exotics, to be sure; or rather, our young men who display extreme cleverness in raising small exotic plants from English soil. But the practice of this eccentric horticulture is a fad rather than a movement, and the plants grow to a very little height. I believe that Mr. Arthur Symons's "Silhouettes" mark the extreme point up to which they can be trained, and that the fate of Mr. Symons's really brilliant talent depends on his willingness

or

unwillingness to outgrow these morbidezzas and minauderies of juvenile melancholy, and woo the Muse with something less of self-consciousness. Mr. Mallock also has too much humour to take the publication of his book of verses half as seriously as the critics do. But his joke is so subtle that he will, I am certain, allow us to slur its point, and for the benefit of ingenuous youth warn them against attempting to imitate it. I feel a malicious pleasure, too, in pointing out to Mr. Symons (who loves to be ahead of the fashion) that to be morbid just now is to be sadly belated. Five years ago-two years ago-we were all dolorous, and given to addressing the world in terms of weary pessimism. But our disease is by this time as hopelessly antiquated as the Vapours. We seek now to let the fresh wind in upon our pages, and the Grace's naked toe treads so hard upon the heels of satin slipper and varnished boot as to gall the wearers' kibes. We begin to recognise that a constant quality of all the best of our English literature has been a large sense of the open air, and a cheerfulnessranging from good-humoured stoicism to lyric rapture-such as the open air breeds. In Mr. Le Gallienne's " English Poems" the air, if I may say so, seems a trifle too heavily scented-though with native blooms to be quite English. But the best poets in their youth have cloyed us with sweetness; and Mr. Le Gallienne has plenty of time before him for diluting his honey. More than this-since the publication of the volume before me, his work has been steadily growing in strength. His subjects to-day have more weight, and his handling is more accomplished. I can speak positively on this point, for Mr. Le Gallienne's career was obviously worth watching from the first, and I have watched for his verses in the magazines and reviews, and studied them eagerly. Do any of my readers remember certain lines of his, "The Second Crucifixion," which appeared in The Speaker

V.

al

Mr. Le Gallienne, most at the beginning of his career, gave us a clever and sympathetic "appreciation "that is the latest word, it seems -of George Meredith. And Mr. Meredith, one guesses, is the very man to rejoice in Mr. Le Gallienne's growing strength of song; not only because it has found nutriment in the study of his own methods, but because our great novelist's heart is always with the young. That which he calls "the cry of the conscience of Life "

"Keep the young generations in hail,

And bequeath them no tumbled horse." -has been the note of all his recent writings, of " One of Our Conquerors no less than of his latest small volume of verse. His own modest estimate of his poesy he condenses, I believe, in the phrase "piping in a corner." But the corner at any rate is sufficiently wide to include all those who, living in close

years ago. Yet this is what those critics predict who find significance and even the germs of a new poetic "movement" in the sudden popularity of Mr. William Watson. I may as well confess at once that I am one of the very few among Mr. Watson's contemporaries who can claim

no share at all in the "discovery" of his genius; nor have I yet thrown my cap into the air over it. In 1880 no less a judge than Rossetti wrote of him in a letter to Mr. Hall Caine that "He goes right back to Keats with a little modification." After reading "The Prince's Quest," on which this judgment was founded, I must humbly dissent; but the question has lost its importance, since Mr. Watson has by this time evolved a style of his own, which is as unlike Keats's as any style may be. Of his more recent verse I find Mr. Grant Allen writing, "In its own kind, I venture to say, since In Memoriam burst upon us, we have not heard from any

new

tongue quite SO authentic a voice, so large and whole an utterance; we have not met anywhere with such close marks of kinship to the sanest work of the great English singers." This does something less than justice to Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis," written about a dozen years after the publication of In Memoriam; but up to a point we may agree with Mr. The voice is "authentic "; Grant Allen. the utterance is "large and whole "; if Mr. Watson has a message for our generation, we may rest content he will deliver it perfectly. Only I am still in some doubt about this message, observing that his fame at this moment rests almost

entirely on a few graceful elegiacs upon a few dead poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson. I may be answered that the fame of Gray rests upon a scarcely broader base; and will admit the example of Gray to prove that a poet may attain to the first, or almost the first rank, though his writings be very few in number, his thoughts far from original or deep, his sympathies far from warm or wide. But Gray had a rare sense of humour, and Mr. Watson has none, as he has been at pains to demonstrate to us in that very saddening caprice "The Eloping Angels.' And Gray's thought, if shallow enough, was exquisitely limpid; whereas Mr. Watson's is occasionally confused, as in the third line of his now famous memorial verse upon Tennyson

"Carry the last great bard to his last bed-" where the antithesis is entirely illogical. A poet without either humour or wide sympathies or the gift of lyrical rapture must find it a stiff climb to the summit of Parnassus; but if any man can be carried to the very top by careful workmanship, sobriety of feeling, an exquisite sense of the right word and a power of fusing poetical sequences unparalleled among living writers, Mr. William Watson is that man. It is hard to be fair to one's own feelings in a few lines, and I feel with shame that the above remarks effectively dissemble a very sincere admiration.

VII.

BUT it is possible that I should be very much more unfair if I allowed myself to write at length of the last two poets on our list. The public is now more or less accurately acquainted with Mr. Hosken's history, and I have engaged to give some particulars of it in another place. Let it be confessed then that when first I saw Phaon and Sappho in a small privatelyprinted volume, I had doubts about its author's capacity-doubts which (let me say) greater critics than I did not share. The poetic gift was there, but its strength and range did not seem satisfactorily asserted. An examination of a considerable mass of Mr. Hosken's verse in manuscript astonished me out of these doubts, and I now stand pledged to the opinion that here is a poet the world

new

T. E. BROWN.

From a photograph.

volume of verse and his first collection of lyrics. We all have our favourite writers, those who (fortuitously perhaps) have helped us at some crisis of our life, have spoken to us with peculiar appropriateness at the right moment, and for that reason sit cathedrally enthroned in our affections. Το explain why the author of Betsy Lec, Tommy Big-Eyes, and The Doctor, is more to me than any living poet-why to open a new book of his is one of the most exciting literary events that can befall me now in my twenty-ninth year-would take some time, and the explanation might poorly satisfy my audience. But to a few hearts, I am sure, this poet speaks more directly than any living writer. Having carefully read the opinions of some half-dozen reviewers on this new book of his I can only wonder. Either they or I must be crass beyond hope. And there let me leave the question to the public, with the recommendation that it read two poems in this new volume, Mater Dolorosa and Catherine Kinrade. If it remain cold to these, then-I shall still preserve my own opinion,