It is all very well to object that this is not the first time we have had this fellowship proclaimed, but in the arts alone can we find the inner heart of a people. There is a deeper calm and a deeper conviction in this eastern expression than we have yet attained. It is by the arts alone that one people learns to meet another far distant people in friendship and respect.
I speak with all gravity when I say that world-fellowship is nearer for the visit of Rabindranath Tagore to London.
Ezra Pound
REVIEWS
The Poems of Rosamund Marriott Watson (John Lane.)
This English poet, whose singing ceased a year ago, had a real lyric gift, though a very slight one. The present volume is a collection of all her poems, from the first girlish sheaf Tares, to The Lamp and the Lute, which she was preparing for publication when she died.
Through this whole life-record her poetry ripples along as smoothly and delicately as a meadow rill, with never a pause nor a flurry nor a thrill. She sings prettily of everyone, from the Last Fairy to William Ernest Henley, and of everything, from Death and Justice to the Orchard of the Moon, but she has nothing arresting or important to say of any of these subjects, and no keen magic of phrase to give her warbling that intense vitality which would win for her the undying fame prophesied by her loyal husband in his preface.
Nevertheless, her feeling is genuine, her touch light, and her tune a quiet monotone of gentle soothing music which has a certain soft appeal. Perhaps the secret of it is the fine quality of soul which breathes through these numerous lyrics, a soul too reserved to tell its whole story, and too preoccupied with the little things around and within her to pay much attention to the thinking, fighting, ever-moving world without.
A big-spirited, vital, headlong narrative poem is The Adventures of Young Maverick, by Hervey White, who runs a printing press at Woodstock, N. Y., and bravely publishes The Wild Hawk, his own little magazine. The poem has as many moods as Don Juan, which is plainly, though not tyrannically, its model.