author is one of a select few in the United States, and it is to be hoped he will produce more of as high quality as the best in this first book. Passages in these poems seem to me to be among the finest in American verse.

Where Mr. Davidson learned his tricks makes little difference: whether he derives in part from T. S. Eliot, Edwin Arlington Robinson, or James Branch Cabell (a good poet). It seemed to me in some of the unsuccessful work

in "An Outland Piper" I recognized echoes from Kipling and De la Mare. Any undertones or overtones of reminiscense merely indicate that Mr. Davidson, like all good poets, was eclectic in his development.

He knows how to mould language:

A COSMIC COMEDY

(Saint Joan, by Bernard Shaw. New York City, 1924)

Brentano's

NE has come to have a depressing presentiment every time one picks up a Shaw review (and somebody is always writing one) that one is going again to see that frayed, that dog-eared commonplace about his preface being so very much better than his play. And one always does; because being a commonplace, it is true. It is a Puckish trick of Mr. Shaw to launch his play, pleasant or unpleasant, on to the critics, hear what they have to say about it (and those solemn and voluble gentlemen always say so much), then devastate them with a dazzling retort courteous in the form of a mighty preface to the published edition.

In the case of "Saint Joan", the drama gentlemen had outdone even themselves. They had delivered, via Romeike, bales of good advice at the door of Mr. Shaw, most of which bravely ignored the fact that he had himself written criticism as well as plays and might conceivably know almost as much about the theater as some of the people who had done very little of the first and none at all of the second. However, it was all very satisfactory to Mr. Shaw, as it gave him an opportunity to write a preface that will be remembered and read as an integral part of the Joan legend, long after his critics and probably his play are forgotten.

The preface is pure Shawese. In it, he is unmistakably the moralist, Fabianite, vegetarian, playwright, critic, Wagnerite, Ibsenite, jester to the cos mos and the most serious man on the

planet that James Huneker calleld him back in the late nineties when he was emerging from the Saturday Review and being engulfed in those peculiarly fine-print volumes in which his publishers have so consistently kept him.

There remains the play; a chronicle play, he terms it, wherein he, wise, sophisticated and cynical, chooses a mystic from the Middle Ages for his latest heroine. But it is not so paradoxical as it seems. Reality, one remembers, has never bothered Mr. Shaw. His characters have always had their being on lighter, more fantastic shores than ours-some high plateau, remote and chilly, where denizens of heaven and hell meet and talk interminably, or perhaps some glorified Roman arena where haughty emperors and no less haughty lions play at hide-and-go-seek. With this in mind, none need be surprised that such ancillary matters as Joan's voices give him little concern. There are, quoth Mr. Shaw in his own, his inimitable manner, people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visible figure. And that is all there is to Joan and those voices that have played such queer tricks with her reputation these five hundred years. Newton's imagination had been of the same vividly dramatic kind," continues Mr. Shaw ingratiatingly, "he might have seen the ghost of Pythagoras walk into the orchard and explain why the apples were falling. Such an illusion would have invalidated neither the theory of gravitation nor Newton's general sanity. What is more, the visionary method of making the discovery

"If

the

would not be a whit more miraculous than the normal method. The test of sanity is not the normality of the method, but the reasonableness of the discovery. If Newton had been informed by Pythagoras that the moon was made of green cheese, then Newton would have been locked up."

Thus simply does Mr. Shaw attempt to dispose of those troublesome voices. But perhaps he doth protest too much. Whatever may have been the real Joan's idea about them (and for five centuries, the mystery has been sealed in silence) few will believe that Mr. Shaw's Joan took very much stock in them. A vague but persistent impression remains that they were merely Joan's method of impressing the importance of her ideas on her contemporaries. Mr. Shaw could understand this; he has so often done the same thing with his own. And the change in time has brought only this change in manners that while Joan attributed her ideas to the saints, Mr. Shaw attributed his to the Continentals (preferably untranslated ones). Despite this, or perhaps because of it, he has, with his lingering cerebral femme complex, made Joan a thoroughly understandable and human figure. Clever beyond her age and time, she was yet crushed between the upper and nether stones of two vast and opposing forces, the old order and the new, of which she herself exemplified the new. Her death is not the climax of the play, but an incident; and is a tragedy merely from a personal, a hedonistic point of view. Before one is "not only the visible and human puppets but the Church, the Inquisition, the Feudal System, with divine inspiration always beating against

Mr. Dresbach is not a great poet, but he has written some short poems (several of which are in this volume) which are a genuine lyrical expression, characterized by a poignant wistfulness, a piercing personal sincerity and a bald rhythmic vitality like that of old songs. In this class of work Mr. Dresbach is a really good poet. In his sonnets he is, though not consistently, a pretty good poet. But his narratives, his contemplative and elegiac poems, his descriptions and his average lyrics (too many of which seem to stem from an intellectual conception simply rather than from a poetic urge) are, though sometimes fairly good, usually indifferent and often actually bad. He is not it seems to me, an instinctive craftsman in any form except the spontaneous lyric. His diction and his rhythms in any other form seem either studied and forced, or habitual. His forte is the song, and like all poets who write songs he pays the penalty of producing a dozen unsuccessful expressions for the sake of the occasional fine one. This is no disgrace. All lyrical poets-even Burns and Heine-have produced a quantity of rot.

Some of the charming lyrics in "The Enchanted Mesa" appeared originally in The Double Dealer, as did "Mardi Gras Night- Panama" and "To a Road Runner" among the sonnets. Also this magazine printed some of these verses which are not so good.

In the volume the best work seems to me to be "Wild Geese Over the Desert," "A Cock Crows Near the Desert," "Who Dreams and Feels Too Soon," "A Rainbow Over the Desert," "Spider, this web you have spun," "Not

to a Temple Dancer," "Calm Near the Desert," "To a Road Runner," "Mardi Gras Night-Panama," and two or three other poems. All the narratives seem ineffectual. "The Enchanted Mesa," the opening poem, has intellectual merit, but seems to me to fail as poetry except for a few passages, compared with the briefer lyrics. There is intellectual merit in a number of the other poems which I would class as indifferent or bad.

The following lines, already familiar to old subscribers to the Double Dealer are typical of Mr. Dresbach's lyrical expression:

A RAINBOW OVER THE DESERT

Distant-as rains that fell

Upon less wistful lands Has grown an arch for beauty Above these thirsting sands.

For it no buds may swell

And no new leaf may stir, Only it gives a splendor

Above things as they were.
Only-my heart can tell

Of change that I can trace
In lights upon the desert's
Deep-lined and weary face!

WILD GEESE OVER THE DESERT
From sunset, slowly fading

To misted beryl and blue Streaked with the melted topaz, The goose-wedge comes in view.

The boughs of twisted cedars
On ledges darkly sway,
Making a futile gesture
To rise and fly away.

Nothing will have begining
And nothing end in me,
For watching the geese fly over,
That any one may see.

Only my heart makes gesture,
Of lifting wings to go,
Like boughs of the twisted cedars
Dark on a fading glow.