Arnold on the other, are wont to analyse poems, he will find it full of the most glaring faults-not merely of grammar, as to which Pope was the greatest of sinners-but of taste and sense. And yet, because of the element of vitality, it lives and breathes, and nourishes and sustains those who read it.

But perhaps it will be said that Pope was here touching great themes, themes the highest that the human mind can conceive, that he was a master in words, and that therefore it was no wonder if he could make his theological satire glow and burn with the fire within him. Let me then break fresh ground with a poem which cannot claim any of these aids, in which the subject and the method of attack seem equally unpromising, namely Lindsay Gordon's 'How we beat the Favourite.' A horse race is not necessarily an unpoetic subject, as Pindar proves; Lindsay Gordon, however, was not singing of the Olympian games, but merely 'A Lay of the Loamshire Hunt 'Cup.' He did not treat his subject from the heroic standpoint, but from that of the local trainer, the gentleman Jock, and the rural Bookie. Yet because he could bring the vital element to his work, the result is fully satisfying. We forgive him his jigging metre, his ramshackle epithets, his go-as-you-please grammar, and his Mid-Victorian journalese. It is all cancelled by the effects of the unanalysable, life-giving element.

"A gentleman rider-well, I'm an outsider,

But if he's a gent, who the mischief's a jock?
You swells mostly blunder, Dick rides for the plunder,
He rides, too, like thunder--he sits like a rock.

"He calls hunted fairly' a horse that has barely
Been stripp'd for a trot within sight of the hounds,
A horse that at Warwick beat Birdlime and Yorick,
And gave Abdelkader at Aintree nine pounds.

"Dark brown with tan muzzle, just stripp'd for the tussle, Stood Iseult, arching her neck to the curb,

A lean head and fiery, strong quarters and wiry,
A loin rather light, but a shoulder superb.

"Some parting injunction, bestowed with great unction,
I tried to recall, but forgot like a dunce,

When Reginald Murray, full tilt on White Surrey,
Came down in a hurry to start us at once.

"Keep back in the yellow! Come up on Othello!
Hold hard on the chestnut!
Keep back there on Spartan!
So, steady there, easy," and

Turn round on The Drag!
Back you, sir, in tartan!
down went the flag.

*

A hum of hoarse cheering, a dense crowd careering,
All sights seen obscurely, all shouts vaguely heard;
"The green wins!" "The crimson!" The multitude swims on,
And figures are blended and features are blurred.

"The horse is her master!" "The green forges past her!" "The Clown will outlast her!" "The Clown wins." "The Clown!"

The white railing races with all the white faces,

The chestnut outpaces, outstretches the brown.

On still past the gateway she strains in the straightway,
Still struggles, "The Clown by a short neck at most,'
He swerves, the green scourges, the stand rocks and surges,
And flashes, and verges, and flits the white post.

Aye! so ends the tussle,-I knew the tan muzzle

Was first, though the ring-men were yelling "Dead heat!" A nose I could swear by, but Clarke said "The mare by A short head." And that's how the favourite was beat.'

Let me take one more example of a poem which must be judged bad on all accounts except that of vital power. The poem is Bishop Heber's funeral hymn, 'Thou art gone to the grave.' It has all the faults to be expected in the work of a theological rhetorician of the Regency. It reminds one of the architecture of old Brighton and of Brunswick Square-if not, indeed, of the Pavilion. And yet, in spite of its tumid language and barrel-organ prosody, there is something present which reveals the poet's nobility of feeling, and brings satisfaction to the reader's mind:

'Thou art gone to the grave: we no longer behold thee,
Nor tread the rough path of the world by thy side;
But the wide arms of Mercy are spread to enfold thee,
And sinners may die, for the Sinless has died!

Thou art gone to the grave: and, its mansion forsaking,
Perhaps thy weak spirit in fear linger'd long;

But the mild rays of Paradise beam'd on thy waking,

And the sound which thou heard'st was the Seraphim's song!' Another example of bad verse which, owing to the presence of the life-giving hitherto unanalysed element, has become fit diet for the most fastidious appetite is Glover's inimitable

Ballad of Admiral Hozier's Ghost-the ballad which helped to blow Walpole from office. It has every literary fault except the absence of the vital quality: but having that, it lives, and will continue to live, in our literature. It is through the same quality that most of Macaulay's verse endures. The critic can easily demolish the Lays of Ancient Rome,' and yet there will never be a time when men's pulses will not be made to beat more quickly by the story of the dauntless three, by the glorious geographical catalogue of The Armada,' or by the contrast of the Arno and the Tees in 'A Jacobite's Epitaph.'

Crabbe's poems offer specially good examples of the same point. Indeed, one might almost call shameless some of his intrusions of poetic vitamines into his dullest-or rather, apparently dullest-poems, for in reality Crabbe is never dull. For example, in one of his Tales he wishes to describe the high Tory views of a gentleman farmer. The man expects implicit obedience from those below him in the social scale, and yields a similar respect to those above him. His scheme of life is a strictly ordered hierarchy. That is rather a dull thing to put into verse, and this is how the audacious Crabbe handles it: 'And as fair virgins dancing in a round,

Each binds the other and herself is bound.'

There rises before us a canvas of Albano's delicate craft, or one of the exquisite plaques that Flaxman designed for Wedgwood in grey-green and white. Surely the Muse of Politics was never invoked so strangely as here! And all to tell us how a boor was also a snob!

Some of the most vital poetry in existence is to be found in the snatches of popular song which have escaped oblivion, as for example the verse which contracted Medieval Socialism into a single couplet :

'When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman ?"

Or take a later example, the Chartists' invocation of the Passion, to illustrate the daily martyrdom of Labour:

'Crucified, crucified, every morn,

Scourged, and spat on, and crowned with thorn;
Mocked with hyssop, and drenched with gall,
Brothers, how long will you bear this thrall?
Mary, Magdalene, Peter, and John,
Answer the question, and pass it on.'

It is such short, sharp poems, winged with 'vitamines,' that, in Bacon's words, 'fly abroad like darts,' and stir men's hearts to deeds of dread. With the aid of this vital element Barnes, like the glorious pedant that he was, took an elaborate, unrhymed Persian metre- The Pearl '-set it in the broadest of Dorsetshire dialect, and so achieved a literary miracle. Dryden again could make an Epilogue or a Prologue to some filthy, leering drama (his own or another's) blaze like a beacon, by the same hidden power. Take next Thomas Moore. In spite of his blowzy, slipshod vulgarisms and Regent's Park anacreontics, Moore can never be ignored by lovers of poetry, because of his compelling vitality. It is only necessary to recall the fascinating lines that describe the English girl who personifies' Country Dance':

'Let her but run that threefold race

She calls a set, not Dian e'er

Came rosier from the woodland chace.'

Next let us turn to those poets who have left nought but the shadow of a name because, however great their technical perfection, they possessed no vital force. Johnson's Lives of the Poets afford dozens of examples of poets who in their own day gained, and in many ways deserved, some fame, but upon whom if a man now tried to nourish himself he must soon die of inanition. Thomson is the capital example of the poet who has perished, or lives only a pale life, partly on borrowed glory and partly because he brought back nature and blank verse to elegiac literature. As far as readers are concerned, in wanting vitality he wants everything. He had the wit or the good fortune to see that blank verse could and ought to be restored to its place in our literature, and that the couplet -king too long-could be easily dethroned, or converted from a tyrant into a constitutional monarch. Again, to use Pope's phrase, he called in the Country,' and dared to bring us face to face with the real landscape, and not with one which, to quote Pope again, had been treated like a modest Fair,' not overdressed nor yet left wholly without draperies. But though our debt to Thomson is so great, and though he gave so much inspiration first to Cowper and then to Wordsworth, no man could call his poems alive or find in them the source of life. If we were to try to live upon him, we could but meet the fate

of those who try to live upon cereals that have proteins but no vitamines.

To revert once more to the analogy of polished rice. It is quite clear that in verse, as in food, the vitamines may be polished away. A good example of the bad results of overpolishing may be found in 'The Rape of the Lock,' when Pope, to improve his poem and make it more polished, added the machinery of the Sylphs. He lavished on the verses dedicated to the Sylphs all the magic of his art, but he failed utterly in his undertaking, because for some reason or other he could not give them the vital element. Consequently all wise men read the poem, either consciously or unconsciously, with the Sylphs omitted. Take, for instance, the glorious climax of the Third Canto, and note how completely the famous lines are devitalised by the introduction of the Sylph. Here they are as Pope originally wrote them:

'The peer now spreads the glittering forfex wide,
To enclose the lock; now joins it to divide.
The meeting points the sacred hair dissever
From the fair head, for ever, and for ever!'

Now see them polished and deprived of vitality:

'The peer now spreads the glittering forfex wide,
To enclose the lock; now joins it to divide.
E'en then, before the fatal engine closed,
A wretched sylph too fondly interpos'd:

Fate urged the shears, and cut the sylph in twain
(But airy substance soon unites again);

The meeting points the sacred hair dissever
From the fair head, for ever and for ever!'

Yet one dare not dogmatise, for in some cases this elusive vital element which did not exist in a poem before may have been introduced in the process of polishing. That exquisite lyric, as curiously felicitous as any Ode in Horace, Congreve's 'Fair Amoret has gone astray,' gains its vital qualities not from the thought of the poem, but purely from the amazing accomplishment of the verse.

Perhaps the best proof of the importance of the vital element in poetry is to be found in the dullness of almost all poetic translations. In very few cases is the translator able to transfer this essential element from the original to his own page. In the process of translation this minute but precious substance