MR. A. P. GRAVES'S IRISH POEMS.* WHAT constitutes the merits

of a song written for music ? Why does it happen that it is not always the finest lyric which is the best song; or, to put it otherwise, why may a good song have indifferent words, while a beautiful poem may never

find its proper musical setting We have no adequate explanation to give; but of one thing we are certain,—it is not accident which makes one lyric also a song and the other only a lyric. There is a quality in the sentiment, the phrasing, and the rhythm of some poems which attracts good music as naturally as some coverts draw singing birds. Very superior critics affect to despise the gift of writing to music, forgetting that all the Elizabethans from Campion to Herrick did it, and that their condemnation includes Shakespeare and Burns, not at their worst, but at their best. " Ae Fond Kiss," for example, is a song which cries out for adequate music, and has now and then found it; but it happens to be also the high-water mark of Burns's genius. If, then, this capacity for being sung often belongs to the greatest work, we would do well to be respectful about it. For one thing, the song is the only poetry which has a truly universal appeal. If the poet desires to please and mould all classes of humankind, he had better be a song-maker. Of all modern song-makers Mr. A. P. Graves is probably the most successful, since, while working on a high literary plane, he has attained to that direct popular appeal which makes the song. " Father O'Flynn " is sung wherever the English tongue is spoken, and Mr. Graves has written others quite as good. He has a multitude of beautiful old Irish airs at his command, and these have been his chief inspiration. The airs are in his mind, so they were in Burns's, and the words follow naturally. Though there are one or two remarkable exceptions, we believe that that is the way in which the best songs are written.

To the critic one of the most interesting features about Mr. Graves's work is its catholicity. Modern Irish verse is apt to be impatient of the past, unless that past is prehistoric. It seeks an archaic simplicity and mystery, and it has evolved a manner of its own to attain its ends. Every one is conscious of the beauties of that manner. In the bands of masters like "A. E." and Mr. Yeats it has produced some of the most fascinating poetry of our generation. But we are also bound to admit fiat in inferior hands, and even in those of the masters when they nod, it is apt to become a mannerism. By dint of doubtful syntax, halting lines, the judicious use of a few epithets like "pale," "wan," "dim," "wandering," and plentiful references to the planetary system, you can produce a kind of effect which foolish people may call " Celtic glamour." But there is nothing in the substance or form of such writing to make it poetry. As often as not it is only a platitude obscurely expressed. Sometimes there is a thin prettiness about it, a touch of fancy or melody; but all minor verse has these faint graces. Much of our modern Celtic poetry is pretty, but nonsense, just as the old Book of Beauty contained verses which were nonsense, but were also pretty according to our grandmothers' standards. Mr. Andrew Lang has shown in an amusing essay that Thomas Haynes Bayly's stuff can be turned out easily in a Rossetti garb, and yet be no better poetry. These modern Celtic revivalists think Moore and his kind inconsiderable poets because they had different tricks and mannerisms. Moore was not a great poet, but he was a true one, and at his best is as likely to live as any Irish poet who has succeeded him. The poetical convention he followed was not a very good one, but it had this merit,—it enforced clearness and orderliness, so that the thought could not be missed, and humbug could never masquerade as profundity. When Moore is trite and silly his verse provides no veil for his triteness and silliness. When he is good—and this is by no means seldom—his merit is patent to all the world. He had the direct appeal, and therefore he was an excellent song- writer. But the ordinary man in dealing with the ordinary Celtic revivalist is always a little puzzled. The charm evades him, and he cannot quite put a name to the faults. A line may be profundity itself, or, on the other hand, it may be merely mental confusion and bad syntax. From this type of Irish poet we may get a great deal of

e The Irish Poems of Alfred Percival Graves. 2 voila Dublin: Maunsel and Co. [Si. net each.]

interesting fancy and folk-lore and many beautiful phrases, but we shall get no songs, for to sing well both the poet and his audience must be clear on the meaning.

Mr. Graves gives us good songs, as we have said, largely because of his catholicity. He is not tied to the mannerisms of any school, and the whole of Irish literature is dear to him. He has been influenced by Moore, by Samuel Lover, by Mangan, by Mr. Yeats and his friends, but most of all by countryside ballads, and by the old folk-songs which Dr. Douglas Hyde has translated. But, as was right and natural, the Gaelic revival has had a special influence during these late years, and we find one of these volumes wholly devoted to exercises where both manner and subject are, as Dr. Hyde would say, " of Irish Ireland." Mr. Graves is as a rule sincere, and therefore he acquires from the revival, not a literary trick, but a new way of looking at the world. Take this stanza from his first poem :-

" Dull red the fern ;

Shapes are shadows; Wild geese mourn

O'er misty meadows."

That sentiment and form are worlds away from Moore, and a reversion to something earlier and more strictly poetic. Take some of the songs, like "The March of the Maguire," " Shule Agra," " The Colleen Donn," " Alone, all alone," or the intolerably affecting poem beginning- " Oh, the praties they are small, Over hero, over here."

There is a note in these foreign to nineteenth-century Irish poetry, something simpler, more barbaric, more primitive. The words in each case have sung themselves to a lovely air, and they have a strangeness to arrest the imagination as well as the proper emotion of the lyric. They are fine Irish songs in the idiomatic sense. Elsewhere Mr. Graves has caught the true manner, not the mannerism, of the Gaelic renaissance. Take the verse which Dr. Hyde quotes :-

" I'm left all alone like a stone at the side of the street,

With no kind 'good day' on the way from the many I meet. Still with looks cold and high they go by, not one brow now unbends, None holds out his hand of the band of my fair-weather friends."

That has the plaintive, wondering, and intensely realistic note of Celtic folk-poetry. Mr. Graves's fault on this side of his work is that he is occasionally too pedestrian. The true magic often escapes him, and though his literalness is the accurate tradition of popular verse, it sometimes prevents him from writing poetry. Now and then, too, he falls into a regular Early Victorian jingle, as in " The Minstrel Lover " and " Oiseen's Lament." Such jingles when associated with subjects usually treated in anything but a jingly way jar ou the reader, and the piece called " The Magic Mist," in which a favourite metre of Mr. Swiuburne's ie parodied, contains all that is worst in both the schools with which Mr. Graves is connected. The rococo manner is one thing, and the modern Gaelic manner is another thing, but if you mix the two you get an unholy combination. Mr. Graves may plead the

example of Mangan before him ; but then Mangan was feeling his way to something new, and Mr. Graves has seen this new thing and knows all about it.

This is the defect of Mr. Graves's merits, the penalty he pays for his catholicity. For ourselves, we prefer his "non-Irish

Ireland" poems, his countryside songs and ballads, where the quality, if less idiomatic, is more human and universal. There are many people able to write Celtic lyrics in the new style as well as or better than Mr. Graves, but no other writer from Kerry to Donegal could have written these countryside poems. They follow a different tradition from the Gaelic revival, but it is a tradition equally Irish. The sentiment is obvious, but so is the sentiment of all good ballads. " Blackberrying," "Trottin' to the Fair," "The Discovery of Whiskey," " The Kilkenny Cats," "'Twas Pretty to be in Ballinderry," " The Cradle of Gold,"—there, selected at random, is a set of songs and ballads which few modern writer's can surpass. Mr. Graves claims kin with Moore, with Lover, with Thackeray, and, very remarkable to our mind, with that admirable and strangely neglected writer, the author of the Ingoldsby Legends. "The

Gaelic Story-Telling" is in Barham's best manner. But most of all he is kin to the old song-makers, who knew how to wed fine airs to words which were understood of the people. It is a position of which Mr. Graves may well be proud.