Mr. Stopford Brooke said some time ago that Socialism and the socialistic spirit would give our poets nobler and loftier themes for song, would widen their sympathies and enlarge the horizon of their vision and would touch, with the fire and fervour of a new faith, lips that had else been silent, hearts that but for this fresh gospel had been cold.  What Art gains from contemporary events is always a fascinating problem and a problem that is not easy to solve.  It is, however, certain that Socialism starts well equipped.  She has her poets and her painters, her art lecturers and her cunning designers, her powerful orators and her clever writers.  If she fails it will not be for lack of expression.  If she succeeds her triumph will not be a triumph of mere brute force.  The first thing that strikes one, as one looks over the list of contributors to Mr. Edward Carpenter’s Chants of Labour, is the curious variety of their several occupations, the wide differences of social position that exist between them, and the strange medley of men whom a common passion has for the moment united.  The editor is a ‘Science lecturer’; he is followed by a draper and a porter; then we have two late Eton masters and then two bootmakers; and these are, in their turn, succeeded by an ex-Lord Mayor of Dublin, a bookbinder, a photographer, a steel-worker and an authoress.  On one page we have a journalist, a draughtsman and a music-teacher:  and on another a Civil servant, a machine fitter, a medical student, a cabinet-maker and a minister of the Church of Scotland.  Certainly, it is no ordinary movement that can bind together in close brotherhood men of such dissimilar pursuits, and when we mention that Mr. William Morris is one of the singers, and that Mr. Walter Crane has designed the cover and frontispiece of the book, we cannot but feel that, as we pointed out before, Socialism starts well equipped.

As for the songs themselves, some of them, to quote from the editor’s preface, are ’purely revolutionary, others are Christian in tone; there are some that might be called merely material in their tendency, while many are of a highly ideal and visionary character.’  This is, on the whole, very promising.  It shows that Socialism is not going to allow herself to be trammelled by any hard and fast creed or to be stereotyped into an iron formula.  She welcomes many and multiform natures.  She rejects none and has room for all.  She has the attraction of a wonderful personality and touches the heart of one and the brain of another, and draws this man by his hatred of injustice, and his neighbour by his faith in the future, and a third, it may be, by his love of art or by his wild worship of a lost and buried past.  And all of this is well.  For, to make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.

They are not of any very high literary value, these poems that have been so dexterously set to music.  They are meant to be sung, not to be read.  They are rough, direct and vigorous, and the tunes are stirring and familiar.  Indeed, almost any mob could warble them with ease.  The transpositions that have been made are rather amusing.  ’Twas in Trafalgar Square is set to the tune of ’Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay; Up, Ye People! a very revolutionary song by Mr. John Gregory, boot-maker, with a refrain of