Kipling, with his perception of ordinary people in terms of ordinary life, was one of the strongest links between the Wordsworth-Browning era and the latest apostles of vigor, beginning with Masefield. He has had a score of imitators, ranging from the facile Cicely Fox Smith to the glibly uninspired Robert W. Service, but none of them has captured anything of his quality except his characteristic beat and rhythms. There are occasional and serious defects in Kipling's work. Frequently he falls into a journalistic ease that tends to turn into jingle; he is fond of a militaristic drum-banging that is as blatant as the insularity he condemns. But a burning if sometimes too fatuous faith shines through his achievements. His best work reveals an intensity that crystallizes into beauty what was originally tawdry, that lifts the vulgar and incidental to the place of the universal. JOHN MASEFIELD All art is a twofold revivifying—a recreation of subject and a reanimating of form. And poetry becomes perennially "new" by returning to the old-with a different consciousness, a greater awareness. In 1911, when art was again searching for novelty, John Masefield created something startling and new by going back to 1385 and The Canterbury Pilgrims! Employing both the Chaucerian model and a form similar to the practically forgotten Byronic stanza, Masefield wrote, in rapid succession, The Everlasting Mercy (1911), The Widow in the Bye Street (1912), Dauber (1912), The Daffodil Fields (1913)-four astonishing rhymed narratives and four of the most remarkable poems of our generation. Expressive of every rugged phase of life, these poems, uniting old and new manners, responded to Synge's proclama tion that "the strong things of life are needed in poetry also . . . and it may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must be brutal." Masefield brought back to poetry that mixture of beauty and brutality which is its most human and enduring quality. He brought back that rich and almost vulgar vividness which is the very life-blood of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Villon, of Heine-and of all those who were not only great artists but great humanists. As a purely descriptive poet, he can take his place with the masters of sea and landscape. As an imaginative realist, he showed those who were stumbling from one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that they themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than anything in the world-or out of it. Few things in contemporary poetry are as powerful as the regeneration of Saul Kane (in The Everlasting Mercy) or the story of Dauber, the tale of a tragic sea-voyage and a dreaming youth who wanted to be a painter. The vigorous description of rounding Cape Horn in the latter poem is superbly done, a masterpiece in itself. Masefield's later volumes are quieter in tone, more measured in technique; there is an almost religious ring to many of his Shakespearean sonnets. But the swinging surge is there, a passionate strength that leaps through all his work from Salt Water Ballads (1902) to Reynard the Fox (1919). THE WAR AND "THE GEORGIANS" There is no sharp statistical line of demarcation between Masefield and the younger men. Although several of them owe much to him, most of the younger poets speak in accents of their own. W. W. Gibson had already reinforced the "return to actuality" by turning from his first preoccupation with shining knights, fault less queens, ladies in distress and all the paraphernalia of hackneyed mediæval romances, to write about ferrymen, berry-pickers, stone-cutters, farmers, printers, circus-men, carpenters-dramatizing (though sometimes theatricalizing) the primitive emotions of uncultured and ordinary people in Livelihood, Daily Bread and Fires. This intensity had been asking new questions. It found its answers in the war; repressed emotionalism discovered a new outlet. The war caught up the youth of the country in a great gust of national fervor. But after the first flush of false romanticism passed, the consequent disillusion made itself heard. The fierce war-poems of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves are the very opposite of the jingo journalistic verse that attempted to paint the world's greatest tragedy in bright and cheerful colors. But this intensity was not confined to the martial or the anti-militarist poets. It manifests itself even in the less realistic poems of the romantic Rupert Brooke (who owes less to his immediate predecessors than he does to the passionately intellectual John Donne), in the dark introspections of D. H. Lawrence and the brooding nobility of Charlotte Mew. And, though the younger of these poets (John Freeman, W. J. Turner and others) are echoing traditional English landscape poetry with great persistence and little variety, magic has not disappeared from the world of the contemporary Englishman. Magic lives in the moon-soaked wonder and nurseryrhyme whimsicality of Walter de la Mare, in the limpid and unperturbed loveliness of Ralph Hodgson, in the naïf and delicate lyrics of W. H. Davies, in the soil-flavored fantasies of James Stephens. Any one of these four singers would be an exquisite ornament to his decade. All of the poets mentioned in this section (with the exception of Charlotte Mew and Wilfred Owen, whose verse was posthumously published) have formed themselves in a loose group called "The Georgians," and an anthology of their best work has appeared every two years since 1913. Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drinkwater are also listed among the Georgian poets. When their first collection appeared in March, 1913, Henry Newbolt, critic as well as poet, wrote: "These younger poets have no temptation to be false. They are not for making something 'pretty,' something up to the standard of professional patterns. . . . They write as grown men walk, each with his own unconscious stride and gesture. . . . In short, they express themselves and seem to steer without an effort between the dangers of innovation and reminiscence." The secret of this success is not an exclusive discovery of the modern poets. It is their inheritance, derived from those predecessors who, "from Wordsworth and Coleridge onward, have worked for the assimilation of verse to the manner and accent of natural speech." In its adaptability no less than in its vigor, modern English poetry is true to its period-and its past. Austin Dobson (Henry) Austin Dobson was born at Plymouth, in 1840, and was educated in Wales and on the Continent. In 1856, he received a clerkship in The Board of Trade and remained in official life a great part of his life. His first collection, Vignettes in Rhyme (1873), attracted attention by the ease with which the author managed his dexterous and most difficult effects. With Proverbs in Porcelain (1877), Old World Idylls (1883) and At the Sign of the Lyre (1885), it was evident that a new master of vers de société had arisen. The crispness and clean delicacy of his verse make him the peer of Prior, Praed and Thomas Hood. During the latter part of his life, he devoted himself to a type of semi-biographical essay, intended to preserve the spirit of some nearly- or wholly-forgotten celebrity. In this form, his prose is scarcely less distinctive than his verse; his detailed and charmingly dispensed knowledge of the time of Queen Anne gives to his writings its own special flavor of "archaic gentility". Although most of his rhymes are charming rather than profound, certain pages, like "Before Sedan," are memorable for their serious clarity. Dobson died September 3, 1921. IN AFTER DAYS In after days when grasses high I shall not see the morning sky; |