a reference to Russell tells us little till we read in a delightful footnote :

There was a Lord Russell who, by living too luxuriously, had quite spoiled his constitution. He did not love sport, but used to go out with his dogs every day only to hunt for an appetite. If he felt anything of that, he would cry out, "Oh, I have found it!" turn short round and ride home again, though they were in the midst of the finest chase. It was this lord who, when he met a beggar, and was entreated by him to give him something because he was almost famished with hunger, called him a "happy dog." There may have been a case for neglecting Pope before Mr. Elwin and Mr. Courthope edited and annotated him-though he had been edited well before-but their monumental edition has made him of all English poets one of the most incessantly entertaining.

Pope, however, is a charmer in himself. His venom has graces. He is a stinging insect, but of how brilliant a hue! There are few satires in literature richer in the daintiness of malice than the Epistle to 'Martha Blount and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. The characters of women in the former are among the most precious of those railleries of sex in which mankind has always loved to indulge. The summing-up of the perfect woman :

46

And mistress of herself, though china fall,

is itself perfect in its wit. And the fickle lady, Narcissa, is a portrait in porcelain :

Narcissa's nature, tolerably mild,

To make a wash, would hardly stew a child;
Has even been proved to grant a lover's prayer.
And paid a tradesman once, to make him stare;
Now deep in Taylor and the Book of Martyrs,
Now drinking citron with his Grace and Chartres;
Now conscience chills her and now passion burns;
And atheism and religion take their turns;

A very heathen in the carnal part,

Yet still a sad, good Christian at the heart.

The study of Chloe, who "wants a heart," is equally delicate and witty :

Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour,
Content to dwell in decencies for ever-
So very reasonable, so unmoved,

As never yet to love, or to be loved.
She, while her lover pants upon her breast,
Can mark the figures on an Indian chest ;
And when she sees her friend in deep despair,
Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair!
Would Chloe know if you're alive or dead?
She bids her footman put it in her head.
Chloe is prudent-would you too be wise?

Then never break your heart when Chloe dies.

The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot is still more dazzling. The venom is passionate without ever ceasing to be witty. Pope has composed a masterpiece of his vanities and hatreds. The characterizations of Addison as Atticus, and of Lord Hervey as Sporus:

Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk

Sporus, the bug with gilded wings "-are portraits one may almost call beautiful in their bitter phrasing. There is nothing make-believe here as there is in the virtue of the letters. This is Pope's confession, the image of his soul. Elsewhere in Pope the accomplishment is too often rhetorical, though The Rape of the Lock is as delicate in artifice as a French fairy-tale, the Dunciad an amusing assault of a major Lilliputian on minor Lilliputians, and the Essay on Criticismwhat a regiment of witty lines to be written by a youth of twenty or twenty-one much nearer being a great essay in verse than is generally admitted nowadays. As for the Essay on Man, one can read it more than once only out of a sense of duty. Pope has nothing to tell us that we want to know about man except in so far as he dislikes him. We praise him as the poet who makes remarks-as the poet, one might almost say, who makes faces. It is when he sits in the scorner's chair, whether in good humour or in bad, that he is the little lord of versifiers.

XI

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

JAMES ELROY FLECKER died in January 1915, having added at least one poem to the perfect anthology of English verse. Probably his work contains a good deal that is permanent besides this. But one is confident at least of the permanence of The Old Ships. Readers coming a thousand years hence upon the beauty, the romance and the colour of this poem will turn eagerly, one imagines, in search of other work from the same pen. This was the flower of the poet's genius. It was the exultant and original speech of one who was in a great measure the seer of other men's visions. Flecker was much given to the translation of other poets, and he did not stop at translating their words.. He translated their imagination also into careful verse. He was one of those poets whose genius is founded in the love of literature more than in the love of life. He seems less an interpreter of the earth than one who sought after a fantastic world which had been created by Swinburne and the Parnassians and the old painters and the tellers of the Arabian Nights. He began," Mr. J. C. Squire has said, "by being more interested in his art than in himself." And all but a score or so of his poems suggest that this was his way to the last. He was one of those for whom

the visible world exists. nature than in art.

But it existed for him less in He does not give one the impression of a poet who observed minutely and delightedly as Mr. W. H. Davies observes. His was a painted world inhabited by a number of chosen and

exquisite images. He found the real world by comparison disappointing. "He confessed," we are told, "that he had not greatly liked the East-always excepting, of course, Greece." This was almost a necessity of his genius; and it is interesting to see how in some of his later work his imagination is feeling its way back from the world of illusion to the world of real things-from Bagdad and Babylon to England.

His poetry does not as a rule touch the heart; but in Oak and Olive and Brumana his spectatorial sensuousness at last breaks down and the cry of the exile moves us as in an intimate letter from a friend since dead. Those are not mere rhetorical reproaches to the traitor pines" which

66

Where blaze the unimaginable flowers.

It was as though disillusion had given an artist a soul. And when the war came it found him, as he lay dying of consumption in Switzerland, a poet not merely of manly but of martial utterance. The Burial in England is perhaps too much of an ad hoc call to be great poetry. But it has many noble and beautiful lines and is certainly of a different world from his mediocre version of God Save the King.

At the same time, I do not wish to suggest that his poetry of illusion is the less important part of his work. The perfection of his genius is to be sought, as a matter of fact, in his romantic eastern work, such as The Ballad of Iskander, A Miracle of Bethlehem,

Gates of Damascus, and Bryan of Brittany. The false, fair tale of the East had, as it were, released him from mere flirtation with the senses into the world of the imagination. Of human passions he sang little. He wrote oftener of amorousness than of love, as in The Ballad of the Student of the South. His passion for fairy tales, his amorousness of the East, stirred his imagination from idleness among superficial fancies into a brilliant ardour. It was these things that roused him to a nice extravagance with those favourite words and colours and images upon which Mr. Squire

comments :

There are words, just as there are images, which he was especially fond of using. There are colours and metals, blue and red, silver and gold, which are present everywhere in his work; the progresses of the sun (he was always a poet of the sunlight rather than a poet of the moonlight) were a continual fascination to him; the images of Fire, of a ship, and of an old white-bearded man recur frequently in his poems.

Mr. Squire contends justly enough that in spite of this Flecker is anything but a monotonous poet. But the image of a ship was almost an obsession with him. It was his favourite toy. Often it is a silver ship. In the blind man's vision in the time of Christ even the Empires of the future are seen sailing like ships. The keeper of the West Gate of Damascus sings of the sea beyond the sea:

when no wind breathes or ripple stirs,

And there on Roman ships, they say, stand rows of metal mariners.

Those lines are worth noting for the way in which they suggest how much in the nature of toys were the images with which Flecker's imagination was haunted. His world was a world of nursery ships and nursery caravans.

His

"Haunted" is, perhaps, an exaggeration. attitude is too impassive for that. He works with