tent or ballast. With ample skill and ease in
rhyme, he yet makes up the most important section
of his book largely of verse that is unrhymed, and, to a considerable extent, even irregular. This section — 'In Hospital: Rhymes and Rhythms' — is in many ways the most noteworthy body of
poetry that has appeared in this country for a long-time. Whether or not Mr. Henley would call
himself a Realist is not certain; but it is at least clear that he is not one of the Unrealists. He has here produced twenty-nine short poems 'holly from his experiences in the Old Edinburgh Infirmary, where he was a patient in 1873-75, reproducing almost every phase of the hospital life;— the first impression on entrance; that of the waiting-room and the interior; the states of mind before operation and after; the sick vigil; portraits of the different types of nurse, old and new and lady probationer; the round of the clinical Professor with his students; sketches of patients and cases, of 'The Chief' and the house-surgeon, of the attendants, of visitors, of the 'apparition' of a friend, now recognised by all the world as one R.L.S.; with interludes of expression of the patient's personal moods. The mere enumeration of the motives is enough to set many asking, ' But is this poetry 'i ' and the emphatic answer is. Yes. It is no more prose in its temper than in its form : it is at once selective and artistic, lyric and rhythmic, transmuting every fact into a thing emotionally perceived, so that the reader has not only the data but the poet's impression bound up with them, and this always given in words which make the whole an artistic possession, something more than a mere report, because stamped with a beauty which the fact had not. Take, by way of the most emphatic possible challenge to the conventional notion of poetic beauty and poetic subject, the closing lines of the poem describing the round of the operating and teaching Professor among the beds. The Professor has passed on from a case, and
' Now one can see.
Case Number One
Sits (rather pale) with his bed-clothes
Stripped up, and showing his foot
(Alas for God's image !)
Swaddled in wet, white lint
Brilliantly hideous with red.'
Here is an episode which one cannot read of with-
out wincing, which to have seen yioxAA have been
an unmixedly painful impression ; and yet, while
there is no softening or evasion of the shock, the
verse remains a thing to which we return for its success of artistic statement — a success exactly analogous to that of the actor or actress who moves us to pain by the simidation of mental pain or physical weakness, and yet at the same instant gives us pleasure by the secure skill and fidelity of the imitation. So with another sufficiently unpromising subject, charm is won from the most meagre motive by the sheer vividness with which a nervous impression is retained and reproduced : —
NOCTURN.
' At the barren heart of midnight,
When the shadow shuts and opens
As the loud flames pulse and flutter,
I can hear a cistern leaking.
' Dripping, dropping, in a rhythm,
Rough, unequal, half-melodious,
Like the measures aped from nature
In the infancy of music ;
' Like the buzzing of an insect,
Still, irrational, persistent, . . .
I must listen, listen, listen
In a passion of attention ;
'Till it taps upon my heartstrings.
And my very life goes dripping,
Dropping, dripping, drip-drip-dropping,
In the drip-drop of the cistern.'
Naturalism in minutia; could hardly go further ;
but though one or two critics have announced their inability to see any merit in such work, it may be
predicted that it will win the ear not only of most people who have a feeling both for verse and for psychological observation, but of a posterity which will be still more highly evolved in these matters. To do with seeming ease a thing that the instructed judgment knows to be difficult — this is at all times one of the credentials of mastery. And if Mr. Henley can thus succeed with motives specifically vmpromising, no less is he equal to more fruitful opportunities. His sketch of the sick ploughman, reminiscent of his youthful love-conquests ; the sonnets on ' The Chief and the Nurses ; the power-
fully tei'se account of a tragic ' casualty ' ; the ' Ave Caesar ' from the sufferer musing on death ; the tremulous joy of his return to the outer world — all have the same certainty of touch and directness of insight and of manner. The outer and the inner fact, the phenomenon and its philosophy, are always perfectly synthesised. In the ' Vigil ' the maddening microscopic noises of tlie sleepless night are blent with the sick man's memories : —
' All the old time
Surges malignant before me ;
Old voices, old kisses, old songs
Blossom derisive about me ;
While the new days
Pass me in endless procession :
A pageant of shadows
Silently, leeringly wending
On . . . and still on . . . still on ;'
