It seems hardly worth while to return to Wheels.  Once the argument has been pitched on the plane of ‘Strange Meeting,’ the rest of the contents of the book become irrelevant.  But for the sake of symmetry we will characterise the corporate flavour of the opposition as false sophistication.  There are the same contemporary reminiscences.  Compare Mr Osbert Sitwell’s English Gothic with Mr T.S.  Eliot’s Sweeney; and you will detect a simple mind persuading itself that it has to deal with the emotions of a complex one.  The spectacle is almost as amusing as that of the similar process in the Georgian book.  Nevertheless, in general, the affected sophistication here is, as we have said, merely irritating; while the affected simplicity of the coalition is positively noxious.  Miss Edith Sitwell’s deliberate painted toys are a great deal better than painted canvas trees and fields, masquerading as real ones.  In the poems of Miss Iris Tree a perplexed emotion manages to make its way through a chaotic technique.  She represents the solid impulse which lies behind the opposition in general.  This impulse she describes, though she is very, very far from making poetry of it, in these not uninteresting verses:—­

  ’But since we are mere children of this age,
  And must in curious ways discover salvation
  I will not quit my muddled generation,
  But ever plead for Beauty in this rage.

  ’Although I know that Nature’s bounty yields
  Unto simplicity a beautiful content,
  Only when battle breaks me and my strength is spent
  Will I give back my body to the fields.’

There is the opposition.  Against the righteous man, the mauvais sujet.  We sympathise with the mauvais sujet.  If he is persistent and laborious enough, he may achieve poetry.  But he must travel alone.  In order to be loyal to your age you must make up your mind what your age is.  To be muddled yourself is not loyalty, but treachery, even to a muddled generation.

[DECEMBER, 1919.

The Nostalgia of Mr Masefield

Mr Masefiled is gradually finding his way to his self-appointed end, which is the glorification of England in narrative verse. Reynard the Fox marks we believe, the end of a stage in his progress to this goal.  He has reached a point at which his mannerisms have been so subdued that they no longer sensibly impede the movement of his verse, a point at which we may begin to speak (though not too loud) of mastery.  We feel that he now approaches what he desires to do with some certainty of doing it, so that we in our turn can approach some other questions with some hope of answering them.

The questions are various; but they radiate from and enter again into the old question whether what he is doing, and beginning to do well, is worth while doing, or rather whether it will have been worth while doing fifty years hence.  For we have no doubt at all in our mind that, in comparison with the bulk of contemporary poetry, such work as Reynard the Fox is valuable.  We may use the old rough distinction and ask first whether Reynard the Fox is durable in virtue of its substance, and second, whether it is durable in virtue of its form.