At the time of their appearance these lines and the like of them were vastly admired; everybody read them, most people praised them. They were supposed to stir the English blood like a blast of martial trumpets. Here at length was the poet England had been waiting for. There could be no mistake about him; he had the authentic voice, the incommunicable fire, the master-touch. He had come to stay. At the present moment the bulk of his metrical work is just about as dead and forgotten as the coster-songs of yesteryear. He has not even made a cult; nobody quotes him, nobody believes in him as a poetical master, nobody wants to hear any more of him. His imitators have all gone back to the imitation of better men. If a copy of verses have a flavour of Kipling about it nowadays, editors drop it as they would drop a hot coal. So much for the poet of empire, the poet of the people, the metrical patron of Thomas Atkins, Esq.
Another poet of empire—Mr. W.E. Henley—has fared very little better. "What can I do for England?" is, I believe, still in request among the makers of a certain class of anthology; but English poetry in the bulk is just the same as if Mr. Henley had never been. Even the balderdash about "my indomitable soul" has fallen out of the usus loquendi of young men's Christian associations and young men's debating societies. The Song of the Sword is sung no longer; For England's Sake has gone the way of all truculent war-poetry; and out of Hawthorn and Lavender perhaps a couple of lyrics remain. Mr. Henley attacked Burns when Burns had been a century dead. Who will consider it worth while to attack Mr. Henley in, say, the year 2002?
Possibly the real, true English poet who will in due course put on the laurel of Mr. Austin is Mr. Stephen Phillips. Yet Mr. Stephen Phillips is a purveyor of metrical notions for the stage, and in his last great work—Ulysses—I find him writing as follows:
Athene. Father, whose oath in hollow hell is heard,
Whose act is lightning after thunder-word,
A boon! a boon! that I compassion find
For one, the most unhappy of mankind.
Zeus. How is he named?
Athene. Ulysses. He who planned
To take the towered city of Troy-land—
A mighty spearsman, and a seaman wise,
A hunter, and at need a lord of lies.
With woven wiles he stole the Trojan town
Which ten years' battle could not batter down:
Oft hath he made sweet sacrifice to thee.
Zeus (nodding benevolently). I mind me of the savoury smell.
Athene. Yet he,
When all the other captains had won home,
Was whirled about the wilderness of foam:
For the wind and the wave have driven him evermore,
Mocked by the green of some receding shore.
Yet over wind and wave he had his will,
Blistered and buffeted, unbaffled still.
Ever the snare was set, ever in vain—
The Lotus Island and the Siren strain;
Through Scylla and Charybdis hath he run,
Sleeplessly plunging to the setting sun.
Who hath so suffered, or so far hath sailed,
So much encountered, and so little quailed?
Which is exactly the kind of poetry one requires for the cavern scene of a New Year's pantomime.
Possibly, again, the real, true English poet is Mr. William Watson, with his tiresome mimicry of Wordsworth and his high-and-dry style of lyrical architecture. Mr. Watson is believed to have done great things, but his rôle now appears to be one of austere silence; he is what the old writers would have termed a costive poet. And if his Collected Poems are to be the end of him, his end will not be long deferred. Or, possibly, the one and only poet our England of to-day would wish to boast is Mr. Arthur Symons. Mr. Symons writes just the kind of poetry one might expect of a versifier who, in early youth, had loved a cigarette-smoking ballet-girl, and could never bring himself to repress his passion. Here is a sample of Mr. Arthur Symons at his choicest:
The feverish room and that white bed,
The tumbled skirts upon a chair,
The novel flung half open where
Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread.
And you, half dressed and half awake,
Your slant eyes strangely watching me;
And I, who watch you drowsily,
With eyes that, having slept not, ache:
This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)
Will rise, a ghost of memory, if
Ever again my handkerchief
Is scented with White Heliotrope.