Page:Adams - Songs of the Army of the Night.djvu/26

20 flashing eyes lit up with the glow of a single-hearted life-long enthusiasm.

But the poems are so "unbalanced," says the literary critic, who, with the caution of his kind, is always on his guard against militant writers who "mean business," who have got something to say, and are determined to say it at whatever hazard to delicate academical proprieties. The poems undoubtedly are unbalanced; that is an incidental defect which is accounted for by the circumstances to which I have already alluded. But on the other hand it should be remarked that there is a danger in too much intellectual balance, no less than in too little. We have already far too many balanced literary gentlemen sitting comfortably on the stile, with an equipoise which might move the envy of a Blondin; it is their æsthetic indifferentism, far more than any emotional excess, which is the bane of our present literature. It is therefore not to be regretted that a writer should appear who can voice the passionate resentment of sham philanthropy and sham religion, which is undoubtedly felt by a section, and an increasing section, of English workers,

With its threat to the robber rich, the proud, The respectable free"

It may be that there is exaggeration, unwisdom, injustice even, in the personal references of some of these poems; but in their general indictment of a pharisaical and selfish class-supremacy, they are essentially true and valuable. The Songs, as their author once told me, are an attempt to do what has never been done before—to express what might be the feelings of a member of the working classes, as he finds out the hollowness (to him, at any rate) of our "culture" and "respectability."

Still less valid, I think, is the technical criticism which would set aside the "Songs of the Army of the Night" as bad poetry and doggerel, because the book contains numerous violations of the customary "laws" of metre and rhyme-sound. The author's