o-day!
Afterwards the corn that like gold gives return, afterwards the gold
that like corn is faithful and will bear,
The fruit we have henceforth only to gather, the land we have
henceforth only to share,
But victory we will have to-day!'

In the same spirit Charles Peguy--like Claudel, be it noted, a student
of Bergson at the Ecole Normale--found his ideal in the great story of
the young girl of Domremy who saved France when all the pomp and wisdom
of generals had broken down. And in our own poetry has not Mr. Bottomley
rewritten the Lear story, with the focus of power and interest
transferred from the old king--left with not an inch of king in him--to
a glorious young Artemis-Goneril?

But among our English Georgians this tense iconoclastic note is rare.
Their detachment from what they repudiate is not fanatical or ascetic;
it is conveyed less in invective than in paradox and irony; their temper
is not that which flies to the wilderness and dresses in camel hair, but
of mariners putting out to the unknown and bidding a not unfriendly
good-bye at the shore. The temper of adventure is deeply ingrained in
the new romance as in the old; the very word adventure is saturated with
a sentiment very congenial to us both for better and worse; it quickens
the hero in us and flatters the devil-may-care.

In its simplest form the temper of adventure has given us the profusion
of pleasant verses which we know as the poetry of 'vagabondage' and 'the
open road'. The point is too familiar to be dwelt on, and has been
admirably illustrated and discussed by Mr. McDowall. George Borrow,
prince of vagabonds, Stevenson, the 'Ariel', with his 'Vagabond-song'--

'All I seek the heaven above,
And the road below me',

and a few less vocal swallows, anticipated the more sustained flights
and melodies of to-day, while Borrow's wonderful company of vagabond
heroes and heroines is similarly premonitory of the alluring gipsies and
circus-clowns of our Georgian poetry. Sometimes a traditional motive is
creatively transformed; as when Father Time, the solemn shadow with
admonitory hour-glass, appears in Mr. Hodgson's poem as an old gipsy
pitching his caravan 'only a moment and off once again'.

Elsewhere a deeper note is sounded. It is not for nothing that Jeanne
d'Arc is the saint of French Catholic democracy, or that Peguy, her
poet, calls the Incarnation the 'sublime adventure of Go