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soul to rise above the hideous obsession of his own devilries, to retain the vision of beauty through the riot of foul things, of love through the tumult of hatreds, of life through the infinity of death. True this was not a new power poetry to be poetry must always in some measure possess it. What was individual to the poets was that this power of mastering actuality went along in them with the fierce and eager immersion in it; the thrill of breathing the

'calm and serene air

Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call earth,'

with the thrill of seeing and painting in all its lurid colouring the volcanic chaos of this 'stir and smoke' itself. Thus the same Siegfried Sassoon who renders with so much close analytic psychology the moods that cross and fluctuate in the dying hospital patient, or the haunted fugitive, as he flounders among snags and stumps, to feel at last the strangling clasp of death, can as little as the visionary Shelley overcome the insurgent sense that these dead are for us yet alive, made one with Nature.

He visits the deserted home of his dead friend—

'Ah, but there was no need to call his name,
He was beside me now, as swift as light . .
For now, he said, my spirit has more eyes
Than heaven has stars, and they are lit by love.
My body is the magic of the world,

And dark and sunset flame with my spilt blood.'

And so the undying dead

'Wander in the dusk with chanting streams, And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms upflung, To hail the burning heaven they left unsung.'

Further, this war poetry, while reflecting military things with a veracity hardly known before, is yet rarely

militant. We must not look for explicit pacifist or international ideas; but as little do we find jingo patriotism or hymns of hate. The author of the German hymn of hate was a much better poet than anyone who tried an English hymn in the same key, and the English poets who could have equalled its form were above its spirit. Edith Cavell's dying words 'Patriotism is not enough' cannot perhaps be paralleled in these poets, but they are continually suggested. They do not say, in the phrase of the old cavalier poet, that we should love England less if we loved not something else more, or that something is wanting in our love for our country if we wrong humanity in its name. But the spirit which is embodied in these phrases breathes through them; heroism matters more to them than victory, and they know that death. and sorrow and the love of kindred have no fatherland. They stand above the battle" as well as share in it, and they share in it without ceasing to stand above it. The German is the enemy, they never falter in that; and even death does not convert him into a friend. But for this enemy there is chivalry, and pity, and a gleam, now and then, of reconciling comradeship.

'He stood alone in some queer sunless place
Where Armageddon ends,'-

the Englishman whom the Germans had killed in fight, to be themselves slain by his friend, the speaker. Their ghosts throng around him,

'He stared at them, half wondering, and then
They told him how I'd killed them for his sake,
Those patient, stupid, sullen ghosts of men :
At last he turned and smiled; smiled-all was well
Because his face would lead them out of hell.'

Finally, the poet himself glories in his act; he knows that he can beat into music even the crashing discords

that fill his ears; he knows too that he has a music of his own which they cannot subdue or debase:

'I keep such music in my brain

No din this side of death can quell,
Glory exulting over pain,

And beauty garlanded in hell.'

To have found and kept and interwoven these two musics—a language of unflinching veracity and one of equally unflinching hope and faith-is the achievement of our war-poetry. May we not say that the possession together of these two musics, of these two moods, springing as they do from the blended grip and idealism of the English character, warrants hope for the future of English poetry? For it is rooted in the greatest, and the most English, of the ways of poetic experience which have gone to the making of our poetic literature-the way, ultimately, of Shakespeare, and of Wordsworth. But that temper of catholic fraternity which finds the stuff of poetry everywhere does not easily attain the consummate technique in expression of a rarer English tradition, that of Milton, and Gray, and Keats. Beauty abounds in our later poets, but it is a beauty that flashes in broken lights, not the full-orbed radiance of a masterpiece. To enlarge the grasp of poetry over the field of reality, to apprehend it over a larger range, is not at once to find consummate expression for what is apprehended. The flawless perfection of the Parnassians-of Heredia's sonnets-is nowhere approached in the less aristocratically exclusive poetry of to-day. But the future, in poetry also, is with the spirit which found the aristocracy of noble art not upon exclusions, negations, and routine, but upon imagination, penetration, discovery, and catholic openness of mind.

SOME BOOKS FOR CONSULTATION

Pellissier, Le Mouvement Littéraire au XIXme Siècle.
Brunetière, La Poésie Lyrique au XIXme Siècle.

Eccles, F. Y., A Century of French Poets.

Vigié-Lecocq, La Poésie Contemporaine.

Phelps, Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century.

Muret, La Littérature Italienne d'aujourdhui.

Ladenarde, G. Carducci.

Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature.

Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties.

McDowall, Realism.

Aliotta, The Idealist Reaction against Science.
Soergel, Die deutsche Litteratur unserer Zeit.
Bithell, Contemporary German Poetry (Translated).
Halévy, Charles Péguy.

V

HISTORICAL RESEARCH

G. P. GOOCH

THE scientific study of history began a hundred years ago in the University of Berlin. Preparatory work of the highest importance had been accomplished by laborious collectors like Baronius and Muratori, keen-sighted critics such as Mabillon and Wolf, and brilliant narrators like Gibbon and Voltaire. But it was not till Niebuhr, Böckh, and above all Ranke preached and practised the critical use of authorities and documentary material that historical scholarship entered on the path which it has pursued with ever-increasing success for the last three generations. It is my task to-day to direct your attention to some of its main achievements during the last half-century.

The outstanding feature of our time has been the immense increase in the material available for the knowledge and interpretation of every stage and chapter in the life of humanity. Primitive civilization has been definitely brought within the circle of historical study. The discoveries of Boucher des Perthes, Pitt-Rivers, and their successors have thrown back the opening of the human drama tens if not hundreds of thousands of years, and we recreate prehistoric man from skull and weapon, language and legend. Anthropology has become a science, and the habits and beliefs of our savage ancestors have been rendered intelligible by the piercing insight of Tylor and Sir James Frazer. In its boundless erudition, its constructive imagination, and its wealth of suggestion, the Golden Bough stands forth as perhaps the

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