Something of the enthusiasm with which England has received Middleton's work since his death is indicated by Henry Savage in his introduction to Poems and Songs: "Of his genius I am not using words idly when I say that it is of that rare quality which will sooner or later insure him a recognized position in the front rank of English poets. Those who are not moved by the beauty of the poetry in this volume may find beauty elsewhere, and had better seek it elsewhere. There is that in it beyond the reach of mere criticism. It is of that substance which lives." This hyperbole, for such it is as far as the present volume of verse is concerned, must be construed as the effect of remorse for the thorough neglect which the author suffered during his lifetime and which drove him to suicide at the age of 29.

The quality of Middleton's poetry is well shown by the first stanza of "Envoi":

All the drear Summer time in hot and dusty places
We watched the roses die, and still our lips
Made black by thirst, sang bravely of the ships
That brought us to the isle of lovely faces,
While yet our youth held all the world in fee,
And dared the stars from an exultant sea.

Less deserving verse, perhaps, is published even in reputable magazines, but such work will give no man "a recognized position in the front rank of English poets." The wine of his song is muddy; his creative fire is of too low a temperature to perform the alchemy which brings forth poetry. The crude metal of his emotions is not transmuted. The truth is, that Middleton was not a poet in his own right; he could do no better than decorate his own material with the beauty created by greater men. Scarcely a poem in the volume is not an obvious imitation, inferior to the original. Most of them derive from Swinburne, that most dangerous of masters. In fact, however great his love of beauty may have been, Middleton had not the power of achieving it. He had not the artist's reverence of beauty, as of something divine and not to be profaned; therefore, he had no sense of the necessity of restraint, of severe simplicity, qualities which give clarity and intensity to poetic expression. This lack he tried to atone for by ornament and elaboration. Consequently, his work is without vitality, and by no means "of that substance which lives."

It is a relief to turn to his stories. Here Middleton's genius, not intense enough to command the more exacting medium of poetry, is master of the form it works in. Mr. Arthur Machen remarks in the course of the introduction which he contributes to The Ghost Ship and Other Stories: "It is an extraordinary book, full of a quite curious and distinctive quality." This quality is the expression of Middleton's personality, which gives the volume its interest. Middleton was a man of feelings rather than of ideas; having, unlike contemporary writers of fiction, such as Mr. Wells and Mr. Galsworthy, no theories to expound, he still adhered to the doctrine of art for art's sake. In consequence, the value of his stories lies in their charm and their well-wrought form, not in their intellectual content. Undoubtedly, Middleton knew how to tell a story. However, one meretricious device he employs only too often; that, namely, of mystifying his reader by omitting the solution to the riddle he has propounded. The effect, to be sure, is a rather pleasant fillip to the sophisticated and jaded palate, but counts against his serious pretensions as an artist. His mastery of the point of view in narrative he puts to effective use in telling his stories through the eyes of uneducated men or of children. By this means he gives half its value to his masterpiece, "The Ghost Ship." Like so many writers of short stories, he has a lively fancy, and he needs all his psychological insight and all his faculty for graphic corroborative detail to give the requisite "sting of reality." In "The Ghost Ship" his success is complete. This outrageous yarn of the spectral galleon which a tempest blew into a turnip patch at Fairfield, and which dispensed wondrous rum to the village ghosts, is told by one of the rustic witnesses with so much matter-of-fact assurance that it induces an entire suspension of disbelief. In this tale Middleton reaches his high-water mark.

Although as examples of the art of the short story his tales of children do not rank with "The Ghost Ship," in them lies Middleton's best psychology. Not even Stevenson and M. Anatole France equal him in the sympathetic portrayal of the delicate fancies and the seemingly intolerable sorrows of childhood, with no touch of false sentiment and mawkishness. "A Drama of Youth" and "The New Boy" must recall to any one his rebellious loathing for his first schools, while "Children of the Moon" is as graceful a phantasy as one would ask. When Middleton adopts the child's point of view in telling a tragedy, he gains a poignant pathos and irony, qualities which, indeed, pervade most of his work. They are the reactions of an almost abnormally sensitive mind against the unjust suffering of the innocent.

Twice in this volume his irony rises to excellent satire. "The Story of a Book," somewhat reminiscent of Mr. Bennett's "A Great Man," tells how a publisher by mistake printed 5,000 copies of a commonplace novel and had to resort to strenuous advertising, with the result that the author found himself an eminent man of letters. As a sarcastic study of "best-selling" methods it deserves notice. In "The Biography of a Superman" Middleton discusses a celebrity by the name of Charles Stephen Dale, who corresponds in every point with Mr. Bernard Shaw. If Dale does represent Mr. Shaw, this analysis is as searching as it is diverting. In this study, moreover, Middleton shows a faculty for phrase-making:

Dale's regrettable absence reduced what might have been an agreeable clash of personalities to an arid discussion on art.… He was essentially a modern, insomuch that his contempt for the writings of dead men surpassed his dislike of living authors.… He had drawn from the mental confusion of the darker German philosophers an image of the perfect man.… He generally made his readers more sorry than angry.… He played the part of clown with more enthusiasm than skill.

In Middleton's stories there is much autobiography, more or less open. He was a shy, unduly sensitive, unhappy boy, who never outgrew his preference for dreams rather than action. His sympathies are all with the idealist, the visionary, the weakling. His own lack of strength and vigor his work, especially his verse, shows all too plainly. That is why, though he wrote some half dozen excellent stories, he is not a commanding figure even in contemporary letters, and why his vogue, without doubt excited largely by his tragic death, cannot last.