[In the following essay, Weygandt concludes that Abercrombie's vivid characterizations are the most memorable elements of his poetry.]

Lascelles Abercrombie (b. 1881) is a difficult poet. He is primarily concerned with philosophical problems, or psychological problems, which may be carried by a thread of narrative, or of drama, but which, when they are so carried, strain the thread to the breaking point. And whatever he is concerned with he is concerned with at length. He is not the man to flash a revelation on you and have done. He would analyze and derive, he would discuss and debate. Had he been born in the eighteenth century he had been wholly at home, with Pope and Young and Dr. Johnson. Had he been born then, however, he would surely have been more explicit and simpler and more direct in expression. He seems to have put himself to school to all the crabbed writers from Donne to Doughty. Browning and Meredith he knows intimately; but, for that matter, he knows intimately all the poets of the world, the Greeks and Romans, the Old Testament men, Dante and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Racine, Milton and Goethe, Whitman and Hardy. He is one of the most learned of our poets. He quotes from all poets, and not only from the passages known generally, but from many that he has discovered for himself by the most careful reading. His knowledge, his judgment, his understanding as a poet unite to make him the best academic critic of English poetry since Matthew Arnold. His Idea of Great Poetry (1925) is a book that no student of poetry can neglect.

In an age in which the lyric and the realistic narrative poem are of most appeal among the many kinds of poetry, Abercrombie writes long reflective poems and plays in verse that are surcharged with analyses of states of mind. The plays are easier to follow than the earlier reflective interludes, to which you must return again and again, and always with a fresh mind, if you are to understand them fully. Generally you find in them what pays you for your trouble.

The Sale of St. Thomas (1911) is the most praised poem of Abercrombie. It is a narrative concerned with the doubting apostle on the eve of his sailing to India. Prudence, rather than fear, makes him change his mind about sailing. So Christ, in the guise of a “noble stranger” tells the sea captain with whom Thomas had been debating his passage that Thomas is a runaway slave, a carpenter. Carpenters are in great demand in India, so the captain is glad to buy Thomas. The captain will turn him over to that ruler in India who is desirous of building a great palace of souls. Christ tells Thomas, when the captain is gone to have irons made for his carpenter, why he has acted as he has:

Now, Thomas, know thy sin. It was not fear;
Easily may a man crouch down for fear,
And yet rise up on firmer knees, and face
The hailing storm of the world with graver courage.
But prudence, prudence is the deadly sin.
For this refuses faith in the unknown powers
Within man's nature: …
But send desire often forth to scan
The immense night which is thy greater soul;
Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it
Into impossible things, unlikely ends;
And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire
Grow large as all the regions of thy soul,
Whose firmament doth cover the whole of Being,
And of created purpose reach the ends.

That is a sample of the hard texture of his writing, but easier of apprehension than the characteristic Abercrombie of the earlier poems. His writing seldom softens. There is a moment of what the Puritan calls carnality in “Odours and wines and slim lascivious girls,” and a moment of exaltation in “I am a torch, and the flame of me is God.” The Sale of St. Thomas is a better poem than any in Interludes and Poems (1908), or Mary and the Bramble (1910). In the first poem of Interludes, “The New God: A Miracle,” there is a lyric note now and then. The love of the hills, hidden deep in Abercrombie's heart, wells up and flows into sudden felicities. “I'm thinking of a little tarn, Brown, very lone” is one such, but others of its kind are far to seek here, as in all Abercrombie. There is power in “Blind,” a half-tale, half-interlude, of a mother's long training of her half-witted son to kill his father. At the end she would have stayed his hand, but she could not. She had not thought of the man who deserted her growing old. Always he was before her in the insolent strength and attractiveness of youth, and the sight of the broken man excites her pity, but too late. The trained innocent has been set on the trail of his victim, and he seizes that victim unerringly and strangles him.

It must be, I think, the fundamental brainwork in these interludes that wins them the praise of Bridges and Masefield and Edward Thomas. Emblems of Love (1912) is a fellow to Interludes and Poems in the difficulties it puts in the way of the reader. Pre-Roman Britain, Bible lands, and the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 furnish the background for these studies in the development and nature of love. It is a very modern Vashti that is driven out by Ahasuerus, and a Judith that talks worn brands of feminism before she takes the head of Holofernes.

There is a partial clearing of the style of Abercrombie in Deborah (1913). Deborah; and the plays its successors, in Four Short Plays (1922), The Adder (1913), The Staircase (1914), The Deserter and The End of the World (1914); and Phoenix (1923): all have a definiteness and surety of meaning that is lacking in the early deliberative poetry. Deborah loses some of its effectiveness by heaping horror on horror. In The Adder there is only the one horror, sensed as inevitable from the start, but shocking us none the less when it does come. There is, too, a kind of splendor about The Adder, the splendor of hot blood, the splendor of sin that the old-time evangelists loved to describe before they cast it and its victims into the outer darkness. Of these six plays all but Phoenix are of the English countryside.

The Staircase is the best thing that Abercrombie has done. It tells a story very like that of Gibson's On the Threshold. It is concerned with the return to the home of her youth of a woman whom life has broken. She has been turned out of doors some time back by her parents who now are dead and their old home deserted. She had brought disgrace upon the family and she had been punished with the cruelty traditionally proper in such cases. She comes back the doxy of a tramp. In the house is a young carpenter singing at his work and dreaming of who will be the first to occupy the house he has again made habitable. He knows the story of the girl who was driven out. He has romanticized the story, idealized the girl, made himself her champion. She, now the disillusioned woman, is angered by his blather over what she once was, and tells him that she is the woman of his dream. He will not believe it at first, but he has to in the end. Her man follows her in. Disappointed of food, he would beat her, but the carpenter prevents him. The tramp is outraged by such interference with family discipline. He is hurt to the quick, too, and thus admonishes the joiner:

Have I to down you first before I tan
My woman? Do you call that fair? It's low.
I'm hunger-starved and done—just enough heart
Left in me for lathering her; and you
Push in, you with your belly crammed and good:
It's low! Stand off and be an Englishman.

Torn out of the context, the irony of this seems to miss fire, to be nothing more than bad taste, but read in its place in the play, it is part of the tense whirl of it all, and dramatically true, what would come to the lips of such a waster. Police, pursuing the tramp for rick-burning, now come in and drag him off to jail, his mate going with him, as much out of kindness to the joiner to take herself off his hands as out of her habit of following her master.

The End of the World is an orgy. It uncovers as much ugliness in English country life as the novels of T. F. Powys, but you are in better company during the operation. Abercrombie does not rejoice in human weakness and misfortune as does Powys.

Phoenix is a tragicomedy of a king's house in northern Greece in the time before the Trojan War. It laughs grimly at the conventionalities. Rhodope, the young courtesan who makes all the trouble, is a new character, a creation, a girl so free of morals that she gives no more offense than would an animal. You remember her as you remember the charcoal-burner and his daughter in The Adder; the joiner and the tramp-woman in The Staircase; the sinister Luther of The Deserter; and Deborah, who suffers through so many years. It is the people of Abercrombie, indeed, that you remember longest, and certain scenes in his plays, like the father holding his girl's arm for the snake to bite, and not passages from the poetry, either of lyric loveliness or “readings of life.”