Love is the hardest where all things are hard." "I make no question of your right to goRain and swift lightning, thunder, and the sea, Sand and dust and ashes are less free! Follow all paths that wings and spread sails know, Unheralded you came, and even so, If so you will, you may take leave of me, Yours is your life, and what you will shall be. I ask no questions: hasten or be slow!" "I shall not sing again of love I weary of the old unrest. (But like a hangman, Love has set His crimson emblem on my breast;)" "The stars are colored blossoms on a stormshaken tree, The moon a wanton sheperdess that wanders apart." DIRGE "Though you should whisper Of what made her weep, She would not hear you: She is asleep. "Though you should taunt her With ancient heart-break, She would not listen: She is awake. "Passion would find her Too cold for dishonor, Candles beside her, Roses upon her." CHOICE "I set on this barren board (Yours is the choice, not mine) The bread and leeks for your hunger's ease, The unacknowledged wine. "No protests-no demands Always there shall be The driftwood fire that warms your hands, SPRING "And in my heart A root long-buried Puts forth a delicate frond." OUT OF MY TURBULENT DAYS Out of gray grief and black wrong, "I shall make it light as a bird, So it may tell me what youth was, These are not the best poems in "SeaChange". One could select a score of passages and nearly a dozen lyrics as good as these and some better. There is excellence of a rare order, in whole or in part, in these lyrics from which I have not quoted: "Mellilot," "What Is Love Like?" "As Helen Once," "Lips You Were Not Anhungered For", "I Am So Glad That You Are Dead', "A Woman's Song", "A Song of Happiness", "Mid-Western", some of the sonnets in "Foreword", and others, including "San Cristobal" which appeared last year in The Double Dealer. is made up of brief critical studies of about history as most of the old school the books and authors. The rise of a new literary school is always a matter of interest, and the study of its origin and development is well worth while. Mr. Guedalla is himself one of the principal representatives of a new school, one which may prove to be a tidal wave of importance compared to the gentle ripples created by the autobiographical novelties. Ever since history began to be written the historian has eschewed humor, even in its most innocuous forms; and the satirist has collaborated to the extent of shunning history as he would the plague. When a Voltaire, a Swift, or, at a later date, an Anatole France wished to make his audience smile at the antics of governments he picked some mythical land, some Island of Penguins, where, unhampered by dates, dynasties, or delicacy, he could give free reign to his fancy. This condition of things did no harm to the Voltaires, the Swifts, and the Anatole Frances, to be sure, but it was responsible for some terribly dull histories. How many people can remember that once with childish curiosity and confidence they took from the shelf the first volume of Green's Short Hisory of the English People, or Grote's, History of Greece, or Guizot's, History of France, to mention three of the "Gs," only to acquire a life long disgust for anything known as history. historians. This was amply demon- One often reads a paragraph with the remark, "I've often said that myself"; but how seldom and with what joy one says, "I wish I had said that myself." You will find much in Masters and Men which you have said yourself, but never quite in the way that Mr. Guedalla says it. For my own part, the chapter on Switzerland called "The Soldiery", pleased me the most. I have visited that country several times and have amused myself by making fun of the land and its people. Yet upon contributing Zwingli to the last page of reading, "apart from the distinction of every encyclopaedia, it wears singularly few honours in the European record ....the national Valhalla....must con tain little beyond the unheroic figures discovers with half a shock that the of MM. Nestlé and Suchard.... Yet one upper valleys of the Alps were not always populated by a race ready to Mr. Guedalla knows quite as much oblige with an echo or some edel weiss...." my little jokes about the Swiss railways being in reality only subways; and speculations as to whether Switzerland isn't really larger than the United States if it was only ironed out flat; seem a bit wanting in vigor. rapher and his quotations from the Life of Monseigneur Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, are priceless. "His biographer strove gallantly to remind us by scraps EVAPORATION (Evaporation, by Mark Turbyfill and Samuel Putnam. Modern Review, 1923.) His remarks about the biog-E of French that the scene was laid in France. He even observed, a shade un kindly, that Darboy 'was always the piece de resistance of a large circle.' But when he speaks of a lady's 'picadillos' he creates a grave doubt as to whether he means a small variety of bull-fighter or a central part of London." Other essays on Viscount Grey, Lieutenant-Colonel Repington, Max Beerbohm, Mr. and Mrs. Webb, the critics, Disraeli, George Saintsbury, Dean Inge, and Chesterton are worthy of particular praise. It must be repeated that with Mr. Guedalla, this humor clothes a keen critical knowledge. In no sense is it pure horseplay, but its use is to gain a hearing for true scholarship. At the present time Guedalla and Lytton Strachey are the leaders of a movement which may some day make readable, books on the most obtuse subjects. It is impossible to visualize how far this movement may go. Is it a mystic marriage of Momus and Clio which will be followed by further delightful if bigamous relations of this most charming of the Gods and all the daughters of Appollo? If so Strachey is the presiding priest, but the little cupid above the nuptual couch is Guedalla. IRVING GUMBEL. VEN the critics who lean rather sympathetically toward modern art-Mr. Craven is one-are inclined to point out the limitations of abstractionism in painting, which are generally the contradictions involved in supposing that a highly individualized posing that a form, such as the verse of Samuel Putnam reaches for in this book, can ever multiply itself and found what is called a tradition in the arts. The irrelevancy of the "ideational" in poetry, which Gorham B. Munson reminded us of a year ago with perhaps too great a sense of discovery, is a part of the questionable program announced and performed by the authors of "Evaporation." The ideational meanings of words, fettering ordinary mortals with clay feet to an earth-bound logic, are the very lines of thought that "cross to produce the crucifying jazz of the ages:" "The daily crucifixions of matter must be penetrated and evaporated to be known as the highly decorative procession of shadow-patterns that they really are. These in turn are but the gauzy ghosts and deliquescent replicas of Beauty herself." It is impossible not to credit the sincerity of these two poets. Coming out of Chicago, where the stench of writhing flesh and the hoarse cries of an in articulate civilization throw the sensitive mind back on a discordant pluralism, "Evaporation" tries for a unity beyond the immediate contacts of life and emerges as a kind of grotesque Platonism. Perhaps they are aware, heedless, that a Platonism which ignores the ethical implications of the Idea, or the Immutable Types, becomes an abstract intellectualism that had better take to mathematics or suffer the risk of falling into platitude or gibberish: "highly decorative shadow patterns", stripped of emotional flexibility, cannot be presented in words; the medium is mathematics. In spite of the gyroscoping platitudes in the introductory "Obstetric of the Idea," Mr. Turbyfill is enabled to offer "Coryphee", "Apples", and "The Metaphysical Botanists" and "Dalliance before Destruction", like an Elegy from Propertius. Mr. Putnam, in his "Kitchen Symphony" and "Seductions of a Mirror" is so far beyond me that I fear I can reach him only with the weak tentacle of a smile: "Arrogance is a masque contemptuously over a mirror pompously hung The metaphysics of a rape I'm sure would set you all agape. "It seeks the esoteric mating of the opaque," as Putnam puts it himself. But there's another side to the question: "Evaporation" is a bold and briliant experiment. It may not have any permanent significance for poetry, but it is certain that the authors committed themselves to mortality knowing precisely what they were about. ALLEN TATE. MR. LAWRENCE'S LATEST (Kangaroo, by D. H. Lawrence. Thomas Seltzer, 1923.) HE background of Mr. Lawrence's THE latest novel, "Kangaroo", is Australia. Against this unfamiliar ground, is projected a set of characters that the reader of Mr. Lawrence's fiction will immediately recognize as typical. So that when Richard Lovatt Somers, "a strange little bloke", and Harriett, his wife, "so blissfully unconscious of people on the other side of hedges", both new from England, move into a bungalow in suburban Sydney and become acquainted with Jack and Victoria Calcott the couple next door, the reader of Mr. Lawrenc's fiction knows the sort of situation to expect. Nor is he disappointed, for in the following chapter-"When Somers entered the living room at Wyewurk (the Calcott bungalow), Jack looked up at him with a smile and a glow in his dark eyes, almost like love." However, the reactions of Jack and Somers to each other, and of the Calcotts and Somers generally, are subsidiary. It is with the introduction of Somers to Kangaroo that the plot emerges. Kangaroo is not a Kangaroo but a man who reminds you of one. He is head of a secret political organization, which aims to set him up as a sort of dictator so that he may regenerate Australiawhy this is desirable or in what way it is to be done is left nebulous. Jack takes Somers to see him. Here, in part, is Somers' impression of the man: "A wonderful thing for a sculptor. For Kangaroo was really ugly: his pendulous Jewish face, his forward stooping shoulders, his round stomach in its expensively tailored waistcoat and dark grey, striped trousers, his very big thighs. And yet even his body was beautiful, to Somers-one might love it you love me now you've done it, and I won't hate you for it." Somers turns his face aside and says "No, I can't say it." intensely, every one of its contours, its ers "You've killed me. You've killed roundnesses and downward-drooping me, Lovatt! Say good-bye to me. Say heaviness. Almost a grotesque, like a Chinese Buddha. And yet not a groAnd yet not a grotesque. Beautiful, beautiful as some half-tropical, bulging flower from a tree."...." Why the man is like a god, I love him', he said to his astonished self. And Kangaroo was smiling heavily and ambiguously to himself, knowing that Somers was with him." There are several subsequent meet ings between the two, which end usually in rows. Later, when Kangaroo is shot in the abdomen during a political riot, he sends for Somers. The death-bed scene is in the core of the novel. Somers holds back from Kangaroo, as previously he had held back from Jack. "Yet he wanted some living fellowship with other men; as it was he was just isolated. Maybe a living fellowship!but not affection, not love, not comradeship. Not mates and equality and mingling. Not blood-brotherhood. None of that....Some other living relationship-But what? He did not know. Perhaps the thing that the dark races know that one can still feel in India: the mystery of lordship. That which white men have struggled so long against, and which is the clue to the life of the Hindu. The mystery of lordship. The mystery of innate, natural, sacred priority. The other mystic relationship between men, which democrary and equality try to deny and obliterate. Not any arbitrary caste or birth aristocracy. But the mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority." Yet when the dying Kangaroo says to Som With the death of Kangaroo, Somers and Harriett wait for the next steamer to America, for a change. As Harriett observes to Jaz, Jack's brother-in-law, of her husband "You'd think to hear him he was nothing but a tea-pot brewing metaphysical tea. As a matter of fact Kangoroo went awfully deep with him, and now he's heart-broken, and that's why he's rushing to America." In the delineation of his curious characters and the handling of his peculiar situations Mr. Lawrence is infinitely adept. The portrait of Kangaroo is masterly. And Somers, Harriett, Jack, Victoria, and Jaz (introduced, probably, for variety) are all vivid and sharply personal. The "feel" of the country, too, is admirably given through Somers and Harriett's perception. Here, too, are all the peculiarities of Mr. Lawrence's manner-the conversational style; the lyric flight; the tone of high seriousness often at variance with the thing treated; the frequence of image, not always so effective as the following: "he felt a long navel string fastening him to Europe." What hurts the story is the too frequent insertion of chunks of description and repetitive dialogue. Clogging, also, are the chapters (in the nature of a movie flash-back) of Somers' reactions during the great war; the chapter called "Bits"; and the clumsy intrusion of the first person at the beginning of Chapter XV. With these eliminated, |