occurs again and again. And these disturbances and deviations, rhetoric
and the sacrifice of rhythm to shoddy rhyme, appear more often than the
thematic outline itself emerges.

In short, Mr Aiken is, at present, a poet whom we have to take on trust.
We never feel that he meant exactly what he puts before us, and, on the
whole, the evidence that he meant something better, finer, more
irrevocably itself, is pretty strong. We catch in his hurried verses at
the swiftly passing premonition of a _frisson_ hitherto unknown to us in
poetry, and as we recognise it, we recognise also the great distance he
has to travel along the road of art, and the great labour that he must
perform before he becomes something more than a brilliant feuilletonist
in verse. It is hardly for us to prophesy whether he will devote the
labour. His fluency tells us of his energy, but tells us nothing of its
quality. We can only express our hope that he will, and our conviction
that if he were to do so his great pains, and our lesser ones would be
well requited.

[SEPTEMBER, 1919.




_Ronsard_


Ronsard is _rangé_ now; but he has not been in that position for so very
long, a considerably shorter time for instance, than any one of the
Elizabethans (excepting Shakespeare) with us. Sainte-Beuve was very
tentative about him until the sixties, when his dubious,