with class; turning the many small lights of the story upon the slow emergence of Hodge, and his first participation in the conscious life of the race. That, indeed, is his great theme, developed from the chaos of obscure beginnings into the more assured movement of our own time. If it be a reproach to history when history becomes partisan and historians human, the reproach loses its slight sting when it is turned against a poet; and whatever we have found to regret in the later Books of this chronicle is due rather to the intractable nature of the subject than to the author's failure to keep his own eye and heart engaged. Not a word, however, may be uttered by me except in praise of the Envoy, 'New Domesday.' There he looks upon Hodge and the world from his intimate corner of southern England, and sees him called to take a part in a larger quarrel than his own quarrel of centuries. Hodge, he says, knew little of chancelleries and international wrangles, but knew one certain thing-'The mighty have oppressed the weak.' I wish I had space to quote the passages which have moved my own mind, but it must be enough to say that the song rises with the event, and to add a single passage without comment.

'As up by Kennetside I rode

From Newbury to Savernake,

I thought what sounds had charged her flood
Since Norman William's sword fell slack-
What cheers of triumph and what groans

This funded earth had echoed back,
This soil made deep with English bones,
Made rich with blood of Englishmen,
Whose rede lies graven in the stones
A-litter on the hillside! Then,
Grieving the willow-border'd mead,
Grieving the flower-haunted fen,
The broad-eav'd farms, the nobly-treed,
The eddying river stemm'd with mills,
My eyes sought comfort in their need
And found the everlasting hills
And rested there. . . .

Then, where the forest on the ridge

Thrusts his green shoulder to the plain,

I saw the end of Privilege.'

It would be a half-excusable mistake, though still a

mistake, if The Song of the Plow' were to be visited in time to come for the birds singing thus sweetly in its branches; for the attraction of such music, with its traditional echoes and familiar refrains, is permanent and irresistible.

I have preferred, in this rapid sketch of a sketch, to regard 'The Song of the Plow' in relation to its subject rather than in its purely æsthetic character, but under each aspect it is a fruitful matter for meditation. Under the former, it represents the influence of a great inspiration upon a writer who, among many admirable efforts, has nowhere else found a theme to exercise and exalt his finest powers; and under the purely æsthetic aspect it represents an attempt to widen and invigorate the body of native poetry by means of the intensest of English subjects and the most individual of English verse. French influence, which has been so readily admitted into recent English verse, and classic influences, which have so strongly marked Mr Hewlett's own earlier poetry, are here absent; and whatever success has been achieved in 'The Song of the Plow-and it is considerable-is a success of English poetry at once in the strictest and the widest sense of the term.

'The Village Wife's Lament' is a poem of another form and a smaller scope, but, like The Song of the Plow,' it is written to fulfil a purpose not purely and not at all consciously æsthetic; and so it might share the neglect or the censure of those whose standards are purely æsthetic. It is a dramatic ballad, and the author does not hold himself answerable for all that it expresses concerning aggressive war; but his village wife is made to utter thoughts which he believes to be common to people of her inexpressive kind. 'If I know anything of village people I know this, that they shape their lives according to Nature, and are outraged to the root of their being by the frustration of Nature's laws and the stultification of man's function in the scheme of things.' It is, then, a poet's business to divine the inarticulate, the thoughts which lie too deep for syllabling; and such an attempt is made here.

In a recent 'Prolegomena to the Ballad' our author has stated his own attitude more plainly, saying that

his thoughts upon the English and Scots ballads have turned to what underlies the lovely poetry in them, to the men who made them and the people for whom they were made.

...

'If you can happen upon a ballad plainly composed by a peasant, or for a peasant audience, you are taken immediately into the heart of a deeply interesting and most unknown people-deeply interesting because the peasantry in England by birth and birthright is aboriginal; most unknown owing to its consistent ill-treatment or neglect by the ruling races here throughout history.'

Mr Hewlett is not a peasant, but he has boldly attempted to sink his own sophisticated personality (using the phrase as inoffensively as he has used it of Clare) into the simple, dumb personality of the peasant, and give it a tongue; and thus 'The Village Wife's Lament,' although it is not folk-poetry in authorship, is poetry intended for the folk. Some of it the peasant might not care to read, although Mr Hewlett seems to believe that his village wife has a fondness for nature poetry such as only an eager, accomplished lyrist could sing; but the lyrical poet in Mr Hewlett will not be suppressed and needs must pour out pleasure for some who are not peasants. He is not, I believe, of those who still assert an expiring orthodoxy in the theory that folk-ballads grew mysteriously out of the communal mind, and not from the sudden imagination of a poet. But truly does he interpret the natural mind in his deliberate attempt at a narrative which shall be as 'native' as any ballad whose origin is distant and dark.

The village wives watch sons and husbands marching off to the war:

'The lads go by, the colours fly,

Drums rattle, bugles bray;
We only cry, Let mine not die-
No thought for whom he slay.

But woman bares a martyr breast,
And herself points the flame:

Her son, a hero or a beast,

Will never be the same.'

There is the sharpest of poignance in the simple lines

of other stanzas:

'I lookt forth from my bed

To the cold square of the light-
Unto God I said,

66

"Show me why men must fight."'

And more than all in a single quatrain in which the heart's impeachment is loud:

'They say, let love and light be given

So we keep Liberty :

But I say there is no more Heaven
If men must so be free.'

Is this beyond the village wife's conception? Not so, answers our author, for she is as one wise suddenly, who never understood.' It is possible to dispute the term 'dramatic,' but with that one small point conceded I think there is no other dispute.

Mr Hewlett has a religious mind, and in the grave music of his 'Wiltshire Plainsong' he pleads ('Dedication to the Dead'):

'Let there be one found to record

Your deeds who are content to tread
The way of death, a nameless horde,
Unribbon'd and unheralded.'

He knows that he is called to write the holy dues of them that fought the Holy War, for he has gained by everything that the dead have lost:

6

Chiefest to love that country more

Which breeds such men for such a use.'

It is a great call, and his response in these three books is to subdue himself to the task and let the breath of common aspiration, challenge, sorrow and despair speak through his lips. The task is hard, for poetry as it has developed in England is the most individual and isolated of all the arts by which the spirit of man is expressed. In other books Mr Hewlett's own style, whether of verse or prose, is bold, restless, assertive, provocative; but in these the theme has mastered him. He has heard the undertones of the dead as well as the humble living, and in his evocation of a voice he has added to the purest and oldest tradition of English poetry.

JOHN FREEMAN.

Art. 8.-MODERN DEMOCRACIES.

1. Modern Democracies. By James Viscount Bryce. Two vols. Macmillan, 1921.

THIS is a marvellous book to have been written by a man of eighty-three, as fresh, clear, and vigorous as anything which the author set down when, more than fifty years ago, he opened a new aspect of mediæval history to most English readers in his famous 'Holy Roman Empire.' And this, his last book, is as useful as his first, because it helps in just the same way to define and clarify phrases, words, and ideas, which most men use as common currency without having thought out accurately their own conceptions expressed in those common terms. Republic,' 'monarchy,' 'constitution,' 'equality,' 'justice,' 'religion,' often have different meanings to different men, who fall into dispute because they fail to comprehend that they are not speaking of precisely the same things. Democracy, the catchword of this book's title, is one of the most perilous terms of all, because it has acquired in some countries associations of a social-indeed, almost of a moral— character, which do not accrue to it in others.

'Democracy (Lord Bryce explains) is supposed to be the product and guardian both of Equality and of Liberty, being so consecrated by its relationship to both as to be almost above criticism. Historically, no doubt, the three have been intimately connected-yet they are separable in theory, and have sometimes been separated in practice.'

The object of this great book is to strip democracy of its casual accretions of meaning, to discover its essential connotation, and, when it has been defined, to examine its strength and its weakness. Lord Bryce attacks the problem, as he himself owns, from the standpoint of an old British Liberal, reared in the atmosphere of Victorian party politics; but he is fully conscious that in some degree he is a prejudiced observer for that reason. He warns his readers of the fact, and once and again refrains from comment where the personal element must influence his outlook on British policy. He would have preferred, as he says in his introductory chapter, that