magnificent speech in which the hero sums up the whole matter and takes farewell of the Lemnian peasants, are all conceived and shaped in the manner of great poetry. The characterization throughout, moreover, is exact and admirable, and through the whole work runs a thread of pure lyric beauty which is most memorable, perhaps, in the lovely figure of Pan given in the last part of the Chorus beginning 'In wonder and time-mists.' With such a poem to his credit, de Tabley cannot but be secure against long neglect. WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 1 SPEAKING of Byron, Henley says that he 'was not interested in words and phrases, but in the greater truths of destiny and emotion. His empire is over the imagination and the passions.' As a critical judgment this is far less shrewd than was common with Henley, but it is suggestive in relation to his own work as a poet. Henley was a remarkable figure in the literary world of his day, moving in no scholarly seclusion, but coming out into the open field of journalism, and bearing himself always with spirit and dignity. The best of his work is a durable contribution to the finest kind of popular criticism, vivid, far from unlearned, in close touch with the ordinary and confused affairs of life. On any given subject he might have to yield at points to the specialist, but few men have covered so wide a range with so warm an understanding and with a mind so well versed in the evidence of the case. It is as a critic that he will be remembered, and it is of his critical work that there is most to be said. But he produced a good deal of creative work, and, in common with most writers who work in both kinds, he no doubt hoped that it was in this that he 1 The Works of William Ernest Henley. Five volumes, Macmillan, 1920-21. came to his best achievement. So that, although on the whole it seems likely that this side of his expression will be the first to fade, it cannot be passed by without consideration. 'He was not interested in words and phrases, but in the greater truths of destiny and emotion.' This, in the last analysis, is true of Henley as a poet. He would have accepted the judgment with pride; and that he would have done so is indicative of his real weakness. When he adds that Byron's empire was over the imagination and the passions, he says more than justly can be put in for himself. Henley's poetic world was not that of passion and imagination, but that of clear-sighted morality, which was sometimes transfigured by indignation. It was in this world that he moved as a master in a great deal of his critical work. But it was a world that was, as it always must be, incomplete as an environment for rich poetic creation. In passing, it may be remarked that it merely is not true to say of Byron that in his great poetic moods, of which for all his failures he had as many as most poets, he was not interested in words and phrases. Byron knew, as in practice Henley did not, that, while it is passion and imagination that must condition the poetic faculty, the only possible consummation of that faculty comes through the most exact and disciplined ordering of words and phrases. Henley brought to his poetry many beautiful qualities. He had real courage, he had a greathearted tenderness, he hated Pecksniffs and impure Puritans; he was, in short, a very chivalrous man, with rare intellectual gifts. But he did not perceive that merely to be these things, while it might do anything else for you, could not make you into a poet. Every now and again this fine moral impetus in his being would move with such force as to achieve something which remains memorable and beyond the reach of any but poets of the most indisputable magic. Such pieces as 'Matri Dilectissimæ' and 'On the Way to Kew,' and the wellknown 'Out of the night that covers me,' and 'Or ever the knightly years were gone,' are good things for any man to have written. Coming from the finer airs of Herrick or Marvell or Keats, our minds may not often go to Henley, but at other times we find ourselves recalling, or 'Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 'Or ever the knightly years were gone I was a King in Babylon And you were a Christian Slave...' and we do so with a pleasure that we do not question. But Henley very rarely came to this excel lence in his verse. The great body of it suffers from the fatal defect of having been subjected to no emotional selection, a defect which Henley very thoroughly understood when considering the work of other men. The sequence of Hospital sketches, for example, is no more than brilliant journalism. Brilliant journalism in its place is all very well; and, when a man aiming at it accomplishes it, all credit is due to him, but you cannot pass it off as poetry. These poems, one feels all the time as one reads them, are as much an accident as the occasion of Henley's being in the hospital at all. It is no case of carefully selected emotion being projected through an occasion that shall give it final form, as it seems to the poet; it is, rather, a vivid observation catching up this, that, and the other fragment of casual event and setting it down, not with imaginative but merely graphic power. The tranquillity which, as Wordsworth pointed out, is the condition in which emotion must be recollected for the creation of poetry, is precisely the condition in which the poet works with the utmost precision in that matter of words and phrases. And in most of Henley's verse there is unmistakable evidence that he was working, not in tranquillity, but in Fleet Street. We flash across the level, We thunder thro' the bridges, |