At last there is no mistake about it: Mr. John Davidson has come by
his own. And by "his own" I do not mean popularity--though I hope
that in time he will have enough of this and to spare--but mastery of
his poetic method. This new volume of "Ballads and Songs" (London:
John Lane) justifies our hopes and removes our chief fear. You
remember Mr. T.E. Brown's fine verses on "Poets and Poets"?--
He fishes in the night of deep sea pools:
For him the nets hang long and low,
Cork-buoyed and strong; the silver-gleaming schools
Come with the ebb and flow
Of universal tides, and all the channels glow.
Or holding with his hand the weighted line
He sounds the languor of the neaps,
Or feels what current of the springing brine
The cord divergent sweeps,
The throb of what great heart bestirs the middle deeps.
Thou also weavest meshes, fine and thin,
And leaguer'st all the forest ways;
But of that sea and the great heart therein
Thou knowest nought; whole days
Thou toil'st, and hast thy end--good store of pies and jays.
Mr. Davidson has never allowed us to doubt to which of these two
classes he belongs. "For him the nets hang long and low." But though
it may satisfy the Pumblechook within us to recall our pleasant
prophesyings, we shall find it more salutary to remember our fears. We
watched Mr. Davidson struggling in the thicket of his own fancies, and
saw him too often break his shins over his own wit. We asked: Will he
in the end overcome the defect of his qualities? Will he remain unable
to see the wood for the trees? Or will he some day be giving us poems
of which the whole conception and structure shall be as beautiful as
the casual fragment or the single line? For this architectonic quality
is just that "invidious distinction" which the fabled undergraduate
declined to draw between the major and minor prophets.