Chapter III: Part 3

Again, by his "successors" I mean simply those who come after--those masters of younger birth who seem most nearly to take his place now that he is gone--not any avowed disciples, still less servile imitators of his thought or style. Following upon Homer there was the school of the Homeridae, or "sons of Homer." A cluster of poets at the beginning of the seventeenth century were styled "the sons of Ben Jonson." There are no doubt "sons of Tennyson" at this present date. With these we have now no concern. They are but satellites, while that for which we are scanning the poetical horizon is a rising star of a magnitude in some degree comparable with the stars which have set with the deaths of Matthew Arnold, Browning and Tennyson. There is, I believe, more than one such star already well advanced into the firmament. I am one of those who believe that this is an age unusually rich in genuine poetry. There are to-day singing in the English tongue enough of so-called minor poets to have made the poetical fortune of any epoch between the Elizabethan period and our own. This century has seen re-enthroned the Miltonic doctrine that poetry should be "simple, sensuous, and passionate"; it has learned from Wordsworth of the divinity in Nature, from Shelley of the passion in it, from Tennyson how to express its moods; it has learned from Byron how to be frank about humanity, from Wordsworth how to sympathize with it, from Browning how to understand it; it has been taught by Shelley how to write with melody, by Keats how to write with richness, by Wordsworth with simplicity, by Tennyson with grace and luminousness, by Arnold with chasteness. It has availed itself of these great examples to such good purpose that the average of reputable verse written to-day is more instinct with feeling, more vitalised with thought, more satisfying in expression, than much which is studied and belauded and quoted because it was written a century or two ago.

With great boldness perhaps, but with no less deliberateness of judgment, I maintain that contemporary men and women might better spare for the living, breathing, and often very beautiful work of their contemporaries, some of the time and appreciation which they do not grudge to give over and over again, even if it be with some conscious effort, to the elaborate conceits of the seventeenth century, to the rather frigid frugalities of a Gray, the laborious melancholies of a Collins, or the cold transparencies of a Landor. No doubt justice will be done in the end, but why not do as much of it as possible at once?

It is for these reasons that I beg your attention to an attempt at an appreciation of two contemporary singers, both excellent, though differing in the nature of their excellence. Their names are John Davidson and William Watson.

But first it would be well to look a little closely at that word "appreciation," and to examine frankly the considerations which make up a literary judgment. I am induced to take this course after a somewhat amused survey of a series of criticisms which have been passed upon the two poets who are our immediate subject. One writer, for instance, speaks of Mr. Davidson's works as "marked from end to end by the careless fecundity of power," while the next tells us of the self-same verses that they have "the severe restraint and very deliberately willed simplicity of M. Guy de Maupassant." Careless fecundity and deliberate restraint are sufficiently irreconcilable terms to apply to the same creations. Another critic tells us of Mr. Watson that "it is of 'Collins' lonely vesper-chime' and 'the frugal note of Gray' that we think as we read the choicely worded, well-turned quatrains that succeed each other like the strong unbroken waves of a full tide," and I cannot but wonder how a full tide of strong waves can suggest anything either "frugal" or "well-chosen." It is turbid judgments such as these, and an intellectual slovenliness which is content to accept words and phrases without attaching definite notions to them, that discredit the average English criticism, when set beside the lucid Greek appreciation of Aristotle and Longinus, or of those Frenchmen like Taine or Ste. Beuve who know exactly what they look for and why they look for it. We still require a few Matthew Arnolds to drill us in the first steps in criticism. It seems almost as if we had accepted for literature the ultra-democratic maxim that every man has as much right as every other man to judge a poem--if not a good deal more right.

The appreciation of a poet means the estimation of his rank, the separation of his precious metal from his dross, to the end that we may get the utmost enjoyment out of his beauties, while we feel the intellectual satisfaction which comes of a reasoned opinion at first hand. We appreciate the poet at his true value when we set his particular contribution to the literary joys of life neither too high nor too low. We fully appreciate him when we derive from him the keenest delight which he is capable of affording. And I know of no other process for the attainment of this end than the one which I am about to propound. It is, I think, a method which is analytical without being mechanical, and judicial without being cold.

The excellence of the poems of Tennyson has been placed beyond doubt by a consensus of the best judgment, when there some day swim into our ken first one and then another small volume bearing the name of William Watson or John Davidson. We perhaps read these volumes receptively enough, and form some sort of impression concerning them. But we are not sure of ourselves; we wait to hear what other people have to say. If we hear praise, we feel encouraged to join in it; if we hear disparagement, we grow suspicious of our own more favourable judgment. Perhaps, on the other hand, with that half-resentment which we are always apt to feel at new claims to poetic eminence, and for which a large measure of excuse is to be found in the fact that ambitious but futile rhymesters are a veritable plague of flies to publisher and public--in this spirit of half-resentment we ask, "Who is this Watson?" "Who is this Davidson?" and incontinently proceed to examine them in a cold and carping spirit, with a keen eye to their faults of detail, and with a sort of illogical assumption that if they had been of much account we should somehow have heard of them before.

It is but rarely that an accomplished judge of literature will speak out boldly and unequivocally, without "hedging," so to speak, and not only declare that such-and-such a work reveals a rising genius, but give his reasons why he declares it, distinguishing the poetical elements in which the genius is shown. The critic should frankly analyse; but mostly he does not. He tells us, for instance, that Walt Whitman is the "Adam of a new poetical era," or else that he is "a dunce of inconceivable incoherence and incompetence"; but usually he does not show us the precise data upon which either conclusion is based. Cannot profundity of thought, ardour of emotion, power and charm of expression, be actually demonstrated as present or absent in a poet, when the critic is addressing himself to his natural readers, to wit, persons in whom are pre-supposed a certain amount of brains and heart, and cultivation of both? If they cannot, has criticism any real existence?

To begin with, each reader is bound to recognise how far he is himself at any time capable of appreciating particular kinds of poetry. Out of epic, lyric, dramatic, and descriptive poetry there is usually some one kind with which we have no natural sympathy. It follows not that, because a man is fond of peaches, pears, and grapes, he is also fond of passionfruit or tomatoes. Of these latter he may be no judge whatever. _Non omnia possumus omnes_ in the criticism of poetry, any more than in other departments of activity.

There are, for instance, some who have no patience with poetry of the mystic, half-dreamy kind, but must have their conceptions one and all definitely realized for them. They cannot away with emotional arabesques; they must have recognizable and rememberable outlines. There are others who cannot bring themselves to care for the poetry which broods upon inanimate nature; their interest centres wholly on the problems of man; just as there are limited souls who find no delight in landscapes, and think figure-painting the only field of art. These are no critics, perhaps never could be critics, of more than the verbal expression in those uncongenial regions of poesy. To be a true appreciator of all poetry a man must possess a harmoniously-developed nature, as full and large and liberal as poetry itself. Let us, therefore, begin by admitting and allowing for our limitations where we feel them to exist.

In the first place, we must set about our reading only when we are in the proper mood of receptivity. Poetry is not science, any more than painting is photography, or architecture is building in squares and cubes and circles. To approach the great poetry of "high seriousness" when we are in a cynical or flippant mood; to snatch glances at a great drama or epic when we are in a hurry; to begin from the very first line by examining with a cold-blooded criticism a passionate elegy or fiery lyric, is to act as if one sat at a concert of unfamiliar music only to criticise the gestures of the performers or to watch for an occasional weakness of the second violin. It is almost always open to adult human beings not to be reading poetry if they are not feeling disposed for it. I say "almost always" because the "indolent reviewer" is apt to be an exception. Yet even the indolent reviewer might with advantage often remind himself that poetry is written for people who want to read it, and when they want to read it, and that no art pretends to force men into enjoying it at all times and seasons. Granting, then, that we know our own personal limitations, and what particular sense our organisation lacks; granting also that we are reading our poet spontaneously, simply because the pleasure of poetry is the pleasure we happen to be seeking; granting, further, that we are sufficiently cultivated and experienced in literature to possess ready apprehension of a thought, a fair taste in expression, and an ear for cadence and melody, there is, I believe, but one certain way of telling whether a verse-writer is a poet at all, and then whether as poet he is greater or less.

He must be read a first time without effort at criticism of any kind. The words and rhythms, the thoughts and feelings contained in a particular poem will thus leave a certain general effect, an unanalysed impression. It will be as it is with the true judge of art when he stands before a picture, a statue, or a building. In its presence he either feels the spontaneous delight which comes of a general satisfyingness, or he feels the annoyance of a general unsatisfyingness, or he feels neither one nor the other. So with a poem. We shall either feel that the sounds and melodies have bathed us in delight, or we shall think them harsh, or we shall think nothing about them at all. We shall feel a high intellectual stimulation or a strong emotional excitement, or we shall think the passage rather futile, or we shall be aware of no pronounced feeling one way or the other. If we are constrained to say to ourselves, "What a noble passage!" "What splendid verse!" "What a sweet song!" or to use any of those unstudied exclamations which spring to the lips before we have had time or inclination to realize our impressions more definitely--then, I maintain, we are justified in calling the writer at once and definitively a poet. Whether he is a greater poet or a minor poet remains still to be estimated, but poet he is, be he Burns or Swinburne, Tennyson or Watson or Davidson. Here, for instance, is a passage from Watson's elegy upon Tennyson, which he has called _Lachrymae Musarum_. I do not choose it because it is his best, but because it is typical:--

He hath returned to regions whence he came;
Him doth the spirit divine
Of universal loveliness reclaim,
All nature is his shrine.
Seek him henceforward in the wind and sea,
In earth's and air's emotion or repose,
In every star's august serenity,
And in the rapture of the flaming rose.
There seek him if ye would not seek in vain,
There, in the rhythm and music of the whole,
Yea, and for ever in the human soul
Made stronger and more beauteous by his strain.

For lo! Creation's self is one great choir,
And what is Nature's order but the rhyme
Whereto the world keeps time,
And all things move with all things from their prime?
Who shall expound the mystery of the lyre?
In far retreats of elemental mind
Obscurely comes and goes
The imperative breath of song, that as the wind
Is trackless, and oblivious whence it blows.

Demand of lilies wherefore they are white,
Extort her crimson secret from the rose,
But ask not of the Muse that she disclose
The meaning of the riddle of her might.
Somewhat of all things sealed and recondite,
Save the enigma of herself, she knows.
The master could not tell, with all his lore,
Wherefore he sang, or whence the mandate sped;
E'en as the linnet sings, so I, he said--
Ah! rather as the imperial nightingale
That held in trance the ancient Attic shore,
And charms the ages with the notes that o'er
All woodland chants immortally prevail!
And now from our vain plaudits, greatly fled,
He with diviner silence dwells instead,
And on no earthly sea, with transient roar,
Unto no earthly airs, he trims his sail,
But, far beyond our vision and our hail,
Is heard for ever and is seen no more.

Now it matters not what flaws the austere critic might find with a microscope in those lines. I feel certain that there is no one who would not at this first reading experience that inevitable glow of satisfaction which, in the cultured mind, is the unfailing criterion that the art is good. Whether Mr. Watson is further an original poet, a signal poetic force; whether he is a poet for the mind as much as for the ear, is a further question to be decided by a detailed analysis; but that he is a poet is, I beg leave to think, wholly undeniable. At first sight, has there been anything better in this vein since _Lycidas_?

Here, again, is a brief part of a song from Davidson's _Fleet Street Eclogue_ of May Day. I quote these lines in particular, because, unlike most very short passages of this poet, they admit of being disentangled from their setting. They are typical of only one side of a many-sided being, the side which exults in the simple sensuous delights of nature. They are two stanzas from the song of the nightingale as interpreted by Basil:--

The lark from the top of heaven raved
Of the sunshine sweet and old;
And the whispering branches dipped and laved
In the light; and waste and wold
Took heart and shone; and the buttercups paved
The emerald meads with gold.

* * * * *

Now it is night, and--

The wind steals down the lawns
With a whisper of ecstasy,
Of moonlit nights and rosy dawns,
And a nest in a hawthorn tree;
Of the little mate for whom I wait,
Flying across the sea,
Through storm and night as sure as fate,
Swift-winged with love for me.

And again I ask, has there, at first sight, been anything more like Shelley since Shelley's _Cloud_?

Assuming that the first step in our method has left us quite satisfied that a writer (and here I leave Mr. Watson and Mr. Davidson and revert to the general case) possesses enough share in the divine gift to be called "poet," we may, if we are bent upon truly "appreciating" him, proceed to taste his lines over and over, to dwell in detail upon his expression, upon its charms and splendours and felicities, its vigour and terseness and simplicity. It may be that we shall find our first admiration continually increased, especially when we learn to realise the full music of the verse, the subtle tones of its "flutes and soft recorders," or the swell of the "organ-voice." We may come to taste "all the charms of all the Muses often flowering in one lonely word." It might be, on the other hand, that we should detect a certain over-fulness--what Coleridge has called a too-muchness--of diction; or a certain want of correspondence between the melodious language and any clearly apprehended mental picture. We might find the vigour too often lapsing into sheer bad taste, or the simplicity taking the fatal step into simpledom, as when Tennyson ends the story of Enoch Arden with the banal remark that

the little port
Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

We might, unhappily, discover these things, or, on the contrary, we might find them so rare that our admiration at the expressive genius of the poet would increase, until we were sure that the thing of beauty was really and truly a superlative joy for ever.

And not only in diction and melody, but in that supreme Shakespearian poetic gift of imagination which can vividly portray, body forth in clear form, what others can only feel in a vague and misty way while lacking the power to express it--in this gift also the great poet is known, not at the first reading, nor at the second, nor at the third. An image, a metaphor, which seems most perfect when first met, may lose much of its apparent completeness and depth when the mind examines it; whereas upon many another, which appeared at first so easy and obvious, there is revealed the very stamp of that godlike genius which creates, as if without effort, the one unsurpassable, soul-satisfying "name." If, the more we return to a poet's work, the more it grows upon us and the more we see in it, then, as Longinus truly declares, it possesses the quality of the sublime. Without that result the poet may be great, but not of the greatest. To employ once more that definition which I still find the best yet constructed, true poetry is the "exquisite expression of an exquisite impression." For a reader to reach the apprehension of such an impression in all its exquisiteness, and to recognize the full exquisiteness of its expression, requires some effort. Under the pellucid diction may lurk amazing depths. We must therefore read a poet, and read him anew. This is the way to attain to a reasoned and discriminating judgment, and to escape those vain and vague impressions which we can neither trust ourselves nor impart to others.

So much for the heads of the sermon. The application is to Tennyson's successors. Of William Watson and John Davidson as men, I know practically nothing. I am fain to confess that I have no desire to know anything. There is too much personal gossip already interfering with our enjoyment of literature. These men's work is presumably their best selves, and except for such hints of their personality as occur in their poems, I know not "whether they be black or white." Incidentally, Mr. Watson lets us learn that he is from the North of England, and I gather that Mr. Davidson is a Scot from the fact that he scans "world" as two syllables, uses "I mind" in the sense of "I remember," and talks unpatriotically enough of his nurture in that easily identifiable region where are to be found--

A chill and watery clime; a thrifty race
Using all means of grace
To save their souls and purses.

Among their many points of difference, the two men have this prime quality in common, that they are ready to rely upon their own poetical resources. Their work contains, indeed, many an echo of their great predecessors, many a suggestion of familiarity with Milton or Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley, or Tennyson. It is evident that both have steeped themselves in the literature which is best calculated to make an English poet. But it is equally evident that they have mastered their material, and not allowed their material to master them. Watson, it is true, has attained to a much less firm and spontaneous style than Davidson, but it would be false to say of him that he is, in point of diction, the imitator of any poet in especial, or that he moulds his style upon Tennyson more than on Milton, or upon Milton more than on Wordsworth. And what is true of their form is true of their matter. They think with their own brains and feel with their own natures. They fall back upon no master and no fashion to direct them what to say or leave unsaid. Whatever opinion we may form of their force and range, we cannot but recognise that it is themselves whom they are expressing. And it may be taken as an axiom that nothing so commends the man who speaks to the interest of the man who listens as this--the fact that the speaker is telling his own thought. That, I believe, is the secret of the hold which Browning possesses upon his votaries, and which Goethe will for all time exercise.

We recognise with both our poets that this initial charm is theirs, and if we find in Davidson the richer nature and the more robust, the more infused with Browning's rough, virile strain, we are no less confident that Watson's verse is the natural cream gathered from his daintier and more purely intellectual moods. But in thus comparing the men I anticipate my evidence.

The poems of John Davidson upon which I have based my judgment are those contained in the _Fleet Street Eclogues_ (the first and second series), and in the volume of _Ballads and Songs_. The name of the latter explains itself. In the former are contained some dozen pieces, written in dialogue, in various metres. The interlocutors are London journalists and poets, who meet in Fleet Street on such holidays as Lammas, May Day, Michaelmas, and the New Year, and there hold a kind of discursive symposium on such themes as then and there present themselves. I mildly call the discussion "discursive," though it would be fair in one or two instances to dub the piece frankly a medley. Usually the special holiday suggests a reference to the charms of nature as they are to be seen in the country at that date, and as they are, alas! not to be seen in Fleet Street. This device affords scope for not a few charming word-pictures, as simple in outline and as complete in suggestion as the drawings of flowers and tree sprays made by the Japanese, and as effective in the artistic directness and simplicity of the language as if they had been written by Burns or by a Greek lyrist. I do not think that it would be possible to find anywhere in the English language more pure and fresh delight in the sights and sounds of rural nature expressed with such apparent naivete. And all the time the mind's eye is kept so closely, so distinctly, on the object that the result is often the sublimity of art as defined by Longinus, the selection and combination of exactly those features which are the most essential and most telling. For instance, no man who did not feel and realize with vividness, no man who lacked a genius for expression, could so select and place just the touches which describe the sudden descent of the lark in the evening sky. The lines occur in the song of "Spring" in _Ballads and Songs_:--

High, O high, from the opal sky,
Shouting against the dark,
"Why, why, why, must the day go by?"
Fell a passionate lark.

The words "opal," "shouting," "fell," and "passionate," are exactly the words, and all the words, which could be demanded in an ideal word-picture by those who have been familiar with the scene itself. And to make the ideal twice ideal, the very sound of the bird is brought before one's mind after a score of years, by the whole passage, and particularly in the reiterated "Why, why, why." If there is more consummate simplicity of art anywhere contained in as small a compass of words, I confess I do not know where it is to be found. Shelley does not surpass this.

Throughout Davidson's poems there is this same positive revelling in those delights of the eye and ear and smell which meet the wanderer in the country. They are fresh to him every time; and he realizes and fulfils that function of the poet, the bringing back of new freshness into things common, at which he hints when he makes one of his characters say:--

Dear Menzies, talk of sight and sound,
And make us _feel_ the blossom-time.

In these more sensuous moods he is so filled with the simple Chaucerian gladsomeness of spring that he can sing, or make one of his characters sing--for after all, his characters are but so many sides of himself--

I have been with the nightingale;
I have learned his song so sweet;
I sang it aloud by wood and dale,
And under my breath in the street.

And again--

I can hear in that valley of mine,
Loud-voiced on a leafless spray,
How the robin sings, flushed with his holly-wine,
Of the moonlit blossoms of May.

In all such passages there is the genuine note of the vernal joy which stirs naturally in the blood of all men who are men. The writer feels as the birds feel, nay, as the burgeoning hedges feel, when--

The blackbirds with their oboe voices make
The sweetest broken music, all about
The beauty of the day, for beauty's sake,
And all about the mates whose love they won,
And all about the sunlight and the sun.

Or when--

A passionate nightingale adown the lane
Shakes with the force and volume of his song
A hawthorn's heaving foliage.

But this sensuous rapture, which reminds us of Keats, though of a Keats whose expression is more like that of Shelley, is by no means all that Davidson can feel in nature. Through the eyes and other senses the influence of nature penetrates to his soul and spirit. He touches Wordsworth in such lines as these:--

All my emotion and imagining
Were of the finest tissue that is woven,
From sense and thought....
I seemed to be created every morn.
A golden trumpet pealed along the sky:
The sun arose: the whole earth rushed upon me.
Sometimes the tree that stroked my windowpane
Was more than I could grasp; sometimes my thought
Absorbed the universe.

It is true that these words are put in the mouth of that one of his dramatis personae who is of the most melancholy and brooding disposition; but he who can make another say--

I am haunted by the heavens and the earth;
... I am besieged by things that I have seen:
Followed and watched by rivers; snared and held
In labyrinthine woods and tangled meads;
Hemmed in by mountains; waylaid by the sun;
Environed and beset by moon and stars;
Whispered by winds and summoned by the sea.

--he who can put this thought in another's mouth has necessarily first experienced some measure of it himself.

But it is not merely about external nature that our Fleet Street journalists talk. They speak of such questions of man and life and destiny as are wont to engage any gathering of thoughtful men, and particularly those who are poetically disposed. The contrasts between the beauty of rural nature and the squalor of life, especially the life of the town, these and other matters receive such suggestive treatment as can be given to them by a poet who has no desire to become a preacher, and no desire to pose as an exhaustive philosopher. Upon such questions the many-sided poet, whose sympathies are wide, and whose moods are varied, will touch with a certain suggestiveness; he will flash a ray of cheerfulness into the haunts of pessimism, or throw a new pathos into common situations. And Mr. Davidson possesses a large measure of this many-sidedness, this versatility of sympathy. He appears a very human man, a man unfettered by cant or creed, observing men and things from various sides, and entering into their circumstance. Is he without a creed? From his verses on the _Making of a Poet_ it would appear so--

No creed for me! I am a man apart:
A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world;

* * * * *

A martyr for all mundane moods to tear;
The slave of every passion, and the slave
Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light;
A trembling lyre for every wind to sound.
I am a man set to overhear
The inner harmony, the very tune
Of nature's heart; to be a thoroughfare
For all the pageantry of Time: to catch
The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour
And make them known.

* * * * *

Nevertheless he, or one of his avatars, can also say of the celebration of Christmas with its "sweet thoughts and deeds"--

A fearless, ruthless, wanton band,
Deep in our hearts we guard from scathe
Of last year's log a smouldering brand,
To light at Yule the fire of faith.

He makes no vulgar boast about escaping from the fetters of religion. He spares us any flouts of intellectual superiority. He is apparently an evolutionist, but withal finds little saving grace in that doctrine, and is not uninclined to envy the old days

When Heaven and Hell were nigh.

It is true that behind his Basil and Herbert and Brian and Sandy and Menzies and Ninian, who converse there in Fleet Street, we find it hard to discover any definite synthetic philosophy of Davidson himself. On the other hand, we have no particular wish to discover one. He is a poet, not a Herbert Spencer. We may reasonably be content to catch the side-lights which a poet throws from a large and liberal nature; to be led by him to different points of view. If the result is that we find the man himself to evade us, we can only admit that the same result occurs with Shakespeare. Indeed, there is a hint that a synthetic philosophy is exactly what Davidson never seeks to attain. Says Ninian:--

Sometimes, when I forget myself, I talk
As though I were persuaded of the truth
Of some received or unreceived belief;
But always afterwards I am ashamed
At such lewd lapses into bigotry.

And though another immediately ejaculates

Intolerantly tolerant!

we have a feeling that the poet has betrayed an attitude of mind not wholly unlike his own.

His outlook is both bright and dark. The modern dragons, it has been said, are dooming "religion and poetry." The answer comes--

They may doom till the moon forsakes
Her dark, star-daisied lawn;
They may doom till Doomsday breaks
With angels to trumpet the dawn;
While love enchants the young
And the old have sorrow and care,
No song shall be unsung,
Unprayed no prayer.

Nature is full of joy, man may find abounding delight of life in the midst of it; but what of his destiny?

For the fate of the elves is nearly the same
As the terrible fate of men;
To love, to rue, to be, and pursue
A flickering wisp of the fen.
We must play the game with a careless smile,
Though there's nothing in the hand;
We must toil as if it were worth our while
Spinning our ropes of sand;
And laugh, and cry, and live, and die
At the waft of an unseen hand.

And again--

I am not thinking solely of myself,
But of the groaning cataract of life,
The ruddy stream that leaps importunate
Out of the night, and in a moment vaults
The immediate treacherous precipice of time,
Splashing the stars, downward into the night.

And apart from destiny, which is beyond human control, society is much at fault. Not only is Davidson plainly democratic, he expresses the complaints and aspirations of the higher type of those who might be socialists, if socialism were allowed to be a development, and not tyrannously imposed as a system. He talks of--

... Slaves in Pagan Rome--
In Christian England--who begin to test
The purpose of their state, to strike for rest
And time to feel alive in.

And--

Hoarsely they beg of Fate to give
A little lightening of their woe,
A little time to love, to live,
A little time to think and know.

There are other wrong elements in society besides poverty, and the poet finds occasion to express one in particular. But what Mrs. Grand requires three volumes to discuss is treated with infinitely more effect by him in a dozen lines. The purport may be gathered from these three:--

... My heart!
Who wore it out with sensual drudgery
Before it came to me? What warped its valves?
It has been used; my heart is secondhand.

This is not the time to exhaust the Davidsonian philosophy, if there be such. We are treating the writer as a poet, and the examples which I have quoted of his joy in nature and his fellow-feeling with mankind, should, I think, demonstrate that he has the gifts of vivid seeing, of vivid feeling, and of vivid expression. If genuine poetry consists of two essentials, substance and form, we cannot deny the substance in Mr. Davidson. He has the gift of "high seriousness," which Arnold declares to be a requisite of all that is classic. He is not always deep; he is not faultless. The same writer who can condense a thought thus--

On Eden's daisies couched, they felt
They carried Eden in their heart,

is also capable of writing, as poetry, these lines:--

For no man ever understood a woman,
No woman ever understood a man,
And no man ever understood a man:
No woman ever understood a woman,
And no man ever understood himself;
No woman ever understood herself.

We can only surmise that Mr. Davidson had just been reading Whitman, and was under the temporary hallucination that this poor stuff was profound thinking. But all poets, nay, all prose-writers, even the greatest, have their lapses into bathos. Yes, even--and I say it with trembling--even Shakespeare.

Let us look, now, for a few moments, more closely, in order to appreciate the particular elements of his genius, as manifested in the form which is his style.

And first, his language. To be perfect, expression must be luminous yet terse, vigorous, yet in taste and keeping. It must be without mannerisms, without inadequacy, without flatness, without obscurity. "Clear, but with distinction," is the brief definition of Aristotle. Davidson has learned his lesson well from Shelley and Wordsworth and Arnold. He cultivates all the virtues, and not without success. He has not been tempted to leave the true path and court singularity, whether in the shape of Browning's verbal puzzles or of Swinburne's luscious and alliterative turgidness. His diction is of the simplest. Says one of his personae--

I love not brilliance; give me words
Of meadow-growth and garden plot,
Of larks and black-caps; gaudy birds,
Gay flowers and jewels like me not.

It is astonishing how expressive the simple word can become in the hands of a master. Dante's verb and noun are now proverbial. As for Mr. Davidson, Gray's clear-cut lines in the _Elegy_ can supply no more instances of perfect aptness than those which I quoted some time ago of the lark. Notice the exactness of choice in--

The patchwork sunshine _nets_ the lea,
The flitting shadows _halt and pass_
Forlorn, the mossy humble-bee
_Lounges_ along the flowerless grass,

and in "I heard the _husky_ whisper of the corn." Yet I am disposed to think that, like many another finished artist, he has passed through stages of various practice, and has exercised much self-restraint before attaining to that naturalness which, as Goethe reiterates, is the last crown of art-discipline. From sundry indications I conclude that passages of his _Fleet-street Eclogues_ were written independently at different dates, and have been fitted later into the dialogue form. However that may be, it is possible to detect instances in which he falls below his own maturer ideal of natural language. The diction, that is to say the choice of mere vocables, is eminently natural, except for the odd words "muted," "writhen," "watchet-hued," "dup," "swound," which I have collected with a rather laborious captiousness. But diction is only part of expression, and, as I have just hinted, it would seem as if, before his lesson in pure style was fully learned, he had passed under the fascination of the mannerists, and particularly of Pope. Otherwise it is hard to account for such entirely eighteenth century lines as--

And brimming echoes spill the pleasant din,

or--

The sloping shores that fringe the velvet tides;

and (speaking of steamers)--

Or, fiery-hearted, cleave with iron limbs
And brows precipitous the pliant sea.

How different are these mechanical constructions from that expression of the birds

hid in the white warm cloud
Mantling the thorn.

Whether I am right or wrong as to the process of his development, the fact remains that he can be, if he chooses, a master in language of poetic simplicity. Even a fire of garden rubbish can be expressed without becoming altogether unpoetical when one speaks of

the spicy smoke
Of withered weeds that burn where gardens be.

Perhaps there do exist some things which cannot be made poetical in any diction whatsoever. Tennyson could only express "tea" by "and on the board the fluttering urn," and if Mr. Davidson has to speak of whisky and calls it

amber spirit that enshrines the heart
Of an old Lothian summer,

we have to recognise that he has come very well out of a difficulty. If at another time he refers to it as

things which journalists require,

we must remember that the context implies a certain humour.

"Clear, but not flat," is an easy maxim to utter, but, as Wordsworth too often shows, the danger of falling from studied simplicity into bald prose is always present; and for that reason do smaller artists rather choose to trick their thoughts in verbal jewellery. We cannot say that Davidson, who undertakes to run the risk, never makes the fatal step. In the address to the daisy--

Oh, little brave adventurer!
We human beings love you _so_,

the last word, and indeed the whole line, verges on the infantile. So it is a shock when, after a passage of some pretensions, we come upon the lines--

My way of life led me to London town,
And difficulties, which I overcame;

or--

But yet my waking intuition,
That longed to execute its mission.

It is extremely difficult to realise that the same man wrote these sorry lines who, in another place, adopts this for his style--

... Here spring appears
Caught in a leafless brake, her garland torn,
Breathless with wonder, and the tears half dried
Upon her rosy cheek.

For our comfort and his let us remember that it was the same Wordsworth who wrote both the _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ and also the lines--

I've measured it from side to side:
It's three feet long and two feet wide!

Nevertheless flaws of this kind are few, and it is almost unfair for me to be the means perhaps of conveying even thus much impression of faultiness about verses which sustain so high a general level of excellence of language.

In point of melody and harmony and flow of verse there can be no doubt that our poet is, for instance, an excellent writer of songs, in which a vigorous simplicity is the prime requisite. They lilt along with great vivacity and ease. But elsewhere I could wish that here and there he would amend his rhymes. "Reviewer" and "literature," "pierced" and "athirst," "noise" and "voice," "inquisition" and "division," "trees" and "palaces," "shade is" and "ladies," "giftless" and "swiftness," are far from pleasing; and though I am almost ashamed to play the detective in work which is mostly full of charm, I find myself distressed by such cacophonies as--

Hid in its hoard of haws,

and--

Pierces a rushlight's ray's length into it.

John Davidson, then, is a genuine son of his age; free in his thought, wide in his sympathies, eager for the amelioration of man's estate, divided between the hopes of science and the regret for a lost religion, compelled to fall back on the everlasting consolations of love and nature, an ardent lover of the country and its sights and sounds, constrained to draw word-pictures of the things which thus delight him, and drawing them with the consummate skill of the man who keeps his eye on the essentials of the thing he draws. His charm lies in his frank sincerity, and in the clear healthy sweetness of his utterance. That he is a poet none can doubt; if he is comparatively young, as I surmise he is, and if he pursues his true development, he may, I believe, easily take his place in the first rank, not only as a successor, but as the successor, of Tennyson.

On William Watson I shall dwell less long. To begin with, he is already better known. Moreover, his special virtues as a poet are more easy to apprehend, for they lie somewhat prominently upon the surface. Better still, he apparently apprehends them himself, and is in that unusually happy position for an artist, of knowing exactly where his own strength lies. And undoubtedly in those departments his strength is great. We need not hold the mention of them in reserve. I have already quoted a passage of admirable rhetorical and musical skill and taste from the _Lachrymae Musarum_. That was sufficient to illustrate one of this poet's great gifts--the gift of writing splendid verse, as harmonious as Milton's and as choice in expression as Tennyson's. His other chief endowment is that of literary critic. On Burns, Shelley, and Wordsworth he has said almost the final saying, and assuredly in almost the final language. We may pick faults now and again in his expression, and we may suspect a mannerism here and there, especially when we read large quantities of his verse at one time; nevertheless, each individual piece which fairly represents him is very nearly perfect in its way.

The works of his with which I am acquainted are the volumes entitled _Wordsworth's Grave and Other Poems_, _The Father of the Forest and Other Poems_, _Lachrymae Musarum_, and the series of sonnets upon Armenia, called _The Purple East_. There is in Watson nothing of the dramatist or of the epic writer. He is a lyrist and a sonneteer. He is also a critic, and might very conceivably be a satirist. But, whatever he is in writing, he is mainly and before all things an intellectual rather than an emotional poet; he is an artist rather than a seer. His poems are constructions of taste and intellectual judgment. Let me take, as an example, his poem upon the _Father of the Forest_. A yew tree, which may be fifteen centuries old, is addressed by him; and, musing on the historical scenes it must have lived through, he gives us a series of verses which touch musically upon salient epochs and characteristic figures in the history of England. To this the yew practically replies that the so-called historical events amount to nothing, and that "wars and tears" will repeat themselves, until men are some day civilized into pursuing but one object, which shall be Beauty. The piece itself reveals nothing profound, awakes no particular emotion. Given the first idea of the plot, so to speak--an idea which is not far to seek for any reflective man--the rest of the material follows as a matter of course. But where is the man besides Mr. Watson who will give us such lines as--

The South shall bless, the East shall blight,
The red rose of the Dawn shall blow;
The million-lilied stream of night,
Wide in ethereal meadows flow.

I do not say that the poet is without his measure of feeling; but it is rather the pensive feeling of a Jaques, the dainty interest of a Matthew Arnold, than any surge of emotion. The poet seems to me to encourage his brain to feel--to give it that passing luxury with a certain amount of deliberation.

The _Hymn to the Sea_ is the only real poem written in the English language in hexameters and pentameters. There have been many attempts at these metres, but they have been failures, one and all. And nothing shows Mr. Watson's skill, nay genius, more than the fact that his attempt is a great and conspicuous success. The sea, confined within its shores, never resting, yet never able to pass its bounds, at war with the winds, and serving the moon with its tides, is compared to man, with his unrest, his limitations, his aspirations. As before, when the clue is once given, the thread is easily followed to the end. The result is simply an intellectual operation done into verbal music. Yet who but William Watson, having to speak of the moon as mistress of the sea, could express his fancy in words like these:--

When, as yonder, thy mistress, at height of her mutable glories,
Wise from the magical East, comes like a sorceress pale.
Ah, she comes, she arises--impassive, emotionless, bloodless,
Wasted and ashen of cheek, zoning her ruins with pearl.
Once she was warm, she was joyous, desire in her pulses abounding:
Surely thou lovedst her well, then, in her conquering youth!
Surely not all unimpassioned, at sound of thy rough serenading,
She from the balconied night unto her melodist leaned,--
Leaned unto thee, her bondsman, who keepest to-day her commandments,
All for the sake of old love, dead at thy heart though it lie.

Surely such verse would have a claim to endurance, even if the thought were less of a thought than it is.

_Autumn_, again, is a short piece upon the suggestions of that season. What would those suggestions naturally be? Obviously, the passing and perishing of all things that are. True; but to express those suggestions, obvious as they are, as Watson expresses them, requires a rhetorical power and a taste in melodious words such as would make their possessor eminent in the judgment of men who care anything for beauty. There may be no particular depth in the work; it may be less passionate, less full of thought, than the _Ode to the West Wind_, but we could ill afford to spare such combinations of sound as--

Elusive notes in wandering wafture borne
From undiscoverable lips, that blow
An immaterial horn.

In _Liberty Rejected_ we meet once more with the similitude of the moon and the tide. Mr. Watson's range of purely intellectual imagination is, like that of his emotion, limited. But we do not mind meeting the comparison again, when the lover who refuses to be free expresses himself thus--

The ocean would as soon
Entreat the moon
Unsay the magic verse
That seals him hers
From silver noon to noon.

When he touches upon nature, we feel again that Watson is not "letting himself go." When he escapes from town it is not to revel and to make us revel in the sheer delight of rural sights and sounds. He feels as before, with the eye and the understanding, not with the buoyant blood of the full heart. No matter, he feels enough to give us this quatrain--

In stainless daylight saw the pure seas roll;
Saw mountains pillaring the perfect sky:
Then journeyed home to carry in his soul
The torment of the difference till he die.

Why should I go on to quote such lines as--

That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea,

or,

Curls the labyrinthine sea
Duteous to the lunar will.

Enough that, thanks to a study of Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and therefore a delicate taste in word and phrase, and thanks also to an innate genius for verbal music, restrained from Swinburnian riot by a true artistic instinct, Mr. Watson is a poet most delightful to the physical and the mental ear. That he has taken pains with his study is avowed by himself. Beginning with Shelley and passing through Keats to Wordsworth, he says--

In my young days of fervid poesy
He drew me to him with his strange far light,--
He held me in a world all clouds and gleams,
And vasty phantoms, where ev'n Man himself
Moved like a phantom 'mid the clouds and gleams.
Anon the Earth recalled me; and a voice
Murmuring of dethroned divinities
And dead times, deathless upon sculptured urn--
And Philomela's long-descended pain
Flooding the night--and maidens of romance
To whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come--
Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse
And thraldom, lapping me in high content,
Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms.
And then a third voice, long unheeded--held
Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame--Found
me at last with ears to hear. It sang
Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys,
Of simple manhood, artless womanhood,
And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn;
And from the homely matter nigh at hand,
Ascending and dilating, it disclosed
Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths
Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass
With roots that groped about eternity,
And in each drop of dew upon each blade
The mirror of the inseparable All.

It is also clear from such reminiscences as--

The laurel glorious from that wintry hair,

which is practically Tennyson, or

The maker of this verse, which shall endure
By splendour of its theme, that cannot die,

which, if I mistake not, is echoed Spenser, or--

And ghostly as remembered mirth,

which is largely Tennyson again.

I do not call these plagiarisms, I call them reflections of wide and retentive reading.

William Watson has thus formed a style which is almost perfect. I say "almost," not quite. There are some few mannerisms which we might wish away. He speaks of "greatly inert," "greatly lost in thee," "greatly slain," "doomed splendidly to die," "loudly weak," "immutably prevail," and "vainly great," till we are forced to recognize what looks very much like a trick. He has occasional moments of tautology, which may possibly be deliberate, but is none the better for that, as when he says:--

Not mine the rich and showering hand, that strews
The facile largess of a stintless muse.

And

The retrospect in Time's reverted eyes.

And worst of all--

"Fair clouds of gulls that _wheel_ and _swerve_
In unanimity divine,
With _undulation serpentine_,
And wondrous consentaneous _curve_."

He sometimes falls into lines which ring of the mint of Pope--

No guile may capture and no force surprise.

Or--

Defames the sunlight and deflowers the morn.

Or--

Towers to a lily, reddens to a rose.

In one passage only do I find him falling, falling, falling into the flattest style of the _Excursion_:--

"I overheard a kind-eyed girl relate
To her companions how a favouring chance
By some few shillings weekly had increased
The earnings of her household."

But as I read this, I murmur to myself those lines from Wordsworth--

"And I have travelled far as Hull to see
What clothes he might have left, or other property,"

and wonder how it is that such aberrations can befal even the very man who seems most determined to avoid them.

Watson's second endowment is still one of taste and intellect. It is the gift of literary criticism. The special charm of the great poets is so subtly apprehended by him, and so exquisitely expressed, that it will be a source of much surprise if many of his concise verdicts do not become the household words of students of literature. Let me quote a passage from his poem on _Wordsworth's Grave_:--

You who have loved, like me, his simple themes,
Loved his sincere large accent nobly plain,
And loved the land whose mountains and whose streams
Are lovelier for his strain.

It may be that his manly chant, beside
More dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune;
It may be, thought has broadened, since he died,
Upon the century's noon;
It may be that we can no longer share
The faith which from his fathers he received;
It may be that our doom is to despair
Where he with joy believed;--

Enough that there is none since risen who sings
A song so gotten of the immediate soul,
So instant from the vital fount of things
Which is our source and goal;

And though at touch of later hands there float
More artful tones than from his lyre he drew,
Ages may pass e'er trills another note
So sweet, so great, so true.

Take again--