tially the man who felt acutely, and anything that was a
"feeling" came to have a sort of value of its own as denoting poetic
sensitiveness. Hence the excessive softness, the indefiniteness, the
languishing and the effeminacy which since the beginning of the
nineteenth century have been tolerated in poetry because poetry was
supposed to be the proper vehicle for such weakness. It is significant
that the most admired poem of Keats begins with a sentiment which we
should agree to detest in a prose-writing:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk----

I contend that as this sentiment would be intolerable in prose, so
also it is not to be suffered in poetry.

Now, the Kipling epoch did introduce a certain hardness, or
masculinity, into the cultured life of the country which gave an
opportunity for escape from the querulousness and the vagueness which
had become poetic habits among English poets and lovers of poetry. I
say the "Kipling epoch," for Mr. Kipling himself never had the
self-discipline, perhaps had not the sense of form, to achieve much
durable poetry, and his very masculinity turned at last into an
unmasculine shriek. He marked no more than the transition period. Mr.
Chesterton is a part of it. He, too, is lacking in sense of form and
diction, and could never have been a considerable poet, though there
is in his writings abundant evidence of poetic feeling. What I am
concerned to observe is that his ballad poetry, too, is marked by
that essentially masculine note which seemed to have died out of
English poetry--unless Browning and Morris be taken as exceptions. Mr.
Hilaire Belloc comes at the latter end of the transition period. When
a man has only written a few poems it is injudicious to say of him
that he is a great poet. But, at any rate, Mr. Belloc has written a
few poems which belong to the great order of lyrical verse, and in
_The South Country_ he surpasses anything that Kipling or Henley
achieved, anything perhaps that any English lyrical poet has written
this century. If that is not a great poem, then I for one will abjure
great poetry, and be content with the less. There is all Mr. Kipling's
sense of fellowship, a thousand times refined, and in alliance with
all the most vital emotions of life, the sense for concrete, simple
things, the sense for things remembered, of tragedy expected but not
feared, the feeling for men, as men; for places, as p