Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force, Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, To throw that faint thin line upon the shore! There are many other aspects of Meredith as a poet which might be mentioned if space were unlimited. One might speak of his beautiful rehandling, so entirely and characteristically his own, of some of the Greek myths, as in Phoebus with Admetus, and The Day of the Daughter of Hades. Or one might speak of his astonishing and equally original power of observing and interpreting landscape; the power which, to some of his readers, provides the most unalloyed of all the pleasures to be found in his novels. Some instances of its presence in the poems have already been quoted; it would be easy to add to them. But perhaps it is better to devote the space that remains to a characteristic in which Meredith stands alone. No English poet, perhaps no poet of any time or country, has produced a volume that can be fitly placed by the side of the Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History. We have had great writers of the poetry of history in England. The ideas which give history its life, the eternal ideas of liberty, and justice and wisdom, could not have found nobler voices than England found for them in Milton and Wordsworth and Shelley and Swinburne. But whether they approach these great themes mainly as lovers of their country, like Milton and Wordsworth, or mainly as seers of a universal vision, like Shelley, they have made little or no pretence of rivalling the historians on their own ground. But that is what Meredith has done in these spendid Odes, which take us through every phase of the mind of France, from the last years of the old monarchy to the catastrophe of 1870. Mr. Hardy has lately tried his hand at part of the same great story; but The Dynasts is a series of scenes, not a great poem. Its poetry is rather its weakness than its strength, and its externality, if there were nothing else, would prevent it from being any rival to these burning lyrics in which the very soul of France makes the confession of a century. All she felt before and through the hurrying stages of the Revolution is in the first of them: the high dreams drowned in blood, till drunk with victory she throws herself into the arms of Earth's chosen crowned unchallengeable upstart. And the second follows her through all the twenty years of Napoleon, all she felt of bedazzlement, of disillusion, of urgent memories drugged to silence by the victorious roar of cannon, by the insolent intoxication of prosperity and power. Is there any book in any language, even in French, which tells that tremendous story as it is told here? Is there any other place where thirty pages will give us the whole of Napoleon as it is given in this wonderful Ode? It is not only that the burning fire of poetry, illuminating all dark places, consuming all pretence, is in every line of it; it is also that the knowledge and truth, the imaginative insight, the just and merciful judg ment, of the great historian are there too. Wordsworth, and Victor Hugo, and Carducci can give us the poetry; but Wordsworth is always an Englishman, Hugo a Frenchman, Carducci an Italian, and all are in some sense partiBut Meredith's voice is never that of a partisan, never in these poems even that of an Englishman. We seem, as we read, to hear in it the very voice of History herself pronouncing the ultimate judgment of the supreme and inviolate Justice. sans. He, did he love her? France was his weapon, shrewd At edge, a wind in onset: he loved well His tempered weapon, with the which he hewed Clean to the ground impediments, or hacked, Sure of the blade that served the great man-miracle. He raised her, robed her, gemmed her for his bride, Did but her blood in blindness given exact. Her blood she gave, was blind to him as guide: She quivered at his word, and at his touch Was hound or steed for any mark he espied. He loved her more than little, less than much. The fair subservient of Imperial Fact Next to his consanguineous was placed In ranked esteem; above the diurnal meal, Vexatious carnal appetites above, Above his hoards, while she Imperial Fact embraced, And rose but at command from under heel. Has grasped her, unconsumable, but framed For all the ecstacies of suffering dire. Mother of Pride, her sanctuary shamed; Mother of Delicacy, and made a mark For outrage: Mother of Luxury, stripped stark: Mother of Heroes, bondsmen; thro' the rains, Across her boundaries, to the leaguelong chains! Fond Mother of her martial youth: they pass, Are spectres in her sight, are mown as grass! Mother of Honor, and dishonored; Mother Of Glory, she condemned to crown with bays Her victor, and be fountain of his praise. The grass has grown again, and the crops wave in the wind where, all over Europe, her sons of old carried havoc and ruin and blood. But if earth forgets there are still Powers that remember. Green earth forgets. The gay young generations mask her grief; Nobler still perhaps, great in its awful severity, even greater in its tenderness, is the third of the Odes, France, 1870. There is nothing in all his poetry to which we could go for a finer and truer last impression of Forgetful is green earth; the gods that great soul and mind who Was George Meredith. Ever invoking fire from Heaven, the fire The Fortnightly Review. Where bled her children hangs the loaded sheaf. alone Remember everlastingly: they strike THE EISTEDDFOD IN LONDON. The Welsh national fête has this Smer come to London, the first time for twenty-two years, and the event counts for much more than one among the usual June sensations. Strange to walk across the grass in Kensington Gardens while the half of London was still at breakfast, and hear the tinkle of a harp and come upon a circle of Welsh druids, attended by a crowd of onlookers, among the trees. Kensing ton Gardens makes one think of Thackeray and Becky Sharp; this scene recalled a page of the Mabinogion, in which the "Emperor Arthur" is seen having an Eisteddfod of his own, with a diapered satin carpet and a golden chair, brought by a sumpter-horse, set in state on the grass for him. To have risked the fantasy of a bardic "Gorsedd" within sound of the wheels of Knightsbridge; still more, to have exchanged the light and bright timber pavilions of the Eisteddfod at home for the sepulchral splendors of the Albert Hall, and to have maintained the thing there in its colors, says a great deal for the spirit of the men and women who did it. The open-air part of the fête, the Gorsedd or high session of the bards, is now one of the most effective items in the whole programme. With a little addition, a little of the art of spectacle practised at every town pageant new style, a little sharp stage-management, it could be made more effective still. In Kensington Gardens it was no worse than it has been in Welsh surroundings; but the intrusion of tophats and London frock-coats, and of photographers who set up a scaffold over against the Maen Llôg, or loganstone, quite spoilt the picture. There ought to be a tyrannous master of the ceremonies, a keeper of the ring, chosen from among the bards, who should have as strict a conscience as Mr. Louis Parker in his pageantry. The "Gorsedd," to be seen at its best, should be seen in surroundings like those of Carnarvon Castle, or with a typical hill background, where a six or seven-centuried antiquity conspires with the neodruidic illusion. It is usual for it to take place on three mornings of the National Eisteddfod, when the Archdruid leads out his bardic college to the allotted stone circle, in white, blue and green robes, carrying with them harpers and pennillion-singers, a blazoned banner, a long sword, and a gorgeous Hirlas Horn, which ought to be full of mead. There, when the Gorsedd has been declared open, the prayer is said, one of a very remarkable nobility of idea and phrase; addresses by the Archdruid and others on Cymric affairs and Cymric ideals are delivered from the Maen Llôg, or logan-stone, englyns are recited, and stanzas improvised to the harp. The other rites include the initiation of the new young poets and graduates who have passed the Gorsedd examination during the year, and the granting of some honorary degrees. The late Archdruid, Hwfa Mon, was a man of extraordinary powers,— humorous, histrionic, eloquent, who entered with gusto into the make-believe of the part, and wore his white robe and golden torque with an inimitable air of conscious magnificence. The Gorsedd, as it now appears, with its colors and splendors and paraphernalia, may be said to have grown out of his dramatic personality, aided by Sir Hubert Herkomer and a Welsh artist of fine instinct, known in the bardic ring as Arlunydd Penygarn. The present Archdruid, Dyved, is a more serious bard, who is determined to raise the standard of his bardic college, and has just succeeded in carrying a reform bill to that end. He has none of the histrionic faculty of his predecessor; but at the present time, when the Eisteddfod is making more and more of its intellectual side, he is a right good chief to have. The antiquity of all this bardic business has been hotly disputed within the last ten years. Professor J. Morris Jones, a poet himself, and one of the chosen adjudicators for the Chair Poem at this year's Eisteddfod, has argued that the "Gorsedd" did not exist in the older celebrations. I suspect it owes something of its present pretty symbolism to the genius of a man of real imagination, Edward Williams, otherwise "Iolo Morganwg," who came to London in the eighteenth century. A passage in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1792, to which he occasionally contributed, leaves little doubt about it. There you may read how some Welsh bards, resident in London, met on Primrose Hill at the autumnal equinox (Saturday, September 22nd) in a circle of stones. They carried a sword with them, which was laid naked on the centre stone; and all the bards present helped to sheathe it. If one carries the enquiry further into Iolo's history and his own writings, it becomes pretty clear what part of the machinery and queer terminology of the Gorsedd were owing to him. We need not for that reason make light of it, for we have in it a sort of Robin Hood proverbial reflection of much scattered folk-lore about the druids and their astronomical circles and the rest, with a genuine enough basis to it. For my part, I feel very grateful to the three Welsh artistic patriots who let their imaginations run away with them on Primrose Hill in the year 1792. So much for the Gorsedd-a London re-creation of a Glamorgan bardic rite. The Eisteddfod itself has a much surer record at its back. We know of three at least that were held in the twelfth century, two of them at Cardigan Castle, and the last of these by a Prince of Dyved and the south country, Prince Rhys, in 1176. We read of others beginning earlier than that, and ranging on to Elizabeth's days, at Caerwys, in Flintshire; and though there were evil days and blank periods when the poets and harpers were under a cloud, we find the Eisteddfod reviving again before the end of the eighteenth century. It had. no doubt, some queer ups and downs in the nineteenth, and one speaker at its recent meetings spoke of a year when it was held in a tavern, and a glass of home-brewed was the prize-poet's re ward. A very interesting document that has to do with the Caerwys Eisteddfod 1 of 1568 is given by Sir John Rhys and Sir D. Brynmor Jones in "The Welsh People." From this it seems that a struggle between the true bards and poets and their beggarly imitators was going on at the time. It speaks of the vagrant and idle persons naming themselves "mynstrelles, rithmers and barthes," who are lately grown into an intolerable multitude "within the principalitee." So much so that not only are the gentlemen and others disquieted in their houses by their shameless disorders, but also the expert minstrels are much discouraged "to travail in the exercise and practize of their knowledges." Wherefore, it goes on to say, open proclamations are to be made in all fairs, markets, towns, etc., throughout North Wales, giving a year's warning of the Eisteddfod, according to custom. The document mentions the silver harp which was to be the chief prize, now in Lord Mostyn's possession; and in a petition for another Eisteddfod, which does not seem to have come off, we hear not only of a silver harp for harping, but a silver chair for poetry, a silver crowd (a kind of fiddle) for crowthing, and a silver tongue for singing. From this we see that the "Chairing of the Bard," one of the recognized functions at every National Eisteddfod, is an old Welsh custom with a real history. Some details of the ceremony have been changed; others, like the symbolic business of the sword, have been grafted on to it from the curious ritual of the Gorsedd. It was carried out at the Albert Hall the other day with due state and under the eye of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who himself holds, I believe, a degree or a title from the bardic college. When the stage has been dressed, and the Archdruid and the bards are in place, with the chair for the unknown victor in the foreground, a trumpet is blown, 1st Edition. T. Fisher Unwin, 1900, pp. 518-20. The best and the adjudicators are called up to deliver their verdict. This year it was, as I said, the severest critic the "Gorsedd" has had of its claims, Professor J. Morris-Jones, of Bangor University College, who was the chosen spokesman, which says much for its good sense and open-mindedness; and the subject of the poem-"Gwlad y Bryniau" (Land of the Hills). There were twenty-two poems to judge. of them proved to be by "Hiraethus," all the competing poets being disguised, for obvious reasons, under a "ffug-enw," or feigned name. When the secret victor's presence in the Eisteddfod is discovered, the heraldbard and another march off and arrest him, a lyric prisoner, and bear him off triumphantly to the platform. The victor in this case was Mr. T. Gwynn Jones, or Carnarvon, one of the younger poets and playwrights, who has won the "Chair" once before and who has undoubtedly a touch of the true spirit, the true "awen," in his writing. Before the new poet is installed the Archdruid calls out three times, the symbolic sword being unsheathed, "A oes Heddwch"-Is it Peace? (a cue which Mr. Lloyd George used afterwards very adroitly when he was attacked by the Suffragists during his brief speech). The multitude then replies, "Heddwch!" (Peace) with a shout that lends an impressive note to the function, and suggests a relic of the day when other and armed interrupters were abroad in the land. Finally, peace being assured, the poet is enthroned; and with the delivery of englyns, or Welsh quatrains, specially composed in his honor, this unique piece of pageantry comes to an end. You may wonder what the standard of this prize poetry may be, and what is the claim of the poets who win the bardic chair or the crown-another of the recognized prizes to-day-at these Welsh fêtes? Both have increased very markedly in our own time, and there is less setting of didactic and uninspiring themes, and more feeling for the art as contrasted with the artifice of verse. It must be remembered that Welsh prosody is far more intricate than English, and that in the writing of what are called the "closemeasures," where the verbal reverberations and assonances are definitely prescribed, as well as the stanzaic mould, the writers require a deal of science, beside their play of motherwit and imagination, to make good such poems as the awdl, or ode-elaborate, and the cywydd, or ode-simple. There is a danger, in the extreme complicacy of the metrical machinery, that the pedant should thrive at the expense of the poet; and so it has sometimes proved. But a fresh and healthy breath of lyric poetry has blown over the Welsh Academe latterly, and the winners at this London Eisteddfod count among them three or four poets at least who, I should say, are equal to any three or four of at all similar genre who are writing in English. Poetry and its special cult, however, are only one of the aims of the Eisteddfod. Music counts popularly for much more in the feast. There indeed is an art which, as Mr. Balfour said when presiding at the first day's meeting, is not subject to "the tragedy of art" by which the true accent in literature and poetry of any one language is shut off from any other. It is an art, needless to say, that is a national passion with the Welsh people. The battles of the choirs, the battle especially in "Y Brif Gystadleuaeth Gorawl" (a title which reads meanly enough in English the "Chief Choral Competition," the last being a word to suggest economics and melancholy), and the lesser struggles of the singing men and women, are things that must be witnessed and heard to be appreciated. This year |