There are a dozen books by this author, the work of about a dozen years. They began to appear in 1902; and they end, so far as the present survey is concerned, with poems that were published in the first half of 1914. They make a good pile, a considerable achievement in bulk alone; and when they are read in sequence, they are found to represent a growing period in the poet's mind and art which corresponds to, and epitomises, the transition stage out of which English poetry is just passing. That is to say, in addition to the growth that one would expect—the ripening and development which would seem to be a normal process—there has occurred an unexpected thing: a complete change of ideal, with steady and rapid progress in the new direction. So that if Mr. Gibson's later books were compared directly with the early ones, they might appear to be by an entirely different hand. Place Urlyn the Harper—which was first published—beside a late play called Womenkind or a still more recent dramatic piece called Bloodybush Edge; and the contrast will be complete. On the one hand there is all the charm of romance, in material and in manner—but very little else. On the other hand there is nothing to which the word charm will strictly apply; an almost complete artistic austerity: but a profound and powerful study of human nature. On the one hand there is a dainty lyrical form appropriate to the theme: there are songs like this one, about the hopeless love of the minstrel for the young queen who is mated with an old harsh king:

The later work cannot be so readily illustrated: it is at once subtler and stronger, and depends more upon the effect of the whole than upon any single part. But for the sake of the contrast we may wrest a short passage out of its setting in Bloodybush Edge. A couple of tramps have met at night on the Scottish border; one is a cockney Londoner, a bad lot with something sinister about him and a touch of mystery. He has just stumbled out of the heather on to the road, cursing the darkness and the loneliness of the moor. The other, a Border man to whom night is beautiful and the wild landscape a familiar friend, protests that it is not dark, that the sky is 'all alive with little stars':

Putting an early and a late book side by side in this way, the contrast is astonishing. And it is not an unfair method of comparison, because when the new ideal appears it strikes suddenly into the work, and sharply differentiates it at once from all that had been written before. Like the larger movement which it so aptly illustrates, the change is conscious, deliberate, and full of significance; and it is the cardinal fact in this author's poetical career. It marks the stage at which he came to grips with reality: when he brought his art into relation with life: when the making of poetic beauty as an end in itself could no longer content him; and the social conscience, already prompting contemporary thought, quickened in him too.

Humanity was the new ideal: humanity at bay and splendidly fighting. It appeared first in the two volumes of 1907 as dramatic studies from the lives of shepherd-folk. Four books had preceded these, in which the texture of the verse was woven of old romance and legend. Another book was yet to come, The Web of Life, in which the prettiness of that kind of romanticism would blossom into absolute beauty. But the new impulse grew from the date of Stonefolds; and when the first part of Daily Bread appeared, the impulse had become a reasoned principle. In the poem which prefaces that volume it comes alive, realizing itself and finding utterance in terms which express much more than an individual experience. I quote it for that reason. The immediate thought has dignity and the personal note is engaging. There is, too, peculiar interest in the clarity and precision with which it speaks, albeit unconsciously, for the changing spirit in English poetry. But the final measure of the poem is the touch of universality that is latent within it. For here we have the expression of not only a law of development by which the poet must be bound, and not only a poetical synthesis of the most important intellectual movement of this generation, but an experience through which every soul must pass, if and when it claims its birthright in the human family.

Being wise after the event, one can discover auguries of that change in the very early work. There is, for example, a group of little poems called Faring South, studied directly from peasant life in the south of France. They indicate that even at that time an awakening sympathy with toiling folk had begun to guide his observation; and they are in any case a very different record of European travel from that of the mere poetaster. There are studies of a stonebreaker, a thresher, a ploughman; there is a veracious little picture of a housemother, returning home at the end of market-day laden, tired and dusty; but happy to be under her own vine-porch once more. And most interesting of all the group, there is a shepherd, the forerunner of robuster shepherds in later books, and evidently a figure which has for this author a special attraction.

But these characters are not living people, they are types rather than individuals, and idealized a little. They are, as it were, seen from a distance, in passing, and in a golden light. Years were to pass before knowledge and insight could envisage them completely and a dramatic sense could endow them with life. Meantime the more characteristic qualities of this early work were to develop independently. The lyrical power of it, in particular, was to enjoy its flowering time, revelling in the sweet melancholy of old unhappy love stories, in courts and rose-gardens, kings and queens, knights and ladies and lute-players. Perhaps the most charming examples in this kind are "The Songs of Queen Averlaine." Here are a couple of stanzas from one of them, in which the queen is brooding sadly over the thought of her lost love and lost youth:

They are graceful songs, and their glamour will not fail so long as there remain lovers to read them. The critic is disarmed by their ingenuousness: he is constrained to take them as they stand, with their warmth and colour, their sweet music and the occasional flashes of observed truth (like the March runnels of this poem) which redeem them from total unreality. The reward lies close ahead. For even on this theme of love, and still in the lyric mood, sanity soon triumphs. It heralds its victory with a laugh, and the air is lightened at once from the scented gloom of romanticism. "Sing no more songs of lovers dead," it cries, sound and strong enough now to make fun of itself.

The volume from which that stanza is taken, The Web of Life, contains this poet's finest lyrics. From the standpoint of art nothing that he has done—and he is always a scrupulous artist—can surpass it; and the seeker whose single quest is beauty, need go no further down the list of Mr Gibson's works. There are some perfect things in the book: poems like "Song," "The Mushroom Gatherers" and "The Silence," in which the early grace and felicity survive; and where the lyric ecstasy is deepened by thought and winged by emotion. In one sense, therefore, although this volume is only midway through the period we are concerned with, it has attained finality. We ought to pause on it. We see that it culminates and closes the 'happy singing-flight' with which this career began. We realize, too, that it has absolute value, as poetry, by virtue of which many a good judge might rank it higher than its remarkable successors. And, indeed, it is hard to break away from its spell. But when we judge The Web of Life relatively, when we place it back in the proper niche amongst its kindred volumes, its importance seems suddenly to dwindle. Beside the later books, it grows almost commonplace; we perceive its charm to be of the conventional kind of the whole order of regular English poetry to which it belongs. That is to say, though there is no sign that the work has been directly modelled upon the accredited poets of an earlier generation, it has characteristics which relate it to them and secure a place in the line of descent. There are pieces which remind us of Keats or the younger Tennyson. Here is a stanza from the poem called "Beauty" which might have been the inspiration of the whole book:

Or there are poems in which passion trembles under a fine restraint, as in "Friends":

And there is the group of classical pieces at the end of the book, in which one regretfully passes over the flexible blank-verse of "Helen in Rhodos" and "The Mariners," to choose a still more characteristic passage from "A Lament for Helen":

But this book, which is so good an example of poetic art in the older English manner, is not Mr Gibson's distinguishing achievement. That came immediately afterwards, and was the outcome of the changed ideal which we have already noted. The Web of Life may be said to belong to a definite school—though to be sure its relation to that school is in affinity rather than actual resemblance. The books which follow have no such relation: they stand alone and refuse to be classified, either in subject or in form. And while the earlier work would seem to claim its author for the nineteenth century, in Daily Bread he is new-born a twentieth-century poet of full stature.

The most striking evidence of the change is in the subject-matter. Daily Bread, like Fires, is in three parts, and each of them contains six or seven pieces. There is thus a total of about forty poems, every one of which is created out of an episode from the lives of the working poor. Thus we find a young countryman, workless and destitute in a London garret, joined by his village sweetheart who refuses to leave him to starve alone. A farm labourer and his wife are rising wearily in the cold dawn to earn bread for the six sleeping children. There are miners and quarrymen in some of the many dangers of their calling, and their womenfolk enduring privation, suspense and bereavement with tireless courage. There is a stoker, dying from burns that he has sustained at the furnace, whose young wife retorts with passionate bitterness to a hint of compensation:

There are fishermen in peril of the sea; the printer, the watchman, the stonebreaker, the lighthousekeeper, the riveter, the sailor, the shopkeeper; there are school-children and factory girls; outcasts, tramps and gipsies; and a splendid company of women—mothers in childbirth and child-death, sisters, wives and sweethearts—more heroic in their obscure suffering and toil than the noblest figure of ancient tragedy. With deliberate intention, therefore, the poet has set himself to represent contemporary industrial life: the strata at the base of our civilization. He has, as it were, won free at a leap from illusion, from a dominant idealism, and the jealous, tyrannical instinct for mere beauty. Life is the inspiration now, and truth the objective. The facts of the workers' lives are carefully observed, realized in all their significance and faithfully recorded. Sympathy and penetration go hand in hand. Personal faults and follies, superstitions and vices, play their part in these little dramas, no less than the social wrongs under which the people labour. And the conception, in its balance and comprehensiveness, is really great; for while on the one hand there is an humiliating indictment of our civilization (implicit, of course, but none the less complete) on the other hand there is a proud vindication of the invincible human spirit.

Viewed steadily thus, by a poetic genius which has subdued the conventions of its art, such themes are shown to possess a latent but inalienable power to exalt the mind. They are therefore of the genuine stuff of art, needing only the formative touch of the poet to evoke beauty. And thus we find that although the normal process seems to have been reversed here: although the poet has sought truth first—in event, in character and in environment—beauty has been nevertheless attained; and of a type more vital and complete than that evoked by the statelier themes of tradition.

As might have been expected the new material and method have directly influenced form; and hence arises another distinction of these later works. The three parts of Daily Bread and the play called Womenkind are the extreme example; and their verse is probably unique in English poetry. It has been evolved out of the actual substance on which the poet is working; directly moulded by the nature of the life that he has chosen to present. The poems here are dramatic; and whether the element of dialogue or of narrative prevail, the language is always the living idiom of the persons who are speaking. It is nervous, supple, incisive: not, of course, with much variety or colour, since the vocabulary of such people could not be large and its colour might often be too crude for an artist's use. Selection has played its part, in words as in incidents; but although anything in the nature of dialect has been avoided, we are convinced as we read that this is indeed the speech of labouring folk. We can even recognize, in a light touch such as an occasional vocative, that they are the sturdy folk of the North country. There is a dialogue called "On the Road" which illustrates that, as well as more important things. Just under the surface of it lies the problem of unemployment: a young couple forced to go on tramp, with their infant child, because the husband has lost his job. That, however, inheres in the episode: it is not emphasized, nor even formulated, as a problem. The appeal of the poem is in its fine delineation of character, the interplay of emotion, the rapid and telling dialogue—the pervasive humanitarian spirit; and, once again, an exact and full perception of the woman's point of view. Mr Gibson is a poet of his time in this as well—in his large comprehension and generous acknowledgment of the feminine part in the scheme of things. I do not quote to illustrate that, because it is an almost constant factor in his work. But I give a passage in which the Northern flavour is distinctly perceptible, in addition to qualities which are limited to no locality—the kindliness of the poor to each other and their native courtesy. An old stonebreaker has just passed the starving couple by the roadside and, divining the extremity they are at, he turns back to them:

The curious structure of the verse is apparent at a glance—the irregular pattern, the extreme variation in the length of the line, the absence of rhyme and the strange metrical effects. It is a new poetical instrument, having little outward resemblance to the grace and dignity of regular forms. Its unfamiliarity may displease the eye and the ear at first, but it is not long before we perceive the design which controls its apparent waywardness, and recognize its fitness to express the life that the poet has chosen to depict. For it suggests, as no rhyme or regular measure could, the ruggedness of this existence and the characteristic utterance of its people. No symmetrical verse, with its sense of something complete, precise and clear, could convey such an impression as this—of speech struggling against natural reticence to express the turmoil of thought and emotion in an untrained mind. Mr Gibson has invented a metrical form which admirably produces that effect, without condescending to a crude realism. He has made the worker articulate, supplying just the coherence and lucidity which art demands, but preserving, in this irregular outline, in the plain diction and simple phrasing, an acute sense of reality. Here is a fragment of conversation, one of many similar, in which this verse is found to be a perfect medium of the idea. A wife has been struck by her husband in a fit of passion: she has been trying to hide from her mother the cause of the blow, but she is still weak from the effects of it and has not lied skilfully. Her mother gently protests that she is trying to screen her husband:

Occasionally, it is true, the principle on which the verse is built is too strictly applied: the phraseology is abrupt beyond the required effect; and the lines, instead of following a rule which seems to measure their length by a natural pause, are broken arbitrarily. Speaking broadly, however, it is beautifully fitted to the themes of Daily Bread, though one is not so sure about it in a poem like "Akra the Slave." This is a delightful narrative, akin in subject to the earlier work, and belonging to that period much more than to the date at which it was published, 1910. One cannot linger upon it, nor even upon the more important work which followed, and is happily still continuing—more important because it indicates development and marked progress along the new lines. The three parts of Fires carry forward the conception of Daily Bread, but now in narrative style, permitting therefore a relaxation of the austere dramatic truth of the dialogue form. The verse is modified accordingly, as will be seen in this passage from "The Shop": A workman has entered his favourite shop—the little general-store of a poor neighbourhood—to buy his evening paper. But he is not attended to immediately; and a sickly little girl who has come for a fraction of a loaf and a screw of tea, is also waiting. The shopkeeper is engrossed with a parcel from the country—from a little convalescent son who has gone for the first time to his father's native place:

Music has come in again, in frequent and sometimes intricate rhyme; in metrical lightness and variety; in a fuller and more harmonious language. The spirit of this later work remains humanitarian, but it is not concentrated now solely upon the tragic aspects of the workers' lives. A wider range is taken, and comedy enters, with an accession of urbanity from which characterization gains a mellower note. The world of nature, too, banished for a time in the exclusive study of humanity, returns to enrich this later poetry with a store of loving observation, an intimate knowledge of wild creatures, and the refreshing sense of a healthful open-air life in which, over a deep consciousness of sterner things, plays a jolly comradeship with wind and weather.