en brightly innocent
of it. And as in addition our smaller minds will be overborne by the
startling activity and cool power of the prose of such a writer as Swift,
its superiority will only enhance our complaining grief.

VII. The Modern Mind

JULY 6, 1918. A Symphony in Verse has just come to me from America. The
picture on its wrapper shows a man in green tights, and whose hair is
blue, veiling his eyes before a lady in a flame-coloured robe who stares
from a distance in a tessellated solitude. As London two days ago
celebrated Independence Day like an American city, and displayed the
Stars and Stripes so deliriously that the fact that George III was ever a
British king was lost in a common acknowledgment that he was only another
violent fool, this Boston book invited attention. For ladies in gowns of
flame, with arms raised in appeal, may be supposed to want more than the
vote; and American poets wearing emerald tights who find themselves in
abandoned temples alone with such ladies, must clearly have left Whittier
with the nursery biscuits. Longfellow could never grow blue locks. Even
Whitman dressed in flannel and ate oranges in public. Nor did Poe at his
best rise to assure us:

"This is the night for murder: give us knives:
We have long sought for this."

Well, not all of us. The truth is some of us have not sought for knives
with any zest, being paltry and early Victorian in our murders. Yet in
this symphony in verse, _The Jig of Forslin_, by Mr. Conrad Aiken, there
are such lines as these:

"When the skies are pale and stars are cold,
Dew should rise from the grass in little bubbles,
And tinkle in music amid green leaves.
Something immortal lives in such air--
We breathe, we change.
Our bodies become as cold and bright as starlight.
Our hearts grow young and strange.
Let us extend ourselves as evening shadows
And learn the nocturnal secrets of these meadows."

It is not all knives and murder. The Jig, in fact, dances us through a
world of ice lighted by star gleams and Arctic streamers, where sometimes
our chill loneliness is interrupted by a woman whose "mouth is a sly
carnivorous flower"; where we escape the greenish light of a vampire's
eyes to enter a tavern where men strike each other with bottles. Mermaids
are there, and Peter and Paul, and when at last Mr. Aiken feels the
reader may be released, it is as though we groped in the dark, bewildered
and alarmed,