ened the faculty for purely literary discrimination as contrasted with melopoeic discrimination-will escape the enthusiasm of his emotions, some of which were indubitably real. At any rate we can, whatever our verbal fastidiousness, be thankful for any man who kept alive some spirit of paganism and of revolt in a papier-maché era, in a time swarming with Longfellows, Mabies, Gosses, Harrisons. After all, the whole of his defects can be summed up in one—that is, inaccurate writing; and this by no means ubiquitous. To quote his magnificent passages is but to point out familiar things in our landscape. Hertha is fit for professors and young ladies in boarding-school. The two ballads and the Triumph of Life are full of sheer imagism, of passages faultless. No one else has made such music in English, I mean has made his kind of music; and it is a music which will compare with Chaucer's Hide Absalon thi gilte tresses clere or with any other maker you like. The Villon translations stand with Rossetti's and the Rubaiyat among the Victorian translations. The ballad, Where ye droon ane man I drown twa, is as fine as any reconstruction, and the cross-rhythms are magnificent. The Itylus, the Ballad of Burdens-what is the use of naming over poems so familiar to all of us! "As yet you get no whole or perfect poet." He and Browning are the best of the Victorian era; and Browning wrote to a theory of the universe, thereby cutting off a fair half of the moods for expression. No man who cares for his art can be deaf to the rhythms of Swinburne, deaf to their splendor, deaf also to their bathos. The sound of Dolores is in places like that of horses' hoofs being pulled out of mud. The sound in a poem of sleep is so heavy that one can hardly read it aloud, the voice is drawn into a slumber. (I am not sure that this effect is not excessive, and that it does not show the author overshooting his mark; but for all that it shows ability in his craft, and has, whatever one's final opinion, an indisputable value as experiment.) Swinburne's surging and leaping dactyllics had no comparable forerunners in English. His virtues might be largely dug from the Greeks, and his faults mostly traceable to Victor Hugo. But a perception of the beauties of Greek melopoeia does not constitute a mastery in the creation of similar melopoeia. The rhythmbuilding faculty was in Swinburne, and was perhaps the chief part of his genius. The word-selecting, word-castigating faculty was nearly absent. Unusual and gorgeous words attracted him. His dispraisers say that his vocabulary is one of the smallest at any poet's command, and that he uses the same adjectives to depict either a woman or a sunset. There are times when this last is not, or need not be, ipso facto a fault. There is an emotional fusion of the perceptions, and a certain kind of verbal confusion has an emotive value in writing; but this is of all sorts of writing the most dangerous to an author, and the unconscious collapse into this sort of writing has wrecked more poets in our time than perhaps all other faults put together. Forth, ballad, and take roses in thine arms, And gird thee in the golden singing coat. The splendid lines mount up in one's memory and overwhelm any minute restrictions of one's praise. It is the literary fashion to write exclusively of Swinburne's defects; and the fashion is perhaps not a bad one, for the public is still, and will presumably remain, indiscriminate. Defects are in Swinburne by the bushelful: the discriminating reader will not be able to overlook them, and need not condone them; neither will he be swept off his feet by detractors. There are in Swinburne fine passages, like fragments of fine marble statues; there are fine transcripts from the Greek: A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man. And there is, underneath all the writing, a magnificent passion for liberty-a passion dead as mutton in most of his contemporaries, and immeasurably deader than mutton in a people who allow their literature to be blanketed by a Comstock and his successors; for liberty is not merely a catchword of politics, nor a right to shove little slips of paper through a hole. The passion not merely for political, but also for personal, liberty is the bedrock of Swinburne's writing. The sense of tragedy, and of the unreasoning cruelty of the gods, hangs over it. He fell into facile writing, and he accepted a facile compromise for life; but no facile solution for his universe. His unbelief did not desert him; no, not even in Putney. Ezra Pound A GLASS-BLOWER OF TIME Lustra, by Ezra Pound. Elkin Mathews, London; and Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Reading in a single volume Ezra Pound's poems of the last few years, one discovers, or at least should discover, in oneself a certain misjudgment of this poet. Though he has the habit of putting his unpopular foot forward, so that one must be on one's guard, he is not the extremist, the bête noir, one had thought him. Neither in form nor in substance is he the radical so many readers have assumed him to be. What with his quantities, stresses, alliterations, iterations and heaven only knows what, his style is certainly not anarchical nor arbitrary. On the contrary, it is elaborate; his forms are much more difficult, and require more fineness of touch, than a sonnet. Neither is he the extremist in his choice of subjects; indeed, he seems almost timid about them. One might imagine that this poet would not dare treat a subject that had not been sanctified, or the reverse, by Catullus, Villon, Arnaut Daniel, or some other ancient of the many he knows. What are Pound's most important qualities? and what are his most important contributions to English poetry? To me his most important quality is grace. No matter what he takes up, it melts into extreme grace. present in the idea as well as in the form. The movement of many of his poems suggests what a Greek dance must have been like; they are rhythmical with a deep, solemn, graceful rhythm, with never a shade of triviality or vulgarity. One Grace is can find proof of this almost Dance Figure, in The Spring. and the Shadow: anywhere in the book: in Here is a part of The Fish As light as the shadow of the fish that falls through the water, She came into the large room by the stair. Yawning a little she came, with the sleep still upon her. "I am just from bed. The sleep is still in my eyes. Come. I have had a long dream." And I: "That wood? And two springs have passed us." "Not so far, no, not so far now, There is a place-but no one else knows it A field in a valley, Qui'ieu sui avinen Ieu lo sai." "She must speak of the time Of Arnaut de Mareuil," I thought, "qu'ieu sui avinen." Light as the shadow of the fish That falls through the pale green water. Or this from the River Song: The purple house and the crimson are full of spring softness. And high over the willows the fine birds sing to each other and listen, Crying "Kwan, Kuan," for the early wind and the feel of it. His other important quality is clearness. Pound speaks of having seen the dome of pure color: it is this-purity of color-which distinguishes him. In Provincia Deserta |