Three months after this essay was written the first volume of the long awaited definitive edition of Mr Hardy\'s works (the Mellstock Edition) appeared. It was with no common thrill that we read in the precious pages of introduction the following words confirming the theory upon which the first part of the essay is largely based.

\'Turning now to my verse—to myself the more individual part of my literary fruitage—I would say that, unlike some of the fiction, nothing interfered with the writer\'s freedom in respect of its form or content. Several of the poems—indeed many—were produced before novel-writing had been thought of as a pursuit; but few saw the light till all the novels had been published….

\'The few volumes filled by the verse cover a producing period of some eighteen years first and last, while the seventeen or more volumes of novels represent correspondingly about four-and-twenty years. One is reminded by this disproportion in time and result how much more concise and quintessential expression becomes when given in rhythmic form than when shaped in the language of prose.\'

Present Condition of English Poetry

Shall we, or shall we not, be serious? To be serious nowadays is to be ill-mannered, and what, murmurs the cynic, does it matter? We have our opinion; we know that there is a good deal of good poetry in the Georgian book, a little in Wheels.[13] We know that there is much bad poetry in the Georgian book, and less in Wheels. We know that there is one poem in Wheels beside the intense and sombre imagination of which even the good poetry of the Georgian book pales for a moment. We think we know more than this. What does it matter? Pick out the good things, and let the rest go.

   [Footnote 13: Georgian Poetry, 1918-1919. Edited by E.M. (The
   Poetry Bookshop.)

Wheels. Fourth Cycle. (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell.)]

And yet, somehow, this question of modern English poetry has become important for us, as important as the war, important in the same way as the war. We can even analogise. Georgian Poetry is like the Coalition Government; Wheels is like the Radical opposition. Out of the one there issues an indefinable odour of complacent sanctity, an unctuous redolence of union sacrée; out of the other, some acidulation of perversity. In the coalition poets we find the larger number of good men, and the larger number of bad ones; in the opposition poets we find no bad ones with the coalition badness, no good ones with the coalition goodness, but in a single case a touch of the apocalyptic, intransigent, passionate honesty that is the mark of the martyr of art or life.

On both sides we have the corporate and the individual flavour; on both sides we have those individuals-by-courtesy whose flavour is almost wholly corporate; on both sides the corporate flavour is one that we find intensely disagreeable. In the coalition we find it noxious, in the opposition no worse than irritating. No doubt this is because we recognise a tendency to take the coalition seriously, while the opposition is held to be ridiculous. But both the coalition and the opposition—we use both terms in their corporate sense—are unmistakably the product of the present age. In that sense they are truly representative and complementary each to the other; they are a fair sample of the goodness and badness of the literary epoch in which we live; they are still more remarkable as an index of the complete confusion of ?sthetic values that prevails to-day.

The corporate flavour of the coalition is a false simplicity. Of the nineteen poets who compose it there are certain individuals whom we except absolutely from this condemnation, Mr de la Mare, Mr Davies, and Mr Lawrence; there are others who are more or less exempt from it, Mr Abercrombie, Mr Sassoon, Mrs Shove, and Mr Nichols; and among the rest there are varying degrees of saturation. This false simplicity can be quite subtle. It is compounded of worship of trees and birds and contemporary poets in about equal proportions; it is sicklied over at times with a quite perceptible varnish of modernity, and at other times with what looks to be technical skill, but generally proves to be a fairly clumsy reminiscence of somebody else\'s technical skill. The negative qualities of this simplesse are, however, the most obvious; the poems imbued with it are devoid of any emotional significance whatever. If they have an idea it leaves you with the queer feeling that it is not an idea at all, that it has been defaced, worn smooth by the rippling of innumerable minds. Then, spread in a luminous haze over these compounded elements, is a fundamental right-mindedness; you feel, somehow, that they might have been very wicked, and yet they are very good. There is nothing disturbing about them; ils peuvent être mis dans toutes les mains; they are kind, generous, even noble. They sympathise with animate and inanimate nature. They have shining foreheads with big bumps of benevolence, like Flora Casby\'s father, and one inclines to believe that their eyes must be frequently filmed with an honest tear, if only because their vision is blurred. They are fond of lists of names which never suggest things; they are sparing of similes. If they use them they are careful to see they are not too definite, for a definite simile makes havoc of their constructions, by applying to them a certain test of reality.

But it is impossible to be serious about them. The more stupid of them supply the matter for a good laugh; the more clever the stuff of a more recondite amazement. What is one to do when Mr Monro apostrophises the force of Gravity in such words as these?—

  \'By leave of you man places stone on stone;
  He scatters seed: you are at once the prop
  Among the long roots of his fragile crop
  You manufacture for him, and insure
  House, harvest, implement, and furniture,
  And hold them all secure.\'

We are not surprised to learn further that

  \'I rest my body on your grass,
  And let my brain repose in you.\'

All that remains to be said is that Mr Monro is fond of dogs (\'Can you smell the rose?\' he says to Dog: \'ah, no!\') and inclined to fish—both of which are Georgian inclinations.

Then there is Mr Drinkwater with the enthusiasm of the just man for moonlit apples—\'moon-washed apples of wonder\'—and the righteous man\'s sense of robust rhythm in this chorus from \'Lincoln\':—

    \'You who know the tenderness
  Of old men at eve-tide,
    Coming from the hedgerows,
  Coming from the plough,
    And the wandering caress
  Of winds upon the woodside,
    When the crying yaffle goes
  Underneath the bough.\'

Mr Drinkwater, though he cannot write good doggerel, is a very good man.
In this poem he refers to the Sermon on the Mount as \'the words of light
From the mountain-way.\'

Mr Squire, who is an infinitely more able writer, would make an excellent subject for a critical investigation into false simplicity. He would repay a very close analysis, for he may deceive the elect in the same way as, we suppose, he deceives himself. His poem \'Rivers\' seems to us a very curious example of the faux bon. Not only is the idea derivative, but the rhythmical treatment also. Here is Mr de la Mare:—

  \'Sweet is the music of Arabia
  In my heart, when out of dreams
  I still in the thin clear murk of dawn
  Descry her gliding streams;
  Hear her strange lutes on the green banks
  Ring loud with the grief and delight
  Of the dim-silked, dark-haired musicians
  In the brooding silence of night.
  They haunt me—her lutes and her forests;
  No beauty on earth I see
  But shadowed with that dream recalls
  Her loveliness to me:
  Still eyes............