ClocticU Mniuerattg ffiibrarg 
 
 JItltata, Ntto $orh 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR 503.D78P9 
 
 Prose papers, 
 
 3 1924 013 264 050 
 
The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013264050 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 Poetry — 
 Poems. 1908-1914. 
 CoPHETUA : A Play. 1911. 
 Rebellion : A Play. 1914. 
 Swords and Ploughshares. 1915. 
 Olton Pools. 1916. 
 Pawns : Tliree Plays. 1917. 
 Tides. 1917. 
 
 Prose — 
 
 William Morris. 1912. 
 Swinburne. 1913. 
 The Lyric. 1915. 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN DRINKWATER 
 
 LONDON 
 
 ELKIN MATHEWS, CORK STREET 
 
 MCMXVII 
 
Aa^ 
 
 ol\'=\ 
 
DEDICATION 
 
 My dear William Rothenstein, 
 
 I dedicate these essays to you, first for the profound 
 pleasure that your drawings have given me, and in homage 
 to an art the contemplation of which is a daily and growing 
 inspiration to my own life and work. Then, it is to thank 
 you for having found for me a corner of your enchanted 
 Cotswold country. Lastly, and, perhaps, chiefly, it is in 
 admiration for a generosity to your fellow-painters that 
 is as heartening as it seems, unhappily, to be rare. I do 
 not know whether my own experience of literary life has 
 been uncommonly fortunate : fortunate it certainly has 
 been. The chivalry that I have found in writers of an 
 older generation than myself has only been a less intimate 
 delight than the fellowship of my immediate contempor- 
 aries. With many of the Georgian poets, my collaborators 
 in New Numbers and others, I have formed close friend- 
 ships, and I know of nothing more splendid than the way 
 in which these men, with various and often violently 
 opposing views about their art, realise that they all are 
 working for a common end, and are enthusiastic one for 
 another's success — allowing always, of course, a resent- 
 ment of dishonest work. Among painters of my own 
 generation, and I am told that it is not a new phenomenon, 
 I have not observed the same good-will. I have observed, 
 rather, a disposition to intolerance, sometimes to jealousy. 
 What the reason may be I do not know. Whether it is 
 that the painter's emotion is, by the nature of his art, less 
 tempered with philosophy than the poet's, or whether the 
 
rivalry of school-life makes for friction, I cannot say. 
 But, whatever the cause, the effect is lamentable. If an 
 artist, in any kind, does honest work, making no con- 
 cessions from his vision, he is a fool if he expects anything 
 more from the public than a slowly mellowing antagonism ; 
 but that his spirit should be impoverished in its struggle — 
 for these things are impoverishing, however proud the 
 denial may be — by the disparagement of his fellow-artists, 
 or that he in turn should be ungenerous to men whose 
 brave intention is his own, is ugly and distressing. We 
 artists have the world to fight. Prejudice, indifference, 
 positive hostility, misrepresentation, a, total failure to 
 understand the purposes and the power of art, beset us on 
 every side. Nevertheless, if the world is to be renewed, 
 it will be renewed by us, and with a sense of this responsi- 
 bility upon us it is something meaner than folly to waste 
 our energies in quarrelling among ourselves. 
 
 It is to the magnanimity with which, in your actions 
 and your utterances, you have witnessed against this 
 Uliberality, that I wish to pay tribute in this dedication. 
 Nothing in the public affairs of art has been more in- 
 spiriting in my time than the tributes that you have paid 
 to your contemporaries, and your eager recognition of the 
 painters of a, new generation, some of them in revolt 
 against the methods of your own art. Your illustrious 
 distinction as a creator gives peculiar dignity to this 
 generosity of mind, and I am, as everyone who cares for 
 the health of art must be. 
 
 Very gratefully yours, 
 
 JOHN DRINKWATER. 
 Far Oakridge, 
 
 September, igiy. 
 
NOTE 
 
 These papers, varied in occasion, have, neverthe- 
 less, a common theme. They consider many 
 writers, but in all of them, I hope, will be found a 
 governing conception of the art with which they 
 are concerned. 
 
 For leave to reprint some of them I thank 
 Messrs. J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., Messrs. George 
 Routledge & Sons, Ltd., and Mr. Martin 
 Seeker ; also the Editors of The British Review, 
 The Contemporary Review, The Journal of English 
 Studies, The Manchester Guardian, The Nation, 
 The Nineteenth Century and The World. The paper 
 on Rupert Brooke has already appeared in a small 
 privately printed edition. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 , , -. -^ — PAGE 
 
 Poetry and Conduct ii 
 
 Thb Value of Poetry in Education • • ■ 35 
 
 The Poet and his Vision 48 
 
 Art and the Artist 58 
 
 Chaucer : the Poet of Spring .... 66 
 
 Philip Sidney 74 
 
 Thomas Gray .... . -94 
 
 S. T. Coleridge . 109 
 
 The Brontes as Poets 118 
 
 Frederick Tennyson 131 
 
 William Morris and the State . . . .138 
 
 Theodore 'SjVatts-Dunton 147 
 
 Rupert Brooke 174 
 
 Rupert Brooke on John Webster . . .193 
 
 The Nature of Drama igg 
 
 St. John Hankin 224 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 When every philosophy has been tested, when all 
 policies have been heard and all speculations as 
 to the destiny of man weighed one against another, 
 it is bigotry alone that will assert that it has the 
 last word in any argument. No social faith is 
 ever wholly proved, there is no god but will sooner 
 or later be dethroned, no chart of life that we can 
 know with certainty is truly drawn. This is not 
 unhappily so. The imagination of man is so vast 
 an instrument, and the world of experience upon 
 which it may work so varied and so exhilarating, 
 that a lifetime of untiring activity will enable us 
 at best to realise but an odd stray here and there 
 from the thronging life that is daily waiting to be 
 shaped to our delight. The man who is continually 
 refusing the witness of his own imagination and is 
 crying for the assurance of authorities other than 
 his own alert spirit is withered in the centre, he is 
 spiritually dead. You may be sorry for him ; his 
 II 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 misfortune may be explained. Life may have 
 dealt so hardly with him, his nature may be so 
 little robust or may have been so ill-tended, that 
 he cannot oppose calaipity with the resources of 
 his own resilient character and imagination. But 
 compassion and a recognition of causes do not 
 alter the fact that here is spiritual death — the 
 most lamentable, as it is, perhaps, the commonest 
 of all tragedies. It is a tragedy that permeates 
 society, thriving even when there is no bitter 
 burden of cruel experience to excuse or at least to 
 explain it. Flourishing trades are built upon it. 
 We all know the unfortunate people whose 
 spiritual lethargy is so profound, who are so in- 
 sensible to the calls of the innumerable adventures 
 that are in every wind and bough and footstep, 
 that they will pay sly palmists to tell them of a 
 to-morrow that they may be sure will be duller 
 than to-day. It is a tragedy that our newspapers 
 exploit with a certain knowledge of profit. So 
 general is the apathy in which we move that a 
 placard promising us a sensation — it is the very 
 word of common use — ^will sell a paper to three 
 men out of four as they pass. 
 
 12 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 This pervading dullness of spirit is the gravest 
 penalty that we pay for an over-specialised civil- 
 isation. There are so many things that, in the 
 state which we have blindly chosen, have to be 
 done by routine and example, that routine and 
 example have become habits with us, creeping 
 from what should be their lowly station of servility 
 and warping the free functions of our imagination. 
 That this should be so is tragic chiefly because it 
 is a denial of our proudest right. If absolute know- 
 ledge is beyond our attainment, as it is, a con- 
 tinuity of vivid experience is not beyond our 
 attainment, and such activity of experience 
 is the fulfilment of the highest function of 
 which man is capable. It is health ; it is 
 peace — ^the peace that passeth all understanding, 
 that is. the peace that is greater than all under- 
 standing. Its full and perfect realisation is, 
 perhaps, impossible, but that it can be realised in 
 some measure is the hope, indeed the certainty, 
 that makes this perplexing and capricious life so 
 greatly worth living. That this experience includes 
 sorrow does not affect the question. It is the act 
 of experiencing that matters, that exercises our 
 
 13 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 nature in the only full and significant way. And 
 out of this exercise, this alertness of our nature, 
 which is in and for itself of supreme importance 
 to us as individuals, comes a sure and single sense 
 of justice, which is of equal importance to us as 
 members of society . For all inj ustice , and inj astice 
 is the only social evil, or we may say that it 
 covers all social evils, is bom of spiritual lethargy. 
 When a man's thought is alert, when his spirit is 
 responsive to the beauty and awe of the world, 
 he does not put his hand to the terrible evil of 
 injustice. 
 
 For its direct value to us, then, as individuals, 
 liberating as it does the highest force that is in us, 
 and for its indirect influence upon our social 
 integrity, this wealth of passionate experience is 
 the thing that we must most desire. To destroy 
 lethargy of spirit, to shape all our daily meditation 
 and intercourse and the fertile activity of the 
 natural world into sharp and intimately realised 
 forms in our own imagination, is the aim of every 
 rightly disciplined mind. And in the accomplish- 
 ment of this aim the poet is he who of all men can 
 give us the surest help. Without inquiring too 
 
 14 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 curiously whether the desire for this intensity of 
 experience can in the beginning come from any 
 external impulse, whether it must not at first 
 make some unaided gesture, it is not questionable 
 that once it has moved, however shyly, contact 
 with fine poetry will of all things foster it into 
 vigorous certainty and growth. For contact with 
 fine poetry is precisely contact with most vital and 
 personal experience conveyed to us in the most 
 persuasive medium invented by man for habitual 
 intercourse — ^pregnant and living words. Pregnant 
 and living : for here is the secret of poetry. The 
 use of words, in the common run of daily affairs, 
 has become so much a matter of habit, so depen- 
 dent upon the thousand small conventions by 
 which we conduct the necessary or chosen routine 
 of our lives, that it is devoid of any real significance. 
 The common use of words is to convey from one 
 man to another information, which is a thing quite 
 distinct from experience, since we have trained 
 ourselves to receive and impart a great deal of 
 information daily out of mere custom and for the 
 purpose of keeping pace with the exacting and 
 often monstrous machinery that governs our 
 
 15 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 society. If we could number the words passing to 
 
 and from us in the course of a week that were really 
 
 born of significant and urgent experience, we 
 
 should have but a very small reckoning. And, not 
 
 being born of this quick experience seeking to 
 
 announce itself, the words are not pregnant and 
 
 living, but dead. Most of the multitudes of words 
 
 that are current among us have no true significance 
 
 at all. I do not say that they are not necessary, 
 
 or that it would be possible for men to bear the 
 
 pressure of constant interchange of words that 
 
 had real significance, but the fact is, none the less, 
 
 that words as we continually use them for the 
 
 common purposes of daily traffic mean, in the 
 
 more exacting sense, nothing. It is only when 
 
 they are used to convey experience that they 
 
 become quick and stir in us not a mere acceptance 
 
 that is barely a mental action at all, but an energy 
 
 of experience that corresponds to the energy that 
 
 is their source. And it is of the necessity that such 
 
 experience finds, when it is most profound, to state 
 
 itself in perfectly selected and ordered words, that 
 
 poetry comes into being. The precision and light 
 
 that are the characteristics of fine poetry can be 
 
 i6 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 achieved by intense and individual experience and 
 from no other source whatever. This is not to say 
 that intensity and individuality of experience are 
 in themselves enough to create poetry ; the poet 
 alone knows the diUgence with which he must 
 discipline his craftsmanship before he can serve 
 his art worthily. But they are none the less the 
 only sources of the material upon which he can 
 hopefully direct his craftsmanship ; it is from 
 them alone that his words win their significance, 
 and it is of them that his words speak to us, com- 
 pelling in us an ecstasy which is exactly a response 
 to that ecstasy of his own. And so it is that he, 
 of all external influences, is the most potent in 
 directing us to the realisation of what should be 
 our deepest desire, spiritual activity. 
 
 So do we trace the association, profound and of 
 far greater importance than is ever reaUsed in the 
 government of the world, between poetry and 
 conduct. The old question as to whether poetry — 
 or any art — should proclaim a moral can occupy 
 none but dull and unimaginative minds. Poetry 
 proclaims life ; that is all and it is everything. 
 Didactic poetry does not necessarily fail. It 
 
 B 17 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 generally does so, and because it generally comes 
 not of conviction, not of that urgent experience, 
 but of the lethargic acceptance of this or that 
 doctrine or moral attitude that is not the poet's 
 own delighted discovery, and so we respond to it 
 with no more than lethargic acceptance on our 
 side. It is always a question of the poet's sincerity 
 and conviction. Our experience in receiving his 
 poetry must correspond to his experience in creat- 
 ing it, and it is experience alone that we demand 
 of it. What the nature of the experience is does 
 not matter, but the experience itself must be 
 thrilling with life. This question was raised aptly 
 enough at a debate recently in one of our uni- 
 versities, when a motion was put that " the trend 
 of modern drama is and should be sociological and 
 not poetic." That is to say, what is poetical is not 
 sociological. I can only see one possible way of 
 reasoning whereby so queer a conclusion can have 
 been reached. Sociology, it must have been argued, 
 is a practical science, concerned directly with the 
 practical conditions of our daily lives. And then, 
 it must have been said, poetry is something which 
 is not so concerned. And a convenient popular 
 
 i8 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 fallacy was ready to hand in support of the notion. 
 For is not the poet a vague and ambitious visionary, 
 creating in his fancy a pleasant world of retreat 
 from the unfortunate difficulties of actual life ? 
 Does not poetry, therefore, bear the mark of its 
 makers, being the fit concern only of people who 
 are prepared to shut their eyes to the distressing 
 phenomena which vex the routine of our busy 
 days ? Yes, yes — ^it is consoling enough at stray 
 moments when the armour is ofE to indulge in this 
 pleasant pilgrimage to Lotus land, leaving the fret 
 and burden of affairs, of the great problems of 
 evoliition, behind us. They are good fellows, these 
 poets, in their way, giving us enchanting interludes 
 of make-believe against the sterner business of life. 
 But, remember, we are serious men and women in 
 our normal hours, facing this great seething per- 
 plexity with stubborn wills to master it if we can, 
 and we want our drama to be serious in its aim too, 
 to become the powerful pulpit that it may be, 
 pointing us shortly to answering these many ques- 
 tions that beset us, or, better still, answering them 
 for us outright. The poets — yes, on dreamy after- 
 noons when, tired and dusty from the momentous 
 
 19 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 struggles that are our daily use, we snatch an 
 hour's well-earned idleness ; even, in strictly 
 governed measure, and if it be not too difficult, 
 as a diversion from the more important matter of 
 our morning papers. But in the theatre ? No, 
 not for two hours and a half when we would 
 settle our minds to grave and more responsible 
 things. 
 
 This is, unhappily, no fantastic manipulating 
 of a case. This fundamental misunderstanding of 
 the nature of poetry is common enough in the 
 world, as, if it would but see it, Europe to-day 
 should realise. Our governors have not taken art, 
 which is spiritual activity with its consequent 
 clear-sighted moral judgment, seriously, and we 
 and our governors are paying the sorry penalty. 
 But let us think a little more of that curious pro- 
 position. What is the purpose of sociology ? Is 
 it anything more or less than the better regulation 
 of society, which is the relationship of man to his 
 fellows ? That is what all your sociologists are 
 striving for, unless they are lost in a mere maze of 
 theories. We are gregarious cattle, and we do not 
 very well know how to behave to each other at all 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 times. Quite simply, as I have already said, we 
 are unjust to one another. The sociologist ex- 
 amines the phenomena of this injustice in the 
 abstract, tabulates the, results, underlines as far 
 as may be the points at which reform may most 
 hopefully make its attacks, and suggests the 
 methods by which such reforms should work. 
 Admirable : full of fine zeal, often even of heroism. 
 And your sociological dramatist, yet more sensitive 
 to the grievous manifestations of this injustice, 
 defines them yet more clearly through the agency 
 of imagined men and women. Yet more admir- 
 able, striking as it does more directly at the heart. 
 But, when all is said, all these people — -the people 
 whose sociological inquiry and enthusiasm take 
 the form of a definite exposure of particular social 
 injustice — are but telling us what we know. And 
 here is the centre of the matter. I do not say that 
 it is not a good thing to tell us what we know. I 
 do not say that if you tell us often and eloquently 
 enough you will not sometimes shame us into sudden 
 resolutions that may bear fruit in some actual rep- 
 aration, but I do say that to tell us what we know is 
 not at all the same or so big a thing as to make us order 
 
 21 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 that knowledge in our minds with a clear moraljudg- 
 ment. If, for example, you take your industrial 
 sweater, and ask him over his lunch whether he 
 thinks it good to steal another man's labour and 
 food and life itself, he will tell you — no. He knows 
 it is evil, but he does not mind evil. And you may 
 demonstrate as clearly and as persuasively as you 
 will to him in propaganda or on the stage or from 
 the pulpit that this sweating is evil, and you will 
 only have told him what he knew, and stiU he will 
 not mind evil. You have done nothing to rouse 
 him from the lethargy of spirit which is the cause 
 of his insensibility to the ugliness of the evil that 
 he does. 
 
 This lethargy comes of too close a preoccupation 
 with facts. To be a man of affairs — and we are all 
 in some measure men of affairs — generally means 
 a too constant absorption in facts for any concern 
 with what is really important, the significance of 
 facts. Again, the newspapers, those great criterions 
 of popular temper, flatter, sagely enough, a char- 
 acteristic which is so general. They will tell us 
 that a wretched clerk has defrauded his employers 
 of five pounds, and that he has been sent to prison 
 
 22 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 for two years, knowing that the public is greedy 
 for facts. But what are we told of the significance of 
 these facts, of the surrounding circumstances, of the 
 conflict of mind and the failure of character, of the 
 hearts that must bear the punishment without 
 having offended, of the wreckage of love, of the 
 petty and odious tyrannies that have made trouble 
 yet more difiicult ? Nothing ; for we have no 
 taste for these things, our spirits being inactive, 
 not eager for experience. And our industrial 
 sweater — a single practitioner in the evil of in- 
 justice of which we are none of us blameless, none 
 of us being always and wholly free of this lethargy 
 — ^living dully under this deadening pressure of 
 facts, has not the spiritual wit to realise that the 
 evil which he does is a terrible thing. He knows 
 that it is evil, but he does not feel its terror. If, 
 as I have said, you show him its terror very vividly 
 and directly in your drama or otherwise, you may 
 occasionally shock him into perception, but in 
 nearly every case the shock will be merely tem- 
 porary and effect no radical quickening of the 
 spirit. And it is just such radical quickening of 
 the spirit which is the only effective cure for 
 
 23 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 injustice of all kinds, and, as we have seen, it is 
 just this radical quickening of the spirit which 
 is the highest function of poetry. The poet 
 will commonly, in the intensity of his vision, 
 see beyond the facts of our immediate concern 
 as sociologists into the great etemaJ asser- 
 tion of which these are but local and ever mutable 
 negations. He will — not necessarily, but com- 
 monly — sing humanity with all its natural sorrows 
 and exultations, without emphasising this or that 
 particular folly which is only of particular appli- 
 cation. And in doing this (let me here say that 
 nothing is easier than for a man to deceive himself 
 that he is doing this when he is doing no more than 
 to repeat a bundle of hearsay generalities about 
 which he has no real conviction whatever, and so 
 to become that most troublesome and useless of all 
 things — a pseudo-poet) the poet, whether we agree 
 with what he has to say or not, quickens our 
 imaginative perception. That is to say, he makes 
 us alive. And, quite definitely, to be alive is to be 
 moral. Injustice is the result of mental inertia ; 
 that is to say that unjust people, in so far as they 
 are unjust, are spiritually dead people. 
 
 24 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 Remembering always that the chief distinction 
 of poetry is that it enables men who are habitually 
 responsive to its appeal to exult in the beauty and 
 the heroic conflict of life, and that this other virtue, 
 this conditioning of men's minds so that injustice 
 becomes abhorrent, is but its secondary glory, 
 this is the case for poetry as a sociological weapon 
 and as the most wholesome of all influences upon 
 conduct ; being the expression of the most intense 
 spiritual activity to which man can attain, it, 
 more than any other use of the common means of 
 communication, words, begets spiritual activity in 
 its hearers. And to combat the supreme evil of 
 society, injustice, we need not be told that it is 
 evil, which we know and yet persist in its practice, 
 but to have our spiritual activity quickened, 
 when we shall know that it is loathsome, and 
 crush it. 
 
 Of the three principal elements of poetry as it 
 leaves the poet a finished art, rhythm, diction, and 
 the image, the one having the most immediate and 
 widest appeal is rhythm with its emphasis, rhyme. 
 Consequently, since the capacity for rhyme and 
 simple rhythm is common, these are the qualities 
 
 25 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 which are most frequently abused and in them- 
 selves mistaken for poetry when the finer spirit of 
 poetry has left them untouched. Simple rhythms 
 have been and are continually used by poets to 
 contain the rarest poetic imagination, but in them- 
 selves they may be ordered by the most unpoetic 
 minds to no better purpose than pointing reflections 
 that have neither savour nor persuasion, and minds 
 equally barren of imaginative fervour will give 
 these jingles glad acceptance as shaping, a little 
 more clearly than they have done for themselves, 
 their own jaded moralities. And so it is that what 
 passes for poetry is widely extolled as the most 
 efficient of all guides to conduct by people who 
 have in their hearts no tidings whatever of poetry 
 and its functions. I have a little book which, al- 
 though it belongs to an earlier generation, would, 
 I am sure, find a large public to-day if its Victorian 
 dress were re-modelled to our later modes. It is 
 called Learning to Converse, and it has two splen- 
 didly instructive chapters on poetry. An impeccable 
 uncle is teaching his nephew, Edmund, the art of 
 polite conversation, and in a lucky thirteenth 
 chapter he begins thus : 
 
 26 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 " I have not yet, Edmund, in teaching you to converse, 
 said anything about poetry ; and yet when introduced 
 with judgment into conversation, a verse of poetry is often- 
 times very effective. In prose, thoughts are frequently 
 too much spread, whUe in poetry they are brought more 
 to a point, and affect us more." 
 
 Any doubt as to whether this childlike opening 
 may not after all have in it the roots of wisdom is 
 answered when a moment later Edmund is further 
 enlightened by examples : 
 
 " There is that in a, rhyme that catches the attention 
 and clings to the memory. Were I to say, ' Edmund, we 
 must make hay while the sun shines — 
 
 Now's the time, and now's the hour. 
 By and by the sky may lour ' — 
 you would see at once that the thing we had in hand was 
 not to be neglected. And if I wanted to cheer your spirits 
 on a dull day, hardly could I do it better than in crying 
 out in a cheerful tone of voice — 
 
 ' Never despair when the fog's in the air ; 
 
 A sunshiny morning will come without warning.' " 
 
 " Oh," says Edmund with a very natural gaiety, 
 
 " I should be in spirits directly." 
 
 " Again," (continues his uncle under this deplorable 
 encouragement,) " you would be likely enough to be 
 impressed with the uncertainty of life were one to say to 
 you in conversation — 
 
 Whatever paths our feet may tread. 
 
 Our life is but a spider's thread," 
 
 27 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 and his sagacity is confirmed by Edmund's de- 
 lighted : "I think I should ; and hardly could I 
 forget the words." But the old gentleman's 
 appetite grows by what it feeds on, and before long 
 he reaches triumphant heights. 
 
 " You must remember," he says, " that the effect of 
 poetry in conversation depends much on the judgment 
 with which it is introduced. Sometimes it is necessary to 
 give a reproof at the moment, and there are instances of 
 this being done with much point and discretion. It is said 
 that Dr. Byrom once reproved an officer for swearing, 
 in the following words — 
 
 Soldier, so tender of thy prince's fame. 
 Why make so free with a superior name ? 
 For thy king's sake the brunt of battle bear. 
 But, for the King of kings' sake, never swear." 
 
 " He would not be likely to forget them. They 
 are very striking," says Edmund with commend- 
 able insight, and so the incorrigible old man goes 
 his iniquitous way. 
 
 It all sounds very queer, doubtless. The trick of 
 speech has changed. There is to-day nothing 
 ingenious in the heavy Victorian formality to 
 conceal the emasculation of mind and the absurdity 
 of it all, which are patent enough as we read this 
 little volume of misbegotten humour. As it is set 
 
 28 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 down here the most guileless uncle of to-day would 
 see that there was something amiss in the manner 
 of instruction, and the most unsophisticated 
 Edmund would be suspicious. But the sentiment 
 has lost none of its power. We can very well 
 imagine a popular novelist of to-day saying a good 
 word for an equally popular rhymester something 
 in this way : 
 
 The Duke put his hand on the boy's shoulder. Having 
 no son of his own, his nephew was dearer to him than any- 
 thing in the world, and he never tired in his afifectionate 
 admonitions. " Stick to your games, my boy," he would 
 often say, " and always play the game. You must be a 
 manly man. But don't be ashamed of your books. I 
 read a little poetry myself, and often repeat the lines — 
 Laugh, and the world laughs with you. 
 
 Weep, and you weep alone. 
 For this sad old earth must borrow its mirth. 
 But has sorrow enough of its own." 
 The boy's mind was already susceptible enough to respond 
 vaguely to the beauty of sentiment in the poet's lines, 
 of which his uncle kept a goodly store in his memory. 
 
 It need hardly be said that verse such as " Laugh, 
 and the world laughs with you," which makes its 
 appeal by confirming, with an easy trick of rhythm 
 and rhyme, the trite moral reflections with which 
 the minds of its admirers are already well stocked, 
 
 29 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 has no reference to or influence upon the spiritual 
 activity of man. It is not, in any full sense, poetry. 
 It has rhythm, but it has neither excellence of 
 diction nor imaginative intensity. That is to say, 
 the rhythmic impulse is used not to accentuate the 
 imaging of some urgently perceived mood or idea 
 in superbly chosen and ordered words, but merely 
 to gratify a very common habit of mind, the 
 unctuous parading of easy platitudes, by associat- 
 ing it with an equally common instinct — one which 
 when expressed passes generally enough for poetry, 
 but is in itself no more poetry than is a dictionary. 
 Again, I will not say that those lines about " the 
 sad old earth " have never been of any benefit to 
 anybody. They may have been, just as, I suppose, 
 somebody or another may have been saved from 
 indiscretion by remembering that you should look 
 before you leap, or that you cannot eat your cake 
 and have it. These proverbial sayings, indeed, 
 have a certain flavour if we can distinguish it from 
 the thick dust of constant usage, but they do not 
 work in the way which is poetry's, and still less do 
 the devices of the didactic rhymester. They may 
 sometimes regulate a man's discretion, but they 
 
 30 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 can never penetrate to the roots of his spiritual 
 being, quickening it with the provocative power 
 that is art's alone. Born of and communicating 
 urgent life ; that is the nature of poetry, and it is 
 mere futility to confuse it with the facile rhyming 
 that comes from borrowed and half-reaUsed 
 emotion and impresses nothing but a dull inertia 
 of acceptance. It matters not at all whether the 
 poet's utterance controls an emotion that has no 
 apparent strain of moral contemplation, as in : 
 
 In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 
 
 A stately pleasure dome decree : 
 Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 
 Through caverns measureless to man 
 Down to a sunless sea, 
 
 or one that has so direct and obvious a significance 
 
 as : 
 
 To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. 
 Creeps in this petty pace from day to day. 
 To the last syllable of recorded time ; 
 And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
 The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle 1 
 Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 
 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. 
 And then is heard no more ; it is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 Signifying nothing. 
 
 31 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 In either case we are aware, unless we are funda- 
 mentally insensible to the challenge of poetry, of 
 a strange and lovely imaginative ardour within us, 
 responding eagerly to the energy from which the 
 poet's word has sprung. And of such ardour, and 
 of such alone, comes all sanity. 
 
 There have not been wanting voices to proclaim 
 that in these terrible days such things as poetry 
 have no proper place. It is new witness of the 
 profound misunderstanding of art that is almost 
 desperately prevalent. Never was the world so 
 deeply, so critically in need of the persuasive 
 influence of poetry as it is to-day. I am not here 
 concerned with the poetry that has actually been 
 produced by the war. There has already been 
 some fine work done, more, perhaps, than might 
 have been expected, and there has been a great 
 deal of work done that is wholly negUgible for any 
 positive qualities, but curiously interesting as a 
 sign of the times. The gigantic shock that has 
 fallen upon Europe has startled great numbers of 
 people from the lethargy of thought and feeling of 
 which I have spoken. The immediate results have 
 been rather unpleasant than gracious. The people 
 
 32 
 
POETRY AND CONDUCT 
 
 who, before August, 1914, in normal times and 
 under relatively simple conditions, had not one 
 thought in their heads to rub against another, 
 have suddenly been confronted by a situation 
 about which they cannot escape from having some 
 ideas, and with irresponsible arrogance they now 
 assume, in conditions that are extraordinarily 
 complex and difficult for every thinking mind, 
 the right to direct and censure the conduct of their 
 neighbours with the most impudent assurance. 
 And so with the people, equally numerous, who 
 before this catastrophe had no very defined feehng 
 about anything. They, too, have suddenly been 
 forced against a circumstance that makes complete 
 absence of emotion no longer possible. And a 
 great many of them have, unfortunately, hurried 
 to relieve the emotion by translating it into verse 
 without having any poetic equipment. There is 
 not reaUy in them a sudden access of fuU emotional 
 life ; that is not a thing that waits for its being 
 upon some violence of event. They have merely 
 passed from lethargy to vague excitement, which 
 is the habitual state of the ineffective rhjnnester. 
 But, troublesome as are the first manifestations 
 
 c 33 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 of this new activity, the activity is there. To 
 think arrogantly is better than not to think at all, 
 and to be excited is better than to be lethargic. 
 It may safely be said that never in history has 
 there been so vast a force of incipient spiritual 
 activity to be influenced for good or evil as there 
 is to-day, and it is the duty of every artist and 
 every man and woman who cares for art and under- 
 stands its meaning to labour at this moment with 
 the most loyal determination to foster and establish 
 the power which, springing from alert and supple 
 and just activity in the spirits of its creators, 
 would, if duly heeded, more surely than any other 
 bring this stirring of the seed to a prosperous 
 harvest. 
 
 34 
 
THE VALUE OF POETRY 
 IN EDUCATION 
 
 The gravest indictment of oiir educational systems 
 is that they callously and persistently neglect art. 
 They seek continually to store our minds with 
 information, information that is often desirable 
 and excellent, without seeking to quicken our 
 receptive faculty. They sow broadly, but they 
 do not prepare the ground. With reckless and 
 disastrous waste of power they cast, upon the 
 barren places of our mere acceptance, statements, 
 doctrines, counsels, that can fertilise only in the 
 soil of experience. Since language is our habitual 
 means of communication, I propose, in considering 
 how this misdirection of energy might be corrected 
 by art, to speak only of the highest verbal art, 
 poetry, though the same reasoning might in 
 substance be applied to the use of music, painting, 
 and all arts alike. The poet, then, in his work, no 
 
 35 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 less than the pedagogue, presents some statement, 
 doctrine or counsel. He sees or beheves something 
 that his impulse to poetry bids him to mould into 
 the form which is art. But he does more than 
 this ; he not only sees or believes, he also states 
 his vision or belief in such a way that we cannot 
 fail to respond to his experience with a real ex- 
 perience of our own, and the essential value of his 
 poetry to us lies not in the vision or belief that is 
 stated, but in our response to the statement. It 
 may be that his vision is one that is outside the 
 habit of our own thought, or that his belief is one 
 to which we do not assent, but that is no matter. 
 There is a precious enrichment of our nature in the 
 very act of perceiving, despite all disagreement. 
 And it is such enrichment of our nature that above 
 all else enables us to take our share fitly in the 
 government of the world. 
 
 It would be a mistake to suggest that to make 
 us ripe for this government is the highest function 
 of the enrichment of which I speak. That would 
 be to flatter the far too common fallacy of setting 
 the State above the individual. A fine appreciation 
 of poetry brings to the individual a spiritual ecstasy 
 
 36 
 
VALUE OF POETRY IN EDUCATION 
 
 that transcends all morality, but the capacity for 
 such appreciation also fosters a justness in moral 
 judgment that is the most desirable end of formal 
 education and yet the one that it most commonly 
 fails to achieve. We need not here open the diffi- 
 cult question as to whether the poet — or the 
 creative artist generally — is, in the exercise of his 
 gift, likely to make for more or less moral excel- 
 lence in himself. The creative artists must always 
 be few, and their personal morality one way or the 
 other cannot affect the morality of the State more 
 noticeably than can that of any other handful of 
 men. In some cases there may be no surplus for 
 anything else when the energy necessary to creation 
 has been consumed, in others it may be plentiful ; 
 that is all, and the question is not to the present 
 purpose. But that a living responsiveness to the 
 challenge of poetry is almost inevitably coincident 
 with moral health is beyond all doubt, and, I think, 
 for a reason that is easily defined. 
 
 Cardinal morality is the system evolved by long 
 generations of men as being the wisest and cleanest 
 for governing their intercourse. The thousand 
 conventions and institutions that decline so freely 
 
 37 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 from conveniences to superstitions have nothing 
 to do with morality. It is neither moral nor im- 
 moral to drink gin or to have three wives. These 
 are not questions of morality ; in the one case it is 
 simply a question of how much you drink, in the 
 other of where you live. But imcharitableness, 
 greed, tyranny, lust for power over any but our- 
 selves, bearing false witness, reluctance to see 
 others fortunate — such things as these are im- 
 moralities always and everywhere. And they are 
 immoralities that the essential nature of man, if 
 only it be allowed to realise itself, denounces and 
 attacks. If only it be allowed to realise itself. 
 There is the whole difficulty, in the easing of which 
 hes the paramount duty of education. 
 
 Merely to tell a child that to deprive another of 
 his dues is wrong, or that " Might is right " is a 
 dishonourable ethic, or that intemperance of all 
 kinds is a savage cruelty, is to beat wings in a 
 vacuum. Assertion of this sort can never take 
 flight. The child either knows these things already, 
 or he wiU not understand you. If he knows them 
 already it is by the exercise of his instinctive 
 morality working out from the first realisation of 
 
 38 
 
VALUE OF POETRY IN EDUCATION 
 
 his essential nature. If he does not know them, 
 it is futile to tell him. The real service that is in 
 our power is to help him towards that realisation, 
 and so towards his own moral discovery of the 
 things that we have vainly asserted. There is no 
 surer way of doing this than to encourage him in 
 the contemplation of significant and imaginative 
 speech ; and the most significant and imaginative 
 speech is poetry. 
 
 In bringing poetry to the service of education, 
 there are two subtle dangers to which we must be 
 very sensitive. The first is the danger of choosing 
 for our purpose poetry not for its power of signify- 
 ing, but for the particular thing that it signifies ; 
 to choose, say : 
 
 Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever ; 
 
 Do lovely things, not dream them aU day long ; 
 And so make Life, and Death, and that For Ever 
 
 One grand sweet song, 
 
 rather than : 
 
 It ceased ; yet still the sails made on 
 
 A pleasant noise tiU noon, 
 
 A noise like of a hidden brook 
 
 In the leafy month of June, 
 
 That to the sleeping woods all night 
 
 Singeth a quiet tune, 
 
 39 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 because of Kingsley's explicit charge to virtue. 
 We must remember that explicit charges to virtue 
 are no longer our concern, and we are now seeking 
 something that will best quicken the power of 
 responsiveness in the pupil. There is little or no 
 life in Kingsley's words, and they leave us inert ; 
 but Coleridge's are quick, beating out in a million 
 waves, and we become all eagerness as we hear 
 them, and under that eagerness stirs refreshed the 
 faculty of moral justness : 
 
 A noise like of a hidden brook 
 In the leafy month of June, 
 That to the sleeping woods all night 
 Singeth a quiet tune. 
 
 The second danger, which is really a refinement of 
 the first, is that of lazily deceiving ourselves as to 
 what is significant language. If our imagination 
 is sluggish, the second-rate or even the spurious 
 wiU easily impose upon us. In nothing do we 
 blunder more readily than in the belief that we are 
 being impressed when we are not — an idle frailty 
 that accounts in most cases for the extraordinary 
 importance that is given to the leader-writers in 
 40 
 
VALUE OF POETRY IN EDUCATION 
 
 our newspapers. An adroit use of language that 
 is so familiar as to be meaningless will, unless we 
 are very vigilant, tempt us into the belief that we 
 are agog with responsiveness, while we are in truth 
 doing no more than purr in our sleep. For 
 instance : 
 
 Nothing remains but the Eternal Nameless 
 
 And all-creative spirit of the Law, 
 Uncomprehended, comprehensive, blameless. 
 
 Invincible, resistless, with no flaw ; 
 So full of love it must create forever. 
 
 Destroying that it may create again — 
 Persisting and perfecting in endeavour. 
 
 It yet must bring forth angels, after men — 
 This, this remains. 
 
 Here is an opinion which has an air of gravity, and 
 it is set out in sounding fashion. But what do 
 these lines really mean ? What is their signifi- 
 cance ? Nothing. We sleep on, purring or not as 
 the case may be. Many people have purred loudly 
 as they read those lines no doubt — ^they are by an 
 admired American poetess — ^believing themselves 
 to be quivering with vital perceptions. But we 
 have only to recall some other rhyme, teUing of 
 things as plain and simple as you will, but telling 
 
 41 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 of them in language really significant, to realise the 
 difference even if we cannot explain it : 
 
 Fear no more the heat o' the sun. 
 
 Nor the furious winter's rages ; 
 Thou thy worldly task hast done, 
 
 Home art gone and ta'en thy wages : 
 Golden lads and girls all must. 
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. 
 
 When you have taught a child to know the value 
 of that 
 
 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust, 
 
 you have done more for his moral sense than will 
 ever be done by the whole maze of text-book 
 information and precept. If we had an educational 
 system that accustomed the child's intelligence to 
 habitual contact with the humane and resilient 
 beauty of such words as these, we should be laying 
 the foundations of a truer citizenship than the 
 modem world has known. 
 
 This is not an occasion upon which to discuss 
 the difficulties and practical means of organising 
 the new education that shall take poetry for its 
 strongest instrument. To find teachers whose 
 own judgment is delicate and balanced in the 
 
 42 
 
VALUE OF POETRY IN EDUCATION 
 
 choice of the material to be used, and who can 
 then decide how to use it to the best advantage, 
 will not be easy to do, but it will be possible. And 
 I beUeve it to be, almost more than anything else 
 in our social effort, worth doing. Modem civilisa- 
 tion has looked upon art as a luxury, a dehght for 
 idle moments, the dreams of a few unpractical 
 visionaries, and modem civilisation has failed, and 
 I wiU add that it has failed directly in consequence 
 of this neglect of art. Our housing reforms, our 
 Insurance Acts, our old-age pensions, our minimum 
 wage bUls, our factory legislation — all these things 
 are but a patching of the pot at one place while it 
 is beginning to leak at another. Government is 
 but education grown up, and in both modem 
 civilisation has made the same mistake. We tell 
 people that they must seek beauty, and we take 
 no steps to enable them to recognise it. We tinker 
 with the surface of their hves and leave the central 
 source untouched. For example, a great deal has 
 been said about the state of our raral populations. 
 Much effort has been spent on the mending of their 
 housing and general econonlic conditions. We 
 tell a man that he should have a decent house ; we 
 
 43 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 even pay to have his house made decent. But it 
 is a waste of energy, because he does not under- 
 stand . To take this one question alone, here is a way 
 in which the authorities may effect a fundamental 
 rural reform. Let them use some of the money 
 available for the purpose to send companies into 
 the villages to play Shakespeare, and the work of 
 other great or fine dramatists, and in less than a 
 generation the people will desire decent conditions, 
 and as soon as they desire them they will have 
 them. This is no fantastic plea. It is time that 
 we who care for art and understand its character 
 insisted roundly and in every season that we are 
 the strictly practical people, that we are the people 
 who have our eyes set straight, not squinting, and 
 so can see beyond our noses. And the supreme 
 hope of the world is that in nearly every one of us 
 lies the capacity for this understanding of art. 
 Our education hitherto has contentedly gone its 
 way, asserting, asserting, asserting ; we come out 
 of it with our consciousness latent and dulled, and 
 as a result we go through life accepting the catch- 
 cries of expedience or so-called interest instead of 
 
 44 
 
VALUE OF POETRY IN EDUCATION 
 
 framing a clear moral judgment. The faculty in 
 us which might so frame has never been stirred. 
 But all this would have been changed if from the 
 dawning of our intelligence we had been called 
 into activity by the alert and provocative spirit 
 of poetry. We must demand our rights in this 
 matter. Here is the new crusade. Civilisation 
 has had generations in which to prove a system of 
 education and government that disregards the 
 power of art. And the result ? Our social evils 
 fester year after year, and our system does no 
 more than cover them fearfully up, while our 
 national morality — I am speaking of modem 
 civilisation as a whole — bears fruit in the hideous 
 and blasphemous tragedy that has fallen upon 
 Europe to-day. Our hand in this immediate 
 circumstance has been honourable, but has never- 
 theless been forced to the sword, but you will not 
 find a man in Europe whose moral judgment has 
 been evolved in that spiritual activity that is 
 induced by habitual responsiveness to noble poetry 
 who would have lent his sanction to the policies in 
 which all the nations have carried themselves 
 
 45 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 to this unthinkable madness. No : the method 
 chosen by civilisation to conduct its social affairs 
 has failed lamentably and disastrously, and again 
 I say that it has failed because it has refused to 
 accept the immeasurable services of art in quicken- 
 ing the nature of man so that he may develop his 
 native morality to its full efficiency. I do not 
 suggest, I need hardly say, that familiarity with 
 art is the only way in which man's consciousness 
 may attain the activity that releases his highest 
 moral sense, but I do say that it is incomparably 
 the surest and most efficient way. And it is the 
 way that we should insist, with every authority 
 that we can control or influence, should now be 
 attempted. When we have passed through this 
 present calamity, social reorganisation will inevit- 
 ably begin on a scale hitherto unknown. And we 
 must get down to the roots. We must turn from 
 the enunciation of moral principles to the fostering 
 of man's spiritual activity. If we can contrive 
 this, moral principles may safely be left to assert 
 themselves with justice and sanity. And in the 
 education of the spirit poetry is an invincible ally, 
 ready to our hand. If for one decade our children 
 
 46 
 
VALUE OF POETRY IN EDUCATION 
 
 could be intelligently guided into frequent contact 
 with the life that informs all great poetry, the vast 
 majority of them would respond to that hfe, and 
 out of the response would spring the regeneration 
 of mankind. 
 
 47 
 
THE POET AND HIS VISION 
 
 A PASSION for poetry must spring, it would seem, 
 from one of two desires. Either we seek to enlarge 
 our experience, or we seek to establish it by ex- 
 ternal and independent testimony. The former 
 desire makes for catholicity and eager adven- 
 turousness, the latter for selection and rejection. 
 The profoundest lesson that man has learnt in his 
 brief history is that he must not hope for any 
 perfect revelation of fixed and central truth, that, 
 indeed, abstract truth is as fabulous a rumour as 
 the philosopher's stone. We no longer hope for a 
 happy chance that shall guide our hand to the 
 hidden comer of the world's veil, and, enabling us 
 to draw it aside, leave the riddle solved for ever. 
 As to the source and destiny of this, our present 
 life, men are forced, for all their hundred hopes 
 and dreams, into an heroic stoicism or an heroic 
 faith ; but, rightly considered, this life itself is not 
 a problem at all, but a vision. Not an abstract 
 
 48 
 
THE POET AND HIS VISION 
 
 vision that we may by the grace of God come up 
 to one of these fine days, but a definite vision 
 created anew by every temperament. It is to state 
 the fact too curiously to say that the external world 
 has no existence outside our own consciousness, 
 but every vision is wrought of this element, un- 
 changing and self -existent it may be, and a con- 
 sciousness that is distinct from aU others. There 
 is a common factor in the terror of James Thomson 
 and the heroic courage of WiUiam Morris. The 
 City of Dreadful Night and the windy places of 
 HindfeU are of the same world, but they are 
 wrought through conflicting temperaments into 
 whoUy divergent visions. Both revelations are 
 infinitely remote from the phantom of abstract 
 truth, yet both are eternally true with the truth 
 of existence itself. Whether or no we are con- 
 cerned in both depends upon our mental disposi- 
 tion. If we desire to explore the experiences of all 
 men, then we shall approach both, not to confirm 
 our own intuitions, but with minds gladly receptive. 
 If we feel that the only safety in life lies in strength- 
 ening against all weather our chosen philosophic 
 and spiritual moorings, then we shall mistrust the 
 
 D 49 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 vision that does not coincide in some measure with 
 our own. There is no doubt as to which course 
 makes for riper charity among men, but it is 
 equally certain that to some a sacrifice of such 
 charity is necessary for their peace. 
 
 It is this factor of temperament in vision, as 
 apart from the thing seen, that makes the classifi- 
 cation of poets in terms of an epoch so dangerous. 
 It is no very helpful system that couples the names 
 of Webster and Spenser, Milton and Suckling, 
 Blake and Gray, Wordsworth and Keats, Tennyson 
 and Browning, Morris and Swinburne. It may be 
 true to say that in every age there are peculiar 
 manifestations in the general life of mankind which 
 combine with the eternal things of nature and 
 humanity to make up the thing seen, and that 
 they also will combine in each case with the poet's 
 temperament to create the vision, resulting in 
 some small degree in a common factor in the work 
 of the poets of an age. But beyond this it is not 
 safe to go. It may happen at times by accident 
 that a group of poets, working together in close 
 intimacy or under some powerful common in- 
 fluence, will produce work of a like texture, but it 
 
 50 
 
THE POET AND HIS VISION 
 
 is by accident only, and it is a consideration that 
 never applies to poets of the first rank. Ben Jonson, 
 the greatest of the many great men whom we do 
 nothing to deserve, uttered one of the most superbly 
 right critical phrases in literature when he said 
 that his friend was not for an age but for all time. 
 His word has become diluted to an echo by much 
 repetition ; but, freshly read, it contains the seed 
 of all critical wisdom in this matter. It is almost 
 a negligible part of the poet's function to reflect 
 his age. The poet is to hold the mirror up to 
 Nature, and the mirror is his own temperament. 
 How will the world look seen through that ? This, 
 at any rate for those of us who dare embark upon 
 the adventure at all, careless for the moment of the 
 reflection in our own particular mirror, is our sole 
 curiosity. 
 
 When Swinburne's Poems and Ballads appeared 
 it created a profound impression, which at least 
 was something for a book of poems to do with an 
 unknown name on the title-page. The sensation, 
 however, was not one of delight in the discovery 
 of a great new poet, but one of shock to the 
 manners of the time. The phase of Victorianism 
 
 51 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 that expressed itself in pious respectability was 
 rudely upset by this exultant voluptuary in song, 
 and in consequence his voluptuousness itself is 
 commonly set down as the product of revolt, as 
 something deliberately designed to clear the air of 
 immoral righteousness. It was, of course, nothing 
 of the soit, but the finely unbridled expression of 
 the poet's temperament. It is highly improbable 
 that Swinburne, when he was writing his first 
 poems, or at any time save when he was making a 
 direct challenge, gave a thought to the intellectual 
 Philistinism that he did so much to kUl. It is vain 
 to deny or to assert that the obscure power that 
 controls the Universe sent this wholesomely 
 corrective influence at the precisely appropriate 
 moment, but in any case the influence itself was 
 certainly unconscious of this particular aspect of 
 its function, save in so far as the evil thing was an 
 element in the great composite world that was 
 reflected in the poet's temperament and wrought 
 into the durable record of vision in these poems. 
 To look upon Poems and Ballads as chiefly, or 
 even considerably, important by virtue of their 
 destructive and revolutionary qualities is whoUy to 
 
 52 
 
THE POET AND HIS VISION 
 
 misunderstand the nature of poetry. To think 
 of them in this way is to deny them all hope of 
 permanence, for it makes their achievement one 
 that is necessarily forgotten with the encompassing 
 of their purpose. It is to make anew the mistake 
 of praising art for its destructive, rather than its 
 creative, qualities. That manifestation of his age 
 was, in the cosmos that Swinburne contemplated, 
 no more than a speck of dust on the great shining 
 pattern of life ; he brushed it aside, but to suppose 
 that it troubled him seriously or claimed more than 
 momentary attention is to think in ill proportions. 
 The fact is that we are in danger of becoming 
 the slaves of a fallacy. We have been told that 
 the best study of history is to be found in the 
 literature of the ages. But it is necessary to choose 
 the literature, and that not the highest creative 
 literature. Can it be advanced as a serious pro- 
 position that it would be possible to reconstruct, 
 even vaguely, Greek civilisation and custom from 
 Sophocles and Euripides, or Elizabethan England 
 from Shakespeare, or the Commonwealth from 
 Milton, or any age at aU from Blake, or Shelley, 
 or Morris ? Of course not. There are certain 
 
 53 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 indications of current standards implied in the work 
 of these men, indications made more profoundly 
 by them than by lesser writers ; but the only thing 
 as to which we can pronounce with any certainty 
 is the temperament through which they saw the 
 eternal things. And this is, moreover, the only 
 thing about which a passion for poetry will make 
 us curious, whatever kind of curiosity we may 
 have for other reasons. It is true to say that the 
 Puritan Age helped to make Milton, and that it 
 was in some measure responsible for the moulding 
 of his temperament ; but this does not affect the 
 fact that our interest is in what Milton thought of 
 the world as Milton, however he may have been 
 fashioned, and not in what he may be able to tell 
 us of the spiritual and intellectual opinions of 
 Puritans in the aggregate. We honour our poets, 
 and turn to them, not because they are like the 
 rest of men, but because they are gloriously unlike. 
 History, at best, is but a very vague approxima- 
 tion. To know the history of the world would be 
 to see clearly into the myriad temperaments into 
 which the world has been reflected, each making 
 its own separate image. Now and again it is given 
 
 54 
 
THE POET AND HIS VISION 
 
 to one in the millions to leave some record of his 
 vision, and that man is the poet. Through this 
 circumstance we are given the priceless privilege 
 of unrestricted intimacy with another mind, and 
 that, if we could but reedise it, is the holiest gift 
 that is to man. A poet can no more be the con- 
 centrated expression of an age than a mayor can 
 of a city, and we wrong both ourselves and him if 
 we neglect the distinction of his separate entity in 
 seeking a kind of composite abstraction. 
 
 The nature of the poet's vision is not to be 
 confused with his technical equipment. It is 
 questionable whether the acutest critic could 
 assign, say, our twelve greatest poets to their 
 proper epochs from internal evidence. If he were 
 able to do so, it would be from the evidence of 
 technique, in which some sort of historical growth 
 and development can be traced, and from stray 
 references to inessential things. It certainly would 
 not be from those things of the poet's vision that 
 were most lofty and memorable, not from the 
 essential revelation of his temperament. A poet 
 might have had Browning's vision in the seven- 
 teenth century, or Milton's in the nineteenth. To 
 
 55 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 realise this is to realise that poetry is a thing of 
 fundamental and eternal values, and that the 
 vitality of its continuous manifestation through 
 the centuries depends, not upon the slow evolution 
 of humanity in the mass, but upon the inex- 
 haustible caprice that bestows upon every man a 
 strangely new temperament. The poet's business 
 is not to express his age, but to express himself ; 
 not to reveal truth, but to reveal himself. This is 
 not to exalt a dreamy subjectivity ; to express 
 himself fully, he must show us how the external 
 world appears to him. But it is time that we left 
 off talking of an age as though it were a realisable 
 unit, instead of being, as it reaUy is, a medley of 
 conflicting and largely unrelated individualities, 
 and of truth as though it were a pearl, and the only 
 trouble was to find the right oyster. Abstractions 
 and generalities are useful, even necessary, in the 
 practical working of the State and institutions ; 
 but poetry has nothing to do with them ; and 
 notliing is more dangerous to our intellectual 
 balance than to magnify their real importance. 
 It leads us, for example, into the error of thinking 
 that Parliament governs the country, whilst the 
 
 56 
 
THE POET AND HIS VISION 
 
 essential things of our lives are as uncontrolled by 
 Parliament as are the stars. The supreme distinc- 
 tion of poetry is that it is an eternal testimony to 
 the richest birthright of us all, a separate person- 
 ahty, and the power to blend it with the external 
 world into a new vision. Poetry is the record of 
 the few who are able to find for the vision per- 
 manent expression. 
 
 It is possible for criticism to be quite logical, 
 and yet, at the same time, quite insincere. It may 
 be shown conclusively, for example, that Swin- 
 burne did actually destroy much that was un- 
 worthy in the days that immediately preceded 
 him ; but if we make this the chief reason of our 
 praise, we are praising a thing that we do not very 
 greatly value. Victorian prudery is nothing to us 
 to-day, and we are not reaUy deeply moved by the 
 spectacle of its destruction. Emotionally, we 
 treasure Swinburne's poetry because it tells us, 
 in the highest manner of utterance of which man is 
 capable, how one of our fellows saw the natural 
 beauty of the world, and love, and the charities 
 and pity of humanity, what figure the universe 
 threw in the mirror that was his mind. 
 
 57 
 
ART AND THE ARTIST 
 
 Whether the appetite for crumbs from the table 
 of the elect is more prevalent to-day than in the 
 past may reasonably be questioned. Doubtless 
 the small folk who revolved round the gallants of 
 the Elizabethan theatre, and at a later date round 
 the wits of the coffee-houses, were not less eager 
 than their posterity of to-day to carry away scraps 
 of gossip and tokens of intimacy from the dis- 
 tinguished company in which they foregathered. 
 The passion for traffic in inessentials is not new, 
 but it has been reserved for our own time to foster 
 it into its most malevolent phase. Hitherto its 
 operation has been confined to the few who by 
 circumstance could come into direct contact with 
 eminence ; to-day it is a most acute menace to 
 all the finer things of art. It has made vigorous an 
 affectation of culture which merely bewilders the 
 uninitiated and disgusts the humble and wise. 
 
 58 
 
ART AND THE ARTIST 
 
 The number of books published every year devoted 
 neither to sincere criticism nor sincere biography, 
 but irankly to chatter and nonsense concerning 
 the great, is lamentable. For the makers of these 
 sham chronicles to flatter themselves that the 
 influence of their work is at worst a negative one, 
 is foolish if not dishonest. It is harmful in a 
 peculiarly subtle and vicious Way. 
 
 The Puritan Revolution in England had for its 
 foundation a zeal of singular purity, and it was 
 prosecuted with an energy that has had, perhaps, 
 no parallel in the world's history in the loftiness 
 and singleness of its aim. But by a combination 
 of circumstances which cannot even be outlined 
 here, it made it momentarily impossible for the 
 English temper rightly to understand art, and from 
 this sudden darkening of the aesthetic vision we 
 have not yet, as a nation, fully recovered. The 
 motives that induced this intolerance in the poorer 
 yet potent spirits of the revolution are perfectly 
 intelligible, if not excusable. The mistrust of 
 beauty was, perhaps, the heaviest price that we 
 had to pay for an intellectual freedom that was 
 new in the records of the nations, but lamentable 
 
 59 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 as the damage was, it was not irreparable. Once 
 in our history we have understood that art is 
 essential to national sanity and well-being ; the 
 Elizabethan had a full and clear sense of beauty. 
 This sense was stifled by n:ien who, having other 
 work to their hands, destroyed much good together 
 with intolerable evil. It was for their children to 
 re-create, or rather to re -invigorate, a faculty 
 which of all others most clearly gives man his 
 sovereignty. Slowly the instinct for the fit did its 
 work, and we have to-day made some recovery of 
 our lost heritage. Art is still distrusted, but it is 
 no longer outlawed, and We are beginning once 
 again to realise as a people that life which is not 
 exultant and unashamed in its perception of 
 beauty and the excellence of naked truth, is life 
 incomplete and full of mean suspicions. And now, 
 at a time when this new harvest most needs care 
 and thoughtful fostering, it is threatened by a 
 danger that is no mere scarecrow. 
 
 A wise and deep understanding of character is 
 one of the rarest as it is one of the most precious of 
 man's possessions. The common standards are 
 
 60 
 
ART AND THE ARTIST 
 
 those of custom and expediency, and however 
 much we may deplore the fact it is folly not to 
 recognise it. Nicely to adjust circumstance with 
 causes and appearances with fact is reserved for 
 the few. The popidar mind is concerned only to 
 see how circumstance and appearance shape to its 
 own familiar pattern, and its judgment depends 
 on this alone. That a right relation to art itself is 
 the only discipline that can develop this criticism 
 from dullness to distinction need not be urged here. 
 The point vital to this present consideration is that 
 whatever truth there may be — and finally there is 
 much — ^in the assertion that the man of genius 
 must be measured by an uncommon standard as 
 to that superficiaUty of character which we mis- 
 name morahty, the truth is one which the popular 
 mind cannot possibly accept, and until the popular 
 mind has developed and strengthened itself, it is 
 an error gravely culpable to force upon it facts 
 which it must inevitably misinterpret. 
 
 At the present moment the chief topics of con- 
 versation among the people who are nurtured on 
 what has been appropriately called " culturine " 
 
 6i 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 are Wagner and Shelley : rather, grotesque lights 
 thrown from obscure facets of Wagner and Shelley. 
 In Wagner's case he is, in some small measure, 
 himself to blame. His autobiography has, of 
 course, been carefully misrepresented by means of 
 liberal extracts set out by critics who know their 
 public, but the fact remains that it leaves the 
 impression of a man who can by no deftness be 
 made to fit into the pattern. Chatter about 
 Shelley is becoming a cult ; volumes of it have 
 come from the press within the past few years ; 
 doubtless more volumes are to foUow. And in 
 Shelley's case the result is the same : we are left 
 with a character hopelessly at variance with the 
 pattern. The reason is, of course, perfectly 
 obvious. Wagner's autobiography and chatter 
 about Shelley give us only the quaint and scandal- 
 ous incidents of character which are mere mons- 
 trosities until they are assigned to their proper 
 place in the complete figure, which is to be seen 
 alone through Wagner's music and Shelley's 
 poetry, and in no other way whatsoever. But the 
 popular mind cannot understand this, and it 
 treasures up for itself the memory of a Wagner 
 
 62 
 
ART AND THE ARTIST 
 
 who was disloyal to his friends, and insolent to his 
 benefactors, and a Shelley who had hallucinations 
 and was an irresponsible apostle of free-love. To 
 the people who know the music and the poetry these 
 things are harmless ; the knowledge itself implies 
 a faculty of rejection and interpretation that insure 
 safety. But these people are a small minority — a 
 minority unhappily ignorant of the temper of the 
 majority, almost of the majority's existence. And 
 to this majority incalculable harm is done by the 
 chatter and caricature. A certain section, of 
 course; delights in it all merely on account of the 
 scandal and interrupted privacy, but a far greater 
 section to whom the false rumours filter through 
 is sincerely disturbed and offended. That it should 
 be so is pitiable, but that it is so is unquestionable. 
 And the misunderstanding and prejudice which 
 are so generated are by no means the least con- 
 siderable obstacles in the way of the re-vitalising 
 of art as a national influence. The old resentment 
 and mistrust of beauty are stirred up again by the 
 discrediting of the men who have created beauty. 
 The black side of the Puritan temper has not yet 
 been turned wholly to the light, and in these false 
 
 63 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 reports — false because shamefully incomplete — ^it 
 finds for its own contentment the fullest vindica- 
 tion of its sinister moroseness. 
 
 Sincere and acute criticism and broadly con- 
 ceived biographical statement are, of course, of 
 immense value. They help to make our under- 
 standing of the artist's work — ^which should be 
 our single purpose — more profitable and complete ; 
 they disentangle difficulties and resolve obscur- 
 ities. To the critic and to the biographer we owe 
 honour and gratitude, and we are not grudging in 
 our payment. Knowing that it is not given them 
 to create, they are yet eager to do some service, 
 and they become honourable interpreters. But 
 the scavengers, who write for no reason save that 
 by doing so they gain a few pence and a little 
 notoriety, are pests. And they are at this time 
 dangerous pests. In these things the supply 
 creates the demand. It is so in art, and it is so in 
 the prostitution of art. Through the energy and 
 enthusiasm of a few just men, beauty is being 
 set up once again in the market-place, and the 
 people are gathering round to see and be refreshed. 
 It is a time full of difficulty and doubt, but of 
 64 
 
ART AND THE ARTIST 
 
 tremendous possibilities. No danger must be un- 
 watched, and here we have one, deadly though 
 tricked out in bright colours and seductive in its 
 bearing, and it needs to be crushed. 
 
 65 
 
CHAUCER: THE POET OF 
 SPRING 
 
 By a gracious whim of circumstance, the earhest 
 Enghsh poet of the first order, Geoffrey Chaucer, 
 had in his blood nothing austere or sombre ; his 
 song was the spring-note of our verse, and into it 
 he freely wove spring only of all the moods of 
 nature. A light-hearted, gracious-humoured man, 
 the blown rose and withered leaf had no place in 
 his poetry. His constant charity of temper at no 
 time allowed him to look upon the tragic foUies of 
 human affairs for more than a brief moment. 
 When the conduct of his story leads him to the 
 contemplation of sorrow or ruined frailty, he 
 makes a simple statement of the happening and 
 passes from it without elaboration. But when he 
 is singing, as he usually is, of laughter and good 
 luck, he waits on them delightedly, and then it is 
 that he turns continually to nature for colours 
 
 66 
 
CHAUCER : THE POET OF SPRING 
 
 whereby to heighten his expression and bear wit- 
 ness to his exultation in the beauty of health and 
 the sanctity of joy. His attitude towards nature, 
 as expressed in his poetry, is wholly objective ; he 
 sees the spring flowers and hears the song of the 
 birds, and they make him glad. He never suggests 
 for a moment that nature is in any way related to 
 his own personality, or that she is rejoicing with 
 him. His only concern is that her sweetness and 
 happiness are infectious, and that a virtue is 
 constantly passing out of her for him to gather 
 who will. The benefaction is unconscious on her 
 part, a gracious dispensation of God. 
 
 For certes, as at my devys. 
 There is no place in paradys 
 So good in for to dwelle or be 
 As in that Gardin, thoughte me ; 
 For there was many a brid singing, 
 Throughoute the yerde al thringing. 
 In many places where nightingales, 
 Alpes, finches, and wodewales. 
 That in her swete song delyten. 
 In thilke place as they habyten. . 
 
 And, trusteth wel, whan I hem hearde. 
 Full lustUy and wel I ferde ; 
 
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PROSE PAPERS 
 
 And certes, when I herde hir song, 
 And saw the grene place among, 
 In herte I wex so wonder gay, 
 That I was never erst, er that day. 
 So jolyf, nor so wel bigo, 
 Ne mery in herte, as I was tho. 
 
 So fine a faculty is, indeed, not fashioned piece- 
 meal ; perception that rejoices in the hawthorn 
 and the tender colours of spring is not unstirred 
 by the golden sheaves and the barren majesty of 
 winter. But these emblems of change and the 
 passing of beauty were of no service to Chaucer 
 as poet ; nature as a theme in his song he never 
 accepted, but she was an inexhaustible symbol 
 when he meditated the sweeter humours of the 
 world. April has never since possessed any poet's 
 blood quite so fully. A bird in spring song was 
 enough at any moment to fiU all earth with laughter 
 for him. The soimd will send him into the very 
 garrulousness of delight. 
 
 The briddes that han left hir song, 
 Whyl they han suffred cold so strong 
 In wedres grille, and derk to sighte, 
 Ben in May, for the sonne brighte. 
 So glade, that they shewe in singing. 
 That in hir herte is swich lyking, 
 
 68 
 
CHAUCER : THE POET OF SPRING 
 
 That they mote singen an be light. 
 Than doth the nightingale hir might 
 To maken noyse, an singen blythe; 
 Than is blissful, many a sythe, 
 The chelaundre and the papinjay. 
 Than yonge folk entenden ay 
 For to ben gay and amorous. 
 The time is than so savorous. 
 
 Everywhere, from The Romaunt to The Canterbury 
 
 Tales, it is the same. When Sir Mirthe comes into 
 
 the garden it is 
 
 to here 
 The briddes, how they singen clere. 
 The mavis and the nightingale. 
 And other joly briddes smale, 
 
 and of the Lady Beauty he tells us 
 
 Hir flesh was tendre as dewe of flour, 
 Hir chere was simple as byrde in bour. 
 
 In The Book of the Duchess he cannot bear that 
 even the sorrowful lament of the bereaved lover 
 should be set in gloom. The poet dreams that he 
 hears the sound of 
 
 Men, hors, houndes, and other thing, 
 
 and joining the hunt he meets the forlorn man who 
 unburdens himself of his sorrow at length. But he 
 
 69 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 is careful to tell us that before this, as his dream 
 opens, he thought that it was May, and that he 
 
 was waked 
 With smale foules a gret hepe. 
 That had affrayed me out of slepe 
 Through noyse and swetnesse of hir song ; 
 And, as me mette, they sate among. 
 Upon my chambre-roof withoute, 
 Upon the tyles, al a-boute. 
 And songen^ — 
 
 and then : 
 
 through the glas the sunne shon 
 Upon my bed with brighte bemes. 
 With many glade gilden stremes ; 
 And eek the welken was so fair. 
 Blew, bright, clere was the air. 
 And ful atempre, for sothe, hit was ; 
 For nother cold nor hoot hit nas. 
 Ne in al the welken was a cloude. 
 
 In his greatest poem Chaucer makes but little 
 use of natural illustration. The famous opening 
 
 Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote§ 
 The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote. 
 And bathed every veyne in swich licour, [ 
 Of which vertue engendred is the flour ;J 
 
 Than longen folk to groon on pilgrimages, 
 70 
 
CHAUCER: THE POET OF SPRING 
 
 is followed up by no reflections on the changes of 
 the days as the pilgrims travel nor on the country 
 through which they pass. At rare intervals only 
 in the course of the tales do we find the poet's old 
 eagerness to point some beauty of mind or body 
 by nature's greenness, as in the lovely line in the 
 Knight's tale, where we are told that Emelye 
 
 fairer was to sene 
 Than is the lUie upon his stalke green. 
 
 In the same tale, just before the fateful meeting 
 between Arcite and Palamoun in the grove, we 
 find Chaucer again characteristically mellowing 
 the coming trouble by setting the event in the 
 sweet May dawn : 
 
 The bisy larke, messager of day, 
 Salueth in hir song the morwe gray ; 
 And fyry Phebus ryseth up so brighte. 
 That al the orient laugheth of the lighte. 
 And with his stremes dryeth in the greves 
 The silver dropes hanging on the leves. 
 
 Once, in the Miller's tale, he turns to autumn for 
 a simile when he says of the carpenter's wife that 
 
 Her mouth was swete as bragot or the meeth 
 Or hord of apples leyed in hey or heeth, 
 
 71 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 and, again, there is a reminiscence of the full year 
 in the Squire's tale : 
 
 The vapour, which that fro the erthe glood, 
 Made the sonne to seme rody and brood. 
 
 These, however, are isolated instances. Still rarer 
 are the occasions upon which he draws any moral 
 from nature. Once or twice only in all his poetry 
 do we come to such utterances as 
 
 The see may never be so still, 
 That with a little wind it nil 
 Overwhelme and turne also. 
 As it were wood, in wawis go. 
 
 For the rest, it is the exhilaration and high 
 promise of the early days of the year, sorting weU 
 with his large and generous outlook upon human 
 affairs, that Chaucer gathers into his song. Nature 
 is not for him to analyse or to relate to his own 
 soul. There is sorrow in the world, but he cannot 
 contemplate it long. There is gloom and decay in 
 nature, but these too he will not consider. Spring, 
 the season of sweet sanity, is for him, and he 
 remembers winter only as the vanquished of the 
 new summer : 
 
 72 
 
CHAUCER : THE POET OF SPRING 
 
 Now welcome somer, with thy sonne softe. 
 That hast this wintres weders over-shake, 
 And driven away the longe nightes blake ! 
 
 Seynt Valentyu, that art ful hy on lofte ; 
 
 Thus singen smale foules for they sake — 
 
 Now welcom somer, with they Sonne softe, 
 That hast this wintres weders over-shake. 
 
 Wei han they cause for to gladen ofte, 
 
 Sith ech of hem recovered hath his make ; 
 
 Ful blissful may they singen whan they wake. 
 
 Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe. 
 
 That hast this wintres weders over-shake. 
 
 And driven away the longe nightes blake. 
 
PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 Sidney's reputation as a poet may be said to rest 
 chiefly on his sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella. 
 Although in the Arcadia and amongst the miscel- 
 laneous work may be found isolated poems of 
 great beauty, it was when writing Astrophel and 
 Stella that the poet set aside aU thought of his ill- 
 considered theories of poetical technique — of which 
 more hereafter — ceased to think of verse-making 
 as a pleasant and polished accomplishment, and 
 wrote with fire and passion as aU true poets write, 
 to ease his mind. The few comments which may 
 be offered concerning this his greatest work may 
 be held to apply, broadly speaking, to his less con- 
 siderable achievements. At the outset, however, 
 it will be well to glance briefly at the state of 
 English poetry at the time when Sidney was writ- 
 ing, and incidentally to clear away such obstacles 
 as his classical experiments which may hinder us 
 
 74 
 
PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 in the consideration of his most notable contribu- 
 tion to poetical literature. 
 
 We of to-day, looking back on our great line of 
 poets, from Chaucer to Swinburne, find it not a 
 little difficult to adjust our point of view to that 
 of a man bom in 1554. Such a one, given the 
 guiding instinct, would see in Chaucer the first and 
 solitary great English poet, succeeded by indifferent 
 imitators, and darkness until the pubhcation of 
 Tottel's Miscellany in 1557. This collection con- 
 sisted chiefly of the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt 
 (1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey 
 {1516-1547). These poems were remarkable in 
 two ways: for their individual excellence and 
 inspiration, and for the new turn which they gave 
 to the craft of verse-making in England. Of the 
 comparative merits of Wyatt and Surrey, and the 
 respective shares they took in the new movement, 
 it is not necessary to speak here. When they began 
 to write the influence of Chaucer had deteriorated 
 through ill-usage at the hands of many inept 
 disciples, until it had become, for practical pur- 
 poses, almost negligible. The poet writing to-day, 
 with the accumulated experience and example of 
 
 75 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 half a hundred great names ready to his hand, can 
 scarcely reconstruct the position of the man who 
 feels the impulse to sing, and yet lacks the inspira- 
 tion and aid of a single great voice before him. 
 The poet, indeed, is no common pick-purse or 
 imitator, yet when he can boast of noble ancestry, 
 his song wiU of necessity bear in some measure the 
 impress and character of his descent. That this 
 should be so is, of course, both natural and right. 
 Wyatt and Surrey, however, wrote under no such 
 auspicious circumstances. To their own poetical 
 forbears they could look for but Uttle guidance, 
 and they turned to the poets of Italy and France. 
 From them they borrowed the sonnet form, which 
 had been popularised in an extraordinary manner 
 by Petrarch, and introduced it into England. 
 Modifying it in structure and arrangement, they 
 adhered to certain fundamental requirements, and 
 in so doing they evolved a certain degree of order 
 out of the chaos into which English verse had 
 fallen. The chastening influence of this self- 
 imposed bondage, moreover, brought a new music 
 and shapeliness into their less regulated lyrical 
 work. To anything Uke full understanding of their 
 76 
 
PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 craft they did not, of course, attain, but they 
 left behind them many things of great value in 
 themselves, and they set up for future and 
 completer use the framework of a new and great 
 tradition. 
 
 Sidney naturally came under the influence of 
 these two men, and, partly through them, under 
 that of their sources, the Italian and French 
 sonneteers. He was not content, however, to 
 leave the poetical revolution exactly where he had 
 found it, and with Spenser, his senior by two years, 
 and Gabriel Harvey, he conceived the idea of 
 introducing classical metres into Enghsh verse. 
 He, too, realised that some reform was called for, 
 and considered that no better method could be 
 adopted than that employed in the masterpieces 
 of the ancients. The result was a woeful proof of 
 the futility of attempting to impose the manner 
 and possibilities of one language on another. That 
 the experiment was an unqualified failure is no 
 matter for wonder ; that two such men as Spenser 
 and Sidney should have discussed it seriously, is. 
 Fortunately Spenser learnt to laugh at the whole 
 question, and Sidney to discount it by his practice. 
 
 77 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 The point need not be carried further. There is, 
 however, another aspect of this question of foreign 
 influence which is of the utmost importance. 
 Sidney — and this consideration applies to the 
 whole group of Elizabethan sonneteers — in going 
 to foreign models for guidance in the matter of 
 form, carried away with him not a little of their 
 substance. Modem scholarship has shown these 
 predatory excursions to have been both frequent 
 and considerable in extent. It has, in a way, 
 proved its case up to the hilt, by advancing 
 numberless instances where an image or whole 
 phrase has been appropriated without a qualm. 
 In some cases, indeed, a complete sonnet is Uttle 
 more than a fairly close translation, and Thomas 
 Watson , at least, admitted openly that his sequence 
 of irregular stanzas. The Tears of Fancy, was no 
 more than this. In Sidney's case, however, as in 
 that of most of his contemporaries, the work is set 
 before us as being original, and a decision as to 
 whether this claim is or is not to be allowed, is 
 obviously of great moment. Asirophel and Stella 
 being a love poem, the first thing to be done when 
 it is submitted to our judgment is to enquire 
 
 78 
 
PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 whether it be sincere. The writers who have so 
 convincingly denoted the debt of the Elizabethans 
 to foreign models in form and stray — or even 
 numerous — expressions and images, have directed 
 us into an interesting field of poetical history. 
 When, however, from these ascertained facts they 
 proceed to draw deductions which set aside all the 
 claims which the poet makes as being most essential 
 to his function, dissent becomes imperative. We 
 are told that these sonnets are no more than a 
 clever exercise, displaying here and there a pretty 
 fancy and a delicate ear for a musical phrase, 
 having for their substance hearsay and conven- 
 tional attitudes, devoid of all inventiveness, 
 passion, and conviction. That they are, in short, 
 written precisely as poetry should not be written, 
 from the head and not from the heart. At this 
 stage of the enquiry we come to something beyond 
 the application of judicial learning to facts, we 
 come to the apphcation of our feeling to that of 
 the poet. 
 
 When my good angel guides me to the place 
 Where all my good I do in SteUa see. 
 That heav'n of joys throws only down on me 
 Thund'ring disdains and lightenings of disgrace ; 
 
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PROSE PAPERS 
 
 But when the rugged'st step of Fortune's race 
 Makes me fall from her sight, then sweetly she 
 With words wherein the Muses' treasures be, 
 Shows love and pity to my absent case. 
 Now I, wit-beaten long by hardest fate. 
 So dull am, that I cannot look into 
 The ground of this fierce love and lovely hate. 
 Then, some good body, tell me how I do. 
 Whose presence absence, absence presence is ; 
 Blest in my curse, and cursed in my bliss. 
 
 If writing like that is artificial, it is an artifici- 
 ality the secret of which has been lost, for utterance 
 of the kind only rises to-day from the deep wells of 
 emotion. 
 
 In this connection there is, however, a special 
 circumstance in Sidney's case to be considered. 
 The Stella of the sonnets was Penelope Devereux, 
 daughter of the Earl of Essex. So much is clear 
 from both external and internal evidence. The 
 known facts of her history, in so far as it afiects her 
 relations with Sidney, may be told briefly. They 
 met when he was just over twenty years of age, 
 she barely thirteen. Shortly afterwards there was 
 talk of a match, favoured by the parents on both 
 sides, concerning which the parties chiefly inter- 
 ested were naturally — in view of the girl's age — not 
 
 80 
 
PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 of any decided opinions. For no clearly assigned 
 reason the matter fell through, though for the next 
 four or five years it was still under consideration. 
 It is clear that at this time neither he nor she enter- 
 tained any serious affection for the other. In 1581, 
 at the age of eighteen, Penelope married Lord Rich, 
 from whom she was ultimately divorced to become 
 the wife of the Earl of Devonshire, after having 
 been that nobleman's mistress for some years. 
 That her first marriage was unhappy is evident, 
 and the conclusions drawn from these scanty 
 premises are usually somewhat as follows : 
 
 Sidney, we are told, really loved Penelope from 
 the first, but, being in no hurry to marry, let year 
 after year go by without taking definite steps. 
 Further, distracted by his court and official duties 
 and his interests at Penshurst and Wilton, he was 
 less ardent in his wooing than the lady desired. At 
 length, partly out of pique, partly out of despera- 
 tion, she married Lord Rich, and this event came 
 to her old lover in the nature of a catastrophe. 
 That which he could long since have had for the 
 taking was now beyond his reach, and his desire 
 was quickened and increased tenfold. His pent-up 
 
 F 81 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 passion at length broke from its silence, and poured 
 itself out in song. Then come new critics and very 
 justly observe that all this is improbable in the 
 extreme. That we know enough of Sidney's 
 character not to believe that had he truly loved 
 Penelope he would have dallied and made a fool 
 both of himself and her. That he was a man of 
 singularly clear judgment and self-knowledge, and 
 that had his will been to marry this girl he would 
 have given it effect. In demolishing one inde- 
 fensible position, however, they proceed, I think, 
 to set themselves up in another. Sidney did not, 
 as is shown by the facts, they say, bear any sincere 
 devotion to Penelope. Nevertheless this same 
 Penelope is the object of the passionate declarations 
 of the sonnets, and, therefore, the sonnets them- 
 selves are insincere, and become merely the in- 
 genious display of a considerable poetic talent. In 
 order effectively to cut off our retreat in all direc- 
 tions, they urge that if by any means the sonnets 
 can be shown to be sincere, then they are certainly 
 shown to be immoral, inasmuch as the object of 
 these amorous protestations was a married woman. 
 And so we have this elusive question of a poet's 
 82 
 
PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 creativeness reduced to the most matter-of-fact 
 rule-of-thumb that could be desired. 
 
 It may be granted at once that scattered through 
 the sonnets are many signs of the poet's debt to 
 his sources in more than actual structure ; that 
 an idea is not infrequently taken from Petrarch or 
 his followers. Further, that superficially they bear 
 indisputable evidence of having been written for 
 Lady Rich, the historical personage of whom we 
 have a more or less complete record ; and lastly, 
 that they are adorned or marred throughout by the 
 conceits and extravagances which were the poetic 
 fashion of the age. Then let us read the sequence 
 carefully, and undisturbed by the hundred jarring 
 theories as to its biographical interpretation, and 
 we shall, I think, come to a decision which it is in- 
 conceivable could have at any time been over- 
 looked. Poetic truth is a greater thing than the 
 truth of courts and schools, and the sign of poetic 
 truth is written large over the pages of Astrophel 
 and Stella. A poet does not make a pretence of 
 purging his soul for the entertainment of his fellows, 
 nor does he use his poetry as a catalogue wherein 
 to record the facts of his life. Sidney was in love. 
 
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PROSE PAPERS 
 
 With whom is a question that does not concern us 
 in the least ; in all probability — it is indeed prob- 
 able to the point of certainty — it was with none 
 but an ideal of his own. As a framework upon 
 which to build his ideal he chose Penelope Rich, 
 and so the ideal became invested with certain of 
 the qualities and circumstances of the material 
 woman. 
 
 To suppose that the object of a poet's love and 
 worship is either a definite being possessed of 
 certain known attributes, or else a mere unsub- 
 stantial unreahty from which he can gather no 
 inspiration and support, is utterly to misunder- 
 stand both the poet and his poetry. It is a common 
 thing to laugh lightly at the idea of a man being in 
 love with love. The state is generally regarded as 
 being incidental to nonage, a youthful abnormality 
 that will bum itself out rapidly and finally. The 
 truth is that many men and all poets are in love 
 with love till the end of their days. The poet may 
 be united to one woman and faithful to her, or he 
 may from time to time fall under the speU of many, 
 but, however this may be, he will create for his in- 
 most need an ideal transcending his earthly love, 
 84 
 
PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 fashioned indeed out of the material and suggestion 
 of this love, but wrought into perfection on the 
 anvil of his own imagination. Shelley we know 
 wove Epipsychidion out of his acquaintance with 
 Emilia Viviani, but Mary Shelley was wise enough 
 to understand that the poem was the poet's crea- 
 tion. Tennyson wrote In Memoriam, and therein 
 made Hall am a more supreme type of the friend 
 than ajiy man could ever be of himself ; and was 
 the Beatrice of Dante's song the daughter of a 
 Florentine citizen ? These reflections do not, of 
 course, detract one whit from the honour and 
 power of womanhood, but they do remind us of 
 the danger and folly of attempting to reduce the 
 poet's creation to the proportions of biographical 
 fact. The material that a woman brings the poet 
 upon which to build may be great or small ; in 
 Sidney's case it was probably shght, but it was 
 sufficient for his purpose. Out of it he wrought a 
 glowing passion of song, which may be hopelessly 
 bewildering if we attempt to read it in the hght of 
 dates and records, but which becomes gracious 
 and clear if we pass it through the fire of the 
 imagination. 
 
 85 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 I do not for a moment suggest that thij idealisa- 
 tion by the poet of his love determines the existence 
 of the physical side of his passion ; on the other 
 hand, the imaginative love of the poet is complete 
 in every way. It is quite possible that some of the 
 incidents of Astrophel and Stella referred to par- 
 ticular occurrences— for example, the meeting 
 described in the fourth song. The important point 
 to bear in mind is that the essential truth of these 
 things is not in the least affected by the considera- 
 tion as to whether they had or had not their 
 counterpart in actual physical occurrences. Love 
 is both of the flesh and of the spirit, and such is 
 the love of which Sidney sings from a full store 
 of imaginative experience. It is not for us to 
 demand that this experience shall coincide with 
 his diary. 
 
 Astrophel and Stella was first published by 
 Thomas Newman, without authority, in 1591, that 
 is to say five years after Sidney's death. It is clear 
 from the Preface that the poems had long been in 
 circulation in manuscript, but there is nothing to 
 show that the poet himself had ever prepared them 
 in any way for the press. In view of this circum- 
 
 86 
 
PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 stance their freedom from obscurities is remark- 
 able, no less than their singular smoothness and 
 polish. It must be remembered that no poet of 
 magnitude had arisen between Surrey and Sidney, 
 and the technical advance beyond Tottel's Miscel- 
 lany is enormous. It is possible, perhaps, that 
 Sidney had seen some of Spenser's sonnets which 
 were to be pubHshed in 1595 under the title of 
 Amoretti, but, even so, they would not be suffi- 
 ciently in perspective at the time to exercise any 
 profound influence, however apparent their beauty 
 might be. And, moreover, Sidney need not fear 
 comparison with any other Ehzabethan sonneteer 
 save Shakespeare. The epithet " sugared," so 
 commonly applied by critics of those days to con- 
 temporary poetry, has with us faUen into discredit 
 as impl5dng superfluous ornament and mere pretti- 
 ness. When it was used it meant, precisely, sweet, 
 and it was appUed to Sidney's verse with perfect 
 justice. In the whole sequence it would be difficult 
 to pick out a score of halting lines, and this, when 
 we remember the state in which the poet found 
 English versification, is extraordinary. The sonnet 
 form as he uses it is a compromise between the pure 
 87 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 Italian type and the English type, as used and 
 made finally distinctive by Shakespeare. In the 
 octave he generally adopts the Petrarchan rhyme 
 scheme abba abba, with the occasional varia- 
 tion — a b a b a b a b. He never departs from the 
 rule that the octave shall contain but two rhymes. 
 In the sextet he is less regular, in most instances 
 making use of the final couplet, and allowing him- 
 self any sequence for his three rhymes. Thus he 
 observes the Itahan arrangement of the octave and 
 limitation to five rhymes in aU, but generally in- 
 fringes the rule of the sextet. It is not without 
 interest to trace the descent of the sonnet from 
 Petrarch to Shakespeare in this manner, using as 
 illustration the type most generally used in each 
 case : 
 
 Petrarch .abba abba c d e c d e 
 
 Sidney .abba abba cdcdeeovccdeed 
 
 Spenser . ab ab b cb c c d c d e e 
 
 Shakespeare ab ab c d c d efefgg 
 
 A great deal of critical discussion has arisen 
 as to the aesthetic value of these varying forms. 
 What appears to be the root intention of the 
 sonnet, namely, that the close of the octave should 
 
PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 carry the tide of feeling and expression to its 
 highest and most commanding point, and that this 
 should find a more or less subdued lapse in the 
 sextet, was of course defeated by the EUzabethan 
 use of the final couplet, which serves rather to 
 emphasise than repress the last npte. In similar 
 manner the latitude allowed in the number of 
 rhymes in the EngUsh sonnet operates against that 
 unity and conciseness which is properly charac- 
 teristic of the form. It must be allowed that, all 
 things considered, the Petrarchan type, with its 
 rigid exclusion of all diffuseness, its recurrent beat, 
 and its subtle arrangement of the sextet, whereby 
 the rhymes are so placed as to avoid too great a 
 sweetness and yet are just evident enough to 
 satisfy the ear, is best fitted to lend the sonnet that 
 dignity and lofty economy of expression which 
 place it in poetry as a thing apart. At the same 
 time dogmatism here, as in all things critical, is 
 speedily confronted with its own folly. Mr. 
 Harold H. Child, in touching upon one of the points 
 above mentioned, sums up the whole question in a 
 single observation : 
 
 " But the final couplet," he says, " has been 
 
 89 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 used so freely and to such noble ends by English 
 writers that objection is out of place."* 
 
 The same may, of course, be said of all the varia- 
 tions and licenses to which I have alluded. 
 
 The only other observation to be made in the 
 matter of the prosody of Astrophel and Stella is 
 that Sidney in a few instances uses lines of twelve 
 syllables instead of the orthodox ten. This is a 
 transgression which it is not so easy to defend ; 
 indeed it is, I think, indefensible. The ten syllable 
 line is as essential to the character of the Enghsh 
 sonnet as it is to that of English blank verse, and 
 it may well be said that on this point if no other 
 the requirement of the form admits no denial. 
 One has only to look at an example of trespass in 
 this direction, say the eighth sonnet of Astrophel 
 and Stella, to perceive the extraordinary effect of 
 incongruity that is produced. The lilting jog-trot 
 of the line is agreeable enough in itself, but as we 
 read on and find it wedded to a singularly austere 
 rhyme arrangement, we feel as we should do if 
 Mercutio spoke with the voice of Hamlet. 
 
 ^ Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. iii. 
 chap. viii. 
 
 90 
 
PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 Sidney's vocabulary was both extensive and 
 flexible. He had in a marked degree the faculty of 
 investing a famihar word with a deepened signifi- 
 cance, rather than use a strange or eccentric one. 
 The opening of one of the most famous sonnets in 
 the series will suffice to illustrate this : 
 
 With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies. 
 How silently, and with how wan a face ! 
 What, may it be that even in heav'nly place 
 That busy archer his sharp arrows tries ? 
 
 It will be observed that there is no word here which 
 is in the least uncommon, and yet by their disposi- 
 tion and through the conviction and feeUng behind 
 them they take on a distinctive atmosphere and 
 become poetical in the true sense of the term. 
 This power is, of course, one of the greatest that an 
 artist can possess, and Sidney possessed it in full 
 measture. In point of imagery he is not so decidedly 
 successful. He was in no way free from the prevail- 
 ing vice of conceit-making, and he too frequently 
 seeks to illustrate his statement by mere fanciful 
 decoration instead of penetrating imaginative 
 parallel. What he has to say he says generally 
 clearly and in suggestive, well-chosen language, 
 
 91 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 but he seldom drives his utterance home by any 
 elaboration which he may make. To do this, how- 
 ever, except on the rarest occasions, is an achieve- 
 ment reserved for the greatest alone, and by the 
 greatest is imphed the few who are great at aJI 
 points, and it is no discredit to Sidney to say that 
 he was not of these ; he may still take rank with 
 immortal names. 
 
 A poet to whom excellence can be allowed only 
 on comparative and circumstantial grounds is, 
 after all, in poor case. If he is only good as a 
 pioneer, or for his years, or for his station, he can- 
 not rightly be said to be good at all. As a pioneer 
 Sidney makes an unanswerable claim to praise. 
 He stands shoulder to shoulder with Spenser in the 
 great movement of English verse. His friend, 
 indeed, attained heights which he did not attempt, 
 but he shares with him the honour of introducing 
 new light and grace and strength into the verse 
 that had already been beaten into some comeUness 
 by the poets of Tottel's Miscellany. His claims do 
 not, however, end here. Apart from all relative 
 considerations, and judged solely as a poet by the 
 highest standards which we can find, he occupies 
 
 92 
 
PHILIP SIDNEY 
 
 an honourable place in our literature. His poems 
 are worthy to be read, and are read, to-day for their 
 positive achievement. Taking up a vehicle which 
 was at the time experimental and lacking in any 
 finahty of polish, he imparted to it a sweetness 
 which at its best has rarely been excelled, and he 
 used it to give expression to griefs and exultations 
 of his own experience. 
 
 93 
 
THOMAS GRAY 
 
 The acute power of observation that Alexander 
 Pope applied so admirably to the manners of his 
 time and the foibles of humanity was not wholly 
 set aside in his contemplation of man's spiritual 
 life and the beauty of the natural world. A tradi- 
 tion, not false in itself, but false in him because 
 he accepted it without a poet's conviction, was, 
 indeed, continually set between him and the thing 
 seen. He could not see a woodland without pre- 
 tending to himself that he also saw it peopled by 
 " coy nymphs," and a flock of sheep outraged his 
 sense of decency unless it was accompanied by 
 Pan. But, in spite of this imaginative trickery, 
 he had moments when he came near to seeing the 
 loveliness of earth with undistracted vision, and 
 they are moments that afford a striking com- 
 mentary on the essential weakness of his poetry 
 and that of his age. Whilst it is true that the 
 
 94 
 
THOMAS GRAY 
 
 sublime is but a step from the ridiculous, it is 
 equally true that the greatest poets, those who 
 have most often encompassed the sublime, are also 
 those who have had least fear of the false step that 
 should lead them to disaster. They have not in- 
 frequently taken it, and been utterly unashamed, 
 probably not even conscious of their lapse. Great 
 poetry is never self-conscious ; however carefully 
 it may be wrought, the care is a concession to the 
 poet's desire to express fully the thing that he has 
 discovered, and not to his sense of propriety. The 
 profoundest imaginative truth in poetry is often 
 embodied in an utterance quite unable to bear 
 examination by common standards of fact. A 
 level-headed lawyer, who carried truth in a nut- 
 shell, reading Shelley's Skylark, came to the phrase 
 " Thou scomer of the ground." " Nonsense," he 
 exclaimed, " the bird makes its nest on the ground." 
 The besetting sin of the temper in poetry for which 
 Pope stood was precisely this self-consciousness, 
 this distrust of poetic truth, this fear of the ridi- 
 culous. So that Pope, looking out on to distant 
 hills and seeing that they were blue, was troubled. 
 He knew that they were really green or brown, 
 
 95 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 in any case not blue. And then he began to doubt 
 whether even in appearance they were quite blue 
 after all, and finally suppressed the poet that was 
 in him and wrote : 
 
 There wrapt in clouds the blueish hills ascend. 
 
 Propriety was unoffended, and we were given an 
 epitome in one hue of the twist that did so much 
 to devitalise the poetry of the age. 
 
 As if to emphasise the essential unity of matter 
 and manner in art, this timorousness of spirit 
 found its exact parallel in the form into which 
 poetry was shaped. The prevalence of the heroic 
 couplet cannot have been due to any conviction 
 in the minds of the poets that this was indisput- 
 ably the form best fitted for the language. But it 
 was capable of a balance, a regularity, a precision 
 that commended it with peculiar force to men to 
 whom these things were of first-rate importance in 
 their reading of life. Once it had beer handled by 
 a master technician, it was thenceforth easy to 
 determine at a glance whether the versification 
 was correct, and the appead to correctness was 
 sacrosanct. Any departure from recognised rules 
 
 96 
 
THOMAS GRAY 
 
 coiild be instantly detected : a most comfortable 
 privilege to men who valued rule more than ad- 
 venture. Rejecting blank verse as sorting ill with 
 that elegance which was a plaything for polite 
 society, the poets were not disposed to surrender 
 those qualities of blank verse most suited to their 
 formal habit of mind. The five foot line was estab- 
 lished as the staple of English verse, and by strip- 
 ping it of variety and lending it the adornment of 
 rhyme they found a vehicle as rigid as their own 
 perceptions and at the same time not devoid of 
 authority. To have experimented with more 
 flexible lyrical forms would have been, in their eyes, 
 wilful folly, for flexibility meant a confusion of 
 standards, a license that would have destroyed the 
 simple code of reference to which they were used. 
 The relationship of early eighteenth-century poetry 
 in England to classicism is extremely remote. In 
 great classic art, as in great art of every kind, the 
 supreme arbiter is the imagination, and it was the 
 radical flaw of that phase of English poetry that 
 the imagination was subjected not merely to the 
 reason, but to a reason that continually argued 
 back to formal standards and not forward to 
 
 G 97 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 discoveries. The poets were not even progressive 
 in their science. 
 
 To praise a poet because he achieved in spite of 
 great difSculties rather than for his achievement 
 itself is to serve him ill. The external circumstance 
 of John Clare's poverty adds nothing to the worth 
 of his lyrics. We may be astonished at the spectacle 
 of a penniless and untutored labourer adding to 
 the store of authentic poetry, but our astonishment 
 has nothing to do with our understanding of art. 
 It is not our concern, in seeking for the beauty that 
 is the gift of art, to remember that Milton was 
 blind or Beethoven deaf. We may acclaim 
 Chaucer because he shaped a language, but we 
 love him because he was a poet, and it is by our 
 love that he is immortal. It is the function of 
 poetry to impart to us strong exaltation, to free 
 our imaginations and quicken our spiritual percep- 
 tions, and if it fails to do this no plea of disabilities 
 or obstacles will serve the poet. That he might 
 have done better under other circumstances, or 
 that he did well considering this thing or that, does 
 not matter. The poet's revelation alone can move 
 us, and his written word is the only revelation that 
 
 98 
 
THOMAS GRAY 
 
 we can accept. If he fails to reveal we may still be 
 interested in the failure, but for reasons remote 
 from the divine curiosity that leads us to poetry. 
 There are, however, circumstances that, whilst 
 not increasing the positive value of a poet's work, 
 may throw his achievement into greater relief. 
 Thomas Gray, who was bom when Pope was 
 twenty-eight years old, holds his place among the 
 poets because he had something to reveal, and 
 with whatever uncertainty and in however small 
 a compass, found fit expression for the thing that 
 he had to say, and for no other reason. But he 
 arrests particular attention in the course of English 
 poetry because he was the first man of importance 
 to revolt against the formalism of the poets of the 
 age into which he Was bom. The distinction was 
 shared by Collins, who heralded the great romantic 
 revival with a note of purer poetry than that of 
 the poet who is more widely known, but the two 
 men were working independently to the same end. 
 Gray certainly owed nothing to CoUins ; he might, 
 indeed, have done so with gain. His judgment 
 was not at any time as sound in this matter of 
 contemporary poetry as his instinct. He worked 
 
 99 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 away from the things that he praised and towards 
 the things in which he professed to see no virtue. 
 We find him speaking highly of Shenstone and 
 Beattie and Mason, and yet writing to his friend 
 Wharton, " Have you seen the works of two young 
 authors, a Mr. Warton and Mr. Collins, both writers 
 of odes ? it is odd enough, but each is the half of a 
 considerable man, and one the counterpart of the 
 other. The first has but little invention, very 
 poetical choice of expression, and a good ear. The 
 second, a fine fancy, modelled upon the antique, 
 a bad ear, great variety of words and images, with 
 no choice at all. They both deserve to last some 
 years, but will not." But the denial of the false 
 tradition by which he was surrounded was no less 
 emphatic because it was more or less unconscious. 
 Gray's habitual outlook upon the world was rather 
 of the scholarly observer than that of the creative 
 seer, but he had moments of genuinely imaginative 
 vision, and his instinct impelled him to allow these 
 free and not unadventurous expression. Lyrical 
 verse during the hundred years that followed him 
 attciined a variety and colour that would have 
 seemed even to his independent mind the merest 
 
 100 
 
THOMAS GRAY 
 
 vagary and licentiousness ; but in his rather form- 
 ally constructed odes, and even in the simple 
 stanzas of the Elegy, he made a definite and memor- 
 able departure from the rigidity that was threaten- 
 ing to deprive poetry of all its suppleness and finer 
 expression. In his diction he was unable to escape 
 with any certainty from the constraint of his age. 
 Poetry in his hands was still too often concerned 
 with hearsay instead of vision, and, save at times 
 when he gave himself up wholly to his better im- 
 pulse, he was ready to lend his authority to the 
 fustian rhetoric that did duty for style. We still 
 have the " attic warbler " and the " fury Passions," 
 " melting strains," and the " enchanting shell," 
 and we still find poetry masquerading in such dress 
 as this : 
 
 What idle progeny succeed 
 To chase the rolling circle's speed, 
 Or urge the fl3dng ball ? 
 
 There are, in short, many traces in Gray's poetry 
 of a tradition against which he revolted but which 
 he could not be expected to overcome at a stroke. 
 But there are, scattered through his small volume 
 of work, many instances of the poet's determination 
 
 lOI 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 to express himself completely and with indifference 
 to current standards. He could rival Pope himself 
 on occasion in precision and the sublimation of 
 mere reason, as for example in : 
 
 all are men 
 Condemned alike to groan. 
 The tender for another's pain. 
 The unfeeling for his own . . . 
 or : 
 
 where ignorance is bliss 
 'Tis folly to be wise, 
 
 or again in such a phrase as " leave us leisure to be 
 good." But he could also reach true dignity of 
 style, a thing new to his time : 
 
 Nor the pride, nor ample pinion 
 That the Theban Eagle bear, 
 Sailing with supreme dominion 
 Thro' the azurS deep of air. 
 
 and : 
 
 In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes ; 
 Youth on the prow and Pleasure at the helm. 
 
 are notes for which he could find no example among 
 his contemporaries save Collins. And he could, 
 further ,|touch the pure simplicity of manner that 
 he found discredited and rejected in the practice 
 of the men that were then accepted as controllers 
 
 102 
 
THOMAS GRAY 
 
 of taste, and is yet the highest triumph of the 
 poet's expression. He did this not only in such 
 isolated passages as : 
 
 The meanest floweret of the vale, 
 The simplest note that swells the gale, 
 The common sun, the air, the skies, 
 To him are opening Paradise, 
 
 but also, with very few lapses, throughout a whole 
 poem. The Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, 
 has the distinction of being one of the few excellent 
 poems in the language that are really popular. 
 The quahties that have made it popular have, of 
 course, nothing to do with Gray's position as a 
 pioneer. They are those of tenderness and of clear 
 distinction between sentiment and sentimentality, 
 of intimacy with the beauty and change of earth, 
 all set down without affectation and yet never 
 meanly. It is a chapter of simple things which 
 once again have gripped a poet by their loveliness 
 and poignancy, and it is by virtue of this that it 
 has won the affection of so many men ; but it does, 
 nevertheless, take on a new distinction when we 
 realise that it was written at a time when these 
 qualities were most grudgingly served by poetry. 
 
 103 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 Gray had not a particularly rich imagination, but 
 he was willing at times to allow what imaginative 
 faculty he had free play. His power of vision was 
 not of the highest, but in his more inspired moments 
 he was careful to allow nothing to come between 
 his vision and the thing seen. It has been charged 
 against him that " he never spoke out." The 
 criticism would not seem to be well considered. 
 He did not, it is true, speak often, and he some- 
 times spoke without conviction. But it is not the 
 least of his distinctions that at other times, when 
 he was reaUy moved to foUow the guidance of his 
 instinct, he was one of two men in his age who did 
 speak out. He was not afraid to put on record the 
 evidence of his imagination. If Gray saw blue hills 
 he called them blue and not blueish. 
 
 Wordsworth did Gray an injustice by placing 
 him " at the head of those who, by their reason- 
 ings, have attempted to widen the space of separa- 
 tion betwixt prose and metrical composition," and 
 adding that he was " more than any other man 
 curiously elaborate in the structure of his own 
 poetic diction." Even in his elaboration Gray was 
 
 104 
 
THOMAS GRAY 
 
 doing something to escape from a precision numb- 
 ing in its formality, and, although Wordsworth 
 rightly protested against much in the earUer poet's 
 diction, he might have drawn his examples as aptly 
 from almost any of Gray's contemporaries, who 
 could not have defended themselves by an " Elegy" 
 or the passages of perfectly sincere and imaginative 
 diction that are to be found in the Odes. Although 
 Gray was not at all times a profitable servant, he 
 was ever ready to acknowledge the lordship of the 
 imagination, and it was ungenerous of Wordsworth 
 to omit this fact from his reckoning. Johnson 
 complained that he was " tall by walking on tip- 
 toe," but the desire to be tall was in itself laudable, 
 and not always unrewarded. 
 
 The poet's letters are not only dehghtful in their 
 revelation of a most companionable personality, 
 but they also contain many passages that show a 
 clear-sightedness as to the general principles of his 
 craft. It was natural enough that he should be 
 mistaken as to ColUns, and confused in his judg- 
 ments of the work that was being done in his own 
 day, even that he should at times be disloyal to 
 
 105 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 his instincts in his own creation. The influence of 
 Pope was too great for any man to resist without 
 some hesitancy. But as soon as he began to con- 
 sider the abstract nature of poetry he did so with 
 admirable balance and insight. His professed 
 essays on the art are concerned rather with the 
 evolution of language and metrical form than with 
 the cosmic spirit of poetry, but his correspondents 
 might profit, if they were able, by many swift words 
 of profound critical understanding. Speaking of 
 description, he says, " I have always thought that 
 it made the most graceful ornament of poetry, but 
 never ought to make the subject," and his letters 
 to Mason about that industrious writer's work 
 abound in observations that are worthy of a better 
 subject. It is clear from these flashes of criticism 
 scattered through the letters that he had a finer 
 understanding of his art than, perhaps, any man 
 of his age, however inconsistently he may have 
 applied his understanding in practice, and although 
 this, again, does not add to his stature as poet, it 
 gives some new distinction to his place in the 
 history of letters. 
 The chief defect in his positive contribution to 
 io6 
 
THOMAS GRAY 
 
 poetry is its unconcern with humanity. He peoples 
 his poems with personages that are but rarely warm 
 with life. Gray was not commonly fortunate in his 
 choice of subjects. The Odes, which form the 
 greater part of his work, each contain incidental 
 and isolated passages that by their sudden rise to 
 excellence of style or their clarity and intimacy 
 of feeling are made memorable, but they do not 
 command our interest either by their unity of 
 conception, their sustained beauty of expression, 
 or their nearness to our own experience. In the 
 Elegy alone among his more serious poems did he 
 take a subject that by its simplicity and univer- 
 sality enabled him to write in complete accord 
 with the impulse that was in him for direct and 
 unstrained expression, and it is the Elegy that we 
 treasure as a complete poem, reading it from 
 beginning to end when we turn back to it, not 
 hastening forward for some rare glimpse of splen- 
 dour that we know awaits us. In his lighter poems, 
 notably The Long Story, he attained something of 
 this same warmth. His himiour was always one of 
 his most lovable quaUties, and when he brings it to 
 his poetry it is some compensation for the natural- 
 
 107 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 ness and depth that we miss in the Odes save at 
 long intervals ; nearly related as it is to the quick 
 humanity that stirred him to utterance in the poem 
 that popular affection has agreed with Dr. Johnson 
 in proclaiming as his highest achievement. 
 
 1 08 
 
S. T. COLERIDGE 
 
 When the psychologist comes who shaJl attempt 
 An Inquiry into the Visitations of Genius, he might 
 well adopt, as the sole basis of his investigation, 
 Coleridge's Complete Poetical Works.^ We have 
 them here in two volumes, admirably produced 
 and edited, amounting to well over eleven hundred 
 p£^es. By virtue of these, Coleridge, who was 
 bom in the year after Gray's death, and wrote his 
 first known poem in 1787, takes a moderately 
 distinguished place among the poets for whom we 
 can only feel a certain compassionate reverence 
 for their loyalty to an art that steadily refused to 
 bestow any of its finer favours on their services. 
 The eighteenth-century poets, those who were 
 bound by, instead of transcending, their age, may 
 not have been aware of their own rather painful 
 
 ^ The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor 
 Coleridge. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. (Clar- 
 endon Press.) 
 
 109 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 limitations ; but they were, at best, not allowed 
 to know anything of the rarer ecstasy which is the 
 poet's right, and to despise them is to despise a 
 singularly unfortunate company of men. The 
 good Mr. Akenside, had he lived a himdred years 
 earlier, with all his desire and labour for poetry, 
 might have set his heart dancing to some jolly song, 
 instead of laboriously spending it on a forlorn 
 hope ; cind even he made some honourable en- 
 deavour to bridge the darkest years that poetry 
 has known since its beginning in England, with 
 little enough of the poet's one true reward, what- 
 ever he may have had of praise. And Coleridge 
 normally — ^save for some divine whim, always — is 
 of this company. He remarks of one of his earliest 
 compositions that it is not beyond the power of 
 any clever schoolboy ; that it is no more than a 
 putting of thought into verse. That was the staple 
 industry of Coleridge and his fellows. Through 
 eleven hundred pages we find thought being put 
 into verse ; thought sometimes witty, sometimes 
 dull, very often pompous and sentimental ; but, 
 save at one or two blessed intervals, never thought 
 transfused into im^ination and poetry. It shines 
 
 no 
 
S. T. COLERIDGE 
 
 in the gay little Ode in the Manner of Anacreon ; 
 it is elephantine in things like the Religious Mus- 
 ings ; it struggles towards something rarer in stray 
 lines like : 
 
 And scatter livelier roses round, 
 
 or stanzas such as : 
 
 And oh ! may Spring's fair flowerets fade, 
 May Summer cease her limbs to lave 
 In cooling stream, may Autumn grave 
 Yellow o'er the corn-cloath'd glade ; 
 Ere . . 
 
 or it trots merrily as in the lines Written After a 
 Walk before Supper. It can become amazing, as 
 in the Lines to a Friend, who Died of a Frenzy 
 Induced by Calumnious Reports, beginning : 
 
 Edmund ! thy grave with aching eye I scan . . . 
 
 it can perform admirable tricks, as in the epigram 
 on Donne : 
 
 With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots. 
 Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots ; 
 Rh3mie's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue. 
 Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw. 
 
 And then, when the technique has been brought 
 under easy control by long use, and the philosopher 
 
 III 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 has matured, it can reach true sublimity in The 
 Hymn before Sunrise and Dejection. Coleridge 
 made all the poetic adventures approved by his 
 time, and told of them generally as weU as another, 
 occasionally better. He wrote plays, too, and they 
 make up one of the present volumes. In these he 
 was Elizabethan by intention, and remained sealed 
 of the eighteenth century in result. The sturdy 
 strength that gave even Webster the mastery over 
 his most unconsidered horrors was beyond the 
 reach of the author of Remorse, whose terror is the 
 make-believe of a child. For the eighteenth- 
 century Coleridge and his peers, the tragic clashing 
 of the natural world and of humanity was not a 
 great emotional ecstasy, but something of which 
 to make a ceremony. They called it horrific, and 
 were quite unmoved. Having none of the wisdom 
 of imagination, they conceived the great wastes of 
 tragedy to be a kind of fairyland, peopled by 
 Shapes and Presences, who moved to a perpetual 
 accompaniment of tremendous thunder. The 
 external confusion of action that was utterly un- 
 important in the Elizabethans, because it had 
 behind it a supreme spiritual unity, became in the 
 
 112 
 
S. T. COLERIDGE 
 
 hands of these men a meaningless end, instead of 
 a riotous symbol. 
 
 And in all this our psychologist of the arts might 
 find much to entertain him before beginning to 
 write his treatise, which treatise would be provoked 
 by certain poems that cover, perhaps, sixty pages 
 of these two volumes. The years 1797-8 are 
 curiously memorable ones in the history of poetry. 
 A poet, moving smoothly enough along the ap- 
 pointed ways of his age, " putting thought into 
 verse " with some creditable success, in those years 
 wrote The Ancient Mariner and Christabel, Frost 
 at Midnight, with its incomparable : 
 
 Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, 
 Whether the summer clothe the general earth 
 With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing 
 Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch 
 Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch g 
 Smokes in the sun-thaw ; whether the eave-drops fall 
 Heard only in the trances of the blcist. 
 Or if the secret ministry of frost 
 Shall hang them up in silent icicles 
 Quietly shining to the quiet moon, 
 
 and Kubla Khan. Whatever achievement may be 
 claimed by other poets, none can point to anything 
 
 H 113 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 more manifestly drawn from a vigorous and en- 
 chanted imagination than these poems. Divine 
 caprice has overthrown reason, and, Une by Hne, 
 we meet with adventures that none can foretell, 
 and none can re-conceive. In accounting for the 
 visitation, our aesthetician-psychologist need be 
 distracted by no external circumstance. It has 
 been suggested that Wordsworth's friendship 
 inspired Coleridge to this strange new enthusiasm. 
 It may, indeed, have helped to loose the poet's 
 tongue ; but it cannot, in any way, account for 
 the miracle of the word that he was to utter. The 
 best work of Coleridge's later years was a develop- 
 ment of his earliest and normal manner and vision, 
 with stray flashes of the wonder that only for one 
 short period attained to clear and sustained ex- 
 pression. In 1817 it broke into one fitful gust in 
 the eleven lines of The Knight's Tomb, and at 
 another date we get : 
 
 So will I build my altar in the fields, 
 
 And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be. 
 
 And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields 
 Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee, 
 
 Thee only, God ; and Thou shalt not despise 
 
 Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice. 
 
 114 
 
S. T. COLERIDGE 
 
 Even at his great period, Coleridge wrote with 
 no certainty of genius. The three or four master- 
 pieces were written at the same time as inefEective 
 songs and pedestrian exercises, as untouched as 
 possible by the heady inspiration of which he had 
 tasted. What is yet stranger, the two moods and 
 faculties may be found at this time in one poem, 
 even in consecutive stanzas. That any poetic 
 perception should be capable of setting these lines 
 in the same poem is sufficiently amazing : 
 
 'Tis sweet to hear a brook, 'tis sweet 
 
 To hear the Sabbath-bell, 
 'Tis sweet to hear them both at once. 
 
 Deep in a woody dell. 
 
 So they sat chatting, while bad thoughts 
 
 Were troubling Edward's rest ; 
 But soon they heard his hard, quick pants, 
 
 And the thumping in his breast. 
 
 But there is, at least, a saving interval between 
 them, whilst the beauty of the second stanza of the 
 following succeeds the ill-shapen doggerel of the 
 first with perfect unconcern : 
 
 And he had passed a restless night. 
 
 And was not well in health ; 
 The women sat down by his side. 
 
 And talked as 'twere by stealth. 
 
 "5 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 The Sun peeps through the close thick leaves, 
 
 See, dearest Ellen, see ! 
 'Tis in the leaves, a little sun. 
 
 No bigger than your ee. 
 
 Coleridge's visitation yielded him a small harvest 
 of exquisite and essential poetry. He came face 
 to face with song for one glorious season, and then, 
 from time to time, he was vouchsafed a momentary 
 glimpse that enabled his pen to touch the paper 
 with something of the divine expectancy, but no 
 more. Eleven hundred of these pages are as a 
 prodigious monument, built in an outworn fashion, 
 durable but dead. They are interesting to the 
 analyst ; they even have some intellectual excite- 
 ment of their own at intervals ; but it is all in verse 
 that never sings or flies because of its own imagin- 
 ative discovery. And the remaining p^es — ^less 
 than a hundred of them — are among the most 
 marvellous treasures of poetry. It is a sheer delight 
 to write down again such things as : 
 
 The harbour-bay was clear as glass. 
 So smoothly it was strewn I 
 And on the bay the moonlight lay. 
 And the shadow of the moon. 
 
 Il6 
 
S. T. COLERIDGE 
 And: 
 
 The thin gray cloud is spread on high. 
 It covers but not hides the sky. 
 The moon is behind, and at the full ; 
 And yet she looks both small and dull. 
 The night is chill, the cloud is gray : 
 'Tis a month before the month of May, 
 And the Spring comes slowly up this way. 
 
 After all, the psychologist would but waste his 
 pains. It is not to be explained. We can only 
 watch Coleridge during those two years with 
 " admiration," in Shakespeare's words : 
 
 For he on honey-dew hath fed. 
 And drunk the milk of Paradise. 
 
 117 
 
THE BRONTES AS POETS 
 
 I 
 
 In his introduction to this volume,^ Mr. Benson 
 says : "It may frankly be confessed that the 
 interest of the poems is entirely centred on the 
 work of Emily. If it had not been for the genius 
 which her work unmistakably displays, the poetry 
 of the other three would have sunk into oblivion." 
 If this is so, we may very reasonably ask why nearly 
 half the book should be given up to this other 
 negligible work : why Emily's genius should have 
 to carry this dead weight about with it, because 
 the dead weight happens to be the property of her 
 relations. And dead weight it unquestionably is. 
 Of Branwell we shall have a word to say later, but 
 of both Charlotte and Anne the plain fact is that 
 
 * Bronte Poems ; Selections from the Poetry of Charlotte, 
 Emily, Anne, and Branwell Bronte. Edited, with an 
 Introduction, by Arthur C. Benson. (Smith, Elder.) 
 
 ii8 
 
THE BRONTES AS POETS 
 
 they were not poets at all. The verse of both has 
 a certain biographical interest, and speaks truly 
 enough of the sincerity of character of two women 
 who did work of lasting distinction in another form 
 of literature. For this reason it is not insignificant, 
 but it is already easily accessible to those who wish 
 to consult it for these values, and we see no good 
 reason for reprinting it in a book for which the 
 only occasion can be its poetical quality. In all the 
 pages devoted to Charlotte's and Anne's verse, 
 there is not a line that has the unmistakable flavour 
 of poetry. There Would appear to be an exception 
 on page i6, in the poem beginning 
 
 Gods of the old mythology, 
 
 and definitely marked by a sombre poetic imagina- 
 tion throughout its sixteen lines. It is here printed 
 as Charlotte's work, but there is an editorial note 
 saying, " This poem has been in some collections 
 attributed to Emily Bronte." It was first printed 
 under Mr. Shorter's editorship in Emily's collected 
 poetry in 1910, and we do not know that it has 
 been reprinted since, nor does Mr. Benson give any 
 authority for this new attribution. By every 
 
 119 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 internal evidence it is clearly Emily's ; if Mr. 
 Benson can make good Charlotte's claim to it, he 
 establishes for her a moment of genuine poetic 
 inspiration such as never revisited her. 
 
 All this is not in any way to detract from the 
 fine gifts that made so memorable contributions 
 to the English novel, but merely to guard against 
 the danger — evident from the plan of such volumes 
 as the one before us — of allowing these gifts to 
 lend other activities an authority that their own 
 achievement does not warrant. When we say that 
 Ruskin and Carlyle made a very poor job of their 
 attempts to write poetry, we do not behttle their 
 noble powers, and we can still be wholly grateful 
 for Jane Eyre, while saying that there is no reason, 
 other than those already mentioned, for printing 
 Charlotte Bronte's verses. They have none of the 
 emotional pressure that forces itself into rhythmic 
 pattern of expression, no trace of the perfect selec- 
 tion and ordering of words that are the tokens of 
 complete imaginative experience, nor has it even 
 any share of the metrical precision and pohsh that 
 gave so much eighteenth-century verse its own 
 distinction without giving it the higher character 
 
 120 
 
THE BRONTES AS POETS 
 
 of poetry. It not only does not move us ; it does 
 not give us the pleasure that comes of witnessing 
 expert accomplishment. In Anne's verse there is 
 an occasional note of faintly charming ingenuous- 
 ness, but it is rare, and her claim to poetry is as 
 little real as Charlotte's. 
 
 II 
 Of a great deal of Emily Bronte's verse, very 
 much the same thing must be said as of that of her 
 sisters. It bears the stamp of character as clearly, 
 and her character was the rarest and most im- 
 pressive of them all. But in doing this it does no 
 more than confirm, without notably emphasising, 
 facts which have been evident from every word 
 that has been written of her from the time of 
 Charlotte's letters. Again, we have to keep our 
 minds clear as to our demands. Impressive and 
 heroic character is of inestimable value in the 
 world's business, but if Emily's work did no more 
 than bear witness to such character, her distinction 
 would be a far commoner thing than it actually is. 
 And there is much of her verse that does hardly 
 
 121 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 anything more than this. We say hardly, since 
 there is often, even in her poorest work, an un- 
 developed but not wholly uninteresting instinct 
 for rhythmic individuality. The instinct is not 
 very adventurous, not sufficiently so, we think, to 
 justify Mr. Benson's remark that " many of Emily's 
 poems are bound to appeal most vividly to those 
 who have a technical understanding of the craft 
 of poetry." Most of Emily's verse is not parti- 
 cularly interesting to the student of poetic tech- 
 nique, but it has just a touch of rhythmic inde- 
 pendence, and chiefly in the practice of packing a 
 line so as to give it an added fullness and rapidity 
 while retaining the exact stress value, as in : — ■ 
 
 and : 
 
 I am the only being whose doom 
 
 No tongue would ask, no eye would mourn, 
 
 As they were playing the pillars 'mong 
 And bounding down the marble stair. 
 
 It is, of course, a device common enough in Enghsh 
 poetry, but its use does show a care for the capaci- 
 ties of verse not to be found in the ordinary 
 rhymester, and in the hands of a master it is 
 
 122 
 
THE BRONTES AS POETS 
 
 capable of producing such splendid results as 
 Swinburne was constantly achieving. And yet 
 Mr. Benson, as though to refute himself at any 
 cost — since here is the best support of his state- 
 ment about the technical interest of Emily's 
 verse — curiously tells us in footnotes that she used 
 " being " and " playing " as monosyllables — beng 
 and plang, thus depriving her of the credit for some 
 technical skill, and accusing her of incredible 
 pronunciation. 
 
 But even this interest added to its biographical 
 value does not endow Emily Bronte's verse with 
 any considerable poetic significance, and most of 
 it, which has no more than these quaUties, stands 
 as little chance as Charlotte's or Anne's of receiving 
 durable attention for its own sake. It has, this 
 bulk of it, a greater intellectual gravity than theirs, 
 a more apparent responsibility ; it has also an 
 occasional phrase that almost thrills, as " shadowy 
 fiend," and very often vague indications of an 
 intention towards poetry, of the poetic energy 
 hidden away in the mind but seeking release. 
 But as we read on through the work of her earlier 
 years, we find page after page of these elusive 
 
 123 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 suggestions that fail over and over again to shape 
 themselves into poetry. 
 
 The moonbeam and the storm. 
 
 The summer eve divine, 
 The silent night of solemn calm. 
 
 The full moon's cloudless shine. 
 
 Were once entwined with thee, 
 
 But now with weary pain, 
 Lost vision ! 'tis enough for me. 
 
 Thou canst not shine again. 
 
 It is general, indefinite, diffused, made up of easily 
 accepted imagery — all of which poetry exactly is 
 not. The sombre strength of Emily's very char- 
 acter itself for many years could find little but 
 conventional expression, a rather hectic violence 
 that may well have derived from the lesser side of 
 Gray. " Froze upon my tongue," " their deadly 
 ray would more than madden me," " wild blast," 
 " dreary doom," " frenzied thoughts," " frantic 
 curses " — aU these are from one poem, written 
 when she was twenty. With the exception of 
 some undated work at the end of the collection, 
 which we may assume to be roughly in its right 
 place, the poems are given in chronological order. 
 There is, from the beginning, a development of the 
 
 124 
 
THE BRONTES AS POETS 
 
 qualities that we have mentioned ; but not until 
 1 841, when she was twenty-three, do we find any- 
 thii^ more than the suggestion that here is a 
 sincerely intentioned talent that might in a 
 fortunate moment expand into poetic intensity. 
 Then the suggestion becomes a reasonable hope 
 with the second stanza of The Caged Bird : 
 
 Give we the hills our equal prayer, 
 
 Earth's breezy hills and heaven's blue sea ; 
 
 I ask for nothing further here 
 But my own heart and liberty. 
 
 The achievement is not yet, but it has come nearer. 
 There is in these lines a new precision of statement, 
 a quickening in her use of words, a tightening up of 
 the symmetry. A little later, in 1843, we come to 
 
 Leaves upon Time's branch were growing brightly. 
 
 Full of sap, and full of silver dew ; 
 Birds beneath its shelter gathered nightly ; 
 
 Daily round its flowers the wild bees flew. 
 
 Sorrow passed, and plucked the golden blossom ; 
 
 Guilt stripped off the foliage in its pride ; 
 But, within its parent's kindly bosom. 
 
 Flowed for ever Life's restoring tide. 
 
 The hope has become an assurance. The poetry 
 has not come into unblemished life, but that poetry 
 is seeking deliverance there can no longer be any 
 
 125 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 doubt. And in less than a year we have A Day 
 Dream, simple, indeed, and not of uniform cer- 
 tainty in its flight, but showing an athletic imagin- 
 ation coming into its own. Then, as far as we can 
 tell from the recorded dates, for another year, with 
 the exception of a formless and unsuccessful poem 
 with good touches in it (which Mr. Benson quotes 
 in his introduction but does not include in his 
 selection), there is silence, to be broken by Remem- 
 brance, with its superb 
 
 Cold in the earth — and fifteen wild Decembers, 
 From those brown hills, have melted into spring, 
 
 and thereafter we have a poet who is never sure of 
 proving herself for long together, but who repeat- 
 edly achieves the note that makes her rank secure 
 against any challenge. The poems we have named, 
 together with Warning and Reply, the song begin- 
 ning " The linnet in the rocky dells," How clear 
 she shines, " Plead for me," Self-Interrogation, 
 The Old Stoic, A Little While, The Moors, and 
 No Coward Soul is Mine, and stray lines, such as 
 
 It was the autumn of the year. 
 When grain grows yellow in the ear. . . 
 and 
 
 The herons are flown to their trees by the Hall, 
 
 126 
 
THE BRONTES AS POETS 
 £ind this, as spoken by the wind : 
 
 And when thy heart is resting 
 
 Beneath the church-aisle stone, 
 I shall have time for mourning, 
 
 And thou for being alone, 
 
 make but a small gathering, but they give to the 
 author of one of the most passionate novels in the 
 language the yet higher distinction of having en- 
 riched for ever the store of English poetry. 
 
 Ill 
 
 There remains to be considered the surviving 
 work of Branwell Bronte. It covers but a few 
 pages : in Mr. Benson's selection, which we take 
 as being representative, less than twenty. Bran- 
 well's story has been told many times, and always 
 with the same conclusion. He had a good deal of 
 natural charm, and a character that was for him- 
 self and his friends tragic in its weakness. " At 
 home he is a drain on every resource — an impedi- 
 ment to all happiness," wrote Charlotte, who loved 
 
 127 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 him ; Swinburne, with customary vehemence, 
 calls him a " contemptible caitiff " ; Mr. Shorter, 
 in the admirably arranged chapter on Branwell in 
 his Bronte book, emphasises the general opinion ; 
 " his memory now craves that of our charity, we 
 leave it alone," says Mr. Birrell, allowing, justly 
 we think, that " had he been well bred and trained, 
 and duly kicked and disciplined, he might have 
 escaped a shocking fate and a disgraceful death." 
 There is no disputing the facts ; Branwell, what- 
 ever allowances may be made for him, was a moral 
 weakling, a disaster to his family, and he drank or 
 drugged himself to death. But that was not the 
 whole tragedy. From the evidence of these few 
 pages, he also destroyed a poet, and it is more than 
 likely that he himself suffered most in the destruc- 
 tion. In this matter there has been much con- 
 fusion. In their very natural indignation with a 
 man who repaid the patience and love of his heroic 
 sisters so ill, his critics have commonly refused to 
 aUow Branwell anything of what Mrs. Gaskell 
 called his " brilliant talent." " He did no more 
 than write poor verses," says one ; " of his sisters' 
 
 128 
 
THE BRONETS AS POETS 
 
 gifts he had not a particle," says another. Mr. 
 Benson, who insists as clearly as his predecessors 
 upon " the catastrophe of his hfe," does well, if the 
 comparison had to be made, to say that " he had 
 a higher instinct for poetry than either Charlotte 
 or Anne," though he does so apologetically. The 
 fact is that in Branwell was wrecked a quite notable 
 poetic endowment, and neither truth nor moraUty 
 is served by refusing to acknowledge the endow- 
 ment because of the wreck. It may well be that 
 in any poet who has achieved highly and used his 
 gift worthily and fully, the balance of character 
 can be shown to be with nobility, but that a man 
 may woefully abuse it is as true of this gift as of 
 any other. Although we may hopefully beheve 
 that such lamentable wastage is rare, yet even 
 the great responsibility of poetry may sometimes 
 be betrayed, as it was betrayed here, and to relieve 
 Branwell of the responsibility altogether by deny- 
 ing his gift, and so to make his tragedy common- 
 place instead of realising its last bitterness, is to 
 trifle with facts. Save for a moment now and then, 
 the poetry in Branwell was strangled, but when 
 
 I 129 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 we read a short poem, Noah's Warning over 
 Methuselah's Grave, the general level of which 
 hardly falls below that of its best stanzas, 
 
 Will you compel my tongue to say, 
 That underneath this nameless sod, 
 
 Your hands, with mine, have laid to-day. 
 The last on earth who walked with God ? 
 
 By that vast wall of cloudy gloom, 
 Piled boding round the firmament ; 
 
 By all its presages of doom, 
 
 Children of men — Repent ! Repent ! 
 
 and find in another place : 
 
 But all without lay silent in 
 
 The sunny hush of afternoon, 
 And only muffled steps within 
 
 Passed slowly and sedately on, 
 
 and remember that the man who could, in spite of 
 himself, write thus, living until he was past thirty, 
 left what amounts to no more than a momentary 
 gesture in witness of the precious gift that was 
 there for his taking, the tragedy becomes far more 
 poignant than it has commonly been shown to be. 
 
 130 
 
FREDERICK TENNYSON 
 
 Every poet is both born and made ; that is a rule 
 to which there is no exception. The instinct, the 
 energy, the fearlessness for poetry are a man's 
 birthright or for ever beyond his acquisition ; but 
 the faculty of shaping these into the tangible stuff 
 of art is to be created by work as hard as a navvy's, 
 and in no other way. The self-discipline of the 
 man who is loyally seeking to train his imaginative 
 sense to the pitch when the faintest suggestion of 
 false thinking or the smallest failure in a chosen 
 word is instantly perceived and corrected as 
 destroying the final balance of the whole work is, 
 indeed, colossal in its severity compared with tha.t 
 involved in any other kind of labour. The reason 
 that artists not infrequently break under the strain 
 is not that they are weaker than other people, but 
 that the strain is so much heavier upon them. The 
 average successful business man, who is in the 
 
 131 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 habit of thinking more or less indulgently of axtists 
 as rather a slack lot.would be appalled if he could 
 reaHse the relative daily expenditure of brain 
 tissue as between himself and the artist of normal 
 productivity. The trained alertness that enables 
 a man to juggle deftly with " futures " is mere 
 primitive dullness beside the insight, won only by 
 unweariable patience, that enables him to distin- 
 guish between a thing said well and the same thing 
 said ill, between form and its counterfeit. Turner 
 having himself lashed to a mast so that he might 
 really see what a storm was like, Browning assimil- 
 ating the English dictionary as an elementary 
 primer of his art, Ben Jonson exhausting classic 
 learning to embeUish his satires on Ehzabethan 
 London, Morris adding yet another virtue to his 
 epic by crossing Iceland on a pony — -here are trifl- 
 ing exploits that may be matched in the counting- 
 house ; but not so the severity of the daily vigi- 
 lance of eye and brain that taught these men to 
 shape their eagerness for life into great art. It is a 
 ridiculous, but strangely common, fallacy to sup- 
 pose that art is an easy enough thing if you have 
 the knack of it. It is not. If you have not the 
 
 132 
 
FREDERICK TENNYSON 
 
 knack of it, there is an end of the matter ; but if 
 you have, then begins a lifetime of the most exact- 
 ii^ labour that a man can undergo if you are to 
 make anything of it. 
 
 All of which is directly about Frederick Tenny- 
 son. He died in 1898 at the age of ninety-one. 
 Allowing the first twenty yeeirs of his life for pre- 
 paration for work and the last twenty for rest from 
 it, then he was a poet — ^probably a lyric poet of 
 the first, or of a very high, rank — ^less, shall we say, 
 eight hours' close work a day at his job for fifty 
 years. He was a poet bom, and never came within 
 the most distant promise of being a poet made.^ 
 In this volume of selections — inasmuch as it is of 
 exactly the same texture from the first page to the 
 last, we may take it that it is a thoroughly repre- 
 sentative volume — there is everything that a poet 
 can demand or desire as his heritage, and nothing 
 else. Here is all the material of poetry. An 
 instinct for beauty, a heightening of the common 
 charities and passions, a sense of unity in all the 
 manifestations of life, the fearless desire for truth 
 
 ' The Shorter Poems of Frederick Tennyson. (Mac- 
 millan.) 
 
 133 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 and a gift of quick and shining speech ; in short, 
 fulMess of hfe. But here is not only the fullness of 
 life, but also its formlessness. The chaos is not 
 disciplined into shape ; the man who would be, 
 and by his birthright might have been, a poet, has 
 broken an imperative clause in the contract, and 
 has refused to work. The instincts, the thought, 
 the delight, the imagery, the speech, all are inces- 
 santly vague, unorganised. And there is no such 
 thing as vague poetry. Poetry may be difficult, 
 so subtle in significance as to elude any but the 
 most careful enquirer, but vagueness cancels poetry 
 as certainly as 33° F. cancels frost. Frederick 
 Tennyson is rarely subtle or difficult ; his verse 
 does not exercise the mind — ^it blurs it. And it is 
 precisely this missing quality of definiteness that 
 work, and work alone, could have supplied. Mr. 
 Charles Tennyson, who writes the preface to this 
 volume, and, on the whole, writes it excellently, 
 recognises this defect in his subject's work, but 
 does not seem to recognise its full gravity. " Ex- 
 treme abstraction " and " extreme diffuseness," 
 when they really are extreme, can scarcely be said 
 to be faults in poetry ; rather where they are 
 
 134 
 
FREDERICK TENNYSON 
 
 poetry cannot be. A great many people are full of 
 right tendencies in their thought and instincts about 
 life, but the trouble is that with so vastly complex 
 a subject before them, their thought and instincts 
 will, strive as they may, remain " abstracted " and 
 " diffuse." It is to the poet that we look to clear 
 away all this vagueness and difficult confusion, 
 and substitute clarity and order. If he does not 
 do that, he is no more poet than are other people, 
 which means that he has as little reason for 
 explaining his shortcomings in a book. 
 
 There are, it is true, remarkable quahties in this 
 volume — ^highly exasperating qualities as it hap- 
 pens. The man who could write 
 
 and 
 
 What do they there with lance and helm, 
 And corslets that shake off the light ? 
 
 The banded sheaves stand orderly 
 Against the purple autumn sky, 
 Like armies of Prosperity . 
 
 might have come to be a very considerable figure 
 in his art. But he seems to have been one of the 
 men who are always too busy to work. His mind 
 was occupied with a hundred things : spiritualism, 
 drawing (there is something almost pathetic in the 
 
 135 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 statement that his family still has " one excellent 
 example of his work — an Italian landscape, 
 painted in half an hour, on the back of his plate 
 after breakfast "), music, sport, society. All these 
 things are well enough for a poet if they are recrea- 
 tion and subordinate to his work as a poet ; but 
 when a man takes to them all indifferently, as the 
 normal habit of his life, there is an end to all hope 
 of really big achievement. And so it was, for 
 example, that when Frederick Tennyson turned 
 his attention for the moment to the study of verse 
 technique, he was attracted chiefly by the pleasure 
 of building up more or less elaborate stanza struc- 
 tures, the sort of thing that anyone can do on a 
 winter's evening if he thinks it worth whUe ; but 
 that a poet only does to amuse himself now and 
 again after he has learnt that the whole range of 
 verse-technique, from the veriest album incom- 
 petency to the most superb lyric mastery, may be 
 covered in a perfectly regular five-foot quatrain. 
 Kingsley said of him that, " even in his most 
 abstract lines, he often wrote with the neatness of 
 Pope," which can only mean that he was sure of 
 his finger-beats, since Pope's neatness was the 
 
 136 
 
FREDERICK TENNYSON 
 
 result of clear-cut precision in statement that 
 amounted at times, indeed, to a poverty of signifi- 
 cance in its surrender to formalism (as distinguished 
 from form), but was certainly always far removed 
 from vagueness of the kind that beset Frederick 
 Tennyson. So that the claim amounts to nothing ; 
 anyone, again, can beat out regular lines of verse 
 who has nothing better ta do. No ; Frederick 
 Tennyson was richly endowed with a poet's 
 natural gifts ; if he had given himself to the organ- 
 ising of his world, to making the shapes and 
 rumours that were ever active in his brain biddable 
 to the transfiguring power of a severe art, if he had 
 worked, he could not have known defeat. As it is, 
 we are forced to consider him for a moment with 
 his brother. This volume suggests that the two 
 men were pretty equally blessed in natural equip- 
 ment, neither of them being fortunate in this way 
 as have been the very greatest ; but one of them, 
 with gifts enough at the outset to make such an 
 end possible, achieving greatness and an impreg- 
 nable place in his art by sheer hard work. 
 
 137 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS AND 
 THE STATE 
 
 Morris's essays and lectures on art and socialism, 
 if they can in any way be thought of as separate 
 subjects in his philosophy, Hopes and Fears for Art, 
 Lectures on Art and Industry, Signs of Change, and 
 Lectures on Socialism, have but one theme ; but it 
 is a theme that he rightly supposed to be incom- 
 parably the most important of all the concerns of 
 propaganda in these days. An enormous propor- 
 tion of the people living under modern civilisation, 
 so runs the argument, is engaged in joyless work — 
 work that leaves neither surplus energy nor time 
 for more wholesome employment. That is the 
 master-crime of which we as a society stand 
 accused to-day, and no one yet has found — or is 
 likely to find — any semblance of a plausible 
 defence. The psychology of the matter is com- 
 pUcated enough, but the root of the trouble lies 
 clearly in the natural law that when a mind ceases 
 
 138 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE STATE 
 
 to be productive it becomes avaricious, and at the 
 same time, loses its sense of beauty. Thus, when 
 a man passes from the proper condition of his 
 being, which is production, by means of acquiring 
 control over the production of others, he will cause 
 those others to make a great many unnecessary 
 things without caring that they should have 
 beauty — the sign of the producer's joy in produc- 
 ing — ^which, indeed, under this new and senseless 
 pressure of demand, they could not have. And so, 
 by a process which is quite direct and simple and 
 only appears confused and indefinable because of 
 the vast area over which it works, capitalism 
 destroys the delight in labour, which is the greatest 
 privilege of man and the secret of all communal 
 health. In attacking this perversion of Nature's 
 intention, Morris found two weapons to his hand — 
 an active socialist programme and art. Of the 
 former, an appeal by reason as much to the drivers 
 as to the driven, he had no great hopes ; nor has 
 the prospect changed since his time. Poverty, 
 with its attendant ugliness, is a great spoiler of the 
 wits, and capitalism will not soon be ready to 
 accept any argument as being better than its 
 
 139 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 money. Such activity has its uses, but it is at best 
 but a patching of an odd rent here and there ; and 
 Morris, with many of his fellows, found in it more 
 weariness than satisfaction. But his larger 
 socialism, which was art, struck down to the roots, 
 and there are many artists and friends of art — -a 
 growing number — -who still believe that in his 
 gospel lies the hope of the world. These lectures, 
 given to working men throughout the country, 
 exclude for the sake of convenience, in his own 
 words, from their definition of art, " all appeals 
 to the intellect and emotion that are not addressed 
 to the eyesight," dealing with all those concerns 
 of the craftsman which elsewhere he groups under 
 the general term architecture. In this way, illus- 
 trated liberally by example, and developed in 
 crafts-rooms wherever possible, he sought to move 
 the workers to demand such leisure as would 
 enable them to express delight in their work by 
 making it beautiful, and so by a natural con- 
 sequence to destroy the over-production which he 
 denounced as the curse of competitive commerce. 
 And all this effort was one in instinct with his own 
 creative art — from his poetry to the designing of a 
 
 140 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE STATE 
 
 chintz. "It is the province of art," he says in 
 How I became a Socialist, " to set the true ideal of 
 a full and reasonable life before [men], a life to 
 which the perception and creation of beauty, the 
 enjoyment of real pleasure that is, shall be felt to 
 be as necessary to man as his daily bread, and that 
 no man, and no set of men, can be deprived of this 
 except by mere opposition, which should be resisted 
 to the utmost." 
 
 It is a simple remedy for the ills of the world, 
 one in which, in spite of everything, there is yet 
 much strong faith. Yet how far we are short of its 
 proper use the tale of these disastrous times stands 
 in witness. For let it be said clearly and as often 
 as possible, lest it should be forgotten again in 
 these coming days when Europe wiU gather to the 
 most momentous counsels of her history, that if 
 there is one body of men who would have con- 
 sistently and unanimously opposed the policies 
 that have ended in this disaster of blood, it is not 
 the churchmen, nor the enlightened publicists, nor 
 the Liberal politicians, but the creative artists. 
 It is idle to say that the artist is an unpractical 
 visionary, incapable of rational conduct either of 
 
 141 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 himself or of affairs. The notion is possible only 
 to people whose acquaintance with artists is 
 confined to gossip of or about very minor poets, 
 and even more minor critics who spend their 
 energies chattering in the unsavoury kind of salon. 
 It is equally idle to say that the usual platforms 
 are open to the artist, and that here he can take 
 his share in the control of things when he wishes. 
 His way is not the way which has, in plain facts, 
 come to so terrible an issue. He says, quite com- 
 prehensively, let art be recognised as the most 
 powerful of ail authorities, let it be fostered 
 everywhere, and so — and so only — shall you give 
 men clean minds, and through clean minds alone 
 can you beget in them the wiU and the courage to 
 resist and destroy the folly of a few idle and mis- 
 chievous brains. And if this counsel is once again 
 swept aside by the men of affairs as a piece of 
 pleasant but fantastic idealism, then quite surely 
 the savage that is in the world wiU have its way 
 again in due time in spite of all treaties. A Europe 
 peopled by men whose daily lives were governed 
 by the happy energy that an understanding of art 
 begets — unless it be too oppressed on every side by 
 
 142 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE STATE 
 
 antagonistic forces — could never, it is not neces- 
 sary to say, have involved itself in this desperate 
 madness. 
 
 These prose papers of Morris's are a full and 
 often superbly managed exposition of his artistic 
 creed. There is, as he states in one of his prefaces, 
 a good deal of repetition, as was inevitable ; but 
 on the whole they are, perhaps, the noblest state- 
 ment of faith that any creative artist of the first 
 rank has ever made. When we remember that the 
 passion and clear-headed analysis of facts that 
 went to their making were but momentary inci- 
 dents in that crowded life, we can but wonder 
 afresh whether there was ever an energy like to 
 this. And yet in this splendid brain, full of 
 righteousness and hope and imagination, there is 
 an incompleteness. It would be more reasonable, 
 perhaps, to say that the quality which seems to be 
 missing was never tested. Its lack interfered in no 
 way with the fullness of his own work. He saw a 
 world, perfect within natural limitations ; he 
 realised it in his poetry, he preached its conditions, 
 and, as far as possible, realised these, too, in his 
 own life and the lives of those who came under his 
 
 143 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 influence. It is a lack upon which we find a curious 
 comment in an interesting list of his chosen books 
 that Morris contributed to a newspaper symposium 
 in 1885. The Bible, Homer, Beowulf, the sagas, 
 folk-tales, and traditional poems were safe for 
 inclusion — most, indeed, of the ancient and 
 mediaeval masters, but Euripides is banned here 
 as by Swinburne, and of Virgil no more is allowed 
 than, " Of course, I admit the archaeological value 
 of some of them, especially Virgil and Ovid." 
 After Chaucer, no English poet until Shakespeare 
 is named, and thence only Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, 
 Keats, and Byron. And beside this list there is the 
 significant note : " I hope I shall escape boycot- 
 ting at the hands of my countrymen for leaving 
 out Milton ; but the union in his works of cold 
 classicalism with Puritanism (the two things which 
 I hate most in the world) repels me so that I cannot 
 read him." The " cold classicalism," in view of 
 the richness of ornament with which Milton loads 
 his poetry, seems just a word of hasty criticism ; 
 but the " Puritanism " cannot be answered so. 
 It would be absurd to suppose that Morris associ- 
 ated Milton with the sour-faced hypocrisy that 
 144 
 
WILLIAM MORRIS AND THE STATE 
 
 used its power to destroy the beauty it could not 
 understand without any wholesome zeal for the 
 cause whose name it wrongly took. It seems to us 
 that the quality in Milton with which Morris could 
 not sjmipathise was a capacity for investing com- 
 promise with moral dignity. Here was a disagree- 
 ment in which, without experience of the particular 
 kind of circumstance that sharpens this quality, 
 many of us would be on Morris's side. How many 
 earnest and imaginative EngUshmen, for example, 
 had their views in this matter modified or reversed 
 in August, 1914 ? Morris desired a certain state, 
 and he saw it whole. In this, the chief, almost the 
 only, purpose of his hfe, there could be no question 
 of compromise. Therefore, compromise was to 
 him simply the mean thing that normally all 
 honest men know it to be. But Milton found him- 
 self faced with a great and terrible difficulty. He 
 formd himself, with no hope of intellectual escape, 
 forced into the position of adopting and supporting 
 means against which his whole natural manhood 
 revolted, to attain something which he knew must 
 yet be marked of imperfection when attained. 
 And to justify himself to his own soul he could but 
 
 K 145 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 say, and by a logical process of the spirit he was 
 forced to say it : " My cause is righteous." Is it 
 not the strangest irony of all in this dark day that 
 we ourselves are forced to say " Our cause is 
 righteous," since thereby we are forced to the 
 acceptance of conduct at which, in itself, our whole 
 being sickens ? It is only direct experience of the 
 mental state bom of such a crisis that noakes full 
 sympathy quite possible. It is this fact that made 
 Morris write that note. The greatest and most 
 splendid fighter of his generation was spared the 
 most bitter difficulty of all. But to-morrow his 
 message must be heard. 
 
 146 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 I 
 
 It has often been said, and said by men of per- 
 ception, that the temper of an age is reflected more 
 exactly in the work of its secondary writers than 
 in that of its masters. Taking the generalisation 
 at its apparent significance, it would seem to have 
 but a slender foundation of truth. The masters 
 are gluttons of honour, and they add to their 
 success in directing the attention of posterity to 
 their analysis of the elemental things of Ufe, the 
 distinction of recording, not deliberately, but 
 implicitly and casually, the intellectual and 
 spiritual habit of their own time more efficiently 
 than their subordinates. Apart from their 
 supremacy on more important grounds, Spenser, 
 Shakespeare and Jonson tell us more of the 
 underlying spiritual activity of Elizabethan 
 England than all Dekker's admirable joumaUsm 
 and a dozen Yorkshire Tragedies; Milton and 
 
 147 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 Herrick, set aptly at an angle, are the justest mirrors 
 of the fundamentals of their age, Pope of his. And 
 it is always so. We know the atmosphere of Mid- 
 Victorian speculation and resistance and desire 
 more accurately from the poetry of Tennyson, 
 Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti and Swinburne 
 than we do from the more explicit records of many 
 Tuppers. These widely accepted critical general- 
 isations, however, seldom receive their sanction for 
 nothing ; nor is the present one devoid of reason. 
 
 The measure of a poet's greatness is not the 
 content of his art, but his art itself ; by the perfect 
 shaping of his vision and not by the nature of his 
 vision is he memorable. And the greater and more 
 memorable his art, the more surely will its content 
 be transformed from the workaday symbols by 
 which it commonly expresses itself into new and 
 more significant symbols of the poet's devising. 
 It is the spirit, the essence of Elizabethan England 
 that Shakespeare gives us, not the detailed cir- 
 cumstance. To the great artist his art is the most 
 important thing in the world, a very purging and 
 ordering of life itself. An obituary notice of 
 Mr. Brown, late of the Colliery Board, will give us 
 148 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 a great deal of exact information about an estim- 
 able man, but what would the world know of 
 Edward King and Keats if Milton and Shelley were 
 the only witnesses : yet by how much poorer 
 would the world be in understanding of untimely 
 death without Lycidas and Adonais ? And so it is 
 that the particular is absorbed by the great artist 
 into the texture of his art, the outward aspect 
 being changed while the significance is retained. 
 The artist, in effect, brings his material into just 
 subjection to his art, which he rightly believes to 
 be more persuasive than hfe unformed and un- 
 selected. And since the intellectual habit and 
 spiritual temper that distinguish his own age come 
 within the range of his contemplation together 
 with the emotional experiences common to all the 
 ages, these too will, essentially, be wrought into 
 his art, thence to impress themselves upon our 
 consciousness in spite of the translation that has 
 been made — indeed, the more incisively because 
 of that translation. Ulysses, one of the poems in 
 which Tennyson most definitely escaped the 
 journahstic tendencies of his poorer work and 
 asserted himself as of the masters, is finely eloquent 
 
 149 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 of the character of the poet's own generation, not- 
 withstanding an apparent indifference to it. The 
 great artist is bearing witness to his age, but with 
 no show of deliberation. After the great, however, 
 there are two ranks of artists, defining themselves 
 largely by the expression of their relation to their 
 time. There are those, failing perhaps in their 
 claim to be called artists at aU, who can see nothii^ 
 but an inert and shapeless image of their age, 
 having no perception of its significance. They 
 would see nothing in the career of Mr. Brown 
 beyond the facts that he was educated at the town 
 grammar school, joined his father, Sir Jonas 
 Brown, in commerce at the age of seventeen, was 
 elected . . . and so forth. In their work they 
 substitute, in consequence, a certain explicitness 
 of statement for comprehension, as when one of 
 them addressed Matthew Arnold in a sonnet as 
 
 The greatest educationist of thy time. 
 
 These people not only have no art, they have no 
 vision. Of them it certainly cannot be said that 
 they express their age, since they express nothing. 
 But there is another kind of artist, not attaining 
 
 150 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 greatness yet of wide influence and importance. 
 His perceptive power is often acute, and it is 
 directed upon the same objects as that of the 
 masters ; he too meditates upon the life common 
 to the generations and the hfe peculiar to his own 
 generation. His spiritual ardour is as loyal as that 
 of greater artists than he, though it is less intense. 
 He is aware of the necessity of inventing a new 
 s57mbol to give authority to his expression of the 
 thing before him, but his capacity for this invention 
 is uncertain. In other words, although his purpose 
 is active and not at all content with the journalistic 
 record, his mastery over art is incomplete. His act 
 of fashioning does not entirely absorb and trans- 
 form the material upon which it works, and his 
 achievement will therefore, in smaller or greater 
 degree, leave the thing that he has seen stated but 
 not interpreted. But this very statement makes 
 for more immediate recognition of its subject than 
 does interpretation, and so it is that when we 
 consider such an artist, whose work has a dignity 
 great enough to command our respect and even 
 affection and is yet not controlled with the final 
 mastery, we find the material in which he has 
 
 151 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 worked finely emphasised without being re-created . 
 And since his material is in part the character of 
 his own generation, we are apt to say that he, 
 more clearly than another, expresses the spirit of 
 his age. 
 
 II 
 
 Theodore Watts-Dunton was, perhaps, the most 
 eminent example of the artist in this kind of his 
 generation. The second half of the nineteenth 
 century saw many poets who accomplished per- 
 fectly the expression of a slight but quite genuine 
 impulse, making a durable music out of a not too 
 ambitious adventurousness, but Watts-Dunton in 
 his poetry aimed with fine earnestness at a breadth 
 and power comparable to that achieved by his 
 great contemporaries. Although the volume of his 
 work as a poet is small, it is marked everjrwhere 
 by the most serious intention and a diligent concern 
 with the relating of a personal experience to uni- 
 versal experience. Now and again to sing consum- 
 mately a secluded and delicate emotion was not at 
 aU his desire ; enthusiastically he set himself to 
 
 152 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 travel the wide world of imaginative thought in 
 high-hearted emulation of the masters, more than 
 one of whom he could call friend. If time deals 
 unkindly with his fame as a poet, it wUl be because 
 he purposed far more greatly than many whose 
 lasting if gentle reputation, built on no finer or 
 even less considerable a natural equipment, is 
 assured. The Coming of Love, his chief poem, is 
 designed in the manner of greatness. It has no- 
 table qualities : a large instinct for bringing its 
 landscape, much variety of event, and the conduct 
 of subsidiary characters, to the presentation 
 of the central character, Rhona ; a deeply 
 felt passion in the conception of that character 
 itself ; a frequent richness of diction and an occa- 
 sional majesty of music. But with every grateful 
 concession to an uncommon distinction of purpose, 
 we have to admit that the art is not disciplined 
 and comprehensive enough to crown so ambitious 
 a scheme with success. The vision is individual, 
 having something of the true discovery, but the 
 imagination at work upon it relaxes too often to 
 achieve the transformation of a fine vision into a 
 
 153 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 great poem. To take three varying examples of 
 this relaxing of the imagination : 
 
 We two glide along 
 'Tween grassy banks she loves where, tcill and strong. 
 The buttercups stand gleaming, smiling, yellow. 
 
 The poet no doubt saw that the buttercups were 
 aU those things — tall, strong, gleaming, smiling, 
 yellow — but categorically to state that they were 
 so is not at all the same thing as translating the 
 fact into poetry. The buttercups are there plainly 
 enough, but the explicit detail fails to give them 
 their due significance ; for the moment the imagin- 
 ation has ceased to work upon the thing seen, 
 which is left at its factual value. Then : 
 
 And larks the sunshine turned to specks o' gold. 
 
 Here is an image which is an arbitrary invention 
 of the fancy. When Milton speaks of the " marble 
 air " he transcends fact in the achievement of 
 imaginative truth, as does Shakespeare when he 
 speaks of " golden lads," but to call a skyward 
 lark, which in the sunlight appears black — which, 
 poetically, is black — a. speck of gold, is not to 
 
 154 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 transcend fact but to forget it.^ And this again 
 is a weakening of the imaginative grip. Finally : 
 
 And merle and mavis answer finch and jay. 
 
 The imaginative laxity here is none the less real 
 because it happens to be of a curiously subtle kind. 
 When Byron wrote 
 
 The mountains look on Marathon, 
 And Marathon looks on the sea, 
 
 he was selecting from truth in order to create an 
 image having a new truth of its own. It is point- 
 less to remind him that the mountains look on the 
 sea as well as on Marathon, and that in turn it is 
 not Marathon alone that looks on the sea, since the 
 mountains do this too. Byron justifies his dis- 
 regard of these facts by a perfect expression of the 
 fact essential to his purpose. But to suggest that 
 merle and mavis answer finch and jay as against 
 merle answering mavis, and so forth, is to make a 
 
 ' I need hardly point out that when Shelley likens a 
 lark in flight to a " glow-worm golden in a dell of dew," 
 he is in reality likening the influence of the one pheno- 
 menon upon the imagination to that of the other, with no 
 thought of identifying the appearances of the phenomena 
 themselves. 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 very precise and therefore very challenging re- 
 constitution of fact that has no corresponding gain, 
 in the image created, to warrant it. These examples 
 of artistic uncertainty would not be important in 
 themselves, but there are not many pages in The 
 Coming of Love on which one or another of them 
 cannot in some degree be matched, and they are 
 indications of the prevalent inadequacy of the art 
 of the poem to deal greatly with a greatly intended 
 design. The art too often either refrains from 
 translating its material, Ufe, or substitutes for its 
 material a fancied life that is not quite good metal. 
 This does not at all detract from the admirable 
 quaHties of the poem, nor is it to deny the poet his 
 dues for a finely spirited purpose, but it does mean 
 that in a work where continuity in the presentation 
 of the central theme is of high or chief importance, 
 the defect, destroying as it does complete and 
 persistent fusion, makes the final achievement 
 impossible. The poetic mastery is intermittent 
 and therefore, as far as the structural value of the 
 work as a whole is concerned, non-existent, and 
 the success of the poem must remain with its 
 more excellent parts. Failures of this kind are 
 
 156 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 unfortunate for a poet's report, more unfortunate, 
 perhaps, than they should be. Masterpieces 
 manques generally get less than their proper share 
 of popular approval in the long run even if they 
 get more than their deserts for a moment, but they 
 are full of instruction and far from empty of de- 
 light for those who care to consider them. Noble 
 purpose frustrated cannot compel the admiration 
 won by noble purpose realised, but nobility of 
 purpose is in either case good company. Though 
 it may be relatively poor in conspicuous merits, 
 and though it may fail for other reasons. The 
 Coming of Love fails not more surely than most of 
 Swinburne's and Tennyson's plays, than Endymion, 
 than The Romaunt of the Rose. And who would 
 wish these cancelled ? 
 
 Whilst, however, Swinburne and Tennyson 
 failed in their plays for lack of certainty in dramatic 
 sense, and Endymion fails because it is but the 
 delighted effervescence of immature genius, and 
 The Romaunt because it is an almost unguided 
 experiment in a new art. The Coming of Love fails 
 because a ripened and really adventurous percep- 
 tion could not command an art equal to its purpose. 
 
 157 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 And this fact makes the poet curiously expressive, 
 in the more obvious sense, of the spirit of his age. 
 Tennyson was two poets, and the lesser of these 
 and Watts-Dunton represent the characteristic 
 temper of their time more directly, perhaps, than 
 do any of their contemporaries. Tennyson at his 
 best ranks with the other great Victorian poets as 
 absorbing this local temper into the universal 
 significance of his art, but there were times when 
 his imagination relaxed in the same way as did 
 Watts-Dunton 's, leaving the material upon which 
 it worked more exactly defined but not trans- 
 figured. And this temper was a blending of the 
 last glow of the romanticism of which Gray and 
 Collins and Ossian were the dawn, with a new and 
 vigorous sympathy with individual men to which 
 Wordsworth had sounded the lonely but mighty 
 prelude. The romantic revival in England, or, as 
 Watts-Dunton admirably called it, the renascence 
 of wonder, was accompanied by a great deal of 
 perfervid and hectic licence. 
 
 With haggard eyes the poet stood ; 
 (Loose his beard, and hoary hair 
 
 Stream'd, like a meteor, to the troubled air) 
 
 158 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 as Gray sang of his Bard, and even Collins dealt 
 freely in " shrill shrieks " and " frantic fears." 
 But, in spite of all excesses, wonder was reborn in 
 the work of these men, to be caught up a little later 
 into the superb art of Shelley and his peers. 
 Shelley's ecstasy is rarer than Gray's or Collins's, 
 and it is more perfectly controlled into poetry, 
 but it is still of the same texture. His worship is 
 rather of a sublime than a familiar landscape, of 
 the liberated spirit of man than of man captive to 
 circumstance. This is not to say that Shelley was 
 unconcerned with the landscape about him or with 
 humanity ; he was, passionately, but these things 
 were not only absorbed by his art, they became in 
 his imagination so purged of circumstance as to be 
 magnificently incomplete. In the creation of his 
 world he did not reject common experience, but he 
 purified it so completely as almost at times to 
 go beyond the interpretation to the change of its 
 significance. And while Shelley was thus finding 
 for the single spirit of romantic wonder its supreme 
 expression, Wordsworth was amplifying it by an 
 alert reference to the immediate life of the world 
 at his door, and the wonder broadened in its range 
 
 159 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 without losing in intensity. The heritage into 
 which Victorian poetry came was thus dual in 
 nature. It had in it the rapturous wonder of 
 Shelley and the patient but greatly eager inquiry 
 of Wordsworth. And the inquiry worked upon 
 the wonder, subduing it beautifully, without 
 destroying it, investigating experience more in 
 terms of the concrete image and aiming at a subtler 
 or at least more complex psychology in its observa- 
 tion of life, until Browning and Arnold with more 
 in them of Wordsworth than of Shelley, Tennyson 
 — at his best — and Morris with, perhaps, an equal 
 distribution of the two influences, and Swinburne 
 and Rossetti more directly in descent from SheUey 
 than from Wordsworth, through the agency of 
 their own individual endowments, wrought into 
 their poetry the spirit of their age with more or 
 less sympathy towards the one or the other of its 
 two chief characteristics. 
 
 Watts-Dimton accepted his heritage eagerly and 
 in its fullness, and since his consciousness of its 
 nature was highly developed, and since at the 
 same time the translation of his vision through art 
 
 i6o 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 was imperfect, we have in his work a vivid and 
 easily intelligible testimony as to what the heritage 
 was. The instinct for wonder and the instinct for 
 inquiry, testing and modifying each other, move 
 through all his poetry, expressing themselves with 
 an openness that is almost naive. 
 
 Young with the youth the sea's embrace can lend. 
 Our glowing limbs, with sun and brown empearled. 
 
 Seem born anew, and in your eyes, dear friend. 
 Rare pictures shine, like fairy flags unfurled. 
 
 Of chUd-land, where the roofs of rainbows bend 
 Over the magic wonders of the world. 
 
 In such passages as these it is not the spirit of 
 wonder wrought to the purpose of a great art that 
 we find, it is the wonder itself, not invested with 
 new significance, but very definitely emphasised 
 for all to see. And even Tennyson, in his more 
 restricted mood, was no more precise in curious 
 observation than this : 
 
 O God ! a, blazing world of sea — 
 A bUstered deck — an engine's grinding jar — 
 Hot scents of scorching oil and paint and tar — 
 And, in the oifing up yon fiery lee. 
 One spot in the air no bigger than a bee — 
 A frigate-bird that sails alone afar. 
 
 L l6l 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 while the very constraint of a passage such as : 
 
 The trees awake : I hear the branches creak ! 
 
 And ivy-leaves are tapping at the pane : 
 Dawn draws across the grey a saffron streak, 
 
 To let me read at sunrise once again 
 
 Beautiful Rhona's letter, which has lain, 
 Balming the pillow underneath my cheek. 
 While in the dark her writing seemed to speak : 
 
 Her great eyes lit my brain, 
 
 reminds us the more immediately of the analytical 
 activity controlling it. The spirit of inquiry is 
 here being used as material, and so deUberate is 
 the use that it is at once evident. And it would 
 be difficult to find anything in the poetry of the 
 period illustrating more explicitly the interaction 
 of the two chief phases of the period's distinguish- 
 ing temper than this : 
 
 The young light peeps through yonder trembling chink 
 The tent's mouth makes in answer to a breeze ; 
 The rooks outside are stirring in the trees. 
 Through which I see the deepening bars of pink. 
 I hear the earliest anvils tingling clink 
 From Jasper's forge ; the cattle on the leas 
 Begin to low. She's waking by degrees : 
 Sleep's rosy fetters melt, but link by link. 
 
 What dream is hers ? Her eyelids shake with tears 
 The fond eyes open now like flowers in dew : 
 She sobs I know not what of passionate fears. 
 
 162 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 " You'll never leave me now ? There is but you ; 
 I dreamt a voice was whispering in my ears, 
 ' The Dukkeripen ' o' stars comes ever true '." 
 
 Wonder and inquiry are very plainly written here. 
 If the poet's sincerity were less unchallengeable or 
 his purpose less single, the wonder and inquiry 
 would be vague in their statement because they 
 would be but vaguely apprehended ; if his art 
 were greater they would be suggested by a new 
 symbol of the poet's invention instead of being 
 clearly projected, as they are, in their own image. 
 The spirit of the age is veritably manifest. 
 
 Watts-Dimton's poetry has been praised, and 
 with every justification, by men whose authority 
 is undeniable. His friendship with many of his 
 great contemporaries may perhaps have accented 
 their opinion of his work, but it would be not only 
 ungracious but whoUy unintelligent to suppose 
 that the opinion and its statement were more 
 influenced by circumstance than this. Morris 
 wished to print The Coining of Love, and the 
 sanction of the Kehnscott Press was not lightly 
 given. Meredith and Mr. Hardy represent an 
 ^ Prophecy. 
 163 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 attitude very naturally adopted by a considerable 
 body of the genius of the time towards a poet who 
 expressed so lucidly material with which it was so 
 deeply concerned itself. Meredith wrote of a sonnet 
 on Coleridge : " The sonnet is pure amber for a 
 piece of descriptive analogy that fits the poet 
 wonderfully, and one might beat through volumes 
 of essays and not so paint him." The work is 
 praised for its admirable " descriptive analogy," 
 not for its art. And similarly Mr. Hardy says of 
 Christmas at the Mermaid : "it seems remarkable 
 that you should have had the conjuring power to 
 raise up those old years so brightly in your own 
 mind first, as to be able to exhibit them to readers 
 in such high relief of three dimensions, as one may 
 say." Again it is the vision rather than its fashion- 
 ing into great poetry that is noted and admired. 
 This is not to detract from the weight and value of 
 such approval, but to point out the habit in which 
 the approval instinctively moved. The indisput- 
 able evidence of intellectual effort and sincerity 
 that this poet gave in his work could claim with 
 authority the applause of men who knew the rare 
 value of these qualities, and they could bestow it 
 
 164 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 with perfect honesty and gladly without consider- 
 ing the question of creative mastery too closely. 
 So long as the art was not worthless, and here it 
 certainly was not that, they were eager not to with- 
 hold their gratitude for fine spiritual determination 
 merely because the art was not correspondingly 
 great. And other critics than these, with, in a 
 limited sense, equal justice, went beyond them in 
 praise. It has already been said that wMle Watts- 
 Dunton's imaginative discipline was not perfect 
 enough to carry a great poetic design to the fullness 
 of success at which, by its own magnitude, it aimed, 
 he achieved many notable beauties in brief. In 
 spite of its failure as a constructive whole, there 
 are many memorable things in The Coming of Love, 
 as the spirited and deftly modulated haymaking 
 song, such lines as 
 
 Where golden shafts from out the quiver of morn 
 Pierce the wet leaves and wake the hidden thrush. 
 
 and 
 
 But when I'm dead the Golden Hand o' Love 
 Will shine some day where mists o' mornin' swim ; 
 Me too you'U see, dear, when the sun's red rim 
 Peeps through the Rookery boughs by Rington spire 
 And makes the wet leaves wink like stars o' fire ; 
 
 165 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 Then, when the skylark wakes the thrush and dove, 
 An' squirrels jump, and rabbits scrabble roun', 
 An' hares cock up their ears a-shinin' brown, 
 An' grass an' blossoms mix their mornin' smells 
 Wi' Dingle songs from all the chirikels,* 
 You'U see me there above, 
 
 and touches so admirably contrived as the return 
 of the burden of the quarrel poem in Rhona's plea 
 made long afterwards in her letter : 
 
 Come back minaw, and you may kiss your han 
 To that fine rawni rowin on the river. 
 
 And this fortimate management is to be found, 
 
 in some shape or another, in many of the shorter 
 
 poems. Christmas at the Mermaid is full of energy, 
 
 with a swinging narrative movement and many 
 
 finely visualised descriptive strokes. A passage 
 
 such as 
 
 He saw a child watching the birds that flew 
 Above a willow, through whose musky leaves 
 A green musk-beetle shone with mail and greaves 
 That shifted in the light to bronze and blue, 
 
 achieves, by virtue of its style, the translation of 
 vision into poetry of which we have been speaking, 
 and although there is in the poem at times the 
 
 ' Birds. 
 
 i66 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 same kind of uncertainty as in The Coming of Love, 
 it does not here interfere so seriously with the total 
 effect, since the design is much less ambitious. 
 The poem deserves and should continue to enjoy 
 the wide favour that it has won. With the memory 
 in our minds of many exquisite moments in his 
 work, therefore, it is not surprising to hear of so 
 authoritative a judge as Rossetti speaking of 
 " Watts's magnificent star sonnet." Had it been 
 possible for Watts-Dunton to concentrate his gifts 
 on the production of a slender lyric output they 
 might have been more profitably spent. But he set 
 them to the creation of work that needed a master's 
 far-ranging art to encompass, and his poetic achieve- 
 ment suffers in consequence. His responsiveness 
 to the great masterpieces of poetry and his 
 intimacy with men who were adding to their 
 number led him to a lofty and eager emulation. 
 This liberal purpose did not prosper in its highest 
 ambition, but in following it loyally he attained to 
 a poetry that is often beautiful, profoundly inter- 
 esting as a study both in its failure and its success, 
 and dignified always by an informing principle of 
 earnest^enthusiasm that, in its kind, touches great- 
 
 167 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 ness. And it has a definite place in the literary 
 history of the age. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In prose Watts-Dunton wrote his widely-known 
 romance, Aylwin, and a great deal of uncollected 
 criticism. The reputation of Aylwin as a very 
 remarkable book is not likely to be seriously 
 revised even though it should cease to be very 
 commonly tested. It has the qualities and defects 
 of his poetry, but in a work of prose fiction these 
 particular qualities are of the highest importance 
 while the defects do not assume at all the same 
 gravity. The power of projecting vision into an 
 insinuating but reticent art is still faulty, the 
 imagination failing at times to fuse its materials. 
 The following passage, for example, is quite 
 sincerely conceived, but it is unwrought. Two 
 children, both of them under twelve years of age, 
 are talking. The spirit of the thing is true, but the 
 expression impugns rather than enforces the truth. 
 
 " Don't you wish," said the little girl meditatively, 
 " that men and women had voices more like birds ? " 
 
 The idea had never occurred to me before, but I under- 
 stood in a moment what she meant and sympathised with 
 
 i68 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 her. Nature, of course, had been unkind to the lords and 
 ladies of creation in this one matter of voice. 
 
 " Yes, I do," I said. 
 
 " I'm so glad you do," said she. " I've so often thought 
 what a pity it is that God did not let men and women talk 
 and sing as the birds do. I believe He let 'em talk like 
 that in the Garden of Eden, don't you ? " 
 
 " I think it very likely," I said. 
 
 " Men's voices are so rough mostly and women's voices 
 are so sharp mostly that it's sometimes a little hard to love 
 'em as you love the birds." 
 
 " It is," I said. 
 
 " Don't you think the poor birds must sometimes feel 
 very much distressed at hearing the voices of men and 
 women, especially when they all talk together ? " 
 
 The idea seemed so original and yet so true that it made 
 me laugh ; we both laughed. . . . 
 
 " The rooks mayn't mind," said the little girl. . . . 
 " But I'm afraid the blackbirds and thrushes can't like it. 
 I do so wonder what they say about it." 
 
 But this artistic incompleteness is easily forgiven 
 in a novel for qualities such as Aylwin possesses. 
 It may pass as a little idiosyncratic to-day, but it 
 has always seemed to me that the iirst duty of a 
 work of fiction is to tell a good story and tell it 
 convincingly. I have the hardihood to think that 
 the novel has set itself to many tasks that can only 
 be accomphshed by poetry. However that may 
 be, Aylwin does tell a story, full of passion and 
 
 169 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 observation, and it maintains its interest with 
 admirable sureness. The faculty that created 
 Rhona Boswell in strong vivid outline is here put to 
 excellent use, and we become intimately concerned 
 in the histories of many credible and arresting 
 people. In its own generation the book attracted 
 as much attention for its adventures into mysticism 
 as for its more durable qualities, which, in their 
 degree, are those of Fielding and Scott and Dumas, 
 to prove kinship with whom remains the novehst's 
 highest distinction. The mysticism and scientific 
 ferment of Aylwin may well perish ; the simple 
 humanity and narrative power of it will survive. 
 
 A careful selection of Watts-Dunton's critical 
 essays should be a feather in some diUgent editor's 
 cap. Long before he had pubUshed anything, his 
 opinions passed the rounds of literary circles with 
 authority. He was over forty years old when his 
 first critical article, a review of Mr. Gosse's poetic 
 play, King Erik, appeared in the Examiner. The 
 work which he subsequently did for the AthencBum 
 and other papers did more, perhaps, than that of 
 any other man of his time to establish a proper 
 consideration of poetry in literary journalism. 
 
 170 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 That in itself was a great service, but it was by no 
 means the measure of the work's value. He 
 explored the principles of hterature with a discern- 
 ment of a very rare order, and a well-edited selec- 
 tion from his pronouncements would take its place 
 as one of the most clear-sighted — though not neces- 
 sarily most profound — books of criticism in the 
 language. His best known essay, that on Poetry 
 in the Encyclopedia Britannica, is a httle formless 
 in design, largely because of the necessities of the 
 occasion. But his criticism is not chiefly valuable 
 for its sustained argument or comprehensive 
 treatment of a given subject. It moves in leisurely 
 fashion, discursive and sometimes quite gaily super- 
 ficial, but at frequent and unexpected moments 
 it drives a shaft right to the heart of its theme. 
 They would make a very gallant quiverful for the 
 gathering.* 
 
 IV 
 
 I saw Theodore Watts-Dunton twice at " The 
 Pines." He was then eighty years of age, but his 
 
 * The posthumous volume The Renascence of Wonder is 
 so badly edited as to be worse than valueless. 
 
 171 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 mind was wholly unsubdued by his bodily infirm- 
 ities. He was full of a most gracious courtesy, 
 eager for any news of the literary world succeeding 
 that in which he had lived with so much distinction. 
 The nature of his most intimate relationship with 
 that world, his friendship with Swinburne, has 
 been told by Mr. Gosse, whose monograph on 
 Swinburne has covered the ground once and for 
 all. But it pleases me to record thus briefly the 
 unseared enthusiasm and alertness of the old poet 
 and critic. He talked freely of the great men who 
 had been his friends, speaking of Rossetti as in- 
 comparably the most forceful personaHty of his 
 age, of Morris's eager and noble simplicity, of 
 Swinburne's insatiable appetite for newspaper 
 reading sorting oddly with the amazing range of 
 his knowledge of literature, and of a hundred other 
 things making for pleasant gossip. He was anxious 
 to hear about the new poets, generous in encourage- 
 ment, and fuU of faith in the future of the art that 
 he had loved and served. He made no mention of 
 having written a line of verse himself, nor, save 
 for a casual remark that " many years ago he did 
 a good deal of work for the magazines " and a 
 
 172 
 
THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 
 
 reference to a note in a new edition oiAylwin, any 
 mention of having written at all. Now and again 
 his mind would flash out in some brief critical 
 disquisition, praising Dickens, it might be, or 
 attacking Ibsen. It was curiously soothing to 
 hear this old man who had lived through a genera- 
 tion which if it was distinguished by great friend- 
 ships was also violated by bitter animosities, 
 talking with serene freshness at the end. 
 
 173 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 I 
 
 Posterity, untroubled by the regrets and intimate 
 sorrows of friendship, untouched by the resent- 
 ment with which we cannot but meet what for a 
 moment seems mere brutality of accident, will see 
 in Rupert Brooke's Hfe, achievement, and death, 
 one of those rare perfections that attain greatness 
 by their very symmetry and fortunate grace. It 
 is truly as though the gods would have this man 
 great ; as though, having given him all bright and 
 clear qualities of brain and heart, they were im- 
 patient of any slow moving to the authority for 
 which he was marked, and must, rather in divine 
 caprice than in nature, bring him to untimely and 
 bewildering fulfilment. His brief hfe, with its in- 
 evitable intervals of temperamental unrest, was 
 happy in disposition and in event. It shone with 
 many gifts other than the great gift of poetry. 
 Wit, the cleanest kind of chivalry, inflexible 
 174 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 sincerity, and the dear courtesy that only the 
 sincere man knows, courage and reverence duly 
 met, intellectual ease and great personal charm 
 and beauty — all these made his friendship one of 
 the most treasurable things of his time. But they 
 did not touch his life to greatness. Had these been 
 the whole story, there would have been nothing to 
 mark his hfe from many millions that have gone 
 through the world, eager, beautiful, forgotten. 
 His achievement as a poet, definite, memorable, 
 exhilarating, yet reaches its fullness in a volume 
 of work circumscribed enough if we set it beside 
 that by which any other poet establishes his claim 
 to greatness. Finally his death, noble as it was, 
 was yet but one of lamentable multitudes, marking 
 heroism if you wiU, but not greatness. For it is not 
 lightly that we call men great ; it is only once in a 
 while that we single one from the many who do 
 splendidly and fully all that they might do, and 
 say that he among them all is great. But with this 
 man fortune was to be lavish against all example. 
 Although neither his brilliance in hfe nor his 
 courage in death could place him among the few 
 at whose names the blood of generations thrills, 
 
 175 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 and although his work, sure as it is of durable fame, 
 does not place him with those poets, perhaps a 
 score in the language, who, by the scope and volume 
 of their poetry alone, assert their greatness, yet 
 Rupert Brooke will be a name as surely marked of 
 greatness as any in England. Only once before in 
 our history, I think, has a man passed to so large 
 and just a renown with so unconsidered and slender 
 a warrant. Until April z^id in this year,^ when 
 this greatly loved boy died at the Dardanelles, 
 Philip Sidney had not found his fellow. 
 
 To those of us who see in poetry the perfect 
 flowering of life, the story of Rupert Brooke will 
 always mean chiefly the score or so of poems in 
 which he reached to the full maturity of his genius 
 and gave imperishable expression to the very heart 
 of his personality. Nor will any profound response 
 to his poetry be enhanced by the accident that 
 brought sublimity to his death, either in those who 
 knew and loved him or in these few who from age 
 to age shall build his best renown. Rupert Brooke, 
 as all poets, would wish to stand or fall chiefly by 
 his poetry, and in the ultimate judgment of poetry 
 ^ 1915- 
 176 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 no external circumstance whatever has the weight 
 of a single word. Not even the fact that the man 
 who wrote the sonnets, than which after long 
 generations nothing shall make the year 1914 more 
 memorable, served and died for England at war, 
 can add one beat to their pulse. The poetry that 
 shines and falls across them in one perfect and 
 complete wave is, as poetry must always be, in- 
 dependent of all factual experience, and comes 
 wholly from the deeper experience of the imagina- 
 tion. To say that only under the actual conditions 
 could these sonnets have been written is not to the 
 point. Experience of the conditions is common 
 enough ; the rare thing is the genius of the poet, 
 and we know that this will fulfil itself be the condi- 
 tions what they may. It is well to be clear in this 
 matter. We must not suppose, as has sometimes 
 been loosely suggested, that Brooke, in answering 
 a national call, was stirred to a new and profounder 
 poetic expression. At the time when his poetic 
 power was moving in its fullness, it happened to 
 find itself concerned with a great national crisis. 
 The intensity with which this crisis seized his 
 imagination produced poetry which must endure ; 
 
 M 177 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 also it determined him to take up arms. But the 
 two results were not dependent on each other, and 
 to pretend that they were is a sophism of the kind 
 that he would scornfully have repudiated. Had 
 he for any reason been disqualified for service, the 
 poetry would have come in no less certain measure. 
 It is intensity of perception that creates poetry. 
 
 Rupert Brooke's best poems are secure of the 
 admiration of all who have the wit to praise justly 
 in these things, and it is this renown that he would 
 most have desired. But we must remember that 
 the people who care deeply and with understanding 
 for rare and lovely art are very few ; a few thou- 
 sands, perhaps, out of the many millions of an age. 
 It is only the ineffectual visionary who supposes, 
 that the masses of the people will respond directly 
 to the appeal of excellence in poetry or painting,, 
 or even in the more popular arts, as music and the 
 drama. The evidence in the matter is plain 
 enough ; I do not even know that the fact is 
 lamentable : it is a fact. But there are already, 
 as I believe there always will be, great numbers of 
 people to whom the name of Rupert Brooke means. 
 something, while his poetry, strictly speaking,. 
 
 178 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 means nothing. There are times when such a thing 
 is unhappy. The interest with which people who 
 are incurably lazy in their higher perceptions will 
 regard a poet who is a navvy, or has no arms, or is 
 mentioned by a bishop, is merely nauseating and 
 vulgar. But sometimes a poet becomes celebrated 
 among this wider public in a way that makes for 
 good. The homage that has instinctively been 
 paid for three hundred years to Philip Sidney by 
 people who know not a line of his poetry, and 
 scarcely an event of his life, is wholesome and 
 springs from the better parts of human nature. 
 And so it is with Rupert Brooke. His truest fame 
 will be with those who love his poetry, but the 
 many spirits that will quicken at his name, knowing 
 but vaguely of a brief and fortunate life, a brilliant 
 personality, a poetic genius which they will not be 
 curious to explore, a supreme sacrifice, will quicken 
 worthily and to their own good. Always there will 
 be the false gods of popular favour, the charlatans,, 
 the panders, the crafty and unscrupulous flatterers 
 of mob-sentimentality, who betray their con- 
 sciences daily for a little unsavoury power. The 
 people exalt without understanding them, blindly- 
 
 179 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 praising, as it were, their own baser instincts. 
 But, blindly too perhaps, the people wUl also desire 
 and from time to time discover some external 
 symbol of the nobility that is in them also, patiently 
 keeping the balance of the world. Such a symbol, 
 clear, almost spare, yet magnificently complete, 
 is the radiant, perfectly poised story of Rupert 
 Brooke. 
 
 II 
 
 The development of Rupert Brooke's poetic 
 power was, it seems to me, unlike that of most 
 poets. The early verse of men who afterwards 
 prove their authenticity generally shows a great 
 emotional force with little intellectual power of 
 arrangement, and a weakly imitative craftsman- 
 ship. The emotion will commonly be concerned, 
 partly by personality and partly by acceptance 
 from tradition, with what we may roughly call the 
 more generous normal instincts of mankind, as a 
 delight in the natural world, the lover's worship, 
 hatred of tyranny, the mere high spirits of young 
 and happy hmbs, sorrow for the passing of beauty. 
 Of such things is the material of most fine poetry, 
 
 i8o 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 as it is of nearly all futile versifying, and so it is 
 that early work frequently tells us nothing of 
 its writer's future. We know that the material is 
 there, but there is nothing to show whether or no 
 there will ever be the art to shape it. But in 
 Rupert Brooke's beginnings there is none of this. 
 The volume of Poems published in 1911, which 
 contains work written as early as 1905, when he 
 was eighteen, shows an art curiously personal, 
 skilful, deliberate. It shows, too, an intellectual 
 deftness altogether unexpected in so young a poet, 
 and it shows finally, not always but often, an in- 
 difference to the normal material upon which poets 
 good and bad are apt to work from the outset, and 
 in the shaping of which ultimately comes all poetry 
 that is memorable. Nearly every page is interest- 
 ing on account of its art and intellectual deftness, 
 qualities that we should not expect to be marked. 
 But there are many pages where we do not get the 
 real glow of poetry, and this because the content, 
 it seems to me, often fails to satisfy the demands 
 of poetry. It is true enough to say that it does not 
 matter what subject the poet may contemplate, 
 but there is an implied provision that the subject 
 
 181 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 shall be one that grips his emotions, one, that is to 
 say, that he perceives poetically. It so happens 
 that this capacity in subject-matter for stirring 
 the emotion to poetic intensity is nearly always co- 
 incident with a sympathy with the common ex- 
 perience of the world. A poet may write in praise 
 of his mistress as freshly to-day as if none had 
 written before him, but, although we say that he 
 may choose what theme he will, we could not 
 respond to him if he told us in his song that, while 
 he loved his lady and her beauty and his wooing 
 was in all ways prosperous, the thing that he most 
 desired was never to see her again. We should at 
 once know that the attitude was a piece of cold 
 intellectuality, that it was against poetry in 
 substance. 
 
 In Rupert Brooke's earhest work there is a strain 
 of this intellectual coldness. It is difficult, indeed 
 impossible, to say exactly what was its source. It 
 may partly have been an immature enthusiasm for 
 Donne's poetry, partly a concession to University 
 preciosity, partly a natural instinct that was not 
 yet coloured by humanity and experience. To 
 control sentiment was a determination that never 
 
 182 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 left him, but to control sentiment is not at all the 
 same thing as being afraid of it, and at the begin- 
 ning he was apt to be afraid. And he would often 
 substitute for the natural emotions which most 
 young poets experience and cannot shape, an in- 
 tellectual fancy that he cannot have felt with 
 passion, and shape it with astonishing skill and 
 attractiveness. Poetry cannot prosper on these 
 terms ; it must sit at the world's fire, or perish. 
 The most common note that we find in his first 
 book in illustration of my meaning is the presence 
 at love's moment of the knowledge that women 
 grow old and beauty fades. The reflection is true 
 in fact, but it is not poetically true, and so, in its 
 present shape, it is false. That is to say, we know 
 that, although women do grow old, the lover in the 
 dehght of his mistress does not realise this, and 
 that the assertion that he does is not emotional 
 passion of conviction but intellectual deliberation. 
 Rupert Brooke goes one step further into danger ; 
 not only does he assert that the lover feels some- 
 thing that we know he does not feel, but — ^it is 
 perhaps an equitable penalty for the first false step 
 — he makes the realisation of a fact that we know 
 
 183 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 is not realised in the circumstances, a source of 
 revulsion, when we know that if the lover felt at all 
 about his mistress's old age it would certainly be 
 with peace and surety. It is only a detached intel- 
 lectual attitude towards a thing fully perceptible 
 to passion alone, that can suffer the illusion that 
 the lover's mood is subject to these external facts. 
 To argue that a woman does really grow old and 
 lose her younger beauty, and so may forgo some- 
 thing of her power, is beside the point ; the lover 
 does not hear you, and it is the lover's consciousness 
 alone of which we are speaking. In poetic truth, 
 which is the strictest truth, the woman, living in 
 the young man's mood, is adorable beyond change, 
 and if the young man says, " I worship you, but I 
 know that you wiU grow old and fade, and that 
 then I shall hate you," we know that he is speaking 
 not from his heart but from a nimble brain. 
 
 We find, then, in a great many pages of this first 
 book, an instrument that on so young lips is 
 efficient and enchanting against almost all example, 
 yet playing a tune that does not come wholly from 
 the heart. Never, I think, has technique reached 
 so great a perfection without corresponding 
 
 184 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 authenticity of impulse. Only half a dozen times 
 in the book do we get such phrases as " rife with 
 magic and movement," or " whirling, blinding 
 moil," and even in the poems where most we feel 
 the lack of emotional truth, there is a beauty of 
 words that made the book full of the most exciting 
 promise. Already, too, there was in certain poems 
 assurance against the danger that this intellectual 
 constraint might degenerate into virtuosity. In 
 the song beginning : 
 
 " Oh ! Love ! " they said, " is King of kings," 
 
 the intellectual mood, even in the love traffic in 
 which it has been most shy, is adjusting itself finely 
 to the clear and common impulses of mankind, 
 while in Dust, The Fish, The Hill, The Jolly Com- 
 pany, Ambarvalia, Dining-Room Tea, and the 
 lovely opening sonnet : 
 
 Oh ! Death will find me, long before I tire 
 Of watching you 
 
 there is a movement, a perfect visualisation of 
 image and a clarity of individual thought, that 
 mark him as being of the great tradition, and 
 
 185 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 endowed with the spontaneity that fellowship in 
 that tradition implies. 
 
 In the volume published after his death, Rupert 
 Brooke seems to me to have passed into full and 
 rich communion with the great normal life of the 
 world. There are three poems : All suddenly the 
 Wind comes soft, The way that Lovers use is this, 
 and Mary and Gabriel, that are just a little formal 
 perhaps, by no means valueless, but touched with 
 some literary memory at a moment when the 
 poetic faculty was not as alert as usual. There are 
 two poems : There's Wisdom in Women, and Love, 
 where the old detached and ironic mood that was 
 once unreal returns not quite happily, and another, 
 The Chilterns, in which it has been transmuted 
 into a gracious and acceptable humour. Also there 
 is a sonnet, Unfortunate, in which, there is a remin- 
 iscence of the old mood, but it is now treated very 
 reverently and with superb psychological insight. 
 For the rest we have thrilling and adventurous 
 beauty from beginning to end. There is no more 
 tender landscape in English poetry than Grant- 
 chester, suffused as it is with a mood that never 
 changes and yet passes between the wittiest 
 
 i86 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 laughter and the profoundest emotion with perfect 
 naturahiess. The subject-matter throughout the 
 book no longer forces us to dissent or question. It 
 has become wholly merged in the corporate art, 
 and we accept it unhesitatingly as we accept the 
 content of all splendid work. As in aU really fine 
 achievement in poetry, there is in his choice of 
 form a glad acceptance and development of the 
 traditions that have been slowly evolved through 
 generations, and a perfect subjection of those forms 
 to his own personality, until a sonnet becomes as 
 definitely his own as if he had invented the external 
 structure. . We find, too, that the early constraint, 
 even though it led to a touch of falsity at the time, 
 has not been without its uses. Th6 common 
 emotions of the world he has, after jealous waiting, 
 truly discovered and won for himself, unstaled of 
 the world's usage. His passion is extraordinarily 
 clean, burning among all simple things, clear, un- 
 troubled, ecstatic. Except in the two or three 
 pages of which I have spoken, we find everywhere 
 an almost fierce renunciation of anything that 
 would not stir the plain knitters in the sun, with 
 an unwearying determination to translate all this 
 
 187 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 common simple life into the most exact and stir- 
 ring beauty. It is true that in one or two cases, 
 notably Heaven, the image that he creates of this 
 simplicity of passion is such as not to relate itself 
 easily at first glance to the clear normal thought 
 that is nevertheless its basis if for a moment we 
 consider its significance. When the poet elects to 
 make brief intellectual holiday, so long as he does 
 so in the terms of his own personality, we should 
 do nothing but make holiday gladly with him. 
 And we may well do so at intervals in a book that 
 moves in the high consciousness of rare but natural 
 poetic achievement, alert with the freshness and 
 daring of splendid youth, grave in that profoundest 
 knowledge which is imagination ; a book that will 
 surely pass to vigorous immortality. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The first time I saw Rupert Brooke was in the 
 summer of 1912, a few months after his first 
 volume had been published. The editor of Georgian 
 Poetry, whose friendship with the poet will itself 
 make a page in literary history, and who is to write 
 
 188 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 the story of his friend's life, had invited some of 
 us to hear about his proposed anthology. There 
 were then but a few moments in which Brooke and 
 I could talk together, and all that I can remember 
 is an impression of an extraordinarily alert intel- 
 ligence, finely equipped with both wit and pene- 
 trative power, and resolutely declining to use 
 either for any superficial effect. I suppose no one 
 of his years can ever have had in greater measure 
 the gifts that can be used to make easily swayed 
 admiration gape, or greater temptations so to 
 employ his quahties : and I am sure that no man 
 has ever been more wholly indifferent to any such 
 conquests. Humour he had in abundance, but of 
 witty insincerity no trace. Never was a personality 
 more finely balanced. Ic is this that I remember 
 of him at that first meeting, this that I — and all 
 his friends — found governing him and bracing his 
 genius till the end. It has been said that he had a 
 strain of self -consciousness about his personal 
 charm and brilliance, that he was a little afraid 
 lest that side of him should claim too much atten- 
 tion. To answer the suggestion would be an im- 
 pertinence. He was properly glad of his qualities ; 
 
 189 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 also, he was properly careless of them. The notion 
 that any such matter ever occupied his mind for a 
 moment can be nothing but ludicrous to those who 
 knew him. 
 
 After 1912 I saw him several times in London 
 and in Birmingham. I find a letter shortly after 
 I had first met him, sending me his book, another 
 in November speaking of it and some work of my 
 own, and " feehng much excited " about the new 
 repertory work in Birmingham. Nothing more 
 till March, 1913, when he writes twice, arranging 
 to come for the night, and asking for precise direc- 
 tions as to where he shall sit and how be dressed in 
 the theatre. We stayed up most of the night talk- 
 ing. In May he sends me a play, and says he is 
 just off to America for some months. Then, in the 
 summer of 1914, he was back again, and we met in 
 London after a vehement letter bidding me to a 
 festivity in any clothes, which is to be immense 
 fun, and if I haven't a bed he can find me a couch. 
 Also he means to stay with us again in Birmingham 
 next week, but he will have been to the dentist and 
 will not be fit company for human beii^s. But he 
 came, and I remember we exhausted the complete 
 
 190 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 theory of drama in a tea-shop, went to a promenade 
 concert afterwards, and again talked till morning. 
 Also he arranged to take Lascelles Abercrombie, 
 Wilfrid Gibson, and myself in a motor-car to some 
 quiet place where we could discuss New Numbers^ 
 which was now being published. A few days later 
 the project is written off as " I can't get the car 
 that week. My mother demands it on some ne- 
 farious political business. We must work out 
 something for later." The letter ends with a 
 charming message to my wife, who has been, he 
 sees, " infinitely victorious " in some tennis under- 
 taking. 
 
 The something for later was never worked out. 
 In the last week of July we lunched twice together 
 in a Soho restaurant. War was threatening. If 
 it broke, he must go ; I think it was said in so 
 many words ; it certainly was clear. He was still 
 eager about his new fellowship work at Cambridge, 
 but, as one feels now, there was already in the 
 eagerness the note of foreboding, calm indeed and 
 wholly contented, that seemed to touch all his 
 words thereafter till the end. I heard of him from 
 time to time, then came a long and graphic letter 
 
 191 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 after the fall of Antwerp, at which he was present 
 with the Royal Naval Division. " There was some 
 affair at Antwerp, I remember ... a burning 
 city, the din of cannonades, a shattered railway- 
 station, my sailors bivouacking in the gardens of 
 a deserted chateau, refugees coming out of the 
 darkness. . . ." Then, " not a bad time and place 
 to die, Belgium, 1915." We met once again. He 
 was on sick leave, and I saw him for an hour in 
 London. He tcdked of his new sonnets, just 
 written, of Antwerp, of the boredom of training, 
 the great fellowship that comes in fighting. He 
 expected to be in England for some weeks, and it 
 was arranged that I should spend a day or two 
 with him at Blandford. But he went to the 
 Dardanelles almost at once. On April 23rd I was 
 in London. The news that came on that day was 
 the most terrible that I have yet known. 
 
 192 
 
RUPERT BROOKE ON 
 JOHN WEBSTER 
 
 With the publication of this book^ we now have 
 the complete work by which Rupert Brooke's 
 place in letters will be decided : the two voliunes 
 of poems, the letters from America, and this essay 
 in literary criticism. Mr. Marsh's memoir, when 
 it is pubUshed, will give the world a closer know- 
 ledge of the poet's personal habit and character, 
 and add an intimate emphasis to the qualities that 
 stand out clearly from his writings. But from the 
 work now pubUshed a full view of his achievement 
 can be taken. Of the poetry much has been 
 written, and, on the whole, a fairly just estimate 
 has been formed. It is a permanent and exciting 
 addition, slender and uneven as it is, to the thing 
 that of all things England has done best. No 
 man could ask anything better of fate than to be 
 
 ' John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama. By Rupert 
 Brooke. (Sidgwick and Jackson.) 
 
 N 193 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 remembered as an English poet. Brooke's letters 
 showed us an alert and companionable young man, 
 tremendously interested in everything that came 
 in his way, with just as much " manner " as is 
 healthy at twenty-five, and stamped already with 
 rare intellectual grip and honesty. Now he estab- 
 lishes himself as a literary critic, assessing a large 
 and difficult subject with skill and a poet's under- 
 standing. 
 
 This book was the dissertation for which Brooke 
 was awarded his Fellowship at Cambridge. The 
 first chapter is concerned with a general aesthetic, 
 and, while there are many striking and witty 
 comments, we do not get very far beyond the feel- 
 ing of a healthy impatience in Brooke with the 
 generalisations that grow so abundantly in this 
 field of inquiry. Then follows an historical precis 
 of the growth of English drama in general and of 
 Elizabethan drama in particular. This is excel- 
 lently done, and, without pretending in any way 
 to be pioneer work, it deals very clear-sightedly 
 with one or two confusions of thought that have 
 been a snare to writers on the subject ; as, for 
 example, the neglect of dancing and minstrelsy 
 
 194 
 
RUPERT BROOKE ON JOHN WEBSTER 
 
 as sources of the drama, and the indifference to 
 the necessity of training an audience, no less than 
 the actors, as " one of the conditions of great 
 drama." The ensuing analysis of Webster's 
 genius seems to us to display what, in a world of 
 imperfections, may be said to be a perfect under- 
 standing of the subject. There are details both 
 here and in the preliminary chapters upon which 
 disagreement with Brooke could make out a very 
 good case for itself. He quotes the second line of 
 Brachiano's 
 
 On pain of death, let no man name death to me : 
 It is a word infinitely terrible 
 
 as being " tremendously moving " while many 
 people would say that it weakens the superb force 
 of the first line, and that it was set down by 
 Webster for the admissible reason that it would 
 make the significance sUghtly easier to an audience. 
 Again, his assertion that Webster's language 
 " was greater than speech, but it was in that kind ; 
 it was not literature " is but an indulgence in a 
 heresy and confusion. Nor is he very happy in 
 finding lack of concentration to be one of the 
 characteristics of the mystery and miracle plays. 
 
 195 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 We should say that one of the chief difificulties 
 presented by them to an audience is over-concen- 
 tration — a lack of detail in proving the develop- 
 ment of the drama. But these differences are few 
 and inevitable. The essay throughout, both in its 
 reference to Webster's art and its consideration of 
 the general principles of drama, is full of subtle 
 perception. The Elizabethan habit of summing 
 up the particular case in the first line of a conclud- 
 ing couplet and of presenting its general applica- 
 tion in the second, the folly of the views of an 
 " industrial age " about plagiarism, the enormous 
 merit of the " domestic tragedies " — ^point after 
 point is made with admirable conviction. Webster, 
 for all his strange gloom of spirit that was almost 
 a malady, a thing almost unnatural and against 
 poetry in itself, was yet among our very greatest 
 poets, and this book is an honour to the poet who 
 wrote it and to the poet in celebration of whom 
 it was written. 
 
 But the chief charm, perhaps the chief value of 
 the book lies not in its direct contribution to 
 criticism, notable as that is, but in its pervading 
 temper, so strikingly characteristic of Brooke 
 
 196 
 
RUPERT BROOKE ON JOHN WEBSTER 
 
 himself and of the movement in which he was so 
 memorable a figure. The new poetry, whatever 
 its faults, has the great virtue of turning again to 
 the sharply defined and simple experiences and 
 events of normal hfe. It has freed itself of what 
 Watts-Dunton, in one of his flashes of insight, 
 called " knowingness." It is a denial, not in arro- 
 gance or without respect for the thing denied, but 
 quite emphatic, of the kind of poetry that seemed 
 to say that twilight was the only time of day in 
 which vision could be clear, that confused in- 
 nuendo with reticence, and was rather consciously 
 concerned with langours and the perfumes of the 
 boudoir. This elegant detachment produced 
 many lovely poems, and though its charm was 
 always faint, it is in no danger of extinction. But 
 a reaction of vigour and open windows was bound, 
 to come, and Brooke was as fine and convinced a 
 spirit as was to be found in its ranks. He was one 
 of the new writers who see, without any sacrifice 
 of intellectual force or subtlety, the eternal distinc- 
 tion between yea and nay. He was not afraid of 
 calUng a thing good or bad, recognising that to sit 
 on the fence, whatever philosophical justificatioa 
 197 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 it may have, is not to do much towards helping the 
 "world go round, and is certainly to be dissociated 
 from all great poetry. And his book on Webster 
 is full of this robust and positive health. He revels 
 in the story of Elizabethan art just as the Eliza- 
 bethans themselves revelled in the making of it. 
 It is all eager, forthright, and it moves with a finely 
 careless haste, knowing that its general bearing is 
 noble enough to be able to leave the smaller graces 
 to look after themselves. 
 
 1 98 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 The function of the artist being, whatever he may 
 practice, to cast into clearly defined form that 
 which in life and nature is formless, to refine and 
 distinguish that which in the common run of 
 experience is diffuse and vague, the first thing 
 which he has to decide for himself is the selection 
 of an image through which he may project his 
 disciplined perception. And let it be said at once 
 that in all art of urgent imagination, this decision 
 is not at all an inevitable one, but one of carefully 
 weighed and sometimes almost arbitrary deliber- 
 ation. For the governing impulse that is at 'the 
 back of the artist's mind, urging him to creation, 
 is not truly the perception of some particular 'fact 
 about a particular thing or person, but a conviction 
 as to some more or less generalised phenomena 
 stirred to activity in his brain by his cumulative 
 experience of many men and things. It would be 
 199 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 idle to suppose that Shakespeare suddenly came 
 across the prototypes of Macbeth and Lady Mac- 
 beth and then had no more to do to express their 
 tragedy than to invent a suitable succession of 
 events. What happened was that Shakespeare, 
 from long contact with life, became acutely aware 
 of a certain strain of tragic beauty in the daily 
 experience of the world, and to give shape to his 
 perception had to find an image through which to 
 work. And the image that he chose was not the 
 story of Macbeth but the characters of Macbeth 
 and Lady Macbeth which he then set in an adequate 
 action. So that we may say not that Shakespeare 
 in Macbeth chose to speak of two particular human 
 characters, but that to shape his vision of profound 
 elemental agencies and emotions he selected 
 human character as the image for his purpose. It 
 is necessary perhaps to lay particular emphasis 
 upon the distinction between this use of the word 
 character as covering all fundamental human 
 passion, emotion and impulse, and that use of 
 the word which is made when we talk of the 
 comedy of character, which commonly refers to 
 
 200 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 idiosyncracy and to the particularisation of fashion 
 or manners. The word character as we are now 
 using it has much in common with the word idea — • 
 we are talking of the drama of character or idea. 
 The same considerations hold, as examination 
 would show, if it were to our present point, in all 
 the arts, but we need do no more, before proceeding 
 to a more detailed analysis of the image in drama, 
 than to look briefly at the subject in the light of 
 other forms of the literary art. In lyric poetry, 
 the poet, again pledged to select from and define 
 his general experience, commonly does so in a 
 direct and personal statement, but it wiU be found 
 that in lyric poetry of any imaginative power, this 
 statement is not really in celebration of a parti- 
 cular event or experience, but that a particular 
 event or experience is recorded by the poet merely 
 as an appropriate and forceful way of giving body 
 to some profound generalisation of his mind slowly 
 built out of his life. If it is not so, then his verse 
 is but that of occasion, and gives him but minor 
 rank. In short, the event or experience which he 
 sings is not truly the purpose of his song, but the 
 
 201 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 image through v/hich that purpose may be fulfilled. 
 The image itself may here sometimes be so slight 
 as to be almost intangible : 
 
 waly, waly, up the bank, 
 
 And waly, waly, down the brae. 
 And waly, waly, yon burn-side. 
 Where I and my love wont to gae ! 
 
 1 lean'd my back unto an aik, 
 
 I thocht it was a trustie tree ; 
 But first it bow'd and syne it brak- — 
 Sae my true love did lichtlie me, 
 
 or, again, it may be so particularised as almost to 
 seem to claina chief importance for itself : 
 
 Now Arthur's seat sail be my bed. 
 
 The sheets shall ne'er be 'filed by me ; 
 
 Saint Anton's well sail be my drink ; 
 
 Since my true love has forsaken me . . 
 
 but in either case, if we truly respond to the poet 
 we feel the profound and universal emotion which 
 lies behind his particular statement. Arthur's 
 seat and Saint Anton's well, and the lamenting by 
 bum-side and up and down the bank and brae — 
 these are not the inspiration of poetry, but the 
 means that poetry selects to shape itself. The 
 nature of the image chosen does not affect the 
 
 202 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 quality of the artist's work. The remote and 
 strange image of Kubla Khan or La Belle Dame 
 Sans Merci conveys poetry to us as superbly as 
 the intimate and direct image of The Solitary 
 Reaper or Sir Patrick Spens. But the choice 
 certainly has a considerable influence upon the 
 scope of the artist's appeal. The more familiar his 
 image the wider will be his audience. And the 
 image nearest and most familiar to man is his 
 fellow-man, and the artist, when he chooses human 
 beings for his purpose, chooses the image which of 
 all makes for the widest popularity. Assuming 
 that he is truly an artist, that he is sincerely a 
 creator, it will be, as I have already suggested, the 
 character of his created people that he considers 
 as his image, but to give that character play he 
 will commonly invent an action, and thereby con- 
 struct a story. And so we find that of aU branches 
 of the literary art the narrative, with human beings 
 at its centre, is the most popular. I would say 
 once again that this popularity is in itself no indica- 
 tion of quality either good or bad. Supreme art 
 may be very widely popular or known to a small 
 body of people who add but ;l dozen or so to their 
 
 203 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 number in a generation. That twenty people know 
 Macbeth for one who knows Samson Agonistes tells 
 us nothing of the relative merits of those works. 
 We shall see presently how spurious narrative art 
 has obtained an enormous hold upon the people, 
 but for the moment we are concerned only with 
 the most general form of true narrative art, that is 
 to say, narrative built about human character. 
 
 This kind of Uterary art, because of the increased 
 immediacy and scope of its appeal, from time to 
 time attracts a conscientious literary artist, and a 
 good, or perhaps a great, novel or narrative poem 
 is written. Chaucer, Fielding, Emily Bronte, 
 Jane Austen, Morris, Meredith, Hardy — -these 
 writers, I believe, choose the narrative consciously 
 because it seems to them to promise the widest 
 audience, and they use it without impairing their 
 creative integrity. I do not believe that the choice 
 is governed by any fundamental necessity, or that 
 it enables a man to say something essentially 
 impossible to any method other thcin the narrative. 
 I do not, for example, feel that Morris captures 
 any fundamental emotion in his form that is 
 impossible to Blake in his, or that Meredith is able 
 
 204 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 to explore experience that is closed to Montaigne. 
 But choosing the narrative form, it is possible for 
 the artist to choose both ■yirisely in his generation 
 and honourably at once. And from this simple 
 spoken and descriptive narrative to drama is but 
 a step. The artist employing narrative in its 
 simple form reaches his public through the ear ; 
 his work is primarily intended to be spoken aloud, 
 and we may reasonably admit that when we are 
 reading we are essentially receiving by the ear and 
 not by the eye. He conceives a character, and 
 then to show us the character in being and develop- 
 ment he tells us that his imagined personage does 
 such and such things, which action is realised to 
 us by the ear only. Dehghted with the popularity 
 which his selection of humanity as his image has 
 brought him, the artist may now consider how he 
 may yet further widen his appeal without betray- 
 ing his creative instinct. And he will ask whether 
 people will not more readily attend to and under- 
 stand him if he enables them to use two senses 
 instead of one in receiving what he may have 
 to communicate. He will say, quite logically — 
 his reasoning, as always with the artist, is 
 
 203 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 subconscious — at present my public hears what 
 my characters say, from the characters themselves, 
 and they hear what my characters do, from me ; 
 would it not be a directer and more forceful way 
 to let them hear what they say and see what they 
 do ? And he concludes that it would be so, and 
 there is the beginning of dramatic art in the artist's 
 mind. Out of this beginning arises the necessity 
 for people to show this action in progress, and the 
 actor's work begins ; then a place in which the 
 action may be shown is needed, and a stage is 
 built, and thence we have the whole complicated 
 business of the theatre. In detail we shall find 
 that these new conditions modify or elaborate the 
 nature of narrative art, but in essential significance 
 there is no change. There is a new channel of 
 appeal, a new manner of craftsmanship, but funda- 
 mentally the art of drama is the art of simple narra- 
 tive with the addition of stage action. The 
 spiritual intention and effect of the art of Homer 
 are in kind the same as the spiritual intention 
 and effect of the art of Shakespeare. 
 
 I suggest, then, that in principle the practical 
 origin of drama is the instinct of the artist for 
 
 206 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 widening his audience, and I believe that this is so 
 in actual experience. No man writes plays without 
 the hope, however regularly it may be unrealised, 
 that they will be acted and so reach that wider 
 public that likes to exercise its mind through the 
 use of two senses rather than one. I do not mean 
 that a play can have no existence apart from the 
 stage ; it can, and a very vigorous one. But the 
 writer chooses the dramatic form, I believe, with 
 all its difficulties and necessities for compromise, 
 quite definitely with the response of a theatre 
 audience in his mind, 'and it is for this, and not 
 because of any inherent virtue which he finds in 
 this form and in no other, that his choice is made. 
 The lyrist, the story-teller, the epic poet even, may 
 affect or be truly possessed by an indifference to 
 an audience, but the dramatist is the one literary 
 artist who impHcitly accepts the condition, in 
 choosing his form, that the pubHc is his object. 
 He may fulfil this condition triumphantly and with 
 perfect spiritual candour, as the great dramatists 
 have done, but it is in this condition that the whole 
 danger of the theatre lies, as we shall see. One 
 casual consideration may be disposed of here. It 
 
 207 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 is often said — generally by professors in the school 
 of what is ironically called the well-made play — 
 that of all arts the drama is the most difficult. 
 Without supporting the fantastic notion that it is 
 an easier form than the novel because it is a shorter 
 form, I do not believe that it is a greater feat of 
 the im^ination to create a great drama than it is 
 to create a great epic, or even, on the grounds of 
 pure creative quality, a great ballad or a great 
 lyric. What is meant, I think, is that when a play 
 is written, and well-written, the mechanical diffi- 
 culties between the manuscript and a perfect 
 performance are so enormious, the inevitable 
 accidents so many, that the rounded excellence 
 that is comparatively often achieved in the lyric 
 or the ballad or the simple narrative is so hardly 
 achieved in a stage performance as to seem to be 
 almost unattainable, and thus we get an illusion 
 of difficulty, which is really accidental and un- 
 related to the essential nature of dramatic art. 
 *w We may now summarise the distinguishing 
 nature of drama and its evolution thus. The 
 artist to express his emotion needs an image ; look- 
 ing for one that by its universal relationship shall 
 
 208 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 bring him a wide hearing, he chooses human 
 character. To display this character he invents an 
 action, and we have the art of narrative. He 
 elaborates or varies his method by appealing not 
 to the ear only of his public but to the ear and eye 
 at once, a place is constructed where this new 
 appeal may be made, and actors are found to make 
 the appeal, and we have the art of the drama and 
 of the theatre. These, simply, would seem to be 
 the conditions of all worthy drama that employs 
 words, conditions with which all worthy drama in 
 the world's literature will be found strictly to 
 comply. And I must now emphasise a point which 
 I have already mentioned more than once, since it 
 is the danger-point which threatens all theatrical 
 ventures and involves many of them in disaster. 
 I have been careful to insist that the image chosen 
 by the truly imaginative artist is human character 
 and that the subsequently invented action is con- 
 structed solely as arising out of the natural demands 
 of that character and for the purpose of showing 
 us that character in operation, and never for its 
 own unrelated excitement. /So long as this condi- 
 tion is faithfully observed, pe dramatist is justified 
 
 o 20jt 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 in bringing to his play as much and as exciting 
 action as he can contrive. While an audience 
 whose judgment was not degraded would not 
 complain that The Medea was undramatic because 
 it has but little external action, it equally would 
 not resent Arms and The Man because it is loaded 
 with it. The dramatist must be free to use as 
 much or as little event as he finds suitable to his 
 intention, but he cannot use event unrelated to 
 character without betraying his honour as an 
 artist. And it is this abuse of event in drama 
 which has vulgarised our EngUsh theatre until 
 imaginative and passionate and beautiful work, 
 wrought out of ecstasy and burning with experi- 
 ence, has been very nearly expelled from it alto- 
 gether. Let us for a moment consider what this 
 action is. 
 
 If we take a single normal day in the life of any 
 average being among us, we find that it consists of 
 a series of more or less calculable events, or rather 
 of certain events which belong for the most part 
 to the group of happenings of which experience is 
 common and which we may therefore call calcul- 
 able, dealt with by that being in the terms of his 
 
 210 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 own individual character. He will, for example, 
 have to go about the earning of his daily bread, 
 he will have to meet and arrange his behaviour 
 towards his family and his friends, he will have to 
 settle with intimates or acquaintances with whom 
 he finds himself in disagreement, he will have to 
 decide how to support the public influences that 
 he conceives to be for good, how to oppose those 
 that he conceives to be for evil, he will have to 
 steel himself against any of the natural losses that 
 may come to him, he will find himself confronted 
 with the beauty and terror of the world and have 
 to come to some reckoning in his soul about them. 
 And when we have seen for a sufficient length of 
 time how he conducts himself in these various and 
 varying but universal relationships, we shall know 
 something — as our insight is keen or weak — of the 
 Jkind of man he_is, of his character. And the 
 dramatist by taking any event or series of events 
 of this kind has a medium through which to show 
 his created persons, fitted to universal experience 
 and understanding, and directly related at all 
 points to that character which is its source and 
 governance in the daily life of the world. For the 
 
 211 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 purposes of his art the artist will select from and 
 heighten these events. He will no more attempt 
 to show us the chaotic and complete action of life 
 than he will attempt to show us the manifold 
 operations of a single character. His business is 
 not to be exhaustive but to be significant. Per- 
 ceiving some significant aspect of human character, 
 he selects out of the stock of common action an 
 event or events that will serve to give such aspect 
 the opportunity of bringing its significance into 
 tangible shape. It is apparently, from the way in 
 which people talk of the matter, easy to fail to 
 understand how rigorous this selection always is 
 in art. There has, in recent years especially, been 
 a great deal said about the realistic drama, and 
 we are often asked to suppose that what the real- 
 istic dramatist gives us is an exact reproduction 
 of the ordinary conduct of daily life. This is noth- 
 ing but unintelligent nonsense. In this sense, 
 Mr. Galsworthy's Silver Box is no more realistic 
 than Macbeth, nor, indeed, in any sense. The 
 scenes in the Barthwicks' dining-room are the 
 carefully selected, concentrated and heightened 
 essence of Mr. Galsworthy's knowledge of life, and 
 
 212 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 could no more take place in the haphazard of an 
 actual dining-room than a Scotch king would 
 actually carry on a conversation with his wife at 
 the supper-table in blank verse. If you used a 
 gramophone and recorded the conversation that 
 passed in two highly critical hours in the hves of 
 three or four people of whom you knew nothing 
 you would find a great deal that was unintelligible, 
 being without its context, a great deal that was 
 whoUy irrelevant to the central issue, a great deal 
 of tiresome repetition, a great deal that was in- 
 articulate, all obscuring, if not wholly effacing, 
 the poignant significance at the heart of the matter, 
 and, strictly speaking, it is quite illogical to attempt 
 to put on the stage a photographic reproduction 
 of a room or any other scene as the setting for 
 what, even in the most naturalistic play, is but a 
 conventionahsed action. It is the dramatist's 
 business, in the expression of his imaginative vision, 
 to shape this chaos into orderly inteUigibiUty, to 
 give us the context, to strike out the irrelevancies 
 and the reiteration, to say clearly what has been 
 said vaguely, to give proportion where there was 
 none. 
 
 213 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 We find the dramatist, then, occupied with an 
 aspect of character, going to those normal events 
 which spring from character for the machinery of 
 his drama. But there is another kind of event in 
 life, the event that does not spring from character, 
 or at least does not do so in any way that our 
 human senses can perceive, but is the outcome of 
 accident or unaccountable and negligible eccen- 
 tricity. An entirely healthy mind has no concern 
 with events of this nature : it spends on them at 
 most but a moment's curiosity. No one with a 
 really healthy and balanced mind, watching, say, 
 a field of haymakers with a river and wooded hiUs 
 behind, and the sunny clouds of an August day, 
 would trouble to do more than momentarily turn 
 his eyes to see a man on the other side of the hedge 
 standing on his head. And yet, strangely, a man 
 standing on his head can be infallibly certain of 
 drawing a laxge crowd, and the reason is that we 
 have not, generally speaking, anything like healthy 
 and balanced minds. To support themselves in 
 the monstrous system that has seized upon civili- 
 sation, the great majority of men and women have 
 been forced into a way of life that is damned 
 
 214 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 by a devouring lethargy, which by some strange 
 perversion is called busyness, and in this state all 
 the vital, homely, beautiful events lose their force 
 and delight, and are degraded from what should be 
 hourly significance to sullenly accepted incidents 
 of the daily struggle. And in their place are 
 worshipped the abnormal, the bizarre, the cata- 
 clysmic events which wiU startle jaded suscepti- 
 biHties into a moment's refreshing activity. A 
 house on fire, a brutal frenzy, a monstrous birth, 
 a sky raining potatoes, a street accident, a man 
 weighing five stone more than. he decently ought 
 to, a man who paints bad pictures with his toes, 
 a mirage, snow in July, a leper, a war — these are 
 the things that are infallibly sure of exciting con- 
 sciousness in a people for whom the sweet and 
 reasonable and common things of the world have 
 grown stale. And out of this miserable condition 
 of life has grown a like condition in the theatre, 
 and one of the great arts of the world has fallen 
 into a disease of which the hideous evidence is on 
 every side of us. Astute business men have 
 observed this condition of our society, and have 
 realised that the demands which it makes can be 
 
 215 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 very readily satisfied in the theatre. And so has 
 come into being a new kind of play, in which 
 character giving rise to action no longer has any 
 place, but in which sensational and abnormal 
 event is of paramount interest. It is a kind of play 
 invented expressly for minds that need an excite- 
 ment which they can no longer find in nature, that 
 supreme source of excitement when there is sanity 
 to perceive ; for tired minds, for sick minds, for 
 restless and frightened minds, but not for minds 
 that are quiet, vigorous, and eagerly in touch with 
 the simple and normal life that is so marvellously 
 beautiful. Along with this travesty of action in 
 the theatre is a relative travesty of character. 
 The abnormal, the fantastic, the character that is 
 in fact merely an eccentricity — these are the sure- 
 ties of success, and we have our popular dramatists 
 confessedly depending for motive not upon any 
 profound vision of life quickened through many 
 years of patient and deUghted experience, but 
 waiting upon the discovery of some striking situa- 
 tion altogether unrelated to significant life, or of 
 some idiosyncracy that shall masquerade as 
 character instead of being known as the negligible 
 
 216 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 accident of character. These are the dramatists 
 of occasion, and there is no health in them, but 
 they have infected the theatre, encouraged or com- 
 manded by the managers of the theatre, and over- 
 run it with apparently irresistible power. Play 
 after play is produced in London which is modelled 
 exactly to this type. Even if a masterpiece is 
 acted, on the strength of a name as potent as 
 Shakespeare's, it is insolently mauled and hewn 
 precisely in order that this same feverish demand 
 may be satisfied, for when Shakespeare's plays are 
 acted not as the greatest dramatist in the world's 
 history wrote them but as some impertinent pro- 
 ducer chooses to rearrange them, it is monstrous 
 to think that the change aims at any heightening 
 of the real dramatic intensity. What it aims at is 
 to throw out the exciting action of the play into 
 undisputed possession of the stage, with the most 
 shameless sacrifice of the character and imaginative 
 passion out of which that action grew in the poet's 
 brain. And from being a device exploited by 
 acute business men for the sake of their purses and 
 an evanescent popularity, this kind of thing has 
 become almost the sole concern of the theatre, and 
 
 217 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 in London, the greatest city of the world, with I 
 know not how many theatres, you may search 
 from end to end of the town and from month to 
 month, and except at an odd half-private per- 
 formance or two given under crippling difficulties, 
 you will not find any passionate or beautiful work 
 whatever. Here in England we have the finest 
 dramatic literature that any nation has ever pro- 
 duced, and it is neglected in a way which is an un- 
 speakable disgrace. You may mention GranviUe 
 Barker's Shakespeare revivals, one or two pro- 
 ductions at the Frohman Repertory Season, 
 The Dynasts at the Kingsway, and I will say that 
 you cannot add six other productions, in the 
 regular course of London theatre management 
 during the last six years, of plays that, as they 
 were produced, have any permanent importance 
 whatever. I say as they were produced, because 
 that rules out practically every Shakespearean 
 revival in the ordinary London theatres other than 
 Mr. Barker's. I do not necessarily say that these 
 lifeless performances, compounded of a cynicism 
 and a sentimentality equally preposterous, should 
 be forbidden the theatre entirely. It may be an 
 
 218 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 impossible idealism that asks for a society so con- 
 stituted that there shall be no jaded brains to 
 which this excitement is the only rehef ; such 
 productions may persist as necessarily as the drug- 
 shops to which Synge likened them. In their place 
 they might be a tolerable nuisance, but the trouble 
 is that they have poisoned our theatres through 
 and through, giving beautiful drama no air that it 
 can breathe, and we have the disgusting spectacle 
 of one theatre manager after another talking of 
 the honourable traditions of the stage while they 
 are battening upon the disease with which they 
 are helping to infest the stage. And sincere 
 dramatic art finds no home among us save at stray 
 performances of a Sunday night club, or when a 
 splendid adventurer like Mr. Poel can bring 
 together the means once in five years to exercise 
 his genius and be called a fanatic for his pains, 
 here and there in enterprise hke Sir Frank Benson's 
 company at its prime, or in one or two small 
 provincial theatres, where, as some day will be 
 discovered, dramatic history is being made which 
 is of incomparably more importance than the 
 219 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 exploits that engage fashionable attention round 
 about Charing Cross. 
 
 Out of its sure knowledge of the needs of a 
 lethargic public imagination, this trade of the 
 theatre has achieved a prosperity in which it is 
 apparently invulnerable. Great capital interests 
 have secured the support of a docile Press, and we 
 have a stupefying condition of things in which the 
 terms " literary drama " has been invented as a 
 term of reproach — as though any verbal drama 
 which was not fine literature also ever has been or 
 could be worth twopence. I would not be unjust 
 about the Press. There are in London two or 
 three critics, and two or three more in the pro- 
 vinces who use a fine intelligence without fear or 
 favour, nor would I be thought to believe that 
 with the more responsible papers good opinion is 
 to be bought. But I do say that the capital power 
 of the commercialised theatre in England to-day 
 is so great that it has been able to impose its 
 standard on nearly all the people who are habitually 
 in contact with its merchandise, and most of the 
 critics among them, so that one piece of catch- 
 penny insincerity after another is extolled by 
 
 220 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 what passes for expert opinion as a valuable con- 
 tribution to the great art of the dramatist, while 
 a piece of work like Mr. Gordon Bottomley's King 
 Lear's Wife, which, whatever may be questioned 
 in it by the highest standards, is for vigour of 
 imagination, poetic eagerness cind dramatic passion 
 not to be excelled by anything that has been put 
 on to the Enghsh stage since the Elizabethans, is 
 met with a clamour of ignorance that almost 
 charges the poet with some sinister personal 
 offence, and there is scarcely a theatre critic — the 
 play has been produced twice, and I can remember 
 only one honourable exception — ^who has either 
 the wit to imderstand it or the courage to say that 
 he cannot understand it, while in most cases we 
 find no standard whatever being brought to the 
 judgment of an original work of art other than a 
 spurious morality. 
 
 Against the return of the theatre to passionate 
 life, then, we have arrayed the condition of our 
 civilisation, a strongly organised and capitalised 
 industry, which is served by highly skilled em- 
 ployees, and bewildered or incapable public guides. 
 The odds are very heavy, and? after some experi- 
 
 221 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 ence of work in the theatre, I believe them to be, 
 from the vaguer visionary's point of view, over- 
 whelmingly heavy. In any widespread reform of 
 the theatre, reaching all this thriving commerce 
 of which we have been speaking, I have little or no 
 faith. Neither this generation nor the next will 
 see the overthrow of a system which is as flourish- 
 ing as the turf or the business of stocks and shares. 
 To look for a regeneration that shall transform 
 all this expert, prosperous profiteering into the 
 generous and passionate service of art, is but to 
 indulge a pleasant idleness. The only thing to do, 
 if we care about fine drama, and are, nevertheless, 
 determined not to be forbidden the theatre, is to 
 leave this other great organisation happily to its 
 own devices, and do what we can independently 
 of it to satisfy our own needs. If good example 
 should at length affect the whole theatrical body, 
 so much the better, but in the meantime let us 
 give no thought to conscious proselytising, con- 
 cerning ourselves only with the effort to achieve 
 what we know to be good. With a little courage 
 and a little tolerant patience it can be done. It is 
 wonderful to see how quickly and gratefully the 
 
 222 
 
THE NATURE OF DRAMA 
 
 few people who care deeply for imagination and 
 truth will attach themselves to the most unskilful 
 enterprise if only it be sincere, and it is yet more 
 wonderful to see that sincerity giving skill and 
 mastery to the work, to see the delight of the actor 
 working under these new and vigorous and 
 spiritually exciting conditions, and to see the 
 response of the audience slowly shaping and 
 strengthening itself. There is no more yet to be 
 said to the flourishing trade for which the theatre 
 has been exploited than — you may be secure in 
 the assertion of your will, but you shall no longer 
 dominate ours ; you shall have power and noto- 
 riety and fat purses in your theatre, but you shall 
 not make it impossible for us to have life in ours. 
 
 223 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 St. John Emile Clavering Hankin died in 1909, 
 at the age of thirty-nine. To discuss the circum- 
 stances of his death would be an irrelevancy that 
 could serve no useful purpose. The only word 
 that need be said in this connection is in answer 
 to an ill-considered suggestion that the event was 
 hastened by some sense of disappointment, an un- 
 satisfied hunger for recognition. AU artists of real 
 distinction are alike in being proud of their work ; 
 they differ only, for temperamental reasons, in the 
 manner of expressing their pride. Reserve in this 
 matter is not necessarily the virtue of modesty, 
 nor, on the other hand, do we think the less of the 
 makers who have foretold that their rhymes should 
 be more durable than marble monuments. St. 
 John Hankin was proud of his work, and made 
 frank avowal of the fact. " You always think so 
 well of your own plays, Hankin," said a colleague. 
 " Of course I do," was the reply, " otherwise I 
 224 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 shouldn't continue to write them." The state- 
 ment implies no undue self-satisfaction. He was 
 not easily content with the thing he had written, 
 and was a finely conscientious workman in revision 
 and the search for Tightness in balance and form. 
 But the task done, he was glad to stand by it, and 
 said so. It is, however, a deep injustice to his 
 memory to suppose that this frankness sprang 
 from any overweening concern for his immediate 
 reputation, and mere folly to add that it affords 
 any clue as to the cause of his last act. In the first 
 place, artists do not die of wounded pride. Keats 
 was not " snuffed out by an article," but by an 
 organic disease, and even Chatterton's tragedy 
 might have been averted by a few shillings a week. 
 Secondly, Hankin had already received a large 
 measure of the only kind of recognition that he 
 valued. He was not forced to write for money, 
 and he neither expected nor wished his plays to be 
 readily accepted by the general public. He was 
 deliberately in the camp of the pioneers, and did 
 not look for the rewards of conformity. But his 
 work had won the approval of progressive audi- 
 ences, and had been acclaimed by the most liberal 
 
 P 225 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 critical opinion. The new repertory movement in 
 the theatre, upon which he himself exercised so 
 important an influence, was in turn recognising 
 him as one of its most notable products. His name 
 was one of credit among the people who were seek- 
 ing to quicken a stage that had grown moribund, 
 and the knowledge that this was so gave him just 
 and genuine pleasure. He was working with a 
 clearly defined aim, and he was achieving his 
 purpose as rapidly as any man can hope to do. 
 St. John Hankin the neglected and disappointed 
 dramatist is a myth. At the time of his death he 
 was winning and enjoying the best kind of success, 
 and his end was one of those untimely accidents of 
 temperament and physical circumstance that we 
 are wise to accept without too curious analysis. 
 Nor would it be profitable to speculate as to what 
 might have been added to his achievement had his 
 life been prolonged. We have to consider his work 
 as it stands, and examine the grounds upon which 
 its claims to permanence may be established. 
 
 The decadence of EngUsh drama, that began 
 with the passing away of the Elizabethans and has 
 been arrested only in our own day, has commonly 
 
 226 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 been supposed to have been the penalty paid for 
 the neglect of life. By decadence we do not mean 
 a lack of superficial and momentary success. 
 Every age has produced its harvest of plays that 
 would attract and hold large, if uncritical, audi- 
 ences, and they have not always been wholly bad 
 plays. The great mass of them have, indeed, been 
 radically deficient in true dramatic sense, and, by 
 substituting violent events and action for ideas 
 and character focussed into action, have vulgarised 
 a great art. But a substantial minority have been 
 the product of sincere observation and some feehng 
 for character. And yet, the plays written in 
 England between the end of the Shakesperean age 
 and the beginning of the present generation that 
 are of indisputable excellence when put to the test 
 of the stage and also survive the processes of time 
 might be numbered at a bare dozen ; certainly no 
 more. The Restoration dramatists would con- 
 tribute some three or four between them ; Gold- 
 smith claims one, perhaps two, Sheridan two, 
 possibly three. The list is not easily to be length- 
 ened. On the other hand, most of the poets of 
 high rank have written plays, and in many cases 
 
 227 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 plays that are immortal, but only by virtue of 
 qualities that are not stage qualities. Action is 
 not essential to the stage, but in its absence there 
 must at least be some direct progression of idea or 
 spiritual conflict that shall perform its ofBice of 
 holding the attention of an audience. The poets 
 have, justly, thrown action from its usurped 
 station in drama, but they have failed either to 
 use it in proper measure or to substitute its equi- 
 valent, and for this reason their influence has been 
 deflected from the theatre. We have, then, the 
 few plays that have held the stage and still live ; 
 the poets' plays that are imperishable but do not 
 fulfil the requirements of the stage ; the large 
 number of plays that sought only a momentary 
 and sensational success and could not, by reason 
 of their essential abuse of dramatic art, achieve 
 more. And there are left those plays, cumulatively 
 through the generations a large number, that had 
 in them some sincerity and conscience and also a 
 measure of fitness for the stage, and have yet 
 passed into oblivion. If we ask ourselves why 
 these plays have perished, we find that the sug- 
 gestion that the stage had divorced itself from life 
 
 228 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 leaves the question unanswered. The truth is that 
 the stage fell upon evil days not because it divorced 
 itself from life, but because it divorced itself from 
 literature. Literature means style in the expres- 
 sion of life, and if we look at those plays that paid 
 some heed to Hfe and adjusted it with skill to the 
 theatre, we find that the one supreme') quality 
 that they lacked is style. The poets have always 
 brought this quality to the drama, butjthey have 
 neglected the rightful demands of the stage in 
 other things. Drama that shall succeed in the 
 theatre and also be a permanent addition to the 
 art of the world can only spring from the union of 
 an understanding of stage-craft and the faculty 
 of at once seeing and apprehending life and 
 character, or at least manners, and bringing to 
 their expression that discipline of language which 
 is style. 
 
 The loftiest style is employed in the service of 
 poetry. When the impulse to express the thing 
 seen passes beyond a certain degree of urgency 
 the expression takes on a new quality of rhyth- 
 mical force, shaping itself generally into verse. 
 The difference between fine prose and fine verse is 
 
 229 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 fundamentally rather one of urgency, of intensity, 
 than of beauty. The greatest verse may have a 
 loveliness that is not to be found in the greatest 
 prose, but this beauty is a result of the essential 
 distinction, not the distinction itself. It is for this 
 reason that our new drama, full as it is of hope and 
 even achievement, does not yet make any serious 
 challenge to that of the Elizabethans. With two 
 or three exceptions the plays that we have pro- 
 duced have not been forced by the sheer strength 
 of their begetting impulse into poetic form. But 
 many of them have already been so forced into 
 style, a style lower than the highest, but of clear 
 authenticity, and these are plays, too, that are 
 fitted to the requirements of stage presentation. 
 We have not yet regained our lost estate, but we 
 are realising that it is worth regaining, and already 
 the result is a quickening of our dramatic percep- 
 tion. A knowledge of Ufe and the theatre is no 
 longer considered sufficient equipment for the play- 
 wright, and men of real literary gifts, men, that is, 
 with the gift of style, are seeking first to under- 
 stand the theatre so that they may bring their 
 labours to its service. The stage is renewing its 
 
 230 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 old relation to literature, and that is the most 
 wholesome thing that has happened to the stage 
 for nearly three centuries. It was St. John 
 Hankin's privilege and distinction to be one of the 
 first dramatists in England to help in the estab- 
 lishment of this re-union. The great worth of his 
 plays lies not in their philosophy ; after all, the 
 Eustace Jack sons of the world have never lacked 
 persuasive and perfectly logical advocates, and 
 Mrs. Cassilis only invents a new trick to emphasise 
 a very old truth. It is not in the technical excel- 
 lence of their st£^e-craft ; they are often merciless 
 to producer and actors, and St. John Hankin's 
 stage has a habit of resolving itself into a veritable 
 chessboard. They will take a permanent place in 
 the theatre because they are, on the whole and in 
 spite of their flaws in this respect, constructed for 
 action on the stage, and their expression of the 
 dramatist's view of hfe is vibrant with style from 
 beginning to end. 
 
 The distinction between writing that has this 
 
 quality of style and writing that lacks it, is not the 
 
 distinction between the same thing well and ill 
 
 said ; it is the distinction between two entirely 
 
 231 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 different things. It is the difference between the 
 dull acceptance which is knowledge and the swift 
 realisation which is imaginative thought. The 
 former might induce a man to speak of one dead 
 as, say, having " escaped from a very worrying 
 world and the annoyances of jealous and unjust 
 people and the disappointments of life in general," 
 but it is clearly a mistake to suppose that he 
 experiences or expresses the same spiritual emotion 
 as the man who cries out : 
 
 He has outsoared the shadow of our night ; 
 Envy and calumny and hate and pain. 
 And that unrest which men miscall delight 
 Can touch him not and torture not again ; 
 From the contagion of the world's slow stain 
 He is secure, and now can never mourn 
 A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain ; 
 Nor when the spirit's self has ceased to burn 
 With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. 
 
 The difference here is that between formal assent 
 and vision. Ultimately it is sincerity that creates 
 style, and sincerity has been lost to our theatre 
 save for brief interludes until these new dramatists 
 once again began to write not from rumour but 
 from conscience. Those momentarily successful 
 
 232 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 plays that presented life not altogether distorted 
 and at the same time fulfilled the technical require- 
 ments of the stage perished because their virtues 
 were not really sincere. Their makers said the 
 right thing because it was commonly reported 
 to be the right thing and not from conviction, 
 and consequently said it ill, which, artistically, 
 amounted to not saying it at all. Lacking the 
 sincerity which should result in style, they lacked 
 the power of complete utterance, and in art a thing 
 either is completely said or it does not exist. We 
 must not, of course, confuse completeness with 
 over-elaboration ; reticence is often the spirit of 
 style. Completeness implies the embodiment of 
 the creative ecstasy of the artist with the actual 
 statement made, and this ecstasy cannot exist, of 
 course, apart from the strictest sincerity. 
 
 Among the many vague generalities that have 
 gained currency among us none is more thought- 
 less than the pronouncement that art should 
 imitate nature. It should do nothing of the sort. 
 When Oscar Wilde asserted that, on the contrary, 
 nature imitates art, he was only refuting what he 
 knew to be a shallow conventionalism with his 
 
 233 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 usual fantastic gaiety. It would need a good deal 
 of ingenious sophistry for such an ideal to find a 
 more excellent realisation than the photograph 
 and the gramophone. Nature — ^life — ^becomes art 
 only by concentration and selection. A play 
 focusses into two hours the selected and concen- 
 trated experience of many lives, and it finds an 
 expression that is correspondingly artificial and 
 purged. Its failure to do this is the measure of its 
 failure as a work of art. It is for this reason that 
 the greatest drama is the poetic drama, where the 
 expression reaches the highest artificiahty, and the 
 symbol most consistently takes the place of the 
 traditional formula of speech. To say that a play 
 is true to life, in the sense that it is an unshaped 
 extract from life, and that its people speak in life- 
 like speech, is utterly to condemn it. Those plays 
 of which I have spoken frequently preserved, when 
 they were not couched in fustian rhetoric, the most 
 exact parallel to the daily use of conversation. 
 The point is that in either case they were the result 
 of hearsay and not of imagination ; they accepted 
 without question either the false rumours of liter- 
 ature which their authors had never examined or 
 
 234 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 the current speech of daily life which had lost all 
 freshness and a great deal of its meaning. Ibsen 
 paused to consider this question before making his 
 plays, or perhaps it would be nearer the truth to 
 say that, bringing real creative impulse to his 
 work, he necessarily rejected at the outset the 
 false doctrines of common acceptance. St. John 
 Hankin was one of the men who, consciously or 
 not, profited by the example. His characters are 
 as far removed as possible in expression from a 
 debased tradition of literary grandiosity, and, on 
 the other hand, they are far from reaching high 
 imaginative utterance. But their speech is, 
 nevertheless, definitely one of the imagination : 
 
 Henry. — It was extremely undignified and quite un- 
 necessary. If you had simply come up to the front door 
 and rung the bell you would have been received just as 
 readily. 
 
 Eustace. — I doubt it. In fact, I doubt if I should have 
 been received at all. I might possibly have been given a 
 bed for the night, but only on the distinct understanding 
 that I left early the next morning. Whereas now nobody 
 talks of my going. A poor invalid ! In the doctor's 
 hand ! Perfect quiet essential. No. My plan was best. 
 
 Henry. — Why didn't that fool Glaisher see through 
 you ? 
 
 Eustace. — Doctors never see through their patients. 
 
 235 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 It's not what they're paid for, and it's contrary to pro- 
 fessional etiquette. (Henry snorts wrathfully.) Besides, 
 Glaisher's an ass, I'm glad to say. 
 
 Henry {fuming) . — It would serve you right if I told the 
 Governor the whole story. 
 
 Eustace. — I daresay. But you won't. It wouldn't be 
 cricket. Besides, I only told you on condition you kept it 
 to yourself. 
 
 Henry {indignant). — And so I'm to be made a partner 
 in your fraud. The thing's a swindle, and I've got to take 
 a share in it. 
 
 Eustace. — Swindle ? Not a bit. You've lent a hand — 
 without intending it — to reuniting a happy family circle. 
 Smoothed the way for the Prodigal's return. A very 
 beautiful trait in your character. 
 
 Henry (grumpy) . — What I don't understand is why you 
 told me all this. Why in heaven's name didn't you keep 
 the whole discreditable story to yourself ? 
 
 Eustace (with flattering candour). — The fact is I was 
 pretty sure you'd find me out. The Governor's a perfect 
 owl, but you've got brains — of a kind. You can see a thing 
 when it's straight before your nose. So I thought I'd let 
 you into the secret from the start, just to keep your mouth 
 shut. 
 
 Henry. — Tck ! (thinks for a moment). And what are 
 you going to do now you are at home ? 
 
 Eustace (airily) . — Do, my dear chap ? Why, nothing. 
 
 (And on the spectacle of Eustace' s smiling self-assurance 
 and Henry's outraged moral sense, the curtain falls .) 
 
 That is not the speech of daily life. No two 
 brothers ever talked to each other or could talk so. 
 
 236 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 There is in their conversation something added to 
 the actual argument between the two men, and 
 this addition is Hankin's imagination. Eustace 
 and Henry Jackson are not wholly creatures of 
 their own independent being ; they exist partly 
 in terms of their creator's temperament and vision, 
 and they justly and inevitably bear witness to this 
 fact in their utterance. The philosophy that finds 
 a spark of the Godhead in every man is relatively 
 applicable to art. The creature bears in him some 
 token of the creator, and unless he does so he is 
 deprived of his proudest right. The dramatist 
 whose characters are set out photographically, 
 not reflected through the distinctive medium of 
 his own personality, does not create at all and he 
 has no claim to consideration as an artist. He 
 may then catch the verisimilitude of speech, but 
 the spirit with which he should invest words must 
 necessarily be beyond his consciousness, and his 
 expression wiU remain untranslated into style. 
 
 It is a curious fact that this essential condition 
 of all art should have been so often overlooked in 
 dramatic criticism whilst its importance has been 
 consistently recognised in the discussion of the 
 
 237 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 other arts. A poem or a picture or a statue is 
 accounted as deficient in the finer parts of its 
 being unless it bears in its composition some 
 signature of its source, and yet for some obscure 
 reason we have been asked to consider it as a 
 virtue that a play should be as a bough lopped 
 from the tree of life, unshaped and showing no 
 pressure of the artist's hand. The great dramatists 
 have never bestowed their approval on this 
 monstrous notion by their practice. The art of 
 the dramatist is, indeed, more essentially objective 
 than that of his fellows, but objectivity in art does 
 not imply an abortive dissociation of the thing 
 seen from the eyes that see. Strangely enough, 
 St. John Hankin, who realised this truth always 
 in his art, appeared to lend support to its violation 
 in an essay otherwise full of admirable reason. 
 " It is the dramatist's business," he says, " to 
 represent life, not to argue about it." It is, 
 perhaps, not special pleading to suggest that in 
 speaking of argument he had in mind the distortion 
 of life to make it conform to fore-ordained ends. 
 The sentence is to be found in the Note on Happy 
 Endings, where he justly resents the sentimental 
 
 238 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 intrusion of expediency on the dramatist's con- 
 ception of truth. His protest would seem to be 
 made rather against the sophistical devices of 
 argument than against argument in the shape of 
 commentary, but, with so important an issue at 
 stake, he would have done well to have considered 
 his statement more carefully. However this may 
 be, it is clear that aU dramatists who have written 
 sincerely have not only represented life, but 
 argued about it. The very texture of their ex- 
 pression, as in the passage that has been quoted, 
 is an implicit argument about life, in that it knits 
 up the artist's temperament into the speech of his 
 characters. But the argument has always been 
 explicit also, a dehberate as well as an incidental 
 commentary. The Greek chorus was, funda- 
 mentally, a device employed by the poet whereby 
 he might exercise this privilege of argument. The 
 characters that he created might be allowed to 
 work out their own destiny as far as he could 
 enable them to do so by virtue of his experience of 
 life ; but he was careful to reserve his right of 
 commentary upon the process. The aesthetic 
 value of this determination is obvious. Our 
 
 239 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 demand of the artist is that he should show us not 
 life, but his vision of life. The earliest English 
 drama made frank allowance of this right, an 
 allowance too frank, indeed, to be artistically 
 sound. The explicit argument was not clearly cut 
 off from the characterisation as it had been by the 
 Greeks, nor was it yet woven into the fibre of the 
 characterisation in the manner attempted by the 
 Elizabethans. And the Elizabethans themselves 
 were not blameless in this matter. In rejecting 
 the classical model Shakespeare set himself the 
 most difficult of his technical problems. His 
 magnificent genius justified its own choice, but the 
 sohloquy was, inherently, a less perfect artistic 
 form than the chorus. The greatest difficulty in 
 the loyal presentation of Shakespeare's plays is in 
 deaJing convincingly with these choric soliloquies. 
 To^ adopt the line of least resistance and cut them 
 out, as is commonly done, is merely to maim the 
 poet. Shakespeare felt the artistic necessity of 
 comment upon his creations, but in blurring the 
 dividing line between his dramatic and choric 
 statement instead of defining it sharply he deprived 
 his audience of help to which it has a legitimate 
 
 240 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 claim. But diffigulty is no excuse for inefficiency, 
 and no Shakesperean production is of the slightest 
 aesthetic value that does not honestly seek to meet 
 the difficulty instead of evading it. 
 
 The demands of art upon the artist are inexor- 
 able. The artist finds certain requirements im- 
 posed upon him by his work from which there is no 
 escape. And one of these is this necessity of the 
 chorus, or the poet's argument in drama. The 
 whole significance of the chorus in the drama of 
 the theatre had fallen into neglect and obhvion, 
 because the plays of the theatre were being written 
 by men who had no sincerity of artistic impulse. 
 And then, as soon as men once more bring their 
 conscience to this work and write sincerely as 
 artists, we find the necessity reasserting itself in 
 spite of any reasoned denial. The new dramatists, 
 of whom St. John Hankin was one of the ablest 
 and sincerest, seemed to be determined that the 
 construction of their plays should follow a false 
 tradition at least in this, that it should not allow 
 anything to interfere with the development of the 
 action. But they were too good artists to be able 
 to carry out their own determination. Being 
 
 Q 241 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 sincere, and creating characters instead of cutting 
 them out with a pair of scissors, they found it 
 necessary, as we have seen, to invest them with 
 something of their own temper, and that in itself 
 wholesomely disturbed the mechanical continuity 
 that had become a fetish. Here was the beginning 
 of regeneration, and the beginning forced its own 
 growth. Having brought impUcit argument back 
 to the drama, they felt an artistic desire for argu- 
 ment that was explicit. Not being quite sure of 
 themselves, they refrained from satisfjdng the 
 desire openly, and they started a new tradition, 
 which will, it is safe to prophesy, prove nothing 
 more than the prelude to a return to the frank 
 acceptance of an essential artistic necessity. They 
 invented the stage direction. Not the old direction 
 that set out a stage and brought people on to it 
 and off again, but a new full-bodied thing that 
 enabled them to do something which their art 
 compelled them to do. 
 
 General Bonsor {too broken with the world's ingratitude 
 to protest further) . — Boring ! (follows Miss Triggs, shaking 
 his poor old head. There is a pause while we realise that one 
 of the most tragic things in life is to he a bore — and to know 
 it. Mrs. Eversleigh, however, not being cursed with the gift 
 
 242 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 of imaginative sympathy, wastes no pity on the General. 
 Instead of this she turns to her sister, and; metaphorically 
 speaking, knocks her out of the ring.) 
 
 That is pure chorus, and nothing else. And again : 
 
 Mrs. Jackson. — But what became of your money, 
 dear ? The thousand pounds your father gave you ? 
 
 EusTACB. — I lost it. 
 
 Mrs. Jackson (looking vaguely round as if Eustace might 
 have dropped it somewhere on the carpet, in which case, of 
 course, it ought to be picked up before someone treads on it.) 
 Lost it ? 
 
 This is as clear in intention as a chorus of Trojan 
 women, and instances are to be found on nearly 
 every page of the authentic artists who are re- 
 estabhshing the credit of our theatre. They are, 
 indeed, to be found on the pages only, not yet on 
 the stage in their complete and rightful authority, 
 but the fact that they are conceived and written 
 is evidence of the return of a perfectly sound 
 instinct. The most complete attempts to give 
 this elemental desire natural expression that have 
 yet been made in modern drama are, perhaps, to 
 be found in certain of Mr. Yeats's plays and in the 
 Gaffer of Mr. Masefield's Nan. 
 The Two Mr. Wetherbys was written in 1902. 
 
 243 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 Before that date St. John Hankin had worked as 
 dramatic and literary critic, and was known as a 
 contributor to Punch. He had by him, too, the 
 usual sheaf of plays, and was wise enough to leave 
 them in their pigeon-holes when his reputation as 
 a dramatist might have lent them a value not their 
 own. He looked upon The Two Mr. Wetherbys as 
 the first achievement by which he cared to stand. 
 Mr. Punch's Dramatic Sequels was published in 
 1901, but its wit is relatively immature and not 
 comparable with that of his Lost Masterpieces, 
 published three years later. Between 1902 and 
 his death he wrote seven plays and began an 
 eighth, and it is upon these that his reputation 
 rests. In The Two Mr. Wetherbys certain of his 
 qualities appear almost in their full development, 
 others scarcely at all. The faculty of writing 
 dialogue, the style, the salty wit and the debonair, 
 faintly cynical philosophy of life, are all there. 
 But there is as yet nothing of the deeper humour 
 and the real tenderness that were to throw their 
 gracious charity over the mocking satire of the 
 later plays, nor is the artistic sincerity yet perfect. 
 It is the only one of his plays that has a conven- 
 
 244 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 tionally happy ending of the kind that he laughed 
 at so vigorously in the preface from which I have 
 already quoted, and it is the only one that ends un- 
 satisfactorily. In sending Dick and Constantia off 
 to inevitable domestic tribulation, he may have 
 had his tongue in his cheek ; but, if so, the humour 
 was too subtle to be safe, involving as it did a 
 direct negation of his own conviction. The whole 
 question of the destiny of the artists' creations is 
 necessarily one that each artist must decide for 
 himself. St. John Hankin quite rightly decided 
 that the romantic conclusions popularly favoured 
 were false. It does not follow that they are false 
 to life or to another artist's view of life, but simply 
 that they were false for him. They are, indeed, 
 commonly enough so contrived as to fail altogether 
 in artistic conviction, but this does not affect their 
 radical fitness when conceived by the right temper- 
 ament. Eustace Jackson's engagement to Stella 
 Farringford would, doubtless, have trebled the 
 popularity of The Return of the Prodigal, but any 
 balance in our knowledge of life, or, more parti- 
 cularly, in our knowledge of Hankin's vision of life, 
 precludes us from deploring his refusal to sanction 
 
 245 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 such an event ; but we are, none the less, pro- 
 foundly disturbed by the accident that prevents 
 the consummation of Romeo's love for Juliet. It 
 is the prerogative of passion to take no account of 
 institutions or social expediency. Great poets in 
 their most passionate seasons create without 
 reference to anything save their own burning con- 
 ception. Love's moment is for them an immortal 
 term which is independent of any subsequent re- 
 action or retribution. But it was Hankin's limita- 
 tion as an artist that he could not see life detached 
 from such institutions and expediencies. He could 
 see clearly, but not very deeply ; his characters 
 are alive and considered from many points of view, 
 but he was never able to divest them of the rags of 
 circumstance. The danger of passion was, in con- 
 sequence, a more real thing for him than its glory. 
 Much as he did for the renascence of drama in 
 many ways, he was yet far from bringing reason 
 under the fine subjection of the imagination. 
 Eustace's marriage to Stella would have been a 
 catastrophe only because these peoples were 
 created by Hankin's temperament ; a greater 
 imagination might have made such an event 
 
 246 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 triumphant. An artist, however, is not to be 
 censured for his limitations, but only for his refusal 
 to recognise and work within them. Of the higher 
 things of passion Hankin was incapable, but he 
 was wisely content to acknowledge the incapacity, 
 and, working consistently within his powers, he 
 rediscovered certain artistic principles of fixst-rate 
 importance, in the expression of an impulse not 
 of the highest order, yet in itself of no mean 
 value. 
 
 The Return of the Prodigal, which followed the 
 Wetherbys, was written in 1904. Not only have 
 the qualities that were found in the earher play 
 matured, but there are new qualities discovered. 
 If it was not given to him to be passionate, Hankin 
 here shows that he could encompass a quite rare 
 tenderness. Mrs. Jackson, first-cousin to the 
 Lady Denison of a later date, is conceived with a 
 charity that has in it no trace of cjaiicism. She is 
 not a central figure in the play, and yet she is, it 
 seems to me, more completely imagined than any 
 other character in the whole of Hankin's work. 
 This is not to say that she is the most striking of 
 his people, but there is in her just that subtlety of 
 
 247 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 presentment that is the product not of delibera- 
 tion but of uncurbed artistic instinct. She is there 
 for no other purpose than to satisfy the dramatist's 
 impulse to embody a type for which he clearly had 
 no common affection. Eustace and Henry, Samuel 
 Jackson and even his daughter Violet, admirably 
 fashioned as they are, are yet moved by a purpose 
 that is not wholly their own, and answer in some 
 measure to the dictates of the dramatist's reason. 
 But Mrs. Jackson is a complete creation, arguing 
 nothing, doing nothing, merely being, and in her 
 Hankin approaches poetic imagination in concep- 
 tion, though not in utterance. And it is note- 
 worthy that, moving on this higher artistic plane, 
 her influence upon the other characters of the play 
 is more authentically dramatic than is that com- 
 monly operating between Hankin's people. The 
 conflict between Eustace and his father and 
 brother is, again, primarily one of the reasons, 
 just as, in a lesser degree, is that between him and 
 his sister. They have a definite and circumstantial 
 problem to solve, and they argue the matter out 
 consistently in terms of their own personalities. 
 But Eustace's relation to his mother is an emo- 
 
 248 
 
ST, JOHN HANKIN 
 
 tional one, and, consequently, far more moving. 
 " Dear old mater. She's not clever, but for real 
 goodness of heart I don't know her equal." Speak- 
 ing of her he becomes, for a moment, greater than 
 himself, concerned with simple and fundamental 
 and not complex and superficial things. 
 
 In 1905 two plays were written, The Charity that 
 Began at Home and The Cassilis Engagement. If 
 Hankin saw life in something less than heroic pro- 
 portions, he was at least able to apply an almost 
 faultless logic to the life that he did see. His world 
 was circumscribed, but he purged it thoroughly of 
 shams, and if to do this is not the highest function 
 of the artist it is one of the most worthy functions 
 of the artist who professes no kinship with the 
 greatest. And it is certainly to be accounted to 
 him artistically as a virtue that although he 
 exposed what he considered to be ethical and 
 social fallacies in some measure by statement and 
 argument, he did so in a larger measure by the 
 operation of character. In other words, although 
 he intuitively realised the necessity of the chorus 
 in drama, he was also able to preserve a just 
 balance between chorus and action. The questions 
 
 Q 2 249 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 that confront Lady Denison and Mrs. Cassilis are 
 considered by the dramatist not only with fine 
 subtlety and mental precision, but also with a 
 quite notable instinct for dramatic form. Generally 
 speaking, the impulse behind the plays is not 
 sufficiently imaginative to raise them save at rare 
 intervals to the level of a Mrs. Jackson, but the 
 instinct that directed the adjustment of the rela- 
 tions of the dramatist's reflections to the action of 
 his characters was in nearly every case sound. 
 Whilst the dramatist may and should argue about 
 life, it is not his business to argue about ideas in 
 the abstract. If he uses his characters merely as 
 mouthpieces for the exploitation of abstractions 
 he abuses them ; his privilege of choric com- 
 mentary is justly exercised only when it is confined 
 to the contemplation of ideas that shape them- 
 selves out of the action of his characters ; when, 
 in other words, it is applied to the general only as 
 it is resolved from the particular. It is not for 
 (Edipus, crushed, blind and bereft, driven from his 
 fellows, to be conscious of more than his immediate 
 misery ; life, for him, has become the present 
 moment of fierce pain and nothing more. But the 
 
 250 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 poet, seeing his creation set against the whole of 
 experience, remembering this man's beginning and 
 story and all men's hope, can draw from the 
 disastrous moment an abstract idea purged into 
 peace, almost into exultation : 
 
 Ye citizens of Thebes, behold ; 'tis CEdipus that passeth 
 
 here. 
 Who read the riddle-word of Death, and mightiest stood 
 
 of mortal men. 
 And Fortune loved him, and the folk that saw him turned 
 
 and looked again. 
 Lo, he is fallen, and around great storms and the out- 
 reaching sea ! 
 Therefore, O man, beware and look toward the end of 
 
 things that be. 
 The last of sights, the last of days, and no man's life 
 
 account as gain 
 Ere the full tale be finished and the darkness find him 
 
 without pain.^ 
 
 Hankin was not a poet and did not move upon 
 these emotional planes, but within the limits of 
 
 1 Professor Gilbert Murray's translation. It is a striking 
 commentary upon the common confusion as to the aesthetic 
 meaning of the choric element in drama that in a recent 
 production of CEdipus Rex in this country these last lines 
 which, when spoken, as Sophocles directed, by the chorus, 
 have an emotional value scarcely to be paralleled in 
 dramatic poetry, were allotted to CEdipus himself, and so 
 deprived of every vestige of significance. 
 
 231 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 his own less ambitious design his instinct guided 
 him to a proportion in this matter that was per- 
 fectly just, and he helped definitely towards a new 
 understanding of one of the subtlest principles of 
 dramatic form. 
 
 The Last of the De Mullins was written in 1907 
 and was Hankin's last dramatic work save two one- 
 act plays and an unfinished comedy. The socio- 
 logical problem which is its theme is set out with 
 his customary lucidity and investigated fairly in 
 terms of art and not of propaganda. Great passion 
 in art is, always, the product of the imagination, 
 and yet it is in this play which is further away 
 from imagination than any other of his more 
 important efforts, that he approaches most nearly 
 to passion. The reason is that Hankin's imagina- 
 tion being the least developed of his quahties, the 
 problems of reason which he explored depended 
 for their power of moving him deeply upon the 
 directness with which they were stated. The 
 social question of Janet De Mulhn is more complete 
 and clearly stated than those of Mrs. Cassilis and 
 Geoffrey, of Lady Denison or Eustace Jackson. 
 However improbable it may be, it is remotely 
 
 252 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 possible that an adjustment of circumstances 
 might show Mrs. Cassihs to be mistaken, Lady 
 Denison to be wise in her charity, and the Jackson 
 compromise to be something other than the best 
 possible solution of the family conflict. This is not 
 to suggest that Hankin should have resolved these 
 plays in any way other than that he chose, but to 
 point out that in each instance it might be urged 
 that he controlled the conduct of his protagonists 
 to certain ends, and that other ends are conceiv- 
 able. But Janet's attitude and conduct are inevit- 
 able, and her decisions are the only ones that we 
 could accept as being possible. And this tightening 
 up of his reasoning faculty served Hankin for the 
 moment in some measure as a substitute for 
 imaginative intensity and brought him near to 
 passion. Janet is the one figure among his men 
 and women of whom we can think as loving 
 passionately and being passionately loved. 
 
 The new seriousness of The Last of the De MulKns 
 precluded any free exercise of the wit that had 
 been so admirably employed in the earlier plays, 
 but otherwise his quahties here reach their full 
 maturity. The mastery of style has developed, 
 
 253 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 and the characterisation has gained in subtlety 
 and the power of suggestion. Mrs. De MuUin may- 
 be set beside Lady Denison and Mrs. Jackson, and 
 De MuUin himself, choleric and stiff-necked as he 
 is, bears witness anew to the tenderness with which 
 his creator contemplated the foibles and prejudices 
 of his creations. It was a rare gift of Hankin's, 
 one that has been memorable in many greater 
 men, this faculty of making human weakness at 
 least not contemptible. There is scarcely a noble 
 figure in his plays — even Violet Jackson lacks 
 something of courage — and yet there is scarcely 
 one for whom we cannot spare some affection. 
 Lady Farringford herself might discover a heart 
 at any moment. 
 
 The two one-act plays. The Burglar Who Failed 
 and The Constant Lover, were both written in 1908. 
 The former is an amiable little farce, not unpleas- 
 ing, but far from showing the dramatist at his best. 
 It has an air of being manufactured. But The 
 Constant Lover is one of the most perfectly polished 
 excursions in prose comedy dialogue that the new 
 drama has produced. Conceived with a fancy of 
 
 254 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 quite uncommon delicacy, the play is carried 
 through from the first word to the last without a 
 flaw. It is full of good sunshine and laughter, 
 light and debonair yet wholly sincere. Hankin 
 never reahsed his aim more fuUy than in this little 
 masterpiece, and although it stands of necessity 
 below his more ambitious work in many ways it is, 
 perhaps, a more perfect achievement than any- 
 thing else that he did. He himself valued it highly, 
 and the last letter he ever wrote closed with a 
 reference to it, poignant and yet not without 
 cheer. 
 
 When he died Hankin left an unfinished play, 
 Thompson. He had written the first act and some 
 later fragments. Relying far more upon a conven- 
 tional and definite plot than was his custom, it was 
 clearly his intention to give free rein in the dialogue 
 to the wit of which he was a master. Mr. George 
 Calderon's able completion of an extremely difii- 
 cult task must speak for itself. In addition to his 
 plays Hankin wrote a number of essays on the 
 theatre which, apart from the excellence of their 
 matter, are remarkable for their admirable prose. 
 
 255 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 As in the plays, imaginative beauty is beyond the 
 writer's aim, but there is always a clear-cut pre- 
 cision, a lucidity and balance of statement, that 
 are a lasting delight even when the subject under 
 discussion is not of permanent interest or the point 
 of view has become obsolete. 
 
 But when the Puritan stayed away from the theatre 
 altogether, irrespective of the character of the play 
 presented, his approval or disapproval became a. matter 
 of indifference to the management. It is very gratifying, 
 of course, when you put up a play, to have it praised by 
 the godly for its elevating tendency. But if none of the 
 godly will come to see it your only course is to withdraw 
 it and substitute something to attract the wicked. For 
 the wicked, with all their faults, buy seats. And so the 
 drama, which, like the rest of the arts, is in its essence 
 neither moral nor immoral, neither religious nor irreligious, 
 got a bad name, and when a calling, or an art, or an insti- 
 tution gets a bad name it soon begins to deserve it. 
 
 That is a fair example of the style employed in 
 these essays, and it would be difficult to find a 
 higher excellence in the same province. 
 
 In these occasional papers Hankin makes many 
 
 shrewd observations upon his art and allows us 
 
 many entertaining glimpses of his philosophy in 
 
 the rough, of the materials in his workshop. How 
 
 256 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 suggestive, for example, in the light of the plays, 
 is that passage in the essay on " Mr. Bernard Shaw 
 as Critic," where he slyly opposes his own spirit of 
 comedy to the rather dour gravity that he was 
 one of the few men wise enough to find in his 
 subject. Quoting a paragraph from Mr. Shaw's 
 Dramatic Opinions, he comments : " This is not 
 the voice of a jester. It is the voice of Dr. Chfford, ' ' 
 and proceeds : 
 
 Again, of Miss Mary Anderson's autobiography he 
 writes — 
 
 " Note how she assumes, this girl who thinks she has 
 been an artist, that the object of going on the stage is to 
 sparkle in the world and that the object of life is happi- 
 ness ! " 
 
 One can almost hear the thump on the cushion as the 
 preacher utters that sentence. Yet 1 fancy most people 
 have been in the habit of regarding Mr. Shaw's attitude 
 towards the theatre as one of flippant tolerance largely 
 tinged with contempt. The republication of these criti- 
 cisms should serve to correct that impression. One would 
 rather like to hear, by the way, what the " object of life " 
 really is from Mr. Shaw's point of view. Perhaps some 
 day he will write a play about it. 
 
 St. John Hankin lived and wrote at the begin- 
 ning of a new movement, and his permanent dis- 
 
 257 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 tinction in drama will be rather that of right en- 
 deavour and the recapture of just instincts than of 
 full-bodied achievement. But that his plays have 
 durable qualities there is no question. They are a 
 valuable effort towards the re-establishment of the 
 union between drama and literature ; they contain 
 at least a suggestion of a return to true principles 
 of dramatic form ; they have not style in its rarer 
 manifestation, but they have style, and that is 
 much. Hankin's characters are not very passion- 
 ately conceived nor are they stirred often by the 
 essential emotions of men, but they have life. The 
 comedy which is Falstaff can stale only with the 
 change of fundamental humanity : the comedy 
 which is Eustace Jackson might lose some of its 
 flavour with a change of certain social conditions ; 
 Eustace is, nevertheless, a quick creation and not 
 a puppet. The Note on Happy Endings pleasantly 
 emphasises the fine objectivity with which the 
 dramatist saw his characters. In bringing them 
 into existence he gave them also independence of 
 being, and is able seriously to discuss their future 
 and their problems of conduct with as much detach- 
 
 258 
 
ST. JOHN HANKIN 
 
 merit as he would gossip of his neighbours over the 
 tea-cups. In the essay on Mr. Shaw he gives 
 counsel to critics that is peculiarly valuable in the 
 consideration of his own plays : 
 
 Our dramatic critic, as a class, are always asking 
 whether the dramatist is doing what they want, instead of 
 giving their minds to the only question of any importance 
 critically, namely, whether he has done what he wants, 
 and done it competently. 
 
 And done it competently. That is the point. It 
 does not follow that even if he has done this we 
 shall like his work, but in that event it is better to 
 leave it alone than to denounce it for not being 
 somethii^ else. Swinburne was not far wide of 
 the mark when he said that the only criticism of 
 value was the criticism that praised. Those of us 
 who beUeve that the stage cannot regain its full 
 vigour until it has rediscovered poetry as its 
 natural expression, find in Hankin and his three 
 or four adventurous fellows invigorating promise 
 rather than fulfilment, but we are fooUsh if we 
 refuse gratitude to the men who have made the 
 first step towards the new estate and deny our- 
 selves the pleasure that their work can give. 
 
 259 
 
PROSE PAPERS 
 
 Among these men Hankin takes an honourable 
 place, and that he was one of the few who first 
 sought to. bring back sincerity and a fit dignity of 
 form to a great art is a distinction that will not 
 easily stale. 
 
 WM. DEENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND 
 
 9^ 
 
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