished ten years later. The long ballad of "Leipzig" and the savage "San Sebastian," both highly characteristic, were also conceived and a few lines of each noted down long before their completion. "Valenciennes," however, belongs to 1878, and the "Dance at the Ph?nix," of which the stanza beginning "'Twas Christmas" alone had been written years before, seems to have been finished about the same time. What evidence is before us goes to prove that in the 'seventie

Present, which came out in the first days of 1902, could not but be in a certain measure disappointing, in so far as it paralleled its three years' product with that of the thirty years of Wessex Poems. Old pieces were published in it, and it was obvious that in 1898 Mr. Hardy might be expecte

pipe a p

lent the

silence has be

ing 'The Bri

loved, rom

show by smil

hy and wh

of pieces composed in Rome were not so interesting; Mr. Hardy always seems a little languid when he leaves the confines of his native Wessex. Another section of Poems of the Past and Present is severely, almost didactically, metaphysical, and expands in varied language the daring thought, so constantly present in Mr. Hardy's reverie, that God Himself ha

s Solace? No

ing, suffe

ting Life's

eding Time'

eaving to

azing on

y things go

firmed, and more than confirmed, the high promise of Wessex Poems. The author, in one of his modest prefaces, where he seems to whisper while we bend forward in our anx

failures in passion, of the treason of physical decay. No landscape of Mr. Hardy's had been more vivid than the night-pictures in "The Revisitation," where the old soldier in barracks creeps out on to the gaunt down, and meets (by one of Mr. Hardy's coincidences) his ancient mistress, and no picture more terrible than the revelation of each to th

s, such as "Rose-Ann," and "The Vampirine Fair"-he allows no considerations of what the reader may think "nice" or "pleasant" to shackle his sincerity or his determination; and it is therefore to Time's Laughingstocks that the reader who wishes to become intimately acquainted with Mr. Hardy as a moralist most frequently recurs. We notice here more than elsewhere in his poems Mr. Hardy's sympathy with the local music of Wessex, and especially with its expression by the village choir, which he uses as a spiritual symbol. Quite a large section of

poetic value to minute conditions of life which have escaped less careful observers. But in Satires of Circumstance the ugliness of experience is more accentuated than it is elsewhere, and is flung in our face with less compunction. The pieces which give name to the volume are only fifteen in number, but the spirit which inspires them is very frequently repeated in other parts of the collection. That spirit is one of mocking sarcasm, and it acts in every case by presenting a beautifully draped figure of illusion, from which the poet, like a sardonic showman, twitches away the robe that he may display a skeleton

yellow

rthful

g straws with

ring th

up th

alone, without

mment upon its execution. Of the merit of these monotonously sinister Satires of Circumstance there can be no question; whether the poet's indulgence in the mood which gave birth to them does not tend to lower our moral temperature and to

ng," with a sort of magic, like that of a wizard. He has learned to track the windings of the human heart with the familiarity of a gamekeeper who finds plenty of vermin in the woods, and who nails what he finds, be it stoat or squirrel, to the barn-door of his poetry. But there is also in these last-fruits of Mr. Hardy's mossed tree much that

ut a pars

erein towar

ught what gho

ng footsteps

knelt, and s

rink, into

figure see

ith the bye

h rhymes of ch

t what my wo

into my e

a tenderer v

ical quality, which was singularly misunderstood at first, and which has never, we believe, been boldly faced. In 1898, and later, when a melodious falsetto was much in fashion amongst us, the reviewers found great fault with Mr. Hardy's p

ts separatene

g of accent, deserved hanging"; perhaps we may go so far as to say that Mr. Hardy, for his indifference to a mellifluous run lays himself open to a mild rebuke. He is negligent of that eternal ornament of English verse, audible intricacy

er part of prosody, we must perceive that Mr. Hardy is not only a very ingenious, but a very correct and admirable metricist. His stanzaic invention is abundant; no other Victorian poet, not even Swinburne, has employed so many form

Bulleys,

dawn till

w not that

ay's pale

e who san

of the birds warbling faintly in the sunset. Again, the hurried, timid irresolution

izbie

lse h

ed as

esh s

ut of

izbie B

uits the mood of denunciation, while "Tess's Lament" wails in a metre which seems to ro

ese are identical in form, and for each he selects, or more often invents, a wholly appropriate stanza. He makes many experiments, one o

sadly onwar

ghway t

its pale riba

nchet a

h the Stour-b

ions had

he slow riv

een ca

o which we shall presently recur. The drawling voice of a weary old

en wi' its

n'y town I c

Nick should

id Vale

e verse-form of "The Souls of the Slain," in which the throbbing stanza seems to dilate and withdraw like the very cloud of moth-like phantoms which it describes. It is difficult to follow out this theme without more frequent

Doomsters," accident, chance, and time, from whom he has had to endure injury and insult from the cradle to the grave. This is stating the Hardy doctrine in its extreme form, but it is not stating it too strongly. This has been called his "pessimism," a phrase to which some admirers, unwilling to give things their true name, have objected. But, of co

oets, and although ennui inspires a multitude of sonnets, a deliberate and imaginative study of useless suffering in the world around us is rare indeed among the poets. It is particularly to be noted that Mr. Hardy, although one of the most profoundly tragic of all modern writers, is neither effeminate nor sickly. His melancholy co

th the sad

of see

d cloak, and th

o-forced p

at thou wo

, Time,

it long, and

all mean

st thou

in rare

ke truth, fo

rth is

ne me to

with thee

what as

I shall

n a frosty evening, are so ecstatic that they waken a vague hope in the listener's mind that the thrush may possibly know of "some

r of disillusion. But there is a great distinction in the aim of the two poets. Crabbe, as he describes himself in The Parish Register, was "the true physician" who "walks the foulest ward." He was utilitarian in his morality; he exposed the pathos of tragedy by dwelling on the faults which led to it, forgetful of the fatality which in more consistent moments h

menteur, toute

u fond de la co

t disposed to waste time over its consequences. At the end he produ

mes startling. But Mr. Hardy's disdain of sentimentality, and his vigorous analysis of the facts of life, render him insensible not indeed to the mystery nor to the beauty, but to the imagined sympathy, of Nature. He has no more confidence in the visible earth than in the invisible heavens, and neither here nor there is he able to persuade himself to discover a counsellor or a friend. In this connection, we do well to follow the poet's train of thought in the lyric called "In a Wood," where he enters a copse dreaming that, in that realm of "sylvan peace," Nature would

hen, no g

me of

back to

y as

least smi

ourse tril

and then,

loyal

her negligence, her blindness, her implacability. We find here a violent reaction against the poetry of egotistic optimism which had ruled the romantic school in England for more than a hundred years, and we recognise a branch of Mr. Hardy's

es say that L

hill Clump

says a thin

t, 'Gra

fe al

ell'ha

fe is for e

hat Life w

ted pur

o live, and ar

at's th

l, in

ell'ha

fers-to

closer to the level of the subject than his great predecessor does. Wordsworth is the benevolent philosopher sitting in a post-chaise or crossing the "wide moor" in meditation. Mr. Hardy is the familiar neighbour, the shy mourner at the grave; his relation is a more intimate one: he is patient, humble, un-upbraiding. Sometimes, as in the remarkable colloquy called "The Ruined Maid," his sympathy is so close as to offer an absolute flout in the face to the system

fiddler at a dance, surveying the hot-blooded couples, and urging them on by the lilt of his instrument, but he is always perfectly aware that they will have "to pay high for their p

ow 'a wo

uld raise

n the waggon f

ight o'

ow 'a wou

estring di

t her coats, give

round a

ow 'a wou

y lips w

h a place for

eeps of

reparable tragedy, woven, as a black design on to a backgr

ake no selection, and his field is modest to humility and yet practically boundless. We have a poem on the attitude of two people with nothing to do and no book to read, waiting in the parlour of an hotel for the rain to stop, a recollection after more than forty years. That the poet once dropped a pencil into the cranny of an old church where he was sketching inspires an elaborate lyric. The disappearance of a rotted summer-house, the look of a row of silver drops of fog condensed on the bar of a gate, the effect of candlelight years and years ago on a woman's neck

his jealousy of the child is rendered with extraordinary refinement. The difficulty of course is to know when to stop. There is always a danger that a poet, in his search after the infinitely ingenious, may lapse into amphigory, into sheer absurdity and triviality, which Cowper, in spite

n the dee

gree the ch

s I bent there

ed panes of m

the wat

on in its

med clouds wer

e and col

in's eye seen thro

through Wessex to be present at the funeral of the wrong woman; as he returns, by a coincidence, he meets the right woman, whom he used to love, and is horrified at "her liquor-fired face, her thick accents." He determines that by an effort of will the dead woman (whom he never saw) shall remain, what she seemed during his wild ride, "my Cicely," and the living woman be expunged from memory. A similar delibera

t it was; and perhaps at the same source he acquired his dangerous insight into the female heart, whether exquisitely feeble as in "The Home-coming" with its delicate and ironic surprise, or treacherous, as in the desolating ballad of "Rose-Ann." No one, in prose or verse, has expatiated more poignantly than Mr. Hardy on what our forefathers used to call "cases of conscience." He seems to have shared the experiences of souls to whom life was "a wood before your doors,

he Melancholy Hussar. The reader of the novels will not have to be reminded that "Valenciennes" and the other ballads have their prose-parallel in Simon Burden's reminiscences of Minden. Mr. Hardy, with a great curiosity about the science of

and I

old anci

ave set us

ny a nip

important part of the volume of 1918, should be carefully examin

in the case of aged or exhausted persons, a revival of spiritual force, and on the whole he is disinclined to cling to the faith in a future life. He holds that the immortality of a dead man resides in the memory of the living, his "finer part shining within ever-faithful hearts of those bereft." He pursues this theme in a large number of his most serious and affecting lyrics, most

and much of the character of some apocalyptic design by Blake. The volume of 1902 contains a whole group of phantasmal pieces of this kind, where there is frequent mention of spectres, who address the poet in the accents of nature, as in the unrhymed ode called "The Mother Mourns." The obsession of old age, with its physical decay ("I look into my glass"), the inevitable division which leads to that isolation which the poet regards as the

n history, is a work which calls for a commentary as lengthy as itself, and yet needs no commentary at all. No work of the imagination is more its own interpreter than this sublime historic peep-show, this rolling vision of the Napoleonic chronicle drawn on the broadest lines, and yet in detail made u

entury of imaginative creation, he has not modified the large outlines of his art in the smallest degree. To early readers of his poems, before the full meaning of them became evident, his voice sounded inharmonious, because it did not fit in with the exquisite melodies of the later Vict

is standpoint there he contemplates the wide aspect of life, but it seems huge and misty to him, and he broods over the tiny incidents of Wessex idiosyncracy. His irony is audacious and

OLDIER

acquainted readers with work few had "the leisure or the zeal to investigate," and it brought the writers themselves together in a corporate and selected relation. I do not recollect that this had been done-except prematurely and partially by The Germ of 1850-since the England's Parnassus and England's Helicon of 1600. In point of fact the only real precursor of Mr. Marsh's venture in our whole literature is the Son

ght hit at their elders with their staves, but they had turned their swords into pruning-hooks and had no scabbards to rattle. This is a point which might have attracted notice, if we had not all been too drowsy in the lap of our imperial prosperity to observe the signs of the times in Berlin. Why did no one call our attention to the beating of the big drum which was going on so briskly on the Teutonic Parnassus? At all events, there was no echo of such a noise in the "chambers of ima

earliest expressions of lyric military feeling came from veteran voices. It was only proper that

ring shall

through

in to S

y throug

bewildering weeks, much was happening that called forth with the utmos

tions,

man's unconq

led by our national veteran, Mr. Thoma

faith and f

o marc

barn-c

s growi

hence no tea

faith and fi

o marc

pamphlets of verse, often very carefully written, and these the critics had treated with an indulgence which would have whitened the hair of the stern reviewers of forty years ago. The youthful poets, almost a trade-union in themselves, protected one another by their sedulous generosity. It was very un

leled. There had never before, in the world's history, been an epoch which had tolerated and even welcomed such a flood of verse as was poured forth over Great Britain during the first three years of the war. Those years saw the publication, as I am credibly informed, of more than five hundred volumes of new and original poetry. It would be the silliest complaisance to pretend that all of thi

d that, as a cancelled lin

anker of peace wa

the winter of 1914, it is almost pathetic to observe how difficult it was for our easy-going British bards to hate the Germans. There was a good deal of ineffective violence, and considerable misuse of technical terms, caused, in many cases, by a too hasty reference to newspaper reports of gallantry under danger, in the course of which the more or less obscure verbiage of military science was picturesquely and inaccurately employed. A

in the least to the form, since it is curious that the war-poetry of 1914-17 was, even in the most skilful hands, poetry on a small scale. The two greatest of the primal species of verse, the Epic and the Ode, were entirely neglected, except, as will later be observed, in one notable instance by Major Maurice Baring. As a rule, the poets constrained themselves to observe the discipline of a rather confined lyrical analysis in forms of the simplest character. Although particular examples showed a rare felicity of touch, and although the sincerit

ied journalistic impression is all that is desired, "prose cut up into lengths" is the readiest by-way to effect. But if the poets desire-and they all do desire-to speak to ages yet unborn, they should not forget that all the experience of history goes to prove discipline not unfavourable to poetic sincerity, while, on the other hand, the absence of all restraint is fatal to it. Inspiration does not willingly attend upon flagging metre and discordant rhyme, and never

llion, Nature,

man, Art,

that the coach will drive itself, if only th

ng of non-combatants at home. I propose to fix our attention on what was written by the young soldiers themselves in their beautiful gallantry, verse which comes to us hall

young man's

h, dying for

tar in brightness, and from the constellation I propose to select half a dozen of the clearest luminaries. What is said in honest praise of these may be said, with due modification, of many others who miss merely the polish of their accomplishment. It is perhaps worth noticing, in passing, that most of the poets are men of university training, and that certain literary strains are common to the rank and file of them. The influence of Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Ro

France, an oriflamme of the chivalry of his country. It is curious, in this connection, that neither Péguy nor Brooke had the opportunity of fighting much in the cause; they fell, as it seemed for the moment, obscurely. Rupert Brooke was a pawn in the dark and dolorous flight from Antwerp. He died in the ?gean, between Egypt and Gallipoli, having never seen a Turkish enemy. So Péguy faded out of sight on the very opening day of the bat

nty-eighth year. He was, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, a meticulous and reserved writer, little inclined to be pleased with his work, and cautious to avoid the snare of improvisation. Hence, though he lived to be older than did Keats or Fergusson, he left a very slender garland of verse behind him, in which there is scarcely a petal which is not of so

neither a trumpet nor a torch. He lives in the memory of those who knew him as a smiling and attentive spectator, eager to watch every flourish of the pageantry of life. Existence was a wonderful harmony to Rupert Brooke, who was determined to lose no tone of it by making too much noise himself. In company he was not a great talker, but loved to listen, with sparkling deference, to people less gifted than himself if only they had experience to impart. He lived in a fascinated state, bewitched with wonder and appr

or Berlin, in Grantchester or Tahiti, had in the least prepared him, were devoted-for we must not say wasted-to breaking up the cliché of civilised habits. But of this harassed time there remain to us the five

bugles, over

these so lonely

made us rarer

world away; pou

youth; gave up

oy, and that

e; and those who

hey gave, the

ow! They brought

ed so long, an

e back, as a k

subjects with

s walks in o

come into ou

feit of knowledge and a riot of action. He was a humanist of the type of the fifteenth century, soldier, scholar, and man of pleasure, such as we read of in Vespasiano's famous book. Everything he did was done in the service of St. Epicurus, it was done to darsi buon tempo, as the Tuscans used to say. But this was only the superficial direction taken by his energy; if he was imperious in his pleasures, he was earnest in his pursuit of learning; there was a singular harmony in t

nd it is difficult to say whether humour or courage is the quality which illuminates it most. It will be referred to by future historians of our race as the most vivid record which has been preserved of the red-blooded activity of a spirited patrician family at the opening of the twentieth

Africa when hostilities broke out, and he was already fighting in Flanders in October 1914. After a very brilliant campaign, in the course of which he won the D.S.O. and was twice mentioned in despatches, he was shot in the head near Ypres and died of his wounds at Boulogne on May 26th, 1915. During these months in France, by the testimony of all who

g man shall

d life from the

e light-foot

trees to ne

trees that s

o him each o

peak in the w

o valley and

rel hover

e owls that c

swift and k

ear, as swi

sings to him 'B

e last song y

r you may not

er, s

memorable, down to its f

ing line of

ir Death moa

clasp him with

ll fold him i

ll probably continue to remain, the clearest lyrical expression of the fighting spirit of England in which the war has found words. It is a poem for soldiers, and it gives noble

magical in the nature of its service, that it is bound to conquer a place in poetry. The air-machine, to quote The Campaign once more, "rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." But the poets are still shy of it. In French it has, as yet, inspired but one good poem, the "Plus haut toujours!" of Jean Allard-Méeus, a hymn of real aerial majesty. In English Major Maurice Baring's ode "In Memoriam: A.H." is equally unique, and, in its complete

is more liable to lapses of dignity, to dull and flagging passages. Even Dryden in Anne Killigrew, even Coleridge in the Departing Year, have not been able to avoid those languors. Many poets attempt to escape them by a use of swollen and pompous language. I will not say that Major Baring has been universally successful, where the suc

nstructed with great care on a complicated plan, but a fragm

de you valiant,

ou with a bu

riotous ardou

r youth's tumul

your you

in moments

ments m

piness

pring to Death

ripeness, pow

dals the strong

ling up of fine words; it is a closely

et secured the attention of the poets. In A Naval Motley, by Lieut.

rs to kn

n hard-fou

ttle and the ba

ddenly

p beneath

that rives th

cies of emotion is awakened by no volume more than by the slender Worple Flit of E. Wyndham Tennant, who died on the Somme in September 1916. He was only nineteen when he fell, at an age when, on the one hand, more precocious verse than his has been written, and when yet, on the other, some of the greatest poets had not achieved a mastery of words equal to that already possessed by this young Wykehamist. The voice is faltering, and there is a want of sureness in the touch; the metrical hammer

en banks o

ars in th

own hares in

ing on

glittering streams-and

t a perfe

the possibility that a talent of very high order was quenched by death, because in few of them do we find

1915, and that he was long in hospital. I felt the hope, which later information has confirmed, that he was still alive and on the road to recovery. Before Ardours and Endurances reached me, I had met with Invocation, a smaller volume published by Lieut. Nichols in December 1915. There has rarely been a more radical change in the character of an artist than is displayed by a comparison of these two collections. Invocation, in which the war takes a s

luctant but unhesitating answer to the call in England, the break-up of plans; then the farewell to home, "the place of comfort." "The Approach," in three successive lyrics, describes the arrival at the Front. "Battle," in eleven sections, reproduces the mental and physical phenomena of the attack. "The Dead," in

y: the deep t

nd blaze

d puffs the

sun rakes

all the sta

rty stan

weat and gri

ttle in

a sniper's

the whin

soldier si

ll's for

high cool cl

lane's f

s down, the th

speck tr

ing, dizzi

ot trenc

next shrewd

life or

literature, from the wail of David over Jonathan downward, such an expression of the hopeless longing for an irrecoverable

ld, away from

ded with a ca

earth aches, th

ly clouds dr

te from him by

ins, generous,

lie, and my B

elder knights

and native sensuousness suddenly stunned, and as it were momentarily petrified, by horrible spiritual anguish. If the strain were not relieved by the final numbers of "Aftermat

eral attitude towards the war. He has no military enthusiasm, no aspiration after gloire. Indeed, the most curious feature of his poetry is that its range is concentrated on the few yards about the trench in which he stands. He seems to have no national view of the purpose of the war, no enthusiasm for the cause, no anger against the enemy. There is but a single mention of the Germans from beginning to end; the poet does not seem to know of their existence. His experiences, his agonies, his despair, are what a purely natural phenomenon, such as the eruption of a volcano or the chaos of an ea

eant to be a poet; he is not one of those who have been driven into verse by the strenuous emotion of the war. In some diverting prefatory lines to Over the Brazier he gives us a picture of the nursery-scene when a bright green-covered book bewitched him by its "metre twist

an end t

ie and I

e-murder a

th, for

songs ne

ys to dark

so young,

e was m

o meet the tragedy not mournfully but boisterously. Where by most of the soldier-bards the subjective manner is a little over-done, it is

AD FOX

little capta

lay well

and, stone-cold,

, all de

d their goal, bu

line, and in the

wn rosy colou

ost lost

dying and in

rs' sake

all rebellious

tight clenched

live uprightl

s no bars

aste.... Or what

but hunt

s? No, Justic

e straight and

had no Hunt

must fin

nd doubt they

e to teach

host of Sera

carlet to his

ugh clouds of nonsense under a sky of unruffled gaiety. In our old literature, of which he is plainly a student, he has found a neglected author who is wholly to his taste. This is Skelton, Henry VIII's Rabelaisian laureate. Captain Graves imitates, with a great deal of bravado, those breathless absurdities, The Tunning of Elinore Rummyng and Colin Clout. He likes roug

riness and impatience: "How long, O Lord, how long?" The name-piece of the volume, and perhaps its first in execution, is a monologue by an ignorant and shrewd old huntsman, who looks back over his life with philosophy and regret. Like Captain Graves, he is haunted with the idea that there must be fox-hounds in Heaven. All Lieut. Sassoon's poems about horses and hunting and country life generally betray his tastes and habits. This particular poem hardly touches on the war, but those which follow ar

ck,' cold-footed

n the trench tha

cked Corner;

me; and how, a

o small

the sentimentality of London is cont

ammed: tier beyo

the Show, whil

ll the chorus,

Kaiser loves the

e a Tank come d

ime tunes, or 'Ho

no more jokes

ddled corpses

patience. He has much to learn as an artist, for his diction is often hard, and he does not always remember that Horace, "when he writ on vulgar subjects, yet writ not vulgarly." But he has force, sincerity, and a line of his own in thought and fancy. A considerable section of his poetry is occu

uded, for such sentiments must tend to relax the effort of the struggle, yet they can hardly be reproved when conducted with so much honesty and courage. Lieut. Sassoon, who, as we learn, has twice been severely wounded and has been in the very furnace of the

ve shown military gifts as well as a fine courage, for when he was killed in action in October 1915, although he was but twenty years of age, he had been promoted captain. In the universal sorrow, few figures awaken more regret, than his. Something, too, had I space, should be said about the minstrels who have been less concerned with the delicacies of workmanship than with stirring the pulses of their auditors. In this kind of lyric "A Leaping Wind from England" will long keep fresh the name of W.N. Hodgson, who was killed in the battl

loosely versified, respectable in sentiment, uniformly meditative, and entirely without individual character. The reviewers who applaud all these ephemeral efforts with a like acclaim, and who say that there are hundreds of poets now writing who equal if they do not excel the great masters of the past, talk nonsense; they talk nonsense, and they know it. They lavish their flatteries in order to widen the circle of their a

9

OF ENGLIS

val rose ouvrir

e laurier que

mais, hier com

le Jour et ruer

DE R

My subject is chimerical, vague, and founded on conjectures which you may well believe yourselves at least as well fitted as I am to propound. Nevertheless, and in no rash or paradoxical spirit, I invite you to join with me in some reflections on what is the probable course of English poetry during, let us say, the next hundred years. If I happen

us parts of the globe. I will mention one instance in the history of our own time: a quarter of a century ago, the practice of writing verse was deliberately abandoned in the literatures of the three Scandinavian countries, but particularly in that of Norway, where no poetry, in our sense, was written from about 1873 to 1885. It almost died out here in England in

cupied the purest and the fieriest minds in all ages, and you will remember that Plato, who excluded the poets from his philosophical Utopia, was nevertheless an exquisite writer of lyrical verse himself. So, to come down to our own day, Ibsen, who drove poetry out of the living language of h

but it represents Pegasus, the horse of the Muses, careering in air on the vast white arc of his wings, against a sky so dark that it must symbolise the obscure discourse of those who write in prose. You are left quite doubtful whether he will strike the rocky terrace in the foreground with his slender, silver hooves,

of freshness of expression. Every school of verse is a rising and a breaking wave. It rises, because its leaders have become capable of new forms of attractive expression; its crest is some writer, or several writers, of genius, who combine skill and fire and luck at a moment of extreme opportuneness; and then the wave breaks, because later writers cannot support the ecstasy, and merely repeat formulas which have lost their attractiveness. Shirley would have

s closed to future bards who wish to speak with simplicity of similar straightforward things. In several of the literatures of modern Europe-those which began late, or struggled long against great disadvantages-it is still possible to produce pleasure by poems which describe primitive emotions in perfectly limpid language. But with us in England, I confess that it seems to me certain that whatever we retain, we can never any more have patience to listen to a new shepherd piping under the hawthorn-tree. Each generation is likely

apply without some illuminating response, recommends that "Qui saura penser de lui-même et former de nobles idées, qu'il prenne, s'il pent, la manière et le tour élevé des ma?tres." These are words which should inspire every new aspirant to the laurel. "S'il peut"; you see that

"giant ignorance" from expressing an opinion on the subject, but I presume that in Welsh the resources of language are far from being so seriously exhausted as we have seen that they are in our own complicated sphere, where the cultivation of all the higher forms of poetic diction through five centuries has made simple expression extremely difficult. I am therefore re

these has already received every obvious tribute. So also there can hardly fail to be less precise enumeration of the primiti

s red, the

sweet, and

to them. Future poets will seek to analyse the redness of the rose, and will scout, as a fallacious observation, the statement that the violet is blue. All schemes of art become mechani

m not sure that you would understand what the poet intended to convey, any more than the Earl of Surrey would have understood the satires of Donne, or Coleridge have enjoyed the odes of George Meredith. Young minds invariably display their vitality by attacking the accepted forms of expression, and then they look about for novelties, which they cultivate with what seems to their elders to be extravagance. Before we attempt to form an idea, however shadowy, of what poetry will be in the future, we must disabuse ourselves of the delusion that it will be a repetition of what is

ten, I feel sure that we should consider them obscure. That is to say, we should find that in his anxiety not to repeat what had been said before him, and in his horror of the trite and the superficial, he will achieve effect and attach interest obscuris vera involvens-wrapping the truth in darkness. The "darkness" will be relative, as his own contemporaries, being

an obscurity to which the title of Lycophrontic darkness has been given from the name of its most extravagant exponent. It was fatal to several highly-gifted writers of the close of the Elizabethan period, who endeavoured to give freshness to an outworn scheme of poetic ornament; I need only remind you of the impenetrable cloud or fog, by Cyril Tourneur, called The Transform'd Metamorphosis, and of the cryptic rhymed dramas of Lord Brooke. It has not been fatal, I hope, but I think desperately perilous to a beautiful talent of our own age, the amiable Stéphane Mallarmé. Nothing, I feel, is more dangerous to the health of poetry than the praise given by a group of irresponsible disciples to verse which

s, and it is hard to sustain it in the rude air of modern life. It easily degenerates, as Europe saw it degenerate for a century and a half, into pomposity relieved by flatness. It is apt to become a mere sonorous rhetoric, a cultivation of empty fine phrases. If we examine the serious poetry of the end of the seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth century-especially in the other countries of Europe, for England was never without some d

dawn of civilisation poetry had it all its own way. If instruction was desired upon any sphere of human knowledge or energy, the bard produced it in a prosodical shape, combining with the dignity of form the aid which the memory borrowed from a pattern or a song. Thus you conceive of a Hesiod before you think of a Homer, and the earliest poetry was pro

ention of critics. But it was attempted, by no less a person than Wordsworth, more than a hundred years ago. I make no

but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the rela

of one so sublimely gifted and so enriched with the spoils of meditation. The belief of Wordsworth was that the poetry of the future would deal, in some vaguely inspired fashion, with the discoveries of science. But when we look back over the field of 113 years, how much do we find our national poetry enriched with ore from the mines of mineralogy or botany or chemistry? It is difficult to see that there has been so mu

e was consciously attempting to inaugurate this scheme of a wide and all-embracing social poetry. Nor do I suppose that efforts of this kind will ever cease to be made. We have seen a gifted writer in whom the memory is perhaps even more surprisingly developed than the imagination, employ the stores of his experience to enrich a social poetry the elements of which, prima facie, should be deeply attractive to us all. But I do not know that the experiments of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, brilliant as they are, are calculated to encourage the poets of the future to pu

an and fl

crannel pipes of

t, I marvel at the confidence with which it is taken for granted that the sphere of interest occupied by writers of the imagination is sure to grow wider and wider. It is expected to embrace the world, to take part in a universal scheme of pacification, to immortalise imperial events, to be as public as possible. But surely it is more and more clearly proved that prose is the suitable medium for such grandiose themes as these. Within the last year our minds have been galvanised into collective sympathy by two great sensations of catastrophe, each case wearing the most thrilling form that tragedy can take in the revolt of nature against the feverish advanc

of collective interest to the race at large. I dread lest the intense cultivation of the Ego, in minutest analysis and microscopical observation of one's self, should become the sole preoccupation of the future poet. I will not tell you that I dread lest this should be one of his principal preoccupations, for that would be to give way to a cheery piece of mid-Victorian hypocrisy which would be unworthy of you and of me

face, and treat his readers with exemplary disdain. We must be prepared, or our successors must, to find frequently revealed the kind of poet who not merely sees nothing superior to himself, but nothing except himself. I am not concerned to say that this will be unfortunate or blameworthy; the moralist of the future must attend to that. But I can believe that this unyielding and inscrutable attitude may produ

onducted social system, what place will there be for the sorrows of Tasso and Byron, for the rage of Dante, for the misanthropy of Alfred de Vigny, for the perversity of Verlaine, for the rowdiness of Marlowe?-the higher the note of the lyre, the more ridiculous is the attitude of the lyrist, and the coarse public applauds the violence of Diogenes when he tramples on the pride of the poets with a greater pride than theirs. I can

h was a collectivist experiment of this kind. It was founded in October 1906, and it was dissolved in consequence of internal dissensions in January 1908. It was an attempt to create, in defiance of the public, in contemptuous disregard of established "literary opinion," a sort of prosodical chapel or school of poetry. It was to be the active centre of energy for a new generation, and there were five founders, each of whom was

"a heroic act," an act symbolical of the way in which poetry would in the future disdainfully protect itself against the invasion of common sense, the dreadful impact of the sensual world. I think you will do well, if you wish to pursue the subject of our conjectural discourse, to keep your eye on this tendency to a poetical collectivism. We have not noticed much evidence of it yet in England, but it is beginning to stir a good deal in France and Italy. After all, the highest poetry is a mysterious thing, like the practices of the Society

f the sophistication of the poets, sometimes delicately and craftily exhibited, but often, as in foreign examples which will easily occur to your memory, rankly, as with the tiresome persistence of a slightly stale perfume, an irritating odour of last night's opopanax or vervain. And this is the one point, almost I think the only point, in which the rather absurd and certainly very noisy and hoydenish manifestoes of the so-called Futurists, led by M. Marinetti and his crew of iconoclasts, are worthy of our serious attention. It is a plank in their platform t

world itself, either into an egotistical isolation or into some cloistered association of more or less independent figures united only in a rebellious and contemptuous disdain of public opinion. But the inconsistency may very well be one solely in appearance. It may well happen that the avoidance of all companionship with the stereotyped social surfaces of life, the ignorance-really, the happy and hieratic ignorance-of what "people" in the fussy sense, are supposed to be saying an

al to sublimity in all art. In Continental literature, and particularly in the very latest Russian drama, this determination to see blackness and blackness only, to depict the ordinary scene of existence as a Valley of the Shadow of Despair, has been painfully frequent. In England we had a poet of considerable power, whose tragic figure crossed me in my youth, in whose work there is not a single gleam of hope or dignity for man;-I mean the unfortunate James Thomson, author of The City of Dreadful

would be one of complete and humdrum uniformity of existence, such as was dreamed of at one time, but I think is no longer so rigidly insisted on, by extreme socialistic reformers. As long as there is such variety of individual action possible as will give free scope to the energies and passions, the hopes and fears, of mankind, so long I think the element of plastic imagination will be found to insist on expression in the mode of formal art. It is quite possible that, as a result of extended knowledge and of the democratic instinct, a certain precipitant hardness of design, such as was presented in the ninete

o a direct description of the same; it arouses the idea of it in the awakened soul; rings a bell, for we may almost put it so, which at once rouses the spirit and reminds it of some special event or imminent service. The importance of making this the foremost feature of poetry is not new, although it may be said that we have only lately, and only partially, become aware of its value. But, really, if you will consider it, all that the Symbolists have been saying is involved in Bacon's phrase that "poetry conforms the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subj

their rest

grace, one wond

o words n

light on any expected spot. Let me return to it in closing, that I may suggest our only sage attitude to be one of always watching for

OF THE VIC

d old favourite poets, painters, and musicians are treated with the same scorn as the glued chairs and glass bowls of wax flowers of sixty years ago. The new generation are hardly willing to distinguish what was good from what was bad in the time of their grandmothers. With increasing audacity they repudiate

to be more perennial than bronze. Successive orators and writers have put the public in possession of arguments, and especially have sparkled in pleasantries, which have sapped the very foundations of the faith of 1850. The infection has attacked us all, and there is probably no one who is not surprised, if he seriously reflects, to realise that he once implicitly took his ideas of art from Ruskin and of philosophy from Herbert Spencer. These great men are no longer regarded by anybody with the

versive sentiments can rush. But this violence cannot be expected to last, and it would lead to anarchy if it did. Slowly the impetus of the stream diminishes, the river widens, and its waters reach a point where there seems to be no further movement in their expanse. No age contains in itself the elements of endless progress; it starts in fury, and little by little the force of it decli

in which the Victorian Age is seen sinking into the sands. Nothing could be vaguer, or more open to contention in detail, than this delineation, but at all events it gives our deliberations a frame. It excludes Pickwick, which is the typical picture of English life under William IV., and Sartor Resartus, which was the tossing of the bound giant in his sleep; but it includes the two-volume Tennyson, "chiefly lyrical," the stir of the Corn Law agitation, the Tractarian Crisis of 1841, and the History of the French R

nst "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic spectralities." This theological tension marks the first twenty years and then slowly dies down, after the passion expended over Essays and Reviews. It was in 1840 that we find Macaulay, anxious to start a scheme of Whig reform and to cut a respectable figure as Secretary of State for War, unable to get to business because of the stumbling-block of religious controversy. Everything in heaven and earth was turned into "a the

ruptly falling. Voltaire, never very popular in England, becomes "as mischievous a monkey as any of them"; the enthusiasm for Rousseau, which had reached extravagant proportions, completely disappears, and he is merely the slanderous sceptic, who, after soaking other people's waistcoats with his tears, sent his own babies to the Foundling Hospital. The influence of the French eighteenth-century literature on the mind of England was first combated and then

emies may allege to its discredit, they cannot pretend that it was languid or monotonous. No Age hitherto lived out upon the world's surface has been so multiform or so busy; none defies the art of the historian to such a bewildering degree. Its latest critic does not exaggerate when he says that our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information concerning it "that the industry of a Ranke woul

ice; it has been talked about wherever people have met together; and has received the compliment of being seriously displayed before the University of Oxford by one of the most eminent of the Victorian statesmen whom Oxford has produced. If we look into the causes of this success, enjoyed by the earliest extended book of a writer almost unknown, a book, to

y, but we cannot avoid seeing the ulterior intention, which is to undermine and belittle the reputation of the great figures of the Victorian Age. When the prodigious Signor Marinetti proposes to hurl the "leprous palaces" of his native city into her "fetid canals," and to build in their place warehouses and railway stations, he does not differ in essential attitude from Mr. Lytton Strachey, delicately "laying bare the facts of some cases." The only real diff

here; discredited piecemeal; subjected to the ravages of the white ant. He has seen that the lives of the great Victorians lend themselves to this insidious kind of examination, because what was worst in the pretentiou

d masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detach

of "Impressions," by a series of elderly friends, which closes the official Life of Tennyson, published in 1897. He will find there an expression of the purest Victorian optimism. The great object being to foist on the public a false and superhuman picture of the deceased, a set of illustrious contemporaries-who th

ame." (Tennyson, who was thirsty for ceaseless laudation, and to whom a hint of censure was like the bite of a mosquito!) Frederick Myers ejaculated, "How august, how limitless a thing was Tennyson's own spirit's upward flight!" The Duke of Argyll, again, during the space of forty years, had found him "always reverent, hating all levity or flippancy," and was struck by his possessing "the noblest humility I have ever

rough in speech, brooding like an old gipsy over his inch of clay pipe stuffed with shag, and sucking in port wine with gusto-"so long as it is black and sweet and strong, I care not!" Their fault lay, not in their praise, which was much of it deserved, but in th

be eighty-five. The motto of Mr. Strachey is "Put not your trust in the intellectual princes of the Victorian Age," or, at least, in what their biographers have reported of them; they were not demi-gods in any sense, but eccentric and forceful figures working dimly towards aims which they only understood in measure, and which very often were not worth the energy which they expended on them. This attitude alone would be enough to distinguish Mr. Strachey from the purveyors of indiscriminate praise, and in adopting it he emphasises his deliberate break with the age of which they were

idly-without false ornament of any kind. Some of his pages might, with advantage, be pinned up opposite the writing-tables of our current authors of detestable pseudo-Meredithian and decayed Paterese. His narrative style is concise and brisk. His book may undoubtedly best be compared among English classics with Whiggism in its Relations to Literature, although it is less discursive and does not possess the personal element of that vivacious piece of polemic. In this recurrence of Mr. Strachey to a pellu

ressed on all sides by a plethora of information, instead of being incommoded by it, had to seem to be moving smoothly in an atmosphere of his own choosing, and to be completely unembarrassed by his material. He must have the air of saying, in Froude's famous impertinence, "This is all we know, and more than all, yet nothing to what the angels know." In the face of a whole literature of controversy and correspondence, after a storm of Purcell and Hutton, Ward and Mozl

om he betrays some partiality. "The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile fancy painted her," and it has greatly entertained Mr.

indeed, among her intimates, Mrs. Nightingale almost wept. 'We are ducks,' she said with tears in her eyes, 'who

its irresistible violence of purpose. It is an evident pleasure to him to be able to detach so wild a figure from the tameness of the circumambient scene, and all his enmity to the period comes out in the closing pages, in which he describes how the fierce philanthropist lived so long that the Victorian Age had its

o contemptuous, almost so vindictive, in his attitude to Lord Panmure, that the reader is tempted to take up the cudgels in defence of an official so rudely flouted. But, on reflection, what is there that can be said in palliation of Lord Panmure? He was the son of a man of whom his own biographer has admitted that "he preserved late into the [nineteenth

him. In 1860 he became eleventh Earl of Dalhousie. He died two years later, having enjoyed every distinction, even that of President of the Royal Military Asylum. He was "unco guid," as pious as his father had been profane, but he had no social or political or intellectual merit of any kind which can at this distance of time be discerned. Florence Nightingale called him the Bison, and his life's energy seems to have been expended in trying, often with success, to frus

ppreciated in the midst of this intense epoch of exhortation seems a paradox, till we recollect how careful Dickens is, when his laughter is loudest, never to tamper with "the deep sense of moral evil." This apprehension of the rising immorality of the world, against which the only rampart was the education of "a thorough English gentleman, Christian, manly and enlightened" was dominant in no spirit more than in that of Mr. Thomas Arnold, of whom Mr. Strachey gives a somewhat deterrent portrait. It is deterr

demand the exclusion of irony from the legitimate weapons of the literary combatant. This is to stoop to sharing one of the meanest prejudices of the English commonplace mind, which has always resented the use of that delicate and pointed weapon. Moreover, Mrs. Ward does not merely adopt the plebeian attitude, but she delivers herself bound hand and foot to the enemy by declaring the use of irony to be "unintelligent." In support of this amazing statement she quotes some wandering phrase of Sainte-Beuve. By

ts observed from a great height by an amiable but entirely superior intelligence. The peculiar aim of Mr. Strachey, his desire to lower our general conception of the Victorian Age, tempts him to exaggerate this tendency, and he succumbs to the temptation. His description of Lord Acton at Rome in 1870-"he despised Lord Acton almost as much as he disliked him"-is not ironic, it is contemptuous. Arthur Hugh Clough presents no aspect to Mr. Strachey

death-bed; but what did those manifestations mean? To Mr. Strachey it is evident that the fun of the whole thing is that they meant nothing at all; they were only part of the Victorian absurdity. It is obvious that religious enthusiasm, as a personal matter, means nothing to him. He investigates the feelings of Newman or Keble as a naturalist might the contortions of an insect. The ceremonies and rites of the Church are objects of subdued hilarity to him, and in their presence, if he suppresses his laughter, it is solely to prevent his missing any detail precious to his curiosity. When the subject of Baptismal Regeneration agitates the whole pious world of Eng

e leaving the rest of the picture misty and vague. Even in that case the subordinate figures, if subdued in fogginess, should not be falsely drawn, but Mr. Strachey, intent upon the violent portrait of Gordon, is willing to leave his Baring and Hartington and Wolseley inexact as well as shadowy. The essay on General Gordon, indeed, is the least successful of the four monographs. Dexterous as he is, Mr. Strachey has not had the material to work upon which now exists to elucidate his other and earl

h the proclamation of Papal Infallibility. But here again one is annoyed by the

wards removed to become Assistant Under Secretary of State at our Foreign Office. The author of Eminent Victorians is pleased to describe "poor Mr. Russell" as little better than a fly buzzing in Manning's "spider's web of delicate and clinging diplomacy." It is not in the memory of those who were behind the scenes that Odo Russell was such a cipher. Though suave in address, he was by no means deficient in decision or force of character, as was evidenced when, some months later, he explained to Mr. Gladstone his reasons for statin

unt of effective support which British opposition to the Decree of Infallibility was likely to receive from the Catholic Powers, he no doubt held strong opinions. Some years later he did not conceal his conviction that Prince Bismarck would be worsted in his conflic

ey's remarkable volume are exemplified in the following q

s and poor punctilios, which are wont to hem about the great? Or was it something untameable in his glances and in his gestures? Or was it, perhaps, the mysterious glamour lingering about him of the antique organisation of Rome? For whatever cause, the mind of the people had been impressed; and yet, after all, the impression was more acute than lasting. The Cardinal's memory is a

poise of his own genius which points Mr. Asquith out as a judge peculiarly well fitted to sit in judgment upon rival ages. In his Romanes lecture there was but one thing to be regretted: the restricted space which it offered for the full expansion of the theme. Mr. Asquith excels in swift and rapid flights, but even for him the Victorian Age is too broad a province to be explored within one hour. He endeavoured to ligh

ne, the Arcadia, the Ecclesiastical Polity, Tamburlaine, The Discovery of Guiana, and Bacon's Essays. If the works catalogued by Mr. Asquith do not equal these in intensity, they excel them by the breadth of the ground they cover, extending from Browning to Darwin and from Thackeray to Ruskin. Moreover, the Oxford list might have included Lavengro and Newman's Lectures, and Herbert Spencer's Social Statics

the fortune of that book are excellent. No one can over-estimate the value of what we owe to Darwin. But perhaps a Frenchman might speak in almost the same terms of Claude Bernard, whose life and work ran parallel with Darwin's. If the Origin of Species made an epoch in 1859, the Introduction à la médicine expérimental made another in 1865. Both these books, as channels by which the experimental labours of each investigator reached the prepared and instructed public, exercised at once, and have continued ever since to exercise, an enormous effect on thought as well as on knowledge. They transformed the methods by which man approaches scientific investigation, and while they instructed they stim

ept away with contumely? Perhaps indeed it is only among those extravagant romanticists who are trying to raise entirely new ideals, unrelated to any existing forms of art and literature, that we find a denial of all merit to the Victorian masters. Against this caricature of criticism, this Bolshevism, it would be hopeless to contend. But there is a large and growing class of more m

on by talking habitually "over the heads," as we say, of the majority of their readers. They make "great music for a little clan," and nothing can be more praiseworthy than their effort, but, as a matter of fact, with or without the aid of the newspapers, the people who really care for literature or art, or for strenuous mental exercise of any kind, are relatively few. If we could procure a completely confide

dle class to ecstasy. An opportunity for such protests is provided by our English lack of critical tradition, by our accepted habit of saying, "I do hate" or "I must say I rather like" this or that without reference to any species of authority. This seems to have grown with dangerous rapidity of late years. It was not tolerated among the Victorians, who carried admiration to the highest pitch. They marshalled it, they defined it, they turned it from a virtue into a religion, and called it

e. What its character will be, or what its principal products, it is absolutely impossible for us as yet to conjecture. Meanwhile the Victorian Age recedes, and it loses size and lustre as we get further and further away from it. When what was called "Symbolism" began to act in urgent and direct reaction to the aims of those still in authority, the old order received its notice to quit, but that was at least five and twenty years ago, and

9

N

e Cretei

, Lor

on of, to Romantici

o, by Catharin

side

Méeus,

y B. Dis

sm, and Edgar Al

Quee

, by E.A. P

, Duke

to, 8

, Angel

, 3, 68, 7

Mr. Strachey's p

Romanes lect

on,

ot, W

re standards of

den, S

, poems of

, Sir

, Mrs

desdale at, 217-8

laire

le,

Aphr

, of Sel

eley

rton,

Rev.

, W.,

gton, L

u, 70,

th,

ley, G

War poetry

lac, Ml

te, dislike of

e from pain and

ness, its c

note of her w

, Emil

ge of the, address d

ion with Dew

pert, poem

, R., 9,

etiè

mbill

t, 10

biguity of his positi

s biograph

, 117, 118-9, 120, 122,

graphy,

rimonial tro

ter, 1

es and frie

ntemporary writer

y lif

itude of critics

of his writ

and merits

pposition to Bulwer-Ly

pen letter to, on L

, 52, 53, 54,

shop, patron of the

, Mrs.

y, Dr

ton

104, 108,

yle,

., her opini

llus

s II,

aubri

tert

, Coll

ticists' revolt again

A.H.,

n, Mr.,

e, 104,

, attack on sta

ns, 8

land's debt to Wa

otter's relations with

sraeli, 153, 164, 1

ng, by B. Disra

.M.F., poe

war tim

ley

per

Hardy compar

h, C.

rd, essay

nd literary ac

eaker,

ouse of Lords

l tastes

titude to life a

e and reflect

r, 21

e, 2

activitie

r, Mm

untess of Mo

e, 2

George, Ear

bign

t, A.

, E.,

s, W.

re, M

e of Rosina, Lady

Bront?s' conne

C, 100,

novels of, a

iously as an

ods of wri

ary ficti

Grey,

ung Du

ta Temp

i Flemin

influenc

s influen

ed by Ve

tia,

erience and liter

gsby,

l, 1

ed, 1

Minist

173-8;

78, 111, 23

harles, E

den

Sir A

, 49, 50,

s, Ab

m, Lo

er

, sympathy betwe

y Pope, its appeal t

son,

by Lytton Strachey

y, The Future

onal lapses in po

f expression and diffi

f vernacular

ous description and reflection and to tak

ns concerning nineteent

social poe

al sensibility" mo

xperimen

rance of eroti

try and symb

by Pope, Romanticist

s of Pope, by

uhar

ship, by C.

t, Rev

, Mr

John, so

, by E.A.

songs

John, 1

, Anat

l, Mrs

r, T.,

Duke

its pre-war chara

bon

n, W.

t, Sir

pin

n, Henri

the

court,

gor

, Gene

y's portrai

Mrs.

his opinion of Su

nay, Ml

vill

., poetry

, 89

ene

J., poem

igh's "gold

ax, L

del

rt, Mr

, lyrical poe

f his career a

sistence of h

with Swin

elopment of

g interferin

y in his liter

d "Poems of Past an

d "Times' Laughi

Circumstan

of Vision

ality of his

l forms

conception o

with Cr

on found

ith Wordsw

sympat

subject

s on immort

nasts,"

eness of hi

the Soldi

horn

ley

itt,

le, by B. Disr

, songs

s, Bev

bes

n, W.N

er,

ker

H.T.

n, A.E

, 6, 12,

me

Leig

, Dr.,

, Ralei

and treatment of R

s II

s opinion of the

t, Dr

le's opinion of,

Peter,

R., poetr

, Leti

wne, L

ale, Ea

Maitland, Du

H., poem

e,

42, 54,

tre,

"Monk

ne Trotter's d

of,

hart

ge,

y B. Disra

s, by Cathari

ell

, Lor

, Jo

wer-, see B

lwer-Lytton, 117, 118-19, 120

raphy of Bulwer-

y, Lord

hers

ranch

rbe,

rmé,

Morte d'A

rs., 44,

Mr. Strachey's port

oa,

nt

ti, M.,

ini

, Sarah, Du

Catharine Trotter's

, songs

h, E

Lady, 55

inge

rne, L

rd Redesdale, 2

on eighteenth-centur

Major H

l, A.

ision, by T.

Milnes, S

ris

s, F

Open Letter to Lady

s of,

riendship

d physical st

eristic

or of lif

to the co

on and correspo

literature a

al natu

emoirs of Lady D

Margaret, D

., poetry

sche,

rence, Mr. Strac

, John

mann

he Faerie Queene,

oach of Summer,

. Warton,

ay,

e, Lor

Gasto

nel

Dr.

r, W

re, C

ock,

le,

y, C

wer-Lytton, the autho

s, S

th Earl

tevelde, by H

Lady,

, Sir

. Mary,

tenary of, add

as a poet i

of recogniti

o unfriendly c

lities of his

conception of

l of poe

ces upo

, poetic gen

sness of

ism of

.C. Swinburne, Bulwer-L

nd Present, by

revolt against cla

ia Charlotte,

lais

e, Mrs.,

Carolina, fou

, W., j

delivered on Tercentena

hatred of Spa

acte

ous natu

I and,

orado dr

nd tri

aspects

l strateg

s coloni

nt and exe

y, Al

ord, last da

y caree

in authorship an

of son

ries,

oblem of occupyin

st book, its

days,

né

L., poe

é, A

olds

, attack upon

nia, British s

ord and

s of, Joseph and Thomas

ement, featu

, D.G.,

ish Romanticists' re

kin

ll, O

e-Beu

pho

S., poems

cumstance, by

Sir E

r W., 108

y, M.

G., war inve

rne, L

den

ncou

rney, The, by L

ury, English wom

e, the Son

matic val

qualitie

contemporary lyr

74, 104

ston

the Ocean,

er, C

ier Poets

f war poet

ritish Hymns

nce upon poetic

dispense wit

rary influe

Brooke,

nfell,

ring,

Corbe

ennant

hols,

aves,

soon,

son, K. Lawson, L. Ren

.H., poem

ey, 5

valry in days of Walter

17, 82,

Sir Lesli

, Essay on the C

d childh

ament,

al develop

of feeling

erature's d

delicac

evanc

uences upon l

e, Mr

e, Ro

son, R

minent Victorians" b

ey, Si

luctuations in tas

s, Mon

C, Bulwer-Lytt

thy with, 235

and poet

apan, by Lord

by B. Dis

uctuation

g Wordsw

's conclusi

cerning Sully-

e Miscel

e, Mr

E.W., poe

inion of, 320-1; 7, 12

kera

rden, by Lord

, by E.A.

, by T. Har

Joseph Warton, im

s, by Catharin

by E.A. P

Sweden, by Catha

tent, by Cathari

e, by B. Disr

, James

astle of In

g Stocks, by T

Miscell

by L. Sterne, 9

Capt. D.,

Cathari

ity, 3

ntag

rty,

vers

with celebrat

e Castr

ale Wit

riendsh

ryden's de

py Penite

t a Lo

with the

cal studie

m for Loc

ion in Swed

nce with Le

sions on feminine in

come to Mar

to G. Bur

ith Mr. Co

life

Mrs., pov

per

Compa

.A. Poe, 103,

r, Hen

d Redesdale, the

by B. Dis

ascination fo

ggen,

ine,

R.E., poe

le, B., 9

ge, the Ago

gil

y B. Disraeli,

ire,

ler

n, Dr.,

. Humphre

, novels of,

s; Two Pioneers of Roman

nd early ha

romantic mo

mporaries and

leading sp

, its romantic

st principles of c

atures of early R

influen

e Genius of

on the Faerie

criticis

ttack upon

ts of

s White

ads, by T.

y Lytton), Miss De

age with Bulwe

ehea

am II

s, N.

Harriett

ey, Lo

iss, 141,

Hardy compar

poetry, 298-9; 3, 4, 10, 74,

erle

ts,

, 68,

RITAIN BY RICHARD

FORD ST., S.E. 1, A

TNO

, October 29th, 1918, on occasion of the T

ole literature of fiction, which Mr. Montague Summers has i

respondance de Leibnitz avec l'

Lecture, before the British

to the Authors' Club

antity; but how little

e Bront? Society in the Town Ha

before the English Ass