Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/47

Rh August, and yellowing Autumn, so

To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,

And you've been everything.

Dear, you've been everything that I most lack

In these soul-deadening trenches—pictures, books,

Music, the quiet of an English wood,

Beautiful comrade-looks,

The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,

The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,

And Peace, and all that's good.

Yes, he is the man who does not forget, whom to-day does not absorb; he remains conscious of a crowd of younger selves, and of those distant places which have coloured his thought. At the front the absent are "everything," and after death "everything" becomes the lost friend. A complex and delicately poised nature, but perhaps lacking the passion and impetus that can shape large and difficult themes. Watts might have painted a young man leading a child through Gehenna and preventing its terror by keeping it laughing, but such allegories are not necessary or obvious enough for successful plastic treatment even by a great painter. Christophe's statue, Le Masque, is better conceived; a smiling artificial visage still fronts the world from which the real agonised head has fallen back. From one view—

while from the other—

as Baudelaire describes the well-known masterpiece in the Jardin des Tuileries. Only I think to substitute a man for the woman would heighten the effect, and for this the Rh