["8", "THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 1922.", "## UNWIN'S BULLETIN,", "Mr. FISHER UNWIN will publish on January 11, in his \"First Novel\" Library, a remarkable new South Sea romance, entitled", "## THE VALLEY\nof PARADISE.", "By ALFRED GORDON BENNETT. 7/6 net.", "The title suggests a story of primitive love in an Eden-like South Sea island garden. Actually it is a story of three men—no white, one black—and a girl castaway on a deserted Island in the South Seas. It is an unusual story, full of human passion, of love, jealousy, adventure and death.", "### ORDER YOUR COPY IN ADVANCE,", "## THE VALLEY OF PARADISE.", "By ALFRED GORDON BENNETT. 7/6 net.\n*NOTE—The opening chapter of \"The Valley of Paradise\" appears in \"M. A. B.\" (Xmas copy of the issue will be sent post free on receipt of $4).*", "T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1, Adelphi Terrace, London.", "## THE STAGE LIFE\nOF MRS. STIRLING.", "By PERCY ALLEN. With an Introduction by Sir FRANK R. BENSON. Illustrated. 12/6 net.", "This is the first record in book form of the long career of Fanny Stirling. It touches also upon Macready, Charles Reade, Robson, and many other famous authors of the 19th Century.", "### TWO GOOD AUCTION BOOKS,", "## AUCTION BRIDGE\nFOR TWO OR THREE:", "With New Laws for these Games.", "By MILTON C. WORK. 7/6 net.", "## AUCTION BRIDGE METHODS\nUP-TO-DATE.", "By MILTON C. WORK. 7/6 net.", "### POPULAR EDITION. 3/6 net.", "## FEMINISM AND\nSEX EXTINCTION.", "By Dr. ARABELLA KENEALY.", "T. FISHER UNWIN, Ltd., 1, Adelphi Terrace, London.", "JANUARY", "## UNIQUENESS, WITH A NOTE\nON VERS LIBRE,", "Criticism will do itself a serious disservice if it allows the doctrine of the uniqueness of every work of art to become an obsession. Every work of art is individual, but every buttery is also individual, and so is every human being. Nevertheless we distinguish Red Admirals *en bloc* from Painted Ladies, we distinguish *admirals* from beetles, animals from men, and among men, where our sense of individuality is very marked, we easily distinguish the Frenchman from the German and both from ourselves. We do not ignore individuality when we treat of the broader characteristics, which makes classification possible; on the contrary, until we have classified, until we recognize types; the essence of the individual necessarily eludes us; what assurance have we that the traits which are superficially salient are those in which individuality is expressed? In our individuality is in one aspect a guide through the labyrinth of conventional and other wrappings to the core, the suffusing, revitalizing principle which is unique in every living thing.", "It is the same in art. Every work is itself a unity or a nullity; every work is itself and nothing else. Agreed. But the problem for criticism is to discover, in presence of a certain complex of conditions, what there is unity or no, and, if there is, what is its nature. This cannot be done without recourse to the faculties of comparison, generalization, and analysis. We distinguish music from poetry, with whom our convection that every poem, every eventment, is unique. We go on and distinguish in music different styles and methods, the sonata, the fugue, the rhapsody, and in poetry the sonnet, the idyll, the ode. We go farther; we perceive that poets and composers are of their time. That they write as they do because of their position in a developing or a receding line of expression, because the thought and feeling of the mass of their contemporaries was subdued or enthusiastic, blunt or fine, because Mozart was not Mozart, but the successor of Haydn, the precursor of Beethoven, and that Beethoven's task was conditioned by the fact that Bach, Haydn, and Mozart had preëted him. In their paper, the appreciation of individuality, the more clearly we see that the expression of it is conditioned. The artist cannot be fully known in isolation; and his work, even when we have placed it historically, must submit still to this final qualification of its uniqueness, that it is his. Three lines of Shakespeare, three bars of Beethoven, declare their origin to the accustomed ear. There has been no artist yet who has not in all that he has done repeated himself.", "If it were indeed the function of criticism to declare the incompatibility of every work, there could be no future in it. In future, there would be no incomparable nothing can be said. But the truth is, on the contrary, that criticism is essentially a study in comparison. It is, if you will, our way of spontaneous or indisciplined either in intention or in fact. The verses of H.D., as, for instance, in HYMEN (The-Egoist Press, 3s. net), are a striking example of the opposite tendency. She has not abjured metre nor even rhyme; and if she generally avoids regular recurrences, then it is not because a set tune demands too much of the poet, but because in her view it demands too little. In the high court of beauty where she serves the forms of our verse are arranged less for what they forbid than for what they allow: they are vulgar licences, they are bathes; a suggestion that the attainment of beauty is facile and normal, whereas", "beauty is apart\nbeauty is cast as the sea\na barren rock,\nbeauty is set about\nwith a blue sky.\n\n\"What to me is all the beauty of Greece!\" she cries to an imaginary friend who has finned before the isolation, the self-discipline, demanded of the true votomy: —", "what are the islands to me\nif what is Greece, if you draw me\nfrom the terror\nand the splendour of song\nand its bleak sacrifice?", "", "", "If such verse as this is \"free\" in form, it is only in order that it may find the one form which belongs to it, that it may finally leave behind it the distinction between form and substance and allow the poet's intuition to shape itself in inevitable words. The form is to have, not the ease and freedom of conventional poetry, but the strictness and rigour of unique creation. It is not very difficult, in reading and savouring H. D.'s work, to recognise the sharpness of her chisel-strokes. That she is deliberately handling a dangerous tool, and handling it with judgment and purpose, we are quite soon aware. Then why is it that, when we come to ask ourselves what she is doing, what she is working and what her art or any example of it amounts to, our perplexity is so great? Surely because it is as hard for us to follow her along the path of her originality as it was for her to open up the way. The conventional Forms of our language, a code of communications. The idea to be achieved after all a code of communications. Is inoperative if you will, but, since it has been admitted, must not its consequences be admitted with a poet wrote it on it one line with the right hand guiding the pencil's progress by the edge of the paper. Of these words, the age of age of age of age of age of age

BY DR. ARABELLA KENALY.

T. FISHER UNWIN, Ltd,
1, Adelphi Terrace, London.

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origin to the accustomed ear. There has been
no artist yet who has not in all there has
done repeated himself.

If it were indeed the function of criticism
to declare the incompatibility of every
work, there could be no criticism in future;
for about the coming of the unique be
said. But the truth is, on the contrary,
that criticism is essentially a study in com-
parisons. It is, if you will, our way of pre-
paration and initiation, enabling us to discern
the touch of the unique when it comes, so
that we may not waste our responsiveness in
vague and ignorant raptures, nor imagine
an experience to be significant because we
have not ourselves encountered the like of it
before. And what is true of the attitude of
the critic as he upon art and judges
it, is not true least of those who are in
vain. In isolation, he is helpless; he
can not begin at the beginning, however
much he may desire to do so; he can only be
alone in his own desire to do so; he can only
be begin. In isolation, he is helpless; he
is unique, is more likely therefore to be a sign
of weakness than of strength in the artist.
It implies as a rule a sense of bondage to the
past and the impulse to seek expression by
avoidance of the means through which
it has previously been found. The whole
school of English versirs are, broadly
speaking, seekers after singularity, and are
weak on that account. Their position is as
different from that of the French versirs
as the requirement for the condition of France
are different from the conditions
among English-speaking peoples. Comparing
the poetry of the French with the poetry of
the Greeks or the Italians, we see that it
has sacrificed the man to the exquisite,
pursue its high perfections rigorously. There
is a balance to be redressed, therefore,
and the case of the literary revolutionaries
is strong. Straitness, puritan, perfection of
form, have not been the chief qualities of
English poetry, originality of quality,
which is true; to us it says primarily that
poetry is informality, which is false. To
them it says, "The forms we have elected
and deified are forfeited shrines"; but how
can it say that to us, who have not deified
it, or elected anything to us? To us, inevitably,
it has a flavour of difference for difference sake;
its suggestion is that a work only resembles
other works by some sacrifice of individuality.
That is a popular thing to suggest at the
present time; it is a seed which is tempo-
rarily invading the province of criticism,
where, as we have seen, it is so peculiarly
out of place. It is a truth, but, like almost
all other truths, is of relative and not of
absolute importance.

So the English critic is justified in looking
in upon the exercise of *vers libre* with
suspicion and of demanding from it an appreciable
recompense for the pleasures of which
it deprives him. It is a proof, where there
is nothing to protest, but for freedom in a
free country. Yet he *must* be on his guard
against supposing that *vers libre* is necessarily

And so the question arises, or, recures, why, if
he consents to employ the words we know, he
should not consent to employ also the forms
we know, since they too offer themselves as
a means of communication? ... What
common use are earth-bound and lifeless; the
poet breathes on them and makes them live.
The conventional forms of verse are likewise
commonly more corporate and skeletons, but
they live when life isbreathed into them
then, because we know the forms, we feel the
life immediately. To reject them is to move
in the direction of the unique, the incom-
parable, the incommunicable; it is to take a
perilous turn.

H. of. is not unaware of these perils, and
his concentration would be that they be a part
of a sense of the pitter remoteness of the
world. It is to be remembered that the
from the life of men. Her world of beauty
is such a world as she conceives Phleidias
or Sophocles or fragile verses she reverberates
faintly into the spirit of beauty of their works.
She combines in a remarkable degree of
symbol with a kind of mystification as to
the nature and clear presentment of the
symbol with a clear and natural description
of the symbol which she reveals to us are mainly
physical. This looks like another indication
of the instinct of the poet, of beauty for
quenchings, the appearances of the Greek
world as we look back upon it are indeed
predominantly physical; but to them their
art was the instant expression of an encom-
passing beauty which as spiritual, and we do not
really enter into the spirit of beauty, so
by reverting to a conception of beauty the
secret of which vanished from the world
with the lives that embodied it. They had
a simplicity which cannot be recovered.

There is, after all, no greater tragedy for
the artist than to be conscious of immeasur-
able gulfs dividing us from beauty. For is it
not his main function to remind men that
beauty, whatever it may be, the difficulty of sub-
duing brute matter to spiritual ends, it is
a difficulty which in the wonderful world we
inhabit has been overcome. The poeple, the
discipline by which a man must qualify
himself to solve the secret of expression, are
misunderstood if the effort, the bleakness,
remain in his expression when it is found.
The essence of beauty is gracefulness, and that
done alone is beautifully done which is effortlessly
the sunrise and sunset, the unfolding
leaves and flowers, delight us most of all by
the ease with which their miracle is accomplished.
What is at once most incompre-
henible in them and most moving is that
their beauty is a matter of course. The pain
and hardships, the iron discipline of all the
ages, have been endured, but they have also
been forgotten; and so the gift is not a gift
of beauty only, but of love as well.

Mr. J. M. Keynes's "A Revision of the
Treaty," a sequel to his "Economic Con-
sequences of the Peace," will be published by
Messrs. Macmillan next week,

descriptions of funeral ceremonies, battle
scenes and scenes in field hospitals; cries of
rage and despair at his imprisonment; calm
comments on the events and persons
of the sick room, the nurse, the doctor, his
daughter, the muscians who to him, to him,
his first walk in the garden; and childhood.
It is impossible to comment on the book
as a whole, for it has no unity but the
inexhaustible voice of its author; and by
its very sincerity it reveals how radical is
that failing in all D'Annunzio's artistical
work—the want of the supreme architecture
unity which knits together the masterpieces
of art. Proportion is wanting to D'Annunzio's
genius: it is to be overwhelmed by the tremendous
ness of the image and a vascularity of the
health or sickness, in the course of past his
mental eye. In the seem of a magnificent
war on a naval enterprise—the poet was
on one of five destroyers which went
out to night to lay a torpedo barrage in the
bay of Penzance—he remarks:

La vita non è un'innatazione di aspetti di di
ma è una specie di sensibilità diffusa, una con-
senza offerta a tutti i sensi, una sostanza buona
da flutuare, da palpare, da mangiare.

A typical instance of this attitude is given
later when, after his first walk in the garden,
he is excited to immediatamente D'Annunzio
lyrism over the spectre of an insect de-
icing the heart of a white rose. This subli-
mated sensuality is, in reality, that very
ill which he laments in another passage as

Il male che ha devastato tanta parte della
mia esistenza, che ha gustato tanta mia ricchezza,
ha avvinto tanta mia felicità, e ha affluito tanta
mio Impatto, difettando tanta
mia opera, distrutto tanti germi, contemnendo
la morte di un deceduto, e ha messo in pericolo
male originale, il mio male credibile, ecco,
forse per la prima volta, accumulato, isolato, con-
ferito in me, e mi duole come dol gene
l'infezioni mortali.

Images, images, images, some fantastic,
some magnificent, all passionate—such is
the work of D'Annunzio; and such is
“Notturno” at the outset of which, typically,
in describing his method of writing in bed,
and in motionless and in silence, he has
claiming: “Sento in tutta la mia attitudine
la rigidità di uno scriva egizio scolpito nel
baselae.” It is for us, then, to choose the
images which we like the best. The long
drawn-out narration of the death of the
airman Miraglia and the poet's ego of mourning
will hardly be one of these; nor shall
we say be likely to feel with the poet who,
contemplating the aeroplane in which three
pilots met their death, mounts it and almost
ejects it over the death which, but for a
chance, would have been a failure. We shall
turn rather to his account of his return
from exile to his home at Pescara, dominated
by the figure of his another who found him
only to lose him once again; to the memory
of his first horse so and his death in the stable
while he and the other children sat on the
dusk descending upon his garden in the Versilia.
In passages like these D'Annunzio preserves
undamaged his intense lyrical powers,

His exuberant turbing as to be exqui-
lates and belies away from theمال
of the man to theمال
like Chaucer.
"law of kind
ness which
Balza puts
realism
tales among
here, at least,
It is as though
sufficed to turn
even a charm re-
sulted in the
sudden flash at
the last page
of "Contes," as
he put with col-
our.

Here, in a very
subtle, and
of turning Bal-
spending English
respecting trans-
port carried it through
sense of an arti-
the labour of
vivacity and
ciety enjoyed. The
most striking
have appeared
Crawford has de-
fourteenth-centur-
seventeenth-centur-
the book, and
Suecubus," he
Moorish girl ran
she had been pri-
timely death by
catholic
by a succubus,
cess and nar-
dation. The whi-
some sentimen-
t of the
natural "law of
Chaucer; and
Mr. Crawford
used to
society which
he had not
argued with
sorrows, but
wrote better
—since in gen-
eral Rabelaisian
accent into whi-
lam atmosphere.

We must put
with Balza to al-
lay the easy
lorn goldsmith,
so,
Aussy, aujour-
des femmes qu'el
nottoyt pour
e Tourangeau s'en
comme ung poe-
sant, et il est
muni muir d'une
mire tiendroy
toiles, me racou-
dans la maison
faire tont
elles disent to-
ung joyau: "He
oec, c'est-cox pa-

22 TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT,

THURSDAY, JANUARY 5, 1922.
poet breathes on them and

UNIQUENESS, WITH A NOTE
ON VERS LIBRE.

Criticism will do itself a serious disservice if it allows the doctrine of the uniqueness of every work of art to become an obsession. Every work of art is individual, but every butterfly is also individual, and so is every human being. Nevertheless we distinguish Red Admirals *en bloc* from Painted Ladies, we distinguish butterflies from beetles, animals from men, and among men, where our sense of individuality is very marked, we easily distinguish the Frenchman from the German and both from ourselves. We do not ignore individuality when we treat of the broader characteristics, which makes classification possible; on the contrary, until we have classified, until we recognize types, the essence of the individual necessarily eludes us; what assurance have we that the traits which are superficially salient are those in which individuality is expressed? Generalization is in one aspect a guide through the labyrinth of conventional and other wrappings to the core, the suffusing, vitalizing principle which is unique in every living thing.

It is the same in art. Every work is either a unity or a nullity; every work is itself and nothing else. Agreed. But the problem for criticism is to discover, in presence of a certain complex of sensations x, whether there is unity or no, and, if there is, what is its nature. This cannot be done without recourse to the faculties of comparison, generalization, and analysis. We distinguish music from poetry, without prejudice to our conviction that every poem, every movement, is unique. We go on and distinguish in music different styles and methods, the sonata, the fugue, the rhapsody, and in poetry the sonnet, the idyll, the ode. We go farther; we perceive that poets and composers are of their time. That they write as they do because of their position in a developing or a receding line of expression, because the thought and feeling of the mass of their contemporaries was subdued or enthusiastic, blunt or fine. We recognize that Mozart was not Mozart only, but the successor of Haydn, the precursor of Beethoven, and that Beethoven's task was conditioned by the fact that Bach, Haydn, and Mozart had preceded him. Indeed, the more delicate our appreciation of individuality, the more clearly we see that the expression of it is conditioned. The artist cannot be fully known in isolation; and his work, even when we have placed it historically, must submit still to this final qualification of its uniqueness, that it is his. Three lines of Shakespeare, three bars of Beethoven, declare their origin to the accustomed ear. There has been no artist yet who has not in all that he has done repeated himself.

If it were indeed the function of criticism to declare the incomparability of every work, there could be no criticism in future; for about the incomparable nothing can be said. But the truth is, on the contrary, that criticism is essentially a study in comparisons. It is, if you will, our way of preparation and initiation, enabling us to discern the touch of the unique when it comes, so that we may not waste our responsiveness in vague and ignorant raptures, nor imagine an experience to be significant because we have not ourselves encountered the like of it before. And what is true of the attitude of the critic as he reflects upon art and judges it is not less true of the artist himself as a creator. In isolation, he is helpless; he cannot begin at the beginning, however much he may desire to do so; he can only be himself if he will consent to be the follower

spontaneous or indisciplined either in intention or in fact. The verses of H.D., as, for instance, in HYMEN (The Egoist Press, 3s. net), are a striking example of the opposite tendency. She has not abjured metre nor even rhyme; and if she generally avoids regular recurrences, it is not because a set tune demands too much of the poet, but because in her view it demands too little. In the high court of beauty where she serves the forms of our verse are arraigned less for what they forbid than for what they allow: they are vulgar licences, which they bathos; a suggestion that the attainment of beauty is facile and normal, whereas

beauty is set apart,
beauty is cast by the sea
a barren rock,
beauty is set about
with wrecks of ships.

"What to me is all the beauty of Greece!" she cries to an imaginary friend who has flinched before the isolation, the self-discipline, demanded of the true votary:—

what are the islands to me
if you hesitate,
what is Greece, if you draw back
from the terror
and cold splendour of song
and its bleak sacrifice?

If such verse as this is "free" in form, it is only in order that it may find the one form which belongs to it, that it may finally leave behind it the distinction between form and substance and allow the poet's intuition to shape itself in inevitable words. The form is to have, not the case and freedom of conventional poetry, but the strictness and rigour of a unique creation. It is not very difficult, in reading and savouring H. D.'s work, to recognize the delicacy and sharpness of her chisel-strokes. That she is deliberately handling a dangerous fool, and handling it with judgment and purpose, we are quite soon aware. Then why is it that, when we come to ask ourselves to what end she is working and what her art or any example of it amounts to, our perplexity is so great? Surely because it is as hard for us to follow her along the path of her originality as it was for her to open up the way. The conventional forms of poetry are after all a language, a code of communications. The idea of a code is inartistic if you will, but, since it has been admitted, must not its consequences be admitted with it? The poet in making use of words commits himself to the acceptance not only of conventional symbols, but of age-long associations also. The substance of his poem must be communicated to us by means of a system of irrelevancies, which he accepts because he could not otherwise communicate it at all. To be strict with himself, to be the ideal artist, he ought to create for each poem the language appropriate to it; but, if he did, we should not understand him. And so the question arises, or recurs, why, if he consents to employ the words we know, he should not consent to employ also the forms we know, since they too offer themselves as a means of communication? Words in common use are earth-bound and lifeless; the poet breathes on them and makes them live. The conventional forms of verse are likewise commonly mere corpses and skeletons, but they live when life is breathed into them, and then, because we know the forms, we feel the life immediately. To reject them is to move in the direction of the unique, the incomparable, the incommunicable; it is to take a perilous turn.

H. D. is not unaware of these perils, and her contention would be that they are a part of the price of beauty. She is haunted by a sense of the 'bitter remoteness of beauty from the life of men. Her world of beauty is such a world as she conceives Pheidias or Sophocles to have apprehended, and in her firm and fragile verses she reverberates

to declare the incomparability of every
work, there could be no criticism in future;
for about the incomparable nothing can be
said. But the truth is, on the contrary,
that criticism is essentially a study in com-
parisons. It is, if you will, our way of pre-
paration and initiation, enabling us to discern
the touch of the unique when it comes, so
that we may not waste our responsiveness in
vague and ignorant raptures, nor imagine
an experience to be significant because we
have not ourselves encountered the like of it
before. And what is true of the attitude of
the critic as he reflects upon art and judges
it is not less true of the artist himself as a
creator. In isolation, he is helpless; he
cannot begin at the beginning, however
much he may desire to do so; he can only be
himself if he will consent to be the follower
of those who have preceded him. The
pursuit of differences, the endeavour to be
unique, is more likely therefore to be a sign
of weakness than of strength in the artist.
It implies as a rule a sense of bondage to the
past and the impulse to seek expression by
avoidance of the means through which it
has previously been found. The whole
school of English vers librists are, broadly
speaking, seekers after singularity, and are
weak on that account. Their position is as
different from that of the French vers librists¹
as the conditions of poetical expression in
France are different from the conditions
among English-speaking peoples. Comparing
the poetry of the French with the poetry of
the Greeks or the Italians, we see that it
has sacrificed the human to the exquisite,
that it has tended to straiten itself and to
pursue its high perfections rigorously. There
is a balance to be redressed, therefore, and
the case of the literary revolutionaries is
strong. Straitness, rigour, perfection of form
have never been conspicuous qualities of
English poetical expression; we have no
chains to break, no prison to escape from.
The meaning of vers libre, its individuality,
the quality of its uniqueness, is, in conse-
quence, modified for us. To the French it
says primarily that poetry is not formality,
which is true; to us it says primarily that
poetry is informality, which is false. To
them it says, "The forms you have elected
and deified are forsaken shrines"; but how
can it say that to us, who have not deified
or elected anything? To us, inevitably, it
has a flavour of difference for difference sake;
its suggestion is that a work only resembles
other works by some sacrifice of individuality.
That is a popular thing to suggest at the
present time; it is a creed which is tempo-
rarily invading the province of criticism,
where, as we have seen, it is so peculiarly
out of place. It is a truth, but, like almost
all other truths, is of relative and not of
absolute importance.

So the English critic seems justified in
looking upon the exercise of vers libre with
suspicion and of demanding from it an appre-
ciable recompense for the pleasures of which
it deprives him. It is a protest, where there
is nothing to protest, a call for freedom in a
free country. Yet he must be on his guard
against supposing that vers libre is necessarily

a means of communication? Words in
common use are earth-bound and lifeless; the
poet breathes on them and makes them live.
The conventional forms of verse are likewise
commonly mere corpses and skeletons, but
they live when life is breathed into them, and
then, because we know the forms, we feel the
life immediately. To reject them is to move
in the direction of the unique, the incom-
parable, the incommunicable; it is to take a
perilous turn.

H. D. is not unaware of these perils, and
her contention would be that they are a part
of the price of beauty. She is haunted by
a sense of the 'bitter remoteness of beauty
from the life of men. Her world of beauty
is such a world as she conceives Pheidias
or Sophocles to have apprehended, and in
her firm and fragile verses she reverberates
faintly an echo of an echo of their works.
She combines in a remarkable degree pre-
cision of detail and clear presentment of
the symbol with a kind of mystification as to
the nature of the thing symbolized; and yet,
if we insist on penetrating, we find that the
thought is not so much itself distant as kept
at a distance, so that it may, as it were, derive
enchantment from the intervening atmo-
sphere, while the constituents of the beauty
which is finally revealed to us are mainly
physical. This looks like another indication
of the instinct, the research, for differences,
for uniqueness. The appearances of the Greek
world as we look back upon it are indeed
predominantly physical; but to them their
art was the instant expression of an encom-
passing beauty felt as spiritual, and we do not
really enter into the spirit of Greek work to-
day by reverting to a conception of beauty
the secret of which vanished from the world
with the lives that embodied it. They had
a simplicity which cannot be recovered.

There is, after all, no greater tragedy for
the artist than to be conscious of immeasur-
able gulfs dividing us from beauty. For is it
not his main function to remind men that
beauty hedges them in on every side, and
that, whatever may be the difficulty of sub-
duing brute matter to spiritual ends, it is
a difficulty which in the wonderful world we
inhabit has been overcome? The struggle,
the discipline by which a man must qualify
himself to solve the secret of expression, are
misunderstood if the effort, the bleakness,
remain in his expression when it is found.
The essence of beauty is graciousness, and that
alone is beautifully done which is effortlessly
done. The sunrise and sunset, the unfolding
leaves and flowers, delight us most of all by
the ease with which their miracle is accom-
plished. What is at once most incompre-
hensible in them and most moving is that
their beauty is a matter of course. The pain
and hardships, the iron discipline of all the
ages, have been endured, but they have also
been forgotten; and so the gift is not a gift
of beauty only, but of love as well.

2. JAMES LITBARY SUPPLEMENT

THE POEMS OF H. D.

HYMEN. By H. D. 8vo. 47 pages. Henry Holt and Company. $1.75.

THE poems of H. D. do not lend themselves to convenient classification, as Poems of Passion and Emotion, Poems of Reflection, Poems of the Imagination, and Poems Descriptive, and so on. In all of them, passion, emotion, reflection, and the image, the sharp, vivid image that does the work of description, are fused together in the burning unity of beauty. One or more element (it is hardly ever re"ection) may predominate, but it is never alone. You may call The Tribute, Pygmalion, Eurydice, The Cities, The Look-Out, The Cliff-Temple poems of reflection if you like. They are few and in none of them is the concept thinned away to an abstraction. H. D. invariably presents her subtlest, most metaphysical idea under some living sensuous image solid enough to carry the emotion. The air we are given to breathe may be rarefied to the last degree, yet we are moving always in a world of clear colours and clear forms. Like every devout imagist she is intolerant of thinness. Look where you will you will find everywhere the same joy in vigorous movement, the same adoration of divine visible beauty.

In H. D.'s work there is a rich sensuousness which has nothing florid about it or cloying, that has even a certain lucid, clean, auster-ity. Everywhere she cuts clean, she finishes. No loose ends, no blurred edges. There is, perhaps, no contemporary poet who has a finer sense of outline, none who can so constrain rich sensuousness to supersensuous form.

She has been reproached for her obscurity. She is certainly not afraid of the dark when darkness serves her purpose, where it is the essence of her subject or her mood. We must distinguish here be-tween obscurity of thought and obscurity of feeling. Whereas un-clarified thought means shallow thinking, emotion at a certain depth is obscure. It is only in her maturer work, if anywhere, that we find this quality. Her earlier poems have all the finite Greek perfection. Nothing can be added to or taken away from them. Every stroke is laid on with a hand that never hovers, never hesitates. Now, when

204

THE POEMS OF H. D.

a writer achieves formal perfection he is in danger either of standing
still, repeating his finest effects till he becomes his own irreproach-
able plagiarist, or of going back and back in a horrible decline. The
test of an enduring talent is its power to survive this moment. Tech-
nical perfection exists at the mercy of the unfolding spirit. At any
minute a flash of metaphysical vision can destroy it.

H. D. has escaped this disaster.

After the lucid, sharp simplicity of Sea-Roses, Sitalkas, and Her-
mes of the Ways, we have the comparative intricacy of The Tribute,
the comparative obscurity of Egypt, the largeness and mystery of
Demeter. The first named are poems of transition, and they may
well have these transitional defects. Nothing easier than to insist
on such blemishes; and nothing more unprofitable, since they are of
the kind the casual reader may be trusted to discover for himself.
When they begin to appear in the work of a poet distinguished for
the opposite qualities, the plain business of the critic is to search for
the causes of the change, and decide whether it signals the break-up
of a talent or some process of new birth.

Now, not one of H. D.'s earlier poems shows any tendency to
vagueness and obscurity. She has been, from the first, the perfect
imagist. And if the critic will go further and actually take the
trouble to find out what she is trying to express in these later forms,
the obscurity he complains of will vanish. He will see that, at the
worst, under the stress of a profounder vision, she is trying to put
into the image more than it can well convey.

But for the most part her medium, plastic and utterly obedient,
adapts itself. There is nothing tentative and experimental about
these last poems. They may stand for the final, accomplished ex-
pression of H. D. Comparing them with her earlier work, even ad-
mitting that they have lost something of its sharp simplicity, one
sees that she has gained immeasurably in depth and range.

Talents have died before now of their own growth for lack of a
form that allows expansion. I don't want to raise again the ques-
tion whether good verse is, as Mr Flint and Wordsworth maintain,
nothing but good prose. Only whereas with the writer of good
prose, however uninspired, language and meaning go evenly togeth-
er, the purely lyric poet who rhymes and metres is apt to be over-
taken by a dark rush of winged words before he is aware of his mean-
ing. For he is at the mercy of rhyme and metre. Not so the vers

S OF H. D.

he is in danger either of standing
but he becomes his own irreproach-
ably back in a horrible decline. The
her to survive this moment. Tech-
ology of the unfolding spirit. At any
time can destroy it.

The works of Sea-Roses, Sitalkas, and Her-
parative intricacy of The Tribute,
apt, the largeness and mystery of
poems of transition, and they may
not be more unprofitable, since they are of
the trusted to discover for himself.
His work of a poet distinguished for
business of the critic is to search for
whether it signals the break-up
of birth.

The poems shows any tendency to
have been, from the first, the perfect
work further and actually take the
to express in these later forms,
will vanish. He will see that, at the
sounder vision, she is trying to put
her convey.

In dium, plastic and utterly obedient,
tentative and experimental about
and for the final, accomplished ex-
ample with her earlier work, even ad-
thing of its sharp simplicity, one
practically in depth and range.

The growth of their own growth for lack of a
don't want to raise again the ques-
tion. Ir Flint and Wordsworth maintain,
whereas with the writer of good
language and meaning go evenly togeth-
erymes and metres is apt to be over-
words before he is aware of his mean-
rhyme and metre. Not so the vers

MAY SINCLAIR

librist. He is free to follow his thoughts in their own movement. Instead of twisting themselves in unnatural inversions or halting for the cadence and the rhyme, his thoughts are free. Before the dangerous inspiration is upon her H. D. has clarified her thought to its last transparency, and her future work should stand as high or higher than her past.

But here is her latest volume, Hymen.

I do not know which of these poems the London Times' critic was thinking of when he "experienced a difficulty in extracting any meaning from many of them." He names but two: Egypt and "Not Honey." I do not see that they justify his complaint; but I confess that at a first hasty reading I found certain passages in Demeter obscure. I even sent to the London Library for Miss Jane Harrison's Themis and Prolegomena to Greek Religion, in the hope that scholarship would throw some light. They have not come yet, and meanwhile I have read Demeter again more attentively and the darkness has lifted.

What puzzled me was Demeter's references to "her."

"she is slender of waist,
slight of breast, made of many fashions;
they have set her small feet
on many a plinth;
she they have known,
she they have spoken with,
she they have smiled upon,
she they have caught
and flattered with praise and gifts."

You will observe the obscurity was mine. It is clear as daylight
that this is Aphrodite, and that Demeter, the Earth Goddess, is pro-
claiming herself older, more august and mysterious than the graceful
Olympians.

"Sleep on the stones of Delphi—
dare the ledges of Pallas
but keep me foremost,
keep me before you, after you, with you,
never forget when you start

206

THE POEMS OF H. D.

for the Delphic precipice,
never forget when you seek Pallas
and meet in thought
yourself drawn out from yourself
like the holy serpent,
never forget
in thought or mysterious trance
I am greatest and least."

The baffling, cryptic touch is deliberate, a device for evoking
magic, for suggesting the unspeakable mysteries.

This fine poem just misses perfection owing to the abruptness and
comparative insignificance of its close.

But in the others there is nowhere any falling off. I find it hard
to choose among so many perfect things. For one you take you might
have taken almost any other. I cannot pass over the vigorous Sea-
Heroes with its sea-sound and sea-swell:

"Crash on crash of the sea,
straining to wreck men, sea-boards, continents,
raging against the world, furious . . ."

And there is the slender song rhyming on one note, The Whole
White World. There are Simaetha and Phaedra and She Rebukes
Hippolyta.

And there is Circe:

"Panther and panther,
then a black leopard
follows close—
black panther and red
and a great hound,
a god-like beast,
cut the sand in a clear ring
and shut me from the earth,
and cover the sea-sound
with their throats,
and the sea-roar with their own barks
and bellowing and snarls,

MAY

and the sea-stars
and the swirl of
and the rock-tan
and the wind res
but not your voice

These are the poems that the
less, “deadening and monotono
sentences capriciously cut into st

Sea-Garden, the six Choruses,
men, about seventy-six poems in
able thing is that any six, sele-
rough to establish H. D.'s rep
that with each year she has achie-
and intensity of vision. Whether
her technical perfection, or by th
can be no doubt that her place in
matters.

Only, a slight effort of attention
the significance of such poems as J
The creator of strange new bea
from anybody who undertakes to
much to ask? I don't imagine, f
strange new beauty is special and
not be cultivated by any lover of
desires to cultivate it. For beauty
nizable under all differences of for
that any devout lover of it should i
poetry. There is certainly nothing
surpasses these later poems, at first
so radiant, so crystalline. An auste
the quick beat of birds' wings, the
slow, magical movement of figures
Dionysus, carrying the *sacra*.

As for her detractors—"If beaut
would have killed her long ago, wh
Imagists.

MAY SINCLAIR

207

and the sea-stars
and the swirl of the sand,
and the rock-tamarisk
and the wind resonance—
but not your voice."

These are the poems that the critic of The Times found meaning-
less, "deadening and monotonous," indistinguishable from "prose
sentences capriciously cut into strips."

Sea-Garden, the six Choruses, a score of scattered things, and Hy-
men, about seventy-six poems in all (in nine years) and the remark-
able thing is that any six, selected almost at random, would be
rough to establish H. D.'s reputation. The significant thing is
that with each year she has achieved a wider range, a greater depth
and intensity of vision. Whether she is judged by that quality or by
her technical perfection, or by the sheer beauty of her form, there
can be no doubt that her place in literature is secure. No doubt that
matters.

Only, a slight effort of attention is needed to get at the magic and
the significance of such poems as I have quoted.

The creator of strange new beauty has a right to demand so much
from anybody who undertakes to pronounce judgement. Is it too
much to ask? I don't imagine, for example, that my own flair for
strange new beauty is special and extraordinary, a thing that could
not be cultivated by any lover of old familiar beauty who honestly
desires to cultivate it. For beauty is ageless, eternal and one, recog-
nizable under all differences of form. Therefore it is inconceivable
that any devout lover of it should miss the divine quality of H. D.'s
poetry. There is certainly nothing in contemporary literature that
surpasses these later poems, at first sight so splendidly dim, at last
so radiant, so crystalline. An austere ecstasy is in them. They have
the quick beat of birds' wings, the rise and fall of big waves, the
slow, magical movement of figures in some festival of Demeter or
Dionysus, carrying the *sacra*.

As for her detractors—"If beauty could be done to death" they
would have killed her long ago, when first she appeared among the
Imagists.

MAY SINCLAIR

S OF H. D.

ice,

u seek Pallas

om yourself

ous trance
"t."

deliberate, a device for evoking
able mysteries.

ction owing to the abruptness and
ose.

ere any falling off. I find it hard
ings. For one you take you might
cannot pass over the vigorous Sea-
swell:

a,

sea-boards, continents,
furious . . ."

hyming on one note, The Whole
na and Phaedra and She Rebukes

ner,

d

red

lear ring
the earth,
ound

ith their own barks
snarls,

THOUGHT AND VISION

225

turned out those light but pleasing
love stories for "McClure's" and some
of the women's magazines. She strikes
a deeper note now. But always she
lacks one important asset as a writer
— or so it seems to me. She has
merely taken her people in her hands,
impaled them on a pin, turned and
twisted them, laughed at them, studied
them, made them definite beings to
you and me—but never pitied them.
For a long while this interested one
reader, at least; for I had grown so
weary of the stupid optimism of cer-
tain lady novelists that it was refresh-
ing to run across someone of Sophie
Kerr's vivid personality who had the
courage to give us news of life as she
saw it. If people were hard and ter-
rible, with agate hearts, she revealed
them as they were. Brutality, as ma-
terial for stories, appealed to her;
and she was fearless in her delinea-
tion of the folk she had seen and ob-
served and analyzed.

Gradually she is acquiring, not,
thank God, sentimentality, but senti-
ment. She is getting a larger vision,
a saner outlook; and in her latest —
and to my mind her best—novel,
“One Thing Is Certain”, she shows a
sympathy for her hero and heroine
that hitherto has been absent from
her work.

How deftly she unfolds her story! She takes the old materials in her expert hands — the roustabout lover who refuses to be reformed, the country maiden who is adored by two men of opposite types, the lawless associates of the handsome hero, the darky servants, the maudlin girl who secretly loves the protagonist and all but tells him so — she takes this threadbare set of characters, and projects them into a drama as quaint and beautiful and exciting as anything I have read in a long time. She is clever enough to

realize that, with such people, she
must have a new and colorful back-
ground. She knows her Maryland
well; and she loves it with the ardor
of a convert, rather than of one who
was born and bred there. Her negroes
ring true—they talk as they should;
and her description of a revival meet-
ing is as perfect as anything could be.

There is some remarkably fine writ-
ing in this novel, and some of the old,
stinging phrases that only Sophie
Kerr can write. While it is not sen-
sational, there are scenes that cry out
to the longing camera man; I wager
the book is gobbled up by Hollywood
before it is many months old.

I would not have this author aban-
don her short stories; but she must
keep on giving us novels as good as
this, which seems to have written
itself.

One Thing Is Certain. By Sophie Kerr.
George H. Doran Company.

THOUGHT AND VISION

By Winifred Bryher

"A MERICA has more in common
with the South than England
has, its climate and flowers and tem-
perament are more akin." So an
American, writing of the visible world,
first of a Pennsylvanian childhood,
then of maturity in Italy and Greece,
links the two into a garden where
"the white Syrian iris" finds it no
hardship to be but a footstep past the
shining western laurel. Hyacinths and
the winter rose, the yellow flag and
the iris, are native to both continents.
But the children of "Hymen" are
American children, with a freshness
and freedom rarely to be found in
Europe. The little girls with their

226

THE BOOKMAN

quiver baskets are so sweetly serious — they understand what they sing. And the boys, the torch bearers, mar the play with no unseemly burning of each other's chitons. It all might happen, in any Pennsylvanian wood or along the stretch of coastline. And under the names, "Simaetha", "Circe", "Phaedra", is hidden a sensitiveness and an intensity the old world now breeds seldom. "Hymen", for all its title, is neither Greek nor English but American, in its flower-like sense of sympathy, in the intense passion of its rhythm.

"Cuckoo Song" and "Thetis" are anywhere near the sea' . . . hot sand, crisp waves, that mood of fearless-ness that comes at wind touch. "At Baia" is a sadder thing . . . the epi-taph of those discoverers who drop out by the wayside and build their home neither in their own country nor in the land they sought. The bitterness of adventure, and the glory, is chanted in "Helios", in the surf beats of "The Islands".

But beneath the obvious beauty of word and rhythm is stark thought, an equal balance of intellect and emotion. Is not a whole realm of modern research packed into the few lines, "Phaedra Rebukes Hippolyta", the present insistence that an abstraction may be as physical a passion as anything that Leda or Simaetha felt?

The vision is harsh in its uncompromising sincerity. Not honey, not "old desire — old passion —" but the stern heat of steel, truth, the fact, unmisted by sentiment, these are the poet's insistent demand. "Demeter" could only have been wrung forth by the war and the oppression of the subsequent years. It is full of the artist's anger against injustice, against cruelty in the name of kindness that is often worse than death. And

"Prayer" at the end of the volume and the lines to wisdom (all fire of vio-lets) that begin the book, are free of that paralyzing distaste for life that has cut short the literary achievement of many of the younger writers.

Some have said that H. D.'s poetry is a cold thing, like a wave of the sea, or snow on the Albanian mountains. But are not these lines full of the sun baked longing of the south, hot only as flesh is hot, that has been bronzed by a Syrian sun?

Think, O my soul,
of the red sand of Crete;
think of the earth; the heat
burnt fissures like the great
backs of the temple serpents;
think of the world you knew;
as the tide crept, the land
burned with a lizard-blue
where the dark sea met the sand.

A wilder realm than Greece rises before the eyes as Phaedra burns her cones and knots of fir. And here is a lighter, cooler song, caught fluttering from the orange buds between the sun entangled branches.

From citron-bower be her bed,
Cut from branch of tree a-flower,
Fashioned for her maidenhead.

From Lydian apples, sweet of hue;
Cut the width of board and lathe.
Carve the feet from myrtle-wood.

Let the palings of her bed
Be quince and box-wood overlaid
With the scented bark of yew.

That all the wood in blossoming,
May calm her heart and cool her blood
For losing of her maidenhood.

Not cold, not remote, but a beacon to those who, in a destructive age, believe in life, "Hymen" is a long flight beyond the poet's earlier "Sea Garden" both in depth of thought and originality of vision.

Hymen. By H. D. Henry Holt and Co.