One rises from the reading of [Poems and Songs and The Ghost Ship and Other Stories] with the feeling that the end of Richard Middleton came all too soon; that his passage under the stars finished at too early an hour; that his nine and twenty years were but so much promise; and that full achievement lay just beyond the short Night he did not fear but rather sought. One feels that; and yet the feeling may be but a will o' the wisp to lead us astray; very likely it is. Must we consider the man and his work? Must we sever the work from the man? It is not given to all to know the singer, but the first man met in the street may judge the song.

I am, for the moment, concerned with Richard Middleton's song; and I confess that I find it of a monotony which may be divine, but which is—there can be no denial—wearisome. He had many rhythms—he sought variety as he sought pleasure, avidly—but the song was the same, the substance and stuff of it were ever the same: he did not sing dreams, he sang of dreams he had had. The casual reader will say at once: "Richard Middleton was a dreamer." That is just what he was not; he was a man who said he had had dreams, but if dreams he had he kept them jealously to himself, and the hungry of the earth want more from their poets than a disdainful or a pitiful:

I have seen God: but, hush! I may not speak.

And so, because Richard Middleton does not tell his dream, we are minded to fit him with Mr. Arthur Symons' estimate of that other strange departed sprite, Ernest Dowson: "He was not a dreamer; destiny passes by the dreamer, sparing him because he clamours for many things. He was a child, clamouring for so many things, all impossible."

In the intervals of "clamouring for so many things," Richard Middleton sang some fine things, things quite pure and exquisite. Almost perfect is this "Nocturne":

When Sleep puts on the cloak of Death,
And in the city masquerades,
Earth's tired children fight for breath,
And they who sought the dreamy glades
Fall panting on the road, and lie
Like clods beneath the sombre sky.

But when Death comes like gentle sleep,
And takes our children to her breast,
Our weary eyes forbear to weep—
It is so very good to rest
Quietly in the dreamy corn
Until the breaking of the morn.

Almost perfect, I said; almost, but not quite; for here, twice in two stanzas, do we encounter Middleton's King Charles' head—dreamy, which, with dreams, dreaming, dreamful, was his obsession. The word, one imagines, had an uncanny fascination for him.

This "Nocturne" and "The Song of the King's Minstrel," by their simplicity and directness, are worthy of a place in any anthology. In both these there is the true singing-stuff, elemental and inevitable. But on most occasions Middleton sang a more sophisticated strain, and once or twice he passed the bounds of current decency, as in the lines "To C.M.," where he would be Peeping Tom, spying on the mysteries of the alcove, and in "After Love" with its "Let there be lust between us two." Of course, all that was mere braggadocio, the bantam bounce of the late 'nineties that would shock at any price the Puritan fresh from Cowper and Tennyson. And so many of us took it for bravery! Middleton, I feel, would have sacrificed these two pieces, and perhaps also "The Rebel" and the "Epithalamium." The piety of friends has preserved them. The same piety has given us an introduction to the Poems and Songs by Mr. Henry Savage, of which the conclusion may be quoted:

Of his genius I am not using words idly when I say that it is of that rare quality which will sooner or later ensure him a recognised 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 the substance which lives.

Mr. Savage has the fervid courage of the devoted friend; but, honestly, I find that Richard Middleton's songs are Richard Middleton's most discreet and most trustworthy champions.

The prose volume, The Ghost Ship (introduced worthily and soberly by Mr Arthur Machen), is truly remarkable. It would be remarkable in any year, not only for its manner but for its matter. In quality, in fineness as in substantiality, it is far above Poems and Songs; and just as Middleton found himself, before the end, "drawn towards young children and people who are simple and kindly and not too clever," so it may be conceived that he was also being drawn away from the easy artificialities and affectations of prosody, and towards the more austere beauties of prose. Certainly, in prose he has done fine things. "The Ghost Ship" is greatly imagined—humour, pathos, fantasy, poetry, and cunning earthly philosophy—of these is it inimitably made. I feel that it is a masterpiece. And surely there was never a more sincere, a more poignant bit of self-revelation than "The Great Man": every man who has been called to letters must see himself in this faithful mirror. And for all that "The Coffin Merchant" may owe something to Poe and Stevenson and Ambrose Bierce, and "The Soul of a Policeman" a little to Anatole France; these two sketches are gripping things, eloquent in their almost bald diction, beautiful in their spare lines. Richard Middleton's prose has nerve and vigour that his verse lacks, and it has a style that should preserve it long against moth and rust. It is a prose that needs no apologist. It, and not his verse, will make live the name of this hunter after beauty, who gave up the chase ere it was full noon.