The poem is long for these days—five cantos and nearly six hundred Spenserian stanzas. Yet the most casual reader, one would think, could scarcely find it tedious, even though the satirical passages run heavily at times. The hero is a colt of lofty Arabian lineage, and the poem becomes eloquently pictorial in setting forth his beauty:
Young Maverick in the upland pastures lay Woven as in the grass, while star-like flowers, Shaking their petals down in sweet array Dappled his flanks with gentle breathless showers. The thread green stems, tangled in bending bowers, Their pollen plumes of dust closed over him, Enwoofing through the drowse of summer hours, The pattern of his body, head and limb; His color of pale gold glowed as with sunshine dim.
The spirit of the West is in this poem, its freedom, spaciousness, strong sunshine; also its careless good humor and half sardonic fun. The race between the horse and the Mexican boy is as swift, vivid and rhythmical as a mountain stream; and the Mexican family, even to the fat old Gregorio, are characterized to the life, with a sympathy only too rare among writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Certain other characterizations are equally incisive, this for example:
Sometimes I peep into a modern poet Like Arthur Symons, vaguely beautiful, Who loves but love, not caring who shall know it; I wonder that he never finds it dull.
Mr. White is so profoundly a democrat, and so wholeheartedly a poet of the broad, level average American people, that both social and artistic theories sit very lightly upon him. He achieves beauty as by chance now and then, because he can not help it, but always he achieves a warm vitality, the persuasive illusion of life.
The Iscariot, by Eden Phillpotts (John Lane), is the ingenious effort of a theorist in human nature to unroll the convolutions of the immortal traitor's soul. And it is as ineffectual as any such effort must be to remould characters long fixed in literary or historic tradition. In the art of the world Judas is Judas; anyone who tries to make him over into a pattern of misguided loyalty has his labor for his pains.
The blank verse in which the monologue is uttered is accurately measured and sufficiently sonorous.
H. M.