Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/462

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Phillips
D.N.B. 1912–1921
Phillips

effect. The truth is that Phillips had no critical power, and especially no sense of self-criticism. He read little, and so his genius was either starved or allowed to grow unpruned. He is best in Paolo and Francesca, in parts of Herod, or in poems where lyric and drama come together as the climax of such a simple narrative as Marpessa. His most original work is Christ in Hades, but it is somewhat overweighted by its intellectual ambition. Promise of equal originality is found in The Wife; but in that vein the promise is frustrated. Desiring to be objective, he becomes merely squalid, and ends in conventional realism.

List of Phillips's non-dramatic works: 1. Orestes and Other Poems. London, printed for private circulation, 1884 (contains eight poems, of which one, Thoughts at Sunrise, appears again in New Poems; a second, Vale Camoena, in a revised version becomes the first poem in Primavera, and occurs again as The Dreaming Muse in New Poems; a third, Orestes, also reappears in a revised version both in Primavera and in New Poems). 2. Primavera: Poems by Four Authors. Oxford, Blackwell, 1890 (the collaborators were Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose, and A. S. Cripps; contains Vale Camoena and Orestes, noted above, and two more poems by Phillips, To a Lost Love, and two stanzas, A Dream (My dead love …), afterwards printed as the first section of The Apparition in volumes 4 and 5 of this list). 3. Eremus: A Poem. London, partly privately, partly Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894. 4. Christ in Hades. London, Elkin Mathews, 1897 (no. 3 of the ‘Shilling Garland’ series, edited by Phillips's cousin, Laurence Binyon; contains the titular poem, six sections of The Apparition as in 5 below, and the three poems there following entitled Lyrics). 5. Poems. London, John Lane, 1898 (really 1897) (pp. 1–69 give poems now first printed). 6. New Poems. John Lane, 1908 (really 1907) (see under 1 and 2 above; amongst the new matter is Iole, a Tragedy in one act). 7. The New Inferno. John Lane, 1911. 8. Lyrics and Dramas. John Lane, 1913. 9. Panama and Other Poems. John Lane, 1915.

List of dramatic works: 1. Paolo and Francesca. John Lane, 1900 (really 1899); produced 6 March 1902, St. James's Theatre, by G. Alexander. 2. Herod. John Lane, 1901 (really 1900); produced 31 October 1900, Her Majesty's Theatre, by H. B. Tree. 3. Ulysses. John Lane, 1902; produced 1 February 1902, His Majesty's Theatre, by H. B. Tree. 4. The Sin of David. London, Macmillan, 1904; produced 30 September 1905, Stadttheater, Düsseldorf; March 1913, at Johannesburg, by H. B. Irving; July 1914, Savoy Theatre, by H. B. Irving. 5. Aylmer's Secret. Unpublished, manuscript burnt by Phillips; produced 4 July 1905, Adelphi Theatre. 6. Nero. Macmillan, 1906; produced 25 January, His Majesty's Theatre, by Tree (part of the original, omitted from Tree's version and from this volume, appears as a one-act play, Nero's Mother, in Lyrics and Dramas). 7. Iole (in New Poems); produced June 1913, Cosmopolis, Holborn, by Efga Myers and Phillips. 8. The Bride of Lammermoor. Unpublished; produced 23 March 1908, King's Theatre, Glasgow, by Martin Harvey; and as The Last Heir 5 October 1908, Adelphi Theatre, by Harvey. 9. Faust (in collaboration with J. Comyns Carr). Macmillan, 1908; produced 5 September 1908, His Majesty's Theatre, by Tree. 10. Pietro of Siena. Macmillan, 1910; produced 10 October 1911, Studio Theatre, by the Drama Society. 11. The King. Stephen Swift and Co., 1912 (also by John Lane in Lyrics and Dramas); this and The Adversary were to have been produced by the Drama Society, but Tree acquired the rights to The King, and died before producing it. 12. The Adversary (in Lyrics and Dramas). 13. Armageddon. John Lane, 1915; produced 1 June 1915, New Theatre, by Martin Harvey. 14. Harold (in Poetry Review, January and March 1916); not produced.

[W. Archer, Poets of the Younger Generation, 1901, and Real Conversations, 1904; Sir Sidney Colvin, in T. Humphry Ward's English Poets, vol. v, 1918, and in The Bookman, March 1916; A. Waugh, Tradition and Change, ed. 1919; Coulson Kernahan, In Good Company, 1917, and Celebrities, 1923; private information.]

H. B. C-n.


PLATER, CHARLES DOMINIC (1875–1921), Catholic divine and social worker, was born at Brook Green, London, 2 September 1875, the third son and youngest child of Edward Angelo Plater, by his wife, Margaret Harting. His paternal grandfather, Charles Edward Plater, was co-founder of Marlborough College; his father, who resigned a War Office clerkship in 1878 in order to devote himself to music, had been received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1851 by John Henry Newman. The Harting family, which had always remained

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