Some years ago—long before the war—the startled Fauns first heard, then saw (as they peeped through the brushwood) a motor-lorry bumping and careering down the road. It had no hood; it was open. It was the more remarkable because in those days motor-lorries were rare. And it carried nor store nor sand nor any other merchandise, but all that were in those days the Poets of England—Swinburne being dead.

As motor-lorries, so Poets were in those days rare. The whole tale of these was eleven.

They had a Chief, or Master, or Mystagogue, who had gathered them together and was taking them on this perilous pilgrimage. I am not making this up. It is true.

So went they, so bumped they, with a prodigious clatter, and only one Prosator among them, the serf at the wheel; but they, all Poets, were clinging on for dear life in the wooden truck behind ... when—oh, my God!—a wheel struck something, and off the tumbril went into the ditch, and the Poets were flung far and wide. But Apollo stayed the hand of Death; they were the worse for nothing more than bruises. For Phoebus Apollo in his house of light saw Death going down through clouds upon England and he said, "Death, where go you?" and Death answered, "I go to make an end of Eleven Poets." But the Far-Darter answered him again saying, "Oh! Death, tarry a moment while I pour you out the dark wine of Africa which the Massillians have brought over the cloud-shadowed sea to the ports of home."

So Death tarried, and when he had drunk that wine he slept; but while he slept, the Eleven Poets were saved. The lorry was, I know not how, set on its wheels again, and continued, in a chastened fashion, a less violent career, towards The Goal.

That Goal was a house where I had the good fortune to meet them; for in those days I was always in luck's way. I met them for one brief hour. I was not allowed to eat with them. I was sent for after the meal, as children are allowed to come in for dessert.... Yet was I older than most of these.

I did not waste the occasion, but almost immediately after my introduction to the Eleven Poets I challenged the Mystagogue, an Irishman, the Chief of the Band, and asked him the great question which has intrigued my mind from childhood.

"How," said I, "is poetry written?"

He put into his eyes a far-away look, like that of a fish which is dead, and he said in a mournful tone (did the Mystagogue):

"I cannot tell you.... I cannot communicate it to you.... It is a Muse."

I was naturally annoyed, for it was no answer at all; and I said (perhaps a little too sharply):

"I am afraid I cannot accept that answer! The truth is, you are keeping something back from me. You desire to prevent competition in your trade, and to keep its great emoluments for your limited guild. But I will find means to learn, in spite of you all!"

He shook his head, and still more his hair, and smiled in the shape of a capital V. He said it could not be done.

I went home and consulted one of my many thousand books, and then another, and discovered the rules of Poetry, and read descriptions of Poetry in encyclopÆdias and critics' books, and also much poetry direct in Anthologies, hoping to find out how it was done. But to this day I have never discovered the way.

There is a story of Taine taking some of Renan's work to the window, looking closely at it through a large reading-glass, and saying: "One cannot see how it is constructed!" So I with poetry. I can see how verse is done, but I cannot see how poetry is done. How is a startling of the soul produced by the collocation of few, simple words? What essence is it in their sound and their order which opens the blinding doors of vision?

There, in one revelation, are the Passes of the Pyrenees! There are the solemn, menacing heights, the ceaseless waterfalls. There, in that line, are the gods of the unconquered hills. Yet it means in English exactly, word for word, "Charles rides up all the pass," and "Charles rides up all the pass" is not poetry.

I remember a leathery idiot giving, as an example to show that Homer was over-rated, the Catalogue of The Ships, and saying: "At any rate, you won't call that poetry!"—which showed he did not know what poetry was.

If that is not poetry I will eat my hat.

I suppose what the man meant was that a catalogue could not be poetry. You might just as well say that the name of a man could not be poetry, or the listed names of many famous men.

The marvel is that this essence, Poetry, whatever it is, survives, like the human soul surviving death. It survives a complete breach in continuity. The way in which the language was pronounced may be lost; the shades of meaning may be lost; sometimes even the plain meaning of a word or two in a passage of true Poetry may be lost. And yet the poetic essence survives. It survives in full strength—again like the human soul—and if there were a resurrection for languages, as there is for human beings, then the poetic soul meeting the poetic body would be quite at its ease, not enfeebled by so long a separation.

Thus when I hear it argued (with every probability behind it) that French poetry, on account of its extreme subtlety, will not—some centuries hence—survive that most lasting of our languages, I traverse. For men sometimes say that English poetry and Spanish poetry will survive the end of our civilisation, because they are dependent on lilt or stress. But how shall the glory of French verse remain which wholly reposes upon such tiny modulations of the tongue? The answer is that Greek undoubtedly reposed upon these same necessities; yet I take it that Greek poetry has survived.

Moreover, if you look at it, the English effects are a great deal more than lilt or stress, though lilt or stress is never absent from them. Some of the most desperately successful efforts in the English lyric are as slight in their nuance as the French. It is rare, no doubt; but you can find cases. For instance:

"Ah me, whilst thee the shores and sounding seas wash far away."

Here is in English what a French line is: a line with hardly any primary emphasis, a level line wholly dependent for its enormous effect upon the vowel sounds and the slightest modulations. And now for the miracle.

Imagine a time, a few generations hence, when the British th shall be blunted into d by Colonials of every blood and colour, when the short o of "wash" has turned to the popular "worsh" and when the long o in "shore" had come to be pronounced like our oo, when the s of the plural has in every position come to be pronounced like z, when the final d in "and" has become silent, and also the final g in "ing," and the characteristic a of the cultivated has become the popular "oi." "Whoilst dee de zhoores an zoundin zeas worsh far awoi." How could the line survive such changes? But it will survive; though I am damned if I understand how!

There is something very consoling for poor mortals in all this. We are here, in this world, all out of scale. We are hurried, we are grotesquely subject to change, though by our every appetite we protest against change, and hunger and thirst for victory over change. We are fast-rooted things, mocked by ceaseless fading; we are immemorial lovers carried on by a river of progressive forgetfulness; we are deathless within, and yet a death goes on about us (ah! and within us) all the time.

And there is in the midst of such a trial no temporal symbol of our real, our ultimate, security except Poetry. The intellect may convince us (if it is strong enough) of our immortality. Faith will always accept the sensible doctrine of our not time-bound fate, and of the concurrent doctrine of Resurrection. But you do not find any stuff around you to confirm you—except Poetry. Religion assures: but nothing man-made supports the vision of heaven, save the completed line. That endures. That is outside time.

It is no answer to say that a poet may be lost, his writings forgotten. Of course they may—or they may be found again. The point is that the great poetic line is not subject to decay. So long as it is there at all, it is there in its fulness. And this is true of nothing else among the works of men.

On this account I envy those Eleven Poets from the lorry whom I met so long ago, and the Head Poet, or Mystagogue, their leader. I often wish I could meet them again.

These men were secure of something which no great soldier, no great painter, nor sculptor, nor architect—not even any great Secretary of State for Home Affairs or Master of the Buckhounds or Chief Whip—can boast. They had achieved the unique thing, the only deathless thing—that is, supposing they were Poets.

I suppose they must have been Poets, because they came labelled as Poets and were received as Poets; and, in fine, were by all external and social criteria, Poets. Just as a Lord is a Lord, or as a Judge is a Judge, so were they Poets. I really do not know what the definition is, but they were Poets. They were the possessors, the authors, the creators of that which no one could take from them and which will endure for ever—something that will never grow old. What a consolation for the memory of death! What a foretaste of immortality!

It is a fine thing to be able to say, and I can imagine one of these Eleven British Poets saying it:

"I have awkward manners and a foolish smile. I cannot earn more than a few hundreds a year, and my father left me nothing. I cut a poor figure among you all. But I have myself made: I am, therefore, a complete possessor. I am father and master of something entirely different from anything which you command: whether you command wealth, or lineage, or beauty, or any one of the talents which delight mankind in song or in instrument of music, or with the pencil, or even in building. I surpass you all, for I wrote this, that, or the other thing, and it will stand for ever."

Certainly of all boasts short of virtue it is the proudest boast a man can make.