A friend who, like myself, had long been in foreign parts, once told me that he believed the Danes had no business capacity, at least the Danes who stayed at home, because he found them charging the big summer hotel a cent more for milk than they exacted from the poor fishermen on the shore. And when he asked why, he was told that "the hotel took so much more and it was more trouble." But in the first place that was true: and further, I think it was their inborn sense of fairness plus their stubborn democracy that was breaking out there. The smaller folk were to be protected against the wealthier neighbor. A people without business capacity would never have thought of the expedient the Old Town hit upon in a dispute with the local gas company. The sidewalks are narrow and the nights very dark. The gas company refused to give in and the town refused to burn gas until it did, consequently, all parties to the quarrel being Jutlanders, there was no telling when the dispute would be settled, if ever. Therefore the council ordered the lamppost painted white to avoid collision and suits for damages. If that is not business sense what is it?

There is much humor, much fine observation, and occasional bits of delicate pathos in this chatty book of recollections. And the many illustrations by W. T. Benda fit in well with the text and enchance its charm. Mr. Riis has paid his debt to his old home well by this sincere tribute.

Grace Isabel Colbron.

SYMONS'S "ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN
ENGLISH POETRY"ı

BY LUDWIG LEWISOHN

THE absorption of English literature into a single form becomes almost symbolical in the figure of Mr. Arthur Symons. A master of the art of verse, the contributor to English poetry of a new and vital method, he has seen the careless years slip by him, and has been forced, for both fame and bread, to write volume after volume of prose. "Having long given up hoping to find appreciation," to use his own words, for his lyric and philosophic verse, he turned to the poetic drama and wrote a Tristan and Iseult and The Harvesters. The latter was accepted in the summer of 1907 by Miss Julia Marlowe, and he was greatly heartened by this success. But it seems to have proved illusory, and bravely he went on writing prose: musical criticism for the Saturday

'The Romantic Movement in English Poetry. By Arthur Symons. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company.

Review, "partly," as he himself said with a touch of unconscious pathos, "because I am fond of music, but more because it brings me in a little money." Meanwhile volume after volume of irrelevant and conventional verse has been hoisted upon the critical shield and Mr. Symons has labored at The Romantic Movement in English Poetry under circumstances sufficiently tragic.

I

At first sight the volume seems either incompetent or else an instance of mere will-worship. No other writer has ever undertaken to compose formal literary history after this fashion. A series of discontinuous essays, half-biographical, half-critical-this, it will be said, is not history. It is not. But perhaps it is something more significant: an expression, namely, in terms of literary history, of that individual view of life to which Mr. Symons has held in verse and prose, steadily and all but unnoticed, for many years.

Mr. Symons is an extreme individualist. Energy and valor, whether in action or in passion, are the qualities that he prizes. Life is transitory and the soul of each man eternally alone. Hence the individual "if he have any valiancy within" should rise, if necessary, though in quite another sense than Nietzsche's, beyond good and evil, and should live for the achievement of a self-expression, vivid and complete. Mr. Symons has phrased this point of view repeatedly; long ago in the "Credo" of London Nights, more recently in his "Hymn to Energy."

God makes things evil and things good: He makes

Evil and good with an unchoosing care,

Nor sets a brighter jewel in the air

Than on the broidered liveries of his snakes.

Man, make thy world thine own creation; strive,
Color the sky, and the earth under thee,

Because thou art alive;

Be glad, for thou hast nothing but to be.

"To be," to be one's self, whether in art or life-that, according to Mr. Symons, is the highest good. He has no patience with a fugitive and cloistered virtue, or, in his own phrasing in the present volume, "the ignominy of wings that droop and are contented in the dust." Hence he scourges the "inactive virtue" of Coleridge and the "contemptible" moderation of Southey. Hence, finally and inevitably, he cares in literature and art only for the work of the individual artist, the work stand

ing to him wholly for the artist's measure of valor and energy in that battle for self-realization which is life.

It will now be clear why Mr. Symons deals with the poets who contributed to the romantic movement one by one, and obvious that the arrangement of his present volume is not only conscious but even miltant. "No great poet," he exclaims, "ever owed any essential part of his genius to his age." It follows that the conventional historian of literature, in his studies of taste, influence or environment, aims after a hundred subsidiary objects and misses his true one, pursues the amusing trifles of the social historian and fails in the essentials of his professed task. In other words, Mr. Symons desires what seems to him the rigor of the game. The poet and his work are to be viewed under the aspect of eternity alone; enduring values are to be sought for and poetry to be considered in its essence, apart from the accidents of the age in which it came into being.

II

It is surely not difficult, aside from Mr. Symons's individual philosophy, to understand the nature and quality of this protest. How much of contemporary literary history and literary study wholly lose sight of the fact that the poem or the novel or the play is the thing! How many students become enmeshed in the fragile webs of textual and comparative criticism! How many men turn to the professional study of literature to whom the diviner harmonies of verse must always be silent! Science is still too insistently with us, persuading us that the law, the process, is everything and the individual phenomenon nothing, whereas, in art, the individual phenomenon alone has ultimate significance. Unrelated, mysterious, beautiful, it stands forever above the perishable theories and ingenuities of man.

So far Mr. Symons's attitude is irreproachable. This, unquestionably, is the point of view on which, at present, the firmest stress should be laid. But in the very act of rebelling against academic methods Mr. Symons pays them an uneasy tribute. For he has not given us a volume of studies on the great poets of the romantic movement, but upon all its poets. And to what purpose, one may ask, if the temper of an age, the filling in of details in an historical picture matters nothing? Are the eternal values of poetry, its essentials disengaged from the dross of time, to be studied in the works of Beattie and Hannah More, Gifford and Joanna Baillie, of Kirke White and John Hamilton Reynolds?

The truth is that Mr. Symons has felt profoundly and correctly but has not reasoned enough. Hence he overstates his case. The danger of conventional scholarship is not that it concerns itself with history, but that it is not always properly aware of the humbleness of its task and that it too often mistakes the backwaters of bibliography for the springs of Helicon. The minor figures of any literature or period have no interest save an historic or relative one. Abandon that, and you have nothing to say of them, as Mr. Symons has nothing to say, except when, as in the case of Bowles, he repeats, legitimately but in flat contradiction of his own theory, the text-book commonplace of that mild versifier's influence on Coleridge. Similarly in the essay on Moore he analyzes acutely the pinchbeck elements in the public taste of 1807, and by the academic and comparative method brings out the subtle insincerity that lurks even in the metrical structure of Moore's verse. But this, once more, is not disengaging the essentials, or dwelling on the eternal values of poetry. It is ordinary historical criticism, robbed of half its validity by the structure of the book.

Of this contradiction in his work Mr. Symons is not quite unconscious. He tries to reduce its force by emphasizing the imaginative atmosphere that surrounded the romantic movement, by asserting that that movement "added strangeness to beauty," and "wasted surprisingly little of the substance of poetry." This is true, but true, after all, of only the five or six greatest men of the time. Upon such a plea the minor poets are still left to the oblivion from which nothing, in truth, can rescue them but that historic method which Mr. Symons in theory, though not in practice, rejects. And yet the book is instructive through these very contradictions and structural defects. For it proclaims by them, the truth-never more needful to repeat than to-day-that the spirit grappling with the eternal problems of great art outshines, in the end, the most illuminated scholarship, that Arnold, for instance, is a more vital force than Mr. George Saintsbury, and that even an irresponsible impressionist of genius, like M. Jules Lemaître, surpasses in meaning the scientific and-one may fearlessly assert-unphilosophic theories of a Brunetière.

III

It is, then, as a volume of essays upon the greater poets of the early nineteenth century that The Romantic Movement in English Poetry has positive value. And Mr. Symons is well equipped to interpret the works of these men at once subtly and vigorously. His personal preoc

cupations as a poet, too, enable him to set certain matters in a new and more excellent light.

He is especially valuable on the subject, wherever he meets it, of poetic diction. Here he has reflected closely and experimented with the ardor of a great technician. Having achieved in his own verse a blending of simplicity and poignancy of impassioned speech akin to Heine's, he is naturally alert for signs of any effort in that direction. Thus he praises Crabbe for verses that approach "the cadence of natural conversation," and notes Byron's discovery in Don Juan that poetry "can be written not only with the words we use in talking, but in exactly the same order and construction." Mr. Symons's own ideal of poetic diction is phrased here: to make the simplest words in the simplest order nobly poetical and trenchantly true. But not his ideal alone but also, what is most notable, Wordsworth's. And this coincidence of aim enables Mr. Symons to announce with more security than any other critic-the truth that Wordsworth was no babbler visited by an occasional inspiration, but that that great poet failed oftener than others because he aimed higher. He was, as Mr. Symons rightly says, "the advocate of a more than usually lofty order of poetry." He discarded, at the outset of his career, all the graces by which the mass of poets shine. Voluntarily he denied himself the clang and glitter of even his romantic contemporaries. Hence when he failed, he prosed; but when he succeeded, his work has the bare, high pathos, the naked strength of life itself.

Upon other poets Mr. Symons has sayings only less notable than upon Wordsworth. His characterization of Byron goes deep.

Byron has power without wisdom, power which is sanity, and human at heart, but without that vision which is wisdom. His passion is without joy, the resurrection, or that sorrow deeper than any known happiness, which is the death by which we attain life.

Or, better still:

It is for life that Byron cries out, the naked contact of humanity, as the only warmth in the world.

Is not that very nearly the last word upon Byron, who, in his heart, believed in the hell of conventional theology, quivered at the thought of his own defiant sins, but to whom the skies never showed their serenity nor the mountains that austere kindness which consoles beyond the touch or speech of man?