as enjoying and suffering human beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit, to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.' The acceptance of psycho-analysis, theosophy and Christian Science as matter for poetry has immensely widened the poetic grasp and the cult of an obscure symbolism for its proper expression. Anthropological interest leads Mrs. Cornford in PreExistence behind the sophistication, the conventionalities and the falsities of civilization, back to the logical identification of the emotion of the primitive pre-Pelasgian woman with that of her own complex modern personality and to a sense of the essential oneness of humanity:

The grains of sand so shining small

Soft through my fingers ran:

The sun shone down upon it all,
And so my dream began.

How all of this had been before;
How ages far away

I lay on some forgotten shore
As here I lie to-day...

I have forgotten whence I came,
Or what my home might be,

Or by what strange and savage name
I called that thundering sea.

I only know the sun shone down

As still it shines to-day,

And in my fingers long and brown

The little pebbles lay.

Mr. Sturge Moore, Mr. de la Mare, Mr. Gordon Bottomley, Mr. Burrows, Mr. W. J. Turner track the 'panther of their quest' in the dim regions of shadowy recollection, in the dawn of the world when paleolithic man, slowly evolving from the brute, developed a rudimentary tribal consciousness and advanced from the primitive to the crude. Mr. Hodgson, questing freshness and dreading sophistication, weaves such primitive material into the very warp and woof of beautiful poetry in Eve:

Deep in the bells and grass,
Wading in bells and grass
Up to her knees.

The extremists among the moderns, extremists who would seek to repudiate their intellectual indebtedness and dissociate themselves from the tradition of their predecessors, who utter such revolutionary defiance as these lines of Mr. Orrick Jones (save the mark!):

This is the song of youth,

This is the cause of myself;

I knew my father well and he was a fool,

Therefore will I have my own foot in the path before I

take a step;

I will only go into new lands,

And I will walk on no plank-walks,

The horses of my family are wind-broken,

And the guns rusty,

I will make me a new bow from an ash-tree,
And cut up the homestead into arrows,

who resent the perfect technique of the Victorian Tennyson and sneer at his delicate treatment of the Mordred story, find spiritual kinship with the Tennyson of the later Locksley who has known disillusionment and bitterness of spirit and with those who like Carlyle and Ruskin, George Eliot, Gissing and Hardy, eschewed pious moralizing and sought to know the truth indefatigably. The nineties became familiar with the aesthetic creed of 'Art for art's sake', but what was at first a reasoned intellectual reaction against the primness of Victorianism speedily developed into a decadent pose. "The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible,' Wilde wrote. 'All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature.' 'The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.' The issue of such preciosity was plain and it did not require a Robert Hichens or a W. S. Gilbert to expose the virtuosity of the Yellow Book and the artificiality of the decadent Alexandrians. They had passed and were gone ere Henley, realizing the indissolubility of the bond between art and life, was roused to proclaim his exuberant joy in the great adventure of very living.

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeoning of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishment the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Reaction and revolt against reaction is the normal and permanent rule of literary history. Wordsworth led the revolt against the descendants of the revolutionary Dryden, proposing, as he put it in the Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads, as his principal object to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.' The Romantic Movement had expended itself in its first phasepoetry-before 1825;in the Victorian age the novel became the chief medium of expression but without the earlier enthusiasms of the younger Romanticists; scientific discovery and the critical habit became the natural function of thinking progressive men. All this made the present age inevitable.

The realistic revolt of the poets of the present is a reaction against the yearnings of the pre-Raphaelites to recreate out of the romantic past a more liberal, a more simple and a more satisfactory present; it is a renunciation of the 'sweetness and light' of the Victorians; a pose of rude simplicity on the part of certain, which may become the extreme of ridicul

ousness or of tangled pseudo-metaphysical obscurity. The poets of the Celtic Revival aimed 'to express the national consciousness of Ireland through a purely national art.' There is a fundamental difference between the early poets of the AngloIrish movement and those of the Celtic Revival. Politics were the inspiration of the earlier poets; they owed little to Celtic tradition; their concern was with the burning questions of the hour. The genuine return to Celtdom was initiated by Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson; Mangan finding his inspiration in the tragic story of his race and Ferguson in the primitive bardic note of the Ancients. Lionel Johnson, in whose work the national note blends with a strange Catholic mysticism and spirituality, inhabits a deep mystical world filled with the imageries of dreams, with white horsemen, the Knights of God, and grey churches with the crisp of the dead leaves rustling in the wind without and priests murmuring holy Latin immemorial. George Russell (A. E.) has written beautiful lines as subtly cadenced as are anywhere to be found in the work of our moderns, but all these poets are idealists and romanticists, outwith the realism which is our present quest. It was not until Mr. Yeats began to write and until they turned regionalists that the Irish poets felt themselves in living touch with the sobbing, sorrowing laughter of humanity. Moira O'Neill has written beautiful songs that are human and natural and as Irish as the best Scottish songs are Scottish; the music of which is simple and tender and old fashioned; whose cadences are filled with a yearning pain for the old world, with wistfulness and tenderness and home-loving.

There's a deep dumb river flowin' by beyont the heavy trees,
This livin' air is moithered wi' the hummin' o' the bees,

I wisht I'd hear the Claddagh burn go runnin' through the heat
Past Corrymeela wi' the blue sky over it.

Mr. Yeats excelled his predecessors in his interpretation of the dim, shadowy personalities of Celtic myth and legend, but he has his concerns with the daily matters of life as well. In these delicate lines, filled with spiritual grace and sweetness, the poet has, by the very beauty of his thought, raised the commonplace to the wonderful and revealed behind the curtain of the real the very body of the ideal:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty, with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a cloud of stars.

To this poetic inheritance J. M. Synge succeeded, although
it was in dramatic work purely that he attained the
highest expression of his powers. Turning from the
elemental beings of Irish
Irish legend he threw himself
with all the ardour of his being into the study of
the men and women who lived and sinned and suffered and
repented and died amid the melancholy mountains of Kerry
and Wicklow and the barren Isles of the West, and, acquiring
from them a language that was rich and copious because their
language was full and living, he wrote five of the great dramas
of all time. In his poetry he refused to be beholden to the
conventions of the modern school. Ultimately, he argued,
reality is at the root of all poetry; and, before verse can be
human it must learn to be brutal. In Queens, for example, or
in The Mergency Man, there is no trace of the mystical note
of his contemporaries or when he writes these bitter verses,

There's snow on every street
When I go up and down,

And there's no woman, man or dog

That knows me in the town.

I know each shop and all

These Jews and Russian Poles,

For I go walking night and noon

To spare my sack of coals.

His justification is this: 'In these days poetry is usually a flower of evil or good: but it is the timber of poetry that wears most surely and there is no timber that has not strong roots