would be wrong to disguise the fact that her militant policy has of late been pressing very hard upon her finances and making taxation heavy almost to the back-breaking point; but enough indications have been given of late to warrant the belief that with the wiser Nipponese statesmen alive to the gravity of the situation, the strong opinions on the subject originating with the populace and voiced by its representatives in the Diet, recklessness in this respect will be checked in the near future.

Such, in brief, is the tale of Dai Nippon's march forward since the day when Commodore Perry lifted the veil from off her face. Though the work of reform is not quite complete, and the political and social economists are cognizant of the defects and shortcomings in this progression, yet even the most caustic critics are forced to acknowledge that the accomplishment registered by the Japanese in the four and a half decades of the Meiji era, extending from October 13, 1868, to July 30, 1912, when His Imperial Majesty Mutsuhito died, and the present era of Taisho (Good resolutions or Righteousness) began under the new Emperor, Yoshihito, forms a brilliant record, unparalleled for its rapidity and character by that of any other nation in the annals of the world.

When compared with Western countries, Nippon can give a good account of herself. In fifty years she has sucThe London Quarterly Review.

ceeded in actually outstripping all but four or five of the European nations in many respects, and is not far behind the most progressive amongst them.

Therefore the title of the Japanese to treatment at least equal to that accorded to the less-developed peoples of modern Europe can be denied only because of race prejudice and color consciousness. Any course which would allot a lower position to Nippon in the comity of nations, besides being unethical, would be unwise, for that would imply that the West has not moved with the march of Asian progress, and is not willing to put aside its vain and empty boast that the white man is destined for ever to dominate his colored confrères. Such provincialism is calculated to drive the yellow, brown, and black peoples, who far outnumber the Caucasians, and who, in the course of a few years, are bound to master the use of Western arms and armaments as the Japanese have done, to make common cause, the result of which will be the establishment of racial equality. Though at present the voice of some bellicose, blustering Occidentals who would set the whole pack of Western war dogs on little Japan, irrespective of the consequences, have the ear of the public, yet the Caucasian world, it is to be hoped, will see the folly of listening to the jingoes, and will decide the issue in favor of Nippon, granting to her a position of equality in the family of nations.

Saint Nihal Singh.

It is unnecessary to explain to a company of women of letters the difference between the facts of Prose and the facts of Poetry. And this is for

An address delivered to the Women Writers' Dinner, June 6th, 1913.

tunate, because it is a difference so fundamental and important that it does not admit of explanation. There is something supersensual in the very essence of real poetry. Even when it aims at being wholly materialistic and

sensual, it yet bears witness to the dissatisfaction of Man with the purely animal life, his ineradicable desire to put his sensations outside himself and see them as wonderful fine things, much finer than they really are, much more important than they really are. There is no reason why Poetry should exist: it simply does exist. One cannot wonder that Reason feels hurt at such independence of its sovereign rule, and from time to time says that Poetry must go. In the eighteenth century it actually succeeded in bottling Poetry; but we know the explosion that followed. For the last thirty or forty years it had been a common saying that Poetry could not survive the modern high development of the rational and scientific side of our intelligence, because its roots are in the primitive, instinctive part of Man. And it is true that it does spring out of that profound, mysterious instinctive nature of Man on the surface of which his rational intelligence floats, like those little lamps which float upon the Ganges, illuminating its course a little way, telling of its breadth a very little of its depth nothing. Just because the roots of Poetry lie so deep, so much deeper than Reason, some of us have never believed that it could be killed. And now do we not see it springing up all around us in vigorous young shoots? Even the Futurists want Poetry. A glance at the Futurists makes one feel how ideas have progressed in the last century and a half. Jean Jacques Rousseau was in a very real sense the Futurist of the mid-eighteenth century. He was content to take for his motto, his battlecry, "Back to the savage!" The motto, the battle-cry of the modern Futurist, is a far bolder one. It is: "Forward to the gorilla!" I own I was terrified when I first heard the fine stentorian voice of M. Marinetti, the Futurist poet and leader, proclaiming that,

"The God of Pity and Love is dead, and will be buried to-morrow, together with the entire collection of human charities and decencies." The Future seemed to rise up before me dans mon petit coin like the Fat Boy before the Maiden Aunt in the arbor. Yet before allowing my flesh to creep, I thought I would take the opinion of the real Futurists, those who are in fact the Future the really young men. So I turned to young Oxford-to young Balliol, to be particular-and asked, "What about the Futurists and the Future?" I half expected to hear that the reading colleges were full of the boomings of promising youths practising to be gorillas. Young Balliol smiled and replied: "The Futurists have no Future. They are nothing but the last foam on the wave of Nietzschism." So now I can enjoy in peace thimblefuls of Marinetti's poems, just as I have long enjoyed thimblefuls of his countryman, d'Annunzio's: whom M. Marinetti apparently puts on the bonfire, but whose literary qualities and defects he pretty exactly shares. But to speak of a Futurist Poet when Women Poets should be my theme, is manifestly a digression; because, so far as I have ascertained, there are no women Futurists. A surprising circumstance, seeing that one of the most prominent of Futurist mottoes is, "Méprisez la femme": a sentiment which one would suppose must appeal to quite a number of ladies whose letters appear in the daily Press.

Women are playing, and will play, their part in the revival of poetry which we all rejoice to see going on around us. But to the young I will leave for the moment the appreciation of their contemporaries, and will even pass by some of my own contemporaries whose singing has been sweet in my ears, for the sake of the limitation, the canalization of my rather vague and vast subject.

I am going more especially to speak of women poets as artists in Form. It is one of those commonplaces which people repeat without once fixing their eye on the facts, that women are deficient in literary form. Yet the lyric form which remains unapproached and unapproachable in its gorgeous harmonies, in its winged rush, is the lyric form of a woman: Sappho's. No one, not even Swinburne, has ever been able to reproduce her verse. All antiquity hailed her as the greatest of the Greek lyrists, and in modern times it has been said of her: "Never before these songs were sung, and never since, did the human soul in the grip of a fiery passion utter a cry like hers; and from the executive point of view, in directness, in lucidity, in that high imperious verbal economy which only Nature can teach the artist, she has no equal and none worthy to take the place of second."

We know almost nothing about Sappho: the usual stories about her, mostly spiteful, being the inventions of later literary persons. We do know, however, that she did not stand alone. She belonged to a school of women poets of whom others were celebrated. We know, too, that the social conditions in Lesbos, the centre of Folian culture, were very exceptionally favorable to women. They encouraged the existence of societies of women poets and musicians, who specially studied metrical form and diction. And although this Lesbian world flourished between two and three thousand years ago, we can never speak of women poets without speaking of Sappho, because the once existence of that consummate genius, and under those special conditions, points to the fact that, after all, conditions may have a good deal to do with the subsequent dearth of women poets. On the other hand, when one observes the large proportion of men LIVING AGE VOL. EX. 3166

of creative genius who have had poor health, one may reasonably assume that the brain-storm we call Inspiration is a very real strain on a man's nervous system; and therefore that, other things being equal, you would less frequently find a woman's nervous system (which has always its own special strain to support) able to support it.

But other things never have been equal. Our divine poets have never been required to carry on an arduous practical profession, to be manufacturers or general practitioners, and poets only with the fag-ends of their brains and in their odd moments. I say this in no forgetfulness of the official side of Goethe or the theatrical side of Shakespeare. Chaucer used to be quoted as a hard-working, conscientious Government official. But it has transpired that Chaucer was sacked for incompetence if nothing worse. The more intimately we know the social life of the past, the more we realize the tremendous arduousness of the profession of being a woman, up to a quite recent date. The production of children, from one dozen to two, was but a corner of her activities. Look at the drawings of Hans Holbein; the most veracious work of the most veracious portrait-painter that ever existed. They show us the faces of the young wives of men of rank and wealth; charming, gay, or serious school-girl faces, not unlike those of our twentieth-century daughters. Then they show us the faces of the middle-aged wives; and they are like those of keen, perhaps of hard, even of coarse men of business. Why? Because in those days every woman had to be, according to her circumstances, a hand, a forewoman, or a manageress-or all three at once-in a going, an always going business concern. Every private house was a manufactory and a surgery as well.

Those were good days enough for the vigorous, capable, practical women in whom our race abounds. But the best thing the women poets could do was to die young; and I suspect they did it. Yet probably a good many women before Lady Anne Lindsay, the writer of Auld Robin Gray, and Miss Jane Elliot, who wrote The Flowers of the Forest, had contributed to our store of Folk Literature.

Those of us who have read The Bard of the Dimbowitza know that in that remote district of Roumania there is what may be called a School of Women Folk Poets; for the women improvise as they spin together, passing the spindle and the song from one to another. It is by no means claimed that all the poems in the two volumes of The Bard of the Dimbowitza are by women, but we feel the feminine point of view pervading them, whereas in other Folk Literature it is in subordination. The women of the Dimbowitza are accustomed, terribly accustomed, to the sight of blood. They are patriotic; they sing to their sons in the cradle that they must grow up to shed their blood for the country. But nowhere in these songs sounds the exhilarating rhythm, the proud clash of arms that makes itself felt even in so sad a soldier-song as the German"Dawn o' day, dawn o' day, Unto death thou light'st the way." They are sad, not only with the sadness of a violently oppressed people, but with the sadness of women whose part is to stand by the dying and the dead, or to be themselves the victims of jealous and bloodthirsty passions. They sing of things the men singers pass by: the intimate sorrows of the unloved woman, of the dead who know themselves forgotten, of the bereaved mother or childless wife. This sadness makes the Roumanian poems somewhat monotonous, but monotony in Art is often only another name for

character. We do not find fault with the monotony of our innumerable songs which deal with conventionalized attitudes of love, with fighting, hunting, and drinking, simply because we are so accustomed to them. To most people there is no monotony in habit.

But when one speaks of The Bard of the Dimbowitza as Folk Literature, it must be remembered that it is impossible to know how much of it really is so, and how much belongs to the Countess Helène Vacaresco, who is steeped in the life and songs of the people. As, however, it is of the English form in which these poems appeared that I would more especially speak, that secret is one I need not attempt to unveil. The volume appeared in 1892, and was signed by Helène Vacaresco, Carmen Sylva, and Alma Strettell. The form is for the most part irregular blank verse, very original and beautiful in its cadences. The great public of the moment was not interested in poetry, and took little note of it, but it was much read and admired by literary people, especially those who made verses, and had a perceptible influence on the movement towards unrhymed vers libres which has been going on for a quarter of a century or more; although it might be said that this is the form towards which the English language has always inclined, since magnificent examples of it are constantly before us in the Bible and Prayer-book. The metres of The Bard of the Dimbowitza can no more be reduced to a system than those of the English Psalms, but they have a perfect harmony of their own which makes rhyme, when they drop into it, appear almost a vulgarity. Tennyson was proud of having in his beautiful poem, "Tears, Idle Tears," written, as he said, a song in which no one noticed the absence of rhyme. But there are songs in this book which from that point of view are

more perfect achievements. Such is the prelude-repeated at the end-of

this little poem:

"Look not upon the sky at eventide, For that makes sorrowful the heart of

man.

Look rather here within my heart, and joyful

Shall thine then always be."

"To yonder grave there ofttimes came a woman,

And said to it: 'Hast thou forgiven me?'

'Avaunt! the grave made answer. Then weeping she would go her way, but going

She ever plucked a flower from the sward.

Yet still the grave would grant her no forgiveness.

Then said the woman: "Take at least my tears!'

'Avaunt! the grave made answer. But as she weeping turned away and went.

Behold, the gravestone would uplift

itself,

And the dead man gaze forth, Sending a long look after her, that

woman,

Who weeping went her way." "Look not upon the sky at eventide," &c.

I select this poem rather for its brevity than for any special beauty it possesses as compared to the rest of the Dimbowitza poems. The theoretic writings of Robert Bridges,' to say nothing of his beautiful poems, have done very much to set people thinking on the real laws and liberties of English verse. But Christina Rossetti knew all that either by independent study or by intuition. While every literary critic in England was counting syllables or scanning feet, she was The Fortnightly Review.

I Now Poet-Laureate.

discovering for herself exquisite forms and cadences outside the critic's laws but within the poet's liberties. And Ruskin said that Christina's poetry was a disgrace to her distinguished brothers, and she ought to be prevented from writing. But how to prevent Christina from writing? If every other place were denied her, she would write on the corner of the washingstand. The thing was impossible. So Christina continued to write; and, after all, the family was not disgraced. It gave us the only great religious poet we had had since the seventeenth century. For Keble I have never been able to regard as anything but a fluent clerical verse-writer who "attuned his lyre" to the smooth melodies of his day and supplied a felt want-no longer, it would seem, felt. Christina Rossetti came to fill a curious gap in the women poets' ranks; and she filled it with a rush. For Elizabeth Barrett Browning could not be called a specifically religious poet, although she wrote some religious poems. Of her as a versifier it is worthy of remark that she was a daring innovator and experimenter in several respects, but particularly in rhyme-forms. I have heard that Swinburne as a boy admired and studied her poems, especially on that account. But Mrs. Meynell stands much nearer to Christina Rossetti than Mrs. Browning, both in her spirit and her form. And here we have again a poet who admirably illustrates my contention, that far from being weak in form, women poets have excelled in it both by their originality and by the accomplished beauty of their workmanship.

Margaret L. Woods.