Aim and Equipment.
Dr. Hake is one of the most earnest and original of poets. He has taken
nothing from his contemporaries, but has imagined a message for himself,
and has chosen to deliver it in terms that are wholly his own. For him
the accidents and trivialities of individualism, the transitory and
changing facts that make up the external aspect of an age or a character,
can hardly be said to exist. He only concerns himself with absolutes--the
eternal elements of human life and the immutable tides of human destiny.
It is of these that the stuff of his message is compacted; it is from
these that its essence is distilled. His talk is not of Arthur and
Guinevere, nor Chastelard and Atalanta, nor Paracelsus and Luria and Abt
Vogler; of 'the drawing-room and the deanery' he has nothing to say;
nothing of the tendencies of Strauss and Renan, nothing of the New
Renaissance, nothing of Botticelli, nor the ballet, nor the text of
Shakespeare, nor the joys of the book-hunter, nor the quaintness of Queen
Anne, nor the morals of Helen of Troy. To these he prefers the mystery
of death, the significance of life, the quality of human and divine love;
the hopes and fears and the joys and sorrows that are the perdurable
stuff of existence, the inexhaustible and unchanging principles of
activity in man. Now it is only to the few that reduced to their
simplest expression the 'eternal verities' are engaging and impressive.
To touch the many they must be conveyed in human terms; they must be
presented not as impersonal abstractions, not as matter for the higher
intelligence and the higher emotions, but as living, breathing,
individual facts, vivid with the circumstance of terrene life, quick with
the thoughts and ambitions of the hour, full charged with familiar and
neighbourly associations. All this with Dr. Hake is by no means
inevitable. He loves to symbolise; he does not always care that the
symbol shall be appropriate and plain. He prefers to work in allegory
and emblem; but he does not always see that, however representative to
himself, his emblems and his allegories may not be altogether
representative to the world. His imagination is at once quaint and far-
reaching--at once peculiar and ambitious; and it is often guilty of what
is recondite and remote. In his best work--in _Old Souls_, for instance,
and _Old Morality_--the quaintness is merely decorative: the essentials
are sound and human enough to be of lasting interest and to have a
capacity of common application. Elsewhere his imagery is apt to become
strange and unaffecting, his fancy to work in curious and desolate ways,
his message to sound abstruse and strange; and these effects too are
deepened by the qualities and the merits of his style. It is peculiarly
his own, but it is not always felicitous. There are times when it has
the true epic touch--or at least as much of it as is possible in an age
of detail and elaboration; there are times when it has a touch of the
pathetic--when in homeliness of phrase and triviality of rhythm it is
hardly to be surpassed; and there are times, as in _The Snake Charmer_
when, as in certain pages in the work of Richard Wagner, it is so
studiously laboured and so heavily charged with ornament and colour as to
be almost pedantic in infelicity, almost repellent by sheer force of
superfluous and elaborate suggestiveness. Last of all, in an epoch
trained upon the passionate and subtle cadences of the Laureate and the
large-moulded, ample, irresistible melodies of Mr. Swinburne, Dr. Hake
chooses to deal in rhythms of the utmost naivete and in metrical forms
that are simplicity itself.