strong rhythm is in Hardy.  But the virtue eludes all conscious inquisition.  The man who seeks it feverishly sees riot where there is peace.  And may it not be, in the long run, that Mr Masefield would have done better not to delude himself into an identification he cannot feel, but rather to face his own disquiet where alone the artist can master it, in his consciousness?  We will not presume to answer, mindful that Mr Masefield may not recognise himself in our mirror, but we will content ourselves with recording our conviction that in spite of the almost heroic effort that has gone to its composition Reynard the Fox lacks all the qualities essential to durability.

[JANUARY, 1920.

The Lost Legions

One day, we believe, a great book will be written, informed by the breath which moves the Spirits of Pity in Mr Hardy’s Dynasts.  It will be a delicate, yet undeviating record of the spiritual awareness of the generation that perished in the war.  It will be a work of genius, for the essence that must be captured within it is volatile beyond belief, almost beyond imagination.  We know of its existence by signs hardly more material than a dream-memory of beating wings or an instinctive, yet all but inexplicable refusal of that which has been offered us in its stead.  The autobiographer-novelists have been legion, yet we turn from them all with a slow shake of the head.  ’No, it was not that.  Had we lost only that we could have forgotten.  It was not that.’

No, it was the spirit that troubled, as in dream, the waters of the pool, some influence which trembled between silence and a sound, a precarious confidence, an unavowed quest, a wisdom that came not of years or experience, a dissatisfaction, a doubt, a devotion, some strange presentiment, it may have been, of the bitter years in store, in memory an ineffable, irrevocable beauty, a visible seal on the forehead of a generation.

    ’When the lamp is shattered. 
  The light in the dust lies dead—­
    When the cloud is scattered
  The rainbow’s glory is shed. 
    When the lute is broken,
  Sweet tones are remembered not...’

Yet out of a thousand fragments this memory must be created anew in a form that will outlast the years, for it was precious.  It was something that would vindicate an epoch against the sickening adulation of the hero-makers and against the charge of spiritual sterility; a light in whose gleam the bewildering non-achievements of the present age, the art which seems not even to desire to be art, the faith which seems not to desire to be faith, have substance and meaning.  It was shot through and through by an impulse of paradox, an unconscious straining after the impossible, gathered into two or three tremulous years which passed too swiftly to achieve their own expression.  Now, what remains of youth is cynical, is successful, publicly exploits itself.  It was not cynical then.