Germany and Czecho-Slovakia? I put these questions, not because I think that any of these eventualities are impending or perhaps even probable, but because they serve to illustrate the difficulty of the problems connected with the foreign policy of Hungary and the potential importance to Europe of whatever policy she may pursue or, under force majeure, may be compelled to pursue. In so far as it is possible and under the leadership of Count Bethlen, Hungary is likely to maintain her present policy of friendly relations with all countries and alliances with none. A Hungarian politician said some time ago, with cynical realism, 'No one wants an ally that is poor and unarmed'; but Hungary is not so poor as when that was said, and her policy cannot be a matter of indifference to England or the rest of Europe.

Whatever the future may hold in store for Hungarians, I trust it will not deprive them of reward for the courage they have shown during the tempestuous happenings since the Armistice and during the reconstruction period. One can only write about people as one finds them; and during the three years I have had the privilege of trying to help Hungary onto her economic legs, I have found her people to possess, in addition to their frailties, most of the qualities which peculiarly appeal to British mentality. A high sense of honour, perhaps a little on the lines of the public schoolboy's code, loquacious, devoted to sport, hot-tempered, affectionate, alarmingly frank, horribly unpunctual, wonderfully hospitable, religiously apathetic, courageous, with a keen sense of humour and a childlike vanity in all national achievement-in short, intensely human and possessing character: that is the Hungarian as I know him.

WILLIAM GOODE.

Art. 9.-THE 'NEW' POETRY, 1911-1925: A SURVEY. It is now some fifteen years since the first faint beginnings of what at its height was called, without much elegance but not without a degree of accuracy, 'the boom in poetry.' The wave which then raised its head has run up the shingle and seems to have retreated again, at least for the time. The present, therefore, seems to be a suitable moment for inquiring whether it has gone back into the ocean to return in full flood, or whether it was only one of those waves which some accident of wind or current selects for a delusive prominence out of a falling tide.

That the movement, whatever it was, should have been described as a 'boom' was not altogether the fault of the generation which produced it. Among the legacies which the Victorian age left to its successors there was one, in the sphere of literature, which has B been an unqualified hindrance ever since. In that period literary creation and literary criticism began to develop a self-consciousness which they have not yet lost and show no signs of losing.

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In previous ages the existence of great poets, no matter what interest or admiration they might arouse, was never the occasion of any twittering excitement; they were, so to speak, the sort of thing which it was natural to have about. It might, indeed, be held at d any given moment that there were none; and that was an evil, an accident to be regretted, but not a thing to make any one despair of the race. It was like childlessness in a family; and in the same way the appearance of a poet caused the warm but unastonished gladness which in healthy times is caused by the birth of a child.

The vast and sudden material prosperity of the Victorian age produced a different point of view. It seemed necessary that among its glories there should be a poet great enough to be worthy of it, and, for the first time, the interested public looked for that poet with a lingering anxiety lest he should not be there to be found. He was in fact found and, by great good fortune, he bore a certain resemblance, freely recognised by himself, to the chief poet of the Augustan age of

Rome. But already the idea was abroad that great poets were a kind of creatures that existed in earlier times, but were not to be looked for now. Disraeli, writing of Tennyson to Carlyle, clearly implied this view: to him it was not possible to think that his own time should provide the equal of-one supposes-Byron. And when Tennyson died there ensued a feverish search for his successor which was as injurious to both poetry and all standards of criticism as anything could be; and the successor was not forthcoming. Morris and Swinburne were still alive and had been virtually enthroned; but neither was young and there seemed to be no young man acceptable even as a candidate for greatness. Mr Kipling, who alone inherited Tennyson's popular favour, fine poet though at his best he is, was not quite fitted for the position. Then, after the brief, unsuccessful burst which we generally call 'the Movement of the 'Nineties,' poetry fell for nearly twenty years into a greater neglect and contempt than it has ever known in all the history of English literature.

It was not that there were not good poets to uphold the honour of the art. It could indeed be argued that there have been periods of greater barrenness. But with each of the poets of that time there was something that stood in the way of public recognition, and led the critics to champion their favourites a shade too eagerly and too consciously. There were Francis Thompson and Herbert Trench. But Trench, at any rate in his more easily assimilable poems, was getting a good gleaning from Arnold's fields, and Thompson, though there is more to be said of him, is not unfairly described as a splendid anachronism. Mr Bridges, the spiritual heir of Thomas Campion, went on performing his chambermusic to a very small if delighted and intelligent audience. Among the poets of the 'nineties there were two of importance-John Davidson and Mr Yeats. But Davidson mixed up good and bad so inextricably that to this day no critic has seriously attempted the task of disentangling them, and Mr Yeats, the one poet of the 'nineties who in English carried that world-wide inspiration to the point of greatness, so firmly proclaimed himself to be essentially Irish that every one believed him.

And the reading public during these years turned away from almost everything written in verse in a manner quite unprecedented. The public, to be sure, was changed, though the influences which produced the change and its characteristics are too many and too complex for analysis here. But it was larger and lazier, and, by way of the novel, it was more and more deliberately being led into pastures easier for it than the concentration of verse. It was certainly not the same public as had made the fortunes of Byron and Moore, had been by no means unkind to Wordsworth, and might have been as kind to Keats, if he had lived a few years longer, as it later was to Tennyson. But these considerations do not modify the fact that, during this time, the writer who felt verse to be his natural mode of expression, seemed to himself and to others to have drifted into a backwater, to have engaged in an occupation that had ever less and less to do with life. It is a relevant fact that during these years the poet had in almost all cases to bear the cost of publishing his work. It is a relevant fact that in organs of criticism the smallest space was given to consideration of contemporary verse and, even so, in a patronising and pitying tone. There existed in short an atmosphere of slighting inattention in which poetry could not flourish or even maintain a healthy, if humble, existence.

The reaction which has since taken place is generally considered to have some connexion with the war, and indeed the boom' may be considered to have begun in 1915 with the presentation of Rupert Brooke to the popular imagination as a romantic figure. For many persons, in some queer way, his life and death did seem to rehabilitate poetry, to give it once again some sort of standing as a serious, not a trivial, human activity. He became the type of a war-poet, and just the sort of critic who had spent the previous August in complaining that the Great War had produced no Great Poetry was now ready to declare that this was the sort of Poetry he meant. True war-poetry, poetry springing from the war in both substance and spirit, was to come later, and, when it came, was very different from Brooke's sonnets, which were the expression of an ardent civilian preparing himself to be a soldier. There is all the difference in

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the world, in temper as in material, between his 'Blow out, you bugles, over the rich dead,' and Wilfred Owen's :

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.'

The first is the abstract poetry of anticipation, the second is poetry of concrete experience. To this point we shall have to return later. In the meanwhile it is clear that during the first twelve months of the war there came into existence a vague but none the less powerful emotional craving which found more satisfaction in both the reading and the writing of verse than in any other form of literature. We did not in those days know what we were at, neither what war was nor the real nature of our reactions to it, and in that confused, distressed time the intensity of poetry afforded a relief and a tonic to strained spirits. There grew and spread widely an atmosphere in which poetry could draw upon life.

But, like many other things which have had a similar fate, the poetic revival began before the war and was already in existence to be fostered by war conditions. Perhaps there is no recent period of which our minds retain a less distinct recollection, as to details at any rate, than the three years preceding August 1914. We certainly have almost forgotten now that in 1913 moralists were complaining of the modern mania for dancing, of the unhealthy frequentation of night clubs, of the freedom of manners prevalent among the younger generation, and of the immodesty of women's dress. In the same way we have almost forgotten that critics were speaking of a revival in poetry some years before the war, and that by this they meant both that better poetry was being written and that the intelligent public was taking a more living interest in it. And for both these contentions they could cite adequate proofs. There was a movement and a stirring, people began to argue, and even to quarrel, about poetry as though it were really of some importance, and—what is always a significant sign-the charlatan began to lift an alert and interested head.