what had
happened and would happen in Michael's soul. He said: "One third of each
of your poems is good. And there are a few--the three last--which are
all good."

"Those," said Michael, "are only experiments."

"Precisely. They are experiments that have succeeded. That is why they
are good. Art is always experiment, or it is nothing. Do not publish
these poems yet. Wait and see what happens. Make more experiments. And
whatever you do, do not go to Germany. That School of Forestry would be
very bad for you. Why not," said Reveillaud, "stay where you are?"

Michael would have liked to stay for ever where he was, in Paris with
Jules Reveillaud, in the Rue Servandoni. And because his conscience
kept on telling him that he would be a coward and a blackguard if he
stayed in Paris, he wrenched himself away.

In the train, going into Germany, he read Reveillaud's "Poemes" and the
"Poemes" of the young men who followed him. He had read in Paris
Reveillaud's "Critique de la Poesie Anglaise Contemporaine." And as he
read his poems, he saw that, though he, Michael Harrison, had split with
"la poesie anglaise contemporaine," he was not, as he had supposed,
alone. His idea of being by himself of finding new forms, doing new
things by himself to the disgust and annoyance of other people, in a
world where only one person, Lawrence Stephen, understood or cared for
what he did, it was pure illusion. These young Frenchmen, with Jules
Reveillaud at their head, were doing the same thing, making the same
experiment, believing in the experiment, caring for nothing but the
experiment, and carrying it farther than he had dreamed of carrying it.
They were not so far ahead of him in time; Reveillaud himself had only
two years' start; but they were all going the same way, and he saw that
he must either go with them or collapse in the soft heap of rottenness,
"la poesie anglaise contemporaine."

He had made his own experiments in what he called "live verse" before he
left England, after he had said he would go to Germany, even after the
final arrangements had been made. His father had given him a month to
"turn round in," as he put it. And Michael had turned completely round.

He had not shown his experiments to Stephen. He didn't know what to
think of them himself. But he could see, when once Reveillaud had
pointed it out to him, that they were the stuff that counted.

In the train going into Germany he thought of certain things that
Reve