47 PALACE COURT
CHAPTER VII: "POEMS"
In 1893 Messrs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane published Poems, a square book in brown boards with gold circles and a frontispiece by Laurence Housman. The poet viewed it with pleasure, and elsewhere the praise and blame it received were both wholehearted:—
"Many thanks for the copies. The book is indeed beautifully got up," he writes. "I have to thank you for the Chronicle and to thank Mr. Le Gallienne for his article. Such unselfish enthusiasm in a young poet for the work of a brother poet is as rare as it is graceful in these times, when most littérateurs have adopted the French author's maxim: 'There are no writers of genius except myself and a few friends—and I am not certain about my friends.'"
And later:—
"I have read in the Register with great surprise that the first edition is exhausted. I am even more glad for my publisher's sake than for my own. The St. James's article, as unusually appreciative as that of the Chronicle, I am very pleased with."
Recurring, in another letter to W. M., to Mr. Le Gallienne's Chronicle article, he writes:—
"When the first whirl of language is over (was it not a sin of my own former prose when I waxed enthusiastic?) he settles down to appreciation which is at the same time criticism. Will it be believed, however, that after deprecating superlatives I am actually disposed to rank myself higher than Mr. Le Gallienne's final sentence might seem to imply. I absolutely think that my poetry is 'greater' than any work by a new poet which has appeared since Rossetti. Unless, indeed, the greater work to which the critic referred was Mrs. Meynell's. I frankly admit that her poetry has exquisite unclamorous qualities beside which all the fireworks of my own are much less enduring things. Otherwise, I will not vail my crest to Henley, or Robert Bridges, or even William Watson. For the rest I have nothing but warm and surprised gratitude for your untiring efforts on my behalf. I am very pleased with all the letters you have sent me, particularly Vincent O'Sullivan's from Oxford. Am I going to found a school there?
"The minor versifier has at any rate the asterisks in a 'Judgment in Heaven' which he can catch on to. There he can have the latest device in poetry, the whole apparatus procurable at my printer's. I have not forgotten that it was Le Gallienne's admiration for the specimen sent to Lane which finally decided the publication of my book; and I should indeed be sorry to know that I had repaid him by wounding his feelings.
F. T."