tive spirit to great issues; it is public but it is very
far from being official. The war, indeed, is necessarily more important
as a private event even than as a public event. And the few but fine
lines, on a brother fallen in a fight amid wild river that sundered man
from man, is a model of the manner in which such mighty events take
their place among the impressions of the more sincere and spontaneous
type of talent. The topic takes its pre-eminence by intensity and not by
space, or even in a sense by design. Indeed it is best expressed in a
metaphor used by the writer herself about the topic itself; the metaphor
of the colour red in its relation to other colours. Red rivets the eye,
not by quantity but by quality; and in any picture or pattern a spot or
streak of it will make itself the feature or the key. Miss Sibyl
Bristowe's poem conceives the Creator confronted as with a broken
spectrum or a gap in coloured glass; feeling the whole range of vision
to be dim and impoverished and adding, by the authority of His own
mysterious art, the dreadful colour of martyrdom.

Indeed the point of the comparison might very well be conveyed by the
two poems about a London garden; that on the garden in peace being
comparatively long, and that about the garden in war exceedingly short;
short but sharply pathetic with its notion of peering and probing for
the microscope flowers that must be a part of the most utilitarian
vegetables. Indeed the short poems are certainly the most successful;
and there is the same brevity in the last line of the poem about the
tragic passage of time; "If lips of children had not told me so." The
same general impression, as in the comparison already noted, is
conveyed, for instance, in the fact that the poems about South Africa
are private rather than public poems; are in that sense, if the phrase
be properly comprehended, rather colonial than imperial. That is, they
are individual glimpses of great torrid wastes, like similar individual
glimpses of quiet northern woods; visions of crude and golden cities as
personal as the parallel visions of normal northern cottages. Miss Sibyl
Bristowe is perhaps an amateur, in the sense in which this is generally
true of one who happens to be an artist in another art; but it is
unfortunate that the world has so much missed the notion of that natural
ardour that should belong to the word.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

The author has to acknowledge the courtesy of th