artistically-corrected and accomplisiied Whitnianisni of style, with what we may term, without forgetting Mr. Henley's originality, Whitnianisni of motive, does seem much more prophetic of coming developments than the eruption of French formalism. Whitman has certainly now impressed himself on the mind of his time; and it seems just as clear that he is at bottom right in his message (apart from his practice) of free rhythm, as that he is wrong in anticipating a mere poetic exodus from the bondage of verse into the prairie of prose. Nothing can be idler, looking to the data, tlian Mr. Swinburne's characteristic protest that avoidance of rhyme in song is an unwise renunciation of a natural grace : Tennyson's rhymeless ' Tears, idle Tears,' is as exquisite a song as any he has written, to say nothing of those of Mr. Swinburne ; but one has only to read Mr. Henley to see that the ' heaven of prose ' can never yield quite the atmosphere of the region of poesy, and that what men are likely to do is not to give up verse, but to recreate it. Rhyme could not, but neither could prose, yield just the kind of vibration that comes from these lines of Mr. Henley's — not taken, it need hardly be said, from the ' Hospital ' section of his book : —
' The Spirit of Wine
Sang in my glass, and I listened
With love to his odorous music,
His flushed and magnificent song.'
Who does not feel that here rhythm, as well as
diction, goes to produce the total effect ? It is only when he becomes really rhythmical that Whitman so moves us ; and the energetic and intelligent Whitnianisni of Mr. Edward Carpenter, though he is no mere echo of the master he so devotedly imitates, yields nothing that similarly lays hold of memory. Not that way, probably, is the stream of tendency heading.
Nay, it would be a poor compliment to Mr. Hen- ley's admirable work in rhyme to decide that even his success in freer forms ought to promote the abandonment of that : it does but prove that we may progress outside rhyme as well as in it. Few readers will want a change in the ringing poem from which one favourably inclined critic selected this stanza with a deprecating allusion to the ' crudity ' of its terms : —
' In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.'
Need it be demonstrated that these verses can be
crude only to an imperfect man of letters ; and that
they really illustrate the primary principle, once for all set forth, and so often exemplified, by Horace, that the skilful contexture of an old term in a new application is a special literary felicity —
' Dixeris egregi^, notum si callida verbum
Reddiderit junctura novum '— ?
The only sort of ' crudity ' I can find in Mr.
Henley is a solitary nefarious rhyme, bad enougli
for him certainly, but still one of those crimes which are so much less fatal in art than blunders.
No, with Emerson be it repeated, we are not yet
done with rhyme ; and the reader of Mr. Henley's
delectable little book (of which the honourable
cheapness is only relatively a small merit) will find in it half a dozen other perfect successes in that kind, which may not here find quoting space. Even in the ' Bric-a-Brac ' section, made up of French forms, which the author rightly places last, the few pieces that appear also in the ' Canterbury ' anthology are the least meritorious ; and the two last rondeaus of all serve to prove that a great andante music may be sounded even under that title. It is one of the most singular circumstances in recent literary history that a writer who had by him such a quantity of first-rate original verse should hold it back all these years (the ' Hospital' pieces seem all to have been written in 1873-75 ; some of the best of the others are also' dated more than ten years back ; and it does not appear that any of these have been previously published), and should then quietly play his trumps after the reading world had been reasonably entitled, from what he did casually publish, to conclude that he was a clever manipulator of verse forms, but no poet. It is, finally, one more refutation of Mr. Lowell's strange dictum that there can be only one kind of poetry. Here we have the (juickly faded poetry of technical trifling as well as the poetry of
rhythmical and beautiful treatment of winning and
high themes, and rhythmical and admirable treat-
ment of themes that in themselves would never be
thought high or winning. Each has its specific
ministry and charm, and one declines to believe that
any reader can be insensible to all, independent as
they are of any of the deductions here suggested
concerning the sort of art developments they seem
to forecast. On that head it only remains to utter
the hope that Mr. Henley will find some fresh in-
spiration without having to bear again those
' bludgeonings of chance' which drew from him such
' melodious pain.'
John M. Rohkiitson.
