Flit would the ages My pen drew nigh; And the honey-fly: Thou, Lord, and I." That is grandeur, achieved not by "trying one's hand at the grand manner," but simply by humility and sincerity. A well-meaning critic observed recently-apparently in extenuation-that no one but a fool would ask Mr. de la Mare to write an epic. He seems to have meant that Mr. de la Mare was well enough in his way, piping little hedgerow melodies, and that we ought not to despise him for doing no more. Well if we use the word in its stricter sense, neither Mr. de la Mare nor any other man is likely to write an epic again till a new heroic age comes upon the earth. But if we understand by it, what this critic probably wished us to understand, a large poem of large pretensions, such as The Prelude, then I know of no man of his generation from whom such an attempt might, with better reason, be awaited with more excitement and interest. He has, much more than most of his contemporaries, a central conception underlying his work, not a code or a theory, but an idea, instinctive and native; and this conception is not eccentric or limited but applicable to the life of every one. His development in breadth and power has been continuous and rapid throughout the whole of his poetic career. The Listeners, published in 1912, showed a clear advance, not only in sureness but in depth, over the Poems of 1906; and Motley (1918) repeated and excelled that advance. In The Veil (1921), Mr. de la Mare's last volume, a curious quality is present. These poems suggest that so much new material has come to him as almost to throw him back into the position of a beginner-a beginner of much greater genius than the easy technician of Motley. He has become intermittently harsh and crabbed, sometimes even inexact and crude; but such faults suggest only that his advance is continuing with accelerated rapidity and with greater scope. These pieces are opening up new veins of thought, new modes of experience; and in the very awkwardness of some of them is betrayed the truly original poet's inability to stand still or to be content with doing again what he has already done well. F.E.L. G 85 The Poetry of Mr. John Freeman THERE have been periods in which it has been demanded of poetry only, or chiefly, that it should gratify the senses, that it should recall or suggest experiences of sight, touch, hearing, taste, or smell. In face of any such demand, the poetry of Mr. Freeman would have gone for lost, since, in addition to certain positive obstacles in the way of reading it, it would have suffered from the negative quality of offering no very strong invitation to surmount these obstacles. It is a poetry curiously devoid of sensual attraction; and even the music of the verse, which is always subtle and sometimes lovely, the creation of a patient and cunning prosodist, a thing by no means to be forgotten in any survey, is so tenuous and, as it were, so abstract as to reverberate rather in the mental than in the physical ear. Perhaps even now, in a generation not so exclusively devoted to colour and shape and bodily delights as have been at least some of its predecessors, this constitutes one of the greatest barriers in the way of a more general appreciation of Mr. Freeman's work. His first book, Twenty Poems, was published in 1909, his second, Fifty Poems, the first to attract much notice, in 1911. Since then the recognition of his gifts has become more widely spread among poets and among critics, though not much more, it is probable, among other readers; and such recognition as there has been still suffers from a certain vagueness and perplexity, not clearly distinguishing his merits or separating them from his defects. The volume which forms the subject of these pages1 contains, apparently, all he has chosen to preserve of both his earlier and his later work, and is, in fact, a collected edition, by means of which it is possible to survey his poetry as a whole. Only thus indeed is it possible to make other than groping and inaccurate comments on his characteristics. It has been remarked of his earlier and less comprehensive books that it was necessary to read each of them entire and in sequence. He, more than most poets, suffers by the detachment of single pieces; and very often such as are sufficiently near perfection, as wholes, to suffer least by detachment are not among his most representative. He is an unequal writer; not all his poems, especially the most ambitious, are evenly good throughout; and fine and characteristic touches occur in poems which are otherwise among his worst. This large collection, containing nearly two hundred titles, presents therefore a valuable opportunity for estimating his excellences and his faults and for attempting a coherent portrait of him as a poet. Mr. "The earlier pieces," he states correctly in the note to this addition, "will easily be distinguished by those who wish to distinguish them." Freeman has changed, as he recognises, since the publication of his first verses; but the change seems to have been consistently in one direction, and to have been the development of a germ not hard to perceive in his beginnings. He is now, so he describes himself: "A man serious with change but his earliest work, in its already settled gravity, 1 Poems Old and New. By John Freeman. (Selwyn and Blount.) showed him capable of becoming, indeed by inward necessity certain to become, such a man. The change has been not in purpose but in experience and knowledge. He is more serious, in the common sense of the word, than most of our poets, serious enough to have been called a didactic. He has not merely a definite attitude towards life. That attitude is based upon certain definite principles to which he clings; and both attitude and principles are of a sort that prevents him from showing any levity, even that which arises out of sheer ecstatic joy in life. His attitude is necessarily implicit in the best and most characteristic of his compositions. It is his occasional defect that here and there his principles are somewhat too explicitly stated, in a manner which is not quite that of poetry. The word "didactic " rings rather ominously in modern ears; and some consideration of its meaning is not out of place in studying Mr. Freeman's poetry. He is deeply moved by the contemplation of moral beauty, of the beauty of conduct in its widest sense, of man's relations with eternity; and these things are pictured in his verse in such a way that the reader may derive moral profit from them. But when we speak of "didactic poetry we do not mean merely poetry from which we can learn something. We mean poetry the writer of which has definitely set out to teach us something; and our distrust of the term embodies our obscure understanding of the fact that in so doing the poet has refused his proper function and has offered us what we do not ask from him. For it is poetry that must teach us, not the poet: the poet must bear witness to the truth, not expound it. His work must be the outcome of delight in the perception of the truth's existence, not of any desire |