Conversations in Ebury Street, Chapter 15

London: William Heineman, 1 January 1924, pages 190-212, 6,165 words

Conversations in Ebury Street is a nonlinear volume of nineteen chapters. Chapters 7-11 are essays in art criticism; chapter 19 is worldbuilding; the rest are essays in literary criticism. The chapters appear separately in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars of George Moore Interactive. All are included in the ebook of Conversations in Ebury Street in the GMi Shop.

XV

MOORE. My dear De La Mare, Wordsworth and grouse cannot be discussed together; each demands our exclusive attention, and the birds to which I am helping you arrived from Scotland last Monday and reached their highest flavour this evening. And the friend who sent them includes in his presents of game presents of vegetables; he likes his asparagus to overlap his peas and his peas to overlap his beans, and so my dinners are often seasonable.

DE LA MARE.Your long residence in France has raised up in you an inveterate hatred of vegetables boiled in water; and you watched us help ourselves to bread sauce with contempt.

MOORE. Bread sauce has always seemed to me more suitable to little birds just taken out of the nest than to men and women; but it may be, as De La Mare says, that I caught the prejudice in France. Boiled chicken has never appeared on this table.

FREEMAN. I was surprised to see turbot.

MOORE. A flabby, tasteless fish, which for thirty years I ate in full belief of its supremacy like any other Englishman.

DE LA MARE. And when and how was the discovery made that turbot is a flabby, tasteless fish? Was it your palate that turned against it suddenly, or did some words heard accidentally awaken a latent dislike?

MOORE. Our taste in art purifies with age, and it may be that there is an advancement in our palates which the fishmonger does not take into account, for it is almost impossible in London to get any fish except soles, whiting, cod, haddock, salmon, salmon trout.  We may get an occasional brill or plaice, but shad, the finest of all fish, has not been eaten in London for the last fifty years. Shad used to come to London from Holland, but whosoever would eat shad now must go to France in May. Shad comes up the Loire in May, bringing an unimaginable delight to men. Shad and bass are not unlike, but bass comes after shad, a long way before salmon, yet we have to go to France to get this fish. And our grey mullet is sent to France, why I have never been able to find out. The fishmongers tell me that Londoners are too stupid to eat it, but my belief is that the fishmongers have, for reasons which I cannot penetrate, decided that we shall live without bass or mullet. The fault may be with Billingsgate, and the boycott of bass may in the end oblige me to organise a Bass Club. If I could get a hundred members, Billingsgate would have to submit. We will have coffee in the drawing-room, Mabel.  And you, Freeman, will you have some more wine? And you, De La Mare? No? Then we may as well go upstairs. You do not smoke cigars, De La Mare? Freeman, I know, doesn't.  I was sorry I could not offer you a cigarette the last time you were here, but this evening you will find some in a little sandal-wood box, a tea­ caddy of old time, for I dislike the usual silver box­ — well, as I dislike turbot; the two go together. And I have returned to cigars after a long absence with some misgivings, for not every cigar in the box is worth smoking, no matter what price you may pay a hundred. I doubt if the pleasure one gets from a good cigar is a sufficient recompense for the disappointment of a bad one. You will both dine with me on the occasion of the lecture on Shelley and Spenser?

DE LA MARE. I don't know that I shall give the lecture again in London.

MOORE.Then I must read it, for I don't think I can be beguiled out of London even by Shelley and Spenser. What a happy association of names! Together the twin Muses arise before me: Erato and Melpomene.

FREEMAN. A lecture is written to be beard, not read. It will certainly be given again and you must hear it, and should De La Mare fail to inform you of the date, I will.

MOORE. Pray do so, for though I am but a prose writer to-day I read poetry ardently, almost passionately in my youth.

FREEMAN. You said at dinner that you read poetry till you were thirty.

MOORE. And after thirty I hardly looked into a poetry book.

DE LA MARE. Poetry book! You would shock us, but we will not be shocked. How the words —

MOORE. Here is Mabel, come with our coffee.

DE LA MARE. How the words poetry book evoke the trim Victorian parlour with all its paraphernalia: rep sofa, wax fruits, and the murmur of the quiet Sunday afternoon coming in through the open window.

FREEMAN. We know that some men come into the world without the poetic sense —

MOORE. I am not sure that you are right, Freeman; indeed, I am sure that you are quite wrong, and that if a search were made among the private papers of lawyers, doctors, and even colonels in the army, we should find a great number of verses, hundreds and thousands, all written before the writers passed from the twenties into the thirties.

FREEMAN. But the verses you would find would be doggerel.

MOORE. Very likely they would be; but opinions vary about verses and I am making for facts: that everybody, or nearly everybody, writes verses between twenty and thirty.

DE LA MARE. Love verses.

MOORE. The larger part of every poetry book consists of verses about love, not of the best poetry but of the best popular poetry, and no doubt a large proportion of the verses we should find if we were to search among the private papers of lawyers, doctors, colonels, policemen and Cabinet Ministers, would be no more than love calls. Even so, you would be puzzled to answer why this love poetry should cease at thirty, for the love call doesn't cease then, not till long afterwards.

FREEMAN. Are you sure that doctors and lawyers do not continue to write poetry after thirty?

MOORE. Most men read and write poetry between fifteen and thirty and afterwards very seldom, for in youth we are attracted by ideas, and modem poetry being concerned almost exclusively with ideas we live on duty, liberty and fraternity as chameleons are said to live on light and air, till at last we turn from ideas to things, thinking that we have lost our taste for poetry, unless, perchance, we are classical scholars.

DE LA MARE.I am beginning to understand. You would set a new poetic standard.

MOORE.You give a lofty interpretation to a humble enterprise. If you will bear with me I'll continue a little longer. I submit that it is rare to approach life except through interpretive codes: glosses learnt by heart before any attempt is made to read the text, theories of life so thoroughly assimilated that even the exceptional intelligence after a brief survey is glad to take refuge in authority and tradition. The Dean of St. Paul's is an exemplar of the power of education and circumstance to mute the intelligence, if not to mute the intelligence, to mute at least the expression of the intelligence and to make it the humble servant of conventions and prejudices. He knows quite well, for instance, that incest as a sin is an invention of the modern world. The Pharaohs nearly always married their sisters; in ancient Persia a son married his mother, and the fruit of the union was considered sacred. The Dean, as I say, knows quite well that horror of incest is one of our modem con­ventions, but if he were asked he would give it as his opinion that Lord Byron was guilty of a very great sin when he lay with his half-sister; yet we admit marriage between first cousins. Cousins on the father's as well as on the mother's side may marry, and these are more nearly related than a sister is to her half-brother. The Dean of St. Paul's knows, too, that sodomy is essentially a Christian sin. He knows that the Greeks, to whom we owe our civilisation and to whom we are inferior in all the arts, married to continue the race but did not love their wives except in rare instances, yet modem conven­tions might compel him to advocate or at least to acquiesce in the persecution of those afflicted with abnormal love.

FREEMAN. The moral code has been continually sifted for the last two thousand years.

MOORE. Since the birth of the Christ idea.

FREEMAN. If you like to put it so; and it is not easy to believe that after all these moral siftings we are no nearer to the truth than the Greeks were.

MOORE. Our ideas of beauty have coarsened in the years you speak of.

FREEMAN. But in morals we have a clearer vision.

MOORE. I see now that I was wrong to introduce morals into my argument or discourse. You would have understood me better if I had refrained, and I will return without more ado to aesthetics and ask if I am not right when I say that no literary critic, however gifted, would have been able to convince the public of sixty years ago that Shelley wasted half of his life writing about liberty. None was born with a finer intelligence than Shelley, and yet the simple inference that to have liberty we must renounce liberty, was not grasped by him; it seemed to lie outside his consciousness. The other day I began to read Hellas, but could not continue reading, despite the beauty of the verses, so vague was his apprehension of what he was writing about: liberty. Wordsworth advocated duty as strenuously as Shelley had advocated liberty, and he would have been as unable to put a meaning on the word duty as Shelley would have been to put a meaning on the word liberty. None would deny that Mill's was a first-rate intelligence, yet he was duped like everybody else; he delighted in duty. And the explanation of the discarding of the idea of liberty for the idea of duty becomes plain when we remember that the examination of the Bible, begun in the sixteenth century, began to yield its fruit in eighteen-sixty or seventy. Some will call it Dead Sea fruit, some will call it the immortal fruit of the years, but we are poets and unconcerned with public morality. The fact is enough that in the 'sixties belief in God was replaced by belief in morality, and very delighted were the converts to the new creed at their escape from heaven and hell; all the same, they felt cold and strove to keep themselves warm by reading and writing odes to duty. Now, to conclude my little exordium, to which you have listened with great patience, I would like to read a few lines from The Excursion, lines that were much admired when I was a boy:

Possessions vanish, and opinions change,

And passions hold a fluctuating seat:

But, by the storms of circumstance unshaken,

And subject neither to eclipse nor wane,

Duty exists; — immutably survive,

For our support, the measures and the forms,

Which an abstract intelligence supplies,

Whose kingdom is where time and space are not:

Of other converse, which mind, soul, and heart,

Do, with united urgency, require,

What more, that may not perish? Thou dread Source,

Prime, self-existing Cause and End of all,

That in the scale of being fill their place,

Above our human region, or below,

Set and sustained;

It may be doubted if anybody to-day would claim these lines as poetry — but there again I am bringing into my argument or discourse extraneous matter which had much better be left out, for what I wish to draw your attention to is that an idea which was so near to Wordsworth is so remote from us that we hardly understood what Gilbert meant when he introduced the Slave of Duty into The Pirates of Penzance. Morality has gone the way of duty; we call it Victorianism, and when Tennyson's ldyls are mentioned everybody smiles. No doubt the ideas of liberty, duty, and morality will return, but the poetry they once inspired will not. Why are you smiling, Freeman? You think that when maidens become chaste we shall again consider Tennyson a great poet?

FREEMAN. My thoughts had wandered to Carlyle's description of Coleridge snuffling: Subjectivity! Objectivity! as he came across a lawn. A wonderful essay this is, but the cruelty of it is near to savagery. We may speak plainly of each other, but it is doubtful if any man has the right to spit upon another and befoul him.

MOORE. As only a eunuch can befoul another. How dare this impotent Scot speak contemptuously of the author of Christabel!

The night is chill; the forest bare;

Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?

There is not wind enough in the air

To move away the ringlet curl

From the lovely lady's cheek —

There is not wind enough to twirl

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,

That dances as often as dance it can,

Hanging so light, and hanging so high,

On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

Time cannot wither nor custom stale a dream-flower like this one; creating out of itself, the mind gave birth belike to immortality.

FREEMAN. The lines are magical lines, wonderful as cloud or flower, and they must have come to the poet in a dream, a waking dream, maybe.

MOORE. No lines of such aerial beauty, rainbow beauty, stellar beauty, are in Wordsworth.

DE LA MARE. Coleridge outlived Wordsworth's influence, but there was a time when the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge were indistinguishable. But Wordsworth is not altogether without objective poetry.

MOORE. There are passages here and there, but no whole poems.

FREEMAN. Do you know The Green Linnet?

MOORE. I cannot recall it.

FREEMAN. Then you have not read it; for whosoever has read it, if he have the poetic sense, remembers The Green Linnet to the end of his life.

MOORE. I beg of you to repeat it.

FREEMAN. I would not trust my memory. Would you trust yours, De La Mare?

DE LA MARE:

Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed

Their snow-white blossoms on my head,

With brightest sunshine round me spread

    Of spring's unclouded weather,

In this sequestered nook how sweet

To sit upon my orchard-seat!

And birds and flowers once more to greet,

    My last year's friends together.

One have I marked, the happiest guest

In all this covert of the blest:

Hail to Thee, far above the rest

    In joy of voice and pinion!

Thou, Linnet! in thy green array,

Presiding Spirit here to-day,

Dost lead the revels of the May;

    And this is thy dominion.

While birds, and butterflies, and flowers,

Make all one band of paramours,

Thou, ranging up and down the bowers,

    Art sole in thy employment:

A Life, a Presence like the Air,

Scattering thy gladness without care,

Too blest with any one to pair;

    Thyself thy own enjoyment.

Amid yon tuft of hazel trees,

That twinkle to the gusty breeze,

Behold him perched in ecstasies,

    Yet seeming still to hover;

There! where the flutter of his wings

Upon his back and body flings

Shadows and sunny glimmerings,

    That cover him all over.

My dazzled sight he oft deceives,

A brother of the dancing leaves;

Then flits, and from the cottage-eaves

    Pours forth his song in gushes;

As if by that exulting strain

He mocked and treated with disdain

The voiceless Form he chose to feign,

    While fluttering in the bushes.

MOORE. Having found so much pleasure in the bird's plumage and song I think he might have omitted:

The voiceless Form he chose to feign.

FREEMAN. If you can endure no poetry except a description of the external world, your reading will be confined practically to Shakespeare's songs.

MOORE. I shall be glad to re-read these songs, almost forgotten by me. Meanwhile, do you quote one.

FREEMAN. Which do you think, De La Mare?

DE LA MARE. If you have in mind the song in praise of the owl and the cuckoo: While greasy Joan doth keel the pot, recite it.

FREEMAN. The song which the curate, the school­ master, the clown, and others sing at the end of Love's Labour Lost.

SPRING

I

When daisies pied and violets blue

   And lady-smocks all silver-white

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

   Do paint the meadows with delight,

The cuckoo then, on every tree,

   Mocks married men; for thus sings he,

                         Cuckoo;

Cuckoo, cuckoo: Oh word of fear,

   Unpleasing to a married ear!

II

When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,

   And merry larks are plowmen’s clocks,

When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,

   And maidens bleach their summer smocks,

The cuckoo then, on every tree,

   Mocks married men; for thus sings he,

                         Cuckoo;

Cuckoo, cuckoo: Oh word of fear,

   Unpleasing to a married ear!

WINTER

Ill

When icicles hang by the wall,

   And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,

And Tom bears logs into the hall,

   And milk comes frozen home in pail,

When Blood is nipped and ways be foul,

   Then nightly sings the staring owl,

                         Tu-whit;

Tu-who, a merry note,

   While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

IV

When all aloud the wind doth blow,

   And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,

And birds sit brooding in the snow,

   And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

   Then nightly sings the staring owl,

                         Tu-whit;

Tu-who, a merry note,

   While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

MOORE.  My dear friends, I have a proposal to lay before you. If you approve of my definition of pure poetry, something that the poet creates outside of his own personality, we three might compile a book that would be a real advancement in the study of poetry­ — an anthology of pure poetry, the only one that is lacking on the bookstalls.

FREEMAN. An entertaining idea at the first thought of it. What do you say, De La Mare?

DE LA MARE. Many of the most beautiful poems in the language would have to be barred; for instance, Shelley's lines written in dejection on the sea-shore near Naples:

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,

    The waves are dancing fast and bright,

Blue isles and snowy mountains wear

    The purple noon's transparent might,

The breath of the moist earth is light,

    Around its unexpected buds;

Like many a voice of one delight,

    The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,

The City's voice itself is soft, like Solitude's.

In the next two stanzas Shelley writes subjectively, but he begins in the third stanza to see himself as a tired child:

Yet now despair itself is mild,

    Even as the winds and waters are;

I could lie down like a tired child,

    And weep away the life of care

Which I have borne and yet must bear,

    Till death like sleep might steal on me,

And I might feel in the warm air

    My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.

MOORE. The value of the anthology, if we compile it, would be that it creates a new standard. Of course, we should have to explain in the introduction why we discarded one poem and kept another.

FREEMAN. And the reasons for omitting a certain poem will be almost as entertaining as the reasons for the retention of another.

DE LA MARE. We shall find as many as a hundred and fifty if we search the Elizabethans thoroughly. Fletcher wrote beautiful lyrics; he will yield many pages. There's Ben Jonson, and —

FREEMAN. Should we not look further back than the Elizabethans? Spenser — but I am afraid he will yield nothing of what we want. There is Skelton.

DE LA MARE.I like Skelton, a true poet, a darling poet; but we must not trust our memories. It is so long since I have read The Nut-Brown Maid — and you, Freeman, do you remember it enough to tell us that it contains no hint of subjectivity?

FREEMAN. If we arc overstrict I doubt if we shall find a hundred pages of pure poetry.

DE LA MARE.We must draw a strict line, for our anthology rests upon it.

FREEMAN. Moore regrets that Wordsworth could not keep back the words: Voiceless Form.

DE LA MARE. Which may be interpreted that he could not admire the green linnet without intimating that there is a soul in Nature.

FREEMAN. Milton does not abound in objective poetry, Pope still less, but we shall find several poems that come within our definition in the Songs of Innocence, none, I am afraid, in the Songs of Experience. From Shelley we shall gather a handful: the Hymn to Pan, and The Cloud. Would you admit The Cloud, De La Mare?

DE LA MARE. The Cloud is not so good a poem as the Hymn to Pan, but it comes within our definition.

MOORE. There is The Sensitive Plant; a more beautiful description of a garden was never written.

DE LA MARE. But he includes an Indian maiden in the second part, and he ends the poem with a morality:

It is a modest creed, and yet

Pleasant if one considers it,

To own that death itself must be

Like all the rest, a mockery.

MOORE. I see your point, but why not the first part of The Sensitive Plant?

DE LA MARE. If you admit a right of search for objective stanzas our quest will never end. The most beautiful poetry in The Ancient Mariner is the objective poetry —

FREEMAN. And the inclusion of these passages will be a criticism of poetry.

DE LA MARE. Yes; but I think we had better limit the anthology to complete poems.

FREEMAN. I am afraid we shall find very little in Keats.

DE LA MARE. I doubt if we shall find anything. We cannot have the Ode to a Grecian Urn; it is barred by subjectivity, likewise the Ode lo the Nightingale. The Eve of St. Agnes is a long narrative poem —

FREEMAN. If we are not to have a single quotation from Keats —

DE LA MARE. There is only one way of settling our differences, and that is to put the poems to the vote; any poem that doesn't receive two votes will be rejected.

MOORE. Keats never attracted me. I know he is the fashion, but I am more interested in my own than in other people's taste and I think of him too frequently as a pussy cat on a sunny lawn. In Poe —

DE LA MARE. We shall find many poems in Poe. There is, of course, the poem To Helen:

Helen, thy beauty is to me

   Like those Nicéan barks of yore,

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

   The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

   To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

   Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

   To the glory that was Greece,      

And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

   How statue-like I see thee stand,

   The agate lamp within thy hand!

Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

   Are Holy-Land!

The last lines of The Raven exclude the poem from our anthology:

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!

    Quoth the raven, Nevermore.

Our difficulty with Poe will be not to overburden our pages with him. We shall have to consider Dreamland:

By a route obscure and lonely,  

Haunted by ill angels only,

Where an Eidolon, named Night,  

On a black throne reigns upright,

I have reached these lands but newly

From an ultimate dim Thule —

From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,

Out of space — Out of Time.

And there can be little doubt that we must include The City in the Sea:

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West.

We are all agreed about The City in the Sea? And Eulalie:

    I dwelt alone

    In a world of moan,

And my soul was a stagnant tide,

Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride —

FREEMAN. No! No! No!

MOORE. No! No! No!

DE LA MARE.

    Ah, less — less bright

    The stars of the night

Than the eyes of the radiant girl!

ALL. No! No! No!

DE LA MARE. Eulalie has found no supporters. What about The Haunted Palace?

In the greenest of our valleys

    By good angels tenanted,

Once a fair and stately palace —

    Radiant palace — reared its head.

MOORE. Yes.

DE LA MARE. And you, Freeman?

FREEMAN. Yes.

DE LA MARE. The Haunted Palace goes in. Among the late poems The Bells —

FREEMAN. A trick! A trick!

DE LA MARE. The beautiful poem To Helen, the second one, contains some subjective lines which I think you will agree debars it. Eldorado is a beautiful poem, but we agreed to accept nothing but poems of the first rank. Then there is Ulalume:

The skies they were ashen and sober;

    The leaves they were crispéd and sere —

MOORE. I am wholeheartedly for Ulalume.

FREEMAN. I am not wholeheartedly for Ulalume, but I am for its inclusion.

DE LA MARE. We have come down to modem times, and it behoves us to make sure that we have not overlooked anybody of first importance in this preliminary investigation.

MOORE. Landor!

DE LA MARE. An august soul, and yet we overlooked him!

FREEMAN. Landor's prose has obscured the beauty of his verse.

DE LA MARE. I confess my ignorance, I will not say unblushingly but without hesitation, and I doubt, Freeman, if you know Landor much better than I do. But Moore reads little else, and will tell us what to seek in Landor.

MOORE. In Gebir a shepherd tells another how a nymph came up one night from the sea and engaged with him in a wrestling match, the terms of which were that he should receive sinuous shells of pearly hue if he were the victor, and that she should receive from him, if she were the victor, a sheep:

Now came she forward eager to engage,

But first her dress, her bosom then surveyed,

And heaved it, doubting if she could deceive.

Her bosom seem’d, inclosed in haze like heav’n,

To baffle touch, and rose forth undefined:

Above her knees she drew the robe succinct,

Above her breast, and just below her arms.

This will preserve my breath when tightly bound,

If struggle and equal strength should so constrain.

Thus, pulling hard to fasten it, she spake,

And, rushing at me, closed: I thrill’d throughout

And seem’d to lessen and shrink up with cold.

Again with violent impulse gusht my blood,

And hearing nought external, thus absorb’d,

I heard it, rushing through each turbid vein,

Shake my unsteady swimming sight in air.

Yet with unyielding though uncertain arms

I clung around her neck; the vest beneath

Rustled against our slippery limbs entwined:

Often mine springing with eluded force

Started aside, and trembled till replaced:

And when I most succeeded, as I thought,

My bosom and my throat felt so compresst

That life was almost quivering on my lips,

Yet nothing was there painful: these are signs

Of secret arts and not of human might;

What arts I cannot tell; I only know

My eyes grew dizzy, and my strength decay’d;

I was indeed o'ercome … with what regret,

And more, with what confusion, when I reacht

The fold, and yielding up the sheep, she cried,

This pays a shepherd to a conquering maid.

She smiled, and more of pleasure than disdain

Was in her dimpled chin and liberal lip,

And eyes that languisht, lengthening, just like love.

She went away; I on the wicker gate

Leant, and could follow with my eyes alone.

The sheep she carried easy as a cloak;

But when I heard its bleating, as I did,

And saw, she hastening on, its hinder feet

Struggle and from her snowy shoulder slip,

One shoulder its poor efforts had unveil’d,

Then all my passions mingling fell in tears;

Restless then ran I to the highest ground

To watch her; she was gone; gone down the tide;

And the long moon-beam on the hard wet sand

Lay like a jasper column half-uprear’d.

DE LA MARE. The lines:

And the long moon-beam on the hard wet sand

Lay like a jasper column half up-rear’d,

are very beautiful.

MOORE. The incident is complete in itself, but we can have The Hamadryad if you don't like the poem. It surprises me, however, to find Landor writing its bleating, and a little lower down he speaks of its hinder feet, as if the sheep were an inanimate object. And the word hooves, being available, I am puzzled to find a reason for hinder feet.

DE LA MARE. A poem of several hundred lines will destroy the symmetry of our anthology. None of the poems we have provisionally accepted exceed a hundred.

MOORE. A hundred lines, I think, was the length that a poem should never exceed, according to Poe, and the reason he gives is that a poem should be read in one uninterrupted mood of increasing exaltation. He wrote little and I have never read that he wrote with ease, as Shelley did, but he wrote certainly out of an emotive imagination; his poems are almost free from thought, and that is why we have gathered so many in his tiny garden for our anthology. Another thing. He is one of the few modern poets who wrote with his eyes as well as his ears; Browning saw nothing, Tennyson only a little and with an effort.

FREEMAN. Morris.

DE LA MARE. Poetry is not painting.

MOORE. No; nor is it music. Poetry stands between music and painting, sharing their qualities. We hear the word music applied to poetry, but poetry only touches on music inasmuch as poetry and music both rejoice in rhythm. Music has intervals, and limiting music to the treble clef, to thirteen notes and to a singer's voice, which, if he be a good singer, has a range of two octaves, we get a richness of sound far beyond anything that ten syllables can give. But should the poet open his eyes and tell us all that his eyes see, as Morris did, Melpomene and Erato will not be judged less beautiful than their sisters. In Golden Wings our eyes and ears enjoy equally, and so complete is our enjoyment that whilst we read we clap our hands (speaking figuratively) and thank heaven that we have escaped at last from grey thoughtfulness into a world of things:

Midways of a walled garden,

     In the happy poplar land,

     Did an ancient castle stand,

With an old knight for a warden.

Many scarlet bricks there were

     In its walls, and old grey stone;

     Over which red apples shone

At the right time of the year.

On the bricks the green moss grew,

     Yellow lichen on the stone,          10

     Over which red apples shone;

Little war that castle knew.

Deep green water fill'd the moat,

     Each side had a red-brick lip,

     Green and mossy with the drip

Of dew and rain; there was a boat

Of carven wood, with hangings green

     About the stern; it was great bliss

     For lovers to sit there and kiss

In the hot summer noons, not seen.

The poem takes its name, Golden Wings, from the lyric which Morris introduces into the narrative:

Gold wings across the sea,

Moonlight from tree to tree,

Gold hair beside my knee;

Ah, sweet knight, come to me,

Gold wings across the sea.

Are not my blue eyes sweet?

The west wind from the wheat

Blows cold across my feet;

Is it not time to greet

Gold wings across the sea?

I will not answer for the accuracy of the quotation.

DE LA MARE. May we include The Lady of Shalott?

MOORE. Certainly, the one poem whereby poor Tennyson justifies his existence. The knights as they ride in the morning early through the barley — how does it go, De La Mare, how does it go?

DE LA MARE.

All in the blue unclouded weather

Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather,

The helmet and the helmet-feather

Burn'd like one burning flame together,

       As he rode down to Camelot.

As often thro' the purple night,

Below the starry clusters bright,

Some bearded meteor, trailing light,

       Moves over still Shalott.

MOORE. How beautiful l How like Morris!

DE LA MARE. It is not like Morris; it is Morris.

MOORE. And was written probably before Morris. I remember now that the volume entitled The Defence of Guenevere was published in 'fifty-seven. The Lady of Shallott must have been written in the 'forties. But Tennyson had not the genius to continue the style that he had discovered accidentally, or he was beguiled and yielded himself to moralities and mumbled them till he was eighty.

FREEMAN. The Lady of Shallott comes well within our definition, but is it good enough? Is it a better lyric than:

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:

The fire-fly wakens: waken thou with me.

DE LA MARE. Those verses will not get my vote. A better poem, in my opinion, is Blow, bugle, blow.

MOORE. You are forgetting the last verse:

O love, they die in yon rich sky,

    They faint on hill or field or river:

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

    And grow for ever and for ever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

The Victorian could never reconcile himself to finishing a poem without speaking about the soul, and the lines are particularly vindictive. I really couldn't stand it, De La Mare:

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

and worse still:

And grow for ever and for ever.

Are our souls then plants?

DE LA MARE. I had forgotten the soul, and the roll and the roll. Moreover, the first two stanzas are not good enough for us to relax our conditions. I can think of nothing in Swinburne, unless the Spring Chorus from Atalanta; it begins well but ends lamely, and in one line he writes:

And the hoofed heel of a satyr crushes

    The chestnut-husk at the chestnut root.

A chestnut has no husk; the outer shell is the shuck. And in the next stanza we read:

And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,

    Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid.

You, Moore, do not like the word feet applied to hoofed animals, but I think we might concede something, for though Pan has hoofs Bacchus has not.

MOORE. I do not see why he shouldn't have said the fleet-hooved kid, but I dare say I am pedantic. Husk, as you say, is not as correct as shuck, but these are not reasons for omitting the poem, and my vote is given to it.

DE LA MARE. And mine.

FREEMAN. And mine.

DE LA MARE. And now, Freeman, we must be thinking of our train to Anerley.

MOORE. A drink of some sort before you start on this wild journey?

DE LA MARE. Nothing for me.

FREEMAN. Nor for me. We have worked well this evening, and laid down a foundation —

MOORE. Of poetry and of morality.

FREEMAN. Of morality! Our aim has been to leave it out.

MOORE. However slyly we build, morality always finds an unguarded loophole, and to stir up their languid emotions the younger poets and poetesses are obliged to engage themselves in marriage. I have heard that they often stoop, for the sake of a poem, to irregular relations; but we'll not go into that. After playing at love for about a month or more the poem begins to curdle in their brains, and when that falls out the moment for parting has come. I see them in my thoughts going forth into the country; stopping at the cross-roads they speak: My way is to the left, thine is to the right; we have hoped and sorrowed together, and in future time … and so on, I think you know the rest of that poem, both of you.

DE LA MARE. There is a good deal of that poetry going about. Do you think we shall put an end to it by raising the standard?

FREEMAN. Forgive me for interrupting you, De La Mare, but I would ask Moore if he has a title in mind for our anthology.

MOORE. A title? Of course! Pure Poetry.