So much has been written lately in disparagement of the Victorian age that, as a result, people are now beginning to realise what a great age it was. And when I say that no age has interested itself so much in religion, music, physics, metaphysics, mechanics and even in the art of gentle fun, it will be agreed that not only was the Victorian age a great age but that the organ is truly a great instrument. This last, of course, we know already; but I do not think that our appreciation springs from the source whence we privately imagine it to spring. For instance, we think of the organ as King of Instruments ; but such a feeling dies in the breast, the coronate salutation of Mozart becomes frantically proletarian, when we reflect that what we really want to express is the organ's pre-eminent power of making more row than any other instrument (as it certainly can). That it can also make considerably less is, however, not taken into account. We speak of the organ as the King of Instruments, but for the benefit of democracy we instal "grand pipe organs" in every other picture palace. We think of the organ as King of Instruments, knowing very well that a football crowd that wanted to sing The Red Flag more or less in tune would not hesitate to charter a homo ex plebe to play its accompaniment (and an English crowd can sing very loud and very broad) on the only possible instrument. Appreciation of the organ does not come from the average educated concert-goer, from the musician of "catholic" culture: you will find it on the whole among the unschooled likings of the multitude. What makes you hold your breath about the organ is its homeliness, and " home" was the one word the Victorian age in its way did understand if we do not. Besides being splendidly isolated and secluded, home is quite catholic, according as to whether it houses the man who wants to "live alone in the bee-loud glade" or whether it is chock-full of pilgrims (some of whom have to sleep in the bath-room) singing far into the night. The Victorians also understood the word "charm," though expectedly they could not define it, any more than one can define the smell of jasmine, the sight of a pretty maid milking a cow, or the feeling that England was a happier land when its "faces were as ruddy as its fields were green." The organ has both charm and homeliness, which is lost on the mind of to-day obsessed with the insoluble problems of universalities and brotherhoods. The man with an obstinately limited horizon does real service to his neighbours by being a sublime mirth-maker; the man who is born with catholic dogmas in his mouth is a nuisance, because he is generally a flabby controversialist, aiming at a million and missing a unit. And of what use is catholicity without unity? Organ tone is not only provincial, serious and ecclesiastical, but being indefinable is catholic, because it is open for anybody to try and define. It is a sort of intellectual chewing gum for the philosopher, - a crudely barred lollipop for democratic enjoyment.

I arrive at the end of these prolegomena without having dwelt on the one thing organs are supposed to exist for, - music. But my answer is that we shall find music enough when we have climbed up into the dim and dusty organ loft, which with the changeful ease of dreamland will at times become a shelf on the slope of Parnassus, and have looked out upon an age which for all its darkling doubts generally went in for breeding not "men like gods" but "men like God," which is infinitely more important.

Freedom! Everywhere the cry: bugles and kettledrums everywhere! Hectic Utopias from Rousseau and Chateaubriand. Lord Byron declaiming about a new Hellas:-

The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece,

but how much saner is the second verse:-

The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea.

Mr. A. S. M. Hutchinson, in his If Winter Comes describes the effect on Mark Sabre: "Music! the trumpets thinned away, exquisitely thin, tiny, gone. And high above the mountains and far above the sea an organ shook." Here begins the Victorian age.

Of those " singing masons" who built up the structure of Victorianism, Wordsworth not only lived the longest but exercised perhaps the most influence in determining its formation. He is commonly known as a Nature poet, but I think he was only half that. Burns, Crabbe, Cowper and certainly Keats were Nature poets because they could write about Nature naturally, and that was just what Wordsworth, when he was consciously trying, had a difficulty in doing. As regards the French Revolution he had very definite sympathies with General Beaupuis, and like Milton in Cromwellian times, with the Republican cause as a whole, but he was just as fond of sitting on the side of Skiddaw and even perhaps of sliding gracefully down into Derwent-water for a bathe; above all he liked to browse in contemplative piety, which, if my school day memories are not at fault, is nearly Aristotle's idea of the ideal life. Wordsworth is like Milton too in theoretically espousing the faction of rebels, but having the rather sound and very fleshy policy of avoiding actual contact with them as far as possible; but in his real intuitions, almost too natural to be poetical, in the almost jealously guarded smallness of his vision, his clingingly confident and sweetly fatalistic endurance of stupid contemporary criticism, in his irrationality, he may more nearly be regarded as a sort of female Milton. It is perhaps unjust to say that such a man of genius could not make up his mind with himself (I have the utmost admiration for such men), but in plain language it was so. The prongs of the everlasting social dilemma stuck into his impressionable mind with fearful force. That liberty was the right of the people he felt instinctively, but when he heard how poor Louis XVI was executed and the guillotine had stressed the argument of Liberty in a lot of nasty sharp strokes, he decided to wear only a pale literary Tricolour, and do nothing more revolutionary than crumble Pope's pillars of classic mould into dunes of earthly mould.

It is no use pretending that you do feel the same towards the mountain-glory of Cumberland, yourself one of the rabble arrived in the "Silver Queen" to the winding of oozy tin trumpets, as when you are by yourself. The ordinary man can enjoy sightseeing with the populace when it is turned loose or turned tight (as it more often is) on its holidays, with equal and yet not the same relish as when he is alone in a valley and towers upwards with the mountains. We cannot help feeling that Wordsworth could never have appreciated the funny sincerity of "Paradise by way of Kensal Green," even if he disagreed with it, as I most certainly do. The idea of using Nature as a mirror belongs to ancient Greek philosophy, but how often when you look into a limpid pool do you not see your own reflection and nothing more? And Wordsworth, being unable to see men and women as they are, must needs spiritualise them. Or, a la Mr. Chesterton, he could write (prosily enough) about an Excursion, but for all his democratic poses (he actually wore corduroy breeches) never about an excursion train. Worst of all, even in his own line, as if to show how hard put he had been to keep artificiality at bay, he breaks down and we have such lapses as

While the tubed engine feels the inspiring blast.

I would much rather hear our instrument referred to as the tooting-tub, which at least has the merit of Cockney picturesqueness. But it is entirely to his credit that he was fond of outdoor life. He composed in the open air (a difficult feat, I can assure anyone) and was generally addicted to gentle rural pursuits as skating, swimming and the like, all of which gave his poetic temper the slight "gingering up" necessary.

The least interesting of the Lake trio was Robert Southey, who went on the "back-to-Nature" ramp with all the enthusiasm of the dull fool. At his silliest, Wordsworth could be nothing more harmful than a "drunken lark" or "a solemn bleat sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice," but Southey had not the imagination to be anything except an indefatigable man of letters, and it is everyone's duty to be tired sometimes. Coleridge and Wordsworth, too, had certain delicate indecisions about Art in its widest sense; but Southey, clumsy and cheerful to the last, fills up the breaches with his own crude rubble. We are reminded of:-

LINES WRITTEN ON SUNDAY MORNING.

Go thou and seek the house of prayer:
I to the woodland wend, and there
In lovely Nature see the God of Love.
The swelling organ's peal
Wakes not my soul to zeal
Like the wild music of the vernal grove.

This is the kind of momentous thought which he would elaborate into ells of gorgeous drivel. A childish quatrain (not by Southey) does it in a trice:-

My minster hath a roof more vast;
My aisles the oak-trees high;
My altar-cloth is on the hills;
My organ is the sky.

The nature Sir Walter Scott knew best was good nature, or if you could have got him into the frame of mind for seeing a mirror in Nature, it would have been an Aunt Margaret's mirror. While Wordsworth smiles through his tears at the faint remaining glory of the earth, and Coleridge distils pantisocracy in language like otto of roses, you would find Scott playing monks in and out of the ruins of some abbey now impurpled round about by his beloved heather. None of the other leaders of the new movement could be quite romantic without being classic, but Scott's novels are story-telling, transparent and really romantic. None of the same others could properly emancipate the ego, and ego too often means a murky intellectualism. No flagellation, therefore, could have been more cowardly than that in the Appendix of The Romany Rye. To blame Scott, the debonair and festive, as responsible for filling undergraduate Oxford with Popish notions and making her youth "genteel" was as gypsyish as it was unjust. He was plainly and simply a Scottish laird with a turn for painting rosy watercolour pageants of knight-errantry and jousts and things. If his heroes (and heroines, too) were rather addicted to "gramayre" than grammar, they could at least course sturdily with greyhound, shoot far and straight with bow and arrow, make love decently and yet fear God in the doing, which is more than ever Byron's heroes or most people to-day are capable of:-

Well pleased am I, howe'er, that when the rout
Of our rude neighbours whilome, deign'd to come,
Uncall'd, and eke unwelcome, to sweep out
And cleanse our chancel from the rags of Rome,
They spoke not on our ancient fane the doom
To which their bigot zeal gave o'er their own,
But spared the martyr'd saint and storied tomb,
Though papal miracles had graced the stone,
And though the aisle still loved the organ's swelling tone.

There does not seem much religious sympathy with Rome here, but it is not without interest to note that a year after the death of Scott the Oxford or High Church movement began in earnest. I have no doubt that it was a rationalist as well as romantic trend, and prompted by the same aching homesickness of Coleridge to lay his head in the bosom of the Absolute. But in lesser minds than Newman's the unfortunate effect of the religious revival was to spread the idea that piety means living with one foot in the lych-gate. Wordsworth's life of natural piety, too, was beginning to tell on the early Victorians, and such was their respectable domesticity that they actually decorated their mantelpieces with wax models of those meanest flowers, which started in the great poet "thoughts too deep for tears." Art was already beginning to be naturalised, as Nature was to be humanised. Even that the Prince Consort himself played the organ helped to set the fashion of middle-class prudery. Wordsworth lived to see Queen Victoria reign for some thirteen years, and not quite, but very nearly, it was felt that Dame Nature had come to sit on the throne. The architect Pugin joined the Roman Church practically for no other reason than because it struck him that a Gothic nave was man's effort at building a forest of trees; and it is not a little characteristic of the early Victorian period generally that it delighted in a romantic style of architecture with a questionable German name, and built churches as stodgy and ugly as any age before and even after it. But if the Oxford movement began and ended with the burning time of saintly self-trial for Cardinal Newman, who was not a prig, his less intelligent followers seemed to get clogged with their own theology, and we have as a popular result Sandford and Merton. I do not think that the Victorian age by any means stands or falls by this colossal piece of farce, but it does suggest that the tabernacle of the Church, though pegged down at four corners by Lutheran evangelicalism, waved rather languidly with a religious uncertainty which was a great deal the worse for being Charlemagnised. All this time England was gradually tightening up her sinews internationally into what Mr. H.G. Wells with his characteristic verbal beauty has called a closed fist; and yet the Free Trade motion carried the day. We wanted to be all in all to ourselves and at the same time stand behind the counter to the rest of the world.

But the High Church movement was not allowed to go scot free of detraction. Charles Lamb in his essay on "Ears" almost seems to forsee the unwarrantable amount of goody ecclesiolatory which was bound to be affected by the middle classes. "Something like this Scene-turning I have experienced at the house of my good Catholic friend Nov-; who by the aid of a capital organ, himself the most finished of players, converts his drawing-room into a chapel, his week-days into Sundays and these latter into minor heavens." Lamb, for all his urban playfulness, was a man of the world, and this sly humour is infinitely more telling than the explosions of Carlyle against "spectral Puseyisms," especially as Carlyle inconsistently cultivated the German romantic Novalis. Then there was Kingsley, who began to swing dumb-bells and to controvert Newman with all his might. There was also Ruskin, who had an aesthetic weakness (and I will say, the good grace to admit it) for the golden archaity of twelfth-century psalters; but we are surprised when he turns round and backbites at Pusey, Keble and the well-wishers of the High Church movement as people "piped into a new creed by the squeak of an organ pipe" - a remark which is not nearly as clever as it sounds, because it is not exclusively true. The organ may belong to those unhygienic days of ranting monks:-

0 & A and A & 0,
Cum cantibus in choro
Let our mery orgon goe
Benedicamus Domino.

But Rossetti (who was no fool in business) soon found that temporarily the spirit of the times was best served with the certainty of stained glass windows, carved pulpits and nothing so possibly medievalist as the organ. Before leaving the subject of pre-Raphaelitism in the broad sense of the word I would observe that the Brotherhood who followed on in art with what Wordsworth had attempted in verse achieved about the same success, - that is, the more calculated an effort they made to return to Nature and Truth, the more they contrived somehow that their figures were both angular and flat.

About the same time there seemed to be a number of women who were often invalids of body or mind, and sometimes of both: they nearly all wrote poetry, they nearly all laced their corsets up too tightly, they nearly all had a sense of humour except in religion, they nearly all were musical, they nearly all were good women, but goodness is nothing to be ashamed of. A few occur to me runningly: Felicia Hemans, Adelaide Procter, Christina Rossetti, Mary Russell Mitford, Harriett Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett, and so on. The last, who became the wife of Robert Browning, was herself deeply read in the Greek tragedians and a poet of genuine power. It would perhaps have been too much to expect her to take the organ otherwise than seriously, only her seriousness, intensified by so many years of confinement to a life on a sofa, was a most unfortunate handicap. To have pointed out to her the absurdities of her long and ambitious Vision of Poets would have been cruel. There is much noble language in it, but it is in such passages as where she invokes the aid of an elaborate organ simile that the vision becomes truly awful:-

The phantasm of an organ booms
. . .
Now hearken! Then the poet gazed
Upon the angel glorious faced,
Whose hand majestically raised
Floated across the organ keys,
Like a pale moon o'er the murmuring seas
. . .
Then rose and fell (with swell and swound
Of shapeless noises wandering round
A concord which at last they found)
Those mystic keys.

Nor has The Lost Chord more than a superficial inlook, and even less outlook. Adelaide Procter, Dickens tells us, was of an exceedingly humorous turn of mind, as were nearly all typical Victorians. She was a good woman who visited the sick and died a convert to the Roman Church. But how the British Muse must have hidden her face for unseemly mirth when the whole of England could smugly chant "Seated one day at the organ" to Sullivan's doleful setting. The lumps raised in Victorian throats by the cornet solo (that instrument which always seems so sausage-toned) made it especially popular; but Sullivan was for some time organist of St. Peter's, Cranley Gardens, and ought to have known better. However, between them both, they managed to scoop in £15,000 worth of royalties, which was not so bad, considering the wretchedness of the composition. I think perhaps the only pointed line out of an indifferent lot is "But I struck one chord of music," which seems to fend off any idea that the phenomenal chord could be one of Stravinsky's. But the launching of Legends and Lyrics, for all their contemptibilities of form as well as matter, could not have been timed better. Half-educated and self-sufficient England revelled in being told that

Only the Organ's voice with peal on peal
Can mount to where those far-off angels kneel.

No matter whether in the unsuitable form of rhymed Popean couplets or of the beautiful surging blank verse Tennyson wrote, the general public was ready to swallow this whole.

It seems natural to consider Tennyson next, probably because there is a little justification for Lord Westbury's "Miss Tennyson." We do feel sometimes that the Laureate's leonine head dwindles into something rather feline, - as, for instance, when he passes snobbish remarks about quaint John Bright; but professionally he always impresses one as a man who wanted to be everything in literature or nothing. Or, to put it in summa, his verse reminds us of his own Camelot:-

Never built at all
And therefore built for ever.

a perfect little pair of paradoxes the import of which we uneasily feel ought to be God's property, but somehow comes to be appropriated by Tennyson. It is certain that he had a lot of Virgil and Virgil's love of the country in him (no one who has visited Somersby Rectory could go away without feeling that life there must have been equably peaceful), a lot of Milton and Milton's solemnity of thought, a lot of Byron and Byron's sulkiness; and it is also certain that had there been no Keats there would have been no Tennyson as we know him,

Therefore ye soft pipes play on -
Not to the sensual ear, but more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

but there is about his poetry a suspicion of conscious and half-amusing parody which is hard to "spot" exactly, - like the odour of eucalyptus. He is at once the least original, yet the most original, poet in our language. "Most massive, yet most delicate," is how Carlyle described his features and that is how many people describe his poetry; and that is how the casual musician (wrongly) describes organ tone. For it was not because he was the grandest poet of the Victorian age, nor because he was the Herrick of the Victorian age (though he was both), but because he was the most representative poet of his time, that Tennyson let himself go about the organ. But even his attempts to capture the spirit of compromise, that is the spirit of the Bible, suffer on one hand from his lack of humour in weighty affairs and from the studied polish of his verse on the other. In other words, the trouble with Tennyson (and the Victorian age generally) was that he regarded the organ as an easy thing to write poetry about. He could dismiss the terrific upheaval of the French Revolution as "no graver than a schoolboy's barring-out," and in the same poem nearly tumble over himself in his excitement to record impressions of the incidental voluntary at a wedding:

While the great organ almost burst his pipes,
Groaning for power, and rolling through the court
A long melodious thunder to the sound
Of solemn psalms and silver litanies.
[The Princess.]

There is no question of the glory of the music here. If there was one art in which Tennyson required no instruction it was that of versification. He is the most gifted artist of the "refined" school. Coleridge had complained that "Mr. Tennyson's verses would scarcely scan," but those were early days, and for all his word-witchery Coleridge never learnt to master such lovely Virgilian cadences.

The commonest fault found with Tennyson to-day is that his priggishness permeated even his poetry. I do not think he was a prig on purpose, - that is, in defiance of public opinion. He had a hearty dislike of "revolts, republics, revolutions," - the sensitive dislike which belonged to Virgil, and this no doubt made him a trifle complacent when he told the world what he thought about it. But what is so unhappily at variance with the serious spirit of his poetry is that, being unable to trifle with the organ, he quite loses his bearings in the matter of everyday geniality when he comes to write about it. Substitute the word "nearly" for "almost" in the passage I have just quoted and you will see what I mean. Or take another instance, this time from The Palace of Art:-

Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair
Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily.

Now here is a couplet which would have suited down to the ground people like myself who believe that angels have wings and Christmas is the proper time for snow to fall. Neither Tennyson nor I can help it if the modern world persists in showing that these things are not so; but there is still something wrong about the picture, a something which is modified in Rossetti's superb painting. The gilded organ-pipes are not indefensible, nor are the Mrs. Karl Druschkis, in spite of Swinburne's asininely alliterative "roses and raptures." But Rossetti, with his somewhat more developed sense of the fitness of things, knew that he could not paint the patroness of music asleep by the side of her organ for visitors to the Palace to see, because it comes too near to suggesting the scene of a party of house-hunters being shown round a kitchen where a gently-swinked but very well fed cook slumbers sonorously in an armchair by her range. So he painted St. Cecilia kneeling at her keyboard, her head back, her eyes closed as she receives an osculation from some person unknown.

As much an Englishman but more likely to be appreciated abroad was Robert Browning. Tennyson was the sort of Englishman who is simply not understood on the Continent, probably because he prided himself on being so well balanced. But to compatriots, Browning has always seemed a joyous and energetic fighter against nobody maliciously in particular; and it is this wilful spirit which makes his poetry like a firework show, nearly always crazy but often by no means ugly. He is, of course, a Victorian, and as it happens wrote more poetry about the organ than any of his contemporaries. But he is the first big poet in English literature who could take the organ as a serious piece of fun. You will find no such nonsense as "angel and organ" in Browning as you do in Elizabeth Barrett and the rest. He never communicated with God by proxy. Not that he overlooked angels : he very much looked at pictures of them, but with the sort of wide-eyed delight of a child on being taken to the Zoo for the first time to look at rare and beautiful white birds. He is probably the only poet to whom the organ at High Mass in St. Peter's at Rome could "grovel" (like a sort of mediaeval dragon), - an expressive, but quite absurd touch. The best of it is, however, that Browning knew he was absurd and rejoiced therein. He is probably the only poet who considered the broken sticker of an organ pedal poetical. He is probably the only poet who could be so capricious as to choose a name like Charles Avison (b. 1710, d. 1770 : organist of St. Nicholas, Newcastle, and a litterateur) to write a poem upon; or Abt Vogler as the hero for a splendid piece of writing familiar to every Browning lover. Readers of this journal have the further advantage of knowing Abt Vogler as the inventor of the Simplification System of organ building, whereby mixtures were to be ruthlessly pruned, resultant basses used instead of 32ft. pedal open diapasons, and manual pipes to be planted semitonally on the soundboard so as to simplify the action. As likely as not Browning knew all this, and on such an eccentric and secluded bit of knowledge built up his wonderful poem. Briefly it defines his own attitude of mind:-

There is no truer truth obtainable
By man than comes of music.

Heaven is the C major, the perfect round of compromise.

Another of Browning's curious progenies is Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha. In these rollicking quadrupedante sonitu rhymes, the exaggeration of Jesuit casuistry is likened to the "mountainous" fugues of an imaginary understudy of Bach, before the clear-headedness of Pascal on the one hand, and the plainchant of Palestrina on the other reveal the gold of God's truth. Here is a very Browningesque word-photo of the organ:-

See, our huge house of the sounds
Hushing its hundreds at once.

But the evening service is over; there is only an inch of candle left in the socket and the organist has his work cut out to get through the fugue. Master Hugues, "the composer of note," grins in the shade like a Cheshire cat:-

Page after page as I played,
Every bar's rest, where one wipes
Sweat from one's brow, I looked up and surveyed,
O'er my three claviers, yon forest of pipes,
Whence you still peeped in the shade.

Then off we gallop on the ways of a fugue which are also the ways of Jesuits:-

One is incisive corrosive, -
Two retorts nettled, curt, crepitant -
Three makes rejoinder expansive, explosive -
Four overbears them all, strident and strepitant -
Five... 0 Danaides, 0 sieve!

The last line, grotesquely rhymed and abruptly rapped out, is very characteristic of Browning. The daughters of Danaus were of course condemned to pour water through a sieve, - an unending enough occupation. But Browning with all his learning was a real intellectual democrat:-

Hopes t'was for something his organ-pipes sounded,
Tiring three boys at the bellows.

He expresses the philosophy of the whole business with a most pleasing sewing-machine idea:-

Is it your moral of Life?
Such a web, simple and subtle
Weave we on earth here in impotent strife,
Backward and forward each throwing his shuttle,
Death ending all with a knife?

But the organist's fingers have been taxed long enough by the convolvulus-fugues of Master Hugues:-

Bid one two three four five, clear the arena,
Say the word, straight I unstop the full organ,
Blare out the mode Palestrina!

Having finished, he prepares to leave the organ loft, while the candle at the console is flickering out. I cannot resist quoting his grumbles at the darkness of the place, - grumbles which conclude this spirited poem:-

While in the roof if I'm right there...
Lo, you the wick in the socket!
Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there!
Down it dips, gone like a rocket!
What you want, do you, to come unawares
Sweeping the church up for first morning prayers,
And find a poor devil at end of his cares
At the foot of your rotten-planked rat-riddled stairs?
Do I carry the moon in my pocket ?

Matthew Arnold liked the prayers of the Grande Chartreuse anchorites because those prayers were "stern and naked." The organ carried to his ear its accents of bourgeois England, which he disliked ; but his philosophy of classic culture had one weakness, - it was quite Pagan.

With the death of these giants, the Victorian age proper ends, the fin de siecle years being spent in quips, cranks and not a few wanton wiles. When somebody says "Meredith is a prose Browning," Oscar Wilde says "So is Browning." Little Billee is ridiculed for wanting to turn Trilby into a vicar's daughter, - which exempts du Maurier from knowing anything about vicars' daughters. But the whole of this reaction was the trough behind an otherwise incomplete wave. In a recent lecture, Mr. Harold Monro, a modern poet who has written several verses which scan, spoke of Victorian poetry as "pontifical, rhetorical, intensely stylish, &c.;" but when he puts forward the sort of free verse we have been subjected to lately as the "poetry of the future," loud and long laughs Apollo. We can bear with Walt Whitman showing us in terrific fantasias how his entrails work, because we know the limit of his sense of humour. Besides he had genius:-

Now the great organ sounds
Tremulous - while underneath (as the hid footholds of the Earth
On which arising, rest, and leaping forth, depend
All shapes of beauty, grace and strength, - all hues we know,
Green blades of grass and warbling birds - children that gambol and play -
      the clouds of Heaven above)
The strong base stands, and its pulsations intermit not,
Bathing, supporting, merging all the rest - maternity of all the rest;
And with it every instrument in multitudes,
The players playing - all the world's musicians,
The solemn hymns and masses, rousing adoration,
All passionate heart-chants, sorrowful appeals,
The measureless sweet vocalists of ages,
And for their solvent setting, Earth's own diapason
Of winds and words and mighty ocean waves.

The last three lines seem to me splendid ; and that is because the thought is wild and elemental. The serious of the Victorians made the mistake in their poetry of treating the organ nearly as a pure piece of ontology. It is like trying to write poetry about bread, - just bread. Western religion, it is true, has poetised bread, once and for all; but poets usually get on better with unleavened bread or gingerbread. For the same reason the last verse of John Davidson's In Romney Marsh is rewarded for its realism by being fine and English:

The darky shining salt-sea drops
Streamed as the waves clashed on the shore;
The beach, with all its organ-stops,
Pealing again prolonged the roar.

This would have pleased Father Willis the sailor, as well as Father Willis the organ builder.

The other realistic thing in this world is, of course, Love. Dr. Edmund Gosse attempts it:

High in the organ-loft, with lilied hair,
Love plied the pedals with his snowy foot.

but one involuntarily imagines a teacher in some L.C.C. school caught napping during a recitation class: "No, Dolly...... Try very hard to say played the pedals..."

Mr. Alfred Noyes gets his organ technicalities wrong, and Ruskin would call him to account for a pathetic fallacy. But Mr. Noyes is a true poet, and succeeds where others have failed:-

He bowed his head, he stood so still,
They bowed their heads as well;
And softly from the organ loft,
The song began to swell:

"Come up with blood-red streamers!" the reeds began the strain.
The Vox Humana pealed on high: "The spring is risen again!"
The Vox Angelica replied: "The Lord is risen to-day;
"Our house-beams were of cedar, come in with boughs of may."
The Diapason deepened it: "Before the darkness fall,
"We tell you He is risen again: our God hath burst His prison again,
"The Lord of Life is risen again, and Love is Lord of all!"

Here I must break off, lest I lose my temper about our latest poetry which "presents life as it really is;" and this is, I hold, desperate art. The mountains and the sea are vast, but their vastness is limited and horizoned to each individual man. In any case, the poetry of the Victorian age shows the organ as a peculiarly Victorian instrument, apart from the evidence of the Great Exhibition, and of the immense tonal and mechanical improvements made by Victorian craftsmen in the instrument itself. I do not think that symbolically these improvements were the most attractive part of the Victorian age; but not many present day organists will agree with me!