vengeance. The man with whom his wife ran away comes in and Huff attempts to make him cower, but to no purpose, and the curtain rings down on Act I., leaving the dowser alone bemoaning the intolerable waste of beauty that all this scorching of the world will bring about.

On the rise of the curtain for the second and last Act we see Sollers, the wainwright, wrecking the ale-house room in a frenzy of apprehension; the publican comes in weeping, "I've seen the moon; it has nigh broke my heart... I never before so noted her." Beauty at last is beginning to mean something to him now that it is all about to be smashed up and ruined. Merrick, the smith, begins to achieve a philosophy; he begins to find a meaning in the life which is just slipping past him :

You know, this is much more than being happy.
'Tis hunger of some power in you, that lives
On
your heart's welcome for all sorts of luck,
But always looks beyond you for its meaning.
The world was always looking to use its life
In some great handsome way at last. And now—
We are just fooled. . . . I've had my turn.

The world may be for the sake of naught at last,
But it has been for my sake: I've had that.

Huff comes in, moody, unable to find comfort in the vengeance he thought to obtain from the panic-stricken evil-doers; his good, straight life has been like that of a crawling caterpillar ... he thinks of a day long past in Droitwich where he saw women half-naked cooking brine... he could have been daring once but missed his chance. Suddenly Shale, his wife's lover, comes in and implores Huff to take his wife back; Warp, the molecatcher, enters during the scene that follows and tells them that there is nothing to fear; the comet is going away from them; Huff's ricks are alight, certainly, but there is to be no end of the world—yet.

Mrs Huff turns both from her lover and her husband:

They thinking I'ld be near one or the other
After this night.

We are left with Vine moaning:

But is it certain there'll be nothing smasht?
Not even a house knockt roaring down in crumbles?
—And I did think, I'ld open my wife's mouth
With envy of the dreadful things I'd seen!

There is no doubt about the fascination of the play; it holds the reader's attention throughout; there is not a false note from beginning to end. It contains all the philosophy of the younger school; the unending search after beauty, the refusal to shut the eyes to ugliness and dirt, the endeavour to find a meaning in life, the determination to live life to the full and to enjoy. At all costs they strive to avoid sentimentality; these country folk in The End of the World really live; they may be coarse; they certainly have their tragedies, but they are human. We seem to know them through and through; we certainly sympathise with their trials and resent their wrongs as bitterly as we do our own.

This noble volume is intensely typical of the age; everything is tentative, experimental; we are no longer satisfied with the old gods, the old ideals; we set out to prove all things and get most horribly hurt in doing it; but life becomes much more of an adventure; we are at least brave enough to cut ourselves adrift from the old, safe, enclosed harbourage; we make many and gross mistakes, but we do achieve something; we begin to learn for ourselves what life really means and are not content to let our elders tell us what they think it ought to mean.

It means beauty to start with, and that is an almost

new thought; at any rate beauty has to be found by each individual soul at the cost of much sorrow of heart and much unfortunate experience with the ugly; it means love, which is not so easily to be found as our forefathers seem to have thought; we are not to be put off with shams . . . it means courage, and courage is not to be cultivated in safety, in an arm-chair; we have to cut adrift, away from convention and laws made for a milk-livered generation. Georgian Poetry 1913-1914 is a brave book; it is the standard of revolt of the younger, braver souls among us, and we who are apt at times to acquiesce because it is easier owe much to a book which strengthens and fortifies our resolution just when we show signs of wavering. Our poets are our real national leaders; they alone can express all those desires which we feel but are unable to articulate; if our poets are false to us, then indeed are we decadent. From 1913 to 1915 at any rate we may be thankful that they have led us fearlessly, put fresh vitality and renewed energy into our hopes and helped us once more to try to wrest life's secret from her.

I

IV

SOME MORE MODERN POETS

T is commonly said that the only true critics of

poetry are the masters in the same craft, and if

the case of Swinburne may be taken as typical, I agree. We think of Francis Thompson's superb tribute to Shelley and Masefield's contribution to our completer understanding of Shakespeare, and shudder at the thought of a mere prose-writer daring to penetrate the sanctuary and lay his rude hands on the beauty he can never hope to explain. Suddenly we think of Hazlitt and take comfort. To what critic do we turn so often, and why?

Because he acts as half-way house in the ascent of Parnassus; he is the intermediary between the gods and ourselves, because he does what the poets themselves never find time to do, and that is to translate for us exactly what they are at as he understands it. The poets are so busy doing things that they never stop to explain and we are left labouring far in the rear, panting, dispirited . . and sometimes even sympathise with our intellectually moribund, materially minded acquaintances or relatives who start at the word "poetry" as if they had been shot, and exclaim : "What's the use of it anyway? What useful purpose does it serve?" as if they expected it to be a dynamo in the physical as well as the spiritual world.

Those of us who have no poetry in our composition and yet delight in it as the cleanser and purifier of life, who regard poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world, in some way are perhaps best fitted to

bring a realisation of it home to the businesses and bosoms of men; we pay less heed to the technique (in so doing, of course, we miss some of the beauties) and more to the matter. For it seems to me of the first importance that a poet should have something to say. I don't exactly mean a message to bear, but a song that will ease the heart, cause æsthetic delight, help us to face life with a cheerier spirit, fuller of determination not only to see it through, but to make the most of it.

Poetry makes the deaf to hear, the blind to see, the maimed and halt to walk . . . if it doesn't do this, it isn't poetry. Hence it follows that sincerity and nobility of purpose are as essential to our poet as sweetness and music; in fact, these follow from it, for there is no sweetness where there is no light and no music where there is no motive. Facile versifiers abound; I am one of them; you pick up their stuff in all the daily and weekly papers; they are not to be despised any more than an undergraduate is to be despised for dishing up second-hand opinions to his tutor and calling it an essay; it is popularly known as an education. It may be; you and I are not professors, we are not paid to read or give academic exercises-we needn't waste our time over what appears in ephemeral journals.

What is much more extraordinary is that good poets abound. There has never been an age so rich in poets in history as our own, not even the wonderful days exactly a hundred years ago.

We live in a time of amazing literary geniuses of every sort; the whole of England suddenly seems to have become articulate, and in order to express itself it has chosen the vehicle of poetry for the most part.

In times of intense emotional crises, face to face with the eternal realities of birth and love and death, man