perfected beauty of Eden. But dramatic propriety is one thing, and lyrical poetry is quite another. The question is, whether lyric verse can possibly ‘take rank with the several great poetic ages of the past,' unless thought and expression combine to produce a thing of beauty, recognisable as beautiful by any sensitive taste, and containing at the heart's core that inevitable quality of the universal which will be found to distinguish all the poetry that endures. There are certain poems in the collection to which it is possible to ascribe without hesitation this high and inalienable privilege, and it is no slight vindication of the standards of the past that they are all poems conceived and executed in the soundest tradition of fine workmanship.

Let us take, for instance, Mr Sturge Moore's 'Sicilian Idyll,' which is not only the most striking poem in the earlier volume, but may be said to present, in an allegory, the complete philosophy of the poetic movement which it adorns. An aged couple in a Sicilian village are immersed in the mild atmosphere of repose and acquiescence which middle-age brings to those who have escaped from the disturbing passions of youth. Damon with his winebowl and his gossip, and Cydilla with her ball of worsted and nimble fingers, are content enough in their backwater of life. Only one anxiety troubles them. Their son Delphis has broken loose from their uneventful home, and gone out into the world in a mist of rebellion and adventure, to warm both hands before the fire of life. What has befallen him by the way? The shadow of that anxiety is always over the old people. One day Damon meets his son again. He has become tutor to a young lad, and his imagination is aflame with the delight of moulding an impressionable soul to his own pattern. The very ecstasy of creation inspires him; and then suddenly another man crosses his path, a creature of low instincts and animal impulses, who inflames the boy's mind with unclean fancies, and seems likely in a moment to ruin the work of Delphis's long-cherished ambition. Then Delphis in his turn has to learn the lesson of the world's progress. Youth will not stay for the word of experience; the call of the wild tempts every new generation to its disaster. So Delphis, enraged with civilisation, takes the solitary way:

'A vagabond I shall be as the moon is.

The sun, the waves, the winds, all birds, all beasts
Are ever on the move, and take what comes;
They are not parasites like plants and men
Rooted in that which fed them yesterday.

Free minds must bargain with each greedy moment
And seize the most that lies to hand at once.
Ye are too old to understand my words;
I yet have youth enough, and can escape
From that which sucks each individual man
Into the common dream.'

What is this but the perfect apologia for the wandering life of an art which makes no compromise with tradition, an apologia expressed in language of great force, sincerity, and persuasiveness?

But the apologia is double-edged. For the wanderer goes his way, drifting without purpose upon a rudderless course, while the little citadel of civilisation stands firm, because man is a social being, and it is through the self-sacrifice of the individual that the life of each generation is made easier than the last. And so, after Delphis has raved himself out of sight, the last word is with the old parents, as they gather up the worsted and the knitting, and trot off in search of their son's pupil 'to offer their poor service in his stead.'

'We must be doing something, for I feel

We both shall drown our hearts with time to spare.'

Man cannot live for himself alone; his past and present must control the laws for his future. Nor can the artist separate himself from the traditions of his art, and start afresh upon a new programme with each new generation. The continuity of life and of art is alike unbroken; there is nothing really new nor isolated under the sun.

But Mr Sturge Moore has disappeared from the later volume of Georgian Poetry, whether because, as the editor says of absent contributors, he has 'published nothing which comes within its scope,' or because he 'belongs in fact to an earlier poetic generation, and his inclusion must be allowed to have been an anachronism,' we are not told. In any case the absence of his restrained and eloquent verse is a distinct loss to the later Vol. 226.-No. 449. 2 c

collection; and it is a further, and a very real misfortune to the movement as a whole, that two of its most gifted and promising leaders have been removed during the last year by the untimely stroke of death. In James Elroy Flecker and Rupert Brooke we gladly recognise two other poets of indisputable and glowing promise, whose influence upon their contemporaries might possibly have had the most salutary and formative results. Without them much that is left of the movement fades into a feverish confusion of experiment; but one of these two possessed intuitively, and the other was on the point of acquiring by experience, just that quality of artistic self-control which would save them from the excesses with which they were surrounded, and leaven the modern movement as a whole with a powerful leaven of beauty and spirituality. Flecker, indeed, had little to connect him with rebellious modernity. He indulged in no halffledged experiments, and made no attempt to shock his readers' susceptibilities. His passion was chiefly for the old-old ships, old buildings, old legends, and old loyalties ; and he sang their praise in haunting melodies which recalled the immemorial music of the old, unchangeable

sea:

'Evening on the olden, the golden sea of Wales,

When the first star shivers and the last wave pales:
O evening dreams!

There's a house that Britons walked in, long ago,
Where now the springs of ocean fall and flow,
And the dead robed in red and sea-lilies overhead
Sway when the long winds blow.

Sleep not, my country; though night is here, afar
Your children of the morning are clamorous for war:
Fire in the night, O dreams!

Though she send you as she sent you, long ago,
South to desert, east to ocean, west to snow,

West of these out to seas colder than the Hebrides

I must go

Where the fleet of stars is anchored, and the young

Star-captains glow.'

Such melody and such imagery as this are in the true succession; they owe nothing to any passing fashion. But Rupert Brooke was essentially in the heart of the

new movement; and his earlier work was not immune from its shortcomings both of taste and of faulty selection. He was obsessed by the modern melancholy. Fired by that love of English life and English scenery which is the hall-mark of the public school and University man, bubbling over with delight in life and love and sweet companionship, he could nevertheless rarely escape, even for an hour, from the depressing conviction of the transient quality of all beauty and all human enjoyment, even indeed of love itself.

'Magnificently unprepared

For the long littleness of life,'

he had scarcely raised its goblet to his lips, before he saw the wine turn to poison in the cup. Bright eyes, gold hair, red lips-all would be dust in a few years, blown upon the wind in solitary, loveless pilgrimage.

'And every mote, on earth or air,

Will speed and gleam, down later days,

And like a secret pilgrim fare

By eager and invisible ways,

Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,

Till, beyond thinking, out of view,
One mote of all the dust that's I

Shall meet one atom that was you.'

And then, perhaps, would be granted to the dead passion its one faint hope of immortality, that the flame of reunited love should strike into the heart of some pair of living lovers, rapt out of themselves into an unfamiliar ecstasy :

'And they will know-poor fools, they'll know!—
One moment, what it is to love.'

The dread of the loss of individuality burned into the soul of this eager individualist, until the horror of Nirvana almost consumed his power of expression.

'Oh, Heaven's Heaven!-but we'll be missing
The palms, and sunlight, and the south;
And there's an end, I think, of kissing

When our mouths are one with Mouth.' .

That last line, with its taint of inherent ugliness, an ugliness which becomes almost vulgar, is unfortunately characteristic of the worst side of Rupert Brooke, the itch to say a thing in such an arresting fashion as to shock the literary purist into attention even against his will. There are too many such blots upon his poetry.

'Here, where love's stuff is body, arm and side

Are stabbing-sweet 'gainst chair and lamp and wall.
In every touch more intimate meanings hide;
And flaming brains are the white heart of all.'

This is not poetry at all; once more we are confronted with the failure of a vehemence that loses itself in words. So too in the interminable list of material comforts which he loved (and Brooke never quite knew when to stop, when his imagination had started upon a mental catalogue), he exhausts and irritates the fancy with the suggestion of a cloistered, almost an epicurean, selfconsciousness. Individualism indeed ran riot in his temperament; but, when the call came to make the supreme sacrifice, he learnt in a sudden flash of revelation, what so many of his comrades had learnt by degrees upon the hard stones of experience, that individuality is only given to man in order that he may devote it to the service of his generation.

'Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

And all the little emptiness of love!

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there, Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,

Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;

Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there But only agony, and that has ending;

And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.'

So invigorating, and so transcendently sincere, is this return of the poet upon the self-centred dreams of youth, with their vain regrets for the passage of beauty, that