In this way was started the book, of which, alas! only such fragments were composed as form the earlier part of the volume published after his death. It is, however, right to point out that for the too-brief remainder 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 gaiety of the West. He spoke of it incessantly, in letters and conversation. "That will do to go into Veluvana," was his cry when he met with anything rare or strange. For instance, on September 15th, 1915, he wrote to me:—

"To-day, all of a sudden I was struck by the idea that plants, having many human qualities, may also in some degree have human motives—that they are not altogether mere automata—and as I thought, I began to imagine 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 movements themselves, some of which seem never to have been noticed at all, or certainly at best very inadequately. You will see that this brings in the bamboo-garden and Buddha, and so keeps to the scheme of Veluvana."

The monasteries of twelfth-century Japanese Buddhism, which he had visited long before in the neighbourhood of Kioto, now recurred to his memory, 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 wholly germane to his purpose. It drove him back to his Japanese books, and to his friend Sir Ernest Satow's famous dictionary. He wrote to me:—

"No praise can be too high for the work which Satow did in the early days of our intercourse with Japan. He was a valuable asset to England, and to Sir Harry Parkes, who, with all his energy and force of character, would never have succeeded as he did without Satow. Aston was another very strong man."

These reveries were strictly in accordance with the spirit of Veluvana, but unfortunately what Lord Redesdale wrote in this direction proved to be too slight for publication. He met with some expressions of extremely modern Japanese opinion which annoyed him, and to which he was tempted to give more attention than they deserve. It began to be obvious that the enterprise was one for which great concentration of effort, and a certain serenity of purpose which was not to be secured at will, were imperatively needed. In leaving London, he was not content, 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 which had in earlier years diversified and entertained his country life. He had been a great figure among the squires and farmers of the Cotswolds, but all this was now at an end, paralysed by the hopeless decay of his hearing. It grieved him, too, that he was unable to do any useful war-work in the county, and he was forced to depend upon his pen and his flying visits to London for refreshment. He was a remarkably good letter-writer, and he now demanded almost pathetically to be fed with the apples of correspondence. He wrote (November 26th, 1915):—

"Your letters are a consolation for being deprived of taking a part any longer in the doings of the great world. The Country Mouse—even if the creature were able to scuttle back into the cellars of the great—would still be out of all communion with the mighty, owing to physical infirmity. And now comes the kind Town Mouse and tells him all that he most cares to know."

He had books and his garden to enjoy, and he made the most of both. "I hate the autumn," he said, "for it means the death of the year, but I try to make the death of the garden as beautiful as possible." Among his plants, and up and down the high 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, the instincts of vigorous manhood prolonged far beyond the usual limit of such gifts, and yet all were marred and rendered bankrupt for him by the one intolerable defect, the deafness which had by this time become almost impenetrable to sound.

Yet it seemed as though this disability actually quickened his mental force. With the arrival of his eightieth year, his activity and curiosity of intellect were certainly rather increased than abated. He wrote to me from Batsford (December 28th, 1915):—

"I have been busy for the last two months making a close study of Dante. I have read all the Inferno and half of the Purgatorio. It is hard work, but the 'readings' of my old schoolfellow, W.W. Vernon, are an incalculable help, and now within the last week or two has appeared Hoare's Italian Dictionary, published 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 was dark without seeing some hidden and mystic meaning in it. They always seem to chercher midi a quatorze heures, and irritate me beyond measure. There is invention enough in Dante without all their embroidery. But this grubbing and grouting seems to be infectious among Dante scholars—they all catch the disease."

He flung himself into these Italian studies with all his accustomed ardour. He corresponded with the eminent veteran of Dante scholarship, the Honourable W.W. Vernon, whom he mentions in the passage just quoted, and Mr. Vernon's letters gave him great delight. He wrote to me again:—

"This new object in life gives me huge pleasure. Of course, I knew the catch quotations in Dante, but I never before attempted to read him. The difficulty scared me."

Now, on the contrary, the difficulty was an attraction. He worked away for hours at a time, braving the monotonies of the Purgatorio without flagging, but he broke down 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 confess I took advantage of this to recall his attention to Veluvana, for which it was no longer possible to hope that the author would collect any material out of Dante.

An invitation from Cambridge to lecture there on Russian history during the Long Vacation of 1916 was a compliment to the value of the Russian chapters 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 Cambridge address, and yet continue to marshal his fancies for the book. Perhaps I doubted it, and dared to disapprove, for he wrote (March 17th, 1916):—

"You scold me for writing too much. That is the least of my troubles! You must remember that debarred as I am from taking part in society, the Three 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 part of the intellectual panoply of a gentleman, I can neither add, subtract, nor divide! I am a gluttonous reader, and only write from time to time."

He was really composing more actively than he himself realised. About this time he wrote:—

"Just now I am busy trying to whitewash Lord Hertford—not the Marquess of Steyne, that would be impossible—but the unhappy hypochondriac recluse of the Rue Lafitte, 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. The good British public has so long been used to look upon him as a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to be told that he had many admirable points."

At the beginning of last year the aspect of Lord Redesdale was very remarkable. He had settled down into his life at Batsford, diversified by the frequent dashes to London. His years seemed to sit upon him more lightly than ever. His azure eyes, his curled white head thrown back, the almost jaunty carriage of his well-kept figure, were the external symbols of an inner man perpetually 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'esprit," which Montaigne describes as proper to old age. Lord Redesdale was guiltless of the old man's self-absorption or exclusive interest in the past. His curiosity and sympathy were vividly exhibited to his friends, and so, in spite of his amusing violence in denouncing his own forgetfulness, was his memory of passing events. In the petulance of his optimism he was like a lad.

There was no change in the early part of last year, although it was manifest that the incessant journeying between Batsford and London exhausted him. The garden occupied him more and more, and he was distracted by the great storm of the end of March, which blew down and destroyed at the head of the bridge the wonderful group of cypresses, which he called "the pride of my old age." But, after a gesture of despair, 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 there long, but the mischief was done, and in a few hours he was suffering from a bad cold. Even now, the result might not have been serious had it not been that in a few days' time he was due to fulfil certain engagements in town. Nothing vexed Lord Redesdale more than not to keep a pledge. In all such matters he prided himself on being punctual and trustworthy, and he refused to change his plans by staying at home.

Accordingly, on May 23rd he came to London to transact some business, and to take the chair next day at a meeting of the Royal Society of Literature, of which he was a vice-president. This meeting took place in the afternoon, and he addressed a crowded assembly, which greeted him with great warmth. Those who were present, and saw his bright eyes and heard his ringing voice, could have no suspicion that they would see him again no more. His intimate friends 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 mind to the very last. In a shaky hand, with his stylograph, he continued to correspond with certain friends, about politics, and books, and even about Veluvana. In the beginning of August there seemed to be symptoms of improvement, but these were soon followed by a sudden and final relapse. Even after this, Lord Redesdale's interest and curiosity were sustained. In his very last letter to myself, painfully scrawled only one week before his death, he wrote:—

"Have you seen Ernest Daudet's book just published, Les auteurs de la guerre de 1914? Bismarck is the subject of the first volume; the second will deal with the Kaiser and the Emperor Joseph; and the third with 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 documente, and there is much in his work that is new. I don't admire his style. The abuse of the historic present is bad enough, but what can be said in favour of the historic future with which we meet at every step? It sets my teeth on edge."

But he grew physically weaker, and seven days later he passed into an unconscious state, dying peacefully at noon on August 17th, 1916. He was saved, as he had wished to be, from all consciousness of decrepitude.



THE LYRICAL POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY

When, about Christmas time in 1898, Mr. Hardy's admirers, who were expecting from him a new novel, received instead a thick volume of verse, there was mingled with their sympathy and respect a little disappointment and a great failure in apprehension. Those who were not rude enough to suggest that a cobbler should stick to his last, reminded one another that many novelists had sought relaxation by trifling with the Muses. 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 become, as a mere subsidiary and ornamental appendage to his novels. It is still necessary to insist on the complete independence of his career as a poet, and to point out that if he had never published a page of prose he would deserve to rank high among the writers of his country on the score of the eight volumes of his verse. It is as a lyrical poet, and solely as a lyrical poet, that I propose to speak of him to-day.

It has been thought extraordinary that Cowper was over fifty when he published his first secular verses, but Mr. Hardy was approaching his sixtieth year when he sent Wessex Poems to the press. Such self-restraint—"none hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit none shall"—has always fascinated the genuine artist, but few have practised it with so much tenacity. When the work of 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, and has kept it closed. Since 1898 he has been, persistently and periodically, a poet and nothing else. That he determined, for reasons best left to his own judgment, to defer the exhibition of his verse until he had completed his work in prose, ought not to prejudice criticism in its analysis of the lyrics and the colossal dramatic panorama. Mr. Hardy, exclusively as a poet, demands our undivided attention.

It is legitimate to speculate on other probable causes of Mr. Hardy's delay. From such information as lies scattered before us, we gather that it was from 1865 to 1867 that he originally took poetry to be his vocation. The dated pieces in the volume of 1898 help us to form an idea of the original character of his utterance. On the whole it was very much what it remains in the pieces composed after a lapse of half a century. Already, as a very young man, Mr. Hardy possessed his extraordinary insight into the movements 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 have been comprehended. Fifty years ahead of his time, he was asking in 1866 for novelty of ideas, and he must have been conscious that his questioning would seem inopportune. He needed a different atmosphere, and he left the task of revolt to another, and, at first sight, a very unrelated force, that of the Poems and Ballads of the same year. But Swinburne succeeded in his revolution, and although he approached the art from an opposite direction, he prepared the way for an ultimate appreciation of Mr. Hardy.

We should therefore regard the latter, in spite of his silence of forty years, as a poet who laboured, like Swinburne, at a revolution against the optimism and superficial sweetness of his age. Swinburne, it is true, tended to accentuate the poetic side of poetry, while Mr. Hardy drew verse, in some verbal respects, nearer to prose. This does not affect their common attitude, and the sympathy of these great artists for 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 in personal immortality which was professed by Ruskin and Browning. He opposed the Victorian theory of human "progress"; the Tennysonian beatific Vision seemed to him ridiculous. He rejected the idea of the sympathy and goodness of Nature, and was in revolt against the self-centredness of the Romantics. We may conjecture that he combined a great reverence for The Book of Job with a considerable contempt for In Memoriam.

This was not a mere rebellious fancy which passed off; it was something inherent that remained, and gives to-day their peculiar character to Mr. Hardy's latest lyrics. But before we examine the features of this personal mode of interpreting poetry to the world, we may collect what little light we can on the historic development of it. In the pieces dated between 1865 and 1867 we find the germ of almost everything which has since 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 resentment against the blind motions of chance—In "Hap" the author would positively welcome a certainty of divine hatred as a relief from the strain of depending upon "crass casualty." Here and there in these earliest pieces an extreme difficulty of utterance is remarkable in the face of the ease which the poet attained afterwards in the expression of his most strange images and fantastic revelations. We read in "At a Bridal":—

"Should I, too, wed as slave to Mode's decree, And each thus found apart, of false desire A stolid line, whom no high aims will fire As had fired ours could ever have mingled we!"

This, although perfectly reducible, takes time to think out, and at a hasty glance seems muffled up in obscurity beyond the darkness of Donne; moreover, it is scarcely worthy in form of the virtuoso which Mr. Hardy was presently to become. 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, au soir, a la chandelle," but turned round, as Mr. Hardy loves to do, from the man to the woman, and embroidered with ingenuities, such as where the latter says that as her temperament dies down the habit of loving will remain, and she be

"Numb as a vane that cankers on its point, True to the wind that kissed ere canker came,"

which attest a complexity of mind that Ronsard's society knew nothing of.

On the whole, we may perhaps be safe in conjecturing that whatever the cause, the definite dedication to verse was now postponed. Meanwhile, the writing of novels had become the business of Mr. Hardy's life, and ten years go by before we trace a poet in that life again. But it is interesting to find that when the great success of Far from the Madding Crowd had introduced him to a circle of the best readers, there followed an effect which again disturbed his ambition for the 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 form of verse." This was just at the moment when we find Mr. Hardy's conversations with "long Leslie Stephen in the velveteen coat" obstinately turning upon "theologies decayed and defunct, the origin of things, the constitution of matter, and the unreality of time." To this period belongs also the earliest conception of The Dynasts, an old note-book containing, under the date June 20th, 1875, the suggestion that the author should attempt "An Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815."

To this time also seems to belong the execution of what has proved the most attractive section of Mr. Hardy's poetry, the narratives, or short Wessex ballads. The method in which these came into the world is very curious. Many of these stories were jotted down to the extent of a stanza or two when the subject first occurred to the author. For instance, "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's," first published by Lionel Johnson in 1894, had been begun as early as 1867, and was 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 Phoenix," 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 'seventies Mr. Hardy became a complete master of the art of verse, and that his poetic style was by this time fixed. He still kept poetry out of public sight, but he wrote during the next twenty years, as though in a backwater off the stream of his novels, the poems which form the greater part of the volume of 1898. If no other collection of his lyrical verse existed, we should miss a multitude of fine things, but our general conception of his genius would be little modified.

We should judge carelessly, however, if we treated the subsequent volumes as mere repetitions of the original Wessex Poems. They present interesting differences, which I may rapidly note before I touch on the features which characterise the whole body of Mr. Hardy's verse. Poems of the Past and 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 expected to have chosen from what used to be called his "portfolio" those specimens which he thought to be most attractive. But on further inspection this did not prove to be quite the case. After pondering for twelve years on the era of Napoleon, his preoccupation began in 1887 to drive him into song:—

"Must I pipe a palinody, Or be silent thereupon?"

He decides that silence has become impossible:—

"Nay; I'll sing 'The Bridge of Lodi'— That long-loved, romantic thing, Though none show by smile or nod, he Guesses why and what I sing!"

Here is the germ of The Dynasts. But in the meantime the crisis of the Boer War had cut across the poet's dream of Europe a hundred years ago, and a group of records of the Dorsetshire elements of the British army at the close of 1899 showed in Mr. Hardy's poetry what had not been suspected there—a military talent of a most remarkable kind. Another set 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 has forgotten the existence of earth, this "tiny sphere," this "tainted ball," "so poor a thing," and has left all human life to be the plaything of blind chance. This sad conviction is hardly ruffled by "The Darkling Thrush," which goes as far towards optimism as Mr. Hardy can let himself be drawn, or by such reflections as those in "On a Fine Morning":—

"Whence comes Solace? Not from seeing What is doing, suffering, being; Not from noting Life's conditions, Not from heeding Time's monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream, And in gazing on the gleam Whereby gray things golden seem."

Eight years more passed, years marked by the stupendous effort of The Dynasts, before Mr. Hardy put forth another collection of lyrical poems. Time's Laughingstocks confirmed, 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 anxiety not to miss one thrifty sentence, expresses the hope that Time's Laughingstocks will, as a whole, take the "reader forward, even if not far, rather than backward."

The book, indeed, does not take us "far" forward, simply because the writer's style and scope were definitely exposed to us already, and yet it does take us "forward," because the hand of the master is conspicuously firmer and his touch more daring. The Laughingstocks themselves are fifteen in number, tragical stories of division and isolation, of 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 the other in a blaze of sunrise. What a document for the future is "Reminiscences of a Dancing Man"? If only Shakespeare could have left us such a song of the London in 1585! But the power of the poet culminates in the pathos of "The Tramp Woman"—perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hardy's lyrical poems—and in the horror of "A Sunday Morning's Tragedy."

It is noticeable that Time's Laughingstocks is, in some respects, a more daring collection than its predecessors. We find the poet here entirely emancipated from convention, and guided both in religion and morals exclusively by the inner light of his reflection. His energy now interacts on his clairvoyance with a completeness which he had never quite displayed before, and it is here that we find Mr. Hardy's utterance peculiarly a quintessence of himself. Especially in the narrative pieces—which are often Wessex novels distilled into a wine-glass, 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 Time's Laughingstocks takes us to the old-fashioned gallery of some church, where the minstrels are bowing "New Sabbath" or "Mount Ephraim," or to a later scene where the ghosts, in whose melancholy apparition Mr. Hardy takes such pleasure, chant their goblin melodies and strum "the viols of the dead" in the moonlit churchyard. The very essence of Mr. Hardy's reverie at this moment of his career is to be found, for instance, in "The Dead Quire," where the ancient phantom-minstrels revenge themselves on their gross grandsons outside the alehouse.

Almost immediately after the outbreak of the present war Mr. Hardy presented to a somewhat distraught and inattentive public another collection of his poems. It cannot be said that Satires of Circumstance is the most satisfactory of those volumes; it is, perhaps, that which we could with the least discomposure persuade ourselves to overlook. Such a statement refers more to the high quality of other pages than to any positive decay of power or finish here. There is no less adroitness of touch and penetration of view in this book than elsewhere, and the poet awakens once more our admiration by his skill in giving 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 beneath it. We can with little danger assume, as we read the Satires of Circumstance, hard and cruel shafts of searchlight as they seem, that Mr. Hardy was passing through a mental crisis when he wrote them. This seems to be the Troilus and Cressida of his life's work, the book in which he is revealed most distracted by conjecture and most overwhelmed by the miscarriage of everything. The wells of human hope have been poisoned for him by some condition of which we know nothing, and even the picturesque features of Dorsetshire landscape, that have always before dispersed his melancholy, fail to win his attention:—

"Bright yellowhammers Made mirthful clamours, And billed long straws with a bustling air, And bearing their load, Flew up the road That he followed alone, without interest there."

The strongest of the poems of disillusion which are the outcome of this mood, is "The Newcomer's Wife," with the terrible abruptness of its last stanza. It is not for criticism to find fault with the theme of a work of art, but only to comment 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 lessen the rebound of our energy, is another matter. At all events, every one must welcome a postscript in which a blast on the bugle of war seemed to have wakened the poet from his dark brooding to the sense of a new chapter in history.

In the fourth year of the war the veteran poet published Moments of Vision. These show a remarkable recovery of spirit, and an ingenuity never before excelled. With the passage of years Mr. Hardy, observing everything in the little world of Wessex, and forgetting nothing, has become almost preternaturally wise, and, if it may be said so, "knowing," 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 is wholly detached from the bitterness of satire, much that simply records, with an infinite delicacy of pathos, little incidents of the personal life of long ago, bestowing the immortality of art on these fugitive fancies in the spirit of the Japanese sculptor when he chisels the melting of a cloud or the flight of an insect on his sword hilt:—

"I idly cut a parsley stalk And blew therein towards the moon; I had not thought what ghosts would walk With shivering footsteps to my tune.

"I went and knelt, and scooped my hand As if to drink, into the brook, And a faint figure seemed to stand Above me, with the bye-gone look.

"I lipped rough rhymes of chance not choice, I thought not what my words might be; There came into my ear a voice That turned a tenderer verse for me."

We have now in brief historic survey marshalled before us the various volumes in which Mr. Hardy's lyrical poetry was originally collected. Before we examine its general character more closely, it may be well to call attention to its technical 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 prosody; they judged him as a versifier to be rude and incorrect. As regards the single line, it may be confessed that Mr. Hardy, in his anxiety to present his thought in an undiluted form, is not infrequently clogged and hard. Such a line as

"Fused from its separateness by ecstasy"

hisses at us like a snake, and crawls like a wounded one. Mr. Hardy is apt to clog his lines with consonants, and he seems indifferent to the stiffness which is the consequence of this neglect. Ben Jonson said that "Donne, for not keeping 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, probably because of Swinburne's abuse of it. But most of what is called his harshness should rather be called bareness, and is the result of a revolt, conscious or unconscious, against Keats' prescription of "loading the rifts with ore."

In saying this, all has been said that an enemy could in justice say in blame of his metrical peculiarities. Unquestionably he does occasionally, like Robert Browning, err in the direction of cacophony. But when we turn to the broader 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 forms, mostly of his own invention, and employed them so appropriately, that is to say, in so close harmony with the subject or story enshrined in them. To take an example from his pure lyrics of reflection first, from "The Bullfinches":—

"Brother Bulleys, let us sing From the dawn till evening! For we know not that we go not When the day's pale visions fold Unto those who sang of old,"

in the exquisite fineness and sadness of the stanza we seem to hear the very voices of the birds warbling faintly in the sunset. Again, the hurried, timid irresolution of a lover always too late is marvellously rendered in the form of "Lizbie Browne":—

"And Lizbie Browne, Who else had hair Bay-red as yours, Or flesh so fair Bred out of doors, Sweet Lizbie Browne?"

On the other hand, the fierceness of "I said to Love" is interpreted in a stanza that suits the mood of denunciation, while "Tess's Lament" wails in a metre which seems to rock like an ageing woman seated alone before the fire, with an infinite haunting sadness.

It is, however, in the narrative pieces, the little Wessex Tales, that Mr. Hardy's metrical imagination is most triumphant. No two of these are identical in form, and for each he selects, or more often invents, a wholly appropriate stanza. He makes many experiments, one of the strangest being the introduction of rhymeless lines at regular intervals. Of this, "Cicely" is an example which repays attention:—

"And still sadly onward I followed, That Highway the Icen Which trails its pale riband down Wessex O'er lynchet and lea.

"Along through the Stour-bordered Forum, Where legions had wayfared, And where the slow river up-glasses Its green canopy";

and one still more remarkable is the enchanting "Friends Beyond," to which we shall presently recur. The drawling voice of a weary old campaigner is wonderfully rendered in the stanza of "Valenciennes":—

"Well: Heaven wi' its jasper halls Is now the on'y town I care to be in.. Good Lord, if Nick should bomb the walls As we did Valencieen!"

whereas for long Napoleonic stories like "Leipzig" and "The Peasant's Confession," a ballad-measure which contemporaries such as Southey or Campbell might have used is artfully chosen. In striking contrast we have the elaborate 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 quotation than I have space, for here, but the reader who pursues it carefully will not repeat the rumour that Mr. Hardy is a careless or "incorrect" metricist. He is, on the contrary, a metrical artist of great accomplishment.

The conception of life revealed in his verses by this careful artist is one which displays very exactly the bent of his temperament. During the whole of his long career Mr. Hardy has not budged an inch from his original line of direction. He holds that, abandoned by God, treated with scorn by Nature, man lies helpless at the mercy of "those purblind 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 course, Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, just as Browning is an optimist, just as white is not black, and day is not night. Our juggling with words in paradox is too often apt to disguise a want of decision in thought. Let us admit that Mr. Hardy's conception of the fatal forces which beleaguer human life is a "pessimistic" one, or else words have no meaning.

Yet it is needful to define in what this pessimism consists. It is not the egotism of Byron or the morbid melancholy of Chateaubriand. It is directed towards an observation of others, not towards an analysis of self, and this gives it more philosophical importance, because although romantic peevishness is very common among modern poets, 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 could never have dictated the third stanza of Shelley's "Lines written in Dejection in the Bay of Naples." His pessimism is involuntary, forced from him by his experience and his constitution, and no analysis could give a better definition of what divides him from the petulant despair of a poet like Leopardi than the lines "To Life":—

"O life, with the sad scared face, I weary of seeing thee, And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace, And thy too-forced pleasantry!

"I know what thou would'st tell Of Death, Time, Destiny— I have known it long, and know, too, well What it all means for me.

"But canst thou not array Thyself in rare disguise, And feign like truth, for one mad day, That Earth is Paradise?

"I'll tune me to the mood, And mumm with thee till eve, And maybe what as interlude I feign, I shall believe!"

But the mumming goes no deeper than it does in the exquisite poem of "The Darkling Thrush," where the carolings of an aged bird, on 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 blessed hope" of which the poet is "unaware." This is as far as Mr. Hardy ever gets on the blest Victorian pathway of satisfaction.

There are certain aspects in which it is not unnatural to see a parallel between Mr. Hardy and George Crabbe. Each is the spokesman of a district, each has a passion for the study of mankind, each has gained by long years of observation a profound knowledge of local human character, and each has plucked on the open moor, and wears in his coat, the hueless flower 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 he acknowledged. Crabbe was realistic with a moral design, even in the Tales of the Hall, where he made a gallant effort at last to arrive at a detachment of spirit. No such effort is needed by Mr. Hardy, who has none of the instinct of a preacher, and who considers moral improvement outside his responsibility. He admits, with his great French contemporary, that

"Tout desir est menteur, toute joie ephemere, Toute liqueur au fond de la coupe est amere,"

but he is bent on discovering the cause of this devastation, and not disposed to waste time over its consequences. At the end he produces a panacea which neither Crabbe nor Byron dreamed of—resignation.

But the poet has not reached the end of his disillusion. He thinks to secure repose on the breast of Nature, the alma mater, to whom Goethe and Wordsworth and Browning each in his own way turned, and were rewarded by consolation and refreshment. We should be prepared to find Mr. Hardy, with his remarkable aptitude for the perception of natural forms, easily consoled by the influences of landscape and the inanimate world. His range of vision is wide and extremely exact; he has the gift of reproducing before us scenes of various character with a vividness which is sometimes 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 offer "a soft release from man's unrest." He immediately observes that the pine and the beech are struggling for existence, and trying to blight each other with dripping poison. He sees the ivy eager to strangle the elm, and the hawthorns choking the hollies. Even the poplars sulk and turn black under the shadow of a rival. In the end, filled with horror at all these crimes of Nature, the poet flees from the copse as from an accursed place, and he determines that life offers him no consolation except the company of those human beings who are as beleaguered as himself:—

"Since, then, no grace I find Taught me of trees, Turn I back to my kind Worthy as these. There at least smiles abound, There discourse trills around, There, now and then, are found, Life-loyalties."

It is absurd, he decides, to love Nature, which has either no response to give, or answers in irony. Let us even avoid, as much as we can, deep concentration of thought upon the mysteries of Nature, lest we become demoralised by contemplating 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 originality. He has lifted the veil of Isis, and he finds beneath it, not a benevolent mother of men, but the tomb of an illusion. One short lyric, "Yell'ham-Wood's Story," puts this, again with a sylvan setting, in its unflinching crudity:—

"Coomb-Firtrees say that Life is a moan, And Clyffe-hill Clump says 'Yea!' But Yell'ham says a thing of its own: It's not, 'Gray, gray, Is Life alway!' That Yell'ham says, Nor that Life is for ends unknown.

"It says that Life would signify A thwarted purposing: That we come to live, and are called to die. Yes, that's the thing In fall, in spring, That Yell'ham says:— Life offers—to deny!'"

It is therefore almost exclusively to the obscure history of those who suffer and stumble around him, victims of the universal disillusion, men and women "come to live but called to die," that Mr. Hardy dedicates his poetic function. "Lizbie Browne" appeals to us as a typical instance of his rustic pathos, his direct and poignant tenderness, and if we compare it with such poems of Wordsworth's as "Lucy Gray" or "Alice Fell" we see that he starts by standing much 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 of Victorian morality. Mr. Hardy, indeed, is not concerned with sentimental morals, but with the primitive instincts of the soul, applauding them, or at least recording them with complacency, even when they outrage ethical tradition, as they do in the lyric narrative called "A Wife and Another." The stanzas "To an Unborn Pauper Child" sum up what is sinister and what is genial in Mr. Hardy's attitude to the unambitious forms of life which he loves to contemplate.

His temperature is not always so low as it is in the class of poems to which we have just referred, but his ultimate view is never more sanguine. He is pleased sometimes to act as the 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 prancing" at the end of all. No instance of this is more remarkable than the poem called "Julie-Jane," a perfect example of Mr. Hardy's metrical ingenuity and skill, which begins thus:—

"Sing; how 'a would sing! How 'a would raise the tune When we rode in the waggon from harvesting By the light o' the moon!

"Dance; how 'a would dance! If a fiddlestring did but sound She would hold out her coats, give a slanting glance, And go round and round.

"Laugh; how 'a would laugh! Her peony lips would part As if none such a place for a lover to quaff At the deeps of a heart,"

and which then turns to the most plaintive and the most irreparable tragedy, woven, as a black design on to a background of gold, upon this basis of temperamental joyousness.

Alphonse Daudet once said that the great gift of Edmond de Goncourt was to, "rendre l'irrendable." This is much more true of Mr. Hardy than it was of Goncourt, and more true than it is of any other English poet except Donne. There is absolutely no observation too minute, no flutter of reminiscence too faint, for Mr. Hardy to adopt as the subject of a metaphysical lyric, and his skill in this direction has grown upon him; it is nowhere so remarkable as in his latest volume, aptly termed Moments of Vision. Everything in village life is grist to his mill; he seems to make 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 and hair, the vision of a giant at a fair, led by a dwarf with a red string—such are amongst the subjects which awaken in Mr. Hardy thoughts which do often lie too deep for tears, and call for interpretation in verse. The skeleton of a lady's sunshade, picked up on Swanage Cliffs, the pages of a fly-blown Testament lying in a railway waiting-room, a journeying boy in a third-class carriage, with his ticket stuck in the band of his hat—such are among the themes which awake in Mr. Hardy's imagination reveries which are always wholly serious and usually deeply tragic.

Mr. Hardy's notation of human touches hitherto excluded from the realm of poetry is one of the most notable features of his originality. It marked his work from the beginning, as in the early ballad of "The Widow," where the sudden damping of the wooer's amatory ardour in consequence of 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 of his elegant lightness, does not always escape. Wordsworth, more serious in his intent, fell headlong in parts of Peter Bell, and in such ballads as "Betty Foy." Mr. Hardy, whatever the poverty of his incident, commonly redeems it by the oddity of his observation; as in "The Pedigree":—

"I bent in the deep of night Over a pedigree the chronicler gave As mine; and as I bent there, half-unrobed, The uncurtained panes of my window-square Let in the watery light Of the moon in its old age: And green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past Where mute and cold it globed Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave."

Mr. Hardy's love of strange experiences, and of adventures founded on a balance of conscience and instinct, is constantly exemplified in those ballads and verse-anecdotes which form the section of his poetry most appreciated by the general public. Among these, extraordinarily representative of the poet's habit of mind, is "My Cicely," a tale of the eighteenth century, where a man impetuously rides from London 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 deliberate electing that the dream shall hold the place of the fact is the motive of "The Well-Beloved." The ghastly humour of "The Curate's Kindness" is a sort of reverse action of the same mental subtlety. Misunderstanding takes a very prominent place in Mr. Hardy's irony of circumstance; as, almost too painfully, in "The Rash Bride," a hideous tale of suicide following on the duplicity of a tender and innocent widow.

The grandmother of Mr. Hardy was born in 1772, and survived until 1857. From her lips he heard many an obscure old legend of the life of Wessex in the eighteenth century. Was it she who told him the terrible Exmoor story of "The Sacrilege;" the early tale of "The Two Men," which might be the skeleton-scenario for a whole elaborate novel; or that incomparable comedy in verse, "The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's," with its splendid human touch at the very end? We suspect that 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, and a labyrinth within the wood, and locks and bars to every door within that labyrinth," as Jeremy Taylor describes that of the anxious penitents who came to him to confession. The probably very early story of "The Casterbridge Captains" is a delicate study in compunction, and a still more important example is "The Alarm," where the balance of conscience and instinct gives to what in coarser hands might seem the most trivial of actions a momentous character of tragedy.

This is one of Mr. Hardy's studies in military history, where he is almost always singularly happy. His portraits of the non-commissioned officer of the old service are as excellent in verse as they are in the prose of The Trumpet-Major or The 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 war and a close acquaintance with the mind of the common soldier, has pondered on the philosophy of fighting. "The Man he Killed," written in 1902, expresses the wonder of the rifleman who is called upon to shoot his brother-in-arms, although

"Had he and I but met, By some old ancient inn, We should have set us down to wet Right many a nipperkin."

In this connection the Poems of War and Patriotism, which form an important part of the volume of 1918, should be carefully examined by those who meditate on the tremendous problems of the moment.

A poet so profoundly absorbed in the study of life could not fail to speculate on the probabilities of immortality. Here Mr. Hardy presents to us his habitual serenity in negation. He sees the beautiful human body "lined by tool of time," and he asks what becomes of it when its dissolution is complete. He sees no evidence of a conscious state after death, of what would have to be, 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 gravely perhaps in "The To-be-Forgotten" and in "The Superseded." This sense of the forlorn condition of the dead, surviving only in the dwindling memory of the living, inspires what has some claims to be considered the loveliest of all Mr. Hardy's poems, "Friends Beyond," which in its tenderness, its humour, and its pathos contains in a few pages every characteristic of his genius.

His speculation perceives the dead as a crowd of slowly vanishing phantoms, clustering in their ineffectual longing round the footsteps of those through whom alone they continue to exist. This conception has inspired Mr. Hardy with several wonderful visions, among which the spectacle of "The Souls of the Slain" in the Boer War, alighting, like vast flights of moths, over Portland Bill at night, is the most remarkable. It has the sublimity 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 greatest of adversities ("The Impercipient"), the tragedies of moral indecision, the contrast between the tangible earth and the bodyless ghosts, and endless repetition of the cry, "Why find we us here?" and of the question "Has some Vast Imbecility framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?"—all start from the overwhelming love of physical life and acquaintance with its possibilities, which Mr. Hardy possesses to an inordinate degree.

It would be ridiculous at the close of an essay to attempt any discussion of the huge dramatic panorama which many believe to be Mr. Hardy's most weighty contribution to English literature. The spacious theatre of The Dynasts with its comprehensive and yet concise realisations of vast passages of human 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 up of intensely concentrated and vivid glimpses of reality. But the subject of my present study, the lyrical poetry of Mr. Hardy, is not largely illustrated in The Dynasts, except by the choral interludes of the phantom intelligences, which have great lyrical value, and by three or four admirable songs.

When we resume the effect which the poetry of Mr. Hardy makes upon the careful reader, we note, as I have indicated already, a sense of unity of direction throughout. Mr. Hardy has expressed himself in a thousand ways, but has never altered his vision. From 1867 to 1917, through half a century 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 Victorian age. But Mr. Hardy, with characteristic pertinacity, did not attempt to alter his utterance in the least, and now we can all perceive, if we take the trouble to do so, that what seemed harsh in his poetry was his peculiar and personal mode of interpreting his thoughts to the world.

As in his novels so in his poems, Mr. Hardy has chosen to remain local, to be the interpreter for present and future times of one rich and neglected province of the British realm. From his 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 even sardonic, and few poets have been less solicitous to please their weaker brethren. But no poet of modern times has been more careful to avoid the abstract and to touch upon the real.



SOME SOLDIER POETS

The two years which preceded the outbreak of the war were marked in this country by a revival of public interest in the art of poetry. To this movement coherence was given and organisation introduced by Mr. Edward Marsh's now-famous volume entitled Georgian Poetry. The effect of this collection—for it is hardly correct to call it an anthology—of the best poems written by the youngest poets since 1911 was two-fold; it 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 Songs and Sonnettes of 1557, commonly known as Tottel's Miscellany. Tottel brought together, for the first time, the lyrics of Wyatt, Surrey, Churchyard, Vaux, and Bryan, exactly as Mr. Marsh called public attention to Rupert Brooke, James Elroy Flecker and the rest of the Georgians, and he thereby fixed the names of those poets, as Mr. Marsh has fixed those of our youngest fledglings, on the roll of English literature.

The general tone of the latest poetry, up to the moment of the outbreak of hostilities, was pensive, instinct with natural piety, given somewhat in excess to description of landscape, tender in feeling, essentially unaggressive except towards the clergy and towards other versifiers of an earlier generation. There was absolutely not a trace in any one of the young poets of that arrogance and vociferous defiance which marked German verse during the same years. These English shepherds might 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 imagery" which contained Mr. Gordon Bottomley, or in Mr. W.H. Davies' wandering "songs of joy," or on "the great hills and solemn chanting seas" where Mr. John Drinkwater waited for the advent of beauty. And the guns of August 1914 found Mr. W.W. Gibson encompassed by "one dim, blue infinity of starry peace." There is a sort of German Georgian Poetry in existence; in time to come a comparison of its pages with those of Mr. Marsh may throw a side-light on the question, Who prepared the War?

The youngest poets were more completely taken by surprise in August 1914 than their elders. The earliest expressions of lyric military feeling came from veteran voices. It was only proper that the earliest of all should be the Poet Laureate's address to England, ending with the prophecy:—

"Much suffering shall cleanse thee! But thou through the flood Shalt win to Salvation, To Beauty through blood."

As sensation, however, followed sensation in those first terrific and bewildering weeks, much was happening that called forth with the utmost exuberance the primal emotions of mankind; there was full occasion for

"exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

By September a full chorus was vocal, led by our national veteran, Mr. Thomas Hardy, with his Song of the Soldiers:—

"What of the faith and fire within us, Men who march away Ere the barn-cocks say Night is growing gray, To hazards whence no tears can win us; What of the faith and fire within us, Men who march away?"

Already, before the close of the autumn of 1914, four or five anthologies of war-poems were in the press, and the desire of the general public to be fed with patriotic and emotional verse was manifested in unmistakable ways. We had been accustomed for some time past to the issue of a multitude of little 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 unusual to see anything criticised, much less "slated"; the balms of praise were poured over every rising head, and immortalities were predicted by the dozen. Yet, as a rule, the sale of these little poetic pamphlets had been small, and they had been read only by those who had a definite object in doing so.

The immediate success of the anthologies, however, proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear for contemporary verse, an attention anxious to be stirred or soothed by the assiduous company of poets who had been ripening their talents in a little clan. These had now an eager world ready to listen to them. The result was surprising; we may even, without exaggeration, call it unparalleled. 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 this, or much of it, or any but a very little of it, has been of permanent value. Much of it was windy and superficial, striving in wild vague terms to express great agitations which were obscurely felt by the poet. There was too much of the bathos of rhetoric, especially at first; too much addressing the German as "thou fell, bloody brute," and the like, which broke no bones and took no trenches.

When once it was understood that, as a cancelled line in Tennyson's Maud has it,

"The long, long canker of peace was over and done,"

the sentiments of indignation and horror made themselves felt with considerable vivacity. In this direction, however, none of the youngest poets approached Sir Owen Seaman in the vigour of their invective. Most of them seemed to be overpowered by the political situation, and few could free themselves from their inured pacific habit of speech. Even when they wrote of Belgium, the Muse seemed rather to weep than to curse. Looking back to 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. As the slightly censorious reader looks back upon these poems of the beginning of the War, he cannot resist a certain impatience. In the first place, there is a family likeness which makes it impossible to distinguish one writer from another, and there is a tendency to a smug approval of British prejudice, and to a horrible confidence in England's power of "muddling through," which look rather ghastly in the light of subsequent struggles.

There was, however, a new spirit presently apparent, and a much healthier one. The bards became soldiers, and in crossing over to France and Flanders, each had packed his flute in his kit. They began to send home verses in which they translated into music their actual experiences and their authentic emotions. We found ourselves listening to young men who had something new, and what was better, something noble to say to us, and we returned to the national spirit which inspired the Chansons de Geste in the eleventh century. To the spirit—but not 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 sincerity of the reflection in many cases hit upon very happy forms of expression, it is impossible to overlook the general monotony. There used to be a story that the Japanese Government sent a committee of its best art-critics to study the relative merits of the modern European painters, and that they returned with the bewildered statement that they could make no report, because all European pictures were exactly alike. A student from Patagonia might conceivably argue that he could discover no difference whatever between our various poets of the war.

This would be unjust, but it is perhaps not unfair to suggest that the determined resistance to all restraint, which has marked the latest school, is not really favourable to individuality. There has been a very general, almost a universal tendency to throw off the shackles of poetic form. It has been supposed that by abandoning the normal restraints, or artificialities, of metre and rhyme, a greater directness and fidelity would be secured. Of course, if an intensified 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 in the whole choral progress from Pindar down to Swinburne has a great master been found who did not exult in the stubbornness of "dancing words and speaking strings," or who did not find his joy in reducing them to harmony. The artist who avoids all difficulties may be pleased with the rapidity of his effect, but he will have the vexation of finding his success an ephemeral one. The old advice to the poet, in preparing the rich chariot of the Muse, still holds good:—

"Let the postillion, Nature, mount, but let The coachman, Art, be set."

Too many of our recent rebellious bards fancy that the coach will drive itself, if only the post-boy sticks his heels hard into Pegasus.

It is not, however, the object of this essay to review all the poetry which was written about the war, nor even that part of it which owed its existence to the strong feeling 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 hallowed by the glorious effort of battle, and in too many poignant cases by the ultimate sacrifice of life itself. The poet achieves his highest meed of contemporary glory, if

"some brave young man's untimely fate In words worth, dying for he celebrate,"

and when he is himself a young man striving for the same deathless honour on the same field of blood it is difficult to conceive of circumstances more poignant than those which surround his effort. On many of these poets a death of the highest nobility set the seal of eternal life. They were simple and passionate, radiant and calm, they fought for their country, and they have entered into glory. This alone might be enough to say in their praise, but star differeth from star 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 Rossetti is almost entirely absent. The only one of the great Victorians whom they seem to have read is Matthew Arnold, but it is impossible to help observing that the Shropshire Lad of Mr. A.E. Housman was in the tunic-pocket of every one of them. Among the English poets of the past, it is mainly the so-called "metaphysical" writers in the seventeenth century whom they studied; Donne seems to have been a favourite with them all, and Vaughan and Treherne were not far behind.

The spontaneous instinct of readers has taken the name of Rupert Brooke to illustrate the poetic spirit of the great war in a superlative degree. His posthumous volume, brought out in May 1915, a few weeks after his death, has enjoyed a success which is greater, perhaps, than that of all the other poems of the war put together. He has become a sort of symbol, even a sort of fetish, and he is to English sentiment what Charles Peguy is to France, an oriflamme of the chivalry of his country. It is curious, in this connection, that neither Peguy 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 AEgean, between Egypt and Gallipoli, having never seen a Turkish enemy. So Peguy faded out of sight on the very opening day of the battle of the Marne, yet each of these young men was immediately perceived to have embodied the gallantry of his country. The extraordinary popularity of Rupert Brooke is due to the excellence of his verse, to the tact with which it was presented to the public, but also to a vague perception of his representative nature. He was the finest specimen of a certain type produced at the universities, and then sacrificed to our national necessity.

It is needless to describe the verses of Rupert Brooke, which have attained a circulation which any poet might envy. They are comprised in two slender volumes, that above mentioned, and one of 1911, published while he was still at Cambridge. He was born in 1887, and when he died off Skyros, in circumstances of the most romantic pathos, he had not completed his twenty-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 some permanent value. For instance, in the volume of 1911 we found not a few pieces which then seemed crude in taste and petulant in temper; but even these now illustrate a most interesting character of which time has rounded the angles, and we would not have otherwise what illustrates so luminously—and so divertingly—that precious object, the mind of Rupert Brooke.

Yet there is a danger that this mind and character may be misinterpreted, even by those who contemplate the poet's memory with idolatry. There is some evidence of a Rupert Brooke legend in the process of formation, which deserves to be guarded against not less jealously than the R.L. Stevenson legend of a few years ago. We know that for some people gold and lilies are not properly honoured until they are gilded and painted. Rupert Brooke was far from being either a plaster saint or a vivid public witness. He was 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 appreciation. His very fine appearance, which seemed to glow with dormant vitality, his beautiful manners, the quickness of his intelligence, his humour, were combined under the spell of a curious magnetism, difficult to analyse. When he entered a room, he seemed to bring sunshine with him, although he was usually rather silent, and pointedly immobile. I do not think it would be easy to recollect any utterance of his which was very remarkable, but all he said and did added to the harmonious, ardent, and simple effect.

There is very little of the poetry of Rupert Brooke which can be definitely identified with the war. The last six months of his life, spent in conditions for which nothing in his previous existence in Cambridge or Berlin, in Grantchester or Tahiti, had in the least prepared him, were devoted—for we must not say wasted—to breaking up the cliche of civilised habits. But of this harassed time there remain to us the five immortal Sonnets, which form the crown of Rupert Brooke's verse, and his principal legacy to English literature. Our record would be imperfect without the citation of one, perhaps the least hackneyed of these:—

"Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

"Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth, Holiness, lacked so long, and Love and Pain. Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage."

If the fortune of his country had not disturbed his plans, it is more than probable that Rupert Brooke would have become an enlightened and enthusiastic professor. Of the poet who detains us next it may be said that there was hardly any walk of life, except precisely this, which he could not have adorned. Julian Grenfell, who was a poet almost by accident, resembled the most enlightened of the young Italian noblemen of the Renaissance, who gave themselves with violence to a surfeit 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 the exercise of the physical, intellectual, and emotional faculties at his disposal. Julian Grenfell was a master of the body and of the mind, an unrivalled boxer, a pertinacious hunter, skilled in swimming and polo, a splendid shot, a swift runner, and an unwearying student. That an athlete so accomplished should have had time left for intellectual endowments is amazing, but his natural pugnacity led him to fight lexicons as he fought the wild boar, and with as complete success.

The record of the brief and shining life of Julian Grenfell has been told in an anonymous record of family life which is destined to reverberate far beyond the discreet circle of friends to which it is provisionally addressed. It is a document of extraordinary candour, tact, and fidelity, and 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 century. It is partly through his place at the centre of this record that, as one of the most gifted of his elder friends has said, the name of Julian Grenfell will be linked "with all that is swift and chivalrous, lovely and courageous," but it is also through his rare and careless verses.

Julian Grenfell, who was born to excel with an enviable ease, was not a poet by determination. In a family where everything has been preserved, no verses of his that are not the merest boyish exercises are known to exist previous to the war. He was born in 1888, and he became a professional soldier in India in 1911. He was on his way home from South 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 saw him and of all to whom he wrote, his character received its final touch of ripeness. Among his other attainments he abruptly discovered the gift of noble gnomic verse. On receiving news of the death of Rupert Brooke, and a month before his own death, Julian Grenfell wrote the verses called "Into Battle," which contain the unforgettable stanzas:—

"The fighting man shall from the sun Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth; Speed with the light-foot winds to run, And with the trees to newer birth....

"The woodland trees that stand together, They stand to him each one a friend; They gently speak in the windy weather; They guide to valley and ridge's end.

"The kestrel hovering by day, And the little owls that call by night, Bid him be swift and keen as they, As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

"The blackbird sings to him 'Brother, brother, If this be the last song you shall sing, Sing well, for you may not sing another, Brother, sing.'"

The whole of this poem is memorable, down to its final prophetic quatrain:—

"The thundering line of battle stands, And in the air Death moans and sings; But Day shall clasp him with strong hands, And Night shall fold him in soft wings."

"Could any other man in the British Army have knocked out a heavy-weight champion one week and written that poem the next?" a brother officer asked. "Into Battle" remains, and will 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 form to their most splendid aspirations. Julian Grenfell wrote, as he boxed and rode, as he fought in the mud of Flanders, as the ideal sporting Englishman of our old, heroic type.

The ancient mystery of verse is so deeply based on tradition that it is not surprising that all the strange contrivances of twentieth-century warfare have been found too crabbed for our poets to use. When great Marlborough, as Addison puts it, "examin'd all the dreadful scenes of war" at Blenheim, he was really in closer touch with Marathon than with the tanks and gas of Ypres. But there is one military implement so beautiful in itself, and so 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-Meeus, a hymn of real aerial majesty. In English Major Maurice Baring's ode "In Memoriam: A.H." is equally unique, and, in its complete diversity from Allard-Meeus' rhapsody, suggests that the aeroplane has a wide field before it in the realms of imaginative writing. Major Baring's subject is the death of Auberon Herbert, Lord Lucas, who was killed on November 3rd, 1916. This distinguished young statesman and soldier had just been promoted, after a career of prolonged gallantry in the air, and would have flown no more, if he had returned in safety to our front on that fatal day.

Major Baring has long been known as an excellent composer of sonnets and other short pieces. But "In Memoriam: A.H." lifts him to a position among our living poets to which he had hardly a pretension. In a long irregular threnody or funeral ode, the great technical difficulty is to support lyrical emotion throughout. No form of verse 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 success of the great masters is only relative, but he has produced a poem of great beauty and originality, which interprets an emotion and illustrates an incident the poignancy of which could scarcely be exaggerated. I have no hesitation in asserting that "A.H." is one of the few durable contributions to the literature of the present war.

It is difficult to quote effectively from a poem which is constructed with great care on a complicated plan, but a fragment of Major Baring's elegy may lead readers to the original:—

"God, Who had made you valiant, strong and swift And maimed you with a bullet long ago, And cleft your riotous ardour with a rift, And checked your youth's tumultuous overflow, Gave back your youth to you, And packed in moments rare and few Achievements manifold And happiness untold, And bade you spring to Death as to a bride, In manhood's ripeness, power and pride, And on your sandals the strong wings of youth."

There is no rhetoric here, no empty piling up of fine words; it is a closely followed study in poetical biography.

The water has its marvels like the air, but they also have hardly yet secured the attention of the poets. In A Naval Motley, by Lieut. N.M.F. Corbett, published in June 1916, we encounter the submarine:—

"Not yours to know delight In the keen hard-fought fight, The shock of battle and the battle's thunder; But suddenly to feel Deep, deep beneath the keel The vital blow that rives the ship asunder!"

A section of the new war-poetry which is particularly pathetic is that which is inspired by the nostalgia of home, by the longing in the midst of the guns and the dust and the lice for the silent woodlands and cool waters of England. When this is combined with the sense of extreme youth, and of a certain brave and beautiful innocence, the poignancy of it is almost more than can be borne. The judgment is hampered, and one doubts whether one's critical feeling can be trusted. This particular species 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 does not always tap the centre of the nail's head. But what pathos in the sentiment, what tenderness in the devotion to beauty! Tennant had, we may suppose, read Flecker before he wrote "How shall I tell you of the roads that stretch away?"; or was it merely the family likeness in the generation? But I know not what but his own genius can have inspired the "Home Thoughts in Laventie," a poem about a little garden left unravished among the rubble of the wrecked village, a poem which ends thus:—

"I saw green banks of daffodil, Slim poplars in the breeze, Great tan-brown hares in gusty March A-courting on the leas. And meadows, with their glittering streams—and silver-scurrying dace— Home, what a perfect place."

Among these boy-poets, so cruelly and prematurely snatched from the paternal earth, Tennant suggests to us the possibility that a talent of very high order was quenched by death, because in few of them do we find so much evidence of that "perception and awe of Beauty" which Plotinus held to be the upward path to God.