Art. 4.-THE NEW POETRY.

1. Georgian Poetry 1911-12. The Poetry Bookshop, 1912. 2. Georgian Poetry 1913-15. The Poetry Bookshop, 1915. 3. The Catholic Anthology 1914-15. Elkin Mathews, 1915.

THE difficulty which has always beset criticism in its attempts to arrive at a satisfactory definition of the word Poetry is by no means confined to the elusive nature of the art itself. For not only is the art of Poetry so sensitive and subtle as to escape again and again from the process of analysis, but the very standards by which it is controlled are continually changing, and the artist's own conception of his business is in a state of perpetual transition. Religion, philosophy, imagination, fancy, rebellion, and reaction-these, and many other elements in human thought, have left their impress upon the poetic tradition; and the function of criticism, as each new generation breaks with some established canon, has been more and more to hold to what is best in tradition, to test new movements in the light of that best, and yet to keep an open mind towards innovations, and to welcome any change, however revolutionary, that is calculated to enlarge the field of poetic vision and activity. This last function is the hardest of all the tasks that criticism is called upon to undertake; but the more intelligently the critic embraces it, the better will he fulfil his responsibilities. The history of literature has proved with weary iteration that the worst and most retarding fault that criticism can commit is the tendency to doubt every new movement, and to challenge and defy methods whose novelty may indeed be disconcerting, and yet may contain the germ of artistic emancipation and enlightenment.

It behoves the critic, therefore, to walk warily among new movements, without losing touch with the permanent laws of his craft; and, to guide him amid all minor differences of period and taste, there will be found certain main conceptions of the poetic art, which have stood fast in the face of change and revolution. Pre-eminent among these, the very charter of Poetry itself, is the conception that poetry consists in the imputation of universality to the individual idea and impulse; and

conversely in the interpretation of the individual impulse in the light of universal truth. The personal quality of the emotion or impulse expressed has been always regarded as essential, because it is only through personality that the artist can make his appeal. But the individual personality acquires acceptance precisely as it relates itself to the universal heart of the world. When we read a poem, or a passage in a poem, and exclaim instinctively: 'That is true. I never thought it before, but now it is said, I recognise it as true, and as so well said that it is never likely to be said better': when, in short, we find ourselves face to face with an eternal idea expressed in flawless language, we acknowledge instinctively that we are in the presence of poetry of the essential, classic order, against which time and the ebbing tide of taste are powerless. But there must be this complete fusion of thought with expression. The qualities of form, beauty, and music, which tradition has accepted as inseparable from poetry, remain inseparable from it to-day. Without the universal, living idea, embodying itself in personal experience, you may have agreeable, charming verse, but you cannot have poetry. And, with equal emphasis, unless the idea is clothed in language that fits it, embodies it, and gives it poetic currency, you may have rhetoric and eloquence, but you will not and cannot have poetry. For poetry so indissolubly blends the universal and the personal that idea, image, expression, and symbol are indistinguishable from one another in the perfected harmony of their union.

These considerations (trite enough, perhaps, in themselves) would appear to be worth recalling at the present time, since there is evidently some danger of their being forgotten in the indefatigable search for novelty and sensation which, after vexing the field of the English novel with varying fortunes, has recently attacked the poet's art as well. We have been passing through a period of intellectual transition and readjustment. The stirring and revolutionary movements which convulsed the Victorian era have exhausted themselves; the world of ideas has grown stagnant; and the art of poetry has made but little recognisable advance for a period of something like twenty years. And now we are suddenly confronted by a new movement, on whose behalf the claim is made that

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'English poetry is once again putting on a new strength and beauty,' so that we are at the beginning of another Georgian period which may take rank in due time with the several great poetic ages of the past.' These are proud words; and one of the most conspicuous revolutionists of the new school has elsewhere defined the movement with which he is identified in no uncertain terms. Our aim,' he says, 'is natural speech, the language as spoken. We desire the words of poetry to follow the natural order. We would write nothing that we might not say actually in life-under emotion.' It is, perhaps, not surprising to learn, as we do in the same context, that the herald of this new standard of poetry has degrees of antipathy and even contempt for Milton and Victorianism and the softness of the nineties'; * and, though it is improbable that his contempt for what he describes as the Miltonian quagmire' would be endorsed by many of the other champions of Georgian Poetry, it is at least certain that the atmosphere of all the three volumes cited at the head of this article is an atmosphere of empirical rebellion. Since, moreover, this atmosphere of rebellion is introduced with a confidence quite gloriously cocksure, it may not be without value to consider the claims of these young innovators, and to estimate the effect which their influence seems likely to exercise upon English poetry in the immediate future. It is evident that such influence is by no means negligible, for the first anthology of Georgian Poetry is already in a twelfth impression, and many of the names that decorate it are among the most enthusiastically acclaimed of the younger generation. But, before we consider their performance in detail, a few reflections upon the art which they practise may help us to appreciate the precise standard of poetry to which their workmanship and spiritual outlook conform.

Poetry, it will be generally conceded, even by the most enterprising claimant for plain speaking in common speech, must work in one or other, or in all combined, of three different media-ideas, emotions, and moods. When poetry was defined as 'a criticism of life,' the framer

*The Poems of Lionel Johnson.' With an Introduction by Ezra Pound. Elkin Mathews.

of the definition had in mind chiefly the poetry of ideas; when it is described as 'emotion remembered in tranquillity,' the description is directed chiefly to emotional poetry; and when we are told, as we often are nowadays, that the sincere reproduction of a moment's spiritual experience is the proper concern of the poetic art, this third and final definition applies almost exclusively to the poetry which seeks to reproduce the writer's passing mood without any reference to its truth or value. The highest order of poetry will be found, under analysis, to combine elements from each of these three classes; for the emotion, without which poetry is barren, contains in itself an indirect reference to the mood in which it is evoked, while the poet proceeds from the registration of the emotion to test it by the standard of the universal idea. But it must never be forgotten that the idea is the germ of the poem; that the truth and universality of the idea is the test of the poem's quality; and that, as poetry recedes from the region of ideas into that of emotions, and sinks still further from emotions into moods, it retires more and more from that high vantage ground from whose summit the classic poetry of the ages overlooks the manifold activity of the world. From the idea to the emotion, and from the emotion to the mood, is a downward path, separating poetry from its high, universal significance, and bringing it step by step nearer to a condition of anarchy, in which every individual's claim is paramount, where art can represent nothing permanent, since nothing permanent or stable exists within its survey to be represented.

Now a careful examination of these two volumes of Georgian poetry seems to suggest that during the last ten years or so English poetry has been approaching a condition of poetic liberty and license which threatens, not only to submerge old standards altogether, but, if persevered in to its logical limits, to hand over the sensitive art of verse to a general process of literary democratisation. For some time before this movement took shape, the powers of reaction had been at work upon English poetry. The Pre-Raphaelite movement, for example, was in itself a reaction. It found the soulful earnestness of the Victorians quietly sinking into a sort of dogmatic philosophy. Science, religion,

doubt, and faith had apparently taken the Muses' Hill by storm; and a way of escape was sought into the dreams of the past, by reviving ideals and standards of a simpler and a more artistically-minded world. The step from such a mood to one of general discontent with all surviving traditions was but a short one; and the next step after that is inevitably the complete abandonment of tradition and standard alike. We write nothing that we might not speak,' proclaims the new rebellion in effect: 'we draw the thing as we see it for the God of things as they are. Every aspect of life shall be the subject of our art, and what we see we will describe in the language which we use every day. The result shall be the New Poetry, the vital expression of a new race.'

To such a manifesto, even before its artistic achievements come to be examined, there is one preliminary reply. It is indeed true that the artificer may put whatever he sees into his melting-pot, but it by no means follows that he will get a work of art out of his mould. It may be arguable that the poet should shovel the language of the mining-camp into his lyric, but it is more than doubtful whether poetry will emerge. Force may emerge, vigour may emerge, an impressive and vital kind of rhetoric may take form from the composition; but poetry is something more than these. Poetry must possess beauty; beauty is the essence of its being; and it has never been the general experience that the language of the common crowd possesses either beauty or authority. When poetry proposes to confine itself to the commercial counters of speech, the first thing we should expect would be a failure in dignity and charm. When it sets itself to break loose from the traditions of structure and harmony, the next inevitable consequence would be the wastage of form and melody. And, emphatically enough, the very first impression with which the reader of these volumes of Georgian poetry is assailed is an impression of a fitful lack of dignity, and a recurrent tendency to neglect the claims of form and structure, which continually distract the reader's attention from his author's meaning, by thrusting into the foreground a sense of the unrestrained and even violent fashion in which that meaning is striving to get itself expressed. That the form of expression has crude