NOTES 281 



In his Anniversaries and Other Poems (Murray), Mr. Leonard Huxley 

 presents a form of art which is the commonest among to-day's poets — a 

 series of beautiful word-pictures of natural sights or of simple sentiments, 

 without many attempts at invention, constructive design, or philosophic 

 teaching. It is a kind of corpuscular poetry, rich in particles and bright in 

 the granule, to which selection of words and euphony of successive syllables 

 give their distinction. English countryside and Alpine heights yield most 

 of the pictures, many of which are drawn for young people. Especially good 

 are A Midwinter Birthday and Sylvester Eve ; but in his fine rhetorical piece 

 Enceladus, the author figures the war — the escape of Enceladus from beneath 

 Etna, his defeat by the gods, his return to imprisonment, and his appeal to 

 Chaos (let us say, Bolshevism) — a short but elemental apologue. 



Mr. Cloudesley Brereton's Mystica et Lyrica (Elkin Matthews) has an 

 equally beautiful granular texture, but appears to be devoted to a spiritual, 

 or at least a dualist, philosophy. Two of the pieces appeared in Science 

 Progress ; and the description of the Norwegian fjords at sunset in The 

 Mystical Union of Earth and Heaven is a most lovely thing, evidently a classic 

 of pure beauty which must find a place in every anthology. The passages 

 dealing with old age and the lyrics addressed to France have almost equal 

 uniqueness; but scientific men are scarcely likely to accept the philosophy 

 — which seems to be of the kind that Dr. Craggs calls sit ergo est. Thus when 

 the poet exclaims in his verses called After Reading Bergson — 



From the grey and grim bethels of Science, 



Squat, ugly, and meanly designed. 

 With its triple unholy alliance 



Of Logic, Mechanics, and Mind, 

 That pretends with a ruler and compass 



To plot out the soul of mankind—. 

 From such arabesques, dodecahedral. 



Sham symbols of Life and its lore, 

 I return to the old-world cathedral 



That a new race of prophets restore. 

 Where the starved soul may wonder and worship 



The visions it harboured of yore — 



most people will see, as in the alleged philosophy of M. Bergson himself, 

 nothing but illusion. After all, truth, and not the feeding of starved 

 souls, is the first concern of real philosophy. What Dr. Leonard Huxley 

 says so beautifully of childhood may be applied bodily to such strains of 

 thought : 



Childhood lives in a fairy world 



Where fancy mints the sterling gold. 

 And thought's free charter grants for truth 



The strangest tales by the senses told. 

 'Tis a little world with a crystal roof 



Where the world without comes shining through 

 In tangled pictures oddly bent 



Like a bather's limbs in the stream askew. 



Dr. Ronald Campbell MacFie's War (Murray — already reviewed in 

 Science Progress for 1918-19) is a fine single massive structure designed 

 as a monument of recent events. It is only a short poem, divided into four 

 parts with subsections ; beginning with the formation of the earth and 

 the appearance of life ; describing human wars in the past and the recent 

 one in detail ; and ending with some large philosophies on the subject. 



