It may be set down as an axiom that a nation which is in the proper enjoyment of all its faculties, which is healthy, wealthy, wise, and properly conditioned, must be producing a certain amount of poetry. From the beginning this has been so; it will be so to the end. When England was at her highest, when the best in her was having full play, she produced poets. Right down into the Victorian Era she went on producing them. Then she took to the Stock Exchange and an ostentatious way of life, and the supply of poets fell off. If we except Mr. Swinburne, who does not belong rightfully to this present time, there is not a poet of any parts exercising his function in England to-day.[Pg 104] Furthermore, any bookseller will tell you that the demand for poetry-books by new writers has practically ceased to exist.

These statements will be called sweeping by a certain school of critics, and I shall be asked to cast my eye round the English nest of singing-birds, and to answer and say whether Mr. So-and-so be not a poet, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so. I shall also be asked to say if I am prepared to deny that of Mr. So-and-so\'s last volume of verse three hundred copies were actually sold to the booksellers. For the propounders of such questions I have one answer—namely, it may be so.

In the meantime let us do our best to find an English poet who is worth the name, and who is prescriptively entitled to be mentioned in the category which begins with Chaucer and ends with Mr. Swinburne. Shall we try Mr. Rudyard Kipling? Tested by sales and the amount of dust he has managed to kick up, Mr. Kipling should be a poet of parts. He is still young, and, hap[Pg 105]pily, among the living; but it cannot be denied that as a poet he has already outlived his reputation. Two years ago he could set the English-speaking nations humming or reciting whatever he chose to put into metre. Some of his little things looked like lasting. Already the majority of them are forgotten. To the next generation, if he be known at all, he will be known as the author of three pieces—Recessional, the L\'Envoi appended to Life\'s Handicap, and Mandalay. What is to become of such verses as the following?

\'Ave you \'eard o\' the Widow at Windsor,
With a hairy gold crown on \'er \'ead?
She \'as ships on the foam—she \'as millions at \'ome,
An\' she pays us poor beggars in red.
(\'Ow poor beggars in red!)

There\'s \'er nick on the cavalry \'orses,
There\'s \'er mark on the medical stores—
An\' \'er troopers you\'ll find with a fair wind be\'ind
That takes us to various wars.
(Poor beggars! barbarious wars!)

Then \'ere\'s to the Widow at Windsor,
An\' \'ere\'s to the stores and the guns,
The men an\' the \'orses what makes up the forces
O\' Missis Victorier\'s sons.
(Poor beggars! Victorier\'s sons!)

[Pg 106]

At the time of their appearance these lines and the like of them were vastly admired; everybody read them, most people praised them. They were supposed to stir the English blood like a blast of martial trumpets. Here at length was the poet England had been waiting for. There could be no mistake about him; he had the authentic voice, the incommunicable fire, the master-touch. He had come to stay. At the present moment the bulk of his metrical work is just about as dead and forgotten as the coster-songs of yesteryear. He has not even made a cult; nobody quotes him, nobody believes in him as a poetical master, nobody wants to hear any more of him. His imitators have all gone back to the imitation of better men. If a copy of verses have a flavour of Kipling about it nowadays, editors drop it as they would drop a hot coal. So much for the poet of empire, the poet of the people, the metrical patron of Thomas Atkins, Esq.

Another poet of empire—Mr. W.E. Henley—has fared very little better. "What[Pg 107] can I do for England?" is, I believe, still in request among the makers of a certain class of anthology; but English poetry in the bulk is just the same as if Mr. Henley had never been. Even the balderdash about "my indomitable soul" has fallen out of the usus loquendi of young men\'s Christian associations and young men\'s debating societies. The Song of the Sword is sung no longer; For England\'s Sake has gone the way of all truculent war-poetry; and out of Hawthorn and Lavender perhaps a couple of lyrics remain. Mr. Henley attacked Burns when Burns had been a century dead. Who will consider it worth while to attack Mr. Henley in, say, the year 2002?

Possibly the real, true English poet who will in due course put on the laurel of Mr. Austin is Mr. Stephen Phillips. Yet Mr. Stephen Phillips is a purveyor of metrical notions for the stage, and in his last great work—Ulysses—I find him writing as follows:

Athene. Father, whose oath in hollow hell is heard,
[Pg 108]Whose act is ............