the coveted Order of Merit as well as the Albert Medal. The initials, clustering thick after his name in Burke, announce that he was a member of the Privy Council, a Grand Cross of the Bath, a Grand Cross of St. Michael and St. George, a Knight Commander of the Star of India, a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire, a Doctor of Civil Laws of Oxford and of Laws from Cambridge, and several other things. At the bottom of the "Who's Who" paragraph, one learns that he belonged to the five most exclusive clubs in London: The Turf, the Travellers, the Marlborough, the St. James, and Brooks.

During the past few years Earl Cromer appeared often in the Upper House, spoke brilliantly on various proposed pieces of legislation, and took some part in politics and society, but his keen enjoyment lay in the seclusion of his library. Here it was that he composed four books since 1909, the most important being of course the monumental Modern Egypt. Here it was that one loved to meet him and listen, when he was in humor to talk, to conversation delightful in matter, rich in quotation and historical references, pointed by shrewdest criticism of men and things. As this great proconsul sat there, conscious surely of a life's work well accomplished, and, as the chimes of Time's mighty cathedral sounded out in clear and mellow cadences the story of seventyfive great years, the sunlight, laying around that white head, seemed to rest there in a halo of benediction,—a blessing on one who, in his empire building, had done so much to advance the brotherhood of man.

Philadelphia, Pa.

H. MERIAN ALLEN.

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE AND THE TRADITION

OF BEAUTY

I

The struggle between science and art is perennial, and the world is a strange goddess. To him who fights her and beats back her forces, who masters her waterfalls and defies her iron isthmuses, she gives the meed of gold and the laurel of acclaim. Upon him, however, who loves her, who thrills at the laughter of her streams and the songs of her birds, who leaves all to worship nature in her various manifestations, she is likely to turn a questioning gaze. Not until the poet has yearned and suffered, and brought back some accent of its own sadness and mystery, has the world consented to approve him.

So it has been in the case of Richard Le Gallienne. Few poets have been so ardent in the worship of beauty, and few so severely reproved for lingering in Arcadia. But not until we know the man's first love are we able to understand his message for inspiration. All around him beckoned the beautiful, and to all he gave the deepest appreciation. Few modern poets have lived so aloof from the forces of industrialism. Says his own "Poet in the City": "What a masterful alien life it all seemed to me! No single personality could hope to stand alone amid all that stress of ponderous, bullying forces"; and "he has never written ten lines," read one early criticism, "and we can scarcely expect him now to begin to write concerning the pleasure of sweating toil, either in athleticism, adventure, or actual work." Verily it has remained for an age of pure Philistinism to postulate the theory that poetry must be inspired by athleticism and brawn.

It was to be expected, then, that when this poet appeared he should be criticized. It was natural, too, that he should be the more liable because of his own difficulty in making his music clear. He made mistakes at first; his content was sometimes thin, his lavish imagery not always clear, and his taste not always impeccable. There was too great facility, and along with this an excessive sentimentalism. Of all of this he was fully re

minded again and again. But an artist deserves to be judged not so much by the half-dozen pieces in which there are flaws as by the one jewel of perfect workmanship. Keats has his place not because of the mistakes in Endymion, but because of the artistry of The Eve of St. Agnes; and it is not by reason of Love Platonic, but on the basis of To a Bird at Dawn, that our poet is, in the opinion of so many, the foremost master of the lyric writing in English to-day. Has the artist ever, in any of his work, shown that he can give his vision irreproachable form? That is the fair test, and that is the test with which we shall primarily be concerned in the following pages.

II

From Greece the lute; from Rome the trumpet and victorious legions. All through the Middle Ages gleam flashes of the unequal combat, and little place seemed there for a song when the business of life was battle. Charlemagne extended his boundaries, William of Normandy came to England, and the tradition of Roman law permeated the systems of Western Europe. The Church, reared on similar foundations of strength, gradually subdued unto itself all the forces of art and beauty, as well as those of power; and its awful magnificence rises like an impregnable tower from the dimness of medievalism. From time to time, however, in the intervals of the acts, could be heard the love-chant of Abelard or the wail of Villon, a protest against an age that subdued all natural yearning and found the meed of living only in the cloister and the scourge.

With the Renaissance, however, the heart bloomed again. The day of the epic was over, that of the lyric had begun; and the great high-priest of freedom was no troubadour or criminal lover, but a great spiritual teacher, Dante. Chaucer, similarly capable of being a great exponent of beauty, but bound by a tradition of conservatism, became finely ironical when he found himself loving seriously, renounced his offerings to nature, and laughed himself into the second rank of poets. In Spenser for the first time England saw a poet of the highest gifts who was willing to rest his reputation on the resources of hedonistic culture. Others took courage, and Marlowe and Greene and others

that loved not wisely but too well, became the sacrifice demanded of Art for her new recognition. The sonnet flourished, and the age of Elizabethan literature was great not by virtue but in spite of the forces of Puritanism. Milton, overwhelmed in the furious conflict, forsook the dreams of the Round Table for those of the Book of the Revelation, and collapsed wholly when he attempted to clothe with the dress of hedonism a poem on the Temptation of Christ. Even his masterpiece had been adorned with all the resources of the Renaissance, and because of his great gifts as a poet he was able to bridge the terrible chasm when assisted by the imagery of St. John; but one of the greatest of English poets was essentially insincere, and this is one reason why he invariably falls below Shakespeare. He was at heart a rebel, but he was not quite willing to assume the risk that Spenser dared, and not unnaturally even his masterpiece declined in power after he had in the first two books bestowed upon it the richest fruits of his culture. All his prose showed him in revolt against established institutions, and in Comus before Paradise Lost, as in Paradise Regained after that great work, he really showed his true tendencies. He revelled in purple patches, but in the face of Barebones and Bradshaw he simply did not have the courage of his convictions, and it is one of the ironies of literature that one of the most pagan of poets should have been the one to erect the supreme monument to Puritanism.* Other men of his age, less commanding in scope, paid more sincere tribute to beauty. With a wistfulness that has endeared him to all later lovers of the beautiful, Herrick sang To the Daffodils or To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time; and

*Since the passage above was written I have been interested to observe in the Atlantic for October the article "Poetry Insurgent and Resurgent," by Prof. O. W. Firkins, in which Milton is approached from a slightly different point of view. Professor Firkins makes an attack, and our premises, even if not our conclusions, have much in common. "My thesis," he says, "is that, during the last two centuries, English poetry has accepted a principle which is Spanish or Italian rather than English the principle of uninterrupted beauty and distinction. . . . The evil began, I think, with Milton. That studious and meditative mind, in the bright seclusion of its youthful scholarship and the dark seclusion of its uncherished age, found leisure to perfect and mature its English until every word took on the potency and pregnancy that words possess in an oath or a spell.”—B. B.

4

no surer defence for the literature of beauty can be found than in the fact that in the corrupt years of the Restoration, in spite of Suckling and Lovelace, genuine song declined. The whole reign of Queen Anne produced not one noteworthy lyric. Beauty might flourish even in the face of honest opposition, such as that of Puritanism; but it could find no inspiration in the forces of insincerity, artificiality, and decay. Appalled by all the forces of philosophy and dialectic, of moralizing and sermonizing, it did not again come into its own before the era of Burns. Then again the rose bloomed in all the gorgeousness of De Quincey and Keats. Afterwards came Morris and Rossetti, Swinburne and Pater; and not inaptly have the brilliancy and sparkle of recent comedy been found to have some inspiration in the same tradition.

The very name of Pater, however, raises burning questions. To him Richard Le Gallienne's loyalty has ever been unquestioned. Now Pater is of course most close to De Quincey and Keats and Poe; and De Quincey has been remarked by Mr. Chesterton as "the first and foremost of the decadents." Keats, by both friends and foes, is looked upon as representative of paganism at its best, and is famous for his identification of truth and beauty. One of the most direct challengers of this whole school within recent years has been Mr. Paul Elmer More, for whom "this exaltation of beauty above truth, and emotional grace above duty, and fine perception above action, this insinuating hedonism which would so bravely embrace the joy of the moment, forgets to stay itself on any fixed principle outside of itself, and forgetting this, it somehow misses the enduring joy of the world and empties life of true values. Accordingly the sure end of this innocent-seeming theory is decadence." To all of which Mr. Le Gallienne replies: "Decadence is anything but a recent term, for the simple reason that what one calls decadence another would call renaissance. Again, those who apply it to literature confuse a fancied moral decadence with literary decadence." In his defence of Pater, as given in his paper On Re-Reading Walter Pater in the North American Review, he asserted that the teaching of this man, "far from being that of a facile 'Epicureanism,' is seen, properly understood, to involve