endure what no man ought to be called upon to endure, the breaking point comes. Desire fails, ambition dies-nothing is worth while. The happiest, or rather the least miserable, end of all is to crawl away to one's den like a wounded animal; and to Lord Leonard even this was denied he was too rich. What can youth understand of all this?

The only son of a younger son, he passed a miserable childhood of poverty almost squalid. His mother, vastly determined and capable, contrived somehow or other to put him into the Royal Navy. He was not popular-solitude and poverty do not engender the popular qualities, but he made one friend. He loved his work and everything to do with the sea. One fatal day there came the message announcing two deaths. The Commandant sent for him, delivered the message with due gravity, and anticipated some expressions of regret, but all the boy said was : 'Does that mean that I'm Lord Leonard, sir?' To himself the Commandant remarked: 'Hang it all! At his age one does not have such an uncommonly keen eye for the main chance.' So he was misunderstood from the first. All the poor boy was thinking was that his mother would never allow him to stay in the Navy; and, indeed, a midshipman who was a peer of the realm with thirty thousand a year would be something of an anomaly. He was also thinking what a terrible thing it must be to be suddenly transformed into such a disagreeable person as the late Lord Leonard.

He left the Navy then, his one great pleasure. Only one stroke of luck befell him in all his miserable life: he was spared the pains of indigence. No rascally lawyers or swindling trustees could evade the vigilance of Mrs. Leonard, and when he came of age he found himself not only rich, but vastly wealthy. Urged, injudiciously enough, by his mother to marry, he attempts to do so, selecting a graceful and accomplished young lady, who rewards him by eloping with his only friend. Betrayed by his friend and his betrothed, it remained only for him to be betrayed by his wife. The girl was a minx, and turned out to be a termagant or worse, if there can be anything worse than a termagant wife. His son died, but he owned a daughter, of whom nothing could be predicated except that she was his wife's daughter. The unavoidable divorce followed. He retained a love of the sea, and also a queer idea that he could write poetry. Late in life he formed an attachment for the son of his old friend. The boy went out with the naval contingent, and was killed in Methuen's advance. The unhappy man expires almost with the cry of Calvary on his lips.

'The Fine Arts' is an expression that covers all the arts except music, prose, and poetry, as the expression is usually

employed. How many people are there in England who appreciate all the Fine Arts? The members of the Dilettanti Club. Here, in order to secure community of sentiment, you cannot become a candidate; you must be invited. Next, the Burlington Fine Arts Club, with a nominal membership of 500. Finally, the frequenters of Christie's, including those who are interested commercially and those who are interested artistically. Say 1000 altogether. From all of these gentlemen you may expect a sound and probably an expert opinion. Outside this microscopic portion of the electorate there is hardly anything but pretence.

To return to our province of the Fine Art of Prose: there are very few people who can appreciate all styles. Probably at the present moment these novels are not widely read, although in the past they have been highly popular. But as for not being widely read, who reads Shakespeare? Only the most fastidious and highly trained.

Mutatis mutandis and at a long interval we can now place our man. As an exacting stylist, a master of narrative and of psychology, he is easily in the first rank.

W. F. LORD.

1923

THE DIVINE POET

'THE two cardinal points of poetry,' it was agreed by Coleridge and Wordsworth in one of their conversations, are the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of Nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination.' If, on the one hand, we extend the word ' Nature' to include man and his works, his pains and pleasures, and, on the other, the word 'imagination to include those mysterious exhalations from the immaterial world which sometimes, as in the case of Coleridge's own Kubla Khan, seem to amount to frank sorcery, we shall find the definition satisfactory. With these qualifications, for example, it is easy to place Pope, who is manifestly a great poet, though his imagination is not highly coloured, though he is not greatly interested in Nature, in the narrow usage of the term. We shall agree that in fact all that which we call poetry lies between the one and the other, inclining now to the former point, now to the latter. We shall probably conclude that as a rule the greatest genius lies most nearly equidistant between the two. This is certainly true of Milton and Wordsworth, two of the greatest and most representative of English poets, though with the first the needle points rather to imagination than Nature, and with the second the reverse is the case. But the Milton of Paradise Lost is also the Milton of Il Penseroso, our finest pastoral lyric. And where in our language are the two influences more happily combined than in Tintern Abbey and the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality ? Nor is Shelley even an exception to this rule. The men at the extremes will generally be of the second order of poets.

As an example of one sort we may cite the poet Crabbe, whose realism is little illumined by the modifying colours of the imagination.' If the author of Phoebe Dawson be at one pole, Richard Crashaw is at the other. If the first be of the earth earthy, the second is of the sky skiey. Crashaw, indeed, at his best fulfils the conception of the poet as an ethereal being, whose eyes are fixed upon a world that those of grosser vision see not, whose feet scarce touch the clay of this in his passage through it, who shines with a light reflected from divine fires. The foremost charac

teristic of his poetry, that from which springs his chief fascination, which compensates for his faults, is ecstasy. Now we are inclined to consider the Englishman a stolid individual, but it is a fact that ecstasy is very common in English poetry. It is its lack that so often disappoints English readers of French poetry, where they find no Crashaw, no Shelley, no Francis Thompson. Allied with this ecstasy is mysticism, wherein also English literature, from Vaughan to Coventry Patmore, is rich. What is remarkable about Crashaw is that his mysticism is not typically English-is, in fact, most un-English. He stands alone, not only among English poets, but among English Catholic mystics.

Richard Crashaw was born in London, at some date between July 1612 and July 1613, of Protestant clerical stock. He was educated at the Charterhouse. The exact date of his entry cannot be determined, the registers not going back so far. Among his many Latin poems is one addressed to his schoolmaster, ' ornatissimo viro praeceptori suo colendissimo, magistro Brook,' included in the book of Greek and Latin poetry written ‘dum Aulae Pemb. alumnus fuit, et Collegii Petrensis socius.' He was elected a scholar of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in July 1631, graduating in 1634, and transferring in 1636 to Peterhouse, thus making, as Dean Beeching notes, the opposite journey to that which was made by Gray in the following century. In a volume of divine epigrams in Latin published that year is perhaps the most famous Latin line written by an English poet, on the miracle of the water turned into wine, the pentameter

Nympha pudica Deum vidit et erubuit

which has attracted many translators, the majority of them basing their versions on a misprint of lympha' for ' nympha.'

Crashaw became a Fellow of Peterhouse in 1637, the year in which the brilliant young Abraham Cowley, whose friendship with the elder poet was to be immortal, came up to Trinity. Another friend was Joseph Beaumont, author of Psyche, also at Peterhouse. The unknown editor of Crashaw's Steps to the Temple declares that the latter was 'excellent' in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish (in the two last of which he had no instructor), and skilled, as well as in poetry, in Music, Drawing, Limning, Graving.' He became an intimate of Little Gidding, in the neighbouring shire of Huntingdon, where Nicholas Ferrar had founded a religious settlement devoted to divine meditation, where, he declares, in words which have kinship with the famous passage in the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,

The self-rememb'ring soul sweetly recovers

Her kindred with the stars.

At this time he was still a Laudian within the Church of England.

There is no reason to suppose that he would have left it but for the overthrow of the High Church party. In 1644 came that débâcle. Laud was beheaded, and on Cambridge came, like a wolf on the fold, the Earl of Manchester to administer the Solemn League and Covenant. Crashaw refused to subscribe, and was one of sixty or seventy Fellows expelled. He went to the royal headquarters at Oxford, of which University he was already a member. It was probably here that he became a Roman Catholic. We next discover him in poverty and distress in Paris, where, as the story goes, he was presented to Queen Henrietta Maria by Cowley. There also his Steps to the Temple was published. The Queen sent him with letters of introduction to Rome, where he became secretary to Cardinal Palotta, the Governor. Another Fellow of Peterhouse, John Bargrave, relates that he complained to his master of the wickedness of his suite. This brought him into so great danger that the Cardinal had him appointed to a benefice at the Church of Our Lady of Loretto, which enshrined the Holy House, said to have been carried by angels from Nazareth to deliver it from the impious hands of the Saracens. There he died of a fever shortly after his arrival. Dr. Grosart has discovered that a new appointment was made on August 25, 1649, four months later. Cowley writes in his famous elegy:

Where, like some holy sacrifice t'expire,

A fever burns thee, and love lights the fire,

evidently not crediting the story that he was poisoned by the Italians whose wickedness he had exposed to Cardinal Palotta. No more fitting end can be imagined for this creature all flame and passion than a passing at such a site. The incident is one of the great romances of literary history, and has a worthy commemoration in Cowley's splendid ode.

In dealing with the metaphysical poets we find ourselves constantly referred to two names. Whether our study be Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Quarles, Cowley or Marvell, we are always repeating these names, those of John Donne and Ben Jonson. These two poets dominate all their age and for good and ill mark it as their own. Crashaw, most 'metaphysical' of them all, appears to owe rather less than these others to Donne and less still to Ben. Some of those strangely earthly metaphors for sacred things which he employs may indeed come from Donne, but much of his inspiration is foreign-Spanish and Italian. Two of the sources are revealed by himself in his hymns to Saint Teresa, the Spanish mystic, and in Sospetto d'Herode, a translation of the first canto of an epic by Cavaliere Marini, an Italian poet whose death occurred in Crashaw's childhood. It is from these sources that come his religious ardour, wherein the divine mingles so strangely