ed by trees, in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or a
series of Moorish arabesques. It is a frightful descent from the heaven
of Crashaw and the places of the Seraphim in "The Hound of Heaven," by
Francis Thompson, to Richard Aldington.

Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and his favourite poet, and
it has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the critic
is to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet in
relation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how I
could condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning and
Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all the modern English
poets, deserve to be classed indiscriminately together as "inspiring."
And I cannot even scorn the man who declares that Tennyson is _demod['e]_
because his heroines are in crinoline and conventional, and his mediaeval
knights cut out of pasteboard.

By comparison with the original of the "Idylls of the King" this
statement seems to be true. Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies--by
modern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"--do not bear the
test of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are as
different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are from
those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the
"Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their
cadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read Sir
Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and
Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and Alfred
Kreymborg and others new--_chacun [`a] son go[^u]t_--I feel that by
comparison with Francis Thompson, these poets are not rich. They are
poor because they seem to leave out God; that is, the God of the
Christians.

Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because he could not escape the
shadow of the Crucifixion. Theocritus was a real pagan because he knew
neither the sorrow of the Crucifixion nor the joy of the Resurrection.
Keats was a lover of Greece, was ardent, inexpressibly beautiful,
sensuously charming; but Keats could no more be a real Greek than
Shakespeare, in "Julius Caesar," could be a real Roman. Nor could
Tennyson, nor Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites be
really out of their time, for they could not understand the essentially
religious qualities of the times into which they tried to project
themselves.

If you compare the