You lashed and streaming rocks, and sobbing crags,
The screaming gull and the wild-flying cloud :—
To see far off the smoke of my own hearth,
To smell far out the glebe of my own farms,

To spring alive upon her precipices,
And hurl the singing spear into the air;

To scoop the mountain torrent in my hand,
And plunge into the midnight of her pines;
To look into the eyes of her who bore me,
And clasp his knees who 'gat me in his joy,
Prove if my son be like my dream of him.
We two have played and tossed each other words;
Goddess and mortal we have met and kissed—
Now am I mad for silence and for tears,

For the earthly voice, that breaks at earthly ills,
The mortal hands that make and smooth the bed.

I am an-hungered for that human breast,
That bosom-a sweet hive of memories
There, there to lay my head before I die,
There, there to be, there only, there at last!

[Calypso weeps. Ulysses comes and touches her softly.

Remember, Goddess, the great while it is,

How far, far back, alas how long ago!

I admire the prudence of the dramatic critics who were not going to be taken in by appearances. This might seem to be poetry; but they would like to see it down in black and white first. Would a merchant, I wonder, continue to employ a tea-taster who declined to pronounce without resort to chemical analysis? Surely the appeal of all poetry is to the ear, not to the eye, and this is doubly true of dramatic poetry. You cannot judge fairly of the verse which Mr. Phillips writes in his plays when you know it only in cold print; it is designed to be spoken, and spoken to a crowd. The point is worth stressing, for it affects the estimate of him as a poet, and I think that the critics who pin a narrow meaning on to the word dramatic' are equally narrow in their conception of poetry. It is significant, this assumption that poetry must submit to be judged by the eye, which after all plays only a mechanical part in the business. In a recent book called The Beginnings of Poetry, Professor Gummere, an American critic, instituted a distinction, new to me and very suggestive, between poetry which is communal and poetry which is individualist. It is needless to go into details, but any one will see that, for instance, Wordsworth's sonnet on Westminster Bridge expresses the mood of an individual, and can only be enjoyed in seclusion. And the whole tendency of modern literature has been to make poetry more and more a matter of expressing the solitary emotion, the highly individualised turn of thought. Poetry has grown esoteric, and the beautiful verse which Mr. Yeats writes in his most recent play, The Shadowy Waters, would be unintelligible to an average audience, and pushes its avoidance of rhetoric and of

the obvious rhythm to a point at which it is apt to seem, to the normal person, either incoherent or unmelodious. Now the strongest quality in Mr. Phillips is that he has no fear of the obvious. He trusts to his own fire and force, as Byron trusted, to lift out of the commonplace a common emotion or a common thought. With him we escape from the tyranny of the over-subtilised; his poetry is communal, not in the sense that it descends to the level of the crowd, but that it can lift the crowd to its own; and that is why he has got into touch with the great body of readers, as no poet has done since Tennyson, save possibly. Mr. Swinburne in his earlier work. He has reached a point at which criticism can do little for or against his books, but the case is different with a play.

I

A play can ill afford to wait upon the slow effect of oral commendation, the press can always make itself felt, and specially when the thing attempted is something of a novelty. For that reason I deplored the unsympathetic attitude of the newspapers towards Ulysses, and am overjoyed that the public, in spite of it, seem of my inclination. For, in plain words, I am sick to death, and so are many other people, of the stale sordid atmosphere with which modern comedy, and modern tragi-comedy, surrounds itself. recognise the cleverness, the talent both of actors and of dramatists, in such plays as Lord Quex and Mrs. Dane's Defence: I see them once, and I go away, interested and slightly disgusted, without the least desire to see them again. Even when the clean breath of real tragedy is brought into these surroundings, as it was by Mrs. Clifford in The Likeness of the Night, still I depart unexhilarated. There is a thing lacking, and that is beauty; the beauty which can inform either tragedy or comedy, which keeps Shakespeare imperishable. It is the beauty of poetry, and you may drive out poetry with a pitchfork, she will always come back in triumph. Your cleverly constructed play, lacking poetry—that is, lacking not verse, but the touch of imagination which lifts the listener out of finite limitations and curiosities-has only the charm of clever talk, or clever anecdote that palls on repetition. Poetry which is not tied down in a narrow appeal to the logical intelligence, but is, as Milton said, 'simple, sensuous, and passionate,' has the elemental pleasure in it of a spring day, or of autumn sunset. And I hold, as the Greeks held, as the French hold, that perhaps the fullest enjoyment of that pleasure is to be got from poetry on the stage, where it dominates and uses to its own end the beauty of sight and sound at once, the grace of gesture, the richness of colour, the music of song and instruments, the melody of verse, and the glory of splendid words. When so much is attempted there must always be defects, but it is ignorant criticism that can see only the flaws. The wise man, seeking enjoyment, fixes his attention on what pleases, not on what detracts from pleasure. For my own part, if I may for a moment

pose as the wise, I would say that, allowing for all shortcomings, the enjoyment which I got from Ulysses was ten times more than I got from any modern English drama (excepting parts of Herod); it was not only greater, it was different in kind; it was not amusement, it was pleasure.

If a critic is bound to indicate the flaws as well as the excellences, I would classify them into three kinds: faults of acting, faults of management, faults of writing. It is not in the nature of things that all the actors in a large cast should approach the standard set by Mr. Tree himself, and by Miss Collier, Mr. Asche, Mr. Brough, Mr. Kemble, and I would add Mr. Fulton. The tradition of our stage in the matter of speaking verse has become deplorable; though if the impulse given by Mr. Phillips and Mr. Tree continue, this may be quickly reformed. Concerning the management, I would say that there is too much limelight everywhere, but especially in the Hell scene; the more dimly seen the whole of that wonderful spectacle, the stronger its effect. But chiefly I censure Mr. Tree's concessions to a narrow time limit and to criticism. Mr. Phillips's instinct was sound, in my judgment, when he put the set speeches of the Suitors into the final scene. There is in that act, as it is now played, too ceaseless a movement, we cry out for the repose given by these measured orations. I quote the end of the speech of Eurymachus : Sea-gazing consort of a hero dead,

Reign thou with me and find in rule relief.
That thou no longer art a girl, and green,
Troubles me not; rather, I prize thee more
For that long suffering and sleeplessness,
And the sweet wisdom of thy widowhood.
Thou hast caught splendour from the sailless sea
And mystery from many stars out-watched;
Rarer art thou from yearning, and more rich.
Humbly I would entreat thee for my answer.

Of these lines only the first two are now spoken, and this is only a part of the omissions. If you are going to rely on poetry, you must trust poetry, and I cannot imagine an audience so dull as not to be affected by such lines as these. No one questions the charm of eloquence in pulpit or on platform, and poetry like this is eloquence sublimated.

But it is an ungrateful business to cavil at the work of a man who has staked money and reputation on what seemed the quixotic attempt to bring back poetry to the modern stage. And, however one may dissent on points of details, there is no mistaking the high order of intelligence that has been shown by Mr. Tree in these two productions. He deserves to be written high among the benefactors of those who love the drama. Nor should Mr. Alexander's name be omitted here, since without his encouragement Mr. Phillips might probably never have attempted the stage. There

remain a few words to be said by way of criticism on the writing of the play. Mr. Phillips should keep a tight hand on himself in the use of alliteration; an indispensable device which should not be allowed to grow palpable. On points of detail, I would ask, first, why Calypso, clinging to Ulysses and striving to keep him back, should say:

Now by the time I thought eternity

By long sea evenings when all words would cease,
By all the sad tales of thy wanderings,

Sad tales which will be happy to remember.

That is surely not the moment for a hæc olim meminisse juvabit, for the courageous forecast of a pleasure. I would ask again why Mr. Phillips has chosen the worse of two reasons supplied by Homer, when Ulysses has to furnish a pretext to Telemachus for removing the weapons in the hall. Smoke would not tarnish them that day more than any other day, but on the day when Penelope was to make her choice there was specious reason for fearing a quarrel, avròs yàp ¿þéλketai ävòpa oidnpós. My list of objections is longer, but I curtail it. I commend Ulysses, whether as poem or as play, to all who love poetry or the drama, and I would urge upon them a liberal interpretation of both words. Poetry should not be limited to the exquisitely turned phrase or the subtilised emotion that needs to be enjoyed in silence and solitude; nor does drama consist merely in 'situations' which awaken kindred emotions to those which are roused at best by the spectacle of two cocks sparring or, at worst, of a cat playing with a mouse.

STEPHEN GWYNN.

IS THE CROWNED KING

AN ECCLESIASTICAL PERSON?

NOWHERE, it may readily be admitted, have liturgical studies been pursued of late years with greater ardour than in this country, and nowhere has more excellent work been done in the publication of important liturgical texts than by certain members of the Henry Bradshaw Society who are prominently identified with High Church principles. Continental scholars have not been slow in recognising the fact. The Abbé Ulysse Chevalier, himself a distinguished liturgiologist, discoursing not very long since on la Renaissance des Etudes Liturgiques before the Catholic Congress at Fribourg, took occasion to remark, 'In this list (of liturgical publications), which I do not put forward as complete, our neighbours on the other side of the Channel hold the first place, and there seems every probability that they will long retain this position in the study of the ancient liturgies and those of Great Britain in particular.' Similarly Dr. Adalbert Ebner, in the bibliographical sketch with which he has enriched the second edition of Thalhofer's Liturgik, declares that 'incontestably the Ritualistic movement in England must count as the most important factor amongst the influences which have led to the modern development of liturgical studies.' And such testimonies might easily be multiplied.

With regard to the Henry Bradshaw Society in particular, which is now the focus amongst Anglicans of most of this excellent work, the Committee and Editors have for some time past devoted special attention to the Coronation ritual. The English Coronation Orders in the course of the last few years have been published with a completeness which no other country can rival. And there is a peculiar appropriateness in the prominence thus given to the subject. No document setting forth in detail the ceremonial of a royal sacring is probably so old as one of English origin, which The possible exception is the Benedictio ad ordinandum Regem, which has recently been published by Dr. M. Magistretti with the rest of the text of the Ambrosian Pontificale of the ninth century. The codex itself is probably older in date than either the Pontificale Lanaletense of Rouen or the copy of Egbert's Pontifical at Paris, which contain the English order.