we feel that this is at least workman-like work, written by a man who has studied great masters, and who takes himself and his art seriously. There is not an undignified line in the whole poem, nor a break in the slow, deliberate movement. Watson has style, he is never facile or common. He has frequent felicities of phrase, but he subordinates separate effects to the effect of the whole, and he is almost the only living writer of verse of whom this could be said. His ode is excellently made, from every external point of view. Yet, after reading it over and over, with a full recognition of its technical qualities, we are unable to accept it as genuine poetry, as the equal of the thing which it resembles.
Great poetry is not often written for official occasions, but that it can be so written we need only turn to Marvell's Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland to realize. Watson looks instinctively to public events for his inspiration, and there is something in his temper of mind and of style which seems to set him naturally apart as a commentator upon the destinies of nations. He has never put any vital part of himself into his work; he has told us nothing of what he is when he is not a writer. All his utterances have been themselves official, the guarded statement of just so much of his own thoughts and feelings as he cares to betray to the public. His kind is rather critical than creative, and it was by his epigrams that he first attracted attention. His technique is so accomplished that he seems very often to be thinking only of what he is saying, when it is evident, on a closer examination, that he is thinking much more of how he is saying it. For the poet who concerns himself with public events this might seem to be a useful part of his poetic equipment. Court ceremonies demand court dress. Undoubtedly, but the art of the courtier requires him to forget that he is dressed for an occasion, to forget everything but the occasion. Throughout the whole of his coronation ode Watson never forgets that he is celebrating an important ceremony. His costume is perfectly adjusted, he wears it with grace and dignity; his elocution, as he delivers his lines, is a model of clearness and discreet emphasis. Everything that he says is perfectly appropriate; good taste can go no further. But the occasion itself, the meaning, the emotion, of the occasion? That does not come into the poem; the poem tells us all about it.
Now look at Marvell's ode, and forget for the moment that it is a masterpiece of poetry. What a passion fires the hard, convincing thought! How the mere logic holds the attention! Every word lives, and the cadences (creating a new form for themselves) do but follow the motions of the writer's bright, controlling energy. It is impossible to read the lines aloud without a feeling of exultation. In Watson's ode there is not a breath of life; what is said—admirable and sensible, and at times poetically conceived as it is—comes with no impetus from the mind that has conceived it coldly. And it is to be noted that, though thought and expression are fitted together with great skill and precision, the expression is always rather above the pitch of the thought. Take these lines:
O doom of overlordships! to decay
First at the heart, the eye scarce dimmed at all;
Or perish of much cumber and array,
The burdening robe of empire, and its pall;
Or, of voluptuous hours the wanton prey;
Die of the poisons that most sweetly slay;
Or, from insensate height,
With prodigies, with light
Of trailing angers on the monstrous night,
Magnificently fall.
There we find expression strained to a point to which the thought has not attained. In other words, we find rhetoric. Weight and resonance of verse do but drag down and deafen that which they should uplift and sound abroad, when, instead of being attendants upon greatness, they attempt to replace it.
[EMIL VERHAEREN]
The poetry of Emile Verhaeren, more than that of any other modern poet, is made directly out of the complaining voices of the nerves. Other writers, certainly, have been indirectly indebted to the effect of nerves on temperament, but Verhaeren seems to express only so much of a temperament as finds its expression through their immediate medium. In his early books Les Flamandes, Les Moines (reprinted, with Les Bords de la Route, containing earlier and later work, in the first of his two volumes of collected poems), he began by a solid, heavily colored, exterior manner of painting genre pictures in the Flemish style. Such poems as "Les Paysans," with its fury of description, are like a Teniers in verse; not Breughel has painted a kermesse with hotter colors, a more complete abandonment to the sunlight, wine and gross passions of those Flemish feasts. This first book, Les Flamandes, belongs to the Naturalistic movement; but it has already as in the similar commencements of Huysmans so ardent a love of color for its own sake, color becoming lyrical, that one realizes how soon this absorption in the daily life of farms, kitchens, stables, will give place to another kind of interest. And in Les Moines, while there is still for the most part the painting of exteriorities, a new sentiment, by no means the religious sentiment, but an artistic interest in what is less material, less assertive in things, finds for itself an entirely new scheme of color. Here, for instance, was "Cuisson de Pain," in the first book:
Dehors, les grands fournils chauffaient leurs braises
rouges,
Et deux par deux, du bout d'une planche, les gouges
Dans le ventre des fours engouffraient les pains mous.
Et les flammes, par les gueules s'ouvrant passage,
Comme une meute énorme et chaude de chiens roux,
autaient en rugissant leur mordre le visage.
But it is not until Les Soirs that we find what was to be the really individual style developing itself. It develops itself at first with a certain heaviness. Here is a poet who writes in images: good; but the images are larger than the ideas. Wishing to say that the hour was struck, he says: