Jr is the early Clare who wins our affection, Clare

who was in love with the " shy-come nightingale," the yellowhammer, " fluttering in short fears," the white-no-sed bee and Its " never absent couien, black as coal," the " little fish that nimble by," every spot in the cowslip, every streak in this bindweed. We are in the Age of Innocence when we read the detail of nature so transfigured by love, and by wonder, too :— .. "Aye, as I live ! her secret nest is here,

Upon this white-thorn stump. I've searched about For hours in vain. There ! put that bramble by— Nay, trample on its branches and get near.

How subtle is the bird ! "

We can picture him well at this time : short and thin and pale, with a great head too large for his elfish body ; country- dressed, in a green smock and hob-nailed boots ; with rough hands and a shameless Northamptonshire accent, but bearing himself with such grace that strangers took him for" a nobleman in disguise," and Lamb used to refer to him as " Princely Clare." We have absurd anecdotes of him that increase our affection. We know, for example, how frightened lie was when he first visited London, the wicked city. His fellow-labourers had warned him, in the tap-room of the

Bell,' that everyone there was on the look-out to pick your purse or to murder you. And so, when his publishers sent their porter to meet him on his arrival, and when the porter asked him " Are you Mr. Clare ?" he firmly and finally answered " No ! " It is Clare " gentle and simple," as Hood called him, whom many love as the whole Clare.

There is another Clare, an old man. The tranquillity and the regular diet of the Northampton Public Asylum have benefited him physically ; he looks quite prosperous and fat.. The large head seems even larger ; he is bald at the front and at the back his hair hangs down long and white ; his brow seems incredibly high. His eyes are more pieking and wilder. No one has come to see him for years except a journalist or two. His wife and children are too miserably poor to afford- a journey of thirty miles ; and, besides, if they came, they might find him in one of his worst moods—he might be too deeply sunk in despair to recognize them, he might manage to forget, as everyone else seems to have forgotten, that he was John Clare, a once-famous poet. He has nothing to do but read the newspaper, play dominoes with the other inmates, or sit the porch and smoke. He is allowed a good deal of freedom, for he is classified in the books as " harmless." There is not much wrong with him ; he sometimes pretends that he is Lord Byron, or a prize fighter, or a cavalier ; he talks to himself about a certain John Clare, who is happily settled in his old cottage ; once he saw figures moving from the floor of a room to the ceiling ; once he pointed to a molehill and said " Look at that mountain " ; he has fits of bitter melancholy and incoherent speech : there is the sum total of his madness. He still writes -poems on any scrap of paper he. can obtain. Some of them are inconse- quent jingles; some have flashes of genius ; some are the most vivid, the most passionate, the most visionary, the most delicate of all his poems. He experiments in metres that no one has used befoie; he writes in free verse and he writes in complicated stanzas. His range 'of subject has widened ; he has had time enough, the twenty years he has been in the madhouse, to dig into his own soul. He still writes of Nature, and of Nature in detail. He goes aver the memories of his early years, the things that were so dear come back to him, but he sees -them more at distance, more golden. The tragedy of his first love occupies him rtill, and" in a hundred different settings, under a hundred 5fferent names; he writes lyrics -in praise- of -Mary J6yee.

Now and then he imagines himself with- his passions fulfilled :— "In every language upon earth,

On every shore, o'er every sea, I gave my name immortal birth,

And kept my spirit with the free."

More often he sees himself as he is, rejected and forgotten. In his moments of greatest sanity he petitions God for the gift of death. Here, then, is another Clare; who wins our pity and amazement.

Between these two there is a third Clare, the strangest and, to me, the greatest of all : unfortunately we know little of him. He is not yet mad, but those blows which are to drive him mad are battering in upon him. He is in ill-health and poverty : he has a small income, thirty-six pounds a year, but he has a wife and seven children to keep. No farmer will take him on as a labourer ; he is too frail, and anyhow they look upon him with suspicion—he has left the station to which God called him and has been seen talking to the nobility and to gentlemen from London. Those gentlemen from London haven't done him much good ; they lionized him and feted him at first ; a peasant poet was a most amusing figure ; but now they never think of him. Certainly they never buy his poetry. He can't make a penny by writing. When nobody thinks anything of Clare, is it any wonder that Patty, his wife, a hard-working matron, gets rather short with him at times? Someone has done a kind action, to be sure ; Lord Milton built him a cottage at his own expense in a village a few miles from Clare's home—from the cottage where he was born, where he had lived for forty years.- But the last thing in the world that Clare desired was to leave the place where every inch of ground was passionately loved. If anyone felled a tree near his home he was plunged into sorrow. How could he bear to have every field and every stream, every bird's nest, every rabbit track taken from him ? They told him how ungrateful he would be if he insisted on staying where he was ; they half persuaded, half dragged him away. He reached this new home in tears, and he was to take no joy in living for the rest of his days.

His friends had forsaken him, his fame was gone. He believed that he despised " the glory and the nothing of a name" ; but it is those who possess that nothing who despise it. He was sick and almost starving. He scarcely dared go beyond his door ; for everything he saw in the fields and woods reminded him so bitterly of those dearer fields and dearer woods. He lived• in his study and brooded over life. It was the treachery of men that distressed him most :— " I hate the very noise of troublous man,

Who did and does me all the harm he can.

Free from the world, I would a prisoner be, And my own shadow all my company ; And lonely see the shooting stars appear,

Worlds rushing into judgment all the year . . .1!

Well, he was to be free from the world, and a prisoner, too, in a short space of time. " 0 take this world away from me," he cries again :—

" Its very praises hurt me more Than even its coldness did before, Its hollow ways torment me now, And start a cold sweat on my brow."

He was not mad yet, but he turned Methodist—and that could be a gloomy religion in the first half of the nineteenth century. He wrote down on the edges of newspapers vivid and stern paraphrases of the Psalms and the Book of Job. He found comfort in one who was

" An outcast thrown in sorrow's way,

A fugitive that knew no sin,

Yet in lone places forced to stray—

They would not let the stranger in..

Yet peace, though much himself he mourned, Was all to others he returned."

But his religion for the most part was more desperate and more lurid.

His nature poems were still his best poems. Something odd had happened to him, though : he did not now so,often - irradiate Nature with love. One of the strangest - and most terrible moods that I have heard of captured him from time

to time. His observation was as close as ever': read, for example, his description of the marten :—

" The marten cat, tong shagged, of courage good,

Of weazel shape, a dweller in the wood, With badger hair, long shagged, and darting eyes,

And lower than the common at in.size,

Small head, and ever-running on the stoop, Snuffing the ground, and hindparts shouldered up . . ."

But how does Clare, tender-hearted, whose fiercest complaint against men was roused by the smallest show of cruelty, write so many poems at this time in which cruelty of the most brutal-kind is faithfully recorded, with utter impartiality, it would seem, without praise or blame ? If we had not known Clare, if we had not known that cruelty set him shiver- ing with anger and grief, we might almost, from the poems, have suspected him of enjoying the cruelty for its own sake. A badger is set loose in the street ; men and boys set dogs at him, throw sticks and cudgels and stones at him, jump at him and kick him. He falls down as though dead :— " Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again ; Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies,

And leaves his hold and cackles, groans, and dies."

So the poem ends. We are given a picture of a ploughman beating an old dog fox, " till his ribs would crack," of boys running after a lame boy and jeering at him. This trait is most terrifying when we get it in half a line, apparently for no purpose, in the middle of a quite innocent poem :-

"The boy that stands and kills the black nosed bee."

The truth is that something had already snapped in Clare's mind. He was, in such moods, no longer a lover of Nature ; he had become Nature itself. He felt as a wild animal felt, he suffered in sympathy, being hit and fighting back, without passing judgment. He had been obsessed and tormented with the thought of man's cruelty ; he had seen so much of it, and at last his torture had become so wholly a part of him that it remained a horror pervading the depth of his mind but never working its way into speech. Cruelty, cruelty— he must set it down ; but it comes out stark and monstrous. These are, I think, the most gruesome poems in the English language.

Another habit goes to prove that already his mind was weakening. In many of the sonnets—if we can call them sonnets—they were in a form invented by Clare himself—a few words echo themselves throughout the poem. It is as though Clare, in the first line, had set up a sound in his brain that could not exhaust itself until his poem was over. The poems in consequence, have often a naivete of phrasing, a sort of lisp in sense, that is pleasing from its quaintness. In this selection of unpublished poems Mr. Blunden prints an extreme example of the tendency :— "A HILL-SIDE HOUSE.

There is a house stands in a lonely way, The hill seems falling on it all the day ; It seems half-hidden, like a robber's den, And seems more 'safe for robbers than for men:

The trees, look l—bushes--scarcely half as big—

Seem taking root and growilig on- the rig.

The cows that travel up with little heed, Seem looking down upon the roof to feed, And if they take a step or stumble more, They seem in danger then of tumbling o'er, The cocks and hens that fill a little space Are all that look like home abeut the place.

• The woods sdem ready on the house to drop,

• And rabbits breed above the chimney top."

I must not leave to a reader the impression that this review is a description of Madrigals and Chronicles. Mr. Bltmden's book has given me an excuse for writing on Clare, and I seized it with gratitude. It is a volume for the lover of Clare and the collector of fine printing, not an introduction to his work and not a repre- sentative selection for strict criticism. Anyone who has once felt the seraphic quality of Clare will find that every poem restores to him his old joy in Clare, his old love for him. He-will find that it gives him new materials in every period, and especially in that dark and haunted middle period. He will be happy that Mr. Randolph Schwabe, in his excellent Woodcuts, has taken pains to illustrate Clare fittingly. Those who do not know Clare would do better to begin elsewhere.

ALAN PORTE&