our beliefs in this matter of the relation between verse and prose. This is a time of great fertility. It will be a disaster if a hundred years hence it is found that like Pope and the 'Bourgeois Gentilhomme' we never knew that we were speaking prose.

HUMBERT WOLFE

Branches of Adam. By John Gould Fletcher. (Faber & Gwyer.) 6s. net.

It is very seldom in these days that you can sit down with a book of new verse, and read it through as you would a book of prose-a novel, a detective story, for instance, or the latest scientific romance. Why not? A book of verse should be as attractive and as compelling at the very least as a bad novel. But it is not so. We revolt against old modes of speech, old manners of thought, old imagery, more readily when they are in verse than when they are in prose. What is too silly to be said can no longer be sung to an audience. It will fade away. In fact, it no longer has any anticipations of pleasure from the song. It may just peep, but, at the first bars, it Alees.

Mr. Fletcher is, therefore, both to be congratulated and to be pitied, for he has written a poem that can be read with pleasure, interest, and excitement, and the poetasters have destroyed his audience for him. He is in a more tantalising position than that of a man who has written a play that is still unacted. The playwright can comfort himself with the reflection that, if his play were produced. . . . But Mr. Fletcher's poem has been produced, and, if the audience proves reluctant, what then? Disappointment and a feeling of waste.

Branches of Adam retells the story of Genesis, as Mr. Fletcher conceives it, in long powerful rhythms and with a vision that is apocalyptic in its embrace of ultimate things. It is a story such as St. John the Divine might have written, if he had lived in this godless age, and had read Blake and Shelley.

"God (says Mr. Fletcher in his Preface), that is to say the ultimate unchangeable value which exists in each one of us, must be either all-powerful or all good. If the root of life be power, then God must exert power over evil as well as good; He must in fact inflict evil,

as the Jews, the ancient Pagans, and the modern Calvinists have held. On the other hand, if God be altogether good, which is the root-idea of Christianity, then God must refuse to work evil even against evil; He must permit evil to continue to the end of time. In the former case, God is a demon; in the latter, a cold abstraction. Shelley, who perceived this paradox with perfect clarity, declared himself an atheist. The present writer does not. I say there are two sides to God, the light-bearer and the darkness-bearer, Lucifer and Jehovah, the serpent and the eagle, Abel and Cain.'

I agree and disagree with most of this; I think Mr. Fletcher is wrong in his conception of evil. I would rather say that, from God's point of view (if He can be said to have a point of view), evil does not exist. It is a purely man-made notion, springing from the self-centred egoism that sees in its own sufferings a criticism of the universe. God, I am sure, has quite other feelings about it (if He can be said to have feelings, but absolutes can only be discussed in the language of humanity). Consequently, I cannot follow Mr. Fletcher when he says that:

'The object of this poem is to show that good and evil exist in this world simultaneously; that good in fact depends upon evil and evil on good; that this world could not exist if it were altogether good, or if it were altogether evil; and that chaos and disunion, not law and order, are the principles of life which sustain all things.' and that:

'God could not create the world without making its foundations rest upon hell, nor save the world He had created without making hell bring forth heaven.'

I would rather say: there is no chaos and no disorder, except in human relationships; God has not yet created the world of human relationships; He has begun, but perhaps He will never finish: that depends on us, for, in this work, we are God; and, in any case, there is no end, for the heaven we aspire to from hell, and reach, is the hell from which we shall spring to a new endeavour. Perhaps, however, the difference between Mr. Fletcher and me is merely one of

statement.

Despite our difference, I read Mr. Fletcher's poem with the

feeling that I was taking in a poetry that was substantial and sustaining. Here and there, the rhythm seemed to have broken, though the joint was scarcely perceptible, and the language seemed to flag, though the interval was not long enough to be tiresome. There are many passages to quote, but this may be as good as any:

'Out of the darkness rising, there comes completion of spring; Out of the death of the forest, the storm rending the branches apart,

Out of the myriads of dead flying leaves, the chill grip of death on the world,

Blazes anew the Promethean fire of hope in the hero's heart. Out of the desolate last sunset, when man in vain questions the sky,

"Wherefore has God made me mortal, to suffer through numberless years

Some hope without human completion, defeat without birth of new day,

Still unsatisfied, yet ever longing, no completion here but I

dreamed

One even higher and better ": out of this there must rise at the last

Some shining star greater than any man dreamed, which man must yet conquer through death.

Without this faith what were man? A mockery troubling the dark,

Born of some demon of infinite malice, bred out of evil to seize The shores of the great sea and cover them with blood, to wreck every hope and return

To the dead breast of Eternity without joy-grant me great faith, O ye years,

Till I am rent and return as a smouldering dead leaf to my clay.'

Faith? It is the great need, and it may not be so far from us as Mr. Fletcher thinks. It will not be the faith of the Churches; it will be of a kind that will purge Mr. Fletcher, if he lives long enough, of his manicheism; and its two principles will be, I believe, audacity and human-kindness.

F. S. FLINT

Romanticism. By Lascelles Abercrombie (Martin Secker.) 6s. net. Professor Abercrombie is always a scholarly and thoughtful critic; and his new book is likely, for obvious reasons, to find wide acceptance among semi-serious readers of literature. It is just because all he writes has its due of respectful consideration that we feel impelled to say frankly that this work, while most-not all-of its minor arguments and illustrations are ably handled, seems to us unsound and misleading in its main premises and its general conclusions.

The first point of issue is the meaning of the word romanticism. Mr. Abercrombie's expressed purpose is to clarify, and so to standardize, the use of the term. From his own point of view, he does not exactly fail in this; but his success is at best a limited and dubious one. For what he has really done is to philosophize a popular and superficial conception of romanticism: a conception which we believe not only to be inadequate to serious critical purposes, but to be already in the wake of modern thought. (It is surely significant that in the short bibliography of recent writings on the subject there is no mention of M. Seillière, Professor Babbitt, M. Lasserre, or Mr. Middleton Murry.) There is, arguably, no cause why a critic should not give his own meaning to the word romanticism, provided that he is careful to state his terms whenever he uses it. But the proviso is an almost impossible one. Again, the use of the term is so common and philosophically so inevitable that any attempt to standardize it which is less than convincing, is bound to engender confusion. Better an acknowledged vagueness than an erroneous dogma.

Although it is hoped, if not to make clear in a review, at least to suggest to readers of his book, why we think Mr. Abercrombie's romanticism a partial romanticism; our disagreement works from an initial difference of opinion, and differences of opinion must be honestly avowed. To us, romanticism is one of the two great complementary impulses of the human spirit, and has been for a century and a half the dominant mood of the Western consciousness. To him, it is a disease: a fever, exciting, indeed, and productive of gorgeous dreams, but requiring to be tempered with classicism, which is health'. It is in a sense true that romanticism must be tempered; but to say that Dante and Shakespeare are romantic and classic by stages: that in La Vita Nuova or Romeo and Juliet we have

a complete phase of romanticism, subsequently adjusted: to attribute to Romeo and Juliet a 'romantic' motive-the supra-sensual reality of love—which is, surely, more completely embodied in Antony and Cleopatra, the ripest fruit of Shakespeare's 'readjusted' tragic art: this is not to comprehend the manner of the tempering. When one reads that Wordsworth was not a romantic poet; that Shakespeare was romantic in moments' (and what moments!); one cannot but feel that to Mr. Abercrombie literature is classical wherever it is great: that he dislikes this romanticism of his, and is rather ashamed for it: that he feels it to be the liberation of an unworthy element in the human soul: that he unconsciously finds a difficulty in allowing the romantic element even the validity to which his own concessions of definition entitle it.

Classicism, to our critic, is not an 'element', like romanticism, but a method of combining elements. The true antithesis, he says, the opposing element to romanticism, is realism. Here we must emphatically join issue. He gives no satisfactory philosophical definition of realism as a quality in art: nobody, we believe, has done or can do so: a critic so fine as Mr. McDowall failed heroically at this fence. In a sense all art is real: in a sense all art is unreal. Art must always sublimate, essentialize the actual without distorting it. Realism, as a kind, does not touch the impulse or the nature of art; it can consist only in choice of subject-matter. A little more than that: it is a way, a directness, of handling the subject-matter; but only a way of handling it; not even an æsthetic method, certainly not an attitude. It is not an element in the sense in which romanticism, truly apprehended, could be called an element. There is, in any case, no opposition: the most romantic writer is often a realist in the limited meaning which alone can be allowed to the term. When Mr. Abercrombie compares romantic and realistic fairies, or traces the attitude to Views of Porter, Suckling, Norris, and Campbell, or claims that a dreamy or fanciful strain in Dryden, Collins, and Gray is romanticism, we only feel that his vital antithesis is trivial beside the antithesis that has swayed the whole history of literature. This confusion between two planes of thought is surprising, since he has so many glimpses of the truth: of the presence of a romantic quality in Aeschylus and Plato, for example; of the significance of the One and the Many' to the problem; of the relation between feeling and manner; of the distinction between Jonson and