he
Japanese Government sent a committee of its best art-critics to study
the relative merits of the modern European painters, and that they
returned with the bewildered statement that they could make no report,
because all European pictures were exactly alike. A student from
Patagonia might conceivably argue that he could discover no difference
whatever between our various poets of the war.

This would be unjust, but it is perhaps not unfair to suggest that the
determined resistance to all restraint, which has marked the latest
school, is not really favourable to individuality. There has been a very
general, almost a universal tendency to throw off the shackles of poetic
form. It has been supposed that by abandoning the normal restraints, or
artificialities, of metre and rhyme, a greater directness and fidelity
would be secured. Of course, if an intensified journalistic impression
is all that is desired, "prose cut up into lengths" is the readiest
by-way to effect. But if the poets desire--and they all do desire--to
speak to ages yet unborn, they should not forget that all the experience
of history goes to prove discipline not unfavourable to poetic
sincerity, while, on the other hand, the absence of all restraint is
fatal to it. Inspiration does not willingly attend upon flagging metre
and discordant rhyme, and never in the whole choral progress from Pindar
down to Swinburne has a great master been found who did not exult in the
stubbornness of "dancing words and speaking strings," or who did not
find his joy in reducing them to harmony. The artist who avoids all
difficulties may be pleased with the rapidity of his effect, but he will
have the vexation of finding his success an ephemeral one. The old
advice to the poet, in preparing the rich chariot of the Muse, still
holds good:--

"Let the postillion, Nature, mount, but let
The coachman, Art, be set."

Too many of our recent rebellious bards fancy that the coach will drive
itself, if only the post-boy sticks his heels hard into Pegasus.

It is not, however, the object of this essay to review all the poetry
which was written about the war, nor even that part of it which owed its
existence to the strong feeling of non-combatants at home. I propose to
fix our attention on what was written by the young soldiers themselves
in their beautiful gallantry, verse which comes to us hallowed by the
glorious effort of battle, and in too many poignant cases by the