"He began," Mr. J.C. Squire has said, "by being more interested in his art than in himself." And all but a score or so of his poems suggest that this was his way to the last. He was one of those for whom the visible world exists. But it existed for him less in nature than in art. He does not give one the impression of a poet who observed minutely and delightedly as Mr. W.H. Davies observes. His was a painted world inhabited by a number of chosen and exquisite images. He found the real world by comparison disappointing. "He confessed," we are told, "that he had not greatly liked the East--always excepting, of course, Greece." This was almost a necessity of his genius; and it is interesting to see how in some of his later work his imagination is feeling its way back from the world of illusion to the world of real things--from Bagdad and Babylon to England. His poetry does not as a rule touch the heart; but in _Oak and Olive_ and _Brumana_ his spectatorial sensuousness at last breaks down and the cry of the exile moves us as in an intimate letter from a friend since dead. Those are not mere rhetorical reproaches to the "traitor pines" which
sang what life has found The falsest of fair tales;
lands Where blaze the unimaginable flowers.
It was as though disillusion had given an artist a soul. And when the war came it found him, as he lay dying of consumption in Switzerland, a poet not merely of manly but of martial utterance. _The Burial in England_ is perhaps too much of an _ad hoc_ call to be great poetry. But it has many noble and beautiful lines and is certainly of a different world from his mediocre version of _God Save the King_.
At the same time, I do not wish to suggest that his poetry of illusion is the less important part of his work. The perfection of his genius is to be sought, as a matter of fact, in his romantic eastern work, such as _The Ballad of Iskander, A Miracle of Bethlehem, Gates of Damascus_, and _Bryan of Brittany_. The false, fair tale of the East had, as it were, released; him from mere flirtation with the senses into the world of the imagination. Of human passions he sang little. He wrote oftener of amorousness than of love, as in _The Ballad of the Student of the South._ His passion for fairy tales, his amorousness of the East, stirred his imagination from idleness among superficial fancies into a brilliant ardour. It was these things that roused him to a nice extravagance with those favourite words and colours and images upon which Mr. Squire comments: