Women must Weep, by Professor Harald Williams, has the most dreadful cover of any book that we have come across for some time past.  It is possibly intended to symbolise the sorrow of the world, but it merely suggests the decorative tendencies of an undertaker and is as depressing as it is detestable.  However, as the cowl does not make the monk, so the binding, in the case of the Savile Club school, does not make the poet, and we open the volume without prejudice.  The first poem that we come to is a vigorous attack on those wicked and misguided people who believe that Beauty is its own reason for existing, and that Art should have no other aim but her own perfection.  Here are some of the Professor’s gravest accusations: 

   Why do they patch, in their fatal choice,
      When at secrets such the angels quake,
   But a play of the Vision and the Voice?—­
      Oh, it’s all for Art’s sake.

   Why do they gather what should be left,
      And leave behind what they ought to take,
   And exult in the basest blank or theft?—­
      Oh, it’s all for Art’s sake.

It certainly must be admitted that to ‘patch’ or to ’exult in the basest blank’ is a form of conduct quite unbefitting an artist, the very obscurity and incomprehensible character of such a crime adding something to its horror.  However, while fully recognising the wickedness of ‘patching’ we cannot but think that Professor Harald Williams is happier in his criticism of life than he is in his art criticism.  His poem Between the Banks, for instance, has a touch of sincerity and fine feeling that almost atones for its over-emphasis.

Mr. Buchan’s blank verse drama Joseph and His Brethren bears no resemblance to that strange play on the same subject which Mr. Swinburne so much admires.  Indeed, it may be said to possess all the fatal originality of inexperience.  However, Mr. Buchan does not leave us in any doubt about his particular method of writing.  ‘As to the dialogue,’ he says, ’I have put the language of real life into the mouths of the speakers, except when they may be supposed to be under strong emotion; then their utterances become more rapid—­broken—­figurative—­in short more poetical.’  Well, here is the speech of Potiphar’s wife under strong emotion: 

   ZULEEKHA (seizing him).  Love me! or death! 
   Ha! dost thou think thou wilt not, and yet live? 
   By Isis, no.  And thou wilt turn away,
   Iron, marble mockman!  Ah!  I hold thy life! 
   Love feeds on death.  It swallows up all life,
   Hugging, or killing.  I to woo, and thou—­
   Unhappy me!  Oh!

The language here is certainly rapid and broken, and the expression ‘marble mockman’ is, we suppose, figurative, but the passage can scarcely be described as poetical, though it fulfils all Mr. Buchan’s conditions.  Still, tedious as Zuleekha and Joseph are, the Chorus of Ancients is much worse.  These ‘ideal spectators’ seem to spend their lives in uttering those solemn platitudes that with the aged pass for wisdom.  The chief offenders are the members of what Mr. Buchan calls ’The 2nd.—­Semi-chorus,’ who have absolutely no hesitation in interrupting the progress of the play with observations of this kind: