of field and forest, whose love for a "merry jest" serves to identify him perfectly with the jolly baron that entertains Gawayne over the Christmas season. Mr. Lewis is exceedingly happy and original in the cumulation of figures wherewith he iterates the Green Knight's verdancy, culminating in "One glance-as when, o'erhead, a living wire This simile is really capital and not only illustrates one way in which Mr. Lewis obtains his modern effect, but shows how the new objects which science has brought into our life can gradually be drawn into the fold of art. Again, in Gawayne, Mr. Lewis gives us a man half antique knight, half modern football hero in armor, who, on striking off the challenger's head, is greeted by "a mighty shout, As when, o'er blood-sprent fields the long cheers roll Yet Gawayne is still what all the world loves, a true lover, and his lady, Elfinhart, with the romance of her birth and fairy bringing-up, a creature to charm modern readers as she has Mr. Lewis: "Her face was a dim dream of shadowy light, Cull old embroideries for their new-spun fancies; I care not for the trivial, nor the fleeting. Beneath her dress a woman's heart was beating The rhythm of love's eternal eloquence, And I confess to you, in confidence, Though flowers have grown a thousand years above her, And no wonder, for you feel withal that she is not so very different from some of the maidens of our own time. As against these three creations, Richard Hovey has little to offer. To be sure, he has given us Dagonet the Fool, whose dwarfish personality and canny philosophic wit make him something different from his Elizabethan prototypes. But Launcelot, Guenevere, Arthur, Merlin, and the rest are all cast in the classic mold and make no compelling appeal to other than academic readers. In short, Hovey again followed his special instincts, where Mr. Lewis chose a mood with which a modern reading public would sympathize. Another way in which Mr. Lewis has secured his literary effect is by simplicity of form. Instead of the bewildering lyric metres of Hovey's Taliesin and The Quest of Merlin, he took a single, idiomatic verse-form, and devoted his dexterity to making the most melody out of that. And in doing so, he did not fall into the besetting sin of our latter day poets, verbal finesse, a sin which Hovey committed more than once. Take, for instance, this passage from The Marriage of Guenevere: “The sweet long hours whose lingering moments dripped Like rhythmic water-drops into a pool With silver parsimony of sweet sound, As if Time grudged each globule!" This is pretty in its way, but it is not sincere, it is not natural; and naturalness and sincerity are prime requisites for good literature. Mr. Lewis has both these qualities, and at the same time he infuses his straightforward simplicity with a fantastic humor, a fairy delicacy, which give to his story, though modern in form, the exquisite unreality of old romance. From the moment when the first blast of a fairy trumpet announces the coming of the Green Knight, one hears, through all the music of his verse, "the horns of Elfland faintly blowing." In modernness of temper and in simplicity of method, then, as well as in choice of subject, Mr. Lewis has done better than his fellow academician. Instead of giving us such a heterogeneous rout of accessory characters as figure in The Quest of Merlin,-norns, sylphs, gnomes, naiads, dryads, fauns, satyrs, maenads, bassarids, loves, valkyrs, and angels, belonging to at least three different nationalities and mythologies, and all foreign to the principals with whom they are associated,-he sketches three vivid and delightful personalities and tells about them the old story in a new and fascinating way. To say that his temper is modern is not to imply that he nowhere touches the literary past. Indeed, his lines are full of reminiscence, from the Bible to Kipling. Nor, in choosing a romantic subject, has he divorced himself wholly from philosophy; for that he too is something of a philosopher is shown by such verses as these: "Fie on you women's hearts! Consistency Hides her shamed head where mortal women be! True love breeds faith and trust, it makes hearts strong; The heart's anointed king can do no wrong!" Nor, finally, in using modern similes and indulging his playful humor, has Mr. Lewis lost the capacity for serious thought and noble verse, as these lines bear witness: "For poets fable when they call love blind; All mists and fogs that baser spells create. Love? What is love? Not the wild, feverish thrill, When heart to heart the thronging pulses fill, And lips that close in parching kisses find No speech but those ;-the best remains behind. The tranquil spirit-the divine assurance That this life's seemings have a high endurance— Thoughts that allay this restless striving, calm The passionate heart, and fill old wounds with balm; These are the choirs invisible that move In white processionals up the aisles of love." It is such passages as this that give Mr. Lewis his truest right to the title of poet, from whatever source his inspiration be drawn, or whatever may be his temper, his method, his form, or his style. The conclusion of the matter, then, is that Mr. Lewis has succeeded in producing a work of genuine literature in so far as he has freed himself from the tendencies and interests of his academic station and has taken a more thoroughly human point of view. After all, the material of literature is at bottom as old as the race. The real men of letters have been, not those who treated this material as archeologists, but those who took it as it came to hand and remoulded it in a form that should express the common interests and ideals of their own day and generation. It is the tendency of the academic poet to be a literary archæologist, and only by breaking away from this tendency can he produce true literature. That he can thus break away, has been sufficiently shown by the example of Mr. Lewis. Richard Hovey broke away from it sometimes, also; and when he did, his Songs from Vagabondia proved his power as a poet. Such lines as these from the "Stein Song," "For we all are frank and twenty When the spring is in the air, And we've faith and hope a plenty, will be remembered while the last copy of Launcelot and Guenevere is mouldering in a bookstall. The case of the academic poet, therefore, is hopeful. Indeed, the converse of Professor Santayana's proposition may be truly stated of him: that real literature can also be produced by a man who, though in a position that keeps him at arm's length from the world and its concerns, is yet of sufficient power to move in the world and share its spiritual life. As for Mr. Lewis, one can enthusiastically say, Macte virtute, and sincerely hope that future achievement may bear out the abundant promise of this new academic poet. Robert M. Green. AN ODE OF UNWELCOME. Spring would be wandering her fantastic ways From out Swiss valleys to the welcome plain, And wayward beauty with soft verdure rife A laced and thwarting bondage on their strength In straitened length on length Of measured prudence vile, where plies the pruner's knife. Thrift and the peopled soil, The ruthless touch of toil, The plodding pace from morn to morn Content from things to things, Never on fluttered mystic wings Into the heavens borne, Ashes of freedom, beaten pinions drooped, No nostril wide with rebel will, But sides to fatten, maws to fill, And custom-cluttered tables eager-trooped: These throng the Spring out of the hearts of men, W. H. |