The judicious will see at once what a faculty was here to be cultivated. And this, again, in the middle of a sympathetic reference to Kingsley:

'K. screams often when he ought to speak. All his books scream. If he tells you it is five o'clock, it seems as if it were the last hour of the world.

And this of Charlotte Brontë:

'The vulgarity is not in Charlotte herself, but in the fact that she is drawing characters in a society which, as she had no experience of it, she is forced to invent out of her prejudices. . . .'

And, finally, of Mr Shaw's Man and Superman':

'Ann's character is the best thing in it, and is admirably done. I know those soft cats, who purr you out of existence.'

It is useless to argue that these things are no more than the captivating but slight dicta of a man of affairs who could at his leisure turn a happy phrase. Whatever they may be in substance, in their evidence of a very rare kind of faculty they are anything but slight. They spring from a source that, had it been allowed to run freely, could not but have risen to a stream of no common depth and force. We cannot read such things as these without reflecting, a little jealously, that Brooke devoted to the improvement of a congregation what was meant to enlighten mankind. When we turn from these strangely personal intuitive flashes to his observations made in response to the daily pressure of society and his followers our regret is emphasised. Already when he is twenty-five he writes as mentor to a sister, and, instructing her about the art of painting, says, 'It is a grand office, that of the artist, to be the orator of Nature, the exponent in form of the loveliness of colour '-than which anything shallower and more inept could not well be conceived.

This too ready surrender of himself to the transcendentalism of service, to the idea, slightly enervating to the imagination, of a continual outpouring of pervasive love, led him, moreover, at times into the most sentimental indulgence of the pathetic fallacy; for example;

"The little river ran swiftly among its boulders, and the thin grove of trees hung over it, dropping now and then a leaf loosened by the wind into it, just like a message of kindness'; and, 'The wind is the free Bohemian of the Universe, who goes over all the earth, and from north and south, east and west, from tropic to pole and from pole to tropic, it brings to the trees all the news of all the continents and isles of ocean, and of all the life of men and beasts.'

Or it could bring him to an intellectual confusion that is hardly credible in a mind capable of such insight as is shown in the passages that have been quoted:

'I love the talk of a stream more than any poetry, and the mists on a mountain shoulder more than any picture, and the sound of the wind in the forest more than a sonata of Beethoven, and the building of a mountain like Snowdon more than any cathedral in the world.'

We can hardly believe our eyes as we read, so far does the drawing of such comparisons fall short of the very alphabet of æsthetic perception. Brooke himself, it goes without saying, when the genius in him was in authority, was as alive as any one to the defective imagination implied in this manner of thinking. He could then play with such ideas graciously enough, but that was a very different thing from being mastered by them as he was at those other times. I like to sleep with the sound of the ocean in my ears, and to think that the waters whose gentle noise I listen to have come across 3000 miles to visit me with their affection. Their affection is given to them by me, but why not?' And let us add one other word in illustration of the profound and simple understanding that he had when his genius and not the hungry world controlled him: 'Tennyson says nothing to you. He speaks to me, not as a prophet, or a consoler, or a thinker. He speaks to me because he was a poet.'

It is for the recurrent glimpses that it gives us of the quality that lay behind so right an utterance as that and so vivid a conception as the one of old John Pounds in his shop that Mr Jacks' book is chiefly suggestive and inspiriting. But it has a further value. That the quality was never brought to full fruition is a fact which we may lament, but its conflict with the forthright and vigorous

instinct for direct ministration by which it was subdued is strikingly implicit in Mr Jacks' presentation, and it has its own special significance.

One of the results of this condition that so largely governed Brooke's nature is that his old age impresses the observer, with the whole record before him, as the period of his life when he most deeply realised himself. We do not see it as a period of quietness and retrospection closing a long and crowded career, but rather as one of escape from the ties of circumstance and the more tyrannous side of himself into the full and delighted possession of the richer and rarer strain of his personality. He gave up Bedford Chapel when he was sixty-two, a few months after the publication of his 'Tennyson.' He lived twenty-two years longer, and during that time wrote and published a book on Browning, two on Shakespeare's plays, and two of miscellaneous essays on poetry. In these he never quite disentangled himself from the duality of disposition that it has been the chief purpose of this study to analyse; but his life, from the time that he cut himself clear from the formal obligations of his ministry, attained a singular lucidity and completeness. Those chapters of Mr Jacks' book that deal with this period present a figure of remarkable spiritual and intellectual beauty. The diaries and letters of these later years are pervaded by a sense of delighted liberation, none the less profound because Brooke himself probably was not externally aware of it. In passing out of the sphere in which he had laboured so nobly to realise his ideal of service, he found for the first time the condition in which his highest and subtlest instinct, the instinct for mere nobility of being, could come to perfect flowering. Mr Jacks calls the period a renewal of youth; but there is, truly, nothing in Brooke's youth or middle life comparable with the serene greatness of his old age. When the last analysis is made, that old age is, perhaps, the clearest symbol of his supreme achievement, his most durable and excellent claim to remembrance and celebration.

'I used to see a great deal of the world, a host of folk, but I got tired, and other things that I went through isolated me, and now I find the social roads very dusty and wearying. I always desire the wild moors, and solitude is my meat and

drink. There is a pompous, high-pitched sentence for you. Only, I am never morose, and life amuses me.'

'It is well-fitted to impel and kindle youth.' So wrote Brooke of Emerson's Essays; and the remark was made in admiring homage. No commendation can be more fitly made of Brooke's own critical work. It is praise that might easily be misunderstood in view of the kind of thing that is not uncommonly supposed to be suitable for this purpose, but, rightly considered, it implies no easy distinction. The young mind, in its first delighted and uncertain consciousness of the life of poetry, could have no better fortune than to come under the influence

of Brooke's essays. It would suffer there nothing of the indignity that is nearly always done by age to youth in the name of instruction; it would find an unblemished eagerness to match its own, it would come continually upon profound yet simple generalisations to help it in the exercise of its judgment, and it would profit incalculably by having before it a rare example of humility. This last quality lies very sweetly at the roots of all Brooke's critical thought. It is so beautiful a poem,' he writes of 'Maud,'

'that the small regrets of criticism are as nothing in comparison with the large delights its poetry gives. Moreover, the criticisms may be all wrong. When we approach a great poet's work, our proper position is humility.' And, again, 'It is not by saying that one poet is better than another that we shall win a good delight for ourselves. It is by loving each of them for his proper work, and by our gratitude to them all.'

It is not necessary to attempt any detailed survey of what is a very considerable body of work, work that has, within its easily definable limitations, a durable distinction. Throughout the essays are scattered passages that could have been achieved by none but a critical mind of a very high order, a mind half directed by genius, as we have seen. Here are two examples taken indifferently from among scores. He asks what kind of poems will be written (by a poet whose instincts are sound in the matter) at a time of national crisis.

"They will not be directly written on the special national

excitements. The poet is kindled by these excitements, but he does not write on them. The stirring in his heart which he receives from the nation he applies to his own subjects, those which are personal to him.'

And this is what he says of Meredith

'It is easy to be obscure, but there is a certain difficulty in being as obscure as Meredith was; and he liked that difficulty, and kept it with him, as a king keeps a jester.'

His style, too, often touches a most felicitous precision. 'Their manner,' he says of Milton's prose works, 'is always victorious; an audacity and a defiant life fill their controversy.' The limitations that keep his critical work as a whole from the first rank which, by the evidence of its finest moments, it might have taken, are imposed by that same defect of concentrative power that has already been examined. Just as in life he responded, too readily for serene spiritual self-realisation, to the multifarious claims of the world, so he was often so eager to explore every mood in the poet he was studying and to pour out his sympathy upon every turn in his poet's deliberation, that he left the hard way of close and exact analysis of the particular in relation to general principles and strayed into the diffuseness of unprofitable paraphrase. Both in his character and in his writing he suffered, it would seem, more than any man of his measure whose life has been recorded, from the defects of his qualities. But the qualities were of the very finest texture, and, had they been as little disturbed by conflicting elements as by every chance of nature they ought to have been, he would not only have been the memorable and distinguished figure that he is, he would have been one of the greatest men of his age.

JOHN DRINKWATER.