same pieces and dedicated to His Majesty, Albert I, King of the Belgians. The title-poem seeks to cultivate an air of bravado, but it has an undercurrent of pathos that will not down : I guess it strikes a chill somewhere, the bravest won't deny, Away to shove, And set your teeth to die; But better dead, When all is said, Than lapped in peace to lie If we love not England well enough for England to die. V If ever a volume marked the close of an epoch in a poet's work, that volume was the New Poems of Richard Le Gallienne (1910). The poems were hardly for the most part new: many had already appeared in magazines; and the book gives something of the impression of miscellanies, a sort of gathering up of fragments since the last important collection, that of 1895. The volume is lacking in any central positive note, except that here and there one might discern a deepening conception of the influences of nature. It is as if a cultivated and sophisticated gentleman of the town permitted us to wander awhile with him in the country. Occasionally his thought lingers upon some earlier experience; he remembers pleasantly an old acquaintance or a marriage of friends; he is somewhat absorbed in his own musing, a little self-conscious as he thinks of the past. He enjoys the birds and the fields, occasionally praises his wholesome country fare; but he has no great thoughts and no great emotions, and he does not care if he has not: he has come from the crowded life for a little season of refreshment and peace. If we desire to walk with him he has no objection, but it must be understood that he will be pardoned if he does not exert himself to entertain us. While for one who knows what Mr. Le Gallienne is capable of it is a little difficult to be enthusiastic about this volume, the book has still very distinct merits. One must recall that in spite of appearances it does not quite represent the vintage of fifteen years. Numerous books in prose and the paraphrases from Omar and Hafiz had intervened in the meantime. A certain fineness of expression and delicacy of versification more than once denoted great advance in technique. There was also evident an increasing refinement in taste. Something of impalpable loveliness was constantly recurrent in the book; there was a charm in its dying falls, and on page after page the poet showed his power of "seizing his evanescent emotion or revealing in a phrase the beauty that flashes and dies." It is as if the master of the lute, in a leisure moment, tested all the resources of his instrument before playing the beautiful lyrics of the poet's later work. The Nightjar, the poet's strongest expression in the volume of his love for nature, has been highly praised. The most representative piece of work, however, is probably At Evening I Came to the Wood: At evening I came to the wood, and threw myself on the breast Of the great green Mother, weeping, and the arms of a thousand trees Waved and rustled in welcome, and murmured, "Rest-Rest-Rest! The leaves, thy brothers, shall heal thee, and thy sisters, the flowers, bring peace." Almost simultaneously with New Poems appeared Orestes, Mr. Le Gallienne's treatment of the old story of the avenging of the murder of Agamemnon and the pursuit of Orestes by the Furies. The play was written at the request of Mr. William Faversham, who, being desirous of producing a music-drama on the story of Orestes, asked Mr. Le Gallienne to make for him another version. The poet was circumscribed somewhat by having to follow the lead of the music, especially in the first of the two acts; but the simplicity and dignity of a Greek play are excellently preserved. Ægisthus was made a lay-figure, but generally the characterization is strong. In the case of Clytemnestra this is unusually so. Occasionally an otherwise strong speech was slightly marred by an excess of prettiness, but on the whole the sacrifice of the poet to the spirit of Greece was thoroughly adequate and effective. VI The Lonely Dancer (1913) was in every respect a noteworthy achievement. In the first place it was remarkable that a poet whose art had shown little definite advance within twenty years, and whose last volume had been something of a disappointment, should suddenly begin to show more and more progress to the heights of lyric endeavor. Since the Robert Louis Stevenson volume of 1895 such an adaptation in brilliant poetry as the Odes from Hafiz had appeared; but there had been little to show a deepening and a broadening of the spirituality suggested in that earlier work. In technique also the new book indicated fulfilment of promise. Instead of verses crowded with images and conceits it revealed on page after page lines brilliantly chiselled, but with a simplicity of diction and a sureness in rhythm that made them linger irresistibly on the ear. A freedom and refinement of expression, comparable only to the upspringing of a bird, left no longer any doubt as to the claims of a genuine lyric poet. From the book, moreover, the last traces of self-consciousness and eroticism had disappeared, and in their place had come a great broadening of sympathy, with a distinct note of brotherhood. The "still sad music of humanity" had reached the poet, and as never before he found solace in the sweet influences of nature. Over all was a new tenderness, and what with a slight change of thought or expression might a few years before have awakened cynicism now by its very sincerity carried conviction. The poet possessed a new vision, an "instinctive reverence for the spirit of life"; and while his song may have been beautiful before, it now rose in a new dignity of yearning, suffering, and peace. The typical poem is To a Bird at Dawn, an effort that fully justified a claim for the ennobling influences of beauty upon the spirit, and one that unassisted would assure for the poet a place among the masters of the lyric in English : O bird that somewhere yonder sings, In the dim hour 'twixt dreams and dawn, In some sky sanctuary withdrawn; I think you must be more than bird, Some morning planet 'tis that sings; To you, sweet bird, one well might feign— So clear, yet so profound a strain Into the simple ear of spring— And all my life until this day, Seem calling yonder in the sky; And there is something the song saith That makes me unafraid of death. Page after page in the book expresses the ennobling and uplifting influence of a great new love. This is best seen in Flos Aevorum: The moonlight of forgotten seas Dwells in your eyes, and on your tongue The honey of a million bees, And all the sorrows of all song: You are the ending of all these, The world grew old to make young. All time hath traveled to this rose ; To the strange making of this face Find in this flower their meeting place. VII The foregoing pages have had to do almost solely with Mr. Le Gallienne's poetry; and indeed it is in the capacity of a poet that he will ultimately be most distinguished. It must not be forgotten, however, that he has been a really voluminous writer, and that much of his best work has been in the form of prose. Even when as a young man, just a little more than twenty, he definitely set out upon his literary career in an old loft of an office in Liverpool, he dreamed of continuing the magnificent tradition of De Quincey and Pater and Stevenson, and others who had given to style such an æsthetic quality and such an emphasis as it had never possessed before. In attempting to realize his purpose he has written much and rather unevenly-prose fancies, light romances, brief reviews, longer critical works, serious essays, allegories, short stories, sketches, theological discus sions, versions of old legends, articles popularizing literature, introductions to other writers, etc. His own papers and prose works as collected into volumes now embrace nearly thirty titles. Of all of these books, from the standpoint of style and general literary quality, the early works, The Book-Bills of Narcissus and Prose Fancies, must always take high rank. Later collections, such as Little Dinners with the Sphinx and Sleeping Beauty, but carry on the tradition of the second of these books. Narcissus is really a study in the spiritual evolution of a young man of poetic temperament. The work most happily represents the poet's feeling for phrasing and for delicate fancy. Fancy, indeed, rather than pure imagination, is one of his outstanding qualities. He speaks of "vulgar lovers, that seek to flatter at the expense of yesterday," and of the boy who "chases the butterfly and thinks nought of the wood and the blue heaven." There are constantly present, however, the swift irony and the pessimism of the neo-romanticists. Thus we read: "If you ever engage me to write that life which, of course, must some day be written I wouldn't write it myself-don't trouble about your diary. Give me your private ledger"; and "A great love comes and sets one's whole being singing like a harp, fills high heaven with rainbows, and makes our dingy alleys for a while bright as the streets of the New Jerusalem; and yet, if after five years we seek for what its incandescence has left us, we find, may be, a newly helpful epithet, maybe a fancy, at most a sonnet." Similarly, in The Quest of the Golden Girl we read: "When one is twenty and romantic one would scorn a woman who would jilt us for wealth and position; at thirty one would scorn any woman who didn't." Prose Fancies excels some of the later works because, embodying such qualities as these, it represents the author at the time when he was most fresh and original. "Be not oversolicitous of wedding-presents," he warns; "they carry a terrible rate of interest. A silver toast-rack will never leave you a Bank Holiday secure, and a breakfast service means at least a fortnight's 'change' to one or more irrelevant persons twice a year." Exceedingly personal and even autobiographic is most of his work, in some of his later books especially (Vanishing Roads, for instance) his point of view has become more and more detached |