February

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_ "O That I were lying under the olives!"--if I may echo the burthen of a beautiful little poem by Mrs. Margaret L. Woods. I have not yet consulted Zadkiel: but if I may argue from past experience of February--'fill-dyke'--in a week or so my window here will be alternately crusted with Channel spray and washed clean by lashing south-westerly showers; and a wave will arch itself over my garden wall and spoil a promising bed of violets; and I shall grow weary of oilskins, and weary of hauling the long-line with icily-cold hands and finding no fish. February--_Pisces?_ The fish, before February comes, have left the coast for the warmer deeps, and the zodiac is all wrong. Down here in the Duchy many believe in Mr. Zadkiel and Old Moore. I suppose the dreamy Celt pays a natural homage to a fellow-mortal who knows how to make up his mind for twelve months ahead. All the woman in his nature surrenders to this businesslike decisiveness. "O man!"--the exhortation is Mr. George Meredith's, or would be if I could remember it precisely--"O man, amorously inclining, before all things _be positive!_" I have sometimes, while turning the pages of Mrs. Beeton's admirable cookery book, caught myself envying Mr. Beeton. I wonder if her sisters envy Mrs. Zadkiel. She, dear lady, no doubt feels that, if it be not in mortals to command the weather her husband prophesies for August, yet he does better--he deserves it. And, after all, a prophecy in some measure depends for its success on the mind which receives it. Back in the forties--I quote from a small privately-printed volume by Sir Richard Tangye--when the potato blight first appeared in England, an old farmer in the Duchy found this warning in his favourite almanack, at the head of the page for August:--

"And potentates shall tremble and quail."

Now, 'to quail' in Cornwall still carries its old meaning, 'to shrink,' 'to wither.' The farmer dug his potatoes with all speed, and next year the almanack was richer by a score of subscribers.

Zadkiel or no Zadkiel, I will suspire, and risk it, "O that I were lying under the olives!" "O to be out of England now that February's here!"--for indeed this is the time to take the South express and be quit of fogs, and loaf and invite your soul upon the Mediterranean shore before the carnivals and regattas sweep it like a mistral. Nor need you be an invalid to taste those joys on which Stevenson dilates in that famous little essay in "_Virginibus Puerisque_" (or, as the young American lady preferred to call it, "Virginis Pueribusque."):--

"Or perhaps he may see a group of washer-women relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and something significant or monumental in the grouping, something in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic of the dress of these Southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are richer by one more beautiful experience. . . . And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate, and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like 'cloud on cloud,' massed in filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows."

English poets, too, have been at their best on the Riviera: from Cette, where Matthew Arnold painted one of the most brilliant little landscapes in our literature, along to Genoa, where Tennyson visited and:

"Loved that hall, tho' white and cold,
Those niched shapes of noble mould,
A princely people's awful princes,
The grave, severe Genovese of old."

[I suppose, by the way, that every one who has taken the trouble to compare the stanza of 'The Daisy' with that of the invitation 'To the Rev. F. D. Maurice,' which immediately follows, will have noted the pretty rhythmical difference made by the introduction of the double dactyl in the closing line of the latter; the difference between:

"Of olive, aloe, and maize, and vine,"

And:

"Making the little one leap for joy."]

But let Mrs. Woods resume the strain:--

"O that I were listening under the olives!
So should I hear behind in the woodland
The peasants talking. Either a woman,
A wrinkled granddame, stands in the sunshine,
Stirs the brown soil in an acre of violets--
Large odorous violets--and answers slowly
A child's swift babble; or else at noon
The labourers come. They rest in the shadow,
Eating their dinner of herbs, and are merry.
Soft speech Provencal under the olives!
Like a queen's raiment from days long perished,
Breathing aromas of old unremembered
Perfumes, and shining in dust-covered palaces
With sudden hints of forgotten splendour--
So on the lips of the peasant his language,
His only now, the tongue of the peasant."

Say what you will, there is a dignity about these Latin races, even in their trivial everyday movements. They suggest to me, as those lines of Homer suggested to Mr. Pater's Marius, thoughts which almost seem to be memories of a time when all the world was poetic:--

"Oi d'ote de limenos polubentheos entos ikonto
Istia men steilanto, thesand d'en nei melaine . . .
Ek de kai antoi Bainon epi regmini thalasses."

"And how poetic," says Pater, "the simple incident seemed, told just thus! Homer was always telling things after this manner. And one might think there had been no effort in it: that here was but the almost mechanical transcript of a time naturally, intrinsically poetic, a time in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture in 'the great style' against a sky charged with marvels."

One evening in last February a company of Provencal singers, pipers, and tambour players came to an hotel in Cannes, and entertained us. They were followed next evening by a troupe of German-Swiss jodelers; and oh, the difference to me--and, for that matter, to all of us! It was just the difference between passion and silly sentiment--silly and rather vulgar sentiment. The merry Swiss boys whooped, and smacked their legs, and twirled their merry Swiss girls about, until vengeance overtook them--a vengeance so complete, so surprising, that I can hardly now believe what my own eyes saw and my own ears heard. One of the merry Swiss girls sang a love-ditty with a jodeling refrain, which was supposed to be echoed back by her lover afar in the mountains. To produce this pleasing illusion, one of the merry Swiss boys ascended the staircase, and hid himself deep in the corridors of the hotel. All went well up to the last verse. Promptly and truly the swain echoed his sweetheart's call; softly it floated down to us--down from the imaginary pasture and across the imaginary valley. But as the maiden challenged for the last time, as her voice lingered on the last note of the last verse . . . There hung a Swiss cuckoo-clock in the porter's office, and at that very instant the mechanical bird lifted its voice, and nine times answered 'Cuckoo' _on the exact note!_ "Cuckoo, Cuckoo, O word of fear!" I have known coincidences, but never one so triumphantly complete. The jaw of the Swiss maiden dropped an inch; and, as well as I remember, silence held the company for five seconds before we recovered ourselves and burst into inextinguishable laughter.

The one complaint I have to make of the Mediterranean is that it does not in the least resemble a real sea; and I daresay that nobody who has lived by a real sea will ever be thoroughly content with it. Beautiful--oh, beautiful, of course, whether one looks across from Costebelle to the lighthouse on Porquerolles and the warships in Hyeres Bay; or climbs by the Calvary to the lighthouse of la Garoupe, and sees on the one side Antibes, on the other the Isles de Lerins; or scans the entrance of Toulon Harbour; or counts the tiers of shipping alongside the quays at Genoa! But somehow the Mediterranean has neither flavour nor sparkle, nor even any proper smell. The sea by Biarritz is champagne to it. But hear how Hugo draws the contrast in time of storm:--

"Ce n'etaient pas les larges lames de l'Ocean qui vont devant elles et qui se deroulent royalement dans l'immensite; c'etaient des houles courtes, brusques, furieuses. L'Ocean est a son aise, il tourne autour du monde; la Mediterranee est dans un vase et le vent la secoue, c'est ce qui lui donne cette vague haletante, breve et trapue. Le flot se ramasse et lutte. Il a autant de colere que la flot de l'Ocean et moins d'espace."

Also, barring the sardine and anchovy, I must confess that the fish of the Mediterranean are what, in the Duchy, we should call 'poor trade.' I don't wish to disparage the Bouillabaisse, which is a dish for heroes, and deserves all the heroic praises sung of it:--

"This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is--
A sort of soup, or broth, or brew,
Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes,
That Greenwich never could outdo;
Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron,
Soles, onions, garlic, roach and dace:
All these you eat at Terre's tavern,
In that one dish of Bouillabaisse."

To be precise, you take a langouste, three rascas (an edible but second-rate fish), a slice of conger, a fine 'chapon,' or red rascas, and one or two 'poissons blancs' (our grey mullet, I take it, would be an equivalent). You take a cooking-pot and put your langouste in it, together with four spoonfuls of olive-oil, an onion and a couple of tomatoes, and boil away until he turns red. You then take off the pot and add your fish, green herbs, four cloves of garlic, and a pinch of saffron, with salt and red pepper. Pour in water to cover the surface of the fish, and cook for twenty minutes over a fast fire. Then take a soup-plate, lay some slices of bread in it, and pour the bouillon over the bread. Serve the fish separately. Possibly you incline to add, in the immortal words of the late Mr. Lear, "Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of window as fast as possible." You would make a great mistake. The marvel to me is that no missionary has acclimatised this wonderful dish upon our coasts, where we have far better fish for compounding it--red mullet, for instance, in place of the rascas; and whiting, or even pollack or grey mullet, in place of the 'poissons blancs.' For the langouste, a baby lobster might serve; and the saffron flavour would be no severe trial to us in the Duchy, who are brought up (so to say) upon saffron cake. As for Thackeray's 'dace,' I disbelieve in it. No one would add a dace (which for table purposes has been likened to an old stocking full of mud and pins: or was that a tench?) except to make a rhyme. Even Walton, who gives instructions for cooking a chavender or chub, is discreetly silent on the cooking of a dace, though he tells us how to catch him. "Serve up in a clean dish," he might have added, "and throw him out of window as fast as possible."

"O that I were lying under the olives!" And O that to olive orchards (not contiguous) I could convey the newspaper men who are almost invariably responsible when a shadow of distrust or suspicion falls between us Englishmen and the race which owns and tills these orchards. "The printing-press," says Mr. Barrie, "is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which." I verily believe that if English newspaper editors would nobly resolve to hold their peace on French politics, say for two years, France and England would 'make friends' as easily as Frenchmen and Englishmen 'make friends' to-day.[1] One hears talk of the behaviour of the English abroad. But I am convinced that at least one-half of their bad manners may be referred to their education upon this newspaper nonsense, or to the certainty that no complaint they may make upon foreign shortcomings is too silly or too ill-bred to be printed in an English newspaper. Here is an example. I suppress the name of the writer--a lady--in the devout hope that she has repented before this. The letter is headed--

"THE AMENITIES OF RAILWAY TRAVELLING IN FRANCE.

"Sir,--As your newspaper is read in France, may I in your columns call attention to what I witnessed yesterday? I left Dinard by the 3.33 p.m. train _en route_ for Guingamp, having to change carriages at Lamballe. An instant before the train moved off from the station, a dying man belonging to the poorest class was thrust into our second class carriage and the door slammed to. The poor creature, apparently dying of some wasting disease, was absolutely on the point of death, and his ghastly appearance naturally alarmed a little girl in the carriage. At the next station I got down with my companion and changed into a first-class compartment, paying the difference. On remonstrating with the guard (_sic_), he admitted that a railway carriage ought not to be turned into an hospital, but added, 'We have no rules to prevent it.'

"I ask, sir, is it decent or human, especially at such a time, to thrust dying persons in the last stage of poverty into a second-class carriage full of ladies and children?"

There's a pretty charity for you! 'A dying man belonging to the _poorest class_.'--'_Our_ second-class carriage'--here's richness! as Mr. Squeers observed. Here's sweetness and light! But England has no monopoly of such manners. There was a poor little Cingalese girl in the train by which I travelled homeward last February from Genoa and through the Mont Cenis. And there were also three Englishmen and a Frenchman--the last apparently (as Browning put it) a person of importance in his day, for he had a bit of red ribbon in his buttonhole and a valet at his heels. At one of the small stations near the tunnel our train halted for several minutes; and while the little Cingalese leaned out and gazed at the unfamiliar snows--a pathetic figure, if ever there was one--the three Englishmen and the Frenchman gathered under the carriage door and stared up at her just as if she were a show. There was no nonsense about the performance--no false delicacy: it was good, steady, eye-to-eye staring. After three minutes of it, the Frenchman asked deliberately, "Where do you come from?" in a careless, level tone, which did not even convey that he was interested in knowing. And because the child didn't understand, the three Englishmen laughed. Altogether it was an unpleasing but instructive little episode.

No: nastiness has no particular nationality: and you will find a great deal of it, of all nationalities, on the frontier between France and Italy. I do not see that Monte Carlo provides much cause for indignation, beyond the _tir aux pigeons_, which is quite abominable. I have timed it for twenty-five minutes, and it averaged two birds a minute--fifty birds. Of these one escaped, one fluttered on to the roof of the railway station and died there slowly, under my eyes. The rest were killed within the enclosure, some by the first barrel, some by the second, or if they still lingered, were retrieved and mouthed by a well-trained butcher dog, of no recognisable breed. Sometimes, after receiving its wound, a bird would walk about for a second or two, apparently unhurt; then suddenly stagger and topple over. Sometimes, as the trap opened, a bird would stand dazed. Then a ball was trundled at it to compel it to rise. Grey breast feathers strewed the whole inclosure, in places quite thickly, like a carpet. As for the crowd at the tables inside the Casino, it was largely Semitic. On the road between Monte Carlo and Monaco, as Browning says--

"It was noses, noses all the way."

Also it smelt distressingly: but that perhaps was its misfortune rather than its fault. It did not seem very happy; nor was it composed of people who looked as if they might have attained to distinction, or even to ordinary usefulness, by following any other pursuit. On the whole, one felt that it might as well be gathered here as anywhere else.

"O that I were lying under the olives!" But since my own garden must content me this year, let me conclude with a decent letter of thanks to the friend who sent me, from Devonshire, a box of violet roots that await the spring in a corner which even the waves of the equinox cannot reach:--

TO A FRIEND WHO SENT ME A BOX OF VIOLETS.

Nay, more than violets
These thoughts of thine, friend!
Rather thy reedy brook
--Taw's tributary--
At midnight murmuring,
Descried them, the delicate,
The dark-eyed goddesses.
There by his cressy beds
Dissolved and dreaming
Dreams that distilled in a dewdrop
All the purple of night,
All the shine of a planet.

Whereat he whispered;
And they arising
--Of day's forget-me-nots
The duskier sisters--
Descended, relinquished
The orchard, the trout-pool,
The Druid circles,
Sheepfolds of Dartmoor,
Granite and sandstone,
Torridge and Tamar;
By Roughtor, by Dozmare,
Down the vale of the Fowey
Moving in silence.
Brushing the nightshade
By bridges Cyclopean,
By Glynn, Lanhydrock,

Restormel, Lostwithiel,
Dark woodland, dim water,
dreaming town--
Down the vale of the Fowey,
Each in her exile
Musing the message--
Message illumined by love
As a starlit sorrow--
Passed, as the shadow of Ruth
From the land of the Moabite.
So they came--
Valley-born, valley-nurtured--
Came to the tideway,
The jetties, the anchorage,
The salt wind piping,
Snoring in equinox,
By ships at anchor,
By quays tormented,
Storm-bitten streets;
Came to the Haven
Crying, "Ah, shelter us,
The strayed ambassadors!
Lost legation of love
On a comfortless coast!"

Nay, but a little sleep,
A little folding
Of petals to the lull
Of quiet rainfalls,--
Here in my garden,
In angle sheltered
From north and east wind--
Softly shall recreate
The courage of charity,
Henceforth not to me only
Breathing the message.

Clean-breath'd Sirens!
Henceforth the mariner,
Here on the tideway
Dragging, foul of keel,
Long-strayed but fortunate,
Out of the fogs,
the vast Atlantic solitudes,
Shall, by the hawser-pin
Waiting the signal--
"Leave-go-anchor!"
Scent the familiar
Fragrance of home;
So in a long breath
Bless us unknowingly:
Bless them, the violets,
Bless me, the gardener,
Bless thee, the giver.

My business (I remind myself) behind the window is not to scribble verses: my business, or a part of it, is to criticise poetry, which involves reading poetry. But why should anyone read poetry in these days?

Well, one answer is that nobody does.

I look around my shelves and, brushing this answer aside as flippant, change the form of my question. Why do we read poetry? What do we find that it does for us? We take to it (I presume) some natural need, and it answers that need. But what is the need? And how does poetry answer it?

Clearly it is not a need of knowledge, or of what we usually understand by knowledge. We do not go to a poem as we go to a work on Chemistry or Physics, to add to our knowledge of the world about us. For example, Keats' glorious lines to the Nightingale--

"Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird . . ."

Are unchallengeable poetry; but they add nothing to our stock of information. Indeed, as Mr. Bridges pointed out the other day, the information they contain is mostly inaccurate or fanciful. Man is, as a matter of fact, quite as immortal as a nightingale in every sense but that of sameness. And as for:

"Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,"

Science tells us that no such things exist in this or any other ascertained world. So, when Tennyson tells us that birds in the high Hall garden were crying, "Maud, Maud, Maud," or that:

"There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate:
She is coming, my dove, my dear;
She is coming, my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near';
And the white rose weeps, 'She is late' . . ."

The poetry is unchallengeable, but the information by scientific standards of truth is demonstrably false, and even absurd. On the other hand (see Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_, c. xiv.), the famous lines--

"Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November, . . ."

Though packed with trustworthy information, are quite as demonstrably unpoetical. The famous senior wrangler who returned a borrowed volume of _Paradise Lost_ with the remark that he did not see what it proved, was right--so far as he went. And conversely (as he would have said) no sensible man would think to improve Newton's _Principia_ and Darwin's _Origin of Species_ by casting them into blank verse; or Euclid's _Elements_ by writing them out in ballad metre--

The king sits in Dunfermline town,
Drinking the blude-red wine;
'O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle
Upon a given straight line?'

We may be sure that Poetry does not aim to do what Science, with other methods, can do much better. What craving, then, does it answer? And if the craving be for knowledge of a kind, then of what kind?

The question is serious. We agree--at least I assume this--that men have souls as well as intellects; that above and beyond the life we know and can describe and reduce to laws and formulas there exists a spiritual life of which our intellect is unable to render account. We have (it is believed) affinity with this spiritual world, and we hold it by virtue of something spiritual within us, which we call the soul. You may disbelieve in this spiritual region and remain, I dare say, an estimable citizen; but I cannot see what business you have with Poetry, or what satisfaction you draw from it. Nay, Poetry demands that you believe something further; which is, that in this spiritual region resides and is laid up that eternal scheme of things, that universal _order_, of which the phenomena of this world are but fragments, if indeed they are not mere shadows.

A hard matter to believe, no doubt! We see this world so clearly; the spiritual world so dimly, so rarely, if at all! We may fortify ourselves with the reminder (to be found in Blanco White's famous sonnet) that the first man who lived on earth had to wait for the darkness before he saw the stars and guessed that the Universe extended beyond this earth--

"Who could have thought such darkness lay conceal'd
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood reveal'd,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?"

He may, or may not, believe that the same duty governs his infinitesimal activity and the motions of the heavenly bodies--

"Awake, my soul, and _with the sun_
Thy daily stage of duty run . . ."

--That his duty is one with that of which Wordsworth sang--

"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are
fresh and strong."

But in a higher order of some sort, and his duty of conforming with it, he does not seem able to avoid believing.

This, then, is the need which Poetry answers. It offers to bring men knowledge of this universal order, and to help them in rectifying and adjusting their lives to it. It is for gleams of this spiritual country that the poets watch--

"The gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land. . . ."

"I am Merlin," sang Tennyson, its life-long watcher, in his old age--

"I am Merlin,
And I am dying;
I am Merlin,
Who follow the gleam."

They do not claim to see it always. It appears to them at rare and happy intervals, as the Vision of the Grail to the Knights of the Round Table. "Poetry," said Shelley, "is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."

If this be the need, how have our poets been answering it of late years? How, for instance, did they answer it during the South African War, when (according to our newspapers) there was plenty of patriotic emotion available to inspire the great organ of national song? Well, let us kick up what dust we will over 'Imperial ideals,' we must admit, at least, that these ideals are not yet 'accepted of song': they have not inspired poetry in any way adequate to the nobility claimed for them. Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley saluted the Boer War in verse of much truculence, but no quality; and when Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Henley lacked quality one began to inquire into causes. Mr. Kipling's Absent-minded Beggars, Muddied Oafs, Goths and Huns, invited one to consider why he should so often be first-rate when neglecting or giving the lie to his pet political doctrines, and invariably below form when enforcing them. For the rest, the Warden of Glenalmond bubbled and squeaked, and Mr. Alfred Austin, like the man at the piano, kept on doing his best. It all came to nothing: as poetry it never began to be more than null. Mr. Hardy wrote a few mournfully memorable lines on the seamy side of war. Mr. Owen Seaman (who may pass for our contemporary Aristophanes) was smart and witty at the expense of those whose philosophy goes a little deeper than surface-polish. One man alone--Mr. Henry Newbolt--struck a note which even his opponents had to respect. The rest exhibited plenty of the turbulence of passion, but none of the gravity of thoughtful emotion. I don't doubt they were, one and all, honest in their way. But as poetry their utterances were negligible. As writers of real poetry the Anti-Jingoes, and especially the Celts, held and still hold the field.

I will not adduce poets of admitted eminence--Mr. Watson, for instance, or Mr. Yeats--to prove my case. I am content to go to a young poet who has his spurs to win, and will ask you to consider this little poem, and especially its final stanza. He calls it--

A CHARGE

If thou hast squander'd years to grave a gem
Commissioned by thy absent Lord, and while
'Tis incomplete,
Others would bribe thy needy skill to them--
Dismiss them to the street!

Should'st thou at last discover Beauty's grove,
At last be panting on the fragrant verge,
But in the track,
Drunk with divine possession, thou meet Love--
Turn, at her bidding, back.

When round thy ship in tempest Hell appears,
And every spectre mutters up more dire
To snatch control
And loose to madness thy deep-kennell'd Fears,--
Then to the helm, O Soul!

Last, if upon the cold, green-mantling sea
Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar,
Both castaway,
And one must perish--let it not be he
Whom thou art sworn to obey.

The author of these lines is a Mr. Herbert Trench, who (as I say) has his spurs to win. Yet I defy you to read them without recognising a note of high seriousness which is common to our great poets and utterly foreign to our modern bards of empire. The man, you will perceive, dares to talk quite boldly about the human soul. Now you will search long in our Jingo bards for any recognition of the human soul: the very word is unpopular. And as men of eminence write, so lesser wits imitate. A while ago I picked up a popular magazine, and happened on these verses--fluently written and, beyond a doubt, honestly meant. They are in praise of King Henry VIII.:--

King Harry played at tennis, and he threw the dice a-main,
And did all things that seemed to him for his own
and England's gain;
He would not be talked to lightly, he would not be
checked or chid;
And he got what things he dreamed to get, and did--
what things he did.

When Harry played at tennis it was well for this our Isle--
He cocked his nose at Interdicts; he 'stablished us the while--
He was lustful; he was vengeful; he was hot and hard and proud;
But he set his England fairly in the sight of all the crowd.

So Harry played at tennis, and we perfected the game
Which astonished swaggering Spaniards when the fat Armada came.
And possession did he give us of our souls in sturdiness;
And he gave us peace from priesthood: and he gave us English
Bess!

When Harry played at tennis we began to know this thing--
That a mighty people prospers in a mighty-minded king.
We boasted not our righteousness--we took on us our sin,
For Bluff Hal was just an Englishman who played the game to win.

You will perceive that in the third stanza the word 'soul' occurs: and I invite you to compare this author's idea of a soul with Mr. Trench's. This author will have nothing to do with the old advice about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly before God. The old notion that to conquer self is a higher feat than to take a city he dismisses out of hand. "Be lustful be vengeful," says he, "but play the game to win, and you have my applause. Get what you want, set England fairly in sight of the crowd, and you are a mighty-minded man." Now the first and last comment upon such a doctrine must be that, if a God exist, it is false. It sets up a part to override the whole: it flaunts a local success against the austere majesty of Divine law. In brief, it foolishly derides the universal, saying that it chooses to consider the particular as more important. But it is not. Poetry's concern is with the universal: and what makes the Celts (however much you may dislike them) the most considerable force in English poetry at this moment is that they occupy themselves with that universal truth, which, before any technical accomplishment, is the guarantee of good poetry.

Now, when you tell yourself that the days of 'English Bess' were jolly fine empire-making days, and produced great poets (Shakespeare, for example) worthy of them; and when you go on to reflect that these also are jolly fine empire-making days, but that somehow Mr. Austin is your laureate, and that the only poetry which counts is being written by men out of harmony with your present empire-making mood, the easiest plan (if you happen to think the difference worth considering) will be to call the Muse a traitress, and declare that every poem better than Mr. Austin's is a vote given to--whatever nation your Yellow Press happens to be insulting at this moment. But, if you care to look a little deeper, you may find that some difference in your methods of empire-making is partly accountable for the change. A true poet must cling to universal truth; and by insulting it (as, for example, by importing into present-day politics the spirit which would excuse the iniquities of Henry VIII. on the ground that 'he gave us English Bess'!) you are driving the true poet out of your midst. Read over the verses above quoted, and then repeat to yourself, slowly, these lines:--

"Last, if upon the cold, green-mantling sea
Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar,
Both castaway,
And one must perish--let it not be he
Whom thou art sworn to obey."

I ask no more. If a man cannot see the difference at once, I almost despair of making him perceive why poetry refuses just now even more obstinately than trade (if that be possible) to 'follow the flag.' It will not follow, because you are waving the flag over self-deception. You may be as blithe as Plato in casting out the poets from your commonwealth--though for other reasons than his. You may be as blithe as Dogberry in determining, of reading and writing, that they may appear when there is no need of such vanity. But you are certainly driving them forth to say, in place of "O beloved city of Cecrops!" "O beloved city of God!" There was a time, not many years ago, when an honest poet could have used both cries together and deemed that he meant the same thing by the two. But the two cries to-day have an utterly different meaning--and by your compulsion or by the compulsion of such politics as you have come to tolerate.

And therefore the young poet whom I have quoted has joined the band of those poets whom we are forcing out of the city, to leave our ideals to the fate which, since the world began, has overtaken all ideals which could not get themselves 'accepted by song.' Even as we drum these poets out we know that they are the only ones worth reckoning with, and that man cannot support himself upon assurances that he is the strongest fellow in the world, and the richest, and owns the biggest house, and pays the biggest rates, and wins whatever game he plays at, and stands so high in his clothes that while the Southern Cross rises over his hat-brim it is already broad day on the seat of his breeches. For that is what it all comes to: and the sentence upon the man who neglects the warning of these poets, while he heaps up great possessions, is still, "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee." And where is the national soul you would choose, at that hasty summons, to present for inspection, having to stand your trial upon it? Try Park Lane, or run and knock up the Laureate, and then come and report your success!

Weeks ago I was greatly reproached by a correspondent for misusing the word 'Celtic,' and informed that to call Mr. Yeats or Mr. Trench a Celt is a grave abuse of ethnical terms; that a notable percentage of the names connected with the 'Celtic Revival'--Hyde, Sigerson, Atkinson, Stokes--are not Celtic at all but Teutonic; that, in short, I have been following the multitude to speak loosely. Well, I confess it, and I will confess further that the lax use of the word 'Celt' ill beseems one who has been irritated often enough by the attempts of well-meaning but muddle-headed people who get hold of this or that poet and straightly assign this or that quality of his verse to a certain set of corpuscles in his mixed blood. Although I believe that my correspondent is too hasty in labelling men's descent from their names--for the mother has usually some share in producing a child; although I believe that Mr. Yeats, for instance, inherits Cornish blood on one side, even if Irish be denied him on the other; yet the rebuke contains some justice.

Still, I must maintain that these well-meaning theorists err only in applying a broad distinction with overmuch nicety. There is, after all, a certain quality in a poem of Blake's, or a prose passage of Charlotte Bronte's, which a critic is not only unable to ignore, but which--if he has any 'comparative' sense--he finds himself accounting for by saying, "This man, or this woman, must be a Celt or have some admixture of Celtic blood." I say quite confidently that quality cannot be ignored. You open (let us say) a volume of Blake, and your eye falls on these two lines--

"When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,"

And at once you are aware of an imagination different in kind from the imagination you would recognise as English. Let us, if you please, rule out all debate of superiority; let us take Shakespeare for comparison, and Shakespeare at his best:--

"These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

Finer poetry than this I can hardly find in English to quote for you. But fine as it is, will you not observe the matter-of-factness (call it healthy, if you will, and I shall not gainsay you) beneath Shakespeare's noble language? It says divinely what it has to say; and what it has to say is full of solemn thought. But, for better or worse (or, rather, without question of better or worse), Blake's imagination is moving on a different plane. We may think it an uncomfortably superhuman plane; but let us note the difference, and note further that this plane was habitual with Blake. Now because of his immense powers we are accustomed to think of Shakespeare as almost superhuman: we pay that tribute to his genius, his strength, and the enormous impression they produce on us. But a single couplet of Blake's will carry more of this uncanny superhuman imagination than the whole five acts of _Hamlet_. So great is Shakespeare, that he tempts us to think him capable of any flight of wing; but set down a line or two of Blake's--

"A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage . . .
A skylark wounded on the wing
Doth make a cherub cease to sing."

--And, simple as the thought is, at once you feel it to lie outside the range of Shakespeare's philosophy. Shakespeare's men are fine, brave, companionable fellows, full of passionate love, jealousy, ambition; of humour, gravity, strength of mind; of laughter and rage, of the joy and stress of living. But self-sacrifice scarcely enters into their notion of the scheme of things, and they are by no means men to go to death for an idea. We remember what figure Shakespeare made of Sir John Oldcastle, and I wish we could forget what figure he made of Joan of Arc. Within the bounds of his philosophy--the philosophy, gloriously stated, of ordinary brave, full-blooded men-- he is a great encourager of virtue; and so such lines as--

"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action . . ."

Are thoroughly Shakespearean, while such lines as--

"A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage . . ."

Are as little Shakespearean in thought as in phrasing. He can tell us that:

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

He can muse on that sleep to come:--

"To die, to sleep;
To sleep; perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."

But that even in this life we may be more truly ourselves when dreaming than when waking--that what we dream may perchance turn out to be more real and more important than what we do--such a thought overpasses his imaginative range; or, since to dogmatise on his imaginative range is highly dangerous, let us be content with saying that it lies outside his temperament, and that he would have hit on such a thought only to dismiss it with contempt. So when we open a book of poems and come upon a monarch crying out that:

"A wild and foolish labourer is a king,
To do and do and do and never dream,"

We know that we are hearkening to a note which is not Shakespearean at all, not practical, not English. And we want a name for that note.

I have followed the multitude to call it Celtic because in practice when we come upon this note we are pretty safe to discover that the poet who utters it has Celtic blood in him (Blake's poetry, for instance, told me that he must be an Irishman before ever I reflected that his name was Irish, or thought of looking up his descent). Since, however the blood of most men in these islands is by this time mixed with many strains: since also, though the note be not native with him, nothing forbids even a pure-blooded Anglo-Saxon from learning it and assimilating it: lastly, since there is obvious inconvenience in using the same word for an ethnical delimitation and a psychological, when their boundaries do not exactly correspond--and if some Anglo-Saxons have the 'Celtic' note it is certain that many thousands of Celts have not; why then I shall be glad enough to use a better and a handier and a more exact, if only some clever person will provide it.

Meanwhile, let it be understood that in speaking of a 'Celtic' note I accuse no fellow-creature of being an Irishman, Scotsman, Welshman, Manxman, Cornishman, or Breton. The poet will as a rule turn out to be one or other of these, or at least to have a traceable strain of Celtic blood in him. But to the note only is the term applied, Now this note may be recognised by many tokens; but the first and chiefest is its insistence upon man's brotherhood with bird and beast, star and flower, everything, in short, which we loosely call 'nature,' his brotherhood even with spirits and angels, as one of an infinite number of microcosms reflecting a common image of God. And poetry which holds by this creed will hardly be subservient to societies and governments and legalised doctrines and conventions; it will hold to them by a long and loose chain, if at all. It flies high enough, at any rate, to take a bird's-eye view of all manner of things which in the temple, the palace, or the market-place, have come to be taken as axiomatic. It eyes them with an extraordinary 'dissoluteness'--if you will give that word its literal meaning. It sees that some accepted virtues carry no reflection of heaven; it sees that heaven, on the other hand--so infinite is its care--may shake with anger from bound to bound at the sight of a caged bird. It sees that the souls of living things, even of the least conspicuous, reach up by chains and are anchored in heaven, while 'great' events slide by on the surface of this skimming planet with empires and their ordinances.

"And so the Emperor went in the procession under the splendid canopy. And all the people in the streets and at the windows said, 'Bless us! what matchless new clothes our Emperor has!' But he hasn't anything on!' cried a little child. 'Dear me, just listen to what the little innocent says,' observed his father, and the people whispered to each other what the child had said. 'He hasn't anything on!' they began to shout at last. This made the Emperor's flesh creep, because he thought that they were right; but he said to himself, 'I must keep it up through the procession, anyhow.' And he walked on still more majestically, and the Chamberlains walked behind and carried the train, though there was none to carry."

This parable of the Emperor without clothes can be matched, for simplicity and searching directness, against any parable outside of the Gospels, and it agrees with the Divine parables in exalting the wisdom of a child. I will not dare to discuss that wisdom here. I observe that when the poets preach it we tender them our applause. We applaud Vaughan's lines:--

"Happy those early days, when I
Shin'd in my angel-infancy . . .
When yet I had not walk'd above
A mile or two from my first love,
And looking back--at that short space--
Could see a glimpse of His bright face;
When on some gilded cloud or flow'r
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity. . . ."

We applaud Wordsworth's glorious ode--

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! . . ."

We applaud even old John Earle's prose when he tells us of a Child that--

"The elder he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches. He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse; the one imitates his pureness, the other falls into his simplicity. . . . His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see what innocence he hath outlived. . . . Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without a burden, and exchanged but one heaven for another."

But while we applaud this pretty confident attribution of divine wisdom to children, we are much too cautious to translate it into practice. "It is far too shadowy a notion," says Wordsworth prudently, "to be recommended to faith as more than an element in our instincts of immortality;" and he might have added that, while the Child may be Father of the Man, the Man reserves the privilege of spanking. Even so I observe that, while able to agree cordially with Christ on the necessity of becoming as little children as a condition of entering the Kingdom of Heaven, we are not so injudicious as to act upon any such belief; nay, we find ourselves obliged to revise and re-interpret the wisdom of the Gospels when we find it too impracticably childish. When Christ, for instance, forbids oaths of all kinds, we feel sure He cannot be serious, or we should have to upset a settled practice of the courts. And as for resisting no evil and forgiving our enemies, why, good Heavens! what would become of our splendid armaments! The suggestion, put so down rightly, is quite too wild. In short, as a distinguished Bishop put it, society could not exist for forty-eight hours on the lines laid down in the Sermon on the Mount. (I forget the Bishop's exact words, but they amounted to a complete and thoroughly common-sense repudiation of Gospel Christianity.)

No; it is obvious that, in so far as the Divine teaching touches on conduct, we must as practical men correct it, and with a special look-out for its indulgent misunderstanding of children. Children, as a matter of experience, have no sense of the rights of property. They steal apples.

And yet--there must be something in this downright wisdom of childishness since Christ went (as we must believe) out of His way to lay such stress on it; and since our own hearts respond so readily when Vaughan or Wordsworth claim divinity for it. We cannot of course go the length of believing that the great, wise, and eminent men of our day are engaged one and all in the pursuit of shadows. 'Shadows we are and shadows we pursue' sounded an exquisitely solemn note in an election speech; but after all, we must take the world as we find it, and the world as we find it has its own recognised rewards. No success attended the poet who wrote that--

"Those little new-invented things--
Cups, saddles, crowns, are childish joys,
So ribbands are and rings,
Which all our happiness destroys.
Nor God
In His abode,
Nor saints, nor little boys,
Nor Angels made them; only foolish men,
Grown mad with custom, on those toys
Which more increase their wants to date. . . ."

He found no publisher, and they have been rescued by accident after two hundred years of oblivion. (It appears, nevertheless, that he was a happy man.)

And yet--I repeat--since we respond to it so readily, whether in welcome or in irritation, there must be something in this claim set up for childish simplicity; and I cannot help thinking it fortunate and salutary for us that the Celtic poets have taken to sounding its note so boldly. Whatever else they do, on the conventional ideals of this generation they speak out with an uncompromising and highly disconcerting directness. As I said just now, they are held, if at all, by a long and loose chain to the graven images to which we stand bound arm-to-arm and foot-to-foot. They fly far enough aloof to take a bird's-eye view. What they see they declare with a boldness which is the more impressive for being unconscious. And they declare that they see us tied to stupid material gods, and wholly blind to ideas.

P.S.--I made bold enough to say in the course of these remarks that Euclid's _Elements_ could hardly be improved by writing them out in ballad metre. A friend, to whom I happened to repeat this assertion, cast doubt on it and challenged me to prove it. I do so with pleasure in the following--

[In the original text, there is shown a geometrical diagram which consists of two equally sized circles superimposed so that they each intersect the other's centre which points are marked A and B. The outermost points on the two circles in line with AB are marked D and E. The upper point where the two circles intersect is marked C and an equilateral triangle is shown by joining points A, B and C.]

NEW BALLAD OF SIR PATRICK SPENS.

The King sits in Dunfermline toun
Drinking the blude-red wine:
"O wha will rear me an equilateral triangle
Upon a given straight line?"

O up and spake an eldern knight,
Sat at the King's right knee--
"Of a' the clerks by Granta side
Sir Patrick bears the gree.

"'Tis he was taught by the Tod-huntere
Tho' not at the tod-hunting;
Yet gif that he be given a line,
He'll do as brave a thing."

Our King has written a braid letter
To Cambrigge or thereby,
And there it found Sir Patrick Spens
Evaluating PI.

He hadna warked his quotient
A point but barely three,
There stepped to him a little foot-page
And louted on his knee.

The first word that Sir Patrick read,
"_Plus_ x," was a' he said:
The neist word that Sir Patrick read,
'Twas "_plus_ expenses paid."

The last word that Sir Patrick read,
The tear blinded his e'e:
"The pound I most admire is not
In Scottish currencie."

Stately stepped he east the wa',
And stately stepped he north:
He fetched a compass frae his ha'
And stood beside the Forth,

Then gurly grew the waves o' Forth,
And gurlier by-and-by--
"O never yet was sic a storm,
Yet it isna sic as I!"

Syne he has crost the Firth o' Forth
Until Dunfermline toun;
And tho' he came with a kittle wame
Fu' low he louted doun.

"A line, a line, a gude straight line,
O King, purvey me quick!
And see it be of thilka kind
That's neither braid nor thick."

"Nor thick nor braid?" King Jamie said,
"I'll eat my gude hat-band
If arra line as ye define
Be found in our Scotland."

"Tho' there be nane in a' thy rule,
It sail be ruled by me;"
And lichtly with his little pencil
He's ruled the line A B.

Stately stepped he east the wa',
And stately stepped he west;
"Ye touch the button," Sir Patrick said,
"And I sall do the rest."

And he has set his compass foot
Untill the centre A,
From A to B he's stretched it oot--
"Ye Scottish carles, give way!"

Syne he has moved his compass foot
Untill the centre B,
From B to A he's stretched it oot,
And drawn it viz-a-vee.

The tane circle was BCD,
And A C E the tither:
"I rede ye well," Sir Patrick said,
"They interseck ilk ither.

"See here, and where they interseck--
To wit with yon point C--
Ye'll just obsairve that I conneck
The twa points A and B.

"And there ye have a little triangle
As bonny as e'er was seen;
The whilk is not isosceles,
Nor yet it is scalene."

"The proof! the proof!" King Jamie cried:
"The how and eke the why!"
Sir Patrick laughed within his beard--
"'Tis _ex hypothesi_--

"When I ligg'd in my mither's wame,
I learn'd it frae my mither,
That things was equal to the same,
Was equal ane to t'ither.

"Sith in the circle first I drew
The lines B A, B C,
Be radii true, I wit to you
The baith maun equal be.

"Likewise and in the second circle,
Whilk I drew widdershins,
It is nae skaith the radii baith,
A B, AC, be twins.

"And sith of three a pair agree
That ilk suld equal ane,
By certes they maun equal be
Ilk unto ilk by-lane."

"Now by my faith!" King Jamie saith,
"What _plane_ geometrie!
If only Potts had written in Scots,
How loocid Potts wad be!"

"Now wow's my life!" said Jamie the King,
And the Scots lords said the same,
For but it was that envious knicht,
Sir Hughie o' the Graeme.

"Flim-flam, flim-flam!" and "Ho indeed?"
Quod Hughie o' the Graeme;
"'Tis I could better upon my heid
This prabblin prablem-game."

Sir Patrick Spens Was nothing laith
When as he heard "flim-flam,"
But syne he's ta'en a silken claith
And wiped his diagram.

"Gif my small feat may better'd be,
Sir Hew, by thy big head,
What I hae done with an A B C
Do thou with X Y Z."

Then sairly sairly swore Sir Hew,
And loudly laucht the King;
But Sir Patrick tuk the pipes and blew,
And _played_ that eldritch thing!

He's play'd it reel, he's play'd it jig,
And the baith alternative;
And he's danced Sir Hew to the Asses' Brigg,
That's Proposetion Five.

And there they've met, and there they've fet,
Forenenst the Asses' Brigg,
And waefu', waefu' was the fate
That gar'd them there to ligg.

For there Sir Patrick's slain Sir Hew,
And Sir Hew Sir Patrick Spens--
Now was not that a fine to-do
For Euclid's Elemen's?

But let us sing Long live the King!
And his foes the Deil attend 'em:
For he has gotten his little triangle,
_Quod erat faciendum!_

[1] This was written some time before the _entente cordiale_. _

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