environment. It implies, in a word, a certain amount of biographical information, proceeding either from books or from personal knowledge. Now, in most cases, no such knowledge was available to me, and in no case did I regard it as my business to go in search of it, or to make use of such chance rumours as happened to have reached my ears. It would be possible, no doubt, for a writer of extraordinary tact and skill to go over exactly the ground I have covered and produce a gallery of critical character-sketches, instead of the series of talent-definitions here presented. Such a work would, under present conditions, be one of extreme delicacy; and I, for my part, felt no impulse to attempt it. There is a time for everything, and, in the case of most of the poets here dealt with, the time for psychological criticism, in the full sense of the word, has not yet come. When it does come, I hope the critics who take the task in hand may not find my preliminary studies of talent quite unhelpful towards the ultimate co-ordination of talent and character.

It may not be quite superfluous to mention that many of the poets here treated of are personally unknown to me, while with none have I more than the merest passing acquaintance. Whatever the errors of my criticism, they are in no case due to clique-enthusiasm.

Only one of the ensuing essays-that on Mr. A. E. Housman, reprinted by permission from the Fortnightly Review-has already appeared in anything like its present shape. In other papers I have embodied occasional passages and phrases from articles in the Daily Chronicle, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Westminster Gazette, the Sketch, and the Pall Mall Magazine. But to all intents and purposes the book is entirely new.

Mr. John M. Robertson, in his very able New Essays towards a Critical Method (1897), advances a plea for scientific criticism which puts to shame the irresponsible

dilettantism of the following pages. I have already explained why, even had I possessed Mr. Robertson's intellectual machinery, I could scarcely have applied it to advantage in dealing with the productions of living men and women whose work is, by hypothesis, far from complete, and whose personal history is not yet before the public. One of Mr. Robertson's suggestions, however, which he puts forward as a far-off ideal, seems to me perfectly practicable even in the "ignorant present." It amounts to this, that the critic should give the reader and the person criticised an opportunity of checking his individual judgments, and estimating their value, by a reference to his general culture and habit of mind; so that (for example) an author whom he condemns in the present may know what authors of the past fall under a similar ban, and may possibly take comfort from the company in which he finds himself. But I will let Mr. Robertson himself expound his proposals. He writes:

The perfect scientific critic, the critic of the future perhaps, might be conceived as prefacing his every judgment—or the body of his judgments-with a confession of faith, bias, temperament, and training. As thus: "I have a leaning towards what is called 'exact' [or religious or mystical] thought, with [or without] a tenderness for certain forms of arbitrary [or spiritual] sentiment which prevail among many people I know and like. I value poetry as a stimulus to sympathy and moral zeal [or, as the beautiful expression of any species of feeling], caring little [or much] for cadence and phrase as such; accordingly I value Browning and Dante and Hugo above Heine and Musset and Tennyson* [or vice versâ]. . . . I am reverent [or irreverent] of august tradition and social propriety; and I have little taste [or, I care above all things] in imaginative literature, for those forms called realistic, as aiming at a close fidelity to everyday fact [or, for those exercises of invention which carry me most completely out of my normal relation to my

If this were other than a mere formula, in which the particular names used are of no importance, one could not but wonder to find Dante figuring among the scorners of "cadence and phrase."—W. A.

surroundings]. I am a Unitarian [or a Baptist, or a Catholic, or an Agnostic], having been brought up in that persuasion [or having come to that way of thinking in mature life]. In politics I am ———. My main physical diathesis is Finally, I am years of age

in this year

This is more than a merely sportive suggestion on Mr. Robertson's part. The day may very well come when every critic will be called upon to fill up some such schedule of temperament and qualification, in order that readers may know clearly through what medium they are invited to contemplate any given work of art.* Nowadays we are far enough from any such ideal. We do not even demand to know the name of a critic, so as to correlate one judgment with another; much less do we make any formal inquiry into his culture, his temperament, his prejudices. Yet it is only by such vague knowledge on these points as we can glean from the internal evidence his work affords, that we are able to attach anything like their true value to the simplest terms he employs. Enginedrivers are examined (at least we hope so) lest perchance they should prove to be colour-blind; but we apply no such tests to critics, though they are called upon to make infinitely subtler discriminations than the mere distinguishing of a red light from a green.

There is all the more likelihood, however, of Mr. Robertson's suggestion finding acceptance, since it is eminently comfortable to the egotist within us. Without inquiring whether I am fulfilling a duty or yielding to a temptation, I propose to give the reader some such material for checking the judgments contained in the following pages as Mr. Robertson's scientific ideal demands. Poetry being the sole question at issue, I shall confine my con

* It might perhaps be desirable, for the guidance of the persons criticised, that a statement of the critic's athletic record, his chestmeasurement and his fighting weight should be included.

fidences to such matters as seem to bear directly or indirectly upon my qualifications as a critic of poetry.

In the first place, I am a pure-bred Scotchman. There is some vague family legend of an ancestor of my father's having come from England with Oliver Cromwell and settled in Glasgow; but I never could discover any evidence for it. The only thing that speaks in its favour is that my name, common in England, is uncommon in Scotland. My maternal grandfather and grandmother both came of families that seem to have dwelt from time immemorial in and about Perth, at the gateway of the Highlands. This being so, it appears very improbable that there should not be some Keltic admixture in my blood; but I cannot absolutely lay my finger on any "Mac among my forbears. Both my parents belong to families of a deeply religious cast of mind, ultra-orthodox in dogma, heterodox, and even vehemently dissenting, on questions of church government. I can trace some way back in my mother's family a strain of good, sound, orthodox literary culture and taste; of specially poetical faculty, little or none. It may perhaps be worth mentioning that one of my great-grandfathers or great-grand-uncles printed, and I believe edited, an edition of the poets, much esteemed in its day.

The earliest symptom I can find in myself that can possibly be taken as showing any marked relation to the poetic side of life, is an extreme susceptibility (very clearly inherited from my father) to simple, pathetic music. It is related that, even in my infancy, one special tune-the Adeste Fideles-if so much as hummed in my neighbourhood, would always make me howl lustily; and indeed to this day it seems to me infinitely pathetic. I have carried through life, without any sort of musical gift, and with a very imperfect apprehension of tonality, harmony, and the refinements and complexities of musical expres

sion, this keen sensibility to the emotional effect of certain lovely rhythms and simple curves of notes. I am not sure that Lascia ch'io pianga, Che farò senza Euridice, and the cantabile in Chopin's Funeral March do not seem to me the very divinest utterances of the human spirit, before which all the achievements of all the poets fade and grow dim. But it is all one to me (or very nearly so) whether they are reeled off on a barrel-organ or performed by the greatest singers, the finest orchestra. Nay, my own performances of them, in the silent chamber-concerts of memory, are enough to bring the tears to my eyes.

I cannot remember that the poetry I learned at school interested or pleased me particularly--" On Linden, when the sun was low," "Fitz-James was brave, yet to his heart," "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold," and so forth. At about the normal age, fourteen to fifteen, I was seized with the normal attack of Byronism, knew by heart "The Isles of Greece," "Then rose from sea to sky the wild farewell,"

Slow sinks, more lovely ere his race be run,
Along Morea's hills the setting sun,

with other gems, and bought and read devoutly Moore's life of my hero. The first composition of mine that ever found its way into print was some sort of rhapsody (in prose) on Byron at Missolonghi. The attack passed off in six months or so, and I am not aware that it left behind any permanent ill effects. About the same time I read the greater part of The Faery Queen, with a certain pleasure, but without any real appreciation. It was from Wordsworth, whom I read for a college essay, that I learned the true meaning of the word poetry. I did not win the prize, but I won what was much more valuable-a perception, as yet vague and uncertain enough, of the distinction between fustian and style. Let me not be understood to imply in