MR. GRAVES, MR. FROST, AND MR. ROY CAMPBELL. ,

75. 63.) • •

WHEN one is young—really young, I mean, young beyond the dreams of the middle-aged—one never has the least diffieuIt3 in distinguishing between Poetry and Not. It is one of the most ominous signs of that senility which begins to attack us in our late teens that this faculty of-immediate; undoubting. unreasonable distinction begins to fade ; that one admits border-line cases, that one doubts and hesitates, that one allows on Thursday that on Tuesday one was wrong. • Most people fondly believe that the change is outside them, that since their schooldays the -pure milk of contemporary poetry has been cumulatively watered. But-well launched into the twenties as I now am it is impossible to keep up the self- deception any longer ; I have to admit that I am getting old.

Imagine, then, the joy—like a breath of new youth, like a - love affair to a lady in her fifties—with which I found myself immediately and -flatly deciding that. The Flaming- Terrapin was poetry. Whether good or bad poetry was -neither- here - nor there ; there can be good or bad poetry as, there is' goodor bad cheese ; the point was that I never for a moment imagined

it to be chalk. - Mr. Roy Campbell is a young South. African whose work has been known for some time, but chiefly privately. (for this is his first book). He was an enthusiast -for Rimbaud, and generally at least as much influenced by French as English tradition ; and his personality was notably picturesque. But the present book is as surprising to his earlier admirers as to those who have never heard of -.him before. The - style is almost pure Marlowe-Vaehel :Lindsay, with occasional touches of Dryden, ranging. from

" Round the stark Horn with buckled masts she clove, Round the lean forearni of the World she drove, • Round the stark Horn, the lupanar of Death, Where she and that fierce Lesbian the Typhoon Roll smoking in the blizzard's frosty breath, Where, like a skinny cockroach, the faint moon Crawls on their tattered blanket, whose dark woof Of knitted_oloud shrouds their dread dalliance, proof To the white archery of the sun, and those Thin javelins that cold Orion throws.

Round the -stark Horn, where bleak and stiffly lined - Hooked ridges-form a cauldron for the wind, , And droning endless tunes, that gloomy sprite ' Stoops to his dismal cookery all night, • • - And with his giant ladle skims the froth, Boiling up icebergs in the stormy broth, Brewing the spirits that in sinking ships Drowned sailors tipple with their clammy lips " - " While old Plutocracy on gouty-feet

Limps like a- great. splay camel -down the street ; _ And Patriotism, Satan's angry son,

Rasps on the trigger of his rusty gun, — While priests and churchmen, heedless of the strife, Find remedy in thoughts of aftergife.; .

Had-they nine lives 0 muddled and perplexed _

• They'd waste each one in thinking of-the next ! •

.anci 'even: 0--Ipic passages- that one might alFaost call gentle

to and tender. But unfortunately the poem, as a whole, is not quite so impressive as it is in parts. In the first place, its central notion is not sufficiently sublime or original really to tax the poet's powers of expression, as the powers of a great poet are always taxed ; it is a simple personification of the élan vital as a giant Terrapin, which tows the Ark round the World in headlong Odyssey and barges Satan over the edge of the Pit ; and it does not add much to other similar personi- fications. And in the second place, Mr. Campbell is always noisy, always expresses his meaning by exaggeration ; and in the end he really does deafen one by the din. One becomes immune to his effectiveness.

In short, he is the last Elizabethan in an age swinging to- wards the Augustans. Will he at all check that swing, start a movement, as a cynic wittily put it, for Bigger and Better Poems ? Heaven only knows.

It is a far cry from the Horn to New Hampshire. Mr, Frost is never noisy. Sometimes he is quietly facetious :-

" Raving a wheel and four legs of its own Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone To get it anywhere that I can see.

These hands have helped it go, and even race ; Not all the motion, though, they ever lent, Not all the miles it may have thought it went, Have got it one step from the starting-place."

Sometimes he is as banal cs the wildest Wordsworth ; but, generally, he is notable for an easy, pleasant, and consummate power of description by understatement. Of all American poets he gets the most sympathy here ; and indeed he might get it anywhere, for he is not, in the vicious sense, peculiar, but original, and often fantastic, as witness Paul's Wife, the lady found in the centre of a log. He is, indeed, a difficult person to place in the hierarchy of poets; so quiet, so unem- phatic, so fresh ; will the freshness and pleasure ever go from such an idyll as Wild Grapes, for instance, and the quietness ever be petrified into dullness ? Or will it be one of those fortunate pieces whose qualities are enhanced—nay, often discovered, invented almost—by the passage of a thousand years ?

At first sight there seems less in Mockbeggar Hall of Mr. Graves than of his Indian philosopher and friend, Mr. Malik. As one who has only occasionally had opportunity for hearing Mr. Malik discourse I cannot attack the question with any certainty ; but it seems to me that the aspect of his philosophy pertinent, at any rate as interpreted by Mr. Graves, may be summarized thus : wherever there is conflict of opinion, neither party is in the right ; wherever there is conflict, each action has its equal and opposite reaction. Thus, in the play written by Mr. Graves and Mr. Malik in collaboration, the latter summarizes its intent in the prologue :—

" As for the content, I can only make a negative statement, that the plot will not conform with the European and Asiatic tradition of allotting a definite character to each individual which he must wear unchanged until the end, nor will the drama allow any one opinion to triumph over another and remain unchallenged happily ever after."

Here, surely, the authors are whipping a dead horse ; for I defy them to adduce any single great work of civilized

literature which does not conform to their (as opposed to what they call the traditional) point of view. It is, in fact, one of the axioms of all dramatists or writers of fiction ; but Mr. Graves has seized on it as being something so new as to be the raison d'etre, not only of this play but of most of the poems in this book : he affirms it

" Not once, now and then,

But again and again And again and again and again."

It is a hard. thing to say, but one feels on reading this book that Mr. Graves has been led away by the attraction of the picturesque ; he is taken with the Romance of Philosophy as other poets get taken with the Romance of Science or the Romance • of Buccaneering ; and Mr. Malik's talk of conflict (in a metaphysical sense) struck him just when conflict (in the present technical psychological ablirse) was exercising a good deal of his thought ; and with his gift for poetic logic he has naturally superimposed the one on the other—the x of one equation on the x of the other. It seems to me that this, rather than any presumable lack of profundity on Mr. Malik's side, is the cause of the unsatisfactory nature of the result ; which is liable to be unpalatable to the purely poetic reader and inuutritious to the purely philosophical. With any less important writer this would be less of a pity ; but I yield to no one in admiration for Mr. Graves, and again and again his poetic genius shines through the metaphysical murk, an indication of what one is missing. Mr. Graves and Mr. Malik are really on such different planes of mental process that one cannot but feel partnership of this kind a drawback to_them both. RICHARD Hues.