FRANCIS BURDETT MONEY-COUTTS

SOME poets are primarily thinkers of thoughts, others are primarily weavers of words. Some think before they sing, others sing before they think, and are apt, indeed, to omit the latter process altogether. Only in the greatest poets do thought and melody so absolutely coalesce that it seems impossible to imagine the one without the other, or to attribute priority to either element in the perfect whole.

Mr. Money-Coutts belongs to the clan of the thinkers. His best work is to be found in his two long philosophical poems (relatively long, that is to say, for neither exceeds one thousand lines), An Essay in a Brief Model and The Revelation of St. Love the Divine. Next in order of merit come his sonnets, for he treats the sonnet, and with reason, simply as the jewelled casket of a thought. The most successful of his lyrics are those that most nearly approach the epigram. In the pure lyric, one almost prefers to feel that the singer found his initial impulse in some predestinate congruity of words to which he adapted by afterthought, as it were, the idea or emotion which his lines express. Mr. Money-Coutts's lyrics seldom or never give us this sensation. We are apt to feel rather too clearly that their initial impulse lay in some thought, fantasy, or, it may be, conceit, which has subsequently, with more or less labour, woven for itself a more or less close-fitting vesture of words. Mr. Money-Coutts, in short, is a born discourser

rather than a born melodist. Many of his lyrics are original in conception and inventive in metre; but few of them can be said to flower like the lilies of the field, without either toil or spinning.

Already in the dedication, "To my Mother," of Mr. Coutts's first book, we have a foretaste of that suave dignity of expression which is this poet's finest gift. In a passage in praise of Imagination, for example, he writes:

For this was Spenser's magic; this the might
That turned our Milton's darkness into light;
This ministered to Goldsmith's loneliest hour,
And sunned the heart of Shelley into flower :
Sweet influences! Pilgrims, to and fro
Ranging the world, and singing as they go;
Till men, like cattle, captive to the grass,

Raise their slow heads to hear them, when they pass.

An Essay in a Brief Model is a dialogue between Humanity and Religion on that inexhaustible theme, the Origin of Evil, or, to put it in more general terms, the paradox of pain. In explanation of his title, Mr. Coutts cites a passage from The Reason of Church Government, wherein Milton speaks of "that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer . . . are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief, model." We are thus referred at once to Job and to Milton, who are indeed, in almost equal measures, the inspirers of the poem. Humanity plays the part of Job: Religion is a veritable Job's comforter; and both speak in cadences closely and not unsuccessfully modelled on those of Milton. To say that Mr. Coutts advances any absolutely new thought, whether in arraignment or in justification of the scheme of things, would be to claim for him a unique philosophic eminence. He re-treads the mazes of speculation in which, after the adjournment of their first great Parliament, even the fallen angels lost themselves; but he brings his own mind to bear on the eternal problems, think

ITY

ing them out afresh, not merely parroting the old solutions and evasions; and he finds novel and forcible imagery for his thoughts. The poem is, take it all in all, a truly noble piece of philosophic rhetoric, tense with significance, and at many points glowing with imagination. As I turn its pages, there is not one on which some line or sequence does not stand out either as a highly-condensed epigram or a luminous figure. The wonders of modern science are the outcome of

Fierce forces, tortured to betray

Such secrets as a wizard hardly spies

In crystal dream, or dreaming, when he wakes
Derides exulting, saner than his dream.

Humanity protests against the malice that would to the record of his crimes

Add faults

Of ignorance, omission, and the breach

Of laws that are themselves the breach of Law
Divine.

One rather regrets the last epithet. The phrase "Laws that are themselves the breach of Law" is very striking in its nudity. "Ah! but let me be!" Humanity cries in exasperation at the sophistries of Religion :

Let cerement-wreathing darkness wrap me round,
And noiseless flake on flake of feathery night

Compose me to oblivion absolute.

Rest, rest I crave! From wisdom and from war,
From vanity, endeavour, and despair,

False riddles and false oracles. I crave

Rest from the pauseless pulses of the world!

But it cannot be said that Mr. Coutts reserves all his good things for his protagonist. Job's comforter is no less eloquent than Job himself; witness the following passage placed in the mouth of Religion:

Repine not that effectual Wisdom works

In secret; with innumerable threads