we may be excused for believing that, had Rupert Brooke survived the war, its cleansing fire would have lighted him to achievements both in life and poetry far greater than had yet been dreamed of by a philosophy so disillusioned and so disintegrate. Dis aliter visum: and now this bright young harbinger of beaconing possibilities sleeps by the Egean sea :

'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 in his grave rest, beyond doubt, the highest expectations of the poetic movement which he seemed destined, in the very hour of his death, to turn into richer and more profitable channels.

The gulf which separates these three poets from the larger body of the New Poetry may, perhaps, be bridged by Mr John Drinkwater, who in a well-conceived and finely-written idyll gives expression to yet one more allegory of the artistic life. The Carver in Stone' indeed is easily referable to the sister art of poetry. It tells of a sculptor, patient and idealistic, who was engaged, with a host of his fellow-workmen, to decorate the frieze of a great temple. They set to work to embody the forms of local deities, tiger, owl, bull, leopard, ram, camel, lizard, and the rest, and carved them, as the crowd preferred to find them, without life or vital meaning. The solitary artist, on the other hand, threw all his energies into the sculpture of an eagle, that spread

'Wide pinions on a cloudless ground of heaven,

Glad with the heart's high courage of that dawn
Moving upon the ploughlands newly sown,

Dead stone the rest. He looked, and knew it so.'

The crowd, however, looked with other eyes. The king and his counsellors flocked to inspect the work, and praised the lean, dull animals of the field. Only one critic noticed the eagle at all, and he would have preferred a swan. So the lonely artist left popularity to the others, and begged to be allowed to decorate the panels in the clerestory, unseen because no one would ever trouble to climb the winding stair. There he carved

a great, squatting toad, the emblem of the crowd's 'emphatic warrant,' and surrounded it with the other types of the people's gods, wonderfully interpreted now in the light of their own ugliness-cruelty, fear, and servile toil. The temple was finished, and nobody climbed the stair to see his panels between the high windows. But he looked in solitude and contentment

'Again upon his work, and knew it good,

Smiled on his toad, passed down the stair unseen,
And sang across the teeming meadows home.'

It would not be just to carry the comparison too far; for the fault of the New Poetry is certainly not that it lacks life, like the heavy images of the people's gods in the poem, but rather, and principally, that it lacks beauty and spirituality. Life it has in abundance, the fierce, feverish life of a mind that has not yet established its relations with its environment, and is perpetually launching excursions into new territory, without consolidating the ground that it has won. It is the life, in fact, of experiments and moods; and the poetry in which it issues is precisely that poetry of the mood and of the emotion, which we have already defined as lacking the sound foundations and universal significance of the poetry of ideas. The general atmosphere is that of a world in which there is no prevailing current of ideas, no pervading intellectual stimulus, and from which the natural refuge is found in the exaggeration of trivial incidents into some sort of symbolic relation with big movements, and in the acceptance of individual whims and wayward fancies in the place of firm philosophic ideals.

Symbolism plays an inevitable part in such a movement; and the readiness with which symbolism runs to seed always renders it a dangerous ally of poetry. For when it gets out of hand, it is apt to trail off into a sort of entanglement of its own elaboration, growing by selfindulgence. The prolixity of the author's fancy dulls the edge of the animating idea; and this is the very foible in which the imagery of the New Poetry loses itself again and again. It gets hold of a half-developed idea, and elaborates it out of all proportion and perspective. The Hare,' by Mr Wilfrid Gibson, a fine poem in many respects, nevertheless labours under this disadvantage. In the

hunted eyes of the hare the rustic sportsman realises something of the shy apprehension of womanhood, a shyness which maternity and its consolations alone have the power to dispel. The image and the idea are true, but the poet proceeds to decorate them with all the circumstance of venery-first the pursuit of the hare, then the pursuit of the woman, and then the two pursuits merged symbolically into one; until the whole thing is so overclouded by half-realised metaphor that the main idea fades out of sight.

This fault strikes one the more strangely in Mr Gibson's work, since his particular strength lies at the other extreme of quality. Swift vividness of impression is the essence of his art, and none among the younger writers has a surer gift for seizing upon the elements of a scene or an incident and presenting them arrestingly to the imagination. The brief, eager little poems, which he has devoted to events and impressions of the present war, furnish characteristic illustrations of his talent in this respect; and it is curious to find, as occasionally happens in his longer flights, that his touch is capable of faltering into indecision. But, when the artist breaks free of restraining standards, it is no uncommon experience that he should lose a sense of selection also. The very vividness of his insight tempts him to multiply impressions, until they overcrowd the picture and obliterate its purpose. This is one of the most insidious dangers of realism; and there are occasions when an even more perilous boundary gets crossed, in the poet's effort to be original and arresting at any cost.

The two pieces by Mr D. H. Lawrence, which bear the names 'The Snapdragon' and 'Love and Cruelty,' might well serve as cautionary examples of realism running riot in verse. Both deal with the sudden submergence of judgment aud self-restraint in the clutch of gross physical passion, and both use symbols from the natural world to illustrate a degree of self-abandonment which is so invertebrate as to be practically abnormal. The sinister power of the impression is not to be denied; but it bears no sort of affinity to poetry. It is in both cases an experiment in perverted symbolism, casting a sombre shadow upon the wholesome impulses of passion and of natural sexual attraction.

Realism, however, is no rarity among the younger poets; and the lack of restraint which stimulates their frequent and irrelevant prolixity inspires them no less in the choice of subjects and of methods so coarse as inevitably to repel the clear, bright atmosphere of poetry altogether. Mr John Masefield, no doubt, has done something to set the fashion, although he is only inadequately represented in these pages. But Mr Masefield's moral narratives in verse have a powerful sense of virility behind them; and two of them, 'The Everlasting Mercy' and 'The Widow in the Bye Street,' whatever may be thought of their violence of taste and diction, are at any rate highly impressive homilies in metre, filled to the brim with a glowing passion for morality. Mr Masefield, moreover, is full of the true stuff of poetry, and, when he is once at work by the countryside or on his even more familiar ocean, the splendour and variety of his imagery are impeccable. His realism also is invariably in the dramatic vein. If he is coarse, he takes his colour from the theme; directly the theme rises in the spiritual scale, the poet's inspiration rises with it to heights that not infrequently border on sublimity. The same is true of Mr Ralph Hodgson, who completely justifies the rather sombre realism of 'The Bull' by the intense pathos and sincerity of its human allegory. Strength of this sort, even if it broadens down into crudity, is in direct harmony with its subject; the dramatic situation requires it, and its final effect appears artistically inevitable.

The realism of Mr Lawrence and of Mr William Davies is of an entirely different order. Here, as in certain isolated passages in Rupert Brooke's work, individualism bursts its bounds, and elevates a merely animal instinct into that higher region of ideas to which, of course, animal instinct has always been recognised as a congenital foe. And the result, as in The Bird of Paradise,' is sheer ugliness, an ugliness which does grave injustice to the true spirit of beauty which fills Mr Davies's pastoral poems with sunshine and the scent of flowers in a spring breeze. It is strange, at first sight, that such aberrations of taste should exist side by side with so much natural beauty; but they are evidently a common defect of the New Poetry, and would appear to

have their root in the defiance, and consequent loss, of authority which attends all efforts to democratise society and art.

This failing is painfully evident in one of the finest and most impressive poems in either volume, the noble 'King Lear's Wife' of Mr Gordon Bottomley. Here, in a strongly-knit, vigorous, dramatic fragment, we are given a sort of prelude to Shakespeare's tragedy, and that a prelude which serves very reasonably to explain the inhuman treatment meted out to their father by Goneril and Regan at a later stage of his history. The Lear of this fragment is still a man in his prime, lusty and lustful, with a sickly dying wife who has long since ceased to satisfy his uxorious demands. Goneril is just emerging into womanhood-a huntress maid; Cordelia is a prattling nursery child; Regan hangs about the kitchen for scraps. Upon Goneril falls the horror of revelation, for, as her mother lies dying in the great bed, she sees her father toying in the shadow with her mother's maid, who is already destined by the doting Lear to be the moribund wife's successor, while all the time the wanton is carrying on an intrigue with a younger man in the King's retinue. The honour of the house is in Goneril's hand, and she stabs her father's paramour to death, returning with the blood upon her hands, to point the moral of a woman's intuition :

'I do not understand how men can govern,
Use craft and exercise the duty of cunning,
Anticipate treason, treachery meet with treachery,
And yet believe a woman because she looks
Straight in their eyes with mournful, trustful gaze,
And lips like innocence, all gentleness.

Your Gormflaith could not answer a woman's eyes.
I did not need to read her in a letter;

I am not woman yet, but I can feel

What untruths are instinctive in my kind,

And how some men desire deceit from us.'

So far the drama, though not without a certain pagan brutality, is four-square within the containing walls of poetry-a fine and living piece of literature. How, then, comes it that on the very last page Mr Bottomley should be willing to dissipate the final effect of a powerful scene