Money ... woman ... money! I want naught with their money. I want my husband, And my children's father. Let them pitch all their money in the furnace Where he ... I wouldn't touch a penny; 'Twould burn my fingers. Money ... For him! There are fishermen in peril of the sea; the printer, the watchman, the stonebreaker, the lighthousekeeper, the riveter, the sailor, the shopkeeper; there are school-children and factory girls; outcasts, tramps and gipsies; and a splendid company of women--mothers in childbirth and child-death, sisters, wives and sweethearts--more heroic in their obscure suffering and toil than the noblest figure of ancient tragedy. With deliberate intention, therefore, the poet has set himself to represent contemporary industrial life: the strata at the base of our civilization. He has, as it were, won free at a leap from illusion, from a dominant idealism, and the jealous, tyrannical instinct for mere beauty. Life is the inspiration now, and truth the objective. The facts of the workers' lives are carefully observed, realized in all their significance and faithfully recorded. Sympathy and penetration go hand in hand. Personal faults and follies, superstitions and vices, play their part in these little dramas, no less than the social wrongs under which the people labour. And the conception, in its balance and comprehensiveness, is really great; for while on the one hand there is an humiliating indictment of our civilization (implicit, of course, but none the less complete) on the other hand there is a proud vindication of the invincible human spirit. Viewed steadily thus, by a poetic genius which has subdued the conventions of its art, such themes are shown to possess a latent but inalienable power to exalt the mind. They are therefore of the genuine stuff of art, needing only the formative touch of the poet to evoke beauty. And thus we find that although the normal process seems to have been reversed here: although the poet has sought truth first--in event, in character and in environment--beauty has been nevertheless attained; and of a type more vital and complete than that evoked by the statelier themes of tradition.