XX.—­GEORGIANS

(1) MR. DE LA MARE

Mr. Walter de la Mare gives us no Thames of song.  His genius is scarcely more than a rill.  But how the rill shines!  How sweet a music it makes!  Into what lands of romance does it flow, and beneath what hedges populous with birds!  It seems at times as though it were a little fugitive stream attempting to run as far away as possible from the wilderness of reality and to lose itself in quiet, dreaming places.  There never were shyer songs than these.

Mr. de la Mare is at the opposite pole to poets so robustly at ease with experience as Browning and Whitman.  He has no cheers or welcome for the labouring universe on its march.  He is interested in the daily procession only because he seeks in it one face, one figure.  He is love-sick for love, for beauty, and longs to save it from the contamination of the common world.  Like the lover in The Tryst, he dreams always of a secret place of love and beauty set solitarily beyond the bounds of the time and space we know: 

  Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come,
  There, out of all remembrance, make our home: 
  Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair,
  Hollowed by Noah’s mouse beneath the chair
  Wherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound,
  Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound. 
  Perchance Leviathan of the deep sea
  Would lease a lost mermaiden’s grot to me,
  There of your beauty we would joyance make—­
  A music wistful for the sea-nymph’s sake: 
  Haply Elijah, o’er his spokes of fire,
  Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre,
  Spied, tranced in azure of inanest space,
  Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace,
  Where two might happy be—­just you and I—­
  Lost in the uttermost of Eternity.

This is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry.  Even the waltz-songs of the music-halls express, or attempt to express, the longing of lovers for an impossible loneliness.  Mr. de la Mare touches our hearts, however, not because he shares our sentimental day-dreams, but because he so mournfully turns back from them to the bitterness of reality: 

  No, no.  Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep
  Could lull poor mortal longingness asleep. 
  Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost Man
  Shall win what changeless vague of peace he can.

These lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective vagueness of phrase, which is Mr. de la Mare’s peculiar vice as a poet) suggests something of the sad philosophy which runs through the verse in Motley.  The poems are, for the most part, praise of beauty sought and found in the shadow of death.

Melancholy though it is, however, Mr. de la Mare’s book is, as we have said, a book of praise, not of lamentations.  He triumphantly announces that, if he were to begin to write of earth’s wonders: