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THE LIVING AGE

November,

Murmuring holy Latin immemorial; Swaying with tremulous hands the old censer full of spice, In gray, sweet incense clouds; blue, sweet clouds mystical: To him, in place of men, for he is old, suffice ' Melancholy remembrances and vesperal.

There were other poets, generally a few years younger, who having escaped that first wave of excitement lived tame and orderly lives. But they, too, were in reaction against everything Victorian.
II

A church in the style of Inigo Jones opens on to a grass lawn a few hundred yards from the Marble Arch. It was designed by a member of the Rhymers' Club, whose architecture, like his poetry, seemed to exist less for its own sake than to illustrate his genius as a connoisseur. I have sometimes thought that masterpiece, perhaps the smallest church in London, the most appropriate symbol of all that was most characteristic in the art of my friends. Their poems seemed to say: 'You will remember us the longer because we are very small, very unambitious.' Yet my friends were most ambitious men; they wished to express life at its intense moments, those moments that are brief because of their intensity, and at those moments alone. In the Victorian era the most famous poetry was often a passage in a poem of some length, perhaps of great length, a poem full of thoughts that might have been expressed in prose. A short lyric seemed an accident, > an interruption amid more serious work. Somebody

has quoted Browning as saying that he could have written many lyrics had he thought them worth the trouble. The aim of my friends, my own aim, if it sometimes made us prefer the acorn to the oak, the small to the great, freed us from many things that we thought an impurity. Swinburne, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning had admitted so much psychology, science, moral fervor. Had not Veriaine said of In Memoriam, 'when he should have been broken-hearted he had many reminiscences'? We tried to write like the poets of the Greek Anthology, or like Catullus, or like the Jacobean Lyrists/men who wrote while poetry was still pure. We did not look forward or look outward: we left that to the prose writers;, we looked back. We thought it was in the very nature of poetry to look back, to resemble those Swedenborgian angels who are described as moving for ever toward the dayspring of their youth. In this we were all, orderly and dis orderly alike, in full agreement. When I think of the Rhymers' Club and grow weary of those luckless men, I think of another circle that was in full agreement. It gathered round Charles Ricketts, one of the greatest connoisseurs of any age, an artist whose woodcuts prolonged the inspiration of Rossetti, whose paintings mirrored the rich coloring of Delacroix. When we studied his art we studied our double. We, too, thought always that style should be proud of its ancestry, of its traditional high breeding, that an ostentatious originality was out of place whether in the arts or in good manners. When the Rhymers' Club was breaking up, I read enthusiastic reviews of the first book of Sturge Moore

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