Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/175

 alone. It is easy to disarm criticism, but he has disarmed the disciple. He gives us philosophy through the medium of wit, and is never so pathetic as when he is humorous. To turn truth into a paradox is not difficult, but George Meredith makes all his paradoxes truths, and no Theseus can tread his labyrinth, no Œdipus solve his secret."

One of the best of Oscar Wilde's contributions is "A Note on some Modern Poets," in which he writes of W. E. Henley's verse: '"His little 'Book of Verse' reveals to us an artist who is seeking to find new methods of expression, and who has not merely a delicate sense of beauty and a brilliant fantastic wit, but a real passion for what is horrible, ugly, or grotesque. No doubt everything that is worthy of existence is worthy also of art, at least one would like to think so, but while an echo of the mirror can repeat for us a beautiful thing, to render artistically a thing that is ugly requires the most exquisite form of alchemy, the most subtle magic of transformation. Some of the earlier poems of Mr. Henley's volume, the 'Rhymes and Rhythms in Hospital,' as he calls them, are like bright, vivid pastels; others like etchings with deeply bitten lines and abrupt contrasts and clever colour suggestions. In fact, they are like anything and everything except perfected poems, that they certainly are not. But it is impossible to deny their power. They are still in the twilight. They are preludes, inspired jottings in a notebook, and should be heralded by a design of 'Genius making Sketches.' Rhyme gives architecture as well as melody to verse; it gives that delightful sense of limitation which in all arts is so pleasurable, and is, indeed, one of the secrets of perfection; it will whisper, as a French critic has said, 'things unexpected and charming, things with strange and remote relations to each other,' and bind them together in indissoluble bonds of beauty; and in his constant rejection of rhyme Mr. Henley seems to me to have abdicated half his power. He is a roi en exile who has thrown away some of the strings of his lute, a poet