iS 
LAND & WATER 
Books to Read 
By Lucian Oldershaw 
October 26, 191O 
WHATEVER other may be the literary need of 
the tiglitinj,' man, lyric poetry is certainly one. 
" The Tommy is a singing soldier, " says Mr. 
Patrick Mac(iill in his .So/rf/V/- Songs (Herbert 
Jenkins, 3s. 6d. net), but he is only recording a truth 
tliat is as old as war— as old, that is, as love and death. 
ll<' lias more to tell us when he describes what >ongs the 
soldiers sing, when he is working out the greatest common 
measure of the lyrical impulse in our armies. As to 
this he is fain to confess that " The soldier has in reality 
very few songs," and that what he has may be summed 
up in the word of his friend Iceman Bill Tc ake : " These 
'ere songs are no good in England. They 'a\e too much 
guts in them. " 'Tommy's own songs indeed apj)ro\imate 
much more in tone and temper, and in absence of literary 
values, to those of Mr. K. W. Campbell in T/ie Making 
of Micky McGhcc ((leorge Allen and Unwin, js. 6d. net), 
than to Mr. MacGill's own songs. Mr. Campbell's verses 
are not good, but their narratixe (luality, their ob\'ious 
sentiment and their appreciation of the Bacchanalian 
element in a soldin 's liff may attract the reciter of the 
camp sing-song. 
^ Hf Hf tt * 
What the soldier sings in companies and platoons is 
less the business of the literary critic than what satisfies 
the lyrical desires of the individual soldier. I have hinted 
that Mr. MacCiill's poems have a factor or so, in the way 
of literary glamour and the like, too many to appeal to 
Tommy en masse. When he goes oiit on the listening- 
patrol, he sees all sorts of wonderful things : " Now Bill 
never sees any marvels like these." But many an 
individual Tommy will recognise the truth and the 
vision in Mr. MacGill's verse, and those at home will 
be glad to have a lyrical counterpart to his previous 
vohuTie, The Great Push. For here the reader may see 
the soldier at the front, both in his lighter moments when 
" Tommy takes his puttees off and strafs the blooming 
fly," and in the most poignant moment of all : 
" Chum o' mine, and \ ou're dead, matey, 
.'Vnd this is the way we part, 
The bullet went through your head, matey, 
But Gawd ! it went through my 'eart." 
4> « * * * 
Patrick MacGill still has his spurs to win as a poet. 
Thomas Hardy, though he has written about the best, 
because one of the simplest and most direct, songs of the 
present war. Men Who March Away , is already a classic. 
Hence the propriety of including his selected poems in 
Messrs. Macmillan's famous Golden Treasury Series 
(2s. 6d. and js. 6d. net). This is not the place to attempt 
any sort of final appraisement of the poetical output of 
one who, like Gicorge Meredith, returned after a long 
career as a novelist to the verse-making of his youth ; 
but I recommend any poetry-loving soldier going back 
from leave to slip this little volume into his pocket. If 
he does not already know Thomas Hardy as a poet, he 
will be surprised at the savour of the homeland there is 
in his ))oems. These are for the most part dramatic 
lines with many such pictorial flashes as this of the old 
lady with tales to tell of the scare of Napoleon's invasion : 
With cap-framed face and long gaze into the embers — 
We seated around her knees — 
She would dwell uu such dead themes, not as one who re- 
members. 
But rather as one who sees. 
There are difficulties, hesitations, reservations that 
restrain very often the free play of the emotional 
faculties, but every now and then the poet warms even 
his stoic philosophy into a lambent flame : 
Let me enjoy the earth no less 
Because the all-enacting Might 
That fashioned fortli its loveliness, 
Had other aims than my delight. 
Above all — and this is why this collection is particular y 
welcome at this moment-^these poems belong to luig- 
land ; they are racy of her soil, and they are true to the 
central ideals of her people. 
William Butler Yeats belongs to a poetic generation 
mid-way between that of Thomas Hardy .and Patrick 
MacGill. 1 make no apology for thus placing him in the 
point of time, for, in his latest utterances the weight of 
years seems to hang heavy on him. He is, as he tells us 
in his Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (Macmillan and 
Co., 6s. net), " sorrowful and disturbed." The cause of 
his sorrow will seem strange to those who know his 
achievements in contemporary poetry. " When I think," 
he .says, " of all the books I ha\e read, and of the wise 
words I have heard s|X)ken, and of the anxiety I have 
given to parents and grandparents, and of the hopes that 
1 ha\-e had, all life weighed in the scales of my own life 
seems to me a preparation for something that never 
happens." There is the same mood in his new poems 
Responsibilities (Macmillan and Co.. 6s. net) : 
" When I Was young, 
1 had not given a penny for a song, 
Did not the poet sing it with such airs 
That one believed he had a sword upstairs ; 
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish. 
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.". 
In effect Mr. Yeats has been passing through a pei-iod of 
somewhat melancholy self-e.xamination, but now that he 
has taken stock of himself and his forbears, as he docs in 
these wistful and engaging Memories (as informative as 
to the growth of the poet's mind as the Prelude itself), let 
us hope that a new period of actixity is about to begin 
that will rival e\en that ultra-romantic one that gave us 
The Isle of htnisfrae. Indeed, there are signs of such 
a renascence in the new volume of poems in which there 
are many that add a new note of virility to the haunting 
plaintiveness of his old tunes, but in which there is nothing 
so significant as the much stronger and more dramatic 
re-setting of his little play 7'he Hour Glass. For the 
rest — to discuss these \olumcs fully would be to discuss 
modern Ireland, a task outside my sphere, but certainly 
. a task which should be approached with an understanding 
of the point of view, albeit a somewhat detached and 
special point of view, from which Mr. Yeats looks with 
sadness and love on his countrymen. 
:•: :): 4< !): !|c 
From a poet of the sword to John Galsworthy, the 
humanitarian, is at first thinking a far cry. Head, how- 
ever, the collection of pamphlets, letters to the press and 
other miscellanea that are gathered together into 
A Sheaf (Heinemann, 5s.), and behold a chivalry as fine, 
if not as romantic, as the Irishman's. These writings 
stretch from before the war and have to do, first with 
rights of animals and rights of women problems, then 
with the war and then with after the war. From them 
you will learn why the humanitarian fights for England, 
in the hope that he is fighting in the last fight, and how 
he hopes that this will come about. You will also see, 
j^ainted by a dramatist, some wonderful pictures of the 
war moods of the men and women about you. And, 
while you consider the publicist's plea and enjoy the 
artist's beauty, you may take pride in active well-doing, 
for Mr. Galsworthy's book is being sold on behalf of St. 
Dunstan's and the Nati(jnal Institute for the Blind. 
***** 
Ohe of the most obvious problems of the reconstruc- 
tion before us is that of our future relations with the 
Dominions. We are getting to know more of their men than 
we ever did before ; we should not neglect any oppor- 
tunities afforded us of learning about their history and 
environment. Such a book therefore, as Capt. Burton 
Deane's Mounted Police Life in Canada (Cassell and Co., 
6s. net.) is welcome, more particularly so as it is written 
without any reference to the present day and is conse- 
quently unbiassed in its evidence. This book gives us a 
graphic, interesting and unvarnished tale of the develop- 
ment of the great North \\'est provinces for the last thirty 
and more years, and incidentally reveals much of the; good 
and of the evil that have gone to the building up of 
tlfc Dominion. Captain Deane provides material, for 
romance as well as for historv. Thus there arc some 
