Modern English Writers

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Modern English Writers:

Being a Study of Imaginative Literature
1890-1914

By Harold Williams

Author of 'Two Centuries of the English Novel,' etc.

London : Sidgwick & Jackson, Limited
3 Adam Street, Adelphi, W.C. 2. mcmxxv

First Published September, 1918

Second Impression May, 1919
Third Edition, revised January, 1985

Printed in Great Britain by
The Dmedin Press Limited, Edinburgh.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This book was completed not long before the outbreak
of the war in 1914, a date which will probably present to
future generations a visible dividing line in almost every
sphere of human activity. No man can be unconscious
of a change within himself and in his preconceptions during
the past four years. If most of the writers named in the
following pages are still alive, few, perhaps those only
whose work is an artifice rather than a response to life,
continue contentedly in the old paths , and for the majority
the pursuit of art and literature, as a primary objective,
is temporarily dispossessed. The scope of this survey may,
therefore, fairly be regarded as covering a period con-
tained by natural boundaries. The introductory chapter
assigns reasons for accepting the year 1890 as marking the
end of a stage in literary history at>d the appearance of
new ideals : the beginning of the great war was an abrupt
break in all the affairs of men.

In only one or two cases has it been thought necessary,
at the time of publication, to carry the story beyond the
early months of 1914, save in the matter of an added date
or footnote. Exceptions to a rule will be found in the pages
which treat of Rupert Brooke and James Elroy Flecker, two
poets whose deaths fell in the earlier part of the war. In
the case of the former, at least, to leavexunnamed the work
of the last few months would be to qjftit nearly all that
mattered. It has not, on the other hand, been possible
to observe rigidly a line (as imaginary as the equator and
as useful) drawn through the year 1890 ; and ao more than
a loose adherence, in the spirit rather than in the letter,
has been attempted.

The author is not unconscious of the temerity of
criticising in summary writers still living. Contemporary
estimates need not be falsified by time, but they are sub-
ject to the indistinctness of near vision, to those confusions

v

vi PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

and aberrations the critic could easily have avoided had
he been removed from the scene instead of playing a part
within it. Nevertheless these chapters may not be without
interest and usefulness as a record of adventures among
books, and possibly something more.

Apart from faults to be charged to the writer it may be
that slips appear which would have been corrected in better
times. During the greater part of the war the author has
been serving, he has enjoyed fewer advantages in passing
the proofs than he could have wished, and, on this score,
he can perhaps make some claim to indulgence.

To the publishers thanks are especially due for helpful-
ness and advice at each stage of this book's production;
acknowledgments are tendered to the editors of the Fort-
nightly Review and Atlantic Monthly for kind permission
to reproduce, with modification, matter relating to Mr.
Thomas Hardy and Sir William Watson ; and, further, the
writer is gratefully indebted, for information readily given,
to the Rev. W. H. Flecker and to Miss Munro, as well as
to many of those whose work is discussed in the pages
which follow.

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

The original preface to the edition of 1918 I leave to
explain a text which has not been materially altered.
Additions and corrections I have made, and I have quali-
fied a few statements ; but, despite the invitation, my
courage and goodwill, not now perhaps what once they
were, failed at the thought of an- attempt to bring the
last ten years within my chapters. This could mean little
less than a complete rewriting of the whole. I am com-
forted in refusing the task, for I am told that, as it stands,
the book is now more up-to-date than shortly after its
publication. Time has befriended me and justified, more
or less, what once appeared obvious oversights and
omissions. And, further, these pages were planned to give
some kind of a survey of literary developments in the years
1890 to 1914. Here again the unexpected outbreak of a
world war came to my assistance and drew a boundary
line as real as it was adventitious. To include the years
which follow would have been to recast what framework
and design the book may have.

In the case of a few writers only have I attempted to
carry the story beyond the first year of the war. Some-
times I have mentioned a more recent book ; and in one or
two instances, Herbert Trench and Mr. Masefield are
examples in point, added a comment on later work if some
qualification seemed to be necessary.

But, as a compromise, and to give this edition a refer-
ence value as nearly as may be to the date of publication,
I have added a bibliographical appendix to which the
reader can turn. In this list, which obviously makes no
claim to be exhaustive, are shown the more important
books published since 1914 by authors discussed or named
in the pages preceding.

vu

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY

FAGB

NEW INFLUENCES AND TENDENCIES .... 1

PART I
POETRY

CHAPTER

I. POETS OF THE TRANSITION . . . 23-39

Oscar Wilde — Alfred Austin — ;RobertriBridge^r—
Watts-Dunton — Andrew Lang— Edmund Gosse
— Wilfrid Scawen Blunt — Alice Meynell — Mar-
garet Louisa Woods.

II. HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 41-75

§1. Arth'ur Symons — John Davidson — W. E.

Henley — Rudyard Kipling.
§2. Sir William WgtgQp — Ernest Dowson —

William Sharp-—¥rancis Thompson.

III. THE PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES . . . 77-160

§1. Thomas Hardy — A. E. Housman — Herbert
Tre*ncE::::::::SS^Iien Phillips — Laurence Binyon —
Maurice Hewlett— C. M. Doughty— W. W.
Gibson — John Masefleld — Lascelles Aber-
crombie.

§2. Laurence Housman — Richard Le Gallienne —
A. C. Benson — H. C. Beeching — Norman Gale
— Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch — Sir Henry New-
bolt.

§3. H. D. Lowry— Alfred Noyes— T. Sturge
Moore — Hilaire Belloc — G. K. Chesterton —
Alfred Williams— W. H. Davies— John Drink-
water — Walter de la Mare — Ralph Hodgson —
Rupert Brooke — James Elroy Flecker,
ix

x CONTENTS

CHAITBR PAGE

TV.— THE POETESSES 161-171

Laurence Hope — Michael Field — Mary Coleridge
— Rosamund Marriott Watson — Lady Margaret
Sackville— Ethel Clifford.

PART II

IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS
I. THE CELTIC REVIVAL 175-182

IL IRISH POETS . 183-201

W. B. Yeats—A.E.— Douglas Hyde— Lionel
Pigot Johnson — J^M. Synge— Padraic Colum
— James Stephens — * John Eglinton ' — Charles
Weekes — J. H. Cousins — Thomas Keohler —
George Sigerson — * Seosamh MacCathmhaoil '
— Seumas 0 'Sullivan.

III. IRISH POETESSES 203-212

Jane Barlow— ' Moira O'Neill '—Eva Gore-
Booth — Alice Milligan — Ella Young — Nora
Hopper — Katharine Tynan — Dora Sigerson
Shorter.

IV. THE IRISH LITERARY THEATRE .... 218-216

V. THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 217-240

W. B. Yeats— A.E.— Edward Marty^— George
Moore — Lady Gregory — J. M. Synge — William
Boyle — Padraic Colum — Lennox Robinson — T.
C. Murray— Rutherford Mayne— St. John
Ervine.

PART III

LITERARY AND INTELLECTUAL DRAMA IN

ENGLAND

%

I. BEFORE IBSEN 248-256

T. W. Robertson— Oscar Wilde— Sir Arthur
Pinero — Henry Arthur Jones — Sydney Grundy
— Charles Haddon Chambers?— R. C. Carton —
H. V. Esmond.

CONTENTS xi

CHAPTER PAGB

II. AFTER IBSEN ....... 257-282

Bernard Shaw — Granyill«p-Barker — St. John Han-
lun^^^ Houghton —

Gilbert Caiman — Githa Sowerby — John Mase-
field.

III. THE UNCEBTAIN NOTE 283-288

Sir James Barrie — Alfred Sutro — Arnold Bennett
— Somerset Maugham — W. H. Davies — Rudolf
Besier — B. M. Hastings.

PART IV
THE NOVEL
I. LATE DEVELOPMENTS 291-297

II. NEWCOMERS 299-372

§1. Oscar Wilde — George Moore — George Gissing
— Rudyard Kipling — Samuel Butler.

§2. Watts-Dunton— ' Mark Rutherford/

§3. Hubert Crackanthorpe — Henry Harland —
Ernest Dowson — H. D. Lowry — Arthur Symons
—John Davidson — Max Beerbohm — Laurence
Housman — Bernard Shaw.

§4. Cunninghame Graham — W. H. Hudson —
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch — Sir Henry Rider
Haggard — Baring-Gould — Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle — Sir Gilbert Parker — Henry Seton
Merriman — Grant Allen — Israel Zangwill —
W. E. Tirebuck.

§5. David Christie Murray — Sir Hall Caine —
Frankfort Moore — E. F. Benson — Morley
Roberts — g F. Anstey 9 — Jerome K. Jerome —
W. W. Jacobs.

SCOTCH NOVELISTS

§6. Steverfson, Macdonald, Black — William
Sharp — Neil Munro — Sir James Barrie — ' Ian
Maclaren ' — S. R. Crockett — ' George Douglas '
— J. H. Findlater and Mary Findlater.

xii CONTENTS

OHAPTER

III. THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL .... 373-433

H. G. Wells— Arnold Bennett— John Gals-
worthy— Eden 3Phillpotts — * John 'Trevena ' —
Gilbert Cannan— B. M. Forster— William de
Morgan — The Cockney Dialect Novel : Arthur
Morrison, Somerset Maugham, Barry Pain,
Pett Ridge — Hugh Walpole, Compton Mac-
kenzie, J. D. Beresford, Frank Swinnerton,
D. H. Lawrence — Josp4xjCoi»ad — F. T. Bullen
—John Masefield— Robert Hichens — Maurice
Hewlett — Sir Henry Newbolt — R. H. Benson —
* Anthony Hope ' — W. J. Locke — Alfred
Ollivant— G. S. Street— Hilaire Belloc— G. K.
Chesterton — * Saki ' — E. V. Lucas — Stephen
Gwynn — * G. A. Birmingham ' — Canon Sheehan
—Barnes Stephens.

IV. WOMEN NOVELISTS 435-472

Mrs. Humphry Ward — ' Olive Schreiner 9 — Sarah
Grand — * George Egerton ' — ' Iota ' — Eliza-
beth Robins — May Sinclair — M. P. Willcocks —
Beatrice Harraden — * Lucas Malet ' — c John
Oliver Hobbes ' — Mary Coleridge — € Elizabeth *
— Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler — Lady Ritchie —
M. L. Woods— < John Strange Winter '— W. K.
Clifford— Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick— Netta Syrett—
Una L. Silberrad — Ethel Sidgwick — Jane Bar-
low— Katharine Tynan — Nora Hopper — * Som-
erville and Ross ' — c Ouida ' — M. E. Braddon
— Marie Corelli.

V. A NOTE ON AMERICAN NOVELISTS . . . 473-498

Henry James — W. D. Howells — F. Marion Craw-
ford— G. W. Cable — James Lane Allen —
Harold Frederic — Mary Eleanor Wilkins —
6 Charles Egbert Craddock ' — Thomas Nelson
Page — Ellen Glasgow — Owen Wister — Frank
Norris — Upton Sinclair — Winston Churchill —
Robert Herrick — Ambrose Bierce — Jack Lon-
don— Mrs. Atherton — Kate Douglas Wiggin —
Edith Wharton.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX ..... 499-508
INDEX 509-582

INTRODUCTORY
NEW INFLUENCIES AND TENDENCIES

EVERY year begins a new age, and each week we are in
transition between distinct and important periods in the
life-story of men. But in certain years or decades of years
the rifts in the narrative are wider, and the eye in retro-
spect cannot avoid resting upon them. The majority of
the human race lives upon the plains; but nations are
largely divided from each other by seas, rivers and
mountain ranges. And, in like manner, literature and
art tend within periods that can be defined to expand
upon the same plane. There will be inequalities of sur-
face, broken ground and smooth, arid tracts and fertile
slopes; yet in the whole we recognise a land tempered
by a single climate. And such a land, lying under the
influences of one climate, we see in those years between
the death of Byronism as a cult and the beginning of the
nineties in the last century; that period chiefly marked
out in poetry by the work of Tennyson and Browning,
in fiction by the novels of Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes,
George Eliot, and, in some degree, George Meredith and
Mr. Thomas Hardy, in miscellaneous prose and essay
writing by Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Pater. But just
as the eighteenth century proper was broken in its ninth
decade by the shock of the French Revolution, so the
Victorian age, with its antimacassars, glass pendants,
religious polemics, muscular Christianity, and despairing
belief in the earnestness and reality of life, loses itself in
the sands ten or fifteen years before the close of the cen-
tury. The rule and the graded scale have no place in
literary history; we can draw no hard-and-fast line be-
tween periods however distinct; Rogers and Campbell
wrote long after the Revolution, Victorian novels and
poetry are still published, perhaps always will be ; never-

A 1

2 INTRODUCTORY

theless, the century of Pope, Voltaire and Johnson was
passing away in 1790, and the Victorianism of the
Victorian age died about 1890.

By the year 1890, nearly everything we more peculiarly
associate with the genius and achievement of Queen
Victoria's reign was passing out of a present into a past ;
its work in prose and poetry was being diligently edited
with notes and commentary to guide a later generation.
The battle of science and theology, which vexed the first
readers of In Memoriam, no longer disquieted, and even
the searchings of La Saisiaz (1878) seemed remote. " The
Victorian era comes to an end and the day of sancta
simplicitas is quite ended,'9 wrote Mr. Max Beerbohm in
1894. It. was despite, or perhaps because of a naive
simplicity that the reign of Victoria is signally great in
the annals of literature, thought, art, mechanical inven-
tion and commercial expansion. The Oxford Movement,
the Broad Church Movement, the sceptical soul-earnest-
ness of Clough and Arnold, the Darwinian theory, the
miscellanies of Spencerian philosophy, Positivism, Pre-
Raphaelitism were once master-keys to influential sects,
but by 1890 they were bent and only turned in the locks
with much humouring. They were all in turn to the
popular mind single remedies for complicated ills, and
when the cure failed to be as complete as many had
promised, a reaction set in against these simple abstrac-
tions. Either in weariness or that distaste of the adoles-
cent for the scheme of things in which they have been
educated, men claimed the right to paint or to write of
life as they saw it without speculation. The life of the
present is with us, the deductions and philosophies uncer-
tain, it suffices to show what is, without embodying per-
sonal interpretations — this realistic attitude was adopted
by a number of artists and writers of the younger genera-
tion. But, as every stream has eddies which set back-
ward beneath the bank, every change in the tide of events
swirls uncertainly, seeking its way from the present into
the future. The cross-currents are many and often wear
the bank as quickly as the central stream; and this is
exactly what we note in the last two decades of the nine-
teenth century.

The year 1890 has been named as the virtual close of

NEW INFLUENCES AND TENDENCIES 8

the age commonly known as Victorian. In the decades
preceding and following that year new forces and new
influences take the place of those which had ruled since
the romantic triumph early in the century and the decay
of Byronism a little later. The nature of these new
influences cannot be stated in a few words, but they may
be roughly divided under four heads, which may best be
explained by (1) an attempt to interpret the general
significance of Oscar Wilde's sestheticism, (2) the aims
of the group of writers which gathered about the Yellow
Book and Savoy, (8) the influence of W. E. Henley, and
(4) the ideals of the Celtic Revival in Ireland. Of these
four the work of Oscar Wilde slightly antedates the period
with which this volume is more immediately concerned.
On the other hand, it is to be remembered that the closing
years of the last and the early years of this century are
still too near to be seen in clear perspective. Nevertheless
certain broad tendencies manifest themselves, and, if it be
remembered that no hard and fast demarcations are safe,
it will be found that the majority of writers belonging to
the period of this book incline to follow one or another of
the chief directions of influence which have been noted.

And, yet again, the Victorian age, which was passing in
1890, was not of one texture, nor did it disappear suddenly.
George Meredith, for example, was typical of a period of
transition. He was a Victorian, but not wholly of his
time, for none of the great movements of the age, scientific,
theological or literary, can claim his discipleship. He
numbered friends in the extreme left of the scientific
materialists, but he was as little of them as he was a
follower of the churches; accepting neither an easy
optimism nor a commonplace pessimism he steered a
middle course between the two; and his strong faith in
humanity never led him into the camp of the Positivists.
He was one of the few men of his time — Butler was another
— to realise that life and art are too complicated to Be
solved by the formulae of sects, that our chief business
is with the present, and that the soul lives on hopes, not
dogmatic certainties. He never abandoned in contempt
the hope of the infinite buried in the finite, but the problem
did not weigh upon him as upon so many Victorian poets
and prose-writers. In his ability to see life steadily and see

4 INTRODUCTORY

it whole without attempting to simplify, in his power to
doubt without losing faith, in his contentment to use the
present that is given and speculate on the unprovable
without uneasiness, Meredith belonged less to the middle
than to the end of the century in which he began to write.
His psychology also, like his thought, is elaborate and
complex, unlike the simple, sentimental and Arthurian
moralities which surrounded him in his youth.

It was not, however, till 1885, with the publication of
Diana of the Crossways, that Meredith became an even
moderately popular writer; and about this time can be
placed the popularisation of the theory of " art for art's
j5§Jke*" The appearance of this doctrine, that art goes
first with life padding humbly at her heels, clearly marks
a turning from the broad turnpike of Victorianism, now
grown a little dusty with the number travelling that way.
Even the most extreme of the Pre-Raphaelite poets and
painters were often as much concerned with history as
with art, their poems and pictures were founded upon
myth, legend and story long traditionary with men.
Their art was not intelligible ..withaut a knowledge ot the
i3eas underlying it ; it was not merely a matter of line and
colqur, the impressionistic rendering of a moment.
Rossetti painted *' Dante's Dream," Swinburne wrote
^M^tj»JnM(dudQn..(l^65) and Erectheus (1876).

If not the popularly recognised apostle of the new gospel
of art for art's sake, James M'Neill Whistler was the most
consistent follower of its tenets. His work owes nothing to
human, moral and sentimental interest ; his whole aim is to
assimilate and select from the visual and transient impres-
sions of the eye. Tradition and medievalism are nothing to
him ; he paints the mists and smoke-dimmed sunsets of the
Thames without yielding to the pathetic fallacy, and his
" Portrait of Miss Alexander " is a " Harmony in Gray
and Green." His practical inability completely to master
line or colour governed the direction of his theory and
practice, and partly explained his abandonment of colour
for the use of tone. His primary importance to the story
of English art, however, is his persistent exclusion of
history or literature from painting.

The action Whistler brought against Ruskin in 1878
gave his theories a general nptoriety ; and soon after this

NEW INFLUENCES AND TENDENCIES 5

Oscar Wilde's eestheticism was sufficiently well known to
ordinary theatre-goers to call for the satire of Patience.
And Wilde unwittingly engineered the popularity of the
operetta in the United States by lecturing in that country
in 1882 on * ^Esthetic. PJ^ospphy^^ For many Americans
he was the specimen aesthete who made intelligible the
satire of the English musical comedy. Wilde returned to
England the high priest of aestheticism ; but he failed to
observe the consistency of Whistler in another field of
art. The endeavour of either was to insulate art from the
multifarious activities of everyday life, to sit in a little
corner and burn incense before jealous gods unknown to
the heathen Philistine. Wilde, like Whistler, tried to
make of art an exclusive cult for a chosen people* He
failed because he had a larger mind and wider knowledge,
because his theories constantly overran the measure he
attempted to impose upon them, and because he was more
human than Whistler — he was, as Andre Gide has called
him, " un grand viveur." Wilde was a man of genius:
nearly everything he has written suggests a faculty for
something greater, for his work as a whole is an illustra-
tion of the wreck of art upon theory. He is, however, of
interest and importance as the chief figure in one of those
movements which mark the close of the period which
we call Victorian for want of a better term of de-
finition.

Wilde completely transfigured the early influences under
which he fell and gave them again to the world in a new
form. The strongest impressions he received during his
undergraduate days at Oxford came to him from Euskin,
Pater, and a journey in 1877 to Italy and Greece. But the
academic and thrice-refined doctrine of Pater became a
sensuous aestheticism, and Ruskin's assumption of an
ethical rule for the judgment of art is reversed. In Modern
Painters Ruskin had written in explanation of himself as
a critic of art : "In my works on architecture the prefer-
ence accorded finally to one school over another is founded
on a comparison of their influences on the life of the work-
man." The one-time disciple, Wilde, declared: "They
are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

6 INTRODUCTORY

Perverse and crochety as Ruskin's judgments often are,
the moral standard is always the final court of appeal :
for Wilde art was a cult independent of life, the use of the
ethical rule was a confusion of thought, — art was neither
moral nor immoral, it was simply non-moral.

Wilde has supplied clear expositions of his theory of the
nature of art in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
and in his essay on The Decay of Lying. If we accept his
postulate that such a thing as an art wholly independent
of life can exist, we see that his assertion of its non-
morality is not a mere flouting of popular prejudice but a
direct consequence of his theory. If art can be produced
without reference to nature, whether human or inanimate,
we can scarcely attribute moral responsibility to the artist
or his work. And this was Wilde's position. " The proper
school to learn art in," he writes in The Decay of Lying,
" is not not Life but Art " : and again, in the same essay,
" All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature,
and elevating them into ideals." He believed, impossible
as it is to conceive the position if art be a product of
human activity, that " Art never expresses anything but
itself." Far from regarding art as a mirror of life he
asserted, " Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates
Life"; and he added as a corollary: "External Nature
also imitates Art. The only effects that she can show us
are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or
in paintings." The handling of the dialogue in this essay
bears witness to the innate literary skill of Wilde, but his
logic, like his art, is impressionistic and irrelevant. If
Wilde were merely trying to say, as by some he has been
understood to say, that life strives to express itself in art
and therefore follows art, his essay only calls for the
remark that he has succeeded in bedizening with useless
and confusing epigrams a truth often before simply and
clearly stated. This, however, is not his meaning, for
Wilde is never weary of asserting the independence of life
and art. If he had regarded art as the highest expression
toward which life was constantly striving he could not
have written, " All art is quite useless," perhaps the only
remark in the preface to Dorian Gray quite relevant to the
matter of the book.

Oscar Wilde and Mr. Arthur Symons are in the succes-

NEW INFLUENCES AND TENDENCIES 7

sion of Ruskin and Pater, but they stand on the other
side of a rift, and mark a new period. Ruskin had declared
that there are laws of truth and right in art as fixed as
those of harmony in music and affinity in chemistry, laws
ascertainable by study, labour and thought. In the more
systematic part of Modern Painters he makes some parade
of method in the discovery and arrangement of these
canons of art, but soon desists with the remark, so con-
genial to his habits of mind, that too systematic a book
is rather a hindrance than a help to the reader. Ruskin 's
great talent for close observation and analysis of detail
could never make him the master of a complete philosophy
of the beautiful : the facts which remain clear are that with
him art was a criticism of life and nature, its functions
moral, and that his ultimate judgments were guided by
the ethical standard. In^ earlier life PjrteiV his disciple,
departed so far from hisTmaster as tcT^mBrace a vague
kind of aesthetic hedonism, nourishing the inner flame of
life on emotions aroused by beauty; but in later years
he adopted an esoteric Christianity and a more pronounced
moral attitude toward life and art. In the work of Pater,
as a critic of art, there is nothing sufficiently decisive or
original to mark a point of fresh departure. He is not ill
at ease in the same house with Ruskin and Tennyson.
With Oscar Wilde and Mr. Arthur Symons it is far other-
wise ; art is no longer an integral part of life, decking its
halls with Morris hangings, but a way of escape into a
haven secluded from crude reality.

It is needless to expose the irrationality of a theory
which conceives of an art Independent of everyday life.
No work of art can be wholly impersonal. If Wilde asserts
in The Decay of Lying that, " Art never expresses any-
thing but itself,55 it is not with full knowledge that he can
support his thesis; for in the preface to Dorian Gray he
offers the less dogmatic assertion that, " To reveal art
and conceal the artist is art's aim.55 Nor is the preface
consistent within itself; before the conclusion he writes,
" It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.55
Art cannot be held to mirror and conceal the artist or
spectator at one and the same time. The conclusion of
the whole matter must be that art reveals the artist in
greater or lesser degree and mirrors life the more abun-

8 INTRODUCTORY

IP

dantly as the artist is in touch with the whole experience
of life.

The impulses, orthodox or sceptical, of art and poetry
in the Victorian age were largely governed by a belief
that conduct was all-important. Wilde's unavailing
attempt to create an intellectual theory of art, of a
sensuous sestheticism, was the first sign of a reaction. It
was followed or accompanied by other formative ten-
dencies which are still working themselves out in our
midst. The central decades of the last century were
almost wholly Teutonic in feeling and inspiration. The
work of Carlyle in introducing German literature to
English readers had borne abundant fruit where it was
least recognised, and Matthew Arnold's praise of the
lucidity, logical acumen, " openness of mind and flexi-
bility of intelligence," of the French people fell on deaf
ears. The group of young writers and artists who gathered
about the Yellow Book (1894-97), and the Savoy (Jan. to
Dec., 1896) represents a reasoned and intellectual reaction
in the direction of Celtic and French ideals; and other
attempts at producing an art and literature of a new form
appeared in The Dome (1897, 1898) and The Pageant
(1896, 1897). In poetry the most notable contributors to
the Yellow Book were Mr. Arthur Symons, John Davidson,
Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Mr. Laurence Binyon,
Mr. W. B. Yeats and Mrs. Marriott Watson; in prose
fiction may be named Henry James, Henry Harland,
Hubert Crackanthorpe, Mr. Kenneth Grahame, ' George
Egerton,5 and, belonging to an older generation, Mr.
George Moore; among artists whose drawings appeared
in the magazine were Aubrey Beardsley, Conder, Mr.
Charles Shannon, Mr. Will Rothenstein and Mr. Laurence
Housman. Writers as diverse in aim and ideal cannot be
placed in a common class or bound by a single definition.
The hard realism of Crackanthorpe and the mysticism of
Mr. W. B. Yeats or Mr. Laurence Housman have neither
part nor lot with each other. But undoubtedly the clearest
note of the new publication was a conscious effort to avoid
the moral sentiments and romantic idealisms of the
Victorian age and to paint life with an exact and unshrink-
ing realism. Crackanthorpe was the disciple of Maupassant
and described drab and seamy corners of life with cold

NEW INFLUENCES AND TENDENCIES 0

w

realism ; ' George Egerton 5 wrote in the same spirit,
touching her narrative with commentary upon the relation-
ship of woman to man in the social economy ; Mr. Symons
and Davidson wrote poems of the ballet, the music-hall
and Fleet Street.

The first number of the Yellow Book contained a fine
essay by Mr. Arthur Waugh on ' Reticence in Literature1,
which might easily, on account of its importance, be taken
for a manifesto of the new periodical. . The habit of reti-
cence, Mr. Waugh points out, is not a national charac-
teristic, for, as a people, we admire openness of speech.
But to the value of outspoken bluntness there is a limit.
Wise men always exercise a reserve. The representative
literature of each age is not its critical and philosophical,
but its creative. And for the literature of each age is set
a point of reticence — the intelligence and taste of that age.
Beyond this the point of reticence is marked by " the
permanent standard of artistic justification the presence
of the moral idea." The essay is, in brief, an assertion of
the classic ideal; and we are often reminded of Matthew
Arnold. But few of the opinions expressed in this essay
find illustration in the magazine. The first number opens
with a story by Henry James, it contains Mr. Max Beer-
bohm's witty and well-known ' Defence of Cosmetics/ and
other sketches, stories and poems bearing little family re-
lationship to each other. The truth is that Harland, the
editor, never succeeded in giving to the magazine any
recognisable character. The first three numbers con-
tained clever and sometimes strong work by young men,
who were united only in the attempt to discover for them-
selves individually a personal and fresh mode of expres-
sion. The Arthurian romances of Tennyson and the
medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites were sinking into a
meaningless and hoary tradition, and against this conven-
tion the group which gathered about the Yellow Book and
the Savoy rebelled, striking out in different paths toward
severe realism, Gallic wit and gaiety, Celtic or bookish
mysticism, according as each man was called and found
himself able. But their aims were too diverse to admit of
fusion, and the more important contributors to the Yellow
Book soon fell away.

1. Adopted by Mr. Waugh as the title of a volume published in 1915.

10 INTRODUCTORY

The periodical appeared quarterly and struggled on to
a thirteenth number, but long before this it had lost any
character it ever possessed. The first four numbers alone
are of interest and significance. By the summer of 1895
the Yellow Book, in the words' of Mr. Symons, " ceased to
mark a movement, and had come to be little more thaq
a publisher's magazine. " Aubrey Beardsley withdrew his
support, and his pictures now appeared in the rival Savoy >
edited by Mr. Arthur Symons. The Savoy, though it
enlisted many of the writers to the earlier publication, was
a better and more purposeful magazine than the Yellow
Book. In an editorial note Mr. Symons disclaimed any
epithet for his contributors — Realists, Romanticists or
Decadents; all he offered was good work. " We hope to
appeal to the tastes of the intelligent by not being original
for originality's sake, or Audacious for the sake of adver-
tisement, or timid for the convenience of the elderly-
minded." To turn over the pages of the Yellow Book now
is to feel that we are handling an ordinary magazine,
better perhaps than most, yet only a publisher's magazine.
The Savoy is printed on poorer paper, and the illustrations
are often indifferently reproduced, but we are conscious
that it stands for something. Ernest Dowson, Mr. Symons,
Mr. Havelock Ellis write well ; there is no narrowness or
limitation in subject and outlook ; the contributors to the
magazine are possessed with the spirit of intellectual
enthusiasm and curiosity, they are anxious to discover
and know life and the world in which they find them-
selves. Mr. Symons writes on Verlaine and De Goncourt,
Mr. W. B. Yeats on Blake, Mr. Havelock Ellis on
Nietzsche, world-names that do not fall into a natural or
easy conjunction. The Yellow Book presents chiefly the
pose of the dilettante ; the Savoy stands for the earnest
and sincere work of young poets, dreamers and students.

To the present-day reader the essays in authorship of
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872-98) are by far the most
interesting part of the Savoy, although these pieces may
have no intrinsic importance. Beardsley used his pen very
much as he used brush or pencil, In his drawings the
line is clear and sharp ; the massing of light and black-
ness (not shadow) is hard and precise. The extraordinary
effect he can gain by this method is well illustrated by the

NEW INFLUENCES AND TENDENCIES 11

contrasted masses of black and white in " The Wag-
nerites," — the white bosoms of the women standing out
against the darkness of the theatre. For it was thus that
Beardsley saw the world; his intellect was hard and
unemotional. Despite the grotesque fancy of his designs
he possessed an almost incisively practical mind. Not
beauty, as commonly perceived, but the curious, the
unexpected and the grotesque was what he saw, and his
line had no direct reference to the whole, but to a satirical
or psychological representation of some aspect of life.
And in writing his manner is the same. Every sentence
was composed separately for its own sake, and allowed to
find later some finished niche in the growing narrative.
His method reveals the sketcher rather than the man
conscious of the nature of prose. He contributed to the
Savoy three poems and a prose fragment, ' Under the
Hill/ a parody of the story of Venus and Tannhauser.
Beardsley's prose is fantastic and artificial. It reaches
the confines of preciosity, and the liberal use of French
words gives a bizarre and grotesque appearance to the
sentences. We hear of an " ombre gateway " and doves
that love " to froler." Nevertheless, the vision of Beards-
ley is always that of the artist and poet, and there are
passages of real beauty in thought and phrasing. On the
first page of ' Under the Hill ' comes this exquisite little
sentence : "It was taper-time ; when the tired earth puts
on its cloak of mists and shadows, when the enchanted
woods are stirred with light footfalls and slender voices of
the fairies, when all the air is full of delicate influences,
and even the beaux, seated at their dressing-tables, dream
a little." The touches of malicious wit are good. Of Helen
we are told that she looked, " Not at all like the lady in
' Lempriere.' " His poem, ' The Three Musicians,' has
a gay note of satire which reaches its point ; and 6 The
Ballad of a Barber,5 a curious little piece with a grim
conclusion, deserves to be recalled for the simple beauty of
one stanza —

" Her gold hair fell down to her feet
And hung about her pretty eyes ;
She was as lyrical and sweet
As one of Schubert's melodies."

12 INTRODUCTORY

It was an ambition of Beardsley's to be a great writer,
for the author he seems to have regarded with greater
veneration than the artist; but had he lived longer it is
improbable that he would have written anything save
the curious and interesting, except in isolated passages
and lines of beauty. His touch is hard and unsympathetic ;
frills and decorations of speech divert our attention from
the matter, when there is any, and his conception of com-
position was limited by the paragraph and even by the
sentence. The faculties which made Beardsley the most
original artist in the bizarre of his time could scarcely fit
him to become a great writer. Nevertheless, his name
cannot well be dissociated from the text of the Savoy,
though his illustrations to that magazine are of greater
importance and value.

Mr. Arthur Symons was the typical and characteristic
critic and exponent of those ideas which animated the
younger writers of the Yellow Book and Savoy. Whether
in criticism or in poetry his mind was the most subtle
and comprehensive of the group; and in himself he
illustrated admirably the realism and the mysticism of
different writers in the new period. If we regard him
merely as the writer of realistic poems descriptive of the
stage, the ballet, or forbidden love we do him an injustice,
for these are to him symbols, as flowers and mists and
hills were to Wordsworth, an attempt to perceive in the
common externals of everyday life the ideal of which the
visible is only a garment. Sometimes Mr. Symons will
seem as unshrinking a realist as Crackanthorpe, at other
times as inevitably mystical as Mr. W. B. Yeats : his
vision of life is as subtle as Beardsley 's was precise.

As a critic capable of original observation and analysis
Mr. Symons is not at first to be found in his work. His
Introduction to the Study of Browning (1886) is a good
and straightforward handbook to the poet ; and the essays
and reviews collected in Studies in Two Literatures (1897)
are too widely separated in date and too miscellaneous
in character to present a homogeneous criticism. Yet
several of these studies of Elizabethan drama, of contem-
porary French and English writers reveal the bent of his
mind, — his flexibility, his sympathy with the French and
his dreamy intellectualism. His interest in the romantic,

NEW INFLUENCES AND TENDENCIES 18

slightly unhealthy mysticism and consummate artistry of
Christina Rossetti is intelligible, and not less, when writing
of Coventry Patmore, his witty remark that in the
Victorian scientific generation, " it was supposed that by
adding prose to poetry you doubled the value of poetry. "
As we might expect, his " Note on Zola's Method " is a
direct attack on Zola's habit of looking at life through a
formula and studying it with immense industry by the
help of that formula. The formula was as romantic and
unreal as any dream of the idealist. Mr. Symons, the
dreamer, angered with Zola's sordid realism, did not con-
sciously perceive this, although his critical instinct seized
upon it in passing, for he writes, — " So powerful is his
imagination that he has created a whole world which has
no existence anywhere but in his own brain," — one of the
aptest remarks ever made of the man who laboured
mightily to represent life exactly as it is. In these and
other essays of the volume we learn that we cannot place
Mr. Symons either with the naturalistic school or with the
emotional and sentimental romanticists.

The first of his books to present an individual concep-
tion of the nature of art and literature was The Symbolist
Movement in Literature (1899). The earlier studies were
written like any other reviews and introductions, and
might have come from the hand of any good contem-
porary: The Symbolist Movement is something different,
for here Mr. Symons is writing of a school to which he
himself belongs. The volume treats of Gerard de Nerval,
Verlaine, and other French symbolists, and with them Mr.
Symons counts Mr. W. B. Yeats, to whom he dedicates
his book. In Mr. Symons's interpretation symbolism is
to literature what Platonism is to philosophy, or, to use
another analogy, what the art of Mr. Gordon Craig is to
the stage. " A symbol might be defined as a representa-
tion which does not aim at being a reproduction."
Material things are but the shadow flung on the wall.
Symbolism in literature is an effort to escape the drab of
realism and the bounds of that which is visible, to express
by the use of words the beauty of that ideal world of which
the external is but a vesture. In symbolist literature,
therefore, a poem exists for itself as a thing of beauty,
like a gleam of light piercing through a veil. Language

14 INTRODUCTORY

consists of tokens and signs, and art to the symbolist is
but an effort to reflect by signs and patterns the beauty
of the spiritual. Thus, in a sense, symbolism is but old
romanticism writ intellectually*

The distinction Mr. Symons draws between the drama
of realism and symbolist drama, like Villiers de Plsle-
Adam's Axel, helps us further to realise the nature of
symbolism. In realistic drama " the 'form ... is de-
graded below the level of the characters whom it attempts
to express," for that type of dialogue which imitates the
conversation of everyday life can express no more than
a tithe of what every man thinks and feels. But the drama
of De PIsle-Adam is a drama of spiritual forces and speaks
with the voice of man's spirit, not with the words
of his lips. It expresses not what we say, but what we
are.

Mr. Symons 's later volumes of prose contain some of
the best and most illuminating criticism of recent years,
but they add little that is valuable to the thought already
expressed in The Symbolist Movement in Literature. In
Plays, Acting and Music (1903) short essays, contributed
chiefly to the Academy, are gathered together. Studies
in Prose and Verse (1904), a companion volume to the
Studies in Two Literatures, embodies several of the essays
which appeared in the earlier book. Few men would dare
to publish Studies in Seven Arts (1906) : even Mr. Symons
must sometimes write as an amateur, and his paper on
cathedrals alternates between mere essay writing and the
discovery of sermons in stones. But when he speaks of
painting, of music, of sculpture, of dancing, of the stage,
he can always claim to be heard. The Romantic Move-
ment in English Poetry (1909) is a less literary and less
interesting book. Every poet, important or negligible,
who may, even by a wide stretch of courtesy, be classed
with the romantic movement at the close of the eighteenth
and the beginning of the nineteenth century, is here to be
found tabulated by his or her date and discussed with an
intellectual aloofness that makes heavy reading; and the
arrangement of the names darkens counsel by a rule that
is mechanical. The book can scarcely be read, although
we may turn to it as we refer to an encyclopaedia.

In the preface to Plays, Acting and Music is a passage

NEW INFLUENCES AND TENDENCIES 15

which is worth quotation for the light it throws on Mr.
Symons's faith and doctrine as a critic —

" In all my critical and theoretical writing I wish to be
as little abstract as possible, and to study first principles,
not so much as they exist in the brain of the theorist, but
as they may be discovered alive and in effective action,
in every achieved form of art. I do not understand the
limitations by which so many writers on aesthetics choose
to confine themselves to the study of artistic principles
as they are seen in this or that separate form of art. Each
art has its own laws, its own capacities, its own limits;
these it is the business of the critic jealously to distin-
guish. Yet, in the study of art as art, it should be his
endeavour to master the universal science of beauty. "

The display of method here made is repeated when
he writes in Studies in Prose and Verse that he is interested
only in " first principles," that criticism " is a valuation
of forces, and it is indifferent to their direction. It is
concerned with them only as force, and it is concerned
with force only in its kind and degree." He professes
to the possession of only a few principles of criticism,
which, however, he asserts that he constantly applies as
tests. But it is difficult to discover what these tests are.
They cannot be gathered as we gather Matthew Arnold's
principles. We may learn that the mystical and idealistic
appeal to Mr. Symons, that the classical spirit is revered,
but only afar off, that realism is alien to his mind and
only awarded praise when it appears in a Balzac or a
Flaubert, whom he cannot gainsay. Flaubert is even
"the one impeccable novelist." We see that though a
romanticist he is intellectual, distrusting reliance upon
the unaided instincts and emotions; and, therefore, he
quarrels with Tolstoy's theory of art. But to learn as
much as this does not carry us far, and a reason why we
do not clearly grasp Mr. Symons 's principles is that his
critical writings consist chiefly of occasional pieces, and
within themselves the ordering of matter might often be
better. Indeed it is obvious that Mr. Symons is never
wholly aware of his principles. There mingle in him the
poet, the scholar, the religious mystic, the lover of physical
sensations, the intellectualist, and therefore he is not
always consistent nor always sure of his ground. Like

16 INTRODUCTORY

Gautier he inclines to find the best in everything, and is
more quick to appreciate than to condemn; and this,
little as that side of the matter is often understood, is the
true business of criticism. Good criticism will appreciate
wherever it can, bad criticism alternates between rhap-
sody, rodomontade and vilification.

Among living English critics none other shows the range,
the subtlety and the power of illumination belonging to
Mr. Symons. He is almost equally at home as a critic of
literature, music, acting, dancing and painting: his
knowledge is wide, his experience curious, he has the mind
of the student and the gifts of the artist. As a critic he
stands in the succession of JPater^ for whom he shows an
exaggerated respect in one of the early essays. And his
manner, like that of Pater, often has a note of cold and
dreamy aloofness, although he has none of Pater's senti-
mentality, and is far more a man of the world. It is a
misfortune that he has trusted almost entirely to the short
and occasional essay and attempted no work of wide and
general survey, save in one instance, and that with
unhappy result. When moved he can lapse into exaggera-
tion, but he is more frequently coldly intellectual, notably
in his Romantic Movement in English Poetry. Only too
often in his critical writings we seem to be listening to the
versatile expert explaining art to experts, yet no twist of
academicism narrows his outlook.

The genius of Mr. Symons is doubly rich in a strong
intellectualism and a dreamy romanticism, and it is the
possession of these contrasted tendencies of mind which
makes him an important figure in his time and place. His
intellectualism led him to sympathise in a degree with
the work of French realists and their English disciples, his
dreamy romanticism to an understanding of the French
Symbolists, Blake and the Celtic movement in Ireland,
typified in the person of Mr. W. B. Yeats. Mr. Symons
shares nothing with the moral or sentimental romanticisms
of the Victorian age or the Byronic romanticism which
preceded them — he is an intellectual romanticist.

Oscar Wilde and the group of the Yellow Book have
been named among new forces. Less notable, but stand-
ing distinctively for a fresh and vigorous influence was
William Ernest Henley. In nothing that is essential can

NEW INFLUENCES AND TENDENCIES 17

we differentiate between Henley the poet and Henley the
journalist and critic. He will therefore demand fuller
treatment at a later stage, and it will only be necessary
here to indicate his influence in fostering a tendency to
a typically Anglo-Saxon noisy verse and prose of action
and imperialistic politics. An invalid all his life, struggling
against physical disabilities that would have crushed a
weaker man, Henley sang loudly the courageous defiance
of life's ills and the joy of tireless doing. He had a simple
faith in strong and efficient men, in the value of material
prosperity, he gloried in the spectacle of British imperial
rule, and he lived long enough to blow the trumpet of
patriotism in the days of the Boer War with as ready a
faith as any religious fanatic that the Lord was on his
side. Henley had an admirable gift for discovering talent
in others, and it was chiefly as an editor that he came
directly into contact with the younger men of his time
and assisted them. Among these were Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, George Warrington Steevens (1869-1900), the war
correspondent, and Sir Gilbert Parker, who may be named
as severally illustrating in some degree the manner and
influence of Henley. In 1877-78 he was editor of the
weekly, London, and published in its pages Stevenson's
New Arabian Nights. From 1882-86 he supported Whistler
and interpreted the genius of Rodin to England in the
Magazine of Art. In 1889 he was editor of the Scots
Observer, and when this was removed to London in 1891
as the National Observer, Henley became a powerful in-
fluence. He gathered round him a large band of notable
contributors — R. L. Stevenson, T. E. Brown, G. W.
Steevens, Andrew Lang, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. J. M.
Barrie, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. Arthur Morrison, Mr.
G. S. Street, Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr, W. B. Yeats, H. D.
Lowry and Mrs. Rosamund Marriott Watson. Not all
these, if any, can be counted among his direct followers,
but it was impossible to come into contact with Henley
without receiving some influence from the vigorous and
independent personality of the man and the write]
Henley was more than one among many others ; he repre-
sented an interpretation in new terms of a cult well known
forty years before he made it popular again. He is the
muscular agnostic, the counter-part in the world of
B

18 INTRODUCTORY

Kingsley in the Church. As Kingsley talked in a loud
voice to reassure himself in the dark, so does Henley;
as Kingsley was constitutionally incapable of thinking for
himself, but an admirable interpreter to the masses of
other men's thoughts, so was Henley ; as Kingsley had, on
occasion, one of the best ears for metre of any poet in the
last century, so had Henley ; and further they were fellows
in a tendency to moods of vigorous Anglo-Saxon melan-
choly. These lines might well have been written by
Kingsley —

" So, till darkness cover

Life's retreating gleam,
Lover follows lover,

Dream succeeds to dream.

" Stoop to my endeavour,

O my love, and be
Only and for ever
Sun and stars to me."

(Echoes, xvi.)

Like Kingsley's verse it is at once strong and pretty, and
it has no subtlety.

Henley was the strong and happy invalid, bravely
encouraging himself in a belief that life was good; and
because he possessed so few of life's material benefits he
was inclined, like Whitman, to preach material prosperity
as a gospel, admiring in others the power to win success
from adverse circumstance. He was not a thinker, but
he had a good historical sense, a passionate enthusiasm
for individual men and women, a love of great causes in
their concrete manifestations, and he was thus fitted to
lead and inspire, if not to illuminate.

In the same years a fourth distinctive literary move-
ment, more important and more productive of fine and
enduring work than any of the three named, made its
appearance. The Irish literary movement represented the
awakening of a new sense of national consciousness. Its
aims were not single, the workers followed different paths,
but the faith was one, and a race-consciousness inspired in
the writers of the Irish school a type of literature impos-
sible in a city so cosmopolitan as London, the whirlpool
toward which nearly all English writing is attracted. In

NEW INFLUENCES AND TENDENCIES 19

England writers have little sense of common race and
faith, each man shuts himself in his own workshop or
shares his opportunities with a few others, and his work
emerges as whole as it may from the unresting conflict of
hostile thoughts and ideals. The writers of the Irish
literary movement, diverse as the results may be, had a
knowledge of community in fellowship and work. The
movement has produced a poetry of mysticism and
national consciousness in the writings of Mr. W. B. Yeats,
*A.E.' (Mr. George Russell), Mr. Padraic Colum, Moira
O'Neill and others ; the finest example for over a century
of English literary drama in the work of J. M. Synge ; and
a scholarship to illumine the older life and poetry of
Ireland in the person of Dr. Douglas Hyde.

Ireland, by virtue of her position, was saved from the
prosperity and all-devouring commercialism of Europe
before the great war. She is still, as she was centuries
since, a small island of the western seas, poor and religious.
It was the hope of Mr. W. B. Yeats and those who were
with him that they might one day spread in their country
" a tradition of life that makes neither for great wealth
nor great poverty, that makes the arts a natural expression
of life, that permits even common men to understand
good art and high thinking, and to have the fine manners
these things can give.55 The ideal is high and inspiring,
but it stands on a level with the attempts to revive handi-
crafts or folksong among cottagers living in an age of
bleak industrialism. The times will prove too much for
the Gaelic League and the Celtic Revival; but a losing
fight nobly played is more inspiring and valuable than
overwhelming victories easily gained. The Irish literary
movement, as a movement, will expire and leave no mark
on practical life, but it will leave some dreams and a little
good art to be remembered when much that seems to us
important is forgotten and has ceased to interest the men
of another time. The justification of all great religious
and artistic movements is not that they achieve their end,
but that they inspire the work of a few individuals.

PART I
POETRY

CHAPTER I

POETS OF THE TRANSITION

Oscar Wilde—Alfred Austin— Robert Bridges— Watts-Dunton — Andrew
Lang— Edmund Gosse— Wilfrid Scawen Blunt — Alice Meynell —
Margaret Lousia Woods.

THE process of history is comparable to a gardener digging
leaf-mould in a lane and sifting out the coarse particles
till the fine earth is left for use in his flower-beds. The
results of man's practical activity pass through the sieve
of time and are quickly refined by the demand of utili-
tarianism. In other words the history of human life is
the story of a ceaseless process of valuations. The writer
of contemporary history is severely handicapped, for he
works unaided in his estimates; he must judge as best
he may without the help of time's sifting process. The
historian of literature is not only faced with complica-
tions more intricate and less defined, but for him time
valuations work themselves out more slowly. He may
distinguish between writers and groups of writers in con-
temporary literature, but he cannot pretend to give a
reasoned survey of their ultimate significance. Nor can
he safely mark the stages at which a mode of thought, a
fashion in writing, is lost, and its place taken by a new
mode, a new fashion. But if all judgments of contem-
porary writers must be tentative, it is to be remembered,
on the other hand, that no literature concerns us more
closely than that which is being written in our own life-
time. No reader, no writer is strong enough to resist
his time and place. Thoughts and aims quickly modify
in every few years, and a general knowledge, even if
inaccurate in detail, of the literature of the day cannot
be without a personal value. Further, however impartial
may be the ideal in study and criticism, the personal
equation must weigh more strongly than in our attitude

28

24 POETRY [PART *

toward a literature which has passed through the rocking
sieve of the years.

In the year 1890 the great work of poets representative
of later Victorian days was already a thing of the past,
Swinburne and Meredith, to name but two, overlived the
dividing line by nearly twenty years, but they added
nothing of outstanding importance to the tale of their
work. There are, on the other hand, a few poets, either
living or only recently dead, who had gained their dis-
tinctive standing before 1890, whom it is difficult not to
name in a transitional chapter, for they belong almost
equally to the story of this generation and a generation
that is gone. Mr, Thomas Hardy, for example, as a
novelist virtually finished his work many years since, but
his poetry is of fresh significance, and derives in nothing
from the Victorian traditions. As a poet he must be
placed in another chapter with the younger generation.
Among those whose work may be taken as an instance of
overlapping may be named Oscar Wilde, Alfred Austin,
the late poet laureate, his successor, Mr. Robert Bridges,
Andrew Lang, Watts-Dunton, Mr. Edmund Gosse, and a
few others. The inclusion of these poets in a single chapter
is dictated not by the recognition of any peculiar unity
in their methods, but by the fact that though much of
their work antedates the period of our survey it is impos-
sible to dissociate them from the living poetry of more
recent years.

Oscar O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, and
early imbibed literary leanings from his mother, who
wrote under the pseudonym of ' Speranza.'
Oscar Wilde, At Oxford Wilde won the Newdigate Prize
1856-1900. in 1878 with a poem on Ravenna. At
Oxford, further, he adopted his life-long
pose as the aesthete, filled his rooms with blue china and
art trifles, cultivated the manners of the complete idler,
but succeeded in taking a first-class in Classical Modera-
tions and literae humaniores. Already he had written
poems which appeared in various periodicals. A selection
of these early pieces was printed as Poems by Oscar Wilde
(1881). The chief additions to this volume were The
Sphinx (1894), in the metre of In Memoriam, and The
Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898),

CHAP, i] POETS OF THE TRANSITION 25

Wilde's poetry is not an important part of his life's
work. In the volume of 1881 he is frankly imitative of
many poets. Much of his early poetry resembles a decora-
tive dado, it lacks intensity and sincere feeling. Among
the longer poems ' The Burden of Itys ' is noteworthy,
among the shorter the beautiful and unaffected little
dirge, ' Requiescat,' suggested by the death of his sister
in childhood; and several of the sonnets, especially the
fine ' Madonna Mia,5 are good. The Sphinx, a record of
" amours frequent and free," is a more personal utterance
than any of the earlier poems, but The Ballad of Reading
Gaol, written when Wilde came out of prison, is by far
his greatest piece of writing, whether in prose or verse.
The style, the plaining recurrence of word melody, the
imagery, all convey a haunting picture of prison cell and
high-walled yard, where —

" — each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long."

And the repetition with slight changes of the sad stanza —

" I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went

With sails of silver by."

is a good example of the effective use of echo and refrain.
Wilde here adopts, with immense gain, a simple language
in place of a decorative, The poem comes from the heart
of a man who has been through the valley of shadows,
and nothing written by Wilde has the same enduring
quality as The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Yet none of his
writing in verse is of special importance; nor can it be
said that English poetry would be regrettably poorer had
Wilde never written save in prose.

For over forty years Tennyson held the office of Poet
Laureate, and, if many were inclined to agree with Fitz-
gerald that after the volumes of 1842 all changes in
Tennyson were changes for the worse, few questioned his
fitness to represent officially the poetry of England. More
comprehensively than any poet of his time he expressed

26 POETRY [PART i

in beautiful words the average mind of the Victorian age
in its best hopes and ideals. The choiee of a successor to
Tennyson left the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, in a
dilemma. In poetic genius Swinburne was indubitably
pre-eminent, but the scandal of Poems and Ballads (1866)
still clung to him, and his political views were a difficulty ;
and Mr. William Watson, who might, at that time, in
default of Swinburne, have hoped for the appointment,
was, on the ground of his radicalism, at a disadvantage.
The Prime Minister refused to yield immediately to the
claims definitely advanced by Sir Edwin Arnold, Sir Lewis
Morris, Alfred Austin and others. The post was kept open
till the announcement was made on New Year's Day, 1896,
that the Queen approved the appointment of Alfred
Austin, who enjoyed a record for unblemished patriotism
if not for any remarkable talent as a poet.

Alfred Austin was born near Leeds, and educated at
Stonyhurst and Oscott in the Roman Catholic faith of

his father. After taking his degree at the
Alfred Austin, University of London he entered at the
1835-1913. Inner Temple, and was called to the Bar

in 1857. But on his father's death he
abandoned the profession of law, and after some years
became an active journalist, especially in connection with
the Standard, a paper for which he wrote conservative
leaders. And as a capable journalist he won well-deserved
success.

He began to write verse early, and first drew attention
to himself with The Season (1861), a satire composed in
rhyming couplets after the manner of Dry den and Pope,
with an admixture of Byron. And to the end of his life
Byron was the strong influence in moulding his poetry.
His later work may be divided into poetic drama and
volumes of lyric verse. The five large poetic dramas are
The Tower of Babel (1874), Savonarola (1881), England's
Darling (1896), Prince Lucifer (1887), and Fortunatus, The
Pessimist (1892). In the first three Alfred Austin attacked
by implication the degrading materialism of modern
England. The philosophical poems, Fortunatus and
Prince Lucifer, exhibit the necessity of faith in a moral
and spiritual law, a moral law founded upon the con-
servative tendencies of society. None of these longer

'CHAP . i] POETS OF THE TRANSITION 27

poems revealed Austin as a profound or original thinker,
but they showed a man who had a message for his age,
a message which he was able to express with a directness
and force not contemptible, and a poet capable of writing
sufficiently good if not very imaginative blank verse. He
is no fanatic, yet eagerly at war with the false luxury of
his age; and without prejudice against other countries
he is convinced that England is the best of fatherlands.
Patriotic love of fatherland is the constant theme of his
shorter lyrics ; and in his more ambitious poems, of which
the best are Fortunatua and Prince Lucifer, he expounds
his philosophy of life, and that theory, like his patriotism,
is bound up with perfervid conservatism. With Sir Henry
Newbolt he would agree that man's hopes, ideals, and his
salvation rest upon memory and the associations of the
past. He believes that the common ethical and spiritual
tradition of man is valid. And the patriotism which he
never wearies of preaching springs from the strong histori-
cal sense with which he is imbued.

But lyrical genius is rarely knit with historic sense,
The world's lyrical poets, Shakespeare included, cared
nothing for history as a chronicle of immutable facts,
Alfred Austin, with his objective and common-sense
attitude, has not the true gift of the lyrical poet, and even
his philosophical poems are based on maxims of expediency
drawn from history rather than upon any theory of meta-
physical necessity. The dramas named illustrate this fact,
and almost better The Conversion of Winckelmann (1897),
a dramatic monologue in blank verse, and one of Alfred
Austin's most successful poems. The character oJ
Winckelmann is admirably exhibited ; his argument with
himself — whether or no for the sake of his life's pursuit
to confess obedience (not intellectual assent) to Rome, is
a matter-of-fact mental debate plainly within the cognis-
ance of the poet. The subtler mind of Bishop Blougram
would not be intelligible to him.

Alfred Austin's lyrics are chiefly patriotic pieces, idylls
of pastoral life, poems of nature and love songs. His
inspiration flows chiefly from a love of England as a nation
with an historic past, as a land of green and quiet wood-
lands, meadows, flowery lanes and rose-embowered home-
steads. With a persistent naivety he has preached that

28 POETRY [PAUT i

the country is better than the town, a defensible position,
and the disputable theory that country environment has
been the inspiration of most great poetry from the earliest
times to the date of his own writing. Whatever may be
our judgment on the poetic value of his shorter pieces
it is impossible not to feel respect for his genuine love of
fatherland and the peace of the country-side. To the
question he asks in a deplorable line —

" Don't you think that silence and stillness are the
sweetest of all our joys ? "

he lias but one answer. His poems of pastoral life, never
strongly human or realistic, are written in the manner
of Tennyson's earlier idylls. g A Farmhouse Dirge *
immediately recalls * The May Queen.' Others are
pleasant, matter-of-fact and characterless. And the
patriotic lyrics, though spirited and written unto edifica-
tion, have little power of stimulating the imagination or
exciting sudden enthusiasm.

In later years Alfred Austin wrote two more philosophic
poems, The Door of Humility (1906) and Sacred and Pro-
jane Love (1908). The first is not unlike In Memoriam in
form, although in theme it is an appeal to history and not
to intuitive faith; the second contrasts worldly ambition
with spiritual idealism in the form of the literary career
at its highest.

Although Alfred Austin scarcely understood the use of
language in a higher and imaginative connotation he could
write good verse, both rhymed and unrhymed, and on
occasion he can surprise us with the magic of true poetry,
as in these lines from The Conversion of Winckelmann—

" In dreary Stendhal with its grass-grown ways,
Where everything's forgotten, and the wind
Wails over sand and unremembered bones."

But when he labours to astonish, as in the closing lines of
his poem to * George Eliot,' he only achieves a stucco
grandiosity.

Unfortunately Austin began with a theory of poetry
which he set forth with admirable precision in his critical
books, The Poetry of the Period (1870) and The Bridling of,
Pegasus (1910). The chief source of offence in his theory

i] POETS OF THE TRANSITION 29

is an excessive admiration of Byron and the extemporary
method of composition. According to this doctrine the
$>oet is best advised to use the words that come unsought,
expressing himself simply and artlessly without excessive
elaboration. In consequence Austin's poetry is blotched
with grammatical perversities, rich in passages of sheer
colloquialism, vulgar slang, awkward and insecure sen*
tences, and an untold quantity of useless chenille. His
admiration for Byron was a piece of incongruous per-
versity. Except for his tendency to the commonplace he
had nothing in common with Byron. But he had much
in common with Pope. Like Pope's his mind was logical
and ratiocinative? only redeemed by a limited faculty of
poetic feeling and expression. Byron, on the other hand,
was intensely subjective ; and Austin produced his poetry
by objective methods which share nothing with the
impetuous spontaneity of Byron. If any poet had ever
need to exercise care and pains that poet was Alfred
Austin ; he chose the other way, and with unhappy results,
only accentuated by the superiority of some poems, such
as Prince Lucifer and a few of the lyrics, in which he failed
to practise his theory.

It would be difficult to discover a contrast greater than
that between the ragged and irregular poetry of Alfred

Austin and the deliberate and exquisite
Robert Bridges, word-music of Mr. Robert Bridges, his
b. 1844. successor in the office of poet laureate.

Among living English poets none has a
name more to be held in honour for the rare and delicate
beauty of his work, for the respect he has shown for his
art, and for the light he has thrown upon the laws and
secrets of English versification. His Account of Milton's
Prosody (1898) and the occasional essays distributed in
various periodicals have done more than any recent
writings to excite interest in the study of metre. It is not,
however, by these nor by his eight verse plays, nor by the
long and beautiful early poem, Eros and Psyche (1885),
that he is likely to be remembered in the future, but by
the sonnet group, The Growth of Love (1889), and by the
the-flve books of Shorter Poems, first collected in complete
form in 1894. Especially in the Shorter Poems, and in
a few lyrics of later years, such as the exquisite ' Winter

80 POETRY [PART I

Nightfall,5 is Mr. Bridges5^ art most clearly to be seen.
He is conversant with all that is best in classical poetry
and in the work of our Elizabethan and Caroline poets;
and no one has caught so surely the ethereal and transient
lightness of sixteenth and seventeenth century cadences.
His subtleties of word-music have been sought, they are
deliberate and conscious, but art is concealed in the ful-
filment of the poet's intent. Each one of these shorter
poems ijs a mosaic in beautiful word-pattern, each word
chosen with perfect fitness to serve its double function of
expressing thought and enhancing the melody of the
whole. Poems like ' The Winnowers ' and ' The Cliff-Top 5
are in imagination the slightest impressionism, but in
delicacy of music and perfect beauty of language among
the most exquisite of English lyrics. And to name two
poems is to remember others — ' London Snow,5 6 There
sis a Hill ' — and a score with equal claims to notice. Mr.
bridges' short lyrics, as a whole, are the most perfect work
in pure prosody, in magic of cadence, since Herrick, Carew,
Drummond and the Caroline poets.

In content, in thought, in imaginative power Mr.
Bridges5 work does not, on the other hand, claim any
distinctive place. His poems are idylls and songs of grace-
ful love, vignettes of landscape and meadowed valleys,
glimpses into a serene and undisturbed mind. He has
never felt with sufficient intensity to be a great poet. He
has written of himself —

" But since I have found tHe beauty of joy

I have done with proud dismay :
For howsoever man hug his care

The best of his art is gay.55

And if a pensive melancholy visits Mr. Bridges, the
" proud dismay 55 of greater poets can hardly have touched
him at any time. All his work is the reflex of a serene,
a shy and cultured mind far removed from the stress of
the world5s endeavours and battles. The life of our day
with its philosophies, sciences, social unrest and its out-
break against the strongholds of tradition and faith might
not be, so far as the content of Mr. Bridges5 poetry is con-
cerned. His lyrics are the work of the scholar, the recluse
and the prosodist, gifted with a true and constant but
not a strong emotional resnonse to life,

CHAP, i] POETS OF THE TRANSITION 81

It is unnecessary here to dwell pn Mr. Bridges' experi-
ments in metre, which, at one time, were dismissed con-
descendingly or described as " carpentry. " The critic who
came from Tennyson or Swinburne might be disturbed
by * London Snow/ but the beauty of this and other ex-
periments in combined stress and syllabic prosody will be
best appreciated if it be realised that the rhythm is nearer
to that of ordinary speech than the forms to which the ear
has grown accustomed. On the other hand it is equally
clear that Mr. Bridges has not, in later years, added any-
thing to the best that was in his earlier work, for the simple
and beautiful music of the Shorter Poems is often replaced
by a laboured accentuation. His art has sometimes grown
too conscious of itself. But not always ; for October and
other Poems (1920) contains the beautiful ' England to
India ' and a few poems in his better manner, together
with the occasional pieces written by a poet laureate in
time of war.

Mr. Bridges is peculiarly an English poet ; and English
in a more homely sense than ever was Tennyson. For the
subject of his verse he turns to those joys of everyday life
that lie nearest to hand — memories, friendships, dreams,
and especially the joy of the countryside, the beauty of the
flowering bank, the June meadow, the winter thicket, the
weald stretching away from the foot of the hill. These he
is content merely to describe ; hardly any nature poetry is
more simply descriptive than that of Mr. Bridges.
And in everything he finds a kindly joy which suffices
to fill the content of his days and the measure of his
verse.

Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton is another of the
scholarly poets. For thirty years he lived in Putney with
Swinburne; before the close of the
Walter Theodore century he was well past middle age;
Watts-Dunton, but The Coming of Love, his single
1836-1914. important volume of poetry, did not

appear till 1897. As a boy he came into
touch with gipsy life in East Anglia, and in early man-
hood he made the acquaintance of George Borrow. His
knowledge of gipsy superstition and folklore and his friend-
ship with Borrow became the two strong creative influ-
ences of his life. The Coming of Love and Aylwin (1898)

82 POETRY [PAET I

set out, the one in verse, the other in prose, the romance
of gipsy life.

But Watts-Dunton owed no part of his scholarly
fastidiousness to Borrow or the gipsies. His preoccupa-
tion with criticism induced in him a discontent with less
than perfection, and after a long lifetime virtually the
whole of his original work is to be found in a volume of
verse and one novel. In 1875 he joined the staff of the
Anthenseum, and for twenty-three years contributed to
that paper articles and reviews of outstanding distinction
for their style, originality and wide range of knowledge.
He also wrote a number of articles for the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, including the splendid and exhaustive essay
on poetry, the crowning work of his life as a critic.

His original writing was done largely in the intervals
of continuous critical study and exposition. The Coming
of Love is a series of poems written in widely separated
years and united by a background of gipsy life and the
narrative of the loves of Percy Ay 1 win and Rhona Bos well.
The series holds a place by itself, and is as unique in
modern English poetry as is the autobiographic fiction of
Borrow in prose. These poems do not reveal Watts-
Dunton as a spontaneous and lyric poet with gifts of the
highest order; they show a mind steeped in the finer
influences of nature and literature. Their charm lies in
the emotional rendering of nature : the theme of the series
is not the love-story, but the revelation of a natura
benigna. Not all these poems are successful, and, on the
whole, the best are those which avoid gipsy dialect.
" Gipsy Heather, " for example, gains greatly in purity of
emotion and in music by the sinking of realism. In one
sense Watts-Dunton knew too much about poetry to be a
wholly spontaneous and magical poet. Beautiful as are
many of the descriptive passages, they come of fore-
thought, and are neither sudden nor inevitable in con-
ception or expression.

Nor can Watts-Dunton be accounted entirely successful
in the poem of lyrical narrative and dialogue, * Christmas
at the Mermaid.' His greatest achievement as a poet lies
in his sonnets which give him a place of honour among
English sonnet-writers. The strict limitations of the form
suited his slow and deliberate manner. Nearly all his

CHAP, i] POETS OF THE TRANSITION 3#

sonnets are good, the rise and reflux of octave and sestet
almost always admirably handled. And, although his
critical instinct inclines him to condemn argumentative
poetry, he has written two fine sequences of philosophical
sonnets in ' A Grave by the Sea ' and * The Silent Voices.5
The latter series, especially, is an exquisite and beautiful
piece of writing. Yet his poetry, if never commonplace,
never reads as the outcome of involuntary and uncon-
scious rapture. He has the gift of thought and a true
emotion, but he succeeds best in restricted metrical forms,
for his mind is that of the scholar, slow, thoughtful and
orderly, rather than that of the artist, swift and intense.
And therefore The Coming of Love, although a volume to
be set above the greater part of contemporary minor
poetry, is not a book of equal importance with others
whose content of labour and thought is by comparison
slight.

Among other writers of the older generation, primarily
men of letters and secondarily poets, are to be named
Andrew Lang and Mr. Edmund Gosse.
Andrew Lang, Regarded strictly as a man of letters, and
1844-1912. not as a sympathetic observer of contem-

porary life, Andrew Lang was one of the
most remarkable men of his time in Europe. His range
of knowledge and his power of work were astonishing.
In the easy sweep with which he covered several domains
of literature, in the swiftness combined with grasp and
fair accuracy with which he wrote he has rarely had a rival.
He described himself as a born reader, reading as naturally
and continuously as he breathed, and the consequence is
that, despite his stores of knowledge, he was the inferior
of several contemporaries in any single field. A scintilla-
tion of wit, a gift of style, at once light yet almost im-
peccably good, lent distinction to all his work. In his
earlier years, when he first came to London to follow the
vocation of man of letters, his chief interest lay with verse,
and Helen of Troy (1882) was written under the influence
of a strong ambition to produce a poem worthy his own
ideals of English poetry. His disappointment at the poor
reception of the poem turned him to light and occasional
verse, which he had already practised in Ballades in Blue
China (1880). There followed Rhymes a la Mode (1884),

84 POETRY

Grass of Parnassus (1888), New Collected Rhymes (1905),
and other volumes of slight verse. One of the strong
influences under which Lang fell was his love for French
romantic literature in its wit and dexterity, and this,
with modern variations, he reflected in some of the best
light verse written in recent years.

In 1911 Mr. Gosse collected his verse in a single volume
with a modest preface in which he tells us that the poems
" belong in essence to a period which has
Edmund Gosse, ceased to exist, to an age which is as dead
b. 1849. as the dodo." The truth of the matter is

rather that the poems here collected be-
long to the great tradition of English poetry, which may,
under all aberrations, be recognised for the same in each
successive age. He has never been interested, save as a
student, in the fevered attempts of discontented strivers
after originality to divert little rivulets to turn their
private mill-wheels. Mr. Gosse makes no pretence to
originality. There are many echoes in his verse of the
poets who inspired him in his youth, — Tennyson, Brown-
ing, Rossetti, Swinburne; there are imitations of French
forms, and among French poets he owes much to Leconte
de Lisle, to whom he has written some fine memorial
stanzas. In techinque he is invariably exact; and, if he
is rarely full of matter, he is not often thin or purposeless.
On Viol and Flute (1873) was a volume of rare distinction
for a young man of twenty-four. The two poems named
6 Old and New ' are evidence of a fine faculty in the choice
of words, and they have the impassioned emotion which
belongs to true poetry. Of quite another kind the pensive
* Lying in the Grass ? is a beautiful nature poem. The
New Poems (1879) and Firdausi in Exile (1885) also con-
tain many poems delightful in charm of technique and
thought. But the best of his books is In Russet and Silver
(1894), which is none the worse for the frank introduction
of a note of middle age. The title-poem of the volume,
' Revelation/ and ' Chattafin ' are pieces which will bear
re-reading and lingering upon. And if The Autumn Garden
(1908) shows some falling off it contains a few poems of
nearly equal beauty with these.

Mr. Gosse does not make for anything new or original,
but his verse takes a worthy place in English poetry

CHAP, i] POETS OF THE TRANSITION 85

written in the second half of the last century. And
further his poems are interesting as a reflection of a period
in modern literature, for he is receptive and sensitive to
influences. If the poems make for nothing in themselves
they are an admirable commentary, and a commentary
worth reading apart from the text.

Alfred Austin set up as a model the poetry of Byron,
but his thin talent and practical temper bore no resem-
blance to the impetuous genius of the
Wilfrid Scawen author of Don Juan, and he was least
Blunt, 1840-1922. faulty when his standard was least in
mind. In the poetry of Wilfrid Scawen
Blunt there is, on the other hand, much that reminds us
of Byron, and with Byron's faults he does succeed in com-
bining some part of what is best in Byron's vitality,
cynicism, and worldly, devil-may-care manner. Griselda :
a Society Novel in Rhymed Verse (1893), although thrown
into heroic measure, would hardly have been written had
not Don Juan set the pattern ; and it has sufficient wit and
effective satire, combined with a fluent carelessness in
versifying, to carry the reader on his way. In The Wind
and the Whirlwind (1883) and Satan Absolved: A Mystery
(1899) he writes in rhetorical verse to denounce the selfish
and cruel imperialism of the English, — a burden of pro-
phecy which always lay heavily upon him. His experience
when serving as a young man in the diplomatic service
taught him to be on the side of the little and downtrodden
peoples ; and his advocacy of Irish freedom involved him in
a short period of imprisonment, an incident celebrated in
the verses of In Vinculis (1889).

A good selection from Blunt 's poetry was made in 1898
by W. E. Henley and George Wyndham.1 After that date
he wrote Satan Absolved and the translations of the Seven
Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia (1903) ; but considered only
as a poet he is at his best in the early Love Sonnets of
Proteus (1880). These sonnets are rough, irregular, care-
lessly framed. He not only neglected, he defied the canons
of rhyme, and nearly every sonnet contains surprising
transgressions. ' Chance ' rhymes to ' hands,' ' death ' to
* path,' * alas ' to ' face,' and ' lace ' rhymes both to
6 dress ' and 'sash.' These crudities are indefensible ; harsh
1. The collected Poetical Works appeared in 1914.

86 POETRY [PART I

janglings do not make for vigour, but in Blunt >s case they
are due neither to ignorance nor carelessness, and after we
recover from our first surprise it is possible without serious
qualms to take pleasure in the directness and force of these
rough sonnets. In all his poetry he wrote as one for whom
life and action are more than art. He was a traveller and
a man of the world who took to the writing of verse because
he enjoyed it and had a true gift of utterance. And the
thing said was of far greater importance to him than the
manner of saying it. He was the brilliant amateur writing
to exercise and delight himself, but no more than the
amateur.

Since the eighteenth century the number of women
writers in verse has multiplied fast, and the minor
poetesses tend rapidly in our day to exceed calculation.
Nevertheless, Christina Rossetti, the one English poetess of
indubitable genius, has left no successor ; Mrs. Browning's
poetry is being lost in the perspective of time, and in
recent years only a few women writers have betrayed
clear and individual originality. Among poetesses who
began to write many years ago must be named Mrs. Alice
Meynell and Mrs. Margaret Louisa Woods.

As long ago as 1875 Mrs. Meynell (then Miss Thompson)
published her Preludes, and, although she failed to attract
general notice, she won from Ruskin the
Alice Meynell, eulogism that some of the passages in this
1850-1922. volume contained the finest things he had

seen in modern verse. The greater number
of the pieces in Preludes was afterwards reprinted, with
changes and alterations, in company with later work in
Poems (1898). Mrs. MeynelPs thought is slight, and,
although she is never verbose, these short poems cannot
always carry their length, and might in some cases be
bettered by the excision of stanzas. A beautiful simplicity
is her greatest charm. She never tortures language nor
seeks the inevitable and improbable word; and her lines
are never subservient to the exigencies of rhyme. Nor,
again, is she an experimentalist in metres and forms ; her
lyrical measures are the simplest; she never frames any-
thing more elaborate than the sonnet. And if her sonnets
have received more than their meed of eulogy, a few, and
notably the well-known ' Renouncement/ may compare

CHAP, i] POETS OF THE TRANSITION 87

with those of Christina Rossetti, than whom no woman
has written more perfectly in the sonnet form.

The simple melody of Mrs. Meynell ?s poems is often
truly delightful — pensive with slight pauses in the rhythm
that enhance the music. ' In Early Spring ' is a good
example of her work, as a poet of nature, and in * Parted '
we have a tender poem of regret, which again reminds
us of Christina Rossetti, although the fourth stanza —

" Although my life Is left so dim,
The morning crowns the mountain-rim;
Joy is not gone from summer skies,
Nor innocence from children's eyes,
And all these things are part of him " —

has a note of simple and human optimism alien to the
religious mysticism of Christina Rossetti.

Mrs. Meynell has written little. Eight years after Poems
she published a thin volume of Later Poems (1901), which
is not wanting in the limpidity and simple charm of the
earlier collection, although hardly anything matched the
best she had written already. In 1918 her poems were
collected with a few additions.1

Mrs. MeynelPs verse is graceful and tender rather than
thoughtful or strong, but within her range she never fails
of clearness, and she never, even in poems of love and
devotion, becomes sentimental. The same sincerity,
simplicity, clear and restrained thinking are carried over
into her two volumes of miscellaneous essays, The Rhythm
of Life (1898) and The Colour of Life (1896). These are
poetic essays, almost prose-poems, on things in general.
The thought again is clear and definite, but the essays
hold us by a charm of personal manner rather than by
any freshness or originality in ideas.

Mrs. Woods began to write poetry before the period of
this book, and she has continued to write since, but slowly
and at infrequent intervals. The col-
Margaret Louisa lected volume of 1907, containing the
Woods, b. 1856. greater part of her best work, is frell
under two hundred pages of loose print,
and the collection of 1914 adds but a few new poems.
Nevertheless, slight as is the quantity of her work, her

1. The Poems of Alice Meynell: Complete Edition; published in 1928

after her death.

88 POETRY [PABT I

name cannot be passed over in speaking of the few poets
who fall into that debatable region of time belonging
neither wholly to Victorian influences nor to the spirit
of the nineties. In some respects, if we judge Mrs. Woods
by her novels, by the two racy and vigorous peasant
poems, ' The May Morning and the Old Man ' and * Marl-
borough Fair,' or by the tragedy in rough and common life
of that fine poetic drama, Wild Justice (1896), we might
be led to count her with the realists. But, apart from the
last-named writing, which contains passages of splendid
and truly dramatic blank verse, she shows little tendency
in her poetry to realistic statement of the present. It
is distinguished rather by gravity and a masculine strength
of thought. Further, there is little marked difference
between the earlier and the later volumes in the temper
and character of her writing. The ' Gaudeamus Igitur '
of the Lyrics (1888) is a strong and thoughtful poem suf-
ficient to lend distinction to any volume. The title-poem
of Aeromancy (1896) is a grave and pensive elegy on
Oxford written in good and well-handled terza-rima. In
Poems New and Old (1907) the only piece that arrests
attention, standing out from the earlier pieces there
collected, is the noble ode upon England's dead and the —

" New thoughts, new regions, unattempted things "

left as an inheritance to the living generations of the
English. Mrs. Woods has written no greater poetry than
this splendid and inspiring ode. In the Collected Poems
(1914) she added the profound and strong unrhymed ode,
' High Tide on Victoria Embankment,' which suffers only
from passing lapses into rhetoric incidental to this form,
together with ' Marlborough Fair ' and a few new and
beautiful songs and lyrics.

Small in quantity though her work may be Mrs. Woods
is not to be dismissed with the hundreds of minor poet-
asters who write little because they can no more. She has
no largess of facility nor any peculiar charm in the use of
metre, but she has melody, her vision of life is genuinely
poetical, her thought is always strong and individual,
and she has a wonderful versatility, including in her
range, and in each case with success, drama, ode, dialect
poem, elegy, ballad, lyric and tender conceit.

CHAP, i] POETS OF THE TRANSITION 89

There are other poets who began to write within the
central decades of the nineteenth century and continued
to write to its close or the early years of this century.
But the chronological standard, mechanically applied,
tends only to confusion. Sir Lewis Morris (1833-1907),
famous as the author of the Epic of Hades (1876-77), was
still writing poetry in the twentieth century, but he
belonged to another age. Sir Edwin Arnold's (1832-94)
Light of Asia appeared in 1879 and its characteristic
facility without distinction clung to all his later work.
Robert Buchanan (1841-1901) wrote The Book of Orm
in 1870, and all that is of account in his work was finished
before the century was drawing to an end. And the
poetry of Lord de Tabley (1835-95), George Meredith
(1828-1909), Frederick Myers (1843-1901) and T. E. Brown
(1830-97) belongs to the story of Victorian literature. The
work which has been briefly summarised in this chapter
belongs to writers who cannot easily be dissociated from a
period which is of the past, nor, on the other hand, from
the opening years of the twentieth century, writers who
can neither be neglected, nor, with one exception, or pos-
sibly two, be regarded as literary landmarks.

CHAPTER II

HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS

§ 1

5 J. Arthur Symons — John Davidson — W. E. Henley — Rudyard Kipling —
§ 2. Sir William Watson — Ernest Dowson — William Sharp — Francis
Thompson.

IN a preceding chapter some attempt has been made to
summarise and distinguish four phases in literary ideals
which emerge and become clearly visible about ten years
before the close of the last century. The arbitrary
division of writers by schools is always to be deprecated
if the dividing line be exaggerated into a partition wall.
And this is more especially a mistake in an age when
ideas are more rapidly diffused throughout the civilised
world than at any other time. In days of slow com-
munication and difficult travelling schools of painters,
working almost independently of each other, might be
found in Italy, Germany, Holland and Spain; but for
centuries Europe had been in its use of Latin a single
commonwealth of letters, and though later the adoption
of vulgar tongues divided writers by nations, ideas, more
volatile than technique, cannot readily be imprisoned.
If ordinary readers in each country are separated from
each other, in the craft of literature men tend to become
at one, for language is a vesture not the fetters of thought.
And if we narrow our purview to a single country and
time the difficulty in clear demarcation between writers
is proportionately increased. The movement of influences,
the coming and going of ideas, is not always outwardly
traceable, and the contemporary as often as not conflicts
with the permanent importance of the writer.
The purpose of roads, however, is twofold, — that they

41

42 POETRY [PART i

bring us to our destination, and, often of more significance,
that they give us the pleasure of our journey by the way.
The cutting of tracks through the study of history, art,
or literature has no other meaning. The dusty surface of
the road has no beauty in itself, and only the sullen and
insensible traveller walks with eyes unraised; the true
wayfarer sees not the road, but the encompassing beauty
of earth and sky. In travelling part of our way across new
country we passed through the sometimes attractive but
not arresting scenery of Wilde's poetry. At the same
stage, or a little later, we come upon five names in a poetry
standing distinctively for fresh and individual influences
upon the time. As Oscar Wilde typified a first phase, Mr.
Arthur Symons and John Davidson characteristically
typify a second, and W. E. Henley and Mr Rudyard
Kipling a third. Mr. W. B. Yeats, who has been named
as typical of a fourth aspect of literary revival in these
years must find his place with other Irish poets of our
time.

The poems of Mr. Symons's first volume, Days and
Nights (1889), are but slight things. The melancholy of
intellectual rather than emotional sadness
Arthur Symons, characterises each poem. He writes
b. 1865. chiefly with his mind, but his verse is less

intellectualised in the process than is
common when poetry is wrought out in this fashion. The
intellectual poet is often dry, Mr. Symons scarcely ever.
If music be the most emotional of the arts, poetry is the
outcome of jar between emotion and intellect, each of these
elements of our nature striving for the mastery. Intellect
and emotion at one and in complete harmony make for
contentment and unproductiveness; their unresting con-
flict produces the highest of the arts — poetry. Where
intellect masters the emotions we have the clear light of
weaker passages in Matthew Arnold, or Sir William
Watson; where emotion alone rules we have the effer-
vescence of American poetesses and their imitators. From
the dissatisfaction of intellect and emotion emerges
poetry.

Mr. Symons's strongest quality is a subtle intellectual
power, but his poetry is never parched by intellect. The
first volume, if it holds little of great merit, if it is often

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 48

a little weak, gives evidence of the man born with the
gift of letters and a mind attuned to poetry; and it
shows, furthermore, and this is no small gift in the poet,
the power of close and accurate observation. It contains
chiefly poems on things and incidents observed and
intellectually considered. And Mr. Symons is thus saved
from falling into the slough of that decadence which was
in the air when his earliest volume of verse appeared,
although poems like * Satiety/ ' The Opium-Smoker ' and
* Night and Wind,5 the last perhaps the finest poem in
the volume, are tinged with the spirit of the decadents.

Silhouettes (1892) does not differ markedly from its
predecessor save that it shows an advance in technical
power, and the artificial world of streets, casinos, stage-
doors and theatre-stalls, of which Mr. Symons continually
writes, is more in evidence. The poems on that banal
seaport Dieppe are interesting as a piece of history. Here
the makers of the Yellow Book and Savoy used to gather
for their summer holidays to enjoy the place with childish
glee and all the sense of novelty in situation of which the
schoolgirl is conscious on her first visit abroad. In
Silhouettes the strongest influence traceable is that of
Browning — the poems are cast largely in the form of
dramatic monologue. The contents of the volume are
hardly of sufficient character, they are the work of the
imitative youth who exercises himself in the form Brown-
ing and Tennyson so largely used.

Reference has been made to the artificial setting of
these earlier poems. It is true the second volume con-
tains poems descriptive of nature unspoiled by man, the
common sights of earth and sky. But Mr. Symons is not
at his best here": he writes as a score or two of his con-
temporaries might have written. London Nights (1895)
has, as the title would lead us to expect, less of nature
and more of man, and contains some of the poet's best
things in this kind. Here also are many voluptuous poems
of the dreamer, who lives in the world of the mind and
writes with ecstasy of sensuous pleasures, making of these
more than the gods have made them to be. One of these
poems of transient love closes on a note of half-wistful,
half-cynical regret, and a few lines may be quoted as
typical of the dreamy intellectualism of Mr. Symons.

44 POETRY [PART i

" What shall it profit me to know
Your heart holds many a Romeo?
Why should I grieve, though I forget
How many another Juliet?
Let us be glaii to have forgot
THat roses fade and loves are not,
As dreams, immortal, though they seem
Almost as real as a dream/'

(Stella Marls.)

Many of these poems are in English what Baudelaire and
Verlaine are in French, and the influence of Baudelaire is
manifest throughout. Like Verlaine, the mystic and the
sensualist are mingled in Mr. Symons, and like Verlaine,
who could teach in schools and lecture, and even think
of farming, Mr. Symons is not without a certain practical
sense which emerges from time to time. And, to name
another characteristic, the impressionistic painting of
lights, faces and passing scenes has scarcely ever been
better and more deftly done in verse. Take as an example
the poem entitled ' At the Stage-door.'

" Under the archway sheer,
Sudden and black as a hole in the placarded wall,
Faces flicker and veer,
Wavering out of the darkness into the light,
Wavering back into night ;
Under the archway, suddenly seen, the curls
And thin, bright faces of girls,
Roving eyes, and smiling lips, and the glance
Seeking, finding perchance,

Here at the edge of the pavement, there by the wall,
One face, out of them all."

Mr. Symons has not the delicate charm of Dowson, but
he is a greater poet. Yet the third of his volumes does
not entirely fulfil the promise of the second. It is a better
book, the young poet has more to say, and he says it
better, but lasting poetry cannot be made out of the
artificial and lime-lit pleasures of a sophisticated world,
and Mr. Symons was too much caught in the net of these
things. The poems are works of the night, written in an
atmosphere laden with the blue smoke of cigarettes and
heavy with the odour of perfumes. And the rhythm often

CHAP. 11] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 45

does not suffice to hold the ear ; there is an absence of range
and variation in tone.

Amoris Victima (1897) opens with a series of fourteen
line poems, not sonnets, which narrate a story of broken
love. The series was probably suggested by Meredith's
Modern Love. Other series of poems in varying metres,
entitled ' Amoris Exsul,' ' Amor Triumphans ' and ' Mundi
Victima ' follow. These are the poems of an older man ;
the voluptuous pieces of the earlier volumes disappear;
Mr. Symons still writes of love, unrest and passion, but
with greater restraint; the traces of care and diligence
in composition are obvious. The note of love's regrets
and disillusions harped in the minor key wearies, and this
is one of the least arresting of Mr. Symons's volumes
in verse. In Images of Good and Evil (1899) he reverts
to his better manner, and although the volume as a whole
is possibly not so characteristic of the author, its poetry
is on a far higher level than most of his work, dealing
with the essential things and not with the pirouettings
and flaring lights of the music-halls. In not a few of the
poems, notably in the beautiful cadences of ' Palm
Sunday : Naples/ the handling of metre is more sure.
* The Old Women ' is a poem he has scarcely rivalled else-
where, and in ' The Dance of the Daughters of Herodias '
we have the finest achievement of Mr. Symons in the
realm of pure poetry for poetry's sake. The poem is
written in rough blank verse, and closes —

" Dance in the desolate air,
Dance always, daughters of Herodias,
With your eternal, white, unfaltering feet,
But dance, I pray you, so that I from far
May hear you dancing fainter than the drift
Of the last petals falling from the rose."

This collection contains also the fine ' Wanderer's Song,'
which is not the less attractive because the sentiments —
the love of Whitmanesque open-air wandering — are hardly
within the intimate experience of the author.

Scarcely anything written later than Images of Good
and Evil calls for special remark. A Book of Twenty
Songs (1905) contains slight lyrics in irregular and varied
metres ; The Fool of the World and other Poems (1906)

46 POETRY [PART I

contains some work of a higher order, but it is not a
volume of any distinction, and in the more sedate poet
it is often difficult to recognise the author of London
Nights; Knave of Hearts (1913) gathers a miscellaneous
collection of short poems and translations (chiefly from
Verlaine), written between the years 1894 and 1908, and
adds nothing of significance to his work, representing
chiefly verse the author scarcely thought worth the print-
ing in volume form at an earlier date.

Mr. Symons 5s poetry is rarely wanting in substance.
On a first reading this may not be realised, but closer
examination will show that he is always thoughtful,
observant and in touch with living human beings. If
Dowson's poetry is the poetry of sentiment and mood,
Symons's is the poetry of sights, sounds, people studied —
the opium-smoker, the absinthe-drinker, the theatre, a
woman of the pavements. Mr. Symons is a romanticist,
but a romanticist with the gifts of the realist; he sees
clearly and observes accurately. His most characteristic
work is to be found in London Nights and his finest poetry
in Images of Good and Evil : and these two volumes show
him as the poet sensitively critical of his own work. The
critical and introspective element is one of the chief
limitations of Mr. Symons 's poetry. Erotic and sensuous
as many of his poems appear the poet is never rapt in
the passion of the moment; his poems of fleshly love do
not suggest the overpowering impulse, but an imaginative
re-creation by the poet of what might, ought (or perhaps
ought not) to have been. And indeed Mr. Symons has
confessed that these are renderings of moments imagined
rather than of passions experienced, for the poet never
surrenders himself to his sensations. The sensation is
enjoyed not in the experience, but in the mood of analysis.
In these poems there are always two personalities, the
psychological pathologist and that other self at whom he
is looking. The most constant characteristic of Mr,
Symons 's poetry is its intense, and often morbid,
psychology and melancholy. Nevertheless, this habit of
introspection, the attitude of the critic, renders Mr.
Symons 's poems among the most subtle and exquisite
written within the last few decades, although his is a poetry
never likely to commend itself to the English temper.

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 47

John Davidson has this in common with Mr. Symons
that he began by refusing imaginative idylls to write of
the common sights and sounds of the
John Davidson, everyday world in which he lived. In
1857-1909. other respects he departs widely from Mr.

Symons. In his passionate love of strength
he compares with W. E. Henley ; and in the loud declama-
tions of his materialistic philosophy he stands very much
by himself. His poetry is sombre, his life was a tragedy.
Endowed like Carlyle, a greater Scotchman, and like
Henley, an English contemporary, with a crude admira-
tion of power, he failed in character because he suffered
abnormally from that defect of many Scotch minds — a
credulous belief in facts. Like Carlyle he was a protagonist
of the actual ; for in boyhood he had been trained in the
strictest sect of the Calvinists, and like Carlyle he spent
half his life in buffeting the universe as a Calvinist with-
out dogma. He was, as Mr Filson Young observes,
haunted by the shadows of Predestination, Election and
Justification. Doctrines he had lost, but a violent asser-
tiveness of temper remained with him, and at the last,
soured and embittered with poverty and ill-health, he
flung defiance in the face of the powers who created the
universe, announcing, " I begin definitely ... to destroy
this unfit world and make it over again in my own image."
But even in the twentieth century Prometheus lay bound,
the powers of the universe were too strong for Davidson,
and he relinquished in suicide the superhuman task of
carving out the world afresh in a form nearer to his heart's
desire. For Davidson, though a man of genius, was unwise
and never discovered himself and the tasks to which he
was best fitted. Nevertheless, in the perspective of time,
his name begins already to emerge as one of the strongest
and most original influences in contemporary English
poetry. In sheer force of personality nobody will compare
with him. His poetry represents unshrinking fidelity to
life and actuality, and in a blundering way it is a reaction
from the romantic sentiments of the Victorians toward a
classical spirit. But Davidson does not exhibit his
classicism in the love of form for its own sake ; his poetry
is couched in the simplest metres, and these he uses in a
rough and ready manner, far more engaged with the say-

48 POETRY

ing of what lies in him than the exact form in which he
states it.

His early career was chequered. John Davidson was
born at Barrhead in Renfrewshire, and at thirteen, his
school days over, he entered the chemical laboratory of
a business house in Greenock, and in 1871 became assistant
to the town analyst. Between 1872 and 1890, when he
came up to London, he taught in schools or worked as a
clerk for his livelihood. During this time he wrote a
number of early dramas, marked with many passages of
fine lyric poetry, but wholly without dramatic possibility.
Of these the most brilliant is the fantasia, Scaramouch in
Naxos (1889). In London he tried to earn his living by
journalism and the writing of novels. Of his novels the
best is the witty and humorous Perfervid (1890), which
has fallen into unjustifiable neglect.

But poetry was his true means of expression. The
volume entitled In a Music Hall and other Poems (1891)
aims at a direct and realistic painting of ordinary life in
verse. " The statement of the present and the creation
of the future are the very body and soul of poetry, "
Davidson once declared. In a Music Hall is a statement
of the present, but Davidson had not yet found a personal
mode of expression, and the poems of this volume are
flat and lifeless. He found his voice with Fleet Street
Eclogues (Two series, 1893-96). The idea was original,
the writing strong. Humanity, realism, imagination
belong to these easy-going dialogue poems. The beautiful
and tender ' Christmas Eve ' of the first series is strangely
unlike the violently angry John Davidson of the Testa-
ments. His descriptive powers and his use of words in
these Eclogues show him to be a poet of the divine calling.
His style is simple, plain and unadorned, but for force,
cumulative power and pictorial effect Davidson outstrips
in passage after passage others who use a larger and more
ornate vocabulary.

Ballads and Songs (1894) was his most popular book,
and fully deserved to be. In pure poetry it stands for
the high- water mark of Davidson's achievement. It con-
tained the splendid * Ballad of a Nun ' and ' Ballad of
Heaven,' in which the force of his simplicity in style is
carried to its highest point in ordinary ballad measure.

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 49

Almost every stanza has that intensity of emotion which
is the soul of poetry. The lines —

" Sometimes it was a wandering wind,

Sometimes the fragrance of the pine,
Sometimes the thought how others sinned,
That turned her sweet blood into wine."

have been quoted times without number, and they never
lose with repetition. In the same volume came ' Thirty
Bob a Week ' which would never have been written save
for Mr. Kipling, but it has Davidson's stronger moral
earnestness. And ' A Cinque Port/ though short, is, as
a rounded and complete work of art, one of the most
perfect poems Davidson ever wrote. It is pensive, grave,
severe, yet beautiful. The New Ballads (1897) contained
work nearly as good in the ' Ballad of a Workman ' and
in that splendidly imaginative poem, * A New Ballad of
Tanriliauser, which is fortunately not ruined by the
didactic aim the poet professes of laying the ghost " that
still haunts the world — the idea of the inherent impurity
of nature " — a purpose most readers would never divine
without the help of the explanatory note. The title
poem of The Last Ballad (1899) is more impersonal and
less declamatory than Davidson at his worst, but neither
it nor the long ' Ordeal ' can be counted among his suc-
cesses. Nor do Holiday and other Poems (1906) and Fleet
Street and other Poems (1909) add anything of value to
the earlier work. In the last-named miscellaneous collec-
tion the most striking poems are ' Liverpool Street
Station/ perhaps the best example of Davidson's use
of poetry to state the present, and ' Cain/ which was
intended to be the first of a series of five poems to be
entitled ' When God meant God.'

Most of the poems in these volumes are in rhyme, but
Davidson had long been practising blank verse, and in
his later years he wrote a series of Testaments beginning
with The Testament of a Vivisector (1901) and culminating
with The Testament of John Davidson (1908). The last
Testament was prefaced by a violent and unbalanced
* Dedication ' to the peers temporal of Great Britain and
Ireland in which with the sound of a tempest Davidson
set forth his view of Christianity as the seed of decadence,
D

50 POETRY [PART i

and rounded off his address with a statement, afterwards
repeated in Fleet Street, that Man is " the very form and
substance of the universe . . . become conscious and self-
conscious.95 He disclaimed the name of philosopher, nor
did he admit allegiance to Nietzsche, who, according to
Davidson, conceived the image of the Overman only
because he came himself of inferior stock. " Such an
idea would never occur to an Englishman. The English-
man is the Overman." Nevertheless, although he thrusts
Nietzsche contemptuously aside, Davidson preaches a
gospel of aristocratic and material power which is scarcely
distinguishable from Nietzschean theory. It is difficult
to take the Testaments seriously — the poet of rare and
beautiful genius has sunk into declamatory spasms of
denunciation uttered in rhetorical blank verse. The
Testaments and the two parts of Mammon (1907-8), a
trilogy incomplete at Davidson's death, are of interest
as human documents, but as poetry, or as a philosophy
of the universe, they are almost negligible. His war with
the Olympian powers is like a buffeting of the air in a
rage because the things you wish to smite are not at hand.
The vaticinatory mouthings of The Testament of John
Davidson are fortunately interrupted by passages of irrele-
vant poetry which gladden the reader's way, and at the
close it is a relief to turn the page and reach the epilogue
which is worth the whole Testament and much more.

" I felt the world a-spinning on its nave,

I felt it sheering blindly round the sun;
I felt the time had come to find a grave :

I knew it in my heart my days were done.
I took my staff in my hand ; I took the road
And wandered out to seek my last abode.
Hearts of gold and hearts of lead,
Sing it yet in sun and rain,
' Heel and toe from dawn to dusk,
Round the world and home again/ "

Davidson, like Tennyson, was a poet of science : in
Mammon and the Testaments he exalted the dignity and
purity of matter, he chanted the psalm of the evolutionary
processes, whereby Nature has, at last, made herself self-
conscious in Man. He never wearied of repeating the
doctrine that Man is but the Universe grown conscious.

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 51

The glory of Man is that he quits himself boldly and is
strong, living out his life to the fulness in opposition to the
decadent altruism of Christianity. Thus Davidson sub-
stituted for the forsaken dogmas of Calvinism dogmas of
his oWn, as triumphant, ungraceful and unyielding. His
later poetry is the voice of one crying in the wilderness
exhorting man to forbear from repentance, to be his own
god and kingdom of heaven. Nevertheless, he constantly
declared that he came not to supply a new inetaphysic
or philosophy. "It is a new poetry I begin, a new
cosmogony, a new habitation for the imagination of men."
And by a new poetry Davidson meant that poetry should
be a crescive art, a statement of the present and of the
future, that it should be a poetry not of pleasant glades, of
nightingales, of fair women seated like pensive goddesses
in bowers, but a poetry of Fleet Street, of railway stations,
of the factory, of the applications of science ; and, so far,
Davidson may be regarded as the English precursor of
Marinetti and the continental poets of Futurism. As the
Futurist painter attempts to convey in pigment motion
and the combined emotions of artist and spectator, so
Davidson attempted to convey in poetry the cosmic
emotion conscious of itself in individual men. This was
the end of his Testaments and tragedies — especially of The
Theatrocrat (1905).

In later years he found the ornament of rhyme a
limitation too narrow to admit the declamatory announce-
ment of this cosmic emotion. In a note appended to
Holiday and other Poems he writes of a poetry which is,
" the will to live and the will to power,5' a poetry which
has found its greatest expression for all time in English
blank verse, " the subtlest, most powerful, and most
various organ of utterance articulate faculty has pro-
duced." In the writing of blank verse he found the greatest
satisfaction and joy of his hard and embittered life.
Davidson's note ' On Poetry ' is often incoherent, but it
is a stirring piece of writing, for hardly another poet has
declared his faith in accents so rapt and believing as his.
Yet it cannot be maintained that his blank verse is of
the finest order. Rhetoric is the bane of blank verse,
and it caught Davidson in its toils. There are passages,
and not a few, wherein he rises to writing as flexible,

52 POETRY [PART i

melodious and strong as anything in modern poetry, but
against these we have to set hundreds of lines of bombast
and declamation.

Despite his love for the art of blank verse Davidson will
be remembered by a few rhyming ballads, eclogues and
short lyrics. And if we judge him only by this narrow
selection from his work he must he placed in a small
group with poets as dissimilar as Mr. Arthur Symons,
Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. A. E. Housman
and Herbert Trench, who have produced something
beyond the range of their contemporaries, a poetry that
leaves nothing quite as it was before.

In his faith in a material world, in his admiration of
strength and courage, in a tendency to lapse into declama-
tion, William Ernest Henley is sometimes
William Ernest not unlike Davidson. Davidson's health
Henley, Was poor, at the last he was haunted with

1849-1903. the belief that he was a victim of cancer ;

and it is always to be remembered that
Henley was an invalid. His physical disabilities go far to
explain his writing.

Henley was educated at the Crypt Grammar School of
Gloucester, and grew up under the influence of T. E.
Brown, who became head master in 1861. From boyhood
he suffered from tuberculous disease, which finally
necessitated the amputation of a foot, and his * Hospital
Verses ? are the record of a period when he lay in the
infirmary at Edinburgh. These verses, as might be
expected, were rejected by every editor to whom they
were submitted. They were publishd in 1888 as part
of the Book of Verses. His other chief volumes of verse,
written in the intervals of driven journalistic work, were
The Song of the Sword (1892), which contained the
' London Voluntaries,' and was re-christened by that name
in a second edition, Hawthorn and Lavender (1899), and
For England's Sake (1900).

The volume of 1888 brought Henley some recognition
in England and, perhaps, more immediate fame in
America. The best of its contents were ' In Hospital 9 and
the ' Bric-a-brac ' poems. The interest of ' In Hospital '
for us is the personality of Henley rather than these rough-
hewn and unrhymed verses. And, beyond this, their

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 58

highest merit is their realistic rendering of the atmosphere
of the sickward, the operating theatre, the silent figures of
nurse, student and house surgeon coming and going. The
tense stillness broken by stertorous moans, the smell of
anaesthetics and drugs, the footfalls in the night and
whispered consultations of nurses, these are all repro-
duced with astonishing fidelity. In the illusion of reality
Henley achieves complete success. In the words of Mr.
Arthur Symons, " Here is poetry made out of personal
sensations, poetry which is half physiological, poetry
which is pathology — and yet essentially poetry. " Judged
as poetry the finest of these pieces is the last — * Dis-
charged.' In this there is something of a finer inspira-
tion which Henley did not often reach. And typical of
this collection are those poems which sketch individuals
— the staff-nurse, the lady probationer, the house-surgeon,
the scrubber, and, best of all, the well-known ' Apparition 5
with its portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson.

In mastery of metre and in beauty of imagery the
important contents of Henley's second volume are the
c London Voluntaries/ The easy movement and loose
rhyming arrangement of these poems gives them a peculiar
flexibility and admirably adapts them to the purpose of
describing London in her moods. And in felicity of
thought, epithet and phrase Henley is at his best. When
he writes that though a hundred years hence other lovers
will be where we are now,

" But being dead, we shall not grieve to die,"

he expresses an old thought with a simplicity and direct-
ness which gives to it new life. And among memorable
epithets and descriptive phrases we have the river " new-
mailed in morning, " the " golden-coasted sky " of
evening, the wind " slouching, sullen and obscene " along
the streets. The ' London Voluntaries ' probably cost
Henley more pains to produce than any other part of his
writing. Hawthorn and Lavender, upon the other hand,
is not a book in which we find him at his best. These
poems of the south coast, of Sussex Downs and lanes, too
strongly suggest the over-worked journalist spending a
well-earned holiday, surprised at his leisure and hardly
knowing how to use it save in a rollicking tramp along

54 POETRY [PART i

the roads, improvising scattered staves of song upon
flowers and winds and clouds* It is all a little boisterous
and violent, disturbing the silence. He shouts —

" Sound, Sea of England, sound and shine,

Blow, English Wind, amain,
Till in this old, gray heart of mine
The Spring need awake again/'

A few songs like this have their use after reading Tennyson
and the languid —

" Heavily hangs the broad sun-flower,
Heavily hangs the tiger-lily," —

but the collection of some seventy pages makes us regret
our evening walk with a companion whose voice is so
strident, who is so obviously out to enjoy himself. The
poems too strongly suggest the man resolved to persuade
himself he is enjoying life, and his conception of a good
time is typically Anglo-Saxon — something a little noisy.
And so Henley finds it in him to write of autumn's
" exquisite chromatics of decay/' a phrase which suggests
nothing so much as the oily discolourations of a noisome
pool. But sometimes he redeems himself and shows that
his violence was largely an affectation by which he deceived
himself into forgetting that his life was one of pain and
hard struggle. The poems beginning * Look down, dear
eyes, look down ' and ' Come where my Lady lies * are of
another order. In these we are nearer to the innermost mind
of Henley than in any part of the two preceding volumes.
For England's Sake (1900) was his contribution to the
outbreak of patriotic poetry excited by the Boer War,
and it was but natural that Henley, with his faith in the
material event, should have written as he did. These
poems, however, add nothing to his reputation^ for the
patriotic song, like the church hymnary, appeals to an
instinct other than the faculty of poetry. With the
exception of —

" What have I done for you,
England, my England? "

Henley's last volume is not much above the range of good
journalistic verse-writing.
The finer breath of Doetrv did not lie within the borders

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 55

of Henley's genius. He is a singer who only transposes his
key by an accident; his common method is to sing of
himself and his daring, passionate enjoyment of life. But
Kingsley, Henley, Stevenson protest too loudly the joy of
life to convince us that they found it easy to be happy ;
too often they speak like men attempting to persuade
themselves against their better judgment. Henley praises
the generous gods for life, like the preacher who doubts
that his congrgation follow his doctrine, and, scarcely
sure of it himself, he falls back upon his " unconquerable
soul," for which again, and unnecessarily, he thanks the
gods. He is a better poet, and, it may be added, a wiser
man, when he is less defiant.

" Shall we not take the ebb who had the flow ?
Life was our friend. Now, if it be our foe —
Dear, though it spoil and break us ! — need we care

What is to come ? "

" Let the great winds their worst and wildest blow,
Or the gold weather round us mellow slow :
We have fulfilled ourselves, and we can dare
And we can conquer, though we may not share
In the rich quiet of the afterglow

What is to come."

That is Henley at his best in mood, wisdom and poetry.

Henley's finest gift was an ear for the melody of words,
and in this he was not unerring, nor did he always strive
for perfection. Many of his Ballades, Vilanelles, and the
irregular rhythms of * London Voluntaries ' give pleasure
by their deftness and happy choice of words. Nor could
anything in the mere technique of some of the short
4 Bric-a-brac ' poems be bettered. The double ballade of
4 Life and Fate ' has the note of Villon ; ' While the west
is paling ' is an exquisite snatch of song caught from the
slight stir of the evening air. Yet the poet in Henley
never sinks beneath the craftsman. As a poet, however,
his range is narrow; his imaginative powers are of the
simplest ; he frequently repeats his ideas and images ; and,
often as he sounded the trumpet calling to life, he had
few ideas about living beyond the need of love and courage
to endure. For Henley's chronic invalidism shaped his
ideas and poetry. * In Hospital ' is more than a story of

56 POETRY [PART i

the poet's days in the Edinburgh infirmary — it is the
picture of a soul. Like Scott and Stevenson he was in-
capacitated for the active life to which he was born by
temperament, and therefore the more was he lured on by
the " bright eyes of danger. " The hospital verses are a
story of adventure in the surgeon's den; * Bric-a-brac,'
* Echoes,' * Rhymes and Rhythms,' poems of his soul's
adventures in a world of pain shot with gleams of love and
happiness ; * A Song of Speed ' chants the novel adventure
of riding in a motor-car. Like his friend, Stevenson,
Henley is the child lost in the fair,

" Dreaming, desiring, possessing,"

and trying bravely to laugh away weariness and fear.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling's early verse, like much of
Henley's, was merely part of his work as a journalist
and editor. Like Henley he grows noisy
Rudyard Kipling in his glorification of physical courage
b. 1865. and the prowess of the English, and, at

the worst, his patriotism sinks beneath
Henley's into an " underbred swagger and brawling
imperialism." Yet Mr. Kipling, conscious of the English
race far-flung over the surface of the earth, has the
foundations of his imperialistic gospel deeply-seated. He
has not been guiltless of foolish noise, but he is not the
writer of empty jingo ditties : for, born in India, he has
travelled widely throughout the English-speaking world,
and his mind is strongly imbued with a consciousness of
the group-soul of the race to which he belongs. The
British Empire is not only a physical fact to Mr.
Kipling, it is a psychic phenomenon and a natural religion.
And he is more typically English than Henley the pagan,
for he accepts the gods of his country and the doctrines
of Old Testament Christianity.

Mr. Kipling's connection with India in early manhood
has everything to do with the cast of his thought and the
character of his writing, whether in prose or verse. He
returned to India, when his school days were over, and
formed a connection with the editorial staffs of the Lahore
Civil and Military Gazette (1882-87) and the Allahabad
Pioneer (1887-89); and to these papers he contributed
satirical verse, sketches and short stories of Indian life.

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 57

And, although he has written of every corner of the earth,
the best of his work, especially in prose, is that set with
an Indian background. Yet the light verse of Depart-
mental Ditties (1886) has an interest too restricted to
make any wide appeal. They may still be read by the
Anglo-Indian, and they are sometimes slightly amusing
to his brother in England, but the humour is of the
character named " family," and at a distance loses its
point. As satirical verse these ditties take no high place :
Mr. Kipling is out-distanced by at least a dozen men in
the last half-century from Thackeray to Sir Owen Sea-
man, and he shows no special faculty in one grace of this
kind of writing — extravagances of metre and rhyme.

Before the publication of Barrack-room Ballads (1892)
snatches of verse under that name appeared as epigraphs
to some of Mr. Kipling's tales ; later Henley printed many
of the ballads in the National Observer, and in due course
they appeared in volume form to meet with an instan-
taneous and phenomenal popularity, hardly equalled since
Scott, Byron, Tupper and Montgomery. Barrack-room
Ballads was divided into two parts, and, as Mr. Richard
le Gallienne pointed out many years ago, whereas there
can be no doubt of the success of the swinging ballads in
soldier dialect (better handled here than in the Mulvaney
stories) the ' Other Verses ' are comparatively dull and
uninspired. The artifice of Macaulay's verse is too trans-
parent and obvious to charm us a second time, and * With
Scindia to Delhi/ ' The King's Mercy,' and even the oft-
praised ' Ballad of East and West,' although they do not
lack vigour, only serve to remind us how much better
Macaulay did these things. The whole of this section is
wanting in the personality of the author and in genuine
poetry ; and pieces like ' An Imperial Rescript ' and c The
Ballad of Boh da Thone ' are almost stupidly weak.
* L 'Envoi,' which closes the section, alone has the breath
of true poetry and is worthy of better precursors. Very
different is it with the twenty poems of * Barrack-room
Ballads.' The matter is unequal, but only one or two
need be set aside. ' Snarleyow,' with its repulsive goriness,
is a poem that ought never to have been written. Its
theme may be true; but of some subjects, if we must
speak, we speak in whispers for the sake of our common

58 POETRY [PART i

humanity. The blundering falseness of thought and senti-
ment in * Soldier, Soldier ' is a discredit to the author.
But four swinging and racy ballads in soldier dialect,
* Fuzzy-Wuzzy,' ' Gunga-Din,' * Oonts ' and ' Mandalay,'
are almost a new kind of poetry, and scarcely below them
come 'Ford o' Kabul River ' and * The Young British
Soldier.5 ' Fuzzy- Wuzzy,' with its lolloping refrain, is
pehaps no great achievement, but an individual one, and
offers a good example of Mr. Kipling's swing.

" So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy- Wuzzy, at your home in the Soudan ;
You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin'

man;
An* 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick head of

'air —

You big black boundin' beggar — for you broke a British
square ! "

6 Mandalay ' is by far the finest poem in the collection.
The slow rhythmical rise and fall of the lines reminds us
of the pathetic tenseness of plain-song chant, and the
poet has wonderfully transfigured common thoughts and
common words. It is the crystallisation into poetry of
a mood in the vulgar mind of a cockney, who has never
seen the Orient so clearly as when away and at a distance.
Were we to question everything else Mr. Kipling has
written, * Mandalay ' ranks him with the poets. In the
poetry of commonplace thought nothing could surpass
this —

" 'Er petticoat was yaller an5 'er little cap was green,
An' er name was Supi-yaw-lat — jes' the same as Theebaw's

Queen,

An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,
An' a-wasting Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot :
Bloomin' idol made o' mud —
Wot they call the Great Gawd Budd—
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed 'er where she
stud 1

On the road to Mandalay,

Where the flyin'-fishes play,

And the dawn comes up like thunder outer

China 'crost the bay."

The defects of all these poems are those which inhere in
all Mr. Kipling's work — crudity of sentiment, bluster, loud

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 59

shouting, and an inability to resist the temptation to
garish effects. But, if we are content not to expect the
note of finer poetry, it cannot be denied that in their genre
the Barrack-room Ballads are an achievement. They and
their successors in the later volumes have probably been
imitated by budding poets more often than any modern
verse. And the fact that Mr. Kipling can be imitated,
so that the copy is scarcely distinguishable from the
original, is a measure of his quality.

The Seven Seas (1896), beside the poems which give a
title to the volume, contain a further selection of * Barrack-
room Ballads,' including the truly beautiful ' Mary, Pity
Women,' that splendid song of reiselust, ' For to Admire/
and more ballads with the rollicking swing of the earlier
collection— < Cholera Camp,' < The 'Eathen ' and < The
Shut-eye Sentry.' None of these is quite as good as the
best ballads of the earlier series, neither is anything in
The Seven Seas on the same plane as ' Mandalay,' nor
anything as bad as the worst things in the first ' Barrack-
room Ballads,' the level of workmanship is, in general,
better sustained. Three poems stand distinctively before
the others — the two dramatic monologues, * M* Andrews'
Hymn ' and ' The Mary Gloster,' and that stirring ballad,
* The Rhyme of the Three Sealers,' which tells the story
of a fight between sealing boats in the cold fogs of the
North Pacific. * The Rhyme of the Three Sealers ' is an
epic in ballad form, the ballad of the long anapaestic and
iambic line, and renders in poetry the thoughts and lives
of rough seamen with a vigour and truth which makes
the poem one of Mr. Kipling's greatest pieces of writing.
The anvil and heavy hammer attempts of Mr. Masefield
and his imitators to get the common thought of common
people into verse is the merest bungling beside these lines
in which the rough sealing skipper bids farewell to life
as he lies wounded on the deck —

" He'll have no more of the crawling sea that made him suffei

so,
But he'll lie down on the killing-grounds where the hollus-

chickie go.
And west you'll sail and south again, beyond the sea-fog's

rim,
And tell the Yoshiwara girls to burn a stick for him."

60 POETRY [PART i

The last line with its naive revelation of the man's moral
standard is one of those inspired flashes of character
drawing which Mr. Kipling strikes now and again. The
first of the dramatic monologues, ' W Andrews' Hymn,5
reveals the character of an old Scots engineer and is, at
the same time, a song of steam and machinery. For the
other, ' The Mary Gloster,' it may be said that it would
be impossible, whether in prose or verse, to find elsewhere
in Mr. Kipling's work a painting of character stronger,
more exact and more convincing than this drawing in his
own words of the life and personality of the coarse and
successful shipowner who lies on his death-bed talking in
mingled moods of cynicism, contempt and earnestness to
his idle, luxurious and effete son. " Actuality " is the
word often used of Mr. Kipling's work, and never with
better reason than of * The Mary Gloster.'

In the ' Song of the English,' which opens The Seven
Seas, Mr. Kipling blows the trumpet of imperialism loudly,
but without any of the vulgar flourishes with which he is
often indiscriminately credited. It would be beside the
mark to pretend that he always avoids shallow jingoism ;
for he appears sincerely to entertain the belief that
Englishmen and Anglo-Saxon colonials are better than all
foreigners. In this simple faith he wrote the early soldier
stories and the verse of the Barrack-room Ballads ; and in
The Five Nations (1903), inspired, like Henley, by the Boer
War he assumes the mantle of a prophet of empire. In
justice to Mr. Kipling it ought, however, to be kept in
mind that his imperialistic exhortations are, as often as
not, as strongly denunciatory of faithlessness and the trans-
gressing of the law as are the chapters of Isaiah.

" Keep ye the Law — be swift in all obedience —

Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford.

Make ye sure to each his own

That he reap where he hath sown ;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the

Lord."

The famous gibe at " the flannelled fools at the wicket or
the muddied oafs at the goal " is only one of a series of
ironical casts at the complacent superiority of the insular
mind ; the prosy slang of ' The Lesson,' which drives home

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 61

the moral of our discredit in South Africa, can hardly be
counted a eulogy of British efficiency ; and the ' Reces-
sional ' of 1897 reads like the admonition of a Jeremiah in
khaki. The jingoism of Mr. Kipling lies not so much in
anything he writes as in the magnificent assumption that
Anglo-Saxons may make mistakes, may sin against their
Law and their God, but at the worst the strong inclination
of Jehovah is to support the English whenever possible.
Our virtues are our own, our follies are such as

-the Gentiles use

Or lesser breeds without the law."

The worship Mr. Kipling pays in his temple has been well
described as " a rather morbid version of Judaism."

The volume of 1903 contains nothing that could add to
Mr. Kipling's immediate popularity or enduring fame.
In the memorial verses to C. J. Rhodes he reaches a
restrained dignity which is not frequent with him; and
* Sussex,5 a poem in praise of the county he has adopted
for his own, has a distinction in the fine simplicity of its
English. Even Mr. Hilaire Belloc has written nothing as
good of his beloved county. * The Truce of the Bear/ in
which " Matun, the old blind beggar " tells the story of his
mauling by " Adarn-Zad, the Bear," is set apart from the
other poems of the volume in its mystical emotion and
pathetic intensity. The impulse to chant the romance of
steam, commerce and machinery appears in the per-
sonifications of 'The Bell Buoy,5 * Cruisers ' and 'The
Destroyers.5 But neither here, nor in the ' Service Songs '
of the same collection, which are dull and spiritless, is
there anything which reaches the level of the best things
in the earlier volumes.

The Boer War had an ill effect on art and literature ;
and Mr. Kipling was among those who suffered most —
nearly all his better writing in verse antedates the war,
for since that time he has been too conscious of his pro-
phetic call to cry aloud and spare not. This was the more
natural because he has never dissociated poetry from jour-
nalism, and latterly his poems have appeared in the news-
papers like verse leaders on important topics of the day.
Mr. Kipling is the poet of empire, colonial expansion and
commercial activity, as these things were imagined and

62 POETRY

believed by the great mass of the English at the close of
the nineteenth century ; and he is therefore almost wholly
a poet to his contemporaries ; nearly all his verse writing
is cramped by limitations of time and place, and of simple
and essential poetry there is less to be found in him than
might be hoped. A like statement holds true of a great
part of his prose work ; the faults and the virtues are in
either case the same, and it will be more possible to
estimate Mr. Kipling as a whole in another chapter. As
a poet he is emphatically of an age. His popularity and
his credit have already waned. But in his place he is
important as a finger-post pointing the way, indicative of
much in a literary phase. And that he has a true but
limited genius as a poet is manifest, for he was more
inspired when he wrote * Mandalay,9 ' The Three Sealers '
and * The Mary Gloster ' than in any part of his prose.

§2

The close of the century is not without other names of
distinction among poets who had either ceased to write
before its last year, or had by that time published all that
is essential to our knowledge of their work. If they are
here set apart from others named in this chapter the
differentiation implies not necessarily a lesser poetic
genius, but an influence less marked upon the impulses and
tendencies of poetry in our own time. Although Sir
William Watson, Ernest Dowson, William Sharp and
Francis Thompson suffer little and often gain in a compari-
son with the poets whom we have named earlier in the
chapter they have not in a perceptible degree directed any
recent trend in poetry. In ' Wordsworth's Grave ' and
' Lacrimae Musarum ' Sir William Watson has written two
noble elegies, but he is in the following of Milton, Words-
worth and Matthew Arnold, and only slightly a man of
his generation ; the slender and beautiful lyrical genius of
Dowson was not of a nature to extend its influence far;
Francis Thompson was a poet from the world of books and
Catholic mysticism ; and William Sharp was the poet of
an eerie and somewhat affected Celtic mysticism. For
differing reasons these four illustrate no clear relation to
their time, save that Dowson belonged to the group of the

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 63

Yellow Book, and the poetry of Sharp is one facet in the
Celtic Renaissance. But these two links are weak and of
no special moment.

The volume containing The Prince's Quest (1880)
appeared over forty years since. Oddly enough, as it
is one of Sir William Watson's earliest,
Sir William it is also his longest poem. The motif is

Watson, that underlying the Hymn of Bardaisan,

b. 1858. Shelley's Alastor, and many another of the

world's poems — the quest of the soul's
ideal. It is his only poem which exhibits any vagueness
in thought and form, and is obviously inspired by Shelley
while betraying echoes from Tennyson. The metre em-
ployed— five-foot iambic couplets — moves slowly, the poet
is not wholly at his ease in it, and the poem as a whole
announces its immaturity. Sir William Watson's genius
first found definite expression four years later in his
Epigrams of Art, Life and Nature (1884). The terse and
chiselled form of the epigram, was scarcely the favourite
child of the times, and its revival by a young poet showed
at least a courage to stand aloof and work out his own
salvation. He disclaims all intention of conforming to the
popular conception of the epigram, and chooses rather to
emulate " the nobler sort of epigram " — that is, .the single
thought on art, life or nature, pointedly and concisely
expressed. In this sense all great poetry (and all great
prose) will contain epigrams ; though the epigram in itself
can never be a high form of the poetic art. But the interest
of Sir William Watson's venture, so far as he is concerned,
is that it has given to all his subsequent writing* a terse
and sententious character. The Prince's Quest, and the
shorter poems of that volume, together with the book of
Epigrams, gave evidence of a genuine poetical faculty
combined with a fine command of reserved and dignified
English, which it was good to see at a time when the
tendency ran, as it still does, to a careless enlargement of
the borders of poetical vocabulary. Sir William Watson's
ideal of poetic form and diction was from the first rigidly
exacting. His early volumes displayed a self-control and
reserve remarkable in a young man. But, as a poet of
wider reach and feeling, he first showed the range of his
his powers with Wordsworth's Grave, written between

64 POETRY [PAET i

1884 and 1887, a poem which attracted universal admira-
tion for its simple form and dignity of phrase. The com-
parison with Milton, which the poem suggested to more
than one critic, was an overflow of contemporary feeling.
In Wordsworth's Grave we do, however, find something
of that intellectual passion for the commanding word and
the inevitable epithet, which belonged to Milton ; and the
lines move slowly, as to " a solemn music. " The manner,
the diction, and the music of the poem are exactly fitted
to the subject, and, despite the contrary opinion of the
few, in the judgment of the majority of those who read
poetry at all it will remain as Sir William Watson's finest
poem.

In the order of elegiac poetry Sir William Watson
followed Wordsworth's Grave with Lacrim& Musarum
(1892), written after the death of Tennyson. This is his
most beautiful, warmly-coloured and melodious poem.
The loose metre of the ode, though faulty in the first
version, was revised later; and imagery combines with
thought to sustain the poem on a plane worthy of its
theme. The natural tendency of Sir William Watson to
finished terseness and rounded completeness in short
phrases disappears. We do not stop, as we are inclined to
do in Wordsworth's Grave, to dwell upon the single
thought or isolated image. The opening passage of the
elegy could not be bettered, either in the poetic imagery
of its thought or in the fitting stress it lays upon the
oneness of Tennyson and his poetry with the racial con-
sciousness of the land to which he belonged. In his other
more noteworthy elegies, ' In Laleham Churchyard ' and
4 The Tomb of Burns,' he returns to the concise and
epigrammatic habit.

It is in the elegy, the ode and the quasi-philosophical
poem that Sir William Watson's muse finds her fittest
sphere of song ; it is in these that he stands differentiated
from other poets of his time; and for this reason the
common comparison with Wordsworth has its meaning,
although he wholly lacks Wordsworth's interest in the
apparently commonplace. He is not obsessed with a
belief in the enormous importance of little things, but
inclines to display, on the contrary, a manner which is
almost irritatingly superior. General conceptions rather

CHAP. 11] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 65

than everyday trifles appear in the mirror which he holds
up to life. But that, after a short discipleship to Shelley,
he conceived a deep and lasting reverence for Wordsworth,
it is needless to say. The reason is not far to seek. If
the emotion of the pure lyric is spontaneous and un-
sought, the inspiration of elegiac poetry, using the words
in their widest connotation, is thought touched with
emotion. And it is here that Sir William Watson finds a
point of contact with Wordsworth. Wordsworth was not
one for whom poetry was an inrush which came to him
wholly unbidden; poetry was for him "emotion recol-
lected in tranquillity,55 and that is why he was never able
wholly to distinguish between his hours of inspiration and
the days when he wrote poetry as a poet by profession.
Sir William Watson knows that his is not " the facile
largess of a stintless muse,55 but

" A fitful presence seldom tarrying long,
Capriciously she touches me to song."

The character of the larger part of his poetry is " emotion
recollected in tranquillity.55 Apart from the elegies, — the
ode, the philosophical poem and the sonnet, with its
exacting rules, are the forms most naturally fitted to the
character of his genius. On another plane we may add
his political poetry, which can hardly have more than an
ephemeral interest, and his few short satires, which, for
point and venom, can scarcely be surpassed. Among his
finer odes are the splendidly sonorous ' Hymn to the Sea *
and ' England my Mother 5 ; and of his quasi-philosophical
poems the most distinctive are ' The Hope of the World '
and ' The Unknown God.5 In the two poems last named
Sir William Watson appears as an egotistic rebel, defying
the order of the universe on his own account. And this is
a mistake, for, as Epictetus pointed out long ago, it is
better for a man to confine himself to the things which
lie in his power. It is this self-centred attitude which
hampers him as a poet. He is not lyrical because he
cannot place himself in other situations with a subjective
and imaginative sympathy. And this faculty lies at the
root of all dramatic and lyrical achievement. If, however,
his genius does not express itself naturally in lyric song,
he has written a few short Ivrics of supreme beautv. The

66 POETRY [PAKT i

following stanzas, which bear no title, form a lyric poem
with the integral purity of clear crystal —

" Thy voice from inmost dreamland calls ;
The wastes of sleep thou makest fair ;
Bright o'er the ridge of darkness falls
The cataract of thy hair."

" The morn renews its golden birth :

Thou with the vanquished night dost fade ;
And leav'st the ponderable earth
Less real than thy shade."

And there are a few other short poems of a true lyrical
character.

Sir William Watson's New Poems (1909) cannot be said
to add anything of real importance to his earlier work, with
the exception of that splendid ode in unrhymed verse,
6 Wales : A Greeting.' This volume and the next mis-
cellaneous collection, The Muse in Exile (1913), came as a
disappointment. Some of the pieces in the last volume
hardly rise above a better type of light doggerel, and in
longer poems, ' Part of my Story ' for example, he drops
into trite prose. In the poems of the two last collections
the lines are parched and dry ; rapture there is hardly any ;
emotion of any kind is difficult to find. Sir William
Watson has driven his own ideal of sculptured and
statuesque beauty in form and diction to an extreme, and
anything like vital emotion has been strangled in the
birth. In tranquillity he has evidently found it difficult
to remember his moments of emotion.

The genius of Sir William Watson is elegiac rather than
lyrical, and the abstracted emotion of his poetry has
prompted the comment, which often appears in print, and
is no less often heard from the average reader, that he has
not enough passion for a poet. This is not only false in
itself, but it displays an extraordinary ineptness. It is
true that poetry is in danger when it loses touch with
physical life and strays into the region of things purely
intellectual ; but the lyric of the mind may be as genuinely
moving and real as the lyric of human passion, hope or
disillusion. Perhaps the finest lyric in our language,
Milton's ode ' On Time/ has no single concrete idea on
which we can seize — time is only a convention of the mind

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 67

— and the sphere in which the thought moves is wholly
mental ; yet few poems are more profoundly moving. And
to those who level at him the accusation that his art is
cold Sir William Watson retorts that

" in man's life

Is room for great emotions unbegot
Of dalliance and embracement, unbegot
Ev'n of the purer nuptials of the soul."

Among living English poets he stands by himself with a
collection of poetry which is not closely comparable in
character with that of any of his contemporaries. The
distinctive position he has won for himself he owes to
the consistent faith with which he has pursued a method,
style and ideal he evolved in early youth. That style,
the return to classic restraint and dignity, was hardly
in the ascendant when he adopted it; but he followed it
with strong conviction. He has written slowly, at
intervals, and with elaborate care, refusing to print a
line which did not satisfy his own ideals of artistic form
and the traditions of great poetry. Only in later volumes
has the power of self-judgment completely deserted him.
The danger of substituting rhetorical verse for poetry
always beset him, and at the last he does not escape. We
do not look in his work for colour, warmth and lyric
passion; for the emotion of his poetry is abstract and
intellectual, of the mind, not of the heart.

Oscar Wilde alleged as a law that art cannot surrender
its imaginative medium to life or nature without losing

itself, and Mr. Arthur Symons propounds
Ernest Dowson, the same thesis in another form when he
1867-1900. asserts that art is but an escape from

life — a means of forgetting. The poetry
of Ernest Dowson is an illustration of the poet seeking
in his art a door of escape from sordid reality. Gentle,
sensitive, wistful, Dowson went out of his way to live
amid evil surroundings. He took his supper in cabmen's
shelters; he received by legacy an old dock in the East
End, and there he lived for a time in a crumbling shed,
drinking at night in the squalid pothouses of the district ;
in Paris he frequented the questionable purlieus of Les
Halles. He was never more at his ease than in an environ-
ment beneath him. His only happiness lay in blindness

68 POETRY IPAUT i

to the present moment. He loved with " shy and eager
devotion " the daughter of a foreign restaurant keeper.
When she disappeared for the evening his only desire was
to kill another night in drink. Fortunately she married the
waiter.

The desire for drink was the ruin of a rare and beautiful
personality. Gentle and sensitive when sober, Dowson
became another man in his cups, gave way to foul and
abusive language and entirely lost control of himself.

Physically fragile, retiring and shy, without ambition,
writing fastidiously to please himself, with hardly a thought
of that vulgar creature, the public, Dowson never lived,
as ordinary men count living. But, although there is
nothing strong or assertive in his three small volumes of
verse, once known the impress does not easily slip from
the memory, for there is something of the inner spirit of
poetry in everything he wrote. Yet the content is slight,
the meaning negligible. His poems are pure fantasies, the
reflected mood of a moment — they appeal by beauty of
form, grace of thought and felicity of music. He quoted
as his ideal a line from Poe —

" The viol, the violet and the vine,"

declaring his belief that " v " was the most beautiful of
consonants and could not be used too often. A true
poetical inspiration and a critical fastidiousness united to
give to Dowson 's verse its peculiar qualities. He never
mistook his limitations. He was not tempted to astonish
or write the epic. He knew that to please, to grace a
transient sentiment, to paint beautifully the streaks of the
tulip, could be his only achievement. Unhappy weak-
nesses the gods had showered upon him : they did not
withhold the highest of their gifts — self-knowledge. He
made no painful and tiresome efforts — the vice of the
twentieth century — at startling originality, but adopted
with perfect naturalness the old and well-worn phrases
and images, recognising that what has often been used is
thereby shown worthy of use again.

" Ah, Lalage ! while life is ours,

Hoard not thy beauty rose anil white,
But pluck the pretty, fleeting flowers
That deck our little path of light."

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 69

The study of Dowson's poetry in chronological order is
disconcerting. Chronology, it has been said, has nothing
to do with a writer's work. This assertion is one of the
most stupid ever seriously made. Powers of intellect and
genius are not exempt from the malignity of circumstance
and the ravages of time. There is no better method of
learning to know an author than to begin at the beginning
and read through to the end. The course of his develop-
ment is thus seen like the arc of a circle ; we trace its rise
and fall. All that is best in Dowson, indeed all that justifies
his claim to more than the briefest notice, is contained
in his Verses (1896). This was followed by The Pierrot
of a Minute (1897), illustrated by Beardsley, and
Decorations (1899). The Pierrot of a Minute, a one act
play in dainty heroic measure, has favour and prettiness,
but this slight sketch of the fantastic loves of a moon
maiden and a pierrot in the gardens of the Trianon scarcely
calls for comment or a second reading. Few could have
touched it with the grace with which Dowson adorns his
theme ; but even as a fantasy it fails, for it has no atmos-
phere. It suggests the desk rather than twilight shadows
in sheltered garden ways. In Decorations Dowson repeats
himself and falls much below the level of Verses. One
poem, * Breton Afternoon,' must, however, be singled out,
both because it does not suffer by comparison with the
first volume and because in its concluding lines we have
an apt commentary on the poet's character.

" Mother of God, O Misericord, look down in pity on us,
The weak and blind who stand in our light and wreak our-
selves such ill."

The cry comes directly from Dowson's heart.

Dowson was a weak poet, unable to sustain his flight,
sinking quickly after a few short years of poetic inspira-
tion; and to read his volumes consecutively is to trace
not growth but failure in power. His genius was clouded
by drink and weakness of will. In view of the very
restricted character of his output, the briefness of his
period of true inspiration and the slightness of thought
and imagination in his poetry, it may be questioned
whether by some Dowson has not been ranked too high.
In like manner Coleridge *s period of poetic inspiration

70 POETRY [PART i

falls within a few months, but his work is supremely
great. Nobody would make a like claim for Dowson;
perhaps few would give him a distinctive place with
secondary poets. On the other hand, it may safely be
asserted that few are likely to care for Dowson who do
not care for the finer breath of pure poetry, a poetry
which rests nothing upon its content and all upon its
melody, mood and form.

Dowson is an example of the weakness of will and
intellect characteristic of some of the French romantic
and symbolist poets of the last century. His ordinary
mood is a melancholy, the melancholy of the weak man
of scholarly and precise instincts. All the finer poetry of
Verses is tinged with sadness. It is the note of tender
regret for things which may never be again which gives
an exquisite beauty of sentiment and music to ' In
Tempore Senectutis ' —

" When I am old,
And sadly steal apart,
Into the dark and cold,
Friend of my heart !
Remember, if you can,
Not him who lingers, but tKat other man,
Who loved and sang, and had a beating heart, —
When I am old ! "

Beautiful, too, in the same mood is ' Amantium Ire ' ; and
in ' Impenitentia Ultimae ' Dowson has again given us
one of those glimpses into his heart so frequent in his
work —

" For, Lord, I was free of th'y flowers, but I chose the
world's sad roses. "

The one distinctively strong poem of the volume has the
same note of regret and disillusion. In c Non sum qualis
eram bonae sub regno Cynarae * the reticence which
commonly marks Dowson's verse is lost, and for once he
writes with fire and passion. Nothing else in his work
is quite like this. Only one other poet living at the time
could have written thus, and only occasionally did Swin-
burne reach greater melody and more powerful words,

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 71

" I have forgot much, Cynara ! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind ;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion.
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long :
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara ! in my fashion."

Of the poets whose work appeared in the Yellow Book,
who won a name at that time or in the later nineties, for
purity and charm of poetic gift, none, save Mr. Arthur
Symons, can be compared to Dowson. And few have
achieved so much upon so narrow a margin of imaginative
and intellectual power. His opposite is to be found in
John Davidson, who had imagination and strength
sufficient to have compassed greater work than any he
has left behind him. The story of Ernest Dowson is the
tragedy of a nature too weak for the circumstances of
life, that of Davidson the tragedy of a strong nature
hampered by a weak environment.

The prose romances of William Sharp are of greater
moment than his poetry, but in the ten years, 1882-91,
he published in verse under his own name
William Sharp, four volumes, The Human Inheritance,
1855-1905. Earth's Voices, Romantic Ballads and

Poems of Phantasy, and the unrhymed
poems in irregular metre entitled Sospiri di Roma. These
contain fluent, ready, impressionistic, not peculiarly
original verse. A large element of the feminine mingled
in Sharp's nature, and in all his work there is that facility
and comparative neglect of perfect form characteristic of
much feminine writing. In his anxiety not to miss the
mood of the moment he adopts a lax and over-abundant
use of words and often fails to utter his thought. At his
worst he becomes weakly verbose. Nor do these faults
disappear from the single volume of poetry, From the Hills
of Dream (1896), which belongs to that other side of his
life, when, as ' Fiona Macleod,' he became the magician
and seer of Celtic myth, mysticism and superstition.
Neither by environment nor training had Sharp, who
belonged to the manufacturing district of Paisley, the
dreamy and mystical character of the Celt imparted to
him. But in later life he developed an extraordinary
faculty for absorbing the eerie, especially as it found

72 POETRY [PART i

expression in the lives and speech of islanders off the west
coast of Scotland. Even so he remains, as in his earlier
work, superficial. His prose and verse, written under the
pseudonym of Fiona Macleod, contain deft impres-
sionistic glimpses of Celtic mysticism, and not, to state
an obvious contrast, the inherent mysticism of a whole
personality belonging to A. E., Mr. W. B. Yeats and other
Irish poets. For he lived in a dream of ideal beauty
rather than in an impulse of genuine spiritual mysticism.
He chose as a maxim in life : "To live in beauty — which
is to put in four words all the dream and spiritual effort
of the soul of man." And From the Hills of Dream sought
to imprison in words the transient gleams of beauty, of
love, of spiritual emotion, which visit the mind to fleet
away in the selfsame moment. The result is an artificial
and even level of ecstacies. These poems are beautiful,
they are emotional, they have an atmosphere of the un-
earthly, but they lack substance and diversity. Miss Eva
Gore-Booth writes, especially in The One and the Many, a
poetry as mystical and otherworldly as Fiona Macleod 's,
and a poetry with genuine thinking and true content to
which Sharp can make no pretence. But if no poetry can
endure long without matter as well as large utterance,
poetry may breathe and live on lower levels by virtue of
beauty in imagery and expression. And these virtues
the prose poems and verse of From the Hills of Dream
possess ; and, further, they have in an extraordinary degree
•what H. D. Traill, in speaking of Fiona Macleod's work,
well described as " the fascination of ' atmosphere.5 "
They reveal that Celtic and mystical side of the Scotch
nature, which marked the work of an earlier and greater
Scotch writer, George Macdonald (1824-1905), who died in
the same year as William Sharp. Even in our day there
can come out of Scotland other things than the kailyard
school has painted.

Francis Thompson was another poet of mystic aspira-
tion who was neither a great poet nor a
Francis Thompson, profound mystic. But in his case we do
1860-1907. not feel, as with Fiona Macleod, that his

mysticism is a cultivated and carefully
nurtured mood — it is an integral element of the poet's
nature, though hardly an overpowering conviction.

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 73

The order in which Thompson's poems were published
evidently does not follow the order of composition, for
at first he wrote poetry in poverty and destitution, finding
no publisher. His father, who was a doctor, educated his
son at Owen's College, Manchester, for the practice of
medicine; but Thompson soon abandoned all thought of
a professional career for poetry and opium in London.
Years of misery followed till he was given a home by
Mr. and Mrs. Wilfrid Meynell, who saw to the publication
in 1893 of his Poems. Sister Songs (1895) and New Poems
(1897), which followed, contain, in general, greater poetry
than the first volume. There is little need in Thompson's
case, however, to follow any chronological method. In
splendour of phrase no poet since Keats has rivalled
Thompson, and in his verse there is a reminder of the
cadence and regal grandeur of Milton's prose. And,
further, the tricks of Keats are all here — the coinage of
new words, the use of substantives for verbs and the
passion for the double epithet, which in phrases like
" flame-chorded psalterion " and " tawny-hided desert "
the younger poet uses with splendid effect. Too often,
however, he drops into pedantic and almost vulgar
Latinisms. The line —

" Sublimed the illuminous and volute redundance "

has become a byword of ridicule, and the inflated periods
of ' To Monica Thought Dying ' wholly fail to touch us.
Thompson was in his own words the " dedicated amorist "
of beauty, but he was as often the slave as the lord of the
mistress whom he loved. In the opening lines of * The
Hound of Heaven ' we have one of the greatest passages
of poetry written in the last century; but Thompson
soon ceases to be a master of the grand style and sinks
beneath his own redundance. And not infrequently he
lapses into deplorably halting metre. Yet he can write
simply ; and it is a pity he did not more often put aside
his mannerisms to write other poems like * In No Strange
Land/ 'Ex Ore Infantium ' and * Daisy.' Not even
Wordsworth could write poetry more simple and true than
Thompson in the last-named poem,

74 POETRY [PART i

" She went her unremembering way,

She went, and left in me
The pang of all the partings gone
And partings yet to be.

" She left me marvelling why my soul

Was sad that she was glad;
At all the sadness in the sweet,
The sweetness in the sad.

" Nothing begins, and nothing ends,

That is not paid with moan;
For we are born in other's pain,
And perish in our own.55

In Francis Thompson's coffin was laid with roses the
tribute of George Meredith to a poet far removed in
character and belief : " A true poet, one of a small band.'5
And if ever men were born with a high vocation to poetry
Francis Thompson was of their number. There have been
many greater poets, poets more simply truthful to the
chastity of their art, poets more tuneful, and poets who
come home more powerfully to the heart and imagina-
tion, but none called to poetry, as to a sacred office not
to be laid aside, in any greater wise than Thompson.
Poetry was his revelation of life, and for him, as for Keats,
poetry was end in itself. Keats claimed that poetry
should be rounded and complete, leaving no sense of dis-
satisfaction, and Francis Thompson sought to make of
poetry an art for its own sake. Like Keats, but to an
excess the earlier poet never dreamed of, he loads every
rift with ore ; or rather he weaves a web of stiff cloth of
gold. And the fault of much of his poetry is the fault
of his Essay on Shelley (1908). The Essay is not good
criticism but a marvellous feat in ornate and mystical
diction; and his poetry often collapses into a turgid
splendour of metaphysical and Latin words. His most
ambitious poem, the poem most distinctive of his gorgeous
and ornate phraseology, is the famous ' Hound of Heaven/
But, after the magnificent opening, the poet is unable to
sustain his flight, and passages sink into little more than
elaborate acrobatics in Latinised vocabulary. Thompson
uses words, as the maker of tapestry uses his threads, to

CHAP, n] HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS 75

weave a beautiful pattern, as the executant fingers notes
on the piano, making of poetry an art confined within
the limits of the pictorial and melodious. The fascination
of language blinds him almost as much as it did the French
symbolists who read words in colours. Yet, strangely
enough, Thompson was distinguished among poets of his
time by his moral and spiritual exaltation. The inspired
fervour of the religious mystic illumines his thought, glows
in his verse, sanctifies his genius. But it does not appear
that Catholic dogma was an intellectual necessity to him.
The mystical doctrines irradiating his poetry are a theory
accepted, not a conviction gained with great price. The
ardent faith of Crashaw reaches the unbelieving mind, for
Crashaw won his reward of faith ; Thompson, like Herbert,
leaves us unmoved by the faith that is in him. His meta-
physical theology is the canvas backing to his tapestry, its
function performed it has no further purposes to serve.

CHAPTER III

THE PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES

§ 1. Thomas Hardy— A. E. Housman— Herbert Trench— Stephen Phillips
— Laurence Binyon — Maurice Hewlett — C. M. Doughty — W. W.
Gibson — John Masefield — Lascelles Abercrombie. 8 2. Laurence
Housman — Richard Le Gallienne — A. C. Benson — H. C. Beeching —
Norman Gale— Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch— Sir Henry Newbolt.
§ 3. H. D. Lowry— Alfred Noyes— T. Sturge Moore— Hilaire Belloc
— G. K. Chesterton— Alfred Williams— W. H. Davies— John Drink-
water—Walter de la Mare — Ralph Hodgson— Rupert Brooke — James
Elroy Flecker.

§1

BETWEEN forty and fifty years ago Mr. Thomas Hardy
published his first novel, and it is now nearly thirty years
since the appearance of his last piece of long work in
fiction. As a novelist he belongs to an earlier chapter of
literary history than any which falls naturally within the
survey of this book. But as a poet he cannot be neglected
in the present chapter where we are concerned with writers
still living and many of them young; for his novels,
among the greatest in English, are already classics in the
backward of time, while in poetry he is a post- Victorian
and owes nothing to the tradition of Browning, Tennyson,
Matthew Arnold or Swinburne. And his poetry, like his
fiction, has that large note of universality, that boldness
of imaginative conception, which sets it apart from the
work of any living poet, despite Mr. Hardy's limitations
in the graces of the poetic art. It is, therefore, natural
to deal with his work as a poet first and singly when we
come to speak of poetry in the immediate present. The
poetry treated in the last chapter belongs to or is contem-
poraneous with what has been called the renaissance of the
nineties, but here we are occupied with a poetry in
evolution.

77

78 POETRY [PART i

When Lionel Johnson wrote his admirable critique,
The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894), he made no mention

of Mr. Hardy as a writer of verse, treating
Thomas Hardy, him wholly as a novelist and craftsman in
b. 1840. prose. It was not till four years later that

Mr. Hardy relinquished prose and came
forward as a poet with his not insubstantial volume of
W essex Poems (1898). Curiously enough only four of the
poems contained in this volume had already appeared in
print. Critics whose sovereign virtue is a suspicion of
novelty have plunged into consistent disparagement of
Mr. Hardy's poetic faculty, and have never ceased openly
to regret that a master of prose fiction has erred and gone
astray. But he held on his way, publishing Poems of the
Past and the Present in 1901, another miscellaneous col-
lection of short poems, Time's Laughing-stocks, in 1909,
and between these two came The Dynasts in three volumes
(1904-1908). In these and in later collections Mr. Hardy
has, at least, justified himself by conquering a natural
prejudice against the choice of a new form of expression,
and winning recognition, which no limitations can obscure,
for the great qualities of his poetry.

In conception, in comprehensiveness, in the wide issues
of its subject, and even in mere length, The Dynasts might
have taxed the imagination and intellectual strength of
a great poet in the prime of his powers, yet it is the work
of a man over sixty years old, who has given the best of
his time to prose. In this poem, perhaps more than in
his novels, Mr. Hardy has exhibited that extraordinary
sense of proportion and relative value which enables him
to build every detail of a vast and varied scheme into an
artistic and composite whole. The architectural faculty,
upon which every critic of Mr. Hardy insists, shows no
sign of failure, nor is there loss of insight in the great
poetical drama. The Dynasts, when completed, was hailed
as one of the most important and significant things in
modern literature, as a " new species of writing/' as the
complete achievement of a far-reaching concept; and
nothing was more remarkable than the detachment of the
author from poetic methods of his time. It stood by itself
in form, method and spirit. "For a like achievement,"
wrote a critic in The Times, " we can only go back to one

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 79

thing — the historical plays of Shakespeare, where great
and small are, as here, seen with a single eye, and where,
as here, the common life of common humanity is made a
part of the progress of history. " And it is, perhaps, not
the least interesting fact relative to the poem, when we
consider its subject and complex form, that it has been
widely read by the average frequenter of the lending
library.

In The Dynasts Mr. Hardy has chosen to write a poem
more ambitious in scope and design than any attempted
by a poet since Faust lay for nearly sixty years in the
hands of Goethe. The nearest approach to the same
range of imagination in any English poem of modern
times is to be found in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound,
and, incomparably greater in splendour of poetry as is
Shelley's visionary drama, it reads but as an unrelated
incident compared with the whole experience of the human
race when placed in contrast with Mr. Hardy's great work.
In The Dynasts he has dramatised for the eye of the
imagination, not for the stage, the chronicle of the
Napoleonic wars, especially as they are related to English
affairs, in three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and
thirty scenes. Peer Gynt or the second part of Faust may
be adapted to the stage without destroying all that lies
enfolded within their poetry or hidden in those far-
withdrawn regions whither the mind alone can travel;
but in The Dynasts the appeal is directly to the intellect
working through the imagination. No devices of the
stage could compass its intention ; nor will a love of pure
poetry, qua poetry, commend it to the reader. Mr.
Hardy's aim has been to set forth the Napoleonic epoch
as an instantaneous imaginative vision of Europe and
to impress upon the reader its philosophical significance,
if that word may be used of a poem which disclaims any
hope of lifting " the burthen of the mystery." No mover
of scenes, save the swift working of the mind, is competent
to the changes of Mr. Hardy's drama. At the close of a
scene we may be asked to understand that the Marchioness
of Salisbury's reception-room in London " is shut over
by the night without, and the point of view rapidly recedes
south, London, and its streets and lights, diminishing till
they are lost in the distance, and its noises being sue-

80 POETRY [PART I

ceeded by the babble of the Channel waves " (II.
ii. 3).

Beyond the human figures of the great scene are super-
natural spectators whose chief end is to illustrate Mr.
Hardy's deterministic concepts. The Dynasts is, in the
words of Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, " the biggest, the
most consistent and deliberate exhibition of fatalism in
literature.9' The Pities gaze sadly and in sympathy upon
the spectacle of man's helplessness, the Ironic Spirits glee-
fully note the wanton malice of events, but neither can
influence the ancient Spirit of the Years who has looked
upon it all from time unending, and knows that the inces-
sant troubling of man is no more than one manifestation
of the All-urging Will in a progress that has no meaning
either good or bad to evoke either pity or ironic laughter,
for

" like a knitter drowsed,
Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness,
The Will has woven with an absent heed
Since first life was : and ever will so weave.55

Mr. Hardy's philosophical concept of life is not here in
question ; but, however little its value, it cannot be denied
that its very simplicity and consistency lend a grandeur
to The Dynasts which it would not otherwise possess. To
a later world it may seem as strange as the theologies of
Dante and Milton are to the modern mind; yet as cer-
tainly as these earlier poems would never have grown to
their largeness and beauty apart from that concept of the
universe which either poet held, so surely Mr. Hardy's
impressive drama would have remained unborn save for
the unchanging and comprehensive determinism of his out-
look upon life. And, if we refrain from judging it purely
as a poem, The Dynasts, in the grand simplicity of its
imaginative scene, wherein the land, cities, peoples and
armies of Europe are revealed as in a single spectacle,
moving, breathing, writhing in meaningless and self-
immolating tragedy, is the most impressive achievement
in English literature for two or three generations. But
in the nobler kind of poetry it fails, save in brief passages
or groups of lines, such as those quoted above; and to
meet with these the reader must endure for many pages

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 81

rough and unpleasing blank verse, unredeemed by any
potency or magic of expression and marred by crudities
that no pains were needed to avoid. In contrast the prose
passages are simple and vigorous. Only incidentally can
The Dynasts please in its parts ; its greatness lies in the
architectural grandeur of the all-embracing conception of
which it is built.

Though not so generally recognised, Mr, Hardy's
achievement with the short poem has been no less signifi-
cant ; and his later volumes show not only an advance in
treatment and handling, but an absolute gain in poetic
content. The bare fact that a writer who turns to poetry
late in life should extend his reach, the intensity of his
expression and the poetic quality of his thought, is as
curious as it is remarkable. And, though few of us will
share the feeling, it is now possible to find people, whose
instinct upon such a point is not contemptible, who will
express a preference for the poet above the novelist.

The statement which has just been made, that Mr.
Hardy turned seriously to verse late in life calls for some
qualification. At least thirty poems, and probably more,
in the miscellaneous collections were written before any of
the novels appeared. Every active mind, when it makes
its first uncertain ventures in original expression, begins
with verse. Mr. Hardy is no exception to the rule.
Though the rough sonnets of the early period are evidence
of much more than persevering industry, he fortunately
realised that he was sent, to put it in his own formula,
" into the world ... by the all-immanent Will," as a
writer of prose; and when all has been said, when the
volumes of verse, including The Dynasts, have been
weighed against the novels, he is greater as a prose-writer
than as a poet. When the balance of value and per-
manent worth in imaginative prose writing during the
nineteenth century is adjusted a hundred years hence,
there can be little risk in the prophecy that the five greatest
of Mr. Hardy's Wessex tales will, for qualities of sincerity,
intensity and craftsmanship, retain their place with the
best that has yet been done in English. The novelist has
overshadowed the poet ; but the glib ease with which, in
some quarters, the poet has been deplored as an intruder
can find no justification in the volumes of poetry.

F

82 POETRY [PART i

To turn over Mr. Hardy's volumes of miscellaneous verse
is to be impressed, at the outset, with the range and
variety of content, with the " bigness " of the world in
which his thought and imagination move. We carry away
from the poems that conscious awe of life's wonder and
tragedy which the novels convey, the knowledge that in
the fields and lanes of Wessex the drama of individual
existence is as intense and inscrutable as in the larger
whole which it reflects. We have sonnets, dramatic mono-
logues, psychological studies, speculative poems, poems
of pilgrimage, poems of war, dialect poems, love lyrics,
songs, ballads, humorous poems and epigrams ; and it can
be said, without exaggeration, that in hardly more than
half a dozen instances is there no implication of the latent
mystery which is behind the mood and incident of the
moment. Little masters of song can write lyrics, touched
with a passion or subtle emotion, which seize upon us for
the moment, but only for the moment; they are hardly
more than the voice of a transient mood. The emotion
of Mr. Hardy's poetry is that of a strong personality, too
deep to break out into the feeling which has no essential
relation to the whole attitude of his mind and thought
toward the problems of life and nature. There is curiously
little change in character between the early and the later
poems. Mr. Hardy moves with greater ease in the
trammels of verse now than when a young man; but his
melancholy, his deep sense of pity, his haunting conscious-
ness of the irony of time which makes men's love and
hatred and envy to perish — these are the same, and reflect
themselves in the earliest as in the latest poems. He is
convinced that " a man cannot find out the work that is
done under the sun. . , . Yea, farther, though a wise man
think to know it, yet shall he not be able to find it " ; and
fris * Young Man's Epigram on Existence,' written in 1866,
echoes the thought of the Preacher —

" A senseless school, where we must give
Our lives that we may learn to live !
A dolt is he who memorizes
Lessons that leave no time for prizes."

Many of the early poems, which have been reprinted,
are sonnets, a little awkward in form, uncertain in move-
ment, and wanting in the sweeping lift of thought and

CHAP, m] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 88

music which belongs to the great sonnet; yet admirably
effective in unity and singleness of conception. The
sonnets bring before us Mr, Hardy's fondness not only
for the poem of disillusion in love, which we might expect
from him, but a theme underlying many of his poems,
which was also a stock subject with Tennyson — the
mesalliance. His treatment of one of the world's oldest
stories is more varied than Tennyon's, and it is also more
intellectual. He cares less for details; the gentlemanly
resignation or scolding regrets of Tennyson's Middle-
Victorian people may be there, as perhaps they always are,
but for Mr. Hardy they are not the essence of the matter,
and he passes them over to show, often in personal mono-
logue, the workings of the mind analysing the feelings of
the heart and speculating on " life's little ironies." He
displays here, as in his novels, that combination of
tolerant pity and intellectual curiosity which marks his
attitude toward the greatest of all tragic problems — the
reason of sentient existence. Mr, Hardy's lovers never
wholly lose themselves in the passionate joy or sorrow of
the moment; they can always remember that their own
story is part of the larger tragedy of life, they struggle
unsuccessfully with the temptation to believe that " by
the sadness of the countenance the heart is made wiser,"
there is always a note of aloofness in their mental attitude.
In Mr. Hardy's poems of love and regret there is a
Shakespearean breadth of conception and thought. No
other writer has made us feel so clearly and forcibly the
unity of all life, the presence of earth's natural forces in
the drama of conscious existence, and the continuity of
man in his generations. Individual characters, personal
details, and the circumstances of a story confined to a
small county, are brought into unity with the whole drama
of life, its inscrutable yet insistent problems, the mysteries
of its joy and pain. The value of the dramatic monologue
for purposes of reflection and speculative thought in
poetry was raised to its highest power by Shakespeare
in the plays and the great sonnet series ; it was with this
form that the two great poets of the latter half of the last
century reached their finest achievements ; and Mr. Hardy
reflects a contemporary tendency, if in nothing else, in his
adoption of this method of expression in verse.

84 POETRY [PART i

In the three volumes of short poems the dramatic
monologue is not only a favourite form with Mr. Hardy,
but much of his best work is cast in this mould. That
the monologue should become an important instrument
of poetry in an introspective age is not surprising, for,
while it affords opportunity for the spontaneity of lyrical
emotion, it embodies the more purely intellectual qualities
of elegiac poetry. In the dramatic monologue the poet
can find not only a natural means of uttering the inex-
plicable things of the heart, whence are "the issues of
life," but emotion may be combined with intellectual
speculation, and the two may pass and repass, merge or
flow in separate channels. In the eighteenth century
the impersonal attitude of the Essay on Man was the
natural form of the reflective poem; but the insistent
personal note of the nineteenth century demanded the
monologue. Into one or another form of the dramatic
monologue the most memorable of Mr. Hardy's shorter
poems naturally fall— < Her Death and After/ ' A Sign
Seeker/ ' The Two Rosalinds/ <A Tramp-woman's
Tragedy/ < A Sunday Morning Tragedy/ ' In the Crypted
Way.5

The four last-named poems belong to the volume of
1909, which gathers some of his finest work in pure poetry.
In this collection there is no loss of content in thought, no
weakening of the imaginative powers, and, in point of
poetic diction, in the moulding of metre and the use of
words, several of these pieces are beyond anything in the
earlier volumes. It is rare to find a poet who can learn
and make use of experience when well past middle age.
The exception to the rule which Mr. Hardy affords is
attributable, doubtless, to the curious impartiality with
which he combines originality of genius and temperament
with a readily receptive mind. The poems are an object
lesson to point the statement that originality of the
highest order and a plastic receptivity play concurrent
parts in the production of Mr. Hardy's work.

Of the poems in monologue, which have been
named, the most striking and impressive, as well as the
most characteristically Wessex, is " A Tramp-woman's
Tragedy ' ; but it is overlong for quotation in extenso, and
it is difficult to give less than the whole, ' In the Crypted

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 85

Way 9 is short, inevitably reminiscent of Browning, yet
original; and in all that it reveals and suggests, without
definite " lining-in," is, in the region of poetry, surpassed
by few pieces anywhere.

" In the crypted way, where the passage turned
To the shadowy corner that one could see,
You pause to part from me — plaintively ;
Though overnight had come words that burned
My fond frail happiness out of me.

" And then I kissed you — despite my thought
That our spell must end when reflection came
On what you had deemed me, whose one long aim
Had been to serve you ; that what I sought
Lay not in a heart that could breathe such blame.

" But yet I kissed you : whereon you again
As of old kissed me. Why, why was it so ?
Do you cleave to me after that light-tongued blow ?
If you scorned me at eventide, how love then ?
The thing is dark, Dear. I do not know."

Mr. Hardy's advance in the use of metre and poetic
form has been alluded to already ; but nobody will study
him as a metrist of charm. His ear is not sensitive to
subtle harmonies of vocalic and consonantal music; and,
for the most part, music of line and felicity of inevitable
words are not ends for which he labours. For many
pages he seems scarcely to use a word, idiom or phrase,
which do not belong to prose, yet we rarely drop into a
suspicion that we are reading prose edged with rhyme.
The style is too individualistic; and the thought of even
the baldest of the poems could scarcely be put so well in
prose. In the writing of a poet like Mr. Hardy, whose
great qualities lie elsewhere, the occasional flatness and
the faults of his versification are, perhaps, points unworthy
of attention. He becomes uncertain and rough when he
combines anapaests with disyllabic feet; and in easier
metre he is in danger of tiring the ear with hammered
accents. In ' The Darkling Thrush,5 for example, a short
poem of thirty-two lines in common measure, there is only
one trisyllabic foot to relieve the unbroken beat of the
lines. It might almost seem that Dr. Johnson's famous

86 POETRY [PAKT I

example of the metre was followed with judicious care.
Many of the earlier poems sing-song distressingly, or
impinge on the ear heavily without variety or relief. The
later volumes bear evidence to greater skill in the use of
words, in the moulding of line and stanza, and a few poems
could hardly be bettered in form. But a metrist Mr.
Hardy is not ; and few can so well afford as he to dispense
with the graces of verse making.

The note of melancholy, the doubt of any ultimate
ethical and spiritual good which pervade the prose and
verse of Mr. Hardy have, it has been well said, far from a
depressing, an almost bracing effect. The attitude of
his mind has never varied ; it is as clear in the early poems
as it is in the late; though we may discern in the later
volumes the quieter tone of old age, which no longer
strives against the bars of the world. In great pessimists,
different as they are, such as the Preacher, Schopenhauer,
Carlyle, Mr. Hardy, we are not listening to petulant out-
bursts of Byronic disillusion. The thought goes deeper:
it is a reasoned belief, the frank confession of logical
inability to see the world as others see it, to accept it
upon too easy terms. This is Mr. Hardy's attitude ; he
does not doubt the sincerity of optimism; but he is as
sincerely incapable himself of discovering its justification.
The poet finds himself at a cathedral service, and acknow-
ledges—

" That from this bright believing band

An outcast I should be,
That faiths by which my comrades stand

Seem fantasies to me,
And mirage-mists their Shining Land,

Is a drear destiny. "

Yet he bids those who think differently to himself to
remember that the " bird deprived of wings " does not
" go earth-bound wilfully," but because it must. And
herein lies the root of the whole matter.

As we should expect from a student of personality and
temperament of Mr. Hardy's power and insight, those
poems which may be described as psychological studies
of character are of great interest. A large proportion of
the whole number of his shorter poems might be brought

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 87

into the class without difficulty, for intellectual intro-
spectiveness is the bent of Mr. Hardy's mind; but a
certain smaller number falls more directly within this
category. And here again, in ' The Slow Nature/ ' The
Two Men,5 ' Middle-age Enthusiasms/ 6 In a Looking-
glass/ ' The King's Experiment/ * The Conformers/ the
whirligig of time, the irony of fate, is the single thought
which pervades the poems. The unchanging form of Time
is personified ; it broods over the life of man ; without
haste and without remorse it works its unconscious will
upon him. We are reminded of the like sentient endow-
ment which Mr. Hardy gives to the unseen forces of earth,
sky and air in the novels. The irony of man's littleness,
the vacillation of his character with the passing years, the
limitations of his heart and intellect in the face of all-
embracing time, are reiterated. The young man knows
that the glow of romance will die down into the " frigid
tone of household speech/' that those who come after,
forgetting the love romance, will

" ... as they graveward glance,

Remark : * In them we lose
A worthy pair, who helped advance
Sound parish views ! ' "

On the other hand, the poet finds * In a Looking-glass '
the pathos, not less great, of those who grow old, while
the impulses of the heart are still fresh and warm. The
mystery of time weighs upon his thought and imagination.
This is true of him not only in his later years ; for 6 The
Two Men ' (1866), one of his earliest poems, is imbued
with the same profound sense of the insufficiency of human
endeavour and ambition, the same consciousness that
" there is one event unto all." The * War Poems/ ' Poems
of Pilgrimage/ and some of the narrative poems escape
this obsession; but if we turn to the ' Love Lyrics/ ex-
pecting to find songs " all breathing human passion," we
shall either be disappointed, or interested to read lyrics
of love, or more often its loss, tinged with at least as much
intellectualism as passion. This is not to say that passion
is wholly absent; but the lover as often turns to dissect
the nature of his regrets and hopes as to utter his feelings
without reflection. Among Mr, Hardy's shorter pieces,

88 POETRY [PART i

however, not of a few of the most truly poetical, both in
form and content, belong to this section.

It is curious that so few poems of the novelist of Wessex
should be in dialect; for Mr. Hardy makes no attempt
to work the same ground as Barnes's Poems in the Dorset
Dialect. Poems containing dialect there are — ' Friends
Beyond,' * The Curate's Kindness,' ' The Homecoming '
and ' The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's,' which was first
printed in bowdlerised form in the Gentleman's Magazine,
nearly fifty years ago. The best version of this spirited
piece is that in Wessex Poems, where the author has
supplied more dialect than in that printed by Mr. Lane
in the appendix to The Art of Thomas Hardy. But in
the matter of dialect and the use of local idiom Mr. Hardy
has gone his own way; and his poetry almost entirely
eschews these things.

An insistence upon the more obvious characteristics of
Mr. Hardy's work as a poet tends to obscure aspects and
issues which are hardly less significant and interesting.
He is not primarily a poet, but a prose-writer whose great
achievement it has been to raise the standard of plot con-
struction in the writing of the English novel, while he is
first and foremost an artist endowed with a profoundly
original vision of human life. The strength of the poems,
as of the prose, is the backing of an original and self-
centred personality. Mr. Hardy's insight may sometimes
be obscured by limitations of temperament ; he may ring
the changes of thought and situation upon a narrow cycle ;
yet even in his repetitions he never trifles with his subject
or works by rote. He is never without content ; and even
in the slightest poem of two stanzas we are conscious that
we are never far from the confines of the larger issues of
life. There is a reality wider than the poem ; almost every
poem makes us feel that the thought is greater than the
expression — and of how little poetry or prose can this much
be said ? Even in the few pieces of lyric song there is a
breadth and simplicity of thought and emotion which
carry us away to days of less strain, artifice and nervous
complexity than our own.

A study of Mr. Hardy's poetry almost inevitably brings
to mind Mr. A. E. Housman, a poet of like temper, whose
verse centres in the life and people of one county:

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 89

although beyond these two aspects there is little similarity,
for Mr. Housman 's verse is as perfect in form as the older
poet's is often hammered and uneven.
A. E. Housman, Mr. Housman has contented himself
b« 1859. with the publication of two slender vol-

umes of verse, A Shropshire Lad (1896)
and Last Poems (1922). The reflective melancholy, the
faithlessness in the immortalities, with which nearly all
his poetry is informed, has no sentimentality or morbid
pettiness. His melancholy has been compared to that of
Mr. Hardy, and, like Mr Hardy's discovery of life's un-
meaning, Mr. Housman's philosophy of disbelief is strong
and bracing. His attitude is simply summarised in a poem
of mingled humour and earnest —

" Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good."

In Mr. Housman's world the gods kill us for their sport
and life is an irony; as often as not the reward is given
to him who did not toil, and the bride lies by another
while the green grass and clover grow above her lover.
Mr. Housman, like Mr. Hardy, has a stoic faith, in the
courage to endure, but he takes no pride in hiding his
sympathy for the suffering of simple and obscure people
who sink beneath their fate. Nearly all his poetry is of
the dales and woodlands of Shropshire, of the life of the
people on the soil and in the market town, but it is not
a pastoral poetry. His language is entirely simple, he
writes of the primitive and changeless in life, but his
simplicity is that of the cultivated and thoughtful mind
holding itself aloof. He uses ballad measure, but his
thought is elegiac; no impassioned emotion sways him
to the loss of his soul. Though he writes of earth and
the life of the soil, and his vocabulary is admirably re-
strained, his poetry reveals in every line the reflective
melancholy of the scholar and recluse. Few volumes of
poetry published within the last quarter of a century
possess qualities which make for enduring life as do Mr.

90 POETRY [PAET i

Housman's two books of verse. His vision of life is
intensely poetical, he never writes a poem that is empty
of thought, image or idea, for he must have something
whereof to sing; and in nuance, in subtle and exquisite
cadences of music and rhythm only one living poet has a
more beautiful faculty than he — Mr. Bridges. And
whereas few poems of Mr. Bridges have a content that
satisfies, Mr. Housrnan rarely fails to utter some thought.
Mr Bridges' is largely an art of verse; poetry demands
more than melody — the lesser art of the musician. A
Shropshire Lad and its successor after more than a quarter
of a century hold a collection of poems of almost entire
perfection, like stones cut to many facets and beautifully
reflecting the light in many aspects, whether we regard
them merely as verse exercises, strong and simple reflection
on life, or poetry of elegiac emotion. The level is wonder-
fully even, and it is hard to discriminate between these
poems, but in one, ' Be still, my soul, be still,' Mr.
Housman rises above his ordinary manner to a large and
spacious utterance which sets the poem apart.

After the mention of Mr. Thomas Hardy the problem
of differentiation between the more important writers of
verse in our day becomes increasingly difficult, relations
and distinctions can hardly be discovered or stated in
set words, and, in general, we must content ourselves
with the study of the individual poet, avoiding the tempta-
tion to find impossible and fanciful links of connection
with others. In the middle of the last century the wide
and prevailing influences in poetry were simple and clearly
marked ; the impulses of the period spent themselves,
and in the last thirty years, although certain tendencies
already marked can be defined, the course of English
poetry has largely resolved itself into individual and dis-
connected aims. And, therefore, in continuing this section
of the present chapter it will only be possible to bring
together poets of larger endowment and higher distinction
than their contemporaries, and assign to another section
poets of narrower range and lesser talent, noting, when-
ever they manifest themselves, common influences or
ideals. It was natural to name A Shropshire Lad in
immediate conjunction with the poetry of Mr. Thomas
Hardy, not only in view of a likeness in temper and mood

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 91

between the poets of Wessex and Shropshire, but because
the genius of Mr. A. E. Housman places him in a group
with the first few of living English poets.

His name is not widely known to the large army of
desultory readers who take their knowledge of contem-
porary poetry from information provided by literary
periodicals, nor does he appear as yet to have won an
adequate recognition with the few, but it may safely be
prophesied that so far as beauty of melody, command of
felicitous phrase, and high gifts of simple and sincere
imagination can confer lasting fame Herbert Trench need
not fear an early oblivion. His career opened brilliantly.
He won distinctions at Oxford and a fellowship at All
Souls' College. He was a civil servant,
Herbert Trench, a manager of the Haymarket Theatre, and
1865-1923. he travelled widely in Europe and the

Near East. His life was thus full and
active ; but he was by birth a native of the world of mind.
Art and the expression of life in art were for him the
chief end in life. It is, therefore, surprising that his first
volume of verse, Deirdre Wed1 (1901), did not appear till
he was in his thirty-sixth year. The title-poem of this
volume chooses as a theme no established incident from
the story of Deirdre, that magnificent subject handled by
nearly all Irish poets and dramatists, but an episode
largely invented by the poet. The story is told by three
chanters chanting out of three different epochs in three
metres. The voice of Fintan out of the first century speaks
in blank verse, the voice of Cir out of " a century more
remote, but unknown," speaks in a four-line stanza of
anapaests, the voice of Urmael out of the sixth century
speaks in a ten-line stanza of iambic pentameters. Fintan,
who speaks twice, has the advantage of the first and last
word. Variation of metre in a single poem may be used
with singular appropriateness to changes in theme and
matter — Tennyson 's Vision of Sin is an example that
occurs to mind — but, as Mr. William Archer pointed out
long since, there seems no differentiation between the
sections of Trench's brief epic which warrants these curious
experiments in metre and the adoption of a form tiresome
in its artificiality. In a poem of direct narrative, tinged
1. The title was later changed to Deirdre Wedded.

92 POETRY [PART i

with the epic manner, his scheme can only be regarded
as an unfortunate device which detracts from the beauty
of the work as a whole. It destroys all sense of unity;
and a further fault is that Herbert Trench showed little
consciousness of fit conjunction between theme and
language. With all their affectations the poets of the Irish
school have recognised that the stories of Deirdre and
Oisin are so far removed from modern vision and thinking,
that they can only be told in a special vocabulary differing
from modern English as widely as the otherworldliness
inherent in these stories of a dim past differs from the
spirit of a practical and commercial age. Trench's metres
and style have no psychical relation to his matter. The
total impression of Deirdre Wedded is that of a splendid
poem failing of complete success for the want of restraint in
diction and care in the moulding of metre. The blank
verse exhibits extraordinary liberties in the use of trochees
and anapaests; the anapaestic lines lack measured
swing; and the iambic pentameters are sometimes
curiosities.

" For his heart, after thee rising away "

can by no ingenuity be scanned as an iambic line. And
nobody would suspect as other than prose Herbert
Trench's verse when written thus —

" But when an upward space of grass — so free — so endless —
beckoned to the realms of wind Deirdre broke from his side,
and airily fled up the slopes, flinging disdains behind/'

All the writing in this poem has pace and vigour, we are
carried swiftly on our way, but the technique is weak and
faulty. The vocabulary is often tortured beyond a degree
of easy tolerance. Trench's passion for double epithets
was extraordinary. Sometimes they are used with effect,
and sometimes preposterously. The " wind-sleek turf "
is a good image, and the " green-litten air " of the woods ;
but the " ravage- whetted bulk " of the boar conveys no
idea, and the " flake-soft " descent of Deirdre's hand
suggests not snow but the scaling off a surface.

The blundering awkwardness of much of the poem is
surprising when we reflect on its many beauties, its onrush,
its gift of imaginative phrasing which arrest and hold us.

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OP THE CENTURIES 98

In romantic and mystical landscape painting none of the
Irish poets, hardly Shelley himself in Prometheus Unbound
or Alastor, has surpassed these lines —

" So they measured the Plain of the Dreamers, the Brake of

the Black Ram,

Till the Crag of the Dances before them did shape and loom,
And the Meads of the Faery Hurlers in silver swam.
Then up to the Gap of the Winds, and the far-seen tomb
White on Slieve Fuad's side."

There is so much of beauty, true imagination and power
of language, especially of epithet, in Trench's poem, that it
is of far greater moment and importance than the complete
successes of other poets in easier fields.

He was not a rapid writer. Not till six years after his
first did his second volume, New Poems (1907), appear,
It contained one of his finest poems, the long and
allegorical, ' Apollo and the Seaman.' Apollo comes to
earth and sits sharing a jug of wine with a sailor who tells
him that —

" I heard them calling in the streets

That the ship I serve upon —
The great ship Immortality —
Was gone down, like the sun,"

The poem proceeds in the form of a dialogue between
Apollo and the seaman, leading up to the conclusion,
announced by Apollo, that the true nature of immortality
is racial, not individual, and that the world is permeated
with God.

" Yet leaf shall of leaf become aware

On the self-same bough and stem,
Whose branches are murmuring everywhere ;
And the heaven floods all of them."

The versification in passages is not without its rough-
nesses, but for the most part the common measure is used
strongly, simply and melodiously. The temptation to
quote passage after passage from this noble poem, remark-
able for the direct simplicity of its allegory, the sincerity
of its mystic interpretation of life, the beauty of its
imagery, and the music of its verse is hard to resist. In
an age when cheap and sentimental mystic systems have

94 POETRY [PART i

become a vogue with drawing-rooms and literary coteries
it is a relief to turn from artifice and facile ecstasies to
reality. ' Apollo and the Seaman 5 is a poem of atmo-
sphere, and often reminds the reader of The Ancient
Mariner, but not with the suggestion of derivation.

The same volume contains another allegorical poem of
some length in ' The Queen of Gothland,' some noble
' Stanzas to Tolstoi,9 a curiously poignant but metrically
rough poem, ' The Questioners/ and a number of shorter
lyrics, not one of which is negligible. In the wealth of
its vocabulary, in the mingled truth and beauty of its
mystic apprehension of life, in its imaginative content New
Poems was a volume that took a place in the first order of
poetry written within this century.

Lyrics and Narrative Poems (1911) is chiefly a rearrange-
ment of older verse. Among the new poems the ode * On
Romney Marsh at Sunrise,5 and ' Bitter Serenade,5 are
marked by that true emotion which distinguishes the best
of Trench's lyrical poetry. The Poems of 1918, enlarged
in the complete collection published in 1924, and the verse
portion of Napoleon: A Play (1919) added some of his
greatest work, including the splendid * Battle of the
Marne 5 and ' Song of the Larks at Dawn.5 These volumes,
in their command of phrase and compass of expression,
placed Herbert Trench at least with the first three or four
of any contemporary poets.

He was far from being a prolific writer ; and in what he
wrote he was not always careful, even if all allowance be
made for his purposeful disregard at times of the mere
graces of verse. In this it is plain that he wrote with his
eyes open. But he was better than himself, and the greater
part of his poetry is not only imaginatively conceived but
melodiously executed. In Herbert Trench we recognise
the scholar inspired with a love of art and a passion for
poetry, a scholar and a poet who never loses touch with
life and those philosophical questionings which knock
throughout the generations at the heart of man. In
' Apollo and the Seaman,5 in the odes and in the short
lyrics he is the poet of an optimistic faith and philosophy.
It was his belief that : " In alliance between the arts of
Poetry and Music, and in the philosophic ideas they may
together convey, lies . . . much of promise for our civili-

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 95

sation." In the genius of Herbert Trench there was a
mingling of adventurous romanticism, intuitive mysticism
and reasoned philosophy, comparable, magno intervallo, to
the endowment of Coleridge. The mysticism of the Celt
in his nature was balanced by an English level-headed-
ness : his vision of the world was almost equally pictorial
and abstract, for his abstract ideas readily took the form
of poetic allegory.

In choice of theme — classic legend or mediaeval romance
— in resemblances between their use of verse, rhymed or

unrhymed, and in other parallelisms of
Stephen Phillips, manner the names of Stephen Phillips,
1868-1915. Mr. Laurence Binyon and Maurice

Hewlett present some kind of conjunc-
tion, and among poets of the day they are noteworthy,
although in the case of not one of the three is the measure
of inspiration constant or abundant. The name of
Stephen Phillips is associated in the popular mind with the
revival of poetic drama on the English stage. His early
experience as an actor was here of value to him, but the
gifts he possessed were lyric rather than dramatic. Never-
theless he was caught by the fascination of the theatre
when a young man. At the end of his first term at Cam-
bridge he left the university and joined the Shakespearean
company of Mr. F. R. Benson, with whom he remained for
six years. After abandoning the stage he was for a short
time an army coach before definitely turning to literature.
In 1890 he published with his cousin, Mr. Laurence Binyon,
and others a booklet of verse entitled Primavera. None of
the poems of this brochure is of significance; but with
Eremus (1894), a lengthy blank-verse poem, Phillips won
the praise of critics like Symonds and Stopford Brooke.
Despite its many metrical shortcomings, and its shapeless
construction, Eremus gave evidence of poetic vision and
the power to write fluent and rapidly moving blank verse.
The narrative of this pessimistic allegory is almost ludi-
crous. Eremus is borne to the regions of Chaos to dis-
cover that the Creator makes worlds and planets for his
sport and leaves them to drift to ruin. On his return to
earth Eremus, with unpardonable tactlessness, reveals his
discoveries in the supernatural world. The allegory, such
as it is, shows no depth or intellectual force; the verse,

96 POETRY [PART i

though disfigured by metrical violences, is not without
beauty and vigour; and the dialogue, freely used, may
be regarded as an early indication of the dramatic bent
in the young actor-poet's mind.

Christ in Hades (1896), a blank-verse narrative of
Christ's descent to the nether world and his meeting with
Virgil, Prometheus and other figures, is of no higher merit
allegorically or imaginatively, but it had the distinction
of bringing into the arena of the daily paper and the street
placard a discussion upon the legitimate uses of trochees
and inverted stresses in English blank verse. Eremus, no
less than Christ in Hades, is rich in lines difficult of
scansion on any principles yet known. In 1898 Mr. James
Douglas appeared in the Star as the champion of Milton
against Stephen Phillips. The poet replied and the battle
was ranged upon either side between those who refused
to be persuaded by his justification of his eccentricities and
those who roundly declared " it would be as impossible
for Mr. Phillips to write a halting line as, let us say, for
Sarasate to play out of tune." The critic just quoted
cites as an example of Phillips 's music these lines from
Christ in Hades —

" The bright glory of after-battle wine,
The flushed recounting faces, the stern hum
Of burnished armies."

Lines more intolerable it would be difficult to conceive.
They bristle with faults — the trochee in the second foot
of the first line and the disregard of elision, the caesura
and collapse of stress in the fourth and virtual spondee
in the fifth foot of the second line, all combine to produce
an effect so cacophonous that we stand in amaze that
Phillips, a careful student of metres, should succeed in
passing it. To pursue his versification further would here
be out of place. Enthusiastic defenders of his irregularities
in the two early blank-verse poems may take it as matter
for reflection that in his later blank verse, in * Marpessa '
and the plays, he evidently took his chiding to heart, for
in these a change to a more careful method of versification
can hardly pass unnoticed. And with an advance in
technical mastery he wrote a few passages of melodious
blank-verse of true distinction.

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 97

The Poems of 1897 gained the doubtful laurel wreath
of the Academy one hundred guinea prize, and once more
the name of Stephen Phillips was blazoned abroad to the
millions of poetry lovers who read the evening papers.
The volume contained beside Christ in Hades, already
published, another long poem, * Marpessa.' The cadences
of the blank verse of ' Marpessa,' the paragraph structure,
present a striking advance upon his earlier work. In
variation of stress and rhythm, in the harmonious and
ready flow of the lines, in the form of his sentences he
succeeded in using his verse with a real knowledge and
power. In many single lines and phrases there come those
swift analogies which are the essence of fine poetry. He
often achieves surprising condensation of thought and
imagery in two or three lines, as in —

" thy life has been
The history of a flower in the air,
Liable but to breezes and to time,
As rich and purposeless as is the rose/5

And he does not often sink to the level of images so falsely
conceived and absurdly expressed as — " lilies musical with
busy bliss." The poem tells how Marpessa having been
given her choice between Apollo, the immortal, and Idas,
a mortal, chose Idas. And the noblest passage of human
poetry Phillips has written is that in which Marpessa gives
reason for her choice.

" But if I live with Idas, then we two
On the low earth shall prosper hand in Hand
In odours of the open field, and live
In peaceful noises of the farm, and watch
The pastoral fields burned by the setting sun.
And he shall give me passionate children, not
Some radiant god that will despise me quite,
But clambering limbs and little hearts that err.
And I shall sleep beside him in the night,
And fearful from some dream shall touch his hand
Secure; or at some festival we two
Will wander through the lighted city streets ;
And in the crowd I'll take his arm and feel
Him closer for the press. So shall we live."

In strength, tenderness and purity nothing fails in this
passage. The beauty of its music is only marred by the
o

98 POETRY [PART i

intrusion of two trochees where they ought not to be,
and the grave simplicity of the style by the use of one
conventional phrase — " pastoral fields."

6 Marpessa ' is by far the finest poem of the volume.
The realism of ' The Woman with the Dead Soul ' misses
effect in diffuseness. ' The Wife ' is sordid without point
or moral. Nor are the short lyrics of outstanding beauty ;
but the brief blank verse, ' To Milton — Blind/ is a fine
and simple poem of address.

Several of the early poems — * Marpessa,' ' Christ in
Hades ' — showed a tendency to the use of dialogue, but
there was no special evidence of dramatic faculty till, at
the request of Sir George Alexander, Phillips wrote Paolo
and Francesca (1899), the first of the blank verse plays
which gave to the author the distinction of reviving poetic
drama on the stage with some measure of success. As
dramatic poets Tennyson and Browning notably failed,
despite the genuine dramatic power of ' A Blot in the
'Scutcheon.' James Sheridan Knowles had stagecraft, but
he was utterly deficient in imagination and poetry. Swin-
burne's plays were hardly written for the stage, and the
same statement holds true of the work of that poet of
genius, Beddoes. The poetic drama of the nineteenth
century is a drama of the study ; whatever its intention,
its end is poetry, not drama. The age of Elizabeth was an
age of action, of outward pomp and show, of extrava-
gance in dress, of magnificent affectations in deportment
and conduct, reflected in the writers of the period in an
almost universally diffused power of dramatic composi-
tion. The age of Victoria, an age of science, of intellectual
and ethical megrims, fostered lyric and elegiac poetry.
Into one or other of these classes nearly all the poetry of the
century falls. Nor did Phillips escape this limitation as a
dramatist. The poetry of great drama must be objective,
for it is the projection of the author's imagination into the
minds of differing characters; lyric poetry is subjective,
and therefore incongruous with true drama. Stephen
Phillips, from experience, had a knowledge of the actor on
the boards and his needs ; he was painfully eager to allow
no pause in action, lest the vitality of his drama should
suffer ; he was fully conscious of the value of adventitious
aids, such as the sound of trumpets, the murmuring of

CHAP, m] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 99

crowds, the use of asides, swift alternations between the
intense and the lighter treatment of life. But these are
adventitious aids and have neither part nor lot in the
essence of great drama. And Phillips came short of great
poetic drama, because, among other reasons, the poetry
of his dialogue is not flexible to the sway of mood in
differing characters. Or, put summarily, his poetry is a
garment of dialogue, it is not the inevitable utterance
of the soul in its transcendent moments ; it lends beauty
to his plays, it gives them no additional dramatic power.
His poetry is a decoration and serves little purpose in
the interpretation of personality. For, although he pos-
sessed a genuine dramatic gift, his poetry was lyrical ; but
it was his good fortune as a poet for the stage to express
himself better in blank verse than in any other metre. Yet
the series of his poetic dramas was hailed at first with
triumphant panegyrics. Professor Churton Collins de-
clared that Paolo and Francesca gave Phillips kinship
"with Sophocles and Dante." To-day this unbalanced
outburst only excites a smile, and we are puzzled to con-
ceive how anybody could be led to attribute to a beautiful
but slight lyric the grandeur of Sophocles and Dante.
The tragedy of man in all his generations is mirrored in
the older poets : in Phillips 's poem we are never tempted
to look beyond the pathos of Paolo and Francesca ?s love-
story. Nevertheless, following Mr. Archer, it may be said
of his first drama, that he took a story shrined in beauty
by Dante and rendered it again without derogating from
its beauty. Paolo and Francesca is not undramatic, but
it is something better — one of the most beautiful long
poems written in the last century, within which it just
succeeds in falling. The stories of Paolo and Francesca
and of Tristram and Iseult are the two most beautiful of
the world's stories of transgression, because they tell not of
indulgence, but of love that is lord of the earth. Stephen
Phillips 's poem is beautiful as a whole, and it is also full
of that magic of poetry in single and pictorial phrases
which he lost later, which, indeed, he never reached
again in nearly equal measure, save in Ulysses. The
description, for example, of the stillness before dawn is
exquisitely and magically beautiful.

100 POETRY [PART i

" So still it is that we might almost hear
The sigh of all the sleepers in the world,
And all the rivers running to the sea."

The characters of the drama are living, they are far from
being mere puppets, but they are subsumed to the general
lyrical atmosphere of the play rather than strongly
delineated. Paolo and Francesca are romantic embodi-
ments of youth and pure passion; Giovanni Malatesta
is a brooding and sinister pattern of the dramatic type
to which he belongs ; and Lucrezia, the best drawn char-
acter of the play, is the middle-aged woman of the world in
whom the sympathies of motherly tenderness are awakened
by the helplessness and innocent purity of Francesca.
The dramatis persons are well-known types, seen before
and recognised again; Paolo and Francesca contains
no strong, original or creative character-drawing.

The brilliant, hard and spectacular character of his
theme in Herod (1900), the second of his dramas, gave
Phillips less opportunity as a poet, and we are conscious
that he does his best in spite of, rather than for the sake
of his subject. The background of political affairs also
hampers him ; for politics do not enter readily into drama.
And, further, he made the mistake of rendering in blank
verse the quick give-and-take of half-sentences and
exclamatory phrases — an impossibility. In Paolo and
Francesca and Ulysses he wisely used prose in many
scenes, and Herod would be the better for a liberal use of
prose dialogue. Blank verse cannot be snipped asunder
successfully; it is the function of drama in verse to utter
the thoughts of the heart not to render back the common
colloquialisms of everyday speech. And the poetry of the
longer speeches in Herod comes short of his best powers,
although detached lines and thoughts of great beauty are
not wholly wanting. The impassioned outbursts of Herod
in the second act occasionally almost reach the extrava-
gant metaphorical splendour of Elizabethan drama.

" I arise,

And spill the wine of glory on the ground :
I turn my face into the night."

On its first performance these lines and passages of a like
nature suggested to enthusiasts a comparison between

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 101

Herod and the dramatic poetry of Webster. Ulysses
(1902), even more emphatically than Herod, is poetry
wedded to spectacular scenes, not drama ; it is to be read
rather than performed, and in its ideal and mythical
setting it loses itself in undramatic lyricism. In Ulysses
Stephen Phillips regained, however, the poetic inspiration
which had, in part, been checked by Herod.

At this stage he was still to be considered as the lyric
poet, possessed of some stagecraft, who sought to restore
poetic drama to the theatre. In the dramas which followed
he threw in his lot with the makers of problem plays, and
his poetry suffered because the author's attention was
divided. Yet the first two acts of The Sin of David (1904),
first produced in 1914, are dramatically most successful ;
the verse, though not arresting, is admirably suited to its
purpose, and he does not stray into lyric irrelevance. The
characters of Colonel Mardyke, the stern Puritan, Miriam,
his beautiful wife, and Sir Hubert Lisle, who sins with
her the sin of David, are drawn in firm and convincing
outline. But the third act, placed four years later,
collapses dramatically ; and the pseudo-happy ending over
the body of the dead child of Lisle and Miriam is a fault
in taste and ethics only saved from repulsiveness by its
melodramatic sentimentality. Nero (1906) is likewise a
problem play — a sketch of stages in Nero's mental de-
generation rather than a drama. It is longer and more
diffuse than the earlier plays, and in poetry a retrogression.
The craftsmanship of the verse is good, but there is hardly
a trace of those felicities of phrase and thought which
marked ' Marpessa,' Paolo and Francesca, Ulysses and The
Sin of David. On the other hand the play does give evi-
dence of a genuine gift of psychological insight. Without
unnecessary elaboration or labour Phillips shows Nero not
as the monster of purposeful cruelty, but the man with
giant powers of self-deception, who, in the worst of his
moods, the destruction of his mother, his attempts to
seduce Poppaea, his burning of Rome, regards himself as
one who cannot sin, the least malicious, most gentle and
highly-gifted of men.

Pietro of Siena (1910) is, like The Sin of David, founded
upon one of the world's well-worn problem tales — in this
case the bribe of a brother's life for the sacrifice of chastity.

102 POETRY [PART i

The temptation is resisted, the riotous libertine, like the
lover of Pamela, offers marriage, all are reconciled and
we end to the music of marriage bells. The treatment is
too conventional for the subject. The construction of the
play is good ; but the theme is sifted through the imagina-
tion like fine sand and leaves nothing behind. The ethical
standpoint, as vulgar as Richardson's, would surprise us
in Stephen Phillips had we not already met with his lapse
in The Sin of David. And in poetry we are conscious that
he strives, without success, to reach the standard of his
earlier days. Only once in the play do we meet with
lines possessing the magic of his best manner.

" A voice that stole on us
Like strings from planets dreaming in faint skies,
With a low pleaded music."

This is the last of Phillips 's poetic dramas cast in the
Elizabethan mould. In The King (1912) he esssayed a
drama constructed after the Greek model in a series of
continuous scenes, based upon the story of Don Carlos.
The play is comparatively short, and while the scheme
does not serve to differentiate the play in any essential
way from the earlier dramas, the poetry illustrates the
author's exhaustion. The only passage of beautiful and
impassioned writing is the renunciatory speech of Christina
in the second scene. Of this speech the author need not
have been ashamed at the height of his powers. But it
does little more than accentuate by contrast the poverty
of the rest of the play.

It is scarcely twenty-five years since Paolo and
Franccsca was hailed with extravagant praise as the dawn
of a new era ; and of Stephen Phillips it was hoped that he
would bring again to the theatre the dayspring of poetry
banishing the long night of prose. A few years have
passed, his plays have been played, and the night, to all
appearances, has settled upon them, for managers show no
anxiety to risk a revival. Stephen Phillips succeeded
no better than Tennyson, whose plays are not contemptible
dramatically, and yet we hardly trouble to weigh them in
any estimate of his genius. Ibsen's powers as poet or
dramatist are set far above the plane of Phillips, but
Brand and Peer Gynt can only be read, and Ibsen's social

CHAP, m] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 108

dramas are written in a bald prose which avoids the
faintest tincture of poetry. The use of poetry that justifies
itself dramatically in its power of revealing character is
of all the gifts of genius the most rare. It manifested
itself first in Greek tragedians at Athens in her great day,
again with varying power in English dramatists of Eliza-
beth's reign, a little later in Corneille, Racine and Moliere,
in the next century in Schiller and slightly in Goethe. In
ages and countries widely separated true poetic drama
has flourished; and we are not yet justified in asking
with despair whether the world has not grown too old
and sophisticated for a living and breathing poetry of
the theatre. If is it not now yet it will be. But it was
not given to Stephen Phillips to restore poetic drama in
England, for his poetry is intrinsically lyric, adorning
his dialogue, not vivifying his characters. Nor is there
any clear originality, belonging to himself and his age,
distinguishing his poetical and dramatic methods. The
influences shaping his drama are three, Elizabethan, Greek
and classical French. Greek influence is most clearly
exhibited in The King, and elsewhere in the rigid economy
of his method, the influence of French classic drama in the
stately stiffness of many of his passages, and Elizabethan
influence in the cultivation of paradoxical metaphors like
that contained in the lines often praised —

" The red-rose cataract of Her streaming hair
Is tumbled o'er the boundaries of the world. "

Like others who attempted to write poetic drama in the
nineteenth century Phillips was derivative, and his success
was no greater than theirs.

Phillips's later non-dramatic verse is contained in New
Poems (1908), The New Inferno (1911) and Lyrics and
Dramas (1913). In the first volume are gathered
together poems belonging to several years and collected
from various quarters. The blank verse ' Endymion ' is
not in his best manner, but * Grief and God ' written in
heroic couplets, after a bad begining with two detest-
ably ugly lines continues as a beautiful poem. The short
lyrics of this volume are more likely to linger in the
memory than the longer poems. In verbal magic and
music two poems of regret, ' A Girl's Last Words ' and ' To

104 POETRY [PART i

a Lost Love ' are among the most beautiful Phillips
ever wrote, although the latter is too obviously copied
from Rossetti's ' Blessed Damozel.' The New Inferno is
a poem of nine cantos written in blank verse oddly divided
into stanzas of four lines. For the ordinary reader, un-
biassed by scholarly, antiquarian or historical interests,
even the poetry of Dante has to struggle hard disburthen-
ing itself of a vision of life more alien to the modern mind
than the concepts of the Greek and Latin poets. To those
who desire poetry the narrative and background of Dante's
poem are a veil shutting out the light. For a modern
poet to adopt the same form is to invite much weariness.
The poet of The New Inferno is escorted by a guiding
spirit through regions of the lower world where he sees
successively Napoleon, the souls of those who on earth
indulged their appetites, self-slayers, and others, and
various ethical problems, such as the reason for the
creation of dangerous drugs, are inconclusively solved.
The poem closes upon a note of hope for all souls alike.
The book is not without true poetry, especially in the
eighth canto, where we enter " the sea of lawless thoughts. "
But as the early allegory, Eremus, was ill-fashioned, so
is this. Not one of the last volumes contains poetry to
match the Poems of 1897. Lyrics and Dramas contains
nothing to enhance our conception of Phillips 's powers
as a poet. Nearly all the poems are short and trivial lyric
musings. Two narrative poems, * Prosperity ' and * The
Blow ' do not, however, fail to embody the tragic emotion
of either story ; and ' Shakespeare * exhibits the poet's
earlier command of language. But these are insufficient
to redeem a volume of verses seldom touched by any
powerful overflow of feeling.

Mr. Laurence Binyon is Stephen Phillips's cousin; in
Primavera, the small paper-covered volume of 1890,

their poems appeared side by side, and
Laurence Binyon, features of likeness more essential may
b. 1869, be found in their work. More than

twenty years ago Mr. Archer declared
that the talent of Mr. Binyon was epic; Mr, Streatfleld
was equally persuaded that it was lyric. At that time
he was to be judged as a writer of epic poetry by
Porphyrion (1898), a blank-verse narrative poem of fifteen

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 105

hundred lines, and he has since attempted nothing that
aims at epic breadth, for the blank verse Penthesilea (1905)
is shorter by five hundred lines. Mr. Archer was carried
away with admiration for the romantic glow of poetry in
Porphyrion, a poetry which is, however, lyrical, and
destroys rather than supports the claim of the poem to
be considered an epic. The subject is that of many a
youthful poem — an allegory of the soul's quest. A young
man of Antioch, fascinated by the principle of Christian
asceticism, flies to the desert, but an apparition of magical
beauty changes his nature, and he returns to the world in
search of ideal loveliness. The theme of Penthesilea,
which tells how the Queen of the Amazons sought death
at the hands of Achilles in expiation for having slain her
sister unwittingly, is more tolerant of epic treatment.
But that Mr. Binyon is lyrical by gift is proved by the
aridity of Penthesilea; it has less than Porphyrion the
glow and fervour of poetry, for the poet is tormented
by the necessity to narrate. In the earlier poem he had a
lyric theme and treated it in lyric blank verse ; in the
later he has a tale to tell, and he drops into mere narra-
tion. Narrative in blank verse scarcely constitutes an
epic poem, and the lyrical Porphyrion with its more
human note, the finely imaginative passages descriptive
of scenes in desert and city, its less apparent artifice and
greater spontaneity, is the poem of the two that better
endures a second reading. Yet it is by no means an out-
standing poem. As the cadences of Penthesilea inevitably
call to mind the second version of Hyperion, so Porphyrion
is reminiscent of Milton's blank verse. Both poems serve
to persuade us that Mr. Binyon's gift of poetry lies in a
vague, dreamy lyricism, sometimes inspired by life but
more often by literature.

In 1890 Mr. Binyon won the Newdigate with a poem
on Persephone, and in the same year he published a few
poems in Primavera, which call for no comment. Nor
do the volumes that follow, Lyrical Poems (1894), Poems
(1895) and The Praise of Life (1896) reveal any noteworthy
advance in poetical powers, strength of thought or imagin-
ative gifts. And often Mr. Binyon is capable of being dull
or lapsing into ugly crudities of thought and phrase. His
verse-writing first showed distinction in the two parts of

106 POETRY [PART i

London Visions (1896-99), which were republished in an
augmented edition in 1908. In expression and style these
poems showed individuality; but as an observer of life
Mr. Binyon is too academic. To read these descriptions
of varied and motley humanity is but to be forcibly re-
minded of their flatness when compared with the full-
blooded buoyancy of a Walt Whitman, or, to take a more
modern contrast, the humorous cynicism of Mr. James
Stephens in portraying character. He is at his best when
he abandons the effort, unnatural to him, of realistic
observation, and writes poems like * The Threshold ' in
the form of an ode, or becomes purely subjective and
lyrical as in ' Trafalgar Square/ Poems like ' White-
chapel High Road ' and ' The Road Menders,' which aim
at realistic painting, are laboured and monotonous and
fail to bring life near. As a literal rendering of things
seen by far the best poem of the two volumes is ' The
Little Dancers.' But, in general, Mr. Binyon's observa-
tion of life and types fails to illuminate, save when he
turns aside, as he does in ' Salvation Seekers,' to comment
on psychological causes.

He showed a higher inspiration in Odes (1901), for * The
Dryad,' * The Bacchanal of Alexander,' * Amasis ' and the
third part of ' The Death of Tristram ' are finely con-
ceived and impassioned poems. To quote a short passage
from any of these would be to do Mr. Binyon an injustice ;
but, without cavil, he has never done greater work than in
* The Bacchanal of Alexander,' a spirited poem filled with
the glow and colour of the summer scene and riotous
abandon of life it describes.

The Death of Adam and other Poems (1903) adds
nothing of real value to his earlier work. The verse and
imagery of the title-poem are too strongly reminiscent of
Keats 's Hyperion to give pleasure. Of the shorter poems
the beautiful * Santa Cristina ' may alone compare with
the best of his earlier lyrics, and it is disfigured by the
choppiness of the rhyming octave couplets.

Dream Come True (1905) contains a collection of formal
and metaphysical love-lyrics ; and Pans and (Enone (1906)
and Attila (1907) are blank verse tragedies. None of these,
either dramatically or poetically, is of special interest.
The verse is not easily flexible ; and in Attila too classical

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 107

in character to lend itself to the semi-barbaric scene.
Meredith's wonderful poem on the same subject contains
far more realistic and vivid painting of barbaric and
brutal life in the camp of the Huns. Auguries (1918) con-
tains grave and regular verse embodying the not too eager
musings and emotions of a cultivated, thoughtful, if not
original mind. ' The Tram ' reverts, not unsuccessfully,
to the method of realistic painting of drab life early
essayed in London Visions. In * The Mirror/ a finely ex-
pressed poem, the words catch some fire from a genuine
emotion ; but we are left unmoved by the serene and self-
conscious writing of nearly every other poem in the
volume.

Mr. Binyon did not again approximate to the standard
of his writing in Porphyrion and the Odes till eight years
passed and he published in 1909 England and other Poems.
At least three poems of this volume, ' Sirmione,' * Kuan's
Voyage ' and ' Milton,' stand with the best of his work.
' Sirmione ' has the colour, passion and descriptive power
of the odes in the volume of 1901. In the magic of pure
poetry Mrf Binyon has never surpassed ' Ruan's Voyage,'
a narrative poem written in varied metres. His touch is
wonderfully sure. As an example of swift painting, the
scene in which Ruan, the fisherman opens the magic box
and three hundred years pass over him in the flight of a
moment may be quoted —

" Ere he can pray, ere he can groan,
Swift as grass in a furnace thrown,
Or a crumbled clod in a heedless hand,
He withers into whitened bone.
Where his breathing body stood,
Flushed with life and warm with blood,
Is a heap of ashes, a drift of sand,
And the wind blowing, and the silent strancl."

Mr. Binyon's verse has by no means the constant note
of unconscious and unpremeditated song ; he gains his ends
deliberately, with self-knowledge, and, with some excep-
tion, the clear passion of true poetry is only to be found
in Porphyrion, the Odes, in a few pages of London Visions
and England, and in those poems inspired by the war
collected under the title of The Four Years (1919). His

108 POETRY [PART i

work rarely fails to do him credit as a scholar and student
of literature, but genuine poetry springs from life and not
from books, and Mr. Binyon, even in his poems of pre-
meditated realism, is not closely in touch with substantial
human nature ; in less than half his writing does he escape
an attitude of chilly and academic detachment. He is,
therefore, more the poet when he departs from everyday
life to kingdoms of myth, mysticism, or pure imagination.
His poetry combines the qualities of fine scholarship,
cultivated taste and a nature sensitive to the ideal of
beauty. He never offends against good feeling ; he is not
guilty of meaningless crudities like the allegory of
Phillips's Eremus, the dull purposelessness of ' The Wife '
or the false denouement of The Sin of David and Pietro
of Siena. To compare the work of the two writers is to
recognise that in the immediacy of a poetry which springs
from the void unsought Phillips far surpasses Mr. Binyon,
for it is only occasionally in the poetry of the latter that
we escape a consciousness of effort, labour and the use
of the file. In sudden and unexpected surprises of thought
and phrase, in the picture-making quality of his words,
in wealth of imagery Mr. Binyon, save rarely, falls short
of Phillips's highest attainment in the Poems, Paolo
and Francesca and Ulysses. Mr. Binyon, like Pater, the
academic aesthete, is never sufficiently in contact with the
stress and bustle of a rough and hard-driven world — in
short, his poetry is always a little remote from its subject.
Save that Maurice Hewlett was more impassioned and
more intimately in sympathy with men and women as
creatures of flesh and blood, much that
Maurice Hewlett, has been said of Mr. Binyon applies with
1861-1923. equal relevance to his work as a poet.

His volumes of verse do not give proof
of a gift of poetry prodigally bestowed. Much of his
writing is suggestive of restrained declamation rather than
poetry; neither words nor thoughts are winged. And,
further, the level of attainment is monotonously even —
just words in a sufficiently good order, but rarely the
best words in the best order. In his first two volumes
the emotion of the reader is never aroused, and in not a
line is there the fire of lyric inspiration* Neither in phrase
or melody has Maurice Hewlett's early verse any spon-

CHAP, m] PASSAGE OP THE CENTURIES 109

taneity. His poetry is the verse of a man gifted with a
fine sense of literature and not devoid of passion, although
he expresses himself better in prose than in verse. Of
poetry in a transcendent sense he has scarcely written a
line.

A Masque of Dead Florentines (1895), written partly in
rhyming octossyllables and partly in iambic pentameters,
presents a processional passage of the Florentine dead —
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and others — and gives evidence
of a mind tempered to the splendour and fascination of
Florentine history, but the poetry has no spell or charm.
Songs and Meditations (1897) is divided, as the title
indicates, into two parts, and in neither was Hewlett
notably successful. The gift of quick song was not his,
and he was not genuinely meditative by temperament. A
scholarly romanticism eked out with an interest in the
intrusion of the passions is the groundwork of his writing.
Among the songs of his second volume of verse * Divae
Genetricis Laudes ? has ampler music and imagination ;
but more beautiful is the short poem of three stanzas,
* Iseult of the Mill/ in which he adopted the manner of
folk-song.

Artemision: Idylls and Songs (1909) followed its pre-
cursor in verse at a distance of twelve years, but the poems
contained in this volume were written 1895-98, and this
was evidently a period in which Maurice Hewlett gave
himself almost entirely to the writing of verse, before
popularity with the short story and novel led him in an-
other direction, for the three dramatic poems of The
Agonists (1911) belong in date of composition to the same
years. Artemision opens with three long poems on classi-
cal themes, ' Leto's Child,' ' The Niobids ' and ' Latmos,'
followed by sonnets and lyrics, some of them reprinted
from Songs and Meditations. These poems do not serve
to alter a conviction that Hewlett's primary gift was not
that of the poet. His use of English was always good,
but pedantic, mannered and rigid, yielding no nuances of
thought or phrase, no flashes of inspiration or poetic
felicity. And his ear was defective. This shortcoming he
had the wit to see, for he informs us in Artemision that
several of the poems are to be read as prose that the
correct stress may be found and the pieces resolve them-

110 POETRY [PART i

selves into verse. The same warning is posted in the
preface to The Agonists, and we are, therefore, on our
guard. Whether prose may be scanned by the method
of Professor Saintsbury is a question that may be left
in doubt, but all will agree that when the cadences of
prose fall into the metre of verse we are reading bad prose.
Nevertheless all good prose has its ordered balance of
rhythms. Th greater part of the world's verse is written
to strict metres, because in ordinary speech the stronger
the emotion the stronger and more rapid in recurrence is
the stress of the voice, and poetry is the noblest form
of emotional utterance. But verse that only appears as
verse when read as prose is another matter, and a strange
anomaly. The only consequence of reading Hewlett's
verse on his own principles is that is resolves itself into
bad and weak prose.

" Being so fair thou art holy
Even as Beatrice is,
Sister-torches of God,
Twin pastures untrod,
Handmaidens meek and lowly,
Consecrate priestesses,
To heaven dedicate wholly."

(Donna e gentil — .)

What is this but staccato and jerky prose ? It only stirs
a regret that phrases so good should be so ill conjoined.
In The Agonists, to which, fortunately, he was able to give
more time, Mr. Hewlett was more successful, and there is
a music in his verse though we read it in the dispassionate
temper of prose. The three dramatic poems of the volume,
written in irregular and constantly diversified forms of
rhymed and unrhymed verse, are, in force, flexibility and
human interest, the highest attainment of Maurice Hewlett
in poetry. Further, these three poems have a philoso-
phical basis and lead up to an epilogue on the passion of
Christ, wherein it will be shown that " the divine qualities
can only mate with human faculty in the ideal presented
to mankind in the Incarnate God of the Christians."
* Minos, King of Crete,' * Ariadne in Naxos ' and ' The
Death of Hyppolytus ' illustrate the failure of the ancient
concepts of the relation of God to Man, in that the essential

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES ill

qualities of God — Power, Love and Knowledge — were
never combined in the individual. The problem of the
poems is, in brief, the question tortured by Browning
into many shapes — the relationship of love and knowledge
in the individual life.

Helen Redeemed (1918) is another of Hewlett's poems
based on a classic subject, this time written in heroics,
but of so rough a kind that for many lines the words
stagger, trot and amble in helpless confusion. It may be
possible to find an iambic scansion for such a line as

" Shed ; nor yet so the end for Here cried, "

or

" His hand over the crupper, of such girth,'5

but only with violence to word-stresses. Nevertheless,
this epic in eleven stages of Troy's fall and the redemp-
tion of Helen through a second treachery is eloquent;
and in the later passages of the poem Maurice Hewlett
uses his metre with a better grace and skill. But, in all,
the poem is monotonous as nearly all poetry is fated to be
which translates the poet to an age so distant that the
characters can never be other than superhuman and
meaningless. The poem as a whole but serves to confirm
the impression we gain from all Maurice Hewlett's earlier
volumes of verse. Knowledge, thought, independence and
a gift of eloquent language he does not lack; but there
are no surprises, no unforgettable beauties, no magic in
phrase or analogy, which mark the presence of genius.

If Maurice Hewlett reminds us of any poets before him it
is of Browning and Meredith; but chiefly of the latter.
At the best, however, he is only a pale reflection. He has
nothing of Browning's music or swift onrush, little of
Meredith's originality in thought. But he shares some-
thing with Meredith's manner; and, like Browning, he
derives the substance and background of his poetry from
Italy, the Renaissance and Pagan mythology. The pre-
face to The Agonists, in which Mr. Hewlett makes his
profession of faith, is a little surprising, for nearly all his
poetry suggests a pagan temper, a dislike of asceticism
and a flirting with the voluptuous. Beyond this it is
true, however, that we can detect the detached and

112 POETRY [PAW t

impersonal nature. And, therefore, in the whole he has
only reached true poetry in the philosophical series of The
Agonists, a poetry which flows strongly, is permeated with
colour and steeped in knowledge of classic lore and myth.
Of a very different order, despite the limitations of its
artifice, is the splendidly imaginative and vigorous writing

of Mr. Charles Montagu Doughty. As
Charles Montagu a young man he explored the wilds of
Doughty, b. 1843. Arabia, cut off from all intercourse with

Europeans, to emerge with a knowledge
of Arabia and her inhabitants given to no man of his time.
Ten years after his reappearance he published his Travels
In Arabia Deserta (1888), in two large volumes, which
showed that he was not only the explorer, but the master
of a style at once precise and imaginative. Arabia Deserta
is no book of dry-as-dust inquiry into ethnography and
archaeology, it belongs to literature by virtue of a prose,
clearly chiselled, poetically imaginative and rich with a
vocabulary of potent words. The style recalls English
prose of the seventeenth century, and the style of his
blank verse epic The Dawn in Britain (1906), also derives
from English of the same period. The snipped idiom and
vocabulary of modern prose Mr. Doughty found insuffi-
cient to his needs : and the style of his epic is also a delib-
erate artifice, archaic in phrase, idiom and construction,
borrowing directly from Milton and Spenser. But he has
little share in the romanticism of either poet. More de-
finitively than any living English poet Mr. Doughty stands
for an intellectual and classical reaction against Victorian
feeling. And, difficult though it may be to read The Dawn
in Britain as a whole (as difficult as an entire reading of
the Faerie Queene), it leaves an impress of sheer intel-
lectual force in which it is only surpassed by one other
poem of the day — The Dynasts.

The dawn of which Mr. Doughty writes is the advent
of Christianity in Britain, and in his poem he attempts
to paint a picture of our country in the third century
as realistic as the drawing of Arabia in his prose volumes.
He aims at the intellectual realisation of a past epoch,
avoiding the sentirnentalism of the Arthurian legends as
they are found in the Victorian poets. Perhaps the clearest
and most obvious example of his intellectualism is his

CHAP, m] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 118

sedulous and painstaking rejection of the pathetic fallacy.
He is guiltless of view-hunting or landscape-painting, that
vice so severely lashed by Carlyle and Ruskin, who sinned
in common against their own theory. If Mr, Doughty
notes the outer face of nature, it is only in incidental and
brief rubrics. One or two examples will illustrate the
objectively intellectual character of his landscape-painting,
and its wonderful truthfulness.

" And now springs the late dawn; sun's glistering beams

Clipping the hoary boughs, like golden hairs." (i. 62).
or

" By fenny brooks, amongst brown bramble-brakes" (v. 76),

He hardly tries to paint an imaginative picture, even
briefly. Commonly he writes of natural phenomena in a
manner purely intellectual —

" How sweet the Spring-tide, in far island-Britain,
When soars the heavenly lark, with merry throat ! " (vi. 95).

The English, or " Anglecism " as he would call it, of
Mr. Doughty is, as nearly as may be, the English of
Spenser. It is his belief that to Spenser, above any
English poet, was given the " golden intimate tongue "
of the muses. And outside English poetry Mr. Doughty's
chief debt is to Homer. But the spoken word comes be-
fore literature; and the best workman is not he who
refuses to use the tools to his hand because they are not
what he would wish. By the time the lesser artist has
finished pottering with his tubes, his palette, his brushes
and his lighting the true painter has his picture finished.
In The Dawn in Britain we are as often conscious of tools
and the business of getting to work as of any effect gained.
Bold experiments are interesting; but to walk across the
river of the epic carefully balanced on a tight-rope of words
serves no very useful purpose in life or art. Mr. Doughty
has not succeeded in six volumes and thirty thousand lines
in writing a great epic ; he has experimented in an extra-
ordinarily interesting manner with an ancient garment of
speech. But the recurring use of " sith," " ben,"
" sheen," " wox," and other archaisms becomes as mono-
tonous and unedifying as the larding of conversation with
H

114 POETRY [PART i

one or two tricks of slang. Despite its wonderful vigour
and continuous movement the poem can only be regarded
as a splendid artifice.

Examples must be rare of the author who begins as a
poet so late in life. Mr. Doughty was over sixty when he
published The Dawn in Britain, but after this beginning
he has continued to write at astonishing length and with
surprising speed. In Adam Cast Forth (1908), a sacred
drama in five acts of blank verse, archaic vocabulary is
much less in evidence, although the texture of Mr.
Doughty >s " Anglecism " is still that of Spenser and the
Elizabethans. His intimate knowledge of Arabia has
enabled him to give a Semitic atmosphere to the whole
poem. But the most readable of his writings is The
Cliffs (1909), a long blank-verse drama which recalls, in
structure and in the use of supernatural machinery, Mr.
Hardy 's Dynasts, and it would probably never have been
written without inspiration from that source. The style
of the poem is still archaic in its inversions and its omis-
sion of particles, but as the time is present day Mr.
Doughty wisely shelves much of his Spenserian affectation.
He chooses for his theme the decadence of England and
invasion by Germany, and especially invasion by air. The
poem opens with a long monologue by John Hobbe, a
Crimean veteran who tends sheep on the cliffs of East
Anglia. His soliloquy is scarcely cut short, but, at least,
curtailed in length, by the sudden landing of a Prussian
(' Persic 9 is Mr, Doughty *s word) airship containing two
German officers and a mechanic, who have come to spy
out the land with a view to immediate invasion. This
they proceed to do by discoursing at large on the
effeminacy, apathy and carelessness of the English. Old
Hobbe springs out upon them and tries to rend their
balloon with his crook. They run him through the body
and depart in haste, leaving maps and other trifles on
the grass. In the second part supernatural beings are
introduced, Sirion, Truth, great JEons, and a company
of elves who dilate, before the ruined edifice of Britannia's
temple, on the low estate to which English politics and
patriotism have fallen. In Part III coastguards dis-
cover the body of Hobbe and the papers left by the Persies
and return to rouse England with the news of invasion.

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 115

In Part IV the temple of Britannia is seen re-edified as
the result of the revival of patriotism, supernatural beings
again appear with the ghosts of the great English departed,
and two foreign ghosts — Napoleon and Joan of Arc. In
Part V Claybourne village is discovered, guarded and
patrolled by sentries, one or two English successes are
related, and in conclusion the vicar of the village reads
a long patriotic song which is taken up in unison by the
soldiers and all present standing round the colours. The
scheme of the poem is grandiose, even to the verge of
the ludicrous ; yet there is a largeness in the manner, an
intensity, and an individual note which check the smile.
Despite the fact that Mr. Doughty's tirades against the
decadence of England are fatally suggestive of verse
parodies upon the leading article in the morning paper,
the impression left by the poem as a whole is of substance
and breadth in conception. And, especially in Part IV,
Mr. Doughty has succeeded in writing some beautiful
poetry; though he can also write —

" The Medical Board reported me, as unfit
for further service; and with a pension, for
my wounds, I was discharged " —

and leave the reader to conjure the words into blank
verse. The conclusion we are driven to is a doubt whether
the poem would ever have been written but for The
Dynasts, and a conviction that whereas in verse and magic
of language both largely fail, there is an epic strength in
Mr. Hardy's poem to which Mr. Doughty never wholly
attains.

The Clouds (1912) is an epilogue to The Cliffs in fifteen
blank verse poems. The epigraph from Spenser — " AH
places full of forraine powers " — gauges the state of Mr.
Doughty's mind. England is overrun with invading
armies till the colonies come to her assistance. For the
sake of his poetry it is a pity the author should be so
heavily overweighted with a prophetic theme. His
immense gain in poetry is manifest when he escapes his
obsession, as in his picture of the elves' banquet in The
Cliff, and also in the splendid opening passage of ' The
Muses' Garden ' in The Clouds, the finest example of his
writing in blank verse.

116 POETRY [PART i

Mr. Doughty 's poetry in the whole is an example of
varied experiment in epic and literary drama; and,
further, though he borrows his style and idiom from the
most romantic of poets, his temper is classical, and the
interest of his writings, especially of The Dawn in Britain,
is their intellectual and objective manner.1 The subjec-
tive, romantic, emotional poetry of the last century has
never touched or influenced him ; we are never tempted to
recall the fact that Tennyson, Swinburne and Rossetti
have lived and written.

The use of dramatic monologue, in a form which com-
bined the characteristics of subjective lyricism and the
objective address of the drama, was a marked develop-
ment of poetry in the last century. Both Tennyson and
Browning have left the best of their writing in this form.
The constant use of the dramatic monologue was a natural
outcome of the introspectiveness of the age; it was used
as an instrument of psychological analysis and a means of
making poetry a more individual and realistic utterance
of the heart. But Victorian poetry is a poetry of ideas,
and rarely aims at concrete realism. Within recent years
a tendency to depart from purely lyrical forms has become
marked ; a poetry of crude and violent realism, typically
illustrated in some of Mr. Masefield's writings, became
the mode ; and there are but few living poets who wholly
escape this influence. Poets like Mr. Doughty, Stephen
Phillips, and Mr. Binyon, whose talents do not at all fit
them to give an imitation of men and manners in their
time, have yielded in some degree to a common tendency.
Herbert Trench, on the other hand, was a poet of genius
too individual and strong to write but in his own way ; and
the realism of Mr. Hardy and Mr. A. E. Housman is an-
other matter and peculiarly their own. Perhaps in no
case has a poet abandoned romantic lyricism for bald
realism with so little loss in poetic content as Mr. Wilfrid
Wilson Gibson. It was impossible to read
Wilfrid Wilson his first essays in poetry without thinking
Gibson, b. 1878. by turns of Tennyson, Browning, Swin-
burne, Morris and Rossetti. His first

1. Perhaps Mr. Doughty's Spenserianism is seen at its best, in vigour
and archaic stateliness, in Mansoul (1920, revised 1923), a semi-philosophic
poem with variants and excursions.

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 117

volumes of verse belonged to the stained-glass tradition
of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites. Between 1902 and
1905 he published in small booklets Vrlyn the Harper, The
Queen's Vigil, The Nets of Love and the slightly larger
collection of The Golden Helm; and in The Web of Life
(1908) he returned again to the imitative lyricism of these
early poems. The lyrics of these collections bear witness
to Mr. Gibson's ready gift of melody and song, his facile
command of metres, his ability to employ a rich vocabu-
lary without abuse, but they are imitative and wholly
lack the impress of personality. The light of these poems
is that of the dim cathedral aisle with sunlight burning
upon the rich colours of high and painted windows. Their
most strongly marked characteristic is a passion for the
wan flame and the red, for bright and glancing colours,
for the golden haze of atmosphere. And this passion for
colour is exemplified notably in * Faring South,' a section
of Vrlyn the Harper, which contains in short two-stanza
poems of observation more strength and individuality
than any other part of Mr. Gibson's volumes of collected
lyric verse. His pictures in * The Stone-breaker 9 and
' The Ploughman,' poems of this section, are conceived in
colour. The ploughman's

" . . . white share spills in dust the hot grey soil,"

the washer bending at the stream is " white-capped, red-
armed," the harvester's face and throat are " copper
glowing," the stone-breakers 's arms are " brown " and the
flints he cracks " dark-moulded," the country wife's face
burns " red-golden " beneath her " snow-white " cap.
The sureness of Mr. Gibson's eye and the fidelity of his
painting in these few short poems differentiates them from
the others ; but his lyric and narrative poems show little
writing that is personal to the author.

Later Mr. Gibson executed a complete volte-face,
writing in The Stonefolds (1907), On the Threshold (1907),
Daily Bread (1910) and Fires (1912), poetic drama and
dramatic poems, objective and unshrinkingly realistic in
manner. Queens, forlorn damsels, knights, esquires,
jousts, tourneys and scenes of mediaeval romance and
story had been his themes, but now he chooses for the
subjects of his poems cottagers, shepherds, ferrymen, pit-

118 POETRY [PART i

men, printers, carpenters, the unemployed, he dramatises
the primitive hates and loves of uncultured people, their
struggle for daily bread, the courage with which they face
adversity and pain, their motives, their virtues and their
sins. In the first two series of dramatic poems he uses a
strong and flowing blank verse. As an 'instrument of
vigorous and straightforward expression it would be
difficult to overpraise it. Its music is not strikingly varied,
it is plain and affects no ormanment, but it is neither end-
stopt nor wearisome to the ear, and admirable for the
purposes to which Mr. Gibson puts it. The early volumes
gave little promise of any dramatic instinct in the author,
but these short dramatic poems, containing only two to
four characters apiece, are instinct with dramatic feeling,
human emotions and individual characterisation. They
contain more humanity and more true drama than much
in poetic drama — Stephen Phillips and Mr. Binyon, for
example, — which has appeared on the stage.

The desire to come nearer to the heart of reality
prompted Mr. Gibson to go further, and in the dramatic
poems of Daily Bread blank verse is eschewed for ejacula-
tory verse in short unrhymed lines. His subjects, taken
from common life, are the same, and he loses nothing in
dramatic power, but his handling of blank verse was so
good that it is a pity he abandoned it for the curious and
trying versification of these poems. In Fires he writes
again of everyday and common life, but for the most
part in rhyming octosyllables with variations and irregu-
larities. Some of these poems, like ' Flannan Isle,' have a
macabre and eerie twist, some, like * The Stone,' are grim ;
but in concentration of power and psychical weirdness the
best of the tales, * The Old Man,' is also one of the shortest.
In this poem Mr. Gibson has won astonishing success in
creating an atmosphere of ghostly creepiness.

The realism of Mr. Gibson is not the impressionistic
realism of Mr. Arthur Symons and other poets in the
nineties, but the broader realism of recent years, inspired
with a faith in God and human nature. These poems
may be regarded as anticipatory of the attempts of Mr.
Masefield to write passionately and violently of rough and
common men. They illustrate a tendency, manifested
recently in poets, dramatists and novelists, to give an

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 119

appearance of strength to their writing by treating baldly
or noisily the passions and emotions of untutored minds.
In noise and blatancy nobody can claim to have out-
stripped Mr. John Masefield, and his example has reacted
for evil upon smaller writers in proportion
John Masefield, to the indubitably high gifts he possesses
b. 1874. as a poet. His experiences as a wanderer

in early life led him to begin with the
nautical poems, written in sailor speech, of Salt-water
Ballads (1902), and Ballads (1903). These ballads remind
us of Mr. Kipling's soldier poems and the contents of
The Seven Seas, though Mr. Masefield 's melodies are not,
as a rule, so naive and simple as Mr. Kipling's. Unfor-
tunately, even in his early poems, Mr. Masefield confuses,
as he does later with great success, crudity and brutality
with strength. Indifference to the death of comrades is a
frequent topic of the Salt-water Ballads, and it is not a
subject which grows more pleasing with repetition. Nor
does Mr. Masefield echo the patriotism of Mr. Newbolt's
sea-songs : his pirates, buccaneers and deck-hands on the
dirty tramp steamer declare in their own tongue the
wonders of sea and storm. Among the best of the poems in
sailor speech are ' One of the Bo 'sun's Yarns ' and ' Cape
Horn Gospel ' ; ' Captain Stratton's Fancy ' is among the
best of drinking-songs ; and of poems not in the colloquial
of the deck ' A Valediction ' and the fine ' Seekers ' are
noteworthy. In these poems Mr. Masefield has, at least,
caught the spirit 'of the high seas, but Mr. Kipling has
written better ballads of the sea in cockney arid rough
slang, Mr. Newbolt two or three sea-songs which out-
distance anything of Mr. Masefield's.

It was not till he had been writing poetry for ten years
that he began to produce in the English Review those long
poems, full of strange oaths and turbulent rhythms, which
provoked either hearty admiration or scoffing ridicule. On
the one hand he was hailed as the greatest genius in modern
poetry, on the other held up to opprobrium as one who
dragged poetry in the mire of coarse speech ; and he was
admirably parodied by Mr. J. C. Squire, who had little
to do but reproduce the original with slight unfaithful-
ness. In these poems of Mr. Masefield we have the cul-
mination of that disregard for form and the principle of

120 POETRY [PART i

beauty in all things sadly predicted by Robert Louis
Stevenson. But this does not conclude the whole matter.
If a large part of Mr. Masefield's later poems degenerates
into slap-dash rhetoric in the dialect of the hamlet and the
dirty slum, the real beauty of long passages, the vigour
of utterance and conception in the whole cannot be denied.
This is more especially true of Daffodil Fields (1918),
which has passages of great beauty in its description of
English country scenes. The River (1913), which followed
it, has lost the force and raciness of The Everlasting Mercy
(1911) and The Widow in the Bye-street (1912) without
any compensations. Of these realistic novels in verse the
best as a complete poem is Dauber (1912), the chronicle
of a voyage and the story of a youth who dreamed of
becoming a great painter. It is less violent than its
immediate predecessors, more coherent in narrative, but
little broken in upon by prosy moralising, and only slightly
disfigured by rhyme for rhyme's sake. And the description
of storms and icy winds off Cape Horn is one of the greatest
things of its kind in verse — the utter desolation and wild
abandon of sea and sky are wonderfully vivid in the
telling.

It cannot be denied that these rough-and-ready poems
are a form of literature alive in every line, springing
unthought from a sensitive nature responsive to every
influence of life; their weakness lies in the unfortunate
self-consciousness of Mr. Masefielcl in his attempts to gain
strength by crude violences to language and rhythm. In
Daffodil Fields the metre is often hideously uncouth. The
use of foul words and the realistic description of brutal
scenes lends no additional vigour to the poems; for Mr.
Masefield writes far better when he forgets these things.
And, further, the passages of religious and wordly-wise
comment interpolated in the narrative are, as often as not,
ludicrous in their context. It is incredible that the con-
verted sinner of The Everlasting Mercy should move with
facile fluency from telling with gusto the story of his evil
life to playing his own chorus in pious refrain. And
the interpolations of The Widow in the Dye-street
are even more incongruous. It is difficult to read
with patience this warning against wicked and design-
ing beauty —

CHAP, m] PASSAGE OP THE CENTURIES 121

" So tea was made, and down they sat to drink;
O the pale beauty sitting at the board !
There is more death in women than we think,
There is much danger in the souls adored,
The white hands bring the poison and the cord,
Death has a lodge in lips as red as cherries,
Death has a mansion in the yew-tree berries."

Ancient maxims, wholly out of place, are here introduced
by violence; they serve no purpose of beauty or moral
appeal. And the passage quoted illustrates a persistent
fault of these slap-dash poems — the subservience of matter
and sense to rhyme. The only business of the fourth and
fifth lines is to provide rhymes to " board." It is no
universal truth that " there is much danger in the souls
adored, " and the statement interests us as much as if
Mr. Masefield said " there is much danger in going to sea
in ships. " It simply was not worth saying; and line
after line, passage after passage, was not worth writing.
Ugly and unnecessary faults abound. The great merit of
these poems, doubtless, is their sincere whole-heartedness
and their real beauty when the poet forgets men and
writes of nature. If Coleridge's dictum that poetry should
equally give pleasure in the parts as in the whole be applied
as a test these poems fail. Much of Mr. Masefield's narra-
tive writing in verse is ugly, noisy, violent ; he is not, with
all his display of realism, as true to simple and essential
humanity as, to give but one example of a tuneful poet,
Mr. A. E. Housman, and dramatically these poems are
not as convincing as Mr. W. W. Gibson's essays in a similar
kind of writing.

But the change, foreshadowed in Daffodil Fields, toward
the writing of poetry for the sake of beautiful and not ugly
things, was almost complete in Philip the King and other
Poems (1914). Before the volume was published Europe
had become a battlefield, and thereafter Mr. Masefield 's
prose and verse suffered a war change, and with it his
writing gained immeasurably in poetry and sincerity of
utterance. In the collection last-named came the splendid
6 August, 1914, ' the restrained and simple expression of
an Englishman's love of country as he looks across a
familiar landscape

122 POETRY [PAET i

" These homes, this valley spread below me here,
The rooks, the tilted stacks, the beasts in pen,
Have been the heartfelt things, past speaking dear
To unknown generations of dead men.55

Within the same covers appeared that stirring and graphic
allegorical poem of the sea, g The Wanderer, * and the
spirited * Biography.' Lollingdon Downs (1917) contained
nothing as good. A large part of the book consists of
sonnets cast in monotone, dwelling upon the inevitability
of death or the quest of the ideal beauty veiled in the
visible and only dimly apprehended of the soul. Reynard
the Fox (1919) is, in outward form, written after the
manner of the earlier narrative poems, but the vigorous
and arresting verse portraits, the pictures of English fields
and hills, the onward sweep of the story lift it to a higher
and better plane.

Among living English poets Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie
gained a reputation more rapidly than many. Despite
much dissimilarity a certain likeness may
Lascelles Aber- be discovered between part of his work
crombie, b. 1881. and that of Mr. Masefield. In the rough-
ness and crude energy of Mr. Aber-
crombie 's ' Blind ' and ' Mary : A Legend of the '45 ' there
is much to remind us of the series of poems Mr. Mase-
field inaugurated with The Everlasting Mercy. But,
whereas Mr. Masefield inspires us with the belief that he
writes currente calamo, Mr. Abercrombie 's force is
obviously only won at the cost of protracted labour — the
similes, metaphors, vocabulary are often far-fetched and
elaborated with difficulty. Arid this appearance of strain
and effort inheres not only in those poems in which we can
point a parallelism with Mr. Masefield, but in others, more
in number, which may be described as metaphysical rather
than realistic or romantic in character.

The Interludes and Poems (1908) contained the realistic
drama * Blind/ four metaphysical dialogue poems, ' The
New God,' ' The Fool's Adventure,' < An Escape ' and
' Peregrinus,' and some shorter pieces. Following upon
this volume came the delicate and truly beautiful Mary
and the Bramble (1910), and the over-long and pointless
Sale of Saint Thomas (1911). In Emblems of Love (1912)
Mr. Abercrombie continued to treat, either realistically

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 123

or metaphysically, questions of sex and love. The two
finest poems of the volume, * Vashti ' and ' Judith,9 are
based on scriptural themes.

Mr. Abercrombie possesses a wide vocabulary and one
peculiar to himself; and this has led many to regard
him as a strong poet who expresses himself with a ready
gusto. But the more closely his poetry is examined the
more definitely it appears as literary in its inspiration,
wrought out with pains and difficulty. He often uses
daring and splendid images. When he writes of

" the world

From the soft delicate floor of grass to those
Rafters of light and hanging cloths of stars,"

or again writes,

" And then a hundred beasts of wind leap howling,
And pounce upon the roof with worrying paws,"

we do not easily forget metaphors so extravagantly
splendid. But as often Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie becomes
merely grandiose in his efforts. He can write meaningless
nonsense. Thus he tells of the elder gods, degraded to a
place of darkness, how

" Often their drownfed agony shall heave
Large sobs from under, till the shouldered pit
Plunges, the blind cumber of the useless mire."

The clumsy words and preposterously awkward phrasing
in these lines almost entirely obscure the image present
to the poet's mind. Again in

" You hear the chime of frowning lipping water
Trodden to dhattering falsehood by the keels
Of kings' happiness,"

he can be guilty of grotesque confusion in metaphor. And
these are but examples that may easily be matched.

Mr. Abercrombie >s thought is derivative and indirect,
his style is a cultivated artifice. Of all the younger poets
of to-day he has the most definitely metaphysical bent
of mind. He is thus often led into regions where poetry
is singularly ineffective. Like Donne, of whom he some-
times reminds us, he is the better poet in his lapses of
memory, when he forgets conceits, artifice and meta-

124 POETRY [PART i

physics. Decidedly Mr. Abercrombie is in the succession of
Donne when he writes —

" Yea, Love, we are thine, the liturgy of thee,

Thy thought's golden and glad name,
The mortal conscience of immortal glee,

Love's zeal in Love's own glory. "

This metaphysical bent is most clearly exhibited in his
Interludes and Poems, and of poems in this vein * Pere-
grinus ' and ' The Fool's Adventure ' are the most success-
ful. But the thought could often be expressed in good
prose better than in Mr. Abercrombie's roughly-handled
unrhyming lines. Only too frequently his verse pounds
and staggers, and we remember Dr. Johnson's curt dis-
missal of those who thought that not to write prose was
most certainly to write poetry. It is a misfortune that
Mr. Abercrombie should strive to achieve a stucco gran-
deur when he can, as in Mary and the Bramble, write with
a beautiful simplicity. In ' Judith ' and ' Vashti,' further-
more, there are arresting passages of imaginative poetry ;
and the fine ode on ' Indignation ' is so wrought that it
exalts the ethical consciousness despite its crude and
halting rhythm. But too large a part of his verse reflects
a process of purely intellectual manufacture.

Happily he succeeded in Deborah (1913), a blank-verse
drama of four acts, in shaking off pedantries and affecta-
tions. The scene is in humble life, a fishing village on
river marshes by the sea. A plague sweeps the village.
Saul, the pilot, forces the doctor to visit first his son,
Barnaby, and thus saves his life; but the delay results
in the death of David, Deborah's lover. Nevertheless,
Deborah forgives, and, after the death of Saul, cherishes
Barnaby, who indirectly cost her the life of her lover.
The play closes with the tragic death of Miriam, David's
younger sister, who bears an illegitimate child to Barnaby.
In the last act Miriam thinks she hears the Gabriel hounds
howling in the wind for her baby's soul. The irony of
circumstance, after the manner of Mr. Thomas Hardy,
is the motif of this poem, incomparably the simplest and
most powerful Mr. Abercrombie has yet written. In place
of tortured involutions he here uses a verse that is direct
and rapid in movement.

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 125

But all in all Mr. Abercrombie appears to be an example
of the man who writes poetry not because he must, but
because he has something to say and has sufficient intel-
lectual force to compass, by purposeful industry, a certain
range of poetic expression.

§2

In everyday life we fight a guerilla warfare with time,
harassed by the knowledge that while we are mortal our
enemy, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, is " not subject to
casualties." But in the perspective of the past the malice
of time is forgotten, our petty defeats lose their bitter-
ness, and time appears as an old friend who only of late
has become unfriendly, trapping and waylaying us in our
footsteps. For memory is an artist who keeps in mind
none save the sunny hours, omitting all that is inessential
to the good of life. And the common instinct of man does
likewise, keeping only the poetry and literature which is
the same in all ages, not merely good for the generation
in which it was written. At the beginning of the twenty-
first century, in all probability, the greater number of
the poets named in this book, with all their poems, will
only be matter for comparative study by the literary
expert. Many he will not trouble to include in his history
of English literature in the twentieth century, others will
be known only by his mention of them, for they will be
read by nobody ; and three or four, perhaps, will yet find
readers. But our loves and our hopes are conditioned by
our environment, changing with each generation and half-
generation. The poet of the eighteenth century, curtly
dismissed by the historian of to-day with a bare name and
date, once moved a few hearts more strongly than poets
of the same period whom we all know and are supposed
to read. Nobody now cares for Bowles, but Bowles
turned Coleridge to poetry, and he may therefore be
accounted part author of the Ancient Mariner. Thus
those who live and write to-day, only to be forgotten
to-morrow, are creating the greater songs and greater
poets of the future, knowing not how or when. As Bowles
inspired Coleridge and brought Wordsworth to a halt
on Westminster Bridge, so poets not for all time but of

126 POETRY [PART i

an age are for us of that age ; for we cannot discriminate
with the wisdom and wide knowledge of those who are
happy in coming after us. Time quickly hunts the greater
part of printed poetry into holes and corners; and it is
most natural in treating of other poets of our period to
follow a rough chronological method, gathering into this
section poetry belonging in part to the nineties and in
part to this century, reserving for the next section poets
who have written almost wholly within the present century.
A few poets have yet to be named who wrote either for
the Yellow Book or for Henley's publications, and of these

Mr. Laurence Housman, brother of the
Laurence Housman, author of The Shropshire Lad, deserves,
b. 1865, for the versatility and individuality of

his work, to be placed first. He is an
illustrator, a poet, a novelist, a critic, a dramatist. To
many readers he is known as the author of An English-
woman's Love Letters (1900), one of the poorest and least
characteristic of his writings. A number of his illustra-
tions, chiefly of a grotesque and fanciful kind, appeared
in the Yellow Book; he has also illustrated Christina
Rossetti's Goblin Market, Meredith's Jump to Glory Jane
and a number of his own books. As a poet he is to be
counted with the inner circle of the mystics, for he often
writes in hieroglyphs of no meaning to the exoteric mind.
He has written volumes of verse haunted with a mystic
consciousness and a spirit of morbid self-abasement before
the thrones, dominations and powers of this universe,
verse which places him at the opposite pole to his brother.
The severe simplicity, the clear-eyed stoicism give place
to cryptic involvements and a tangled spirituality. In
wistfulness and melancholy the minds of the brothers
meet, but while one faces life's complexities " abashless,"
to use Francis Thompson's word, the younger brother is
diffident and abashed to find himself alive. The note of
morbid spiritual wistfulness makes the poems of Green
Arras (1896), Rue (1899), and Spikenard (1898) almost
unreadable save to the mind rightly attuned. The atmo-
sphere of these poems is that of Mediaeval Catholicism,
with its renunciation of the passions and its desire for
virgin purity. Spikenard is a series of mystical rhapsodies
following the cycle of the ecclesiastical year : Rue is the

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 127

simplest and most intelligible of these volumes. Of the
technical beauty of the verse there can be no question,
though Mr. Laurence Housman does not rival his brother
in mastery of the simplest forms.

In Mendicant Rhymes (1906) we escape to a healthier
and more human atmosphere, emerging from the ecstasies
of the hermit's cell and the meditations of the cloister to
the open air, the inn and the battle-field. And when in
occasional poems he reverts to doctrinal mysticism it is
with new power, especially in the opening stanza of the
impressive * Deus Noster Ignis Consumens ' —

" To Him be praise who made
Desire more fair than rest :
Better the prayer while prayed,
Than the attained bequest.
Man goes from strength to strength,
Fresh from each draught of pain,
Only to fail at length
Of heights he could not gain.55

The emotional strength of writing like this raises the
poem far above the morbid, obscure and tenebrous
mysticism of the earlier volumes ; it is like escaping from
a cave of shadowy unrealities to a bright and clear sky.
But as a draughtsman and as a poet Mr. Laurence
Housman is the direct descendant of the Pre-Raphaelites ;
and the greater part of his verse writing is almost unin-
telligibly mystical. This is, nevertheless, far from being
his only mood. In prose he can be realistic, and even
effectively satirical.

Mr. Richard Le Gallienne is in poetry ten years the
senior of Mr. Laurence Housman, but he traces his

ancestry a shorter distance, to Oscar Wilde,
Richard Le and thus indirectly has has a distant kinship
Gallienne, to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. In other

b. 1866. respects his poetry has no resemblance to

that of Mr. Housman, save in a slender
strain of mysticism and a dreamy detachment from
practical life. Unfortunately Mr. Le Gallienne, struggling
to find himself in the midst of uncongenial surroundings,
was caught in the whirl of the aesthetic movement and
swept off his feet. He received an indifferent education,
and from school was passed on to a business office in

128 POETRY [PART i

Liverpool. But he was born with an unforced passion
for fine literature, and, at the age of twenty-one, when
Oscar Wilde was the dominant power, he printed privately
My Ladies' Sonnets (1887), and five years later appeared
a much larger volume of English Poems (1892). Most of
these poems are painfully immature and unrestrained :
frequently, as in the erotic * Hesperides,' they degenerate
into mere gush. Apart from the aestheticism of Wilde the
chief influence traceable is that of Keats. The spenserians
of * Paolo and Francesca 9 are imitated from Keats, not
Spenser. ' An Epithalamium ' is loaded with ornament,
and a few pieces of doggerel remind us of Keats's attempts
in the same manner of verse. On the other hand there is
not much good poetry in the English Poems ; and when
Mr. Le Gallienne attempts the grand style he inclines to
bombast.

" With thunderous splendour of my rhythmic ire,"

is a line both cacophonous and ridiculous in its exaggera-
tion. Mr. Le Gallienne is always too effusive in these
poems. He has no respect for the individual word, and
this is a great failing. That he was not altogether without
the power of writing restrained and simple poetry he
showed in the beautiful ' Child's Evensong ' and * In Her
Diary ' ; but the volume, as a whole, is deplorably ill-
balanced.

Happily in the three years that elapsed before the pub-
lication of Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy, and other
Poems (1895) Mr. Le Gallienne learned much. The gush
has almost disappeared, as in the nature of things was
to be expected, for the poems are chiefly personal, in the
form of elegy or verse-epistle. The title-poem is not with-
out grace and felicity, although the apostrophe to Steven-
son, as " Virgil of prose, " is not very apt. ' Tree-worship '
is another poem exhibiting a marked advance upon the
earlier writing. The analogy, it is true, contained in the
line —

" Thy latticed column jetted up the bright blue air,"

is not illuminating in its reference to a massive and gnarled
tree-stem; and —

" Thy rugged girtH the waists of fifty Eastern girls,55

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 120

is an example of far-fetched imagery which brings toppling
down to the associations of the seraglio the dignity of a
mighty tree, described in the preceding line as " huge as a
minster. " But Mr. Le Gallienne is prone to these slips
of disproportion in image and thought. His rhymes, also,
are often fetched from a far country. Perhaps the one
poem of this volume which will always find a place in
English anthologies is the simple and moving ' Second
Crucifixion.'

A long interval, during which Mr. Le Gallienne aban-
doned his native country for the United States, elapsed
before he published in 1910 a collection of New Poems,
which opened with a series evidently inspired by the Boer
War, although the poet does not, like Henley and Mr.
Kipling, sing the praises of the strong. Rather he is on
the side of the little peoples who ask only to be left

" . . . little margins, waste ends of land and sea,
A little grass, and a hill or two, and a shadowing tree."

In this, ' The Cry of the Little Peoples,' and a few other
poems of the volume there is a clear passion, a simplicity
in thought and style, which places them above his attain-
ment in the early books of verse; but often, again, he
attempts no more than prettiness. Examples .of careless
and exaggerated writing are still not infrequent. It is
curious that so late in life Mr. Le Gallienne could print
anything so inexpressive as —

" London, that mighty sob, that splendid tear,
That jewel hanging in the great world's ear."

This says nothing, and helps us not a jot to understand
London. Compare with this Mr. Symons's poems on
London, and the difference in subtlety, power of observa-
tion and expression is manifest.

Mr. Le Gallienne 's verse- volumes can only excite a regret
that they contain work so inadequate as a reflection of the
author's poetical faculty. He is no literary hodman ; but
instability and want of intellectual force have hampered
all his efforts. He has said better what there is in him
to say in the prose sketches and criticism of The Book Bills
of Narcissus (1889), Prose Fancies (1894-96), Retrospective
Reviews (1896) and Little Dinners with the Sphinx (1909),

180 tO&TRY

which show that he has fancy, imagination, a genuine love
of good literature, critical powers above the average and a
happy gift of writing nervous English in cadences pleasing
to the ear.

The distance we may travel in a few years is borne in
upon us when we discover that the Yellow Book, regarded
once as typical of brilliant and youth-
Arthur Christopher ful originality, contained verses by
Benson, b. 1862. Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson, now

Master of Magdalene College, Cam-
bridge. With the ideas of the central group connected with
that magazine he had, it is needless to say, nothing in
common. In all Mr. Benson has written some five volumes
of verse since the privately printed Le Cahier Jaune (1892) ;
and a collected edition of his poems appeared in 1909.
Yet he has confessed that he has no illusions about his
verse, writing it only as an exercise in style. It is little
probable that verse written in this spirit and to this end
will be of a high order, or indeed, save by a kind of in-
advertence, ever reach the level of poetry. And both in
the verse and prose of Mr. Benson too much has been
sacrificed to style, for, at last, even style has gone, and
Mr. Benson's prose, which, at first, had distinction, has
slipped into mellifluous garrulity. But his prose is easy to
read, his thought does not tax the mind; he is chiefly
known as a journalistic essayist, and scarcely at all as a
poet.

The Poems of 1893 opens with a pretentious preface,
coming from the hand of a writer unknown, displaying
the profound interest in himself which has never failed
Mr. Benson. He asserts his faith that to be a man is
more than to be an artist, that the simple experiences
of life are unchanging behind the burning questions of
the hour, that there is a Divinity shaping our ends, and
he tells us that his poems try " to present certain aspects
of men and nature that have come home to him with
force. " The contents of this and succeeding volumes —
Lyrics (1895), Lord Vyet and other Poems (1896), The
Professor and other Poems (1900), Peace and other Poems
(1905), scarcely fill in the outline sketch of this preface.
Mr. Benson is graceful, clear, restfully meditative, he
draws apt little morals from all that he sees, from the

CHAP, m] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 131

creeping beetle to the floating thistle-down, but he never,
whether he writes of man or nature, comes sufficiently
near to his theme to hold the reader. This is specially
true of his poems on men. In the lines written to Dean
Swift the poet asks what deductions are to be drawn from
Swift's life-story, and answers —

" This : that our days are wholly incomplete; —

Some baseness mars them, some unbanished taint,
That clogs in miry ways the aspiring feet,
And specks the robe of many a willing saint."

Swift himself was no great preacher, but he would have
been surprised at this prosy moral pointed by his life.
In a few poems of men — ' My Friend/ ' The Dead Poet '
and ' Lord Vyet ' — Mr. Benson does write effectively and
strongly. But he is at his best in poems of nature, for
he can observe closely and paint in graceful words the
brooding quiet and subdued colouring of English lawns
and meadows. Unfortunately he thinks it incumbent
upon him to deduce a trite moral from every scene and
incident. The burrowing mole reminds the poet that
" beneath free air and merry sun " he is shut in by " dark
fancies9'; the ugly toad suggests that man dreams of
loveliness and is blind to truth ; the brief existence of the
glittering dragon-fly bids him remember that man's life
is short. There is a monotony in these moral deductions,
which neither say anything new nor express the old with
any freshness. Mr. Benson handles his metres sufficiently
well, his style is exact and careful, he is graceful and
consistent, but in verse he never achieves the distinction
he has attained in his earlier prose. As a poet he is no
more than the writer of meditative verses containing a
philosophy of smooth and cultured sentimentalism.

Dean Beeching, country clergyman, poet, essayist and
editor, is known as a poet by his share in Love in Idleness

(1888) and Love's Looking-glass (1891,
Henry Charles which contained also poems by J. W.
Beeching, Mackail and J. B. Nichols), but chiefly by

1859-1919. In a Garden (1895). It is by the last volume

that he is to be judged as a poet and writer
of contemplative verses, pleasant and graceful like those of
Mr. A. C. Benson, though never original or stimulating*

132 POETRY [PART i

His poetry is inspired by the secluded quiet of an English
rectory garden, but it is almost entirely wanting in the
personal emotion and truthfulness of Mr. Norman Gale's
pastoral poems. Flowers, lawns and gar den ways are seen
through the veil of familiar acquaintance with the best that
is in English poetry. Yet his writing is never signally weak
or monotonously trite ; it gives pleasure if not exhilaration ;
and he avoids the tiresome habit of discovering parables in
nature. In * Accidia ' and ' Love Unreturned ' Dean
Beeching has written good sonnets, and the strong and
simple * Heart and Wit ' is an outstanding poem. But in
sincerity, directness and mastery of language several of the
religious pieces stand with the best of his work. < The Tree
of Life ' and * Prayers ' are both poems that will bear
many readings. Apart from these perhaps the most truly
beautiful of his poems is contained in the section entitled
' In a Garden ' :

" Rose and lily, white and red,
From my garden garlanded,
These I brought and thought to grace
The perfection of thy face.
Other roses, pink and pale,
Lilies of another vale,
Thou hast bound around thy head
In the garden of the dead."

In this short poem Dean Beeching rises above versifica-
tion into the plane of true poetry. But in all he belonged
to the class of poets who are made not born. In verse
his content is thin; he rarely rises above quiet medita-
tiveness expressed in words he has learned and borrowed
of good literature. His best work lay elsewhere, in the
writing of those delightful and charming volumes of mis-
cellany, Papers from a Private Diary (1898) and Provincial
and other Papers (1906).

Mr. Norman Gale, like Dean Beeching, is one of those
poets, more common in England than elsewhere, made
by the traditions of public school and university life.
Theirs is the poetry of scholarly grace and ordered leisure,
sufficiently quickened from mere academicism by a vein
of strong humanity. Like Herrick in another day, like T,
E. Brown and Mr. Robert Bridges in this, Mr. Gale sings

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 188

in scholarly verse the sweetness of meadows, lanes^ hedge-
rows, thick-set plantations and purling streams, and ming-
ling with poems of this kind are dainty
Norman Rowland Jove-lyrics in the manner and/ the
Gale, b. 1862. metres of the Caroline poets. His

best and most distinctive work is
contained in the two series of A Country Muse (1892-93),
Orchard Songs (1893), and the much later collection of
Song in September (1912). His love-songs are more re-
miniscent of Herrick than of anybody else ; in his fastidious
use of the simplest words, in the delicate beauty of his
rhythms, in the graceful nuance of his thought, he is nearer
to Mr. Robert Bridges than to any other modern poet.
He has no message, he is untroubled by the problems of
the day, its theologies, class conflicts and party struggles.
He finds all of life that he needs in the limits of a garden,
a few square miles of the English country-side, and, it
may be added, a playing field, for during several years
Mr Gale was a schoolmaster. In the simple, strong, sweet
and enduring things he finds happiness and the inspiration
of his poetry.

" I am content to know that God is great,

The Lord of fish and fowl, of air and sea —
Some little points are misty. Let them wait."

Mr. Gale attempts nothing new, he is content to follow
the tradition of English song-writers of the best period ;
his country scenes and country folk are idealised, even
more idealised than Herrick's, for he has none of Herrick's
interest in custom and folk-lore. In the love-lyrics the
conventional words are repeated a hundred times — white,
snow, breast, lace, hose, garters — and he can be as frank
tfS-*iieed reasonably be expected of a nineteenth century
Herrick. But his is the frankness of literary artifice, not
of realism, and the critics who drew forth his ' Defense, '
in the volume of Orchard Songs, must have been unworthy
the honour done them.

Song in September bears unmistakable traces of middle-
age reflectiveness; many of the poems are more serious
in intention, more loaded with thought than the simple
pastoral verses Mr. Gale wrote as a young man. A note
of melancholy intrudes, and in ' The Cherry of Lucullus 5

184 POETRY [PART i

he arraigns his country in the spirit of Sir William Watson.
In these poems there is less of the Caroline influence and
more of the modern spirit. An interval of nearly twenty
years separates Orchard Songs from Song in September.
In these years he published verses, for the most part
humorous, on the game of cricket— Cricket Songs (1894)
and More Cricket Songs (1905) — verses for children and
short idylls in prose, notably A June Romance (1894). A
break of so many years, chiefly surrendered to jeux
d* esprit, is curious in a poet of unquestionable lyric
charm and genius. In the end, hpwever, Mr. Gale
came back to his own, to pastoral poetry, not a whit
less beautiful, if a little more serious and grave than his
first.

The change is necessarily abrupt when we turn from
the reflective, meditative and mystic poets just named
to two writers of romantic ballads, Sir
Sir Arthur Quiller- Arthur Quiller-Couch and Sir Henry
Couch, b. 1863. Newbolt. The verse of Sir Arthur

Quiller-Couch has been forced into a
secondary place by his prose fiction and by his duties as a
professor of literature, but he has written a small quantity
of spirited poetry. He early showed his literary gift in
the facility with which he caught the manner of other men
in Verses and Parodies (1898). The 'Anecdote for
Fathers ' is much better parody of Wordsworth than the
famous example in Rejected Addresses, and the travesties
of Whitman and Browning only suffer from being too short.
As a writer of more serious verse he has published Poems
and Ballads (1896) and The Vigil of Venus and other Poems
(1912). The longest piece in Poems and Ballads, a blank-
verse monologue, < Columbus at Seville,' is simpler and
more vigorous than Tennyson's dramatic monologue repre-
senting Columbus in old age and misfortune. But better
still are the ballads—6 The Comrade,5 ' The Masquer in the
Street * and ' Sabina.' In these the author seizes admir-
ably the lilt and rhythm of ballad measure. The most
important poem in The Vigil of Venus is a free translation
of the Pervigilium Veneris, in which Sir Arthur Quiller-
Couch has succeeded in writing a fine poem, save that
he suggests too strongly the melody and manner of Swin-
burne. In nearly all his ballads and lyrics a spring of

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 135

true poetry rises, and when inspiration is weak its place is
partly supplied by the admirable literary gift the author
possesses. In whatever he touches he is never awkward,
he never fails of a certain charm in manner.

Sir Henry Newbolt has the fortune to be a popular poet,
and his poetry betrays the limitations of all popular poetry

— it is never poetical in a high sense.
Sir Henry John After long years of practice at the
Newbolt, b. 1862, Bar he opened his literary career with

a prose story and followed it with a
blank-verse drama, Mordred (1895), written in good but
exceedingly Tennysonian verse. Tennyson degraded the
Arthurian legends to picturesque sentiment; and it will
be some time before any poet can restore to life the
Arthurian cycle of stories. William Morris and Arnold
are only successful in short passages; Swinburne alone
in the passionate sweep and magnificent heroic measure
of Tristram of Lyonesse successfully defied the Tenny-
sonian influence. Sir Henry Newbolt's Mordred is frankly
imitative, and its characterisation is weak. It was with
the stirring sea-songs of Admirals All (1897) that he
deservedly won reputation. Admirals All contained twelve
short poems. It was followed by The Island Race (1898),
which added twenty-eight pieces. Even to-day all his
verse may be printed in a single volume of moderate size.
Like Mr. Kipling he is the singer of England's mission of
imperialism; but he has more historical sense than Mr.
Kipling and more often finds his subjects in the past of
English naval story. His temper is breezy and free, he
delights in manhood, youth and courage, he is untroubled
by the morbid introspectiveness of the age, and when he
chooses the rdle of the prophet it is to exhort England
to remember her heaven-sent mission to conquer and
thereby bless that part of the earth which is still unhappy
in its freedom from British rule. His poems are stirring,
dramatic, vivid, written with a good swing rather than
with careful versification. In ' The Ballad of John
Nicholson ' he is on Mr. Kipling's ground, India, and in
no short ballad has Mr. Kipling succeeded in this way in
catching the spirit of the epic : on the other hand Sir Henry
Newbolt never comes within measurable distance of the
poetical intensity of 'Mandalay,' Among other early

186 POETRY [PAET i

poems the truly splendid ' Vae Victis ' departs from merely
ballad form and approaches the manner of great poetry.
But had the other poems of the little volume been of this
kind it would hardly have caught the popular fancy as it
did. The one ringing and unforgettable ballad is ' Drake's
Drum ? :

" Drake he was a Devon man, an* sailed the Devon seas,

(Capten, art tha sleepin' there below ?)
Rovin' tho' his death fell, he went wi' heart at ease,
An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe.

" Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,

Strike et when your powder's runnin' low ;
If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o* Heaven,
An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed them long
ago."

«In The Sailing of the Longships (1902) and Songs of
Memory and Hope (1909) his inspiration grows weaker.
In many poems of the first volume he is moved, with
Henley and Mr. Kipling, to sing individual acts of courage
which went some way to redeem our initial failures in
South Africa. But none of these verses has the same ring
as the earlier sea-songs. Far better are the fine * Com-
memoration,' and ' Srdhmandazi,' the ballad of an African
bride who chose rather than life to accompany her lord
through the gates of death. In Songs of Memory and
Hope Sir Henry Newbolt becomes imitative and even a
little dull. The breeziness has almost gone ; and the poems
become commonplace both in thought and expression. It
is masculine and commonsense writing, but scarcely
poetry ; for he exhausted all that he felt and all that he had
to say, with one or two exceptions, in the early sea-songs.
It is true that in the six new ditties which open the volume
of Poems New and Old (1912), especially in the ' Song of
the Sou' Wester,' he seems to catch a little of the old spirit,
but in a manner imitative of his earlier self. He is breezy,
patriotic, warm-hearted, his poetry is animated by high
ideals and a sense of good form in life ; but the content
is slight, the imaginative element scarcely exists, and he
little metrical faculty beyond an ear for racy an<J

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 187

vigorous lilting in words. He has written a few excellent
songs and ballads, but the finer breath of passionate and
intense poetry, quickened by a strong emotion, he has
never felt.

§3

It is a good rule, worthy of acceptation, never to write
upon living authors, unless it be recognised that this is
but a means of study and inquiry, not a dogmatic assigna-
tion of values. It is only with diffidence we can attempt
to define and characterise the work of writers who may
yet have many active years before them. And in this
section of the present chapter mention is made, so far as
possible, only of poetry published within this century.
New names constantly appear, some to remain, many to
disappear in a few months or years. The reason of this
differentiation is not always apparent to us : we are reading
with our eyes too close to the book to see the print dis-
tinctly. The task of selection from the unending stream
of printed verse can only be undertaken in a temper of
hesitation qualified by the knowledge that judgments have
their value relatively to us, though forty years hence they
may seem blind and groping estimates. In all ages true
poetry is the same, but its value is conditioned by time and
place, and the universal poet, whom time cannot wither,
has seldom been born. But poetry is always poetry; the
distinction between major and minor poetry is a fallacy
of the Philistines. Poetry and verse, it is true, are two
different things, and the most of men who attempt to
write poetry only write verse. But many of lesser note
have written a poem or two which would always be quoted
if contained in the standard editions of Goethe or Shelley.
The difference between the greater and the lesser poet is a
matter of quantity ; the former writes more poetry and less
verse in proportion to his total output. But a poem is
always a poem by whomsoever written. Sir William
Watson and others have cavilled at the distinction between
major and minor poets; but the distinction is entirely
to be justified. The major poet writes more poetry and
less verse; that is all. It is the drawing of a distinction
major and minor poetry which involves confusion

188 POETRY [PART i

in thought. Yet the best of critics may be ludicrously
mistaken in reading contemporary poetry. Perhaps it is
true that the poetry meant for all time is not so clearly
poetry for the men of an age, for its value is unconditioned
and the critic's outlook is conditioned by his environ-
ment. And, therefore, while verse will not often appear
as poetry, great poetry may often appear as incompetent
blundering in the critic's eyes. But, on the whole, what
is bad will soon reveal itself to the unprejudiced observer.
If some good poetry must at first pass unrecognised for
what it is, this is only a temporary evil, for probably Mr.
George Moore is justified in his optimistic faith that no
true poem can be finally lost. If we can only read with
defective and short sight the poetry that is being made
to-day, we have, at least, some advantage over those who
after us read with clearer insight. We can never read
Hamlet as the man who first read it in its earliest printed
form, although he knew little of Shakespeare's greatness
and we much.

It is, therefore, better to read contemporary verse for
the joy and inspiration it may afford us individually,
untroubled by any desire to speak or write of it. But
the blind adventure often brings its reward, and a greater
than we hoped. In any case, as we are here chiefly con-
cerned with poets who began to publish within the present
century, it will be well to name first one long since dead,
whose earlier book of verse appeared twenty years ago.
To the wider public Henry Dawson Lowry was little
known at any time, and during his life almost entirely

as a writer of prose. The sum of

Henry Dawson Lowry, his work is small — a novel, several
1869-1906. collections of short stories, two

slender volumes of poetry and a

child's book. He died young; but as a journalist and
story-writer he was at work for at least seventeen or
eighteen years, and the smallness of his output is evidence
of his fastidious temper. And, further, journalism pur-
sued for a livelihood filled a large part of his working hours.
At the age of twenty-one he began to contribute to the
National Observer, and soon became one of that dis-
tinguished band Henley gathered about him. When the
National Observer came to an end he contributed to

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OP THE CENTURIES 189

various papers, and finally, in 1897, he joined the literary
staff of the Morning Post. In his lifetime he only pub-
lished one volume of poetry, The Hundred Windows (1904).
A posthumous collection of inferior verse, A Dream of
Daffodils, appeared in 1912. Many of the poems in the
first volume are inspired by a love of Cornwall, of the
brooding peace, silent hills and green valleys of the West
Country. In all his poems is revealed the temper of a
singularly gentle and beautiful mind, melancholy in its
moods and naturally attuned to the colourless skies and
landscapes of Cornwall. He writes :

" And you, who love me, if you would know me

Come away to the Western sea,
The land that did make shall take and show me
Better than that I have seemed to be."

The strongest as well as the most beautiful poems of the
volume are * Art in Life ' and * Art and Life.5 If his
poetry as a whole, however, has little strength, it has
beauty : it is never careless, never loud ; it reflects a mind,
quiet, reserved, brooding. For Lowry the writing of
verse was an escape from the vulgar battle of life to those
thoughts and dreams that were lovelier than all experi-
ence.

Of poets still comparatively young one of the most
widely read and known is Mr. Alfred Noyes. His poetry

has the happy fortune to be saleable. And
Alfred Noyes, in 1918, when he encouraged his popularity
b. 1880. by first lecturing in America, he was hailed

as the greatest poet since Tennyson. Con-
temporary popularity may or may not have its moral.
In the case of Mr. Noyes it clearly has ; for his imagina-
tion never passes outside the range of ordinary men's
understanding, he appeals to the common intelligence by
the prettiness or heroics of his verse, and the obvious,
sing-song music of his lines has charms for the least-trained
ear. Further, the ideas he embodies in poems of a
religious nature, such as * De Profundis ' and c The
Paradox/ are those commonly accepted by the majority
of English readers. He always steers a course widely
distant from the innermost heart of man, that greatest
of all things; and he is, therefore, never revolutionary,

140 POETRY [PART i

never disturbing. Mr. Noyes' facile readiness in the use
of a pictorial language does not suffice to make true poetry
of a world which he conceives largely as a well-stocked
and glittering bazaar.

He is a rapid writer. In four years he produced four
volumes — two miscellaneous collections, The Loom of
Years (1902) and Poems (1904), and two long fairy-tale
poems, The Flower of Old Japan (1908) and The Forest
of Wild Thyme (1905). The first of these volumes is
accomplished, the verse is pretty, but there is little that
is distinctive. * The Lotus of Wisdom ' is not without
fine imagery ; the g Love-song of Moina ' avoids the ham-
mered accents so common with Mr. Noyes ; ' An ^Esthete '
has a more direct force than is generally to be found in
his writing; but the finest poem of the volume is the
blank- verse narrative of ' Michael Oaktree,' a poem which
won the praise of George Meredith. It is plain, severe,
free from superfluous ornament, and reaches the heart in
the restrained and dignified pathos with which it tells of an
old cottager's quiet death. And the poem contains one
impressive image, Hebraic in its breadth and simplicity —

" Then Michael Oaktree took his wife's thin hand
Between his big rough hands and held it. There
It lay like a tired ewe, between two crags,
Sheltered from all the winds."

The fault of the volume and of the second miscellaneous
collection is the monotonous and commonplace music of
the lines. There are poems as bad in this respect as the
worst in church hymnals. * Sea Foam,5 for example, is
grotesquely like a well-known hymn. ' The Barrel Organ '
is symbolic of its subject; it is verse ground out by the
turning of a handle. Lilting sing-song is Mr. Noyes'
snare. And he continually glides into a poetry of cloying
sweetness or the prettiness of Dresden china ornament.
These lapses make it difficult to read him with any con-
stant pleasure, although he can write poems of real power,
which manifest his instinctive responsiveness to the beauty
of the world, his love of colour and a faculty, on occasion,
for writing metrically without dropping into obvious lilts.
The blank verse * Night on St. Helena ' is a poem of dis-
tinction ; ' The Old Sceptic ' and ' Lessons > are humanly

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 141

sincere ; among more philosophic poems 4 The Fisher-girl '
is a strong piece of writing; ' Silk o' the Kine '
and ' Sherwood ' are poems of true and unaffected
beauty.

But in his early work nothing is so indicative of the
bent of Mr. Noyes' poetic faculty as the two fairy tales
in verse, A Flower of Old Japan and The Forest of Wild
Thyme. In the former, especially, Mr. Noyes has created
something new and entirely pleasing in this weaving of a
bizarre, grotesque, pretty and fanciful fairy allegory from
the willow-pattern. His naive and not very subtle melodies
are here perfectly in place, in a bazaar-like world of dainty
things — ivories, fans, gorgeously plumaged birds, bright-
sailed ships, glancing seas and gleaming clouds. Even
Mr. W. W. Gibson in his early poems does not paint so
brightly as this, for Mr. Noyes outvies the extravagant
painting of Browning in Sordello. It may be said of these
early volumes that they are sane, healthy, and within
circumscribed limits imaginative and glowing with colour,
but they rarely reach the clearer and greater poetry of
6 Michael Oaktree,'

After these trials of his pen Mr. Noyes essayed the
ambitious task of writing an English epic in twelve books
of blank verse. And in a region far different to the pretty
and decorative poetry of the fairy tales he won undoubted
success. The merit of Drake (1906-8) is not single : the
blank verse is handled with a narrative power which imme-
diately raises it above much of his rhymed verse; the
drama of England's sea-story in the days of Elizabeth
is made to move in vivid pageantry before our eyes ; and
the ** wind-darkened sea " is conceived with epic breadth
as a spirit of destiny brooding over the action of the poem.
It may be added, and this is no disparagement, that read
merely as a story the poem is interesting. In his Dawn in
Britain Mr. Doughty attempted to write, in large outline,
an epic of our island story, and he has communicated to
his poem an atmosphere of the dim and the mysterious
more impressive than the silvern lucidity of Drake. But
whereas Mr. Doughty calls for effort Mr. Noyes carries the
reader with him. And if occasionally the verse rings like
thin beaten metal, it is for the greater part, at least,
adequate to its subject; and it rises occasionally to

142 POETRY (PART *

passages of imaginative splendour or passionate
intensity.

The contents of Forty Singing Seamen (1907) and The
Enchanted Island (1909) are not in any striking character-
istic distinguished from the Poems of 1904 — there is the
same command of words, the same love of colour and
ornament, the same absence of the sudden surprises of
greater poetry, the same easy lyrical faculty. The
Enchanted Island contains a few poems — ' In a Railway
Carriage ' and ' The Newspaper Boy y among them —
which show that Mr. Noyes is following the leading of
the time toward a realistic limning of common life in
verse. * The Admiral's Ghost ' reminds us of Sir Henry
Newbolt, and is quite as good ; and the lines ' On the Death
of Francis Thompson ' have caught something of the
remoteness of utterance and mystic fervour of the poet
they celebrate. The title-poem of Forty Singing Seamen ,
a rollicking and humorous ballad, is one of the best and
strongest things Mr. Noyes has written ; but in ' Orpheus
and Eurydice * and other poems he becomes merely fluent
and verbose ; and the patriotic songs of the volume have
no distinction. In The Wine Press: A Tale of War (1918)
poetry is shouldered aside by rhetoric and exaggerated
declamation. The fighting in the Balkans laid upon Mr.
Noyes the burden of the prophet denouncing war. He
is passionately sincere in uttering his message; he heaps
in disorderly congestion gruesome details and horrifying
scenes; he breaks out in unbalanced tirades upon the
giant evil of war ; he forgets that restraint, not fanaticism,
is power. Like Mr. Masefield in poems of another kind,
he can lose himself in a whirl of meaningless violence.

But The Wine Press is an eccentricity on the part of
Mr. Noyes. As a poet he follows, without any strong
admixture of personality, the main tradition of English
poetry. There is little that is individual in his writing:
he has nothing of Mr. Symons's subtlety, or the impressive
simplicity of Mr. Hardy, or the passionate strength of
John Davidson. These three names, to mention no others,
stand for definite aims, ideals and methods of self-expres-
sion. Mr. Noyes is always sanely beautiful, he uses a
large vocabulary with fluent readiness, he has a true but
not fine gift of song, marred by careless and undistin-

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OP THE CENTURIES 148

guished use of metre. Like Tennyson he is always read-
able, but not often stimulating. Nevertheless, it is a
tribute to Mr. Noyes* powers to be compelled to confess
that he is a true poet in forms so widely dissevered as that
fairy allegory, fragrant with the perfume of roses and tea
gardens, The Flower of Old Japan, and the finely versified
epic drama of Drake.

In choice of classic theme and the use of irregular
measures, it is natural to compare Mr. Sturge Moore to

Maurice Hewlett ; but the former has not
T. Sturge Moore, yet given us in melody and colouring any
!>• WTO- reading of classic legend as beautiful or

significant as The Agonists. Mr, Sturge
Moore has won reputation both as a poet and a critic of
art. As a poet he began by publishing a small volume
of miscellaneous verse, The Vine-dresser and other Poems
(1899). His succeeding volumes may be divided into
poetic drama (for reading, not representation), including
Aphrodite against Artemis (1901), Absolom (1908) and
Mariamne (1911); dialogue poems — The Centaur's Booty
(1903), The Rout of the Amazons (1903) and Pan's Pro-
phecy (1904) ; several small collections of lyric verse — The
Gazelles and other Poems (1904), To Leda and other
Odes (1904), Theseus, Medea and Lyrics (1904); and a
long lyric, Danae (1903). In none of these does Mr. Sturge
Moore sink beneath a high level of literary accomplish-
ment, he never becomes commonplace, but equally he fails,
in general, to reach the plane of pure poetry. The dramatic
poems are written in blank verse or in irregular unrhymed
metres, and in no case does he acquit himself as a pro-
sodist of distinction. Not a little of his blank verse is
hammered out in a long series of endstopt lines. In this
respect Mariamne is no better than the early poems, indeed
perhaps worse. It is difficult to read continuously and
with pleasure verse like —

" Not in kings* houses is it hard to find
False witnesses, when one can seek with gold;
Nor are those high in honour envied least ;
Nor does a woman's hatred take a sword, —
The tongue that sows dissensions she prefers.
Think how thyself stood in like peril once
Of Cleopatra's most offending tongue ! "

144 POETRY [PART I

This is wanting in ear and skill, and the passage may
often be matched in Mr. Moore's blank verse. It makes
the plays monotonous reading. He is more at home in
irregular forms of unrhymed verse. These he can write
with swiftness, passion and fervour, as witness the speeches
of Phaedra and Theseus in Aphrodite against Artemis.
Of his longer poems, however, by far the most beautiful
in thought, imagery and expression is the allegorical Pan's
Prophecy, which interprets in dialogue between Pan and
Psyche the late-born classic myths of the soul.

His shorter lyrics do not display any strongly-marked
and individual features. His earliest volume, The Vine-
dresser, has a few poems that linger in the memory —
* Tempio di Venere ' with its clear observation and forcible
rendering of a scene, * Judith ' with its sustained intensity,
and * The Sibyl.' Some of Mr. Moore's experiments in
verse are uncalled for and unfortunate. The attempt to
render a metrical version of the lament of David over
Saul and Jonathan with close fidelity to the words of
the English Bible may interest the author, but the ordinary
reader only gains from it a strengthened belief in the
inspiration of King James's translators. Mr. Sturge Moore
is an academic and literary poet. He is never closely in
touch with the life of a real world. As exercises in verse,
drawing upon the author's knowledge of classic myth, the
poems doubtless have a personal meaning, but few are
likely to tempt the reader a second time. From this
statement one wise and beautiful poem, Pan's Prophecy,
must be excluded.

As a poet Mr. Sturge Moore writes to please himself
without thought of readers; he is untouched by moods
or phases of poetry in his time, and
Hilaire Belloc, deserts his environment for realms of
b. 1870, legend and myth where he may write

poetry in vacuo. Save for a certain
affinity to the writing of Maurice Hewlett his work bears
little family likeness to the aims and ideals of other poets
of to-day; and it is, therefore, possible to turn from him
to write of two journalistic poets, Mr. Hilaire Belloc and
Mr. G. K. Chesterton, without attempting any sequence
in ideas. Readers acquainted only with the later Mr.
Belloc, whom we have come to know in the twentieth

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 145

century, will meet with surprises in opening the curious
little volume of Verses and Sonnets (1895), printed on thick
cardboard. Three diminutive lyrics of no importance open
the book, eight insignificant sonnets in Shakespearean and
other forms follow, and only then do we reach the section
named (without reason for the most part) * Grotesques,'
in which first we meet with that nimbleness of wit and
fancy, that charm and distinction in the use of English
associated with Mr. Belloc 's later prose and verse. But
no volume as a whole could promise less than this, save in
the humour of the ' Grotesques,' a humour which has
since been put to better use in books of verse for
children.

Fifteen years elapsed before Mr. Belloc published Verses
(1910), another small collection of miscellaneous poems.
The humorous and satirical verse is good, but the greater
part of this volume would scarcely justify us in speaking
of Mr. Belloc as a poet; it is chiefly when inspired by
two great themes, Sussex and beer, that he reaches a
higher level. There are here three fine drinking songs;
and in two poems, ' Stanzas Written on Battersea Bridge '
and ' The South Country/ he far surpasses anything else
he has printed in verse. * The South Country ' has all the
artlessness and pictorial effect gained by simplest means
belonging to the true ballad. It is an infinite pity that
Mr. Belloc has not found it in him to give us more poems
like this. For in it he reaches in verse the poetic roman-
ticism, the naive inconsequence which lend so great a
delight and charm to the prose of The Path to Rome and
The Four Men. In * The South Country ' there is the true
ingenuousness of poetry, a use of simple and good English,
a clear eye for effects and contrasts and an arrestive
melody which mark Mr. Belloc as capable of better poetry
than any he has yet written.

In many points Mr. Belloc and Mr. G. K. Chesterton
are the natural complement of each other — journalists,
democrats, optimists, prophets to their
G. K. Chesterton, age, confident and untiring in asserting
b. 1874. the Catholic faith. Mr. Belloc, how-

ever, has the finer literary sense, a
charm of exquisite style, and he avoids the affectations
and poses of Mr. Chesterton. To the majority of thought-
K

146 POETRY [PART i

less readers the latter is known as a brilliant journalist who
executes upon the carpet amazing contortions in paradox,
as an essayist upon all and nothing and as a writer of
fantastic novels. His mechanical production of paradox
by restating any ordinary truism upside down is stimu-
lating for a time, but it grows a dreary habit with frequent
iteration. Yet it would be idle to deny him a genius for
ideas ; and in his better mood as a critic of literature he
possesses an acuteness and clearness of insight shared by
few. He has written an admirable critical monograph on
Browning, an introduction to a book of selections from
Thackeray which contains some of the best observations
ever made on the greatest of Victorian novelists, a small
book on Victorian literature which illuminates the work of
individual writers if it gives little idea of the period as a
whole, and he has championed Dickens against the dis-
paragements of an age which discountenances imagination
in favour of industrious observation. And, further, Mr.
Chesterton is a poet : his highest literary achievement is
his Ballad o/ the White Horse.

But eleven years earlier he published a volume of
characteristic verse, The Wild Knight and other Poems
(1900). Here are ideas and original ideas, paradoxes, a
message, optimism, and a masculine faith in the goodness
of being alive. The men of the nineties were aweary of
this great world ; Mr. Chesterton suffers from no megrims
of disillusion. Typical of his philosophy of life are the
words of his noble tribute to Gladstone :

" If we must say, * No more his peer

Cometh; the flag is furled/
Stand not too near him, lest he hear
That slander on the world."

4 The Wild Knight ' the longest poem of the volume, after
opening with a passage of fine imaginative poetry, sub-
sides into confused allegorical dialogue. Save for its
opening lines it is inferior to many of the shorter poems.
In common with them it teaches that God's in His heaven
and all's right with the world. But a poem that stirs
and starts the blood in the veins is the splendidly grotesque
soliloquy of ' The Donkey.5

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 147

" The tattered outlaw of the earth,

Of ancient crooked will ;
Starve, scourge, deride me : I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

" Fools ! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet :
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet."

This is the poetry of inspiration. Nevertheless, little in
the early volume can compare with The Ballad of the
White Horse (1911), a long poem written with a genius
for catching the spirited adventurousness of the folk-
ballad, and only marred by the intrusive didacticism with
which Mr. Chesterton preaches the faith that is in him
— the blessing of Christianity and the nihilism of the
pagan, the ancient equivalent of the modern agnostic.
The story of the ballad is King Alfred's deliverance of
the land from the Norseman; but, despite his victory,
the King predicts a time when the heathen shall come
back, not in the guise of manly and savage barbarians, but
mild and shaven " ordering all things with dead words, "
breaking the heart and hope of the world, ruining and
making dark. For it is the faith of Mr. Chesterton that —

" The men of the East may spell the stars,

And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark."

To Mr. Chesterton, as to other men of letters in this day
of doctrinal literature, must be allowed his gospel of
salvation. The Ballad of the White Horse is not, however,
a mere allegory of the conquest of weary agnosticism by
joyous Christianity ; it would remain a ringing and stirring
poem were its message omitted. Mr. Chesterton essays
no elaborate archaic artifices, no hypertrophied devices of
melody; he does not throughout cling to the same
measure, but in the swing and spirit of the poem he has
without labour won the manner of the true ballad. It
is as spontaneous and unforced as one of Scott's lays.
The style is simple arid of few words, the narrative almost
rollicks on its way ; but, again like Scott, Mr. Chesterton

£6ETR¥ [PART 1

has imbued his high-spirited ballad with the atmosphere
of a national epic. It is one of the few long narrative
poems of the last two decades which can be read a second
time. It contains hardly any subtleties or abstract images,
and this is well, for Mr. Chesterton, when he forgets his
message, remembers that he is writing a narrative poem
on an historical subject. And it has pre-eminently in its
narrative the fine objective manner of the old ballad and
carol, a virtue almost lost to the mind of an introspective
age.

The poets of man are born more often than the true
and simple poets of nature. Nearly every rhymester
makes his first essays with descriptions of skies, hills,
woodlands and meadows, but, like Whitman, he discovers
the difficulty of omitting the " stock poetical touches,"
and a great part of nature poetry resolves itself into a
fresh arrangement of well-worn phrases and lines. Loving
observation of nature and constant intercourse with her
will not suffice to create poetry. Wordsworth was a great
poet of nature not because he loved her more passionately
than others, but because he was more often stirred to high
feeling. He would have been a poet had circumstances
bound him all his life to a mean street in London, although
he would have chosen other subjects than were suggested
to him by the Lake Country. To few belongs the gift of
deep and true sincerity in feeling, without which nature
poetry can be no more than an iteration of thoughts
already better conceived and more strongly expressed.
Dean Beeching and Mr. A. C. Benson find joy in the peace-
ful seclusion of gardens and the spring beauty of country
lanes. They express their thought in creditable verse, but
the swift and sudden illumination that comes of an
emotion heartfelt and grounded deep in life rarely if ever
visits them. In Mr. Norman Gale we are often conscious
of an emotion that is unsought and discovers itself in
sincere poetry, and more often are we conscious of this in
Mr. A. E. Housman's Shropshire Lad, which contains
some of the noblest and simplest nature poetry in English.
Thfe rare beauty of the poetry of Mr. Alfred Williams and
Mr. W. H. Davies is a cause of astonishment when we
learn the story of their early lives. They are both born of
the people, they have both passed through years of

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 149

poverty and hard struggle, and neither has been embit-
tered by the past or lost the gracious sense of joy in living.
Mr. Alfred Williams became a farm-boy at eleven and
at fourteen a rivet-lad in the railway works at Swindon.

At twenty he began to read, and by
Alfred Williams, incessant work, early in the morning
b. *877. and late at night, he succeeded not

only in gaining a good knowledge of
English poetry but in teaching himself Latin, Greek
and French. His first verses to see the light were
printed in a miscellaneous anthology, and then in 1909 he
published Songs in Wiltshire. This was followed by Poems
in Wiltshire (1911) and Nature and other Poems (1912).
Mr. Williams, although his sympathy is with the daily
round of the ploughman and the village wife, although life
on the soil is for him the ideal of existence, is too deeply
steeped in literature to be a poet of the people, writing
in their dialect like a Barnes or a Burns. Probably he
would never have written poetry had he not been inspired
by the love of books and set himself, at immense cost,
to acquire culture. And the range of his knowledge is not
bounded by matters purely literary. In his delightful
prose book, A Wiltshire Village (1912), he shows an inti-
mate acquaintance with the geological history of the
county he loves, its present life, its streams, hills, flora and
the fishes caught in any particular reach of the rivers.
His knowledge and his powers of observation are his own
and peculiar to himself ; his passion for the open air is as
sincere as Whitman's; it is not the pose of the poet who,
never leaving his study, sings the joy of the winding road
and the lone sea beach. Echoes of Shelley, Meredith,,
Whitman are not wanting in Mr. Williams's poetry ; but
he utters as his own the thoughts that have stirred us
before. All his writing is strong, simple, sane ; it has no
affectations and betrays none of the assertive arrogance
or the crudities so often to be found in the self-educated
man. The frank and unassuming naturalness of expression
in these poems is one of their high merits. The ' Wiltshire
Song,5 * The Blackbird's Canticle,' c A Woman's Face,'
the ' Rustic Song ' and ' On the Downs ' are all outstanding
poems ; but in joy of song none surpasses ' In the Meadow. '
When Mr. Williams writes —

150 POETRY [PAET i

" Let tHe round world shoot and pass

With its sorrow and its sin,
Like a shattered globe of glass,

And the latter fear begin;
For ever, ever, ever,

As the crimson-flowing wine,
Thou wilt blossom, 0 my soul!

With the rose and eglantine."

he may be thinking of Shelley, perhaps of Davidson, and
the analogy of the " crimson-flowing wine " has no relation
to the imagery of the stanza ; but there is something here
that rises from the very sources of poetry.

The power and beauty of Mr. Williams 's thought grow,
and with his practice in self-expression he learns to avoid
faults inevitable at the first. But the second and third
volumes are chiefly remarkable for their deeper content
and clearer reflection of the poet's personality. * Natural
Thoughts and Surmises/ in the earlier volume, and ' The
Testament,5 in the second, are the most intimate and com-
plete confession of his close communion with nature. In
sincerity, fidelity of observation, in the felicitous use of
words and in largeness of outline these poems are note-
worthy. The rough and unrhymed verse in which they are
written fetches its being from Leaves of Grass, but Mr.
Williams writes it in his own way with greater regularity
and more restraint than Whitman. And he has no need
to eschew rhyme on account of its difficulties, for he can
write lyrics in the familiar measures beautifully and
melodiously. He has the vision of the poet, he can express
himself in words and thoughts which are none the less his
own because they are sometimes coloured by his know-
ledge of the literature of several languages ; and in these
poems we never lose our touch with the sincere and self-
contained personality of the author. His inspiration is far
from unfailing, but he rarely writes as ineffectively as he
does in ' Julia and Margaret.' In the majority of these
poems restraint and unassuming truthfulness are united to
a very real gift of song. Mr. Williams 9s writing is
arresting, it has the note of personal reflection and
personal utterance, despite the many traces of literary
influence. He is one among the few true poets of
nature.

CHAP, m] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 151

It needs only that a bath-chair man or a sempstress
should write a book and succeed in bringing it to notice

and the world will read avidly, sur-
William Henry prised that the book should be written

Davics, b. 1870. at all. The extravagant praise which

greeted Mr. W. H. Davies on the
appearance of his first book, The Soul's Destroyer (1907),
was due less to the merit of his poetry than the interest
of his story which had spread abroad. After years spent
as a tramp in America he lost one foot in an accident and
came back to England to quarter himself in doss-houses
and write poetry. Mr. Davies's story was romantic ; but
this did not justify foolish over-praise of his verse. He
was compared to James Thomson (B.V.), Crabbe, Words-
worth, the Elizabethans, and described as "a lord of
language." Comment is needless. In his first collection
those poems of the doss-house, * Saints and Lodgers ' and
the reverie, * The Lodging-house Fire/ contain good
writing, but the blank verse of the ' Soul's Destroyer ' is
metrically monotonous, and, beyond betraying a genuine
feeling for natural beauty, it has small vestige of the
stronger emotion of poetry. And vulgarisms — for example
the poet's notice of the bird that " twittered some " —
which can never be made into poetry are unpardonable
even in a tramp-poet. The one poem of distinction in this
volume is ' The Lodging-house Fire,' The stanza —

" No man lives life so wise
But unto Time he throws
Morsels to hunger for
At his life's close,"

is an astonishing example of concentration of thought
and expression. In New Poems (1907) and Nature Poems
(1908) he uses to far better purpose the two faculties
that chiefly are his — a vision of beauty and happiness in
life and nature as clear and direct as the child's, and an
unfailing strain of effortless song. Nearly all his poems
are fresh, springing from a mind which sees the world
not as others see. Women and children, bird-song and
sunset, ale and the vagrant life, the characters of doss-
house and slum — of these he sings for the joy and
interest of seeing and feeling. And he wisely forswears

152 POETRY [PAET i

cumbering his poetry with intellectualisms. There is
nothing sophisticated in his thought or style. In restrained
simplicity he is sometimes not far from Wordsworth, in
the fleeting beauty of his word-music not unlike Herrick.
And the next two volumes, Farewell to Poesy (1910) and
Songs of Joy (1911), exhibit even greater gain in melody
and felicitous simplicity. Perhaps in Foliage (1918) he
sings a little less spontaneously of the themes from which
he rarely departs, but his poems retain their charm of
artless grace in imagery and style. Mr. Davies's genius
as a poet is limited ; he has no great vigour nor intellectual
force, nor can he successfully embark on a long poem.
He has no message, no strong thought for his generation.
He is content if he may sing in his own words, year by
year, the changeless and simple facts of life and nature,
and he rarely fails to render these sincerely and with a
clear music.

If the genius of Mr. W. H. Davies is spontaneously
lyrical Mr. John Drinkwater is to be counted with the

elegiac poets, and he sometimes re-
John Drinkwater, minds us of Sir William Watson. His
b. 1882. verse is intellectual and meditative.

The poverty of his first efforts in poetry
was remarkable. Poems (1908) contains wholly unoriginal
verse written in simple metres, and is often mildly pious in
thought. In The Death of Leander (1906) Mr. Drinkwater
is more articulate ; but the volume holds nothing to arrest
the reader's attention. Some of the shorter poems treat,
in a quite conventional manner, the modern man's religious
difficulties. There is little spontaneity or tunefulness in
either of these collections. But with the volume of Lyrical
and other Poems (1908) Mr. Drinkwater showed an aston-
ishing advance in melody, command of thought and
language. The two earlier volumes were utterly uninter-
esting, of the third the last thing that could be said is that
the writing is commonplace or comes from a common
mind. The address to ' Shakespeare ' is a noble ode, the
* June Dance ' is worthy the beautiful month it celebrates,
and the sonnets, ' Supplication ' and * Edinburgh/ are
evidence that Mr. Drinkwater had been studying the
technique of poetry to good purpose. In the two succeed-
ing volumes, not very appositely named Poems of Men and

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 153

Hours (1911) and Poems of Love and Earth (1912), the
growth of his power is proportionately maintained. The
opening ' Prayer * of the earlier of these two volumes is an
impressive poem both in breadth of composition and grave
dignity of utterance. Here we find, beyond mistake, the
earnest and high emotion of poetry —

" Knowledge we ask not — knowledge Thou hast lent,
But, Lord, the will — there lies our bitter need,
Give us to build above the deep intent
The deed, the deed."

6 For They Have Need ' and, indeed, nearly all the other
poems of the volume are informed with the same gravity
and earnestness. The observation applies with almost
equal truth to Poems o/ Love and Earth, save for a few
high-spirited and happy-hearted poerns like ' The Vaga-
bond ' and the inconsequent ' Fleckenham Men.' In ' The
Fires of God ' he returns to the long philosophic poem
with far greater success than in his first attempts ; and
the elegy to Tolstoy is only brought short of success by
its brevity. In his Cromwell and other Poems (1918) the
sequence of poems in varied metres entitled 6 Cromwell *
bears witness to Mr. Drinkwater's command of a finely
chosen vocabulary, but his lines are stiff and pedantic,
and in seeking to reach an epic largeness he has, in a great
measure, missed the sources of poetry. Several of the
shorter poems, and especially ' In Lady Street ? and
6 Travel Talk/ are more characteristic of his genius as a
poet of restrained gravity and moral earnestness.

Mr. Drinkwater is less at his ease in lyric than in elegiac,
meditative and hortatory verse. His lyrics have a grave
intention which differentiates them from a flow of unpre-
meditated song. And he uses English with restraint and
respect. He is never tempted to astonish with exuberance
of language or plethora of imagery. He writes directly
and always uses the most obvious and natural word for
the expression of his thought. The bent of his tempera-
ment is to the ethical and intellectual, and neither
imagination nor emotion carries him away. Although he
betrays no intimate knowledge of classical poetry he is
formal and classical by instinct. It is the failing of poets
who write in the mood of elegy that after a few years intel-

154 POETRY [PART i

lect overpowers the emotions, talent replaces genius and in-
spiration is withdrawn. In his later volumes Mr. Drink-
water has reached a consistently high level of elegiac and
rhetorical verse, but his attainment has been a little mono-
tonously even. If he does not halt uncertainly nor lapse
into the commonplace, equally he is without the magic of
a quickened inspiration.

Four poets to whom the gift of lyricism, song and fancy
in varying mood and form has been given, remain to be
noted before the close of this section. Two of the four,
Mr. Walter de la Mare and Mr. Ralph Hodgson, are still
writing, whereas James Elroy Flecker and Rupert Brooke
died within a few months of each other in 1915.

Mr. Walter de la Mare (Walter Ramal) when he began
to publish his work in volume form was approaching the
fourth decade of his life, but he is the
Walter dc la Marc, singer of a young and romantic world,
k 1W& a singer even for children, understand-

ing and perceiving as a child. In one
sense the sum of his work is small and his province narrow ;
for he is least successful in what he may himself, at one
time, have regarded as his more ambitious poems, in his
laboured ' Characters from Shakespeare,5 in the blank
verse essays on ' Youth ' and ' The Voice of Melancholy,'
and (with some exception) in the sonnets. These belong
to Poems (1906), which holds less that is born of the
author's true genius than his other volumes, suggesting
the result of an earnest will and intention to compose
poetry on set themes rather than a poetry of the heart
and mind. One or two pieces have a more personal note,
but they are not sufficient in themselves to give character
to the collection. Two songs of the sea, of which Mr.
Walter de la Mare never fails to write with the passion of
a lover — * The Sea of England ' and the sonnet, ' Sea-
magic,' and a few other verses, are in his true manner;
but, taken as a whole, Poems hardly ranks in the direct
succession of his work.

Songs of Childhood (1902), a collection passing from
nursery ditty through whimsical fancy to gay or tender
lyric and song, is representative of the author's real genius ;
and in the same mode, with increasing charm and beauty,
followed The Listeners (1912) and Peacock Pie (1918).

CHAP, ni] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 155

Songs of the nursery and childhood, graceful fancies, the
slightest of lyrics, unthinkingly happy or wistfully dream-
ing on things past and never to return, such is the content
of these books. Grace and fleeting music of words, some-
times like Shakespeare's songs of little meaning in them-
selves, are the true realm of Mr. Walter de la Mare's
delicate fancy. And when he attempts nothing more than
a tender conceit, or a day-dream light as the sea-foam and
bright as the sun on glancing water, his genius never
deserts him. The greater things he has fortunately learned
to set aside in the two volumes last named; and, wisely
limiting himself to his reach, he has shaped flawlessly
his fairy songs and happy fancies. But, if grace and charm
are his distinguishing characteristics, they are not the
whole; in a few words, seemingly artless and unsought,
he can express a pathos or a hope as wide as man's life.
6 An Epitaph ' is but eight lines in length, but greater
poets have often said less in as many pages.

" Here lies a most beautiful lady,
Light of step and heart was she ;
I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Country.
But beauty vanishes ; beauty passes ;
However rare — rare it be ;
And when I crumble, who will remember
This lady of the West Country? "

Further illustration, where so much is perfect within its
intention, will serve no good purpose. In The Listeners
may be read verses as varied as the pathos of * Never
More, Sailor ' and ' The Stranger,' the bizarre fanciful-
ness of c The Scarecrow,' the moving sadness and beauty
of ' All That's Past,' or the grace of « The Three Cherry
Trees.' And Peacock Pie has no page without a rare
delight and charm, from the little ditties of ' Up and
Down ' to the beautiful nature poems of ' Earth and Air '
and the closing c Songs.'

Mr. Ralph Hodgson is to be named as a writer of delicate
fancies and rhythms comparable to the verses of Mr.
Walter de la Mare. The likeness is more apparent in
Poems (1917) than in The Last Blackbird and other Lines
(1907), though the earlier book has a charm which is rare.

156 POETRY [PART i

Mr. Hodgson writes with a naturalness which disarms
the suspicion of a studied simplicity for its own sake. The

longer poems, and they are not many,
Ralph Hodgson, are hardly, with the exception of * The
b. ls71- Song of Honour/ those in which his gifts

appear at their best. In the short poem
of a few lines, choosing a passing emotion, a regret, a
doubt, a hope, a moment's fancy, he can grace his thought
in apt and beautiful words; and he wisely chooses this
way for the most part, now and again introducing a flash
or turn of whimsical humour.

The poetry of Rupert Brooke is a poetry of youth and
romance : not the romance of the distant, the bizarre,

the remote, but the romance of the actual
Rupert Brooke, and its adventurous discovery. No
1887-1915. characteristic of Brooke's poetry is more

marked than its valiant and happy
youthfulness, tinged not infrequently with that sceptical
irony and half-affected cynicism not less indicative of the
young man's uncertainty both of life and himself. The
young poet who, like Shelley, Keats, or, it may be added,
Flecker, lives in the world of the transcendental or
mythical is secured against his little knowledge of life;
not so the shielded youth who affects to write of those
things which can only be seen clearly and in perspective
when life has ceased to be a venture at large. And
because of an affectation beyond the measure of the poet's
wisdom and experience Rupert Brooke's first volume is a
fair promise rather than the fulfilment of intention. The
manner of the undergraduate talking of the world he is
about to enter is never far distant ; and the poetry, with
all its personal touches of wit and irony, remains derivative
and experimental. In many poems he followed a con-
temporary tendency to a rough and cynical realism in
verse. In this respect * Jealousy ' and several other pages
of Poems (1911) may be compared to the work of Mr.
James Stephens, although Brooke did not at this stage
possess the originality in humour, philosophy of life and
knowledge of human character belonging to Mr. Stephens.
None of these poems, save for an interest in the author,
will recall the reader a second time. More indicative of
the true poet that was to be are the quasi-philosophical

CHAP, m] PASSAGE Ol1 THE CENTURIES

poems of this volume, which treat, if not always very
intelligibly, with a manner that is personal and unaffected
the mysteries of life and death. Brooke's first volume
had, at least, the merit of unconventionality : and in his
rough-hewn, sometimes whimsical poems he tries, not
always successfully, to avoid manufacturing verses and
express what he has felt.

Three years and a few months of life were left to Rupert
Brooke after the publication of this first volume of poetry,
three years memorable in his brief story. In 1913 he was
elected a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and in the
same year he left England to travel by the United States
and Canada to the South Seas. To this journey we owe
not only the prose Letters from America (1916), and the
warm and sunlit poems of the South Seas, but, in some
part at least, the whole difference between his writing
before the end of 1911 and that day of April, 1915, when
he laid down his young life for his country, not the less
truly because his death was not in the open field. Other
influences had also been at work — life in London, and in
the last months the outbreak of the great war — to make
1911+ and other Poems (1915) a volume of English poetry
not less rapturously youthful than the first, but wise also
and grave. Even the old ironies have become tender and
wistful, as witness the sonnet entitled * Unfortunate ' and
the haunting ' Chilterns.' In melody and range of expres-
sion Brooke gained immeasurably in these years. * Tiare
Tahiti ' and ' The Great Lover ' have a music and a
cadence which set them far above his early work : and, in
another mode, the handling of the octosyllabic couplets of
the spirited * Old Vicarage : Grantchester ' is admirable.
The promise, not always certain, has been more than
redeemed in this posthumous collection of poems, which
is likely to endure with the best that has been written in
recent years. Of Rupert Brooke it may be said that he
not only added to, he enriched English poetry in his slender
volume and English sonnets with the brief series inspired
by the war. Of those sonnets one is both prophetic of
his end and a character of the true poet and joyous lover
of beauty.

158 POETRY

" If I should die, think only this of me :

That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed ;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given ;

Her sights and sounds ; dreams happy as her day ;
And laughter, learnt of friends ; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven."

James Elroy Flecker was peculiarly a poet of intel-
lectualism, who regarded himself as standing for a classical

reaction against the common ten-
James Elroy Flecker, dencies of English poetry in his day.
1884-1915. But the word classical, so far as it

has any longer meaning as a literary
label, allies his poetry not to the reasoned and elegiac
forms of Matthew Arnold and Sir William Watson, but
to the deliberate craftsmanship in words of Keats or the
French Parnassians, whom especially he eulogised and
took to be his masters. Among English poets of his own
generation he has, thus, a place to himself. His ideal in
poetry was the jewelled phrase, the gem-like verse, the
exquisitely chiselled stanza or poem: his abhorrence the
preaching, didactic, fluently romantic, emotional and
sentimental poets. " It is not,5' he declared, " the poet's
business to save man's soul but to make it worth saving."
It was his belief that contemporary English poetry could
only be rescued from the chaos into which, as it appeared
to him, it was falling through the poet's ignorance and
the absence of any guiding principle, by the recognition
that genius unaided by knowledge was as prone to disaster
as in everyday life emotion without strength degenerates
into sentimentalism. He admitted that fine poetry had
been written upon no theory at all, and bad poetry com-
posed upon excellent principles. " But," to use his own
words from the preface to The Golden Journey to Samar-
kand, " that a sound theory can produce sound practice,"

CHAP, in] PASSAGE OF THE CENTURIES 159

and exercise a beneficent effect upon writers of genius, has
been repeatedly proved in the short but glorious history
of the 'Parnasse.' "

It was not at once that Flecker developed his theory,
nor, when once it was fully present to his mind, can it be
said that his faith and practice were always consistent.
The one volume representing the art of poetry as Flecker
conceived it, The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1918),
was preceded by The Bridge of Fire (1907) and Forty-two
Poems (1911). The Golden Journey is not only the pattern
of poetry as Flecker wished to write, it illustrates his
affectation -of a love of the East, in which he was a little
disillusioned by his short experience in the consular service
at Constantinople, after earlier years spent at Oxford and
Cambridge and in teaching. The East in his imagination,
before he saw it, was the dreamland of the Arabian Nights,
a country of flaming colours, burning sunlight, the exotic
and the unreal ; for it was no part of his ideal in poetry
to transfigure the common events and scenes of daily life.
He laboured rather, even more than Keats and Francis
Thompson, to practise his art for its own sake, using words
appealing both to eye and ear, avoiding the influences of
emotionalism and the subject. His most important
volume is written " with the single intention of creating
beauty," not to reveal the poet's mind or offer any reading
of life's meaning.

The theory adopted by Flecker has been followed more
or less whole-heartedly by other poets, but by none with
an entirely faithful allegiance, for it neglects wilfully the
complete nature of man ; and Flecker is not more success-
ful than those who went before him. Inwoven damask
and stiffly-figured tapestries can only be a lesser form of
art: in the end the craftsman lapses into working by
design and rule, unmoved by love and joy. The poet, in
like manner, who conceives of his art as an ornament, will
hardly escape unless, as is most probable, he is governed
only intermittently by the logic of his theory.

When he wrote the title-poem of The Golden Journey
to Samarkand Flecker had his theory constantly in mind,
and the poem, despite all its beauty of phrase, fails to
give more than a transient pleasure ; for the poet's formula
is writ clear and the evidence of composition is plain.

166 POETRY [PARTI

" We have rose-candy, we have spikenard,
Mastic and terebinth and oil and spice,
And such sweet jams meticulously jarred
As God's own Prophet eats in Paradise."

Neither the manner nor the wording is new or original;
others have affected the like preciosity, and art is more
than a cloying sweetness. In a similar mood of intel-
lectualism Flecker wrote * The Gates of Damascus,' * In
Phseacia 9 and other poems shaped to his theory : but
not in all is he successful in maintaining the impersonality
and objectivity of his ideal, for a natural emotion will
intrude or a passing sentiment.

" Or when the wind beneath the moon is drifting like a soul

aswoon,

And harping planets talk love's tune with milky wings out-
spread, Yasmin,

Shower down thy love, O burning bright ! For one night or

the other night
Will come the Gardener in white, and gathered flowers are

dead, Yasmin."

And there are other poems, * Oak and Olive,' for example,
in which the theory is frankly abandoned for songs of the
heart's desire. Further, many of the verses collected in
The Old Ships (1915), including the fine title-poem, are
undisguisedly more subjective and personal. But before
all the poems of this posthumously published booklet had
been written Europe was torn asunder ; and the war was
not without its influence on Flecker 's writing, as, in
especial, the noble faith and hope of his ode, * The Burial
in England,' bear witness.

CHAPTER IV

THE POETESSES

Laurence Hope — Michael Field — Mary Coleridge — Rosamund Marriott
Watson— Lady Margaret Sack vi lie— Ethel Clifford.

THE nineteenth century witnessed a continuous influx of
women into the fields of fiction and poetry. The eighteenth
century was far being without its women writers, although
many hid themselves behind the screen of a pseudonym;
and as late as the time of George Eliot and the Brontes
it was generally felt to be but natural and becoming for
a woman to adopt a pen-name. But the greater freedom of
women's lives in an age when education, travel and social
intercourse had become as easy for them as for men, has
led to an enormous increase in the number of poetesses
and women novelists, and, it may be added, a marked
improvement in the quality of their work. The only
woman's name of any importance in poetry at the end of
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
century? during one of the greatest periods of renascence
in English poetry, is Joanna Baillie, who is now forgotten,
or only remembered as a pale reflection of the romantic
tendencies of the time. But before her death Elizabeth
Barrett and Christina Rossetti were known as poetesses;
and the contrast is a parable of change, for the volumes
of Christina Rossetti rightfully take their place with the
nobler and greater poetry of the period. If, however, it
be possible to strike a general average in poetry and fiction
during the last half-century, it will be seen that, both in
quality and quantity, women attain a more widely distri-
buted and lasting success in prose. Apart from Mrs.
Browning and Christina Rossetti there are no poetesses in
the last century who can presume to claim an equal stand-
ing with the greater poets of the age. And, mutatis
mutondis, when we lower our scale, it remains equally
L 161

162 POETRY [PART I

true that the poetry which makes a difference, shaping
the courses of verse in recent years, comes from men.
There are no poetesses to place with Mr. W. B. Yeats,
John Davidson, Mr. A. E. Housman or Herbert Trench.
Yet modern English poetry is the better, and more
especially in lyric song, for the writing of women.

The work of two poetesses, Mrs. Woods and Mrs.
Meynell, the one possessed of almost masculine strength
the other of fragile delicacy, has already been noticed.
But in either case inspiration is fleeting and capricious,
for the volume of their verse is strangely small : and
neither poetess suggests abundant resource. This is not
wholly to be counted to their discredit; for careless and
indiscriminate fluency is the failing of many women
versifiers. This charge cannot be brought against Laurence
Hope, Michael Field, Mary Coleridge, Rosamund Marriott
Watson, and Lady Margaret Sackville, who claim places of
distinction and honour in the story of modern poetry.
And each follows separate aims, betraying little if any
relation to the others.

The passion and fire of Laurence Hope's lyric inspira-
tion is astonishing. An element of the voluptuous has
militated against her fame, but it is
Laurence Hope, time to recognise that this is neither

1865-1904. the reason nor ground of her poetry,

for there is a tenderness, a strength
and a depth of feeling in many of her poems which raise
them far above the level of erotic songs. It may be that
youth and passionate love are the keynotes of her poems
of the East. But this was not all : and as she wrote she
lived. Laurence Hope (Mrs. Adela Florence Nicholson)
was born in England, but in 1889 she married a colonel
in the Indian army and settled in Madras. The capacity
for intense passion and regret, reflected in her writings,
was illustrated in her last act, suicide by poison in 1904,
two months after her husband's death.

Laurence Hope is directly descended from the writers
of the Yellow Book and Savoy. Her background is
different, but in psychological subtlety and frankness she
was nearer to Mr. Arthur Symons than any other modern
poet. The atmosphere and environment are changed
from the roaring streets and flaring lights of London and

CHAP, iv] THE POETESSES 163

Paris to the burning days and still moonlight nights of the
Orient; but in essence these are Western poems, as
Western as Moore's Lalla Rookh. Yet nobody has trans-
lated the East into English poetry with a like passion and
beauty. Moore and the vogue he established, which com-
municated itself even to Shelley, need not be taken into
account. In poetry Sir Alfred Lyall and Sir Edwin
Arnold are largely concerned with philosophic concepts,
and Mr. Rudyard Kipling sees India given up to Tommy
Atkins and the English civilian. Laurence Hope com-
municates the spell and mysterious fascination of the
blue skies and bronze shadows of the Orient, its vast
inchoate life, its silences, the age-old habits of its life
and thought, its perfumes, its passions, hates, loves and
the transient swiftness of its youth. But the pervasion of
her lyrics with the neurosis of sex is a mode of the Paris
boulevard and the ballet stage of London. By far the
greater number of Laurence Hope's poems are lyrics of
sexual passion, and these reflect the mind of the West
not the thought of the East, which accepts woman, with-
out vexation of spirit, as an ordinary incident of life.
When we have dispossessed our minds of the idea that
her poems mirror the soul of the East we can see that she
owes a heavy debt to Swinburne and to younger English
poets who were influenced by the French Romantics and
Symbolists.

Youth and passionate love — these are the breath and
the spirit of her poetry. Yet she was in her thirty-seventh
year and drawing toward middle age before she published
her first volume, The Garden of Kama (1902). In her life-
time only one more volume, Stars of the Desert (1903),
appeared. Indian Love (1905) was published posthu-
mously. The small collection of stray Poems (1907),
inspired by other lands than India, is so inferior to her
other work that it barely calls for mention.

Sensuous, impassioned, dreamy, melancholy, voluptu-
ously wistful, these are terms of description which come
to the pen when we turn over her volumes. Passionate
intensity of hope, regret and love was given to Laurence
Hope, and the fragments of Sappho come to mind as we
read her verse. A voluptuous abandon, however, is not
the whole meaning of her thought and poetry. A deep

164 POETRY [PART i

melancholy and eager pessimism underlie all her work.
She can write —

" I am so weary of the Curse of Living,

The endless, aimless torture, tumult, fears.
Surely, if life were any God's free giving
He, seeing His gift, long since went blind with tears. "

And this is no affectation or pose, but a cry wrung from
the heart. A poem like ' Rutland Gate ' is evidence of
her humanitarian sympathy and her power to feel pity
for those crushed out in the battle of life. And, beyond
the dreams of impassioned love, in moments of quiet she
realised that

" , . . the joy of life is hid
In simple and tender things. "

Nor need we look in vain, in the volumes of Laurence
Hope, for poetry in the greater manner, a poetry of
language laden with beauty and meaning combined.

" And this is our Wisdom : we rest together,
On the great lone hills in the storm-filled weather,
And watch the skies as they pale and burn,
The golden stars in their orbits turn,
While Love is with us, and Time and Peace,
And life has nothing to give but these."

Writing like this has the power and spell of deep and
sincere emotion. The 6 Famine Song 9 and ' O, Life, I
have taken you for my Lover * carry with them the sudden
excitation of spontaneous and noble poetry. Though her
writing is, in the general mind, associated with another
kind of poetry, her temper is often melancholy, grave,
severe. Undeniably, there was also another side of life
she knew — physical love ; and, quite mistakenly, for many
this is the only significance of Laurence Hope. Old age
she understood, middle age with its important selfishness
she dreaded, but youth and its passionate joy in loving
were the chief themes of her song. For youth is the full-
ness of life and cries :

" Do as thou wilt with mine and me,

Beloved, I only pray.
Follow the promptings of thy youth.
Let there be no delay 1 "

CHAP, iv] THE POETESSES 165

Yet, with all her insistence on a single aspect of life, she
rarely sinks, like many erotic poets, into meaningless
ecstacy or cloying sweetness, A poem like the * Song of
Gulbaz ' occurs to the mind as merely sensuously pretty
and ineffective, but its very flatness stamps it, even for
the hurried reader, as a surprising anomaly among her
poems.

In general Laurence Hope's word-music is spirited and
accurate without exhibiting the finer graces and beauties
of a more accomplished metrist. She does not often lapse
into ugly lines like —

" Solace I my despairing soul with this."

Nor is she often guilty of unnecessary slips like the split
infinitive of

" But now, God knows, what use to still be tender,55
or the colloquial slanginess of

" Yet, when we rested, night-times, on the sand.'5

As a rule her English is simple and good.

If the higher enthusiasm of Laurence Hope's nature had
burned more constantly and clearly she would oftener
have written in the stronger and more impersonal manner
of her greater poems ; but, though intellectual power and
the love of fine thinking were with her, a passionate lyric
emotion took her life in hand. Despite, however, the
enervating character of much that she has written she
has left many pages of fine and moving poetry. The best
of her work is to be found in the first and third of her
volumes. ' Stars of the Desert,' save for a few pages, is
hardly so good a book as the other two.

It would be difficult to find a greater contrast than

that afforded by an apposition of The Garden of Kama and

Underneath the Bough. Restraint and

Michael Field. chiselled beauty of form mark the poems

of Miss Bradley and her niece, Miss

Cooper, who wrote under the pseudonym Michael Field1.

A large part of their writing is literary drama in verse.

Several of the plays deal with English and Scotch history.

The Father's Tragedy (1885) is founded upon the story of

David, Earl of Rothesay, The Tragic Mary (1890) upon

1. Miss Cooper died 1913; Miss Bradley 1914.

166 POETRY [PART i

the life of Mary, Queen of Scots : and Fair Rosamund
(1884), William Rufus (1886) and Canute the Great (1887)
are other historical plays, written in imitation of the
Elizabethans. Callirrhoe (1884) and Brutus Vltor (1887)
have classical themes, but are scarcely classical in feeling.
None of these is arresting : they hardly rise above the
interest of all fine literary experiment. The supremely
beautiful lyrical genius of Michael Field is best seen in
shorter poems, and first in the consummate success of
Long Ago (1889), which attempts the hazardous task of
extending the fragments of Sappho. These are each poems
of crystalline clearness, of exquisite beauty in form and
music. Not less perfect are the nature poems and love-
lyrics, nearly all of them short, of Underneath the Bough
(1893). These are songs as ethereal in sound as the
iridescent colours of sunlight falling upon the glittering
spray of the cascade, like snatches of melody heard faintly
in the distance. Slight in content as they are, in purity
of feeling scarcely any writing of the last three decades
will compare with these poems. The influence of Herrick
and the Caroline poets is hardly to be overlooked, but the
element of imitativeness does not detract from the beauty
of the whole.

The poems of Sight and Song (1892), an attempt in an
exceedingly artificial mode, betray the effort of trying to
say something where nothing useful is to be said, and
these lyrics, which seek to translate into words the line
and colour of some of the world's great pictures, are often
laboured, although several, like ' The Birth of Venus,' in
which the picture is of little account, save as a suggestion,
are among the most beautiful of Michael Field's poems.
These three early volumes, printed in limited editions, con-
tain more that is supremely beautiful than any other of
Michael Field's books. Wild Honey (1908) loses something
of the ethereal and indefinable grace of the early lyrics, and
Poems of Adoration (1912) suffers from the unavoidable
limitations of all religious verse. The theme is written
up to and upon ; it does not spring spontaneously.

There is little contact with the actualities of everyday
life in Michael Field's lyrics and shorter poems. Art,
literature, nature and love seen through the haze of
literary culture, these are the writers' sources of inspira-

CHAP, iv] THE POETESSES 167

tion. But the gem-like finish and perfection, the harmony
of style and thought, the simple directness of these poems
lend them a peculiar beauty. If the stress of life is not
felt these brief lyrics are far from empty of matter; if
they do not bear the impress of thought and great emotion,
they generally express something that was worthy the
singing, and always the expression is finely and delicately
wrought. No analogy so readily springs to the mind in
describing these poems as the image of the clear crystal
with sunlight falling upon it. Michael Field marks no
tendency. These volumes inherit from the Elizabethan
and Caroline poets, they are shaped by a life of seclusion
and culture, and by the love of all that is best in the
world's art. There is here no great writing; but within
their limits Michael Field's lyrics almost reach perfection.
Laurence Hope was a poetess of her age and time,
betraying its influences, reflecting its motives, while time

and place have left few marks on the
Mary E. Coleridge, poetry of Michael Field, whose art is
1861-1907. produced in a haven of seclusion from

the battle of contemporary life. Mary
E. Coleridge is more sensitive to the pain of living, but
as it is felt in solitude, not in the stress of the larger
world. She reflects in no distinctive way any tendencies
of her time. Her life was quiet, she was not unfriendly,
but she did not easily communicate herself in the chance
of social intercourse. Her historical romances, prose
fantasies and poems were as little likely to win recognition
from the average reviewer as the general public, and she
remained but little known save to a small group, though
Stevenson praised The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (1893),
the first of her prose fantasies, and Mr. Robert Bridges
encouraged her in the publication of her verse. In her
lifetime she printed two small books of poetry, Fancy's
Following (1896) and Fancy9 s Guerdon (1897), but it is the
slight collection of two hundred and thirty-seven short
poems, published after her death, which represents Mary
Coleridge as a poetess. She led a shy and lonely life,
treasuring her days in imagination and memory, conscious
of her own failure to take a part in the larger activities and
enthusiasms. Her nature was reserved : she stayed her
3oul on a melancholy wistfulness in default of strong con-

168 POETRY [PAKT I

victions. Her verse is the outcome not of enduring
emotion, but the eager hopes and quiet regrets of a
moment ; and for her the world of dreams was more than
everyday reality. In incident her life was poor : in mood
and sensation it was rich. But her poetry, beautiful
though it is, is unnerving; it is a pessimism of regret for
the things unuttered, a doubt whether the ideals can be
true, unredeemed by any stoic courage or wide humani-
tarian sympathy. She questions the universe, but never
in the hope of an answer. Mary Coleridge scarcely be-
longed to her generation. She was the descendant of
Clough and Arnold, troubled with weakening apprehen-
sions and religious difficulties, and she was unsupported
by the ethical strength of the Rugby poets. She had no
enthusiasm with the writers of a younger generation to
play heartily the game of life for the season in which it is
given. To read the collected Poems (1907) is to suspect we
have chanced upon a document which has strayed in-
advertently out of the sixties.

The poetry of Mrs. Rosamund Marriott Watson is
optimistic in temper, and for this, perhaps, as for other
reasons she has the pen of a more
Rosamund Marriott ready writer than Mary Coleridge and
Watson, 1863-1911. less distinction of manner. Never-
theless, her verse-writing takes its
place but little below the best in recent years. She wrote
nothing that was careless, nothing that was not the reflex
of a mind fastidious in the choice of words and imbued
with a love of fine literature. And not only is her work-
manship good, her sense of literary responsibility unfail-
ing— she possessed in addition a genuine lyrical gift. But
to read her collected Poems (1912) is to make us wish for
a poet a little more unequal : as there are few deep sub-
sidences in her writing so there are few hills. A Summer
Night (1891) gave evidence of matured power and a gift
of handling words, which placed it above A Bird-bride
(1889); but in the next two volumes, Vespertilia (1895)
and After Sunset (1904) there is nothing of an outstanding
character, and her latest poems, The Lamp and the Lute
(1912) repeated, not quite so well, themes, thoughts and
moods which already had appeared sufficiently often. She
is always admirably simple and lucid, exact in her use of

CHAP, iv] THE POETESSES 169

words, and her metres are written almost impeccably ; but
her thoughts are few and she rings the changes upon them
too often in a long series of short poems, for her output was
creditable in quantity. The joy of earth, of town, of
friendship, the wind on the downs, the eager air of the sea,
clouds in the sky, the song of birds — in a continuous refrain
these thoughts and images are reiterated. Her range is,
therefore, limited ; she is not often weak nor often impas-
sioned. Rarely does a strong impulse carry Mrs. Watson
beyond herself and inform her poetry with a high emotion.
The fine poem, ' Resurgam/ is an exception to this gener-
alisation. But it is in poems of nature that the talent of
Mrs. Marriott Watson is seen at its best ; she does not yield
to weak ecstasies and she is never coldly self-conscious like
Mary Coleridge. Her melancholy, and it appears not infre-
quently, is not, as with so many poets of the day, an
irrational anger with the universal order, for she was glad
to live and not ashamed to confess it. And a high merit she
possessed was an ear for the fit conjunction of sound and
sense. An example, perhaps the best example, may be
given from one of her earliest poems, the ' Scythe Song,5
with its refrain so magically suggestive of the rustle and
swish of the gleaming blade through the damp meadow
grasses —

" Hush ! the Scythe says, where, ah where? "

Lady Margaret Sackville shows that love of fine form, of
beauty intellectually conceived, which is commonly asso-
ciated with the classical temper in
Lady Margaret literature. In her choice of classical

Sackville, b. 1882. subjects for her dramatic poems she
falls into a group with Maurice
Hewlett, Mr, Binyon and Mr. Sturge Moore, and in power
of dramatic characterisation she is more than their equal.
The tragedy of Hildris the Queen (1908) is written in skil-
fully handled, nervous and energetic blank verse; and
Bertrud and other Dramatic Poems (1911) contains three
dramatic pieces, * The Wooing of Dionysus,' * Tereus ' and
' Bertrud,' of rare distinction. These are written to be
read and not acted, but they are dramatically conceived
and the characters realistically defined. The story of
Bertrud, the Queen, defamed to her husband by Gerta,

170 POETRY [PART i

and how she yielded place to save the tortured soul of her
unworthy rival, is told with admirably restrained force and
pathos. The thoughts of the poem are beautifully and
nobly expressed. Nor is there in the poetry of Lady
Margaret Sackville any suspicion of careless facility, the
almost universal failing of feminine verse-writing. She
always leaves an impression of a reserve in strength, and
exercises a praiseworthy economy in the use of words. But
it may be questioned whether she would not do well to
write poetry more purely lyrical, despite the success of her
dramatic poems. The lyrics contained in * The Wooing of
Dionysus ' are better than the poetic narrative ; and in
Poems (1901), A Hymn to Dionysus and other Poems
(1905) and Songs of Aphrodite (1913) there are beautiful
lyrics which excite a regret that we have so few from the
same hand. ' The Helots ' is a singularly fine and spirited
poem ; * The Death of Beatrice ' is beautifully conceived
and imaginatively expressed ; and among outstanding
poems in the 1905 volume are 6 Sunset,5 ' The Celts ' and
' The Queen's Cabinet.' The octosyllables of the last-
named poem recall Keats's Eve of St. Mark. The atmo-
sphere of vague and drowsy mystery, the description of
the room rich with costly furniture and hangings, of the
air laden with heavy perfume and haunted by a hovering
fear — all this is suggestive of Keats, but not as a tame
imitation, for * The Queen's Cabinet,' in sheer beauty of
imagery and music, is the most consummate piece of
poetry Lady Margaret Sackville has written. A poem like
this is worth several of her dramas. Dramatic poetry not
for the stage is always something of an anomaly ; whatever
elements of pure poetry it holds are hampered and at a
disadvantage. But Lady Margaret Sackville notably com-
bines lyric faculty with the dramatic instinct. And she
always writes with a fine sense of the fitting, avoiding
attempts to surprise by wealth of imagery, passion of
metaphor or the laboured and far-sought pictorial phrase.
Her style is invariably reserved, yet it rarely becomes flat
or unemotional.

Lady Margaret Sackville writes in a style and manner
individual and self-formed; whenever she recalls greater
poetry it is because she has made its spirit her own, not
because she echoe3 with variations the music of phrases an4

CHAP, iv] THE POETESSES 171

lines she has learned. But the poetry of Ethel Clifford
(Lady Dilke) is an example at its best of much feminine

and derivative verse-writing. In Songs of
Ethel Clifford. Dreams (1903) and Love's Journey

(1905) she invests her world with an
atmosphere of sentiment which is never mawkish, her
rhythms are the outcome of a good literary consciousness,
and she displays a gift of gentle and pleasing song. If
her melodies have little distinctive charm, her art no high
felicity, a quiet grace distinguishes her verse. Her themes
are the common things of sight and sound, she sings of
them not as clearly or strongly as Mrs. Marriott Watson,
but she is, perhaps, less monotonous in her repetitions
than several of the Irish poetesses. Grass, leaves, clouds,
rain, the song of birds and the murmuring of the stream —
from these she rarely wanders to strike a bolder note as
in ' The Song of the Heathen/ A gentle air of melancholy
sentiment and a sympathy with the literary expression of
thoughts — these are the marks of her writing.

PART II
IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

CHAPTER I

THE CELTIC REVIVAL

MATTHEW ARNOLD urged that for literary purposes Europe
must be regarded as a great confederation; and in so
doing he was impelled by the belief that English criticism
and letters suffered from insularity and that the strong
influence of Carlyle's Teutonism had not been without its
ill consequences. With Carlyle he could recognise the
genius of Goethe and admit the supremacy of Faust above
all modern poetry, but he held that English letters had
sufficiently yielded to the influence of German roman-
ticism. To counteract insularity and vague romanticism
he exhorted his countrymen to admire the sanity and logic
of the French people. Arnold's desire was more than
merely to oppose Gallic lucidity to Teutonic romance and
incoherence, his ideal was such a literature as irrespective
of climatic and racial accidents should express the best
that has been thought and with a universal meaning. A
spirit of reaction against the romantic tendency of his
time led him to ask what was neither possible nor good.
His ideal was nearly realised in the eighteenth century,
an age in which the consciousness of nationality was weak.
Nations were conceived as centralisations of arbitary
authority, not as men united by common ties of life,
tradition, custom and faith ; and literature did not escape
the effect of this economic theory. It adopted the institu-
tional view of its functions as definitely as this principle
governed economic concepts. Classicism, which was
primarily Latinism, was arbiter and ruler, and writers
sought to model themselves by the canons of classic taste,
not to utter what lay in and about them. Boileau reigned
in France, Pope in England, and Germany to the middle
of the century was content to serve in obedience to the
classic convention. As the nation was regarded as a

175

176 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

collection of men held together by a legislation externally
imposed, so literature was accepted as an institution
founded upon well-defined principles, subservient to rules
devised of old. This concept reflected both less and more
than incapacity for originality. The eighteenth century
was, at the least, emphatically a century of high dis-
tinction in intellectual power; but it went astray in
adopting a false theory of life, a false theory which lay
in part at the root of Arnold's protest against the
romanticism of his period. The inspiration of writers in
different countries was drawn from sources non-national,
in the belief, whether consciously conceived and stated or
not, that thus poetry and the arts were imbued with a
universality whereby they overcame the limitations of
diverse language and national exclusiveness. But the
literary and artistic standard which knows no confines of
climate or race, yet has an individual life of its own, has
not hitherto been, and probably never will be ; for despite
the wide and rapid diffusion of common knowledge in our
day and an immense acceleration in means of communica-
tion, nationality, provincialism and locality are continu-
ously more emphasised in literature. A most cursory
survey of the past is sufficient to dispel the illusion that
literature derives a more enduring life in so far as it disso-
ciates itself from the accidents of time and place. The
idioms and modes of thought of the Greek dramatists are
bound up with the traditions of a small city-state ; Shake-
speare is summed as " not of an age but for all time,"
and this despite the fact that he was an Elizabethan
Englishman more subject to the limitations of his age
than a Bacon or a Raleigh. And what is true of these
is true no less of all great writers and their work. Nation-
ality, local idiosyncrasy and the accidents of time, scarcely
less than the power of genius to rise above the limitations
of time and place, contribute to that inner truth and
reality without which the arts, though they may please,
die with their begetters. For style is not merely the man,
in Buff on 's phrase, it is the man conditioned by and
relative to the accidents of his birth and environment.
The prose of Plato and Hooker is, perhaps, not the only,
but certainly the chief cause contributory to their immor-
tality, and this prose is the thought of the individual

CHAP, i] THE CELTIC REVIVAL 177

expressing itself in the best and noblest form of speech
garnered from the common language of the day. The
mingled quaintness and splendour of North, Hooker and
Browne had no great ring of fine unfamiliarity to the first
readers. The truth of Buffon's aphorism lies in this —
that style, both true and strong, can never flow from
sources merely literary, for it is a river of life. If the ideal
of Arnold and others be a good rule for the critic to bear
in mind it tends to confusion when it leads to depreciation
of a poetry and prose that derives from the strips and
margins of experience, unconscious of the greater whole.

In modern creative literature the tendency, doubtless,
has been to emphasise the distinctions of nationality.
Arnold himself, with the publication of On the Study of
Celtic Literature (1867), contributed to the interest of
study into racial characteristics ; and he has been followed
by some wise and many foolish writers who treat of the
Celtic spirit. And inevitably the Celt, whether of Brittany,
Scotland or Ireland, learned to play the role expected of
him in various guises of melancholy and mysticism. But
the Celt has not been alone in asserting his nationality.
England, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, the United
States have all found expositors of the national spirit,
either conceived in the whole or mirrored in small pro-
vinces, counties and towns. Provincialism has become
the prevailing note in French fiction, hardly less so in
Germany, every county in England has its chronicler,
and our colonies have given birth to their own writers.
And this decentralisation of literature may be regarded
as one aspect of the widespread agitation for decentral-
isation of government, which is but a natural reaction
against the extension of world-empires with wide, involved
and complicated interests. But the literature of the Celtic
races is not, as is the new literature of our colonies or
Western America, the expression of a full and over-
flowing life, it is the refuge of a little people driven into
the corners of the earth and prevented only by the western
sea from flying further. The Celt from his islands, his
margins of strand and his fastnesses in the barren hills has
flung back, in these latter years, upon the onset of a
material civilisation a spiritual, religious and mystical
poetry, prose and drama, as in the old unhappy days he
M

178 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

flung himself in vain upon the oncoming Saxon, Dane and
Norman.

As a direct expression of " provincialism " among
writers in English no tendency within recent years has
been of greater interest than the Celtic Renascence. It
is not wholly new. No single modern book, embodying
the Celtic spirit in the manifestations by custom associated
with it, melancholy and mysticism, has had a tithe of
the influence exercised by Macpherson's Ossian (1760-63),
which, if it met with some contempt in England, produced
effects almost magical in France and Germany. The
Arthurian Cycle of Celtic tales found an enduring form
in English much earlier than this in Malory's Morte
d9 Arthur (1485), although in this splendid adaptation the
tales have lost much of their authentic character; and
Malory is not to be counted with the manifestations of
the Celtic spirit as we count Macpherson or Lady Charlotte
Guest, whose translation of the Mabinogion (1838-49) did
in a lesser degree for Wales what Macpherson had achieved
triumphantly for the highlands of Scotland. But the
Celtic Revival of recent years within the British Isles
has been almost entirely Irish. William Sharp is the
most striking example of the Celtic spirit in Scotland,
for George Macdonald and Mr. Neil Munro are but partially
Celtic, and some of their best writing belongs to other
spheres of work. T. E. Brown, likewise, is not chiefly
of interest as a manifestation of the Celticism of the Isle
of Man. The Celtic elements of Scotland and Wales have
only received incidental and passing reflection in modern
literature, but Ireland has produced some of the noblest,
the most sincere and the most beautiful poetry, and the
most imaginatively truthful drama recently written in
English. The poems of A. E. and the early poems of
Mr. W. B. Yeats have an individuality beyond that of
all but two or three contemporary poets writing in
England, and no other writer in our language can compare
to-day, in drama that is at once poetry and the highest
truth, with the author of The Well of the Saints.

Nevertheless, the inspiration of the Irish poets is at least
as much climatic and local as racial. A flood of unthink-
ing and nonsensical writing has been poured over the Celtic
Revival ; and the poor Saxon, who is supposed to be with-

CHAP, i] THE CELTIC REVIVAL 179

out those divine gifts of idealism and mystic vision granted
to the race he has driven before him, has been patronis-
ingly belittled. It is no depreciation of the work done
by Irish writers in our day to say that even in those
faculties more peculiarly arrogated to the Celt he has never
approached the depth and breadth of the Teuton, and that
the whole literary output of the Celtic races, so-called,
sinks into insignificance in comparison with the work of the
Teuton. Goethe was greatly moved by Ossian, but no
Celt has yet written a Faust; and it is a question to be
asked why the Ossianic poems should have found their
warmest admirers with a Teutonic people. Again Shelley
was an Anglo-Saxon, Blake a mere Londoner, yet they
surely, by all the signs of their calling, should be of the
Celtic race ? If it be a matter of weighing the vision of
beauty and the power of mystic idealism vouchsafed to the
Celt against the measure of these gifts as they have been
bestowed on the Teuton no impartial judgment could find
a moment of hesitation. The faculties suppositiously the
inheritance of the Celt are not intrinsically his ; and in
powers of thought he falls behind most peoples. Celtic
myth and literature come from the outskirts of the larger
life of Europe ; and it is to this seclusion from the bustle
and pressure of a commercial civilisation we may attribute
the brooding dreaminess of Celtic legend and poetry. In
so far as we speak of Irish writers to-day it may be
questioned whether they are, individually or collectively,
of another race than are writers on the other side of the
Irish Sea. We are of mixed blood in these islands, and
not least so in Ireland, and the accident of birth rather
than the inheritance of tendencies transmitted through
generations explains whatever is peculiar to the work of
modern Irish dramatists and poets.

The Irish novel scarcely enters for contrast, for it has
never in any essential or important manner differentiated
itself from the novel written in England. The typical
novels of Carleton, Lover and Lever present with
abounding burlesque and exaggeration of humour the Irish
peasant and country gentleman in the earlier half of the
last century. It was the work of the last two especially
to create the stage Irishman as he is still imagined by the
average Englishman of to-day, despite the exposure of

180 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

Mr. Shaw's John Bull's Other Island, and the introduction
of a new convention in the sorrowful and poetic Irishman
of the modern drama and a few novels. Lever's drawing
was not wholly out of truth, for Ireland eighty years ago,
before the blight of the great famine, was a richer, happier
and more careless country than it is to-day. But, like
other lands, Ireland reflects the light at many angles, and
the convention of Synge and his imitators is probably no
less a practice in the art of omission than the rollicking,
devil-may-care manner of Lever.

In recent years, though Miss Barlow, Katherine
Tynan, Canon Sheehan, George A. Birmingham and Mr.
James Stephens be not forgotten, Ireland has done no
work of importance, though much that is charming and
pleasurable, in prose fiction. In poetry and drama it is
another story. The drama of the Irish Literary Theatre
is notable and significant, not only in its beauty, its poetry
and its truthfulness, but as an example of reaction against
the European vogue of bald realism in stagecraft, which
was the outward sign of Ibsen's triumph after a long
uphill fight for recognition. Unfortunately this indepen-
dence in style and method, which was grateful in an age
when Germany, France and England had leagued to
pursue " realism " as the only approved method of play
writing, has not been sustained; for in the work of Mr.
Lennox Robinson, Mr. St. John Ervine and other younger
members of the school a tendency to fall back under the
influence of Ibsen, Hauptmann and Mr. Galsworthy is
only too apparent. All that was best in the nationalism
of Synge, Lady Gregory and Mr. Rutherford Mayne is
being lost, and nothing is substituted save the practice
of a dramatic method which by others has been handled
with greater skill and power. Irish literary drama, as
expressive of the peculiarities of a life and habit removed
from the greater cycle of European art, has probably
seen its day, but not before it has produced plays of great
beauty in conception, distinctive originality in language
and method of character-drawing, and alive with a
common and national aspiration. Synge has written
masterpieces of dramatic genius which can only die with
the language; and though Mr. Yeats's faculty is lyric,
not dramatic, and the work of Lady Gregory, Mr. Edward

CHAP, i] THE CELTIC REVIVAL 181

Martyn, Mr. Rutherford Mayne and the other Irish
dramatists falls far below that of Synge, there is in their
writings a freshness, a force and a literary power which
raises their plays above the plane of drama composed only
for the boards and without meaning in printed form.

In poetry the Irish Renascence does not present features
that can readily be co-ordinated. Literature, not life,
is often the fountain source, and there is frequently little
of the spirit of nationalism in the poets whom we may
gather in loose collocation as Irish. At no time has Irish
poetry, as a whole, been distinctively national, and the
epithet Celtic, as has been hinted, is a misnomer if it is
used to appropriate to Irish poets brooding melancholy,
wistful mysticism and fervent idealism, characteristics
which in the poetry of England, Germany, India and virtu-
ally any land appear and mingle with other and differing
tendencies. No one would claim that Tom Moore, George
Darley and Aubrey de Vere peculiarly and essentially
reflected Ireland. Mangan, who belonged to the Young
Ireland party and adapted Gaelic lyrics to the English,
has greater claims to be regarded as an Irish poet on the
strength of My Dark Rosalecn and other poems, whether
translations or originals; but he is at least as fine and
inspired a poet when he writes of subjects that are not
Irish. Nothing, as Professor Hugh Walker observes,
" surpasses, if indeed anything equals, the best of the
Oriental section, The Karamanian Exile with its daring
imagination, its fine swinging rhythm, its skilful use of
the proper name and of Mangan 5s favourite device of
repetition."1 Nor can Arthur O'Shaugnessy, Oscar Wilde
and Herbert Trench be accounted, with any meaning, Irish
rather than English; for their best work has nothing to
do with Ireland and affords no example of hereditary
transmission of characteristics. And if other poets, living
or not long dead, may with greater show of reason be
collected as Irish, this demarcation must in many cases
be taken to imply but little. Mr. W. B. Yeats, though
he has chosen his subjects in lyric and dramatic verse
from Ireland's store of older myth and legend, can find
elsewhere an equal source of inspiration, for his enthusiasm
springs from literature not life ; the poetry of A. E., though

1, The Literature of the Victorian Era, p. 859.

182 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

cast against a background of Irish landscape, in its vision
of a unity of sentient life in man and the universe borrows
from the thought and sacred poetry of India more than
from any influences peculiarly those of Ireland ; Miss Eva
Gore-Booth reflects mystic thought from Heraclitus to
Paracelsus; Dr. Douglas Hyde is a translator; Lionel
Johnson, Norah Hopper and Mr. James Stephens are only
incidentally Irish.

Nevertheless, if the poets of Irish birth be grouped
together it would be idle to deny the presence in their
work, taken in the whole, of a mysticism and wistfulness
which is not so markedly apparent in any considerable
group of more purely English poets. And these character-
istics, if not wholly racial, at least borrow from climatic
and physical environment, they are one manifestation of
a group-soul, and, thus understood, the word Celtic may
serve to describe the literature and mind of certain peoples
whose lot has been cast in the western margins and
mountainous districts of France and these islands.

CHAPTER II

IRISH POETS

VV. B. Yeats— A. E.— Douglas Hyde— Lionel Pigot Johnson— J. M.
Synge — Padraic Colum — James Stephens — * John Eglinton ' — Charles
Weekes — J. H. Cousins — Thomas Keohler — George Sigerson —
' Seosamh MacCathmhaoil ' — Seumas O 'Sullivan.

FOR many Mr. W. B. Yeats is the " indicating number "
of the Celtic Revival, and in this conception of him they

are justified, although in each of his
William Butler activities he has, perhaps, been sur-
Yeats, 1865. passed by other members of the group

to which he belongs. The finest mystical
lyrics of A. E., in their combination of utter simplicity
with substantial force, have not been rivalled by Mr.
Yeats, from whose manner a tinge of artifice has never
wholly been absent ; and in later years this has developed
into deliberate and calculated symbolism. Although some
of his greater passages of poetry are to be found in the
verse dramas, although he has carefully studied and
cultivated play-writing, his dramatic faculty remains
weak; and here Irish writers of less note are easily his
superiors. In knowledge of the older literature, legend
and language of Ireland he is the inferior of Dr. Douglas
Hyde, President of the Gaelic League, who has done more
than any living man for the study of Gaelic. But Mr.
Yeats has witn Maeterlinck, another mystic of like
character, an underlying instinct for practical affairs, and
he has done more for the literary revival in Ireland by
inspiring others with a common hope and ideal than by
any writing of his own, important as that is. To his
unwavering enthusiasm is to be attributed the growth
of the Irish Literary Theatre from its beginnings in London
with English actors, through its vicissitudes and progress
in Dublin from the Antient Concert Rooms to the Abbey

183

184 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PAKT n

Theatre with its company of native actors and actresses.
The genius of Mr. Yeats is undramatic, but he has been
the cause that drama is in others. He discovered Synge
and persuaded him to return to Ireland to write great
drama in place of commonplace critiques of French
authors; he united as workers with one aim Mr. Edward
Martyn, Mr. Rutherford Mayne, Mr. Padraic Colum and
others whom it were needless to name ; he brought Lady
Gregory into the group, to relieve with her native gift
of farcical humour a repertory that inclined the scale too
far in the direction of the sombre, the tragic and the purely
literary ; and for a short time the scepticism of Mr. George
Moore yielded to the spell of his enthusiasm, and the
absentee Irish landlord-author remembered his own land.
By the power to communicate a personal enthusiasm Mr.
Yeats has been the prompter in others of more good work
than he himself has produced ; for, despite the beauty of
part, and especially the earlier part, of his work as a poet,
his genius as a writer of lyric has greatly failed him since
he published The Wind among the Reeds (1899) ; his
finest poetry after that date appears in isolated passages
of the dramas, and more especially in The Shadowy Waters
(1900) and Deirdre (1907). Despite a career of literary
activity that is now not short the quantity of Mr. Yeats 's
poetry that is of a higher order is not large. Not all the
shorter lyrics are noteworthy; none rises to the same
plane of mystic rapture as the more inspired lines of A. E. ;
the beauty of one or two of the verse dramas is a beauty
sustained in spite of the form and context; but in three
poems, The Wanderings of Oisin, The Countess Cathleen
and The Land of Hearths Desire, Mr. Yeats has conceived
and written something which is peculiarly his own and of a
character that once read will not easily be forgotten.

The close of the last century saw a marked revival of
interest in things Irish and of .all that is best in Irish life.
The National Literary Society was founded in Dublin in
1892; in 1893 the Gaelic League was established, and in
the same year the Irish Literary Society in London held
its first meeting. A little later, in 1899, the Irish Literary
Theatre arranged its first performances in Dublin. Before
this new growth of interest in national life and literature
definitely manifested itself to the outward eye and became

CHAP, n] IRISH POETS 185

known beyond Ireland Mr. Yeats had won his laurels,
and nothing that he has written since the inauguration
of the Irish Literary Theatre ha^ affected or enhanced his
position as a poet.

Mr. William Butler Yeats, the son of an Irish artist,
was born in Dublin in 1865. His father >s following first
led him to the study of painting, but he soon began to
contribute poems and stories to Irish periodicals. In
these years his imagination grew under the spell of the
folk-tales and myths of older Ireland and the greys and
greens of Irish landscape. Delving in libraries among
translations from the Gaelic, and sitting by turf-fires in
Connaught, he saturated his mind in mystic tale, legend
and song, and he passed on to edit folk and fairy tales
and stories from Carleton. He has since continued the
practice of prose, and from this early date Mr. Yeats 9s
work may be divided into miscellaneous prose, that poetry
which is primarily lyric, and the dramatic poetry which
followed upon the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre.
From another standpoint three stages can be traced in
Mr. Yeats's development. First came his early and ten-
tative work when he was writing under the influence of
models and seeking a path of his own ; this was followed
by the well-defined symbolism of The Wind among the
Reeds, ' Rosa Alchemica ' and Ideas of Good and Evil ;
and, lastly, the symbolic manner has, in some of the
plays, been brought into closer contact with everyday
life.

The first two stages of the development here sketched
are more clearly illustrated in Mr. Yeats 's prose than in
his verse. The editing of older stories naturally led him
to attempt prose-fiction, and in 1891 he made a beginning
with two tales, John Sherman and Dhoya. Neither of
these is singularly promising. The first is a creditable
study of character set against a background of contem-
porary life in a country town of Sligo; the second is a
myth story, derivative in its manner and betraying little
of that sensitiveness which belongs to his later work. In
The Celtic Twilight (1898) are collected essays drawn
from the associations of the author's early life and his
acquaintance with the peasantry of Ireland, especially
of County Sligo. The volume contains stories, sketches,

186 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

accounts of superstitions and visions of people of the faery
told in a simple and exquisite prose of limited vocabulary.
And the Stones of Red Hanrahan (1904) are tales of a
similar character, grouped about the central personality
of Hanrahan, the hedge schoolmaster. The esoteric mood
of Mr. Yeats is fully pronounced in the wholly mystical
Secret Rose (1897) and The Tables of the Law (1897).
6 Rosa Alchemica,' the longest and most striking story
in the first volume appeared in The Savoy, as did The
Tables of the Law. In the latter we note that convention
and petrification of symbolism which marks the decadence
of a spiritual faith into a dogmatic mythology. The
tendency to fossilise symbols is carried over into Mr.
Yeats's most distinctive book of literary and artistic
criticism, Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), a title typically
borrowed from Blake. And this progressive tendency
toward the stereotyping of mystical ideas may be traced
from the early and simple lyrics through The Wind among
the Reedsy and In the Seven Woods to The Green
Helmet.

The atmosphere of Mr. Yeats 's mysticism has often been
attributed as much to the influence of Maeterlinck as to
Irish myth and folk-lore; but the attribution appears to
have little basis in fact. It argues nothing to speak of the
melancholy of either writer, the inward happiness, the
passionate sympathy with the lonely and mysterious lot
of man, the consciousness of unreality in the visible world,
for these have been common to mystics of all ages. A
parallelism may be discovered in that both writers are
products of the civilisation of modern cities, who seek
amid the refinements of external life to cultivate a
nebulous haven of peace in a vague and metaphysical
region. But The Wanderings of Oisin and The Countess
Cathleen had been written or conceived before the work
of Maeterlinck was known on this side of the channel,
and, thus early, the twilight outline, common to both
writers, was fully developed; and, on the other hand,
Mr, Yeats does not cultivate the artifice of the shadowy
and unknown terror which pervades the work of the
author of Les Aveugles and La Mort de Tintagiles. But,
if Maeterlinck counts for little, it may fairly be doubted
whether the later mysticism of Mr, Yeats would ever

CHAP, n] IRISH POETS 187

have come into being save for the influence of the French
symbolists, Rimbaud, Villiers de PIsle Adam and Theodore
de Banville. Nor must the influence of Blake, whose works
Mr. Yeats has, in conjunction with Mr. E. J. Ellis, edited,
be forgotten. Blake's mysticism is, however, despite his
soaring imagination, often simple and homely. The
family scenes in the illustrations to the book of Job are
emblematic of his mind. In Mr. Yeats enters the tinge
of aristocratic aloofness from common life, a trait which
belongs to his temper, in which also he found a com-
panion in Villiers de PIsle Adam, from whom he quotes
often the saying, " As for living our servants will do that
for us." Celtic legend, Oriental tale, Blake and the French
symbolists, all these have contributed to the formation
of Mr. Yeats 's vision of life over and above the natural
endowment of his mind ; for, as Mr. George Moore in his
last apostasy and disillusion has pointed out, his inspira-
tion visits him from literature, not life. As clearly as his
brother Jack B. Yeats, drew the inspiration of his painting
from life, not art, as clearly as Synge discovered the sup-
reme interest not in books but in living men and the
spoken word, so clearly does Mr. Yeats breathe only in
the atmosphere of intellectual and literary concepts. And
in this characteristic, at least, Mr. Yeats is the fellow of
Maeterlinck.

Mr. Yeats 's earliest lyrics are not peculiarly distinctive
of his genius, and they betray little kinship with the fully
developed mysticism of his later poems. He had not
then learned, in Blake's words, to see " through not with
the eye"; and one of these early poems, * The Song of
the Happy Shepherd/ with its question whether the thirst
of knowledge and hunger of truth may be but misleading
impulses and all truth be found in the heart, indicates a
hesitating and experimental stage of thought. The early
poems which borrow from Hindoo mysticism are lacking
in his true manner ; but ' The Madness of King Goll ' con-
tains the hint of the future poet of Celtic mysticism. And
besides this there are poems, like * The Ballad of Father
O'Hart ' and c Moll Magee,' which touch Irish life in a
vein of simple pathos. But finer far than ' Father O'Hart '
is ' The Ballad of Father Gilligan,' which in its choice of
subject illustrates the development of the mystical reading

188 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

of life in Mr. Yeats's mind. In the earlier poem the
keening of the birds for Father O'Hart scarcely carries us
away from the setting of the fairy tale. In * Father
Gilligan 9 the story of the priest who nods asleep in his
chair through weariness, when he should be consoling the
last hours of a dying parishioner, is raised to a plane far
above the conventional. The old priest wakes and rides
through the night to find that he is late, but God has been
before sending one of his angels to minister the last rites.
And the old man kneels to whisper,

" He who is wrapped in purple robes,
With planets in his care,
Had pity on the least of things
Asleep upon a chair."

But it is in the single volume of The Wind among the
Reeds that Mr. Yeats reaches his highest and most
original work in shorter lyrics. These mystical broodings
of spirit lie outside the highway of poetry, and, though
not untouched by the sophistries of the cultured world,
they are as unintelligible to the common mind as the
arcana of Blake. Yet Mr. Yeats has lived more among
men than Blake and has more of the wisdom of the children
of this world, and he is not guiltless of conscious artifice
where Blake would have been wholly natural and with-
out self-consciousness. Among those poems directly
founded upon Irish legend ' The Old Age of Queen Maeve '
is noteworthy for its epic note and the cadences of its
blank verse, and its melody brings it into sharp contrast
with * Bailie and Aillinn,' another poem founded upon
Irish legend, written in rhyming octosyllables which suffer
from a tendency to jostling haste. Perhaps the most
beautiful poems of the volume are * The Host of the Air,5
' Into the Twilight ' and * The Song of Wandering ££ngus.'
' The Host of the Air ' has that incommunicable magic of
prosody making, as in ' La Belle Dame sans Merci ' and
* Kubla Khan,' pure poetry for its own sake. The poem
which tells how in dreaming vision O'Driscoll saw —

" ... young men and young girls
Who danced on a level place,
And Bridget his bride among them,
With a sad and a gay face.

CHAP, n] IRISH POETS 189

and how —

u The dancers crowded about him,
And many a sweet thing said,
And a young man brought him red wine
And a young girl white bread."

considered only as prosody does not come short of Mr.
Yeats's better known poem, 4 The Lake Isle of Innisfree.'

The year 1899 not only saw the publication of The Wind
among the Reeds, it found the poet busied with the
workings of the Irish Literary Theatre, and it marked a
point of rapid declination in Mr. Yeats's lyric powers.
In the Seven Woods (1903) contains no poetry as individual
as the preceding volume, though it includes the stirring
stanzas of * Red Hanrahan's Song,' a poem which, with
splendid imagery of clouds, winds, yellow pools and
flooding waters, breathes the love of Ireland's bare hills,
bog waters and warm soft rain. Other songs, however,
6 O do not love too long ' and 6 Never give all the Heart,'
for example, suggest purely English and Elizabethan
rather than Celtic models. The short series of love poems
printed in The Green Helmet (1910) are metaphysical and
not very distinctive.

If not with the short lyric, with poems of a different
kind Mr. Yeats has shown himself the poet of an esoteric
beauty in a character and a manner that is all his own.
And further The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), The Countess
Cathleen (1892) and The Land of Heart's Desire (1894),
poems in dialogue, may be regarded as the prelude to his
phase as a dramatic poet. The first version of The
Wanderings of Oisin, compared with the revised text
which Mr. Yeats subsequently printed, was a youthful and
diffuse poem. Often weak in style it was also far from
consistently happy in phrase or imagery. In its later
guise his first long essay in verse has become a poem of a
beauty and distinction that is rare. In its form the poem
derives from the Middle Irish dialogues of St. Patrick
and Oisin and represents the mythic hero relating to the
saint the story of his wanderings in the paradises of pagan
mythology and his passionate love of Niam. It may be
noted that contrasts of paganism and Christianity, which
appear thus early, are of frequent recurrence in Mr. Yeats 's

190 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

poetry. The saint warns Oisin to repent lest his soul be
lost

" Through the demon love of its youth and its godless
and passionate age."

But a pale and bloodless creed has no power over the
soul of Oisin; he hopes to join the Fenian heroes, his
comrades of old time, even though they be tossed on the
floor of hell.

" I will go to Caolte, and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair,
And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames
or at feast."

The most striking characteristic of this early poem is that
curious impression of the supernatural which Mr. Yeats
can convey in narrative verse with a power and a magic
beyond the reach of any other English- writing poet. Many
have striven to give the poetry of myth and legend the
atmosphere of the eerie and otherworldly, Mr, Yeats
achieves it to a quite extraordinary degree. Others may
labour for a time to divest themselves of the trappings
of externality ; the poetry of Mr. Yeats is a poetry of
dreams more true than the things seen with the physical
eye. Mere study of technique in verse melody or in
diction scarcely serves to explain how this effect is gained ;
but, as Swinburne snatches from the air music which
haunts the memory, though we recall no thought nor
even a clear image, so in the poetry of Mr. Yeats we are
caught up into the kingdom of faery as Niam carried
Oisin to the land where " days pass like a wayward time."
The Land of Heart's Desire is closely united in mood
and atmosphere with The Wanderings of Oisin. It is also
imbued with the paganism of older Ireland ; it has to do
" with vast and shadowy activities and with the great
impersonal emotions." The poem, with its graceful and
tender story of one who was snatched by the fairies to
the land

" Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song "

is an altogether beautiful and almost perfect piece of
writing. The Countess Cathleen is broadly contrasted with

CHAP, n] IRISH POETS 191

these two poems, for it is Christian in spirit and treats
of the moral emotions. It narrates the fortunes of the
Countess who sells her soul to demons in order to gain
money to help the poor in time of famine. Yet her soul
is accepted in heaven, for

" The Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone."

The handling of the blank verse, even in the latest version
of The Countess Cathleen, is not always competent, and
in this respect the poem, for beauty and melody, will not
compare with The Shadowy Waters. But it reflects
skill in the use of epithets and proper names — Balor,
Cailtin, Sualtam, Dectara — always an ornament of English
blank verse since the time of Milton. And Mr. Yeats does
not fail to give dramatic unity to The Countess Cathleen,
not by any interplay of passion and emotion directed to
an end, but by a sustained and unfaltering poetic intensity.
These poems are dramatic only in form ; essentially they
are lyrics written in dialogue, though The Land of Heart's
Desire was a sufficient success upon the stage to be played
at the Avenue Theatre for six weeks in 1894. From the
first, however, dramatic writing has been near to the
poet's heart, and when opportunity arose with the founda-
tion of the Irish Theatre, Mr, Yeats turned to the com-
position of drama written both in verse and prose. But of
all his work in the last twenty years it can only be said
that it illustrates a weaker dramatic gift than that pos-
sessed by lyric poets of the last century — Tennyson,
Shelley, Beddoes, for example. His plays are undramatic,
for they move in a shadowy world of vague symbols;
and in the effort to reach the highest plane of the poetic
art, the rendering in dramatic speech of great poetry,
he is, save in isolated passages, less a poet than in the
long lyrics in dialogue and the short lyrics of The Wind
among the Reeds. Several of the dramas are in prose
and may more fitly be named in another chapter with
the work of the Irish playwrights, and even here the
verse dramas need only be characterised briefly, for as
poems they are less than the work of Mr. Yeats's earlier
years.

192 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PAKT n

According to Mr. Yeats he contemplated from boy-
hood the story of The Shadowy Waters (1900), and the
poem, much changed when staged in 1904, represents the
fruit of many years of musing upon and retouching an
age-old theme — the quest of the soul's desire. Forgael,
dissatisfied with earthly love, sails in search of that land
where love is imperishable. The poet's long preoccupation
with the tale explains not only the wistful dreaminess of
the drama but further the beautiful cadence of the blank
verse, which is the best Mr. Yeats has written. In On
Bailees Strand (1903) prose and verse are combined in the
telling of the widely diffused story of the father who
inadvertently slays his son. And thrown into contrast
with the heroic legend of Cuchulain Mr. Yeats introduces
roughspun humour in the figures of the Fool and the
Blind Man. But the welding of the two is unskilful;
and, all in all, the action is a little awkward and the drama
unnecessarily lengthy for the working out of its theme.
Compared with these The King's Threshold (1904) and
The Green Helmet (1910) are slight and occasional. The
latter, written in rhyming fourteeners, is described as
heroic farce, and though it may please with its curious
mingling of the startling, fantastic and heroic in a single
act, it can only give pleasure by an effect other than
dramatic. Deirdre (1907), which was successfully pro-
duced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, is less mystical and
more dramatic than The Shadowy Waters; and, though
Mr. Yeats 's setting of the story is weaker than the fine
version of Synge, the theme lends itself to dramatic treat-
ment and the author has not elsewhere handled a tragic
story with equal strength. In moments of great crisis, as
the Greek and Elizabethan dramatists understood, men
and women speak impersonally with a cadence of universal
meaning. In Deirdre Mr. Yeats realised this truth ; and
not a few splendid passages of great impersonal speech
remain in the memory after reading the poem. And thus,
as also is the case with Synge's play, Mr. Yeats's treat-
ment of the Deirdre story is not peculiarly Irish. In
illustration of the statement that the verse of Deirdre
is written upon the model of Elizabethan drama a
passage may be quoted from one of Deirdre 's
speeches :

CHAP, li] IRISH POETS 193

" Oh, singing women, set it down in a book
That love is all we need, even though it is
But the last drops we gather up like this ;
And though the drops are all we have known of life,
For we have been most friendless — praise us for it
And praise the double sunset, for nought's lacking,
But a good end to the long, cloudy day."

To the national and literary enthusiasm aroused by the
Irish Theatre is due a large part of the strongest and most
imaginative work of Irish writers in the past fifteen years ;
and not a little of the modern drama of Ireland is indirectly
attributable to Mr. Yeats, But in 'his own person he has
contributed nothing of importance to drama; and what
value his plays possess lies in their poetry and not in any
dramatic quality. Nearly every lyric poet of the last
century deviated for a time into dramatic writing; yet
Shelley's Cenci remains the greatest achievement of the
century in poetic drama, and this is better read in the
study, indeed almost impossible on the stage. The nine-
teenth century saw no great poetic drama ; and Mr. Yeats
has not succeeded where many have failed. The failure
was inevitable, for even in prose his dramatic writing
is not comparable to that of several living writers of his
country. It cannot be known whether in his effort to
write drama he checked his lyric faculty or whether his
native gifts were already on the wane when he adopted
the dramatic form ; but, whatever the cause, Mr. Yeats's
finest work as a poet belongs to ten or eleven years, from
1889 to 1899. In the three long lyric dialogues of this
period and in the shorter poems of The Wind among the
Reeds is contained a body of poetry unique of its kind in
the present generation. They set the writer apart as
the poet of Celtic myth and dream. The poetry of A. E.,
though it has a greatness in simplicity lacking in the
poetry of more complex emotions significant of Mr. Yeats 's
character, is by no means entirely typical of those traits
associated with the Celtic temper. His poems are
hortatory, joyous and optimistic ; and A. E. can sometimes
exult almost with the abandon to life of Whitman. His
love of his land is not with the wistful dreaminess of the
Celt, but with gladness and strong hope.

N

194 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS (PARTII

The work of A. E, as a poet is neither large in content
ftor greatly diversified in matter. Homeward, his first

book of verse, appeared in 1894, and each
A. E., of the succeeding small volumes repeated

George W. poems from earlier collections, till the

Russell, b. 1867. whole was gathered in Collected Poems

(1918). Nor does A. E. betray any
peculiar skill in diction, rhythm and metre, for his vocabu-
lary is narrow, and his metrical experiments are usually of
the simplest and follow the standards set by Tennyson
or Swinburne. He has a liking for long anapaestic
measures, and with these, where few have been entirely
successful, he does not fail. In melody he is, perhaps,
at his best with anapaests. Nor, again, do we often meet in
his verse with the inspired and magical phrase which
lingers unforgettable in the memory. To art he owes
little (though he seldom offends in technique) : but his
slender volumes carry with them the soul of poetry in their
rapture, their spiritual exaltation, their glad consciousness
of kinship between the mind of man and the moods of
earth. By his admirers he has been called a great poet.
The praise must be denied him if it means that he is to be
counted with the supreme poets of the world. In gift of
song and in range of thought and vision A. E. has plain
limitations. The recurring motif of many of the poems
— the unity of conscious life in the universe — may tend
to weariness in the end. And this constant theme shows
that his inspiration has come to him not through the
broad channels of English poetry, but from pagan Ireland,
the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads and the mystics of
all ages. The most personal of his poems are those which
sing, in the gladness of a pantheistic faith, the joy and
melancholy of "the grey woods, the upturned soil, the
deeps of the sky and the far reaches of the sombre sea.
In poems of men and women he may be purely imitative.

" From the heat that melts together oft a rarer essence slips,
And our hearts may still be parted at the meeting of the
lips "—

resembles in image and phrase the weaker manner of
Tennyson or Moore. Merely pretty lines, however, sur-
prise us by their unlikeness to his true character as a poet.

CHAP, n] IRISH POETS 195

Mr. Yeats has addressed A. E. as " the one poet of
modern Ireland who has moulded a spiritual ecstasy in
verse/5 and described his poems as revealing " in all
things a kind of scented flame consuming them from
within." No other words could as well state the essential
character of the poet and his work. In the beauty and
power of a spiritual fervour no poetry of to-day, not that
of Francis Thompson, has the skiey light and depth of
the work of A. E. The ideas of a pantheistic philosophy
are in all his poems ; for him there is no gulf fixed between
the physical and the spiritual; the beauty of the land
of heart's desire is wreathed with the sombre hues of earth.

" And one thing after another

Was whispered out of the air,

How God was a big, kind brother

Whose home is in everywhere,

His light like a smile comes glancing
Through the cool, cool winds as they pass,

From the flowers in heaven dancing
To the stars that shine in the grass.

From the clouds in deep blue wreathing

And most from the mountains tall,
But God like a wind goes breathing

A dream of Himself in all."

The joyous faith is repeated in the musings of * The Earth
Breath,' < The Dream of the Children,' ' In the Womb,'
6 The Gates of Dreamland ' and * The Twilight of Earth.'
Earth is a never-failing source of inspiration to the poetry
of A. E, He never writes with higher fervour and exalta-
tion than of the mother-earth whence we are sprung.

" I, thy child who went forth radiant

In the golden prime,
Find thee still the mother-hearted

Through my night in time ;
Find in thee the old enchantment

There behind the veil
Where the gods, my brothers, linger,

Hail, forever, hail ! "

Nbt only is A. E. a poet — he is a painter, a critic, a
public speaker, the chief worker of the Irish Agricultural
Organisation Society. And whatever the task to which

196 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PAETH

he sets himself he carries into it a mystic and spiritual
enthusiasm. But he is first a poet, and a poet who has,
despite the limitation of some monotony in thought, a
splendour of colour, a glow of faith, and a soul-uplifted
anticipation in which Mrs. Woods and Herbert Trench
alone among contemporary poets may sometimes be
counted in the same fellowship with him. It is a fact
noteworthy and of significance that Ireland can produce
in a single generation two poets of such manifest and high
genius, who betray parallelisms yet differ so far in thought
and method, as Mr. W. B. Yeats and A. E. The elusive
rhythms, the esotericism, the wistfulness of Mr. Yeats are
exchanged in A. E. for a powerful spiritual exaltation.
In either case we have a vision of life ceaselessly
poetical.

On A. E. and Mr. Yeats the gift of poetic genius has
been bestowed in full measure, and in the work of other
singers of modern Ireland it is but incidentally that we
meet with a poem of greater inspiration. It would be
hard to rate above its value Dr. Douglas Hyde's work
for Irish nationalism and literature; but he is to be

counted with the scholars and trans-
Douglas Hyde, lators. Outside his own country he is
b. 1860. best known by his Literary History of

Ireland (1899) ; in Ireland he is loved as
the author of Gaelic poems and plays ; and in the older
language he has chosen to write the greater part of his
creative work. It must not, however, be forgotten that in
his Love Songs of Connacht (1894) and Religious Songs
of Connacht (1906) he reveals himself as a translator of fine
literary attainment, and with these translations he has
greatly influenced the English style of other writers in the
Irish movement.

The Irish origin claimed by Lionel Pigot Johnson was

a literary affectation, and he is only loosely to be counted

with the poets of modern Ireland.

Lionel Pigot Johnson, He received a good classical edu-

1867-1902, cation; Winchester, Oxford and

London formed the background of his

life; and the impulse to write came to him through the

highways of Greek, Latin and English literature. Johnson

was a widely and wisely read man. At school he early

CHAP. H] IRISH POETS 197

displayed an interest in literature ; and after he went up
to New College, Oxford, in 1886, the chief influences
upon his prose style were Samuel Johnson and Walter
Pater, a conjunction of names not so curious, perhaps,
as at first it appears. From Oxford he went to London,
and soon became reviewer to a number of periodicals.
He had long been out of sympathy with the Anglicanism
in which he had been educated, and in 1891 he was
received into the Church of Rome. From this point in his
life Catholic tradition together with a love of Ireland,
which he adopted to himself, became the chief influences
upon his work and poetry. Unfortunately these better
influences were checked by the growing habit of intem-
perance to which was due his early death in 1902.

Lionel Johnson had little gift of unpremeditated song.
He was the maker of chiselled verses composed in the
rhythms of a vocabulary borrowed from Latin, though
he never wove so elaborate aijid gorgeous a brocade of
Latinisms as Francis Thompson. His two volumes of
verse, Poems (1895) and Ireland with other Poems (1897),
reflect a mind illumined with the familiar knowledge of
great poetry. Yet for so habitual a quoter in writing
prose, in verse he has singularly few direct borrowings
from classical or contemporary poetry. His chief themes
are the peaceful solitudes of moor and woodland, the
companionship of books, Ireland, the purity and mystic
tradition of Catholic asceticism. His note is elegiac, many
of the poems have a restrained melancholy; and, on the
other hand, the splendid * Sancta Silvarum ' and other
nature poems reveal a spirit of conscious joy in the
mystery of life and the beauty of the universe. His verse
is often ornate, mannered and stiff ; but, as in the delight-
ful lines addressed to Charles Lamb, he can be tender,
simple and unaffected. In his more ambitious manner
' The Dark Angel ' is distinguished by the passionate
sincerity of its thought and an unfaltering strength in
utterance. But it is in the moments, all too rare, of
simplicity without artifice, that we recognise the true poet
repressed by Johnson's wide learning and the critical
instinct fostered by his erudition. 'The Precept of
Silence,' a short and faultlessly beautiful poem, is the best
example he has left of spontaneous and emotional poetry.

198 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PAETII

" I know you : solitary griefs,

Desolate passions, aching Hours !
I know you : tremulous beliefs,
Agonised hopes, and ashen flowers !

The winds are sometimes sad to me ;

The starry spaces full of fear :
Mine is the sorrow on the sea,

And mine the sigh of places drear.

Some players upon plaintive strings
Publish their wistfulness abroad :

I have not spoken of these things,
Save to one man and unto God."

But Johnson rarely wrote as simply as this. His poetry
reveals a mind secluded, sensitive, fine, loving the beautiful
things that are not of a day but for all time, rather than
the genius of the born poet. His real power is better
seen in the admirable study, The Art of Thomas Hardy
(1894), and the miscellaneous critical essays published
under the title of Post Liminium (1911).

Synge was not only the greatest dramatist of the Irish
Theatre, but one of the greatest dramatists who has
written in English. His poetry was
John Millington a minor occupation with him and does

Synge, 1871-1909. not call for much comment. It was
his belief that most modern poetry had
withdrawn itself from human and ordinary things, and
that " before verse can be human again it must learn
to be brutal." To begin with a theory of life and poetry
is not often a happy event ; but only one or two of Synge *s
poems can be regarded as pattern pieces. * The 'Mergency
Man ' and * Danny,' as exercises upon the theory, are so
far interesting and the best in verse that Synge has left
behind him. Of interest also as experiments are his trans-
lations from Petrarch and Villon into the prose idiom of his
dramas. But Synge, the poet, contains no suggestion of
the real greatness of the man.

Of Mr. Padraic Colum it may also be said that in
dramatic writing he has been able to express himself more
fully than in verse. A few of his poems appeared in
New Songs (1904), an anthology from younger Iris^poets
selected by A. E., and in 1907 he published Wild Wth.

CHAP, n] IRISH POETS 199

a separate volume of verse. Not all the poems of this
volume flow simply and naturally, and some are of the

order of made poetry. His talent is
Padraic Colum, chiefly .lyrical, but Mr. Padraic Colum is
k 1881" ambitious, and he attempts in one of his

finest poems, 'The Plougher,' the
manner of the greater ode.

" Slowly the darkness falls, the broken lands blend with the

savage ;
The brute-tamer stands by the brutes, a head's breadth only

above them,
A head's breadth ? Ay, but therein is hell's depth and tfie

height up to heaven,
And the thrones of the gods and their halls, their chariots,

purples and splendours."

This is not only one of his most ambitious, but also one of
his most successful poems. For the most part, however, he
is content to write simply of the joy of life and earth, or
with pain and sadness, as in that pathetic little descrip-
tion (' An Old Woman of the Roads ?) of the wandering
beggar woman who yearns wistfully for her own cottage
with its bed, its clock, its " shining delph " and warm
hearthside. For Mr. Colum has a fine gift of description
in a few apt words. Without the expenditure of a single
unnecessary word ' Across the Door ' paints the whole
scene of a dance and a kiss in the dark night.

Finer work and greater promise may be found in Mr.
James Stephens 's Insurrections (1909) and The Hill of
Vision (1912). The poems contained
James Stephens, in these volumes scarcely at all reflect
b. 1882. the ideals of younger Irish writers, for

Mr. Stephens is the individual rebel
who comes out against the thrones, dominations and
powers of the universe, not as an affectation, but because
he is young and dissatisfied with a world that does not
reach his expectations. The verses of Insurrections are
nearer to the more crude and vigorous poems of Synge
than to the work of other poets in the Irish group. But,
as a poet, Mr. Stephens has a higher gift than Synge.
In c The Chill of Eve ' he can write a merely pretty and
conventional piece, but it is refreshing in the wastes of
minor verse of our day to come upon poems like * The

200 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS OARTH

Street behind Yours/ * Fifty Pounds a Year and a
Pension' or 'Where the Demons Grin/ in which Mr.
Stephens is discontented. In these, and in the first volume
in general, there are traces of the influence of Browning
and the Wesseoo Poems of Mr. Thomas Hardy, but little
enough of the Irish literary movement, unless it be Synge.
Mr. Stephens seeks no graces, nor is slang abomination to
him, but he nearly always expresses something and
expresses it vigorously. In ' The Optimist ' he interprets
afresh the old invitation, "All ye that labour, come to
me, and rest "; and in itself it offers a summary of the
philosophy contained in these poems.

" Let ye be still, ye tortured ones, nor strive
Where striving's futile. Ye can ne'er attain
To lay your burdens down. All things alive
Must bear the woes of life, and if tihe pain
Be more than ye can bear, then ye must die."

But Mr. Stephens is neither pessimist nor despondent
weakling. He has looked at the worst and gladly remains
an optimist. The long ode, ' A Prelude and a Song,'
with which his second volume opens, is animated by a
confident joy in living. It is a fine and imaginative piece
of writing, moving in clear and continuous, if irregular
rhythms. Admirable also are some of the short poems
descriptive of Irish character ; especially apt and vigorous
among pieces of this kind is * Danny Murphy.' And
almost perfect in simplicity of thought, restraint and
frankness is ' Afterwards '—the newly wed wife's lament
for lost maidenhood. Mr. Stephens is a young poet who
comes with the promise of still better things. To the gift
of vigour he adds a vivid, daring and singularly original
imaginative faculty, reflected in an almost equal degree
in his verse and in his unique prose book, The Crock of
Gold.

Other Irish poets of to-day can hardly be named, save
with even greater brevity, for they may be regarded as
deriving from the literary enthusiasm of Dublin in recent
years, and their work shows less trace of clear and definite
individuality. 'John Eglinton ' (W. K. Magee) and
Charles Weekes are mystic poets in the following of A. E.
and Mr. W. B. Yeats. Mr. James H. Cousins is a prolific

CHAP, ii] IRISH POETS 201

writer, and has, at least, half a dozen volumes of verse
to his credit besides textbooks for schools. His sonnets
and other poems in various metres have the merit of
simplicity. But his verse has no magic and little music,
and is the fruit of good literary intention rather than
talent. Thomas Keohler is the author of verse in the
anthology, New Songs, and he has also printed the Songs
of a Devotee (1906), a title which indicates the pietistic
mood of his writing. Dr. George Sigerson and Seosamh
MacCathmhaoil (Joseph Campbell) may also be mentioned
with the lesser Irish poets. On the other hand, save for a
few poems we should scarcely suspect Mr. Seumas O 'Sulli-
van of writing from Ireland. His inspiration springs from
a knowledge of good literature; his verse, pensive and
brooding without being weak or dilettante, is sustained
by careful craftsmanship ; and his poems reflect a thought-
ful and well-ordered mind.

CHAPTER III

IRISH POETESSES

Jane Barlow—' Moira O'Neill '—Eva Gore-Booth—Alice MilHgan— Ella
Young — Nora Hopper — Katharine Tynan — Dora Sigerson Shorter,

IN latter years Ireland has given birth to a larger number
than England of women who reach a creditable level of
poetic attainment, although, with one or two exceptions,
the prevalence of effusive sentiment and carelessly fluent
versification is a shortcoming characteristic of the Irish
poetesses. In the case of those who have fallen under
the spell of the modern Irish school of writers the influence
is little more than superficial and scarcely serves to bring
them within the main current of a national conscious-
ness. The Irish in everyday life are as practical a people
as any in the British Isles. Dublin is a city wholly given
over to practical affairs — government, social functions,
politics, active commerce and academic education. The
very religion of Ireland is immeasurably more definite
and clear than that bewildered phantasmagoria of ideas
which does service for religion in the mind of most English-
men. The battle of a hundred sects has convinced the
English that religion is an indefinite quantity and uncer-
tain in notation ; real Ireland is the home of one dogmatic
and institutional religion with tenets unmistakable to the
meanest intellect. The Celtic and the Latin races adopt
an institutional view of life, the Greek and Teutonic an
indefinite and philosophic ; and for this reason the mystic
genius flourishes among the Celts and Latins, because
the background of life is for them immovably fixed and
secure. Mysticism is the child of rigid and unbending
dogma. In the atmosphere of Catholicism or Calvinism
mystics have been born and lived full of honours; in
the many Protestant sects, where the creeds have lost
their backbone, mysticism has as consistently declined.

203

204 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PARTH

For it is only when a man is not in doubt about his soul
that he can let free his wayward dreams to rove; if he
is uncertain and tries to understand his universe by pro-
cesses of ratiocination he is without the happy confidence
needful to the mystic. The Celt is practical by instinct
and begins by making sure of the immortalities, and he
is therefore free to be a dreamer and an artist; the
Teuton, never wholly convinced of the unseen, resolves
his dreams into adventurous action, and he is therefore
greater, even as an artist, than the Celt. The Irish poets
and poetesses, whether or not they subscribe to the religion
of their country, are of it, and, with few exceptions,
mystics and dreamers.

And, further, the Celt, more primitive and less sophisti-
cated than the Teuton, is enchained in imagination and
memory to the places where he was born. The Teutonic
is one of the newest of races with but little historic tradi-
tion rooting its homing instincts to small areas; and
English poetry long since began to think imperially.
Celtic poetry clings to the little margins of the earth.
Thus a large part of Celtic and Irish poetry either springs
from impulses that are not of the things seen and tem-
poral, or it is inspired by a wistful love of familiar hills
and valleys. And these two aspects of Irish poetry merge
and flow into each other. "Facts," wrote Meredith,
" work on the Celtic mind in its imaginative exercise like
the flame of a lamp crossing the eyelids of a sleeper."
In other words the Irish imagination is moved by the
spirituality of life's external incident ; the temporal event
is of no value save as figurative of human emotions, pains
and joys.

Miss Jane Barlow only serves to illustrate one aspect
of the twofold responsiveness of the Irish imagination

when working in poetry. The people and
Jane Barlow, the soil of Ireland as they are,

b. 1860. neither its dreams nor its legendary past,

are the groundwork of her writing. In
style and approach to Irish life she belongs to the older
convention, not to the school of Mr. Yeats, J. M. Synge
and Lady Gregory. She has more affinity with Lever,
Lover and Mangan. In her poems there is little or nothing
of mystic and personal ecstasy, if more truth and sincerity

CHAP, m] IRISH POETESSES 205

than is to be found in much of the hot-house mysticism of
younger Irish poets of to-day. Although Miss Barlow is
better known as a writer of short stories and novels she
has published in verse Borland Studies (1891) and The
Mockers (1908). The first volume contains seven long
dialect poems written in anapaestic measure. Throughout
we are conscious of a scholarly and reflective mind, which
does not intrude itself but looks clearly and simply on
life and is moved with a genuine sympathy for men and
women. The volume of 1908 opens with two poems written
in the same metre and in the same narrative manner, and
includes, furthermore, poems of a more purely lyrical
character. Sometimes in shorter poems, like the sonnet,
* A Last Lesson, 9 or in the elegiac * On Lisnadara,' Miss
Barlow can write poetry that is uncommon and dis-
tinctive; but she is, in the greater part of her verse-
writing, a literary poet and not a poet of inspiration.
What she has to tell in verse could, as a rule, be told as
well or better in prose; but her narrative poems are
tuneful, they have energy and movement, and there is
never any smallness in her writing. She knows how to
touch the humour and pathos of everyday life without
sentimentalism, and life's nobler implications are always
present to her thought.

Moira O'Neill's (Mrs. Skrine) lyric poems of Irish
peasant life are of a different and far higher order. Her

slender volume, Songs of the Glens of
Moira O'Neill. Antrim (1900)1, contained twenty-five

short poems written in the dialect of
the Antrim glens. Moira O'Neill's heart is with men
and women of the soil; if she sings of nature it is
of nature seen through the unsophisticated vision of
the peasant. For objective or metaphysical abstractions
she cares little. These poems are at once dramatic in
their representation of differing types of peasant life and
intensely subjective. They are sometimes gay with a note
of " divilment," but melancholy is never far absent. When
not remotely spiritual Irish poetry reflects drink, sport and
boisterous diversions, or the sadness of an oppressed and
struggling race. Lever and Lover have long been dead,
and the world only sings drinking-songs as at a religious
I More Song 9 of the Glens of Antrim appeared in 1921,

206 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PAETII

function in which it has ceased to believe. And Irish
poetry has the melancholy of modern disillusion. Moira
O'NeilPs songs are poems of exile, regret or longing, ex-
pressed in the speech and with the thought of the simple
folk of the land, but of a Celtic people who naturally utter
their thoughts to the accompaniment of poetical imagery
and see the common events of their rough lives in the
light of a poetical vision. The beautiful ' Corrymeela,5
the plaint of an Irish harvester in England, is now well
known, and hardly less simple and true in humanity and
pathos are * The Boy from Ballytearm ' and c A Song of
Glennan.' In the poetry of A. E. the love of Irish soil
is a spiritual exaltation, a strong fervour; with Moira
O'Neill it is a pensive and wistful mood. In * A Song
of Glennan ' the labourer torn from his native place utters
his thoughts and regrets^

i€ But since we come away from there

An* far across the say,
I still have wrought an* still have thought
The way I'm doin' the day.

An5 now we're quarely better fixed,

In troth ! there's nothin' wrong :
But me an' mine, by rain an' shine

We do be thinkin' long."

The utter simplicity of the words and thoughts touch the
very heart of human regret as surely as does Swinburne
in his * Jacobite Exile.' And the psychological truthful-
ness of the poem is noteworthy. In the home glens of
Antrim the peasant accepted unthinkingly the accidents
of his life —

*' The weary wind migKt take the roof,

The rain might lay the corn ;
We'd up and look for better luck
About the morrow's morn."

But across the sea in a strange land he meets and suc-
cumbs to the spirit of the modern world — the questioning
mood.

In recent years Ireland has produced no singer of the
simple life of the people gifted with so rare and fine a
genius as Moira O'Neill. By virtue of the simple dignity

CHAP, m] IRISH POETESSES 20*

and strength of her art she takes her place but little
below Mr. W. B. Yeats and A. E., the two chief poets of
the Irish literary group. Her lyrics are the product of
unforced poetic genius ; her gaiety, her melancholy and her
sense of tragedy are entirely inevitable and natural ; and
she has a happy gift of individualising character in song.
She has also written a novel, An Easter Vacation (1893),
and a shorter tale, The Elf-errant (1895), but it is by her
poetry that she is and will be remembered.

No poetess has reflected more beautifuly than Moira
O'Neill the love of Irish soil, and no Irish poetess possesses

in equal measure with Miss Eva Gore-
Eva Gore-Booth. Booth the genius of mystic knowledge

and insight. The first volume of Poems
(1898) revealed scarcely anything of her real power. As a
metrist she wrote without difficulty or effort, but beyond
a slight tendency to wistfulness and melancholy there was
nothing to mark the Celtic strain in her work. On the
other hand some of these poems are incisive, even realistic
and satirical. One poem, * Finger Posts,' reveals the deep-
seated mysticism of Miss Gore-Booth's mind. And the
common and prevailing characteristic of all her later
volumes, including the poetic drama of The Sorrowful
Princess (1907), is a mystic vision of life's spiritual signi-
ficance. This is most clearly seen in her second, and still
the best of her volumes, The One and the Many (1904),
in which, under differing aspects and in separate sequences
of poems, the resolution of life's incongruities is found in
the one dream and hope. The thought of this volume
is quickened with a mystical and optimistic faith. And,
neither as a poetess nor as a mystic, does Miss Gore-Booth
lean only upon her emotions, trusting to the heart divorced
from the intellect, like many of her Irish sisters. She is a
student: her poems reflect the thought of Porphyry,
Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Paracelsus. She does not,
like Mr. W. B. Yeats, nourish her soul chiefly on the
spiritual heritage of the Irish race. She goes far afield;
her poems reveal a mind which has made the mysticism of
the world a living part of its imaginative faculty. The
influence of the Irish literary movement and the
legendary tales of Ireland are traceable in the dramatic
poems, Unseen Kings (1904) and The Triumph of Mseve

208 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PARTII

(1905) ; and, among shorter lyrics, the exquisite ' Little
Waves of Breffny ' owes its inspiration to the love of
Ireland ; but it is in her mystical volumes, in The One and
the Many and the shorter poems of The Three Resurrec-
tions (1905), that Miss Gore-Booth most surely finds her
voice. There is no suspicion of a desire to shirk reality, nor
any suggestion of intellectual weakness in her thought,
mystical and obscure as it may seem to many readers.
Furthermore, the technicaLquality of her poetry is admir-
able, and she writes with an inborn gift for choosing the
perfect phrase. The wistful love of homeland and the
dreamy spirituality of the Celt are severally illustrated
in the poetry of Moira O'Neill and Miss Eva Gore-Booth
with greater power and beauty than in any other Irish
poetesses of to-day.

Miss Alice Milligan and Miss Ella Young are also
poetesses to be counted with the rank and file of the Irish
literary renascence. Miss Milligan *s
Alice Milligan. poems, contained in Hero Lays (1908),
are often of a ringing and patriotic char-
acter. She writes in long lines and with an easy rhythm,
often more reminiscent of masculine than feminine work-
manship. < The Lament of the Dark Daughter ' and ' The
Defenders of the Ford > are strong and vigorous lays.
Miss Milligan always writes with fervour; nearly every
poem is inspired by a passionate love of Ireland. In the
matter of rhyming and metre she can be careless, her
writing lacks distinctive individuality, but she is more
than the mere versifier.

Miss Ella Young has published a few verses in the
anthology, New Songs (1904), and in Poems
Ella Young, (1906), verses that have a tender graceful-
b. 1867. ness, but are in on wise remarkable.

The Irish element in the writing of Nora Hopper,
Katharine Tynan and Mrs. Dora Sigerson Shorter is
accidental rather than considered and
Nora Hopper, deliberate. The group consciousness, when
1871-1906. it passes beyond the limits of family, is

less likely to kindle the imagination of
women than men, and the spirit of a national movement
in Irish literature has only touched women writers fit-
fully. Save for a strain of Celtic sentimentality and the

CHAP, in] IRISH POETESSES 209

occasional use of a Hibernian setting or of dialect there is
little distinctive of race in the volumes of the three
poetesses just named. Nora Hopper (Mrs. Wilfrid Hugh
Chesson) the most abundantly endowed with poetic genius
of the three, writes with truer inspiration of classic theme
than of Irish life. In her first volume, Ballads in Prose
(1894), consisting of Irish folk-stories rendered into
English prose, the chief note is Celtic, but in her verse
she is more influenced by classic myth and English lyrical
song. Many poems in her first volume of verse, Under
Quicken Boughs (1896), relate to Ireland and its people;
but it is in poems of another order, in * Phceacia ' and the
truly beautiful and musical ' Nymph's Lament ' that she
attains to her best. A few lines from the latter will
illustrate Nora Hopper's power, though it is to be con-
fessed she seldom wrote so well :

" O, Sister Nymphs, how shall we dance or sing

Remembering

What was and is not ? How sing any more
Now Aphrodite's rosy reign is o'er?

For on the forest-floor
Our feet fall wearily the summer long,

The whole year long :

No sudden Goddess through the rushes glides,
No eager God among the laurels hides ;
Jove's eagle mopes beside an empty throne,
Persephone and Ades sit alone

By Lethe's hollow shore."

Songs of the Morning (1900) and Aquamarines (1902)
contain nothing on the same plane. The thought is more
conventional, her imagination is weaker, and Nora
Hopper's taste has not improved. * A Woman's Marriage
Song' is almost foolishly mawkish. Although she can
write in the stronger manner of the earlier volume in
'A Pagan,' ' Ulfhada ' and ' The Seaweed-Gatherers,'
there is not much to distinguish these volumes from the
great mass of miscellaneous verse which continually pours
from the press.

Mrs. Chesson always wrote with grace, in that manner

which may be described as refined, and her verse

was nearly always melodious. But, as is the case with

Katharine Tynan, the flow of verse is too easy; there

o

210 tRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PARTII

is a treacherous facility in the expression of little thoughts,
little impressions and superficial emotions. She rarely
calls for intellectual alertness in the reader, she scarcely
ever surprises with the unexpected, and, in equivalence,
she does not often sink beneath the level of moderate
commendation. Under Quicken Boughs is her one dis-
tinctive volume, containing poetry of a nobler and more
imaginative order.

Katharine Tynan (Mrs. Hinkson) is never possessed by
the moods of stronger inspiration which occasionally

visited Nora Hopper. Her earliest
Katharine Tynan, volumes, Louise de Vallitre (1885),
b-1861. Shamrocks (1887) and Ballads and

Lyrics (1891) are disfigured by many
lapses in taste and style. The rhymes — " sweeter, glitter,
palace, trellis, sward, herd " — are often inexcusable; and
she is sometimes guilty of cacophonies in music and
rhythm which go far to ruin a whole poem. * Rosa
Spinosa,' for example, both in content and form rises
above the standard of her earlier work, but she damages
it irretrievably with the jangle of the closing couplet —

" Little rose of thorns, come close
To the heart you stab so, Rose ! "

Many of her poems are songs of childhood and children,
pretty and graceful, but not rising above the common-
place in thought or descriptive power. The Cuckoo Songs
of 1894 showed, however, a distinct advance upon the
work of the earlier volumes. Especially beautiful in this
volume is < The Sad Mother,' which rises above Mrs.
Hinkson >s graceful sentimentality to a note of tragic
pathos which is true and deep. And in some of the
dialect poems, notably in ' The Train that Goes to Ireland,'
in New Poems (1911), she reaches a higher level than her
ordinary manner. But there is little, in general, to dis-
tinguish from each other the many volumes of verse she
has published. The garden in spring and winter, the
birds chirruping, the love of children, pieties and religious
observances, these form the staple of Katharine Tynan's
verse. There is seldom any strong emotion in thought
or originality in phrase, nor, again, is she the possessor
of any personality in style. And with little modification

CHAP, in] IRISH POETESSES

these observations apply with equal relevance to the
writing of Dora Sigerson (Mrs. Clement Shorter).

Mrs. Shorter 's poetry is Celtic not only in its moods
of melancholy and joyous faith, in its wistful tenderness,
but in the incoherence and formlessness
Dora Sigerson which attach to the work of the purely
Shorter. romantic writer. She, like Katharine

Tynan and Nora Hopper, had a ready
gift of slender song, but of intellectual power there is little
evidence and her judgment was untrustworthy. Although
she was not without that power of conciseness which
belongs by right to the ballad form, she was often care-
lessly prolix and indefinite. Nor had she any marked dis-
tinction in style. Like many of the Irish poets, from the
days of Tom Moore to our own, she wrote English as a
language partly foreign to the processes of her thought.
Subconsciously she thought in another grammar, and her
lapses could be surprising. And, further, her ear was
curiously defective. She sometimes failed to note when she
passed from one metre into another; and even in writing
common measure she could break down, as the ballad of
* Earl Roderick's Bride ' will illustrate. Only too often
she suggests a snatching at the first phrases that came to
mind, heedless of rhythms and even sequence of thought.
Her poetry is a poetry of the emotions in which the intel-
lect plays little part.

Her most characteristic work lies in the ballad form,
and, if Meredith be right in asserting that the main point
of a ballad is "to tell a story metrically/' we need feel
less distress with Mrs. Shorter's habitual faults than we
should in lyric and dramatic poetry. For Mrs. SKorter
has written many ballads which manifest a faculty for
sympathy not only with life's emotions and passions,
but with its activities and heroic deeds, and in all there
is present that consciousness of communion with the
unseen world so distinctive of the Celtic temperament.
In 1907 the five volumes of verse she had already pub-
lished were gathered in Collected Poems : in 1910 another
substantial volume, The Troubadour and other Poems,
appeared, and in 1912 New Poems. Among the lyrics
of these volumes ' ^Distant Voices,' * A Vagrant Heart,9
< The Gypsies' Road ' and the charming ' Wind on the

212 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

Hills ' may be named. In these and other lyrics a wist-
fulness of unrest and a love of fatherland are the prevail-
ing themes. But it is when she writes of action, of pathos
and tragedy in life, in such poems as ' The Guardian
Angels,' ' The Six Sorrows,5 ' Jeanne Bras ' and ' A Ballad
of Marjorie > that Mrs. Shorter is at her best. In * A
Ballad of Marjorie ' she reaches kinship with the imper-
sonal and moving pathos of old folk-song, while ' The
Man who Trod on Sleeping Grass * is a beautiful ballad
in a more modern manner. If the greater part of Mrs.
Shorter 's writing does not reach a high standard in distinc-
tion of content and style, a few of her ballads and one or
two of her lyrics are not easily to be forgotten. Her verse
is never enhanced by those sudden and illuminating
felicities of phrase and thought which mark greater poetry
and occasionally the work of lesser poets; but, on the
other hand, her sentiment rarely degenerates to insipidity.

CHAPTER IV

THE IRISH LITERARY THEATRE

THE importance of the Celtic Revival in Ireland is most
marked in the impulse it has aroused toward the com-
position of literary drama, a drama that may not only
be read with pleasure in the library but be acted with
success on the stage. If the work of Synge alone be
taken into account, and other Irish dramatists forgotten,
this statement still holds true. His plays, however, are
not the only work of new power and beauty in this kind
which Dublin has sent out in the last quarter of a century.
To them must be added the dramatic experiments of Mr.
Yeats, A, E., Dr. Hyde, the dialogues and farces of Lady
Gregory, and the prose plays of a number of other writers,
including Mr. Lennox Robinson, Mr. Rutherford Mayne,
Mr. Padraic Colum, Mr. Edward Martyn, William Boyle,
Mr. St. John Ervine. In the few years that have passed
since an Irish theatre for Irish plays came into being more
good work has been done in Dublin than in London for
the production of a drama that can claim to be literature.
The stronger and more national inspiration has already
begun to wane. Mr. Robinson and Mr. Ervine, for
example, are falling back into the rut of Ibsen, Haupt-
mann and Galsworthy, substituting for the greater truth of
poetry the make-believe of photographic realism. But it
would be rash to prophesy that the Irish playwrights are
unlikely to recover their first vigour and originality.
Perhaps Irish drama has only fallen upon its hobbledehoy
period. On the other hand, like the drama of the
Elizabethan age, it may be fated to flourish in full vigour
for less than a generation.

When Dublin began to produce a school of native play-
wrights the time was past by several years since Ibsen
had been staged with comparative success in London and

213

214 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

the battle fought on his behalf by Mr. Archer and Mr.
Gosse virtually won. In 1§93 six plays by Ibsen were
produced in London, and in the preceding year Haupt-
mann's Die Weber appeared in Germany. Hauptmann's
play was an extension of Ibsen 's social drama to sociolo-
gical and economic study in the method and spirit of the
commission of inquiry ; and it provided the pattern which
has since been followed by innumerable playwrights both
in the country of its origin and in England. The tide
set strongly in the direction of realistic and intellectual
drama; and, though this form cannot claim to have won
great popularity, it is the only form of drama, to speak
in general terms, in which work of any value or significance
has been done in the past twenty years. To Ireland, how-
ever, may be assigned the credit of creating a drama, not
cosmopolitan and realistic, but national, poetical and
humorous, a drama which, without pretence of the higher
intellectualism, rendered faithfully the pains and joys of
simple men and women. And it is in this, the reaction,
conscious or unconscious, against the European domi-
nance of Ibsen, that the drama of the Irish Revival is
remarkable and noteworthy. For the first time in its
history Ireland has produced a drama that is national,
owing little to extraneous influences. The plays of
Sheridan and Goldsmith expressed nothing that was
exclusively Irish, and the drama of Wilde in a later
generation reflects Paris and London. But contemporary
Irish dramatists have worked out their own salvation,
finding their sources not in the printed drama of other
countries but in the living Irishman on the soil or in the
streets of Dublin and country towns. That they have
wholly banished the memory of Ibsen, Hauptmann and
Maeterlinck it would be idle to pretend ; yet in their more
individual work they have succeeded in making a new
drama that has a method peculiarly its own in style and in
the substitution of a poetry of human passion in place
of objective and intellectual dissection.

In the preface to The Bending of the Bough Mr. George
Moore supplies, in the mood of dogmatic generalisation
native to his thought, an explanation of the motive which
led to the foundation of the Irish Literary Theatre. Art,
we are told, only flowers in the youth of nations, and

CHAP, iv] THE IRISH LITERARY THEATRE 215

England and London are old. In London the literary
drama of Ibsen and Maeterlinck is unacceptable, for art
is not desired by the theatre-going public of the great
city. Therefore Irish dramatists are content to go to
Dublin to produce plays at a slight loss, not for the sake
of the public but for the sake of art. In the years which
have followed this preface Mr. Moore has discovered that
Dublin fails to respond whole-heartedly, and with a readi-
ness that shames London, to the art of the drama. Dublin,
like London, is in part a city of pleasure, and there as
elsewhere, since Imperial Rome, that section of society
which has leisure and money to amuse itself persists in
regarding the theatre as primarily a place of entertain-
ment, and the populace still finds perennial joy in the
farce, the melodrama and the variety show. The Abbey
Theatre, like the prophet, is not without honour save in
its own country; and its name is more noised abroad
in England and America than in the place of its birth.
Mr. Yeats has estimated the audience upon which the
Abbey Theatre calls at four thousand young people drawn
from the more intelligent and eager section of the lower
middle classes, who have been gradually educated to
appreciate not only the national motif of the new play-
wrights but the sincerity of their artistic intention. The
founders of the Irish Literary Theatre claim that they
have been justified in their aims by discovering a new
audience. The gallery of the Dublin Theatre, it is said,
has been known to applaud the sentiment, " At all events
we have no proof that spiritual truths are illusory, whereas
we know that the world is " — a sentiment, it is implied,
that would pass over the sophisticated and sceptical
gallery of England without response.

The perfect graces of civilisation can only be cultivated
in small city-states, and the playwright of Dublin has,
at least, this advantage over his fellow of London, Berlin
or Paris, that he makes his first appeal to a smaller, a
more compact and a more homogeneous public. But if
Dublin is fortunate in lying removed from the highways
of European commercialism and industrialism she is not
wholly at unity within herself. Dublin Castle was till
recently a centre of foreign influences and ideas ; Trinity
College has never wholly identified itself with Irish life;

216 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PAKTH

and Nationalism or Sinn Fein finds as little use for art as
do political movements in other lands. The literary, the
poetic, the artistic beauty of Irish drama will find its small
audience in London and Chicago, as well as Dublin : it is
in the element of association with the traditions and
memories of racial life that the plays of the Abbey Theatre
will find a devotion in Dublin they cannot hope for else-
where. This apart, Irish drama is as likely to find genuine
appreciation, wide or narrow, in London as in Dublin.

The last century had almost drawn to its close when
the Irish Literary Theatre was founded, but now it has
a repertory of perhaps not less than a hundred plays.
In the initial stages of the project Mr. Yeats was sup-
ported by Mr. Martyn and Lady Gregory, and later they
were joined by Mr. George Moore. In 1899 The Countess
Cathleen by Mr. Yeats and The Heather Field by Mr.
Martyn were produced at the Antient Concert Rooms,
Dublin, In the following year Mr. Moore's Bending of the
Bough was given, and in 1901 Dr. Hyde's Twisting of the
Rope, the first play to be produced in Gaelic. English
actors fetched from London were first used in these per-
formances; but in 1902 they were replaced by Irish
players, who trained themselves in the new drama by
acting in pieces by A. E., Mr. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Mr.
Colum and Mr. Cousins. The workers in the movement
formed themselves into the Irish National Theatre
Society ; and in 1904 , through the generosity of Miss
Horniman, they were put in possession of the Abbey
Theatre, since then the centre of Irish playwriting. The
ideals of the Abbey Theatre have begotten the work of a
group of talented young dramatists. Its repertory is a
body of drama national in temper, original in style,
inspired with poetical image and metaphor, a drama which
has no close counterpart in Europe to-day. The preserva-
tion of Irish nationality was, as Lady Gregory asserts, the
chief end of the Gaelic League. And this ideal has given
also to the Irish dramatists what otherwise they would
not have possessed in equal measure: it has given to
them, and not only to Synge, of whom Lady Gregory
uses the words, " fable, emotion, style."

CHAPTER V

THE IKISH PLAYWRIGHTS

W. B. Yeats— A. E. — Edward Martyn — George Moore — Lady Gregory—
J. M. Synge — William Boyle — Padraic Colum — Lennox Robinson —
T. C. Murray — Rutherford Mayne — St. John Ervine.

WITHOUT the enthusiasm of Mr. Yeats and his chief
supporter, Lady Gregory, the Abbey Theatre would never

have been the magnet drawing toward
William Butler itself so much writing that was original
Yeats, b. 1865. in temper and method. They have not

only written for the stage of that theatre,
but inspired others of a younger generation to gather them-
selves into a group of dramatists animated with a national
ideal. Therefore, though Mr. Yeats is a lyric poet and not
a dramatist, his prose dramas cannot be overlooked.
Verse-drama is doubtless his ideal, and the prose-plays are
probably, in part at least, an attempt to answer the
demands of the average audience in Dublin. Of four plays
in prose — Cathleen ni Houlihan (1908), A Pot of Broth
(1902), The Hour-glass: A Morality (1903) and Where
There is Nothing (1903) — the first-named is not only
dramatically the most successful but the most distinctively
Irish in its atmosphere. The action of the play is placed
at the time of the French landing of 1798, and Ireland is
presented under the figure of a poor old woman. A lad
who is asked by cottagers if he has seen her pass replies,
" I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk
of a queen." The thought of the play is that which
inspires the whole Irish movement — Ireland is old in
history, but young in spirit. The future is yet with her,
though strangers are in her house, and her " four beautiful
green fields " have been taken away. The dialogue of this
play scarcely springs from the characters, but the style

217

218 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PAETH

has a charm in its entire simplicity. And this alone relieves
the obtrusive didacticism of the piece and shelters the
allegorical intention which is thrust into the fore-
ground.

A Pot of Broth is merely slight farce written in a spirit
different to anything else from Mr. Yeats 's pen.

Of a different character again are The Hour-glass, which
shows the wisdom of the Fool who believes in the invisible
world and the folly of the Wise Man who believes only in
that which may be seen and handled, and his longest
dramatic writing, Where There is Nothing, an extra-
ordinary medley representing chiefly the religious ecstasies
and desire of union with the infinite of a man in the
modern world disillusioned with the conventional and
unintelligent materialism of the age. The world of spiritual
vision in which the soul has communion with dreams
transcending the harsh reality of common life, is Mr.
Yeats *s haven of refuge from " fanciless fact," and there-
fore he has given what there is in him to give chiefly in
mystical lyrics. In writing for the stage he has been
most successful when he wrought out in verse the dim
legends of Ireland's heroic past. And the strength of his
verse-plays is in their poetry, not their action. That
drama may be romantic Shakespeare has abundantly
proved, but it may be doubted whether lasting drama
can ever be written save by the writer who finds no
strangeness in contact with human nature in the rough.
And in this faculty Mr. Yeats is weak. Whatever slight
element of it we find in his plays may be attributed to the
influence of Lady Gregory. His journeyings to gather
folk-lore and song from the peasantry of Sligo have not
given him that friendly companionship with the common
people, that knowledge of their thought, speech and
humour which lends truth, vigour, raciness to the dialogue
of Synge, Lady Gregory and Mr. Padraic Colum. Songs
and legendary tales have been to Mr. Yeats literary
material absorbed and transfigured in reproduction by
the workings of an individual and differentiated imagina-
tion. Cathleen ni Houlihan, the best of the prose plays,
is patently allegorical; and the others are of interest,
not as drama, but as additional illustrations of the mood
and thought of the contemporary Celtic Revival in its

CHAP, v] THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 219

contact with the bare and circumstantial detail of the
modern world.

And with but little change these comments apply to

the venture in drama of Mr. Yeats's fellow-poet, A. E.,

Deirdre (1902), which, conceived and

A. E., George W. written rapidly, is the work of a lyric

Russell, b. 1867. and mystical poet. It is one outcome

of the Irish Literary Theatre, but it

can take no place in the drama of value produced by the

movement.

Among those who wrote plays for the new theatre in
its tentative beginnings the names of Mr. Edward Martyn
and Mr. George Moore are of greater
Edward Martyn, importance. Mr. Martyn was one of
b. 1859, the first to be drawn into the move-

ment, and one of the first to fall away
gradually after his play, A Tale of a Town, had been
refused. Although he possesses fertility of ideas Mr.
Martyn has not always been able to use his gift with
dramatic effect; and, like Mr. Moore, he is by tempera-
ment and experience out of touch with the romance,
poetry and mysticism, peasant humour and peasant
speech, which are the ground of the folk-play the Irish
Theatre has set itself to produce. He is more at home
in representing the educated and middle classes of Ireland,
and, in consequence, his work is less distinctively national.
Nevertheless The Heather Field (1899), one of the first
plays produced in Dublin under the auspices of the new
movement, was a popular success. The theme — the con-
trast between harsh fact and Celtic idealism — is elucidated
in the story of the Irish landlord who sacrifices his all
and sinks into madness in the vain attempt to realise
waste land. In the art of construction Mr. Martyn
showed himself in this play a competent student of Ibsen ;
the poetry and beauty of natural scenery he used skilfully
as a background to the action; but the relationship of
the dialogue to the characters is insecure and even false.
The success of the play may be attributed to its excellent
construction and, consequently, its direct appeal to the
audience. The motif of Mseve (1899) is the same —
Ireland's choice of the splendid dream in place of the
material fact— but this mystic and symbolic play is far

220 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PARTH

withdrawn from the everyday character of The Heather
Field. Mr. Martyn's first play seemed to hold the promise
of a new dramatist whose limitations were, perhaps, but
those of inexperience. Unfortunately he has belied his
first promise and fallen back upon crude sensationalism
in The Enchanted Sea (1902), political propagandised in
A Tale of a Town (1902), the drab severity and impersonal
dialogue of Ibsen in The Place-hunters (1905) and Grange-
colman (1912).

Mr. Martyn obviously does not belong to the central
group of Irish playwrights, who adopt an artificial and
literary simplicity in order to escape the trammels of
civilisation and shake off the sophisticated manners of a
world that has grown a weariness to them. Their style
is often a deliberate artifice, their subjects are garnered
from dream-stories of the past or unsullied nooks of
primitive life and thought in modern Ireland. With
these aims Mr. Martyn has nothing in common save his
Irish nationalism. He dramatises the bourgeois and
middle-class life of his country in the present day; his
peasants, if they are introduced, are but foils to the other
characters; his art he has learned not from Mr. Yeats
and Synge, but from Ibsen; and his dialogue approxi-
mates to Ibsen in his most serious lapses from truth to
character. Mr. Martyn would be as successful, neither
more nor less, were his scenes laid out of Ireland. The
life of his country is but the accidental background of
his drama; and his connection with the Irish Literary
Theatre is equally as accidental.

The temporary return of Mr. Moore to Ireland, his active
participation in the work of the Irish Theatre, his late-
born attempt to recover for himself the
George Moore, heritage of the Gael, were surprising as
b. 1853. an example of volte-face in the disciple

of the French realists. But the change
was ushered in with a prelude : not only was Ulick Dean,
in Evelyn Innes, studied from Mr. Yeats, but the anxious
pre-occupation of the narrative and its sequel, Sister
Teresa, with spiritual problems was an outward sign of
new theory and discipleship. And in 1901 Mr. Moore
returned to Dublin, to live there for a large part of the
next ten years. His first enthusiasm soon cooled to luke-

CHAP, v] THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 221

warmness, and then turned to sceptical criticism. And the
most important consequence of Mr. Moore's connection
with the Abbey Theatre is not to be found in his plays,
but in The Lake, the short stories of The Vntilled Field,
and in the trilogy, Hail and Farewell; for, despite the
gift of dramatic characterisation exhibited in the novels,
Mr. Moore has not the genius of a writer for the stage.

Before his conversion to the cult of the Gael Mr. Moore
had staged The Strike at Arlingford (1898) in answer to a
challenge from Mr, G. R. Sims. The construction of this
piece is good, but otherwise it has little to recommend it ;
it is not the original and unconventional piece the author
hoped to make it. One of the first plays produced by
the Irish Literary Theatre, Mr. Moore's Bending of the
Bough (1900), was a complete rewriting of Mr. Martyn's
Tale of a Town, after it had been refused in its earlier
form. In credibility of action Mr. Moore may have
improved upon his original; but just where the author
is strongest in his novels he is weakest in The Bending
of the Bough. It is a colourless production, its dialogue
largely in the air and devoid of local characteristics — a
play made in the study about people whom the author
has not known intimately. His next play, Diarmid and
Grania (1901), was the result of collaboration with Mr.
Yeats in the dramatisation of one of Ireland's ancient
legends. In the realm of the mythic and legendary Mr.
Moore is not at his ease, and Mr. Yeats, who is, has been
overpowered by his collaborator, with the consequence
that the play is false in atmosphere.

With Diarmid and Grania Mr. Moore's direct support
of the Irish Theatre with his pen ceased, although he has
since made one or two further essays in the art of dramatic
writing. Esther Waters in dramatised version (1911)
proved, however, lengthy and ineffective : and Elizabeth
Cooper (1918), containing an excellent subject for light
farce thrown away by mishandling, came only as if to
show that he had turned to the stage too late and did not
possess the knowledge required of the playwright. His
connection with the Celtic Movement, as with the stage, has
been incidental and fortuitous, and to discover the true
genius of Mr. Moore we must turn to him when he is
writing in other veins and after another manner.

222 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PABTH

Mr. Martyn and Mr. Moore have long since dropped
away from the other founders of the Irish Literary

Theatre; but Mr. Yeats and Lady
Lady Gregory, Gregory remain, and to the latter the
k W52. repertory of the Abbey Theatre owes

some of its best caprices and farcial
dialogues. Nevertheless in Our Irish Theatre (1918), in
which Lady Gregory relates the fortunes of the Abbey
Theatre, she informs us that until she was carried into the
new movement she " never cared much for the stage."
Nor did the renascence of interest in Irish life and litera-
ture prompt her at first to dramatic writing. To Lady
Gregory, Dr Hyde and Mr, Yeats has chiefly fallen the
task of resuscitating the older cycles of Gaelic legend.
Their place in the story of literature will be found in Dr.
Hyde's Literary History of Ireland ; Mr. Yeats has used the
tales of Finn and Cuchulain in his dramas and dramatic
poems, On Bailees Strand, Deirdre and The Wanderings
of Oisin; to Lady Gregory it was left to arrange the two
greater cycles and adapt them to English prose narrative
written with an artifice and simplicity which make her
books among the most delightful to English readers of any
that have come out of Ireland in recent years. In Gods
and Fighting Men (1904) she has collected the older cycles
of the Tuatha de Danaan and the Fianna, including the
stories of Finn, Diarmuid and Oisin, in Cuchulain of Muir-
themne (1902) are gathered the later stories of the Red
Branch cycle, which centre in the hero, Cuchulain. And
in the same style are written the stories of a different
character contained in the Book of Saints and Wonders
(1908). These legends are written, to use Lady Gregory's
phrase, " in the manner of the thatched houses, *' that is,
in the idiom of Irish peasant speech. Lady Gregory
attributes the " Kiltartan English " of her prose adapta-
tions and plays to the influence of the idiom employed
by Dr. Hyde in his translations from the songs of Con-
nacht. This style, with the admixture in each case of
whatever element of personality may individually be
possible, has become the common property of a number of
the Irish writers, and, though it may be an impertinence of
the reader who can claim but the slightest knowledge
of Irish peasant speech to doubt the reality of this dialect,

CHAP, v] THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 228

it is difficult to avoid a suspicion that it is an artifice as
unreal as the earlier convention of Lover and Lever. By
admirers it is asserted that " Kiltartan English " is a
living speech; but to Mr. Moore it is only known as a
literary device, and a device not always handled with
skill. The unfamiliarity of the idiom, the quaint turns
of speech, the inversion of common order in words take the
English reader by surprise and delight him with the charm
of the unexpected. It is only on a re-reading that the
literary artificiality, the tortured simplicity of the style
become apparent, and it ceases to give the clear ring of
good coin. Lady Gregory and those who follow the path
of " Kiltartan English " gain their effect largely by sprink-
ling the page at odd moments with far-sought idioms and
curious inversions, as spangles are inserted on a material
and yet form no true part of its texture. The scattered
spangles are superimposed, and " Kiltartan English, " in
like manner, has all the appearance of being manufactured
by sprinkling modern literary English with local idioms.
It is a convention, and a good convention, but whether it
is more seems doubtful. As Lady Gregory handles it,
however, it has quaintness, beauty and charm; and in
rendering the romances of a dim and legendary world it
justifies itself.

Lady Gregory has told us that she first wrote plays
to relieve audiences who were, perhaps, in danger of being
wearied by the verse and romance of A. E., Mr. Yeats
and Synge. Nevertheless she, also, has dramatised tales
from the legendary and romantic period of Ireland ; but,
despite her success in translating and adapting the ancient
tales, she is not altogether happy in the atmosphere of
historic drama. Kincora (1905) carries us back to Ireland
of the eleventh century. It is not only without the large-
ness that Synge and the lyric intensity that Mr. Yeats
would have brought to the same theme — it is weak and
even false in sentiment. Devorgilla (1907) dramatises
loosely, and not very effectively, the heart-sorrow of
Dervorgilla who brought the great curse upon Ireland by
introducing the English. In Grania (1912) the story is
carried to a prehistoric epoch ; and in this one play of old
Ireland Lady Gregory shows herself capable of writing
great and romantic tragedy, though a tragedy of the soul

224 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PARTII

better understood in the reading than the acting. She
handles her literary idiom, here so congruous and fitting,
with singular power and beauty. The White Cockade
(1905) and The Canavans (1906) have their historic setting
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the latter
is chiefly successful in its representation of the Irish
peasantry, who have not greatly changed from the days
of Elizabeth to our own.

Lady Gregory's historical dramas have been collected
in Irish Folk-history Plays (1912), and the whole content
of these two volumes, if Grama be excepted, affords but
the slightest indication of strong dramatic talent. These
historical plays are written with good intention, gifts of
phrase and style, a deep love of Ireland and its people,
but they fail dramatically, for the action, where there is
any, is but unconvincingly related to the characters. And
if the same charge is to be brought against The Image
(1910), its proper apology is that the whole piece is
allegorical farce, attempting no realistic treatment of
character and situation. It is a play of modern Ireland
suffused with esoteric meaning. The image which the
humble stone-mason is to carve is the province of Con-
nacht, and the diverse attitudes toward the project of
characters in the play is figurative of the vision of a future
Ireland as it appears to differing minds. But the esoteric
meaning, unless explained, is hard to come by, and might
not be suspected by the English reader; the dialogue is
loose and rambling; and dramatically the piece does not
arrest the attention.

Lady Gregory's best work for the stage is to be found
in her one-act farces and dialogues. These have been
collected in Seven Short Plays (1909) and New Irish
Comedies (1914). Many of them turn upon the motif
of a whimsical misunderstanding. Spreading the News
(1904) is a laughable skit upon the absurd proportions a
false rumour assumes as it spreads from mouth to mouth.
Hyacinth Halvey (1906) sketches an episode in the career
of a young man who comes from Carrow to Cloon armed
with a huge parcel of glowing testimonials to the unparal-
leled integrity of his character. He is a very ordinary
young man, not above the love of a spree, and the exalted
opinion the townsfolk of Cloon conceive of him on the

CHAP, v] THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 225

strength of his testimonials becomes an intolerable burden,
making him long for death. He steals the carcase of a
sheep in order to disillusion his admirers, only to be over-
whelmed with the gratitude of the butcher who has thereby
been saved from conviction for stocking tainted meat. He
robs a Protestant church, and, when he avows the deed,
is hailed as the magnanimous hero who takes the sin on
his shoulders to save a poor lad who is suspect; and
forthwith he is chaired away to a meeting to deliver an
address on the building up of character. The Jackdaw
(1907) and The Workhouse Ward (1908) turn upon the
like ingenious entanglements of circumstance. In all these
one-act plays the dexterity of the dialogue, the neatness
of the artifice, the dovetailing of misconception and cross-
purpose have the perfection of an effortless feat in skilful
juggling, a combination of touch and sense of balance that
could in no wise be bettered. Not less delightful are the
whimsical turns of thought and speech which Lady
Gregory gives to her characters. There is, for example,
the old army pensioner who takes pride of scholarship in
the memory that once he used to sleep " in the one bed
with two boys that were learning Greek.9'

Of an entirely different character is The Gaol Gate
(1906), which closes with a long lament in Biblical langu-
age. The lament is beautiful and deeply moving, but
utterly undramatic in its context. This tragic little sketch
can only be spoiled in the acting; for the materialisation
of the scene — the helplessness of two poor women, a
mother and a wife, who discover at the prison door that
the man nearest their hearts has been executed — defines in
harsh outline what can only be conceived as the poetry of
the soul. Most beautiful also in conception is Mac-
Donough's Wife (1911), which tells how the wandering
musician with the lament of his pipes drew from the fair
and the sheep-shearing all men to the grave of his
wife.

Lady Gregory's genius in dramatic writing shines most
clearly in exaggerated comedy and farcial dialogue.
Grania, The Gaol Gate and MacDonough's Wije, in which
she essays tragedy, romantically and poetically conceiveH,
do not lend themselves to the stage, for she is without the
gifts necessary to success in that form of drama in which
p

226 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

Synge is immeasurably beyond all his contemporaries
whether in Ireland or England. Style and fine speeches
drama may contain, but it can never be built upon these
alone. The greatness of Synge lies in his large poetic
conception, his broad outline, his massings of light and
shadow, not in his style. If, however, Lady Gregory is
by no means at her best in romantic drama, she has the
power to write dialogue in a mood of everyday humour,
with whimsical turns of thought and expression, that is
quick, racy and flexible, and it is this faculty which makes
her short farcial sketches the finest of their kind the
Abbey Theatre has produced. Not only is the economy
in word and phrase admirable, the touch incomparably
light and deft, but her humour, exaggerated and grotesque
though it may sometimes be, never blunderingly trans-
gresses the limits of the probable or destroys illusion by
grating needlessly against our powers of belief. Lady
Gregory's historical plays are best read; her farces are
equally good in the reading and on the stage. Their
niceness and aptitude in the portrayal of character through
swift and easy dialogue has rarely been equalled.

John Millington Synge, indubitably the strongest and
most original genius of the contemporary Celtic Revival,

came late into his own ; and four or five
John Millington years cover that period of his produc-
Synge, 1871-1909. tivity which is of any account. In the

Shadow of the Glen was performed at
the Molesworth Hall, Dublin, in 1903, and early in 1909
Synge died in a private hospital. He was born at Rath-
farnham, County Dublin, in 1871, and received his
education at Trinity College, Dublin. After this he spent
some years in Germany and in Paris reading, and writing
unsuccessfully in a desultory manner. He also travelled
the roads through Italy, France and Bavaria, supporting
himself, apparently, on an income of forty pounds a year.
In 1899 he was discovered in Paris by Mr. W. B. Yeats.
Synge showed him some of his essays in authorship, but
Mr. Yeats, perceiving that so far " life had cast no light
on his writings, " advised him to " Go to the Aran
Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people
themselves; express a life that has never found expres-
sion. " Synge took the advice, and for the next few years

CHAP, v] THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 227

habitually lived part of his time on Aran studying the
islanders and making notes ol their idioms and speech.

Mr. Yeats has an admirable sentence in which the
character of Synge and the whole personality of the man
is set before us : " He was a drifting silent man full of
hidden passion, and loved wild islands, because there,
set out in the light of day, he saw what lay hidden in
himself. " The Aran Islands was not published till 1907,
but it was written three or four years earlier. The book
is stored with those impressions which are the making of
Synge 's plays ; here are their plots as well as their dialect
and setting. Here, for example, is the story of the old
woman who saw her drowned son riding toward the sea
on a horse. In Riders to the Sea Maurya cries, " I looked
up then, and I crying, at the gray pony, and there was
Michael upon it — with fine clothes on him, and new shoes
on his feet." In The Aran Islands, or in West Kerry and
In Wicklow (1906-7), may be discovered the seed of most
of Synge 's plots — the anecdote of the man who killed
his father with a spade, afterwards used in The Playboy,
the story of the two tinkers who agreed with the priest
to marry them for a half-sovereign and a " fine can,"
used in The Tinker's Wedding. And, of more importance,
living in the west among the people and as one of them,
listening to their talk in shebeens and cabins of Aran,
overhearing servant girls through a chink in the floor,
noting down faithfully impressions of mist and sea and
land, and setting down word for word innumerable
phrases of peasant speech Synge gathered directly from
life the matter that makes his plays. Few men could
have been less interested in the literature of the day, in
the thought or the politics of the world. In his later
years he read hardly any books, and was scarcely known
to express an opinion on a modern writer. Yet Synge
has left behind him a drama which is at once literary and
faithful to life. The power to write and the knowledge
of books have not always been close companions; but
where the influence of books is little the gap must be
filled with a theory; even Shakespeare had a theory of
craft and style which he followed with surprising close-
ness. And Synge's theory was developed by the experi-
ences recorded in his journal kept on the western islands.

228 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

By nature reserved and uncommunicative he never spoke
much of himself or his ideals ; but The Aran Islands came
as near as he could approach to the writing of a personal
confession ; and, judged from a purely literary standpoint,
it is, perhaps, together with The Well of the Saints, his
finest and most distinctive piece of work. Interest in
human nature is the ruling motive from the first page to
the last, yet the clouds, the wide skies, the bleak islands,
the rocky shores washed by the rustling sea, are painted
with a perfection of power and beauty. In his poems
Synge gave little evidence of sensitiveness to environ-
ment, but in his prose and his dramas it constantly
emerges. In The Aran Islands we read of a day of storm :

" For the rest of my walk I saw no living thing but
one flock of curlews, and a few pipits hiding among the
stones.

" About the sunset the clouds broke and the storm
turned to a hurricane. Bars of purple cloud stretched
across the sound where immense waves were rolling
from the west, wreathed with snowy phantasies of spray.
Then there was the bay full of green delirium, and the
Twelve Pins touched with mauve and scarlet in the
east.

" The suggestion from this world of inarticulate power
was immense, and now at midnight, when the wind is
abating, I am still trembling and flushed with exulta-
tion. "

The passage is enough to show the reserved and grave
simplicity of Synge 's prose style ; and among topographical
books The Aran Islands will probably in time take its
place in English with the few itineraries that belong to
literature. For it is, despite what has already been said,
chiefly a book of topography, miscellany, anecdote, not
a personal journal : Synge holds himself in reserve, look-
ing out objectively on the life of the islands.

In the study The Aran Islands will, perhaps, be taken
off the shelf more often than any volume of Synge ; never-
theless his great work, and the word great may here be
used advisedly, is in his dramas, which are all short. In
1908 and 1904 two one-act plays In the Shadow of the
Glen and Riders to the Sea, were produced in Dublin;

CHAP, v] THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 229

three three-act plays, The Well of the Saints, the Playboy
of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows, followed
between 1905 and 1910; and The Tinker's Wedding, a
play in two acts, was first produced in London in 1909.
These plays at first met with a hostile reception. Ireland
took a pride in the chastity of its peasant women, and on
this In the Shadow of the Glen seemed to reflect ; and The
Playboy of the Western World, which was supposed to
exalt into a hero the man who had slain his father, aroused
furious anger. These demonstrations illustrate the curious
lapses from humour of the Irish mind ; for the Irishman,
when serious, has the least flexible intelligence in the world.
That Synge 's six plays were a great and notable event
in the story of English dramatic writing cannot be gain-
said, and the passage of time will almost certainly give
them a more assured place than they hold to-day. But
in the last few years our ears have been deafened with
noisy and undiscriminating praise of Synge 's work, which
has been lauded as the greatest thing in English since
Shakespeare. When we remember that George Eliot
received exactly the same praise of men we are given
reason for pause. We still stand so close to Synge that to
attempt to assign definite rank to his drama is hazardous ;
yet it seems unlikely that he will pass out of sight and
regard. In his work four great qualities combine — the
faculty of dramatic visualisation, reverence for reality,
poetry in concept and thought, and the unexpected in
style. When Synge ?s admirers compare his work to the
plays of the Elizabethan age they are primarily thinking
of the poetry in his drama. In the permeating of drama
with poetry it is difficult to think of anything in English
greater or more significant than The Well of the Saints,
Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows. It was the
belief of Synge that in Ireland " for a few years more we
have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent
and tender," and therefore it was possible to write in Ire-
land a drama, not sick and intellectual like the drama of
London, Paris and Berlin, but a drama inspired by reality
and joy. Joy may appear a curious term to apply to
the themes of Synge 's plays — a wife driven to a frenzy
of unrest by lack of companionship in an old and phleg-
matic husband, the mother who mourns her sons swallowed

230 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

by the sea, the halo surrounding a weak stripling who
thinks he has murdered his father, the harsh tragedy of
the Deirdre legend — but by joy Synge meant the strong
impulse and spirit of poetry latent in emotional natures
uncorroded by the conventions of civilisation, the imagina-
tion tender and fiery whether it shows itself outwardly in
ecstasy or brooding melancholy. In the midst of the
rationalised life led by men in great centres of activity
and their broad outskirts the primitive and passionate
impulse is almost entirely checked. In the west of Ireland,
far removed from the ephemeral fashions of Europe, man
is still passionate as he was in the England of Elizabeth,
in the world dramatised by Shakespeare, Marlowe and
Webster. The joy of life for Synge was the transfiguring
power of the primitive, the poetical and the eternal in man.

In combination with this absorbing consciousness of the
profound vigour and joy of life Synge possessed dramatic
gifts higher than those of any English-writing dramatist
of our day. He deals with no surprising incident, sensa-
tionalism has no part to play in his art ; but the wedding
of a travelling tinker and his doxy becomes matter equally
as dramatic as the story of The Duchess of Malfi. In the
craft of the dramatist, it is true, Synge does not outdo
many between the time of Shakespeare and the end of
the twentieth century. Congreve, Wycherley, Goldsmith,
Sheridan had at least as much dramatic sense, and
Beddoes almost as much poetry and drama combined.
It is easily possible to overstate the achievement of Synge
in this respect. That he far surpasses Mr. W. B. Yeats
in dramatic faculty needs no saying; but Mr. Padraic
Colum in The Fiddler's House, Mr. Mayne in The Drone
are scarcely a whit behind Synge in economy of dialogue,
clear visualisation of character and proportionate spacing
of their matter. They are, however, immeasurably
behind him in poetry, in the power to render atmosphere,
in the suggestion of universal significance within a narrow
theme, and in individuality of style.

Synge opposed reality to intellectualism : and herein
lies the third definitive distinction of his dramatic achieve-
ment. The drama of Europe has been intellectual for
centuries. Moliere's comedy is fashioned by processes of
intellect confined within the chambers of an individual

CHAP, v] THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 231

mind; Dumas and Scribe, to leap across the years, are
intellectual gymnasts, even in the rendering of emotion.
Ibsen, perceiving that the drama of Scribe was outworn,
set a new standard; but if ever there were a drama of
hot-house intellectualism it is to be found in Ibsen, who
confessed that his plays were " deeds of night," com-
posed in the dark recesses of his mind. It is the high
merit of the purely Irish school of dramatists that they
represent a reaction against intellectual drama. Mr.
Moore and Mr. Martyn have remained with Ibsen; but
the Irish dramatists as a body owe him little ; their debt
is to reality, not to detached ratiocination. And to Synge
was chiefly due the offset against Ibsenism of great
romantic drama. The impossible and preposterous in the
characters of Ibsen and Mr. Shaw lies in the obsessions of
intellectualism and the sophistries of the pulpit. Nora in
A Doll's House not only realises herself upon a sudden but
expresses herself with a force and comprehensiveness of
outlook which could only be possible after years of
reflection; Mr. Shaw's otherwise admirable Father
Keegan, the daft and mystical dreamer whom even
villagers pity, suddenly utters a new trinitarian theology
of modern social conditions. In either case the dramatist
is led astray by reading his intellectual prepossessions into
his creature.

It may sometimes appear that Synge strains our powers
of belief in the same manner. After reading The Playboy
we are tempted to ask : Is it possible that a country-girl
should be filled with admiration for a vagrant who con-
fesses that he slew his father in a fit of passion ? When
Christy boasts to the company gathered in the shebeen
that a prison is behind him, hanging before and hell
gaping below, Pegeen is incredulously scornful, but when
convinced she is filled with admiration of one capable of
being carried by anger to the killing of his father.

" PEGEEN. You're only saying it. You did nothing
at all. A soft lad the like of you wouldn't slit the wind-
pipe of a screeching sow.

CHRISTY (offended). You're not speaking the truth,
PEGEEN (in mock rage). Not speaking the truth, is
it? Would you have me knock the head of you with
the butt of the broom ?

282 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART 11

CHRISTY (twisting round on her with a sharp cry of
horror). Don't strike me. I killed my poor father,
Tuesday was a week, for doing the like of that.

PEGEEN (with blank amazement). Is it killed your
father ?

CHRISTY (subsiding). With the help of God I did,
surely, and that the Holy Immaculate Mother may
intercede for his soul."

This fills Pegeen with naive admiration, and later, when
she has the opportunity of talking to Christy alone, she
says : " And I've heard at all times it's the poets are your
like — fine, fiery fellows, with great rages when their
temper's roused." When again, at a later stage, she learns
that Christy only succeeded in stunning his father she
rounds upon him in angry contempt : " And to think of
the coaxing glory we had given him, and he after doing
nothing but hitting a soft blow and chasing northward
in a sweat of fear. Quit off from this." On a first impres-
sion Pegeen appears a preposterous character, and the
whole play reads like one of the manufactured situations
of Ibsen or Mr. Shaw ; but we learn that the admiration
of Pegeen Mike and the frequenters of the shebeen for
the man who is supposed to have murdered his father
exactly represents the probable attitude of peasantry in
untouched regions of Western Ireland. They accept the
fact that no man would kill his father deliberately, and
nobody is to be held accountable for his acts when " great
rages " are upon him. This offers a plausible explanation
of what at first appears to the sophisticated mind an
artificial situation. But for Ibsen's worst offences against
the possible in human nature there is no explanation, save
that reality cannot be conjured out of the mazes of
intellectualism.

Synge, however, had no intellectual interests. He cared
nothing about theories of life; he had no message like
Ibsen, Shaw or Maeterlinck; his sole concern was with
living men and women. In an age when literature, between
the planes of Mr, H. G. Wells and Hauptmann, is satu-
rated with propagandism, Synge emerges as a writer of
outstanding power who has no message of any kind. And
for this alone he deserves peculiar honour.

CHAP, v] THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 288

For the dialogue of his drama Synge invented a style
in which he professed to use no words which he had not
heard on the lips of peasants, to write in the idiom of
the man who thinks in Gaelic when he speaks in English.
But shades of pronunciation are not rendered, and the
sentences are too rounded and rhythmical to be those of
everyday speech. Nobody in real life ever talked like
the characters of Synge. The speech of these plays is a
literary convention, and, in some degree at least, it is a
mosaic. In Western Ireland the peasant often speaks in
English with a Gaelic idiom because he is thinking in
Gaelic ; but in Eastern and Central Ireland, where English
has been spoken for centuries, Elizabethan forms survive.
Thus in Synge 's style we have Elizabethan English, the
English of the Bible and Gaelic idiom jostling each other.
Old Maurya (Riders to the Sea), lamenting her son, is a
woman whose tongue is Gaelic :

" They're all gone now, and there isn't anything
more the sea can do to me ... I'll have no call now
to be up crying and praying when the wind backs
from the south, and you can hear the surf in the east,
and the surf in the west, making a great stir with the
two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I'll
have no call now to be going down and getting Holy
Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't
care what way the sea is when the other women will
be keening. "

But in Deirdre of the Sorrows, in which Synge goes back
to an old and legendary world, he writes in a speech
mingled of Gaelic idiom and the intonations of the
Authorised Version of the Bible.

" Lay out your mats and hangings where I can stand
this night and look about me. Lay out the skins of the
rams of Connaught and of the goats of the west. I will
not be a child or a plaything ; I'll put on my robes that
are the richest, for I will not be brought down to Emain
as Cuchulain brings his horse to the yoke, or Conall
Cearneach puts his shield upon his arm; and maybe
from this day I will turn the men of Ireland like a wind
blowing on the heath."
This is scarcely modified Biblical English; and the

234 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

language the translators of King James employed was
archaic even in their day. Synge was led to an extreme
because he ignored the fact that in English the idiom of
literature has never been the idiom of the spoken lan-
guage. In poetry this has always been true, save for
lapses in the eighteenth century; in prose the contrast
is less marked, but it exists. People never talked like
the Religio Medici, nor do they speak now as Lafcadio
Hearn or Mr. Joseph Conrad write. Synge laboured under
the illusion that he had discovered an original, a tender
and imaginative speech in the talk of the peasantry of
Ireland, just as Wordsworth, a century earlier, found the
Cumberland dalesman speaking " the real language of
men." The language of the Cumberland labourer, how-
ever, was no more real than the language of the Bible and
the Prayer Book, whence it reached him, and it was poorer
in vocabulary. In like manner the spoken English of the
west of Ireland is not a better or more real language than
the best English of books because it is contorted with
Gaelic idioms and the words are few. The drama and the
novel which reproduce a true dialect have their justifica-
tion. Synge only succeeded in producing a convention
which delights with its quaint inconsequences, just as the
faltering language of children has its vigour and charm.
But it may be conceded to him that he made the con-
vention as real to himself as the translators of King James
made the English of the Bible. When he wrote his dramas
he thought in the language he invented.

Every page of his plays shows that Synge understood
the requirements of the stage; but, on the whole, with
the exception of The Well of the Saints, he is at his best
in the shortest pieces. In The Playboy of the Western
World the latter part of the second and the whole of the
third act overweigh the introduction, and the action is
checked without any of the compensation offered by the
common antithesis of the fourth act of a Shakespearean
drama. The interest between the first appearance of Old
Mahon in the second act and his discovery of the run-
away son who felled him with a loy in the third is insuffi-
ciently maintained. In Deirdre of the Sorrows also, where
we are carried away from modern Ireland, the action is
wanting in flexibility and impetus.

CHAP, v] THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 235

Of the three-act plays the early Well of the Saints stands
first in poetry, in beauty of form, in substantial humanity
and in the truth of that symbolism which reminds us
how far Synge is beyond Maeterlinck even on his own
ground. In the first act we see Martin Doul and his wife,
Mary, two blind and weather-beaten beggars, sitting by
the wayside. They are talking together of the joys of
sight, and Martin falls into a voluptuous strain. His wife
reproves him :

"Ah, there's a power of villainy walking the world,
Martin Doul, among them that do be gadding around,
with their gaping eyes, and their sweet words, and they
with no sense in them at all.

MARTIN DOUL (sadly). It's the truth, maybe, yet
I'm told it's a grand thing to see a young girl walking
the road."

A saint with a can of holy water restores sight to them,
and for the first time the pair who were happy in their
blindness and " day-long blessed idleness " are dis-
illusioned. He sees his wife for a wrinkled old hag, and
she sees him for a stumpy and ugly old man. Further-
more Martin is compelled to work for his living : he has
no blindness to bring him coppers as he sits idly by the
roadside. Fortunately blindness returns to them, and they
are happy till they hear the saint's bell coming again
their way. They grope hastily for hiding, but are dis-
covered and dragged before the saint, who offers to cure
them once more. Both plead piteously to be spared the
curse of sight. Blindness is better Martin knows than to
open one's eyes on the bleeding feet of the saint " and
they cut with stones," or " the villainy of hell " looking
out from the eyes of a girl. The old man grows bitter :

" And wasn't it great sights I seen on the roads when
the north winds would be driving, and the skies would be
harsh, till you'd see the horses and the asses, and the
dogs itself, maybe, with their heads hanging, and they
closing their eyes."

But when he and Mary were blindedT

" It's ourselves had finer sights than the like of them,
I'm telling you, when we were sitting a while back

286 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART it

hearing the birds and bees humming in every weed of
the ditch, or when we'd be smelling the sweet, beauti-
ful smell does be rising in the warm nights, when you
do be hearing the swift flying things racing in the air,
till we'd be looking up in our own minds into the grand
sky, and seeing lakes and big rivers, and fine hills for
taking the plough/5

It is difficult to conceive The Well of the Saints Bettered
in any respect. In its spiritual insight, its psychology,
its humour, its dialogue, its allegory which yet carries no
obtrusive message, it is the greatest thing Synge ever
wrote.

Flawless also is the human pathos of the one-act Riders
to the Sea. Old Maurya has lost the last of her sons in the
sea; but she knows that " No man at all can be living for
ever, and we must be satisfied." And on a slightly lower
level of human appeal and beauty of form may be placed
In the Shadow of the Glen and The Tinker's Wedding.

" A drifting silent man full of hidden passion " — in
these words we have the key to the personality of Synge
and the character of his plays. Impersonal, brooding,
humorous, with a strange twist of ironic mysticism, Synge
is the one writer since the Elizabethan age of England
who has written great romantic drama. Wit, humour,
intellect are not enough to satisfy the soul of man; and
the many failures of our poets to write plays in verse
are a recognition of the truth that great drama, which
is to fill the soul with joy and exultation, must be poetical.
In verse Synge had no power; but his prose-plays are
in their conception life transfigured by poetry; and the
style he made unto himself has a cadence and rhythm
which communicates all the pleasure of metre. The plays
of Synge may be compared to the novels of Mr. Hardy.
In either case the writer has raised action and prose-
narrative to the plane of poetry and imbued the story of
rough and home-spun lives with a universal symbolism;
for Destiny, as conceived by the tragic poets of Greece,
presides over the unheeding war of events.

The plays of Synge dramatise the character of the
western Irishman; Lady Gregory's people belong to
Clare and Galway; but Ireland has also produced, in its
different provinces and counties, younger dramatists who

CHAP, v] THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 287

write of the peasants or the middle-class folk of the towns
as they know them in their own districts. Mr. Colum
and William Boyle belong to the midlands, Mr. Lennox
Robinson to the south, Mr. Mayne and Mr. Ervine
to the north. Though Ireland is a small country she not
only speaks Gaelic and English, but English in several
dialects, and, in addition to the grand difference between
Protestant Ulster and the Catholic South, the working-
background of life differs largely from county to county.
William Boyle was no longer a young man when drawn
into writing for the Abbey Theatre, and with only one

play has he won, or perhaps deserved
William Boyle, success. The Building Fund (1905) is
1853-1923. powerful in characterisation, and renders

the unattractive background of the tale
strongly and realistically. None of the characters wins
our sympathy, but with striking force and directness the
play presents a picture of the relationship of a malicious
and miserly mother to her scheming son and selfish grand-
daughter. Unfortunately Boyle never succeeded in reach-
ing again the standard he set himself in this play. The
Eloquent Demsey (1906), a satire on the verbose insin-
cerity of one type of Irish politician, quickly sinks into
broad farce. The complicated Mineral Workers (1906) is
a loose and shapeless piece of writing; and with Family
Failings (1912), which followed after a break of several
years, he was unable to recover his lost ground.

In his pictures of the same part of Ireland, the east
and midlands, which have been transformed by the long

speaking of English, by newspapers and
Padraic Colum, by schools, Mr. Colum has shown greater
b. 1881. dramatic art and more promise for the

future. The Land, which was produced
at the Abbey Theatre in 1905, is a comedy upon the
exaggerated veneration of old Murtagh Cosgar for the
land he has won with a life's toil and his disappointment
with a son who refuses to be coerced into a like religious
devotion to " a bit of land and a house. " The dialogue
of the play is not good, and the humour serves no special
purpose in illuminating character; but the play is essen-
tially Irish in its emphasis upon the Irishman's passion
for the ownership of a strip of land, however poor. Far

238 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

better in workmanship and truth to character is The
Fiddler's House (1907). In this play love of the land also
enters as part of the plot scheme. Conn Hourican, the old
fiddler, a vagrant of the roads, has settled in a cottage
with his two daughters, but love of his art and Wanderlust
are too strong for him. He leaves the house to his
younger daughter, who is to be married, and takes to " the
lasting kindness of the road " with his elder daughter.
Conn is admirably drawn, as is also the gipsy character of
the elder daughter, Maire. The play is straightforward
and strong writing, with good conception of character.
In 1910 came Thomas Muskerry, the story of a workhouse
master, which illustrates the drabness and dreary con-
finement of life in a small Irish town. A greater number
of characters is introduced than in either of the earlier
plays, they are not as definitely portrayed, no character
reaches the level of Conn or Maire Hourican, and the
dialogue tends to drag. Mr. Colum inclines to harshness
in characterisation; but The Fiddler's House is redeemed
by a strong vein of romance, and for this reason it is by
far the best and most human of his plays. In none is his
dialogue invariably true to character; but Mr. Colum
writes with style, he is comparatively young, and better
work may yet come from him.

Mr. Lennox Robinson comes from Cork, his Ireland is
of the south, and he knows the people of town and country
intimately both in their virtues and
Lennox Robinson, their failings. He is observant, criti-
b. 1886. cal, quick to note shams, and his

pictures of Irish life are tinged with
ironic satire, but not with contempt. It is difficult to
believe, however, that to the complacent Irishman Mr.
Robinson's plays can be wholly gratifying. From this
statement may be excepted his early play, The Clancy
Name (1908), which turns upon the unconvincing plot-
idea of a man saving the reputation of the Clancy name
and forestalling the temptation to confess himself a mur-
derer to the authorities by committing suicide. For an
immature play this is remarkably good in character-
drawing; but its faithfulness in this respect is negatived
by the extravagant and sensational theme. The Cross-
roads (1909) is a well-knit play, showing powers of obser-

CHAP, v] THE IRISH PLAYWRIGHTS 289

vation, careful workmanship and a fine instinct for sharp
outline in sketching character. Its satire upon the
slovenly inefficiency of the southern Irish farmer and the
deplorable results of loveless marriages arranged by
parents (a common practice among the Irish peasantry) is
uncompromising. Mr. Robinson's satire in this and the
two succeeding plays is severe because he is in earnest
and wishes well to his victims. Harvest (1910) is an
indictment, perhaps a little unnecessary, of the older type
of education which flourished in the Irish villages.
Patriots (1912), with more point, mercilessly satirises
sham political agitation and rhetorical patriotism.

With Mr. Robinson may be named another realistic

dramatist of southern Ireland, Mr. T. C. Murray. His

Birthright (1910) touches again the

T. C. Murray, perennial Irish theme — the heritage of

b. 1873. the land and the relationship to their

inheritance of those born upon it.

Maurice Harte (1912) brings us to the soul of Irish

Catholicism, and represents the tragedy of a mother's life

when she learns that the son of her hope can never be a

priest.

In the case of Mr. Robinson and Mr. Murray it is clear
that the romantic and poetic drama, which it was the
work of Mr. Yeats, Synge and Lady
Rutherford Mayne, Gregory to restore to the stage, has
b. 1878. ceased to be the only influence. Save in

the background and setting of their
action there is nothing to distinguish their work from the
intellectual and realistic drama of London and Berlin.
The criticism applies equally to the ironic and slightly
exaggerated humour of Mr. Rutherford Mayne's comedy,
The Drone (1908), and to his tragedy, The Troth (1908).
In Red Turf (1911), on the other hand, he deserts the
north, which is his real country, and writes a poetic drama
of Gal way avowedly modelled upon the style of Synge,

Mr. St. John Ervine, likewise, another Ulster dramatist,
is the realistic painter of drab and sordid scenes. His
character-drawing is admirably clear-cut, but Mixed
Marriage (1911) is too slight and brief to support its
tragedy, which is founded upon fact — the death of a
girl accidentally shot by soldiers during Belfast strike

240 IRISH POETS AND PLAYWRIGHTS [PART n

riots. Jane Clegg (1918) and John Ferguson (1914)
were far better plays, combining elements of realism

and excellent humour, but there is
St. John Ervine, little essential connection between his
b. 1883. method and the earlier aims of the

Abbey Theatre.

The work of the younger dramatists of the Abbey and
Ulster Literary Theatres shows that the world has been
too much for the Celtic Revival. Already the movement
has learned to don a modish garb, to think the thoughts
and speak after the fashions of the towns. The drama's
need of joy and reality, as Synge conceived these things,
has little meaning for William Boyle, Mr. Colum, Mr.
Robinson and Mr. Ervine. For reality they have sub-
stituted realism, for joy dispassionate observation, till
there is nothing that is essential to distinguish their plays
from the social drama of Hauptmann, Schnitzler, Mr.
Galsworthy or St. John Hankin. If we are to judge their
drama by its aims it may readily be admitted that several
of these younger dramatists have done remarkably good
work, and that better plays may well be expected of them.
But the poetry, the romance, the mysticism, the brooding
passion, the wistful melancholy of Mr. Yeats, Lady
Gregory, A. E. and Synge — where are these ? The Abbey
Theatre was the outcome of a well-defined national and
artistic impulse, but the foster-mother has gathered about
her a strange brood of ducklings, for many of her later
plays are not more national in temper or Celtic in spirit
than the cosmopolitan drama of the great European cities.
Their colour may be local, but the mood of the authors
is realistic, satirical, detached. The death of Synge in
1909 may be counted as the end of the first period of the
Abbey Theatre's work : the second, if it exists, is still
being written1.

1. The name of Lord Dunsany (b. 1878) has been omitted from these
chapters not through forgetfulness or an inability to appreciate the
imaginative strangeness and beauty of his work, but because he is not
associated with the peculiarly national characteristics of the movement
which found its centre in the Abbey Theatre. He sets his scenes in a
world of wonder, isolated from reality. It may be added that the Irish
Revival was already falling into a decline when his first play, * The
Glittering Gate,' was staged in Dublin in 1909. The plays have been
collected in Five Plays (1914), Plays of Gods and Men (1917) and Plays
of Near and Far (1922).

PART III

LITERARY AND INTELLECTUAL DRAMA
IN ENGLAND

CHAPTER I

BEFORE IBSEN

T. W. Robertson — Oscar Wilde — Sir Arthur Pinero — Henry Arthur Jones
— Sydney Grundy — Charles Haddon Chambers — R. C. Carton — H. V.
Esmond.

BY some critics, Professor Saintsbury among them, it is
asserted that the connection between literature and the
theatre is, in the main, slight, and that modern drama in
particular can only be fruitfully approached from the
vantage-point of a seat in the stalls. Even the buoyant
optimism of Mr. John Palmer can only lead him to speak
of recent developments as a " movement which has
brought the English theatre within measurable distance
of an alliance with English letters.'5 A nice point of
distinction is often involved in an attempt to differentiate
between that drama which bears the insignia of literature
and that which is merely of the stage stagey ; but dramatic
writing must obviously fall, either unquestionably or with
qualification, into three compartments — that in which the
author thinks primarily of histrionic effect, that in which
he is first a man of letters, and lastly into the class of
enduring drama in which literary and theatrical expres-
sion are met together as brother and sister. The best kind
of drama is that which gives its proper pleasure and has
its separate yet consonant value whether as read or acted ;
and, thus regarded, English drama has enjoyed three
literary periods, the Elizabethan, the Caroline and the
Georgian, by which last is intended the comedy of Gold-
smith and Sheridan. During the greater part of the nine-
teenth century the play that could be acted and read,
one and the other, without loss in either case, was a
phenomenon not to be found. In its last quarter, how-
ever, the stigma was removed by the wit of Oscar Wilde ;
and a little later foreign influences, chiefly coming by the

243

244 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [pAHT.m

way of Ibsen, set a style and a form for younger writers
with ideas and gifts of expression — St. John Hankin, Mr.
Bernard Shaw, Mr, Galsworthy, Mr. Granville-Barker and
Stanley Houghton among them. The plays of these
writers depend upon matter, form and expression, not
upon the producer or the actor, and they have, therefore,
a literary quality which may be enhanced but cannot
be changed by the theatre. The matter and the expres-
sion of Shakespeare, Wycherley and Sheridan makes them
masters not servants of the stage, and, in a like but far
weaker degree, literary expression has in these latter days
made some part of dramatic writing independent of the
theatrical manager and his company. Shakespeare, how-
ever produced, would still have something left to him;
and no acting could wholly destroy the wit of Lady
Windermere's Fan or How He Lied to Her Husband.

Three literary periods in the story of English drama
have been noted, and of these only one is poetical. The
world's great drama is and must always be clothed in
poetry — Ibsen the protagonist of bald prose is only truly
great in Brand and Peer Gynt — but in England since the
age of Shakespeare poetical drama has come far short
of victory. The greater and the lesser poets of the nine-
teenth century essayed poetic drama, and none with
entire fulfilment of his intention. Shelley and Beddoes
have left behind them the greatest dramatic poetry of
the century, but The Cenci (1819) for plain reasons is not
for the stage, and Death's Jest Book (1850) is splendidly
imaginative dramatic poetry without coherence or plot.
Others— Sheridan Knowles, Bulwer Lytton, Sir Henry
Taylor— in the earlier half of that century were not with-
out power, but their work in poetic drama is now chiefly
of interest to the student. Tennyson certainly was not
at his best in drama, though this part of his work has been
thoughtlessly belittled, for Becket (1884) and The Cup
(1881) possessed a strong dramatic quality, and his plays
showed that he could make to live again the story of the
past. Browning's instinct for the dramatic rendering of
life stopped short with the monologue, save for A Blot
in the 'Scutcheon (1848), in which he succeeded in weaving
his speeches into genuine dialogue and combining that
dialogue with dramatic action, albeit action a little pre-

CHAP, i] BEFORE IBSEN 245

posterous. Swinburne's experiments with historic drama
in Chastelard (1865), Bothwell (1874) and Mary Stuart
(1881) were fated to failure in the ease of a poet whose
genius was purely lyrical and ill-adapted to the compre-
hension of individual character. The partial successes of
these poets serve only to throw into higher relief the
general inability to create again in England poetic drama.
The more recent attempts of Stephen Phillips equally
belong to the story of poetry not drama, for he did
nothing to give to dramatic writing a new meaning and
a new impulse.

But if the drama of poetry has failed the drama of
prose has achieved latterly a literary quality which has

been much to seek throughout several
T. W. Robertson, generations of writers. A new spirit
1829-1871. came first with Oscar Wilde, who owed

his inspiration chiefly to his native wit,
and after to Sheridan and French models. But Wilde left
no successor, and the strongest influence upon original
English drama within the last quarter of a century has
come through the realistic and intellectual drama of Ibsen,
Hauptmann and Schnitzler, till this type of dreary
realism found its culmination in the aridity of JVtr.
GalswQ£thy« Before this manifest change there had been,
it is true, a movement among the dry bones, which may
be accounted a reaction, in weariness and disgust, against
the long-drawn age of adaptation from the French. The
removal in 1843 of a monopoly in the production of
legitimate drama granted to Drury Lane and Covent
Garden led to a rapid increase in the number of theatres
and a demand for new plays, a demand which was met
for nearly forty years by adaptation from the French,
an art in which Sydney Grundy was peculiarly proficient.
During this period original English drama ceased to exist.
In acted comedy T. W. Robertson is commonly noted
as the inaugurator of a new drama of real life ; and, after
the reign of borrowed melodrama and farce, his plays
have, at least, the merit of individuality. The son of a
provincial actor Robertson knew the stage from childhood.
For many years he led a wandering and troubled life, not
often eating well or dressing finely, supporting himseli
without great success by vriting for the magazines and

246 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART.III

the stage. He first reaped the reward of his labours and
trials with Society (1865). This was the beginning not
only of his success but that of the Bancrofts and the little
Prince of Wales's Theatre. Society was quickly followed
by Ours (1866), Caste (1867), School (1869) and other
plays which were ridiculed as " cup-and-saucer " comedy.
To his own age the realism of Robertson appeared absurd ;
to us it is artificial ; for his knowledge of life was almost
entirely limited to the world of Bohemia where he had
been born; outside that region he guesses, and guesses
badly. His psychology is no more than the emphasis
of one or two dominant traits in a character; and his
dialogue is largely modelled to amuse by swiftness and
repartee rather than to give the illusion of the monotonous
round. Nevertheless, in contrast with the drama that
went before, Robertson was a true innovator, a simple man
who looked sincerely at life and attempted to render the
English world he saw.

The plays of Robertson were as a prophesying in the
wilderness. After him original English drama was slow
in coming. During the seventies Irving rose to fame as
an actor ; but as a manager he has hardly any importance
save as a producer of Tennyson's plays. The Bancrofts,
after the death of Robertson, fell back upon English
classics and translations from the French, and the faint
promise of a new English comedy seemed to die without
fulfilment. Even in the following decade Gilbert, the
brilliantly gifted writer of fantasies, H. J. Byron, Tom
Taylor and Charles Reade all produced adaptations from
the French. Nevertheless about this time, despite a
temporary obscuration, a change was afoot. First, Wilde
set a new example in the writing of comedy, brilliant,
paradoxical, self-conscious, for after him it was impossible
for any young author to fall back upon the stereotyped
theatrical manner ; and, secondly, came the overpowering
influence of Ibsen, which is still, if less forcibly, working
its will upon English drama. These new impulses were
virtually synchronous.

In a sense the influence of Wilde 's comedies has been
greater than their deserts. As drama they are a diploma
example of the wreck of art upon theory. And this Wilde
had the wit to see, for he admitted that his plays were

CHAP, i] BEFORE IBSEN 247

not good. In stagecraft they are weak, though written at
a time when Wilde might have learned of Ibsen ; and they

contain little true character-drawing, for
Oscar Wilde, epigram is distributed indiscriminately to
1856-1900. all the characters. The practice at its

worst is well illustrated in the third act of
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892). The scintillation of
epigram between the four men who are talking in Lord
Darlington's rooms is like nothing so much as an accident
among fireworks. On the whole, however, this is the most
human of Wilde's plays. The figures of Lord Winder-
mere and Mrs. Erlynne have greater verisimilitude than
have most of his types. The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895) is brilliant and actable, but all the characters are
puppets. A Woman of No Importance (1893) illustrates
Wilde's contempt for or ignorance of stagecraft. The
longueurs of the dialogue lead up lamely and haltingly,
without pretence of dramatic action, to the crisis. An
Ideal Husband (1895), with its theme — the honoured
public servant who discovers that his youthful crime is
about to be divulged — is more dramatic ; but the plot is
ill-conducted, and even the saving grace of brilliance has
largely departed from this play which was being performed
at the time of Wilde's downfall.

Wilde's comedies held London spellbound and brought
the author wealth and fame. They can always be played,
just as Sheridan is always actable, but in neither case
have we great comedy. The humour of these intellectual
comedies lies in inessentials. Wilde held that men and
women differ from each other only in accidents; and in
this belief his comedies were written. The truth is con-
versely that accidents may vary in time and place, while
in any given time and place they are approximately the
same for all, but that the character of individual men and
women is outside time and place and their own control —
and in this region lies the source of drama. Wilde's plays
are based upon a shallow theory, and his character-
drawing is therefore negligible. Nevertheless for what
they were his comedies worked a great change, for Wilde
wrote in spoken English and not the jargon of the stage.
Furthermore his puppets, though their relationship witK
the living type was often slight, were no marionettes of

248 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART.III

the theatre, they represented a real reading of the social
world. Wilde's comedies, with all their faults, were native
to himself, sincere in a perverse way, and they had their
effect in abolishing the comedy manufactured by rote.

More important by far was the gradual mastery of
Ibsen. In the early seventies Mr, Gosse introduced him
to England, explained his plays and the greatness and
significance of his genius; but it was to the ordinary
reader and to the man of letters, not to the theatre, that
Mr. Gosse offered his introduction. Translations of his
plays began to appear, yet in this country he remained
a name and little more for another twenty years. Before
the end of these years Mr. Archer did battle for Ibsen;
and the Independent Theatre played him : and at last
in 1893 no less than six of his plays were produced in
London. The year may be taken to date a new stage
in the story of English drama. Ibsen's influence is chiefly
significant of three things — a simpler and more direct
stagecraft, an unreasoning worship of the baldest prose
and a drab representation of life's monotony, and an
intellectual revolt against the accepted in ethics and
religion. In different dramatists this influence took its
separate courses, but by nearly all romance was shunned,
and the play became realistic, intellectual, busied with
the latest and most modern topics, and sometimes tangled
with entirely undramatic psychological intricacies. Chief
among writers of the new order were and are St. John
Hankin, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Mase-
field, Mr. Granville-Barker, Stanley Houghton; and at a
slight remove other and more derivative writers — Mr.
Arnold Bennett, Mr Somerset Maugham, Mr. Gilbert
Cannan, Miss Githa Sowerby, Mr. B. M. Hastings and,
in part, Sir J. M. Barrie — are to be placed.

Even the older and established writers fell into line
with the new movement. Modifications in the manner
of Sir Arthur Pinero, Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and Sydney
Grundy were indicative of the change which was coming
over the face of the theatrical world. The substance oi
their plays is of an earlier time, but, and this is especially
true of Sit* Arthur Pinero, they have so successfully
touched up the older melodrama, sensationalism, senti-
mentalism, romance with a new veneer of realism that they

CHAP, i] BEFORE IBSEN 249

have succeeded in retaining popularity with audiences
who were becoming accustomed to the intellectual
drama.

To regard Sir Arthur Pinero as the author of problem
plays is to do him an injustice. In some of his plays he
has embraced, against his will, the attitude of the social
philosopher; but his main intent appears to have been
the provision of an entertaining drama creditably modelled
to the requirements of the stage. He has not, like Mr.
Henry Arthur Jones, delivered impassioned exhortations
upon the need of a National Theatre and a drama which
offers mystery and imagination. His dialogue is neat,
the interplay between the characters is rapid, the action
moves unflaggingly, the characters are sufficiently pro-
nounced to hold the attention of the average audience,
but there is no attempt to treat them with the hyper-
psychology of Mr. Granville-Barker or Mr. ^Galsworthy,
In a word, Sir Arthur Pinero is an excellent playwright,
but there is nothing in his Theatre to justify the inclusion
of his name with dramatists who are something more than
competent society entertainers.

Sir Arthur Pinero readily changes his manner, and his
plays, therefore, as readily fall into classes. It has been
his attempt to raise farce to the position
Sir Arthur Wing of comedy, but it cannot be said that
Pinero, b. 1855. his intention has been wholly crowned
with success in The Magistrate (1888),
The Schoolmistress (1886), Dandy Dick (1887), The
Amazons (1893) or the later Mind the Paint Girl (1912),
which are good of their kind, though they illustrate the
need in farce of more zest in living than Sir Arthur Pinero
can supply. His most characteristic drama, and that un-
doubtedly nearest his heart, is to be found in the plays
of humour and graceful sentiment, Sweet Lavender (1888),
The Weaker Sex (1889) and Trelawny of the Wells (1898).
The wholly artificial plot of Sweet Lavender and its
embroidery of pretty sentiment made the play a con-
spicuous success. It ran for almost two years, was
frequently revived, played all over the provinces and
translated into several European tongues. Trelawny oj
the Wells, though less a success, owed its qualified popu-
larity to a like weaving of artifice and sentiment. These

250 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA

plays fulfil their intention; but they have exercised no
influence upon the development of true comedy.

If Sir Arthur Pinero is to be regarded as a serious force
in English drama he is to be judged by his problem plays-
The first of these, The Squire (1881), is lacking even in
good stagecraft, and the theme is stultified by a meaning-
less solution. A young couple marry only to find that
the first wife is living. The troublesome first wife is
removed by death; and so the knot is cut, leaving the
problem where it was before. The Profligate (1889),
which turns upon the old story of the woman who marries
the rake in place of the virtuous lover, is similarly solved
by the death of the profligate; and all things remain
as they were, for the ordeal is removed, not endured.
But these, though more serious in intention than Sir
Arthur Pinero's earlier plays, are, in their class, secondary
to The Second Mrs.Tanqueray (1893) and The Notorious
Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895) which were written to meet the
new craving for realistic problem plays aroused by the
advent of Ibsen in England. In the earlier play of the
two Aubrey Tanqueray marries Paula, well aware that
she is a woman equipped with a past, in the hope that
the past may be forgotten and the future irradiated with
blissful love. Perhaps the best feature of the play is
that the development of the tragedy, as always in life,
is based upon a complexity of concurring causes; but,
as in The Profligate, so again the author misses his road
and takes a wrong turning. The spring of the disaster,
ending in Paula's suicide, lies neither in the past nor in
her character, but dramatically in the mistaken drawing
of Aubrey. The man who chose to marry Paula with
open eyes could not be the pompous and chilly individual
of the last three acts. A reasonably generous attitude
on his part would have saved Paula. Her circumstances
are so peculiar that the moral of the play is lost. If The
Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith betrays the gradually increasing
influence of Ibsen, it lies not in better construction, but
rather in the character of Agnes, who shows traces of
Ibsen's Agnes, Rita, Ellida and Rebecca, while Lucas
Cleeve is comparable to the dull and conventional type
of man marked by Tesman and Helmer. Again as a
problem play this goes astray. Had Lucas been a normal

CHAP, i] BEFORE IBSEN 251

man there was no reason why his union with Mrs. Ebb-
smith should not have been happy. He is not. Now
abnormalities find their way into the police court; the
essential problems of life belong to all men, and thus to
art and religion. Sir Arthur Pinero 's problem plays rest
on unlikely conditions and improbable solutions; and
thus their moral significance is lost. The Shakespearean
treatment of knotty ethical points in full-blooded ; this is
skinny and worn.

Sir Arthur Pinero's later plays, such as The Gay Lord
Quex (1899), Iris (1901), Letty (1903) and His House in
Order (1906), are examples of good construction. They
present manners rather than problems, and without any
marked individuality in treatment. They are the work
of an accomplished playright who understands the
limitations of stage production; and, therefore, though
eminently actable, their literary quality is slight and
their influence upon the work of others is negligible.

It is no fault of Sir Arthur Pinero's nor a ground of
contrition that he has survived his age; but it may be
a cause of regret that his work is almost entirely without
the personal note which sometimes distinguishes the
writing of even those lesser dramatists, who likewise have
no influence upon the development of drama. An extreme
sensitiveness to the vagaries of public taste and fashion
has ruled his method of composition. He is an admirable
story-teller, and the stage has been for him the means of
presenting good stories, well told. In this art he has
rarely failed. That he fails as a student of character,
that he never carries any play of serious intention, if
Iris be excepted, to a convincing denouement, militates
not at all against his plays considered as exercises in the
art of story-telling. Sir Arthur Pinero is for the stage
what the good tale-writer is for the monthly magazine.
If he writes farce or sentiment he entertains and pleases,
if he writes more serious drama he holds the attention
though he may fail to command the assent of the imagina-
tion; for he cannot make us feel that drama concerns
the life of the race more than the life of the individual.
Paula Tanqueray and Mrs. Ebbsmith remain individuals.
Synge cannot tell a story as clearly as Sir Arthur Pinero ;
but he can say much more that is important.

252 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA OART.IU

Despite these limitations his drama is not the product
of the study, for he draws upon life; and from life only
with greater consistency than Ibsen. He is, however,
restricted by the want of a large imagination and by his
slender equipment as a psychologist. Within a certain
range he understands individual character; beyond that
range he uses the sighting of an admirable stagecraft,
and thus the further his range the less certain he is to
reach his mark. His mind is practical rather than
imaginative ; his themes, therefore, are direct and prosaic,
sometimes pleasantly sentimental but never poetic. All
his work is self-conscious; in construction often nearly
impeccable, in dialogue swift and decisive, in characterisa-
tion not glaringly bad. But the whole drama of Sir
Arthur Pinero stands for no significant fact. It is an
excellent mirror of changes in public taste.

And Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, although his art is more
personal and individual, likewise posits nothing that is
deeply-founded. He has consistently
Henry Arthur preached a serious intention; and in
Jones, b. 1851. innumerable lectures and essays he has
expounded his aims. He refuses to regard
the drama only as a means of popular amusement,
although he recognises that it can instruct but incident-
ally ; he claims the right to portray all aspects of life ; and
he is resolved to combat modern pessimistic realism by
" the representation of the more imaginative and mysteri-
ous aspects of human life."

It is no disparagement of Mr. Jones to say that his
performance is less than his ideal. This is the fate of all
save those who are of no account. But in his drama it is
difficult to perceive wherein lies that quality of his art
which tends to the fulfilment of his ideals. There is no
largeness in his outlook, and, despite his pretensions to
reveal the spiritual and mysterious, a strain of the
commonplace runs through all his work. His first popular
piece, The Silver King (1882) made no profession to be
other than melodrama, and by this we are not justified in
judging the author. Liberated by the success of the play
he turned to please himself in Saints and Sinners (1884),
a picture of middle-class life and religion in a country
town, which, for reasons difficult now to discover, excited

CHAP, i] BEFORE IBSEN 258

public protest against the representation of religion on
the stage. In itself the play labours under the faults of
the time in which it was written — it is melodramatic to a
degree — Letty is the sweet heroine, happily saved from
ruin by the dear old father; Captain Fanshawe is as
conventional a villain as ever strode upon the boards.
George Kingsmill, the stalwart and true lover, is a bad
edition of Adam Bede, and Fanshawe is a meagre copy
of Donnithorne. Adventitious aids in the shape of coin-
cidence, soliloquies, the reappearance of long-lost persons
to save or ruin the situation, are freely employed. And
it is difficult to discover the motive of the play. In the
acted version George, the true lover, and Letty, the
fallen girl, are happily united; in the printed version
Letty dies. In either case the mistake is one that Sir
Arthur Pinero would likewise have followed. We are
only faced with a moral problem of difficulty if Letty
lives. Mr. Jones is no more able to clinch his play than
Oliver Goldsmith his Vicar of Wakefield, of which Saints
and Sinners is surely a modern version. Goldsmith, how-
ever, saves a story intolerably melodramatic in plot by a
felicitous humour in characterisation in which Mr. Jones is
sadly to seek,

After this, even on Mr. Jones's admission, we have a
relapse into melodrama, till we emerge again with The
Middleman (1889). The object of the play is to satirise
the stupid and blundering middleman of capital who
exploits the brains of the inventor. Unfortunately for
the gift of satire Mr. Jones possesses he only excites our
commiseration for the middleman who sinks into a con-
dition of pitiable indigence. Judah (1890), extravagantly
praised on its first appearance, is an even more incon-
clusive problem play. The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894)
is serious comedy treating the theme of the unlovely
marriage-tie, and a play patently infected by the new
demand for realism created by the drama of Ibsen. In
these years Mr. Jones gave evidence of a continuous
tendency to divest himself of the melodramatic instinct
acquired in youth' and to advance toward a greater reality.
His finest example of the intellectual play of serious import
is Mrs. Dane's Defence (1900). An element of the artificial
is still present, but the treatment of character is infinitely

254 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART, in

more true to life than it had been in the earlier plays.
Mrs. Dane hides her past : it is discovered by a few though
she is cleared in the eyes of the many ; yet in the moment
which is virtual victory the best in her nature triumphs,
and for the sake of the youth who would marry her she
surrenders her chance of happiness. The plot is developed
with swiftness and stagecraft almost equal to Sir Arthur
Pinero at his best; but, unfortunately, Mr. Jones suc-
ceeded in ruining the conclusion with a ridiculous little
twist in the unnecessary engagement of two elderly
characters of the play. The whole ought to have concluded
with Mrs. Dane's exit at the window, when she goes back
to her past and her child. In none of the more serious
plays which followed — Chance, the Idol (1902)j White-
washing Julia (1903) or Joseph Entangled (1904) — did Mr.
Jones rival the measure of truth and reality with which he
had invested the story of Mrs. Dane. Mrs. Dane's Defence
stands for his highest reach in significant and serious
drama.

The plays of Mr. Jones, if more individual, are more
rough-hewn than those of Sir Arthur Pinero. Even Mrs.
Dane's Defence, which marks an advance on his ordinary
workmanship, blunders when placed by the side of The
Second Mrs. Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs. Ebb-
smith. Mr, Jones has little sense of form ; and this defect
is as apparent in his lectures and his essays as in his plays.
Nevertheless he possesses imagination and ideas, and
herein is manifestly the superior of Sir Arthur Pinero,
who is almost wholly derivative. His mind is more full,
but he is by no means as clearly articulate. Nor, again,
though he has defended the possibility of literary drama
against Bagehot and other detractors, has he a finely
developed literary sense. In exactness his dialogue is
wanting; his construction, even judging by the standard
of effective melodrama, is frequently insecure ; his humour
is forced ; and if he has a larger sympathy than Sir Arthur
Pinero with all sorts and conditions of men, his pathos,
on the other hand, is hard and metallic. It was his mis-
fortune to be born at a time when English drama laboured
under the obsession of French writers and suffered especi-
ally from the artifices of Scribe. It is, at least, to the
credit of Mr. Jones that he was, even as a raw young

CHAP, i] BEFORE IBSEN 255

dramatist, fully cognisant of the deplorable condition ol
contemporary drama. He saw what was needed, but his
powers were unequal to providing a true remedy. The
work of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and Sir Arthur Pinero
is typical of a transitional period when men are groping
their way, not fully aware of the nature of the object they
seek. And before either dramatist had fully mastered the
use of his instruments his efforts were supplanted by the
new drama which came from Norway, a land hitherto
unsuspected in the playwright's geography. After a few
years in which Sir Arthur Pinero and Mr. Jones attempted
to adapt their methods to the new style, they were content
to drop back into the older manner and write imblushingly
theatrical farces.

As an original dramatist Sydney Grundy was of less
note. He was not only out of sympathy with later
tendencies in drama, he also never out-
Sydney Grundy, grew the technique he learned from
1848-1914. Scribe and Labiche. His original plays,

even the best — A Fool's Paradise (1889),
Sowing the Wind (1893) and The Greatest of These (1896)
— too obviously laboured under French influences and
showed little that was distinctive or individual. He is
rather to be remembered by his adaptations. Of these
the most successful was A Pair of Spectacles (1890), based
on Les Petits Oiseaux of Labiche and Delacour. This and
his many other adaptations illustrate his skill, but they
have no place in the history of the development of drama.
And it is only necessary here to dismiss with a brief
notice two or three other writers of unambitious comedy
and farce who have for a number of
Charles Haddon years retained their popularity. Charles
Chambers, Haddon Chamber s's Captain Swift

1860-1921. (1888) won a great success. The sensa-

tionalism of the stage story of the bush-
ranger who tries to take a place in English society, on a
return to the home-country, and failing shoots himself,
may in part account for the favour with which the play
met. The Idler (1891) was an equally melodramatic piece.
In comedy, The Tyranny of Tears (1899), for example,
he showed no peculiar ability. Nor do his later plays,
from The Awakening (1901) to Passers-by (1911), reveal

256 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART, in

any fresh power or inventiveness. Richard Claude Carton
(Mr. R. D. Critchett) won popularity with Liberty Hall

(1892) in which he borrowed from Gold-
Richard Claude smith the melodramatic situation of the
Carton, b. 1853. rich squire who, in disguise, helps needy

relatives before revealing himself. In
later plays R. C. Carton abandoned himself to thorough-
going farce. Lady Huntworth's Experiment (1900) turns
upon the experiences of a countess who serves in a vicarage
kitchen. Mr. Preedy and the Countess (1909) depicts the
embarrassments of the innocent young man who gives a

night's shelter in his bachelor chambers
Henry Vernon to a vagrant countess. Of such material
Esmond, 1869-1922. are his farces woven. And Henry Vernon

Esmond (Henry Vernon Jack) was an-
other popular playwright whose best gift lay with farcial
comedy written with no purpose ulterior to the amusement
of the audience.

CHAPTER II

AFTER IBSEN

Bernard Shaw — Granville-Barker — St. John Hankin — John Galsworthy —
Stanley Houghton — Gilbert Cannan — Githa Sowerby — John Masefield.

THE nature of the revolt, inspired by Ibsen, against the
older kind of drama has already been indicated so far as
a movement of the kind can be stated in a few words.
Writers like Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Granville-Barker,
Mr. Galsworthy, St. John Hankin, assumed that drama in
England was fully capable of following the model of
drama in Scandinavia and abolishing from the stage what-
ever in action or word was not an exact copy of events
in the house or street. This, in part, was the impossible
ideal ; but the new impulse communicated itself in differing
ways to individual playwrights ; and in the case of several,
most notably that of Mr. Bernard Shaw, in cultivating
the belief that, as Ibsen had used drama to instruct the
nation in manners and morals, this was the chief function
of the theatre. Ibsen once protested, and truly, that he
had been more a poet and less a social philosopher than
most people were ready to recognise. But of this protest
little notice has been taken. The enduring greatness of
Ibsen lies not in his stagecraft, not in his bald dialogue,
not in his didactic propensity, but in that deep-founded
current of poetry and mysticism in his nature, which even
in the prose-dramas of social life he has been unable alto-
gether to obscure. As a poet, unhappily, Ibsen has made
little impression upon contemporary drama. He has been
understood as an intellectualist, a prophet, a naturalistic
painter qf life, anil it is thus conceived that he has been
a dominant force in moulding the younger dramatists of
our day. The nature of his influence is only to be seen
as it expresses itself in the ideals and work of different
disciples, and of these Mr. Bernard Shaw is, in England,
R 257

258 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART, in

the most significant example. He may himself disclaim
discipleship to Ibsen, and point instead to Butler or
another. And, to do Mr. Shaw justice, his plays are but
one illustrative example of the way in which a new
tendency may take upon itself surprising developments.

When Mr. Bernard Shaw, the young Irishman, first
came to London he wrote novels; and it was during this
period that the lodestar of efficiency
George Bernard began to shine upon him, and with it
Shaw, b. 1856. came his Socialism, his active member-

ship of the Fabian Society, and his con-
version by Karl Marx to a belief that society could be
saved from its confusions and untidiness, made neat,
orderly and efficient. Ever since he has desired to furbish
the world to a high polish. He learned also to abhor
romanticism and idealism, which in his eyes only serve
to darken counsel in economics and art and dim the
brilliant gloss produced by the hard rub of logic and
statistical facts. Idealism he pronounces " only a flatter-
ing name for romance in politics and morals"; and
romanticism he regards as no more than the cant of those
who do not possess normal sight. The vision of nine-
tenths of mankind is abnormal and defective, and in the
remaining tenth stands Mr. George Bernard Shaw as a
pattern type of the normal and clear-sighted man. What-
ever he cannot understand in faiths which have claimed
the allegiance of other men he pronounces due to dis-
torted vision. Unconsciously and with simple-minded
sincerity he joined the little army of those who question
what is simply because it is, and not because it has been.
Mr. Shaw has glimmerings of sympathy with thought so
alien to his own as that of Plato, but he publicly declared
himself an atheist at fifteen because the belief in God is still
a commonly accepted article of faith. And because
Darwin and Huxley were too much with the world he
derided science for the inartistic magnitude of its lies,
and declared the practice of medicine a modern witch-
craft. With a curious blindness to analogy, however, he
was able to accept the unrelated statistics of the Fabian
Society, while he rejected religion and biology without
which they have little meaning and scarcely any import-
ance. Mr. Sidney Webb has preached the gospel of

CHAP, n] AFTER IBSEN 259

salvation by force of actual facts patiently collected and
carefully tabulated — before these new tables of the law
thrones and principalities of inefficiency and wastefulness
will one day crumble to the dust. And in the formation
of Mr. Shaw's mind as prophet and reformer the Fabian
Society, directed by the mathematical gospel of Mr. Sidney
Webb, has been a chief source of influence.

The novels of Mr. Shaw's nonage show him feeling his
way not only towards expression, but to the discovery of
something to express : before he had finished with them
he was entering upon his inheritance. For the novel is
always with him : his drama, which so often collapses into
talk without action, is only the novel transferred to the
stage. It is possible that Mr. Shaw would have made a
more lasting name for himself had he continued to walk
his first path in literature ; although, even in fiction, the
absence of anything like style would have derogated from
his chances of enduring fame. It may be answered that
Mr. Shaw's style is sufficient to its purposes and no more
can be asked of any writer. But the matter does not rest
here, as will be seen later in commenting upon Mr. Shaw's
criticism of Shakespeare. As with everything he attempts
it is true that his style is efficient and clear; but as the
utterance of a strong and original mind it is the most
colourless and least individual style ever written. Never
was any writer more dependent upon what he says and
not upon how he says it. Charm he has none, but
brilliance, wit and ideas in sufficiency; and perhaps these
are the more valuable to a writer who comes with a
message and has always declared himself a dramatist with
a moral purpose.

Between the period of his novels and his appearance
as a playwright eight or nine years intervened in which
Mr. Shaw gave his days to musical and dramatic criticism
and his nights to the Fabian Society and Socialist pro-
paganda. He chose for himself the cart and the trumpet,
and set up as " a professional man of genius." His
criticisms were often marked by an egotism so pronounced
that to many they seemed ludicrous and negligible. It
was in these years he began to create the " G. B. S." myth,
which is still largely accepted for the real man. It was,
in point of fact, only a mask behind which Mr. Shaw

260 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART. HI

hid himself ; and long before the public wearied of gazing
upon the idol his creator had cast him off save as a jest.
But there was meaning in the erection of a large image
before which the peoples should bow, for Mr. Shaw was
a young man, and in England young men are not listened
to with respect unless they are happy in being born to a
title. Therefore the young critic blew the trumpet before
him when he wrote his weekly articles on music for the
Star (1888-90) and his dramatic criticism for the Saturday
Review (1895-98).

When Mr. Bernard Shaw was pushing his way to
notoriety as a young dramatic critic Shakespeare had long
been dead and Ibsen was living, but their fame was in
inverse ratio to their distance from the day. Shakespeare
for nearly a century had been a fetish, revered by all as
much as he was little known save to the few ; Ibsen was a
foreign writer of scandalous plays. The fame of Shake-
speare was, the fame of Ibsen was not. In subservience
to principles which had now become a second habit Mr.
Shaw ranged himself on the side of Ibsen and began to
smite at that huge idol, Shakespeare. He was well-
equipped for his task, for he had known Shakespeare
thoroughly long before he had heard of Ibsen, admired
him and continued to admire him as he dealt him blows
with far greater knowledge and insight than the multitude
who decried his sacrilegious onslaughts. The ground of
Mr. Shaw's contention was a moral enthusiasm. He saw
in Shakespeare a man deficient in inventiveness, ideas
and moral faith, in Ibsen a man of thought and a moralist.
Shakespeare's power lay in a gift of language and a literary
knack. How he said a thing was generally of greater
moment than what he said. Judged by the test of intellect
and dramatic insight " Ibsen comes out with a double
first class, whereas Shakespeare comes out hardly any-
where." To paraphrase Shakespeare in the language of a
Blue Book is to empty him of all wit and thought.

Against Mr. Shaw's contention only one objection can
be urged — that it is not true. If its truth be admitted
it would still be possible to defend Shakespeare against
Ibsen. For, supposing Ibsen to contain any thought of
high value, which is doubtful, the banality of his utter-
ance in the prose dramas of social life outvies the tamest

CHAP, n] AFTER IBSEN 261

drawing-rooms of suburbia. It is in practice impossible
to converse with so little light and shade as the drama
of Ibsen provides. There is nothing to arrest, and nothing
to remember save the general story of each play. We
never meet with those flashes of utterance and thought
which are unforgettable, wherein more is said than words
were fashioned to say. Ibsen and Mr. Shaw use words
merely as instruments of logical expression and set the
potential use of language aside. Now even Mr. Shaw
will not deny that drama is a branch of literature and a
Blue Book is not. And literature consists not in the use
of language to express ideas, but in the use of a language
that is invested by context ^and analogy with a special
power, an .unexpected significance. Where ideas combine
with literary gift there is the highest literature ; but if the
attribution of literary gift involve, as it certainly must,
a potency of implication in the use of language, then it is
impossible for the literary gift to exist apart from
language, and to assign Shakespeare a literary gift while
denying him intellectual insight is a contradiction in terms. .
Ibsen possessed a high literary gift. Unfortunately in his
social plays he sacrificed it to the fetish of intellectual
drama, and in these he succeeded in showing less insight
into character than in his two great poetic dramas where
he allowed full play to the genius of poetry which was
given to him in great measure. More might be said to
exhibit the contradictory nature of Mr. Shaw's main con-
tention in the controversy of Shakespeare against Ibsen.
The discussion is, however, chiefly valuable as a com-
mentary upon Mr. Bernard Shaw's own plays. In his view
Ibsen is great because he writes drama that is intellectual
and moral, and Mr. Shaw, his disciple, is great because
he writes plays with a moral purpose. Shakespeare, the
pessimist, cries " Out, out, brief candle," because he lacks
moral faith f Shaw, the moralist, is also an optimist.

Not literary expression, not even characterisation does
Mr. Shaw consider the chief thing, but the lesson con-
veyed by drama. Upon his theory a drama is an acted
tract — the lesson the audience carries away is the impor-
tant matter. " I write plays with the deliberate object
of converting the nation to my opinions." And if by
morality we understand no more than a congruity with

262 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART. HI

established manners and customs, then Mr. Shaw may
fitly be described as " a specialist in immoral and heretical
plays.95 " My reputation," he says, " has been gained by
my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider
its morals."

His first play began as an attempt at collaboration with
Mr. William Archer, Mr. Archer providing the plot and
Mr. Shaw the dialogue. But in the early stages the plot
was exhausted and Mr. Shaw continued upon his own
course. Widowers9 Houses was produced by the Inde-
pendent Theatre in 1892. It is definitely a play with a
moral purpose, for it is an indictment of the thousands
of worthy and complacent people who live comfortably
upon independent incomes without troubling to inquire
how those incomes are made. Widowers9 Houses is a
genuine problem play; for it raises a question and does
not lay it with any clearly constructed alternative. And
constructive Mr. Shaw always attempts to be. Trench
falls in love with Blanche, the daughter of Sartorious,
an owner of slum property, but breaks off the engage-
ment in horror upon learning the source of his future
wife's income. He has only, however, to face another
and a ruder shock in the discovery that his own income
comes from the same source. Time reduces him to an
unwilling acceptance of things as they are, and the slum
property is still in existence when he returns to the arms
of Blanche Sartorious.

Mr. Bernard Shaw made a good beginning with his
play. The dialogue is incisive, moves rapidly, and carries
forward the action of the drama without the involutions
and digressions of his later plays. The characters do not
attract us ; nor are they meant to be other than objection-
able, with the exception of Blanche, who, however, only
illustrates the inability of the author, already apparent
in the novels, to draw a woman. So far fronjjrepresenting
a strong-natured but unsophisticated girl Blanche is a mere
outline sketch. Ibsen's masculine types are far inferior
to his women ; Mr. Shaw's men are better than their wives,
sisters and daughters. Julia and Grace, for example,
in The Philanderer (1893) are fictitious pieces of charac-
terisation ; and the former is only interesting as the first
example in Mr, Shaw's drama of those women who in the

CHAP, ii] AFTER IBSEN 263

" sex business " take the initiative and pursue the men.
This play was written immediately after Widowers9
Houses, but its technique was unsuitable to the company
of Mr. Grein, who had produced the first play, and the
author replaced it with Mrs. Warren's Profession, which
was censored. The ineptitude of the ban laid upon this
play passes belief. The idea underlying it is akin to the
thought of Widowers9 Houses. A young girl, carefully
shielded, learns the story of her mother's past. The treat-
ment of a hateful subject is serious, and, as a writer in
the Edinburgh Review (April, 1905) declared with justice :
" A play with a finer moral determination than Mrs.
Warren's Profession has not been produced in Europe
during the last twenty years."

The three plays just named were printed in volume
form as Plays Unpleasant together with a companion
volume of Plays Pleasant (1898). In the volume of Plays
Pleasant came Arms and the Man, produced in 1894,
Candida (1897), You Never Can Tell (1900) and the one-
act Man of Destiny (1897). The first of these, described
by Brandes as " a masterpiece whether it is considered
from the psychological or the purely theoretical point of
view," has proved one of the most successful of Mr.
Shaw's plays upon the stage, though it can scarcely be
ranked with his more important compositions. Probably
it has generally been taken for farcial comedy and
thoughtlessly accepted by the majority of every audience
which has seen it performed. Its witty satire upon the
fictitious glory of war and the romantic idealism of woman
has been disregarded, and the success of the play, in a
popular sense, lies in the ease with which any serious
intention it possesses may be passed over, and a good
play left in the residue when all Shavian ideas and
doctrines have been eliminated. Of the other plays in
the same ^jlume You Never Can Tell is the least purpose-
ful and pernaps the most unsatisfactory of the longer
pieces. But within the same covers is Candida^ the
author's greatest success, whether we have regard to the
technique and art of the piece, its character-drawing 01
the directness of its exposition of ideas. Candida is true
drama and not clever journalism adapted to the stage
as some of Mr, Shaw's plays tend to be. Its chiei

264 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART, m

characters, Morell, clergyman and Christian Socialist,
Candida, his wife, and Eugene Marchbanks, the dreamy
poet are among the best and most convincing of Mr.
Bernard Shaw's delineations. Candida, placed between
the two men, the strong, masterful, hardworking, famous
and popularly applauded clergyman and the dreamy,
unpractical poet chooses to remain with her husband, to
be to him wife, mother and sisters, because he has the
most need of her and is the weaker of the two.

" What I am you have made me with the labour of
your hands, " [says Morell to his wife]. " You are my
wife, my mother, my sisters : you are the sum of all
loving care to me."

CANDIDA (in his arms, smiling to Eugene). Am I your
mother and sisters to you, Eugene ?

MARCHBANKS (rising with a fierce gesture of disgust).
Ah, never. Out, then, into the night with me ! "

The whole play is a sincere, human and truthful piece of
work, dramatically conceived and dramatically executed.
It is the one play in which Mr Shaw's failure with women
is not apparent. Candida and Proserpine Garnett, the
typist, are both convincing.

The volume of Three Plays for Puritans (1900) contained
The Devil's Disciple, Csesar and Cleopatra and Captain
Brassbound's Conversion; and of none of these can it be
pretended that it takes a high place among the plays.
The Devil9s Disciple begins as admirable melodrama, only
to be ruined by a conclusion in tedious farce. Csesar and
Cleopatra was offered as an offset to Shakespeare's picture
of Julius Csesar, but the play is entirely undramatic, its
spectacular possibilities are damaged by prolix dialogue,
and in the conclusion we feel, as Borsa has happily re-
marked, " Caesar and Cleopatra have a great deal to do in
five long acts to avoid falling in love with each other."
And Captain Brassbound's Conversion may be placed with
You Never Can Tell as one of the least significant and
interesting of Mr Shaw's plays.

Man and Superman (1905) is his longest and most philo-
sophical play. It resolves itself largely into talk which
cannot be rendered effectively on the stage, and the long
argument in the third act between Don Juan, the Devil

CHAP, n] AFTER IBSEN 265

and the Statue may be read apart from the play without
loss, if with a consciousness that the ideas might have been
given more effectively in another form. The play, as a
whole, embodies a favourite thesis of the author, that
in the " sex business " woman pursues and man is the
prey.

From this date forward the plays tend to fall into one
of two classes — plays of satirical dialogue without action,
or plays of undisguised buffoonery sharpened with wit. In
the former class may be placed John BulVs Other Island
(1904), which satirises English misconception of Ireland
and, in consequence, the English character than which
nothing is more ridiculous in Mr Shaw's eyes, Major
Barbara (1905), which attacks conventional systems of
charity, The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), vigorous satire upon
the medical profession, The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet
(1909), " a religious tract in dramatic form/5 which met
with the ban of the censor, and Getting Married (1908),
which explains its theme in its title and is a comedy upon
the intolerable character of marriage as still practised
among civilised nations. Into the second class fall Fanny's
First Play (1911), an amusing play in lighter mood with
an induction and epilogue in which dramatic critics are
satirised, Pygmalion (1914), which is excellent farce, and
Great Catherine (1913) in which once more the Englishman
is satirised with undiluted buffoonery.

After he had been discovered abroad Mr Bernard Shaw
was for long years a prophet without honour in his own
country. The dramatic critic belittled the art of his plays ;
the audience at the theatre threw up its hands in horror at
his revolutionary ideas, or declared petulantly that it was
impossible to take seriously a man who delighted in a
firework display of unintelligible paradox. His plays were
comparatively little seen in London till a series was pro-
duced at the Court Theatre in 1905-6. But Mr Shaw has
long ceased seriously to shock the middle classes. Whether
his ideas have become agreeable or not the manner of them
is well known, and since 1905, the year of Man and Super-
man, he has not added anything which carries forward his
propaganda or adds intrinsically to the importance of his
work ; and public opinion has divided itself into the beliefs
that either Mr Shaw is tremendously in earnest or that he

266 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART, ra

does not care to be intelligible and merely laughs at him-
self. The theory which holds that he is an obscure,
paradoxical and unintelligible writer is difficult of con-
firmation. Never was the meaning of any writer more un-
mistakable, at least in his prefaces, for those may be
forgiven who are occasionally in some doubt of his inten-
tion in the plays. Of the sincerity and purposefulness
of Mr. Bernard Shaw's writing there can be no manner of
doubt. He has finally won his place because he is sincere
and has a constructive message to deliver. Nobody who
has strong convictions can hide his light under a bushel ;
and Mr. Shaw has powerful convictions and no passion for
self-effacement. Sometimes he appears to regard himself
as a man whose work is to be purely destructive; he is,
nevertheless, governed by a constructive faith and creed.
In his plays, essays, prefaces and tracts he has given him-
self without stint to the conversion of the country to his
own opinions, and his opinions embody themselves in
outward guise in a society which has joyfully accepted a
rule of thumb adherence to lessons deduced from the
statistical tables of Mr. Sidney Webb, a society governed
by cold intellect, unweakened by romanticism, idealism
or sentiment.

And thus it follows that Mr. Bernard Shaw sees life
and portrays it in his drama through the mists of Fabian
theory and argument. His temper is matter-of-fact : his
emotions, and he is not without them, are cowed by an
aggressive intellect. There is no room in his world for
that kindliness, simple affection, bright-eyed or tearful
sentiment which does most to redeem life and save human
existence from the intolerable. Nearly every man and
woman in love becomes sentimental and romantic : there
is no sentiment in the vigorous lovers of Mr. Shaw. Julia
Craven, Ann Whitefield, even Candida, the most human
of his women, have no illusions ; and the men whom they
protect or love are flippant, cynical, coldly ratiocinative,
or, if they give way to sentiment, it is only to betray
themselves into a disadvantage. On Shavian principles
General Boxer, in Getting Married, is the beau ideal oi
the suitor. He protests to the woman who repeatedly
has refused him that she cannot be without the desire
for children or the satisfaction of the natural appetites,

CHAP, n] AFTER IBSEN 267

And, (because Mr. Shaw's vision of life is abnormally
intellectual, he has rendered one side of woman's nature
as it has never been represented on the stage before ; for
woman is at once more practical and more emotional than
man. The practical instincts of woman he has seized
admirably; her emotional sophistries and subtleties he
has completely missed, and his feminine characterisations
are, therefore, but profiles. And, in greater or less degree,
the indictment is applicable to the male characters of the
plays. Keegan, the crazy mystic of John BulVs Other
Island, offers an exception to a rule, which makes us regret
that the accident which helped the author on this occasion
does not more often befall him. But for the greater part
his characters are used as exponents of ideas ; and the habit
has grown upon him till in several of the later plays the
dialogue has lost all character, resolving itself into a
tossing from mouth to mouth of a contention between
advanced notions and shocked prejudices. Each drama is
written to elucidate a thesis, which is stated in a lengthy
preface of greater interest and composed with greater
cogency than the play. His characters, therefore, only
too often remain as tags to everyday topics. Nobody,
it is true, would deny dramatic insight and the gift of
sincere characterisation to the author of Candida and Mrs.
Warren' s Profession; but even these suffer from that
credulous modernity and faith in the vulgar illusions of
the actual which overpower the humanity of the greater
part of Mr. Shaw's drama and distort it into the clever
young man's journalism given a new garment. In later
years the prefaces are the chief matter and the plays
follow as a illustrative comment : and the prefaces are
merely exceedingly good journalism. The plays, likewise,
are acted leaders, introducing the special theories of a
party. They thus lack artistic restraint. The exaggera-
tions in character-drawing and management of the action
are as preposterous as in Dickens and Ibsen, and less
illusive.

Coleridge once declared his admiration of the assertive
young man whose dogmatisms ran in ore direction, even
though they might be plainly wrong. And clearly defined
thought, a consistent tendency in action, an undeviating
ideal in art, must always win not only respect but achieve

268 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART, ra

some end in influencing other workers in the same field.
Even when the manner or mannerism is difficult of

imitation and possibly even a snare to
Harley Granville the beginner something will be made of
Granville-Barker, it, if that mannerism or method be fol-
b* 1877» lowed consistently. To their own damage

young novelists have followed in the
way of Henry James ; and many of those who have more
wisely avoided his way have not escaped that general
manner of hovering on the wing about the mental processes
of the characters portrayed. The widely diffused resolu-
tion of the dramatic or narrative representation of life
into a kind of psychometric is largely due to Henry James.
Mr. Granville-Barker was probably in no way a conscious
disciple of the American novelist, but his prolix, involved
and somewhat chilling intellectual drama is in the same
class in workmanship as Henry James's novels. His plays
have also affinities with those of Mr. Bernard Shaw : and
the bare realism of Ibsen has influenced him, although he
has learned no lessons in the art of form from Ibsen, who
never trangresses against the dramatic virtue of suc-
cinctness and relevance. When a very young man Mr.
Granville-Barker had in him the gifts and graces of poetry
and romance, as The Marrying of Anne Leete (1901)
plainly showed. But he was unfortunately, against his
better nature, inspired with an enthusiasm for intellectual
and realistic drama; and when, in conjunction with Mr.
Vedrenne, he gained control of the Court Theatre the
plays he preferred to produce were those of Ibsen, Haupt-
mann, Schnitzler, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Galsworthy and St. John
Hankin. And his own plays, without abandoning the
detailed psychology already manifest in The Marrying of
Ann Leete, adopted in addition the methods of the realists.
He became one of the naturalists, elaborately painful in
his conception of character and rendering of dialogue,
whether trivial or impassioned, continually probing the
mind and careless of movement and action. In at least
two of his plays, The Voysey Inheritance (1905) and The
Madras House (1910), there seems no special reason why
they should open at the particular stage of the story the
author chooses, and certainly none why they should not
end earlier or later with equal advantage. And Waste

CHAP.II] AFTER IBSEN 269

(1907) and The Marrying of Anne Leete are only a little less
inconclusive.

Mr. Granville-Barker adopted for his manner as a play-
wright a passionless intellectual impressionism. The
picture of the well-to-do shopkeeper's home and family
in the first act of The Madras House is a striking piece of
work. The inanimate dialogue, the insipid questions, the
repetitions of phrase, exactly render the atmosphere of
the house, the character of the inmates and the whole
tradition of their lives. The inconsequence of the dialogue
in this act, however, is not merely a faithful rendering
of what happens in middle-class households, it is a part
of Mr. Granville-Barker's adopted manner ; and therefore
he is here eminently successful. But in the larger part of
his drama this habit of prolix involution in dialogue is
his greatest fault. It is talk, and not always talk that
is relevant or significant. In these plays he exactly trans-
fers life to the stage ; but he interprets nothing. The street
and the counting-house are almost more exegetical of
themselves.

The Voysey Inheritance depicts the inheritance by
Edward Voysey and other members of the family of debts
incurred by the elder Mr. Voysey who has swindled his
clients of their money. It offers a curiously interesting
picture of perturbations in the minds of different members
of the family ; but, as it began in the middle of the story,
it breaks off without development, and nothing is left
to us. Waste turns upon the discovery of an intrigue
which injures the career of an aspiring politician, a theme
often used, and employed in a different way by Stanley
Houghton in Trust the People. The Madras House has
scarcely any narrative or dramatic movement that can
be stated — it is a picture of middle-class people connected
with a large metropolitan drapery establishment. In
these plays Mr. Granville-Barker is at little pains to
dramatise any of his themes : a minutely intellectual
psychology is his purpose, and we are led to suspect that
he would have succeeded better had he cast his plays in
the form of the novel. The narrative contained in the
stage directions and descriptions of character is frequently
more illuminating than the dialogue. Thus, when we are
told of Dr. Wedgecroft that he " squeezes Miss TrebelPs

270 INTELLECTUAL DfcAMA [PART.!!*

hand with an air of fearless affection which is ... not the
least lovable/' and of Mr. Brigs tock that he is " as agitated
as his wife, and as he has no nervous force to be agitated
with is in a greater state of wretchedness " we conceive
the whole character of the individual in either case. More
is told us here than in all the dialogue or dramatic move-
ment. In direct narrative and in impersonal description
Mr. Granville-Barker would probably have been com-
pletely successful. His plays, like those of Mr. Bernard
Shaw, are really novels on the stage. Their tense psycho-
logical atmosphere, the length of their dialogue, the intro-
duction of unrelated discussions on political and social
topics, the absence of movement make them difficult of
representation. Further, they are comparatively passion-
less ; the tension is coldly intellectual and apt to leave the
audience jaded. Mr. Granville-Barker pores over his
characters with the exact patience of the bacteriologist in
his laboratory ; Mr. Galsworthy analyses with the matter-
of-factness of the practising barrister; Mr. Shaw imports
his own personality into every situation.

In his three more important plays Mr. Granville-Barker
has followed an ideal and method to which he was not
born. But there are signs in his productions of Shake-
speare, and in one or two curtain-raisers in which he has
collaborated, that his natural self is not altogether
obscured, and the future may bring plays of a different
character.

St. John Hankin was a few years older than Mr. Gran-
ville-Barker, but his appearance as a dramatist came
later. His first successful play, The
St. John Emile Return of the Prodigal, was produced
Clavering Hankin, by the Vedrenne-Barker management at
1869-1909. at the Court Theatre in 1905. Before

this he had been occupied with journa-
lism both in London and Calcutta, although playwriting
was always his ambition. The first of his plays to be acted
was The Two Mr. Wetherbys, which was privately per-
formed by the Stage Society in 1903. Shortly after this
ill-health compelled him to retire from London life, and
from his seclusion in the country he produced those plays
which have given him a place in the English world of
letters which is scarcely likely to be lost.

CHAP, n] AFTER IBSEN 271

In St. John Mankinds satire on middle-class standards
of morality we may trace the influence of Mr. Bernard
Shaw; but he showed his originality in his absolute
freedom from the illusions and sentiments which Mr. Shaw
has unconsciously cherished. St. John Hankin's comedies
close with the triumph of the villain. This was his form
of protest against the happy ending, which, if more
hackneyed, is at least as true a conception as the unhappy
ending, for the good man may, on the whole, be counted
to win the best that is in life. His plays naturally met
with but limited favour from a public which preferred the
happy ending and found Hankin's cynical wit distasteful.

St. John Hankin based his writing upon a theory, and
a theory which he believed in with fervour. He excluded
all sentiment and sham; he had no sympathy with
ecstatic moralities and ideals, holding with Butler that
the perfectly virtuous man was as offensive to God as the
unrighteous and wicked man who erred too far on the
other side. His drama is the drama of uncompromising
realism, his philosophy of life a cynical commonsense.
The prodigal who arises and comes home to his father,
after wasting the thousand pounds with which he was
packed off to Australia, displays no spirit of repentance.
He regards it as a matter of temperament and circum-
stance that his father and elder brother prefer to live
respectably at home and work hard at the factory amass-
ing" wealth. For the prodigal this is impossible; his
nature forbids it. His father has brought him into the
world ; he demands a yearly allowance for doing nothing
— and gets it.

The motives of his other plays are similar in general
character. Lady Denison, who adopts and puts into
practice the charitable and philanthropic schemes of the
idealist, Basil Hylton, discovers that she opens the gate
to misdemeanours and embarrassing complications with-
out benefiting any one. Altruistic philanthropy, in St.
John Hankin's eyes, was as likely to do harm as good.
Pride of race and generations of tenure on one spot have
weakened the strength and will-power of individual
members of a family. The daughter who chooses to be a
mother without marrying, and to earn her living by
keeping a hat shop in London, is better morally than her

272 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART. HI

unadventurous and weak relatives who stay at home.
These are the plot-ideas which Hankin chose; and, as
an example of merciless realism, The Last of the De Mullins
(1908) is his pattern-play. It is throughout a tense piece
of writing; and, if it preaches a moral, the naturalness
of the characters and their environment obscures this
fact. It is a picture of life with its strange inversions of
right and wrong, justice and injustice, the things that
are fitting and the things that are not. We can sympathise
with the passionate and excited eloquence of old De
Mullin when he storms at the daughter who has smirched
the family honour by bearing a child out of wedlock and
soiled her hands with a trade, A man is in the right to
love the place where his forefathers have lived for genera-
tions; but Janet De Mullin is also right when she cries
impatiently —

" You seem to think there's some peculiar virtue
about always living in the same place. I believe in
people uprooting themselves and doing something with
their lives."

And, for once, Hankin loses his cold restraint when he
allows Janet, the unwedded mother, to cry —

" To know that a child is your very own, is a part
of you. That you have faced sickness and pain and
death itself for it. That is it yours and nothing can
take it from you because no one can understand its
wants as you do. To feel its soft breath on your cheek,
to soothe it when it is fretful and still it when it cries,
that is motherhood and that is glorious.55

But, as a rule, there is little passion in St. John Hankin *s
writing. He studies his characters and their conventional
motives in the spirit of the dispassionate analyst. The
Last of the De Mullins is a stronger and more emotional
play than the others, because in it Hankin was obviously
constrained to utter himself; and, for a like reason, The
Return of the Prodigal is but little inferior to it in force
and dramatic intensity. The subject of The Charity that
Began at Home (1906) does not easily admit of forcible
character-drawing, and the play is the least successful
of his works. The Cassilis Engagement (1907) was the

CHAP, n] AFTER IBSEN 273

most popular of his plays because it is the least rebel-
lious, and it is also excellently adapted to lively repre-
sentation on the stage. Nevertheless in theme and humour
it is less characteristic of Hankin than anything of equal
length he wrote.

Hankin's stagecraft is admirable; his dialogue is a
pattern of prose-dialogue for drama of modern life. He
makes no mistake in being too brilliant or too witty, nor
does he strain, with Ibsen and some of his followers, at
prosaic dullness below the level of middle-class drawing-
rooms. His men and women talk as they would talk,
their thoughts come in an unforced sequence and the
dialogue flows with natural ease. If there be any serious
fault in Hankin 's work it is that he is too detached, too
analytical, too aloof from his characters. And, therefore,
in the more serious crises of life he misses his way. With
one or two exceptions his characters do not spring into fire
when they ought. But the coldly impersonal note of his
drama may be largely explained by the ill-health which
troubled him for many years.

One cause of Ibsen's success with the average audience
which thinks but is not intellectual over-much was his
incessant modernity, his constant dis-
John Galsworthy, cussion of such questions as sex-
b« 1867. relationship, woman's position in the

social scale, the place of idealism in
politics, the disease of nervous hysteria and the host of
other embarrassments which trouble us more than- they
did our forefathers. The types Ibsen continually repro-
duced, the neurotic and half-educated girl who is married
too early, the conventional clergyman, the demagogue,
the dreamy idealist, are they not peculiarly with us to-
day ? And herein Mr. Galsworthy has followed in Ibsen's
footsteps. He is an interpreter of Anglo-Saxon modernity,
denouncing our evil ways, especially our reprehensible
class distinctions and the selfish warfare between labour
and capital. And, like Ibsen, Mr. Galsworthy is impartial,
detached, analytical; like Ibsen he has been ae£US££Loi
pessimiani because he sees the sorrow of life as well as its
joy,; but he is even more cold and judicial than Ibsen,
his humour is as meagre, and he is without Ibsen's fervour
and poetic genius. We cannot but suspect that sub-
s

274 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART. HI

consciously the knowledge of a want of poetry has coloured
Mr. Galsworthy's views upon the future of English drama
(' Some Platitudes Concerning Drama,5 Fortnightly
Review, December, 1909). It will probably, he prophesies,
flow down two main channels " situate far apart. " The
one channel will be that of naturalism " faithful to the
seething and multiple life around lis, drama such as some
are inclined to term photographic/' the other a poetic
drama " incarnating through its fantasy and symbolism
all the deeper aspirations, yearnings, doubts and
mysterious strivings of the human spirit." These are the
two forms drama will take upon itself in the immediate
future, forms rising from " an awakened humanity in the
conscience of our time." But, says Mr. Galsworthy,
" Between these two forms there must be no crude unions ;
they are too far apart, the cross would be too violent."
Here Mr. Galsworthy is speaking for himself, and not for
the possible drama. Ibsen has united naturalism and
poetry in Rosmersholm and The Lady from the Sea; and
often when least we expect it the gleam of poetry lightens
his prose world. The playwrights of the Irish Theatre have
brought naturalism and poetry together — Synge and other
writers of the school. For Mr. Galsworthy in person
naturalistic and poetic prose-drama are " situate far
apart " ; he is not only incapable of welding them, he can
only write realistic drama. The poetry of The Little
Dream (1911) fails, and that play of fancy, The Pigeon
(1912), is ineffective dramatically and tedious as a
morality. Poetry is not impartial and judicial; Mr.
Galsworthy is by nature cold, impartial, judicial. He can
present on the stage the clash of character with character,
the war of the classes, the struggle of the poor and the
rich, and he never depresses the beam of justice with his
own finger. As a dramatist he is noteworthy, but he is
never the great artist, for he is never lost to himself, and
the highest art is ever unconscious arising out of the depths
of man's being, from a region unexplored by the artist
himself.

The importance of Mr. Galsworthy's work in modern
clrama does not lie in its artistic power, but in its moral
implication and the ethical 76rce of the author. That
" * The Moral ' is the keynote of all drama " is the chief

CHAP, n] AFTER IBSEN 275

article of his faith ; and by this he means neither a moral
that is a propitiatory dramatisation of a code approved
by nine-tenths of the audience, nor the code by which the
author himself lives, but a moral without any immediate
]3ractical purpose, left to the deduction of the indivfdual
froixTOaitH^ presentation of things as

tKey are for their own sake— iii a word, the ethical method
of Shakespeare. This is Mr. Galsworthy's theory of the
drama, and sometimes he comes but little short of his
theory. In The Silver Box (1906), Strife (1909) and
Justice (1910), conscious as we are that Mr. Galsworthy
is a thinker with definite views of his own, these views
are only apparent as they are shadowed forth by a pre-
sentation of life that is cold and impartial. Justice, is
kinder to the jich . maiLJthan. to his poorer brother, labour
suffers more than wealth in the warfare of the modern
industrial world, the kindly philanthropist is at once a
laughing-stock and an example to the world, these and
other morals may be read in Mr. Galsworthy's plays, but
he makes no attempt to indoctrinate his audience by
methods which all are quick to resent unless the doctrine
be also their own. There is no bias in the moral Mr.
Galsworthy sets rolling, for he is faithful to the ethical
character of the drama of modern life outspread before
him. John Anthony, chairman of the tin-plate works,
and David Roberts, chief of the strikers, are both deserted
and " done down," and nothing is won for either side.
The morality of Mr. Galsworthy's drama is concerned
not with immediate returns but with the ultimate : it
requires, therefore, " a far view, together with patient
industry, for no immediately practical result."

With Mr. Bernard Shaw Mr. Galsworthy is, then, the
writer of plays with a moral, the author of tendency
dramas. But unlike Mr. Shaw he makes no bid for
popularity. Mr. Shaw must bask himself in the sunshine
sf applause or the atmosphere of execration; Mr. Gals-
worthy can pursue his own path. For the good of his
public Mr. Shaw has been more thoughtful ; for the good
rt his soul Mr. Galsworthy has chosen the more excellent
way. The satirist, unless he raised a laugh, has never
pet cleared away from the heart of society the accretions
}f evil custom and easy acquiescence. John Bull's Other

276 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART.III

Island helps us to see a folly, and it also makes us laugh.
Mr. Galsworthy hardly makes us laugh, not only
because he is wanting in humour, but because he
is always a little strident and harsh. Unless he is writing
with acerbity he becomes profitless and weak. The first
inclination of Mr. Galsworthy 's talent is toward satire. He
adopted fiction by which to express himself because it was
the mode of the day ; in the eighteenth century he would
have written satirical poems in iambic couplets. When he
passed from fiction to drama he felt more painfully the
want of poetry in his method. Cold, involved and
psychological satire can have no place on the stage, for
no actor can represent it, no audience fix its attention
upon its abstractions. Mr. Galsworthy was driven there-
fore to converting satirical fiction into the impartial
analysis of the drama with a purpose.

The purely human problems of life, love, hate, the pas-
sionate impulses, mother-love, madness and world-weari-
ness with the inscrutable ways of the gods, these great
themes which have occupied dramatists of all ages do
not disturb the mind of Mr. Galsworthy. His vision is
narrowed to social problems. Justice asks the question
of Tolstoy's Resurrection — Is society justified in punishing
its members in accordance with a judicial system ? And
the impartiality of Mr. Galsworthy is clearly shown in
this play. The clerk who tampers with a cheque is a
miserably weak and neurotic creature before he goes into
prison, and he is the same useless member of society when
he comes out. The only justice society can offer him is
kindly and repressive care in a labour colony. But this
idea is not the motive of the play, nor is it thrust upon us.
The same inconclusiveness attaches to The Eldest Son
(1912), a play with much the same theme as Stanley
Houghton's Hindle Wakes. A young man of good family
has seduced one of the maid-servants. He offers her
marriage. In the end her father refuses for her, Declining
to accept a " charity marriage. " This has the merit oi
greater probability than Fanny's unlikely refusal of Alan
Jeff cote in Hindle Wakes : but intrinsically the play
achieves no end beyond emphasising the impassable barriei
of class distinction with an incisiveness that will please
the most reactionary of conservatives. These plays, The

CHAP, n] AFTER IBSEN 277

Silver Box, Strife and the inferior Mob (1914) have for
dramatic theme economic problems, because abstract
difficulties are continually in Mr. Galsworthy's mind. In
Joy (1907) and The Fugitive (1918) he has chosen more
human themes. The latter is Mr. Galsworthy's version
of A Doll's House, and a version more credible and
realistic than the original. If Nora could be supposed even
dimly to realise her position she would have been unable
to state it with the force and acumen with which Ibsen
preposterously endows her. With Clare Dedmond the
position is different. She is a clergyman's daughter
married to an ordinary, well-behaved Englishman of
means. After a year of marriage she discovers that love
for her husband, if it ever existed, is dead, and, struggle
though she may, she cannot conquer her feelings of
repulsion. She breaks loose, but soon collapses in the
effort to support herself in a livelihood and battle against
the world's contempt for a woman who has deserted her
husband. She resolves to accept the inevitable left to
a woman in her position, but relents and saves herself
from fate by poison. It is a grim and depressing, if
powerful and credible play. Clare Dedmond, though she
can give little reason as the world judges, is right in
demanding her freedom. And she acts consistently
throughout, as a woman fine in temper but not fine enough.
The defect of the play is the difficulty of avoiding quite
absurd melodrama in acting the character of Malise,
Clare's friend, abettor and lover. It may be said, how-
ever, that in The Fugitive Mr. Galsworthy recovered some
of the ground he had lost since he wrote Justice three
years earlier.

Strong and unwavering sincerity in a writer, absorbing
his whole nature and dominating every thought, will
produce work of impressive quality although he be devoid
of the higher gifts of expression. Mr. Galsworthy's
significance lies in his sincerity. He is painfully aware of
the many evils done under the sun; and he comes as a
reformer and philanthropist. But he is wanting in a
stronger faith; the burning hope which has animated
greater reformers is not his ; his world is uniformly grey.
None of his plays is hopeful; and the dramatic last act
of Justice, ending in utter desolation and misery, is

278 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART, in

characteristic of his thought and attitude. But uninspir-
ing, and in one sense uninspired as is Mr. Galsworthy's
drama, it is strong, realistic, and, above all, it has no
taint of the theatre. No faintest suspicion of stagey effect
clings to a single one of his plays. They are, to use his
own epithet, " photographic " drama,

His dialogue is the speech of men who are living beings
facing the exigencies of the moment in an ordinary world.
There is no artifice in the conversation of his characters.
Nevertheless his dialogue is not merely a mechanical record
of things said in the real world. Probably the most
dramatic circumstances of real life would be intolerably
unconvincing if transferred directly to the stage. Mr.
Galsworthy's dialogue is the most plain and unadorned
matter-of-fact, but he understands the two arts of omission
and arrangement, and, in consequence, his plays have a
directness and economy in method unequalled by any
living English writer.

And, further, there can be no mistaking his characters.
They not only live, they are so clearly defined in
dialogue and action that hardly any room is left to the
actor for personal interpretation. His writing claims no
ornaments and graces; but in simplicity and directness
few modern plays lose less in the reading and gain less
in the acting, even in these days when the producer, not
the author, is the presiding genius of drama.

Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. Granville-
Barker and St. John Hankin are typical examples of the
influence oj jbsen working itself out toward a drama of
modern life which shall avowedly treat of those social
and economic questions vexing the modern world. They
are on the stage what Mr. H. G. Wells is in fiction ; and
the culmination of the tendency is to be found in Mr.
Galsworthy^s plays which reject every device accepted as
axiomatic by the older dramatists, of whom Sir Arthur
Pinero may be regarded as representative. Mr. Gals-
worthy transfers his people from the office, the home, the
street to the stage, modifying nothing save to compress
and arrange, in order clearly to -direct the attention of
his audience to that question of the day which is the busi-
ness of his play. Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. Galsworthy
are little concerned with individual men and women for

CHAP, ii] AFTER IBSEN 279

their own sake; they are commentators upon practical
problems, and their characters are to them only of interest
as they elucidate these problems. Their drama is not,
therefore, a drama which makes its appeal as a work of
art which custom cannot stale. But there are signs already
that the economic-problem play has seen its day. Younger
playwrights, even those who for want of a better term are
to be named " realists," are abandoning the pose of the
demagogue and social reformer to embrace again in drama
the unchangeable problems of life — work and ease, hunger
and fullness, the relationship of man and woman in the
simplest terms, of the old and the young, friendship, love
and hate. In these writers the influence of Ibsen is not
absent, but the impress of other ideals appears, including
that of the Irish school of dramatists ; and the effort has
been made to carry drama away from the centre and pro-
vincialise it. Miss Horniman, with the advantages of her
Manchester Repertory Company, gathered a band of
younger writers for the stage who turned to the use of
dialect; and later came the Liverpool and Birmingham
Repertory Companies. Stanley Houghton was the most
noteworthy of the younger dramatists of the north who
used dialect, and among other northern dialect writers
are Miss Githa Sowerby and Mr. Harold Brighouse. Mr.
Masefield's use of dialect belongs to Gloucestershire.

Stanley Houghton turned from cotton-broking to
dramatic criticism, then to the writing of plays, and in

the first place of comedy. But, despite
Stanley Hougton, his true and unforced humour, he was
1881-1913. only moderately successful in comedy.

The Dear Departed (1908), which
dramatises the coming to life of an old man after his
relations have begun to divide his property, though
amusing, is entirely unimportant. Independent Means
(1909) is barely a comedy, for the author has evidently
not decided in what mood to write the play. And The
Younger Generation (1910), though a simpler affair, suffers
from the same hesitation. The plot-idea has no originality.
The world is agreed that parents make a vast mistake
in insisting that their children, when they reach the end
of their teens, should come home early at night, should go
to church or chapel, should hold no opinions of their own

280 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PAET.HI

or should certainly not express them. The moral is a
little out-worn for full-grown comedy, and Mr. Houghton
fails to make anything of it. The play stands first on one
leg, then another, the author undecided whether he is
writing serious drama, farce or comedy. Trust the People
(1918), in which Mr. Houghton attempts a comprehensive
picture of political life, opens with a scene conceived and
carried out with dramatic force and then breaks down
into what is sometimes little short of farce, the more
ludicrous because unintentional.

Only in Hindle Wakes (1912), where Stanley Houghton
was intensely serious, did he achieve almost unqualified
success. Alan Jeffcote, the son of wealthy mill-owner,
compromises Fanny Hawthorn, a weaver at his father's
mill. The elder Jeffcote, a man of dense and obstinate
principle, insists on his son renouncing his engagement
with a well-to-do girl and marrying Fanny. Alan yields
only to find that Fanny refuses to accept him. He is
puzzled and suspects that she is sacrificing herself in her
anxiety not to spoil his life. She protests this thought
had not occurred to her.

" ALAN. Then, that isn't why you refused me ?

FANNY. Sorry to disappoint you, but it's not.

ALAN. I didn't see what else it could be.

FANNY. Don't you kid yourself, my lad ! It isn't
because I'm afraid of spoiling your life that I'm refus-
ing you, but because I'm afraid of spoiling mine !
That didn't occur to you ? "

He is puzzled and asks again,

" But you didn't ever really love me ?

FANNY. Love you ? Good heavens, of course not !
Why on earth should I love you? You were just
someone to have a bit of fun with. You were an amuse-
ment— a lark."

This last scene surely strikes a note of the improbable ?
It is inconceivable that a mill-girl, situated like Fanny
Hawthorn, should act with her independence and speak
like an emancipated woman who had studied the whole
meaning of social relationships. The note is as false as
the characterisation of Nora in A Doll's House, Neither

CHAP, n] AFTER IBSEN 281

Nora or Fanny could, save by a special intervention of
providence, emerge so suddenly from the chrysalis stage.
Houghton's first two acts were written as they were con-
ceived, the last breaks down because the author was
thinking not of his characters but of a theory of sexual
relationship he was anxious to develop.

The improbability of the last scene apart, Hindle Wakes
was a notable play. And the reason of its success is, for
the greater part of its development, its perfect reality.
Stanley Houghton could dramatise effectively the Lan-
cashire life which he noted shrewdly and clearly; his
humour was entirely natural, and moreover it was the
humour of a man who had pondered life, who saw its
margin of laughter in the moment he painted its tragedy
and sorrow with uncompromising definition, obscuring
nothing. Furthermore the realism of his method was
never the realism of the dispassionate observer, whom we
recognise in St. John Hankin or Mr. Granville-Barker ;
there was in his nature a simplicity, an unpretending
modesty and earnestness, which gave fire and strength to
his best writing.

In the writing of drama Mr. Gilbert Cannan has not
yet won for himself so marked and influential a position.
Mary's Wedding (1912), a dialect play
Gilbert Cannan, in one act, fails upon the stage because
b. 1884. the element of poetry introduced into

the dialogue is obviously unnatural to
the characters and the situation. In other words, the
play is radically false. In the writing of it Mr. Cannan
was doubtless influenced by memories of Synge, and the
same influence is again manifest in Miles Dixon (1910),
in which he tries to restore to the stage the poetry of rough
and common speech and an unspoiled vision of life.

More powerful and more dramatic is Githa Sowerby's
(Mrs. John Kendall) remarkable play, Rutherford and
Son (1912), in which the scene is laid among the hard-
headed manufacturing people of the
Githa Sowerby. Tyneside. The whole action takes
place in the living-room of John Ruth-
erford, the stern and bullying father who worships
his factory and subdues his children to his slightest word.
The two high merits of the play are the creation of an

282 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PABT.III

atmosphere of harsh, grey life, and the tenseness imparted
to the relationship of the characters.

A band of northern playwrights has been springing up
in the past few years, and among them others might well
be named, but none has rivalled Stanley Houghton or
Miss Sowerby in her striking play, nor is it possible at this
stage, when so little has been done, to judge the Lancashire
writers in perspective as workers with common or differing
aims,

Mr. Masefield has also made experiments with the dialect
play, and he has succeeded in writing forcible tragedy.
The Campden Wonder was produced at
John Masefield, the Court Theatre in 1907 by Mr. Cran-
ia 1874. ville-Barker. The play is written in West-
country dialect and describes how a man
to spite his brothers swears that he, his brother and his
mother have murdered a man for his gold. They are hung
and the man supposed to be murdered returns. Excessive
improbability is not the worst fault of a piece which suffers
from the number of its loose threads. The Tragedy of Nan,
produced in 1908, is a better constructed but an equally
dark and terrible tragedy. A woman, contemptuous of
the mean selfishness of her lover, stabs him and flings
herself in the river. Mr. Masefield is the unshrinking
realist. The harshness of life, its relentless savageries are
drawn without stint ; for he is only too prone, here as in his
poems, to confuse violence with strength. But Nan is a
tragedy from which poetry cannot be dissociated. The
ineradicable poetry of life is never absent from its rough
and turbulent scenes. And it is this enfolding atmosphere
of poetry which lends whatever quality it has to The
Tragedy of Pompey the Great (1910). Mr. Masefield's
imagination has been fired by the downfall of empire
symbolised in the death of Pompey at Pelusium, and he
succeeds in rendering in a certain degree what Shake-
speare conveys so powerfully in the Roman plays — the
consciousness of a world-empire behind the movement of
the actors in the foreground. But Pompey suffers from
the absence of any motive save the fall of a man once in
great power ; it is a chronicle play rather than a drama.

CHAPTER III

THE UNCERTAIN NOTE

Sir James Barrie — Alfred Sutro — Arnold Bennett — Somerset Maugham —
Hubert Henry Davics — Rudolf Besier — B. M. Hastings.

OF drama it is probably more true than of any art that
each age gets what it deserves. In any age and in any

country the majority of plays must be
Sir James Barrie, produced in the hope that they will prove
b. I860. a financial success, for, from author to

scene-shifter, many are concerned. The
poet may enjoy an independent income and publish his
verse at his own expense careless of royalties. Practically
the dramatist can never enjoy this happy position, for the
whole army of the theatre is dependent upon his power of
drawing money to the booking-office. A few, Mr. Shaw
and Mr. Galsworthy in particular at this moment in
England, may write to satisfy their own intellectual needs
and yet be rewarded in this world. But the number who
can hope to tread this narrow way is small. The writer
who looks to his returns must, in general, be satisfied
if he can please without entirely sinking his own person-
ality. And because his work marks no high aims, because
it is not indicative of personal force, it does not follow that,
even in a literary sense, it is entirely negligible. Sir James
Barrie is popular, and deservedly for his style, grace and
charm of manner; but he is significant of nothing in
modern drama, for on the stage he is most delightful when
he allows his fancy to roam uncontrolled by reality. The
Little Minister (1897), it is true, apart from a too-abundant
sentiment, was a picture of real life, for it had the
advantage of being founded upon one of the best of his
prose-tales. But in a play like The Admirable Crichton
(1903) he carries us over into the regions of pure burlesque.
Lord Loam holds that class distinctions should be effaced,
and he is ready to sit at meals with his servants, Crichton,

288

284 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PABT. ra

his butler, believes that class distinctions should be
observed. The theme is dramatised by the shipwreck of
Lord Loam's yacht. Lord Loam, his daughter, her
cousin, the tweeny maid and Crichton find themselves
on a desert island. Here the butler comes to the front,
discovers means for supporting the life of all, and the
others are virtually his menials. But after their rescue
and the return to London the old order reasserts itself,
and Crichton falls back into his original position. Equally
popular have been his other plays of burlesque fancy or
sentimental humour, Little Mary (1903), What Every
Woman Knows (1908) and Quality Street (1903). The
last-named play is typical of his favourite manner. The
action which is placed in the days of Napoleon and
Waterloo, gives Sir James Barrie an opportunity for
graceful sentimentality and superficial pathos in narrating
the love-story of the daring soldier and the tired school-
mistress. It is charming, it is pleasant, it is quaintly
ingenious, but it shirks everything that is essential to
painting of human life and character whether realistically
or in the spirit of optimistic idealism. Sir James Barrie 's
natal gift is poetic fancy rather than imagination, and
this gift has found its perfect expression in the beautiful
child's fantasy, Peter Pan (1904).

The sentimental, the pretty, the humorous in undreamt-
of situations Sir James Barrie can touch with an ease
and a grace which is given to no other writer of the day.
But when he attempts tragedy or the intense situation
he fails. Half an Hour (1913), the transcript of half an
hour in which a woman flies from her husband to her
lover and returns to her husband before her flight has
been discovered, is ludicrous and commonplace melo-
drama. The husband is a farcial figure; and the little
play is a piece of pure artifice, as indeed is nearly all his
dramatic writing, save that most of his plays, unlike Half
an Hour9 are redeemed by quaint fancy, kindly humour
and tender sentiment1.

Sir James Barrie has not the force of a strong person-
ality, but popularity has left him the individuality of his

1. In his later plays, notably in Dear Brutus (1917) and Mary Rose
(1920), Sir James Barrie added, with the happiest effect, a strain of
romantic mysticism, a characteristic which is peculiarly a part of his
genius.

CHAP, in] THE UNCERTAIN NOTE 285

work. Of Mr. Sutro it is difficult to say as much : he is
now content to amuse his audiences with the stereotyped
tricks of the comic stage. The Walls of Jericho (1904),
his first success, was understood to be
Alfred Sutro, satire upon idle and worthless society,

b* 1863- and therefore found favour with all

classes. But it may be questioned
whether the moral implication was not accidental and
unsuspected by the author. In his later plays he makes
no pose as the satirist of society. Mollontrave on Women
(1905), The Perplexed Husband (1911), The Two Virtues
(1914) and other plays which fall into the same period are
exaggerated and artificial farce.

Mr. Arnold Bennett is an example of a dramatist with
a commercial sense finely developed. In The Great
Adventure (1911) and Milestones (1912),
Arnold Bennett, the latter written in collaboration with
b- 1867- Mr. Edward Knoblauch, he has suc-

ceeded in producing two plays which
have won upon the public fancy and enjoyed remarkably
long runs. In the case of The Great Adventure this popu-
larity can have nothing to do with the reality of the piece,
for Mr. Bennett names it a " play of the fancy, " and he
might equally so have described Milestones, in which three
generations are represented in three acts. The humour
of the situation turns upon a picture of the daringly
original idea of one generation becoming the common-
place of the next ; but perhaps the greatest recommenda-
tion of the piece was the opportunity it afforded for quaint
contrasts in costume and furniture. It was distinctively
a play for the producer. His gift of light-hearted and
fanciful exaggeration Mr. Bennett put to its best use three
years earlier in What the Public Wants (1909), a spirited
satire on the up-to-date newspaper proprietor.

In wit, art and character-drawing Mr. Somerset

Maugham is a better playwright than Mr. Bennett, though

the personal note is often but faintly

William Somerset heard in his writing, for his manner has

Maugham, b. 1874. changed with his contact with changing

influences. His first play was written in

German and performed in Berlin in 1902. His second

play, A Man pf Honour, appeared in the following year,

286 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART, in

and since that date he has produced novels and plays in
continuous and rapid succession. He eclipsed Wilde's
record by having on one occasion four plays running
simultaneously in London,

In common with nearly all young dramatists he began
by the writing of tragedy. A Man of Honour in idea and
handling is not original, but it is good writing. The
sordidness of unhappy marriage, the pathetic agony of
the little barmaid who loves passionately and knows that
she cannot hold her husband's love, are drawn strongly
and clearly. But he has not chosen since to write any-
thing in the same manner. Lady Frederick (1907), which
succeeded it at a distance of some years, professes to be
comedy and betrays a study of Oscar Wilde's methods.
Mr. Maugham's people do not scintillate as brilliantly as
Wilde's, but they are witty as indiscriminately and with
as little relevance to character. The play was one of Mr.
Maugham's great successes because it was a mixture of
excellent melodrama and farce. Penelope (1909) is better
comedy, the characters more realistic, and there is less
straining for the aphorism, but it presents no features of
outstanding merit, nor was it as successful as Lady
Frederick.

In farce Mr. Maugham is eminently successful. Jack
Straw (1908) and Mrs. Dot (1908) are bright, rapid and
amusing, and they are removed from commonplace farce
which excites laughter by mere buffoonery. In his later
plays — Smith (1909), Loaves and Fishes (1911) and The
Land of Promise (1914) Mr. Maugham takes himself more
seriously, inveighing against the manners and vices of
the social world; and the change is probably due to the
influence of didactic dramatists like Mr. Galsworthy and
Mr. Shaw. But Mr. Maugham is well able to hold his
own and write with something of his own manner, for
The Land of Promise, which contrasts the manners of
the old country with the way of life in a Canadian shack,
is a fine and truthful human comedy.

Mr. Maugham is an extraordinarily rapid, but he is
also a good and accurate worker. He has taught him-
self the requirements of the stage, and if in Lady Frederick
he represents the somewhat naive methods handed on by
Wilde, he can write more realistically in Penelope, and in

CHAP, in] THE UNCERTAIN NOTE 287

some of his later plays he yields to the obsession of the
period in trying to say something to his generation. He
is never strikingly original ; he works with other dramatists
before him and with one eye upon his public ; his aphorisms
upon life are not many, successive plays take up and repeat
the best of them. But he has humour, wit and style;
and for these much may be forgiven, even the rather
distant and unconvincing characterisation he offers us.
He does not appear to have acquired a strong sympathy
with human beings; he uses his characters as pivots for
dialogue and action, content if they are sufficiently true
to escape being wire-pulled puppets or exaggerated
examples of realism.

Among others of his day is to be named Hubert Henry
Davies, who succeeded in combining good writing, some

intellectual depth and a tender emotion-
Hubert Henry alism without at any time rising to a
Davies, 1876-1917. very distinctive level of workmanship.

His plays are in large part plainly
adapted for the theatre and the audience; nevertheless
they rarely fail of passages which give indication of fine
and gentle feeling. The character who takes the title-
part in Cousin Kate (1903) is a generous and warm-
hearted woman drawn in strong and simple outline which
does credit to Davies's knowledge of human nature. The
story of the stolen jewels in Mrs. Gorringe's Necklace
(1903) is more definitely shaped by the thought of an
audience, but it is not without an element of genuine
truthfulness. The Mollusc (1907), if again a little melo-
dramatic, manifests the writer who has sympathy with
everyday life, and who can, when he does not think of
the stage, draw it truthfully. Cousin Kate, despite its
want of stagecraft, particularly in the intolerably long
dialogue of the second act, appeared to give promise of
better things. The author did not, however, redeem the
expectations he raised with this play. He could be tender
without becoming weak, he could bring light, sweetness
and poetry into his plays ; but his outlook was not wide,
nor was his hold upon reality strong ; and finally the com-
mercial needs of the stage appear to have been too much
for him.
The work of Mr. Rudolf Besier and Mr. B. M. Hastings

288 INTELLECTUAL DRAMA [PART, m

deserves also to be noticed. In Don (1909) Mr. Besier

wrote a thoroughly good play in which the clash of temper

with temper was powerfully drawn. It

Rudolf Besier, was ably constructed, and the characters

k 1878« were human. Lady Patricia (1911) was

a gay and farcical comedy, vivacious,

amusing in its situations and little more.

Mr. Hastings belongs to the realists, but not to the
bald and painstaking realists, for he has abundance of
humour, sprightliness and dashes of wit.
Basil Macdonld His dialogue is remarkably deft and
Hastings, b. 1881. clean-cut, and his ideas possess origin-
ality. The New Sin (1912) at first
suggests a title chosen with the aim of attracting the idle
who seek a new sensation ; but the play in itself is far from
being sensational, and the title has wit and point, for
the new sin is the choice of life rather than suicide. So
long as Mr. Hilary Cutts lives his brothers and sisters can
receive no part of the inheritance left by their father.
Upon the death of Hilary they are each to receive ten
thousand pounds. He attempts to make way for them by
taking upon himself the guilt of a cowardly murder com-
mitted by a worthless brother. Unfortunately for this
scheme he is reprieved by the Home Secretary; and the
curtain falls upon an outburst of chagrin from the
murderer who has allowed his brother to go to death in
the prospect of receiving a fortune. The plot is prepos-
terous; but the working-out of the theme and the
character-drawing is striking. Furthermore, although we
are not burdened with didactic excursions, we are con-
scious that the play comes from a writer who has observed
life and has something worth the saying. In another
sphere the light comedy, Love — And what Then? (1912),
produced within a few months of The New Sin, is equally
a striking piece of work. The Evangelical clergyman, the
butterfly wife who realises that she is a pretty woman after
she becomes a mother, and the human, worldly-wise
bishop are delightfully and clearly drawn characters. The
play has its weak and ridiculous scenes ; but these lapses
are not distinctive of Mr. Hastings. At his best he is not
only humorous, but thoughtful and truthful.

PART IV
THE NOVEL

CHAPTER I

LATE DEVELOPMENTS

IN the last half-century, or a little more, the novel is
plainly distinguished from the fiction of the preceding
one hundred and fifty years by two changes — a notable
gain in technique and an increasing solemnity with which
the novelist takes himself and his work. The third-rate
scribbler of to-day would blush to be found guilty of those
weaknesses in the conduct of narrative into which Scott,
Hugo and Thackeray lapsed with magnificent unconscious-
ness of committing offence. In the mere matter of form
and construction the chief influence for good (and some-
times for evil) came from France. Balzac, despite his
insufferably disorderly habits of composition, wrote at a
white-heat which fused his material; and his method of
creating half his matter by corrections in proof had its
formal advantages, and disadvantages only in the printer's
bill. To describe Balzac either as a stylist or a master
of form would be impossible; but there is in him a con-
centration which distinguishes his writing from that of his
great contemporaries, George Sand and the elder Dumas.
They wrote to the bidding of passing impulses, poetically,
romantically ; Balzac, possessed by the French passion for
analysis and arrangement, sketched out the vast outlines,
never completely to be filled in, of La com6die humaine.
Inchoate as is the whole, it is still a vision of order. But
the first of the masters of form for form's sake, Prosper
M6rim6e, came a little later. He and Gautier discovered
and made the short story as it is still understood and
written. Of all forms in prose-writing the short story calls
for the highest endowment of artistic faculty in the author,
and it is, therefore, despite the immense opportunities
afforded by the plethora of modern magazines, seldom
compassed with success. Gautier chose unto himself the

291

292 THE NOVEL [PART iv

motto Vart pour Tart, a counsel of the impossible which
will always meet with its periods of resuscitation from the
limbo of human failures. Its practice in the strictness of
the letter invariably prostrates the artist in emotional and
intellectual exhaustion. Flaubert, who succeeded Gautier
and M£rim£e, was, with his disciple Guy de Maupassant,
saved from nemesis by the original vice of romanticism,
from which neither was wholly delivered, despite high-
minded devotion to the practice of realism, artistic form
and the discovery of the mot propre. Nevertheless in the
second half of the last century no novelist, as an influence
and a moulding force can be counted as of equal import-
ance with Flaubert. Madame Bovary (1859) is a boundary
mark in the story of European fiction. Beyond and above
all differences his influence is traceable in the -brothers
de Goncourt, Daudet, Maupassant, and to carry the survey
into our foreground, in Pierre Loti and M. Anatole France.
The lesson of the French novel, principally as exemplified
in the work of Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola,
crossed the channel and reappeared in the fiction of Oscar
Wilde, Mr. George Moore, Hubert Crackanthorpe, Ernest
Dowson, Henry Harland, and, after his own bent and
manner, in Mr. Thomas Hardy. Even before their advent
the tide had turned. Dickens, Thackeray and George
Eliot wrote novels much as they had been written in the
eighteenth century, in an over-long, disorderly and ill-
judged manner. Charlotte Bronte, however, evolved in
Jane Eyre and Villette the novel of narrow range, which
projected its interest upon two or three figures, the other
characters serving as a curtain against which the pro-
tagonists stood in clear relief. The credit of directing
Charlotte Bronte 's aims in fiction can hardly be given to
the French realists : her venture was an independent
leading of her own genius ; but unintentionally she was a
forerunner of change. New ideals in the art of construc-
tion, concentration, compression, style, chiefly borrowed
from France and sometimes worked in a manner peculiarly
English, mark a break which separates the fiction of the
earlier and the latter half of the century.

The older novelist was not merely content to find his
story and write it from day to day, careless of formal
artistry, he wrote chiefly to please, and this attained he

CHAP, i] LATE DEVELOPMENTS 298

cared little whether other things were added to him or
no. Defogjwas a master of the picaresque romance, and,
despite his pretence of moral intention, the end of his
tale was to capture the taste of his readers for the sensa-
tional and scandalous. Fieldjug .cannot be said to have
any positive aim in view save entertainment ; the greater
qualities of his work are unconscious, for few great men
have been less self-conscious than he. ^iolklt alternated
between the sensational romance and the novel of manners
without any ulterior purpose. Sterne, happily for his
own and later generations, purposed only to be incon-
sequent. And neither Scott nor Jane Austen wrote unto
intellectual and moral edification. Scott was in his own
eyes only secondarily a man of letters, and he held no
high opinion of the novel as a form of literature. Jane
Austen was a retiring maiden-lady with a sense of humour,
who never dreamed of the prophetic call of practitioners
in fiction. Richardson alone in the eighteenth century
took himself with monstrous seriousness, and wrote the
novel first to instruct and afterwards to entertain. His
example was but slowly followed, though, toward the
end of the century, the influence of Rousseau and the
French Revolution set going many doctrinaire novelists
of a minor order — among them Robert Bage, Thomas
Holcroft and William Godwin. And about the same time
novels with a purpose were written by Hannah More,
Mrs. Inchbald and Miss Edgeworth. But even with the
self-important Richardson, and more with the others, the
narrative was regarded in no other light than the spoon-
ful of jam which helped the patient to gulp down his
powder.

Scott, the least didactic of novelists, changed all this.
With Kim the novel became a power, and from the position
of poor serving-maid to literature stepped into the fore-
front and before long became mistress in the house.
HugpL Dumas, and a hundred others in every European
country^praclTsed the writing of historical romance ; and
fiction was no longer negligible by the sister arts of poetry
and drama. The didactic intention grew to adult import-
ance. Balzac offered a complete sketch of human activi-
ties. The moralists and immoralists, including George
Sand, Feuillet, Flaubert, Zola, embodied in fiction didactic

294 THE NOVEL [PART.IV

purposes, and the " heresy of instruction " was noised
abroad. It is unnecessary to follow the story further in
France — few, even of those who accepted the motto of
Gautier, escaped the obsession; and the novelist became
a teacher, a social prophet, a critic of manners. M. Anatole
France, M. Bourget, M. Andr£ Gide, to name but three,
would disclaim the mere standing of society entertainers.
In Russia the story is the same. Tolstoy and Dostoievsky
go out into the byways and hedges compelling the folk
t6 come in. In England the current set early to this
direction. Dickens is the avowed novelist with a purpose,
aiming his shafts at the poor law, the debtor's gaol, private
schools, chancery administration, hypocrisy in religion and
other failures in our social institutions. At the same time
Thackeray satirised individuals and social types. George
Eliot as eagerly uses the novel to inculcate the tenets of
the ethical church as Charlotte Yonge to buttress a new
spirit in the Church of England, and, like Richardson
or Zola, she took herself with immense seriousness.
Meredith and Mr. Thomas Hardy use the novel to set forth
their reading of the world's meaning, and make no con-
cessions to the weak, the conventional and the unintel-
lectual brother. And the tendency to treat narrative as
nothing save the vehicle of philosophy and instruction
grows, till the moral comes first and the story is written
to force it home. This is the state of Mrs. Humphry
Ward, Miss Marie Corelli, Mr. John Galsworthy, and Mr.
H. G. Wells. Mr. Wells has promised us the early death
of novels written only as works of art, reflecting life for
its own sake, detached from prejudices and ethical
principles of the author. The novel of the future is to
assume the functions of the pulpit and the platform, to
exhort, to guide and to restrain. He has illustrated his
theory in didactic tractates like The New Machiavelli and
Marriage. Thus the romance of Defoe and the art of
Flaubert have been sacrificed . at the altar of the
demagogue and preacher.

But the end is not yet. No work has survived the
ordeal of the centuries which did not add to its contem-
porary appeal the claim of creative imagination and
artistic form. Plato's philosophy for most men weighs
as nothing in the balance compared with the consummate

CHAP, i] LATE DEVELOPMENTS 295

beauty of his style and the art of his dialogue. Criticism
and instruction, like grammar, follow the thing made.
Language takes upon it new forms, and grammars quickly
become obsolete. Novels whose primary business is a
criticism or an exhortation based on contemporary life
and events have, unless inadvertently they are also
works of art, no more importance to literature than the
leaflet distributed at revival meetings or the printed
matter sent out by advertising firms and dignified by the
name of " literature." In proportion to the author's
power of imitating, scandalising or entertaining they will
enjoy a few years of life before they lose all significance
under the conditions of a new age when men have other
problems to consider. Art has no direct concern with
passing problems in politics, morals and social economics ;
its foundations are fixed upon the unchanging in human
nature — emotional reaction to experience. And this
emotional reaction is always the same. The triumph of
the financier on the Stock Exchange is essentially the
savage pleasure of his aboriginal forefather when he slew
his prey with a flint-headed spear ; the joy of the aeronaut
in swift flight differs in nothing from the ecstasy of the
Indian shooting broken rapids in a frail canoe. The
insight of the creative artist carries him beyond the curtain
of the visible to the eternal that is in human nature
under all varieties of experience, for his end is not photo-
graphic realism but the imago veritatis. And this faculty
belongs only to the genius who appears but seldom.
Hundreds of novelists can render life accurately as it
appears to most men; but the stronger emotion which
binds the meaning of the individual to the meaning of
the whole lies outside their cognisance. Fiction of the
lower order is pen-and-ink sketch, a journalistic report
of the things that happen — nothing is created from the
limbeck of the imagination. The one invariable result
of the contact of genius with the common experience
of life is the introduction into the world of a new idea,
a new vision. Nobody can again regard humanity in the
same light who has once met with Falstaff — it is an
enlargement of the mental and emotional horizon. The
realistic and non-creative artist leaves everything as it was
before,

296 THE NOVEL [PART iv

It has been predicted that the novel has seen its day
and must decline. This despair has no justification : it
is as probable that the great novels yet remain to be
written. Though fiction has usurped much of the realm
once held in fealty to poetry, drama and the essay, great
poetry is still being written, and perhaps great drama.
The comprehensiveness and elasticity of the novel is its
recommendation ; it has, therefore, been chosen as a form
of self-expression by a number of the greatest of modern
minds. And if the fact that the writing of the novel seems
to call for no special knowledge, no scholarship, no
training, has led to an inrush of the mediocre and incom-
petent, this argues nothing against the value of a novel
by a Fielding or a Tolstoy. There is as much difference
between Tom Jones and any one of the many hundreds of
the season's novels at the library as there is between
Othello and a bad melodrama. Nor, because it appears
easy, is there any need to dismiss the novel as the lowest
of all forms of art. Every sincere expression of emotion
and thought in art is legitimate. Art is always art, poetry
is always poetry in whatever form. What fails to be art
may be good craftsmanship ; and most novels are this and
no more.

It was natural that in early stages the novel should
evolve its peculiar characteristics and potentialities
rapidly. From Defoe to Sterne it travelled a longer
journey than it has since been destined to traverse. At
each stage in evolution toward a greater elaboration and
exactness the power required to advance another step is
enormously increased, just as the great liner must burn
an indefinitely greater quantity of coal to add another
knot to her speed after a certain point has been reached.
With growing complexity in life and the expression of
life in art changes must show themselves more slowly.
And, therefore, to many the art of the novel may seem
to be suspended or exhausted. Like a ship becalmed on
a sea we wait. But the wind never fails at the last to
ripple the water.

Mediocre fiction more easily than any other form of
the literary art wins its brief day of popularity before
it is consigned to oblivion. Each season brings its epoch-
making books which yield to others in the season that

CHAP, i] LATE DEVELOPMENTS 297

follows. Only a few novels in any century can have a
meaning a hundred years after they are written. Five
or six English novelists of the eighteenth century, at the
most, should be known to any ordinarily well-read man,
and perhaps seven or eight who belong to the nineteenth.
The rest are going or gone. Where are the novels of
Bulwer Lytton, Wilkie Collins, William Black ? The snows
of yester-year are more fresh to the memory of all but the
few, the few for whom the knowledge of literature is a
profession. These are gone, or nearly, for they created
nothing out of the unknown.

Writers of prose-fiction mentioned in the chapters which
follow form a large rally, and the names omitted are legion.
Of those who find a place here the greater number will
be forgotten in a few decades. But for all men the game
must be for the hour that is given : if we work for posterity
it can only be by remembering the present.

CHAPTER II

NEW-COMERS

§ 1. Oscar Wilde — George Moore — George Gissing — Rudyard Kipling--
Samuel Butler X

§ 2. Watts-Dunton— ' Mark Rutherford/

§ 8. Hubert Crackanthorpe — Henry Harland — Earnest Dowson — H. D.
Lowry — Arthur Symons — John Davidson — Max Beerbohm — Laurence
H on s man — Bernard Shaw.

§ 4. Cunninghame Graham — W. H. Hudson — Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch —
Sir Henry Rider Haggard — Baring-Gould — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle —
Sir Gilbert Parker — Henry Seton Merriman — Grant Allen — Israel
Zangwill— W. E. Tirebuck.

§ 5. David Christie Murray — Sir Hall Caine — Frankfort Moore — E. F.
Benson — Morley Roberts — Charles Garvice — * F. Anstey ' — Jerome K.
Jerome — W. W. Jacobs.

§ 0. Stevenson, Macdonald, Black — William Sharp — Neil Munro — Sir
James Barrie — * Ian Maclaren ' — S. R. Crockett — * George Douglas '
— J. H. Findlater and Mary Findlater.

§1

IN 1870, the year of Dickens 's death, the first era of the
Victorian novel came to an end. After this date George
Eliot produced the lengthy kaleidoscope of Middlemarch
and the interesting but second-rate study of Daniel
Deronda. But her truly creative period as an artist closed
many years before with Silas Marner (1861). Charlotte
Bronte had been dead some years before George Eliot
appeared as a novelist : had she lived her influence would
in all probability have hastened developments which are
first clearly marked in her novels and later become common
to most writers of prose-fiction of any importance. She
always writes as if what she had to say was vital, not
merely a matter of interest. The iterated note of personal
conviction, first intensified in Charlotte Bronte, has been
adopted by the didactic, hortatory or psychological
novelist of to-day. Further, her novels are constructed

299

800 THE NOVEL [PART iv

upon a conflict of character between two or three per-
sonalities, and the wider canvas of the older novelist is
abandoned. Yet after her Meredith continued, despite the
modern and twentieth-century habit of his thinking, to
write in the older, the broader and more diffuse manner ;
and Mr. Thomas Hardy, although he carried the English
novel a stage on its way in the art of concentration and
construction, still brought within the central interest of his
greater novels a large number of characters.

Meredith and Mr. Thomas Hardy have been the two
most powerful influences upon English prose-fiction in
the last thirty-five years : nearly every
Oscar Wilde, novelist has assimilated something from

1856-1900. one or the other, or from both, introduc-

ing characteristics proper to himself so
far as he was able to discover them. But forty years ago
neither Meredith nor Mr. Hardy had reached the dominat-
ing position they were destined to attain later. After the
decline of the Victorian novel proper with the death of
George Eliot, the chief tendencies traceable come from
France and declare themselves as an aesthetic impressionism
or drab realism, or a combination of the two. The purely
aesthetic novel is as little tolerable finally as a cake com-
posed only of sugar icing; for the ground of the novel
must be an experience of humanity in the rough, and
with this the hot-house plant of sestheticism has little in
common. The novel that may be defined as pure sestheti-
cism, for the want of a better term, has been practised
by Mr. Richard le Gallienne and others, but their attempts
are of small importance or value, and the signal example
of this kind of writing is to be found in Oscar Wilde.
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891) is hardly to be counted
a novel, for the whole matter is on the level of The Canter-
ville Ghost, only redeemed by extraordinary ingenuity
and ironic wit which make it one of the most brilliant
pieces of writing to which Wilde ever put his hand. In
itself, however, it is but an amusing and paradoxical jeu
d* esprit (garnished with twisted proverbial epigrams) in
its picture of the man who calmly commits murder from
a clear sense of duty to the future happiness of the woman
he is to wed. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) is Wilde's
only novel. " I wrote that," he said, " in a few days,

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 301

because a friend of mine declared I could not write a
novel." And Dorian Gray bears traces of rapid produc-
tion in the unnecessary length and tediousness (an art
Wilde did not deliberately cultivate) of much of the
dialogue, and in the absence of proportion in the develop-
ment of the narrative. It is possible to believe that when
Dorian Gray was new it made a stir. The luscious sug-
gestiveness of much of the writing was certain to please
some and shock others; but it is difficult to believe that
it was ever an interesting book to read through at a sitting ;
and Lord Henry Wotton's epigrams are below the standard
Wilde was capable of reaching, save for a few which are of
his best quality — outwardly vain and trivial they contain
clear insight and good philosophy of everyday life.
Dorian Gray was written against a bet, and it has all the
appearance of hasty work, except in the elaborate colour
and wealth of the famous eleventh chapter. Even as a
diploma piece in the art of aesthetic impressionism Dorian
Gray is not very striking work. Its inspiration is purely
literary and drawn from Huysmans' A Rebours. It is
beautiful, it is untrue, it is lifeless, using that word in its
strict sense. Wilde had the power of observation, the
faculties of sincerity and sympathy, but he walked de-
liberately in the blinkers of that art which is a lie, with the
result that he wrote no fiction and no drama which excites
any but an intellectual interest. Even the suggestiveness
of Dorian Gray is purely intellectual, and has no part
with the manner of Sterne, Gautier and Maupassant.
Wilde lived not the life of the emotions, but of intellectual
imagination and the lie. Neither in fiction nor in drama
has he created a single entirely credible character ; and in
this he would have gloried, for he held that while we may
believe in the impossible the probable will never command
our assent. He summed up the nature of his own achieve-
ment when he declared that he kept his talent only for
his books and put his genius into his life.

Wilde used his talent audaciously, throwing out his
net on all sides. He borrowed much from France, but
his primary debt in youth was to Pater and the Pre-
Raphaelites; and he put little into his writing that he
drew directly from an independent observation of
life. He bent nearly all his genius to a pose ; and, despite

302 THE NOVEL [PART iv

his high gifts, the whole after-effect of his work has been
narrowly confined. When Wilde was at the height of
his fame the most important new manifestation in English
fiction was an impressionistic realism due to French
influences; and the greatest work in this vein is to be
found in the earlier novels of Mr. George Moore, while a
band of younger writers, many connected with the Yellow
Book, followed in the same path. As in the poetry so in
the fiction of the period the common tendency was to
worship the god of things as they are and attempt to
render life by a cumulative register of the exact facts.
To this impulse we owe Gissing's drab pictures of middle-
class life, Mr. Kipling's romantic and adventurous realism,
and the satiric realism of Samuel Butler. Butler was not
much known or regarded till many years later, but he
was doing his real work contemporaneously with the best
writing of those whom we have just named, and it is now
possible to see that in independence and intellectual force
he was one of the most notable prose-writers of the last
century.

Of recent years Zola has fallen into a slough of dis-
credit, and Mr. George Moore, the most important example

of English discipleship to Zola, has
George Moore, suffered with his master. A Mummer's
b. 1853. Wife and Esther Waters were once novels

heartily admired or heartily detested by
everybody, for the name of the author stood for a well-
defined intention in literary methods. Other aims and
other ideals have come, Mr. Moore has fallen into a period
of comparative neglect, and this partly because he is not
led by a single idea and refuses to cling obstinately to
lopsided enthusiasms. His chief weakness is a sensitive
receptiveness tempered by a sane and unenthusiastic spirit
of criticism. The result is marked in several changes of
front in the course of his literary life. He began to write
novels under the influence of a profound admiration for
Zola ; in course of time Zola was dispossessed and Balzac
came to his own; in the middle period, with novels like
Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa, Mr. Moore wrote slowly
elaborated psychological studies; the enthusiasm of the
Irish Movement caught him, and he wrote the charming
Untilled Field and The Lake ; and, lastly, disillusioned of

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 803

hopes in the literary renascence of Ireland, he turned to
criticise the movement with a friendly irony. The moods
and the beliefs of Mr. Moore have changed many times ; but
each mood and faith has been shaped by a temperament
personal to himself which betrays no indefiniteness. The
story of his intellectual alternations is not difficult to
follow ; it is clearly printed on the pages of his novels, and,
further, Mr. Moore has written his autobiography many
times, and with a pleasure in talking of himself hardly
rivalled by Stevenson. In 1904 he supplied a preface to a
new edition of Confessions of a Young Man, first published
in 1888. " Here," he writes, " ye shall find me, the germs
of all I have written are in the Confessions, Esther Waters
and Modern Painting, my love of France — the country as
Pater would say of my instinctive election — and all my
prophecies." Here is depicted the youthful egoist, happy
in freedom to shape his own plans in life from an early
age, dreaming and finding his way toward art in detach-
ment from the influences of his country, till he almost lost
familiarity with his native tongue. In Paris he gained his
first strong literary impressions from Hugo, De Musset,
Gautier, Theodore de Banville, Baudelaire, Zola and
Balzac. The influence of Zola was in the ascendent when
Mr. Moore first tried his hand in fiction, but, while from
time to time he has recanted faith in other gods to whom
once he offered worship,. Balzac has never wholly been
disowned. He can write : " Of those I have loved deeply
there is but one that still may thrill me with the old passion,
with the first ecstasy — it is Balzac." Mr. Moore has
never found himself wholly at home in a Teutonic country f
native temperament led him from the first to sympathy
with French literature and French views of life. When a
young man he found little in contemporary English
writers, though he asserts, deceiving himself, that to
Marius the Epicurean he owed " the last temple " of his
soul. He has since burned incense at other altars in
other temples, and with equal fervour; but, beneath the
changes, the mingling of clear-sighted criticism and per-
sonal prejudice has altered little in its character. The
Confessions displays the tireless egoism of Mr. Moore,
his sensitiveness to external influences, his scepticism of
any enthusiasms save his own, and finally of these, his

804 THE NOVEL [PART iv

dislike for the domestic literature of his age, his devotion
to France, and his discovery, repeated many years later
in Salve, that no great literature has been written by
Roman Catholics since the time of the Reformation.

Mr. Moore took up his autobiography again with
Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906), and followed this with
the 4riiogy named Hail and Farewell (1911-1914). The
Memoirs is the most sentimental of Mr. Moore's books,
the book which best illustrates the author's complacent
delight in regarding " the ruins of George Moore by moon-
light " — to use Mr. G. K. Chesterton's happy phrase. As
Mr. Moore tries to summon up the ghost of his dead self,
his affectations grow upon him; and the callousness of
intellectual sentimentality, suffered to reach a rank
luxuriance, is exhibited in the unfeeling comment of the
author, when he learns that he has arrived home too
late to see his mother alive : " Not altogether bad news,"
I said to myself ; " my mother is dead, but I have been
saved the useless pain, the torture of spirit I should have
endured if I had arrived in time." Of a finer order in
every way as literature are Ave (1911), Salve (1912) and
Vale (1914), in which the scene is transferred to Ireland,
and Mr. Moore writes of the Irish literary movement and
its leaders, Mr. W. B. Yeats, A. E. and others. In these
volumes of reminiscence the egotistic sentimentalism dis-
appears, the thought is strong and clear, and characters
are vividly sketched in with a deft satiric touch. After
betraying some difficulty in getting under weigh Mr. Moore
gathers the differing strands of these books skilfully
together, and writes in a style immeasurably superior to
his early work. He writes as the candid friend in the
house of the Irish movement, pointing out the family
weaknesses and predicting inevitable failure in the future.
Though he sees clearly that the movement can never realise
itself, his commentary on its failure is not the charm
of these books — it lies in the portraiture of men. Mr.
Moore has drawn nothing with finer insight and strength
than the figure of A. E., the beautiful poet, imbued with a
high faith in the ancient gods, a profound mysticism, and
a practical genius for taking his part in everyday life and
promoting co-operative societies. It may be questioned
whether Hail and Farewell, which makes copy, half

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 305

satirically, half sympathetically, out of friends, is dictated
by the finest feeling, but waiving this and adopting a
more impersonal standpoint these volumes are to be
counted with the better class of literary autobiography,
and far above the ordinary volume of reminiscence which
adds new terrors to the lives of contemporaries. The
popular appeal is weaker than in Mr. Moore's earlier
memoirs and in the novels, but his fine gifts in style and
literary manner have never been shown to better advan-
tage than in the discursive medley of Hail and Farewell,
for the form affords the author a ready opportunity of
combining fiction and criticism, and in either field, as
novelist or literary and artistic critic, Mr. Moore's work
has been striking and individual.

He began in the conventional and accepted manner
by publishing poetry — Flowers of Passion (1878) and
Pagan Poems (1881) — but with a wisdom, which if shared
by many would ease the bitterness of life, he soon realised
that " minor poetry is not sufficient occupation for a life-
time "; and although, notably in ' The Sweetness of the
Past,' he has not failed to write true poetry, these collec-
tions of verse show that he did wisely in turning to prose.
His verse reflects nothing that may not be found else-
where, whereas his prose never lacks interest and
character. A Modern Lover (1888) and A Mummer's
Wife (1884) were written during Mr. Moore's apprentice-
ship to Zola, a servitude which he cast off before writing
the Confessions; but at this stage he was fast bound.
A Mummer's Wife opens with a scene drawn in the
machine-made and undiscerning manner of Zola. A
woman is watching by the bedside of her husband who
lies tortured with the paroxysms of a bronchial cough.
The dirty room, the fetid atmosphere, the repulsive
medicine bottles, the exasperating cough are all described
with hair-breadth exactness. It is well done ; and if worth
doing Zola could not have bettered it. The story proceeds
with the fortunes of the sick man's wife who falls in love
with a travelling actor, elopes with him, and gradually
sinks into drunken wretchedness. It is a sordid and dreary
tale, and Mr. Moore follows his master even to the neglect
of style ; but the power of the book there is no gainsaying.
The very baldness of the style is perhaps an advantage in
u

306 THE NOVEL [PART iv

describing scenes so shabby, threadbare and unpleasing.
Mr. Moore succeeds by the exact register of each detail in
printing the background of his tale upon the imagination.
In uncompromising and powerful vividness he has never
surpassed the description of the child dying of convulsions
in its cot, while the drunken mother rolls on her bed, and
the merciless green moonlight pours into the room. The
age shuddered, and Mr. Moore was classed with Zola, the
most lewd of writers. But the strength of the book com-
pelled recognition; and although in many respects it is
imitative copy, with Flaubert and Zola carefully remem-
bered on each page, it has a force and directness in gaining
effects which Mr. Moore has never wholly reached again.
Its successor, A Drama in Muslin (1886), though labelled
" realistic " for our information, is so in a different sense;
and Mr. Moore's method of studying girl life among the
gentry classes of Ireland by throwing a group of girls
into high relief and sinking the environing men is un-
natural, and this is not one of his successful studies in
character and temperament.

It was not till ten years after A Mummer's Wife that Mr.
Moore published another book which created a stir of
indignation and admiration — Esther Waters (1894).
Before writing the earlier book he had gathered intimate
knowledge of the travelling actor's life and habits : in
Esther Waters he worked up his notes of the race-course
and the betting-ring; and the story of the servant girl
who meets with trouble has no essential relation to the
background of the novel. Psychological study of character
is slighter in Esther Waters than in A Mummer's Wife.
We learn little that is convincing of the influence upon
Esther, who has been trained among the Plymouth
Brethren, of her introduction to the servants of a racing
household. In A Mummer's Wife the change of mind
and moral standard in the wife of the little draper, when
she is suddenly transported into the atmosphere of a
third-rate theatrical company, is worked out with fine
precision and truthfulness. Esther Waters brought Mr.
Moore greater fame, but A Mummer's Wife is the stronger
book. After we depart from the servants' hall in the
earlier chapters of Esther Waters hardly a character has
interest save the heroine of the tale.

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 807

With Esther Waters Mr. Moore closed his first period as
a novelist, the period in which, to use the word he adopted
to himself, his method was realistic. A second stage and
new influences are marked by Evelyn Innes (1898) and
its sequel, Sister Teresa (1901). His manner in character-
drawing is no longer that with which he began in A
Mummer's Wife, where the line is hard and inflexible
and the shadows black. If we may compare with the
art of painting, the best qualities of A Mummer's Wife
are those of Hogarth, the worst the quantities of meaning-
less black paint with which earlier German artists delighted
to daub the canvas. In Evelyn Innes the characterisation
is more complex and elaborate in execution; Mr. Moore
is more anxious and uncertain, because he sets himself a
more difficult task. Evelyn Innes, an educated woman
and an operatic singer with a European fame, is a suf-
ficiently different figure to the runaway tradesman's wife,
and in her Mr. Moore has succeeded in reaching his most
penetrating study of womanhood. But his success is not
complete, for he writes in a mood too critical for the
artist, and, little as he may be ready to admit it, he
labours under the influence of Henry James, and James's
chief weakness of shapeless inconclusiveness. And too
often Mr. Moore strays into criticism of Wagner, discus-
sions upon the art of music and the place of the sexual
instinct in music — questions which might better have
found a place in a volume of essays. Sister Teresa is
hardly a sequel to Evelyn Innes, but a continuation of the
same story in a different volume and under a different
title. The singer and actress of the first volume has
become a nun. The author's aim is to study the influence
of the meagre pieties of conventual life upon a woman
capable of art, passions and sins. Faith and enthusiasm
are followed by doubt and contempt for the silliness of the
nuns. She discovers that she has exchanged the trivialities
of society for the trivialities of the convent, and her spirit
is tortured with loss of faith in the real presence in the
sacrament. The opportunity of escaping from the convent
is thrown in her way. The portress leaves the keys
on a nail. Evelyn Innes, now Sister Teresa, opens the
door.

308 THE NOVEL [PART iv

" At that moment the pigeons left their roosts and
flew towards the fields. The fields were shining in the
morning light; thrush and cuckoo were calling, the
spring moved among the first primroses, and Evelyn
stood watching the spring-tide.

" She had only to take a step to regain her life in
the world, but she could not take that step. She no
longer even seemed to desire it. In the long months
she had been kept waiting a change had taken place
in her. She felt that something had broken in her, and
she closed the door, and having locked it she hung the
keys on the nail."

In that conclusion is contained Mr. Moore's attitude
toward the faith of his native country — its final result is
to sap character and weaken initiative. Protestantism
and Agnosticism leave the mind free. And when, under
new influences, Mr. Moore began to write of Ireland, this
thought lay continually in the background of his work.
But the conclusion of the whole matter is of little import-
ance in Sister Teresa ; the strength of the book lies in the
mastery with which the subject is handled — the gradual
and slow collapse of a fine and beautiful nature. Despite
his early courses Mr. Moore is by instinct more a disciple
of Flaubert than Zola, and his manner at this stage of
his development recalls the author of Madame Bovary
schooled by later students of feminine psychology, and
among them Henry James.

The relation of the Catholic Faith to the impulsive and
passionate in human nature is the ground of character study
in Sister Teresa, and this motif is carried over into the novels
Mr. Moore wrote after he fell, for a brief period, under
the influence of Mr. W. B. Yeats. The short stories of
The Untilled Field (1903) exhibit the healthy instincts
of man checked by strong sacerdotalism, and in the
poetical romance of The Lake (1905) we see a priest first
discovering his nature as a man when he becomes con-
scious of sex. It is difficult, however, to believe that the
thoughts and emotions of Father Oliver Gogarty, who falls
in love with the schoolmistress of his parish, are wholly
his own, for something of the Parisian, when he thinks of
women, mingles with the ideas of the seminary priest.

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 809

Father Oliver abandons his Church, not because he has
learned an intellectual doubt of her doctrines, but because
he is a man of sensitive character fascinated by the body
as well as the soul of Rose Leicester, and his fall from
grace brings doctrines toppling down in a common cata-
strophe. Only three characters in the book are of any
account — Father Oliver, Rose Leicester, and Moran, the
curate, who is cursed with spasmodic temptations to drink.
The villagers, so far as they appear, are shadows, people
made in the study by a writer who knows nothing about
them. But if he fails to render the peasantry Mr. Moore
describes the country-side of Ireland with great beauty.
The story of Father Oliver is directly opposed to the
tragedy of Sister Teresa's life. He resolves to leave the
Church ; and to Rose, the cause of his defection, he writes :

" I began to look upon myself as a somewhat super-
ficial person whose religious beliefs had yielded before
the charm of a pretty face and a winsome personality.
But this view of the question no longer seems super-
ficial. The very contrary seems true. And the superficial
ones are those who think that it is only in the Scriptures
that we may discover whether we have a right to live.
Our belief in books rather than in Nature is one of
humanity's most curious characteristics, and a very
irreligious one, it seems to me ; and I am glad to think
it was your sunny face that raised up my crushed
instincts, that brought me back to life, and ever since
you have been associated in my mind with the sun and
the spring-tide."

Father Oliver is the most entirely lovable character
created by Mr. Moore, and the book in which he is pro-
tagonist, abandoning realism, is frankly poetic and
romantic treatment of psychological character study.
Real in the strict sense of the word the characters are
not, for their letters embody ideas belonging to an experi-
ence far wider than their own, and Rose Leicester writes
too well. But this is a fault inherent in all epistolary
narrative from the time of Richardson.

Since Mr. Moore appeared more than forty years ago, as
the first champion in this country of Zola, Flaubert and
the French realists, theories and ideals in fiction have

810 THE NOVEL [PAKT iv

changed more than once, and not least with Mr. Moore
himself. He has lived long enough to be regarded as
belonging to a past by the younger generation; and,
further, the variety of his work and his detachment from
factions and literary coteries do not make for wide
popularity or ready recognition from an ordinary public.
To many his autobiographies and critical essays are but
examples of affectation and pose, his recantation of old
and adoption of new forms of worship evidence of in-
stability and weak-mindedness. But consistency is the
virtue of petty minds, and the man who, like Mr. Moore,
seeks for a religion in which he shall be priest and people
is fated never to find it. For beneath all his changes,
even in the wastes of Zolaism, Mr. Moore never lost sight
of the fact that there were in the world Protestantism
and Catholicism, and as late as the years in which he
wrote Hail and Farewell the burden of choice between
the two still lay heavy upon him. As he has never been
able to choose to himself a religion, so he has never been
able to choose to himself an art. His methods in fiction,
his judgments upon art have changed continually, but he
has never entirely changed himself, for he has never wholly
been converted to any creed or artistic faith. His temper
is the temper of the critic and inquirer who can only wonder
at the faiths by which others stand. But he announces
his opinions as authoritatively as Ruskin, and, like Ruskin,
he is always stimulating when most perverse. Modern
Painting (1893), despite limitations of prejudice and
insufficient knowledge, is one of the general books on
painting, written in the last few decades, best worth
reading ; and the miscellaneous essays of Impressions and
Opinions (1890) contain criticism of literature which is
never derivative, but the direct expression of an individual
mind. It is refreshing to see Balzac throned above Shake-
speare, to learn that Meredith's style has neither light
nor magic, to hear that Thackeray is a middle-class writer,
that Turgenieflf is the most subtle of all novelists, and
that nobody ever wrote English as beautifully as Pater.
But it is in the guise of the candid friend that Mr. Moore is
at his best, demonstrating the insignificance of literature
written by Roman Catholics, gently reminding actresses
that "the ideal mother" cannot be the great artist,

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 811

passing strictures upon the " domestic " and respectable
literature of the latter part of the nineteenth century,
signalised by the advent of clubs for men of letters, where
a solemn decorum reigns, the Nineteenth Century lies on
the table and stories can only be told in a corner. This is
all entirely refreshing, but as a final attitude of mind
little more than a tardy survival of the period of the young
French Romantics, when Hugo was coming to his own and
Gautier wore flaming red waistcoats. The stolid and the
respectable have written well in their day; and even Mr.
Moore has a kind word for Wordsworth. He can more
safely be followed when he praises than when he blames.
His estimates are too personal, and he admits that his
dislikes are a matter of temperamental prejudice he cannot
overcome. We lose faith in the critic who sees little but
good reporting in Mr, Hardy, and fails to recognise in
him a range and comprehension, a poetical vision, which
is certainly more profound and significant than that of
Balzac.

It is well Mr. Moore has the grace to disclaim all know-
ledge of criticism as a science. Yet he is not wholly
without principles. Of the novel worthy of the name he
demands that it shall be realistic, that it shall concern
itself with character rather than with incident, that its
narrative shall be presented rhythmically. If realism has
not always been his aim the second and third principles
have never been lost to sight. Mr. Moore is French in
his love of lucidity and logic, but he is not by instinct
an unshrinking realist of the French school, though he
educated himself upon French models in his youth, and
so successfully that in A Mummer's Wife and Esther
Waters he produced novels of definite importance not only
as manifestoes but as influences upon the work of younger
men. In Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa he turned to a
different aim — slowly evolved study of character in a
setting of ethical and religious argument worked in the
author's peculiar vein : and latterly, in a more subdued
manner, he has written poetic fiction in The Lake and
personal confession in the spirit of romantic disillusion in
Hail and Farewell. Different as have been the aims by
which Mr. Moore has been actuated it would not be
difficult, even without the help of title-pages, to recognise

812 THE NOVEL [PART iv

his publications for the work of one hand. His mind is
receptive and plastic, but he shapes his new methods and
enthusiasms by a single mould, as statuettes of identical
form may be cast in different metals. And, though for
many years Mr. Moore has not been a popular or an
influential author, his later work is in true literary quality
on a higher plane than the early realistic novels which
first won him a reputation, distinctive as they were and
beyond the range of other men. If gifts of craftsmanship,
style, and lucidity, and the possession of ideas, can in
themselves serve to redeem a name from the danger of
falling into oblivion Mr. Moore is not likely soon to be
forgotten. In the years of drought following the decline
of the great Victorian novel Mr. Moore appeared not only
as a forerunner of the newer fiction, with which we are
more directly concerned in this volume, but as a novelist
who endures well the scrutiny of comparison with the many
who have begun to write since his youth.

George Gissing, a few years younger than Mr. Moore,
was another sign of the times, a severe realist, not in

consequence of a theory of literary
George Robert methods adopted from others, but in
Gissing, his own right and as a result of unhappy

1857-1903. experience. He has been described as

the " historian of the middle classes, "
and if this leaves something to be added it gives the chief
content and character of his work. Yet Gissing was him-
self unsympathetic toward the lower middle classes, and
especially toward those into whose domestic lives poverty
with all its sordid followers intruded. In Born in Exile
he describes his hero watching the carriages of the wealthy
and fortunate drive in and out of the park, noting the
manner of leisured ease in the occupants of the carriages
and the obsequious attention of the crowd, and feeling
that by temperament and education his place was with
these and not with the shabby throngs of the pavement.
In the musings of his hero George Gissing revealed his own
mind. His attitude is always that of a man wronged. The
lot should have fallen to him in pleasant places, in a
dignified old-world house with a quiet garden, a roomy
library stocked with carefully chosen books, and a suffi-
cient income to free him from the cares of earning a liveli-

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 818

hood, in order that he might spend his hours in leisurely
study and the bettering of his own powers. Instead of
this, alternations of garret and cellar were his dwelling,
the common parks of London his garden, the reading-room
of the British Museum his library, and for many years,
according to himself, he knew no place to wash in save the
unattractive lavatory of the museum.

Gissing's lot was hard; but it may be that uncon-
sciously he magnified his sufferings. From the age of
twenty-five onward he seems always to have been able
to earn a small livelihood. Temperamentally he was
debarred from contentment and happiness; but it was
possible for him to live and eat during the greater part
of his working years, though his surroundings may have
been drab and dreary. To the end he bore a grudge
against life : he was the student and solitary condemned
to manufacture fiction for money. He was not unfriendly,
but shyness, absence of tact, and an inability to stoop
to the common ways of preferment hampered him. To
this it may be added that he married twice and disastrously
to his happiness on each occasion. The wonder cannot
be great, therefore, that Gissing walked through life a
man embittered. In his later years his income was better,
and in Veranilda (1904) he turned from writing realistic
novels of contemporary middle-class life to a romance of
Rome in the time of Belisarius, and in Will Warburton
(1905), his last complete novel, although he returns to
mean streets the tone is kindlier and more gentle. Neither
of these, however, can be accounted typical of his work,
and the latter was written in an easy mood as a money-
making book. In good and comfortable circumstances
Gissing would have been another man : his nature was
friendly and sympathetic, but years of struggle with
poverty and ill-success hardened him into a mood of revolt
against the kind of life he knew well and hated intensely.
We must take Gissing as the social world and his own
mistakes of judgment made him — a man labouring under
a sense of the injustice of circumstance.

His boyhood and youth might well have been spent
under conditions less promising. His father, resident at
Wakefield, where Gissing was born, was a man of intel-
lectual attainments. George Gissing received a good

814 THE NOVEL [PART iv

education, and soon gave evidence of literary ability. At
Owen's College, Manchester, he won a Shakespeare scholar-
ship, an English poem prize and a prize for classics. Un-
fortunately his career at Owen's College broke down, and
he disappeared to live for some years almost as an outcast.
He was a clerk in Liverpool, then crossed to America to
earn his living indifferently as a classical tutor and a gas-
fitter. In 1877 he returned to Europe and was able to
spend a period of quiet study at Jena. In 1878 he was in
England and published at his own expense a novel,
Workers in the Dawn, which proved a financial failure and
effected nothing save the impoverishment of the author
who was flung back upon tutorial work and journalism.

With The Unclassed (1884) and Demos (1886) Gissing
first showed his power, though these are wanting in his
more mature skill. The former is a story of two girls
who rescue themselves from the pavement to live clean
and womanly lives, the latter a study of Socialism and
its influence upon the working classes. Demos displays
qualities and characteristics which marked Gissing's work
throughout — thoroughness, patience, the closest observa-
tion. Many pages show him the true artist, not merely
the classical scholar gone astray; and, on the other hand,
there are many pages of dull narrative, when he writes
without inspiration and evidently without pleasure. After
reading only a few pages of Gissing nobody could mistake
him for the writer of commercial fiction; but there are
large tracts in every book which leave us unexhilarated
and wearied. The result of these drab spaces is, perhaps,
to impress upon us more strongly pictures of those sordid
purlieus of life Gissing commonly paints. But this was
not the intention of his duller passages; they represent
failure to write, not purposive realism.

These two early novels set the tone and pitch of Gissing's
writing for many years. Thyrza (1887) is the story of a
factory girl, endowed with finer thought and feeling than
her fellows, beset with the gross squalor and misery of
life in South London. The Nether World (1889) is a
realistic picture of misery, vice and heartrending struggle
for bread among the sunken multitudes of Clerkenwell.
And in this struggle we see that the battle is not to the
idealist nor the race to the eager and hopeful, but to

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 815

circumstances which overpower all alike. It was not,
however, till he wrote New Grub Street (1891) that Gissing
met with any recognition of the quality and power of
his work. Yet it is by no means one of his best books.
Its direct appeal in subject matter to the ordinary critic
and man of letters probably accounted in a degree for
the greater measure of notice the book received. New
Grub Street is not autobiographical : but the story of the
conscientious and responsible artist who fails of success
while the writer of commonplace fiction prospers is a
theme upon which Gissing could write with feeling and
intensity. Denzil Quarrier (1892) removes the scene to a
life of easier circumstances; and in Lilian we find one
of the most attractive of Gissing's feminine characterisa-
tions. The book is an attack upon the immorality of those
marriage laws which bind a woman to a common criminal
who has grossly deceived her. Lilian chooses to live with
another man whom she can love, but the force of public
opinion is too strong for her and her story ends in suicide.
Apart from the character of Lilian Denzil Quarrier is not a
very successful book ; nor free in passages from a failing
we can rarely attribute to Gissing — exaggeration and
melodrama. To the same year belongs Born in Exile
(1892), a longer, more ambitious and far more striking
book. Here again is a hint of autobiography in the struggle
between religious belief and doubt in the mind of the hero,
who is a strange mixture of strong idealism and base
hypocrisy. Ambitious to rise in the world and meet with
cultivated society he fights to persuade himself into a
belief in the Christian Creeds, that he may take clerical
orders and receive the hall-mark of respectability. The
attempt collapses, both on account of its inherent falsity
and the crooked perversion of the hero's character.
Gissing never surpassed this remarkable study of the
complicated character of Godwin Peak, idealist and
materialist, who continually excites our contempt for his
double-dealing and persevering efforts to lure himself into
a wholly false state of mind, while he never wholly
alienates our sympathy. Never in fiction has a finer
picture been drawn of the man whose environment irks
him, till he is driven into retreat, exhausted and wearied
by a guerilla warfare with sleepless circumstance. The

816 THE NOVEL [PART iv

Odd Women (1893) is not so strong or complex a book,
but it is not less pitilessly realistic. It describes the lot of
superfluous and indigent gentlewomen, and the unhappy
fate of a girl who marries for the sake of a home.

At this stage, although there is good characterisation
and strong writing in passages, Gissing showed signs of
having overworked the seam of his experience and observa-
tion. In In the Year of Jubilee (1894), a satire on middle-
class vulgarity, and The Town Traveller (1898) he attempts
to extract ore from worn-out workings. And this is also
true of The Whirlpool (1897), which has for its motive
the fatal spell of the pleasures and excitements of London.

In these later years Gissing did better and certainly
more attractive work outside the field of fiction. His
Charles Dickens (1898) is the best book ever written on
another and very different historian of the London streets.
It shows how thoroughly and sympathetically he had
read his Dickens, how in a measure he derived inspiration
from him. Yet he could not, like Dickens, recognise
gladly the humour as well as the misery of the under-
world. Dickens was as earnest as Gissing, he sympathised
no less with the helpless and unhappy, but he did not,
like Gissing, doubt the integrity of the universe, and he
could therefore be joyous where Gissing was moved only
to despairing wrath. By the Ionian Sea (1901), the fruit
of a holiday, reflects a side of Gissing's nature starved
in the years of poverty and struggle — the instincts of a
gentle and scholarly mind. But the best of his later
writings is the delightful and personal Private Papers of
Henry Ryecrojt (1903), a happy mingling of autobiography
and fiction, reflecting the musings of a recluse. In this
book Gissing raises the veil and shows the intensity of the
mental suffering through which he passed in the dark
years when it was only with difficulty he preserved un-
spoiled those things which are " quiet, wise and good."

The world at large prefers happy people, and rightly,
for, as Stevenson inadequately remarked, a happy man
or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note.
Unhappy men have rarely won great honour in their
generation, and Gissing was not only unhappy — he made
no attempt to hide the fact. Failing happiness, other sure
roads to success are to be sentimental or amusing; and

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 317

Gissing was neither, he was harshly in earnest and he
could not stoop merely to entertain. Perhaps he would
have come within the range of Samuel Butler's half-
humorous contempt for the last enemy to be destroyed —
serious-mindedness. In personal intercourse he could be
genial, but he never overcame the intellectual complacency
which his schoolfellows chafed against. Meredith's " good
wind of laughter " would have cleared his heart and brain.
But he could not laugh freely and easily; and a steady
reading of his novels is to be overweighted and oppressed
as on a dark and windless day. It is unnatural to feel no
breath of air in the open, to see no movement of the
clouds; and the tense unhappiness of Gissing's novels is
as unnatural. The utmost depths of wretchedness cannot
be without moments of forgetfulness.

Not only is the setting of Gissing's tales grey and sordid,
the style falls into a harmony with the matter; it is a
style that may be described as good standard English
without special individuality or charm. This statement
applies strictly only to the novels and short stories : in
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, with the change of
atmosphere, the style takes upon itself more light and
colour. The greatness of Gissing's work lies in its strength,
independence and thoroughness. If he has little humour
and few graces, he is equally without petty faults and
weaknesses. He is above the suspicion of exaggerating
and making dark mainly for the sake of effect. What he
sees he transcribes patiently and slowly, sometimes with
a laboriousness that is unnecessary and tiresome, but he
never descends to sentiment or attempts an appearance of
strength by violent methods.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling is a younger man than either of
the two novelists just named, but he began to publish

fiction almost as early, and by the
Rudyard Kipling, year 1890 he enjoyed an extraordinary
b. 1865. fame. He is also to be placed here by

right of his far-ranging influence upon
the development of the English short story and novel.
Whether Mr. Kipling is a great writer is a question that
may fairly be asked, but that his early tales represent
a marked and new evolvement of the short story cannot
be denied. Literature constantly tends to stereotype itself

818 THE NOVEL [PART iv

by formal methods, and as constantly attempts are made
to naturalise literature to the standard of common life.
Mr. Kipling's short story was primarily a colloquialisation
of fiction for the sake of mess-rooms, railway carriages
and other places where literature as an art is not greatly
in request. Plain Tales from the Hills first appeared as
short stories in the corner of a newspaper ; and the stories
immediately succeeding these were published in the paper
covers of a railway library. The aim of these tales was
to entertain, but the younger Mr. Kipling was a realist
of the notebook order, who rendered to the life the snipped
and slangy dialogue, the morals and the manners of Anglo-
Indians. The young sub-editor showed no marked
inventive power in his newspaper stories ; but the method
was fresh, the note that of a writer who was strung to
harmony with the activities, vain and useful, of men and
women in the world, the irony of his humour was excellent,
he possessed an admirable knack for journalistic catch-
phrasing; and, further, he adopted the old trick, first
largely practised by Defoe, of taking the reader into his
confidence, and thus cajoling him into a belief in the
reality of narrative and people. " Mrs. Hauksbee," one
tale opens, " was sometimes nice to her own sex. Here
is a story to prove this ; and you can believe just as much
as ever you please." However jaded the reader his atten-
tion is roused to wakefulness by such a beginning. The
author, again, frequently remarks en passant upon another
story of the same kind that he is reminded of by an
incident related, and this lends an atmosphere of veri-
similitude to the narrative in hand. The same end is
served by the repeated appearance of Strickland and the
famous Mrs. Hauksbee.

Plain Tales from the Hills, first collected in 1887,
touches many sides of Indian life — native, official, military,
social. The tales are written in easy and conversational
manner, flow lightly without reflection on higher themes
of philosophy and metaphysics, which is no more than
" playing bricks with words " to Mr. Kipling and his
gallery of characters. But the pathos of many of these
stories is better than the humour, and that is high praise.
The story of Lispeth, the hill-girl, pining for the English
lover who never intended to remember her, of the subaltern

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 819

boy who commits suicide because he is too sensitive to
endure the tolerant code of Anglo-Indian morals (' Thrown
Away '), of the half-caste's slavery to opium (' The Gate
of the Hundred Sorrows ') — in these and others the irony
and the pathos of circumstance are delineated clearly,
strongly and without unavailing sentimentality. On the
other hand the stream of humour in ironic vein never fails,
nor that mark of literary calling, the gift of phrase-making.
If there is little, save in a few of these tales to mark any
consciousness of the beauty of the physical universe, the
light and splendour of the Orient, it is not, as Mr. Kipling
has since abundantly shown, because the author cares for
none of these things, but because the character and setting
of the narrative excludes them.

Soldiers Three (1888) was the first of six collections of
short tales (1888-9) in Wheeler's Railway Library. In
these and in other military tales Mr. Kipling introduces
Private Mulvaney with his two friends, Ortheris and
Learoyd. A prodigality of praise has been lavished upon
the author's pictures of Tommy Atkins and his life; but
the Mulvaney tales, on a dispassionate reading, convey
little but a sense of strain and tedious artifice. The
exaggerated and impossible situations, the difficult joking
of * Krishna Mulvaney ' and others of these tales is weari-
some, and the impossible brogue of Mulvaney exasperat-
ing. Dialect has its place, but its representation in print
must always be an artifice, and the less that artifice is
laboured the better. The best of the Mulvaney stories,
6 My Lord the Elephant,' belongs to a later collection
(Many Inventions) ; but, for the most part, beer, uncouth
thoughts, laboured dialect, impossible and ridiculous
adventures are the substance of these tales, and their
merit is beneath the standard of Mr. Kipling's early
writing. In Black and White, of the same series, treats
chiefly of native life. Slang, dialect, meretricious attempts
at realism disappear, and the tales skilfully depict the
colour, dust, smell and thought of an Oriental world
foreign to the Western mind. But the early volumes
which have retained their popularity with the ordinary
reader are Under the Deodars, The Phantom 'Rickshaw
and Wee Willie Winkie, and that because the contents
of these slight volumes are the work of the born story-

820 THE NOVEL [PART iv

teller. A knack of phrase, of writing dialogue in quick
interplay of colloquialisms, of packing much incident and
emotion into a small space, united to raise Mr. Kipling
to the position of phenomenal popularity he, at one time,
enjoyed. With the uncritical matter is of no account
and style a vain thing ; the public performer who rehearses
his tricks vivaciously, exciting the surprise rather than
the admiration of the spectators, can count upon making
his bow to a storm of plaudits. The majority of those who
read novels or go to the playhouse wish only to forget
for an hour the world that is too much with them, and
they are grateful to the acrobat who carries them out of
themselves without exacting the pain of intellectual effort
or fixed attention. And this Mr. Kipling exactly achieved
with his vivacity and ad hominem appeals. When, in
later life, he assumed the role of Imperialistic prophet,
a task for which the Hebraic obtuseness of his ethic fitted
him, his popularity waned and half the seats in the
auditorium emptied.

Raciness, vigour, and a journalistic knack rather than
a literary gift, give realism to the tales in the collections
last-named. Under the Deodars chiefly contains sketches
of Anglo-Indian life at Simla or elsewhere, tales which
titillate the taste for scarcely innocent flirtations and jaded
intrigues in a society where morals are easy and the Deity
who made the ten commandments is recognised by all,
but, like the tax-collector, forgotten in the intervals
between his visits. The story which gives its title to
The Phantom 'Rickshaw might have been one of the best
of ghost-stories. The piercing refrain of the spectre-
woman's cry to the man who has injured her, " Please
forgive me: it's all a mistake, a hideous mistake! " is
repeated with quite extraordinary effect; and the trick
has been imitated by later writers of ghost-stories, Mr.
E. F. Benson among them. Unfortunately the story is
ruined, as Mr. J. M. Robertson has pointed out, by a
misrepresentation of the obvious and natural attitude of
the hero's betrothed. She would have pitied his mental
derangement instead of flaming into anger with him.
And it is not infrequently that Mr. Kipling fails in this way,
for he is occupied chiefly with story-telling, not with the
analysis of character, and his people react to circumstance

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 821

in an impossible manner. Thus in ' The Strange Ride *
the unbelievable stupidity of Gunga Dass, if he be a
sophisticated Brahmin, puts the finishing touch to the
grotesque incredibility of a macabre tale. And the child-
stories of Wee Willie Winkie have only to be read by the
side of Kenneth Grahame's Golden Age to expose the
impossibly grown-up thought of the children. From this
indictment the two drummer boys of the stirring sketch
6 Drums of the Fore and Aft ' must be excepted. In none
of these early stories does a character, except perhaps
Mrs. Hauksbee, the managing dame of Anglo-Indian
drawing-rooms, emerge with that degree of convincing
reality which prints itself on the imagination. It would
be unfair to ask of Mr. Kipling that he should think in
these early tales, the matter is too slight, and he makes
none of the pretences of his later volumes ; but character-
drawing we have a right to expect, and we do not find
it even within the range compassed by many a second-
rate novelist. High spirits, vivid phrasing, an instinct
for dramatic situation, humour, a gift of swift and vigorous
story-telling, all these we may allow to Mr. Kipling. And
with so much in hand he almost succeeds in hiding the
inadequacy of his characterisation; yet we remember his
people, if at all, by tags extracted from notebooks and
used as labels — they are manufactured. The artifices
by which he depicts the British soldier in India have
already been noted : his partial failure in the stories of
Anglo-Indian society is less remarkable because his types
merely dally with the passing hour. The child-stories
have charm; but the children are grown-up, save for
grammar and pronunciation. The tales of native life are
a different matter, and more difficult to judge; but the
metaphysical bent of the Oriental mind is certainly missed
by the crude matter-of-factness of the Anglo-Saxon. Yet,
despite faults in style and form and thinness of char-
acter-drawing, we are compelled to accept Stevenson's
admission that " there is a tide of life " in all these
stories.

Between the years 1890 and 1897 we come upon a second
period in Mr. Kipling's literary activity. He had now
become famous, had married and settled with his wife in
America for several years. In 1891 he wrote his first long

822 THE NOVEL [PART iv

story, The Light that Failed, which appeared in Lippin-
cott's Magazine. In the original form of the tale, as it
appeared in the pages of this magazine, we meet with the
hero, Dick Heldar, artist and war-correspondent, on his
return to England after ten years of wandering life.
Maisie, the woman who loved him in early days, appears
from the past and nurses him through an illness which
ends in his blindness and their marriage. In the new
and enlarged form of the tale Heldar dies, unmarried and
blind, at the seat of war in the Soudan. More than to any
of Mr. Kipling's books to this has fallen noisy panegyric
and angry denunciation. It illustrates forcibly his con-
ception of men and women. Maisie fails to suggest more
than a flutter of moods in which traces of personality are
lost ; and Heldar and his artist friend talk after the fashion
of men who were once in touch with the courtesies of life,
but have chosen to forget them, and evidently with
willingness. The hero is an exact and life-like portrait of
the underbred and overbearing young Englishman. The
words which spring to his lips when taken off his guard
aptly reveal his character. If he collides with a passenger
in the street he recoils with an oath ; if he is accidentally
pushed into the gutter he mutters, " All right. That's
another nick in the score. I'll jostle you later on "; when
the smoke of the machine-gun blows back in his nostrils
and howls of the wounded rend the darkness, " wild with
delight at the sounds and the smells," he shouts aloud,
" God is very good — I never thought I'd hear this again.
Give 'em hell, men. Oh, give 'em hell ! " The story, the
atmosphere, the dialogue of The Light that Failed, even
when the dialogue turns on art and painting, alternate
between the extremes of the uncouth and violent. Mr.
Kipling is never coarse as Gorky is coarse, nor is he sug-
gestive like De Maupassant; but like Ibsen he can be
vulgar. The author fails to recognise of what sort are his
characters in The Light that Failed, evidently holding
them to be typical of the vigorous and fine instincts of the
British race. Characterisation is confused, and, further,
though in form a novel, The Light that Failed is in effect
only a short story elongated.

In the years named Mr. Kipling further published The
Naulhaka (1892), written in collaboration with Mr.

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 828

Wolcott Balestier, and volumes of short stories not ex-
clusively Indian in their setting, including Life's Handicap
(1890) and Many Inventions (1898). These tales are as
energetic, but they are not so vivacious as the earlier
stories: the sentences are longer, the paragraphs show
more construction and betray the fact that Mr. Kipling
is not so young as he once was and is trying to live up
to a tradition. Captains Courageous (1897) is more a
sketch than a story of fishermen on the Grand Banks, and
illustrates the author's faculty for representing any aspect
of life with a wonderful air of realism. But with all the
care he has given to this book he has scarcely succeeded in
distinguishing the characters from one another. They are
worked up from material stored in the notebooks. By far
the finest and most original work of Mr. Kipling in this
period is to be found in the two Jungle Books (1894-5).
These, with Kim, which may be counted as falling into
another period, are the high- water of his attainment. In
the Jungle Books wolves, tigers, panthers, monkeys and
snakes speak, we are introduced to the customs and laws
of the jungle, and hear the story of Mowgli, the man-cub,
a foundling of the wolves who grows up with the pack
till he returns to the village, and at length comes back to
the jungle to avenge himself on Shere Khan, the tiger, his
enemy. Mr. Kipling has never written better prose and
better dialogue than in these stories; and the charm of
simplicity and naturalness pervades them all.

Kim (1901) is Mr. Kiplingfs one true novel, and after
the Jungle Books his most successful piece of writing,
although his instincts seem naturally to turn to the short
story. In Kim he paints a collective picture of the whole
of modern India, its life both native and European, its
religions, its politics, its esoteric cults, its mystery, its
burning heat, and all the richness of that strange and
cosmopolitan land. The decline in Mr. Kipling's originality
and vigour was already a subject of regret when he
appeared with his most ambitious and most powerful
book. The figures of Kim, the little English lad, left to
grow up among low-caste Hindoos, of the old and yellow-
skinned Tibetan lama, of Hurree Babu, of Mahmet Ali,
the horse dealer, of English soldiers and officers, the
pictures of crowded and busy life in Lahore, Benares

824 THE NOVEL [PAUT iv

and on the Grand Trunk Road are drawn with a vivid-
ness, swiftness and unified interest which the author has
not rivalled elsewhere. Kim is the one book (apart from
the jungle tales) scarcely injured by the journalistic
manner, the one book written in the large manner and
not in the spirit of the short story. No other single book
in English may be compared with Kim in its wide and
comprehensive representation of the mystery, colour and
crowded life of the East. It has been charged against
its theme as a whole that whereas in the earlier part of
the book the author makes no question of Kim's ethical
relationship to the secret service, in the latter part he
cannot help showing his abhorrence of his hero's position,
with the result that Kim is stranded without significance
in the development of the story. The criticism is rather
ingenious than valuable, save in so far as it illustrates
again Mr. Kipling's failure to maintain stability in his
characterisations. After a good beginning Kim degener-
ates into the infallible young hero of the boys' book of
adventure.

In the later years Mr. Kipling showed no sign of weari-
ness in the production of the short story. Stalky and Co.
(1899), a school romance, virtually falls into this category,
for it is little more than a series of sketches. Among the
volumes of collected tales are The Day's Work (1898),
Traffics and Discoveries (1904), Actions and Reactions
(1909), the delightful animal tales for children, Just-so
Stories (1902) and Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), a charming
medley of fairy and historical lore for young people. If
the children of Mr. Kipling's tales are impossible miracles
of precocity he has shown in these later books that he
can write the best of tales for real children to read.

That Mr. Kipling has been one of the most pheno-
menally popular authors of our day, that he has ceased to
be so for some little time, that he has taken upon him to
represent the life of the British Empire all over the globe,
painting men in aspects diverse beyond the daring of
any other writer, are facts apparent to all. And if an
attempt be made to sift in impersonal mood the large
body of his work, without deference to the unbridled
ecstasies of American criticism, now a quarter of a century
old, or the chilliness of the English reviewer in the present,

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 825

a few further facts emerge clearly — that a large part of
Mr. Kipling's painting of life and character is journalism
at its best, that he barely, if ever, crosses the line which
separates him from creative artists, that his pictures of
India are better than his painting of life elsewhere,
because in these he draws upon knowledge absorbed in
boyhood or derived from his father, that his moments
of highest inspiration are in a few poems, but that he
is not a great poet, that his sense of literary responsibility
is slight, that his chief gift is a splendid knack which
often fails him, that he has produced some of the best
work in the last thirty-five years and some of the worst,
evidently without much perception of the difference. The
first point calls for further discussion. No personalities
can be found in the wide limits of Mr. Kipling *s verse and
prose that are distinctive of a great manner in appre-
hending what is essential in human nature and portraying
character that endures with a meaning for all men who
read or listen. Characters are not made to live by string-
ing dialect, technical phrases or slang like beads upon a
string; and, in general* this is Mr. Kipling's method
of conveying character. The vaunted Mulvaney does
not escape this indictment. Dick Heldar and Maisie are
unfinished impressionism. In Kim he reaches a better
standard than elsewhere in prose with the lama, Hurree
Babu and the horse dealer, and only fails by a hairbreadth
with Kim himself. Yet the true hero of this tale is no
human figure but the whole life of India. Captains
Courageous, Stalky and Co. and the later short stories
revert to the bead-stringing manner, and characterisation,
save in the roughest pattern, is not to be found. In the
ballads we need not ask for characterisation, yet in ' The
Mary Gloster ' Mr. Kipling has drawn the truest and most
living of all his human figures. But when the wide field,
the innumerable types of men and women drawn, are
taken into accont, his actual attainment in characterisa-
tion is disappointingly slight.

The three writers who have just been passed in survey
had developed their idiosyncrasies and characteristics
before the beginning of the nineties, and two of them
were noticeably influencing the growth of English fiction.
To Samuel Butler, a man of a different mould, another

326 THE NOVEL [PAR* iv

fate was assigned; and it is difficult to know where to
place him, for he wrote satirical fiction over fifty years

ago> yet his originality and intellectual
Samuel Butler, power has only been adequately recog-
1835-1902. nised since his death. If we judge him

by the date of his birth he belongs to a
generation earlier than any writer who claims a prominent
place in this book. But if anyone was placed beyond the
limitations of chronology it was Samuel Butler — critic,
philosopher, painter, musician, novelist, satirist and
classical scholar, a man so versatile in his attainments,
so worthy a hearing whatever the subject on which he
writes, that he is not to be described by any single defini-
tion. To the unlearned he is best known as the author
of Erewhon, his most popular if not his best book. It
was his only book to meet with a sale on its appearance ;
and it was later awarded the praise of the second-hand
bookseller in the formula, " 6d., very readable." In his
lifetime, beyond the comparative popularity of this book,
Butler enjoyed little fame. None of his other works sold.
Fortunately he was above the necessity of writing for
money. He was educated at Shrewsbury and St. John's
College, Cambridge, and took a high place in the Classical
Tripos. He refused to take orders because he entertained
doubts of the efficacy of infant baptism. A quarrel with
his father ensued, and Butler sailed for New Zealand,
where, in five years on a sheep-run he succeeded in
gathering a moderate competence, with which he returned
to England to lose a great part of it in unlucky invest-
ments. He began to write in New Zealand. Darwin
Among the Machines (1868), the kernel of Erewhon,
appeared in the Christchurch Press. The book in its
present form appeared in 1872, seven years after Butler's
return to England. During this period he was chiefly
occupied with painting, exhibiting regularly in the Royal
Academy, and it was only with Life and Habit (1877)
that he definitely turned to literature. In humble lodgings
at Clifford's Inn he was content to live for thirty-eight
years, pursuing an unvarying routine. His hour of rising,
his morning meal, the route of his daily walk to the British
Museum, the periods of his cigarettes were exactly re-
gulated. In the evening he composed gavottes and fugues

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 327

in the manner of Handel, in his eyes the greatest of
musicians.

A man who obtruded himself so little on literary society,
who was incapable of advertising himself, who walked
his own way, who was full of hard sayings displeasing
to the Philistine, the professional man of letters, the
scholar and the aesthete alike, could hardly make a place
for himself in his own day. But Butler was not without
ambition of fame. His notebooks reveal a conviction
that he was writing for the future and that his name
would endure. Milton could speak with no greater con-
fidence in himself. And Butler was not deceived. Among
writers belonging to the period immediately following
that of the great Victorians he is one of the few whose
name is little likely to be forgotten by the generations
to come. He had no second-hand opinions, his thought
was acute and often profound, his gift of satire in prose
has not been equalled since Swift, and in his one true
novel he showed powers of psychological analysis of the
highest order. And, eccentric as he may seem in some
of his theories and convictions — in his belief in the
feminine authorship of the Odyssey, in his assignation to
Handel of a place immeasurably above all musical com-
posers— he advances no theory without thought and
knowledge, and he is singularly free from prejudice, cant
and crooked vision. The man who satirised church-going
religion in his description of the Musical Banks, who threw
scorn on conventional ethical standards, who declared that
virtue was not a thing to be immoderately indulged, who
wrote an ironical treatise on the miraculous element in the
Gospels, could yet describe himself as a member of the
advanced wing of the Broad Church party and assert that
nobody was of any account who did not believe in a king-
dom of heaven which was better worth the striving for than
anything beside.

He was by instinct a student, a thinker and a critic
of science, art and literature in contemporary life. He
combated conventional religion, attacked ecclesiastical
conceptions of saintliness, deprecated a morality too
earnest, was little moved by visions of the supernatural;
but he also turned to rend Darwinism and its exile of the
mind, he did not bow to accepted estimates in art, and

828 THE NOVEL [PART iv

he had no fear of meeting the classical scholar on his own
ground with startling theories which he backed up with
evidence stronger than the supports of many a belief which
has stood the wear and tear of centuries. Butler never,
however, controverted the accepted for the sake of
originality. He was entirely free from weak affectations,
poses and the temptation to appear different. He was a
clear and serious thinker.

His critical work in Life and Habit (1877), Essays on
Life, Art and Science (1904) and other volumes is stimu-
lating and of great interest, but these belong to miscella-
neous prose-writing and find no place for discussion here.
In Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901), how-
ever, he wrote satirical fiction, and in The Way of All
Flesh (1903), a novel of contemporary life. The form in
which Butler embodies his satire upon society and religion
is not new ; the plot idea in Erewhon is as old as Gulliver's
Travels and older, but not since Swift wrote had it been
used with so pregnant a gift of irony. Mr. Higgs, a
colonist, chances upon a land of fertile plains hidden
behind snowy mountains, and dwelling in these plains
he discovers a nation governed by a king and queen and
ruled by extraordinary perversities of thought, of which
the most remarkable was their tolerant pity for moral
delinquents, whom they regarded as suffering from the
chance misfortune of disease, and their stern repression
of physical deformity or ill-health, which they punished
with fine or imprisonment. The weak and the ill are
haled before the courts ; but the man who forges a cheque,
commits arson or robs with violence " lets it be known
to all his friends that he is suffering from a severe fit of
immorality, just as we do when we are ill, and they come
and visit him with great solicitude. " Furthermore, the
inhabitants of Erewhon have passed severe measures
against the introduction of machinery, in obedience to one
of their philosophers who wrote a book describing the
great dangers to mankind of the enormously powerful
development of machines, to which man was becoming
but a slave and attendant. Erewhon contains, in brief,
nearly all Butler's favourite concepts and ideas. The
excursus upon machines is ridicule of the crude form in
which the theory of evolution was first accepted. His

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 829

picture of Erewhonian topsy-turvy views on morality and
health was not merely a diversion in irony. Health and
a sufficient competence are positive benefits in any society,
and undue emphasis, he held, could be laid on the pursuit
of virtue, for the nations we most admire, Greeks and
Italians for example, are not those most famed for an
austere morality, and " when the righteous man turneth
away from the righteousness that he hath committed, and
doeth that which is a little naughty and wrong, he will
generally be found to have gained in amiability what he
has lost in righteousness. " Erewhon is not woven of one
yarn throughout. The description of the Musical Banks
is a little heavy-handed and not particularly good as satire
upon perfunctory religious observances ; but the book, as
a whole, is much better than Erewhon Revisited, which
scarcely succeeds in rekindling the earlier ironic manner.
It tells how Mr. Higgs returns to Erewhon, after an
absence of twenty years, to find a new religion in vogue
founded upon his own ascent to heaven when he escaped
from the country in a balloon. Though Butler denied
any intention of reflecting upon the Gospel narrative the
resemblance is unfortunately close. The sequel has more
story and is more compact than Erewhon, but it is wanting
in its terse irony, and is certainly neither so amusing nor
interesting.

More important than either of these satirical tales is
the posthumous Way of All Flesh, which carries on the
work of attacking the system of sham morality under
which the ordinary child of the age was educated. The
incentive to the novel was supplied by a Miss Eliza Mary
Ann Savage, whom Butler first met in 1870 or 1871 ; and
he continued to tinker with his manuscript till the time of
her death in 1885. She appears in the tale as Alethea.
The compass of the book is so wide that it scarcely admits
of detailed description. Its chief end is a bitter and
earnest attack upon the false standards inculcated by
home, school and university education, standards which
Butler, like many youths of every generation, had much
pain in outgrowing. The satire is embodied in the conflict
of two generations of father and son, first the vulgar and
wealthy George Pontifex and his timid clerical son, the
Reverend Theobald Pontifex; and secondly between

880 THE NOVEL [PART iv

Theobald and his son, Ernest, who is inveigled into taking
orders, only to find himself in a wholly false position.
The novel is partly autobiographical, and Butler's attacks
upon shams are inspired by strong personal feeling. This
book, and not Erewhon Revisited, should carry as its
epigraph the quotation from the Iliad :

" Him do I hate, even as I hate Hell fire,
Who says one thing, and hides another in his heart."

For the beginning and end of Butler's writing is a loathing
and hatred for crooked vision, darkened counsel, sophis-
tries and the cant of immoderate saintliness. The Way
of All Flesh is as little likely to commend itself to this or
any generation as the novels of Meredith; for, like them,
it contains strong, clear thinking, and it is not the book
of an idle hour. And, further, Butler shows himself not
only the scholar, the critic and the thinker, for in faithful
characterisation, in realism of atmosphere and in illumina-
tion of satirical humour The Way of All Flesh stands with
the greatest English novels of the last century. Psycho-
logical sensitiveness Butler manifested abundantly, and
the power to scheme and plot a large book; but he fails
to seize his dramatic situations. Erewhon Revisited and
The Way of All Flesh abound in incidents that a much
weaker pen might have turned to far better use than
Butler. Like Meredith, however, he was constitutionally
incapable of making the most of his opportunities. Like
Meredith, moreover, whatever influence he has exercised
upon the novel came late, and it confines itself to the
few. Among younger novelists Mr. Gilbert Cannan may
be named as a writer who directly or indirectly has learned
much from Butler, and the tendency of many recent
novels to sketch a complete biography, or the story of a
family in several generations, is doubtless attributable to
Butler.

§2

It will be well at this point to place two novelists of an
older generation whose work, nevertheless, belongs to
recent years, who deserve, also, to be named as influences
upon modern and younger writers, although in originality
of concept and forcefulness of work they can hardly be
counted with Gissing, Butler or Mr. George Moore.

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 881

Theodore Watts-Dunton was first in power a critic,
secondly a poet, and thirdly a novelist. Yet his single

novel won an instant reputation fully
Walter Theodore equal to its deserts. Aylwin (1898)
Watts-Dunton, was written many years before its
1836-1914. publication, but withheld from the

press till the success of the gipsy
romance contained in the poem-sequence, The Coming of
Love, induced the author to print it. In narrative, how-
ever, The Coming of Love is a sequel to Aylwin. The novel
succeeded for some years in winning critical and popular
admiration, for there is undeniable magic in Watts-
Dunston's description of Snowdonia and the wild scenery
of West Wales, there is charm in the love-story and in the
drawing of the character of Sinfi Lovell, there is pathos
and tragic surprise in the narrative, there is interest in
the introduction of Rossetti and others under assumed
names, nevertheless the whole book only too obviously
betrays its slow and laboured birth ; and birth is scarcely
the apt word — the tale has been put together, not born.
Passages of descriptive writing, thoughts contained in
the dialogue or narrative, are beautiful and true, but
they survive in detachment; that unity of movement
and that development of the characters in a conceivable
relationship, which can alone give the illusion of life, are
wanting. As a good novel and a truthful rendering of
life Aylwin fails; its inspiration is an intellectual roman-
ticism, its theme the power of love to reveal the beauty
and mystery of the universe; and, considered in this
aspect, it is a secondary landmark in the literary history
of the period. At a time when the current set toward a
mingling of introspective psychology and bare realism it
exerted some influence in the direction of poetry and
intellectual mysticism.

The novelist who was born while Coleridge and Lamb
were still alive, who moved in George Eliot's circle of

friends, can hardly without violence,
Mark Rutherford, it may seem, find a place in a volume
1829-1913. which treats, for its purposes, Steven-

son and Meredith as belonging to a past.
And Mark Rutherford (William Hale White) was in many
respects a man of the Victorian epoch; his Radicalism

882 THE NOVEL [PART iv

and his rebellion against the doctrines of dissenting
Christianity are Victorian in the form of their unortho-
doxy, and the English life he depicts is largely Noncon-
formist and middle-class life of the forties and fifties.
But the novels were the work of his later life, and the
close realism of his psychology and his impressionistic
manner of outlining scenes and incidents suggest a prim
and distant resemblance to some writers of the Yellow
Book. William Hale White led a curious if uneventful
life. His father was of lower middle-class stock and
successively earned a livelihood as a compositor, a tanner
and a door-keeper to the House of Commons. He passed
on to his son the incongruous gifts of a love of Byron
and a training for the Nonconformist ministry. But Mark
Rutherford, to use his pen-name, was expelled from New
College, St. John's Wood, for heresy, and abandoned all
idea of the ministry. This part of his life is retold in the
most autobiographical of his novels, The Revolution in
Tanner's Lane (1887). After leaving his theological
seminary he turned journalist and hack-writer, and later
became a civil servant with a post in the Admiralty. The
means and ample leisure of a civil servant set him free to
write his novels, and he soon won the admiration of a small
but enthusiastic circle of readers. H. D. Traill was among
the first to recognise the originality of his work ; and he has
been declared a greater than Meredith. In fifteen years
he wrote half a dozen novels of no great length delineating
the life and mind of that part of the Radical middle class
whose thoughts centre in the activities of little dissenting
chapels. There are, besides the novel already named, The
Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881), Mark Ruther-
ford's Deliverance (1885), Miriam's Schooling (1890),
Catherine Furze (1894) and Clara Hopgood (1896).

Mark Rutherford, if occasionally he suggests compari-
sons, has a place peculiarly his own. His style is staid, his
manner grave ; but his ideas, religious and moral, are often
distinctly unorthodox. His stories are without sensational
incident, his people belong to drab corners of life, yet there
is an intensity in his pictures of trivial, sad, weary and
unimaginative lives which compels recognition, and we
discover beneath his searching realism a deep fund of
sympathy for everything save cant and humbug. In a

CHAP. 11] NEW-COMERS 888

quiet way Mark Rutherford has won for himself a reputa-
tion which will probably endure.

§8

The influence of French models in fiction during the
last quarter of the nineteenth century has been noted,
and the typical exemplification of French realistic methods
in the early novels of Mr. George Moore. In these he
anticipated the aims and ideals of younger writers, many
of whom found encouragement and opportunity with the
publication of the Yellow Book ; for the editor, Harland,
was strongly influenced by the French spirit, although by
its delicacy, gaiety and love of beauty in form rather than
by its tendency to logic and exactness. In this group,
among the naturalists in the following of Maupassant and
Zola, the best work was done by Hubert Crackanthorpe
and George Egerton (Mrs. Golding Bright). The former
died young and George Egerton lived to change her
style and methods, and her work will be noted in a subse-
quent section with that of other women novelists. Harland
and Ernest Dowson wrote slight and impressionistic tales
with a leaning to the more serious method of Crackan-
thorpe, and with them may be counted the journalist and
poet, H. D. Lowry, who came under the influence of
Henley and the National Observer. Among others of the
same group who, either during the life of the Yellow Book
and Savoy or later, wrote some fiction, were Mr. Arthur
Symons, Mr. Max Beerbohm, John Davidson, Mr. Bernard
Shaw and Mr. Laurence Housman.

Hubert Crackanthorpe is now remembered by few ; his
life was short, he was much in earnest, and is, therefore,
now practically forgotten. In The Times of Christmas
Day, 1896, appeared a report that Crackanthorpe 's body
had been found in the Seine. Two months before this he

had disappeared from his hotel ; and it
Hubert Crackan- is probable that death was of his own
thorpe, 1865-1896. choosing. The general attitude toward

his work is well expressed by The Times9
comment : " His volume of short stories, called Wreckage,
contained much that was good, though the impression it
left was unpleasant , . t there was ground to hope that

884 THE NOVEL [PART iv

increasing years would bring greater breadth of vision/'
And after his death the volume of Last Studies (1897) was
published, prefaced with a laboured poem by Stopford
Brooke and a critical introduction, grudging and not
peculiarly illuminating, from the pen of Henry James. The
latter is puzzled by the " predominance of the consciousness
of the cruelty of life, the expression, from volume to volume,
of the deep insecurity of things "; and he breathes the
pious belief that these were but youthful weaknesses which
Crackanthorpe, had he lived, would have outgrown. Henry
James, the student of the leisured and cultured margins
of life, shows here a little obtuseness. Hubert Crackan-
thorpe was a modest, gentle-natured young Englishman,
with a love of country scenery and field sports, and a
sincere repulsion from the sordid misery which repre-
sented the ordinary life of so large a proportion of town
populations. Inspired in his art by the short story of
Maupassant he garners his material from direct observa-
tion of life and writes straightforwardly and uncompro-
misingly to show exactly what he sees. His method is
summarised by Mr. Symons — " bare, hard, persistent
realism, the deliberately unsympathetic record of sordid
things." Crackanthorpe was neither a prophet of smooth
things nor one who stooped to make the bid for popularity.
Among that youthful band who contributed to the Yellow
Book the name of Crackanthorpe stands out. His work
showed high promise ; and his early death was a real loss
to English fiction.

In 1892 Crackanthorpe was, with W, H. Wilkins, editor
of The Albemarle, and in the following year he published
Wreckage (1898), a volume of short stories. The title,
upon its face, carries the subject of the book : the flotsam
and the jetsam of humanity, men and women driven to
the last end of despair and suicide, these are the characters
whom we meet in a book which deserves to be remembered,
for every story in the collection reflects the gentleness and
simplicity of a strong and thoughtful mind. And Crackan-
thorpe writes with a clearness and directness well suited
to the subjects he handles. His treatment is admirable,
his phrases and analysis skilful. He writes, for example,
of a sordid London street : " There was an untidiness
about the neighbourhood, an untidiness that was almost

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 885

indecent, the untidiness of a bed that has been slept in."
In a single stroke he depicts the dingy, neglected street.
And, broadly speaking, this is the manner of Crackan-
thorpe. He does not make the mistake of Zola, or of
Mr. George Moore in A Mummer's Wife, of wearying with
photographic completeness in representation. The two
best stories in the book are ' A Conflict of Egoisms ' and
the astonishingly powerful sketch, * A Dead Woman/
possibly suggested by Maupassant's * Inconsolables.' In
the latter we are introduced into the dull atmosphere of a
village inn, moribund since the death of the publican's
wife. The husband sinks into a state of apathy until he
is roused by learning from the slatternly barmaid that
his wife was guilty of misconduct with a local farmer,
his friend. The blow at first overwhelms, and then excites
him to anger. A fierce quarrel follows, but in the end
we see husband and lover discussing, over friendly drinks,
the physical attractions of the dead woman and the course
of the guilty love-affair. It is repulsive and unpleasant ;
but it rings true. Stories like this, and others in the same
manner, were not directed to gain a favourable hearing
with the many, and Crackanthorpe had to meet with much
reviling and antagonism. Yet Wreckage contains some
of the finest and simplest of short stories ; and it is impos-
sible not to recognise in the style and high seriousness
of these tales the work of a man who felt strongly and
looked out on life with grave earnestness. To Crackan-
thorpe was given a sensitiveness which felt the pain of
life more keenly than its happiness. And he writes
severely because he is utterly sincere, determined to be
faithful to that which he has seen and known.

None of the stories in Sentimental Studies (1895) is as
arresting as several in Wreckage. The title suggests a
partial change in manner, but it is by no means a good
title, and better suited to a volume by Harland or Dowson.
' Battledore and Shuttlecock ' is a realistic tale in the
manner of Wreckage : the * Set of Village Tales,' at the
end of the volume, is, however, of a slightly different
genre. They illustrate Crackanthorpe's power of repro-
ducing environment with a clear simplicity, A little bare,
a little melancholy these sketches, yet they betray the
essential gentleness of Crackanthorpe's character. They

886 THE NOVEL [PART iv

suggest sharp and clean etching with a brilliant surface
effect.

The tiny volume, Vignettes (1896), is chiefly of interest
in introducing us to Crackanthorpe's workshop. The book
is a collection of excerpts from his notebooks, jottings
of impressions in London and abroad ; and they show how
he learned to observe, taught himself to recognise the chief
attributes of each scene, and patiently set himself to
convey these to paper. As an example of his method one
of the vignettes may be quoted.

" The entertainment draws to its close, for it is past
four in the morning. In the hall, several of the oil-
lamps have already sputtered out ; the rest are burning
with dull, blear-eyed weariness. A score of unshaven
Spaniards, close muffled in capas and lowering som-
breros, sprawl in limp attitudes over empty benches,
and the circle of gaudy women that fill the stage sit
listless, pasty-faced, somnolent.

And then, for the last time, the frenzy passes. The
guitars start their sudden, bitter twanging, and the
women their wild rhythmical beating of hands.

Amid vollies of harsh, frenzied plaudits la Monolita
dances, swaying her soft, girlish frame with a tense,
exasperated restraint; supple as a serpent; coyly,
subtly lascivious; languidly curling and uncurling her
bare white arms.

Out in the cold night air, as I hasten home through
the narrow, sleeping streets, her soft, girlish frame
still sways before my eyes, to the bitter twanging of
guitars. "

6 Anthony Garstin's Courtship/ a tale of tragic wooing
among Cumberland country-folk, and the first story in
Crackanthorpe's posthumous volume, Last Studies, is one
of his finest and strongest pieces of writing, a dialect story
simply and broadly narrated in a manner that would not
shame Mr. Hardy. The other two stories of the last
volume do not, however, reach the standard of his best
work.

Crackanthorpe was not wholly without humour, but in
his writing it appears only as a tinge of irony. He had
no faculty for suffering the defects of life gladly; and

?HAP. n] NEW-COMERS 887

tolerance of painful incongruity is the foundation of
lumour. Crackanthorpe would not have denied that life
tiad its glad moments and margins of satisfaction, but
tie looked straight before him and saw only the broad
page of unhappiness between the margins. Realists,
French and English, have not always been men of the
finest and gentlest instincts : Crackanthorpe is often the
most drab of realists, yet we never lose consciousness of
a refined and sensitive nature in the writer of these hard,
airy-point sketches and tales. It is probable that they will
drop further from sight as time passes ; but by a few the
name of Crackanthorpe will be remembered for his genius
in observation and character-drawing, and for the un-
deviating sincerity of his work.

Henry Harland, Ernest Dowson and H. D. Lowry also
came under French influences in the writing of fiction,

but with them these influences developed
Henry Harland, in the form of a sentimental and nervous
1861-1905. impressionism. Harland's early life and

training made him a citizen of no nation.
He was an American born in St. Petersburgh, and he was
educated in America, Rome and Paris. His first novels
dealt chiefly with American- Jewish life, and were pub-
lished under the pseudonym Sidney Luska. His first book,
As it was Written: A Jewish Musician's Story (1885), and
others which succeeded it followed the track of sensation-
alism. In 1890 he came to London and published under
his own pame Two Women or One (1890) and Mea Culpa:
A Woman's Last Word (1891). But in 1898, with the
publication of Mademoiselle Miss and other Stones, his
better style appeared, and in the following year he attained
prominence when he was appointed editor of the Yellow
Book. Mademoiselle Miss contains five short tales, which
first exhibit, and notably in the title-story, that, charm
of light and airy style, that graceful humour which are
commonly associated with the name of Harland. These
sketches, for they are sketches rather than tales, in their
air of inconsequence often remind us of Maupassant. They
lead to nothing, and their only charm is the art with which
characters are hit off and environment painted with deft,
quick phrases. The two best tales have a French setting.
* Mademoiselle Miss5 shows the unsophisticated little

888 THE NOVEL [PART iv

English governess flung by chance into a cheap Parisian
hotel and the company of students and 6tudiante$ who
were " to put it squarely the most disreputable family
in Europe." The other, ' The Funeral March of a
Marionette/ is a sketch of the death of a vicious little
cocote. The story reveals that vein of tender pathos which
Harland possessed in addition to gifts of gaiety and wit.
Of the cocote's funeral procession he writes :

" To-morrow women (who would have shrunk from
her in her lifetime, as from something pestilential) will
reverently cross themselves, and men (who would have
. . . ah, well it is best not to remember what the men
would have done) will decently bare their heads, as
her poor coffin is borne through the streets on its way
to the graveyard."

Harland was a master of the short sketch, not of the
story ; for he was wanting in invention, and his imagina-
tion was not strong. Grey Roses (1895), another collection
of sketches, not only follows the manner and subject-
matter of Mademoiselle Miss, it repeats incidents and
sentences almost word for word. In ' The Reward of
Virtue/ for example, Harland uses again, with slight
transposition, the incident and the words already referred
to, when we are told that men bared their heads and
women crossed themselves who would have spurned in
life the old vagabond of the BouP Miche. And this is
not the only instance of close repetition. In these two
volumes of sketches and short tales Harland is, perhaps,
at his best, although it was with the pretty and senti-
mental love-stories of The Cardinal's Snuff-box (1900) and
The Lady Paramount (1902) that he won great popularity.
These are graceful, witty and decorative, but their sub-
stance is slight and their atmosphere unreal.

Harland never attempts the large theme, his gift lies
in the short story which sketches men and women in moods
not too serious and graces vignettes of life with gay humour
and delicate pathos. Though not ambitious his work has
the charm of truth within its limitations, The pathos of
* The Reward of Virtue ' and * When I am King * is simple,
unforced and wholly free from exaggeration. And in
Harland we recognise the stylist, the man who can be

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 889

conversant with good literature without thrusting pedantry
upon us. The lightness of his wit and humour are things
to take joy in. His strength lay in brief and impres-
sionistic tales ; and as an editor he was less successful. The
Yellow Book, with the men and the material he had to his
hand, ought to have been a finer periodical.

Ernest Dowson is to be counted with the poets, but the
little prose he has left behind him has, with his verse, a
charm of sentiment and evanescent
Ernest Dowson, cynicism. The sub-title of Dilemmas
1867-1900. (1895), * Stories and Studies in Senti-

ment,5 expresses well the nature of his
poetry, while the title of the book exactly describes the
prose sketches, for they are studies in cases of conscience
rather than mere sentiment. Each story is a tale of loss and
the irony of circumstance — a man and woman lost to
each through a mistake and the treachery of a friend,
a pupil lost to a master who sinks into poverty while
she becomes a famous prima donna, forgetfulness of an
early friend for the sake of fame, the mistake of a man
who hoards wealth that he may be in a position to marry
the woman of his heart, forgetting that both grow old
and the world is changing for them. The most dramatic
of these tales is ' A Case of Conscience/ Two men love
one woman. One knows that he ought not to marry,
though she has consented, for he has not confessed that
he is a divorced man, and she, as a Roman Catholic, if
she marries him and discovers his past will believe her-
self to be living in open sin ; the other will not enlighten
her lest he should seem to be actuated for the sake of
his love and not her happiness. The issue is left unsolved.
The motive of these stories— life's little ironies— belongs
peculiarly to Mr. Thomas Hardy, though Dowson's treat-
ment is different and more sentimental. All have the
charm of that tender melancholy which marks Dowson's
poetry, and decidedly, even as stories, they are not
negligible; for they have point and are well told. But
the character-drawing is wanting in power of detachment.
Dowson rings the changes upon one or two types he is
able to understand, and the others he neglects.

Henry Dawson Lowry, was, like Dowson, a poet, and
his sketches and short stories in some degree resemble

840 THE NOVEL [PAH* iv

the mood and temper in which Dilemmas
Henry Dawson was written. Lowry's first work of any
Lowry, 1869-1906. note was the series of short stories,

Wreckers and Methodists (1893), and
this was soon followed by Women's Tragedies (1895).
These two volumes contain sketches and stories of life in
his native Cornwall, told with a restraint and distinction
of style which mark them as work far above the average
of the short tale written to meet the needs of the magazine-
devouring public. They reveal a thoughtful and ordered
mind, and a nature lonely and melancholy, but not morbid.
In the combination of an exquisite delicacy and a reserved
power ' The Man in the Room,' a story of the second
volume, almost takes the breath with astonishment. His
novel, A Man of Moods (1896), on the other hand, though
distinguished by the style which never deserted Lowry,
has little else to recommend it; and the child's book,
Make Believe (1896), though beautiful in passages, is apt
to drag and run heavily.

Mr. Symons, with the exception of John Davidson, the
most notable of the younger poets in this group, is scarcely

in any wise to be counted a writer of
Arthur Symons, fiction, though one volume of short
k* 1865. stories stands to his credit. Spiritual

Adventures (1905), a book of imaginative
tales and psychological studies is of interest in the element
of autobiography it contains. Its first sketch, ' A Prelude
to Life/ is in a form scarcely disguised the story of the
development of Mr, Symons 's mind and imagination in
early years. The reference is obvious when the hero of
this sketch confesses that for the first five years in London
he felt an unceasing delight in the mere fact of being
there.

" I had never cared greatly for the open air in the
country, the real open air, because everything in the
country, except the sea, bored me; but here, in the
' motley ' Strand, among these hurrying people, under
the smoky sky, I could walk and yet watch. If evqr
there was a religion of the eyes, I have devoutly
practised that religion. I noted every face that passed
me on the pavement/'

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 841

In this confession lies the secret of the origin of half the
poems in Silhouettes and London Nights.

The other sketches are of a more general character,
and relate, for example, the story of a woman who becomes
a great actress in a moment of passionate wrath at being
displaced by a rival, and the story of a Cornish fisherman
who sins the sin against the Holy Ghost for the sake of
the Lord. The curious and remote in the psychology of
character is the chief interest of these sketches.

Four other writers have been named who had some
connection with either the Yellow Book or The Savoy,

who have chiefly won fame in other
John Davidson, fields, and yet at some period of their
1857-1909. lives have made essays in the writing of

prose-fiction. In manner and style they
have no relation to each other, nor is their fiction of any
special importance, and they may therefore be briefly
dismissed. John Davidson, as has been noted elsewhere,
wrote a few novels in early life in the hope of earning
money by them; but poetry was his joy and the end of
his being. Yet Perfervid (1890) has merit as a novel, and is
not to be set aside as a mere money-making venture. Mr
Max Beerbohm was one of the brightest luminaries in

the constellation of the Yellow Book ; but
Max Beerbohm, he is a caricaturist, an essayist and a
b. 1872. parodist. He was early distinguished as

"brilliant"; he neither achieved bril-
liance nor had it thrust upon him. The word exactly
defines ' A Defence of Cosmetics ' and other essays which
appeared in the Yellow Book and elsewhere, and were
afterwards republished in volume-form; it describes the
witty aptness of the parodies in A Christmas Garland
(1912) ; and, above all, it describes his caricatures1. For
twenty years he has been the only caricaturist of any
eminence or genius in England; for he realises that
caricature must exaggerate the essential and not the
inessential; and, therefore, his caricatures are criticism.
His true fame will rest upon his genius as a draughtsman
and caricaturist; but, at the least, he touches with
brilliance, any thing he attempts. His novel, Zuleika

1. The word " brilliant " fitly describes also those volumes of tales and
sketches which have appeared since the period covered by this survey.

842 TfidE NOVEL [PART tv

Dobson (1911), a piece of fantastic wit and satire, came
as a surprise. Mr. Edmund Gosse discovers in its pages
a bergamot perfume exhaled and communicated from the
pages of John Inglesant; but in this discovery he is,
perhaps, inspired with something of the fancifulness of
the narrative of which he writes. The spirit of Oxford,
its truth, its charm, and its absurdity, is inimitably caught
in this fantasic tale of the loves of an undergraduate duke
and a popular conjurer-actress. And the ground of reality,
as in the caricatures, is always there. In his novel, if novel
it may be called, Mr. Max Beerbohm shows that his gift of
satirical wit is with his caricature grounded in the real.

Like Mr. Max Beerbohm Mr, Laurence Housman con-
tributed both to the text and the illustrations of the

Yellow Book, but his versatility is of
Laurence Housman, another kind. In the first decade of
k 1867. his literary life he was not among

authors popular at the lending library.
His poetry was obscure, and, more distasteful to English
readers, mystical; and the appeal of his prose-allegories
was chiefly literary. But in 1900 he published anony-
mously a book which excited the dulled sensibilities of
subscribers to the libraries; and for a short time An
Englishwoman's Love-letters became the butt of parodists
and the rival of the weather in conversation. Beautiful,
artificial, melancholy, and even in the ecstasy of love a
little morbid, these letters reflect the involvements of
Mr, Housman 's earnest, wistful, tearful pathos. The
moods of his verse are reflected throughout in the English-
woman's Love-letters ; but the subscribers to the lending
libraries had not read his poetry. A passage like the
following may be matched more than once or twice in his
verse :

" I wonder what, to the starving and drought-
stricken, the taste of death can be like ! Do all the
rivers of the world run together to the lips then and
all its fruits strike suddenly to the taste when the long
deprivation ceases to be a want? Or is it simply a
ceasing hunger and thirst — an antidote to it all ? "

As documents purporting to come from life these letters
are too strident of mannerism and studied phrasings, too

CfiAP. ii] NEW-COMERS 848

intellectual to be the utterance of a heart-felt love. No
woman could write thus unless she were thinking more of
herself than the man to whom she was sending the letter;
As love-letters they are self-condemned ; for they represent
an eifaotion other than love ; the gaze is turned inward not
outward. The letters of George Egerton's Rosa Amorosa
(1901), which appeared almost simultaneously with An
Englishwoman's Love-letters, though they attracted less
attention show greater knowledge of the heart, and are a
far more successful essay in the same manner of writing.
Mr. Housman 's book is virtually a novel in epistolary form,
for it traces narrative from the blossoming of love to the
withering of hope; and its success led Mr. Housman to
fresh efforts in the field of fiction with A Modern Antaeus,
(1901) and Sdbrina Warham (1904). The legend of Antaeus,
slain only when deprived of the magic touch of Mother
Earth, has evidently long occupied Mr. Housman 's
imagination, for he writes a poem on the theme in his first
volume of verse; and his first novel in direct narrative
is the story of one who in our modern world lived close
to the breast of Earth and drew sustenance from her.
It is a long novel : its direct realism and the dramatic force
of its incidents are in surprising contrast to the cryptic
mysticism of his earlier work. Sdbrina Warham is
a more straggling story, and hardly so strongly or vividly
written. Both these tales are set against a background
of the English countryside. But Mr. Housman ?s genius
does not readily turn to the realistic representation of
everyday life, and he is more successful in sustaining
interest in John of Jingalo (1912) and The Royal Runaway
(1914), whimsical yet direct and pointed satires upon
things monarchical, political, religious and social in con-
temporary English life. Nearly all problems and activities
of the day are introduced, including the cause of woman
suffrage, to which Mr. Housman has so heartily given of
his time, and the censorship of plays from which he has
suffered. He is wanting in the acid quality of greater
satirists, but the satire is purposive, and without depart-
ing far from things as they are he succeeds in throwing
the life of to-day into humorous relief. Indeed, it is hard
to connect these books with the author of Green Arras and
Spikenard.

6*4 tHfi NOVEL [PA$? iV

Mr. Bernard Shaw, widely as he differs in every other

respect from Mr. Laurence Housman, has this, at least,

in common with him that he is a satirist,

Bernard Shaw, and in early life he wrote several poor and

b- 1856. unsuccessful satirical novels. They were

refused by all publishers and struggled

to life in the pages of magazines which expired soon after

printing the young novelist's contributions. But these

early efforts in fiction have a common characteristic which

usually belongs to the financial triumph of each year —

they are not important as literature nor have they any

great interest or significance. And their author is not

least ready to relegate them to a position of unimportance

and entitle them " Novels of My Nonage." Immaturity

(1879) never appeared in print, but its very title for a first

novel is typical of Mr. Shaw's fondness for a kind of

inverted humour. The Irrational Knot (1880) treats the

hoary problem of the marriage tie, but like a play of much

later date, Getting Married (1908), it suffers in its greatest

need from the author's inability to perceive that, if woman

is more primitive than man in " the sex business," this is

not the conclusion of the whole matter. Woman is both

more primitive and more sophisticated : her receptiveness

and power of imitation have laid her open to the attacks

of civilisation, and her inscrutability is a result of the social

order and its arbitrary conventions to which she has

yielded more rapidly than man. An Unsocial Socialist

(1888) bears the credit of having interested William Morris

upon its appearance in a socialist periodical, but it carries

too many traces of the propagandist in the first flush of

critical interest with new theories; and the whole is

exasperatingly formless. Cashel Byron's Profession

(1882), which had a measure of success from the first both

in England and America, is the best of these early novels,

for it is genuine melodrama, and makes no pretence oi

reaching after higher things. It is the only one of the

novels which gives any evidence of the efficiency which

the author has carefully cultivated all his life — the limits

are recognised and the accomplishment adequate,

Efficiency, variously disguised, and directed to different

ends, has been the simple creed inspiring Mr. Shaw's

work as critic, dramatist and speaker ; it is the ground oJ

CHAP. ii] NEW-COMERS 345

his philosophy and the hope of the Fabian Society which
he has unswervingly supported. As a dramatist Mr. Shaw
has, at least, been efficient : his dramas sometimes fail
not through inability to fulfil his intent, but from mistaken
intention. The novels, save Cashel Byron's Profession, are
inefficient ; they do not fulfil their intention.

§4

At this stage before passing to younger writers of fiction
or the novelists who found themselves a few years later
than those with whom the earlier portion of this chapter
has been concerned, it will only be possible to gather into
a miscellaneous section a few who have either won or
deserve reputation, with the premise that no implication
of relationship is intended by the conjunction of names.
In the case of several similar aims or a like result may be
noted ; but, in general, writers here passed in rapid survey
have written either to please themselves or a public which
had learned to expect a definite manner from them, with-
out reference to any theory in the art of fiction, and with-
out an originality strong enough definitely to influence
others. At the outset it will be possible to range together
a few romantic and imaginative novelists and story-tellers.

Romance in seeking an escape from the civilisation of
an industrial and mechanical world has commonly turned
to the wild and untrammelled corners still to be found
on the earth, and among writers of romance who draw
upon travel, adventure and experience, and write with
unquestionable gifts of imagination and
Robert Bontine literary style are to be named Mr.
Cunninghame Cunninghame Graham and W. H.
Graham, b. 1852. Hudson. Mr. Cunninghame Graham,
traveller, Member of Parliament and
Socialist orator, began to write comparatively late in life,
and it is surprising that an author so finely endowed with
gifts of style and language, of youthful adventurousness,
of full-blooded joy in life, could have waited so long before
yielding to the impulse of self-expression. But the
explanation is to hand in his books, and needs no long
searching. Mr. Cunninghame Grahanr is first a man of
action, a lover of travel, and, above all, a lover of life,

846 THE NOVEL

of the strong, rough life of men and women dwelling on
wild plains, unspoiled by the mechanism of modern
civilisation. And when he writes it is not for the sake of
writing, but to gather what he has experienced. " Let
nobody deceive himself, " he writes, . . . " that books are
spun out from the inner consciousness. ... All that we
write is but a bringing forth of something we have seen
or heard about. " To read Mr. Cunninghame Graham's
sketches and short stories is to be in touch with a writer
alive to the finger-tips, a man who feels not the joy of
life, but a plentitude of gladness in living. Practically
all his work, apart from topographical books and narra-
tives of travel, consists of sketches, studies of character and
fragmentary stories that are no more than sketches. He
writes of Mexico, the Pampas of South America, of Spain,
of the Arabs in North Africa, of his native Scotland, of
life in the untamed and savage corners of the world, of
the weary, wicked life of old-world cities, and always he
leaves the impression of one who intimately and as a
native knows the lives and souls of all the men and
women whom he has seen. Aurora la Cujini (1898), a
realistic sketch of a bull fight and a dancing-hall in Seville,
showed his command of words and of a style that had
the romantic charm without the slightly foppish senti-
mentality of Stevenson. And, unlike Stevenson's, Mr.
Cunningham Graham's realism is not guess-work by a
romanticist — it is observation which shrinks from nothing.
Zola might have described how the short sleeves of the
dancer " slip back exhibiting black tufts of hair under
her arms, glued to her skin with sweat," but Stevenson
would have shrunk from it. Mr Cunninghame Graham
draws characters of all types and nations with a clear eye
for the essentials that matter. No one can forget, after
reading * Beattock for Moffat,' the dying Scotchman
travelling home in the train, or the hard-grained and much-
hated missionary of ' A Convert,' or the contrast of the
innocent and unsuspecting English girl and the courtesan
in * Signalled/ or, in another sketch, the life-like portrait
of the disreputable Dona Ana Alvarez who kept an
establishment of girls " in a winding lane." And to name
these is to select only a few of the stories, sketches and
character-studies which appear in Success (1902), Progress

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 347

(1905), His People (1906), and the series not verily happily
named Faith (1909), Hope (1910) and Charity (1912).
These collections all have romance, the freshness of the
open air, a style, vivid, nervous, idiomatic, and an in-
dividual everyday philosophy conveyed in brief, pregnant,
ironical turns of speech. Above all Mr. Cunninghame
Graham is the lover of quaint and savage life. His
philosophy of the past and present is summed up in
Success :

" The Bedouin draped in blue rags, his sandals on
his feet, seated upon a hide-bound ' wind-drinker,' or
perched upon a camel, with his long gun or spear in
his hand, retains an air of dignity, such as might grace
a king. The same man, waiting at a railway station for
a train, becomes a beggar. ... So does our progress
make commercial travellers of us all."

William Henry Hudson was a writer of romances and
tales founded upon wild life in South America, as well as a
naturalist and ornithologist who won
William Henry deserved reputation as a scientific

Hudson, 1862-1922. observer. His studies as a naturalist
lie outside the scope of this book, but
his few romances excite a regret that he did not give him-
self more often to the writing of fiction. In 1902 he
published El Ombu, a collection of short tales of adventure
in South America. Among these the most striking is the
eerie and supremely well-written tragedy of ' Marta
Riquelme.' Many years before this he wrote The Purple
Land that England Lost (1885), a romance of Uruguay
embodying elements of topography and history. And in
1904 came the still finer romance of wandering and love,
touched with allegorical significance, Green Mansions, a
narrative of the journeyings of a Venezuelan on the upper
reaches of the Orinoco. If Hudson gave the best of his
time to the study of nature and the writing of books such
as The Naturalist in La Plata (1892), Nature in Downland
(1900) and A Shepherd's Life (1910), he possessed also richly
the gifts of a romancer. He had subtlety, tenderness, a
knowledge of man as well as of beasts and birds, a love of
the open air, and a clear direct, sensitive style. His South
American stories reveal not only insight and observation,

848 THE NOVEL [PABT itt

but a powerful imagination. He chose to serve two
masters, and in the twofold service he reached a distinction
gained by few who more prudently concentrate their aims.
Among other writers of romance whose work is, whatever
its exact chronology, most naturally to be placed within

the concluding years of the last cen-
Sir Arthur Quiller- tury, six may be named. Sir Arthur
Couch, b. 1863. Quiller-Couch is, perhaps, the only

living prolific writer of tales of adven-
ture who has a wide and scholarly knowledge of the
literature of his country. His anthology, the Oxford Book
of English Verse, is the best anthology ever collected with
the exception of Palgrave's Golden Treasury. When he
was an undergraduate at Oxford the fascination of Steven-
son's romanticism had not yet caught the world with its
charm. Treasure Island did not come till 1888. But before
he was fairly launched on the world of letters the magic of
Stevenson's prose and his adventurous romanticism were
beginning to exercise their spell, and Dead Man's Rock
(1887), a story of the quest of the great ruby of Ceylon,
has all the macabre character of the tale that delighted
Stevenson. And, further, Q., to use the pen-symbol
adopted by the author, was by nature born a stylist. If
any man could take up the mantle of Stevenson it was he,
and it was therefore fitting that he should be chosen in
1897 to complete the unfinished romance, St. Ives. The
joy of life, the spirit of adventure, a kindly and thoroughly
happy humour pervade all Q.'s romances, novels and
historical tales. Among his pure romances may be counted
his first book, Dead Man9 s Rock, The Adventures of Harry
Revel (1903) and a number of volumes of short stories.
In the series of historical tales are to be included The
Splendid Spur (1889), a romance of the great Civil War,
with the scene chiefly laid in the West of England, and
Fort Amity (1904), with its scene laid in Canada during
the contest for that country between England and
France.

Among the more important books — those that rest
finally upon the study of character — are Troy Town (1888),
The Ship of Stars (1899), The Westcotes (1902), Hetty
Wesley (1903), True Tilda (1909) and the truly delightful
Hocken and Huncken (1912). The story in Troy Town

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 840

resolves itself into sketches, excellent in their humour
and truthfulness, describing the gentry and lesser people
of Troy, or Fowey, in Cornwall, The Ship of Stars is the
love-story of a Cornish lad, a dreamer who becomes, like
many of the world's dreamers, more practical than his
matter-of-fact fellows — a story lit with the poetry of
dreams and ideals. The Westcotes hovers between the
romance and the true novel, and relates the story of an
English girl and a French prisoner during the great wars.
Hetty Wesley is a fine character-study of Hetty, the sister
of the evangelists John and Charles Wesley. Misunder-
stood at home she is sacrificed to the purposes of her
brothers. In the form of the serious and realistic novel,
based upon interest in human character, this is the author's
most ambitious book and his finest piece of writing. True
Tilda, however, is hardly a success, for Q. is not entirely
at home in his environment of bargees, strolling actors
and town dwellers. But he reasserted himself with the
wonderfully good humour of Hocken and Huncken, the
story of two old sea captains and their chequered court-
ship of the well-favoured and moneyed widow, Mrs.
Bosenna. In this tale he returned to Troy Town and its
inhabitants, people whom he cannot touch without draw-
ing the reader to them.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has the gift of versatility. He
has written excellent parodies, stirring ballads, fine lyrics,
sound criticism, tales of adventure, historical romances
and novels. In none of these many forms has he written
anything of outstanding importance; but he has poetry,
romance, humour, a happy optimism, and the power of
conveying, even in the slightest sketch, the impression
of a writer imbued with fine and careful literary instincts.

The sensational and popular tales of Sir Henry Rider
Haggard have less pretension to call for a literary judg-
ment that the romances of Q., but the
Sir Henry Rider author has style and a racy vigour which
Haggard, b. 1856. raises his stories above the common rout.
Some of the better qualities of these
tales are due to the fact that Sir Rider Haggard combined
the life of letters and the life of affairs. While yet in
his teens he went out to South Africa as secretary to Sir
Henry Bulwer, Governor of Natal. In 1878 he was Master

850 THE NOVEL [PART iv

of the High Court of Transvaal. On his return to England
he became a successful farmer and writer of sensational
stories. He has also written upon farming, gardening,
agricultural conditions in Denmark and other countries,
Salvation Army labour colonies at home and in America ;
but to the majority of readers he is known as the author
of exciting tales of adventure. None of these possesses
long-enduring qualities ; but within their range Sir Rider
Haggard's books are not without their distinctive merits.
King Solomon's Mines (1886), a tale of wild adventure
in Central Africa in search of King Solomon's Ophir, first
brought him fame. Its sequel, Allan Quartermain (1888),
is an equally thrilling tale of the discovery of a hidden
nation in the heart of the dark continent. After this the
author ranged over many lands, Holland, Mexico,
Palestine, Egypt, Scandinavia; but nearly always in the
same vein, investing the incredible or improbable with an
air of reality. He is, however, at his best with tales of
peril and adventure in Africa, and more particularly with
Cleopatra (1889), Maiwa's Revenge (1888) and She (1886).
He has also not been unsuccessful in tales of ordinary life
— as in Jess (1887) and Joan Haste (1895) — for he possesses
humour and a sound knowledge of human nature.

The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould may also be counted
with the writers of romance rather than with the novelists.

He began to write so long since that he
Sabine Baring- scarcely falls within the limits of these
Gould, 1834-1924. chapters, although the general character

of his work may be mentioned briefly.
He was amazingly prolific and versatile, and to the end he
continued to write with an industry and vigour that
scarcely faltered. For over half a century he wrote from
different country rectories upon all subjects and with
unabated speed. Comparative religion, quaint, old-world
customs, beliefs, superstitions, folk-lore, topography,
ethnology, and by-ways of history were among his chief
interests. His first important book was Curious Myths of
the Middle Ages (1866-67). This was followed by The
Origin and Development of Religious Beliefs (1869-70),
and the lengthy and laborious Lives of the Saints (1872-77)
in fifteen volumes. He was a hymn writer, the author
of many volumes of sermons, guide-books, histories and

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 851

novels. Perhaps no contemporary among English authors
produced a larger quantity of printed matter ; but the pen
of a ready writer was a snare set in his way, for it cannot
be said that he produced one book of individual character
or distinction. Only a few from the large numbed of his
romances can be named. Mehalah (1880) is sensational,
but it displays some power in character-drawing and
imagination. John Herring (1888), his best character-
study, is a gloomy and pessimistic tale of village life in
Devon and Cornwall. And of his later romances the best
are The Broom Squire (1896) and Cheap Jack Zita (1898).
Baring-Gould for the most part depicted rustic and agricul-
tural life in the West of England, but he used almost any
local setting with complete indifference. When he is at
his best, in John Herring and one or two of the other
novels, his genuine gift of characterisation, his imaginative
rendering of scenery and atmosphere cause regret that he
wrote so rapidly without due thought or care. He was a
born man-of-letters, lacking only self-restraint, patience
and distinctive ideas.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, another popular writer of
romances, is the grandson of John Doyle, the caricaturist
and illustrator of Thackeray. He has written many tales
that are clever and ingenious; but he
Sir Arthur Conan is little troubled with literary idealism.
Doyle, b. 1859. Although he studied medicine at Edin-
burgh, and even practised as a physician
for eight or nine years, he began to write early. His first
books were insignificant ; and it was not till he introduced
his famous detective character, Sherlock Holmes, in A
Study in Scarlet (1887), that he won success. With other
books in which the same acute but prosy detective appears
the author set the vogue of the detective tale, and popular
magazines were inundated with stories in this genre.
Ingenious complications of crime and their certain
solution by the infallible Holmes is the stuff of which is
woven The Sign of Four (1889), The Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes (1891), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
(1898), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and The
Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904). The author possesses
ingenuity in the invention of the mysterious, macabre and
horrifying, but to compare his work with the writing of

852 THE NOVEL [PART iv

Poe, as some have not hesitated to do, is to lose all sense
of proportion.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's historical romances are of
better literary quality. The White Company (1890), a
narrative of the exploits in France and Castile of a com-
pany of English bowmen during the Hundred Years5 War,
is^a well-written and fascinating historical tale; and Sir
Nigel (1906) is another good romance of the Middle Age.
Rodney Stone (1896) describes vividly and realistically
prize-fighting and social amenities in England during the
days of the Prince Regent. The Exploits of Brigadier
Gerard (1896) and The Adventures of Gerard (1908) are a
racy and vivacious record in the first person of the experi-
ences of a gallant but conceited soldier in Napoleon's
Grand Army. The characters of historical romance are
rarely more than puppets ; yet in these and other volumes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle displays a ready aptitude for
weaving a good story of adventure against a background
of history.

During the Boer War he visited South Africa, and
returned to write a history of The Great Boer War (1900)
and a defence of English policy. At this time he received
a knighthood. Latterly he has written several plays and
fresh romances, including The Lost World (1912), in which
appears the sensational character of Professor Challenger
who discovers a territory still inhabited by the fearful
wild-fowl of the earth's early ages. This book is a good
example of the lowest level of the author's commercial
output, which forms the larger part of his work. With
his historical romances, however, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
has shown a real faculty for producing good tales of the
kind.

In fidelity to human nature and in style the Canadian

romances of Sir Gilbert Parker stand on a different plane.

In Pierre and His People (1892) and

Sir Gilbert Parker, companion volumes of tales depict-

b-lWi ing half-breed and French Canadian

life Sir Gilbert Parker drew on the

experiences of his youth, for he was born near Ontario and

learned to know the people of Lower Canada intimately.

The stories collected in Pierre are related to each other

only in that they are strung upon one character, Pierre,

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 853

the half-breed. Taken together they are a painting of
life in that part of Canada assigned by charter to the
Hudson's Bay Company, and sketch in the spirit of
romance, adventure or sentiment the characters of Indians,
half-breeds, servants of the company and experiences of
the North- West Mounted Police. * A Prairie Vagabond,'
the story of Little Hammer's avenging of his wife, in the
exactness and economy of its material is an example of the
art of the short tale. A curious defect in these stories is the
absence of background. The arid wastes, the clear air,
the snows of the north — these are not omitted, but Sir
Gilbert Parker is far from successful in creating an atmos-
phere and a setting for his characters. We can almost
forget our hypothetical environment as we read. Happily
this charge cannot be brought with equal force against the
short stories of An Adventurer of the North (1895), which
continue the records begun in Pierre, and The Lane That
Had No Turning (1900), which contains some of his best
work. But best of all is the spirited and vigorous romance,
When Valmond Came to Pontiac (1895), the story of a valet
who had served in the Bonaparte family, was imbued with
their traditions, came to Pontiac, a small village in French
Canada, posed as a Bonaparte, and died, shot by the Eng-
lish soldiery, for stirring up sedition among the people.
Sir Gilbert Parker achieved noteworthy success in this
book. The villagers, their life, the scenery, the atmosphere
are vividly painted, and humour, pathos and style all
conduce to an excellent story.

Mrs Falchion (1893) is not so convincing as the short
stories or romances. It is a study of some length in the
character of a hard, wire-drawn woman. The characters
are needlessly translated from point to point on the globe,
and the action is melodramatic. The Seats of the Mighty
(1896) is an ambitious but well-knit and successful
historical romance of Canada in the days of its conquest
by Wolfe. The historical material has been worked up
with scholarly care. In The Battle of the Strong (1898)
Sir Gilbert Parker deserted Canada without advantage to
the tale ; and two years later he entered the English Parlia-
ment to the detriment of his work as a writer. The pursuit
of an active life has to some extent forced literature aside.
Among his later books, in which the scene is variously laid,
z

354 THE NOVEL [PART iv

are Donovan Pasha (1902), The Ladder of Swords (1904),
The Weavers (1907), Northern Lights (1909) and The
Judgment House (1913). The last named is a strikingly
dramatic and idealistic novel discussing the relationship of
England and South Africa.

Sir Gilbert Parker's finest work is to be found in his
early studies of French Canadian life, and chiefly in that
truly admirable romance, written with humour and the
dignity of true pathos, When V almond Came to Pontiac.
Valmond, the sincere imposter, is a figure of great attrac-
tiveness, Pierre, the half-breed, the Cure, the Avocat, the
Seigneur of Pontiac, and the villagers are, without excep-
tion, vividly and convincingly characterised. Sir Gilbert
Parker is not an inventive or creative writer, but his style
is good, he is conscious of literary responsibility, his obser-
vation is sure ; and if he belongs to the secondary class of
novelists his French Canadian stories give him a high place
in that class.

Hugh Stowell Scott, who used for his pen-name, Henry
Seton Merriman, was a writer of romantic tales who won
great popularity and large sales, but he has little further

claim to mention, for if his work

Henry Seton Merriman, never sinks far it equally never rises
1863-1903. above a competent mediocrity.

Among his best-known tales are The

Slave of the Lamp (1892), The Sowers (1896) and In
Kedar's Tents (1897).

In sharp contrast with these writers of romance may be
placed two writers of ethical, economic and problem novels
of a realistic character. Charles Grant
Grant Allen, Blairfindie Allen, who abbreviated his
1848-1899. name on title-pages to Grant Allen, was by

the whole influence of his training as a
scientific observer a realist in fiction, a keen and a close
student of character. Unfortunately the necessity to earn
a livelihood by the pen drove him to write many novels of
a kind dictated not by his own ideals but by the taste of the
subscriber at the libraries. In fifteen years he published
over thirty novels, and this rapidity in output speaks for
itself. They all bear evidence to the hard, keen, brilliant
intellect of the author, and many of the short stories are
admirably told ; but Grant Allen wrote fiction by necessity,

CHAP. 11] NEW-COMERS 855

not choice. If he had hot been compelled by circumstances
it is doubtful if he would have turned aside from research
and scientific writing. Fortunately for himself he won
success in the practice of fiction; but even his more am-
bitious novels have little permanent value. The Woman
Who Did (1895), his most famous book, was a sincere and
earnest plea for freer union and love between the sexes than
the present order of society commonly allows ; and inevit-
ably it enjoyed, what the author did not wish, the success
of a scandal. In the nature of the case it was impossible
that The Woman Who Did should be a work of art. Its
obvious didacticism, the keen but deplorably narrow vision
of the author, his inability to see far on either hand, and
his burning desire scientifically to cleanse a smirched and
soiled world, constantly intrude themselves upon the
character-painting. In common with the greater part of
Grant Allen's work in fiction the book exemplifies his acute
intellectual powers and lack of artistic faculty.

Like Grant Allen Mr. Israel Zangwill is a man of causes
as well as of letters. He is a Jew of the Jews, a promoter of
the Zionist movement, an enthusiastic
Israel Zangwill, advocate of woman suffrage, and he has
b. 1864. written what may be described as large-

scale and modern moralities in The War
God (1911) and The Next Religion (1912). With Grant
Allen, Gissing and Mr. Arthur Morrison Mr. Zangwill was
to be counted with a school of realists in the nineties
which was not markedly influenced by French methods.
Before he resigned his position as a master at the Jews'
Free School, after differences with the managers, he had
written a fantastic tale, The Premier and the Painter
(1888), in conjunction with Louis Co wen ; and it was there-
fore natural that he should slip into journalism and author-
ship. He won deserved reputation with Children of the
Ghetto (1892), an ambitious attempt to draw in compre-
hensive outline the Jews of London, rich and poor. Their
ideas, habits of life and ceremonial are represented in close
detail and with great fullness, and a slight thread of
narrative serves to bind the whole. Children of the Ghetto
is a remarkable, interesting and valuable book. Mr Zang-
will broke new ground with this unrelentingly realistic yet
sympathetic picture of life among his countrymen in White-

856 THE NOVEL [PART iv

chapel. He possessed knowledge founded upon close
observation, abundant material, a fine power of strong
characterisation, and, furthermore, lightness of touch, a
vivid manner and humour combined with pathos. Children
of the Ghetto is not, as one enthusiastic critic described it,
" Heinrich Heine writing with the pen of Charles Dickens "
— a startling image — though the book undoubtedly suggests
Dickens, for Mr. Zangwill is able to describe sordid, ugly
and poverty-stricken life without harshness. To Gissing the
underworld was hateful and dirty without redemption.

Mr Zangwill had found his field of work and followed
his first succes with Ghetto Tragedies (1893), short stories
of Jewish life which were later incorporated in They That
Walk in Darkness (1899). Jewish also are the sketches of
Ghetto Comedies (1907). In his novels Mr. ZangwilPs fault
is prolixity; but his handling of the short story is often
masterly. Dreamers of the Ghetto (1898), though Jewish
in its content, is a book of a different order, an attempt,
by an adaptation of Landor's method of the imaginary
conversation, to bring to life great men of the race —
Spinoza, Heine, Ferdinand Lasalle and others.

If the supreme test of power in a novel is the concurrent
and inevitable development of incident and character, then
Mr. Zangwill reaches the top of his performance in The
Master (1895), a non-Jewish tale. Matt Strang, the young
Nova Scotian, comes to England and dreams and labours
for art. He only finds himself and becomes a painter when
he returns to his commonplace wife and her vulgar environ-
ment, sacrificing himself to her happiness, and devoting
himself to his work. " Removed from the sapping cynicism
of the Club conscience, from the drought of drawing-room
disbelief, from the miasma of fashionable conversation,
from the confusing cackle of critics " out of his soul was
born art, " strong, austre, simple. " It is a fine novel and
a fine study of character.

In The Mantle of Elijah (1901) Mr Zangwill again departs
from Jewry to treat the politics of Palmerston's day and
satirise jingoism.

Mr. Zangwill had the good fortune to appropriate to
himself a field of work in fiction where the soil was virgin
and untilled. Work less comprehensive, thorough and
powerful would not have been without its value. For-

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 857

tunately he was happy not only in his choice, but in the
gifts he brought to his work. He is a prolific and facile,
not a careless writer : his mind is stored with the fruits of
observation and reflection on experience ; and it is the very
wealth of his material which leads him into his commonest
fault, the overloading of his narrative. His most important
book is Children of the Ghetto. With this he made his
mark and mapped out his future course. But considered
as a study in the development of a single character that
very fine novel, The Master, must take a higher place. The
theme, artistic life and the career of an artist, is hackneyed,
but Mr. Zangwill's handling of the theme is powerful and
original.

William Edwards Tirebuck is not wholly to be counted
the writer of problem novels, although a pronounced moral

purpose appears in nearly all his

William Edwards Tire- work, and in Miss Grace of All Souls
buck, 1854-1900. he attacks the economic question of

the relationship of capital and

labour. Tirebuck was born in humble circumstances and
early left school to serve as errand boy or clerk in a number
of Liverpool offices, for he was ever a rolling stone. His
mind gradually turned to literature, and with the help of
a friend, who supplied the money, he set up a " critical and
satirical " paper in his native city without a vestige of
literary experience or training. The result may be guessed.
But he persevered, and in time won the offer of a position
on the staff of the Yorkshire Post. At this time he pub-
lished Dorrie (1891), a picture of the poorer life of Liver-
pool, the only city he knew well. Regular work and office
hours sat ill with his wandering disposition, and after some
years he retired from the Yorkshire Post to live frugally in
a small cottage in Scotland and write tales — Sweetheart
Gwen (1893), Miss Grace of All Souls (1895), The Little
Widow (1894), a collection of short stories, Tales from the
Welsh Hills (1896), Meg of the Scarlet Foot (1898), The
White Woman (1899) and the posthumously published
'Twixt God and Mammon (1903).

Not long before his death Tirebuck conceived the ambi-
tion of becoming the novelist of Wales. He left Scotland
to settle in the principality, where time was not allowed
him fully to attempt the realisation of his ideal. In his life

858 THE NOVEL [PART iv

Tirebuek won little success, though recognition was coming
to him before the end and he received the admiring tributes
of critics so far removed from each other as Tolstoy and
Andrew Lang. The shortcoming of all his work is the
impression it leaves of the writer who never realised himself
for the want of a better mental training in early life. Each
book is disorderly ; he has no art of construction and pours
into the tale more than is necessary. His prose, like his
small volume of verse, is in want of revision. Imagination,
humour, strength he had, but these gifts he could only
bring into play spasmodically. Much of his work is dis-
appointing ; yet Dorrie, Meg of the Scarlet Foot and Miss
Grace of All Souls are books far out of the common, as they
are also much above the level of Tirebuek 's other volumes.

§5

In an age when printing is cheap the supply of prose-
fiction is never likely to fall short of the demand, especially
if the majority of readers have little care for art and ask
only to be entertained in the passing hour. The trick of
stringing together in a plausible manner thrilling or laugh-
able incidents is evidently for many not difficult to learn,
and as the rewards for success in this trick are larger than
the prizes for good writing, the number of trained and
competent society entertainers tends to increase yearly.
The commercial novel and the purely humorous tale have
their place in the social economy like everything else, and
the purveyor of saleable fiction has no need to look askance
at his work if his intention be merely to entertain and he be
free from illusions and idle pretensions. His lot only is un-
fortunate when he takes himself seriously, or when, again,
he is unable to decide whether to regard himself as an artist
or a vendor of marketable goods. These points are no
concern of the reader or the critic ; and it is proposed, for
purposes of completeness, to name in this note some
popular writers of the older generation.

David Christie Murray expressed it as his opinion that
the novelist was a variety of the genus entertainer, his
practice agreed thereto, and his work shows no reason
why it should not be taken upon his own valuation.
Before becoming a novelist he was on the staff of various

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 359

dailies and served as a war-correspondent to The Times.
His first novels appeared thirty years before the time of

his death well within the limits of

David Christie Murray, the twentieth century, and the
1847-1907. number of his tales is large. Among

his most popular books were A Life's
Atonement (1880), the story of a young man who by acci-
dent is guilty of a murder and thereafter devotes his life
to atoning for his misdeed. Others are Bob Martin's Little
Girl (1892), Verona's Father (1903), a sketch of a rascally
father with two daughters who will believe nothing against
him, and The Brangwyn Mystery (1906). These and other
tales are inoffensive and not uninteresting, but they are
without any literary merit.

Greater far than the popularity of Pavid Christie Murray
has been the vogue of Sir Hall Caine, who, since the
reviewers have failed to satisfy his expeeta-
Sir Hall Caine, tions, has named the great public his critic
b. 1853. and judge. At one time few writers could

rival the demand made for his books at the
lending library ; and, despite his ugly style, his sensational-
ism and his superficial treatment of character, faults which
the tyro can discover, it may be admitted that he deserves
some recognition for a kind of crude strength and forcible
dramatic instinct. And, though on occasion he does not
disdain the prophet >s mantle, he is free from Miss Corelli's
hysterical ex cathedra dogmatism.

Sir Hall Caine was both unfortunate and fortunate in
the associations of his early life. His birthplace, Runcorn,
is hardly fitted to excite the genius of romance in the most
happily gifted mind ; but he was soon removed to the Isle
of Man, a place which supplies the background to several
of his tales. He was trained as an architect, and for several
years practised his profession and followed journalism in
Liverpool. Later he came to London, on the invitation of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and lived with him for a short
period, at the same time writing for the Athenszum,
Academy and other literary papers. He practised verse,
edited an anthology of sonnets, and in 1881 published his
Recollections of Rossetti. When he turned to fiction he
almost immediately achieved a phenomenal popularity
with two sensational romances of Cumberland, The Shadow

860 THE NOVEL [PART iv

of a Crime (1885) and A Son of Hagar (1887). Murder,
bitter villainy and base intrigue play their several parts in
shaping two exciting tales. But his first story of the Isle
of Man, his chosen place of residence, easily outdistances
these in dramatic thrills and horrors. In The Bondman
(1890) earthquakes and violent disturbances of nature
conspire to assist a tale of blood and revenge in the days
of long ago, when battles were fought with Norway. The
Deemster (1887), a story of the Isle of Man in the eigh-
teenth century, and The Manxman (1894) are nearer to
everyday reality. The latter tale, a variation of the
common theme, two friends and one woman, is not without
passages of true characterisation and dramatic situation.
The novels which follow differ little from the earlier save
in theme and setting. The Christian (1897) places a
passionate love-story against a background of religious
life in modern London. The Eternal City (1901) carries
us through a phantasmagoria of high-pitched scenes of
passion and sentiment, grouped about the moral and
religious life of Rome, to a glimpse of the future and a
religion founded upon the Lord's Prayer. The Prodigal
Son (1904) is a modern and Icelandic version of an old, old
story; and The Woman Thou Gavest Me (1913) is an
elaborate and ingeniously complicated novel of the sex
problem.

Sir Hall Caine's novels have all the elements of excellent
melodrama, and several he has adapted successfully to
the stage. He has imagination and crude power; but
nearly all his work is exaggerated, sensational or preten-
tious, and it has little relationship to any credible con-
ditions of human life. His skill in weaving the entangle-
ments of a complicated plot excites our admiration; but
this and a certain dramatic gift combined with thorough-
ness in the " getting-up " of his local colour are not virtues
which overweigh pages of false sentiment, rhetoric and
sensationalism.

Mr. Frankfort Moore has been for over forty years a
prolific writer of society novels. These are often, as, for
example, According to Plato (1907) or / Forbid the Banns
(1893), purely extravagant, fantastic or satirical. But
Mr. Moore has studied life and manners in the eighteenth
century, and in two novels, at least, he has produced work

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 861

of a better order than his average. These are The Jessamy

Bride (1897), which introduces Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson,

Burke and Garrick, and A Nest of

Frank Frankfort Linnets (1901), in which the story

Moore, b. 1855. Of Sheridan and Elizabeth Linley is

admirably reconstructed.

Where the writers are many and the margin of choice
not wide it is difficult to select or exclude ; but two more
popular novelists may be named in this section and three
humorous writers.

Mr. E. F. Benson has disclaimed the book with which
he won popularity. Nevertheless Dodo (1893) almost set
a new standard of light and easy narrative, built upon
trifling dialogue, intended only to fill the hour of the
idle reader. Among the author's later books have been
The Babe B.A. (1897), Mammon and
Edward Frederick Company (1900), The Challoners (1904)
Benson, b. 1867. and Dodo the Second (1914). Mr.
Benson knows the social world, he can
portray its foibles and thin conventions with effective
satire; but his aims are not high, his gift of charac-
terisation is not strong, and in the matter of style
he is a deplorably careless writer.

Mr. Morley Roberts is an accepted and long-tried writer

of fiction, whose work is of another and better order. An

early knowledge of Australia has been of

Morley Roberts, value to him in the setting of several of

b. 1857. his tales. The Western Avernus (1887),

King Bitty of Ballarat (1891) and The

Descent of the Duchess (1900) may be named as specimens

out of the large number of novels he has produced.

The total bulk of his work is large, and the quality, in
consequence, is not always consistent. Sometimes he is
betrayed into writing as the practised compiler of tales;
but he has also, beyond a knowledge of his craft,
sincere intention and a consciousness of life's larger
implications.

Among the older humorists who continue to write Mr.
Thomas Anstey Guthrie, who uses the pen-name " F.
Anstey," should, for the excellence of his burlesques, extra-
vaganzas, parodies and comic tales, not be left without
mention. He has contributed largely to Punchy and many

362 THE NOVEL [PART iv

of the papers which first appeared there have since been
reprinted in book-form. As early as his undergraduate
days he published several short stories;
F. Anstey, and his first book, Vice Versa : A Lesson

b» W56. for Fathers (1882), enjoyed a great popu-

larity and was subsequently dramatised.
The foundation of the story, an exchange of personality
between a schoolboy and his father, makes no pretence to
be other than the extravagant basis of comic possibilities ;
and F. Anstey's other tales belong to the same family of
burlesque, farce and fantasy. The Giant's Robe (1884)
has an element of the real in the remorse of the young
man who poses as the author of a comedy sent him by a
friend, but the chief purpose of the book is entertain-
ment. Among his other fantasies are The Tinted Venus
(1885) and The Brass Bottle (1900), the latter a grown-up
fairy-tale which relates the escapades of a genie who
escapes from a brass bottle and overloads his liberator
with a series of astounding and exasperating miracles.
A Fallen Idol (1886) is a satire upon the passing phase
of popularity which esoteric Buddhism once enjoyed in
this country. F. Anstey has also written admirable paro-
dies of Ibsen and other notabilities of the day. In his own
peculiar field of work he stands well above his contem-
poraries in raciness, vigour and grotesque imagination.

Doubtless Mr. Jerome K. Jerome would prefer to be
regarded as a serious dramatist who has a message to
deliver. But he is chiefly known to the
Jerome Klapka many as the author of Three Men in a
Jerome, b. 1859. Boat (1889), a book which is humorous
without being witty, and suffers only by
the protraction of each humorous incident. Three Men on
the Bummell (1900) follows the same pattern, save that the
scene is transferred from the Thames to travel on the
Continent. The most readable of his other volumes are
his collections of light topical essays, beginning with the
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886), and continuing
with The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1898) and
Idle Ideas (1905). More serious and ambitious is the semi-
autobiographical study of the hero's experiences as a child,
a youth, an actor, a journalist, contained in Paul Kelver
(1902). As a serious dramatist and novelist Mr. Jerome

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 363

is a little wanting in substance : as a humorist he is good
without being ready or spontaneous. His humour would
often be better could he resist the temptation to drag it
to the full length of its tether.

The humour of Mr. W. W. Jacobs ?s sketches and short
stories of seamen ashore and afloat is, by contrast,

delightfully easy and natural. His
William Wymark fertility in the invention of absurd
Jacobs, b. 1863. situations is surprising, his dialogue

is unforced and has all the ring of truth,
and his seafaring characters, though their chief end is to
support a ridiculous involvement of circumstances, are far
from being puppets. He began to write comparatively
late after many years of service in the savings bank depart-
ment of the post office ; but Many Cargoes (1896) brought
him instant reputation, and three years later he left the
civil service and embraced authorship. His first success
he followed up with The Skipper's Wooing (1897), Light
Freights (1901), The Lady of the Barge (1902) and other
books. Few writers can practise humour consistently with
safety : of Mr. Jacobs it may be said that he is only weari-
some when he attempts to write in other veins than the
humorous.

§6

SCOTCH NOVELISTS

In another chapter it has been pointed out that the
Gael of Scotland has not, in recent years, inspired a body

of literature commensurable with

Robert Louis Steven- the work of writers who are grouped
son, 1850-1894. about the Celtic Revival in Ireland.

Stevenson and George Macdonald

belong to a passage in literary history which antedates this
book. And Stevenson was an essayist, a wise and tender
moralist, a romancer, a stylist, perhaps a stylist above all,
believing that " life was hard enough for poor mortals with-
out having it indefinitely embittered for them by bad art."
With the Celtic spirit in its mystical aspects he showed little
or no sympathy. The verse epitaph he composed for him-
self breathes no esoteric spiritual hope ; and of death he can
write in the temper of the stoic : " The sods cover us, and

364 THE NOVEL [PART iv

the worm that never dies, the conscience sleeps well at the
last; these are the wages besides what we receive so
lavishly day by day/' Stevenson was a Scot of the Scots ;
his finest work depicts the history and life of his land;
but he knew best the Lowland folk, not the Gaels of the
Western Isles. His tales in Scotch dialect are among the
best that have ever been written ; but his sympathy with
life is the strong human sympathy of Scott; the Celtic
twilight never visits his pages.

With Macdonald it was otherwise, yet not wholly. He
was first a minister of religion, and though the suspicion
of heterodoxy compelled him to resign
George Macdonald, his ministry he remained to the end a
1824-1905. profoundly religious man. His faith

was not the austere Calvinism of his
land, but a deep-founded mysticism. This mystical
element of his personality found expression in Phantasies
(1858) and Lilith (1895). It was not, however, in these,
but in his studies of Scotch life and character, especially
in Aberdeenshire, that Macdonald gave evidence of his
true measure as a writer. The first of these was David
Elginbrod (1863); it was followed, among others, by
Robert Falconer (1868), the best of his books, Malcolm
(1875) and The Marquis of Lossie (1877). Despite faults of
clumsy construction and the intrusive moral purpose of
these tales they are, with those of Stevenson, the best and
strongest representation of Scotch character since the time
of Scott and Gait.

William Black can only be named at a distance from
Stevenson and Macdonald. In his day he earned a re-
putation beyond his merits, and he is
William Black, now rapidly being forgotten. He could
1841-1898. be romantic, sentimental, pretty,

humorous, without depth or strength;
and even in his best book, A Daughter of Heth (1871), he
will not bear comparison with greater delineators of Scotch
character.

When we come to later years one writer, William Sharp,
offers a striking exception to the statement that the
mysticism of the Gael in Scotland has found little or no
reflection in modern literature. The dramatic fantasies of
Vistas (1894) were published under his own name, but

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 865

these were the prelude to Pharais : A Romance of the Isles
(1894), The Mountain Lovers (1895), The Sin-eater (1895)

and other volumes of visionary and
Fiona Macleod, mystical tales written under the name of
1855-1905. Fiona Macleod. They were wrought

from " the heritance of the Gael,"
defined in Sharp's words as " the Beauty of the World,
the Pathos of Life, the gloom, the fatalism, the spiritual
glamour." A poetic vision, a consciousness of the mystical
beauty of the universe, an extraordinary faculty for
absorbing and recreating Gaelic myth and superstition, are
enhanced by a singularly beautiful style, which occasion-
ally is betrayed into insincere preciosity. The style of
Fiona Macleod is to be compared to that of Pater, Lafcadio
Hearn, and one or two other writers of the last century.
With them style is much more than a logical and gram-
matical use of language in sentences modulated to please
the ear. Each word has personality, and every phrase
an intimate and psychical relationship in cadence with
the thought expressed or picture painted. Sharp pos-
sessed a curious faculty for creating an atmosphere of the
mystical and weird ; and the eerie magic of his scene
painting communicates itself not the less because we are
often conscious of rhetorical effort. A few sentences from
Pharais will illustrate Sharp's descriptive rhetoric :

" The immense semicircle of the sky domed sea and
land with infinity. In the vast space the stars and
planets fulfilled their ordered plan. Star by star, planet
by planet, sun by sun, universe by universe moved
jocund in the march of eternal death.

" Beyond the two lonely figures, seaward, the moon
swung, green-gold at the heart with circumambient
flame of pearl."

This is beautiful in its degree and kind, but artificial;
and Fiona Macleod cannot be read for long without an
experience of satiety. Poetry, tenderness, pathos, beauty
and the glamour of spiritual mysticism these stories pos-
sess, but in substance they are thin; and the conscious-
ness of a manner deliberately adopted and artificially
sustained is never wholly obscured. Nor do these tales
create character; the personalities introduced belong to

366 THE NOVEL [PART iv

an other-wordly realm of the spiritual, not to this
earth.

Sharp abandoned the world of drab realities for a region
of mystic romance set in an environment of Gaelic folk-
lore and myth; and, although he has
Neil Munro, been followed by lesser imitators, he can

b. 1864. scarcely be said to have had a true suc-

cessor. The Celtic Revival has borne its
fruit almost wholly in Ireland. Nevertheless Mr. Neil
Munro was strongly under the influence of Celtic romance
when he wrote his first volume, The Lost Pibroch (1896).
These stories and sketches are not without a sense of style
and they exhibit imaginative power. The style is, how-
ever, derivative, reminiscent alternately of Stevenson and
Fiona Macleod; and it often becomes wearisome in its
ostentatious use of archaic words — " glunch," " mort-
cloth," " quaich " — for the sake of archaism. Mr. Munro's
Celtic idylls are far from commonplace, they have poetry
and beauty, but they are an experiment, a pose, an
adventure in the art of writing. The majority of his later
books are historical romances. Stevenson's Kidnapped
could not have been far from his mind when he wrote that
fine tale, John Splendid (1898), a story of Inveraray and
the Argyllshire Highlands in 1645. The hero is a character
of the same type as Alan Breck ; and the author uses his
historical and archaeological knowledge fully with the ease
of Stevenson. Other romances, Gilian the Dreamer (1899),
The Shoes of Fortune (1901), Children of the Tempest
(1903) and The New Road (1914) further illustrate his
knowledge of the people of the Western Highlands and his
poetical and imaginative power.

Mr. Neil Munro is in the succession of Stevenson ; other
novelists of Scotland whose work calls for notice belong to
the following in fiction derisively stigmatised by Henley
as the "Kailyard School95; and as leader of the school
stands Sir James Barrie. Scott, Gait, Macdonald, Steven-
son, Mr. Munro, are, broadly speaking, objective, simple,
historical; poetry, romance, imagination colour their
pictures of Scotch life and character; the dialect is used
naturally, and it is not an end in itself. Sentimentality,
pawky humour and the liberal use of dialect for its own
sake are the ordinary ingredients of the kailyard novel.

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 867

The form has enjoyed its period of short-lived popularity,
which is already in the decline. The sentiment and the
quaint unfamiliarity of the dialect attracted readers ; but
the " Kailyard School " has produced no work commen-
surable with the earlier, the simpler and the stronger
delineations of Scotch life. This statement is not invali-
dated even if account be taken of the graceful humour, the
tender pathos of Sir James Barriers studies and tales.

Latterly Sir James Barrie has been better known as a
writer for the stage, but his work as a dramatist belongs
to another chapter, and it was with fiction that he won
fame. He began by earning his livelihood as a journalist,

and the earlier books are largely made
Sir James Matthew of periodical articles and sketches care-
Barrie, b. 1860. fully revised and deftly welded together.

In 1883 he was a leader writer on the
Nottingham Journal, but in the following year he joined
the staff of the St. James's Gazette, and his Auld Licht
Idylls, A Window in Thrums and My Lady Nicotine
appeared in that paper. He was soon writing for other
periodicals including the British Weekly and Henley's
National Observer. His first book, Better Dead, a short
extravaganza, appeared in 1887. It relates the adven-
tures in London of a young Scotsman who joins a society
which exists for the purpose of disencumbering the earth
of spurious existences, in other words of assassinating
those who are weary of life. To adopt an old criticism
it would have been better for this burlesque had it been
more angry or more witty. As a piece of pure jocularity
it grows tiresome, for the jesting is heavy-handed ; and
Stevenson's Suicide Club suggests a comparison in the
same genre not altogether to the advantage of Sir James
Barrie's early tale. Nor had he found himself in When a
Man's Single (1888), which is no more than a collection of
episodical sketches tagged together and given the form
of a book; although the dry wit and humour charac-
teristic of his later work here appear. It was, however,
in the purely Scotch books that Sir James Barrie was
most successful : he has hardly since surpassed the early
Auld Licht Idylls (1888) and A Window in Thrums (1889).
They are both volumes of detached stories and sketches.
The quiet humour, subdued realism, quaintness and

868 THE NOVEL [PART iv

sentimentality in dialogue and situation which characterise
these sketches also lend all that is best to the later Scotch
tales, The Little Minister (1891), An Auld Licht Manse
(1893), Margaret Ogilvy (1896), Sentimental Tommy
(1896) and its continuation, Tommy and Grizel (1900).

In Auld Licht Idylls the author sketched in a spirit of
kindly and sympathetic satire the Auld Lichts, one of the
straitest and most primitive in faith and theology of the
Scotch sects, for whom " there were three degrees of
damnation — auld kirk, play-acting, chapel/5 Their kirk
was chiefly supported by folk of the stamp of the old
woman whose only " case against the minister was that
he did not call sufficiently often to denounce her for her
sins, her pleasure being to hear him bewailing her on his
knees as one who was probably past praying for." A
Window in Thrums follows the pattern of its predecessor ;
it is a collection of studies, not a novel. Jess, the old
cripple woman, sits in a window and watches with untir-
ing interest all the minute goings-on of life in Thrums.
Kirriemuir, under the name of Thrums, has become as
well known on the map of literature as Cranford or Caster-
bridge. But the background of landscape and scenery is
often curiously slight. Thrums is never as vivid to the
eye of the imagination as Mr. Hardy's Dorchester in The
Mayor of Casterbridge. Sir James Barrie is interested
in his little village folk, and he is content to supply no more
than a background that is sufficiently clear and definite
in outline to frame his characters or throw them into relief.
The opening chapter of Auld Licht Idylls is one of the few
exceptions to this statement, and an exception which can
only make us regret that the author has not more often
written descriptively.

" The ghostlike hills that pen in the glen have ceased
to echo to the sharp crack of the sportsman's gun (so
clear in the frosty air as to be a warning to every rabbit
and partridge in the valley); and only giant Catlaw
shows here and there a black ridge, rearing its head at
the entrance of the glen and struggling ineffectually to
cast off his shroud. Most wintry sign of all, I think as I
close the window hastily, is the open farm stile, its poles
lying embedded in the snow where they were last flung

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 869

by Waster Lunny's herd. Through the still air comes
from a distance a vibration as of a tuning-fork : a robin,
perhaps, alighting on the wire of a broken fence. "

Human nature is, however, the chief matter of these
tales which may be counted a reflex of the sentimentalism
underlying the dourness of the Scotch character. The
strong vein of sentiment is probably hidden in nearly all
Scotch folk, but in the older novelists of Scotland it is
held in restraint. Henry Mackenzie, the Edinburgh
novelist of early date, may be counted with the senti-
mentalists, but Mackenzie was almost avowedly a disciple
of Sterne, and no very distinctive reflection of the Scotch
character. Sir James Barrie's work, save in the early
experiments, the isolated My Lady Nicotine (1890), and
the later Peter Pan fairy books, is wholly an outcome of
kindly and sympathetic study of Scotch country folk.
None of these tales reveals any depth in the knowledge
of human character, nor any strong sincerity in touching
upon the greater themes of life and death. Health, sweet-
ness and an unrivalled charm in sentiment are not sufficient
to confer a long life on any writing. Something more is
wanted. Even that most beautiful study, Margaret
Ogilvy, is not without its sentimental lapses of taste, and in
the popular Little Minister and far better Window in
Thrums there is an absence of that deeper sincerity without
which any reading of life must be thin and easily frayed
through. The pathos of these tales is often little more than
an ornamental frill to the drab of everyday reality. Sir
James Barrie's sunshine is never intense, and the chill of
his shadow is tempered. Stevenson was no great philo-
sopher, but it needs only to compare Sir James Barrie's
tales with Stevenson's causerie, with his later books, Ebb-
tide and Weir of Hermiston, to realise the great gulf
fixed between the two writers. Stevenson felt what Synge
knew as the joy and reality of life as the author of A
Window in Thrums has never felt it.

It is not for the southron to dispute the use of dialect
in these " Kailyard " tales, although it has been called
in question by critics on both sides of the border. To the
Englishman, who may be no judge, it is not as convincing
as the virile and simple tongue of Scott, Burns and

870 THE NOVEL [PART iv

Stevenson, whose speech rings true of man speaking to
man. Sir James Barrie's Scotch often sounds as tortured
and extraordinary as the Irish of Miss Jane Barlow's
peasantry. If true use of dialect be, however, a virtue
in a writer, a slight exaggeration is not a matter of great
moment, and Sir James Barrie has the genius of more
excellent things — a knowledge true if not deep of unsophis-
ticated human nature, of pathos and humour in common
lives ; and he has, further, a wit that comes not rarely and
always justly. In these gifts none of the " Kailyard
School " can rival him,

John Watson, after reaching an assured position as a
popular preacher, turned his leisure hours to account by
attempting to create another Thrums by
Ian Maclaren, the name of Drumtochty. Under the
1850-1907. pseudonym " Ian Maclaren " he wrote

two pleasant and readable, but not very
convincing books, Beside the Bonny Brier Bush (1894) and
The Days of Auld Lang Syne (1895), in which the judicious
infusion of sentimentality brought the writer even greater
fame than his sermons. These, his most popular excur-
sions into fiction, were followed by tales written in a
similar manner.

S. R. Crockett was another novelist of the " Kailyard
School/9 who, like " Ian Maclaren," studied life in his

early years from a manse. But after

Samuel Rutherford the popular success of The Stickit
Crockett, 1860-1914. Minister (1893) he retired from the

ministry to take up authorship. He
was a rapid writer, the list of his tales ran to the number
of fifty in a little over twenty years of writing, and it is
scarcely possible to name or characterise them. Cleg Kelly
(1896) is one of the best of his representations of everyday
Scotch life. Some of his books are historical romances,
others are of the kailyard type ; but in no case is his work
of a distinctive or important character.

A very different and far more powerful writer was George
Douglas Brown, who died too early to carry out the
promise of his House with the Green Shutters (1901). In
opposition to the prevailing sentimentality of the " Kail-
yard School " he was a deliberate and uncompromising
realist. The crudeness of passages in The House with the

CHAP, n] NEW-COMERS 871

Green Shutters is therefore in part attributable to its
polemic intention, the author's hostility to the popular

sentimental idealisation of Scotch life.
George Douglas, Nevertheless, though the work of a
1869-1902. young, inexperienced and somewhat

angry young man, this is a book which,
in its force and originality, emerges into a distinctive
position. The early death of " George Douglas " was a
serious loss to Scotch fiction.

It will, further, be most natural to speak here of the
work of the two Findlater sisters, who have done their

best writing when depicting Scottish life,
Jane Helen Find- though not in the manner of the " Kail-
later, b. 1866. yard School'9 to which they do not

belong. The kailyard tale is a picture of
the peasantry or the common people ; the Misses Findlater
write of genteel and middle-class life in Scottish town and
village. Their earlier books have, for the most part, been
written separately, but in later years they have generally
worked in collaboration. Miss Jane Helen Findlater's
first novel, The Green Graves of Balgowrie (1896), is
neither in subject or setting a very remarkable story. It
relates the tragic end of two sisters dwelling in a lonely
house with a mother whose eccentricities gradually develop
into insanity. A Daughter of Strife (1897), a romance of
love and a tragedy of betrayal in eighteenth-century
London, is better and more strongly written. In skilful
construction, in sincerity of expression and in intensity
Miss J. H. Findlater's second novel shows a great advance
in power. Admirable for the same qualities, and far
superior in character-study, is The Ladder to the Stars
(1904), a novel which takes its name from a well-known
picture by William Blake. The character of Miriam, the
young girl who comes up to London from the provinces
to seek culture and pursue literature, is cleverly drawn.

Miss Mary Findlater's novels are a little quieter and less
ambitious in theme, but not less successful within their

sphere. Over the Hills (1897) is a simple
Mary Findlater, story of homely Scottish villagers. Betty
b. 1865. Musgrave (1898) and The Rose of Joy

(1903) are tales of upper middle-class life
in Scotland. In A Narrow Way (1901) the emancipation

372 THE NOVEL [PART iv

of a young girl from confined domestic circumstances is
sympathetically drawn.

Among the books written in collaboration may be named
in particular Tales that are Told (1901), a collection of
short stories, Crossriggs (1908) and Penny Money penny
(1911), two cleverly written studies of Scottish life and
character. The work of the Findlater sisters is not remark-
able, nor does it present any distinctive power or
originality; but it has no faults melodramatic or senti-
mental, it is simple, truthful, sincere.

CHAPTER III

THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL

H. O. Wells—Arnold Bennett— John Galsworthy— Eden Phillpotts—
' John Trevena ' — Gilbert Cannan — E. M. Forster — William de
Morgan — The Cockney Dialect Novel, Arthur Morrison, Somerset
Maugham, Barry Pain, Pett Ridge — Hugh Walpole, Compton Mac-
kenzie, J. D. Beresford, Frank Swinnerton, D. H. Lawrence —
Joseph Conrad — F. T. Bullen — John Masefield — Robert Hichens —
Maurice Hewlett — Sir Henry Newbolt — R. H. Benson — * Anthony
Hope '— \V. J. Locke— Alfred Ollivant— G. S. Street— -Hilaire Belloc
— G. K. Chesterton — ' Saki ' — E. V. Lucas — Stephen Gwynn —
* G. A. Birmingham ' — Canon Sheehan — James Stephens.

WHERE one was writing fiction in the spacious and
leisurely three volume days a hundred now dash off the
eighty thousand words needful to the filling out of a novel,
and the making of books calls for no more than a few
hours snatched at random from a working or an idly busy
life. The impetuous torrent of printed matter, against
which Goldsmith protested over one hundred and fifty
years ago, has become a wide and unbanked river. If the
flood cannot now be checked, if the tide is broad, aimlessly
swirling, and therefore, regarded as a whole, uninteresting,
in its higher reaches it has creeks and side-waters which
have beauty and a recognisable character. The vast
number of novels printed year by year, the huge army
of those engaged in the work of writing, make it impossible
to treat the latest fiction in a satisfactory manner. A
few names, without cavil more important than others,
doubtless appear; but beneath these and in the ranks it
is difficult to pick out individuals from the great company.
In many of its paragraphs the present chapter cannot
claim to be a complete or comprehensive survey of the
more important among writers in the field. Each reader
will have cause of complaint that this or the other novelist
is omitted; and often his vexation will not be without

873

374 THE NOVEL [PART iv

reason. But probably the majority will agree that
novelists included in this chapter may fairly claim their
place, and that, taken together with the chapter on women
novelists, it affords a fairly representative survey of prose-
fiction within the earlier years of the present century.

Despite the fact that some part of modern fiction has
for us a note of freshness and orginality in that it answers
more peculiarly to the thoughts and hopes of a living
generation of men, it cannot be said that the twentieth
century has seen the birth of a fashion or development
that is wholly new. The older kinds, realism, romance,
fantasy, the psychological study, the historical tale, the
dialect story, the provincial sketch, the didactic treatise
are all here as they have been for any time in a hundred
years or more. They are dressed out in modern guise
and tricked with the latest turns of speech; but nothing
essential has been changed. Possibly the collapse of
romance into enervating subjectivism may be noted as
a growth that is strange. But it is strange only in con-
trast with the method of the older writers of romance,
Defoe, Scott, Ains worth, Lytton, Marry at. The seed of
the change is to be found in Stevenson, who took him-
self with some seriousness as a psychologist and student
of the subjective as well as a writer of romance. Ebb-
tide and Weir of Hermiston are indications of the change.
The modern romancer, Maurice Hewlett or Joseph Conrad,
is incapable of the objective and spectacular outlook of
earlier workers in the field. Defoe, Fielding, Smollett,
Goldsmith, and even Sterne, painted men and manners
with the detachment of the onlooker who is interested
and concerned, but never loses sense of his personal
identity. The Spectator of the famous Essays which
inaugurated the eighteenth-century novel was typical of
the mind of the period. We are, however, no longer
spectators ab extra, but grinders of axes, teachers of
doctrines, analysts of the mind and documentary
scientists. The spectacular and adventurous romance has
fallen upon its dotage and become bewilderingly garru-
lous : it has no longer the old power and self-sufficiency.
Dickens introduced the pathetic fallacy into the romance
of London streets ; and it has now attacked a large part
of romance writing, even the professedly historical

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 375

romance. The painting of men and manners in great and
moving scene belongs to the world's lost arts*

Among recent writers those who are to be classed with
the realists have undoubtedly produced more work that
is likely to endure. Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. George Moore,
Henry James, Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett
immediately come to mind, and against these, of writers
to whom the word romantic seems applicable, can only
be placed Maurice Hewlett, Joseph Conrad and Mr. Robert
Hichens, in an equally random selection. The weight in
the scales, few will deny, is with the former group. And,
as is inevitable, the realists write with greater detach-
ment. Several, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. H. G. Wells and
Mr. Gilbert Cannan, are often as much proverbial philo-
sophers or denunciatory prophets as disinterested students
of life; others, Mr. Arnold Bennett and Mr. Eden Phill-
potts are well content to draw the things that are, and
if they weave any doctrine or philosophy into their tale
it is with no instinct of the proselytiser.

To attempt an estimate of the ultimate value of con-
temporary work in fiction would be an act of presumptuous
arrogance. The judgment of the years often confounds
contemporary " opinionettes," but not necessarily nor
always. Shakespeare received plaudits critical and
popular in his day. The part has been preserved to us;
and there is no reason to suppose that the larger part which
has been lost was not more hearty and ungrudging. At
least a few of the writers whom it seems natural for a
contemporary to catalogue here will find their place in any
twenty-first century history of English literature which
pretends to minuteness and comprehension.

Two of the most popular writers of the day, born and
educated in drab and middle class surroundings, nourished
upon ideas which satisfy the vast majority of dwellers
in those forests of red-brick streets which enclose like a
hedge our industrial cities, owe their first rise in favour
to a gift of imagination, whimsical, original, sensational,
carrying them into regions of romance and melodrama
as far removed from their early surroundings as may well
be conceived. The early " fantasies " of Mr. Arnold
Bennett and the scientific romances of Mr. H. G. Wells
mav be accounted an example of reaction against environ-

376 THE NOVEL [PART w

ment. And in their more serious fictitious writing, in
which either attempts to recover and render faithfully
the scenes of boyhood and youth, the element of reaction
is not absent. Mr. Bennett is far from unsympathetic to
the narow life with interests confined to the shop in the
weeklmd chapel-going on Sundays, but his retrospect is
not without the irony of the man emancipated from sur-
roundings once his natural and accepted world. And Mr.
Wells ?s young man, whether Kipps or another, who climbs
or is thrust into a larger world, is but the author drawn
under differing possibilities of experience not widely
diverse from his own. In Mr. Wells's retrospective
sketches there is a larger vein of satire than Mr. Bennett
cares to use.

Both won general popularity with books different in
character to their serious work. Mr. Bennett, after
imitating the French realists, turned to
H. G. Wells, the manufacture of the commercial novel
b. 1866. before giving himself to the writing of

those tales of the Five Towns in which
he held a field to himself. In the case of Mr. Wells we
cannot in like manner divide between what is and what
is not his serious work. In a number of his books Mr.
Bennett makes no profession to be other than a vendor
of undiluted sensationalism. But the scientific romances
of Mr. Wells, if they often have little to do with actual
life, are, at least, more than frolics. They sometimes
reflect the probable, and they often contain good and
vivid character-drawing. They are not, like the tales of
Jules Verne, light entertainments without corroborative
detail; for Mr. Wells comes with an equipment of
scientific knowledge. And the people of these romances
are better than mere puppets upon whom a tale is hung ;
they move quickly and talk with a colloquial readiness
which shows them to be patterned upon men in the streets,
lecture rooms and laboratories. For he has left no stone
of his early experience unturned. Everything has gone
into the melting-pot and been fused into the material of
his vivacious yet substantial stories.

Mr. Wells began life in humble circumstances; the
environment of lower middle class and shop life was his
native country. But he was possessed of energy, ability

CHAP, m] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 877

and enthusiasm. At the Royal College of Science he
acquired knowledge which he was soon to put to good
use in other than an academic direction. In 1888 he
graduated with a first class as a B.Sc. of the University
of London. At first, when thrown upon his resources,
he earned his living as a schoolmaster and a private coach.
In 1893 he began to make excursions into journalism,
writing for the Pall Mall Gazette, the Saturday Review and
Nature. The success of his scientific fantasy, The Time
Machine, led him definitely to abandon teaching and
journalism for the writing of romances which could enter-
tain the idle without exciting a moment of serious thought,
while others could read in them Mr. Wells's advocacy of
his opinions in social, political, economic and scientific
theory.

His work as a writer of books falls into three divisions
— the scientific romances, the sociological treatises and
his realistic novels. Mr. Wells was early a member of
the Fabian Society, and imbibed working ideas from Mr.
Sidney Webb, Mr. Bernard Shaw and other members.
But in time he found the tenets of the sect too narrow :
he disavowed them directly and satirised them in auto-
biographical passages of his novels. In Anticipations
(1901), Mankind in the Making (1903), A Modern Utopia
(1905), New Worlds for Old (1908) and An Englishman
Looks at the World (1914) he has set forth his economic
faith with acuteness, a power of independent and original
inquiry and clear-sighted constructive theory. His hope
in life is based upon the things seen and temporal : the
New Jerusalem of Mr. Wells does not descend from heaven
but is of the earth earthy, a world transfigured by an
impossibly wise and bureaucratic regime, a higher educa-
tion on strictly practical and utilitarian lines, and the
emancipation of life from the fetters of unrefreshing labour
by the continuous development of mechanical invention.
Man thus set free will climb to higher planes of health and
beauty. To inquire into Mr. Wells 's sociology, as we
discover it in these volumes or in his fantastic romance,
The World Set Free (1915), is here unnecessary, save in so
far as it illustrates the working of his mind and imagina-
tion. In one aspect his visions and dreams are those of
an idealist, in another they are commonplace and deficient

878 THE NOVEL [PART iv

in the one thing needful. He has been accused of possess-
ing the soul of an average mechanic ; and as an epitome of
his whole standpoint toward life the indictment is not
unjustifiable. If he confesses JajL difficulty in under-
standing why a railway BTOMnEment is ugly and a natural
hillock beautiful, if he fails to find spiritual inspiration
in the older faiths of men, if he can hope complacently
for an age in which the whole population shall be
swallowed in great cities, the individual sunk beneath
a tyrannous bureaucracy, and man little more than a fly
on the wheels of relentless mechanism, he has abandoned
so much that the most of men would live for more than all
this, that we must hold him to have missed what the world
really seeks.

If, however, his allurements will fail to charm more
than a tithe of men, these books, written in a popular
manner, are the serious contributions of an acute and
original mind to the solution of pressing problems of the
day; and the insight of the writer, especially in destruc-
tive criticism, stimulates thought.

Before he addressed his readers with documents on
sociological theory Mr. Wells had won fame with books
of an entirely different stamp, books with which his name
is still commonly associated in the ordinary mind, although
for years he has abandoned them for the far better wqrk
contained in his realistic novels. His romantic and
sensational tales, based upon modern scientific theory and
Ithe development of mechanical invention, gained him a
Iwide popularity. These stories are distinguished by the
Vivacity of their narrative manner, by ingenuity in the
? conception of situation, by excellent humour, and in
several of the tales — The Invisible Man (1897) is a good
example — by an astonishingly original imagination.

The series opened with The Time Machine (1895) descrip-
tive of the experiences of a man who invents a machine
which can transport him at will into past or future time.
This was followed in the same year by two other books,
The Wonderful Fmt, in which an angel visitant to earth is
shot by a vicar, and the short stories, amusing, grotesque,
macabre, of The Stolen Bacillus. Other collections of
short stories, Tales of Space and Time (1899), Twelve
Stories and a Dream (1903) and The Country of the Blind

CHAP, m] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 379

(1911) show the same versatility of fancy and incorporate
elements of serious criticism and speculation. Among
longer tales, combining in the same manner pure fantasy
with scientific knowledge, are The Island of Dr. Moreau
(1896), The War of the Worlds (1898), a story of the
invasion of the earth by inhabitants of Mars, When the
Sleeper Wakes (1899), a disheartening picture of society
in 2100 A.D. when men are enslaved by machinery, The
First Man in the Moon (1901) and The Food of the Gods
(1904).

But Mr. Wells has never been a public entertainer and
nothing more. While he was writing the shapeless nar-
rative of When the Sleeper Wakes he was trying to do
better things in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900) ; and four
years earlier in The Wheels of Chance (1896), the story of
illumination in the mind of a draper's assistant, he used
his power of drawing human character under conditions
of everyday reality. Love and Mr. Lewisham emphatically
showed Mr. Wells's ability celebrare domestica facta. It
relates the life-story of a very ordinary and by no means
admirable young man of limited education, a schoolmaster
and university student, who begins life with high ambitions
and a spirit of stern discipline which are to lead him on the
road to success. He falls in love, his code of discipline
drops to pieces, he marries without an income and ruins
all his hopes of advancement. It is a depressingly realistic
picture of a raw youth, half-educated and of half-formed
character, collapsing in the competitive struggle of life.
The merits of the book are its strong and faithful character-
drawing and its satiric humour.

Five years later Mr., Wells took up again realistic and
serious fiction with the longer and more ambitious Kipps
(1905), a study in the mind of a young draper's assistant,
who unexpectedly inherits money and finds himself in
surroundings and among people unfamiliar. This was
followed by two books scarcely less good, Tono-Bungay
(1909) and Ann Veronica (1909). The former is again
the story of an unfledged boy's contact with the world
and his growth to manhood; and incidentally it is the
story of the exploitation of a patent medicine. The latter
is the story of a middle-class girl's emancipation. Ann
Veronica aroused an unnecessary outburst of moral

380 THE NOVEL [PART iv

indignation. It has no evil tendency; and is one of the
best and truest tales Mr. Wells has written. He has little
success, as a rule, in depicting women; none at all in
drawing the character of a woman of grace and refine-
ment; but in Ann Veronica he had a type fully within
his cognisance, and he scarcely fails in any particular in
drawing the heroine of his story and the personalities of
those who group themselves about her.

After this, unfortunately, his novels sank under the
weight of theory and the indoctrination of the reader with
the author's sociological principles. The New Machiavelli
(1910) is a political and economic document, reflecting
contemporary people and events with scarcely a pretence
of disguise. Characterisation is laboured; the plot is
unwieldy and formless. Marriage (1912) takes up the
oldest problem of the novelist and dramatist and fails to
illuminate the vexed question. And Mr. Wells breaks
down completely in his representation of the heroine, for
he can make no more of her than a shop girl in better
circumstances, though she is hypothetically the daughter
of educated parents and a woman of culture. And Mr.
Wells 9s final device in the transference of husband and
wife to Labrador, where in the desert they may again find
communion of spirit, is a confession of inability to con-
clude his story without a weak and clumsy anticlimax.
The Passionate Friends (1918) fails again for a reason
that limited him before. He cannot draw consistently
the woman of fine feeling, passionate impulse and good
breeding. He has done his best with Lady Mary Justin,
but she is false to her position and environment, and her
relationship to husband and lover is built upon a series
of manufactured situations. And, further, the dramatic
movement of the tale is needlessly hindered by long
digressions upon the economics of labour in different
quarters of the world. These excursions will be of interest
to a few readers, but their place is the set treatise. Mr.
Wells scarcely pretends to bind them in with the web of
his story. And in style he has grown careless. The
easy-going conversational manner degenerates into care-
less garrulity.

If we are to judge Mr. Wells as a writer of novels on
everyday life we shall find the high-water mark of his

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 881

work in four books, Love and Mr. Lewisham, Kipps, Tono-
Bungay and Ann Veronica. After 1909 he allowed the
theory of his sociological writings, or other extraneous
matter, to drift into his novels, with the inevitable con-
sequence that he has lost his earlier lightness of touch
and resourcefulness in character-portrayal. Not that this
change has been unconscious. Mr. Wells is, at least,
justified of his own principles; for the novel as a work
of art, representative of life and not of didactic theory, he
has chosen to eschew. He claims for the novel that it
tehall be discursive and contemptuously negligent of form
And plot construction, that it shall embrace all ethics, law,
politics within its borders — it is to be " the parade of
morals and the exchange of manners, the factory of
customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of social
dogmas and ideas. " It will be the function of the novelist
not to teach, but to " discuss, point out, plead and dis-
play." Few will refuse their assent to Mr. Wells's con-
tention that the novel may be at free will discursive,
especially if he justify his theory by the example of
Laurence Sterne. It is certainly true, to quote Mr. Wells
again, that " every novel carries its own justification and
its own condemnation in its success or failure to convince
you that the thing was so." All questions of length and
the presence or absence of plot are beside the mark in
ruling a book as a novel or not a novel. But Mr. Wells
forgets that all beauty is of line or colour, or these two
in combination. The colour of life without form is like
a shapeless mist through which the warm, sunlight uncer-
tainly struggles : its colour perceived and rendered back
by an orderly imagination is like a panorama of woods,
valleys, hills and cloud-mountains seen in the clear light
of day — the complete beauty of the world, form and colour
combined. The discursiveness of Mr. Wells's later novels
is like the uncertain struggling of light to pierce a mist :
so far from the narrative illuminating theory, theory
i obscures narrative and character; and this is the abyss
\in which all didactic art is lost.

But in those books which have been given a higher

: place in the tale of his work Mr. Wells is more consistently

the artist. His opinions and prepossessions may not be

hidden ; they are not, however, a burden and a drag upon

882 THE NOVEL [PART, tv

the action. The hero of Love and Mr. Lewisham is drawn
with a sureness and economy of line, with a subtlety of
satire and humour, with a skilled handling of plot which
leave nothing to be desired. And Kipps, in which the
author reveals something of his own experience, has just
that power, which Mr. Wells names, of convincing us that
it must be so. Tono-Bungay only suffers by comparison ;
and Ann Veronica, in which Mr. Wells abandons the raw
youth he is continually sketching in the bold attempt
to portray a young woman not dissimilarly placed, is a
complete success in convincing realism.

Mr. Wells is not a great artist; he has nothing of the
glow and fervour of sympathy which inspires the greater
writer in his contact with simple and impulsive human
beings. Men and women as creatures of flesh and blood
he does not know as Joseph Conrad and Mr. Arnold Bennett
know them. His intellectual acuteness enables him to
seize the psychology of individual minds within a certain
range; but the clearer, the more generous, the more
idealistic mind is outside his knowledge or his power to
render. His description of character is external, not inti-
mate. He began as a writer of tales in which the reader's
attention was to be caught by the clever handling of inci-
dent ; and to the last, the easy, vivid and colloquial manner
of narrative counts for much. The truth is Mr. Wells is an
excellent story-teller to the men of his generation.

Mr. Arnold Bennett, with Mr. H. G. Wells, is, both in
England and America, one of the most popular novelists

of the day. He is versatile, remarkably
Arnold Bennett, prolific, he has wit and humour, jie~ is
b. 1867. observant of types, classes and men, he

is gifted with a power of endowing his
characters with an abounding life in a degree which
reminds us of Dickens whom he has decried ; yet his work
contains little that can be counted of even passing signi-
ficance to the evolution of modern fiction, for, much as
he has written upon the art of literature, it is impossible
to discover -principles either of art .or Jife in his work. Mr.
Galsworthy, Conrad, Mr. Masefield, Mr. H. G. Wells
are definitive of some positive attitude of mind toward
nature and man : Mr. Bennett chronicles the J?iw. Towns
and peoples that dreary tract of England with living men

CHAP, m] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 383

and women ; he interests ,aad entertains* but he leaves all
things as they were before. The other novelists whom we
have named at random cannot be read without the con-
sciousness that our mental horizon has been modified or
enlarged. Mr. Bennett impresses us with being a versatile,
nervous, extremely perspicuous raconteur, journalist,
essayist, playwright, in touch with the lives of men and
women, his mind replete with novel, striking and enter-
taining ideas and turns of thought, quick to conceive
uncommon situations ; but these varied gifts, the multiple
kinds of work he produces, are not knit into any positive
unity by force of strong personality without which no
writing can endure beyond a few days or years.

Mr. Bennett professes to have attacked the outposts of
literature as an " apprentice of Flaubert et Cie "; but he
more often reminds us of a modern and different Dickens.
Like Dickens Mr. Bennett is of the people, and, like
Dickens, he is only too ready, for the sake of royalties,
to accommodate his writing to anything the public wants.
It is true he distinguishes between his " fantasias " and
his serious work, as did Grant Allen, but we can only
suspect that so continuous an output of work for which
the author professes no admiration must be detrimental
to his power of producing better work which claims his
faith and belief. Nevertheless he has continued to publish
side by side books of outstanding merit, like The Old
Wives9 Tale, of second-rate character, like The Cj&rd, and
sensational shockers, like Hugo and The City of Plea$u£&.
The most consistent and least versatile person has his
moods and phases, but a deliberate division of the imagina-
tion by bulkheads is like the wilful indulgence in a
dangerous anatomical experiment, almost certain to cause
a fracture if carried far enough. In any case it is a device
that calls for less admiration than the consistent effort to
produce only for the sake of the best that is in oneself.
To throw alarums and excursions contemptuously to the
groundlings is one thing; to practise on different levels
of workmanship by set hours each day is another.

Mr. Bennett was born in the pottery district of Stafford-

.shke^and his best work is built upon recollections of his

bo_yhood in this dreary region. He spent some years in a

lawyer's office before turning to journalism and editorial

884 THE NOVEL [PART iv

work. And he produced in these early years his first
book, A Ma^romthe North (1898), writing with Flaubert
and tfieTBe Goncourf^^lFotliers in mind. Brevity, good
construction and an unshrinking rendering of lifers grey
tones — these were his ideals in his first book. And A
Man from the North is by no means an unsuccessful piece
of writing. In part the story of the young man from
Bursley, who conies to Xondon, enters an office as^ .clerk
and drifts into literary aspirations, is autobiograjphicaL
The reviews were not wholly complimentary, and the
financial return was negligible. Mr. Bennett therefore
resolved to give the subscribers to lending libraries what
they sought, and in this resolve he wrote his " fantasias "
and " Jrolics," which were regarded by the autfior merely
as cheap goods tricked out for popular consumption.
Among these commercial successes may be named the
extravagant and absurd Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), £&£
Loot of Cities (1905), Hugo (1906) and The City Qlflmmre
(1907). Not unlike these, but better, is Buried Alive
(1908), the story of the shy artist taken for dead in the
person of his valet, his glad acceptance of the popular
mistake and burial of himself in obscure life. It is a good
extravaganza, worked up later into the play, The Great
Adventure. More uncommon and original is The Glimpse
(1909), first written as a short story, which relates the
experience of a man who falls into a trance and has a
glimpse of life beyond death.

But Mr. Bennett holds whatever position he may be
accounted to have in the world of letters to-day by none
of these books, but by a seriesjrfjLQvels in which he Jias
painted realistically theTifef of people in the Five Towns,.
a name he has given to the pottery district o? Stafford-
shire. In these he has given us work, serious and
humorous, always original, deriving from nothing save
observation of life. In his first novel he had drawn a,
Staffordshire lad outside his native environment. The first
unit in his new series, Anna of the Five Towns (1902), is
the dreary story of a girl crushed by the brutal tyranny
of a father, disappointed in love, yet dutiful. Leonora
(1903) is a tale of unhappy marriage set in the same drab
surroundings.

But better far than these is The Old Wives9 Tale (1908),

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 885

in which for the first time Mr. Bennett succeeded in
reaching large outline in his telling of a story. The
narrative is almost uniformly grey: yet sordid and sad
though it may be, it is a book to which we return, con-
fident that this is not fiction but an excerpt from life.
A draper's shop? a ^duJL and dingy square in Bursley, a
third-rate pension in Parisf these form a background to
the life-story of two women, whom we follow from girl-
hood to old age.,, It is a round, unvarnished tale, written
in a bald style, with but few passages of Mr. Bennett 's
ironical humour. Idealism, colour, light, of these there is
hardly a trace ; but the trijthfulness of the characterisation
compels our belief* The Old Wives9 Tale was Mr.
Bennett's first notable .book.. It was followed by two
others, first members of a trilogy, which take their place
only a little below it, representative of the best that Mr.
Bennett can give us in the painting of the Five Towns.
Clayhanger (1910) and Hilda Lessways (1911) are tales that
cannot be dissociated from the smoky atmosphere of the
potteries. Mr. Bennett knows and loves this region in its
grimy squalor and its blurred beauty — a region of
" ragged brickwork, walls finished anyhow with saggars
and slay; narrow uneven alleys leading to higgeldy-
piggeldy workshops and kilns ; cottages transformed into
factories and factories into cottages . . . the reign of the
slovenly makeshift, shameless, filthy and picturesque."

But there is another side to the picture :

" Bursley — tall chimneys and rounded ovens, schools,
the new scarlet market, the grey tower of the old church,
the high spire of the evangelical church, the low spire
of the church of genuflexions, and the crimson chapels,
and rows of little red houses with amber chimney-pots,
and the gold angel of the blackened Town Hall topping
the whole. The sedate reddish browns and reds of the
composition, all netted in flowing scarves of smoke,
harmonised exquisitely with the chili blues of the
chequered sky. Beauty was achieved, and none saw it.55

It is in this atmosphere and against this background that
Mr. Bennett sets his best work.

The three books last-named embody his serious inten-
tion and aim as an artist. Of a different type are The

386 THE NOVEL [PART iv

Card (1911) and its sequel, The Regent (1918). These are
stories of the Five Towns, but reality is abandoned for an
extravagant and entertaining chronicle of the surprising
adventures in success and money-making of Denry, " the
card,'5 who is the hero of picaresque romance attired in
modern dress and venturing on modern enterprises. These
tales, if of less value than Mr. Bennet's best, are not to
be confused with his commercial " frolics.5' They contain,
mingled with melodrama, elements of good character-
drawing and truthful rendering of situation.

It is, however, by three books that Mr. Bennett is to
be judged. Of these two, The Old Wives' Tale and Clay-
hanger are conceived in broader outline and carried
through with greater success than Hilda Lessways, which
is scarcely a worthy sequel to its predecessor. It leaves an
impression of weariness and inability to reach again the
standard already attained. Mr. Bennett's thoroughly good
and outstanding work is, therefore, within our period, to
be counted in two volumes and a third which does not
attain to the two first. In these he has reflected forcibly
the life of a cramped and isolated area. His potters,
artisans, mechanics, printers, drapers, Bethel ministers,
with their wives and daughters, live in dull squares, smoke-
grimed streets, or filthy alleys, but within that range their
experience is an experience common to humanity.

Nevertheless, something is wanting. Mr. Bennett's
sympathies and his conception of the meaning of life are
not sufficiently removed from those of his characters who
work in the shop during the week and go to chapel with
unction on Sunday. He knows them because he is of
them : but he can never place himself at a distance in
order to see the meaning of their lives. Nor does he con-
ceive life with any large background. The difference will
be apparent if we contrast JMr^ Bennett with Mr. Thomas
Hardy. Mr. Hardy is both of his peasantry and not of
them; and, further, he sees that beyond the life of the
individual there is a something that is greater than he.
In Mr. Bennett's tales there is nothing of this : his vision is
the sharply-defined and concrete view of the chapel, but
without its dogmas. And, consequently, his picture of
life, wondejjfiilly true as it seems, is only true within
limitations : poetry and idealism are almost absent, though

CHAP, m] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 887

not wholly, for of these there is a trace in Clayhanger.
The concepts of the shop and the desk still limit Mr.
Bennett and Mr. Wells, and most in the hour of their
emancipation.

Mr. Galsworthy is a realistic writer whose method and
manner is set worlds apart from that of Mr. Bennett
and Mr. Wells. Whether as a novelist
John Galsworthy, Or dramatist we recognise in him the
b. 1867. same judicial temper, the same close

observation which allows no detail to
pass, the same impartial weighing of evidence, the same
acerbity mingled with strong moral intensity, the same
passion for justice and righteousness. Social and economic
problems govern his drama ; they are the stuff from which
he extracts fiction. In an age when the novel had not the
advantages of the platform, pulpit and treatise Mr. Gals-
worthy would not have written fiction ; for he is not in love
with life first of all. He does not feel and then try to
know ; he strives to come into contact with humanity by
learning to know about it. As an American writer has
admirably said, he puts " ethics and sociology, manners
and customs, mankind in the aggregate, overwhelmingly
ahead of the individual." Cold ratiocination is con-
tinually defeating the artist in Mr. Galsworthy.

Despite the narrowness of his intellectual and emotional
sympathies he has, however, won general recognition, both
in England and America, as the protagonist of a new
drama and fiction. He made his appearance as a novelist
long before he attempted writing for the stage; for he
published four volumes of fiction under the pseudonym
John Sinjohn before printing his own name on the title-
page. None of these is worthy of any special mention.
Two are collections of short tales ; and Villa Rubein (1900),
the second of the longer essays in fiction, is a story, not
at all remarkable, of a painter who arouses opposition
from the family of the woman he loves because he is poor
and holds unconventional opinions. If the book in itsell
is not noteworthy, it is of interest in that it contains the
seed of Mr. Galsworthy's later work, for it is a study oJ
conflict between a man of independent and original mind
and the canons of the social code. It was, however, with
the publication of The Island Pharisees (1904), four yean

888 THE NOVEL [PART iv

later, that he assumed his later manner and definitely
began to handle his one theme, the injustice, the folly of
social inequality and exclusiveness. On this foundation he
has continued to write since both in fiction and drama.
In The Island Pharisees he delivered the truth that was in
him. He has done little since save amplify, expand and
comment. The world is too large, its interests too diver-
sified, its problems too complex and interwoven to permit
of being truthfully painted upon a canvas so narrow as Mr.
Galsworthy chooses. The intention is so obvious that we
suspect the author of seeing only the dusty yard, unmind-
ful of the green slopes and wide horizons over the wall.
The social economy looms before Mr. Galsworthy's gaze
like an overhanging cliff ; he forgets that it is only a tithe
of the real meaning and content of life to the great
majority, who are but rarely conscious of its presence. To
most eyes its proportions are those of the mole hill, not the
middle wall of division.

The Island Pharisees, the first book entirely charac-
teristic of Mr. Galsworthy's temperament and reading of
life, has few pretensions as a work of art. It presents in
a series of pictures the disillusionment of a man who is
brought into contact with differing grades of social life
to meet in each with the same shams and false standards.
The scenes and chapters have so slight a connection with
each other that the whole resolves itself into little more
than a rambling story with a moral. Only two characters
are seen with any clearness, Shelton, the questioning and
disillusioned hero, and Louis Ferrand, the vagabond. The
other characters are withdrawn into a misty background,
and used to illustrate the follies of the social economy. A
large part of the book would have been more effective had
Mr. Galsworthy thrown it into the form of a direct treatise
upon social evils.

Far larger and more elaborate in conception is The Man
of Property (1906). In the text of the book Mr. Gals-
worthy remarks ironically upon the anomaly of the novel
without a plot; but he has certainly taken to heart his
failure in The Island Pharisees, and learned in consequence
several lessons. Satire in shapeless prose narrative is
abandoned for a long, intricate, but well-constructed
chronicle of the rich middle-class family of the Forsytes.

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 889

Scarcely a figure outside the Forsyte family in all its
ramifications is allowed to intrude upon the narrative
with the exception of Bosinney, the architect, who is
engaged to one of the Forsyte girls and used to throw
into high relief her family's smug and complacent respect-
ability. The Forsyte family is large, the complications of
their relationships are not always easy to follow; but in
this book Mr. Galsworthy began definitely to show that
faculty so distinctive of all his later work — a remarkable
economy in narrative and dialogue, combined with the
power to give an impression of the literal rendering of life
without omission. He never writes with brilliance, he
has no passion for ensnaring with aphorism or phrase,
his highest light is a subdued grey, he paints the meaning-
less monotony of life upon every page, he is not in love
with individual men and women, his Eumouf is Slight
and sardonic, but he has a concentrated intensity, some-
times one-sided, rarely exaggerated, which clearly marks
him off from other writers of the day. The Man of
Property is a large book, but it is closely condensed ; the
story has few loose strands, no needless chapters. Mr.
Galsworthy simply uses the Forsyte family to represent
in type the smug and well-to-do part of the English middle
class, and Soames Forsyte is the pattern of their moneyed
respectability. The fault of this, as of every work to
which Mr. Galsworthy sets his hand, is not so much the
moral intention as the harshly-defined preconception with
which the author embarks upon his narrative. The faults
of the social economy are many, but they are not a con-
tinual and unavoidable obsession upon individual lives.
The truth of each life is something unaffected by the social
economy; and it is the function of the writer and the
poet to know and reveal this inner truth. But Mr. Gals-
worthy rarely sees men and women save through the veil
of a social economy, and therefore his vision is continually
distorted.

The Country House (1907) has probably been the most
popular of Mr. Galsworthy's tales. It is slighter than
The Man of Property, less subtle and intricate, and there-
fore easier to read. The insincerity of life in an English
country house, its spirit of landlordism, its acceptance of
established traditions and its entire satisfaction with

890 THE NOVEL [FART iv

things as they are form the background of satire in this
book. In his rendering of the atmosphere of an average
country home Mr. Galsworthy is wonderfully successful;
and in condensation and intensity the tale compares well
with its predecessor. The Country House and Fraternity
(1909) are the complement of each other ; the one a picture
of life in the country, the other a representation of upper
middle class and professional life in London; and the
latter is more intimately concerned with social questions.
In the two preceding novels the old theme of the incom-
patible marriage-tie is combined with satire upon British
prejudices: in Fraternity the husband discovers that,
cramped by the narrow ideas of the world, he cannot
act the kindly brother to a poor and wretched artist's
model without arousing suspicion and ill-thinking. The
rich and the poor are grouped and contrasted, and Mr.
Galsworthy's lesson is the evil of a society so ordered
that the true brotherhood of man is impossible till we
transgress its canons and judgments. Of this book it may
be said that in brevity, concentration of interest and
artistic shapeliness it is his best piece of work.

In The Patrician (1911) Mr. Galsworthy breaks new
ground and with indifferent success. His picture of the
Caradocs, an aristocratic English family and their
relations, is wanting in the verisimilitude of his chronicle
of the Forsytes ; and we suspect, in reading, that Mr. Gals-
worthy writes at second hand or from supposition, not
with knowledge. The narrative fails to hold, the characters
are but faintly impressed upon the imagination. The
unkind criticism that the book might have been written
by Mrs. Humphry Ward is hardly true; for Mrs. Ward's
sympathies would obviously be on the side of that social
opinion which prevents the union with another man of
a woman who has ceased to live with her husband. Mr.
Galsworthy leaves the two resigned to the tragedy of
inoffensive acquiescence, but he does not accept the
situation. On the other hand, it is not unjust to say that
characterisation is weaker and more vacillating than is
the case with Mrs. Ward at her best : Mr. Galsworthy
is less at home in his environment than Mrs. Ward would
have been. In workmanship and force this book represents
a backsliding. And The Dark Flower (1918) is an aberra-

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 391

tion in the work of Mr. Galsworthy as unfortunate as
Le Lys Rouge in the work of M. Anatole France. The
three irregular love adventures of Mark Lennan are wholly
unconvincing, because from the outset Mr. Galsworthy
failed to conceive the character of his hero. These three
sketches of passion, for The Dark Flower is no novel, are
hung in vacuo; and long before the close the reader has
lost interest in the fate of any of the actors save the injured
wife of the middle-aged and rather ridiculous sculptor,
who is the protagonist of the story.

Little can be added here as a general commentary upon
Mr. Galsworth^s achievement as a novelist which would
not involve the repetition of observations which are more
naturally in their place as an estimate of his work as a
dramatist ; for as a playwright he has been able to express
himself more fully and with a greater measure of artistry.
Mr. Galsworthy was, in former years, a barrister, and the
judicial temper is the strongest characteristic of his genius.
If he is also a pleader of causes, and a pleader who rises to
passionate exhortation and denunciation, his passion is
wholly of the intellect. He has considered the constitution
of modern society and seen that it is bad. In the plays
and the novels his voice is ceaselessly raised against the
great curse laid upon man as a social being, that inequality
of classes which leads to the establishment of one law
for the rich and another for the poor. But it is ever of
man that Mr. Galsworthy thinks and not of men. Men
and women individually, and apart from the greater whole
they typify, are not bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.
The cold impartiality, the judicially analytic temper of
Mr. Galsworthy hinder his best efforts to come near to
his fellows as a man with men. It is a curious irony of
circumstance that the writer who, of all living English
novelists, is most stirred to moral indignation against the
pain and suffering of mankind should also, as a writer,
be so patently lacking in the poetry of a warmer human
passion. His novels and the collected sketches of A Com-
mentary (1908) and A Motley (1910) are exemplifications
of the author's gift of analytic insight, of his skill ir
rejecting all that is irrelevant and retaining all that i*
essential to creating that hard and brilliant light in whicl
he sees the world, and they are, further, a confession o

892 THE NOVEL [PART iv

his inability to introduce those warmer tones which are
also a part of life. The mind of Mr, Galsworthy is that of
the judicial summer-up of cases, not that of the poet and
imaginative artist.

The three writers named above describe man as he lives
in the towns, in contact with the industrialism, the political

agitation, the curious searchings of the
Eden Phillpotts, age. The statement calls for some quali-
b- 1862. fication ; for Mr. Bennett is a chronicler

of provincial life in a small area ; but his
people belong to the street and the factory, not to the soil.
It was inevitable, however, that Mr. Hardy's great series
of Wessex novels should suggest to others the potentialities
of the tale of agricultural life limited to a few square miles.
Many regional novels have been published latterly, but the
West Country holds its own, and Mr. Eden Phillpotts
and John Trevena, though their work is deplorably
unequal, when writing at their best come nearer than any
others to the supreme greatness of Mr. Hardy, When a
young man Mr. Eden Phillpotts was for a number of years
a clerk in an insurance office; and before he definitely
turned to authorship he essayed the stage, only to dis-
cover himself unfitted for the actor's profession. After
writing several earlier tales with indifferent success he
gained a reputation with two books, Lying Prophets (1897)
and Children of the Mist (1899). In the second he adopted
for the background of his narrative Dartmoor; and for
fourteen or fifteen years he produced annually his novel of
the moor, gradually evolving a regular and stereotyped
mould for shaping each book. The volume begins with its
introductory description of moorland, and each division of
the tale is clearly marked by a fresh descriptive passage,
followed again by a standard length of narrative. Each
year he learned to adhere more closely to his pattern, until
the reader could safely predict the development of the plot.
Mr. Phillpotts has taken himself with some seriousness
as an artist and painter of moorland life. The style,
the method and the size of his books has been dictated
by an ambition to write strongly, sincerely and thought-
fully. The model, and it could hardly be otherwise, has
been Mr. Thomas Hardy. But Mr. Phillpotts 's reach
comes short of his intention. The greatness of the Wessex

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 893

novels, despite their stiffness and occasional ponderosity,
is the universal implication carried by a tale of narrow
life. Destiny, all-powerful, heedless, impersonal, governs
the little ways of men, who act in the belief that they
move freely while about them for ever is earth with her
bars. And Mr. Hardy gains his grand and impressive
effect because his mind is naive and simple. His range
is not wide. Like the child, however, he feels intensely;
his insight is clearer and deeper than that of most men.
Mr. Phillpotts's mind is complex, his ideas sophisticated,
he is sensitive to the newest philosophy of life and morals ;
and therefore he is a far lesser artist than Mr. Hardy.
In nearly all his novels we are conscious of strain — the
intention is unfulfilled. There is a wide gulf fixed between
the book as he designed it and the completed work. In
the Wessex novels the composition is equivalent to the
original inspiration,

In the case of a writer who keeps so closely to his desk
as Mr. Phillpotts it would be impossible to give even a
meagre sketch of his many books. Nearly all his novels
have for their background the Dartmoor hills; the tale
is invariably founded upon the primitive passions as they
express themselves in action in obscure and homespun
lives; the theme is varied but little — two men love one
woman, one woman loves two men, one or the other is the
base of many of his plots.

Lying Prophets was approved by one reviewer as the
strongest thing of its kind since Esther Waters. The scene
is laid in Cornwall. Joan Tregenza, daughter of Michael,
a religious fanatic, is seduced by Barron, an artist, who
comes to stay in the village for the sake of his health.
For him the phase is no more than one of his many moods ;
she finds herself deserted with the prospect of becoming
a mother. For long the post brings no word from her
lover. When the letter comes at last it is from a dying
man; and she, as she hurries to him, meets with death
on a wild night of storm. Her corpse is discovered by
the man to whom she was affianced before Barron crossed
her path. The conclusion reminds us of Mr. Hardy's
Return of the Native ; and, like the earlier tale, Mr. Phill-
potts 's story suffers from an element of the improbable
and melodramatic.

894 THE NOVEL [PART iv

Chilren of the Afwt, though exasperatingly loose in plot-
construction, is an advance in realism and characterisation.
The tale brings us to Dartmoor; and from this date Mr.
Phillpotts followed his stereotyped pattern sedulously
and with varying success. Among the best of the later
books are The River (1902), in which the Dart dominates
the whole tale, The Secret Woman (1905), The Whirlwind
(1907), The Mother (1908), The Three Brothers (1909).
On a secondary level may be placed Sons of the Morning
(1900), the over-literary and pedantic American Prisoner
(1904), The Portreeve (1906) and The Forest on the Hill
(1912). Besides these he has written a number of volumes
of lesser note and published various collections of short
tales.

The Beacon (1911) differed from its Dartmoor predeces-
sors for a number of years by choosing for theme a contrast
between Lizzie Denster, the woman from the cities, dimly
aware of new ideas, and the simple men and women of
the village. The contrast is treated strongly and with
effect; and the book marks a pleasurable break in the
monotony of Mr. Phillpotts's plot-ideas. And Widecombe
Fair (1913) was again a surprise. His humour is occasional
and laboured ; but in Widecombe Fair he has written a
large book, without plot or story worthy the name, in
which with a very genuine humour he has sketched in
large outline and as one picture the whole life of a village.
Differing in character from most of his work, it was one
of his best and most human books for many years.

In Widecombe Fair Mr. Phillpotts believed himself to
have brought to a conclusion the long series of his Dart-
moor novels, and he contributed to the volume a fore-
word, in which, quoting Nietzsche, he declared that it
had been his attempt as a writer to say u yea " to life,
" to display a will to life rejoicing at its own vitality,"
to write of things as they are and thus escape the " hell
of realism or sentimentality." Thence he turned to justify
himself against the charge that his scenery played as
important part in the plot as the characters of the tale.
He asserted rightly that man is of the seasons and
elements, moulded in his career by the forces of nature.
The story of man's environment is the story of man. " We
may incarnate the seasons and set them moving, mighty

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 395

and magic-fingered, upon the face of the earth, to tell a
story laden with unsleeping activities, mysterious nega-
tions and frustrations, battles and plots, tragedies and
triumphs."

If any one book of Mr. Phillpotts is to be chosen before
the others, perhaps The Whirlwind is the most complete,
rounded and artistic piece of work he has given us. The
plot is handled with skill and resourcefulness, the char-
acters are few, the three principal actors, two men and a
woman, are powerfully drawn, and the interplay of animal
vitality, morbid ill-health, scepticism and religious belief
gives the tale a strong interest. The old story — the
sacrifice of virtue for the sake of the husband — is handled
by Mr. Phillpotts in a strikingly new and original manner.

The limitations of his work are patent to all. Talent
deliberately and industriously directed is the source of
these novels; inspiration is rare, save in those moments
of impassioned nature-painting in which he shows himself
a master of style and language. The dialogue of his tales
only too often belongs not to the characters but to the
author; and the thoughts which find utterance in the
dialect of his peasantry are far beyond their range. Their
conversations are wholly unreal ; and the majority of his
secondary characters are untrue to type, invented not on
the moor but in the study. As a chronicler of moorland
people Mr. Phillpotts will not bear comparison with John
Trevena. Further, both in dialogue and description he is
lengthy and formless ; he would be a better artist were he
content with fewer words. Nevertheless, though not
possessed of a creative or original mind, he is not without
the power of drawing character vividly and truly ; and his
work is always thoughtful, for he has sincerely and
earnestly considered life, weighing its meaning in the
balances.

The literature of Dartmoor has been growing steadily
for many years. The fascination of this bare upland is
natural, for it is one of the few wild and untameable tracts
of southern England. A land of barren wastes, sharp tors,
craggy hills rising abruptly into wind, m?st and rain; it
is set like a rugged island, cliff-bound, among the shady
orchards and meadowed valleys of Devonshire. At its
greatest height it is a little over two thousand feet; it

396 THE NOVEL [PART iv

stretches only twenty-three miles north and south and
twenty east and west. But height and expanse are no
measure for a hill-country. Low hills, abrupt and con-
trasting sharply with their surroundings, have all the
effect and grandeur of greater mountains in other situa-
tions. Dartmoor is a land to itself, inhabited, like Tyrol
or the highlands of Bavaria, by a peculiar mountain race ;
a land of steep skies, rolling clouds, shrouding mists and
the unceasing rustle of the wind in heather and grass.

It is impossible to name Mr. Phillpotts as an historian
of the moor without being tempted to a comparison with
John Trevena (Ernest G. Henham). And,
John Trevena, whether as a landscape artist or as a painter
b. 1870. of human character, John Trevena has the

greater genius of the two. Mr. Phillpotts,
in introductory chapters, has a hundred times described
the moor, but the manner has grown stereotyped, and
in each chapter that heralds a new division of the book
we learn what to expect. It is good writing, often beauti-
ful, but the matter is nearly always extraneous to the
story and the manner is laboured. And, further, his
peasantry are products of the study, not of observation
and experience; they talk not as any Devonshire moor-
man ever talked; but, as a reviewer wittily observed,
like "Dons who have forgotten their grammar." The
people of Mr. Phillpotts 's tales are, with some exceptions,
an artifice invented beneath the glow of the study lamp.

In the novels of John Trevena Dartmoor becomes a
symbol, a brooding genius of destiny. It is this remarkable
power to personify the forces of nature, to endow the
background of life's tragedy with mysterious significance,
that makes Furze the Cruel (1907) and Granite (1909)
noteworthy books. The blind cruelty of the will to live in
conflict with fate, circumstance and character is drawn
with a forcibleness which throws all but one or two writers
of the day into the shade. Furze the Cruel, save for the
carelessness of its design and the tiresome passages relating
to the love affairs of Aubrey and Boodles, is one of the
most impressive and overpowering books since Jude the
Obscure. In another aspect the style and the characters
suggest comparison with the craftsmanship of the author
of The House with the Green Shutters. It remains the

CHAP, m] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 897

strongest book John Trevena has written; and its merit
is not confined to any single characteristic. The intro-
ductory chapter, * About Raindrops,5 is a piece of prose
and fine symbolism beyond the range and imagination
of most writers; the story of Pendoggat and his fearful
fate has the note of great tragedy ; and other chapters
of the book are quickened with a prodigality of unforced
humour. Furze is the first member of a trilogy, continued
with Heather (1908) and completed with Granite (1909).
" Almost everywhere on Dartmoor are Furze, Heather
and Granite. The Furze seems to suggest Cruelty, the
Heather Endurance and Granite Strength." As is often
the case the later members of the group fall short of the
first. It may be admitted that to illustrate the power of
Endurance is more difficult than to exhibit the force of
Cruelty; but even if this qualification be taken into
account Heather is a book much inferior to its forerunner.
The characters do not impress themselves upon the
imagination, the plot is confused and the humour is often
far-sought. In Granite John Trevena does not rival Furze,
yet he goes far toward reaching again the standard of his
earlier work. The symbolic significance of Dartmoor
granite is inwoven with the play of human tragedy and
comedy with a fine poetic power. The author describes
how every day the old stone-breaker, Will Yeo, attacks
the granite in his attempt to clear a patch of the moor.

" There was the intoxicating fascination of a gigantic
work in which strength alone could serve, with just a
little cunning added. There was the wild music made
by the iron and stone to be listened to through life;
chief of all the privilege of being out alone every day
subduing a force, while looking over what appeared to
be the whole world stretched below, with the keen
winds tossing the clouds along, and strange voices
coming out of the nooks and corners — that was to live
and not know weakness. "

In consistency, balance and power Furze and Granite
stand first among John Trevena's books. The trilogy was
preceded by A Pixy in Petticoats (1906), a slight and
entertaining narrative and the most popular of his books,
and Arminel of the West (1907), which was a failure and

898 THE NOVEL [PART iv

deserved to be. The tale is absurdly disjointed and incon-
sequent, violent and morbid.

Since the completion of his trilogy John Trevena has
never again written with equal power. There are in
Bracken (1910) passages descriptive of grasses and flowers
which rival the best writing of Jeff cries ; but this curious
story, based upon the study of dual personality, lapses
into a confused welter of mysticism and morbid imagina-
tion. Wintering Hay (1912) combines the chaotic
mysticism of Bracken with stronger elements from the
preceding volumes. The descriptions of Blue Violet are
most beautiful, and in the characterisation of the vaga-
bond scoundrel, Kit Coke, John Trevena regains his earlier
vein of humour; but, in all, the book is a confused and
shapeless piece of work. Sleeping Waters (1918) is the
story of the hallucination of a madman, and the unbridled
imagination of the author runs riot. The lack of construc-
tive art and the elaborate aimlessness of the dialogue in
No Place Like Home (1913) render the whole book weari-
some.

In performance John Trevena has never fully realised
his powers. Furze the Cruel contained writing that stood
out in the wastes of contemporary fiction as something
wholly exceptional and astonishing in relentless force,
sardonic humour and the rude strength of the character-
drawing; and the sheer poetry and beauty of many of
the descriptive passages were unrivalled by any writer
who had worked in the same field. In comparison Mr.
Phillpotts and Baring-Gould were weaklings achieving
failure and only to be commended for good intention.
Unfortunately John Trevena, though imagination and
poetry are still with him, has never reached the same
level of writing again. But whether or no he ever pro-
duces a fitting companion to Furze, it was a remarkable
achievement to have written that one book.

Among living novelists the number of those who may
be counted with the realistic painters of life is so large
that the choice of illustrative and typical names becomes
a matter of almost insuperable difficulty ; and, further, the
dividing line between novels and novelists in their differing
kinds is not easy to draw. A good study in contrast be-
tween the new and the older method of representing men

CHAP, m] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 899

and manners in contemporary life will be found in the
apposition of Mr. Gilbert Cannan and Mr. William de
Morgan. They are both frank, uncompromising, ironical,
humorous, discursive, careless in their
Gilbert Cannan, methods, and often as much occupied
b. 1884. with their own ideas upon life as the char-

acters they delineate, yet in style
and manner they are wholly dissimilar. The one attempts
to use the novel in a new way, the other follows the
Victorian tradition. Among novelists of the youngest
generation hardly one has shown greater promise than
Mr. Gilbert Cannan, who writes as one conversant with
books, culture and the affairs of men whether in high
places or shabby nooks and forsaken corners. Moreover
he is possessed of wit, a happy turn of irony, and a faculty
for handling reflections upon life with an acuteness and
originality which is reminiscent of Samuel Butler. This
resemblance is most noticeable in Round the Corner (1913),
a story of ups and downs in a clergyman's family. Mr.
Cannan cannot be accused of plagiarising, he may never
have read The Way of All Flesh, but it is impossible not
to call Butler to mind when reading his book. The
resemblance is less in the story and characters than in
the ironic, yet wise and sympathetic attitude of mind
common to both writers. Samuel Butler had more
versatility, knowledge and independence; Mr. Cannan
•writes as a younger man, but as a young man who has
thought about life and gained from his experience matter
worth the keeping.

His first novel, Peter Homunculus (1909), is ill con-
structed and falls into two parts so slightly homogeneous
that they might well be placed in separate covers, though
they relate the story of one life. The picture of Peter
Davies, the raw youth of talent, cataloguing in the second-
hand bookshop in Shaftesbury Avenue, and the character
of X. Cooper, the shabby book dealer, contain workman-
ship worthy of high praise. The old man in his shop
mouthing to his boy-assistant philosophies of life and
conduct is an extraordinarily living creature of the
imagination. " Fear of life ! " he croaks in a broken and
uncertain voice, " It is in all of us. That being so, we
can do nothiSg in this world, Homunculus, except to be

400 THE NOVEL [PART iv

kind and strive always to be kinder . . . and . . . and
damn morality.'5 The earlier portion of the book is
wonderfully genuine and true, but in the latter half, in
which we see Peter emerging into higher planes of social
life and taking his part with success in attempts at witty
dialogue, the reader grows weary of the monotony and
hankers for the more human scenes of the dingy book-
shop. The tiresome pages of the second half of the tale
are doubtless designed to present a hard contrast with
the truth and human interest of the earlier scenes, but
they are unnecessarily lengthy and overreach their
purpose.

Devious Ways (1910) likewise begins with the story of
the hero in boyhood and carries it forward through devious
ways — a mean childhood in mean streets, wanderings in
America, Africa and the Far East to married life in
London. Through it all runs the idea only realised by the
hero when he has been faithless, that, " all peace and
happiness hang from what men choose to make of women. "
Mr. Cannari does not shirk the baser and more sordid
aspects of life ; but he is an idealist. It is he who speaks
in the words of his hero when he asserts that the true
principles of the dramatic art are not to make people
think, but to show the drab, dull and mean as more hope-
less and joy-killing than they are, to make people " feel
and fully to grasp the guiding principles of the world and
of life, to make them see the dividing line between good
and evil, between light and darkness, right and wrong.5'
And in his devious and rambling tale Mr. Cannan succeeds
in making us feel something of all this, in exciting our
faith in the original integrity of human nature. In spite
of his biting irony there is something clear, strong and
poetic in his style and in his attitude toward the simple
realities of daily life ; and he has a fine sense of perspective
and proportion in the choosing of what is great and
significant in the actions of men and women. Although
his commentary upon the world is often tinged with
cynicism he still makes us feel that life is to be chosen,
for he sees the individual not in isolation, but as a part
of the common battle in which we may sometimes triumph
and our defeats are not always irretrievable. Mr. Cannan
cannot, therefore, understand life represented in isolated

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 401

incidents and brief crises ; he must see his men and women
in long perspective. Each of his novels is a life-story. He
begins with boyhood, and leads his character to manhood
and the knowledge that comes of plucking the fruits of
good and evil.

The bondage of the soul and imagination when confined
by the bars of social convention is the ruling idea of Little
Brother (1912), Round the Corner and Old Mole (1914).
In these the conflict of character with environment and
artificial education is seen from differing points of view.
If Butler's influence may be traced in Round the Corner,
the inconsequent and aphoristic manner of Little Brother
reminds us of the author of Tristram Shandy. In Old
Mole Mr. Cannan begins with a whimsical sketch of an
old schoolmaster, a student of Lucretius and Voltaire,
who, on account of a ridiculous misunderstanding, is flung
out of his place and dropped into a travelling theatrical
company. Unfortunately the later chapters of the tale
subside into what is little more than a sustained cynical
diatribe against the false aims of social England. And,
as Mr. Cannan has little to do but pour scorn into his
judgments of matters in general, his pages grow dull, for
we are listening to the special pleader who weakens his
case by blackening the cause of his opponents. With
Samuel Butler Mr. Cannan is to be counted with the rebels.
" Some," he writes, " are sold for work which all their
lives they do not comprehend ; some are bought in body,
some in mind, some in both. The soul, the imagination, is
never bought. In bondage it is turned inward, and pro-
vokes a sense of wrong, a dull and never-ending ache."
In these words is summed the underlying thought of Mr.
Cannan's later novels. He is a writer who has studied
life and human nature and has something to say. He has
knowledge and wit, and he will throw carelessly into one
book what many would use to fit out the content of half
a dozen. Little Brother is his most original piece of
writing; Round the Corner his best novel. Curiously
enough, though he has practised the art of the drama,
his novels are singularly undramatic. Even if, as in Round
the Corner , he have a sufficient story to tell, the action of
the narrative runs its course through the minds and
thoughts of the actors, not in external event.

402 THE NOVEL [PART iv

Mr. E. M. Forster, a careful and fastidious worker, has
printed little, if account be taken of the number of years

during which he has been writing. It
E. M. Forster, may be suspected that the mystic and
b. 1879. allegorical tales of The Celestial Omni-

bus (1911), in part inspired by sympathy
with the esoteric meaning of classic myth, are nearer to
the author's thought and mind than the novels ; for hints
of his consciousness of spiritual communion with nature
are not infrequent in his tales of commonplace social life,
and in The Longest Journey (1907) he makes special refer-
ence to two tales of The Celestial Omnibus. In these
stories Mr. Forster shows himself a scholar possessed of
poetic imagination, a man of thought, and, at the same
time, an observer in satiric mood of quite ordinary and
commonplace human beings. His satiric bent of mind is
naturally more emphasised in the novels, in which no
single admirable character is found. A serious satirist
Mr. Forster is, but without bitterness or undue self-
importance ; for he has learned of Meredith's Comic Muse,
of whom he more than once makes open mention. With
Meredith he understands that if life be never wholly as
the colour and perfume of the rose, it is likewise never
completely a dirty drab, and if not entirely lovable yet
not unworthy of love, for man is weak, ever fighting a
losing battle against superior forces.

Mr. Forster published first Where Angels Fear to Tread
(1905), a story of a curious and uncommon character,
throwing into contrast, briefly and without great elabora-
tion, the gulfs fixed between the northern temper of an
over-civilised Englishwoman and the natural impulses of
the South personified in her Italian husband. In this
first book he makes characters live, he is successful in
epigram, and his asides are those of a man who stops to
think for himself; but his comedy borders on farce and
the narrative scarcely escapes the ridiculous. The Longest
Journey, which is apparently a story in part autobio-
graphical, marks a great advance in concentration, power
of sustained effort and the vivifying of a number of
characters groping and failing in a world of weak and
misguided ideals. This book, together with The Celestial
Omnibus, in quality of craftsmanship may be counted

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 408

the best of his writing. A Room with a View (1908) is an
attempt at a more commonplace type of comedy, despite
the author's good memory for Meredith. Howard's End
(1910) is the most difficult reading of any of his books,
and not wholly consistent. The originality of his insight
and the independence of his thought give to the writing
characteristics of its own, but in the actors as we see them
in the conclusion it is difficult to find those whom we met
in the earlier stages of the tale. The narrative suggests
that the author, suspecting a tameness in incident for the
ordinary reader, suddenly betook himself to the over-
loaded passions and tragedies with which he closes.
Howard's End would have been a better and more power-
ful book had Mr. Forster passed by the stronger emotions.
William de Morgan was the least precocious of novelists,
and to this fact, in part, may be attributed the applause
with which his first books were
William de Morgan, received. That a man should print his
1839-1917, first novel in his sixty-seventh year is

remarkable; and even more remark-
able the fact that it should be a distinctive piece of work.
As a young man De Morgan yielded to his ambitions as a
painter, shortly abandoned the brush and canvas for
ceramics, and for the greater part of his life he designed
tiles and pottery. He was a friend of William Morris, and,
within a certain circle, had been well known for years;
and his new venture at so late a stage of life came as a
surprise. Joseph Vance (1906) was both a remarkably
good and a curiously old-fashioned piece of writing.
Dickens and Thackeray were the comparisons which came
instinctively to mind on the appearance of this discursive,
irregular and lengthy story. As a general description of
De Morgan's method the term, " Early Victorian,"
which he resented, is apt and justifiable. These
modern Victorian novels have all the appearance of having
been written at haphazard for monthly publication, like
the tales of Thackeray and Dickens. The names, the
entire disregard of plot, the irrelevancies of matter, the
optimistic, matter-of-fact absence of introspection, save
the most elementary and superficial, the strain of
pleasantly tempered sentiment, all take us back to the
fifties and sixties of the last century. William De Morgan

404 THE NOVEL [PART iv

illustrates, therefore, nothing that is new : his true place
is a volume on Victorian novelists. And in that volume
Joseph Vance, and with less emphasis, It Never Can
Happen Again (1909), and When Ghost Meets Ghost (1914),
should be named with honour. Alice for Short (1907),
his second tale, reflects the first in slightly different terms
with far less spontaneity of manner and less wealth of
matter. Somehow Good (1908) is not so diffuse as his
other tales, but its plot-idea, loss of memory due to shock
in a London tube, is fantastic at first and becomes
laboured later. An Affair of Dishonour (1910) is an
historical romance that can add nothing to the author's
credit ; and A Likely Story (1911) is the shortest, the most
discursive and the least likely of his tales. Something
might be made in another vein of the picture which speaks
and relates its experiences, but in a conglomerate of The
Ring and the Book, Pendennis and David Copperfield the
whole story becomes incongruous.

In Joseph Vance, with its odd humours, caricatures,
irrelevant excursions, and sprawling yet wonderfully faith-
ful characterisation of the lower life of London De Morgan
wrote a real book, the summary of a life's observation.
But in some degree he exhausted himself with his first
venture : in no succeeding volume did he show the same
abundance of humour, whimsy, thought and wealth of
character-drawing. It is chiefly as a painter of street
and gutter life that he is successful; and, even so, his
workpeople are of a past age, not modern artisans con-
testing problems inculcated by the mass meeting and the
tutorial class.

The novel of street life and cockney dialect has not
greatly flourished since the day of Dickens. The romantic
and the idealising tendency of Dickens 's temperament
led him to represent that life as more joyous than it
actually is ; and the truth of his dialect
The Cockney is, in the opinion of the best judges, more

Dialect Novel than questionable. Mr. Arthur Morri-
son's temper and method is wholly
different. His Tales of Mean Streets (1894) is a book
written in a spirit of harsh realism or grim humour. A
Child of the Jago (1896) and To London Town (1899) are
companion pictures of life in the east end of London. Mr.

CHAP, m] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 405

Morrison's strongest writing is to be found in his first
book, which he has never surpassed. He there showed
himself a discerning spectator of life in slums and mean
streets. But he has since been led astray by ingenuity
in contriving the clever twist of incident into writing
detective stories, and it is a misfortune that he has not
followed up the stronger and more truthful writing of his
first book. Mr. William Somerset Maugham now writes
chiefly for the stage, but in Liza of Lambeth (1897) he
published a distinctive and striking novel of London
streets. Mr Barry Pain and Mr. Pett Ridge are also to be
named as writers who have studied the cockney character,
who write realistically and with humour.

If we turn to the younger generation of writers who
are engaged in the observation and the rendering of con-
temporary life in its myriad social phases, the number
of the names and the wealth of the material offered for
inspection compels us to do no more than brush by with
a passing mention which is not intended to carry with
it any slight or disparagement. Among them are
Mr. Hugh Walpole, Mr. Compton Mackenzie, author of
Carnival (1912) and Sinister Street (1913), Mr. J. D.
Beresford, Mr. Frank Swinnerton and Mr. D. H.
Lawrence.

An age of science (though science be the opposite of
poetry) and mechanical invention has not destroyed the
possibilities of romantic experience or
Joseph Conrad, romantic imagination. If, on the whole,
1857-1924. the weight of intellectual power with the

drama and the novel lies on the side of
those writers who care most for the exact representation
of the life of man as it is to-day, the writers of romance,
or the realistic coloured by romance, are far from repre-
senting a subordinate group, and in the matter of style
and literary gift Joseph Conrad and Maurice Hewlett have
no equals among authors who have been treated earlier in
this chapter. Even the reader who is tempted to carp at
Conrad 's psychology will admit the beauty and the
splendour of his style. And his mastery of our language
is the more remarkable if it be remembered that he did
not learn English till he was nearly twenty. Thereafter
for twenty years J6zef Konrad Korzeniowski sailed the

406 THE NOVEL [PART iv

seas on British craft; and at the age of thirty-eight no
printed book stood to his credit.

But during his years at sea he read French and English
literature widely, evidently with the thought of becoming
an author. Almayer's Folly was begun at sea, long carried
about in manuscript, nourished in the imagination, and
finished during a stay ashore. " For many years," wrote
Conrad, "he [Almayer] and the world of his story
had been the companions of my imagination without, I
hope, impairing my abilities to deal with the realities of
sea life." Almayer's story was finished and published.
Joseph Conrad abandoned the British Mercantile Marine
and embarked on the profession of letters with a better
knowledge of the sea than any English writer since Marryat,
and a rich, glowing English style to which Marryat could
make no pretence. The greater number of his novels
and tales, and certainly the best of them, were drawn
from his experience of life on the high seas, in strange
lands, amid unfamiliar and exotic surroundings, on coral
islands of the Pacific, among Malays, Africans, Chinese,
and the strangely assorted rally of Europeans and
Americans who go down to the sea in ships and fail to
observe the wonders of the deep. Almayer's Folly (1895)
narrates the tragedy of a Dutch trader whose Malay wife
reverts to the ways of her people, while his daughter runs
away with a Malay chieftain. An Outcast of the Islands
(1896) continues the story of Almayer; The Nigger of
the Narcissus (1897) is a tale of life in the forecastle;
Tales of Unrest (1898), which was crowned by the
Academy, is a collection of short stories of wild or out-of-
the-way life. And among the other volumes of short tales
are Youth (1902), Typhoon (1903) and 'Twixt Land and
Sea (1912). Lord Jim (1900) is the most elaborate of
Conrad's studies of character. A young mate fails once
in his duty, his mind is morbidly obsessed with the con-
sciousness of failure, he hides himself and his disgrace
among Malays of the Pacific islands and recovers his self-
respect in the influence he gains over them, Nostromo
(1904), with a scene laid in South America, again turns
upon the problem of self-respect. In Chance (1914)
Conrad, with a result not altogether happy, carried a part
of his narrative away from the sea, and in this section of

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 407

his tale was involved in a tangled psychology of a length
unnecessary to the explication of the remainder of his
story. The reversals and retracings of the plot are as
circuitous as in the case of Lord Jim, and the reader gains
less, for the relationship at sea of the captain, his wife
and her vicious father, developed as a curious intensive
drama, has not sufficient substance to support the verbose
narration. And his mannerisms have begun to conquer
him. Under Western Eyes (1911) is a picture of Russian
political conspiracy, as seen by the eyes of the Westerner
who relates the story.

Although Joseph Conrad set nearly all his tales in an
atmosphere of romance and rough seafaring he was not
merely the romantic chronicler. The bent of his genius
led him to involved psychological study, and his gift of
style prompted him to elaborate descriptions of person-
ality and scenery. The romance of adventure, as it was
written by Scott, Stevenson and Dumas, he did not write.
He mingled with sea-faring experience the psychology
and theory of fiction evolved by the author of What Maisie
Knew, and the result is not seldom curious and incon-
gruous. Like Henry James he adopted the method of
continuous exposition by the author's self and the principle
of the point of view. These tendencies in his work are
naturally more apparent in the longer novels than in the
short stories where he has not the same elbowroom. Lord
Jim, Under Western Eyes and Chance are typical of
intricate study of mental phenomena. The method
adopted in each book is very similar. In Lord Jim the
story opens with narrative in the third person by the
author; then we turn to a long, indirect, zig-zag recital
by a spectator of the hero's subsequent career. In Under
Western Eyes the story is retold from a personal point of
view, but abstracted from the manuscript of a character
who plays a part in the tale. In Chance the point of view
crosses and recrosses. The result, especially in Lord Jim,
is a prolix complexity of mental analysis which it is
difficult to believe could have any conscious or uncon-
scious play in the mind of the mate of a crazy steamer
plying the Indian Ocean. These bewildering mazes of
introspection are incongruous with the environment and
the characters of the tale. In a life of cultured leisure

408 THE NOVEL [PART iv

they might be credible, but not in a world of action.
Further, Conrad's narrative can hardly be followed with
pleasure, for he had no conception of the broad high-
way of the human heart. His love of beginning in the
middle and catching up the tags of the past while he
meanders toward the future is exasperatingly confusing.
Ibsen often in like manner begins in the moment of crisis,
but the development of the drama picks up the thread
of the past with an unhesitating sureness and ease of
movement. Joseph Conrad had no vestige of this art. He
disclaimed classification with the writers of adventurous
romance, and asserted that he wished to make us
feel, think and hear. It may, however, he doubted whether
these erratic leapings backward and forward represent
the workings of any ordinary mind engaged with a single
personality and his life-history. If we ask how we come
to understand the hero of Lord Jim, the answer is — through
the exegetical commentary of the author and his mouth-
piece, Marlow. And, though we are thus forced to piece
the narrative together from a maze of digressive moods
and impressions, the wonder is that we are continually
conscious of touch with life, mystery and romance. The
splendid colouring and the cadences of the style enthrall
us; the mystery of life and the joy of youth flood the
narrative. In Joseph Conrad's studies of the problems of
the soul there are no psychological megrims, no morbid
introspectivity. The spirit which giveth life is everywhere
present in his novels.

From Henry James he learned much; but the secret
of form Conrad never made his own. His longer
tales are confused inextricably; and his short stories are
wonderful impressions rather than conies. Nevertheless,
of their kind, there is hardly anything to surpass them in
English fiction; for in his short stories he has less
room for psychology and description, although his descrip-
tive passages are still too frequent and obtrusive. Beauty
of form these stories lack ; but their style is a matter of
continual astonishment when we remember that Joseph
Conrad did not speak English till he was twenty. And the
slight evidences, which do appear, that the author is
writing in an acquired tongue, are but an added grace.
* Youth/ the story of a tempestuous voyage to the East

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 409

in an unseaworthy vessel, ' The End of the Tether/ the
story of a sea captain who hides his growing blindness
behind the trustworthiness of a Malay servant and con-
tinues to steer his ship, * Typhoon/ the sketch of a vessel
struck by a typhoon, these and others are among the best
of all short stories. The cadences, the richness, the
descriptive power of the style, the halo of youth and
romance lend to them a character unmatched. The
English are a race of seamen, but no English writer who
ever took pen in hand has painted a storm in mid-ocean
like Joseph Conrad. The passage of ' Typhoon 9 which
describes a vessel struggling for life in a wild welter of
sky and sea is astonishing in its power, the rounded com-
pleteness of its phrasing and the aptness of the analogical
pictures it summons in quick succession.

" The motion of the ship was extravagant. Her
lurches had an appalling helplessness : she pitched as
if taking a header into a void, and seemed to find a wall
to hit every time. When she rolled she fell on her side
headlong, and she would be righted back by such a
demolishing blow that Jukes felt her rolling as a clubbed
man reels before he collapses. The gale howled and
scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as though
the entire world were one black gully. At certain
moments the air streamed against the ship as if sucked
through a tunnel with a concentrated solid force of
impact that seemed to lift her clean out of the water
and keep her up for an instant with only a quiver
running through her from end to end/9

It is difficult to conceive writing better and more to the
purpose than this. Its descriptive power holds the reader
spellbound.

' Youth ' can hardly be called a story. It is a paean
to youth and its conquest of adversity. A crazy old vessel
sets sail with a cargo of coal for the east; she is buffeted
by the waves and escapes a watery grave only to be gutted
by fire. But in the memory of the young ship's officer
the voyage was more glorious and wonderful than any
he took in later life under happier circumstances.

410 THE NOVEL [PART iv

" O youth ! The strength of it, the faith of it, the
imagination of it. To me she was not an old rattle-
trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight
— to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of
life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with
regret, as you would think of some one dead you have
loved. I shall never forget her."

And it is impossible not to quote one more passage
from the wonderful story, a passage which illustrates the
style of the author in another aspect, in his description
of the spell that is laid upon man by the inscrutable beauty
of the world into which he is thrust blindly to live. The
young ship's officer of the story reaches the East at last,
but in an open boat.

" And this is how I see the East. I have seen its
secret places and I have looked into its very soul ; but
now I see it always from a small boat, a high outline
of mountains, blue and afar in the morning; like faint
mist at noon; a jagged wall of purple at sunset. I
have the feel of the oar in my hand, the vision of a
scorching blue sea in my eyes. And I see a bay, a
wide bay, smooth as glass and polished like ice, shimmer-
ing in the dark. . . . Suddenly a puff of wind, a puff
faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of
blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night
— the first sigh of the East on my face. That I can
never forget. It was impalpable and enslaving, like a
dream, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight."

Joseph Conrad was not among the greatly popular writers
of the day; he was something more; for it is difficult to
believe that the best of his work will be forgotten. The
gift of the story-teller, inexhaustible imagination, a tire-
less invention and strong dramatic instinct, all these in
joint company will fail to ensure lasting fame to an author
who can write so as to be understood but not admired.
And, contrariwise, nothing that has the seal of a noble
and beautiful style upon it can ever utterly perish. The
philosopher or the scientist is not dependent upon a style
that he may influence his own and succeeding generations :

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 411

undoubtedly the creative artist, although he may achieve
a temporary vogue without style, for the lack of this one
thing is fated to an early oblivion. Many popular novelists
of yester-year are now but unimportant names in the
catalogue and index.

Popularity in measure pressed down and running over
could never fall to the lot of Joseph Conrad. He was
wanting in just those qualities which would commend
him to the reader who asks to be entertained, not
illumined. His narrative moves slowly and uncertainly,
the action interests him little, the motives of the actor
much ; he is lavishly, often quite unnecessarily, descriptive
of the characters and the scenes in which they move ; and
the best in his books— their style, their joy of living, their
pervading consciousness of the mystery of man and that
background of nature before which he plays his part —
appeal only to the imagination responsive to these
influences. The adjective romantic, if used of Conrad's
tales, must be understood in a sense other than that in
which we apply it to Scott or Dumas. His romanticism
is not the romance of a stirring tale of adventure, but the
romanticism of an imaginative and poetical vision of life,
as intensely stirred by the dark and close-smelling fore-
castle as by the tropical splendour and blazing sunlight
of the East Indies.

F. T. Bullen was wanting in the style, the imagina-
tion, the passion for involved psychology which charac-
terise the genius of Conrad, but he
Frank Thomas wrote of sea life with experience, a native
Bullen, 1857-1915. gift for expressing himself well, and he
could paint scenes which he knew vividly
and realistically. For fourteen years of his boyhood and
youth he served on a whaler ; and his first and best book,
The Cruise of the Cachalot (1898), is a transcript from his
early experiences. The success of this venture led him to
the writing of other tales of the sea ; and of these may be
named, The Log of a Sea-waif (1899), With Christ at Sea
(1900), A Whaleman's Wife (1902) and Told in the Dog
Watches (19fO). These books are not striking or remark-
able, but they give evidence of an observant eye and a
gift of writing in a strong, simple and wholesome
manner.

412 THE NOVEL [PART iv

Mr. John Masefield, although he has since turned to
other courses, also began as a writer of sea stories. A
Mainsail Haul (1905) was a collection
John Masefield, of short tales of the sea. Lost Endeavour
b. 1874. (1910) and Jim Davis (1911) are tales of

adventure in which incident counts for
more than character. In the same class Captain Margaret
(1908) is a more arresting volume, for a finely narrated
story of broken love is worked into the romance. It is
raised above the ordinary tale of adventure by its strong
character-drawing and by the spirit of poetry which
illuminates the narrative. And these are the redeeming
features of Mr. Masefield's first true novel, Multitude and
Solitude (1909), an otherwise exasperating piece of work,
for the story breaks into two distinct parts, which are
only dove-tailed crudely and violently. In the earlier
part of the book Mr. Masefield tells the story of a dramatist
whose play fails, whose life is further embittered by the
death of the woman he loves ; in the second half the hero
is, by a mechanical collocation of incidents, engineered
off to Africa to study sleeping sickness. And Mr. Mase-
field's longest and most ambitious novel, The Street of
To-day (1911), also suffers from the intolerable clumsiness
of its construction. Lionel Heseltine returns to London
from Africa, and mixing again in the society of dainty
women realises that loneliness in bachelor chambers is
not life. He marries, but only to have his wife leave him
because he cannot give her what she expected. The first
half of the tale is heavily overweighted with the dis-
cussion of social and political problems, and the story
moves slowly; the second half, in which we learn that
Heseltine fails both as a husband and a magazine editor,
is hurried through rapidly. It is evident that Mr. Mase-
field had not planned his work in either book. He is
wanting in art ; when he begins to write he does not know
what he is going to say ; and his staccato, snipped style
makes no pretence to be a pattern of good prose. In his
novels, as in his verse, Mr. Masefield has perhaps come
far short of what he yet may do. His work is breezy,
full-blooded, sincere; it is also crude and violent. In
depth of insight and in fidelity of observation he is a
lesser novelist than many writers of the day ; in Multitude

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 418

and Solitude there is, on the other hand, a spirit of poetry
which makes it a failure of more value than many a
success.

Mr. Robert Hichens combines elements of romance, of
realism, with the study of motives, causes and mental
phenomena. When a young man he
Robert Smythe came to London to become a student of
Hichens, b. 1864. the Royal College of Music; but by a
happy inspiration he chose the moment
when the aesthetic movement was at its height to publish
a witty and spirited satire upon its extravagances. The
Green Carnation (1894) was the book of the moment and a
popular success. It deserved its success, for it was the
most pointed satire of any length directed against the
aesthetic movement. The epigrams and paradoxes of
Esme Amarinth are those of Wilde hardly veiled. " Every-
thing that is true is inappropriate " has all the ring of
Wilde >s manner; and the length and breadth of the
aesthetic moral philosophy is well summed-up in the remark
of Lady Locke — " We are to aim at inducing a violent
rash that all the world may stare at."

Thenceforward Mr. Hichens was committed to the path
of literature, and, diverging from his first direction, the
writing of satiric extravaganza, he turned to more thought-
ful and serious work, till with the most subtle and psycho-
logically intricate of his books, A Spirit in Prison (1908)
he exhausted his powers, and his later volumes, despite
the best efforts of the author, break down under the strain
of trying to catch the former vigour and closeness of
analysis. In Bella Donna (1909) the fantastic element
of his imaginative faculty overpowers his sense of reality
and proportion, and the narrative collapses into a pain-
fully melodramatic effort to represent the glamour of the
Orient. But this is to anticipate, and to pass over several
novels of a better character.

The Green Carnation was followed by An Imaginative
Man (1895), a study in morbid pathology and a satire
upon the shams of modern life, and The Folly of Eustace
(1896). But the curious and original Flames (1897), a
story of spiritualistic phenomena and psychic influences,
was the most remarkable of his earlier tales. Felix (1902)
illustrates the illusions perdues of a young Englishman

414 THE NOVEL [PAKTIV

who is fired with literary ambitions after meeting with
the tailor who once made trousers for Balzac. The book
is partly a tale of the lost ideals of rose-white youth, and
partly an indictment of literary and social life in London.
This and The Woman with the Fan (1904), a well-con-
structed book, are, compared with the occultism of
Flames, realistic novels of the common world. But it
was between the years 1904 and 1908 that Mr. Hichens
reached his best in craftsmanship, insight and concentra-
tion with the three long novels, The Garden of Allah
(1904), The Call of the Blood (1906) and its sequel, A Spirit
in Prison. In these novels, conscious that he was be-
ginning to exhaust his store of observation of English
social life, and anxious to study the psychology of simple,
passionate and unsophisticated men and women, he carried
his scene afield to Northern Africa and Sicily. The Garden
of Allah has a double thread running through its pages —
the fascination of the vast silences of the sandy desert and
the spell of the Roman Catholic faith. Mr. Hichens shows
himself an excellent topographical writer in these tales.

" They were near Beni-Mora now. Its palms appeared
far off, and in the midst of them a snow-white tower.
The Sahara lay beyond and around it, rolling away
from the foot of low, brown hills, that looked as if they
had been covered with a soft powder of bronze. . . .
In this pageant of the East she saw arise the naked
soul of Africa; no faded, gentle thing, fearful of being
seen, fearful of being known and understood; but a
phenomenon vital, bold and gorgeous, like the sound
of a trumpet pealing a great rtveilU. As she looked
on this flaming land laid fearlessly bare before her,
disdaining the clothing of grass, plant and flower, of
stream and tree, displaying itself with an almost brazen
insouciance, confident in its spacious power, and in its
golden pride, her heart leaded up as if in answer to a
deliberate appeal."

The desert in its influence upon the heroine of the story
plays a part comparable to Egdon Heath in Mr. Hardy's
Return of the Native. It governs the narrative and moulds
the characters of those men and women who come in con-
tact with it. Against the sombre colours of the desert is set

CHAP, m] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 415

the somewhat melodramatic love-story of an English girl
and a renegade Russian monk. As Boris, the monk, hears
the call of love and the world, so in The Call of the Blood
Maurice Delarey, half English, half Sicilian, is hurried
by his passionate southern blood into faithlessness to his
wife and a tragic end. But it is in the sequel, A Spirit
in Prison, that Mr. Hichens gives us his finest and closest
work as a student of the mind. A long novel, it is perfectly
co-ordinated, and the development of the theme — the
bondage of the spirit shielded by a lie — is used with extra-
ordinary skill and power. A Spirit in Prison is a fine
piece of writing, and immeasurably Mr. Hichens *s most
substantial work. Bella Donna represented a great
falling off, and only too evidently betrayed weariness and
laboured effort. In his attempt to reproduce the atmo-
sphere of The Garden of Allah — the spell of the Orient —
Mr. Hichens became so unbalanced as to suggest compari-
son with Ouida. The Dweller on the Threshold (1911)
restored the scene to England, and reverted to the subject
of psychic influence ; but, compared with Flames, it was a
brief and slight piece of writing. The Fruitful Vine (1911)
is weaker than his best writing, but it is the one book of
these years which does Mr. Hichens the least discredit.
In The Way of Ambition (1913) he tells cleverly the story
of a musical composer forced against his will into writing
for success, and his consequent downfall. He has a
thorough knowledge of his situations and the many types
of people whom he introduces, but the characters are
wire-drawn and wanting in true life-likeness.

Mr. Hichens 's chief failing in his more ambitious novels
is an absence of that humour which he possessed in
abundance when he wrote The Green Carnation. In later
years he takes himself too seriously and coldly. His
analysis of character is egotistical, chilling and unsym-
pathetic. He cannot sink himself in the people of his
imagination. Even in A Spirit in Prison his manner tends
to be intellectually objective. On the other hand he does
succeed in uniting his narrative to the broader and more
important issues of life and the moral workings of the
universe. Flames exhibits the power of mind upon mind
for evil ; The Call of the Blood illustrates the forces of
heredity and unconscious memory; A Spirit in Prison

416 THE NOVEL [PART iv

and The Fruitful Vine point the moral of the revenge
exacted by circumstance for falsehood even in a good
cause. These are motives patient of great dramatic treat-
ment, and Mr. Hichens has the instincts of the dramatist.
But his work is inexplicably unequal. Felix is slight in
invention, thought and treatment compared with work
that went before ; The Dweller on the Threshold makes a
surprisingly lame use of a subject — psychic influences —
which the author had used already with far greater power
in Flames ; and Bella Donna drops to the grotesque when
contrasted with The Garden of Allah. If Mr. Hichens
had not reasserted himself with The Fruitful Vine it would
be natural to say that he had completely written himself
out in 1908, the year of his most thorough, his most
complex and his most convincing novel in the exposition
of character — A Spirit in Prison.

Maurice Hewlett found his strongest inspiration in the
past and in books; he was an historical romancer, but a
romancer with qualifications. In his
Maurice Hewlett, verse he made peculiarly his own the
1861-1923, reinterpretation of classical myth, and in

prose he is equally identified with a dis-
tinctive and original sphere of work in his six or seven
volumes of mediaeval romance. Beside these, however,
he wrote miscellaneous prose and fiction of an entirely
different order. His prose books readily fall into four
classes. Earthwork out of Tuscany (1895) and one or two
other volumes are topographical; The Forest Lovers
(1898), Little Novels of Italy (1899), Richard Yea-and-
Nay (1900), Brazenhead the Great (1911) and The Song of
Renny (1911) are romances of mediaeval Europe ; The Fool
Errant (1905), The Stooping Lady (1907) and Mrs.
Lancelot (1912) are mannered and preciose romances of
love in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries; the
trilogy, Half-way House (1908), The Open Country
(1909) and Rest Harrow (1910), is a comedy of modern
life.

It was first with The Forest Lovers, a romance strikingly
original in style, that Maurice Hewlett won recognition.
The story of the wandering knight and the peasant girl is
of less account than the wider conception of the book, an
attempt to resuscitate and paint vividly the humour,

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 417

the tragedy and the spectacle of the Middle Age. The
exquisite poetry of the setting, the elaborate and closely-
woven style of many colours win upon the reader. But,
beautiful as The Forest Lovers may be accounted as a
poem, the sugared manner soon cloys, and the volume
will scarcely bear re-reading. We admire it once as a
special feat of skill in a difficult kind of work ; but it is
not a book to live with. In style Richard Yea-and-Nay
is less ornate and inwoven; and the author's imaginative
re-creation of the character of Richard Coeur de Lion and
the spirit of the Crusades illustrates his genuine historical
faculty. The ground of nearly all his work is scholarship
and historical instinct. Brazenhead the Great and The
Song of Renny are romances not in any marked way
differentiated from his earlier essays in the same manner.
But his greatest success in this order is in the short stories
of the Little Novels of Italy, in the New Canterbury Tales
(1901) and in The Queen's Quair (1904), that splendid
historical painting of a later period. In historical romance
he wrote nothing else as simple, sincere and living as this
sympathetic interpretation of Mary, Queen of Scots, and
her tragedy. And, if sometimes a little overwrought and
precious, several of the short tales of the other volumes,
especially the exquisite ' Madonna of the Peach Tree '
could not in grace and sentiment be bettered. In these
stories Maurice Hewlett painted the landscape, the cities
and the pageantry of the Middle Age with a realism and
truth of colour which is both beautiful and convincing.
The description of Padua in ' Ippolita in the Hills ' is an
example of perfect writing in the combination of brevity
with wealth of content.

" Padua is a city set in meadows full of light ; it is
well-spaced, plentifully watered, arcaded, green with
gardens. The streets are like cloister- walks ; as in
Lucca, the plane is the sacred tree, and next to that
flag of green on a silver staff, the poplar shows the
city blushful in the spring and thrilling all summer
with the memory. It is a place of brick and marble,
painted orange, brown, yellow and warm white, where
every corner-stone and every twig is printed sharply
on a sky of morning blue,

2 D

418 THE NOVEL [PART.IV

* Quivi le mura son fatte con arte
Che parlano, e rispondono a i parlanti.*

A tale of Padua should have the edge of a cut gem."

And all these tales are like stones beautifully cut and set.
Maurice Hewlett was not a full-blooded romancer. A
pretty sentiment, a quaint turn of phrase, a delicate
colouring of poetry and adventure, a hinted voluptas and
a style thick-woven like old tapestry, these are the com-
ponents of his romance. And he sometimes sought to
create an archaic atmosphere by the use of cheap artifices
in style, which Scott and Dumas had, in general, the
good sense to avoid.

" He saw a table, a chair, and a bowl full of white
substance, stiff and glistening. * Sit down and take
your filling of it,' said Myrrha. Gervase put his fingers
into the bowl and sucked the tips of them.

" ' It is the same you had in your pocket,' he says;
then sat down and ate some of the stuff. It had a very
sweet sharp taste and was pungent in the nose. He
ate for a time, but sparingly/5

In this short passage Hewlett tries to make tKe style
suggest something other than modern English by a few
little tricks which might well have been left. Not to
write modern English is not necessarily to invest narrative
with a mediaeval atmosphere. He writes " Take your
filling " for " Eat your fill,5' he writes " The same you
had " for " The same as you had," and describes a smell
as " pungent in " instead of " pungent to " the nose.
From these little twists it is not a far road to the larding
of the narrative with impossible mediaeval oaths, the
dressing of characters in hosen and shoon, and the rest
of the romancer's stock-in-trade. If we are compelled,
however, to cavil at minor points, the intrinsic beauty and
art of these tales there is no disclaiming. They are aglow
with the passion and pageantry of life.

As a painter of character Maurice Hewlett did better
work in his romances of a later historical epoch. The
Stooping Lady is, whether consciously or unconsciously,
so bare-facedly written in Meredithese that we are left in
doubt whether this is the sincere admiration of imitation

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 419

or parody. But in Mrs. Lancelot Hewlett wrote indepen-
dently and gave life to his characters. Mrs. Lancelot and
the men who play a part in her story, the Prime Minister,
her husband, her poet-lover, are creatures of flesh and
blood. Poetry, breathing life, and the subtle study of the
clash of character with character all mark Mrs. Lancelot
as, in truth and realism, his best book. The chief char-
acters, historical and fictitious, of this tale are reintroduced
in Bendish (1918), a story told in the same mannered and
deliberate way. As fiction the book is less successful, for
the historical figures consort ill with the fictitious. It
would have been better to give Bendish his name in
history — Byron.

The three comedies of modern life, Half -way House,
The Open Country and Rest Harrow showed that Hewlett
could desert historical romance and write comedy in
narrative of the present time. But apart from the single
character of Senhouse, gentleman vagabond, travelling
with cart-tent and pony, these comedies would be tame
and featureless. Senhouse is the making of the trilogy,
and one of the most attractive personalities in modern
fiction. For the rest Maurice Hewlett does not achieve
anything which Meredith and Henry James have not done
better before him. His comedies move stiffly and
awkwardly, and do not suggest a source in the experience
of a clear and eager observer of common life.

Hewlett's prose, like his verse, is the work of a scholar,
a student, a man of letters, but it is wanting in spon-
taneity. The marks of chisel and plane, and the measure-
ments of the foot-rule, are left too plainly upon it. The
supreme test of the novelist's art is its closeness to ordinary
human nature ; and, judged by this test, Maurice Hewlett
betrays serious limitations. Nevertheless his mastery of
style, his literary allusiveness, the glow of romance with
which he invests his narrative, and his fine historical sense,
render it impossible to exclude him from any half-dozen
of the first chosen from English writers of to-day.

Two other novelists, gifted with a strong historical
sense, may here be mentioned briefly, Sir Henry Newbolt,
the poet, and Robert Hugh Benson. These two writers use
the historical setting of their tales to carry a moral and
religious lesson ; for Maurice Hewlett the past is no more

420 THE NOVEL [PART iv

than a pageant and a poem. Sir Henry Newbolt's first
prose-book, Taken from the Enemy (1892), is an unpre-
tentious story of a plot hatched in
Sir Henry John England to liberate Napoleon from St.
Newbolt, b. 1862. Helena, and its failure caused by the
death of the Emperor just before the plot
is consummated. Fourteen years passed before he pub-
lished a second novel, The Old Country (1906) ; and this
was followed by The New June (1909) and The Twymans
(1911). The three are bound together by their single
theme—the continuity of history. The Old Country carries
an epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne, beginning, " In
Eternity there is no distinction of Tenses"; and the
romance, based upon the translation of a modern man
into fourteenth-century England, is a tractate upon the
unchangng nature of men's ideals and hopes, despite
changes in the externals of life. Sir Henry Newbolt is
conservative in his sympathies, and believes with one of the
characters of his romance that " man's highest hope can
be nothing if it be not itself a memory." The New June
is another romance of mediaeval England, and an exposi-
tion of the same creed. The Twymans, although a tale
of the present day, is one more illustration of his historic
faith. It relates the fortunes of his hero in a public school
and at the university ; and the tale is permeated with the
belief that the best moral instincts of the English race are
bound up with the noble tradition of corporate life at
school and college. In simple and good English, in a vein
of poetry, as we might expect, these romances do not
fail; but Sir Henry Newbolt is no story-teller, his plots
are of the slightest, their development confused and uncer-
tain, and his characters are thinly sketched. His range of
thought is so limited, his treatment of his themes often so
jejune, that, despite his reverence for style and his sense
of literary responsibility, in prose he goes no further
than in verse. He hardly even writes to kindle the
imagination.

Robert Hugh Benson had powers of imagination,
mystical insight and a fine style, and after his conversion
to the Church of Rome he devoted these gifts assiduously to
her service. Besides writing devotional and religious works
he combated in the novels By What Authority (1904) and

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 421

The Queen's Tragedy (1906) the Protestant view of history.
He had the instinct of the scholar and historian and the

gift of style. In the vigour of his imagi-
Robcrt Hugh nation and in native literary genius he

Benson, 1871-1914. stood above his brothers, Mr. E. F.

Benson and Mr. A. C. Benson; but
the dialectician and the proselytizer overpowered the
artist and often led him into exaggeration and sensation-
alism. Had his mind and imagination been set free he
might have written prose-fiction of wider range and
greater distinction.

Anthony Hope (Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins) may,
perhaps, be placed with the romantic writers, for, though

few have surpassed him in the delineation
Anthony Hope, of modern social life, he can scarcely be
b. 1863. counted with the realists in the stricter

sense, and it was first as a writer of un-
diluted romance that he won fame. Before he had
resigned his practice at the Bar he published his first novel,
A Man of Mark (1890) ; but it was not till he wrote The
Prisoner of Zenda (1894), the romance of a purely
imaginary principality in South Germany, that he became
a popular author. In the same year he produced his
fascinating Dolly Dialogues, presenting the conversations
of a lady with the man she has jilted. Wit, in the better
sense of that word, Anthony Hope does not possess, but he
has a singularly light touch ; and these dialogues illustrate
his power to observe and render back the inconsequent
phases and manners of social life. It is in this faculty that
Anthony Hope need fear no rival among his contem-
poraries. For twenty years he has continued to write
stories often remote from everyday life, but he has shown a
continuous tendency to approximate to things as they are.
The God in the Car (1894) contains skilful dialogue and
relates the not very credible fortunes of a company pro-
moter in South Africa. Rupert of Hentzau (1898) con-
tinued the artificial romance of The Prisoner of Zenda.
In the rapid succession of his later novels, including,
among others, The Intrusions of Peggy (1902) and The
Indiscretion of the Duchess (1904) Anthony Hope never
fails in skilful technique, apt dialogue and a ready ease in
handling his characters, which make him an attractive and

422 THE NOVEL [PART iv

popular writer with something yet in reserve. In
Quisanii (1900) he showed his powers to the best advant-
age. Here he essayed to study realistically the interplay
of opposed characters. Quisante, the rough-grained, half-
cultured political adventurer has little to recommend him
save great intellectual powers and a commanding will.
A lady of aristocratic birth and gentle nurture, fascinated
by his personality, marries him, only to discover the pain-
ful incongruity of her position. The plot-idea is more
ambitious than in the earlier tales ; and, although he never
ceases to be the light-hearted and graceful entertainer,
Anthony Hope gradually inclines to produce an approxi-
mation to the problem novel. Mrs. Maxon Protests (1911)
is an example in point. The vivacious Mrs. Maxon dis-
covers the ailment of incompatibility with her husband.
She leaves him, and later unites her lot with that of another
man, only to meet with fresh disillusions ; and in the con-
clusion nothing is concluded save that Mrs. Maxon realises
there are more things than were dreamed of in her philo-
sophy of emancipation. The whole book is cleverly
conceived and brilliantly written.

If Anthony Hope has often been satisfied merely to
entertain, he is an excellent raconteur and a master of
sparkling dialogue. His style is both easy and good,
his touch is graceful, and he has a wholesome cleanliness
in thought and subject matter. He has never attempted
great things; but he is one of the best living painters
of the lighter side of English social life.

Anthony Hope, although he does not take himself with
the solemn earnestness of many of his countrymen, is
unmistakably English in his outlook
William John Locke, upon life. Mr. W. J. Locke, who
b* 1863. shares certain of Anthony Hope's gifts

as a writer, is as emphatically French
in temper. His irony, his lack of solemnity, the nuance
of his sceptical satire belong to the genius of another people.
Sir Marcus Ordeyne, the virtuoso, the book-collector, the
cultured recluse and ironic philosopher, might conceivably
have been imagined by one of the greatest of living French
writers. Mr. Locke's temper is un-English; he knows the
French and their language almost as a native, and he
delights to place the scenes of his tales in France.

CHAP, m] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 423

For ten years or more he wrote novels without drawing
attention to himself, nor was his early work worthy of
remark, save as an average example of good melodrama.
The generous hero takes upon himself the sins of others
and lives a dilapidated, a vagrant and a Bohemian life
— this is the common formula, and Mr. Locke does not
desert it in his later and better books. For in the reserves
of melodrama Mr. Locke continues to dwell. He is not
the serious student of work-a-day life; and were it not
for a certain quality of style, of irony, of insouciant gaiety,
his tales would scarcely call for mention. But Mr. Locke
is of interest among English writers as a passable example
of French irony translated to these shores. The inconse-
quence of his narrative and the looseness of his form is
purely English.

Before the appearance of The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne
(1905) he had written eight books. Typical of these early
melodramas are At the Gate of Samaria (1895), Idols (1899)
and Where Love Is (1903). It was not, however, till he
wrote the first-named book that he gave distinctive proof
of literary gift ; and in dramatised form the novel met with
great success. From a writer almost unknown he became
one of the most popular and best-selling authors of the
day. The substance of his narratives still remained as far
from reality as in his early melodramas, for Mr, Locke
has little sense of responsibility and no sincerity of
intention. As a reaction against the commonplace world
he enjoys writing of la vie de Boh&me ; and he is a skilled
entertainer who can hold our interest in his characters
from moment to moment and afford to neglect his story.
The situation in The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne is whim-
sical and wholly improbable, but it is, at the least, amusing.
Sir Marcus Ordeyne, baronet and literary recluse, picks
up in the streets of London Carlotta, who has escaped
from a harem in Alexandretta.

Mr. Locke followed Marcus Ordeyne with his master-
work, The Beloved Vagabond (1906), slight, but one of the
most delightful and charming essays in fiction of recent
years. The old formula of the man unfairly ostracised
by society is used, and the shabby, dirty, drunken, happy-
go-lucky, erudite vagabond, Berz&ias Nibbidad Paragot
is a figure of contrasts, genius, wisdom and hopeless moral

424 THE NOVEL [PART iv

delinquency, as strange as FalstafPs self; and every right-
minded person will feel that the world has need not only
of its sober, righteous and industrious citizens, but also of
its Falstaffs and Paragots. The story of Paragot's
vagrancy with Asticot, the boy, and Blanquette de Veau,
the peasant girl, soon fades from the memory ; the tale is
nought, but the personality of the whimsical, great-
hearted, Quixotic tramp is unforgettable. It matters little
whether Paragot might or might not have been; in
the kingdom of fanciful imagination he is a notable
figure.

Unfortunately Mr. Locke has written nothing since so
good. His humour and jesting irony have never again
been so companionable. His books have always been
entertaining; but fancifulness has become a strain and
a labour; his readiness has begun to fail him. The
incidents which go to the making of Septimus (1909) are
the same, and the plot, such as it is, is adopted with the
necessary modifications from The Beloved Vagabond ; but
invention is weaker and the characters want the reality
of those in the earlier book. Septimus reads like a tale
made by rote for serial publication, the form in which
it first appeared. And Simon the Jester (1910), with its
loves of the man condemned by the doctors to an early
death and the woman trainer of wild beasts, is riotous
extravaganza. The Glory of Clementina Wing (1911) is
better, and Clementina, the disillusioned, untidy Bohemian
artist of genius is one of the most sincere and credible of
Mr. Locke's characterisations. The Joyous Adventures of
Aristide Pujol (1912) scarcely calls for mention save as an
excellent example of picaresque romance in modern times ;
Stella Mans (1913), which has for theme the relationship
of the adult and the child, is washed in sentimentality;
The Fortunate Youth (1914) is an extravagant tale of rise
to success.

Mr. Locke was once capable of better things than he
has ever done. But he has chosen the less excellent way
of popularity. And his invention is weak : his plots are
monotonous and his characters unreal. A good style, when
he cares to use it, a caustic irony and that kind of nimble
fancy which produces good farcial opera are his native
gifts.

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 425

Alfred Ollivant is one of that group of English writers,
increasing each decade, whose gifts are recognised in the
United States before they are much
Alfred Ollivant, heard of in their native country. Owd
b. 1874. Bob, published in 1898, waited nearly

ten years before its striking power was
recognised in England, although in an earlier and less
finished form, as Bob, Son of Battle, it had long been
accepted by American readers and critics as one of the
strongest and most original novels of recent times. To
say of Owd Bob that it is the best story of canine life
ever written does not debar us from adding that it is also
but little behind Mr. Hardy in its pictures of rough life and
homespun character. It is a work of sincere and sym-
pathetic observation, of splendid imagination and of
poetical genius. From Dr. John Brown's Rob and his
Friends (1858), through Bret Harte to Jack London, the
story of the dog has gone its way; but all canine tales
that went before are secondary to the story of Owd Bob,
the grey dog of Kenmuir. In its mingling of tenderness,
pathos and strength, in its poetry, in its nervous and
vigorous style the book is immediately distinguished from
the ordinary novel of the day. Shepherds, sheep-dogs
and grey fells — these are the material of Mr. Ollivant's
story, and with these he writes his epic of the tailless tyke
that sinned the unforgivable sin of sheep-murder, of
M'Adam, his puny, vindictive little master, and of the
gentle and chivalrous grey dog who fought the black killer
in the wide silence of the moors. There is a fine dramatic
sequence in the events, beauty in the passages descriptive
of nature ; and in the natural force with which he writes
dialect Mr. Ollivant shows a rare literary talent. As a
first novel it is a more than remarkable piece of work ; and
this strong book was written by a young man physically
injured, lying in pain.

It was to be expected that Mr. Ollivant should continue
with another dog story, and Danny (1902) appeared after
four years, only to be withdrawn and published in the
following year in a revised form. Even in its better dress
Danny is disappointingly inferior to Owd Bob ; the story
is slight and conventional, and concerns human beings
more than the canine hero. It is not, like its predecessor,

426 THE NOVEL [PART iv

an independent and original book. There is some exquisite
writing, and passages of true and tender pathos; but
whereas in Owd Bob the glow of imagination made the
whole more than the parts, we remember the second story
by excerpts rather than as a whole.

After this Mr. Ollivant began to experiment, and each
successive book has been a trial of skill in an entirely
different field. The Redcoat Captain (1907), written in a
curious, staccato baby-language, suggests a nonsense-
book upon a first reading of its opening pages. It is,
in truth, a thoughtful and often very beautiful allegory
of life's meaning. It is the

" only one Story, and it is the best story in the world ;
but it is not finished yet, and never will be.

" And this story grows better and better all the time,
which is how we know it from the written stories that
we read.

• •••«•

" For no story really ends sadly for the very good
reason that it can't.

" For Love is Love, and in the end of all Love must

win."

Mr. Ollivant wrote in a not dissimilar staccato manner
his next book, The Gentleman (1908), a story of England
in 1805 and an attempt to abduct Nelson. The romance
flows swiftly through a series of kaleidoscopic scenes of
war, peril and bloodshed. The Taming of John Blunt
(1911) is the least distinctive of Mr. Ollivant's books.
The unconventional wanderer, who is by hypothesis a
gentleman, spasmodically a man of letters, constitutionally
a Socialist, and his experiences with well-bred ladies who
are at first a little alarmed at his uncouth dress and talk,
is by no means a new situation. John Blunt is cousin to
Maurice Hewlett's Senhouse, and in melodrama he would
not always be an incongruous figure. Far better is The
Royal Road (1912) in which, once again, Mr. Ollivant
entirely changes his milieu and paints the life of the
working classes in the mean streets of London. The book
is a signal example of the author's versatility, for both
in humour and truthfulness he rivals Mr. Arthur Morrison
and Mr. Pett Ridge on their own ground.

CHAP, m] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 427

The long interval of silence which followed Mr. Ollivant's
first book suggested that he was to be known only by
one volume. But since 1907 he has continued to write,
not rapidly, yet continuously, and he has refused to repeat
himself. In each tale he has chosen different settings and
characters. Fortunately or unfortunately, however, his
first book has overshadowed the others. None of his later
novels has been as independent, original, powerful and
dramatic; and his name will always be associated with
the prose epic of the tailless tyke and the brave yet gentle
grey dog of Kenmuir.

The novel is patient and long-suffering; like a good
traveller it adapts itself to circumstance, and in every
place is soon at home. Whatever the changes in fashion
it must endure ; and it wears the clothes of one season as
readily as another. Of all forms of the literary art it is the
most vulnerable and the least able to defend itself against
unfair attacks or prying inquisitiveness. It is easy for the
poet, the essayist, the journalist, the critic to guard against
the ennui of his leisure by writing and publishing an
occasional novel. There are thus many novels, of greater
or less merit, written by those who are not by profession
novelists, novels which can be classed under no distinctive
heading ; they are by turns romantic, realistic, didactic, fan-
tastic, grotesque, brilliant and dull. But the novel, like
every work of man's hands, is exacting, and the great novels
have been written by men who were first novelists and after-
wards poets, essayists or leisured men about town. It will
not, however, be out of place to note more briefly the work
in fiction of a few modern writers who do not treat the
novel as the occupation of a lifetime. And among writers
of this class are naturally to be named Mr, G. S. Street,
Mr. Hilaire Belloc, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Saki and Mr.
E. V. Lucas.

Mr. G. S. Street is best described as a man of letters.

He was a contributor to Henley's National Observer and a

more than ordinarily good writer of that

George Slythe type of essay known as " middles." Mr.

Street, b. 1867. Street's essays, in their urbanity, read-

ableness and in the wide knowledge of

good literature they display are among the best of our day.

He has collected a number in Miniatures and Moods (1893),

428 THE NOVEL [PART iv

Quales Ego (1896), Some Notes of a Struggling Genius
(1898), People and Questions (1910) and On Money and
other Matters (1914). In The Autobiography of a Boy
(1894) he wrote a moderately successful satire upon the
aestheticism of Wilde and his followers. In 1905 his
comedy, Great Friends, was produced by the Stage
Society. And upon the death of Mr. Brookfield in 1918 he
was appointed to be an Examiner of Plays. He has also
written short stories and two novels. Mr. Street is there-
fore versatile and a writer of parts. The Wise and the
Wayward (1897), his first novel, was a satire upon those
useless members of society who dally ignobly with life.
The Trials of the Bantocks (1900), his second novel, is
again sustained satire, and modelled upon the pattern of
Thackeray's Snob Papers. The Bantocks are a family
typical of middle-class English snobbery, and the trials
they endure are the severe shocks their snobbishness
receives. Thackeray's Snob Papers grow sometimes mono-
tonous ; of Mr. Street's book it may be said that the vigour
and humour of his satire hardly falter for a page. But
Mr. Street is an essayist rather than a consecutive writer ;
and his only book which may fairly be called a novel,
The Wise and the Wayward, is one of his least successful
efforts. He has style, satirical humour and the genius of
the born critic, and these stand him in good stead in the
miscellaneous essays and in The Trials of the Bantocks,
where he is at his best.

Mr. Hilaire Belloc is with Mr. Street one of the most
vigorous and effective of our living satirists; and Mr.
Belloc is the more imaginative, the more
Hilaire Belloc, witty and the more purposeful satirist
b. 1870. of the two. His first novel of any length,

Emmanuel Burden (1904), satirises
aspects of British commercial enterprise, religious
polemics, newspaper syndicates and other topical matters.
The make-believe, the pretence of unconsciousness in
implication, the brevity and terseness of the satiric thrusts
often recall the manner of Swift. Mr, Clutterbuck9s
Election (1908) and A Change in the Cabinet (1909) are
novels of the same order, save that they introduce a larger
element of political satire. These three books, however,
belong to the story of satirical writing rather than that of

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 429

the true novel. Mr. Belloc is one of the few writers of the
day who can use the weapon of satire without laboured
clumsiness. The heavy bludgeon is not always out of
place, but it must yield to skilful fence with the rapier. In
this relationship it is natural to connect the names of Mr.
Belloc and Mr. Chesterton. The latter is diffuse, and
this in satire is almost always crippling; but he is some-
times the more original and unexpected of the two
writers. On the other hand Mr. Belloc has a concise-
ness and a lucidity of style in which Mr. Chesterton is
generally to seek ; and it is this which lends an individu-
ality, a grace, a charm to books like the ever-delightful
Path to Rome (1902), to his essays, his topical and
historical writings.

Mr. G. K. Chesterton only claims consideration as a
novelist incidentally. He is other things first; for the
most part a journalist, witty, paradoxical, didactic, in an
age of indifference and scepticism preaching with whole-
hearted enthusiasm the Catholic Faith, asserting that only
for the gullible and credulous is it possible to be sceptics,

denouncing asceticism and the mortifi-
G. K. Chesterton, cation of the flesh, protesting the joy of
b« 1874. life will we only accept and live it.

Further, with all his whimsies, he is a
critic of insight and illumination, as witness his Charles
Dickens (1906), his brilliant essay introductory to a selec-
tion from Thackeray, his miscellaneous essays collected in
Heretics (1905), Orthodoxy (1908) and other volumes. Mr.
Chesterton's work is varied, and it is nearly all occasional
in character — detached essays and brief books on topical,
religious and literary subjects — in other words it is jour-
nalism, but journalism scintillating with paradoxical witti-
cisms. The only fault of Mr. Chesterton's method is that
his paradoxes tend to become mechanical and stereotyped.
We are startled into attention when we read of the " bois-
terous masculinity " of Jane Austen, but the trick repeated,
like a familiar drug, loses its power. As any one can, after
a kind, learn to write couplets in the manner of Pope,
so any one, after a kind, can learn to write paradoxes in
the manner of Mr. G. K. Chesterton.

His natural habitat is Fleet Street, his proper work the
essay or sketch written hurriedly against time ; and those

430 THE NOVEL [PART.IV

of his books which may be loosely described as novels
differ little from amusing and satirical journalistic essays
thrown into loose narrative form. They are frolics and
excursions into satiric and didactic fantasy. The Napoleon
of Hotting Hill (1903) is a whimsical nonsense book, the
story of a king at Notting Hill who drives in his blue
omnibus. The Man Who was Thursday (1907) is an extra-
vaganza, too long for its subject, of an anarchist council
who discover themselves to be police in disguise. The
implication — the ease with which men abet each other in
hypocrisies — is obvious. The Ball and the Cross (1910) is
a disjointed fantasy illustrative of faith and disbelief.
Manalive (1912), with a mingling of the Chestertonian
manner, is nearer to life and a little less whimsical.

In his novels Mr. Chesterton is little occupied with the
actual and the probable. To render things as they are
and probe the mysteries of character in conflict with the
circumstances of life is not his purpose, but to preach
a religious optimism and tittilate the intellect with a play
of words and whimsical ideas. With the essay and the
journalistic " middle " he is at home : his tales are, on
the whole, more tiresome than his other books.

Mr. Hector Munro (" Saki ") was also an essayist,
satirist, and writer of fantasies. He contributed short and
humorous sketches to the papers which
"Saki," have been collected in Reginald (1904),

1870-1916. Reginald in Russia (1910) and The

Chronicles of Clovis (1912). These sketches
have wit and point, and the humour is that of a thoughtful
man. His single novel was The Unbearable Bassington
(1912); Mrs. Elmsley (1911) is to be attributed to another
Hector Munro writing in a manner not unlike that of a
capable novelist who also comes from the north of
England, Mr Allan Monkhouse1 ; and in the case of either
narrative is a little laboured; and the dialogue is often
det&ched from the characters or permeated with the
theories and thoughts of the author. The Unbearable
Bassiftgton is a sketch of character and social life written
in epigram and studied phrase, and, despite literary skill,

l Allan Monkhouse: A Deliverance (1898); Love in a Life (1908);
Dying Fires (1912); True Love (1919); My Daughter Helen (1922);
Marmaduke (1924).

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 481

suffers from the common fault of narrative in this method,
an unconvincing distribution of conversational brilliance,
if the indispensable foils be excepted. When William Came
(1913), a fanciful and bitter satire upon the apathy of
England in the matter of national defence, is a strong
piece of writing, but its interest is not that of the novel
which studies the experiences of common life. Hector
Munro was by instinct a humorist and satirist ; his essays
and short sketches sparkle with a wit that is pregnant and
illuminative ; in the sphere of the legitimate novel, though
he wrote better than many, he was unable to make full use
of his natural talents.

Mr. E. V. Lucas, essayist and biographer of Charles
Lamb, in Over Bemerton's (1908), and other novels or
sketches of later date, displays a grace
E. V. Lucas, and wit peculiarly his own. The charm

k 1868. of these books lies in aimless digres-

sion ; narrative is slight ; nevertheless the
characters are firmly sketched.

The Irish novel, it has been pointed out in another
chapter, has little relationship with the Celtic Revival,
and, indeed, presents no marked and
Stephen Gwynn, distinctive features which differentiate it
k 1864* from the contemporary novel as it is

written in England. Nor, again, has
Ireland within recent years produced any work of note
in fiction, no writing that may definitely be placed with
that of Carleton, Lever and Lover, whatever may be the
faults of exaggeration and melodrama in the earlier Irish
novelists. There are but few now who call for mention —
Canon Sheehan, Mr. Stephen Gwynn, * G. A. Birmingham '
and Mr. James Stephens. And Mr. Gwynn is a critic, a
miscellaneous writer, a Nationalist in politics, before he
is a novelist. His few novels, including The Repentance
of a Private Secretary (1898) and The Old Knowledge
(1901) call for no special remark. Mr. Gwynn is de-
servedly better known as an essayist, editor, critic, topo-
graphical and political writer. Nor is it possible to speak
in detail of the many novels of the popular c G. A. Bir-
mingham ' (Canon James Owen Hannay), who began by
writing ecclesiastical books under his own name, before
he adopted a pseudonym and wrote in rapid succession a

482 THE NOVEL [PART iv

series of high-spirited, humorous, inventive and resource-
ful novels — among them Benedict Kavanagh (1906),
Spanish Gold (1908), Lalagc's Lovers
G. A. Birmingham, (1911) and The Red Hand of Ulster
k 186S- (1912). Canon Hannay is a competent

writer, but his chief purpose is to enter-
tain, and as a novelist he represents no literary aim or
idealism.

A better literary quality and greater personal charm is
inherent in the novels of Canon Sheehan, who won fame
as an author late in life. His first book
Canon P. A. did not appear till he was forty-three

Sheehan, years old. Before this he had worked as

1852-1913. a curate, first in England, but later and

for the most part in Ireland. In 1895 he
became parish priest of Doneraile, and in 1905 Canon of
Cloyne. In recognition of the services his writings had
rendered to religion the Pope conferred on him the degree
of D.D. in 1903.

To the greater number of his readers Canon Sheehan
is known as the author of My New Curate (1899), which
first gave proof of his power as a story-teller and his
command of a clear and attractive English style. But,
beside this and other tales of simple Irish life, he essayed
authorship in several different fields. The Triumph of
Failure (1899), a Roman Catholic apologia cast in the
form of a story, remained a favourite book with Canon
Sheehan himself. The Queen's Fillet (1911) was an
historical romance constructed upon the accepted patterns.
In Miriam Lucas (1912) he abandoned his native Ireland
and lost his touch with reality. Under the Cedars and the
Stars (1903) and Parerga (1908) are two volumes of dis-
cursive essays by a writer gifted with a style and a
sufficient body of ideas to hold the reader.

But the charm of Canon Sheehan 's writing is to be
found in the novel with which his name is associated,
My New Curate, and its successors in kind, Luke Delmege
(1901), Glenanaar (1905) and The Blindness of Dr. Grey
(1909). In these tales he wrote of the life he knew well,
the parish priests, curates and peasantry of Ireland. The
stories are told and the characters delineated with a
humour and an air of cultured and reflective ease which

CHAP, in] THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL 433

lend them a peculiar charm. In these novels there is no
writing of note or importance; the characterisation is
good without being vivid; but the urbane humour and
excellent style raise them above ordinary books of the
day.

Mr. James Stephens was discovered for a poet and
rescued from the office typewriter by A. E., and when
he is writing prose it is the poet with
James Stephens, the dashing, careless, happy-go-lucky,
k 1882. Spartan philosophy of life, the poet of

Insurrections and The Hill of Vision,
who wins the day. The Crock of Gold (1912) is written
in prose, but it is a poetic fantasy as much as Meredith's
Shaving of Shagpat, save that the humour is almost too
riotous and abundant for poetic fantasy. It is pure fancy,
a fairy-tale for grown-up people, introducing a philosopher
dwelling among the pine woods, his shrew of a wife,
Leprecauns, Pan, Angus Og, god of joy and love, beasts
and insects, all speaking in the Irish idiom. Mr. Stephens
has a native gift of style, a fine instinct for the choice of
the right word, his pages are rich in epigrammatic reflec-
tions upon life ; but perhaps the most striking charac-
teristic of The Crock of Gold is the abundant and varied
wealth of his imagination. The same reckless imagination,
half-cynical yet generous humour, give a distinguishing
character to the storiettes and impressionistic sketches of
men, women and children in Here are Ladies (1913). The
Charwoman's Daughter (1912) was, perhaps, written earlier
than the other two, for it is a less original book, although
it shows that Mr. Stephens can write a realistic tale of life
among the Dublin poor. Like all his attempts at story-
telling it is no more than a sketch, and he sometimes
forgets that the novelist is not the essayist. But it is a
sincere and sympathetic piece of writing. The Crock of
Gold is, however, Mr. Stephens 's most distinctive achieve-
ment hitherto in imagination and poetry, more original
even than his verse.

CHAPTER IV

WOMEN NOVELISTS

Mrs. Humphry Ward — * Olive Schreiner '—Sarah Grand — ' George
Egerton '—' Iota '—Elizabeth Robins— May Sinclair— M. P. Will-
cocks — Beatrice Harraden — * Lucas Malet ' — ' John Oliver Hobbes 9
Mary Coleridge — * Elizabeth ' — Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler — Lady
Ritchie— M. L. Woods—' John Strange Winter '— W. K. Clifford-
Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick— Netta Syrett— Una L. Silberrad— Ethel
Sidgwick — Jane Barlow — Katharine Tynan — Nora Hopper — * Somer-
ville and Ross ' — ' Ouida ' — M. E. Braddon — Marie Corelli.

As early as the beginnings of human speech the impulse
to story-telling must have come strongly upon man, and
fiction has been written since the earliest stages of any
script ; but the novel, as we understand that word to-day,
is a literary form of comparatively recent growth. In
England we may date it from the eighteenth century.
Fiction in plenty had been written and printed before
that time ; but the consecutive life that can be traced
from the work of Defoe to our own day is a growth in
itself. Defoe's novels, it may be, were a growth from the
womb of the picaresque romance, but the child grew under
a new nurture and the conditions of a more stable and
ordered society. His books were no longer the fantasy,
the chronicle romance or the short conte ; they were that
kind of fiction we now define by the epithet realistic. And
from Defoe to the date of the Sentimental Journey all
things were added to the novel ; little has since been done
save the constant perfecting of its machinery. In fifty
years the working principle was set and established ; and
all changes since have been little more than modifications
or adaptations of the standard pattern to new conditions.

As soon as the novel of the eighteenth century won its
right of way the path was followed by an ever increasing
company of women writers, who found that here they
could compete on more equal terms with men than in any

435

486 THE NOVEL [PAET.IV

other form of the literary art. With the novel, at least,
a few women have challenged the higher ranges attained
by men. Sarah Fielding, Mrs. Haywood, Mrs. Radcliffe,
Mrs. Inchbald, Hannah More are still remembered by
name, and by the few their books are read. At the close
of the eighteenth century Frances Burney and Miss Edge-
worth did better work, though they fell far behind Jane
Austen, incomparably the greatest woman novelist
England has produced. It is needless further to multiply
names and instances; for novels written by women fall
faster than autumn leaves in Vallombrosa. After Jane
Austen the three greatest names in English fiction are
Emily and Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot.

And these names point a moral. One of the first
tendencies in feminine fiction was the projection of
domestic and social interest, the emphasis laid upon the
importance of small details in the common round of life.
In a few women writers, Mrs. Radcliffe for example, the
tendency to romance appeared; but as woman's life is,
in general, less adventurous than that of men, so the
romantic incident, love apart, has less play in feminine
fiction. And this was all to the good ; for it emphasised
what human nature gladly forgets on the slightest pro-
vocation— the enormous importance of the insignificant.
But with the Bronte sisters and George Eliot a change
came over the face of things. On the one hand passionate
earnestness and a franker realism and on the other an
obsession with intellectualism were emphasised as they
had never been. These tendencies have largely moulded
the later courses of novel writing by women ; and not
infrequently for evil. Ethical propagandism, abstract
intellectualism, debate upon economic, religious and sexual
questions, strenuous realism (not always with sufficient
knowledge of life), have often warred against the things
that are more excellent. Jane Austen had no message to
deliver, but the impersonal truthfulness of her painting
of life shows us more that is of permanent value to our-
selves than all the intellectual labour of George Eliot and
many of the later women novelists.

But, for good or ill, the argumentative novel by women,
from the level of Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand and Mrs.
Humphry Ward to that of Miss Marie Corelli is with us.

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 487

For over a quarter of a century Mrs. Humphry Ward
issued to her hundreds of thousands of readers in England

and America her stately sequence of intei-
Mrs Humphry lectual novels, and still the armies who
Ward, 1851-1920. support the circulating libraries consume

unsatiated a fiction which treats the
range of modern life, its religious difficulties, its questions,
social, political, moral with a thorough and laborious
exactness not always found in works sociological, theo-
logical, moral, addressing themselves only to the reader
acquainted with the technicalities of the subject and
making no profession to engage the lighter-minded. The
subject matter of Robert Elsmere (1888), David Grieve
(1892) and Marcella (1894), divested of the unnecessary
accompaniment of a story would not have sold in tens
against the thousands actually reached in circulation.
Nevertheless, though Mrs. Humphry Ward had skill in
developing a story, hardly anyone will contend that she
had a happy gift of mixing her heavier matter with a
narrative thrilling and dramatic which deceives the unwary
reader into a belief that he is interested, till he finds the
moral, like the advertisement, administered at the end.
There was no lightness in her touch, no graces, no rapidity
of movement; her intellect, like that of George Eliot,
worked slowly and laboriously, and, like George Eliot, she
was serious-minded. In her intense earnestness, her depres-
sing seriousness and her total lack of humour lay the secret
of her success with the thousands who read her novels.
Among the majority of her readers will be found the tacit
acceptance of the fallacy that novels are not serious books,
and that serious books are more worthy of attention than
lighter literature. In this belief they live and move, but
the flesh is weak and conduct rarely attains to profession.
When reading the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward they can
still their twinges of conscience in the persuasion that they
are studying almost serious books, an opinion in which
others will more than agree with them. Among the
amateurs of social and religious thought, who are inter-
ested in topics of the day, without any inclination to
observe and think for themselves, will be found the admir-
ing readers of Robert Elsmere and Marcella. There is a
finality, an authoritative manner in the implications of

488 THE NOVEL [PART iv

these books, which cannot fail to impress. How many who
read Robert Elsmere must have been staggered to notice
that, despite its overpowering evidence, there were still
clergymen who held their orders and betrayed no intention
of relinquishing them. It is difficult to avoid the belief
that in reading these novels one stands in the forefront of
modern and advanced thought. The reader is flattered,
continues to read and gathers others about him.

For these dilettantes in seriousness there is no question
of art. A book is nothing in itself apart from the moral
instruction it conveys. For the magic of style they have
no faculty of appreciation ; emotion and imagination only
puzzle them. And humour, without which life cannot be
clearly seen, they probably regard as unworthy the dignity
of better-class fiction. But for others, and they are not
a small class, it is the absence of these qualities which
prevents them from regarding Mrs. Humphry Ward as
a great writer. Her work was interesting and valuable to
her generation in its comprehensive grasp of contemporary
conditions ; but unemotional and intellectual photography
is not art and has little likelihood of long life. The pro-
foundest topic intellectually treated in narrative is as
short-lived as most intellectual dogmatisms. But the over-
powering seriousness of it all won the respect of masses
who regarded Mrs. Humphry Ward as a teacher delivering
earnestly the important message committed to her ; while
the wit, humour and ironical banter of her kinsman,
Matthew Arnold, brought him the reputation of being a
sceptic who trifled carelessly with serious things.

The tenor of Mrs. Humphry Ward's books is partly
accounted for by the history of her early life. Her father,
Thomas Arnold, was a son of the great head master of
Rugby. Thomas Arnold, the younger, was an inspector
of schools in Tasmania, and Mary Augusta was born at
Hobart in 1851, About this time her father's mind was
troubled with religious difficulties; and in 1856 he was
received into the Roman Catholic Church. In consequence
he resigned his inspectorship, returned home with his
family, and was appointed by Newman, Professor of
English Literature at Dublin. He followed Newman to
Birmingham, and there published his Manual of English
Literature (1862). Again doubts came upon him and he

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 439

reverted to the Anglican Communion. But in 1877 he
returned to the Church of Rome; and in 1882 he was
appointed Professor of English Literature at University
College, Dublin. He died in 1900. His daughter was
brought up chiefly at Oxford ; and early associations with
scholarship and religious discussion permanently impressed
themselves upon her mind. In 1872 she married Mr.
Thomas Humphry Ward, fellow and tutor of Brasenose,
editor of the well-known English Poets (1880-81), and later
the principal art critic of The Times. Thus Mrs. Humphry
Ward grew up under the traditions of Oxford, the Arnolds
and an academic atmosphere of religious conflict. And
equally with George Eliot, with whom it is natural to
compare her, her work is powerfully influenced by the
environment of her girlhood. In the Oxford manner Mrs.
Humphry Ward instructed those less fortunate than her-
self, with a high moral earnestness she carried on her
shoulders the burden of all the churches, and in the sur-
charged atmosphere of religious difficulties she breathed
freely.

She began as an authoress by contributing articles to
Smith's Dictionary o/ Christian Biography (1877-87) and
wrote reviews for Macmillan's Magazine. In 1885 she
published a translation of AmieFs Journal Intime. Her
first experiment in fiction was a child's story; and her
first true novel, Mm Bretherton (1886), is but a slight
book. In 1888 came Robert Elsmere, a novel gathering
up the strands of the battle between religion, philosophy
and science, summarising admirably the main features of
the conflict as they appeared to men in the fourth quarter
of the last century. The book came a little after the
particular battle it described was over, with honours
drawn on either side ; but, because it was a belated picture,
it made a wide appeal to the great majority who always
learn after the event. It ran through seven three-volume
editions in England and a large number of cheap editions
in America. Whatever its merits or demerits, whether as
a work of art or a philosophic-religious tract, Robert
Elsmere was one of the most widely-read novels of the
period. Its popularity it owed chiefly to its discussion of
religious questions; for, in the form of a serious novel,
Mrs. Humphry Ward succeeded in forcing home upon

440 THE NOVEL [PART iv

thousands normally uninterested in these questions a
remarkable anxiety concerning the place of the miraculous
in religious belief. Mr. Gladstone came out into the lists
to defend Christianity in the pages of the Nineteenth
Century; the book was reviewed and written upon in
German periodicals and translated into many languages.
If this combination of notoriety and popularity was due
primarily to the religious and spiritual problems treated
in the book, Robert Elsmere is not without strong
character-drawing and dramatic force. The didactic per-
sistency of the narrative may be incongruous with good
art, but the book can claim to be a true picture of English
life at a certain stage of the nineteenth century, it reflects
its academic thought, country, middle-class and cultured
society. In her character sketches Mrs. Ward borrowed
from contemporary situation — Grey of St. Anselm's is
studied from T. H. Green, the philosopher, and J. R.
Green, the historian. The thought is not fresh, it reflects
to a large extent the ideas of Matthew Arnold, which in
themselves were not those of an original thinker. Arnold
attempted to save religion in England by recasting it
hurriedly upon paper with the equipment of a fine culture,
a remarkably good knowledge of the Authorised Version of
the Bible and a creditable acquaintance with the results
of biblical higher criticism. The intention, however good,
was fated to failure. Newman, in another direction, had
tried it before, only to discover that the Via Media was a
paper religion, whereas Protestantism and Catholicism
were religions of the heart which had swayed the emotions
and morals of generations of men. The modified forms
of Christianity to be found in Literature and Dogma and
Robert Elsmere are interesting as personal studies, but
they make no difference to the mass of the people.

And Mrs. Ward is too serious; she has none of the
supercilious humour and irony of Arnold. Her literary
gift in Robert Elsmere best appears in the happy appro-
priateness of her quotations, and in her passages descrip-
tive of nature. She reaches distinction in her painting of
landscape, sunlight, shadow, wind and rain. And in this
faculty she is not limited to the scenery of Westmorland
or any other part of England with which she is intimately
acquainted. In one of her later novels, Canadian Born

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 441

(1910), a story of colonial life, the fruit of a visit to Canada,
she is at her best in this aspect of her work. The descrip-
tion of Lake Louise bathed in the freshness of the morning
will almost compare with Meredith's wonderful descrip-
tion of sunrise in Tyrol. The worst feature of Robert
Elsmere, on the other hand, is the figure of the sceptical
and scholarly squire of Elsmere 's parish, an exaggerated
Coningsby of the intellect, a character far more ludicrous
than impressive.

The History of David Grieve is a tale even more
ambitious than Robert Elsmere, and heavily overweighted
with didactic purpose, covering a wide field of study in
sociological and religious problems. In David Grieve the
authoress chose for her hero not the scholar, but a
rough man of the lower classes. Lawful marriage and
free love are contrasted in his relationship with two
women; his mental experience affords an opportunity
for illustrating the battle of the modern sects, in religion,
politics, sociology. In a popular edition of David Grieve
Mrs. Ward chose to defend the novel of speculative ideas
by asserting that in life these are present, and that to
cast them away is to confine art to the reflection of but
a part of life. In her eyes the speculative matter of
David Grieve is as legitimate to the novelist as the emotions
of the peasant. Mrs. Ward failed to see that the question
is not whether speculative ideas should find their way
into the novel, nor even the extent to which they should
find their way, but the manner in which they are intro-
duced. Assuming, despite the theory of Wilde, that it
is the business of art to reflect life, the artist has also
to remember that nothing in nature or in human nature
is plainly expository of any ethical or religious idea, save
that brought to it by the spectator. And great art, in
like manner, has no neat and unmistakable doctrines of
life and conduct. Experience is action and reaction
between man and his environment ; and whatever inspira-
tion art has to offer lies in a temperamental reciprocity
between the individual and the novel, poem or picture.
But in David Grieve we sit at the feet of a mistress who
permits no doubt of her meaning; nothing is left to be
gathered from experience ; we learn by rote from a text-
book. And in the end of things, Jane Austen or Synge,

442 THE NOVEL [PART iv

to choose two dissimilar types, who never dreamed of
inculcating religious or speculative ideas, set us more in
harmony with life, and therefore move us more for good
than all the laboured philosophies of all the intellectual
novelists.

The content of David Grieve is large, the matter diver-
sified, the scope a little overpowering. With Robert
Elsmere, and two later novels, Helbeck of Bannisdale
(1898) and The Case of Richard Meynell (1911), it is to
be counted with those tales of Mrs. Humphry Ward which
deal mainly with religious problems. Helbeck of Bannis-
dale traces the love affairs of a devout Catholic and an
Agnostic girl. The Case of Richard Meynell is a sequel
to Robert Elsmere, and introduces characters from the
earlier book. But times have changed, the full tide of
Modernism has set in, and Richard Meynell, a beneficed
clergyman and leader of the Modernists, claims the right
for himself and those who follow him to remain within
the national church, there to work out their salvation
and that of a church which is rapidly losing its hold upon
the people because it refuses to modify its interpretation
of the creeds. As a story it moves more rapidly than
Robert Elsmere ; and the optimistic futurism of the hero
is certainly more attractive than the painful conscientious-
ness of the central figure of the earlier book. But in
unbending seriousness and confident didacticism Mrs.
Ward lost nothing in the interval of twenty-five years.

David Grieve showed that the authoress was as much
interested in politics and social questions as in religion;
and Marcella, its sequel, Sir George Tressady (1896) and
The Coryston Family (1913) are largely concerned with
social questions. In Marcella Mrs. Ward drew the woman
of intellect and culture, who discovers that the world is
not to be regenerated by doctrines of Socialism untouched
by force of character. Sir George Tressady continues the
story of Marcella and introduces the young politician,
Tressady, whom she succeeds unintentionally in alluring
into love with her in the course of trying to win his vote
for her husband's party. The Coryston Family, in large
and spectacular outline, covers the ground of most social
and political questions of the day. It is able, it is
ingenious, and again it illustrates Mrs. Ward's power of

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 443

putting together a vastly complicated scene of action.
But theories and questions are so obviously the chief
interest of the authoress, that the reader is never moved
to reciprocal interest in her characters, who are only foils
to doctrine.

Besides these Mrs. Ward wrote tales of a more general
kind, based upon character-study and less upon the
development of abstract and speculative ideas, though
these are by no means divorced from the narrative.
Among these miscellaneous novels the more important
are Lady Rose's Daughter (1903), which borrows its theme
from the story of Mile. Lespinasse, The Marriage of
William Ashe (1905), the story of a statesman and his
unruly wife, an adaptation of the history of Lady Caroline
Lamb, and Fenwick's Career (1906), a tale of artistic life,
in part indebted to the career of Hay don.

In company with George Eliot Mrs. Humphry Ward has
been refused the name and honour of artist, and described
as a woman of great intellectual powers who chose to write
novels. And in her case the disparagement has greater
truth. In her four earlier books, when she drew upon the
reminiscences of girlhood, George Eliot sketched characters
like Janet, Adam Bede, Mrs. Poyser, Silas Marner; but,
after four or five short years of inspiration, she fell back
upon hard thinking, and no great work of art, no con-
vincing portrait of a personality, has been created by
diligent thought. Mrs. Humphry Ward begins by shaping
her books and the characters they contain intellectually,
without emotional leavening, and the result is a series of
novels which reflects contemporary life faithfully, closely,
patiently in a number of its aspects and in diverse social
planes, but the whole is lacking in spontaneity, it is too
evidently a work of industry and strong talent. Emotion
there is little, save a high enthusiasm of the intellect ; wit
and humour are absent, and to the writer's credit, be it
said, she makes no pretence to these gifts. It is difficult,
indeed, to think of any novelist more serious-minded since
Richardson put the finishing touches to Grandison. Mrs.
Ward's theories and doctrines are the common heritage of
her family since the days of Thomas Arnold at Rugby.
These she shaped into the substance of prose fiction. The
enthusiasm of the philanthropist and reformer were hers j

444 THE NOVEL [PART iv

unconscious superiority of manner, engendered by a creed
of culture, limited the range of her sympathy. The
unloveliness of Dissent disturbed her as it did Matthew
Arnold ; and she had little share in the vision granted to
Browning and Walt Whitman, that the vulgar failures of
life are often as valuable in the sight of God and man as
the bitter defeat of the dreamer of noble ideas. Mrs.
Humphry Ward's view of life was too unbendingly serious
and too academic to note clearly and consistently the real
springs of life in those primal emotions and impulses which
finally govern the tangled complexities of a social world
thinly veneered with artifice and convention. Tolstoy
could be as perseveringly didactic as Mrs. Humphry Ward,
but he understood the natural man and woman who have
never sought the means of grace; Mrs. Ward wrote of
these only by hearsay and guess. She would have been
a better observer of life had she been taught to think
less in the language of books; she is always least the
artist when she thinks most; and it is rarely she escapes
forcing her work by hard thinking.

In the technique of the novel she learned much. She
can unfold a tale with great skill, whether in her longer
books or in the short Story of Bessie Costrell (1895) ; and
her development of the narrative by means of dialogue is
often strikingly ingenious. But these virtues do not save
Mrs. Humphry Ward's novels from appearing works of
intellect rather than inspiration.

The tenor of Mrs. Ward's thought had been settled in
the Victorian days of Tennysonian morality, in the atmo-
sphere of eager conflict between the forces of sceptical
science and orthodox religious belief, at a time when the
more ardent of the leisured and fortunate class confidently
hoped that they had only to stoop to raise the masses
to a plane of higher thinking and happier life. Many
things have changed and some illusions have been
shattered since; but Mrs. Humphry Ward's attitude
toward the world of men and women did not greatly alter.
Though she was always earnestly occupied with the
question of the hour she remained Victorian, distant, staid
in her manner; and among women writers of the intel-
lectual novel she has no true successor. In one sense she
belongs to a past, and others to whom it is now natural to

CHAP.IV] WOMEN NOVELISTS 445

turn belong to a new world. If they treat, as they do at
large, questions social, sexual, religious it is in a new, a
franker and a more uncompromisingly realistic manner.
Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm (1883) may
be taken as a rough indication of a new date in the story
of the feminine novel. Other women writers who have,
since that time, built their narratives upon questions of
religion, sex, morality, are not necessarily to be counted
her disciples, but the Story of an African Farm marks the
beginning of a new spirit and method. And among others,
who have followed a similar path are to be named Sarah
Grand, George Egerton, Iota, Elizabeth Robins, Miss
Beatrice Harraden, Miss May Sinclair, Lucas Malet and
Miss M. P. Willcocks.

Olive Schreiner (Mrs. S. C. Cronwright) was born in
Basutoland where her father was a Lutheran missionary.
In 1882 she came to England with the
Olive Schreiner, manuscript of her Story of an African
1862-1920. Farm, which was published in the follow-

ing year. And though she continued to
write at intervals for thirty years she will be remembered by
this one book. The title is scarcely a guide to its contents.
It is not a story of adventure, nor of pioneer life, nor even
a quiet and descriptive narrative of life on an African
farm. Olive Schreiner possessed gifts of imagination and
a picturesque style which enabled her to draw vividly life
on a lonely Boer farm set in the midst of the sandy veldt.
She showed sympathetic insight and abundant humour in
her drawing of the characters of the fat and dirty Boer
widow, Tant* Sannie, of the kindly and gullible German
overseer, of the ragged Irish adventurer, Bonaparte
Blenkins, of the two little girls, Em and Lyndall, and of
the German boy, Waldo. In simplicity of narration,
economy of material, close concentration in the drawing
of characters and scenes the Story of an African Farm
is an example of true art. But the groundwork of the
narrative lies deeper, in the study of a mind tortured with
religious doubts. The ideas belong to an old, a way- weary
and a sophisticated world. It is a sad and haunting tale
of the passage of a sensitive and lonely mind from
Calvinism to Atheism. And in the latter half of the book
woman, her rights in society and her relationship to man

446 THE NOVEL [PAET.IV

arise for discussion. The beauty, the tragic intensity and
the frank sincerity of the story would save the book were
the abstract basis of the narrative more obviously exposed ;
but it is impossible not to suspect, despite the realism
of the character-drawing, that the ideas are incongruous
with their setting. So much simplicity and so much
sophisticated argument of the mind are incompatible. The
doubts which resolve themselves into the passionate
scepticism of the boy, Waldo, would find their fitting
home in London or a University town. The Story of an
African Farm is a book of two parts. Whatever the value
of the transcendental musings, these are a matter of small
moment in comparison with the art and beauty of the
narrative.

Nothing that Olive Schreiner afterwards wrote is of
equal importance or interest. Dreams (1891) and Dream
Life and Real Life (1898) contain idylls and dream fantasies
carrying an ethical or spiritual meaning. But the best
of her later writings is Trooper Peter Halket of Mashona-
land (1897), an allegory in which Christ appears to a
trooper lost on the veldt and shows him; the evil works
of Cecil Rhodes and the Chartered Company in shooting
natives, burning kraals and forcing native labour. In
simplicity and eloquence of style it is a pamphlet of rare
distinction. The attack was not allowed to pass un-
answered. In The Resurrection of Peter (1900) Princess
Radziwill writes of another Christ who appears and
demolishes his predecessor's arguments by explaining the
gospel of imperialistic Christianity. Throughout the
retort the trooper's surname is mis-spelt.

With one exception the later writings of Olive Schreiner
fall far below the level of her first book; and they are
scarcely more than occasional pieces. In the Story of
an African Farm she seems to have exhausted her powers
of drawing on any scale from observation and experience.
Latterly her interest was almost entirely diverted to
ethical and political questions; and even her first book
would probably not have been written save as a garment
to clothe the argument between belief and unbelief. As
a novel and a work of art it is successful despite the
intention of the authoress. The question of woman's
place in society is also, as already has been hinted, a

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 447

subsidiary part of the book's ethical implication; and

this is almost the whole business of Sarah Grand's novels.

Sarah Grand (Mrs. Frances Elizabeth M'Fall) has

asserted that " The * novel with a purpose ' and the * sex

novel,' are more powerful at the present
Sarah Grand, time, especially for good, than any other

b. 1862. social influence." And she takes com-

fort in the thought that Mrs. Humphry
Ward has a thousand readers to Stevenson's one. She
herself has written several novels with a purpose advocat-
ing what is vaguely known as the woman movement. She
is anxious that woman should enjoy a better social ap
moral relationship with man in order that the race

bettered. " Emancipated women consider motherhr
most important function of their lives. . . . E n(jar(j
reason they have begun to demand a much higher £ .
of morals and physique than usual to satisfy them
husbands." Ideala (1888), like Grant Allen's

Did, is an outspoken sex novel. Ideala, the
original and independent woman, with a wea"<:iAmono.
uttering moral maxims and plunging into lengthy Harent
logue, falls in love with a man other than her indiffajree
and faithless husband. She determines to form a *
union, but realises in time that even were this cow.
justifiable to her, it might by other people be used as t\
example to provide them with specious excuses for their
own ends, and she refuses. At this moment the truth of
the maxim she utters much earlier in the book — " Unfor-
tunately there appears to be no neutral ground for us
women : we either do good or harm " — is borne in upon
her. Ideala is a tract rather than a novel. It has none
of the dramatic interest of The Woman Who Did ; and the
chief function of the heroine is to utter lengthy comments
upon life. Art in the telling of the narrative there is none ;
but the hortatory matter is relieved by abundance of
epigram and illuminating humour.

Sarah Grand's best known work, The Heavenly Twins
(1898), even more pertinently illustrates her incompetence
as a story-teller. The narrative wanders by devious ways,
and the whole leaves upon the mind a sense of utter
formlessness. The escapades of the twins are subordinated
to the story of the woman who discovers her husband's

448 THE NOVEL [PART iv

past the moment after marriage, and forthright refuses
to live with him. Evadne is the typical illustration of
Sarah Grand 's contention that woman must henceforth
demand in man the same standard of morality as she
expects in her sisters. The narrative is surcharged with
ethical implication and moral discourses which are but
clumsily united to the action of the story. The whole
book may be described as disorganised diorama. Never-
theless it has the force of strong individuality and the
personal point of view; and the humour is of the best,
springing from the characters and illustrating them; it
is not merely an embellishment to the narrative.

Jn the art of narrative The Beth Book (1897) is greatly
superior to The Heavenly Twins. Beth is another exemplar
of the new woman. Her story from childhood to married
life is c&rried forward in clear sequence. Babs the Impos-
sible (1901) is the study of a type of girlhood and the
contact of a young woman with the world. The short
stories of Emotional Moments (1908) were many of them
written at a somewhat earlier date. They illustrate
varying moods and emotions in the feminine mind.

In? art of narrative and in the faculty of presenting a
large number of characters in interaction with each other
Sarah Grand has given us her best work in Adnam's
Orchard (1912). It is a book far less argumentative than
her eaMier tales, though sidelights upon questions of sex,
the position of woman, the relationship of rich and poor
are by no means absent; nor has the author shaken off
the habit of turning from her tale to address the reader.
But the story is left to produce its own effect, without
expository commentary, and with a greater freedom than
Sarah Grand has hitherto allowed to it. The background
also is new; for Adnam's Orchard is a picture of rural
life, contrasting labourers, farmers, yeomanry, with the
landed and titled classes. Adnam, the pioneer of intensive
culture in his neighbourhood, his father and mother, Ella
Banks, the lacemaker, the yokels in the inn parlour and
the household at the castle are all drawn with greater
truth and impersonality than the authoress has succeeded
in reaching in any of her earlier books.

Sarah Grand is a woman of strong intellectual force;
she has humour and an eye observant of ftuman nature ;

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 449

she is possessed by a sincere indignation at the disadvan-
tages under which she imagines woman to labour in a
society made by man for himself. She adopts the form
of the novel, because, apart from pulpit and platform,
it is the most sure and direct form of appeal to the great
mass of those who can be stirred to thought upon any
question. She is not wholly without the art of character-
drawing, but it may be doubted whether she has any true
sympathy with men and women apart from the ideals
and conceptions they illustrate to her. Her women,
Ideala, Beth, Evadne, are not so much women as idealisa-
tions of the new woman ; and in complexity of character
interest she has done her best work in Adnam's Orchard,
in which she is least possessed with the spirit of the
reformer. Yet, with all her faults as an artist, her
didacticism, her total lack of any sense of form, her out-
bursts of exaggerated diatribe, her novels, like those of
George Egerton, stand for something personal and
distinctive in the expanse of feminine fiction. The thought
is intense, sincere and consistent. The moral inspiration
of her ideals and convictions is without a doubt. It
would have been well had her genuine gift of humour
saved her from some of those uncontrolled statements
which are near neighbours to the shriek of Trafalgar
Square. Even in the most equable of her books, Adnam's
Orchard, she can close a long passage of commentary with
the childish assertion that " When man legislates for
woman, it is not the brute in him that prevails, it is the
devil/' Fortunately these hysterical lapses are few; and
her better mind is expressed in words which are the
groundwork of all her writing :

" Personally I believe that the woman movement is a
great effort of the human race, an evolutionary effort,
to faise itself a step higher in the scale of development ;
and this conviction forced itself upon me when I found
that, beneath the surface, earnest and intelligent women
were everywhere expressing great dissatisfaction at the
present haphazard of marriage and maternity.5'

George Egerton (Mrs. Golding Bright) is to be counted
in the same group of women novelists, for though in her
earliest and best tales she was a disciple of the French
2 F

450 THE NOVEL [PABT.IV

naturalistic school, she wrote with a moral purpose and to
advocate a fuller and franker equality of the sexes* Many

years ago a daily paper declared of her
George Egerton, that she wrote with " the least amount

of literary skill, and the worst literary
taste." The statement serves to illustrate the blind-
ness of the average reviewer to the work of an author
who was sincerely attempting to present life with no eye
to the common market standard of fiction in her day.
George Egerton's contributions to the Yellow Book and
her early short stories single -her out as the feminine
counter-part of Hubert Crackanthorpe, and this is high
praise. Her writing reflects an original mind, a power
to draw upon observation ; and it is in tales of close realism
or in the psychological study of souls who have sinned
and suffered that she is most successful. In the imagina-
tive realisation of beauty she is wanting ; and for this reason
the moral fairy-tales of Fantasias (1898) fail of their pur-
pose— they lack charm, the style of the author is not suited
to the subject. In Symphonies (1897) the redemption of
life through hopes, ideals, affections and the tender
sympathy that comes of blighted ambitions is drawn with
true feeling ; although these tales impress upon the reader
the conviction that life is a strangely a-symphonic affair.
The volume contains much good work. Among its best
tales are * The Captain's Book,' the story of an ineffective
dreamer who never wrote the great book that was the
nursling of a lifelong imagining, and ' Oony,' a pathetic
story of Irish life.

George Egerton's strongest work is, however, contained
in the harsh and unshrinking realism of an earlier book,
Discords (1894). ' Wedlock,5 an extraordinary and almost
repulsive story, which might have come from Gorky,
compels admiration for its truth in observation and its
fidelity in detail. In a different mode * Gone Under ' is a
fine piece of psychological insight, though it illustrates
the author's want of brevity and entire relevance in the
use of every detail, which is so admirable in the work of
Crackanthorpe. And in her later stories and sketches the
fault of diffuseness grew upon George Egerton. But for a
few years in the early nineties hardly anyone was doing
better, stronger and more sincere work than N she.

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 451

Her later books, which are less distinctive of her genius,
may be noted briefly. Rosa Amoroso, (1901), a book of
woman's love letters, appeared shortly after Mr. Laurence
Housman's Englishwoman's Love Letters, although they
were written before its publication. They reveal a woman
more human and lovable than the tediously self-conscious
being of Mr. Housman's letters. The letters themselves
are strong, simple and unaffected. The sketches and
stories of Flies in Amber (1905) are hardly up to the
standard of the early tales. George Egerton fell further
into a tendency, to which she was always prone, of telling
a story by fluttering flights about its centre ; and she lost
the fine directness of her earlier style.

It is the misfortune of some women writers that they
cannot treat questions of sex without exaggeration or
morbid obsession with a single idea. Sarah
*°ta» Grand 's humour does not save her from this

b. 1856. failing. George Egerton knew the world of

men and women better; and, therefore,
though she deals realistically with sordid scenes and
characters there is no taint of morbidity in her writing :
and this is equally true of the problem novels of Iota (Mrs.
Kathleen Caffyn). Her first book, A Yellow Aster (1894),
gave her a reputation. Two years before Miss Corelli's
Mighty Atom it chose for its subject the exclusion of
religious teaching from the education of children. There-
after the story tells of the growth of love through mater-
nity in the daughter of unparental scientists. It is a
thoughtful piece of work, though characterisation and plot
sequence leave much to be desired. The latter part of
the narrative is, however, better conceived and carried
through than the earlier. In cohesion and clearness
Children of Circumstance (1894) loses much. It has all
the appearance of having been written before its predeces-
sor, although the characterisation is more subtle and calls
for greater attention. The narrative turns upon the stale
familiarity of a wedded pair who find it impossible to over-
come the incompatibility of their characters. The best of
lota's later books are Anne Maulverer (1899), a fine study
painted in strong, sure touches, and Patricia (1905), a
problem in contrast between a woman and her daughter-
in-law, whom; she misunderstands. Nor does one of her

452 THE NOVEL [PART.IV

latest books, The Fire-seeker (1911), fall behind these in
the faithfulness with which she treats the interaction of
character with character. lota's work is always worthy a
careful reading; for she has no irrational prepossessions,
she sees life clearly, simply and in the light of humour,
and she has a wide knowledge of men and women in
different parts of the world* Her entire interest is with the
soul in crisis and development, and in dramatic quality
her narrative largely fails. Her dialogue also is sometimes
prolix; the bearing of her narrative is occasionally
obscure ; but her character-drawing is nearly always good.
When Elizabeth Robins (Mrs. George Richmond Parks)
embraced the " woman movement " she did her work

as a novelist irreparable injury. Her
Elizabeth Robins, best writing was all done before she

was troubled with questions of sex and
the place of woman in the social order. She was
born and educated in America, and first made a name
for herself as an actress, especially as an interpreter
of Ibsen's heroines. Her first novels, George Mandeville's
Husband (1894), The New Man (1895), Below the Salt
(1896) and The Open Question (1898) were written under
the pen-name of C. E. Raimond. But in 1904 she pub-
lished under her own name the powerful Magnetic North.
The earlier novels are chiefly studies of problems in
modern social life ; though Below the Salt consists chiefly
of farcial sketches of life below stairs. In The Open
Question Elizabeth Robins took up a problem dear to the
heart of Ibsen, and probably suggested by him, the
influence of heredity. The lovers of the story are two
cousins with the seed of consumption in them. These
earlier novels exhibit the chief characteristics which belong
to the later — the intellectual force of the writer, her
interest in questions concerning her sex, and the almost
masculine attitude of her mind.

The last named characteristic becomes more pro-
nounced in those books in which she abandoned a
pseudonym. The Magnetic North breaks new ground.
The authoress made herself acquainted with the details of
the Klondyke gold-rush; and her story, which falls
naturally into three parts, traces the history of five men
and their disillusion with the land whither they came

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 458

hoping for wealth. The Magnetic North is no tale of
adventure ; it is largely written in dialogue, and it digresses
with unpardonable frequency. But the characters of the
Kentucky Colonel, the agnostic Boy, and the woman,
Maudie, are brilliantly and sympathetically delineated.
Four years later Elizabeth Robins followed The Magnetic
North with another tale, Come and Find Me! (1908), in
which the scene is laid partly in California and partly
in Alaska. The two, in their open-air and romantic
character, are remarkable books for a woman to write;
and it is not surprising that the C. E. Raimond of the
earlier novels was mistaken for a man.

Unfortunately at this stage Elizabeth Robins chose to
become more definitely a novelist with a purpose. In
1907 she wrote The Convert, a document in the form of
fiction upholding the cause of woman's suffrage. In the
same year she composed a play, Votes for Women. And
in 1912 came a lurid tract, Where are you going to ... ^
an extravagantly coloured picture of the white-slave
traffic, which appeared during one of those periods of
moral indignation which seize the English public, and it
enjoyed, therefore, a notoriety it did pot deserve either
as a novel or as a faithful picture of the evil it delineated.

It is in the work of her middle period that Elizabeth
Robins writes at her best, in The Open Question, The
Magetic North, A Dark Lantern (1905) and Come and
Find Me! These are novels built upon observation and
clear, unprejudiced thinking. They are written also with
a steadiness and sincerity of intention, a close grasp of
essentials, and an interest in the life of action and the
open air, which lend them the character of work by a
man rather than a woman. The proportion of dialogue
to direct narrative is very large in all her books. And
yet she eschews the attempt to write brilliantly. Her
people talk as we believe they would. Her dialogue is
remarkably realistic and handled with great skill in
carrying the narrative forward. Her drawing of character
is broad and objective, unlike the detailed and more com-
plicated manner of many women novelists. If in anything,
Elizabeth Robins 's narrative is wanting in background.
Even in The Magnetic North the Alaskan wilderness is
sketched in with a bare sufficiency of line and colour.

454 THE NOVEL [PART iv

There is not the slightest suggestion of intimate acquaint-
ance with or a love of the wilds. The river, the hills,
Dawson City and the snows are paint and pasteboard,
like a piece of stage scenery. In these pictures of the
north Elizabeth Robins challenges comparison with the
wonderful and vivid painting of Jack London, and it is a
comparison she cannot sustain.

With Elizabeth Robins Miss May Sinclair exhibits
toward life an attitude which is curiously masculine, yet
marked by traits which are patently
May Sinclair. feminine. No man could find so con-

tinuous a source of interest in the psycho-
logy of irregular relationships as Miss Sinclair used to
discover. The masculine mind is more objective and
indifferent where men and women are concerned; even
the nervous French temperament is not obsessed in the
same way. Nor, again, does the ordinary masculine writer
make that parade of learned lore which Miss Sinclair pre-
sents for our admiration in The Divine Fire (1904). In
like manner Miss M. P. Willcocks, to choose but one
example of another living writer, often goes far to reduce
to tedium a dramatic story by loading it with masses of
irrelevant knowledge.

If Miss Sinclair wishes to make us feel the incongruity
between the soul of a shopkeeper-poet and his surround-
ings, in so doing she burdens the narrative with an unneces-
sary weight of learning. This is a fault in art. The
obsession of her narrative in The Divine Fire, Kitty
Tailleur (1908) and The Combined Maze (1913) with the
sensuous side of sexual relationship is a fault in balance
and judgment. Women fair and frail the world has always
known; but Miss Sinclair's erring women are false to
reality in their entire want of prudential consideration
and self-knowledge. Neither in aberration or in penitence
are they credible. Their motives are hard to read, their
actions causeless, and we suspect that Miss Sinclair, like
the Brontes, confuses sensationalism with realistic
strength. In style, and in the conduct of the narrative,
she is only too prone to lay on her colours thickly and
crudely. The Divine Fire and The Creators (1910) are
hymns to literary genius, in which the fine frenzy of the
creative artist is laboured to weariness. It is well to

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 455

remember that great artists, from Shakespeare to Rodin,
have been comparatively sober and ordinary human
beings. And, though she is capable of simple writing,
Miss Sinclair can be as rhetorical and bombastic as
Charlotte Bronte at her worst. Her excellent book on the
Brontes is disfigured by purple patches of rodomontade ;
and her novels often suffer in the same way. If, for
example, she wishes to inform us of the simple fact that
reviewers were changing their attitude toward the work
of George Tanqueray she writes :

" They postured now in attitudes of prudery and
terror; they protested; they proclaimed themselves
victims of diabolic power, worshippers of the purity,
the sanctity of English letters, constrained to an act
of unholy propitiation.95

Disproportion more ludicrous between words and the
meaning they are intended to convey it is difficult to
conceive. Fortunately Miss Sinclair has learned a more
guarded restraint. The Combined Maze, the story of the
heroic bearing of a London clerk under tragic marriage
conditions, is told with a rapidity and directness which
is more effective by far than the manner of her ambitious
novels.

It would seem a difficulty for the intellectual woman
who is also an artist to combine these two sides of her
nature. George Eliot's later work breaks down under
the stress of conflict between intellect and imagination.
And in Miss Sinclair the same absence of equipoise is
apparent. Intellect often masters her art. When, as in
The Combined Maze, she is compelled to write of the
ordinary and unintellectual experiences of life she is saved
from her besetting temptation.

To a certain extent the faults charged against the work
of Miss Sinclair are also the failings of an able writer,
Miss M. P. Willcocks, whose books have their setting in
the West Country. In no case, however, have her tales
any essential connection with place ; they are not, like the
novels of John Trevena or Mr. Eden Phillpotts, tales of
the people and the soil. In any other environment the
characters, with slight modification, would equally be real
beings. Widdicombe (1905) first made her name known.

456 THE NOVEL [PART iv

The Wingless Victory (1907) and A Man of Genius (1908)
further enhanced her reputation; and The Power Behind
(1918) enjoyed an even greater popu-
M. P. Willcocks, larity. Miss Willcocks's novels, in inten-
b. 1869. tion and to some degree in accomplish-

ment, are set far above the common
standard of the popular novel. She is sincere, con-
scientious, painstaking and a woman of wide knowledge.
But she cannot restrain herself from emptying dead know-
ledge, whether relevant or irrelevant to the action, into
the pages of her narrative. She is hard-working, thought-
ful, intellectual, and these gifts she uses to the best
advantage ; but her power as an artist is not in proportion
to her endeavour.

Miss Beatrice Harraden is another writer who may more
distantly be included in the " woman movement. " She
was twenty-nine when she won fame
Beatrice Harraden, with Ships That Pass in the Night (1898),
b. 1864, a book which had a phenomenal sale. The

popularity of the tale was due to its senti-
mental ethics and simple piety, lures which never fail to find
response in the great middle class of the British public.
Bernadine, the self-centred English girl, learns the lesson of
everyday dutifulness in the scenes of pathos and misery
which she witnesses in a foreign Kurhaus. She comes home,
after touching the heart of the most disagreeable man in the
English colony, to brighten the life of her old uncle. She
dies in consequence of an accident, but duly fulfils her part
by leaving an edifying message behind her. The languid
story has little merit either in style or characterisation.
Hilda Straff ord (1897), a tale of no great length, illustrates
in another way the same lesson in conduct. A selfish wife
fails to realise her duty of love and helpfulness toward
her husband. In Katharine Frensham (1908) the moral
is diverted in the contrary direction — the beautiful nature
of the heroine wins a moral victory over the sensitive and
irritable hero. Out of the Wreck I Rise (1912) is a longer,
a more ambitious and a more successful, but in no wise
a remarkable book. A part of the narrative is founded
upon a recent and well-known case of embezzlement by a
dramatic agent. Adrian Steele, in the story, defrauds
his cliepts ; but, under the influence of a mystical clergy-

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 457

man and other friends, he reaches a better frame of mind*
Unfortunately a careless avalanche buries him and his
hopes of a nobler life. Both title and the plot motif —
discovery of the true self and instant death — are borrowed
from Browning.

The sentiment and ethical faith of Miss Beatrice Har-
raden's tales have touched the heart of many thousands
of English readers in this and other lands. Her gifts as
a writer are, however, slight. She has little invention or
imagination ; and as a stylist she can make no claim. At
the most it may be said that her tales are wholesome and
do not offend against likelihood and probability.

Lucas Malet (Mrs. Mary St. Leger Harrison) is also to
be counted with writers of the feminine emancipation,
but not wholly, for she is not a writer
Lucas Malet, obsessed with but a few ideas, and her

k 1852. work exhibits a wide range of experi-

ment in diverse directions. She is a
daughter of Charles Kingsley, and was born at Eversley
Rectory. In 1876 she married William Harrison, Rector of
Clovelly , and a few years later published her first novel, Mrs.
Larimer (1882). For a first attempt it is a finely written
book; the technique is good, the style is clean and
vigorous. The story is not in itself remarkable — a young
widow rejects a new love for a life of good works devoted
to the memory of her dead husband. There is, however,
one powerful scene in the picture of Fred Wharton's pro-
posal to Mrs. Lorimer. Lucas Malet followed her first
novel with Colonel Enderby's Wife (1885), Little Peter
(1887), an idyll of country life with sketches of country
characters, and A Counsel of Perfection (1888), which has
a theme out of the common in its representation of a
middle-aged woman 's impulse to love a man unworthy of
her. It is a curious and fascinating tale. But it was first
with her outstanding novel, The Wages of Sin (1891),
that Lucas Malet won wide recognition. The tale — a
rising artist falls into youthful indiscretion and pays the
penalty in the ruin of his hopes when he attempts in later
years to rise to a better and cleaner life — is developed
with forcible realism and skilful concentration in the
sequence of events. The tragic intensity of the story is
relieved hv ^learns of ironin humour, the characters 'are

458 THE NOVEL [PAKT iv

carefully and strongly contrasted, the style is consistent
and clear. In craftsmanship The Wages of Sin is not only
Lucas Malet's best book ; it is a novel that rises far above
the level of contemporary fiction. Had the authoress
written nothing else this book alone would serve to give
her an honourable and distinctive place. In nothing that
she has written since has she surpassed her work here.

The Carissima (1896) is a tale in another and farcial
vein of comedy; The Gateless Barrier (1900), a tale of
psychic mystery, treats of the supernatural and has little
to do with everyday reality. The History of Sir Richard
Calmady (1901) won popularity, a popularity due doubt-
less to the uncommonness of the theme — the rake's progress
of a crippled baronet — and the sensuous appeal of several
chapters in the tale. But Calmady is only too obviously a
figure of melodrama in the worst manner of Dumas ; and
Lucas Malet adopted a literary artifice in style which is a
deliberate experiment with the pen rather than straight-
forward writing. As a true work of art, reflecting life
and character, it will bear no comparison with The Wages
of Sin. The allusive and less direct manner of writing
adopted in Sir Richard Calmady, a manner in part, doubt-
less, borrowed from Meredith, persists in a greater or less
degree in her later books. Adrian Savage (1911), a
thoughtful but unnecessarily lengthy piece of writing, does
not escape this tendency. The chief character is a man
of letters, half English, half French, and the scene is laid
partly in Paris, partly in the south of England. It is one
of the large number of novels belonging to the feminist
movement, novels which have for their object not only the
study of character but a critical analysis of the most
modern complications in religion, art, politics and the
relationship of the sexes, novels that miss their end by an
overwrought intensity and seriousness.

The character of Lucas Malet 's work cannot be readily
or briefly summarised. She is versatile, she is widely-
travelled, she has many interests, and though the degree
of her success varies as she writes in different modes, she
never fails completely through mistaking her intention
or her powers. Her temper turns most naturally toward
a direct realism, but, as The Gateless Barrier bears witness,
the 'sunernatural and the mvstic are not unknown to her.

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 459

Her style, save when she becomes imitative, is terse and
strong; and she has a knack of apposite humour. Her
quality as a writer is seen at its best in The Wages of Sin.
In her later work she is far above the ordinary range,
but she is not guiltless of writing to a standard expected
of her instead of expressing what she feels and is com-
pelled to utter.

It is even more difficult to range John Oliver Hobbes
(Mrs. Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie) with any school of
writers. She was a modern woman,
John Oliver Hobbes, intellectually interested in all ques-
1867-1906. tions of the day ; but she was far from

being the purely analytic and didactic
novelist; wit, fantasy and intellectual comedy are the
most marked characteristics of her work. Although in
certain aspects of her writing she is related to the group of
women novelists which has been defined above, she is not
wholly of that group. In epigrammatic wit, in ideas and
the fruitfulness of her comments upon character and social
life John Oliver Hobbes has no exact parallel among con-
temporary authoresses. Her terse force and pointed wit
were doubtless due in a measure to reaction against a life
embittered by an unhappy marriage and the underlying
seriousness of temperament of a woman who gave a large
part of her waking hours to the claims of fashionable
society, though she recognised the emptiness of its pur-
suits and the waste in its monotonous efforts to bridge
the hours. Literature was with Mrs. Craigie an adopted
profession, she fell back upon writing in order to forget ;
but she also came with a vocation to the art of writing.

John Oliver Hobbes was born in New England, but
within a few months of her birth her parents brought her
to London where they settled, and, though she never forgot
her American origin, London became her home to the end
of her life. In her twentieth year she married Mr.
Reginald Walpole Craigie. The marriage proved a mis-
take; she soon left her husband, and in 1895 obtained
a divorce. The distress of mind through which she passed
in these years led her to seek spiritual consolation, and in
1892 she was received into the Church of Rome.

Before the break with her husband she began to write,
and in 1891 made her mark with the short tate Some

460 THE NOVEL [PAUT iv

Emotions and a Moral, which appeared in Fisher Unwin's
" Pseudonym Library.55 On the title-page of the volume
she adopted the nom de plume of John Oliver Hobbes.
In England alone six thousand copies were sold in the
first year and forty thousand before her death. The
fascination of the book lies in its brilliant, acute and
epigrammatic dialogue, and the cynical humour of its
comments upon life. The narrative is of little importance,
and the characters are wholly subservient to epigram;
but it is impossible to read the opening dialogue without
being caught by the allusive vivacity of the writing. The
mind is continually arrested by light but pregnant com-
ments upon life.

" If women once begin to talk about their souls they're
done for."

" Why was transcendent virtue so much less charm*
ing in its methods than mere worldliness ? "

" Some people regard love as a civilised instinct ;
others as a side-dish.

* Those who regard it as a side-dish are less likely
to get into trouble/ said Lady Theodosia,"

Her second book, The Sinner's Comedy (1892), written
during a period of intense mental strain and anguish, is
similar in character to her first. And then quickly followed
A Study in Temptations (1898), A Bundle of Life (1894)
and The Gods, Some Mortals and Lord Wickenham (1895),
all of which failed to attain the popularity of her first
volume. The last named is one of John Oliver Hobbes 's
typical books, a mingling of fantasy, realism, light
cynicism and serious purpose. In Dr. Warre, the central
figure, she has given us one of her best studies in the
psychology of a sensitive and retiring mind. Despite her
banter and raillery John Oliver Hobbes never lets us doubt
her passionate admiration for fine feeling and fine thinking.
In The School for Saints (1897) and Robert Orange (1902)
the texture is closer, the flash of epigram less studied and
the analysis of a single character more elaborate than in
any of her earlier books. Robert Orange, the hero of
both tales, is an idealised portrait of Disraeli, In the
conclusion he deserts politics to take orders in the Church
of RoAie. On these two volumes John Oliver Hobbes

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 461

expended much labour, thought and care, she gave more of
herself and her philosophy of life than she was commonly
disposed to reveal ; for she was writing to please herself,
not a reading public. These novels are not without
dramatic moments; but the background is slight, narra-
tive is subservient to ideas underlying it, and neither is of
the type designed to win popularity. Love and the Soul
Hunters (1902) does not admit of being summarised; it
has that vagueness and indefiniteness in the welding of
ideas and plot which explain her failure when she wrote
for the stage. In clearness of narrative and definition
of outline The Vineyard (1904), a study of life in a country
town, is sharply contrasted with it predecessor. Her last
book, The Dream and the Business (1906), is the largest
in outline and the strongest in handling of any of her
novels. The epigrammatic and vivacious manner was
gradually abandoned by Mrs. Craigie ; it persists, in larger
or smaller measure, in all her novels up to the date of The
Gods, Some Mortals and Lord Wickenham; after that,
when it appears, it is only as an occasional ornament, not
as a continuous embroidery of the narrative. In The
Dream and the Business it has but a small part to play.
The book consists of a skilful study in contrasts between
the Roman Catholic, the Nonconformist and the Pagan
temperaments; and the absence of prejudice is remark-
able in one who followed seriously and with entire faith
the religion of her adoption.

Mrs. Craigie also nursed ambitions as a dramatist, but
the faults which beset her novels told with tenfold force
against her when she wrote for the stage. The Ambassador
(1898), a comedy in four acts, gained some success by
reason of its witty dialogue; but A Repentance (1899)
and The Wisdom of the Wise (1900) were too indistinct
in action and characterisation to meet with a favourable
reception. The fantastic Flute of Pan (1904), after a
successful production in Manchester, failed in London.

John Oliver Hobbes presented more than one side to
the world. She described herself as living two lives, and
her dual personality could be read in her novels did we
not know it from other sources. In that round of social
life in which she took her part she appeared vivacious,
gay and high-spirited ; in the sanctuary of her mind she

462 THE NOVEL [PART IT

was never f*ree *rom melancholy. It was her wish to be

considered an idealist and a philosophic novelist, not the

author off W^*Y and sparkling tales. But, despite her

wide knc^wlec*Se °* philosophy and the wealth of her ideas,

her rn^kd was nefther clear nor logical, and in her longer

nov,els she failed to attain point and coherence. Her plots

<Cre often extremely ill handled, and the lacunae of her

narrative exasperate the reader. Her strength lies in the

acuteness of her biting wit, the searching insight of many

of her character studies (though she is not always stable

and consistent in her delineation of personality) and in a

style light and vivid but never shallow.

It has been said that the work of John Oliver Hobbes
is not to be paralleled in the writings of contemporary
authoresses. Nevertheless it may be
Mary E. Coleridge, permissible to name here one or two
1861-1907, writers of distinction who are chiefly

noteworthy for imaginative fantasy and
a fine wit. Mary Coleridge is rightly remembered as a
poet; but her prose- writing was not only far greater in
volume than her verse, much of it is also well worthy
of preservation. Non Sequitur (1900) was a volume of
miscellaneous essays far removed from the ordinary in
insight, critical thought and style; and at least one of
her prose tales deserves to be remembered. Her first
published novel, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (1898),
an abnormally fantastic piece of writing, though it met
with the praise of Stevenson, is not an example of her
happiest manner. Nor are her two lengthy and ambitious
historical romances, The King with Two Faces (1897) and
The Fiery Dawn (1901) more than moderately successful
experiments. The chief figure of the earlier romance is
Gustav III of Sweden, of the latter the Duchesse de Berri,
and we are introduced to the Paris of Gautier, Balzac and
Hugo. Her only novel, and indeed the book is scarcely
deserving the name, is The Lady on the Drawing-room
Floor (1906), which relates, with droll wit, humour and
tender pathos, the story of a man and woman who loved
once and met again in a London lodging-house. Mary
Coleridge's historical romances leave us cold and uninter-
ested, but this exquisitely witty, true and gentle vignette
of liffe induces a regret that she wrote nothing more of its

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 468

kind. She was not by nature or instinct the novelist,
true gift lay with the fantasy ; and as a writer of fiction,
apart from The Lady on the Drawing-room Floor, si|e
appears at her best in the few short stories she wrote, ancl
of these the pathetic ' The King is dead, long live the
King ' may be named as one of the finest examples of her
prose and her imaginative power.

Noteworthy also for the fine quality of their wit, irony,
satire, terse and effective style are the easy and delightful
minglings of essay, causerie and fiction
"Elizabeth.'1 contained in the writings of the anonymous
authoress (Countess Russell1) of Elizabeth
and Her German Garden (1898). Her first book was
followed by others equally distinguished for their grace,
light-handedness and satirical wit — among them A Solitary
Summer (1899), Princess Priscilla's Fortnight (1906) and
Elizabeth's Adventures in Rugen (1904). In The
Caravaners (1909) the intentional thrust and directness of
her satire upon German life and manners became emphati-
cally pronounced, and the book gave not the less offence
to its victims because the writer was intimately acquainted
with the inner life of the country she attacked.

Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (Hon. Mrs. Alfred Felkin),
although in her later books she has greatly changed hei
method, first gained reputation as a
Ellen Thorneycroft witty and epigrammatic writer. Aftei
Fowler, b. 1860. publishing several volumes of slight verse
she won general popularity with the
novel, Concerning Isabel Carnaby (1898), a book chiefly
remarkable, especially in the earlier chapters, for clever,
if artificial, dialogue and a plethora of epigram. The
story contrasts the manners of a Methodist household
with the ways of fashionable society, and involves a love
episode between a Methodist tutor and a woman of the
world. The hero, the heroine, the minister's humble house-
hold are all well conceived and clearly depicted ; and the
authoress's turn of epigram is often original and telling,
An individual is summed up in the witty remark that hk
temper, like " canal bridges " was never equal to bearing
more than " the ordinary traffic of the district "; and the
careless servant with the observation that " she seeing
l Formerly Countess von Arnim, Married 2nd Earl Russell, 1916,

464 THE NOVEL [PART.IV

to ?egard herself as merely the instrument in a fore-
ordained scheme of destruction," Isabel Carnaby is no
excursion into a new field, yet it is genuine and sincere
work, witty without triviality, for all Ellen Thorneycroft
Fowler's tales are concerned with the tragedy of man's
moral relationship to inexorable circumstance. But the
moral intention of her novels, together with the plot, is
wanting in originality. She will adopt, without scruple,
wildly melodramatic plots, unconscious of the injury she
inflicts upon her characters, who, better than their situa-
tion, are forced unwillingly to make the best of a clumsy
situation, scarcely able to hide the embarrassment they
feel. In A Double Thread (1899) a woman of wealth plays
an incredibly worked-out double role, sometimes posing
as a poor twin-sister in order to find if she may win true
love; and Mm Fallowfield's Fortune (1908) is a tissue
of improbabilities, in which fate juggles skilfully with
Iife7 death, an unexpected reappearance from the grave
and a million of money. Nor is The Wisdom of Folly
(1910), with its sensational murder case and its unhinged
love affairs, more convincing in narrative. In these later
books Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler almost entirely abandons
the display of aphorism and epigram which gave character
to her first novel and several of its successors — The
Farringdons (1900), Fuel of Fire (1902) and Place and
Power (1903).

If we set aside her interest in the claim of religion and
morality on the heart Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler is not a
writer of the day. Peculiarly modern hopes, ideals and
ambitions are not reflected in her tales; and she is not
to be placed with writers like Miss Sinclair, Elizabeth
Robins or Matilde Serao. Her point of view is feminine,
and the relationship of the sexes is to her as it was to
Jane Austen. Her chief gifts are a power convincingly
to characterise ordinary and commonplace people, and a
readiness in the use of good epigram. Work that might
have been better worthy of mention has been weakened
by absence of originality in vision and invention, by
failure in plot-construction and surrender to melodrama.
I/ Other women novelists, whose work scarcely permits of
j&ftnite classification under any heading, can only be
briefly and after a loose chronological method.

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 465

Lady Ritchie, the daughter of Thackeray, followed in the
footsteps of her father, but her work as a novelist ante-
dates our period, and for many years
Lady Ritchie, toward the end she wrote hardly any
1838-1919. fiction. In her novels, her critical studies

and her edition of her father's works she
has shown herself the possessor of a fine literary gift and
a graceful style. In Elizabeth (1863), The Village on the
Cliff (1865), Old Kensington (1878), and other books lead-
ing to Mrs. Dymond (1885), she gave evidence of a power
clearly and distinctively to portray life and character. In
later years she wrote essays, reminiscences and critical
studies, and in 1898 she edited with admirable intro-
ductions the works of her father.

Mrs. M. L. Woods has won greater distinction as a
poetess ; and in another chapter it has been observed that
if we are to judge her by her poetic
Margaret Louisa drama, Wild Justice, and by her novels
Woods, b. 1856. she is to be classed with the poetic
realists. Tragedy and romance are
mingled in her picture of village life contained in A Village
Tragedy (1887), and in The Vagabonds (1894), a story of
life in a travelling circus. In Esther Vanhomrigh (1891)
Mrs. Woods reconstructs the hidden romance of Swift's
life. These, together with her later books, Sons of the
Sword (1901), The King's Revoke (1905) and others,
manifest her large outlook upon life, her intellectual force
and her sense of the poetry of the commonplace.

Among other women novelists who began to write in the
earlier half of the ninth decade of the last century John
Strange Winter (Mrs. Henrietta Eliza Vaughan Stannard)
and Mrs. W. K. Clifford cannot here
John Strange Winter, be omitted, although in neither case
1856-1911. is their work distinctive or significant.

John Strange Winter, the daughter of
a Yorkshire rector, early began to contribute stories of a
sentimental character to the magazines. Her father,
before taking orders, had been an officer in the Royal
Artillery and came of several generations of soldiers. It
was, therefore, natural that the greater number of John
Strange Winter's tales should describe the life of the army-
After her marriage in 1884 she settled in London, and in
2 G

466 THE NOVEL [PART iv

1885 Bootleg Baby: A Story of the Scarlet Lancers
appeared in the Graphic. The tale, when published in
volume form, met with extraordinary favour ; and within
ten years two million copies were sold. Other stories,
similiar in character, were then produced in rapid succes-
sion. The better known are Houp~la (1885), On March
(1886), Heart and Sword (1898), A Blaze of Glory (1902),
Marty (1903) and Little Vanities of Miss Whittaker (1904).

Outside her writing Mrs. Stannard had many activities.
She took an interest in questions relating to women's dress
and appearance, and even sold a toilet preparation of her
own compounding. She was the first president of the
Writers ' Club (1892) and president of the Society of
Women Journalists (1901-3).

Curiously enough Ruskin was one of the most devoted
and admiring of her readers, and described her as " the
author to whom we owe the most finished and faithful
rendering ever yet given of the character of the British
soldier." But Ruskin is not always a safe guide, and his
praise is certainly high-pitched. John Strange Winter
wrote vivaciously, with humour and sympathy; but the
secret of her great popularity lay in the pretty sentiment
with which she touched her tales; and sentimentality is
always a sure road to the heart of the English public. Her
talent never rose beyond that of the highly accomplished
journalistic story-teller.

And, though one of her books is deserving of greater
praise, pleasant sentiment is the distinguishing charac-
teristic of Mrs. W. K. Clifford's novels. She always writes
sanely and sincerely, she is helped by a cultured know-
ledge of English life at home and abroad; her style is
regular and well-formed; and she
Mrs. W. K. Clifford, touches the chord of tender sentiment
without undue exaggeration. A
pleasant wholesomeness of thought, a slender theme skil-
fully elaborated into a long tale are the marks of her work.
Mrs. Keith's Crime (1885) an early novel, contains more
tragedy than is her wont ; but the agonised delirium of the
mother, who prefers her ailing child to die with her rather
than be left to grow well among strangers, is intolerably
extended, till the reader is more exhausted than impressed.
Aunt Anne (1892), by far her best book, is the character-

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 467

sketch of a pathetic figure, a dignified, yet foolish and
sentimental old woman, deceived into marriage by an
adventurer who hopes only for her money. The book is a
remarkably fine study and a strong piece of writing ; the
foolish, tiresome, extravagant old woman remains in our
imagination and elicits our pity as strongly as the figure
of Pere Goriot. A Woman Alone (1901), The Modern Way
(1907) and Mrs. Clifford's other tales, whether novels or
short stories, are distinctly secondary to Aunt Anne. Sir
George's Objection (1910) may be taken as a pattern of the
type. A charming girl's marriage prospects are clouded by
a stain on her father's memory, but the situation clears in
sunshine and happy tears. Such is the texture of the
story; and of the like simple material her other books
are made.

Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick is also the authoress of a
number of pleasant and skilfully written tales, chiefly
negative in character. They are not
Mrs. Alfred realistically burdened with questions of

Sidgwick. the day, nor do they belong to the class

that is wholly tame. The Inner Shrine
(1900), Cynthia's Way (1901), Anthea's Guest (1911) and
Below Stairs (1918) are typical of her manner ; they pro-
voke no thought or unrest, and they are written in an
easy and excellent style.

Miss Netta Syrett has also a pen that moves readily.
She can write fairy-tales or edit gracefully for children
without losing her power to construct books of a more
ambitious character. She delights to take for her plot-
idea the eccentric or the child of genius faced with the
unexpectedness of life. Rosanne (1902)
Nctta Syrett. and Barbara of the Thorn (1913) were

written upon this motive ; but far better,
and indeed much the strongest of her novels, is The Child
of Promise (1907), a tale distinguished by intellectual
power, true feeling and vigorous humour.

Miss Una L. Sillberrad has less gift as
Una L. Silberrad, a stylist, and her method is sometimes
k W72. crude, but she is observant, her char-

acters live and her tales are marked by a
kind of conscious energy. The Good Comrade (1907) is
perhaps the best of her books, and of the others *The

468 THE NOVEL [PART.IV

Wedding of the Lady of Lovel (1905) and Sampson
Hideout, Quaker (1911) may be named.

Among those who have appeared later in the field of
feminine fiction Miss Ethel Sidgwick is specially to be

named. Promise (1910), an intricate
Ethel Sidgwick, study in the mind of a child and youth
b- 1877* of genius was a remarkable first novel. If

the character and story of the hero in-
evitably recalled M. Holland's Jean-Chrisophe, the method
of Miss Sidgwick was not that of the French writer, for
she is without his sense of form, his wonderful sequence
of movement in the study of a mind and his perfect clarity.
Le Gentleman (1911) and Herself (1912) were also thought-
ful novels, graced with charm, humour and unobtrusive
satire; but it was not till Miss Sidgwick continued the
story of Antoine Edgell in Succession (1913), the sequel
to Promise, that she rivalled her first book. In this she
adopted, as in all her previous tales, a setting half French,
half English, and in a novel of more than average length
she sustained unfalteringly an elaborate if somewhat
distant and detached study of genius in conflict with the
hard knocks of the world. In all her books she has shown
a power of carrying forward the development of plot os
much in the dialogue as in direct narrative. They are
intellectually rather than imaginatively shaped, for,
though her tales are not without pathos and sudden fire,
she writes largely with the mind. Perhaps the failure of
the finer feminine novel to reach the standard of the
greater novel written by man lies in an overplus of self-
conscious intellectuality. George Eliot's failure as an
artist is that she was too much the thinker ; Jane Austen,
on the other hand, the greatest novelist among English-
women, and Christina Rossetti, the greatest poetess, had
no aggressive intellectuality.

The novel written by women in Ireland is not more
characteristic than the novel written by men in the same

country. Save in the matter of a super-
Jane Barlow, imposed local colour it has no marks that
b- 1860. are peculiarly its own. It has not yet

thrown in its part and lot with the Celtic
Revival, and it is now probably too late to begin. Miss
Jana Barlow's tales of peasant folk and gentry belong to

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 469

Connemara. Kerrigan's Quality (1894) and Flaws (1911),
rambling and loose novels of country life, serve to con-
vince us that her true gift lies with the short story.
Irish Idylls (1892), A Creel of Irish Stories (1897) and
From the Land of the Shamrock (1901) are simple tales,
written in a fine style and in a spirit of humour tinged
with irony. Within the limits set these stories are admir-
able in their simple humanity, and injured only by an
unnecessarily laboured rendering of dialect.

Katharine Tynan (Mrs. Hinkson) has written much
pretty and sentimental verse, and her prose is likewise

dreamy, poetical, graceful and senti-
Katharine Tynan, mental by turns, but wanting in any
b. 1861. suggestion of personality. She rarely

fails to introduce a breath of poetry and
quiet grace into her narrative, and as rarely has she any
dramatic force or intensity. The early volume of short
tales, A Cluster of Nuts (1894), has been followed by a
continuous stream of novels and volumes of short stories,
among which may be named more particularly The Hand-
some Brandons (1893), A Daughter of the Fields (1900),
The Story of Clarice (1911) and Honey, my Honey (1912).
The greater number of these tales and sketches of Irish
life turns upon pleasant and agreeable themes — a girl
sacrificed to the drudgery of farm labour finds a lover and
a husband, the broken love affairs of two Irish girls of
good family and their happy marriage in the close of events
— these and other themes of a like nature Katharine Tynan
touches with wholesome sentiment. Her matter is never
very full, she rings her changes upon a small scale of
topics ; but she has, at least, an attractive style and a gift
of lending a gentle vein of poetry to her narrative.

If Nora Hopper (Mrs. Wilfrid Hugh Chesson) be placed
here it can only be by an arbitrary arrangement, and

because in another chapter she must be
Nora Hopper, named with the Irish poetesses. Her two
1871-1906. novels, The Bell and the Arrow (1905)

and Father Felix's Chronicles9 published
posthumously in 1907, in no way indicate the Irish origin
of the authoress. The first is a love tale with a setting
among the country gentry of Devonshire. It hast the
same prettiness as marks her verse, the same sense of

470 THE NOVEL [PAUT iv

pathos and undeveloped consciousness of the tragic. One
character alone is not easily forgotten, that of Miss Dolores
Tregennis, the simple-minded old maid who walks her way
through life clouded by the tender and pretty melancholy
of an early disappointment in love. Father Felix's
Chronicles, a book written many years before publication,
is an attempt to depict life in mediaeval England in the
words of a Benedictine monk. It can scarcely be regarded
as a signal success in a difficult form of art.

In addition to these the work of two cousins, Miss Edith
CEnone Somerville and Miss Violet Martin1, who wrote

under the pen-name of E. CE. Somer-

E. CE. Somerville ville and Martin Ross, may be briefly

ftftd mentioned. They have written a number

Martin Ross. of sporting tales and humorous sketches

of Irish life — Some Experiences of an Irish
R.M. (1899), Further Experiences of an Irish R.M. (1908)
and All on the Irish Shore (1903) are among their collected
volumes — which are commendably written and vigorous if
a little tiresome and laboured in humour. The spirit of
these tales and their simple devices are as old as Lover.

The number of successful women novelists, those who
by fiction can earn a large or modest competence, has
perhaps already outstripped the number of men engaged
in the same struggle. And in either case the quantity of
good, but not distinctive or personal work produced is
remarkable. No purpose could be served in the attempt
to survey a field so large; but three women writers who
for many years retained an astonishing popularity may be
named before this chapter is brought to a close.

Louise de la Ramee, who used the pseudonym Ouida,
was born at Bury St. Edmunds, but spent the greater

part of her later life at Florence. Her
Ouida, first story, printed when she was only

1840-1908. twenty, appeared in a magazine; and

from girlhood throughout life she con-
tinued to be a busy and energetic worker, although the
years brought neither wisdom nor knowledge. Among her
books may be mentioned Strathmore (1865), Under Two
Flags (1867), Moths (1880) and Princess Napraxine (1884).
All tyer tales are conducted with pace and energy, they are

I Miss Violet Martin died 1915.

CHAP, iv] WOMEN NOVELISTS 471

the work of a woman who was herself living to the full
from day to day; but they are a glaring patchwork of
faults in taste and style, and none has a vestige of literary
merit. For many readers her appalling ignorance of even
the commonest concerns of daily life and her amazing
blunders formed the chief attraction of her work, while
others accepted her glitter, tinsel and gaudy effects as a
true picture of that unknown world where the aristocratic
and wealthy misbehave.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Mrs. John Maxwell) was less
gaudy and sensational, but hardly less melodramatic. A

comedietta which was performed in 1860,
Mary Elizabeth poems and one or two early novels had
Braddon, 1837-1915. little success. In 1862, however, Lady

Audley's Secret, a thrilling murder story,
ran through three editions in three months, and since the
year of its appearance it has been continually reprinted.
None of her succeeding books was so immediately popular,
but she never lost her hold upon a class of reader, and
almost each year of her life printed a new novel. Among
the best are Henry Dunbar (1864), Ishmael (1884), The
Infidel (1900) and The Rose of Life (1905), which are
typical of the work of the accomplished writer for the
railway bookstall.

Miss Marie Corelli took herself more seriously and in
one or two books she produced work of a better order
than the last-named two writers. She reached beyond to
that section of readers who enjoy in fiction religious topics
touched with an air of novelty that is not too dangerous,

thus pandering to their petty dissatis-
Marie Corelli, factions with the vicar, the local minister
1864-1924. or the wicked lives of the idle rich. And

if style, character-drawing from obser-
vation and experience, knowledge and thought, as dis-
tinguished from prejudice and emotionalism, are matters
of no moment, the overwhelmingly serious prose-moralities
of Miss Corelli must doubtless seem impressive documents.
Her first book, A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), brought
her the popularity she easily sustained. Novel after novel
was published in an enormous first edition and followed by
a continuous stream of reprints. If Miss Corelli was a
prophet she was not without honour in her own country,

472 THE NOVEL [PART iv

for her most successful books were noisy indictments of
contemporary religion or morality. The Mighty Atom
(1896) reveals the folly of educating children without
religion, lest they should hang themselves to discover
whether a dead friend has gone to heaven. Wormwood
(1890) paints in lurid colours, to a race which is in no
danger of adopting the habit, the horrors of absinthe
drinking. The Master Christian (1900) calls the churches
to judgment and finds them wanting; and God's Good
Man (1904) pictures the clergyman as he ought to be.

If in imaginative and literary quality there be anything
to choose between Miss Corelli's novels perhaps Temporal
Power (1902) may be chosen as the best in her work. Her
melodramatic moral tales, though preposterous in matter,
have probably worked no harm in themselves ; they may
certainly have done something to lower the standard of
taste for readers who were unable to recognise under a
parade of novelty a complete absence of originality,
grotesque travesty of social life, and a slipshod style full
of inaccuracies and gross solecisms.

CHAPTER V

A NOTE ON AMERICAN NOVELISTS

Henry James — W. D. Howells — F. Marion Crawford — G. W. Cable —
James Lane Allen — Harold Frederic — Mary Eleanor Wilkins —
' Charles Egbert Craddock ' — Thomas Nelson Page — Ellen Glasgow —
Owen Wister — Frank Norris — Upton Sinclair — Winston Churchill —
Robert Herrick — Ambrose Bierce — Jack London — Mrs. Atherton —
Kate Douglas Wiggin— Edith Wharton.

SINCE the great Civil War, which marked the beginning
of a new and more national phase in American literature,
the divergence between the fiction of the United States
and that of the older world has become more pronounced.
It is not too much to say that a great proportion of the
better-read people of this country will find themselves
more at home in a novel by Tolstoy, Matilde Serao, Andre
Gide or Anatole France than they will in a tale of American
life by W. D. Howells, Mr. G. W. Cable or Frank Norris.
Paris, rather than London or New York, is the meeting-
place of people of English descent from either side of the
Atlantic. If American literature in the first place, as was
inevitable, imitated the English pattern, within the last
twenty or thirty years Russian realism, German awkward-
ness, French logic and constructive instinct have counted
for more and more. Thackeray and Dickens have not been
forgotten, but Maupassant, Zola, Tolstoy have been more
powerful influences in shaping the writing of some
American novelists of the older and many of the younger
generation. Nevertheless the last accusation which can
be brought against American fiction in its latest versions
is that it is purely derivative; for, like Walt Whitman,
the novelists of the United States have awakened to a
racial and territorial consciousness. A few have been
led away by the delusion, from which they would have
been saved by the smallest knowledge of the history of

473

474 THE NOVEL [PART iv

literature in the past, that the practice of letters should
aim at an indifferent cosmopolitanism. Nothing has been
gained and much has been lost by those who have
attempted to practise the art of fiction under the guidance
of this mistaken theory. Marion Crawford and Henry
James may have written better in describing the life of the
older world than when they put their hand to the painting
of American manners, but this is only because they both
lost touch with their country after a lifetime spent outside
its borders. Neither writer is in any strict sense American.
On the other hand it is America, both in its limitations and
its spaciousness, which has fostered and nourished the
work of the most notable among novelists of the United
States from W. D. Ho wells to Frank Norris and Mr.
Winston Churchill. Ho wells, despite his travels and his
many years of life in Europe, remained a typical American.
American literature, apart from an immense outpouring
of Calvinistic and theological writings, begins with the
nineteenth century, with the beginning of a national life
and a consciousness of unity in the States. And for many
years thereafter it contented itself, more markedly than
the literature of the mother country, with variations upon
standard themes and exercises. American fiction was born
with the early tales and novels of Washington Irving and
James Fenimore Cooper; and these are now scarcely a
century old. In Irving the debt to Addison and Gold-
smith is not concealed, and the imaginative romances of
Cooper owe much to Scott. Almost a quarter of a century
later is to be placed the work of two far greater and more
original writers of fiction, Hawthorne and Poe. The latter
owed little to America; he satirised its democratic com-
placency, he had neither part nor lot with the then pre-
dominant New England transcendentalism. The genius
of Hawthorne was more typically an outcome of the age
and the country ; and perhaps few will contest the state-
ment that The Scarlet Letter is the greatest, the most
original in characer of all American novels. It appeared
in 1850, the year following Poe's death, and falling thus
midway in the century it marks a neutral period, which
passed, after the Civil War, into another more pro-
nouncedly national, in which the American writer became
conscious of the immense size of his country, of its many

CHAP, v] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 475

physical and racial interests, characteristics and peculiari-
ties. The novel definitely invested with a local atmo-
sphere, New England, Virginian, Middle West, Californian
or Southern has overshadowed the older and less localised
type of narrative.

Many writers of the localised or dialect tale and novel
have been content to represent realistically or romantically
the life of a state or district — Mr. Cable and Mrs. Freeman
are pertinent examples of writers whose aim goes no
further. But younger writers have been fascinated by
the immense size and teeming life of the States, and
narrative with an environment set in Chicago, Philadelphia
or California has been violently forced to its highest power,
till an episode or conjunction of circumstances is treated
as symbolically significant of the whole life of the country
or certain aspects of it. The suggestion or inspiration to
attempt this type of novel comes, it is needless to say,
from Zola. Typical American novels built upon this
formula are Frank Norm's Octopus, Mr. Upton Sinclair's
Jungle and Mrs. Atherton's Ancestors. In no case is the
attempt altogether successful : what is true of Zola is true
of these and other American writers — the novel is success-
ful despite the incubus of a big abstract idea, because the
author can forget it and show us living men and women
fighting with the circumstances of their individual lives.
Although the " big idea " has become an obsession for
many among younger American novelists, in itself it is of
no account in any attempt to judge the intrinsic value
of their work, which rests upon something else, just as the
novels of Tolstoy, Dostoievsky and Zola will endure for
other reasons than the heavily-emphasised social or philo-
sophic conceptions upon which they are sometimes built.

Contemporaneously with attempts to write the big and
symbolic novel we find the United States becoming more
and more the land of the short story, for which the
immediate return is often good and the demand of the
numberless magazines is great. The short story has,
perhaps, always been the most popular form of fiction in
America, as witness the tales of Washington Irving, Bret
Harte and Poe. And if, with the exception of Poe, the
standard has never been as high as the best contempora-
neous writing of Russia, France and England, the United

476 THE NOVEL [PART iv

States has latterly produced many exceptionally fine
writers of the short story. It is only necessary to name
Ambrose Bierce, ' (X Henry,' Jack London and Miss
Murfree.

It seemed better in preceding chapters to include with
the English one or two writers by nationality American.
Henry Harland, for example, cannot easily be dissociated
from the Yellow Book and a well-defined group of English
writers ; and one or two women writers, by birth American,
have been included with the authoresses of this country
because they have been largely denationalised and write
almost entirely under the influence of English or European
ideals and habits of thought. As much, at least, is true
of Henry James, who, if he cannot be said to have lost
touch with the land of his birth, certainly found a more
fruitful region for study, in his own peculiar method of
psychological analysis, in the complex, traditional and
leisured life of an older society. And his influence upon
English novelists has probably been greater than any he
exercised upon American writers. It would, therefore,
have been natural to include him in one of the preceding
chapters, had this not involved too gross an example of
kidnapping, and, at the same time, obscured the fact that
in certain traits he remained definitely an American1. His
influence has been so great, his name stands for so much,
especially in those years properly within the purview of
this book, that no apology is needed for writing more fully
of Henry James than of other American writers in a
chapter which only professes to be a note and a brief
summary.

^ A literary gift and a psychological habit of mind would
appear to have been hereditary in the family of Henry

James. His father was a well-known
Henry James, American theologian, his elder brother
1843-1916. the eminent psychologist and pragmatic

philosopher, William James) He received
a varied education in New York, in England^and France,
and in 1862 he was studying law at Harvard. But the
law was soon abandoned for literature. He began by

1 Shortly after the outbreak of the war, 1914, Henry James, in order
to show his sympathy with the cause of the Allies, took out papers
of naturalization as a British subject.

CHAP, v] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 477

writing short stories in the Atlantic Monthly and other
periodicals ; and between 1871 and the year of his death he
published between forty and fifty volumes of essays,
biography, criticism and fiction.^
(f Sis. early tales contain the promise of his later novels,
but they do not obviously exhibit the peculiar charac-
teristics which the average reader associates with his work.
They are distinguished by the gracefulness of their style,
by simplicity of construction and coherence of plot. The
movement of the narrative is never swift, yet it neither
flags nor hesitates. The meeting of people of the new
world with the complicated social barriers of the old is a
common basis for many of these early tales!) It appears
in Roderick Hudson (1875) and its sequel, The Princess
Casamassima (1886), in The American (1877), Daisy Miller
(1878), An International Episode (1879) and The Portrait
of a Lady (1881). In these books and in that clear and
perfect piece of art, The Aspern Papers (1888), the style is
simple, contrasts of character are directly presented, and
there is little suggestion of the prolix elaboration which
belongs to his later novels. ^The early work betrays a
writer pre-eminently subtle and psychological, but the
extreme complexity of the later books is scarcely indicated,
The Aspern Papers and The Finer Grain (1910) might well
be by two different writers. (The Bostonians (1886), a
novel of the middle period, is transitional in its character-
istics ; the prolixity of the later work begins to appear in
this long novel of Boston society, its ideals, its loves and its
grey Puritanism. The Tragic Muse (1890) also belongs to
the time of transition during which he was evolving that
complete and rounded form of fiction which had been his
aim and ideal from the early years, when he wrote simple
and intellectually distinctive stories under the influence
of Turgenieff, Flaubert and Balzac, " the master of us

oil » J
all* /

(He began his third period with What Maisie Knew
(1897), an exquisite picture of the awakening of moral sense
in a child brought up in an ill-regulated atmosphere of
contact with men and women in a world where the ethical
standard is low,} In this novel he fulfilled the aim, pertina-
ciously pursued through years, of reaching further than
Balzac in the creation of the novel of atmosphere. It was

478 THE NOVEL [PART iv

not enough for Henry James to recreate the moral and
social atmosphere surrounding his characters, he wished
to place them in a circumambient fluid of the total con-
sciousness of all the persons of a tale. It was thus neces-
sary that each novel should be imagined as a whole,
rounded and complete, the content and form inseparable,
and fiction given, as Mr, Morton Fullerton has well
expressed it, the character of a plastic art. " The
architect, the painter, the sculptor, the actor, the servants
of all but the two muses of music and literature, have at
their disposal signs and materials which make plasticity
an essential result. To arrive at the same result in prose
literature is the mark of the highest art, Mr. James has
achieved it in his later books, from The Ambassadors to
The Golden Bowl, and it is this achievement which makes
them, in spite of the more accessible charm of his earlier
novels, the significant and original part of his work."1
Whether his performance was commensurate with his
intention is a question that may he waived for the moment,
Mr. Fullerton well expresses the aim ; and he is justified
in asserting that Henry James's later novels are " the
significant and original part of his work," for in these
both in style and method everything has been changed;
and though imitators may be discovered a parallel to Mr.
James in prose fiction is not to be found.) From the simple
form of narrative, which is a chronicle in the third person
by a spectator ab extra, he has moved forward, with clear
purpose and knowledge of his powers, to narrative which
is a record within the consciousness of one or more actors
in the same drama, and by this method he hoped not only
to frame his figures but to set them within life and make us
feel the intensity of life. For with all artists, great or
little, Henry James was in love with life as he understood
it; and he loved London, the capital city of the Anglo-
Saxon race, because it is " the particular spot in the world
which communicates the greatest sense of life." That life
in his sense of the word is a small and narrow country
many will be disposed to assert ; for the world of men and
women untouched by the conventionalities of a hyper-
civilisation lay outside his interest and attention. Life for
him was the intercourse of sophisticated beings in those
* l Quarterly Review, April, 1910.

CHAP, v] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 479

gracious, leisurely and ample surroundings which are the
heritage of centuries of culture, art and wealth. There
are indeed hints of another world discernible in his novels,
but they are no more than meaningless sounds from the
pit where the groundlings are herded. A minute fraction
of the human race has first-hand knowledge of the social
plane which the novels of Henry James describe. If, how-
ever, his range is narrow, it is adequate within its sphere,
and no more can be asked of any man. Mr. Hardy 's
range is equally narrow, but it is nearer to the substance
and stuff of life so carefully wrapped away in the con-
ventionalised beings of Henry James's novels. Mr. Hardy
in his narrowness is far more significant than Henry
James, for he pierces to what man is in the last issue, while
the latter shows man as he has made or is trying to remake
himself. But neither of these has the rangje of Balzac,
Tolstoy and Thackeray, who can speak of all things from
the gross mind of the scullion and the peasant to the
megrims of the intellectual and the prayers of the
mystic.

£ Henry James ranges across the surface veneer modern
civilisation has painted in thick coatings upon the natural
man and marks its pattern, noting occasionally a few
cracks and inequalities, but he carefully refrains from
scraping away the lacquer to examine the nature of the
substance upon which it is painted. It may be answered
that it is of little moment whether a beautifully lacquered
box is of wood or metal, the significance of the box is
the art of the painter. And it can be admitted that if
boxes be only art specimens for a museum the answer
suffices. But for many the original use of boxes for the
storing of food or belongings cannot be forgotten. And
life as we see it in Henry James's novels has too much the
air of a museum of art exhibits, where all is expensive,
ordered, hushed, set apart from the common ways of the
street, where the greater world that sins and suffers presses
on past the doors making the art of the future for another
generation of connoisseurs and virtuosi to inspect beneath
glass frames. The personalities of Henry James's novels
are a finished and sterile product of life rather than life
in the being. And it follows that his psychology is super-
ficial, It is commonly believed, on the contrary, that no

480 THE NOVEL [PART iv

writer has probed so deeply into the secrets of the human
soul. The reverse of this belief seems to be nearer the
truth. " In Mr. James's work/5 says Mr, Scott-James,
" we feel too often that the people are extensive ; seldom
that they are intensive. They may have been analysed
to the last degree ; so that we come to know more about
them, but we do not always see deeply into them."1

The evolution of Henry James's work into the charac-
teristics of the third period is the outcome of definite and
long-considered theory upon the nature of the art of fiction.
As early as 1866, as an article in the Atlantic Monthly
shows, he began seriously to consider the aims and diffi-
culties of the novelist. With unwearying intellectual
enthusiasm and with high faith in himself he continued
to work upon his theories and toward his ideals, until he
slowly evolved the novel in which narrative and character
are reflected within the consciousness of the persons of
the tale. The more important novels and volumes of
short stories belonging to this period of his writing are
What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings
of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden
Bowl (1904), The Finer Grain (1910) and The Outcry
(1911). In these the general theme of the earlier novels,
the clash of the new world with the old, is abandoned, and
replaced by complex studies of ethical and social reactions
against the prim and sentimental spirit of the Victorian
age. Nor is the moral absent ; in Henry James's belief the
moral is an important element of fiction ; the moral, that
is, in a broader connotation, for to dispute the moral and
immoral is to reduce art to the inane. The moral sense
of a work of art depends " on the amount of felt life con-
cerned in producing it." These novels are not merely
ethical and social studies; they are reflections of a sum-
total of atmosphere and an attempt to seize points of
view.

The results of his work are explained by the method of
his approach. f With many writers the first consideration
is a plot. HenVy James followed the method of Turgenieff
and began with a personality. In his preface to The
Portrait of a Lady — his most illuminating pronouncement
upon his own art — he says : ^

1 Modernism and Romance, p. 92.

CHAP.V] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 481

" I was myself so much more antecedently conscious
o£ my figures than of their setting ... I might envy,
though I couldn't emulate, the writer so constituted
as to see his fable first and to make out its agents after-
wards. I could think so little of any fable that didn't
need its agents positively to launch it ; I could think so
little of any situation that didn't depend for its interest
on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on
their way of taking it.

In other words, the narrative is never seen directly either
by the author or the reader, but seen only as lived and
felt by persons in the situations of the drama. (Every-
thing is apprehended on the mental and psychic plane,
nothing is seen in the concrete and physical. Not in style,
nor even in theory is Henry James set apart from other
novelists, but in the completeness with which he removes
narrative from the physical world to the mentalA A sug-
gestion of comparison between Henry James and George
Meredith is often offered for reflection. The comparison is
insignificant. Meredith had little sense of environing
atmosphere, his background is meagre, and his psychology
is far more intensive than that of Henry James, compre-
hending man as a creature of intellect, spiritual emotion
and the impulses of the flesh ; the typical novels of Henry
James are scarcely more than a presentation of surface
psychology and atmosphere.

Each individual exposes to the world mental charac-
teristics of extreme complexity, characteristics which have,
nevertheless, little play in the inner depths of the con-
scious and subconscious life; they are not the substance
of personality but the surface shimmer, the ripple moving
across the face of the water s.N So much each man must
reveal in order to take his part in the interactions of social
life; and the greater the tangle of the environment the
larger will be the surface exposed. With the surface play of
mental phenomena Henry James was so engrossed that he
appears to have forgotten that the earth is a globe and not
an extended plane.Q No writer has shown a more highly
developed faculty fofc following in two dimensions the con-
flict of diverse characters and minds. But not infre-
quently, in real life, each individual reveals to a few of

482 THE NOVEL [PART iv

his or her kind the fountains of the great deep; in the
novels of Henry James never, or scarcely ever. He wraps
even the passion of love in a cloistral and studious sedate-
ness!) Jane Austen could not have written as primly of
Lord Warburton's proposal to Isabel Archer. (jDecorum
was never more distressfully observed. ) The love passages
of The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl are not
without a subduecL beauty, but the pale cast of thought
. (

chills each scene. The.--writ.ing of HglLTy James is Jense,
but not intenseJ Through hundreds of pages we grope
after the mind of Maisie, Isabel Archer or Kate Croy;
and in the end we ask : What did they know, or we about
them? He studies every mind as if it were a wide and
shallow pool ; and if this be an apt analogy for many, there
are other minds more comparable to the deep river ever
flowing onward.

As the range of his study in the ramifications of mental
phenomena extended itself Henry James adopted a style
so verbose and involved that he excited against himself
the outcries Meredith had faced before him. His earlier
manner, save for occasional lapses, was clear, graceful,
brief. Only occasionally was he guilty of the affected
circumlocutions, which became characteristic of his
later style. For the most part his writing is subdued,
even old-maidish. The following passage from The Portrait
of a Lady reminds us of Jane Austen in one of her worst
moments, or of Fanny Burney in her transitional manner.

" He carried out his resolve with a great deal of tact,
and the young lady found in renewed contact with him
no obstacle to the exercise of her genius for unshrinking
inquiry, the general application of her confidence. Her
situation at Gardencourt therefore, appreciated as we
have seen her to be by Isabel and full of appreciation
herself of that free play of intelligence which, to her
sense, rendered Isabel's character a sister-spirit, and of
the easy venerableness of Mr. Touchett, whose noble
tone, as she said, met with her full approval — her
situation at Gardencourt would have been perfectly com-
fortable had she not conceived an irresistible mistrust
of the little lady for whom she had at first supposed
herself obliged to * allow ' as mistress of the house,"

CHAP.V] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 488

In this and many other passages of Henry James's
early and late style we are struck by nothing so much as
the cautiously well-bred maiden-lady manner of writing :
and even when he writes of the vices of modern Babylons,
or of irregular sexual relationships, it is in a manner so
veiled and distantly suggestive that we barely recognise
them for what they are. The habit grew with him ; till
he developed in his later books that indirect allusiveness
coupled with the constant effort to present narrative from
a " point of view," which produced that involved, prolix
and metaphorical style, the despair of the uninitiated unless
aided by essays offering " light on darkest James." If
he is fond of the metaphor and often uses it with effect, it
cannot be regarded as the life and soul of his style, as it was
with Meredith. Rather his style may be described as
allusive, the style of accumulative hints and half-formed
suggestions. By this means he tries to reproduce a simili-
tude of life's experience ; for knowledge gained of experi-
ence is a knowledge of accumulated small detail. The
knowledge of a friend's character is gained slowly and by
scattered hints — no man may reveal himself entirely to his
fellows, however long his life, least of all can we hope to
learn the whole of a man's character in a single flash of
divination. And Henry James, realising this, attempted
to develop to an extreme the method used by Balzac and
Thackeray — the method of allusiveness.

Were life lived in a single key Henry James's manner
might be adequate. It is not. In a great crisis a man
lives and reveals himself more fully than he can in a score
of commonplace years. And it is this his narrative fails to
convey; there is as little difference between his light and
shade as exists between night and day in an English mid-
winter. The note is too even. The page shines with a
dim and uncertain light ; and we are led to sympathise with
Mr. George Moore's dictum that throughout a long book he
flutters in vain after the right word, never finding it.

It may be questioned, furthermore, whether the in-
volved style is necessary to the aim of his later work.
There is nothing in his last novels which is not reached
in The Portrait of a Lady. He would have done well to
preserve the sedate and gentle simplicity of that earlier
book.

484 THE NOVEL [PART iv

But a general review of the work of Henry James presses
home upon us the admission that in two important aspects
his novels, especially those which belong to the close of
the last and the beginning of this century, have exercised
a remarkable influence in carrying forward the story of
prose fiction in its evolution. Stress has been laid upon
his endeavour to write the novel from a " point of view " ;
and in this no one has yet rivalled him. Furthermore,
in a few of the novels, unduly long as they may seem
on a first reading, we must recognise his noteworthy
success in conceiving a single situation in the form of a
narrative which is one picture. Unity of conception com-
bined with unity of form is characteristic of such books
as The Portrait of a Lady, What Maisie Knew, The Golden
Bowl, The Outcry and The Ambassadors. Of the last he
said, " I am able to estimate this as, frankly, quite the
best ' all round 5 of my productions." The story is based
on a favourite theme worked out in a manner pre-
eminently typical of the author. A New England mother,
distressed on hearing of the entanglement of a son in Paris,
dispatches an elderly friend to save the boy. The gradual
discovery by this emissary of the beautiful character of
the woman who has gained an ascendency over the young
American provides the author with an admirable diploma
subject. And the whole, despite the length of the book,
is conceived and presented in unity. The same judgment
applies with equal force to the slight and brief comedy
of the conflict between the American art collector and
the English owner of pictures contained in The
Outcry.

Henry James shrank from the brutal vulgarity of the
event, he avoided a psychology which is personal and
direct ; his characters drift in reflections across the mirror
of other minds, and in his typical novels we never see
them in the flesh. His world is a magic mirror of innumer-
able facets and angles in which we can no more than
catch fleeting and changeful glimpses of individuals as
they pass. Apart from the two theoretical guides already
indicated — the positing of the " point of view," and the
attempt to render fiction a plastic art — Henry James's
later manner was the result of an effort to paint new
characteristics of English social life which emerged in the

CHAP, v] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 485

closing years of the last century, to present a peculiarity
modern world. In this he showed a remarkable faculty of
keeping abreast of the younger generation; his later
writing is more original than his earlier, and has left marks
that are widely traceable in the work of living English
writers of the novel.^

In this country the name of William Dean Howells has
never been one to conjure with, he never established a cult
or an enthusiasm like Henry James ; yet
William Dean twenty-five years ago it seemed natural
Howells, 1837-1920. to call him the chief of American
novelists. The reason of his slight signi-
ficance here and his very considerable effect upon American
fiction is intelligible. Though a born man of letters
Howells never revealed any peculiar originality or power.
Whatever his work had to offer could reach English writers
by a shorter and more direct route. His method is that of
the realists, especially that of Balzac and the Russian
novelists. He attempted to render life in all its common-
placeness, yet to reveal the importance of the common-
place. He essayed an exact representation of the American
scene, avoiding all high lights, elaborate analysis or the
introduction of matter extraneous to his picture. His end
was clear and consistent presentation of the actual fact.
He thus set the standard of the subdued and colourless
narrative ; and his instinctive Tightness as an observer and
a stylist enabled him to influence the American novel of
quiet manners and slight individual interest in a degree it
would be difficult to over-estimate.

W. D. Howells had been for some twelve years or more
poet, journalist, editor, biographer and topographical
writer before he published his first novel, Their Wedding
Journey, in 1871, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), A
Hazard of New Fortunes (1889) and The Quality of Mercy
(1892) are among the best of the many tales which suc-
ceeded it. It may be that the ideal Howells set before
himself in these and other typical novels was too constantly
in his mind. Reserve, subdued lights, the wholly imper-
sonal manner resulted in an arid clearness which emptied
life of much of its zest, joy and stronger reality. It is
certain that the sources of his inspiration long showed a
tendency to run dry. He hardly again equalled Tlie Rise

486 THE NOVEL [PART iv

of Silas Lapham. Many of his tales seem to be written
as experiments in calculated monotony. Plot in the
ordinary sense he avoided sedulously, the only story he
offered was some account of what happens to his people
and a glimpse into their emotions. He did not want for
humour and a delicate fantasy, but idealism and romance
he eschewed; the ideal and perfect character, as he did
not perceive it in life, is excluded from his books. Never-
theless, though his influence has sunk, as editor, cicerone
and novelist he did much to shape the writing of younger
men in his country.

Like Henry James, Francis Marion Crawford, though
of American parentage, owed little to the country of his

citizenship. He was born in Italy and
Francis Marion educated in England and Germany as
Crawford, well as in America, he first took to liter-

1854-1909. ature as the editor of the Allahabad

Indian Herald, he lived the greater part
of his life in Italy, and he made clever use of his cosmo-
politan experience in the groundwork of his many novels.
His least successful books were his novels of American
life, among them An American Politician (1886); for he
had little real acquaintance with the United States and
wrote of the country at second hand. His first novel,
Mr. Isaacs (1882), was a story of modern India and
Oriental theosophy. It was quickly followed by many
others in which, it is not unjust to say, Marion Crawford's
chief purpose was to entertain. He set himself to cultivate
the art of telling a story in an interesting manner, he
became in technique an admirable storyteller, but he paid
the price in the gradual conventionalization of his
plots and characters. His literary ideals he has frankly
avowed in The Novel — What It Is (1893), and there
is no need to go further than his own confession for
a just estimate of the value of his work. He disclaims
classification with the realists or romantic writers, believ-
ing that the best type of novel should contain elements
both of romanticism and realism, he deprecates the novel
with a purpose, save a purpose which leads the reader
to think thoughts " not too serious/5 he accepts the fact
that the novelist, if he treats moral questions, should
remember that many of his readers will be young girls,

CHAP, v] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 487

and the function of the novelist he summarises finally as
the making of " pocket-theatres out of words, " that is
to say novels should be portable dramas. It will be seen
that Marion Crawford did not pitch his standard in any
mood of high seriousness, and this, so far, was well. He
was among the unfortunates who reach their ideal because
they reach within their grasp.

The loss of his mother's fortune, when he was yet a
young man, put Marion Crawford under the necessity of
earning his living : it was incumbent upon him to be
popular, and he succeeded. His opportunities were many!:
he had received an excellent and varied education, he had
been born into an atmosphere of art (his father was the
sculptor, Thomas Crawford), he had enjoyed the blessings
of money and ease, he was by native gift an industrious
and rapid worker. Of the many tales he published the
best, with one or two exceptions, were novels of Italian
life. Italy and the Italians he knew intimately, and in this
he was greatly assisted by the fact that he had joined the
Roman Catholic Church. The ambitious semi-historical
trilogy, Saracinesca (1887), SanV llario (1889) and Don
Orsino (1892), was indebted to his knowledge of modern
Rome. It illustrates his gift of creating characters suffi-
ciently real to satisfy the reader who is not too critical, and
of placing them in manufactured situations which are
neither sensational nor preposterous. None of his other
tales of Italy fails in style, interest and dramatic quality,
and none rises above the level of secondary fiction. In
addition to these the fanciful and sentimental Cigarette
Maker's Romance (1890) deserves to be named for its
style, its vivid imaginativeness and the skilful handling of
its plot.

Perhaps Marion Crawford was happy in being aware of
his limitations. He drew upon his varied experience with
ease and grace, he wrote with reserve and good taste, his
characters were romantic but not injudiciously so, his plots
were conventional but they were not beaten out too thin.
He was one of the best possible examples of the skilled and
gentlemanly craftsman in the art of fiction. And in fiction
alone was he really successful ; his monographs on Italian
history are ill-arranged, and despite the dramatic char-
acter of his novels he failed as a writer for the stage.

488 THE NOVEL [PART iv

The most characteristic novels of two of the writers
just named have little or no relationship to American

life; those of W. D. Howells, on the
George Washington other hand, are certainly typical of
Cable, b. 1844. the life and habits of thought of the

country from which they come; but
they betray also the influence of European models and
standards, and W. D. Howells's method was set over forty
years ago and never changed appreciably. His appeal is
not primarily, like that of Henry James, to the present
generation of readers and writers. It has been said that
the end of the Civil War marked the beginning of a new
and more national phase in American fiction, a period
which has seen a prolific outpouring of the regional and
dialect novel; and in this particular development Marion
Crawford, Henry James and W. D. Howells played no
special part. In a large number of cases writers of the
regional novel have set themselves to describe types and
phases of social life destroyed by the war or fated soon
to disappear. Among the first to be conscious of the charm
of a past which was quickly fading was Mr. George
Washington Cable, who served in the Confederate Army,
and at the close of the war returned to settle in New
Orleans, the city of his birth. He was drawn into
journalism and first made a reputation by sketches and
tales of French-American and Creole life. Several of these
tales were collected in 1879 under the title of Old Creole
Days, and there followed other books — The Grandissimes
(1880), Madame Delphine (1881), Dr. Sevier (1883) and
Bonaventure (1888) — in which, in a spirit of realism
touched with humour, he sketched the life of the south.
Mr. Cable has no exceptional gifts, but he has written many
charming scenes, the poetry of the south is in his pages,
he has a good and unpretentious style, and his novels have
a large element of historical value in putting upon record
old days and old ways in New Orleans. In The Grandis-
simes and Dr. Sevier he produced faithful and discerning
pictures of a type of character and social life. Unfor-
tunately these tales and his history, The Creoles of
Louisiana (1884), gave offence to the people they de-
scribed, and Mr. Cable left the south to settle in New
England.

CHAP, v] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 489

Mr. James Lane Allen, a writer better known to most
readers in this country, is also drawn toward the romantic

past. After spending a number of
James Lane Allen, years teaching in schools and academies
b' 1849« he began to write sketches of the

" Blue Grass " district of his native
Kentucky, and continued with stories of a graceful and
sentimental character. Among these are A. Kentucky
Cardinal (1894), Aftermath (1895), The Choir Invisible
(1897) and The Increasing Purpose (1900). Nearly all Mr.
Allen's writing suffers from stylistic self-consciousness;
and in his later books he loses something of his earlier
simplicity, and even abandons himself to mere verbiage.
The Choir Invisible, a tale of the early settlement of
Kentucky, has, however, an undercurrent of stronger
feeling and is built upon firmer foundations than his other
books. In this historical romance he has been able to
restrain the self-conscious manner and nervous sentimen-
tality which are characteristic of him.

Harold Frederic made a name for himself as a chronicler
of rural life in the state of New York after he had become

London correspondent of the New York
Harold Frederic, Times and settled in England. Frederic
1856-1898. was as instinctively a satirist as Mr.

Allen is a graceful sentimentalist. His
first novel of any importance was Seth's Brother's Wife
(1887). This was followed by The Lawton Girl (1890)
and The Copperhead (1894), a story of the Civil War. But
his powers of ironical insight into the failings and pettiness
of human nature were best illustrated in Illumination
(1896) and Gloria Mundi (1898). Illumination (called in
America, The Damnation of Theron Ware) was a realistic,
witty and satirical picture of religious life in the American
shopkeeper class. By far Frederic's best book it is hardly
a gracious document ; it was unlikely to mend the objects
of its satire and it gave the indifferent ground for derision.
It is brilliantly clever, but with a superficial cleverness.
Gloria Mundi, a story of English upper-class life, is by no
means as vivid ; nor does it bear good witness to Frederic's
spontaneity and abundance of ironical humour. Illumina-
tion was his one striking book ; exaggerated perhaps, but
full of insight and matter.

490 THE NOVEL [PART iv

The stories contained in A Humble Romance (1887)
first brought Mary Eleanor Wilkins (Mrs. C. M. Freeman)

into prominence as an annalist of life
Mary Eleanor in rural New England. The first was
Wilkins, b. 1862. succeeded by a number of other volumes

of short stories. Her tales involve no
great problems, they turn upon simple and pathetic love
themes, upon misunderstandings, upon the history of
bygone New England, but they all manifest a fine sense
of economy in the portrayal of character, and each narra-
tive is skilfully and firmly rounded. In the last-named
characteristic her novels, with the possible exception of
The Shoulders of Atlas (1907), will hardly compare with
the short stories. They are too slight in motive and might
better have been told in briefer compass. Mrs. Freeman
is not a daring and original, but she is a careful and
observant writer, studying with sympathy the humdrum
lives of the middle class and the poor.

A more vigorous character distinguishes the local and
dialectical tales of * Charles Egbert Craddock ' (Miss Mary

Noailles Murfree). Her stories of the
Charles Egbert mountain people of Tennessee were first
Craddock, b. 1850. contributed to the Atlantic Monthly, and

suggested by their force in the descrip-
tion of rough and simple life that they came from the hand
of a man rather than a woman. In 1884 early stories were
collected under the title In the Tennessee Mountains, and
this collection has since been followed by others to a large
extent dealing with that corner of the American continent
which Miss Murfree best knows.

Mr. Thomas Nelson Page and Miss Ellen Glasgow are
two writers who come from the south and write of Virginia.

In Ole Virginia (1887) was Mr. Page's
Thomas Nelson first volume to attract attention, and this
Page, b. 1853. was followed by Elsket (1891), Pastime

Stories (1894), Bred in the Bone (1904),
and various volumes of short stories, which have the merit
of sketching with knowledge and humour the amenities of
Virginian life before the character of the land was changed
by the disasters of the Civil War.

Miss Ellen Glasgow is a more ambitious writer; her
narrative commonly embodies, in one form or another,

CHAP, v] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 491

the conflict between the older aristocratic life of Virginia
and the new democratic ideals forced upon it by defeat.

The Deliverance (1904) is a story of this
Ellen Glasgow, type. And the difficulties of a new
b- 1874. period, as they are illustrated in the

relationship of men and women of
differing social caste and ideals, appear in the much finer
Romance of a Plain Man (1909) and The Miller of Old
Church (1911), Virginia (1918) scarcely opens out any new
vein in plot or idea, nor does it serve to give an enhanced
belief in Miss Glasgow's powers for those who know her
already. She is undeniably a gifted and thoughtful
writer, who can give life to her characters and set
her people within an atmosphere, the atmosphere of
social convention, work and leisured idleness in new-old
Virginia.

Mr. Owen Wister has written in differing veins and of
differing scenes, but his typical tales relate the romance

of cowboy life in the west. To this class
Owen Wister, belong the stories of the early Jimmyjohn
b. I860. Boss (1900) and the latter Members of the

Family (1911). But his two books of
some importance are his full-length novel, The Virginian
(1902) and the short fantasy, Lady Baltimore (1906). These
two are of an entirely different character; the former a
story of cowboy life, the latter a piece of psychology
betraying the influence of Henry James. The Virginian
is, in its separate chapters, a series of sketches rather than
a novel, but it is well sustained by ease in narration, a
humour that is delightful and unforced, and an excellent
style.

Mr. Hardy in England confines his scene to one small
county or little more, yet he invests the story of obscure

lives with a meaning bounded only by
Frank Norris, the mystery of the whence and whither
1870-1902. of the whole race of man. And this he

achieves not by force of the unshrinking
realism commonly attributed to him, but because he
conceives a story written in prose as the world-poet con-
ceives the drama of existence mirrored in the sturm und
drang of a few souls. The American writers named above
localise their scenes in accord with individual knowFedge

492 THE NOVEL [PART iv

and familiarity, and for the most part (Miss Glasgow is
something of an exception) seek no more than the faithful
rendering of ordinary life in one or another corner of the
United States. Others, sometimes perhaps influenced by
Mr. Hardy, more often by Zola, see in the experience of
the individual, or a group of persons, a national or world
drama. They begin not with the men and women, but
with a large social or ethical conception, and weave their
story to illustrate or enforce their theme. Among writers
thus actuated Frank Norris is, perhaps, first to be named ;
for his books are a typical example of the novel with a
" big idea." He drew attention to himself with the
forcible and realistic McTeague (1899) ; but all his powers
were thrown into an incomplete trilogy, The Octopus
(1901), The Pit (1903), and The Wolf which was planned
though never written. The three were to form an epic
of wheat from the time of its sowing in California, through
its distribution at Chicago to its consumption in Europe.
The novels were conceived on a large scale, the basic idea
was full of possibilities, and Frank Norris almost succeeded
in The Octopus and The Pit in making wheat, like some
vast symbol or brooding destiny, enshroud the story. But
he just came short of complete success. The power of
the wheat is not inwoven in the texture of the narrative,
it is paraded in set passages; and the littleness of man,
who is no more than a mote or an insect subservient to the
world-drama of food production, is flung upon us, it is
hammered in, we are not made instinctively to feel it.
Frank Norris was possessed of great imaginative daring,
he was an exceptionally powerful writer, but he was, at
the same time, a young man, and the fulfilment of his
intention lay beyond him. Furthermore, in the matter of
style and method he had much to learn. In narrative and
manner he was prone to extravagance and bombast, and he
was troubled with monotonous tricks of style — one of the
most frequent is the noun followed by three adjectives —
which recur on almost every page. The Pit hinted that
he would outgrow these faults and the belief that big and
clumsy words make for strength and fine writing. Had
Norris lived he would almost undoubtedly have pro-
duced work better by far than any he has left behind
him/

CHAP, v] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 493

Mr. Upton Sinclair has attempted something like the
same largeness of theme in The Jungle (1906), a novel
which has overshadowed his other books,
Upton Sinclair, It is a story of Chicago stockyards, of
b- 1878. conflict between labour and capital, of

injustice, of political swindling. Mr.
Upton Sinclair can paint individual scenes and characters
forcibly, but in this and other tales, The Overman (1907),
Love's Pilgrimage (1911) and Sylvia (1918), the bias of
the author, his socialistic creed, his theory of the relation
of the sexes is too obtrusive, the spirit of the ex parte
tract vitiates the narrative. Mr. Sinclair is too much
a special pleader and man of theories to be a good artist ;
although in one book, undoubtedly, despite a large element
of sensationalism, he has succeeded in drawing some living
characters.

Mr. Winston Churchill's later books suggest that he
has set himself the task of covering the whole ground
of American life, politics, marriage and
Winston Churchill, religion. He began, however, as a writer
b. 1871. of romances. Richard Carvel (1899) is a

disconnected and rather shapeless his-
torical tale, with a scene laid partly in Maryland and partly
in England. The Crisis (1901), a story of the Civil War,
and The Crossing (1904) in which the fictitious element is
set against an account of the early conquest of Kentucky
and Tennessee, are also romances, carefully and elabor-
ately written, but loose and straggling in structure. From
these Mr. Churchill turned to a more serious representation
of his country. Coniston (1906), a tale of political jobbery
in New England, despite the traces of laboured care loses
nothing in the vitality of its character-portrayal, and the
plot is handled with a greater sense of form than in any
of the earlier books. A Modern Chronicle (1910) is scarcely
so good a book. Mr. Churchill is lengthy without excuse ;
and this story of the unfortunate marriages of a modern
American woman, clever as a piece of character-study,
suffers from excessive elaboration of a flimsy and monoto-
nous plot motive. American politics, the problem of
married life in modern America occupied Mr. Churchill
in Coniston and A Modern Chronicle, and from these he
turned to discuss the religion of the country in The Inside

494 THE NOVEL [PART iv

of the Cup (1918). This is an American version of The
Case of Richard Meynell, and the strong family likeness
between the writing of Mr, Churchill and Mrs. Humphry
Ward is here emphasised. Mr. Churchill takes himself
seriously, he has little lightness, he is an intellectual and
the pose of the teacher is gaining upon him. He is plainly
not an easy or facile writer, and intellectual considerations
weigh more heavily with him than the more unconscious
aims of the artist. It is rather by sheer force of intellect
than by any natural gifts that Mr. Churchill reaches his
ends.

Professor Robert Herrick after publishing one or two
novels which scarcely call for comment suddenly made a

name for himself with The Gospel of
Robert Herrick, Freedom (1898), a study in the now much
b* W68. overworked topic — the ill-mated wife's

awakening to a spirit of emancipation. It
was some years before he again wrote novels of equal value,
The Common Lot (1904) and The Memoirs of an American
Citizen (1905) ; and these were followed by the still finer
Together (1908). The first two are indictments of dis-
honest commercial enterprise, the third another of the
many studies in the problem of marriage. In these books
Professor Herrick shows himself a thoughtful writer but
given to overloading his narrative, a fault which he
developed still further in A Life for a Life (1910), in which
his quest of epic grandeur leads him to exaggerated
sensationalism and the introduction of a great overweight
in the discussion of sociological problems.

Nearly all the writers named above write the short story,
and in the case of several it either represents the greater

part of their work or that activity in
Ambrose Bierce, which they are most successful. The
1842-1914. number of American tale writers is so

great that an attempt to name or discuss
individual authors would be fruitless ; and in the majority
of cases the level of attainment is not sufficiently high to
call for special notice. But among writers of the short
story Ambrose Bierce cannot be left without mention.
His strongest liking was, perhaps, for the writing of a fierce
and heavy-handed type of satirical verse, of which the
most characteristic part has been gathered in Shapes of

CHAP.V] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 495

Clay (1903). But the only quality of his satire is its down-
rightness ; it lacks wit, flexibility and point. As a writer
of short stories he was on his own ground. The best of these
are collected in a volume entitled In the Midst o/ Life (first
called Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 1892), a collection
based on the author's experiences in the Civil War, and a
volume of fantastic and supernatural tales, Can Such
Things Be? (1894). Bierce was a disciple of Poe, and in
the best of his short stories he is little behind his master
in his handling of the morbid and gruesome. The method
in each tale is the same. He conducts his story exactly
stage by stage to an unexpected and grimly ironical
climax, and leaves the reader horrified. The last word may
be used advisedly, for not seldom he seems to dilate upon
the disgusting and repulsive for its own sake, until some-
times— the story called * The Coup de Grace ' is a case in
point — the horrible is in danger of becoming the whole
raison d'etre of the story. Besides the device of the
ironical climax Bierce displayed a constant interest in the
attempt to represent an eternity of agony lived in a few
moments — e.g. the prisoner with the noose about his neck
awaiting execution, the mental torture of the man mes-
merised by the gleam of a serpent's eyes. He was a past-
master in the art of the macabre tale.

Jack London, although he wrote several novels, was by
gift a writer of the brief sketch and short story. He could
not conceive a long plot as a whole or
Jack London, bring a number of characters together in a

1876-1916. coherent narrative. His tales are by no

means of equal value ; they relate to wild
and savage, to vagrant and curious life in every corner of
the globe, and many bear traces of the hurried rate at
which they were written and relinquished to the press.
The style is sometimes ugly and it is beset with the
common American fault of exaggerated language ; but in
one thing Jack London hardly fails — in his wonderfully
vivid and realistic painting of landscape, colour and atmo-
sphere. In this faculty he is an artist in words whom no
living American writer can rival. And the finest examples
of his achievement in this particular field are to be found
in his stories of human and animal life in Alaska. Burning
Daylight (1910) is probably the best tale of the Klondike

496 THE NOVEL [PART iv

gold-rush yet written. The frozen silence of earth and sky
in that northern region is painted with an exactness which
no experience could make more vivid to the mind. Unfor-
tunately he was no novelist, and this book collapses in
its latter half into a collection of comparatively uninter-
esting incidents in the hero's career. And not less powerful
than the earlier half of Burning Daylight are those splendid
tales of dog and wolf life, The Call of the Wild (1908) and
White Fang (1907). Jack London wandered far and wide,
but the Klondike, whither he went in the early days of
the gold-rush, seized the young man's imagination as no
part of his later experience moved him. In his many short
stories and tales of the northern wilds he reached his
highest standard as a literary craftsman.

Among America's many women writers Mrs. Atherton
has won a reputation for the intellectual power of her

work. Nevertheless she is an unequal
Gertrude Franklin writer. Rulers of Kings (1904), a
Atherton, b. 1859. romance of an American's relations with

a royal family of Europe, is preposterous
to the point of weariness ; and the book seems to exemplify
not only deliberate exaggeration but a want of balance in
the author. In each of Mrs. Atherton 's books we have the
study of a single person set in the midst of a particular
environment which moulds the character. In The Call-
fornians (1898) a Spanish-American girl attempts to break
loose from the fetters of hidalgo concepts of life. Senator
North (1900) is a picture of an American girl, taught to
despise politics, and her contact with political life in
Washington. In The Tower of Ivory (1910) a well-born
young Englishman in diplomatic circles, starved by a small
income and lavish tastes, is studied in his relationship with
the artistic and the conventional feminine types. But the
finest of Mrs. Atherton's books is Ancestors (1907), in
which we watch the instincts of a Californian ancestry
bearing fruit in the mind and character of a young
Englishman. Mrs. Atherton's varied experience enables
her to write of many scenes, characters and places. She is
in familiar touch with several phases of life, she writes with
a masculine rather than a feminine outlook on the world,
and she has imagination. But she is wanting in reserve and
in sense of form, and is therefore unable to distinguish

CHAP.Y] AMERICAN NOVELISTS 497

between her best and gross lapses into the absurd and
sensational.

Of a very different character is the writing of Kate
Douglas Wiggin (Mrs. George C. Riggs) whose preoccupa-
tion with kindergartens coloured all her
Kate Douglas writing and gave her a constant interest

Wiggin, 1857-1923. in child life. In hardly any of her books
can she be called the novelist; she is
rather the naive, bright and entertaining storyteller,
receptive and gifted with a native charm in setting down
her impressions. Her books are impressionistic sketches of
childhood, of New England life, of an American girl's
experiences in the older world. The Story of Patsy (1889)
and Timothy's Quest (1890) show how clearly she pene-
trated into the workings of the childish mind. Penelope's
English Experiences (1893) is a miscellany hung upon a
slight story, and was followed by other Penelope books
descriptive of the American point of view in relation to
other parts of the British Isles. But Kate Douglas
Wiggin fs best work is to be found in the Rebecca series,
beginning with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), which
paints sympathetically, happily, with humour and
optimism the not very gay life of agricultural New
England. In these easy-going chronicles her simple
method of narration found its natural expression.

Mrs. Edith Wharton is one of the ablest and most
thoughtful of living American writers. Her short stories,
and with these she began, are of a type
Edith Wharton, and character which raise them far above
b. 1862. the short story approved by the common

magazine of the day. The tales con-
tained in The Greater Inclination (1899), Crucial Instances
(1901) and The Descent of Man (1904) turn upon mental
processes and the clash of moral motives ; they relate the
tragedy of misunderstanding, of illusion, of the irony of
circumstance ; and the " point of view/9 as understood by
Henry James, enters largely into them. Mrs. Wharton
is an introspective writer ; for her the world of the mind
is everything, and the event is only a reflex of inner experi-
ence. In this respect she would have succeeded even
better had she not been led away by the lure to which
so many American writers succumb, the desire to use the
2 i

498 THE NOVEL [PART iv

story of the individual as typical of some phase of life or
a social problem.

The House of Mirth (1905) is the best example of Mrs.
Wharton's gifts as a writer. It is a close and clear-sighted
study of the woman of fine education and tastes drawn
into tragedy for the want of money to satisfy these tastes
and an inability to marry a social and intellectual inferior
merely for the sake of money. The converse of this story
— a woman of vulgar taste and training striving for a
place in society — The Custom of the Country (1913), is
also a striking book ; but it is less restrained, and its
satire sometimes borders on the extravagant. The Fruit
of the Tree (1907) handles a grave moral problem, but
the central theme is broken up by irrelevant matter. It
cannot be placed with the best of Mrs. Wharton's books.
Better are the slight but wonderfully perspicuous narra-
tives of Madame de Treymes (1907) and The Reef (1912),
which contain all that goes to prove Mrs. Whar ton's fine
knowledge of the influence of custom and convention in
the conflict of human desires and failings. These and The
House of Mirth mark Mrs. Wharton as a writer distin-
guished in style, epigrammatic force and a knowledge of
the recondite workings of the human mind.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX

This list is intended as no more than a fair summary of
volumes published subsequently to those discussed or named in
the text. As they fall outside the scheme of this survey essays
and miscellaneous writings have been, for the most part,
omitted. Authors whose names do not appear have either
published nothing further, or nothing which can be regarded
as of an imaginative character.

A

ABERCROMBIE, LASCELLES. — Four Short Ploys (1922) ; Phoenix
(1923).

" A.E."— See Russell, Geo. W.

ALLEN, JAMES LANE. — The Sword of Youth (1915); A
Cathedral Singer (1916) ; The Emblems of Fidelity (1917) ;
The Kentucky Warbler (1918).

ATHERTON, GERTRUDE FRANKLIN. — Perch of the Devil (1914);
Mrs. Balfame (1916); The Living Present (1917); The White
Morning (1918); The Avalanche (1919); Sisters-in-Law
(1921); Dormant Fires (1922); Black Oxen (1923).

B

BARLOW, JANE. — Between Doubting and Daring: Verses
(1916); In Mio's Youth (1917).

BARRIE, SIR JAMES MATTHEW. — Plays — A Kiss for Cinderella
(1916); The Old Lady Shows her Medals (1917); Dear
Brutus (1917); The Will (1919); Rosalind (1919); Mary
Rose (1920); Shall We Join the Ladies? (1922).

BEERBOHM, MAX. — Seven Men (1919); And Even Now (1920);
Things New and Old (1923).

BELLOC, HILAIRE. — Sonnets and Verse (1923).

BENNETT, ARNOLD. — Fiction — The Price of Love (1914); These
Twain (1916); The Pretty Lady (1918); Lilian (1922); Mrs,
Prohack (1922); Riceyman Steps (1923). Plays— The Title
(1918); Judith (1919); Saered and Profane Love (1919);
The Love Match (1922); Body and Soul (1922); Don Juan
(1923); London Life (1924 : with Edward Knoblock).

BENSON, EDWARD FREDERICK. — The Oaldeyites (1915) ; David
Blaize (1916); Mike (1916); Mr. Teddy (1917); Up and
Down (1918); Robin Linnet (1919); The Countess of
Lowndes Square (1920); Miss Mapp (1922); Colin (1923);
David of King's (1924).

BERESFORD, JOHN D. — The House in Demetrius Road (1914);
The Invisible Event (1915) ; Mountains of the Moon (1915) ;
These Lynnekers (1916) ; Housemates (1917) ; God's Coimter-
point (1918); The Jervaise Comedy (1919); An Imperfect

499

500 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX

Mother (1920); Revolution (1921); Signs and Wonders
(1921); The Prisoners of Hartling (1922); The Imperturb-
able Duchess and other Stories (1923); Unity (1924).

BESIER, RUDOLF.— Kipps (1912 : with H. G. Wells) ; Kings and
Queens (1915); Kultur at Home (1916); Buxell (1916);
Robin's Father (1918 : with Hugh Walpole); The Prude's
Fall (1920 : with May Edington); Secrets (1922 : do.).

BINYON, LAURENCE. — The Winnowing Fan (1914); The Anvil
(1916); The Cause (1917); The New World (1918); The Four
Years (1919); The Secret (1920).

BIRMINGHAM, G. A.— Adventures of Dr. Whitty (1918); The
Lost Tribes (1914); Minnie's Bishop (1915); Gossamer
(1916); The Island of Mystery (1918); General John Regan
(1919); Good Conduct (1920); Lady Bountiful (1921); The
Lost Lawyer (1921); Found Money (1923); The Grand
Duchess (1924) ; and a number of plays.

BLUNT, WILFRID SCAWEN. — The Poetical Works of Wilfrid
Scawen Blunt : A Complete Edition (1914) ; Poems (1923 :
selected by Floyd Dell).

BRIDGES, ROBERT. — October and other Poems (1920).

BROOKE, RUPERT. — The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke:
With a Memoir [by Edward Howard Marsh] (1919).

CABLE, GEORGE WASHINGTON. — Gideon's Band (1914); The
Flower of the Chapdelaines (1918) ; Lovers of Louisiana
(1918).

CAINE, SIR HALL. — The Master of Man (1921); The Woman
of Knockaloe (1923).

CANNAN, GILBERT.— Three Pretty Men (1916); Mendel (1916);
The Stucco Hause (1917); Mummery (1918); Pink Roses
(1919); Time and Eternity (1919); The Release of the Soul
(1920); Pugs and Peacocks (1921); Annette and Bennett
(1922); Sembal (1922); Seven Plays (1923); The House of
Prophecy (1924).

CHESTERTON, G. K.— Wine, Water and Song (1915); Poems
(1915); The Ballad of Sjt. Barbara and other Verses (1922).

CHURCHILL, WINSTON. — A Far Country (1915) ; The Dwelling
Place of Light (1917).

CLIFFORD, MRS W. ~K.—The House in Marylebone (1917) ; Mrs.
Webster and Others (1918); Mm Fingal (1919); also plays.

COLUM, PADRAIC. — Wild Earth and other Poems (1916 : a
different work to the issue of 1907) ; The King of Ireland's
Son (1920); Dramatic Legends and other Poems (1922);
Castle Conquer (1928 : a novel).

CONRAD, JOSEPH.— Within the Tides (1915); Victory (1915);
The Shadow Line (1917) ; The Arrow of Gold (1919) ; Rescue
(1920); Notes on Life and Letters (1921); The Rover (1928).

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 501

CORELLI, MARIE. — Innocent (1914) ; The Young Diana (1919) ;

The Love of Long Ago (1920); The Secret Power (1921);

Love and the Philosopher (1928).
CRADDOCK, CHARLES EGBERT.— The Story of Duciehurst (1914).

D

DA VIES, HUBERT HENRY. — The Plays of H. H. Davies: With

an Introduction by Hugh Walpole (1921).
DAVIES, WILLIAM H. — The Bind, of Paradise (1914); Child

Lovers (1916); Forty New Poems (1918); The Song of Life

(1920); New Poems (1922); The Hour of Magic (1922); True

Travellers (1928); Secrets (1924).
DE LA MARE, WALTER. — Verse — The Sunken Garden (1917);

Motley (1918); The Veil (1921); Down-a-Down-Derry

(1922); Ding Dong Dell (1924 : prose and verse). Fiction —

Memoirs of a Midget (1921); The Riddle and other Stories

(1928).
DE MORGAN, WILLIAM. — The Old Madhouse (1919); The Old

Man's Youth (1921 : finished by Evelyn De Morgan).
DOUGHTY, CHARLES MONTAGU. — The Titans (1916); Mansoul

(1920).
DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN. — The Valley of Fear (1915) ; His

Last Bow (1917); Danger! and other Stories (1918).
DRINKWATER, JOHN. — Verse — Rebellion (1914 : a three act

play in verse) ; Swords and Ploughshares (1915) ; Olton Pools

(1916); Pawns (1917 : three one act plays); Tides (1917);

Loyalties (1919); The Seeds of Time (1921); Preludes (1922).

Prose Plays—Abraham Lincoln (1918); Mary Stuart (1921);

Oliver Cromwell (1921); Robert E. Lee (1928).

E

ERVINE, ST. JOHN GREER. — John Ferguson (1914); The Ship

(1922); Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary (1928); The Lady of

Belmont (1923) ; and several novels.
" ELIZABETH " (See Russell, Countess).
FIELD, MICHAEL. — Dedicated : an Early Work of Michael Field

(1914); A Selection from the Poems of Michael Field (1923 :

compiled by T. Sturge Moore).
FINDLATER, JANE HELEN AND MARY. — Content with Flies

(1916); Seen and Heard (1916); A Green Grass Widow and

other Stories (1921); Beneath the Visiting Moon (1923).
FLECKER, JAMES ELROY. — Collected Poems (1916); Selected

Poems of J. E. Flecker (1918); Collected Prose (1920);

Hassan: A Play in Five Acts (1922).
FOWLER, ELLEN THORNEYCROFT. — Ten Degrees Backward

(1915) ; Beauty and Bands (1920) ; The Lower Pool (1923).
FORSTER, E. M.— The Story of the Siren (1920); Pharos and

Pharillon (1923) ; A Passage to India (1924).

502 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX

G

GALE, NORMAN, — Collected Poems (1914) ; A Merry-go-round of
Song (1919).

GALSWORTHY, JOHN.— Plays— A Bit o9 Love (1915); The Skin
Game (1920); A Family Man (1922); Loyalties (1922);
Windows (1922); The Forest (1924); Old English (1924).
Fiction— The Freelands (1915); Beyond (1917); Five Tales
(1918); Saint's Progress (1919); Awakening (1920); Tatter-
demalion (1920); In Chancery (1920); To Let (1921); The
Forsyte Saga (1922); Captures (1923).

GIBSON, WILFRID WILSON. — Thoroughfares (1914) ; Borderlands
(1914); Battle (1915); Friends (1916); Livelihood (1917);
Whin (1918); Neighbours (1920); Krindlesyke (1922);
Kestrel Edge and other Plays (1924).

GLASGOW, ELLEN. — Life and Gabriella (1916); The Builders
(1918); One Man in His Time (1922); Dare's Gift and other
Stories (1924).

GORE-BOOTH, EVA. — Broken Glory (1918); The Sword of
Justice: A Play (1918).

GRAHAM, ROBERT BONTINE CUNNINOHAME. — Brought Forward
(1916); The Dream of the Magi (1923).

GRAND, SARAH. — The Winged Victory (1916); Variety (1922).

GRANVILLE-BARKER, HARLEY GRANVILLE. — Rococo: Vote by
Ballot: Farewell to the Theatre (1917); The Secret Life
(1923).

GREGORY, LADY. — The Golden Apple (1916); The Dragon
(1920).

H

HAGGARD, SIR HENRY RIDER, — The Holy Flower (1915);
The Ivory Child (1916); Finished (1917); Love Eternal
(1918); Moon of Israel (1918); When the World Shook
(1919); The Ancient Allan (1920); She and Allan (1921);
The Virgin of the Sun (1922); Wisdom's Daughter (1923);
Heu-Heu; or, The Monster (1924).

HARDY, THOMAS. — Satires of Circumstances (1914); Moments
of Vision (1917); Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922); The
Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923).

HARRADEN, BEATRICE. — The Guiding Thread (1936); Where
Your Treasure Is (1918) ; Spring Shall Plant (1920) ; Thirteen
All Told (1921); Patufta (1923).

HASTINGS, BASIL MACDONALD. — That Sort (1914); Advertise-
ment (1915); The Fourth Act (1916); A Certain Liveliness
(1919) ; Victory (1919 : from Conrad's novel).

HERRICK, ROBERT. — His Great Adventure (1914); Clark's
Field (1914) ; The World Decision (1916).

HEWLETT, MAURICE. — Verse — The Song of the Plow (1916);
The Loving History of Peridore and Paravail (1917); The
Village Wife9 s Lament (1918). Fiction — A Lover's Tale

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 503

(1915); The Little Iliad (1916); Frey and His Wife (1916);
Love and Lucy (1916); Thorgils of Treadholt (1917); The
Outlaw (1919); The Light Heart (1920) ; Mainwaring (1921);
also volumes of essays.

HICHENS, ROBERT SMYTHE. — In the Wilderness (1917); Mr*.
Harden (1919); Snake Bite and other Stories (1919); The
Spirit of the Time (1921); December Love (1922); The Last
Time and other Stories (1923); After the Verdict (1924).

HOPE, ANTHONY. — A Young Man's Year (1915); Captain
Dieppe (1918) ; Beaumaroy Home from the Wars (1919) ;
Lucinda (1920); also plays.

HOUSMAN, LAURENCE. — The Sheepfold (1918); The Wheel
(1919); The Death of Orpheus (1921); Angels and Ministers
(1921); Dethronements (1922); Estrode Paris (1923).

HOWELLS, W. D. — The Daughter of the Storage (1916); The
Leathertvood God (1916) ; The Vacation of the Kelwyns
(1920) ; Mrs. Farrell (1921).

HUDSON, W. H. — Far Away and Long Ago : a History of My
Early Life (1918); Birds in Town and Village (1919); The
Book of a Naturalist (1919); Dead Man's Plack; and an
Old Thorn (1920); A Traveller in Little Things (1921); A
Hind in Richmond Park (1922).

I
" IOTA " (MRS. KATHLEEN CAFFYN). — Mary Mirrielees (1916).

J

JACOBS, WILLIAM WYMARK. — Night Watches (1914); At Sun-

wich Port (1915); The Castaways (1916); Deep Waters

(1919); also plays.
JAMES, HENRY. — The Ivory Tower (1917); A Landscape

Painter (1919); Travelling Companions (1919),
JEROME, JEROME K. — Malvina of Brittany (1916); All Roads

Lead to Calvary (1919); Anthony John (1923).
JONES, HENRY ARTHUR. — The Lie (1915); Cock o' the Walk

(1915) ; The Pacifists (1917).

K

KIPLING, RUDYARD. — Verse — Rudyard Kipling's Verse: In-
clusive Edition (1919) ; The Years Between (1919). Fiction—
A Diversity of Creatures (1917); Land and Sea Tales for
Scouts and Guides (1923).

L

LAWRENCE, D. H.— Fiction— The White Peacock (1911); The
Trespasser (1912); Sons and Lovers (1913); The Prussian
Officer and other Stories (1914); The Lost Girl .(1920);
Women in Love (1921) ; Aaron's Rod (1922) ; The Ladybird

504 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX

(1923); Kangaroo (1923); England, My England (1924).
Verse — Amores (1916); Look! We Have Come Through!
(1917); New Poems (1918); Tortoises (1921); Birds, Beasts
and Flowers (1928); also plays.

LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD, — The Lonely Dancer and other Poems
(1914) ; The Silk-Hat Soldier and other Poems (1915) ; Pieces
of Eight (1918 : a novel).

LOCKE, W. J. — Jaffery (1915); Far-Away Stories (1916); The
Wonderful Year (1916); The Red Planet (1917); The Rough
Road (1918); The House of Baltazar (1920); The Mounte-
bank (1921); The Tale of Triona (1922); Moordius and Co.
(1923); The Coming of A??ios (1924).

LONDON, JACK. — The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914); The
Scarlet Plague (1915); The Star Rover (1915); The Little
Lady of the Big House (1916); Jerry of the Islands (1917);
Michael, Brother of Jerry (1917).

LUCAS, E. V, — Landmarks (1914) ; The Vermilion Box (1916) ;
Verena in the Midst (1920) ; Rose and Rose (1921) ; Genevra's
Money (1922); Advisory Ben (1923); also biography, topo-
graphy and miscellaneous writings.

M

MACKENZIE, EDWARD MONTAGUE COMPTON. — Carnival (1912);
Sinister Street (1913/1914); Guy and Pauline (1915); The
Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett (1918); Sylvia
and Michael (1919) ; Poor Relations (1919) ; Rich Relatives
(1921); The Altar Steps (1922); The Seven Ages of Woman
(1923); The Parson* s Progress (1923); The Heavenly Ladder
(1924); Old Men of the Sea (1924).

MALET, LUCAS. — Damaris (1916) ; Deadham Hard (1919) ; The
Tall Villa (1920) ; Da Silva's Widow and other Stories (1922) ;
The Survivors (1923).

MARTYN, EDWARD. — The Dream Physician (1918).

MASEFIELD, JOHN. — Verse — Phillip the King (1914); Sonnets
and Poems (1916); Lollingdon Downs (1917); Reynard the
Fox (1919); Right Royal (1920); Enslaved and other Poems
(1920); King Cole and other Poems (1923). Plays (in prose
or verse)— The Faithful (1915); The Locked Chest (1916);
The Sweeps of '98 (1916); Good Friday (1916); Melloney
Holtspur (1922); A King's Daughter (1928).

MAUGHAM, SOMERSET. — Caroline (1916); Love in a Cottage
(1918); Caesar's Wife (1919); Home and Beauty (1919);
The Unknown (1920); The Circle (1921); East of Suez
(1923); Our Betters (1923); The Camel's Back (1924).

MEYNELL, ALICE. — The Shepherdess (1914) ; Poems on the War
(1915); A Father of Women (1917); The Last Poems of
Alice Meynell (1923); The Poems of Alice Meynell: Complete
Edition (1923).

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 505

MOORE, FRANK FRANKFORT. — The Lady of the Reef (1915);

The Rise of Raymond (1916) ; The Fall of Raymond (1917) ;

The Courtship of Prince Charming (1920); The 9 — 15

(1921).
MOORE, GEORGE. — The Brook Kerith (1916); Lewis Seymour

and Some Women (1917); Avowals (1919); The Coming of

Gabrielle: A Comedy (1920); Helo'ise and Abelard (1921);

In Single Strictness (1922); Conversations in Ebury Street

(1924).
MOORE, T. STURGE. — The Sea is Kind (1914); Collected Poems

(1916); The Powers of the Air (1920); Tragic Mothers

(1920); Danae: Aforetime: Blind Thamyris (1920); Judas

(1923).
MUNRO, NEIL. — The New Road (1914); Jaunty Jock and other

Stories (1918).
MURRAY, T. C. — Spring and other Plays (1917).

N

NEWBOLT, SIR HENRY JOHN. — Collected Poems (1918).

NOYES, ALFRED. — The Searchlights (1914); A Salute from the
Fleet (1915); Songs of the Trawlers (1916); Walking
Shadows (1918); The Elfin Artist and other Poems (1920);
The Torch-Bearers (1922) ; Songs of Shadow of a Leaf (1924).

O

OLLIVANT, ALFRED. — The Brown Mare (1916) ; Boy Woodburn
(1918) ; The Next Step (1919); Two Men (1919); One Woman
(1921); Devil Dare (1923).

O'NEILL, MOIRA. — More Songs of the Glens of Antrim (1921).

O'SULLIVAN, SEUMAS. — The Twilight People (1905); Verses
Sacred and Profane (1908); Poems (1912); An Epilogue to
the Praise of Angus (1914); The Rosses and other Poems
(1918).

P

PARKER, SIR GILBERT. — You Never Know Your Luck (1915) ;
The Money Master (1915); The World for Sale (1916); Wild
Youth and Another (1918); No Defence (1920); Carnac
(1922).

PHILLPOTTS, EDEN. — Fiction — The Judge's Chair (1914);
Brunei's Tower (1915); Old Delabole (1915); The Green
Alleys (1916); Faith Tresilion (1916); The Chronicles of St.
Tid (1917); The Spinners (1918); Evander (1919); Orphan
Dinah (1920); Miser's Money (1920); Eudocia (1921); The
Bronze Venus (1921); The Grey Room (1921); Children of
Men (1923); The Red Redmaynes (1923); Black, White
and Brindled (1923); ' Cheat-the-Boys ' (1924). Verse—
< Deliaht ' (1915): Plain Sons (1917); As the Wind Blows

506 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX

(1920); A Dish of Apples (1921); Pixies9 Plot (1922);
Cherry-Stones (1928); also plays.

PINERO, SIR ARTHUR.— The Big Drum (1915); Mr. Livermore's
Dream (1917); The Freaks (1918); A Seat in the Park
(1922); The Enchanted Cottage (1922).

Q

QUILLER-COUCH, SIR ARTHUR. — Nicky-Nan, Reservist (1915) ;
Foe-Farrell (1918); Mortallone and Aunt Trinidad (1917);
but chiefly critical and editorial work.

R

ROBERTS, MORLEY. — Sweet Herbs and Bitter (1915); The
Madonna of the Beech Wood (1918); Hearts of Women
(1919); The Mirthful Nine (1921); Followers of the Sea
(1923).

ROBINS, ELIZABETH. — Camilla (1918); The Messenger (1919);
The Mills of the Gods (1920); Time is Whispering (1923).

ROBINSON, LENNOX. — The Dreamers (1915); The Whiteheaded
Boy (1916); The Lost Leader (1918); The Round Table
(1922); Crabbed Youth and Age (1922).

RUSSELL, COUNTESS. — The Pastor's Wife (1914); Christopher
and Columbus (1919); Vera (1921); The Enchanted April
(1922).

RUSSELL, GEORGE W. (* A.E.') — Prose — Imaginations and
Reveries (1915); The Candle of Vision (1918); The Inter-
preters (1920).

SACKVILLE, LADY MARGARET. — The Pageant of War (1916);

Selected Poems (1919); Epitaphs (1921); Poems (1923);

A Rhymed Sequence (1924).
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD. — Heartbreak House, Great Catherine

and Playlets o/ the War (1919); Back to Methuselah: A

Metabiological Pentateuch (1921); Saint Joan (1924).
SHORTER, DORA SIGERSON. — Love of Ireland: Poems and

Ballads (1916); The Sad Years (1918); A Legend of Glenda-

lough and other Ballads (1919); The Tricolour (1922).
SIDGWICK, MRS. ALFRED. — In Other Days (1915) ; Mr. Broom

and His Brother (1915); Salt and Savour (1916); Anne

Lulworth (1917); Karen (1918); The Purple Jar (1919);

Law and Outlaw (1921); Victorian (1922); None-Go-By

(1928) ; London Mixture (1924).
SIDGWICK, ETHEL. — A Lady of Leisure (1914); Duke Jones

(1914); The Accolade (1915); Hatchways (1916); Jamesie

(1917); Madam (1921); Restoration (1923).
SILBERRAD, UNA L. — Cuddy Yarbrough's Daughter (1914);

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX 507

Co-directors (1915) ; The Mystery of Barnard Hanson (1915) ;
The Inheritance (1916); Tfce Lynwood Affair (1918); Green
Pastures (1919); Jim Robinson (1920); Rachel and Her
Relations (1921) ; The Honest Man (1922).
SINCLAIR, MAY. — The Three Sisters (1914); Tanker Jevons
(1916); The Tree of Heaven (1917); Mary Olivier (1919);
The Romantic (1920); Mr. Waddington of Wyck (1921);
Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922); Uncanny Stories
(1923); A Cure of Souls (1924); The Dark Night (1924 : a
novel in verse) ;Arnold Waterlow (1924).
SINCLAIR, UPTON. — Sylvia's Marriage (1915); King Coal

(1917); Jimmie Higgins (1919).
SOMERVILLE, E. GE. — Mount Music (1919 : with Martin Ross);

An Enthusiast (1921).

STEPHENS, JAMES. — Verse — Songs from the Clay (1915); The
Adventures of Seumas Beg. The Rocky Road to Dublin
(1915); Green Branches (1916); Reincarnations (1918).
Fiction— The Demi-Gods (1914) ; Deirdre (1923).
SUTRO, ALFRED. — The Clever Ones (1914); The Bracelet
(1917); The Marriage Will Not Take Place (1917); The Trap
(1918); The Choice (1919); The Great Wall (1922); The
Laughing Lady (1922); Far Above Rubies (1924).
SVVINNERTON, FRANK ARTHUR. — The Young Idea (1910); The
Happy Family (1912) ; On the Staircase (1914) ; The Chaste
Wife (1916); Nocturne (1917); Shops and Houses (1918);
September (1919); Coquette (1921); The Three Lovers
(1922); Young Felix (1923).

SYMONS, ARTHUR. — Tragedies (1916); Tristram and Iseult: A
Play (1917); Love's Cruelty (1923); The Collected Works of
Arthur Symons (1924).

SYRETT, NETTA. — The Victorians (1915); Rose Cottingham
Married (1916) ; Troublers of the Peace (1917) ; The Wife of a
Hero (1918); The God of Chance (1920); One of Three
(1921) Lady Jem (1923); The Path to the Sun (1923).

TRENCH, HERBERT. — Collected Works of Herbert Trench
(1924) ; Selected Poems of Herbert Trench (1924),

TREVENA, JOHN. — Moyle Church-Town (1915); The Captain's
Furniture (1916); Raindrops (1920); The Vanished Moor
(1923) ; The Custom of the Manor (1924).

TYNAN, KATHARINE. — Verse — Flower of Youth (1915); The
Holy War (1916); Late Songs (1917); Herb o' Grace (1918);
Evensong (1922). Fiction — Margery Dawe (1916); Miss
Gascoigne (1918); The Man from Australia (1919); Love of
Brothers (1919); Denys the Dreamer (1920); TKtha's, Won-
derful Year (1921); Mary Beaudesert (1923); Pat the
'Adventurer (1923); The House of Doom (1924).

508 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDIX

W

WALPOLE, HUGH. — The Duchess of Wrexe (1914) ; The Golden
Scarecrow (1915); The Dark Forest (1916); The Green
Mirror (1918); The Secret City (1919); Jeremy (1919); The
Captives (1920); The Thirteen Travellers (1921); The Young
Enchanted (1921); The Cathedral (1922); Jeremy and
Hamlet (1923); The Old Ladies (1924).

WARD, MRS. HUMPHRY. — Eltham House (1915); A Great
Success (1916); Lady Connie (1916); ' Missing ' (1917); The
War and Elizabeth (1918); Cousin Philip (1919); Harvest
(1920).

WATSON, SIR WILLIAM.— The Man Who Saw (1917); The
Superhuman Antagonists (1919); Ireland Arisen (1921);
Ireland Unfreed (1921).

WELLS, H. G.—The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914); The
Research Magnificent (1915) ; Mr. Brittling Sees It Through
(1916) ; The Soul of a Bishop (1917) ; Joan and Peter (1918) ;
The Undying Fire (1919); The Secret Places of the Heart
(1922); Men Like Gods (1923); The Dream (1924).

WHARTON, EDITH.— Xingu and other Stories (1916); Summer
(1917); The Age of Innocence (1920); The Glimpses of the
Moon (1922); A Son at the Front (1923).

WILKINS, MARY ELEANOR.— The Copy-Cat and other Stories
(1914); Edgewater People (1918).

WILLCOCKS, MARY PATRICIA.— Change (1915) ; The Eyes of the
Blind (1917); The Sleeping Partner (1919); The Keystone
(1921) ; Worlds Apart (1923).

WILLIAMS, ALFRED. — Cor Cordium (1913); War Sonnets and
Songs (1916); Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames (1928).

WISTER, OWEN.— The Pentecost of Calamity (1915); A Straight
Deal or the Ancient Grudge (1920).

WOODS, MARGARET LOUISA. — The Return and other Poems
(1921); A Poet's Youth (1923 : a novel).

Y

YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLEH.— Verse— The Wild Swans at Coole
(1919); Seven Poems and a Fragment (1922); Later Poems
(1922). Plays— Four Plays for Dancers (1921); The Player
Queen (1922). Prose — Per Arnica Silentia Lunae (1918);
The Cutting of an Agate (1919); Four Years (1921); The
Trembling of the Veil (1922) ; Plays and Controversies (1928).

Z

ZANGWILL, ISRAEL.— Jinny the Carrier (1919) ; also a number
of plays.

INDEX

" A. E." See Russell, Geo. W.
A Rebours (Huysmans), 801
Abbey Theatre. See Irish Literary

Theatre

Abercrombie, Lascelles, quoted in
Hardy's Dynasts, 80; as poet,
122-125

Aberdeenshire, 864
Absolom (Moore), 148
Academy, The, 97
According to Plato (Moore), 860
Account of Milton's Prosody

(Bridges), 29
Actions and Reactions (Kipling),

824

Adam Cast Forth (Doughty), 115
Admirable Crichton, The (Barrie),

283

Admirals All (Newbolt), 185
Adnam's Orchard (Grand), 448, 449
Adrian Savage (Malet), 458
Adventurer of the North, An

(Parker), 853
Adventures of Qerard, The (Doyle),

852
Adventures of Harry Revelt The

(Quiller-Couch), 848
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

(Doyle), 851

Ae'romancy (Woods), 88
Affair of Dishonour, An (De Mor-
gan), 404

After Sunset (Watson), 168
Aftermath (Allen), 489
Agonists, The (Hewlett), 109-111,

148

Alastor (Shelley), 63, 93
Albemarle, The 384
Alexander, Sir George, 98
Alice for Short (De Morgan), 404
All on the Irish Shore (Somerville

and Ross), 470

Allan Quartermain (Haggard), 350
Allen, Grant, as novelist, 854, 447
Allen, James Lane, as novelist, 489
Almayer's Folly (Conrad), 406
Amazons, The (Pinero), 249
Ambassador , The (Hobhes), 461
Ambassadors, The (James), 478,
481, 484

America, South, 846, 347
American, The (James), 477
American Literature, Beginnings,

473, 474

American Novelists, 473 seqq.
American Politician, An (Craw-
ford), 486

American Prisoner (Phillpotts), 894
Simons Victima (Symons), 45
Ancestors (Athearton), 475, 496
Ancient Mariner, The (Coleridge),

94
Anna of the Five Towns (Bennett),

884

Anne Maulverer (Iota), 451
Ann Veronica (Wells), 379, 880,

881, 882
Anstey, F. (T. Anstey Guthrie), as

novelist, 861, 862
Anthea's Guest (Sidgwick), 467
Anticipations (Wells), 877
Antrim, 205
Aphrodite Against Artemis

(Moore), 143, 144
Aquamarines (Hopper), 209
Arabia, 112
Arabs, The, 346
A ran Islands, The, J. M. Synge

and, 227, 228
A ran Islands, The (Synge), 227,

228

Archer, Wm., on Laurence Binyon,
104; collaborator with Geo. Ber-
nard Shaw, 262
Argyllshire, 366

Arminel of the West (Trevena), 897
Arms and the Man (Shaw), 268
Arnim, Countess von. See *' Eliza-
beth "

Arnold, Sir Edwin, 26, 39, 163
Arnold, Matthew, 1, 2, 8, and
insularity in literature, 175;
reputation as a sceptic, 438; and
religion in England, 440
Arnold, Thomas, 438, 439
Art and passing problems, 295
" Art for art's sake," 2
Art of Thomas Hardy, The (John-
son), 78, 88, 198
Artemision (Hewlett), 109

509

510

INDEX

Arthurian legends, Tennyson and

the, 135

As it was Written (Harland), 837
Aspern Papers, The (James), 477
At the Gate of Samaria (Locke), 423
Atalanta in Calydon (Swinburne), 4
Athenaeum, The, Watts-Dunton

and, 32
Atherton, Gertrude F,» as novelist,

475, 497

Attila (Binyon), 106
Auguries (Binyon), 107
Auld Licht Idylls (Barrie), 367,

368

Auld Licht Manse, An (Barrie), 868
Aunt Anne (Clifford), 466
Aurora la Cujifii (Graham), 346
Austen, Jane, 293, 429, 436, 441,

468

Austin, Alfred, and the Victorian
era, 24; as poet, 26-29; his theory
of poetry, 29; and Byron, 35
Australia, 861
Autobiography of a Boy, The

(Street), 428

Autobiography of Mark Ruther-
ford, The, 882

Autumn Garden, The (Gosse), 84
Ave (Moore), 804
Aveugles, Les (Maeterlinck), 186
Awakening, The (Chambers), 255
Awkward Age, The (James), 480
Aylwin (Watts-Dunton), 81, 881

Babe, B.A , The (Benson), 861
Babs the Impossible (Grand), 448
Bage, Robert, 293
Balestier, Wolcott, collaborates

with Kipling, 322

Ball and the Cross, The (Chester-
ton), 430
Ballad of a Barber, The (Beards

ley), 11
Ballad of Reading Gaol, The

(Wilde), 24, 25
Ballad of the White Horse, The

^Chesterton), 146, 147
Ballades in Blue China (Lang), 33
Ballads (Masefield), 119
Ballads and Lyrics (Tynan), 210
Ballads and Songs (Davidson), 48
Ballads in Prose (Hopper), 209
Balzac, Honor6 de, as writer, 291,

293, 477; and Geo. Moore, 303
Bancroft, Sir Squire and Lady, 246
Barbara of the Thom (Syrett), 467
Baring-Gould, Rev. Sabine, as

writer and novelist, 350, 398
Barker,' H. Granville. See Gran-

ville-Barker

Barlow, Jane, as poet, 204, 205;

as novelist, 468
Barrack-room Ballads (Kipling), 57,

59, 60
Barrie, Sir James M., as dramatist,

283, 284; as novelist, 367-3 JO,

use of dialect, 370
Battle of the Strong, The (Parker),

353

Baudelaire, Chas., 44
Beacon, The (Phillpotts), 394
Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli,

Lord, 460
Beardsley, Aubrey, 8; The Yellow

Book, 10; The Savoy, 10; as

writer, 11, 12
Becket (Tennyson), 244
Beeching, Dean Henry C., as poet,

181-132; as nature poet, 148
Beerbohm, Max, on the end of the

Victorian era, 2; contributor to

The Yellow Book, 9, 311 ; as cari-
caturist and novelist, 341, 342
Belfast, 239
Bell and the Arrow, The (Hopper),

469
Bella Donna (Hichens), 413, 415,

416
Belloc, Hilaire, as poet, 141-145;

as novelist and satirist, 423, 429
Beloved Vagabond, The (Locke).

428, 424

Below Stairs (Sidgwick), 467
Below the Salt (Robins), 452
Benares, 323
Bending of the Bough, 7 he

(Moore), 214, 216, 221
Benedict Kavanagh (Birmingham),

432
Bennett, Arnold, as dramatist, 285;

as novelist, 875, 376, 382-387;

contrasted with Thomas Hardy,

386.
Benson, Arthur, C., 421 ; as poet,

180-131; as nature poet, 148
Benson, Edward F., as novelist,

861, 421
Benson, Robert Hugh, as novelist,

419, 420-421

Berri, Duchesse de, 462
Bertrud and other Dramatic Poems

(Sackville), 169
Beresford, J. D., 405
Bendish (Hewlett), 419
Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush

(Maclaren), 870

Besier, Rudolf, as dramatist, 288
Beth Book, The (Grand), 448
Better Dead (Barrie), 867
Betty Musgrave (Findlater), 871

INDEX

511

Bierce, Ambrose, as novelist, 476,

4*94, 495
Binyon, Laurence, contributes to

The Yellow Book, 2; as poet,

95, 104-108; comparison with

Stephen Phillips, 104
Bird-bride, A (Watson), 168
" Birmingham, G. A." (James O,

Hannay), as novelist, 481, 432
Birthright (Murray), 239
Black, William, as novelist, 364
Blake, William, Influence of, on

W. B. Yeats, 16, 187
Blaze of Glory, A (Winter), 466
Blindness of Dr. Grey, The (Shee-

han), 432
Blot in the y Scutcheon (Browning),

98, 24i
Blunt, Wilfrid Sea wen, as poet, 35-

86
Bob Martin's Little Girl (Murray),

859

Bob, Son of Battle (Ollivant), 425
Boer War, The, W. E. Henley and,

17, 54; Rudyard Kipling and,

60, 61; Richard Le Gallienne

and, 129

Bogland Studies (Barlow), 205
Bonaventure (Cable), 488
Bondman, The (Caine), 860
Book Bills of Narcissus, The (Le

Gallienne), 129

Book of Orme, The (Buchanan), 89
Book of Saints and Wonders

(Gregory), 222
Book of Twenty Songs (Symons),

45

Book of Verses (Henley), 52
Books, the torrent of, 373
Bootlc93 Baby (Winter), 466
Born in Exile (Gissing), 312, 815
Borrow, George, 31
Boston, 477

Bostonians, The (James), 477
Bothwell (Swinburne), 245
Boyle, William, as dramatist, 237
Bracken (Trevena), 898
Braddon, Mary E. (Mrs. John Max-
well), as novelist, 471
Brand (Ibsen), 102, 244
Brangwyn Mystery, The (Murray),

859

Bradley, Miss, 165
Brass Bottle, The (Anstey), 862
Brazenhead the Great (Hewlett),

416, 417

Bred in the Bone (Page), 490
Bridge of Fire, The (Flecker), 159
Bridges, Robert, and the Victorian

era, 24; as poet, 29-31

Bridling of Pegasus, The (Austin),

28

Broad Church Movement, 2
Bronte, Charlotte, 292, 299
Brontes, The, 1, 436, 455
Brooke, Rupert, as poet, 156-158
Broom Squire, The (Baring-Gould),

351
Brown, George Douglas, as novelist,

370, 371

Brown, Thomas E., 17, 89, 178
Browning, Eliz. Barrett, 36, 161
Browning, Robert, and the Vic-
torian Age, 1 ; as dramatist, 244
Brutus Ultor (Field), 166
Buchanan, Robert, 89
Building Fund, The (Boyle), 237
Bullen, Frank T., as novelist, 411
Bundle of Life, A (Hobbes), 460
Buried Alive (Bennett), 884
Burney, Frances, 436
Burning Daylight (London), 495,

496

Butler, Samuel, as novelist, 3, 325-
830; versatility, 826; opinions,
827; and Gilbert Cannan, 399
By the Ionian Sea (Gissing), 816
By What Authority? (Benson), 421
Byronism, 1, 8

Cable, George W., as novelist, 475,

488

Caesar and Cleopatra (Shaw), 264
Caffyn, Mrs. K. See " Iota "
Cahier Jaune, Le (Benson), 180
Caine, Hall, as novelist, 859-861
Californians, The (Atherton), 496
Call of the Blood, The (Hichens),

414, 415

Call of the Wild, The (London), 496
Callirrhoe (Field), 166
Campden Wonder, The (Masefield),

282

Can' Such Things Be (Bierce), 495
Canada, 348, 353, 441
Canadian Bom (Ward), 440
Canavans, The (Gregory), 224
Candida (Shaw), 263, 267
Cannan, Gilbert, as dramatist, 281 ;

as novelist, 899-401
Canterville Ghost, The (Wilde), 800
Canute the Great (Field), 166
Campbell, Thomas, 1
Campbell, Joseph, 201
Captain Brassbound's Conversion

(Shaw), 264

Captain Margaret (Masefield), 412
Captain Swift (Chambers), 255
Captains Courageous (Kipling), 823

325

512

INDEX

Caravaners, The (Russell), 463
Card, The (Bennett), 883, 386
Cardinal's Snuff-box, The (Har-

land), 338

Carissima, The (Malet), 458
Carlyle, Thomas, 8, 47; Teuton-
ism of, 175

Carnival (Mackenzie), 405
Carton, Richard C. (R. D. Crit-

chett), as dramatist, 256
Case of Rebellious Susan, The

(Jones), 258
Case of Richard Meyncll, The

(Ward), 442, 491
Cashel Byron's Profession (Shaw),

344, 845
Cassilis Engagement, The (Hankin),

272

Caste (Robertson), 246
Catherine Furze (Rutherford), 332
Cathleen ni Houlihan (Yeats), 217,

218

Catholicism, Irish, 203; and liter-
ature, 304, 310, 420, 429, 432, 487
Celestial Omnibus, The (Forster),

402

Celtic ideals, 16
Celtic literary revival, The, 8; 19,

175 seqq.; W. B. Yeats and, 188
Celtic mysticism of William Sharp,

71

Celtic poetry, 204
Celtic Twilight, The (Yeats), 185
Cenci, The (Shelley), 193, 244
Centaur '* Booty, The (Moore), 148
Challoners, The (Benson), 361
Chambers, Charles Haddon, as

dramatist, 255-256
Cfcance (Conrad), 406, 407
Chance, the Idol (Jones), 254
Change in the Cabinet, A (Belloo),

428

Charity (Graham), 847
Charity that Began at Home, The,

(Hankin), 272

Charles Dickens (Gissing), 816
Charles Dickens (Chesterton), 429
Charwoman's Daughter, The (Step-
hens), 433

Chastelard (Swinburne), 245
Cheap Jack Zita (Baring-Gould),

351
Chesterton, Gilbert K., as poet,

145-149; as critic, 146; as novelist

and journalist, 429, 480
Chicago, 498
Child of Promise, The (Syrett),

467
Child 'of the Jago, A (Morrison),

404

Children of Circumstance (Iota),

451
Children of the Ghetto (Zangwill),

355, 856, 357
Children of the Mist (Phillpotts),

392, 894
Children of the Tempest (Munro),

866

Choir Invisible, The (Allen), 489
Christ in Hades (Phillips), 96, 97
Christian, The (Caine), 360
Christmas Garland, A (Beerbohm),

841
Chronicles of Clovis, The (Saki),

480
Churchill, Winston, as novelist,

474-493, 494

Cigarette Maker's Romance (Craw-
ford), 487
City of Pleasure, The (Bennett),

383, 384

Clancy Name, The (Robinson), 238
Clare (County), 237
Clara Hopgood (Rutherford), 332
Classicism in European literature,

175

Clayhanger (Bennett), 885, 386, 887
Cleg Kelly (Crockett), 370
Cleopatra (Haggard), 850
Clerkenwell, 314
Clifford, Ethel (Lady Dilke), as

poet, 171
Clifford, Mrs. W. K., as novelist,

466, 467

Cliff*, The (Doughty), 114, 115
Clouds, The (Doughty), 115
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 2
Cluster of Nuts, A (Tynan), 469
Cockney dialect, 404
Coleridge, Mary E., as poet, 167-

168; as novelist, 462, 463
Collected Poems (A.E.), 194
Collected Poems (Shorter), 211
Collected Poem» (Woods), 88
Collins, J. Churton, on Stephen

Phillips, 99
Colonel Enderby's Wife (Malet),

457

Colour of Life, The (Meynell), 37
Colum, Padraic, 19; as poet, 198,

199; as dramatist, 237, 238
Combined Maze, The (Sinclair),

454, 455

Come and Find Me! (Robins), 458
Coming of Love, The (Watts-Dun-

ton),' 31-88, 831

Commentary, A (Galsworthy), 891
Common Lot, The (Herrick), 494
Concerning Isabel Carnaby
(Fowler), 468

INDEX

513

Conder, Charles, 8

Confessions of a Young Man

(Moore), 308, 805
Coniston (Churchill), 493
Conrad, Joseph, as novelist, 405-

411
Conversion of Winckelmann, The

(Austin), 27, 28
Convert, The (Robins), 453
Cooper, James Fenimore, 474
Copperhead, The (Frederic), 489
Corelli, Marie, as novelist, 294, 451,

471-472

Cornwall, 840, 851, 893
Coryston Family, The (Ward), 442
Cosmopolitanism in literature, 474
Couch, Sir A. T. Q. See Quiller-

Couch.
Counsel of Perfection, A (Malet),

457
Countess Cathleen, The (Yeats),

184, 186, 189-191, 216
Country House, The (Galsworthy),

389, 390

Country Muse, A (Gale), 133
Country of the Blind, The (Wells),

378

Court Theatre, The, 268, 282
Cousin Kate (Davies), 287
Cousins, James H., 200
Cowen, Louis, 855
Crackanthorpe, Hubert, 8; as

novelist, 333-337, 450
Craddock, Charles E. (Mary N.

Murfree), as novelist, 476, 490
Crawford, F., Marion, as American,
474, 486; as novelist, 486, 487;
books on Italian history, 488
Creators, The (Sinclair), 454
Creel of Irish Stories, A (Barlow),

469
Creoles of Louisiana, The (Cable),

488

Cricket Songs (Gale), 184
Crisis, The (Churchill), 493
Crock of Gold, The (Stephens),

200, 433
Crockett, Samuel R., as novelist,

370

Cromwell and other Poems (Drink-
water), 153

Crossing, The (Churchill), 493
Crossrigs (Findlater), 372
Crossroads, The (Robinson), 238
Crucial Instances (Wharton), 497
Cruise of the Cachalot, The

(Bullen), 411

Cuchulain of Muirthemne (Gre-
gory), 222
Cuckoo Songs (Tynan), 210

Cumberland, 359

Cup, The (Tennyson), 244

Curious Myths of the Middle Ages

(Baring-Gould), 850
Custom of the Country, The

(Wharton), 498
Cynthia's Way (Sidgwick), 467

Daffodil Fields (Masefield), 120, 121
Daily Bread (Gibson), 117, 118
Daisy Miller (James), 477
Damnation of Theron Ware, The

(Frederic), 489
Danae' (Moore), 143
Dandy Dick (Pinero), 249
Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 299
Danny (Ollivant), 425
Dante's Dream, 4
Dark Flower, The (Galsworthy),

890, 891

Dark Lantern, A (Robins), 453
Dart River, 894
Dartmoor novels, 394, 895, 396
Darwin Among the Machines

(Butler), 326
Darwinian theory, 2, 827
Dauber (Masefield), 120
Daughter of Heth, A (Black), 364
Daughter of Strife, A (Findlater),

871
Daughter of the Fields, A (Tynan),

469

Damd Elginbrod (Macdonald), 864
Davidson, John, contributor to The

Yellow Book, 8, 9; as poet, 42,

47-52, 71; early career, 48; as

novelist, 48, 841
Davies, Hubert H., as dramatist,

287
Davies, William H., 148; as poet,

151, 152
Dawn in Britain, The (Doughty),

112-114, 116, 141
Days and Nights (Symons), 42
Days of Auld Lang Syne (Mac-

laren), 870

Day's Work, The (Kipling), 824
Dead Man's Rock (Quiller-Couch),

348

Dear Brutus (Barrie), 284
Dear Departed, The (Houghton),279
Death of Adam and other Poems,

The (Binyon), 106
Death of Leander, The (Drink-
water), 152

Death's Jest Book (Beddoes), 244
Deborah (Abercrombie), 124
Decay of Lying, The (Wildfc), 6, 7
Decorations (Dowson), 69

514

INDEX

Deemster, The (Caine), 360
Defoe, Daniel, 293, 374, 435 ,
Deirdre, the story of, 91, 92
Deirdre (A. E.), 219
Deirdre (Yeats), 184, 192, 222
Deirdre of the Sorrows (Synge),

229, 233, 234

Deirdre Wedded (Trench), 91, 92
De la Mare, Walter, as poet, 154, 155
Deliverance, A (Monkhouse), 430
Deliverance, The (Glasgow), 491
De Morgan, William, as novelist,

899, 403-404
Demos (Gissing), 314
Denzil Quarrier (Gissing), 315
Departmental Ditties (Kipling), 57
Descent of Man, The (Wharton), 497
Descent of the Duchess, The

(Roberts), 361
De Tabley, Lord, 39
Devil's Disciple, The (Shaw), 264
Devious Ways (Cannan), 400
Devon, 351, 469
Devorgilla (Gregory), 223
Dhoya (Yeats), 185
Dialect, Dorset, 88 ; Irish, 222, 234 ;

Cumberland, 234; Scotch, 369;

in fiction, 395 ; Cockney, 404
Diana of the Crossways (Mere-
dith), 4

Diarmid and Grania (Moore), 221
Dickens, Charles, 1, 294, 374
Dieppe, 43

Dilemmas (Dowson), 339
Discords (Egerton), 450
Disraeli, Benjamin, 460
Divine Fire, The (Sinclair), 454
Dr. Sevier (Cable), 488
Doctor's Dilemma, The (Shaw), 265
Dodo (Benson), 361
Dodo the Second (Benson), 361
Dog Stories, 425
Doll's House, A (Ibsen), 231, 277,

280

Dolly Dialogues (Hope), 421
Dome, The, 8
Don (Besier), 288
Don Juan (Byron), 35
Don Orsino (Crawford), 487
Donovan Pasha (Parker), 854
Door of Humility, The (Austin), 28
Dome (Tirebuck), 357, 858
Dostoievsky, Feodor, 294
Double Thread, A (Fowler), 464
Doughty, Charles M., as poet, 112-

116, 141
Douglas, George (Brown, George

D.), 870, 871

Douglrfs, James, and Stephen
Phillips, 96

Dowson, Ernest, and The Yellow

Book, 8, 10 ; his life, 67 ; as poet,

62, 67-11; as novelist,. 833, 387,

889
Doyle, Sir Arthur Con an, as

novelist, 351-352
Drake (Noyes), 141, 148
Drama, The, and literature, 248;

poetic, 244; H. A. Jones and,

252, 253; Irish, 214, 216
Drama in Muslin, A (Moore), 806
Dream and the Business, The

(Hobbes), 461

Dream Come True (Binyon), 106
Dream Life and Real Life (Schrei-

ner), 446

Dream of Daffodils, A (Lowry), 189
Dreamers of the Ghetto (Zangwill),

856

Dreams (Schreiner), 446
Drone, The (Mayne), 230, 239
Drinkwater, John, as poet, 152-154
Dublin, 203, 213, 215, 433. See

also Irish Literary Theatre
Duchess of Malfi, The, 230
Dumas, Alexandre, 293
Dweller on the Threshold, The

(Hichens), 415, 416
Dunsany, Lord, 240
Dying Fires (Monkhouse), 430
Dynasts, The (Hardy), 78-81, 112,

114, 115

Earth's Voices (Sharp), 71
Earthwork out of Tuscany (Hew-
lett), 416

East, Poems of the, 163
Easter Vacation, An (O'Neill), 207
Ebb-tide, The (Stevenson), 869, 374
Edgeworth, Maria, 293, 436
Edinburgh Infirmary, W. E. Hen-
ley and, 52, 56

" Egerton, George," contributions
to The Yellow Book, 8, 9, 888;
as novelist, 449-451
"Eglington, John" (W. K.

Magee), 200

El Ombu (Hudson), 847
Eldest Son, The (Galsworthy), 276
Elf-errant, The (O'Neill), 207
Eliot, George, 1, 294, 299, 436, 487,

448, 455, 468
" Elizabeth " (Countess Russell),

as novelist, 468, 464
Elizabeth (Ritchie), 465
Elizabeth and Her German Garden

(Russell), 468

Elizabeth Cooper (Moore), 221
Elizabeth's Adventures in Rugen
(Russell), 463

INDEX

515

Ellis, Havelock, 10

Eloquent Dempsey, The (Boyle),

237

ft

Ehket (Page), 490

Emblems of Love (Abercrombie),

122

Emmanuel Burden (Belloc), 428
Emotional Moments (Grand), 448
Enchanted Island, The (Noyes),

142

Enchanted Sea, The (Martyn), 220
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Watts-
Dun ton's contributions, 82
England and other Poems

(Binyon), 107

England's Darling (Austin), 26
English drama, 243, 257
English Poems (Le Gallienne), 128
English Poets (Ward), 439
Englishman Looks at the World,

An (Wells), 377
Englishwoman's Love Letters, An

(Housman), 126, 342, 451
Epic of Hades (Morris), 39
Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature

(Watson), 63

Erectheus (Swinburne), 4, 95, 104
Eremus (Phillips), 95, 96, 108
Erewhon (Butler), 326, 328, 329
Erewhon Revisited (Butler), 328,

829, 330

Eros and Psyche (Bridges), 29
Ervine, St. John, as dramatist, 239,

240
Esmond, Henry Vernon (Henry V.

Jack), as dramatist, 256
Essay on Shelley (Thompson), 74
Essays on Life, Art, and Science

(Butler), 328

Esther Vanhomrigh (Woods), 465
Esther Waters (Moore), 224, 302,

303, 306, 307, 811, 893
Eternal City, The (Caine), 360
European literature, 41, 175
Eve of St. Mark (Keats), 170
Evelyn Innes (Moore), 220, 302,

807, 311
Everlasting Mercy, The (Mase-

field), 120, 122
Exploits of Brigadier Gerard

(Doyle), 852

Fabian Society, The, and G. Ber-
nard Shaw, 258, 266, 344; and
Sidney Webb, 259; and H. G.
Wells, 377

Fair Rosamund (Field), 166

Faith (Graham), 347

Fallen Idol, A (Anstey), 362

Falstaff, 295

Family Failings (Boyle), 237
Fancy's Following (Coleridge), 167
Fancy's Guerdon (Coleridge), 167
Fanny's First Play (Shaw), 265
Fantasies (Egerton), 450
Farewell to Poesy (Davies), 152
Farringdons, The (Fowler), 464
Father Felix's Chronicles (Hopper),

469, 470

Father's Tragedy, The (Field), 165
Faust (Goethe), 79, 175
Felix (Hichens), 413, 416
Fenwick's Career (Ward), 443
Feuillet, 293
Fiona Macleod. See Sharp,

William.

Fiction, works of. See Novels.
Fiddler's House, The (Colum), 230,

238
Field, Michael (Miss Bradley and

Miss Cooper), as poets, 165-167
Fielding, Henry, 293, 296
Fiery Dawn, The (Coleridge), 462
Findlater, Jane H., as novelist, 371
Findlater, Mary, as novelist, 371
Finer Grain, The (James), 477, 480
Firdausi in Exile (Gosse), 34
Fire-seeker, The (Iota), 452
Fires (Gibson), 117, 118
First Men in the Moon, The

(Wells), 879

Five Plays (Dunsany), 240
Five Nations, The (Kipling), 60
" Five Towns, The," 376, 382, 384,

385

Flames (Hichens), 413, 415, 416
Flaubert, Gustave, 292, 293; and

Arnold Bennett, 383, 384
Flaws (Barlow), 469
Flecker, James Elroy, as poet, 158-

160
Fleet Street and other Poems

(Davidson), 49, 50
Fleet Street Eclogues (Davidson),

48

Flies in Amber (Egerton), 451
Flower of Old Japan, The (Noyes),

140, 141, 143

Flowers of Passion (Moore), 305
Flute of Pan (Hobbes), 461
Foliage (Davies), 152
Folly of Eustace, The (Hichens),

413

Food of the Gods, The (Wells), 379
Fool Errant, The (Hewlett), 416
Fool of the World, The (Symons),

45

Fool's Paradise, A (Grundy)r, 255
For England's Sake (Henley), 52, 54

516

INDEX

Forest Lovers, The (Hewlett), 416,

417
Forest of Wild Thyme, The

(Noyes), 140, 141
Forest on the Hill, The (Phill-

potts), 894

Forster, E. M., as novelist, 402, 408
Forsyte Family, The (Galsworthy),

388, 889, 390

Fort Amity (Quiller Couch), 848
Fortunate Youth, The (Locke), 424
Fortunatus, The Pessimist (Austin),

26, 27

Forty Singing Seamen (Noyes), 142
Forty-two Poems (Flecker), 159
Four Men, The (Belloc), 145
Four Years, The (Binyon), 107
Fowey, 849
Fowler, Ellen Thorneycroft (Hon.

Mrs. A. Felkin), as novelist, 463-

464

Fraternity (Galsworthy), 890
Frederic, Harold, as novelist, 489
Freeman, Mrs. See Wilkins, Mary

E.

French ideals, 8
French Novel, The, 292-293, 833
French Revolution, Influence of,

293
From the Hills of Dream (Sharp),

71, 72
From the Land of the Shamrock

(Barlow), 469
Fruit of the Tree, The (Wharton),

498
Fruitful Vine, The (Hichens), 415,

416

Fuel of Fire (Fowler), 464
Fugitive, The (Galsworthy), 277
Fullerton, Morton, on Henry

James, 478
Further Experiences of an Irish

R.M. (Somerville and Ross), 470
Furze the Cruel (Trevena), 896,

897, 898

Gaelic League, 19, 184, 216

Gaelic mysticism, 864

Gale, Norman R., 109; as poet,

132-184; as nature poet, 148
Galsworthy, John, as dramatist,

245, 270, 273-279, 891 ; as novelist,

294, 887-892
Galway, 236, 239
Gaol Gate, The (Gregory), 225
Garden of Allah, The (Hichens),

414, 415, 416
Garden of Kama, The (Hope), 168,

165

Gateless Barrier, The (Malet), 457,

458

Gautier, Thdophile, 291, 294
Gay Lord Quex, The (Pinero), 251
Gazelles and other Poems, The

(Moore), 148

Gentleman, The (Ollivant), 426
George Mandeville's Husband

(Robins), 452

German literature, Carlyle and, 8
Getting Married (Shaw), 265, 266,

844

Ghetto Comedies (Zangwill), 856
GJietto Tragedies (Zangwill), 856
Giant's Robe, The (Anstey), 362
Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson, as poet,

116-119, 121, 141

Gilian the Dreamer (Munro), 866
Gipsy life, Watts-Dunton and, 82
Gissing, George R., as novelist,

802, 312-317; his life, 313-814
Gladstone, W. E., and Robert Els-
mere, 440

Glasgow, Ellen, as novelist, 491, 492
Glenanaar (Sheehan), 482
Glimpse, The (Bennett), 884
Glittering Gate, The (Dunsany),240
Gloria Mundi (Frederic), 489
Glory of Clementina Wing, The

(Locke), 424

Go&lin Market (Rossetti), 126
God in the Car, The (Hope), 421
Gods and Fighting Men (Gregory),

222

God'* Good Man (Corelli), 472
Gods Some Mortals and Lord

Wickenham, The (Hobbes), 460,

461

Godwin, Willian, 293
Golden Age, The (Grahame), 821
GoZden Bowl, The (James), 478,

480, 482, 484

Golden Helm, The (Gibson), 117
Golden Journey to Samarkand, The

(Flecker), 158, 159
Golden Treasury (Palgrave), 848
Goldsmith, Oliver, 258, 873
Good Comrade, The (Silberrad),

467
Gore-Booth, Eva, 72; as poet, 207-

208
Gospel of Freedom, The (Hewick),

494
Gosse, Edmund W., 24; as poet,

83, 34
Graham, Robert B., Cunninghame,

as novelist, 845-847
Grahame, Kenneth, 8, 821
Grand, Sarah (Mrs. Frances E.

M'Fall), as novelist, 447-449

INDEX

517

Grand Babylon Hotel (Bennett),

884

Grand Banks, The 823
Grandissimes, The (Cable), 488
Grangecolman (Martyn), 220
Grania (Gregory), 223, 224, 225
Granite (Trevena), 896, 397
Granville-Barker, H. G., as drama-
tist, 268-270

Grass of Parnassus (Lang), 83
Great Adventure, The (Bennett),

285, 884

Great Boer War, The (Doyle), 852
Great Catherine (Shaw), 265
Great Friends (Street), 428
Greater Inclination, The (Whar-

ton), 497
Greatest of These, The (Grundy),

255

Green Mansions (Hudson), 347
Green, J. R., 440
Green, T. H., 440
Green Arras (Housman), 126, 843
Green Carnation, The (Hichens),

413, 415
Green Graves of Balgowrie, The

(Findlater), 871
Green Helmet, The (Yeats), 186,

189, 192
Gregory, Lady, and the Irish

Literary Theatre, 216; as

dramatist, 222, 228
Grey Roses (Harland), 838
Griselda (Blunt), 85
Growth of Love, The (Bridges), 29
Grundy, Sydney, as dramatist, 245,

255

Guest's, Lady, Mabinogion, 178
Gustav III of Sweden. 462
Gwynn, Stephen, as novelist, 481

Haggard, Sir H. Rider, as writer
and novelist, 849, 850

Hail and Farewell (Moore), 221,
304, 805, 810, 811

Half an Hour (Barrie), 284

Half-way House (Hewlett), 416, 419

Handsome Brandons, The (Tynan),
469

Hankin, St. John, as dramatist,
270-273

Hannay, Rev. James O. See Bir-
mingham, G. A.

Hardy, Thos., 1; as poet, 24, 77-
88; as novelist, 78, 294, 49Tfas
a metrist, 85 ; Arnold Bennett,
contrasted with, 886; Wessex
novels, 892, 893; narrowness of
range, 479

Harland, Henry, and The Yellow

Book, 8, 9; as novelist, 888, 887-
889; Editor of The Yellow Book,
887; as American, 476
Harraden, Beatrice, as novelist,

456-457

Harte, Bret, 475
Harvest (Robinson), 239
Hastings, Basil M., as dramatist,

288

Hauptmann's Die Weber, 214
Hawthorn and Lavender (Henley),

52, 53

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 474
Haydon, Benjamin R., 443
Hazard of New Fortunes, A

(Howells), 485

Heart and Sword (Winter), 466
Heather (Trevena), 397
Heather Field, The (Martyn), 216,

219
Heavenly Twins, The (Grand), 447,

448

Helbeck of Bannisdale (Ward), 442
Helen of Troy (Lang), 83
Helen Redeemed (Hewlett), 111
Henley, Wm. Ernest, Influence of,
8, 16; as editor, 17; compared
with Chas. Kingsley, 18; char-
acteristics, 18; as poet, 52-56
Henry, O., 476

Henry Dunbar (Braddon), 471
Here are Ladies (Stephens), 433
Heretics (Chesterton), 429
Hero Lays (Milligan), 208
Herod (Phillips), 100, 101
Herrick, Profc Robert, as novelist,

494

Herself (Sidgwick), 468
Hetty Wesley (Quiller-Couch), 348,

349
Hewlett, Maurice, as poet, 108-112,

143; as novelist, 405, 416-420
Hichens, Robert S., as novelist,

413-416

Hilda Lessways (Bennett), 885, 886
Hilda Strafford (Harraden), 456
Hildris the Queen (Sackville), 169
Hill of Vision, The (Stephens), 199,

433

Hinkson, Mrs. See Tynan, Kathar-
ine.
Htndle Wakes (Houghton), 276,

280, 281

His House in Order (Pinero), 251
Ht« People (Graham), 847
History of David Grieve, The

(Ward), 487, 441, 442
History of Sir Richard Calmady,

The (Malet), 458
Hobbes, John Oliver (Mrs. P. M.

518

INDEX

T. Craigie), as novelist, 459-462;

as dramatist, 461
Hocken and Huncken (Quiller-

Couch), 848, 840
Holcroft, Thomas, 293
Hodgson, Ralph, as poet, 155, 156
Holiday and other Poems (David-
son), 49, 51

Homeward (A. E.), 194
Honey, My Honey (Tynan), 469
Hope, Anthony (A. H. Hawkins)

as novelist, 421-422
Hope, Laurence (Mrs. A. F.

Nicholson), as poet, 162-165
Hope (Graham), 847
Hopper, Nora (Mrs. Wilfrid H.

Chesson), as poet, 208-210; as

novelist, 469
Horniman, Miss, 216, 279
Houghton, Stanley, as dramatist,

269, 279-281
Hound of the Baskervilles, The

(Doyle), 851
Houp-la (Winter), 466
Hour-glass, The (Yeats), 217, 218
House of Mirth, The (Wharton),

498
House with the Green Shutters

(Douglas), 870, 396
Housman, A. E., as poet, 88-91,

121 ; as nature poet, 148
Housman, Laurence, as poet, 126-

127; as illustrator, 127; and The

Yellow Book, 8, 842; as novelist,

342, 348, 451
How He Lied to Her Husband

(Shaw), 244

Howard's End (Forster), 403
Howells, William D., a typical

American, 474; as novelist, 485,

486, 488
Hudson, William Henry, as

novelist, 847-349 ; his other books,

847

Hugo, Victor, 293
Hugo (Bennett), 383, 884
Human Inheritance, The (Sharp),

71

Humble Romance (Wilkins), 490
Hundred Window's, The (Lowry),

189

Huysmans, J. K., 801
Hyacinth Halvey (Gregory), 224
Hyde, Dr. Douglas, and older Irish

literature, 19, 188, 196; as poet,

196

Hymn of Bardaisan, 68
Hymn .to Dtony*u», A (Sackville),

170
Hyperion (Keats), 105, 106

I Forbid the Banna (Moore), 800
Ibsen, Henrik, staged in London,

218; and intellectual drama, 102,

281, 244; influence, on English

drama, 248, 253, 255, 257, 268,

278, 279; as dramatist, 257; G.

B. Shaw and, 260, 261; natura-
lism and poetry, 278
Ideal Husband, An (Wilde), 247
Ideala (Giand), 447
Ideas of Good and Evil (Yeats),

185, 186

Idiom in literature, 283, 284
Idle Ideas (Jerome), 862
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

(Jerome), 362

Idler, The (Chambers), 255
Idols (Locke), 423
Illumination (Frederic), 489
Image, The (Gregory), 224
Images of Good and Evil (Symons),

45, 46
Imaginative Man, An (Hichens),

413

Immaturity (Shaw), 344
Importance of Being Earnest, The

(Wilde), 247
Impressions and Opinions (Moore),

810

In a Garden (Beeching), 181
In a Music Hall and other Poems

(Davidson), 48

In Black and White (Kipling), 319
In Kedar9s Tents (Merriman), 854
In Memoriam (Tennyson), 2
In Ole Virginia (Page), 490
In Russet and Silver (Gosse), 84
In the Midst of Life (Bierce), 495
In the Seven Woods (Yeats), 186,

189
In the Shadow of the Glen (Synge),

226, 228, 229, 236
In the Tennessee Mountains (Crad-

dock), 490
In the Year of Jubilee (Gissing),

316

In Vinculis (Blunt), 85
In Wfcklow (Synge), 227
Inch bald, Mrs., 293
Increasing Purpose, The (Allen),

489
Independent Means (Houghton),

279

Independent Theatre and Ibsen, 248
India, Rudyard Kipling and, 56

seqq., 828; Laurence Hope and,

168

Indian Love (Hope), 168
Indiscretion of the Duchess, The

(Hope), 421

INDEX

519

Infidel, The (Braddon), 471
Inner Shrine, The (Sidgwick), 467
In Russet and Silver (Gosse), 84
Inside of the Cup, The (Churchill),

493, 494 *

Insurrections (Stephens), 199, 438
Intellectualism in drama, 230
Interludes and Poems (Aber-

crombie), 122, 124
International Episode, An (James),

477
Introduction to the Study of

Browning (Symons), 12
Intrusions of Peggy, The (Hope),

421

Invisible Man, The (Wells), 378
" Iota " (Mrs. Kathleen Caffyn), as

novelist, 451-452
Ireland, The Celtic Revival in. See

Celtic

Ireland with other Poems (John-
son), 197

Iris (Pinero), 251
Irish drama, 180, 218-216
Irish Folk-history Plays (Gregory),

224

Irish Idylls (Barlow), 469
Irish literary movement, 3, 16, 19;

George Moore and the, 302, 804
Irish Literary Society, 184
Irish Literary Theatre, 180, 183,

184, 189, 193, 213-216 ; dramatists

of the, 217, seqq., 220, 240
Irish mysticism, 203
Irish National Theatre Society, 193
Irish novel, The, 179, 180, 431
Irish novelists (women), 468 seqq.
Irish peasant speech, 222, 233
Irish poetesses, 203
Irish poetry, 181
Irish poets, 178, seqq.
Irishman, The stage, 179
Irrational Knot, The (Shaw), 844
Irving, Sir Henry, 246
Irving, Washington, 474, 475
Ishmael (Braddon), 471
Island of Dr. Moreau, The (Wells),

879
Island Pharisees, The (Galsworthy),

887, 388

Island Race, The (Newbolt), 185
It Never Can Happen Again (De

Morgan), 404
Italy, Marion Crawford and, 487

Jacobs, William W., as humorist,

863

Jack Straw (Maugham), 286
Jackdaw, The (Gregory), 225
James, Henry, contributor to The

Yellow Book, 8, 9; as novelist,
268, 407, 476-485, 488; on Hubert
Crackanthorpe, 334; as Ameri-
can, 474, 476

James, Scott, on Henry James, 480
Jane Clegg (Ervine. 240
Jane Eyre (Bronte), 292
Jean-Christophe (Holland), 468
Jerome, Jerome K., as writer and

humorist, 362, 363
Jess (Haggard), 350
Jessamy Bride, The (Moore), 360
Jews in London, 355
Jim Davis (Masefield), 412
Jimmyjohn Boss (Wister), 491
Joan Haste (Haggard), 350
John Bull's Other Island (Shaw),

180, 265, 267, 275
Jo hn Ferguson (Ervine), 240
John Herring (Baring-Gould), 351
John Inglesant (Shorthouse), 342
John of Jingalo (Housman), 843
John Sherman (Yeats), 185
John Splendid (Munro), 366
Johnson, Lionel P., 8; on Thomas
Hardy, 78, 198; as poet, 196-198
Jones, Henry Arthur, as dramatist,

252-255

Joseph Entangled (Jones), 254
Joseph Vance (De Morgan), 403,

404

Journal Intime (Amiel), 439
Joy (Galsworthy), 277
Joyous Adventures of Aristide

Pujol, The (Locke), 424
Judah (Jones), 253
Jude the Obscure (Hardy), 396
Judgment House, The (Parker),

354

Jump to Glory Jane (Meredith), 126
June Romance, A (Gale), 134
Jungle, The (Sinclair), 475, 493
Jungle Books, The (Kipling), 323
Just So Stones (Kipling), 824
Justice (Galsworthy), 275-277

" Kailyard School, The," 366
Karamanian Exile, The (Mangan),

181

Katharine Fensham (Harraden), 456
Keats, John and Francis Thomp-
son compared, 74
Kentucky, 489, 493 ""
Kentucky Cardinal, A (Allen), 489
Keohler, Thomas, as poet, 201
Kerrigan1 s Quality (Barlow), 469
Kidnapped (Stevenson), 866
" Kiltartan English," 222, 228
Kim (Kipling), 823-325 •
JBCtncora (Gregory), 228

520

INDEX

King, The (Phillips), 102, 108
King Billy of Batlarat (Roberts),

861
King Solomon's Mines (Haggard),

350

King With Two Faces, The (Cole-
ridge), 462

King's Revoke, The (Woods), 465
King's Threshold, The (Yeats), 192
Kingsley, Charles, 18, 457
Kipling, Rudyard, as poet, 56-62;
and W. E. Henley, 17, and India,
56; realism, 802; as novelist, 817-
826 ; Mulvaney stories, 819
Kipps (Wells), 879, 881, 882
Kirriemuir (Thrums), 868
Kitty Tailleur (Sinclair), 454
Klondyke, 453, 454, 495
Knave of Hearts (Symons), 46

LacrimseMusarum (Watson), 62, 64
Ladder of Swords, The (Parker),

854

Ladder to the Stars, The (Find-
later), 871
Lady Audley's Secret (Braddon),

471

Lady Baltimore (Wister), 491
Lady Frederick (Maugham), 286
Lady from the Sea, The (Ibsen),

274
Lady Huntworth9s Experiment

(Carton), 256
Lady of the Barge, The (Jacobs),

868
Lady of the Drawing-room Floor,

The (Coleridge), 462, 463
Lady Paramount, The (Harland),

888

Lady Patricia (BesJer), 288
Lady Rose's Daughter (Ward), 443
Lady Windermere9s Fan (Wilde),

244,247
Lahore, 823
Lake, The (Moore), 221, 802, 808,

811

Lalage's Lovers (Birmingham), 432
Lalla Rookh (Moore), 163
Lamb, Lady Caroline, 448
Lamp and the Lute, The (Watson),

168

Land, The (Colum), 237
Land of Heart's Desire, The

(Yeats), 184, 189-191
Land of Promise, The (Maugham),

286
Lane That Had No Turning, The

(Parker), 858
Lang, Andrew, as man of letters,

24; as' poet, 83, 84

Last Ballad, The (Davidson), 49
Last Blackbird and other Lines

(Hodgson), 155

Last of the De Mullins, The (Han-
kin), 272

Last Poems (Housman), 89
Last Studies (Crackanthorpe), 884,

336

Later Poems (Meynell), 87
Lawrence, D. H., 405
Lawton Girl, The (Frederic), 489
Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 150
Leda and other Odes (Moore), 148
Le Gallienne, Richard, as poet, 127-

180; as novelist, 300
Le Gentleman (Sidgwick), 468
Leonora (Bennett), 384
Lespinasse, Mile., 443
Letters from America (Brooke), 157
Letty (Pinero), 251
Lever, Charles, 179, 180, 481
Liberty Hall (Carton), 256
Life and Habit (Butler), 826, 828
Life for a Life, A (Herrick), 494
Life's Atonement, A (Murray), 859
Life's Handicap (Kipling), 828
Light Freights (Jacobs), 863
Light of Asia (Edwin Arnold), 89
Light that Failed, The (Kipling),

822

Likely Story, A (De Morgan), 404
Lilith (Macdonald), 864
Listeners, The (De la Mare), 154,

155
Literary History of Ireland

(Hyde), 196, 222
Literature and Dogma (Arnold),

440

Little Brother (Cannan), 401
Little Dinners with the Sphinx (Le

Gallienne), 129
Little Dream, The (Galsworthy),

274

Little Mary (Barrie), 284
Little Minister, The (Barrie), 288,

368, 869
Little Novels of Italy (Hewlett),

416, 417

Little Peter (Malet), 457
Little Vanities of Miss Whittaker

(Winter), 466

Little Widow, The (Tirebuck), 857
Liverpool, 859
Lives of the Saints (Baring-Gould),

350

Liza of Lambeth (Maugham), 405
Loaves and Fishes (Maugham),

286
Locke, Wm. John, as novelist, 4Q2-

424

INDEX

521

Log of a Sea-waif, The (Bullen),

411

Lollingdon Downs (Masefield), 122
London, Jack, 454, 476; as novelist,

495-496 '

London, Henry James and, 478
London (weekly), 17
London Nights (Symons), 48, 46,

841

London Visions (Binyon), 106, 107
Long Ago (Field), 166
Longest Journey, The (Forster),

402

Loom of Years, The (Noyes), 140
Loot of Cities, The (Bennett),

884
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime

(Wilde), 800

Lord Jim (Conrad), 406, 407, 408
Lord Vyet and other Poems (Ben-
son), 180

Lost Endeavour (Masefield), 412
Lost Pibroch, The (Munro), 866
Lost World, The (Doyle), 852
Louise de Valliere (Tynan), 210
Lover, Samuel, 179, 481
Lotje and Mr. Lewisham (Wells),

879, 881, 382
Love and the Soul Hunters

(Hobbes), 461

Love— And What Then? (Hast-
ings), 288

Love in a Life (Monkhouse), 480
Love in Idleness (Beeching), 181
Love Songs of Connacht (Hyde),

196
Love Sonnets of Proteus (Blunt),

85

Loue's Journey (Clifford), 171
Love's Looking-glass (Beeching),

181

Love9s Pilgrimage (Sinclair), 493
Lowry, Henry Dawson, as poet,
188-189 ; as novelist, 338, 837, 339,
840

Lucas, E. V., as novelist, 431
Luke Delmege (Sheehan), 432
Lyall, Sir Alfred, 168
Lying Prophets (Phillpotts), 892,

898

Lyrical and other Poems (Drink-
water), 152

Lyrical Poems (Binyon), 105
Lyrics (Benson), 130
Lyrics (Woods), 88
Lyrics and Dramas (Phillips), 108,

104
Lyrios and Narrative Poems

(Trench), 94
Lys Rouge, Le (France), 391

Mabinogion (Guest), 178
MacCathmhaoSl, Seosamh, 201
Macdonald, George, 72, 178; as

novelist, 368, 364

MacDonough's Wife (Gregory), 225
Mackail, J. N., 131
Mackenzie, Compton, 405
Maclaren, Ian. (Watson, John M.)

370
Macleod, Fiona. See Sharp,

William

Macpherson's Ossian, 178
McTeague (Norris), 492
Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 292,

808
Madame de Treymes (Wharton),

498

Madame Delphine (Cable), 488
Mademoiselle Miss (Harland), 837,

838
Madras House, The (Barker), 268,

269
Maeterlinck, M., Influence of, on

W. B. Yeats, 183, 186
Maeve (Martyn), 219
Magazine of Art, 17
Magee, W. K., 200
Magistrate, The (Pinero), 24-9
Magnetic, North, The (Robins),

452, 453

Mainsail Haul, A (Masefield), 412
Mahoa's Revenge (Haggard), 850
Major Barbara (Shaw), 265
Make Believe (Lowry), 840
Malcolm (Macdonald), 864
Malet, Lucas (Mrs. St. Leger

Harrison), as novelist, 457-459
Malory's Morte d'Arthur, 178
Mammon (Davidson), 50
Mammon and Company (Benson),

861

Man, Isle of, 360
Man and Superman (Shaw), 264,

265
Man from the North, A (Bennett),

384

Man of Destiny (Shaw), 263
Man of Genius, A (Willcocks),

456
Man of Honour, A (Maugham),

285, 286

Man of Marfc, A (Hope), 421
Man of Moods, A (Lowry), 340
Man of Property, The (Gals-
worthy), 888, 889
Man Who Was Thursday, The

(Chesterton), 480
Manaliwe (Chesterton), 480
Manchester Repertory Company,

279

522

INDEX

Mangan, Jas. C., as an Irish poet,
181

Mankind in the Making (Wells), 377
Mantle of Elijah, The (Zangwill),

856
Manual of English Literature

(Arnold), 438

Manxman, The (Caine), 860
Many Cargoes (Jacobs), 363
Many Inventions (Kipling), 319, 323
Marcella (Ward), 437, 442
Margaret Ogilvy (Barrie), 368, 369
Mariamne (Moore), 143
Marlus the Epicurean (Pater), 803
Mark Rutherford's Deliverance

(Rutherford), 832
Marmadake (Monkhouse), 430
Marquis of Lossie, The (Mac-

donald), 364

Marriage (Wells), 294, 880
Marriage of WiUiam A she, The

(Ward), 443
Marrying of Ann Leete, The

(Barker), 268, 269
Marty (Winter), 466
Martyn, Edward, and the Irish
Literary Theatre, 216; as
dramatist, 219, 220
Mary, Queen of Scots, 417
Mary and the Bramble (Aber-

crombie), 122, 124
Mary Stuart (Swinbarne), 245
Mary's Wedding (Houghton), 281
Masefield, John, as poet, 116, 118-
122; as dramatist, 282; as
novelist, 412.

Masque of Dead Florentines (Hew-
lett), 109

Master, The (Zangwill), 356, 357
Master Christian, The (Corelli), 472
Maugham, Wra. Somerset, as dra-
matist, 285-287 ; as novelist, 405
Martin, Viclet. Sec Somerville
Mary Rose (Barrie), 284
Maupassant, Guy de, 292
Maurice Harte (Murray), 289
Mayne, Rutherford, as dramatist,

230, 239
Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy),

368

Mea Culpa (Harland), 337
Meg of the Scarlet Foot (Tirebuck),

857, 358

Mehalah (Baring-Gould), 851
Members of the Family (Wister;,

491
Memoirs of an American Citizen,

The (Herrick), 494
Memoirs of My Dead Life (Moore),
, 804

Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

(Doyle), 351

Mendicant Rhymes (Housman), 127
Meredith, George, and the Vic-
torian Era, 1, 3; characteristics,
4,; poetry, 24, 39; as novelist,
294, 300; and Henry James com-
pared, 481 seqq.
Merime'e, Prosper, 291
Merriman, Henry Seton (Hugh

Stowell Scott), as novelist, 354
Mexico, 346, 850
Meynell, Mr. and Mrs. Wilfrid, and

Francis Thompson, 73
Meynell, Mrs. Alice, as poet, 86,

87, 162

Middleman, The (Jones), 253
Middlemarch (Eliot), 299
Mighty Atom, The (Corelli), 451,

472

Miles Dixon (Houghton), 281
Milestones (Bennett), 285
Miller of Old Church, The (Glas-
gow), 491

Miliigan, Alice, as poet, 208
Mind the Paint Girl (Pinero), 249
Mineral Workers (Boyle), 237
Miniatures and Moods (Street), 427
Miriam Lucas (Sheehan), 432
Miriam's Schooling (Rutherford),

332

Miss Bretherton (Ward), 439
Miss Fallowfield's Fortune (Fowler),

464
Miss Grace of All Souls (Tirebuck),

357, 358
Mr. Clutterbuck's Election (Belloc),

428

Mr. Isaacs (Crawford), 486
Mr. Preedy and the Countess (Car-
ton), 256
Mrs. Dane's Defence (Jones), 258,

254

Mrs. Dot (Maugham), 286
Mr*. Dymond (Ritchie), 465
Mrs. Elmdey (Munro), 430
Mrs. Falchion (Parker), 853
Mrs. Gorringe's Necklace (Davies),

287

Mr*. Keith's Crime (Clifford), 4€6
Mr*. Lancelot (Hewlett), 416, 419
Mra. Lorimer (Malet), 457
Mrs. Maxon Protests (Hope), 422
Mrs. Warren's Profession (Shaw),

263, 267

Mixed Marriage (Ervine),, 289
Mob (Galsworthy), 277
Mockers, The (Barlow), 205
Modern Antxus, A (Housman),
848

INDEX

528

Modern Chronicle, A (Churchill),

498

Modern Love (Meredith), 45
Modern Lover, A (Moore), 805
Modern Painters (Ruskin), 5, 7
Modern Painting (Moore), 303, 810
Modern Utopia, A (Wells), 37T
Modern Way, The (Clifford), 467
Mollontraoe on Women (Sutro), 285
Mollusc, The (Davies), 287
Monkhouse, Allan, 430
Monologue, The dramatic, 44
Moore, F. Frankfort, as novelist,

360, 361

Moore, George, 8, 138; and the
Irish Literary Theatre, 214, 216;
as dramatist, 220, 221 ; as novelist,
802-312; influence of Zola, 802,
808 ; of Balzac, 302, 303 ; as poet,
805 ; on Henry James, 483
Moore, T. Sturge, as poet, 143, 144
Moral, The, in drama, 275
Morals of Marcus Ordeyne, The

(Locke), 423

Mordred (Newbolt), 135
More, Hannah, 293, 436
More Cricket Songs (Gale), 134
Morris, Sir Lewis, 26, 39
Morrison, Arthur, as novelist, 404
Afort de Tintagiles, La (Maeter-
linck), 186

Morte d9Arthur (Malory), 178
Mother, The (Phillpotts), 394
Afotta (Ouida), 470
Motley, A (Galsworthy), 891
Mountain Lovers, The (Sharp), 865
Multitude and Solitude (Masefield),

412, 413
Mummer's Wife, A (Moore), 802,

805, 306, 307, 811, 835
Munro, Hector. See " Saki "
Munro, Neil, 178; as novelist, 866
Murfree, Mary N. See Craddock,

Chas. E.
Murray, David Christie, as novelist,

858, 359

Murray, T. C., as dramatist, 289
Muse in Exile, The (Watson), 66
My Dark Rosaleen (Mangan), 181
My Daughter Helen (Monkhouse),

430
My Ladies9 Sonnets (Le Gallienne),

128

My Lady Nicotine (Barrie), 867
My New Curate (Sheehan), 482
Myers, Frederick, 89
Mysticism, 203; Irish, 208

Napoleon of Notting Hill, The
(Chesterton), 480

Narrow Way, A (Findiater), 871
National (Irish) Literary Society,

184
National Observer, The, W. E.

Henley and, 17, 57, 333, 427
Nationality in literature, 175 seqq.
Naturalist in La Plata, The (Hud-
son), 347
Nature and other Poems

(Williams), 149

Nature in Downland (Hudson), 347
Nature Poems (Davies), 151
Nature poetry, 148
Naulahkit The (Kipling and Bale-

stier), 822

Nero (Phillips), 101
Nest of Linnets, A (Moore), 861
Nether World, The (Gissing), 314
Nets of Love, The (Gibson), 117
New Arabian Nights (Stevenson),

17

New Ballads (Davidson), 49
New Canterbury Tales (Hewlett),

417

New Collected Rhymes (Lang), 84
New England, 490, 493, 497
New Grub Street (Gissing), 315
New Inferno, The (Phillips), 103,

104

New Irish Comedies (Gregory), 224
New June, The (Newbolt), 420
New Machiavelli, The (Wells), 294

380

New Man, The (Robins), 452
New Orleans, 488
New Poems (Davies), 161

(Gosse), 84

(Le Gallienne), 129

(Phillips), 103

(Shorter), 211

(Thompson), 73

(Trench), 93

(Tynan), 210

(Watson), 66

New Road, The (Munro), 366
New Sin, The (Hastings), 288
New Songs (Colum), 198

(Keohler), 201

(Young), 208

New Worlds for Old (Wells), 877

New York, 489

Newbolt, Sir Henry J., as poet, 134,

135-187; as novelist, 419, 420
Newman, Cardinal, 488, 440
Next Religion, The (Zangwill), 855
Nichols, J. B., 181
Nietzsche, John Davidson and, 50
Nigger of the Narcissus, The (Con-
rad), 406
1914 and other Poems (Brooke), 157

524

INDEX

JVo Place Like Home (Trevena),
398

Non Sequitur (Coleridge), 462

Norris, Frank, 474, 475 ; as novelist,
491, 492

Northern Lights (Parker), 854

Norway, 860

Nostromo (Conrad), 406

Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, The
(Pinero), 250, 254

Novel, The—What It Is (Craw-
ford), 486

Novel, The. Irish novels, 179, 180;
changes in the last half-century,
291; the short story, 291;
French fiction, 291-293; histori-
cal romance, 293; didactic, 298;
of contemporary life, 295; its
position, 296; ephemeral fiction,
296-297; the Victorian novel, 299,
800; the aesthetic novel, 300;
realism, 302; saleable, 358; Scot-
tish novels, 863 seqq. ; the
"Kailyard School," 367; the
flood of novels, 373; twentieth
century development, 874; en-
during novels, 875; realists and
romantics, 375; romance, 405;
as written by novelists, 427; as
literary form, 485; women
novelists, 435 seqq.; divergence
between the American and Euro-
pean, 478; the short story in
America, 475; F. Marion Craw-
ford on the novel, 486

Noyes, Alfred, as poet, 139-145

October and other Poems

(Bridges), 81

Octopus, The (Norris), 475, 492
Odd Women, The (Gissing), 316
Odes (Binyon), 106, 107
Old Country, The (Newbolt), 420
Old Creole Days (Cable), 488
Old Knowledge, The (Gwyn), 451
Old Kensington (Ritchie), 465
Old Mole (Cannan), 401
Old Ships, The (Flecker), 160
Old Wives9 Tale, The (Bennett),

883, 884, 885, 886
Ollivant, Alfred, as novelist, 425-

427

On Baile's Strand (Yeats), 192, 222
On March (Winter), 466
On Money and other Matters

(Street), 428

On the Threshold (Gibson), 117
On Viol and Flute (Gosse), 84
One ar& the Many, The (Gore-
. Booth), 72, 207, 208

O'Neill, Moira (Mrs. Skrine), 19;
as poet, 205-207

Open Country, The (Hewlett),
416, 419

Open Question, The (Robins), 452,
453

Orchard Songs (Gale), 133, 134

Origin and Development of Reli-
gious Beliefs (Baring-Gould), 350

Orinoco, The, 347

Orthodoxy (Chesterton), 429

Ossianic poems, 178, 179

O'Sullivan, Seumas, 182

Ouida (Louise de la Rame'e), as
novelist, 470

Our Irish Theatre (Gregory), 222

Ours (Robertson), 246

Out of the Wreck I Rise (Harra-
den), 456

Outcast of the Islands, An (Con-
rad), 406

Outcry, The (James), 480, 484

Ot?er Bemerton's (Lucas), 431

Over the Hills (Findlater), 871

Overman, The (Sinclair), 493

Ou?d Bob (Ollivant), 425, 426

Oxford Book of English Verse
(Quiller-Couch), 848

Oxford Movement, 2

Padua, 417

Pasran Poems (Moore), 805

Page, Thomas Nelson, as novelist,

490

Pageant, The, 8
Pain, Barry, 405

Pair of Spectacles, A (Grundy), 255
Palmer, John, 243
Pampas, The, 846
Pan's Prophecy (Moore), 148, 144
Paolo and Francesca, The story of

98, 99
Paolo and Francesca (Phillips), 98-

102, 108
Papers from a Private Diary

(Beeching), 182
Parerga (Sheehan), 482
Pam and CEnone (Binyon), 106
Parker, Sir Gilbert, and W. E.

Henley, 17 ; as novelist, 852-854
Passers-by (Chambers), 255
Passionate Friends, The (WeUs),

880

Pastime Stories (Page), 490
Pater, Walter, 1, 5, 7; as critic of

art, 16 ; and Geo. Moore, 808
Path to Borne, The (Belloc), 145,

429

Patience (Gilbert), 5
Patmore, Coventry, 18

INDEX

525

Patricia (Iota), 451

Patrician, The (Galsworthy), 890

Patriots (Robinson), 239

Paul Kclver (Jerome), 362

Peace and other Poems (Benson),

130

Peacock Pie (De la Mare), 154, 155
Peer Gynt (Ibsen), 79, 102, 244
Penelope (Maugham), 286
Penelope's English Experiences

(Wiggin), 497
Penny Moneypenny (Findlater),

872

Penthesilea (Binyon), 105
People and Questions (Street), 428
Perfervid (Davidson), 48, 841
Perplexed Husband, The (Sutro),

285

Persephone (Binyon), 105
Peter Homunculus (Cannan), 899
Peter Pan (Barrie), 284, 369
Petits Oiseaux, Les (Labiche), 255
Phantastes (Macdonald), 864
Phantom Rickshaw, The (Kipling),

319, 820

Pharais (Sharp), 865
Philip the King and other Poems

(Masefield), 121
Philanderer, The (Shaw), 262
Phillips, Stephen, as poet, 95-104;

and poetic drama, 245
Phillpotts, Eden, as novelist, 392-

396
Picture of Dorian Gray, The

(Wilde), 6, 7, 300, 801
Pierre and His People (Parker),

853, 854
Pierrot of a Minute, The

(Dowson), 69

Pietro of Siena (Phillips), 101, 108
Pigeon, The (Galsworthy), 274
Pinero, Sir Arthur W., as drama-
tist, 248-250, 254, 255
Pit, The (Norris), 492
Pixy in Petticoats, A (Trevena), 897
Place and Power (Fowler), 464
Place-hunters, The (Martyn), 220
Plain Tales from the Hills (KTp-

Hng), 818
Playboy of the Western World,

The (Synge), 227, 229, 231, 234
Plays of Gods and Men (Dunsany),

240
Plays of Near and Far (Dunsany),

240
Plays, Acting and Music

(Symons), 14

Plays Pleasant (Shaw), 268
Plays Unpleasant (Shaw), 263
Poe, Edgar Allen, 474, 475, 495

Poems (Benson), 130

— (Binyon), 105

— (Bridges), 29

— (Brooke), 156

— (Coleridge), 168

— (De la Mare), 154

— (Drinkwater), 152

— (Gore-Booth), 207

— (Hodgson), 156

— (Hope), 163

— (Johnson), 197

— (Meynell), 36, 87

— (Noyes), 140, 142

— (Phillips), 97, 104, 108

— (Sackville), 170

— (Thompson), 73

— (Marriott Watson), 168

— (Wilde), 24

— (Young), 208

Poems and Ballads (Quiller-Couch),

134

Poems and Ballads (Swinburne), 26
Poems in the Dorset Dialect

(Barnes), 88

Poems in Wiltshire (Williams), 149
Poems, New and Old (Newbolt),

136

Poems, New and Old (Woods), 38
Poems of Adoration (Field), 166
Poems of Love and Earth (Drink-
water), 153

Poems of Men and Hours (Drink-
water), 152
Poems of the Past and the Present

(Hardy), 78

Poet-Laureate, Office of, 26
Poetesses, 86, 161 ; Irish, 203
Poetry and Verse, 137; contem-
porary verse, 188; of man and
of nature, 148
Poetry of the Period, The (Austin),

28
Poets, Dramatic, 98, 101, 102;

major and minor, 137
Pope, 2
Portrait of a Lady, The (James),

477, 480, 482, 483, 484
Portreeve, The (Phillpotts), 894
Porphyrion (Binyon), 104, 105, 107
Positivism, 2, 3

Post Liminium (Johnson), 198
Pot of Broth, A (Yeats), 217, 218
Potteries, The. See " Five Towns "
Po?0er Behind, The (Willcocks),

456

Praise of Life, The (Binyon), 105
Pre-Raphaelitism, 2, 4, 127
Preludes (Meynell), 86
Premier and the Painter, The
(Zangwill), 855

526

INDEX

Primatjera (Phillips and Binyon),

95, 104, 105, 107

Prince Lucifer (Austin), 26, 27, 29
Prince's Quest, The (Watson), 63
Prince** Casamassima (James), 477
Prince** Napraxine (Ouida), 470
Prince** Priscilla's Fortnight

(Russell), 463

Pri*oner of Zenda, The (Hope), 421
Private Paper* of Henry Ryecroft

(Gissing), 316, 317
Prodigal Son, The (Caine), 360
Professor and other Poem*, The

(Benson), 130

Profligate, The (Pinero), 250
Progress (Graham), 846
PrometTieu* Unbound (Shelley), 79,

93

Promise (Sidgwick), 468
Prose Fancies (Le Gallienne), 129
Prot?inciaZ and other Papers

(Beeching), 132

Provincialism in literature, 177
Pwcfc of Poo/c'* Hill (Kipling), 324
Purple Land that England Lost,

The (Hudson), 347 '
Pygmalion (Shaw), 265

Quales Ego (Street), 428

Quality of Mercy, The (Howells),

485

Quality Street (Barrie), 284
Queen'* Fillet, The (Sheehan), 432
Queen's Quair, The (Hewlett), 417
Qween'a Tragedy, The (Bqnson),

421

Qween'* Vigil, The (Gibson), 117
Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, T. (Q.),

as poet, 134-135; as novelist,

848-349; influence of R. L.

Stevenson, 348
Quisantt (Hope), 422

Rab and His Friends (Brown), 425

Radziwill, Princess, 446

" Raimond, C. E." See Robins,
Elizabeth

Ramal, Walter. See De la Mare

Ravenna (Wilde), 24

Realism in The Yellow Boole, 8; in
poetry, 116, 118

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
(Wiggin), 497

Recollection* of Rossetti (Caine),359

Red Hand of Ulster, The (Bir-
mingham), 482

Red Turf (Mayne), 239

Redcoat Captain, The (Ollivant), 426

Reef, The (Wharton), 498

Regent,* The (Bennett), 886

Reginald (Saki), 430

Reginald in Russia (Saki), 480
Religious Songs of Connacht

(Hyde), 196

Repentance, A (Hobbes), 461
Repentance of a Private Secretary,

The (Gwynn), 431
Reat Harrow (Hewlett), 416, 419
Resurrection (Tolstoy), 276
Resurrection of Peter, The (Radzi-
will), 446

Reticence in Literature (Waugh), 9
Retrospective Reviews (Le Galli-
enne), 129
Return of Sherlock tjolmes

(Doyle), 351
Return of the Native (Hardy), 893,

414

Return of the Prodigal, The (Han-
kin), 270, 272

Reynard the Fox (Masefield), 122
Revolution in Tanner'* Lane, The

(Rutherford), 832
Rhodes, Cecil, 446
Rhymes a la mode (Lang), 33
Rhythm of Life, The (Meynell), 37
Richard Cartel (Churchill), 493
Richard Coeur de Lion, 417
Richard Yea-and-Nay (Hewlett),

416, 417

Richardson, Samuel, 293, 444
Riders to the Sea (Synge), 227, 228,

229, 233, 236
Ridge, W. Pett, 405
Rise of Silas Lapham, The

(Howells), 485, 486
Ritchie, Lady A. I., as novelist, 465
River, The (Masefield), 120
Riuer, The (Phiilpotts), 394
Robert Elsmere (Ward), 437-442
Robert Falconer (Macdonald), 864
Robert Louis Stevenson and other

Poems (Le Gallienne), 128
Robert Orange (Hobbes), 460
Roberts, Morley, as novelist, 861
Robertson, Thomas W., as drama-
tist, 245-246
Robins, Elizabeth (Mrs. George R.

Parks), as novelist, 452-454
Robinson, Lennox, as dramatist,

238, 239

Roderick Hudson (James), 477
Rodin, Auguste, 17
Rodney Stone (Doyle), 852
Rogers, 1

Roman Catholicism. See Catho-
licism

Romance of a Plain Man (Glas-
gow), 491

Romance of Two World*, A (Cor-
elli), 471

INDEX

527

jRomanttc Ballads and Poems of

Phantasy (Sharp), 71
JRomanttc Movement in English

Poetry, The (Symons), 14, 16
Rome, 360, 487

Room with a View, A (Forster), 403
Rosa Amoroso (Egerton), 843, 451
Rosanne (Syrett), 467
Rose of Joy, A (Findlater), 871
Rose of Life, The (Braddon), 471
Rosmersholm (Ibsen), 274
Ross, Martin. See Somerville
Rossetti, Christina, 13, 36, 37, 161,

468
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, " Dante's

Dream," 4; Hall Caine and, 359
Rothenstein, Will, 8
Round the Comer (Cannan), 399, 401
Rousseau, Influence of, 293
Rout of the Amazons, The (Moore),

143

Royal Road, The (Ollivant), 426
Royal Runaway, The (Housman),843
Rue (Housrnan), 126
Rulers of Kings (Atherton), 496
Rupert of Hentzau (Hope), 421
Ruskin, John, 1 ; judgments on art,

5, 6, 7 ; on John Strange Winter,

466

Russell, Countess. See " Eliza-
beth."
Russell, Geo. W. (" A. E."), 19;

as poet, 178, 181, 193-196; as

dramatist, 219; George Moore

and, 304
Rutherford, Mark (Wm. Hale

White), as novelist, 331-333
Rutherford and Son (Sowerby), 281

Sabrina Warham (Housman), 843

Sackville, Lady Margaret, as poet,
169-171

Sacred and Profane Love (Austin),
28

Sailing of the Lonqships, The
(Newbolt), 136

St. Ives (Stevenson), 348

Saints and Sinners (Jones), 252, 258

Saintsbury, Prof. George, 110, 243

Saisiaz, La (Browning), 2

" Saki " (Hector Munro), as essay-
ist and novelist, 450-431

Sale of Saint Thomas (Abercrom-
bie), 122

Salt-water Ballads (Masefield), 119

Salve (Moore), 304

Sampson Rideout, Quaker (Silber-
rard), 468

Sand, George, 293

Sarit' llario (Crawford), 487

Saracinesca (Crawford), 487
Satan Absolved (Blunt), 85
Savonarola (Austin), 26
Savoy, The, 8, 8, 9, 10, 13, 841
Scaramouch in Naxos (Davidson), 48
Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne),

474

School (Robertson), 246
School for Saints, The (Hobbes),

460

Schoolmistress, The (Pinero), 249
Schreiner, Olive (Mrs S. C. Cron-

wright), as novelist, 445-447
Scotland, 178
Scots Observer, 17
Scott, Sir Walter, 293
Scribe, A. E., 254
Season, The (Austin), 26
Seat* of the Mighty, The (Parker),

353
Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The

(Pinero), 250, 254
Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow,

The (Jerome), 362
Secret Rose (Yeats), 186
Secret Woman, The (Phillpotts), 394
Senator North (Atherton), 496
Sentimental Studies (Crackan-

thorpe), 335

Sentimental Tommy (Barrie), 368
Septimus (Locke), 424
Seth's Brother's Wife (Frederic),

489
Setjen Golden Odes of Pagan

Arabia (Blunt), 35
Seren Sea*, The (Kipling), 59, 60
Seven Short Plays (Gregory), 224
Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, The
^ (Coleridge), 167, 462
Sex Questions, Women novelists

and, 451, 452
Shadow of a Crime, The (Caine),

360
Shadowy Waters, The (Yeats), 191,

192
Shakespeare, G. Bernard Shaw and,

260-261

Shamrocks (Tynan), 210
Shannon, Charles, 8
Shapes of Clay (Bierce), 494
SJiarp, Wm. (Fiona Macleod), as

poet, 62, 71-72; and the Celtic

spirit, 178; as novelist, 365
Shaving of Shagpat (Meredith),

433
Shaw, George Bernard, his drama-

atic characters, 231; his ideas,

257; his novels, 258, 259; as a

critic, 259; as dramatist, 958-267,

270, 344; collaborates* with

528

INDEX

William Archer, 262 ; prefaces to

plays, 267; as novelist, 844-345
She (Haggard), 850
Sheehan, Canon P. A., as novelist,

481, 482
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound

compared with Hardy's The

Dynasts, 79 ; The Cenci, 198, 248
Shepherd's Life, A (Hudson), 847
Ship of Stars, The (Quiller-Couch),

848, 849
Ships that Pass in the Night (Har-

raden), 456

Shoes of Fortune, The (Munro), 866
Shorter, Dora Sigerson, as poet,

211, 212

Shorter Poems (Bridges), 29, 81
Shoulders of Atlas, The (Wilkins),

490
Showing-up of Blanco Posnet, The

(Shaw), 265
Shropshire, 89
Shropshire Lad, A (Housman), 89,

90, 148
Sidgwick, Mrs. Alfred, as novelist,

467

Sidgwick, Ethel, as novelist, 468
Sigerson, Dora. See Shorter, Dora S.
Sigerson, Dr. George, 201
Sight and Song (Field), 166
Sign of Four, The (Doyle), 851
Silas Marner (Eliot), 299
Silberrad, Una L., as novelist, 467
Silhouettes (Symons), 43, 841
S^er Box, The (Galsworthy), 275,

277

Silver King, The (Jones), 252
Simla, 820

Simon the Jester (Locke), 424
5m of David, The (Phillips), 101,

108

Sin-eater, The (Sharp), 365
Sinjohn, John. See Galsworthy
Sinclair, May, as novelist, 454-456
Sinclair, Upton, 475; as novelist,

493

Sinister Street (Mackenzie), 405
Sinner's Comedy, The (Hobbes),

460

Sir Charles Orandison (Richard-
son), 448

Sir George Tressady (Ward), 442
Sir George's Objection (Clifford),

467

Sir Nigel (Doyle), 352
Sister Songs (Thompson), 73
Sister Teresa (Moore), 220, 802, 807,

808,811

Skipper's Wooinq, The (Jacobs), 363
tSkrine, Mrs., 191, 205

Slave of the Lamp, The (Merri-

man), 854

Sleeping Waters (Trevena), 398
Sligo, Co., 185, 218
Smith (Maugham), 286
Smollett, Tobias, G., 293
Snob Papers (Thackeray), 428
Society (Robertson), 246
Soldiers Three (Kipling), 319
Solitary Summer, A (Russell), 468
Some Emotions and a Moral

(Hobbes), 460
Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.

(Somerville and Ross), 470
Some Notes of a Struggling Genius

(Street), 428

Somehow Good (De Morgan), 404
Somerville, Edith O. E., and

Martin Ross (Violet Martin), as

novelists, 470

Son of Hagar, A (Caine), 860
Song in September (Gale), 133, 134
Song of Renny, The (Hewlett),

416, 417
Song of the Sword, The (Henley),

52
Songs and Meditations (Hewlett),

109

Songs in Wiltshire (Williams), 149
Songs of a Devotee (Keohler), 201
Songs of Aphrodite (Sackville), 170
Songs of Childhood (De la Mare),

154

Songs of Dreams (Clifford), 171
Songs of Joy (Davies), 152
Songs of Memory and Hope (New-
bolt), 186
Songs of the Glens of Antrim

(O'Neill), 205
Songs of the Morning (Hopper),

209

Son* of the Morning (Phillpotts), 394
Sons of the Sword (Woods), 465
Sordello (Browning), 141
Sorrowful Princess, The (Gore-
Booth), 207

Sospiri di Roma (Sharp), 71
SouVs Destroyer, The (Davies), 151
South Seas, The, 157
Sowerby, Miss Githa, as dramatist,

281-282

Sowers, The (Merriman), 854
Sowing the Wind (Grundy), 255
Spain, 846

Spanish Gold (Birmingham), 432
Spencerian Philosophy, 2
Sphinx, The (Wilde), 24, 25
Spikenard (Housman), 126, 848
Spirit in Prison, A (Hichens), 418,

414, 415, 416

INDEX

529

Spiritual Adventures (Symons), 840
Splendid Spur, The (Quiller-Couch),

848

Spreading the News (Gregory), 224
Squire, J. Ceilings, parodies of

John Masefieid, 119
Squire, The (Pinero), 250
Stalky and Co. (Kipling), 824, 825
Star* of the Desert (Hope), 163
Steevens, Geo. W., 17
Stella Mart's (Locke), 425
Stephens, James, as poet, 199, 200;

as novelist, 433

Sterne, Laurence, 293, 384, 401
Stevenson, Robt. Louis, as writer,

17; and Sir J. M. Barrie com-
pared, 370; as novelist, 363 .
Stickit Minister, The (Crockett),

870

Stolen Bacillus, The (Wells), 378
Stone folds, The (Gibson), 117
Stooping Lady, The (Hewlett), 416

418
Stories of Red Hanrahan (Yeats),

186
Story of an African Farm (Schrei-

ner), 445, 446

Story of Bessie Costrell (Ward), 444
Story of Clarice, The (Tynan), 469
Story of Patsy, The (Wiggin), 497
Strathmore (Ouida), 470
Street, George S., as essayist,

satirist, and novelist, 427-428;

examiner of plays, 428
Street of To-day,' The (Masefield),

412

Strife (Galsworthy), 275, 277
Strike at Arlingford, The (Moore),

221
Studies in Prose and Verse

(Symons), 14, 15

Studies in Seven Arts (Symons), 14
Studies in Two Literatures

(Symons), 12

Study in Scarlet, A (Doyle), 851
Study in Temptations, A (Hobbes),

460
Study of Celtic Literature, The

(Arnold), 177

Success (Graham), 846, 847
Succession (Sidgwick), 468
Suicide Club (Stevenson), 367
Summer Night, A (Watson), 169
Sussex, 53, 145

Sutro, Alfred, as dramatist, 285
Sweet Lavender (Pinero), 249
Sweetheart Owen (Tirebuck), 857
Swinburne, Algernon C., 24, 26,

and historic drama, 245
Swinnerton, Frank, 405
2L

Syltna (Sinclair), 493
Symbolism in literature, 18
Symbolist Movement in Literature,

The (Symons), 13, 14
Symons, Arthur, and art, 6, 7, and
The Yellow Book, 8, 9, 10; and
The Savoy, 10, 12, 13; as critic,
14, 15, 16; as poet, 42-46; on
Henley's poems, 53; on Hubert
Crackanthorpe, 334; as story
writer, 340-341
Symphonies (Egerton), 450
Synge, John M., 19, 441; as
dramatist, 180, 213, 226-236; W.
B. Yeats and, 184, 187; as poet,
190; his life, 226; the idiom of
his characters, 233; his person-
ality, 236
Syrett, Netta, as novelist, 467

Tables of the Law, The (Yeats), 186
Taken from the Enemy (Newbolt),

420
Tale of a Town, A (Martyn), 219,

220, 221

Tales from the Welsh Hills (Tire-
buck), 357
Tales of Mean Streets (Morrison),

404
Tales of Soldiers and Civilians

(Bierce), 495
Tales of Space and Time (Wells),

378

Tales of Unrest (Corn-ad), 406
Tales that are Told (Findlater), 372
Taming of John Blunt, The (Olli-

vant), 426

Temporal Power (Corelli), 472
Tennessee, 490, 493
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, and the

Victorian Age, 17; as poet, 25;

and the Arthurian legends, 135 ;

as dramatist, 244
Testament of a Vivisector, The

(Davidson), 48, 51
Testament of John Davidson, The,

48, 51
Teutonic influence, 8; literature,

179; race, 204
Thackeray, Wm. M., 1, 294
Thcatrocrat, The (Davidson), 51
Thomas Muskerry (Colum), 238
Their Wedding Journey (Howells),

485
Theseus, Medea and Lyrics

(Moore), 143
They that Walk in Darkness (Zang-

will), 856
Thompson, Francis, as poet, ($,

72-74, 195

580

INDEX

Three Brothers, The (Phlllpotts),

894

Three Men in a Boat (Jerome), 862
Three Men on the Bummell

(Jerome), 862
Three Musicians, The (Beardsley),

11
Three Plays for Puritans (Shaw),

264

Three Resurrections, The (Gore-
Booth), 208
Thyrza (Gissing), 814
Time Machine, The (Wells), 877,

878
Time's Laughing -stocks (Hardy),

78

Timothy's Quest (Wiggin), 497
Tinker's Wedding, The (Synge),

227, 229, 236

Tinted Venus, The (Anstey), 362
Tirebuck, William E., as novelist,

357-858
To Leda and other Odes (Moore),

143

To London Town (Morrison), 404
Together (Herrick), 494
Told in the Dog Watches (Bullen),

411

Tolstoy, Count, 296, 444
Tom Jones (Fielding), 296
Tommy and Grizel (Barrie), 868
Tono-Bungay (Wells), 379, 881, 882
Tower of Babel, The (Austin), 26
Tower of Ivory, The (Atherton),

496

Town Traveller, The (Gissing), 816
Traffics and Discoveries (Kipling),

824
Tragedy of Nan, The (Masefield),

282
Tragedy of Pompey the Great, The

(Masefield), 282
Tronic Mary, The (Field), 165
Tronic Muse, The (James), 477
Traill, H. D., on William Sharp's

work, 72
Travels in Arabia Deserta

(Doughty), 112

Treasure Island (Stevenson), 848
Trelawny of the Wells (Pinero), 249
Trench, Herbert, as poet, 91-95
Trevena, John (Ernest G. Hen-
ham), as novelist, 892, 895, 896-

899
Trials of the Bantocks, The

(Street), 428
Tristram and Iseult, 99
Tristram of Lyonesse (Swinburne),
• 185
Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 401

Triumph of Failure, The (Sheehan),

482 t

Triumph of Mseve, The (Gore-
Booth), 207
Trooper Peter Halket of Mcutona-

land (Schreiner), 446
Troth, The (Mayne), 289
Troubadour and other Poems, The

(Shorter), 211

Troy Town (Quiller-Couch), 848
True Tilda (Quiller-Couch), 848,

349
Trust the People (Houghton), 269,

280
Twelve Stories and a Dream

(Wells), 378

Twisting of the Rope (Hyde), 216
Twixt God and Mammon (Tire-
buck), 857

Twixt Land and Sea (Conrad), 406
True Love (Monkhouse), 430
Two Mr. Wetherbys, The (Han-
kin), 270

Tico Women or One (Harland), 887
Two Virtues, The (Sutro), 285
The Twymans (Newbolt), 420
Tynan, Katharine (Mrs. Hinkson),
*as poet, 210-211 ; as novelist, 469
Typhoon (Conrad), 406, 409
Tyranny of Tears, The (Chambers),
255

Ulster Literary Theatre, 240
Ulysses (Phillips), 99-101, 108
Unbearable Bassington, The

(Munro), 430

Unclassed, The (Gissing), 814
Under Quicken Boughs (Hopper),

209-210
Under the Cedars and the Stars

(Sheehan), 432
Under the Deodars (Kipling), 819,

820

Under the Hill (Beardsley), 11
Under Two Flags (Ouida), 470
Under Western Eyes (Conrad), 407
Underneath the Bough (Field),

165, 166

Unseen Kings (Gore-Booth), 207
Unsocial Socialist, An (Shaw), 844
Untilled Field (Moore), 221, 802,

808
Urlyn the Harper (Gibson), li7

Vagabonds, The (Woods), 465
Vale (Moore), 804
Veranilda (Gissing), 818
Verlaine, Paul, 44, 46
Verona'* Father (Murray), 859
Verses (Belloc), 145

INDEX

581

Verse* (Dowson), 69

Verses and Parodies (Quiller-

Couch), 184

Verses and Sonnets (Belloc), 145
Vespertilia (Watson), 168
Vicar of Wakefield (Goldimith),

258

Vice Versd (Anstey), 862
Victorian Age, The end of the, 1,

89, 812 seqq.

Vigil of Venus (Quiller-Couch), 134
Vignettes (Crackanthorpe), 886
Villa Rubein (Galsworthy), 887
Village on the Cliff, The (Ritchie),

465

Village Tragedy, A (Woods), 465
Villette (Bronte), 292
Villiers de 1'Isle Adam, Drama of,

14
Vine-Dresser and other Poems,

The (Moore), 148, 144
Vineyard, The (Hobbes), 461
Virginia, 490, 491
Virginia (Glasgow), 491
Virginian, The (Wister), 491
Vision of Sin (Tennyson), 91
Vistas (Sharp), 864
Voltaire, 2

Votes for Women (Robins), 458
Voysey Inheritance, The (Barker),

268, 269

Wages of Sin, The (Malet), 457-459

Wales, 178, 357

Walker, Prof. Hugh, on Mangan,

181

Watts of Jericho, The (Sutro), 285
Walpole, Hugh, 405
Wanderings of Oisin, The (Yeats),

184, 186, 189, 199, 222
War God, The (Zangwill), 855
War of the Worlds, The (Wells),

879
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 294; as

novelist, 437-445 ; influence of her

girlhood, 488-489; beginnings as

authoress, 439; view of life, 443-

444

Ward, Thomas Humphry, 489
Waste (Barker), 268, 269
Watson, John M. (" Ian Mac-

laren "), as novelist, 870
Watson, Mrs. Rosamund Marriott,

8 ; as poet, 168-169
Watson, Sir William, 26; as poet,

62-67; his position, 67
Watts-Dunton, Walter Theodore

24; as poet and critic, 81-88; as

novelist, 881
Waugh, Arthur, 9

Way oJ*All Flesh, The (Butter)

828f 829, 880, 899
Way of Ambition, The (Hichens),

415

Weaker Sex, The (ftnero), 249
Weavers, The (Parker), 854
Web of Life, The (Gibson), 117
Webb, Sidney, 258, 266
Weber, Die (Hauptmann), 214
Wedding of the Lady of Lovel,

The (Silberrad), 468
Wee Willie Winkle (Kipling), 319,

821

Weekes, Charles, 200
Weir of Hermiston (Stevenson),

869, 874

Well of the Saints, The (Synge),
J 178, 228, 229, 234, 236
Wells, H. G., on novels as works of

art, 294; as novelist, 376-882;

scientific romances, 376; his

career, 876-377; his sociology,

877, 380, 381
Wesley, Hetty, 851
Wessex, Thomas Hardy and, 78, 88
Wessex Poems (Hardy), 200, 455
West Country fiction, 892
West Kerry '(Synge), 227
Westcotes, The (Quiller-Couch),

848, 349
Western Avernus, The (Roberts),

861

Whaleman's Wife, A (Bullen), 411
Wharton, Edith, as novelist, 497,

498
What Every Woman Knows

(Barrie),284
What Maisie Knew (James), 407,

477 480 484
What the 'Public Wants (Bennett),

285

Wheels of Chance, The (Wells), 879
When a Man's Single (Barrie), 867
When Ghost Meets Ohost (De

Morgan), 404
When the Sleeper Wakes (Wells),

879
When Valmond Came to Pontiac

(Parker), 858, 355
When William Came (Saki), 451
Where Angels Fear to Tread

(Forster), 402
Where are you going to . . . ?

(Robins), 453

Where Love Is (Locke), 428
Where there is Nothing (Yeats),

217, 218

Whirlpool, The (Gissing), 916
Whirlwind, The (Phillpotts), 894,

895

INDEX

don), 496

Worn**, The (Tirebuck), 857
aafttngF Julia (Jones), 254

, Walt, 478
Widdicombe (Willcocks), 455
Widecombe fair (Phillpotts), 894
Widow tn the Eye-Street, The

(MasefieldL 120

Widower'* Houses (Shaw), 262, 268
Wigghi, Kate Douglas (Mrs. G. C.

Kiggs), as novelist, 497
WOd Earth (Colum), 198
Wild Honey (Field), 166
Wild Justice (Woods), 88, 465
Wild Knight and other Poem*,

The (Chesterton), 146
Wilde, Oscar, aestheticism, 8, 5, 6;

characteristics, 7; theory of the

nature of art, 8; as poet, 24-25,

42; as dramatist, 248, 245-248;

as novelist, 800-802
Wilkins, Mary E. (Mrs. C. M.

Freeman), as novelist, 475, 490
Wilkins, W. H., 884
Witt Warburton (Gissing), 813
Willcocks, Miss M. P., as novelist,

454, 455-456

William Rufus (Field), 166
Williams, Alfred, his career, 148;

as poet, 148-150
Wiltshire, 149
Wiltshire Village, A (Williams),

149
Wind Among the Reeds, The

(Yeats), 184-186, 188, 189, 191-193
Wind and the WhMwind, The

(Blunt), 85
Window in Thrums, A (Barrie),

867, 868, 869

Wine Press, The (Noyes), 142
Wingless Victory, The (Willcocks),

456
Wings of the Dove, The (James),

480, 482
Winter, John Strange (Mrs. H. E.

V. Stannard), as novelist, 465
Wintering Hay (Trevena), 898
Wisdom of Potty, The (Fowler), 464
Wisdom of the Wise, The

(Hobbes), 461
Wise and the Wayward, The

(Street), 428

Wister; Owen, aa novelist, 491
With Christ at Sea (Bullen), 411
/, The (Norris), 493

(Clifford), 467
/mportance, A

Woman Thou G&test Me, The

(Cauw), 860
Wot^Who Did, The (Allen),

855,447
Woman With the Fan, The

(Hichens), 414

Women novelists, 485 seqq.; suc-
cessful, 470
Won&en writers, in verse, 86; and

peudonyms, 161 ; increase in, 161
Women's Tragedies (Lowry), 840
Wonderful Visit, The (Wells), 878
Woods, Margaret Louisa, as poet,

36-38, 162 ; as novelist, 465
Wordsworth, Wm, Watson and,

compared, 64; *s nature poet,

148
Wordsworth's Grave (Watson), 63-

65

Workers in the Dawn (Gissing), 816
Workhouse Ward, The (Gregory),

225

World Set Free, The (Wells), 877
Wormwood (Corelli), 472
Wreckage (Crackanthorpe), 838,

884, 835
Wreckers and Methodists (Lowry),

840

Yeats, Jack B., 187

Yeats, William B., 19; contributes
to The Yettow Book, 8; to The
Savoy, 10; as poet, 178, 181, 183-
193; as dramatic writer, 183, 191,
193, 217-218, 222; his career, 185;
as writer of prose fiction, 185;
influence of Maeterlinck, 186;
influence of Blake, 187; influence
of Lady Gregory, 218; and J. M.
Synge, 226

Yellow Aster, A (Iota), 451

Yellow Book, The, 3, 8, 9, 10, 12,
16, 71; contributors, 126, 180,
802, 833, 389, 841, 450

Yonge, Charlotte M., 294

You Never Can Tell (Shaw), 268,
264

Young, Elk, 208

Younger Generation, The (Hough-
ton), 279

Youth (Conrad), 406, 408, 409

Zangwill, Israel, as novelist, 855-

858
Zola, EmSle, Arthur Symons on,

18; and George Moore, 298, 805
Zuleika Dobson (Beerbohm), 841