The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century. William Lyon Phelps

on one occasion a curtain call as the Ghost in Hamlet. This experience—with the early Stratford inspiration—probably fired his ambition to become a dramatist. The late Sir George Alexander produced Paolo and Francesca; Herod was acted in London by Beerbohm Tree, and in America by William Faversham. Neither of these plays was a failure, but it is regrettable that he wrote for the stage at all. His genius was not adapted for drama, and the quality of his verse was not improved by the experiment, although all of his half-dozen pieces have occasional passages of rare loveliness. His best play, Paolo and Francesca, suffers when compared either with Boker's or D'Annunzio's treatment of the old story. It lacks the stage-craft of the former, and the virility of the latter.

      Phillips was no pioneer: he followed the great tradition of English poetry, and must be counted among the legitimate heirs. At his best, he resembles Keats most of all; and none but a real poet could ever make us think of Keats. If he be condemned for not breaking new paths, we may remember the words of a wise man—"It is easier to differ from the great poets than it is to resemble them." He loved to employ the standard five-foot measure that has done so much of the best work of English poetry. In The Woman with the Dead Soul, he showed once more the musical possibilities latent in the heroic couplet, which Pope had used with such monotonous brilliance. In Marpessa, he gave us blank verse of noble artistry. But he was far more than a mere technician. He fairly meets the test set by John Davidson. "In the poet the whole assembly of his being is harmonious; no organ is master; a diapason extends throughout the entire scale; his whole body, his whole soul is rapt into the making of his poetry. … Poetry is the product of originality, of a first-hand experience and observation of life, of a direct communion with men and women, with the seasons of the year, with day and night. The critic will therefore be well-advised, if he have the good fortune to find something that seems to him poetry, to lay it out in the daylight and the moonlight, to take it into the street and the fields, to set against it his own experience and observation of life."

      One of the most severe tests of poetry that I know of is to read it aloud on the shore of an angry sea. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton gain in splendour with this accompaniment.

      With the words of John Davidson in mind, let us take two passages from Marpessa, and measure one against the atmosphere of day and night, and the other against homely human experience. Although Mr. Davidson was not thinking of Phillips, I believe he would have admitted the validity of this verse.

      From the dark

       The floating smell of flowers invisible,

       The mystic yearning of the garden wet,

       The moonless-passing night—into his brain

       Wandered, until he rose and outward leaned

       In the dim summer; 'twas the moment deep

       When we are conscious of the secret dawn,

       Amid the darkness that we feel is green. …

       When the long day that glideth without cloud,

       The summer day, was at her deep blue hour

       Of lilies musical with busy bliss,

       Whose very light trembled as with excess,

       And heat was frail, and every bush and flower

       Was drooping in the glory overcome;

      Any poet knows how to speak in authentic tones of the wild passion of insurgent hearts; but not every poet possesses the rarer gift of setting the mellower years to harmonious music, as in the following gracious words:

      But if I live with Idas, then we two

       On the low earth shall prosper hand in hand

       In odours of the open field, and live

       In peaceful noises of the farm, and watch

       The pastoral fields burned by the setting sun. …

       And though the first sweet sting of love be past,

       The sweet that almost venom is; though youth,

       With tender and extravagant delight,

       The first and secret kiss by twilight hedge,

       The insane farewell repeated o'er and o'er,

       Pass off; there shall succeed a faithful peace;

       Beautiful friendship tried by sun and wind,

       Durable from the daily dust of life.

       And though with sadder, still with kinder eyes,

       We shall behold all frailties, we shall haste

       To pardon, and with mellowing minds to bless.

       Then though we must grow old, we shall grow old

       Together, and he shall not greatly miss

       My bloom faded, and waning light of eyes,

       Too deeply gazed in ever to seem dim;

       Nor shall we murmur at, nor much regret

       The years that gently bend us to the ground,

       And gradually incline our face; that we

       Leisurely stooping, and with each slow step,

       May curiously inspect our lasting home.

       But we shall sit with luminous holy smiles,

       Endeared by many griefs, by many a jest,

       And custom sweet of living side by side;

       And full of memories not unkindly glance

       Upon each other. Last, we shall descend

       Into the natural ground—not without tears—

       One must go first, ah God! one must go first;

       After so long one blow for both were good;

       Still like old friends, glad to have met, and leave

       Behind a wholesome memory on the earth.

      Although Marpessa and Christ in Hades are subjects naturally adapted for poetic treatment, Phillips did not hesitate to try his art on material less malleable. In some of his poems we find a realism as honest and clear-sighted as that of Crabbe or Masefield. In The Woman with the Dead Soul and The Wife we have naturalism elevated into poetry. He could make a London night as mystical as a moonlit meadow. And in a brief couplet he has given to one of the most familiar of metropolitan spectacles a pretty touch of imagination. The traffic policeman becomes a musician.

      The constable with lifted hand

       Conducting the orchestral Strand.

      Stephen Phillips's second volume of collected verse, New Poems (1907), came ten years after the first, and was to me an agreeable surprise. His devotion to the drama made me fear that he had burned himself out in the Poems of 1897; but the later book is as unmistakably the work of a poet as was the earlier. The mystical communion with nature is expressed with authority in such poems as After Rain, Thoughts at Sunrise, Thoughts at Noon. Indeed the first-named distinctly harks back to that transcendental mystic of the seventeenth century, Henry Vaughan. The greatest triumph in the whole volume comes where we should least expect it, in the eulogy on Gladstone. Even the most sure-footed bards often miss their path in the Dark Valley. Yet in these seven stanzas on the Old Parliamentary Hand there is not a single weak line, not a single false note; word placed on word grows steadily into a column of majestic beauty.

      This poem is all the more refreshing because admiration for Gladstone had become unfashionable; his work was belittled, his motives befouled, his clear mentality discounted by thousands of pygmy politicians and journalistic gnats. The poet, with a poet's love for mountains, turns the powerful light of his genius on the old giant; the mists disappear; and we see again a form venerable and august.