TWO POETS.* IN no age since the Elizabethan has the

writing of good verse been a. gift so widely distributed among cultivated people as it is to-day. We are the last to complain of the phenomenon. Before a man can write good verse he must have attained to a high pitch of literary training and be something of a master of his own speech. Just as good elegiacs are the proof of a certain mastery over Latin, so good English verses are at all events a proof of a considerable literary skill. But the universality of the art has one drawback,—it makes it difficult to keep an alert ear for the true master. Where all are so accomplished the few who possess the something more may escape notice. The two books before us seem, with all their faults, to have that "something more." Mr. Doughty is one of the rudest craftsmen who over hammered at the English tongue. Mr. St. John Lucas often falls from grace out of sheer facility. Melodious lines come so readily to him that he is apt to think melody enough. But both at their best have moments when they surprise and delight us with something incommunicable and inimitable, something which makes us say spontaneously : "This is assuredly poetry." And after all, however we may disguise it in learned words, this direct appeal is the only teat.

The author of that itinerary of genius, Travels in ,Arabia Deserla, has brought the formless, misshapen spirit of the desert into his work. He sings of man's first disobedience in a style compounded of a Norse saga and a Bedawin lay, with a memory somewhere of the great hymns of the early Church. His landscape is mainly outside the world, in Harisuth, the Land of the Lord's Curse, or in some strange Valley of Vision which is neither earth nor chaos. His figures are Eve and Adam—fallen from immortality, but as yet scarcely human— and a concourse of Archangels, Winds, Hours, and Days. The stage directions are of this pattern :—" Swart night Hours, cloudy winged Creatures, enter from above, and these slowly hover forth : then the morrow cometh,-and the white day-Hours go by, till afternoon." In the opening Adam is revealed in a waste land, blinded, famished, and alone, for when he and Eve had been cast out of Paradise they had fallen in different regions. The angel Ezriel appears and shows him Eve, who, as sick and weary as himself, has ap- proached "on a tall camel." In the morning an angel's voice proclaims that the years of Adam's punishment are ended, and the two are led into a Valley of Rest, where they wash in a healing spring and regain sight and health. In a beautiful passage Adam tells of the old life in Eden, while Eve sits plaiting sandals for his feet. But the Valley of Rest is cut off by a great waste from the earth which , is their heritage, and at the angel's bidding the two set out to cross the desert. Then follows a wonderful saga of toil. Beaten on by sun and wind, bruised, wounded, bearing alternately each other's• weight, they stagger across the waste, still haunted by memories of the heavenly gardens they had lost. At last they reach the barrier ridge of the Valley of Vision, and see before them the gates of earth. With the promise of the Lord before them, they enter on their inheritance. A succession of pictures shows the first man labouring in the fields and building rude shelters, gazing at the sea, marvelling at the way of the seasons, while Eve has become a housewife, and makes clothing of skins and rules the simple order of their home. It is a strange, fascinating, and indescribable world,—earth before humanity cast its spell over it, humanity not yet wedded to earth. The consummation is reached when the first fire crackles on the floor of the cave, and the first children crowd round Eve's knees. The last " (1) Adam Cast Forth. By Charles M. Doughty. London : Duckworth and Co. 14s. 6d. net:1—M New Poems. By St, John Lucas. London, A. Constable and Co. [5s. net.] scene is typical of Mr. Doughty's art. The little group are safe indoors and outside is the noise of tempest. Eve, remem-

bering the Land of the Lord's Curse, shivers, but Adam con- soles her. This is no awful blast from the outer darkness, but the kindly storms of winter, out of which will come increase and fruitfulness to earth. Mr. Doughty has fashioned his "Jndaeo-Arabian legend" into a poem whose quality is un- deniable, and yet hard to define. It has no felicities to quote.

It is simple to rudeness, and so elemental as to be now and then almost too grotesque for art. Its spacious imaginings move in a world as austere in its lines as the desert itself.

But like the desert they have grandeur, and at rare intervals a green oasis. In the .latter scenes, especially, there come passages of a simple human beauty, like herbage round a spring in a bare land. We had expected magnificence from Mr. Doughty, but we do not know whether his moments of tenderness are not more impressive than his heroics. He has written a noble poem which will be welcomed by all who are worthy of an art that makes no concessions to popularity.

Mr. St. John Lucas makes concessions, but rarely with offence. His cardinal merit is his complete sincerity. It is his fortune to be young, but to have lived long enough to see the first rapture of youth die. He has memories behind him,

as well as a wide outlook in front. He is scrupulously honest with himself, and in this book of New Poems, while many of

the pieces are intimate and personal, there is no hint any- where of a literary pose. He never forces himself to be robuatious or to be melancholy for the sake of art. This sincerity would be only a negative nierit—for many a plain man is sincere and yet no poet—but Mr. Lucas has also no common imaginative force, and a broad sympathy which ranges with ease over most phases of life. Few men have sung more heartily of the joys of the open road, but he escapes the obtuseness and banality into which the robust singer is apt to fall. Take, for example, his "Ballad of the Ridgeway," a splendid morning song of youth and travel; or his version of the tale of Sir Ysumbras of the Ford, which has the true ecstasy of romance ; or, best of all, his "Ship of Fools," which we would rank high among modern chants of

adventure,—a poem which will be familiar to readers of the Spectator, since it first appeared in our columns :— "The worn ship reels, but still unfurled Our tattered ensign flouts the skies ; And doomed to watch a prudent world Of little men grown mean and wise, The old sea laughs for joy to find One purple folly left to her,

When glimmers down the riotous wind The flag of the adventurer !

0 watchman leaning from the mast, What of the night? The shadows flee ; The stars grow pale, the storm is past ; The blood-red sunrise stains the sea. At length, at length, 0 steadfast wills, Luck takes the tiller and foul tides turn ; Superb amid majestic hills The domes of Eldorado burn!"

This is a noble strain, but it does not prepare us for the subtlety and insight which Mr. Lucas also possesses. His " Lazarus " deals not with the joy of resurrection, but with the certain horror which must have overtaken one recalled from death, and his meeting with the daughter of Jairus and the widow's son of Nain by the Dead Sea is finely imagined. "The Artist," too, is a subtle allegory, and the "Funeral March of a Mad Poet" is a version of Browning's "Gram- marian's Funeral," in which to a haunting music the squalor of life and the majesty of dreams are strangely contrasted. Mr. Lucas, like all true poets of youth, is awake to the shadows which at moments must cloud the most gallant bravery of spirit. The last, and to our mind the finest, poem in the book, "The Return," tells of a revisiting of old scenes and thepange which lurk in the fairest memory. In stanzas

of which Matthew Arnold would not have been ashamed, we have the romance of the Oxford countryside, the happy valour of youth, the regrets of its passing, and the consolation of an unchanging Nature. As the Scholar-Gipsy was still seen "at some lone homestead in the Cumnor hills," so this poet has still the Road "Further afield than the Ridgeway goes; Steeper than Hackpen height;

To an austere place that ne man knows It leads me day and night." A word must be said about Mr. Lucas's craftsmanship. He has little to learn from anybody, for he is full of the spirit of old and good poetry. In a song like "The Lute" there is no word we can imagine otherwise. This mastery over words enables him to put a difficult thought in small compass, as in " Pain " and "The Little Sinner,"—an accomplishment which is impossible for those who have only the gift of easy melody. It also enables him to write urbane and delicate verses on homely matters where a hint of rhetoric would offend. As an instance of this uncommon gift we take leave to quote in full a little poem called "My Dog" :— "The curate thinks you have no soul :

I know that he has none. But you, Dear friend! whose solemn self-control In our four-square, familiar pew Was pattern to my youth—whose bark Called me in summer dawns to rove— Have you gone down into the dark Where none is welcome, none may love ?

I will not think those good brown eyes Have spent their light of truth so soon ; But in some canine Paradise Your wraith, I know, rebukes the moon, And quarters every plain and hill, Seeking its master. . . . As for me This prayer at least the gods fulfil: That when I pass the flood, and see Old Charon by the Stygian coast Take toll of all the shades who land, Your little, faithful, barking ghost May leap to lick my phantom hand."