and so in the sonnet on 'The Chief,' the firmly
and felicitously drawn portrait is backgrounded by
the vision of the universal life : —
'We hold him for another Herakles,
Batthng with custom, prejudice, disease,
As once the son of Zeus with Death and Hell.'
In short, if any one would realise the gain to poetry from a competent resort to living motive, in the full faith that the actual is always conquerable by art, he may find a more convincing demonstration in Mr. Henley's book than in almost any verse of the cur-
rent generation. Beside Epics of Hades, versifica-
tions of Buddhist mythology, blank verse tragedies
and rhymed romances, all steeped in archaism alike
of thought and phrase, this handful of impressions
from a grey corner of actual life stands out vital
and magnetic, as much more truly poetic than those
other performances, as it is more readable. If it
does not live by this merit, some of us are far astray
in our forecasts of literary destiny. Similar things
have been attempted before : the spirit of the
eighteenth century, in its recoil from the sterile
extravagance in which the genius of the sixteenth
and seventeenth had been finally lost, was at last
ready enough to attempt transcription from every-
day life, doing without theory what Wordsworth
later felt led to do by theory — but faring no better.
It was wrecked either on the Scylla of unfelt diction,
or in the Charybdis of a factitious epic ambition.
If a last-century poet had tried (as probably some
did) to reproduce such a train of experience as .Mr.
Henley's in hospital, he would have made it a
formal poem in several books, as his congeners did
with so many themes, manufacturing pseud-epics on
the Grave, the Sabbath, the Course of Time, the
Pleasures of Imagination, and so forth, and so
whelming a pinch of prose sense in a measureless
Hood of thin rhetoric. If, on the other hand, one
of that tribe had gone about to versify a single one
of Mr. Henley's hospital motives, he would have
first of all adjusted his voice to a funereal falsetto,
and his mien to something suggested by the theatre ;
and the result would be an abortive discourse in
frigid cadences and cracked rhymes, with some such
title as those in which Slienstone, in his way, outdid
the nmiseries of the coming Wordsworth — ' Elegy
xvin. : He repeats the song of Collin, a decerning
shepherd, lamenting the state of the zcoollen vianu-
factury ;"" '■Elegy xxvi. : Describing the sorrow of an
ingenuous mind, on the melancholy event of a licenti-
ous amour. But just as surely as affectation and
falsetto are fated to oblivion, is the clear note of
personality and nature destined to endure. The
comparative lyric naturalness of Collins's ' Evening'
Ode, as beside the typical laborious artifice of his
popular contemporaries, suffices to retain for him
an esteem higher than is diie to his best perform-
ance on its intrinsic merits ; and even his lucklessly-
titled ' Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands,'
which with the rest could find no readers on its
publication, finds sympathetic critics to-day.
The name of Collins recalls us to the point that
Mr. Henley exhibits not only a resort to fresh
motive, but a movement towards free rhymeless
forms, all the more noteworthy because made by a
writer who achieves charming successes in various
staves of rhyme. Among his 'Hospital' rhythms
we have unrhymed quatrains, closed and unclosed,
in the trochaics of ' Hiawatha,' — quatrains, that is, like those of Heine's ' Atta Troll,' a very different thing from a continuous movement in the same measure, be it noted ; — quatrains in a sapphic movement with another than the sapphic close ; stanzas such as this : —
' The gaunt brown walls
Look infinite in their decent meanness,
There is nothing of home in the noisy kettle.
The fulsome fire ;'
and, perhaps most important of all, a number of
pieces in the short, irregular blank verse, of which two extracts are given above. Verse of this kind has already been made classic for us by Mr. Arnold, who, indeed, managed it sometimes to rather pedestrian purpose, but at others succeeded with it in a degree above praise and above rivalry. Arnold presumably had it from Goethe, who, in some dozen or more pieces, handles it with at least his average energy; and by Heine, Aho, in his early No7'dsee collection, writes it with more suppleness than Goethe, but also, perhaps, with less pregnancy, and who later found that regular blank rhythms better emphasised his rare gift of phrase. It is in such verse as this that the essentials of poetic art are best tested, and the chances are that most foreign readers have paid less heed to it in Goethe and Heine than to their regular and rhymed rhythms, because only a perfect sense of all the shades of verbal association could ensure perfect pleasure in it, even if its success were technically complete. Rhyme and measure carry many a lame dog over many a stiff stile. It would be out of place here to discuss the relation of Goethe's and Heine's irregular verse to later German poetry ; but it is impossible to avoid speculating on the chances of a following to Arnold's and Mr. Henley's lead. The latter, perhaps, is not entirely uninfluenced by Whitman, though he is always rhythmical, which Whitman, to put it mildly, is generally not. Now, this coincidence of
