minate England and
shake her clean out of her fin-de-siecle complacency. England could
never be the same again, after those three men had been at the helm,
for however short a period. The course was deflected; the reckoning
lost. Austere, dignified Whigs would appear again in politics, but
never again would their austerity and dignity represent our political
system. Sonorous, sober, highly judicious journalists might still
succeed in producing, at great loss, a journal expressing themselves
and their views, but no considerable section of the nation would ever
again hang upon their words. And even in poetry, which lies so much
nearer to the roots of human nature, and might therefore be expected
to vary less with the fashions of a time, we cannot but perceive that
the private, personal utterances of an Arnold, a Tennyson, a Browning,
a Rossetti, would have less chance of being heard in the din of
to-day, however sweet the expression, however intimately moving to the
spirit. There is a poet belonging to the younger generation who has
written lyrics of exquisite grace and charm, who can deal half
playfully, half seriously with the lightest of subjects, and make it
delicate and entrancing; who can touch the deeper note of the romantic
poets and make of it something grim, perplexing, haunting; or can
produce in a few stanzas an intimate feeling for persons portrayed in
some suggestive aspect. Mr. Walter De la Mare is well known to a small
circle of literary persons, but neither his poems nor his
prose-writings have been widely read as they should have been.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling would perhaps shudder at the thought, but it is
evident--is it not to his credit?--that he was essentially a democrat.
He made his appeal to the average man. His ballads were written about
ordinary men and ordinary things; the feelings they portrayed were the
feelings of everyday life, feelings which everyone without distinction
might feel in a vigorous and perhaps boisterous way. Wordsworth never
really brought poetry back to the common, everyday life of simple
folk. Long ago Coleridge pointed out that this was a popular
superstition about Wordsworth shared by the poet himself. But to a far
greater extent Mr. Kipling did make his appeal to the common stock of
everyday and average emotion--the emotion of the average man. He was
not interested, as the great Victorian poets had been, in the lonely
way of the spirit; in the more personal emotions; or in n