He gives us every detail of the filth, the dullness, and the agony of the trenches. His book is in its aim destructive. It is a great pamphlet against war. If posterity wishes to know what war was like during this period, it will discover the truth, not in Barrack-room Ballads, but in Mr. Sassoon's verse. The best poems in the book are poems of hatred. This means that Mr. Sassoon has still other worlds to conquer in poetry. His poems have not the constructive ardour that we find in the revolutionary poems of Shelley. They are utterances of pain rather than of vision. Many of them, however, rise to a noble pity-The Prelude, for instance, and Aftermath, the latter of which ends : Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at The night you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on Do you remember the rats; and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench, And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain? As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men? With dying eyes and lolling heads,--those ashen-grey Have you forgotten yet? . . . Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget. Mr. Sitwell's satires-which occupy the most interesting pages of Argonaut and Juggernaut-seldom take us into the trenches. Mr. Sitwell gets all the subjects he wants in London clubs and drawing-rooms. These "free-verse" satires do not lend themselves readily to quotation, but both the manner and the mood of them can be guessed from the closing verses of War-horses, in which the "septuagenarian butterflies" of Society return to their platitudes and parties after seeing the war through: But now They have come out. They have preened And dried themselves After their blood bath. Old men seem a little younger, Are longer than ever; Earrings weigh down aged ears; And Golconda has given them of its best. They have seen it through! Theirs is the triumph, And, beneath The carved smile of the Mona Lisa, False teeth Rattle Like machine-guns, In anticipation Of food and platitudes. Les Vieilles Dames Sans Merci! Mr. Sitwell's hatred of war is seldom touched with pity. It is arrogant hatred. There is little emotion in it but that of a young man at war with age. He pictures the dotards of two thousand years ago complaining that Christ did not die Like a hero With an oath on his lips, Or the refrain from a comic song— His own verse, however, seems to me to be hardly more in sympathy with the spirit of Christ than with the spirit of those who mocked him. He is moved to write by unbelief in the ideals of other people rather than by the passionate force of ideals of his own. He is a sceptic, not a sufferer. His work proceeds less from his heart than from his brain. It is a clever brain, however, and his satirical poems are harshly entertaining and will infuriate the right people. They may not kill Goliath, but at least they will annoy Goliath's friends. David's weapon, it should be remembered, was a sling, with some pebbles from the brook, not a pea-shooter. The truth is, so far as I can see, Mr. Sitwell has not begun to take poetry quite seriously. His non-satirical verse is full of bright colour, but it has the brightness, not of the fields and the flowers, but of captive birds in an aviary. It is as though Mr. Sitwell had taken poetry for his hobby. I suspect his Argonauts of being ballet-dancers. He enjoys amusing little decorations-phrases such as concertina waves "and The ocean at a toy shore His moonlight owl is surely a pretty creature from the unreality of a ballet: An owl, horned wizard of the night, Far from the forest cool, To find the star-entangled surface of a pool, Of stars. At the same time, here and there are evidences that Mr. Sitwell has felt as well as fancied. The opening verse of Pierrot Old gives us a real impression of shadows: The harvest moon is at its height, The evening primrose greets its light The mimic moon within its cup. Tall trees, as high as Babel tower, Thrown down their shadows to the flower- An ending to infinity. But there is too much of Pan, the fauns and all those other ballet-dancers in his verse. Mr. Sitwell's muse wears some pretty costumes. But one wonders when she will begin to live for something besides clothes. XXI.-LABOUR OF AUTHORSHIP LITERATURE maintains an endless quarrel with idle sentences. Twenty years ago this would have seemed too obvious to bear saying. But in the meantime there has been a good deal of dipping of pens in chaos, and authors have found excuses for themselves in a theory of literature which is impatient of difficult writing. It would not matter if it were only the paunched and flat-footed authors who were proclaiming the importance of writing without style. Unhappily, many excellent writers as well have used their gift of style to publish the praise of stylelessness. Within the last few weeks I have seen it suggested by two different critics that the hasty writing which has left its mark on so much of the work of Scott and Balzac was a good thing and almost a necessity of genius. It is no longer taken for granted, as it was in the days of Stevenson, that the starry word is worth the pains of discovery. Stevenson, indeed, is commonly dismissed as a pretty-pretty writer, a wordtaster without intellect or passion, a juggler rather than an artist. Pater's bust also is mutilated by irreverent schoolboys it is hinted that he may have done well enough for the days of Victoria, but that he will not do at all for the world of George. It is all part of the reaction against style which took place when everybody found out the æsthetes. It was, one may admit, an excellent thing to get rid of the æsthetes, but it was by no means an excellent thing to get rid of the virtue which they tried to bring into English art and literature. The æsthetes were wrong in almost everything they said about art and literature, but they were right in impressing upon the children of men the duty of good drawing and good words. With the condemnation of Oscar Wilde, however, good words became suspected of kinship with evil deeds. Style was looked on as the sign of minor poets and major vices. Possibly, on the other hand, the reaction against style had nothing to do with the Wilde condemnation. The heresy of stylelessness is considerably older than that. Perhaps it is not quite fair to call it the heresy of stylelessness: it would be more accurate to describe it as the heresy of style without pains. It springs from the idea that great literature is all a matter of first fine careless raptures, and it is supported by the fact that apparently much of the greatest literature is so. If lines like ог or Hark, hark! the lark at Heaven's gate sings, When daffodils begin to peer, His golden locks time hath to silver turned, shape themselves in the poet's first thoughts, he would be a manifest fool to trouble himself further. Genius is the recognition of the perfect line, the perfect phrase, the perfect word, when it appears, and this perfect line or phrase or word is quite as likely to appear in the twinkling of an eye as after a week of vigils. But the point is that it does not invariably so appear. It sometimes cost Flaubert three days' labour to write one perfect sentence. Greater writers have written more hurriedly. But this does not justify lesser writers in writing hurriedly too. Of all the authors who have exalted the part played in literature by inspiration as compared with labour, none has written more nobly or with better warrant than Shelley. "The mind," he wrote in the Defence of Poetry the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; the power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious |