EVOLUTION IN ENGLISH VERSE.
THE appearance, a year ago, of Mr. Gleeson White's compact but copious collection of Ballades and Rondeaus; Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, etc., seemed to not a few of its many readers a very notable ' sign of the times ' in matters literary, though it was not easy to say oft'hand what it amounted to. The fact that within fifteen years more than two hundred writers of English verse had taken to the production of what they themselves regarded as 'exotic' forms of poetry, and had turned out among them some thousands of samples — this was certainly an unprecedented phase of literary fashion ; and it pointed at least to strong forces of change, whatever might be their outcome. There were not wanting, of course, verdicts that the new tendencies were the beginning of the end of Engiisli erse properly so called ; that our poetry was becom- ing played out — or that our poets «ere ; and that this harking back to old and highly artificial French forms meant the advent of a new era of mechanical and constrained art, a sort of later Popeism, of which the musical sense was a trifle more sophisti- cated, but the intellectual grasp and moral ambi- tion even narrower and slighter than those of the eighteenth century. English poetry, in short, was declared by some to be going to the dogs. Needless to say, this was a very hasty inference : a great historic art does not go to the dogs so easily as all that. The very suddenness and vogue of the new departure, indeed, implied transiency, it being in the nature of any decisive intellectual change, even in these progressive days, to come about gradually. And there is clearly no abiding-place for poetic energy at all in the pagoda of the archaic-artificial, of which the cells are only fitted up for a day's hide- and-seek. It is perhaps rash to make the suggestion without statistical research, but one ventures to surmise that the very issue of Mr. White's little volume has abated the zest of the versifiers who fur- nished him with his matter ; that in the next fifteen years we shall have only a dwindling production of the exotics in question — at least on the part of the abler producers. A stroll through one such antho- logy seems enough to sate any reasonably robust taste for the ' Gallic bonds ' of which Mr. White, in a prose hardly Gallic, hopes to help to effect the ' complete naturalisation in our tongue.'
But the outburst of artificialism, we are all agreed, signifies something ; and it seems worth while to note what that is. On the face of the matter it is an aspiration towards form, towards measure and completeness, towards concision, even if the seduction of experiment often lead to the mere dilution of one grain of motive with the required glassful of words. There is implied in such experiment a recoil from indeterminate and rambling utterance ; and this is perhaps as large a part of the total impulse as the hankering of the ear for the chimes of repetitive verse, well described by Dr. George MacDonald, but exenqjlified in his own work by some rather factitious trifling. Now, such a re- action must needs tend to express itself, as it can only be expressed satisfyingly, in art forms which shall permit of the higher assthetic effects aimed at, while avoiding those cheaper if more promptly attractive features that are really aesthetic limitations, keeping almost the whole mass of Mr. White's collection on a plane of effect finally felt to be inferior to that of much other poetry. In short, the same instincts or tendencies which have yielded the multitude of artificial verse-forms are bound to show forth also in specifically free forms, were it only because, as Shakespeare has gone so far to prove, the freest verse-form allows the maximum of concision. And when there appears, from the hand of one of the most industrious ^ of the formalists represented in the ' Canterbury ' collection, a volume of the most remarkable of recent verse, specially characterised by successful resort to free forms, those who apprehended a decline of poetic power from the spread of the other fashion may once for all be reassured.
Mr. W. E. Henley, whose little Book of Verses"^ has created such an impression, figures in the ballade volume rather as a copious and facile than as a subtle artist. Such poetic effects of the finer kind as may there be met with are absent, I think, from his contributions, which almost invariably savour of clever dilettantism rather than of poetic impulse, though they prove an uncommon gift of sheer vocabulary and versification. But in his own Book of Verses he leaves the whole content of the formalist anthology behind, in point alike of inspiration and accomplishment, as if his share in that had been but so much pastime — as indeed it purported to be. His inartificial verse (to use a roughly but conveniently distinguishing term, which must not be understood to concede that the verse in question is produced without much art) may indeed offend the very tastes which condemn the artificial revival ; but it is hardly possible that any taste will pronounce it lacking in intellectual con-
' It is to be noted in the same connection that another of the formalists, Mr. H. C. Bunner of New York, has produced some of the most genuine of recent poetry in his Airs from Arcady and Elsewhere, ' London : David Niitt.
