MODERN DEVELOPMENTS IN BRITISH POETRY This note purports only to deal with the principal developments of British verse in the loth century. The difficulty, however, is to decide when that century began. We cannot, unhappily, for this purpose permit the composers of almanacs to settle the question. Something more subtle than arithmetic is at work. What we have actually to do is to isolate the moment at which Victorianism was definitely spent and something new was born. From that point of view an attempt will be made to show that the new period was precipitated not earlier than 1910 with the Georgians. Till then we are still in the spacious days of great Victoria.
The '9os were, of course, essentially Victorian, in the sense that every blind reaction is an integral part of that from which it reacts. The Rhymers' club was not that new way of saying "yes" which alone is the mark of a new movement. It was merely spirited contradiction, or even what we should now call a rather blatant exhibition of an inferiority-complex. When Arthur Sy mons, for example, wrote his defence of the prostitute, with cock robin self-consciousness, he was not so much shocking the suburbs as Lord Tennyson. When Ernest Dowson fainted prettily with Pierrot, or invited Cynara to share his exquisite self-depreciation, he was not in fact languid or corrupt. He was protesting against the heartiness of Dickens and the incorruptibility of King Arthur. In that way a queer self-condemned poetry of artifice arose, which had its roots neither in life nor in the refusal of life, but in the rejection of the poet laureate. That, however amusing or lively, is not a broad enough basis for a new period of literature.
Yet these objections, though serious, are not valid. In every period there are distinguished writers who do not influence, and are not influenced by their contemporaries in their sphere of crea tion. That is essentially true, though for different reasons, of Bridges, Hardy and Kipling. Robert Bridges in such a poem, for example, as "I have loved flowers" permanently enriched the English treasury. But it has that curiously withdrawn quality, that affinity to the grave unswerving mould of the classic, which distinguishes all his work. Both in his simplicity here, and his metrical experiments and complexities elsewhere, Bridges is neither Victorian nor post-Victorian. He contributes, but he neither borrows nor influences. So, too, with Hardy. That reluc tant expression, that constant effect of breaking a chisel on ob durate stone, may be admired : it can never be imitated, and it is doubtful whether any one would seek to imitate it. Standards that apply to no other poet, and to no other poetry, have been applied to Hardy, and by those standards he has by some been adjudged triumphantly successful. But he has no disciples as he had no master. To some his poetry may stand out like Stone henge in a great plain, and in these it will inspire awe and perhaps worship. But it will remain as rugged, as isolated, and to many as unmanageable as those great monoliths. Kipling again, though incomparably the most popular poet of his time, is not, and could not be, a poet's poet. In so far as he was a brilliant and some times vicious pamphleteer, he was bound to suffer the fate of all politicians. As the author of Barrack-room Ballads he created not so much a new school of verse as a new army, just as in his poems of empire he joined hands with Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamber lain, and turned his back on Parnassus. When he consented to be a poet, as in such a perfect lyric as the Valour and Innocence poem in Rewards and Fairies, he did not affect his fellow poets because they had been frightened away by the outcries of the imperial buccina. The small body of his real verse will be winnowed out by Time from the great quantity of chaff, but its effect will not be felt till the separation is complete.