re a quiet recitative was what the
theme demanded and his art could not ensure.

'Death himself in the rain ... death himself ...
Death in the savage sunlight ... skeletal death ...
I hear the clack of his feet,
Clearly on stones, softly in dust,
Speeding among the trees with whistling breath,
Whirling the leaves, tossing his hands from waves ...
Listen! the immortal footsteps beat and beat!...'

We are persuaded that Mr Aiken did not mean to say that; he wanted to
say something much subtler. But to find exactly what he wanted might
have taken him many months. He could not wait. Up rushed the rhetoric;
bang went the cymbals: another page, another book. And we, who have seen
great promise in his gifts, are left to collect some inadequate
fragments where his original design is not wholly lost amid the poor
expedients of the moment. For Mr Aiken never pauses to discriminate. He
feels that he needs rhyme; but any rhyme will do:--

'Has no one, in a great autumnal forest,
When the wind bares the trees with mournful tone,
Heard the sad horn of Senlin slowly blown?'

So he descends to a poetaster's padding. He does not stop to consider
whether his rhyme interferes with the necessary rhythm of his verse; or,
if he does, he is in too much of a hurry to care, for the interference
occurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric
and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the
thematic outline itself emerges.

In short, Mr Aiken is, at present, a poet whom we have to take on trust.
We never feel that he meant exactly what he puts before us, and, on the
whole, the evidence that he meant something better, finer, more
irrevocably itself, is pretty strong. We catch in his hurried verses at
the swiftly passing premonition of a _frisson_ hitherto unknown to us in
poetry, and as we recognise it, we recognise also the great distance he
has to travel along the road of art, and the great labour that he must
perform before he becomes something more than a brilliant feuilletonist
in verse. It is hardly for us to prophesy whether he will devote the
labour. His fluency tells us of his energy, but tells us nothing of its
quality. We can only express our hope that he will, and our conviction
that if he were to do so his great pains, and our lesser ones would be
well requited.

[SEPTEMBER, 1919.

_Ronsard_

Ronsard is _range_ now; but he has not been in that posi