[In the following review, Bradley finds The Flower of Old Japan a disappointing effort in mediating between William Blake and Lewis Carroll.]

Mr. Noyes's second American publication will not, we think, materially assist his reputation—which was left somewhat in suspense by his first volume. In fact, we believe that it will rather retard his serious recognition as a poet in this country. For if the selection of poems which was published here last year as an introduction to American readers was inconclusive; if it served on the whole to display the brilliance of his technique, the facility and cleverness of his versification, and his unusual verbal resources, without at the same time giving any evidence of deep-seated originality or genuine imaginative power, it at least contained a number of poems, like "The Swimming Race," in which there was much beauty of expression, and others, like "The Barrel Organ," in which, despite certain feeble affectations of manner, there was a blithe buoyancy of tone, together with a fresh unconventionality in the handling of metrical forms and in the use of the refrain.

In The Flower of Old Japan, on the other hand, it is possible to see little but futile ingenuity in the misdirection of poetic energy. The volume contains two long poems which were issued separately in England, but which are here brought together appropriately in that the second poem, "The Forest of Wild Thyme," is conceived in the same spirit as the title poem, and is, in a sense, a sequel to it. Of the former, Mr. Noyes says in his preface that it "must not be taken to bear any real relation to Japan. It belongs to the kind of dreamland which an imaginative child might construct out of the oddities of a willow-pattern plate, and it differs chiefly from wonderlands of the Lewis Carroll type in a certain seriousness behind its fantasy." "The Forest of Wild Thyme" also seeks, in another field but with the same underlying seriousness of sentiment, to construct the imaginative atmosphere of childish fantasy. Both poems are therefore attempts, as Mr. Mabie puts it in his preface to the earlier volume, to combine "the gay temper and the serious mood."

"The gay temper," for Mr. Noyes, is synonymous with the spirit of childhood. Hence, as he says of these two poems in his preface, "If the feet of the children are set dancing in them it was because as children we are best able to enter into that kingdom of dreams which is also the only true, the only real kingdom." One may, however, with some justice question just how representative such verse as he has written really is of the imaginative mood of childhood. Mr. Noyes has borrowed his precise form of fantasy from the modern nonsense verse which he appears to have accepted absolutely at its infantile face value. But such verse itself seems to us very often to have much more of sophistication, of the very antithesis of the child's way of thinking and feeling at the bottom of it, than is sometimes suspected. It is certainly a mistake to assume that because the child's view of nature appears grotesque to the grown man, the child himself is conscious of this grotesquerie or has any aesthetic appreciation of it. Much of what is today written either to please children or to interpret their incomplete or confused idea of things in general seems to us a gross libel on their intelligence, a slur on the pathetic seriousness of their attempts to construct a real world out of their incomplete knowledge and experience. Most nonsense-verse is puerile rather than childlike in any worthy sense of the word, and it seems to us that especially in the first of these two poems by Mr. Noyes, "The Flower of Old Japan," there is a very considerable measure of this sheer puerility which is not made any the more palatable by the fact that the poet has adopted not only the ideas, if we may call them so, but the very idiom of modern nonsense-writers:

This sort of thing is not redeemed by any amount of clever rhyming nor is the poem as a whole, of which it is perhaps an exaggerated example of the poet's style at its silliest, saved by the richness of its exotic coloring or the quaintness of some of its conceits and pictures. What might without the gratuitous intrusion of the note of infancy be acceptable as a sort of musical fantasia on Japanese themes and motives is marred irretrievably by the false affectation of simplicity which is in reality far from simple, while the jingling measures and abrupt staccato phrases well-nigh reach the limit of maddening monotony. Even if it were essential to his purpose to create the illusion of childish naïveté Mr. Noyes might have achieved this with less violation of the principles of sound taste. One is forced either to the conclusion that Mr. Noyes is indeed deficient in imaginative insight as well as in the higher control of his art to be obliged to resort to so poor and mechanical an artifice for the evocation of "atmosphere," or that he is the victim of that conception of pseudo-realism which is variously exemplified in the poetry of to-day, and which makes Mr. Noyes in effect to say that to write poetry from the child's standpoint it is necessary to write like a child, or as a child might be expected to write if it could actually write at all. The ease with which this theory can be carried to a reductio ad absurdum is only too apparent, if indeed The Flower of Old Japan does not itself represent that final effort of futility.

But even more extraordinary than Mr. Noyes's verse is the preface. We have already quoted some pregnant passages from this preface, which was prepared especially for the American edition and which gives every sign of having been written, as it actually was, some time after the poems themselves. Indeed, one could almost fancy that the poet had not even taken the trouble to reread the latter for the purpose of refreshing his memory as to their real character and his real purpose in writing them, so little do they seem to support the profound and almost metaphysical interpretation which he attempts to put upon them. There is not space here for a complete analysis of what strikes us as a fundamental want of correspondence between poems and preface. One point, however, is clear, even obvious—this is, that whatever importance we attribute to the form of nonsense verse as an interpretation of one side of the child's imaginative life, it is not, at all events, exhaustive. It certainly does not translate, or attempt to translate, the mood of simple serious wonder of childhood in which is contained the germ of its later religious feeling. If it represents anything at all, it is rather the reverse of wonder, the mood of practical matter-of-fact acceptance, the complete conviction of what Mr. Noyes himself says—namely, that the world of dreams is the only true, the only real world. It is only in its direct contact with reality from which it cannot escape into some imaginative atmosphere of its own that the mood of wonder is evoked in the child—or in the man either for that matter—and it is the very condition sine qua non of nonsense verse, the primary principle of its existence, that such reality be banished beyond its boundaries.

It would seem scarcely necessary to make the above distinction, or to point out that there is a fundamental difference between "Songs of Innocence" and, say, "The Bab Ballads," or the works of Edward Lear, if it were not for the fact that Mr. Noyes seems to have failed to make this very ordinary distinction for himself or to understand clearly the nature of the barrier that separates these representative examples of two antipodal classes of literature. His own verse he apparently feels to partake of the nature of both, to affect a synthesis between them. Hence the curious confusion in the following passage in his preface: "It is perhaps because these poems are almost light enough for a nonsense book that I feel there is something to them more elemental, more essential, more worthy of serious consideration, than the most ponderous philosophical poem I could write. They are based on the fundamental and very simple mystery of the universe—that anything, even a grain of sand, should exist at all."

But are they so based? To us it seems that, just because they are of a quality to fit into a nonsense book, they are devoid of the very slightest trace of genuine mystery or wonderment. And why, if even a grain of sand is so mysterious, the creation in The Flower of Old Japan, of so elaborate an artificial wonderland? No, it is impossible to be both William Blake and Lewis Carroll at one and the same time. Nothing of the former has been revealed in Mr. Noyes so far, and his attempt to force upon his own poems a superior construction more in accordance with the profound ideality and mystical intuition of that poet only serves to bring into still clearer relief their essential kinship with the paradis artificiels of the "wonder" writers….