poetry of the Georgians, to say nothing of the poetry of the Elizabethans. But it also has its merits, and they are intimately abiding. He has two salient characteristics; a delicacy that is almost robust and a robustness that is almost delicate. His lyrics especially show such a robust delicacy as is here meant; they are direct and forceful, yet not rugged; they are full of feeling, yet not sentimental; they are limpid in handling, yet not wavering. Indeed, possibly the fault of not being sufficiently inconsequent is occasionally attributable to them. Herein, perhaps, can be seen the influence of Byron, a poet whom Henley admired. The antithesis to the art of Henley is, in consequence, the art of such poets as Shelley on the one hand and Blake on the other. Henley's lyricism never vapors; it is of the earth earthy, though that particular earth bears a great mass of flowers; it is soft earth, not dried mud.

But beyond the influence of Byron —and that influence is not too apparent and hardly ever so in mere technique there is the individual touch of the poet himself, and this makes his lyrics, at any rate the best of them, join together to form a genre that is very nearly unique. The admixture of atmosphere in them, especially as the atmosphere is not an end in itself but only an underlying accompaniment to the emotion, gives them a note that is entirely Henley's own. Read, for example, the following:

The night dislimns, and breaks
Like snows slow thawn;
An evil wind awakes

On lea and lawn;

The low East quakes; and hark!
Out of the kindless dark,
A fierce, protesting lark,
High in the horror of dawn!

A shivering streak of light,
A scurry of rain:

Bleak day from bleaker night
Creeps pinched and fain;

What atmosphere there is in that, in the first two verses especially! Yet how artistically subordinate is the atmosphere to the emotion. Every stroke in the whole poem leads up to the final four lines.

But Henley's lyrics are not all of this pattern. He can write a song which, for singing quality, matches the lyrists of the Cavalier epoch. The following makes an excellent foil and contrast to the poem already quoted.

O, gather me the rose, the rose,

While yet in flower we find it,
For summer smiles, but summer goes,
And winter waits behind it!

For with the dream foregone, foregone,
The deed forborne forever,
The worm, regret, will canker on,

And Time will turn him never.

So well it were to love, my love,

And cheat of any laughter The fate beneath us and above, The dark before and after.

The myrtle and the rose, the rose,
The sunshine and the swallow,
The dream that comes, the wish that goes,
The memories that follow!

Even in this delicate piece of flute music there is a robustness which lifts it from the sentimental. His songs are strenuous with a mental vitality which takes for its verse-clothing a certain physical vitality of metre. It is possibly this metrical robustness which made Henley so naturally begin working in the medium of vers libre.

Henley's principal predecessor in the handling of vers libre in English is Matthew Arnold, who derived it - but with what a loss of flavor in the process! - from Goethe and Heine. However, be this as it may, there is little similarity between the vers libre of Henley and the vers libre of Arnold. Henley's is built after a fashion of his own; it is heavier in its march and, though heavier, more musical, despite Arnold's habit of being anapæstic. Above all, it is not prose sliced into contortion, a type of verse for the eye rather than the

ear

and even then for an astigmatic eye! It remains verse, with each line a definite metrical unit, and has certain affinities with the choruses in Samson Agonistes. In one particular, especially, is it different from Georgian vers libre: it sometimes uses rhyme. Consequently it is nearer to French vers libre than to German, and in this fact lies the essential diversity in Henley's use of it and Arnold's, though, indeed, some of Arnold's does not eschew the grace of the syllabic chime. London Voluntaries forms the outstanding example of Henley's rhyming vers libre, and in that collection the iambic beat is fairly persistent, and maybe a confirmed Georgian would consider it illegitimate and on a level with a sonnet of fifteen lines. Therefore, as a sop to Cerberus a sop designed to make 'several gentlemen at once' have an appetite for Henley's poetry by tickling their palates with something choice by way of hors-d'œuvres we quote a passage from a poem in vers libre of that type calculated to mislead the future critic of Georgian verse form. The spell-bound ships stand as at gaze To let the marvel by. The gray road glooms . . . Glimmers .. goes out... and there, O, there

where it fades,

What grace, what glamour, what wild will,
Transfigure the shadows? Whose,

Heart of my heart, Soul of my soul, but yours?
Ghosts ghosts - the sapphirine air

Teems with them even to the gleaming ends
Of the wild day-spring! Ghosts,
Everywhere

everywhere - till I and you

At last dear love, at last!
Are in the dreaming, even as Life and Death,
Twin ministers of the unoriginal Will.

That is not prose chopped up into lines; it has a rhythmic beat, which seems to gather momentum as we read, and to pulse with emotion. Chopped prose cannot do that. It is, in more ways than one, a tragedy that Henley has not had more influence over the Georgians. Alas, that our critical gentleman, as foreshadowed in our first paragraph, will be so wrong!

To assess either the originality or the value of the poetical work of Henley is not easy. In the first place he is that unfortunate artist who comes in a transitional period; he is a link rather than a landmark. In the next place he did not deal with any resounding theme which could catch the imagination of mankind by its subject-matter, irrespective of its treatment. Henley's variety lies not so much in his themes as in the vitality of his presentation of feelings which, in their very humanities, are necessarily unoriginal. The seasons have nothing original about them; beauty itself is the most hackneyed of phenomena. Lyrical poetry is, at its best, probably the least original of all the arts, because it deals almost solely with the simple and primitive emotions of the individual heart. Henley's place is nearer to poets like Lovelace and Herrick though entirely different from them in tone, temper, and type -than to poets like Browning and Tennyson. That is to say, he is a poet who will live by his lyrical quality rather than by any interpretation of life or society. In its limits his work is more deeply impregnated with thoughtful emotion than either Lovelace's or Herrick's; but it is no more a 'criticism of life' than theirs, and that is perhaps

why, in an age so wrapt up in the following after gods that are not æsthetic, - deities such as socialism, spiritualism, schism, and antinomianism, — he has seemed to have no 'message' for the super-enlightened youth of the present decade.

Henley's influence has not been upon the Georgians; but it may be discoverable later on in the post-Georgian reaction.

Perhaps in a way he is too individual to have disciples, especially as he is not the giver forth of a new philosophy, but is a lyrical poet alone. Even when he is descriptive, as in the London Voluntaries, it is the lyrical feeling behind the picture which makes it memorable. Above all, he is the lord of the adjective. He places his adjectives with the skill of a mediæval captain ordering his line of battle; they have a fighting quality, they make his verse hit you in the face. There is also at times a sort of kinship with Francis Thompson in this: in such a poem as the elegy upon Queen Victoria it is sometimes as if the hand of Thompson could be detected, but it is the hand of a Thompson de-catholicized, de-latinized. The kinship is entirely an æsthetic one, in the cunning of the artifice whereby the right syllabification makes the color-emphasis of a passage ring true.

But it is only poets themselves who appreciate such a matter as that; and the reading public requires something more germane to the commoner issues of human endeavor. And what are they especially likely to find in the poems of Henley? A brave outlook, emotion that does not degenerate into sentimentality, and a power of expressing the primitive feelings that we all have about life and death. Henley makes an ideal bedside breviary; he also makes an equally ideal companion upon a holiday, both in the open air, surrounded by the fierce cleanliness of nature, and

by an inn fire, when the logs are crackling and the pastoral music is becoming mute in the fields and meadows around.

The companion volume of his essays is one of very great interest for the literary student. The essays on Fielding, Smollett, and Burns are the best, and he says some admirable things. His estimate of Fielding could hardly be bettered, and is own brother to the well-known article by Thackeray. The essay on Burns is more provocative, especially when he is dealing with Burns the man; but, unless one is a Scotsman, it is not apparent that Henley strays far from the truth, while his remarks on the poetry of Burns are singularly illuminating on a poet who has been so frequently and so wildly estimated by the sentimental and the nationally enthusiastic. Burns wrote many masterpieces; he also wrote many pieces of verse that are very other. Henley's essay, written as the introduction to an edition of Burns, is perhaps the sanest and most adequate criticism that Burns, the man and the poet, has received. It has permanent value.

The notes on 'Byron's World' are intensely interesting to the student of that period; and Byron, more than almost any other English poet, needs studying in the light of his social surroundings. This essay also is of permanent value.

Henley seems, on the other hand, less happy when he ventures into the realms of foreign literature. His two short articles on 'Balzac as he Was' and "The Two Hugos,' while full of very true and very shrewd observation, seem to betray him as out of real sympathy with the essential Balzac and the essential Hugo. Hugo is, of course, an easy mark for satire and depreciation; so is Balzac, though in a different way; and the English critic is rarely the man to assess the value of either of them when it is a question of being very

English and judging the very French. Henley is as exasperating to the real student of Balzac and Hugo as is Robert Louis Stevenson when writing upon Hugo's romances. Neither Henley nor Stevenson had the proper feeling for either the work or the personalities

of Balzac or Hugo. It is particularly difficult, however, to sustain this argument, since neither Stevenson nor Henley is guilty of really false statement or foolish criticism; it is not that what they say is wrong, but that what they do not say would be so much more right.

EVERY American who has any opinion at all regarding his government's foreign policy instinctively recurs to Washington's political testament, which he left in his Farewell Address to Congress at the conclusion of his second term as president. It culminates in the formula no entangling foreign alliances. This was a natural warning to a weak, young, half-organized state; but we should recall that Lord Salisbury, flushed with the consciousness of Britain's mighty power, coined more than a century later the winged words, 'England's splendid isolation.' The American counterpart to that attitude of Great Britain is the Monroe Doctrine, the theory that the whole American hemisphere is to be preserved immune from European usurpation. This doctrine, which has been the cornerstone of American foreign policy since 1823, goes back rather remarkably to a suggestion by Canning, who thereby

promptly punctured a plan of the Holy Alliance to recover the revolting Spanish colonies in America for the King of Spain. Originally it was only a protest against the interference of Europe in the domestic affairs of the young LatinAmerican republics. It was laid down as a fundamental principle that European powers must not interfere with the self-chosen political institutions of an American state, or threaten the latter's independence.

Later, this doctrine was developed into the principle of 'America for Americans.' This applies to the whole continent, both north and south of the Equator. No European power was to be permitted to occupy, as a colony, any portion of these territories, whether settled or not. The Yankees regarded themselves as chosen by Providence to be the masters of North America. They were confirmed in this conviction by the singular ease with which they conquered Mexico, and extended their

boundaries to the west and south. The Spanish War, which brought Cuba and the Philippines under American control, was the high-water mark of American imperialism, which thereby repudiated the limitations of the Monroe Doctrine and stretched forth its tentacles toward distant Asia. The formula 'America for Americans' had already become, in essence, 'America for the United States'—at least, North and Central America.

With the completion of the Panama Canal, the protean Monroe Doctrine entered a new phase, in order to defend this indispensable sea-route. The United States could not tolerate a foreign naval station in the Caribbean Sea, even at a distance of several hundred miles. That of course developed at once into the dictum that the Caribbean Sea must be exclusively American waters a theory that might have caused a conflict with England if the Federal Government had not put a damper on its champions.

A people bursting with wealth and energy, constantly reinvigorated by new blood from Europe, is bound to make financial and economic ventures far beyond its political borders. Soon Cuban plantations, and Mexican haciendas and mines, were falling into American hands. In Central America this movement met the competition of German banks and merchants. Whenever differences arose with the authorities of revolution-harried countries, like Haiti and Santo Domingo, the United States made short shift of their governments, sending a war vessel to seize their harbors and customs-houses, and to compel them to submit to their decisions. Yankees often inspired a change in administration in their own favor, or even erected a new government outright, as in the case of Panama. These tactics came to be known as 'dollar diplomacy' and the 'big-stick

VOL. 310-NO. 4018

policy.' The United States was characterized as a policeman with a club, maintaining order on the continent.

Very naturally, these usurpations by their northern neighbor caused resentment and suspicion in the SpanishAmerican republics. It was not an easy matter for Washington statesmen to persuade their southern colleagues to join the so-called Pan-American Union, which was originally intended to serve the Yankee trade interests, but more recently has been extended to include cultural and social objects. A Pan-American Congress is held every four years, usually in a different capital Washington, Rio de Janeiro, or Buenos Aires. The Pan-American Bureau has its headquarters at Washington, in a magnificent palace erected by the munificence of Carnegie. Its assistance in facilitating trade, exchange, and other forms of intercourse, has drawn the Spanish-speaking republics closer together, and they are trying to make the so-called 'A B C' powers Argentina, Brazil, and Chile a counterpoise to the United States. These three countries protest that they are able to manage their own affairs, and do not need the United States to defend them against European aggression. All the governments of the Pan-American Union have concluded arbitration treaties with each other, and have bound themselves to submit their disputes to a Pan-American tribunal; so they already form a kind of American League of Nations.

As logical corollaries of the Monroe Doctrine, we had 'Europe for the Europeans' and 'Asia for the Asiatics.' Washington has been generally consistent in observing this principle, although the annexation of the Philippines by Roosevelt the Imperialist is an exception. Wilson and the Democratic Party opposed the expansionist policy of their predecessor, and put