"AT EVENING TIME THERE SHALL BE LIGHT."

The day was wild with wind and rain,
One grey wrapped sky and sea and shore,
It seemed our marsh would never again
Wear the rich robes that once it wore.
The scattered farms looked sad and chill,
Their sheltering trees writhed all awry,
And waves of mist broke on the hill
Where once the great sea thundered by.

Then God remembered this His land,
His little land that is our own,
He caught the rain up in His hand,

He hid the winds behind His throne,
He soothed the fretful waves to rest,

He called the clouds to come away,
And, by blue pathways, to the west

They went, like children tired of play.

And then God bade our marsh put on
Its holy vestment of fine gold;
From marge to marge the glory shone

On lichened farm and fence and fold;
In the gold sky that walled the west,
In each transfigured stone and tree,
The glory of God was manifest,

Plain for a little child to see!

HENRY NEWBOLT

MR. NEWBOLT is known chiefly as a writer of patriotic lyrics and ballads; but he began his literary career with a tragedy which must not be overlooked if we would take the just measure of his talent. Mordred, to my thinking, is scarcely a success; but it is far from being, like so many modern blank verse plays, a mere conventional futility. Its style is nervous and clear-cut, with a good deal of really dramatic feeling in it. Mr. Newbolt does not, like so many poets, mistake rhetoric for drama, or imagine that intensity of effect is to be sought in copiousness of utterance, or even in vividness of imagery. His men and women express themselves in credible human speech, ennobled indeed, but not inflated and bedizened beyond recognition. Several scenes in the play possess genuine life and movement; and, as blank-verse dramas go, that is saying a great deal. The tragedy falls short of complete success for two main reasons, as it seems to me. First, Mr. Newbolt has handicapped himself by his choice of a theme; secondly, he has handled his almost impossible theme in an undecided and somewhat baffling fashion.

The poet, and especially the dramatist, who tackles the Arthurian legend, necessarily finds himself in an awkward dilemma. A realistic treatment (psychologically realistic I mean) would strike us as grotesque and irreverent; while the possibilities of romantic sentimentalism have been

exhausted by Tennyson. We may regret (though the regret is, I think, a trifle unphilosophic) that Tennyson made Arthur a Philistine paragon, and enveloped him in a golden haze of Early Victorian idealism. But the time has not yet come to rescue him (if, indeed, he be worth rescuing) from that "light that never was on sea or land." The Idylls of the King, whatever their dramatic or philosophic shortcomings, are great in the essentials of pure poetry, and have powerfully impressed the national imagination. Therefore, while we smile at the Tennysonian "blameless king," any attempt to humanise him has inevitably the air of a parody. If we cannot take Tennyson's Arthur seriously, still less can we yield imaginative credence to a revised and corrected Arthur. The Arthurian legend, in short, has become, like the Gospel narrative, impossible for purposes of serious art. Its conventional poetry is exhausted, while whatever unconventional poetry may be extracted from it is discounted in advance by the hold the conventional poetry has taken on our imagination. A realistic Arthur, whether the Arthur of Malory or another, could not but strike us as comic in his very contrast to the glorified waxwork (but how gloriously glorified!) of the Tennysonian allegory.

Mr. Newbolt has not overcome this initial difficulty. His hero seems to me to have put off the blamelessness of Tennyson's Arthur, while retaining a good deal of the priggishness. But stay! Is Arthur the hero, or Mordred? I do not know; and no more, I take it, does Mr. Newbolt. He prefaces his play with this citation from Hegel :

"In genuine tragedy, they must be powers both alike moral and justifiable, which from this side and from that come into collision. Two opposed Rights come forth: the one breaks itself to pieces against the other: in this way both alike suffer loss: while both alike are justified, the one towards the other; not as if this were right, that other wrong."

It appears then, that Mr. Newbolt seeks to exemplify this