Racine stately, splendid and melodious verse. The absolute perfection of the French they cannot see. Byron has always appealed to foreigners. They appreciate his force, his rhetoric, his satire, his cynicism, his knowledge of the world. Wordsworth has none of these things. He has not even humour, except that he does not really say ridiculous things. The critics of the Lake poets, especially Jeffrey and Lockhart-rivals in everything else, but agreeing in their incapacity to estimate Wordsworth and Coleridge-vied with one another in their efforts at turning them into ridicule. Posterity, at least that part of posterity which cares for such things, has decided that they made nothing of it. Ridicule may, or may not, be a test of truth. It is certainly a test of poetry. Many poets famous in that day have succumbed to it. Wordsworth, as Browning says of Beddoes, breasts the tide. The tide ran strong, for Byron lent his prodigious force to it. But it was not strong enough to overwhelm the stout Cumbrian statesman, who said his prayers, and went on as if nothing had happened. He did not see the fun. It did not amuse him and he was not afraid of it. How completely the result justified him would hardly be worth stating if it were not for two facts. The first is that his assailants were supremely clever. The second is that his triumph was greater than if he had never been attacked. There are few, if any, other instances in literary history where a poet has owed so much to his detractors. They called attention to his peculiar merits. For Wordsworth is often at his best when he is most homely, and when he therefore lends himself to the easiest ridicule. When to the Edinburgh Reviewers he was a stumbling-block, when to Macaulay he was foolishness, then he was a great poet to the few who can discern, and an edifying writer to the many who sustain, if they do not make, reputations. It is not the Odes to Duty and On Immortality, it is not the lines on Tintern Abbey, or the two stanzas on the death of Lucy, by which the public in general know Wordsworth. Partly, no doubt, it is the Sonnets which are common ground, being equally admired by the most fastidious and the least discriminate lovers of poetry. But it is also, and in a special degree, Michael and We are Seven, and Alice Fell, and Lucy Gray. These are just the sort of lines which the smart reviewer of the day loved to make the object of his cheap jokes:

Upon the Forest-side in Grasmere Vale

There dwelt a shepherd, Michael was his name,
An old man, stout of heart and strong of limb.

Yet they are not prose, and it would be a good exercise for the selfconstituted critic of poetry to explain why they are not. There is a simple line of a contemporary poet, whom I will not name, which prose pure and simple:

is

Why have I silent been so long?

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You do not turn prose into poetry by simply altering the natural order of the words. Wordsworth leaves the order quite unchanged. But he gives the incommunicable touch which makes all the difference in the world. There is a famous verse, equally simple, which describes Michael's attempt to build a sheep-fold after his son's ignominious disappearance:

"Tis not forgotten yet

The pity which was then in every heart

For the Old Man-and 'tis believed by all
That many and many a day he thither went,
And never lifted up a single stone.

There we see how a real poet expresses the simplest possible idea in the simplest possible language, without being in the least like Pope, or like Horace's sermo pedestris qui repit humi. Pope no poet? said an old Scottish lady, referring to The Rape of the Lock, 'I ken every card in Belinda's hand!' The conclusion does not follow from the premisses, but there are several kinds of poets. Byron's attempt to put Pope above Wordsworth recoiled upon himself, and damaged his own reputation. Pope had no idea of poetry in his head, though, like Byron, who was really praising himself when he was praising him, he was full of eloquence, and still more full of wit. Wordsworth said of Goethe that Goethe's poetry was not inevitable enough. It is hardly true of Goethe perhaps. But the opposite is certainly true of Wordsworth. His poetry is inevitable. It could not have been otherwise. The poem on the daffodils which begins ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,' is purely and intensely Wordsworthian. No one else could have written it since the world began.

HERBERT PAUL.

THE RIGHT TO WORK'

No social observer can fail to be impressed by the significance of the debate and division which took place in the House of Commons on Friday, the 13th of March. On that day no fewer than 116 members of the House voted for a Bill 'to provide work through Public Authorities for unemployed persons and for other purposes connected therewith.' Promoted by the Labour party, and backed by such men as Mr. Shackleton, Mr. Arthur Henderson, Mr. Barnes, Mr. John Ward, and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, the Bill was supported in the division lobby by two Unionists and some sixty or seventy 'orthodox' Liberals. It is permissible to surmise, especially after the querulous speech delivered by the chief Liberal Whip, that more Liberals were prevented from straying from the fold only by a stern insistence on party discipline. Even more suggestive, perhaps, is the fact that nearly 300 members found it convenient to be absent from the House on that memorable Friday afternoon.

It may be worth while to scrutinise somewhat narrowly the exact scope of the measure which frightened so many valiant legislators away from Westminster and secured the support of so large a proportion of those who 'faced the music.' The Unemployed Workmen's Bill provided for the creation of a Central Unemployed Committee, consisting of persons representative of the Boards of Agriculture, Trade, Education, and Local Government, together with 'not less than two persons nominated by a national body or bodies representative of trade unions.' It proposed to enact that all County and Borough Councils and all Urban District Councils with a population of over 20,000 should act as Local Unemployment Authorities and should initiate an exhaustive system for the registration of unemployed persons. But the kernel of the Bill was indubitably contained in Clause 3, which ran as follows:

Where a workman has registered himself as unemployed, it shall be the duty of the local unemployment authority, subject to conditions hereinafter to be imposed, to provide work for him in connection with one or other of the schemes hereinafter provided, or otherwise, or failing the provision of work, to provide maintenance should necessity exist for that person and for those depending on that person for the necessaries of life. Provided that a refusal on the part of the unemployed workman to accept reasonable work upon one of these 999

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schemes, or other employment upon conditions not lower than those that are standard to the work in the locality, shall release the local unemployment authority of its duties under this section.

Other clauses provided for the appointment of unemployment commissioners to make inquiries necessary for the working of this Act, to inspect and examine work being done under this Act,' etc.; for meeting the expenses of administration from national taxation or local rates; for the acquisition of land, 'dwellings, buildings, material, tools, implements, machinery and plant,' and for dealing with any case in which unemployment is owing to deliberate and habitual disinclination to work.' When this is the case the Unemployment Authority

may report the case to a court of summary jurisdiction, and the court may issue an order which shall permit the local unemployment authority to enforce control over the person named in the order for a period not exceeding six months, which period must be passed in the performance of reasonable work under the supervision or control of the local unemployment authority.

But interesting and suggestive as the rest of the Bill may be, it is desirable to concentrate attention upon its essential principle, enshrined in Clause 3, which may be described as the legislative recognition of the right to work. In the course of the debate Mr. Asquith thus summarised the proposals with commendable explicitness :

or in

It comes to this, that as a remedy for the problem of unemployment you are to give to every man or woman who registers himself or herself as an unemployed person the right to demand and to impose on the local authority in the district or area in which he or she resides the obligation to provide work, and work, as I read the Bill, at the standard rate of wages default of such work to maintain him or her and all those dependent on them. . That is a principle which involves ... the complete ultimate control by the State of the full machinery of production, and which, in my opinion so far from remedying or helping to remedy the problem of unemployment, will vastly aggravate it. The real issue is, Is this House going to recognise for the first time in the history of Parliament this principle of the right to work and the obligation to provide work, which, once recognised, will, I venture to say, lead to conclusions little dreamt of or suspected to-day?. I believe these conclusions, if carried into practical effect, will have consequences which .. would prejudice no class of the community more seriously than the working class.

Mr. Asquith's analysis, calm and critical, yet not unsympathetic, was admirably adapted to the occasion. That the problem for which the Bill offered a solution is grave and insistent will be denied by no one who has any acquaintance with the industrial conditions of to-day. The demand for work put forward by a sober, well-conducted and able-bodied workman thrown out of employment, perhaps by the invention of labour-saving machinery, perhaps by a change of fashion, perhaps by a recurrence of the cyclical depression of trade, is one which must appeal to all whose ears are not deaf to the cry of human suffering.

But it is necessary at this point to enter an emphatic protest against an assumption which is becoming all too common. Pity for undeserved misfortune has not yet become the monopoly of any single party, political or economic. To express mistrust of any particular solution is not to deny the existence of a problem or to refuse to sympathise with the consequences arising from it. Caution is confounded with callousness, and a refusal to take the first short cut indicated by inexperienced enthusiasm is denounced as cowardice, even though the short cut may lead over an economic or social precipice. Such a short cut is to be found in Clause 3 of the Bill rejected by the House of Commons on the 13th of March. That Bill was supported from some quarters by the usual appeal to a priori 'rights,' but the serious and scientific argument in its favour was thus stated by Mr. Ramsay Macdonald :

Every economist, every sociological investigator in the country, with Mr. Charles Booth at their head, had laid down that modern industry demanded a surplus of labour to carry it on. He wanted to supplement that by another doctrine, that modern industry not only required a steady surplusage of labour, which might become a minimum, but also required now and again a critical condition of unemployment. It not only required its 2 per cent. always, but its 10 per cent. occasionally. If they agreed with that, there was an inevitable corollary. If we were to have unemployed, not because the men were inferior to the employed, but because of the very nature of the organisation of industry, it was a logical and humane corollary that the burden of unemployment should not be placed on the backs of these weak men, should not be left to charity or to odds and ends of ill-assorted legislation, but should be dealt with more and more on the lines of Clause 3 of the present Bill.

No fair-minded person will deny the force of Mr. Macdonald's plea. But before it can be admitted as argument for legislation two questions, at least, demand an answer. Admitting the doctrine of 'labour reserves,' is there any sufficient reason why the economic burden of providing these should be laid upon the shoulders of the State? Is it not a burden which ought to be borne by the industries primarily concerned? In a word, ought not the expense of maintaining the necessary reserves to fall upon the employer who is presumed to benefit from their existence ? 1

Again: Mr. Macdonald must show that the phenomenon which everyone deplores has made its appearance only since the introduction of modern industrial methods, and can be cured only by the method which he prefers. Can either proposition be seriously maintained? Unemployment is unhappily no new phenomenon, either in this or in other countries. It has no doubt been accentuated by the conditions of contemporary industrial life; the crises appear to recur with increased frequency; and manifestly it has become more stridently articulate; but it is not new or even abnormal. It would unquestionably

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This point was developed in an admirable article in the Spectator, March 21 1908.