tradition dora St. Sup fair t dects -ies, su me of Belisar arch. E chroms but as marate the be berts have b l" by the identification of man's fullest life with "striving The discussion of the General Will is hardly clearer. What we can conclude from all this is that the good citizen must obey the general will; but the general will is merely the right will, and of what is right he alone. must judge. But that a good citizen is one who does what he believes right we might have surmised with fewer words. And the doctrine is not only otiose, but dangerous, for in less impartial hands than Professor Watson's, by a natural equivocation between this ideal general will and the will of all or of the majority, it becomes a potent argument against independence and dissent. It is hard to help suspecting that the common good and the general will are merely two more devices for outlining our duties in advance, and saving us the painful consideration of actual conditions and the balance of conflicting obligations. Such a hope appeals to the laziness of us all, and perhaps its promise of rule and regularity is particularly attractive to scholars. But in the nature of the case it is as impossible as a test of truth which will save us from weighing the evidence or a rule of art to economize our critical judgment. There is much truth in Ruskin's phrase that "" No man ever knew, or can know, what will be the ultimate result to himself or others of any given line of conduct. But every man may know, and most of us do know, what is a just and unjust act"; and in John Grote's suggestion that we may just as well assume that the greatest good will result from doing what is right as that we are doing right if we pursue the greatest good. Professor Watson himself, however, makes no extreme claims for his theory. It is true that when he thinks of the good as consisting in doing right he says that the good of the individual and of the whole coincide; but in a wider sense of the word he only hopes piously, It may well be that the good of a State is identical with the good of mankind as properly conceived" (p. 216). With a similar modest optimism he urges that the ordinary voter, carried away by party catchwords, is really misled by a "light from heaven," since he mistakes what is pernicious for what is rational. On the whole, Professor Watson falls between two stools. We could wish he had devoted some consideration to the question whether, as distinct from moral philosophy, there is any theory of the State other than Ideal Republics and Utopias. Perhaps the State, like the family, is merely one complication in which we must do what seems right. E. F. C. E give LORD GREY'S FOREIGN POLICY HOW THE WAR CAME. By Earl Loreburn. (Methuen. 7s. 6d. net.) ARL LOREBURN'S book will almost inevitably rise to acrimonious controversy. His thesis is that Viscount Grey's policy between 1905 and 1914 not only made it impossible for us to avoid being involved in the European war, but bound the Government's hands at the crucial moment when, if they had been unfettered, they could almost certainly have prevented the war altogether. Whatever be one's personal views upon this thesis, it is impossible not to admit and to admire And it has the ability with which the book is written. something more than mere ability. We confess that, until we had read this volume, we never fully realized the meaning of "British Justice," as it has materialized in the best traditions of the Bench of Judges. It is an august and a terrible thing. Earl Loreburn's book is really the summing up of a British judge, scrupulously fair, but pitiless and relentless, against Viscount Grey. Every benefit of every doubt is given to the accused man, every loophole for his escape is scrupulously opened, and as relentlessly closed against him; and, as we listen to the lucid but weighty paragraphs dropping with their regular thud as if each was a hammer blow from the hand of fate, and as we watch the case accumulate and the victim stripped and penned in his corner, waiting hopelessly now for the inevitable verdict, we feel a clutch at the heart of fear and of pity for this miserable, but guilty, man. Lord Grey's guilt, however, as it appears in this case, is not that of any criminal intention. Earl Loreburn would acquit him and his policy of anything consciously or intentionally wrong. The book gives no kind of support to the German case against Britain as it appeared in the propaganda of the Kaiser's Government. Earl Loreburn's terrible indictment can be stated simply. He maintains that, when Viscount Grey agreed in 1905 to the "military and naval conversations between the French and British staffs, and when he concealed the fact from the Cabinet, he entered upon the slippery slope of a secret policy upon which he and the Cabinet and the nation and Europe imperceptibly descended towards the "inevitable war. For those secret conversations led to an agreement as to the disposition of the British and French fleets, and hence to an obligation of honour" which really bound us to support France if she became involved in war with Germany. And since France was bound by treaty to Russia, that meant that we had no longer kept our hands free in the wilderness of continental policy we had in fact slipped into an entangling alliance, for, if Russian policy involved the Tsar's Government in war with Austria and Germany, France would be drawn in, because of her treaty, to support Russia, and we should be drawn in, because of our obligation of honour, to support France. And this policy was doubly disastrous because neither Viscount Grey nor the Government admitted to themselves that they had in fact entered the mesh of this entangling alliance. They dared not admit to the nation and Parliament the existence of such an obligation, and they honestly convinced themselves, and they kept on right up to the last moment assuring themselves and the nation, that their hands were free. But their hands were not free. Hence when those terrible fourteen days came with their terrible realities, realities which left no room for and paid no respect to any honest self-deceptions of statesmen, all Viscount Grey's tremendous efforts to prevent war were doomed from the first to fail. He could not make up his mind as to our policy, and therefore he could not throw the real weight of Britain on the side of peace. L. W. THE EGYPT EXPLORATION FUND THE JOURNAL OF EGYPTIAN ARCHEOLOGY. Vol. V. Parts 1-4, 1918. (Egypt Exploration Fund, 13, Tavistock Square, W.C. 6s. net each part.) T graphies of Christian and of Ancient Egypt respectively are A THE HAPPY But what good came of it at last? quoth little Peterkin." It is the question which every disinterested mental activity must, sooner or later, face in a world more interested in money-making and money-spending than in the pursuit of knowledge. The art of Egypt, it must be confessed, was often, particularly in the later centuries, lifeless and mechanical; Egyptian thought and Egyptian religion were too often merely puerile. The Egyptian mind lacked that most precious art, the art of forgetting, and continued, in its maturity, to carry about with it the impedimenta which had served its infancy. The fable of mysterious wisdom and a profound science evolved by Egyptian priests, and only in part transmitted to the Greeks, made a brave show so long as the hieroglyphics remained unread; but when the shrine was unlocked by Champollion and his successors, it was found to be empty; as the disillusioned gentleman in the German anecdote said of the expressive purple eyes whose owner he had married in hope to fathom the secret which he felt sure lay behind them, es war nichts dahinter." But that is only half the truth. Egyptian art was not always lifeless and mechanical; it was very often exquisite, sometimes even sublime; and a religious experience which could inspire the hymns of Akhnaton, a literary impulse which produced certain among the scanty remains of Egyptian literature which we possess, was far indeed from being merely puerile. HE Egypt Exploration Fund, typically British though its position is, has done a great deal to maintain the reputation of British scholarship in the world. Typically British "; for this body, devoting itself to the history and archæology of a country for whose destinies we have made ourselves responsible, enjoys no such Government subvention as an institution of the kind would certainly receive in France or Germany, and is dependent on the subscriptions or donations of its British and American supporters. Money questions have consequently been prominent in its history, and it has sometimes been difficult, and grows increasingly more so, to continue its activities on an adequate scale without financial risk. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, how much work of the highest value it has accomplished. The identification of Naucratis, the first Greek city of Egypt; the excavation of Daphnæ, where the Greek mercenaries of the 26th dynasty had their camp; of the great temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Der el-bahari near Luxor, and of Abydos, where most important results have been obtained; the copying and publication of the pictures and inscriptions in many Egyptian tombs-these are among the tasks carried out either by the main fund or by its younger branch, the Archæological Survey. And there is besides the Græco-Roman branch, which has unearthed tens of thousands of papyri, and increased our stock of Greek literature by texts of the highest value. The Journal of Egyptian Archæology, the latest venture of the Fund, was started at an unfortunate time, in 1914, and during the war has been carried on under the difficulties only too painfully familiar to all editors of similar publications; but under the able editorship of Dr. Gardiner it has attained a very important position in Egyptology, and this, its latest volume, shows small trace of the difficulties of the time save in its belated appearance, the 1918 October number not being issued till June, 1919. It contains, indeed, in the way of illustrations, nothing of quite such general appeal as the superb portrait statue of a lady or the noble head of Amenemmes III. published in Vol. III., though the basrelief in blue faïence of a Ptolemaic king chosen for the frontispiece to part 2 is a very charming work of art and admirably reproduced; but in solid value and in interest to students of Egyptology it yields to none of its predecessors. To mention but a few of its contents, the article on the "Expulsion of the Hyksos" by Mr. Gunn and Dr. Gardiner, with its translations of historical documents, and still more that of Dr. Gardiner on Delta Residence of the Ramessides," are of really great importance. In the latter Dr. Gardiner discusses the much-disputed question as to the site of Pi-Ra'messe, the Delta residence of Ramesses II. and his successors; and though what he and Mr. Gunn in the previous article well call the "empty frothiness" of Egyptian style and the incurable inaccuracy of Egyptian scribes, who could rarely copy a text quite correctly, make many steps in his argument somewhat conjectural, he certainly makes out a very strong case for his thesis that this famous city was situated at or near Pelusium, and, further, that the Raamses of Exodus is to be identified with it. M. Bénédite discusses an interesting prehistoric ivory knifehandle and various related objects, and throws light not only on primitive art, but also on the zoology of that distant period, and (if his theory of the geographical significance of the animals represented be correct, as it well may be) on the beginnings of the territorial divisions which afterwards became the nomes of Egypt. Biblio The Apart, however, from all this, Egypt was, with Mesopotamia, for us Westerners the Westerners the birthplace of civilization; from Egypt, if Dr. Gardiner's brilliant explanation of the characters seen in certain inscriptions found by the Fund in the Sinai peninsula be accepted, we derive our alphabet; and it is to Egypt that we owe even several of the motives familiar to our religious art. The fish symbol itself, for instance, whose purely Christian origin might seem to be guaranteed by the initials of Christ's titles (IXOYX), appears from a recent discovery mentioned in Mr. Griffith's bibliography (p. 288) to have been first a symbol of Osiris, the god on whom rested a pious Egyptian's hopes of immortality. The extraordinary good fortune by which the dry climate of the country has preserved so many relics of antiquity furnishes an unsurpassed wealth of material for tracing the growth of culture from its most primitive forms to a high degree of perfection; while in the Greek papyri we have a storehouse of information, such as no other branch of ancient history can boast, on the social, economic, and administrative development of Graeco-Roman Egypt. In the collection and publication of these treasures the Egypt Exploration Fund has played a great part, and it would be a thousand pities if, in view of the immense increase in all expenses, the recent refusal of our Government to assist its funds by a Treasury grant should lead to a curtailment of its activities. B. it MESSRS. APPLETON will shortly issue the centenary edition of" Leaves of Grass," by Walt Whitman. This volume will have the whole of the copyright matter, which has been entirely reset, and will thus include three volumes in one. A MODERN CHRYSOSTOM THE HAPPY PHANTOM ; OR SUSSEX REVISITED. By Arthur F, Bell. With an Introduction by Miss M. D. Petre. (Hove, Combridges. 5s. net.) T HERE is much to recall Arthur Bell in these sentences from Pater's "Renaissance": An indefinable taint of death had always clung about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Arthur Bell's life was a practice of the philosophy of that book. It was not a conscious enterprise, perhaps, and it was carried through not in the sense of a self-indulgent æstheticism, but as the courageous acceptance of a difficult life. Nevertheless, "to pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy," was Bell's ideal, and he might have made his own the maxim: "not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end." " That is why Miss Petre's work of piety in gathering up his Sussex essays, and issuing them with four of his delicate sketches of Sussex scenery, though welcome to his friends, does little to keep alive his personality. Her own tribute "In Memoriam does more, for no selection from Bell's work would give much of himself. He completed little of what he wrote, and published little, we think, of what he completed. And his writing, in verse and prose, was in the main but the echo of his reading. It registered the effect on his mind of his literary gods: Belloc, Galsworthy, Mary Johnston, George Tyrrell and the rest. He imitated their works that he might live them; it was experience he aimed at, not creation. It is tempting to speculate what that experience would have been, had the fearful accident of his childhood been spared him. He emerged from it paralysed in both legs, but never a cripple. Five minutes' intercourse with him banished all memory of his infirmity. His immobility in his chair, his need to be waited on, seemed simply an act of rather disdainful choice. The mental vigour that let him dispense with his limbs was an index to what he might have done with their aid. Gazing at the great head, which was in fact, not in mere rhetoric, Napoleonic, you could not doubt he would have stamped himself on the world. As things were, he had to enjoy the world through his mind, for, like many victims of physical disability, he had relatively little emotional sensitiveness. But he tasted every experience open to him with all the force and brilliance of his character. Just as he spared no pains in starting books he never meant to finish, so he thought no trouble too much to found careers he never meant to follow. He could execute wonderful journalistic coups, but he would never yoke himself to journalism. At Oxford, to which he went late in life for a whim, he would spend himself sitting up over his texts at all hours, till the sight of Bell turning the leaves of his Liddell and Scott, revealed through the uncurtained windows of his lodging, became as familiar to the returning reveller as ever Friar Bacon bending over his crucible. Yet, though he could turn the gossip of his college into Tacitean prose that delighted his tutors, he soon grew weary of the race for honours, and left Oxford again with little to show for his labours. He was content to have felt what the scholar's life was like. There remains of him really but the memory of his talk. There has been no other such Chrysostom in our time. In the Coffee Room of the "White Horse" at Storrington the visitors would humbly approach his table, and ask if they might take seats at it, merely to listen. “We were the last of the wits at Oxford," he would say to some bashful friend who wondered what his own share in the wit could have been. But Bell touched nothing he did not turn to laughter: tutors, scouts, lodging-house keepers, all were irradiated. He nothing common saw nor mean Even the unfortunates employed to drag his bath-chair became great mythical figures in his circle. Even beyond his circle, among those who never heard his name, the greybeard commemorated in deathless iambics and the youth who, he swore, was the original stage-yokel, have become fixed types in the realm of impious legend. But it is useless to dwell on this now. The disciple can preserve the wisdom, but never the wit, of his master. The was Whether or no Bell, like the great man referred to by Pater, found his stimulus in "the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire," his mind was essentially of the eighteenth century. His rather tragic relations with religion showed that. Haunted to the end of his life by the spell of Catholicism, he could never find rest in a creed that demanded faith. After the failure of Modernism-to which all his fondness for Tyrrell could not blind him-he relapsed into a kind of Erastian Anglicanism. Church of England is a branch of the Civil Service an aphorism that he loved. Clergymen he would describe as "civil servants," and the decorous rites of his college chapel as "a very civil service indeed." Unforgettable is the pantomime in which he would render the disapprobation of his views felt by a certain celebrated High Church clergyman. Yet he wavered again after reading the Life of Newman," and one of his latest sketches was of the singing of the gospel at High Mass in St. Bartholomew's, Brighton. He died without further change, however, and no change was really to be expected from him. He would have made a triumphant entry into Valhalla, and, surely, on any gods that prize courage and fellowship, so gallant and well-loved a spirit must have a claim. P other blossoms of the year. And yet there is an anguish, PORTRAITS AND PASSIONS SEPTEMBER. By Frank Swinnerton. (Methuen. 7s. net.) ERHAPS it is owing to the composure and deliberation of Mr. Swinnerton's style in this his new novel that we are sensible of a slight chill in the air long before Marion Sinclair discovers that she is in the September of her life. We are given, at the very outset, a full-length and highly finished portrait of her: Portrait of a Lady, Etat. thirty-eight-blond, beautiful, extraordinarily reserved, "completely, it seemed, mistress of herself in every emergency." She has been married for fifteen years to a wealthy City man whom she knows thoroughly well and is clever enough not to despise. She is childless and without relatives or intimate friends, but in the country, where she spends the greater part of the year, her neighbours find her mysterious enough and sympathetic enough to make them wish to confide in her, even while they feel "rather ashamed in her company of their own silliness and passion for excitement." Fond of flowers, enthusiastic over her bees, a good tennis-player, playing the piano with a sensitive touch, though without technical equipment enough for Chopin's Ballade in A Flat-does the author mean to be cruel or to be kind in thus describing her? We are never wholly certain, but having her thus framed and glazed, we are rather acutely conscious of his task when he proceeds to turn the lady into flesh and blood. The first shock administered is a slight but unexpected one. Offering her husband the cigarettes one evening: "Two-toed-Twins? "What are they?" he demanded. It is Cherry's name for them. When Marion recovers from this final shock, she begins, as it were, to step back into her frame. She decides, after "a frenzy of jealousy,' that Cherry and Nigel are meant for each other, and it is only through her recovered sympathy and understanding that they are saved from drifting apart. So marriage will be very difficult for you, and it's only if you try hard to be considerate, and find your happiness in Nigel's happiness, that the marriage will succeed These are among her final words, and we feel they are just what she would have spoken before she stepped out of her frame. They are the words of advice given by the Portrait of a Lady, Etat. thirty-eight, blond, beautiful, and with enough air of mystery to invite confidences . . In her frame she could not be more convincing, but out of it-do such ladies ever escape? Do they not rather step into other frames? Portrait of a Lady in Love, Portrait of a Jealous Lady-and then a whole succession of "problem" portraits: Nigel lighting a Two-toed-Twin cigarette with Marion looking on, and Howard and Cherry embracing in the wood with Marion looking through the leaves. They are most carefully, most conscientiously painted, but we are not held. What has happened to Marion, to Nigel, Cherry and Howard? Nothing. They have weathered the storm, and dawn finds them back again in the same harbour from which they put out--none the worse or the better for their mock voyage. We cannot help recalling the words of an old-fashioned Music Professor: "My child, leave the expression' out; you are playing a study. One does not put 'expression' into studies. Is it possible that Mr. Swinnerton even ever so slightly agrees with him—or would like to agree with him? And what do we mean exactly by that word "expression"? Can we afford to leave it out of a page, of a paragraph And she realizes almost immediately that the silly name is a joke he has with another woman, and that he is being unfaithful to her . . . 'She is a little resentful." Then some neighbours come to dinner, bringing with them a nephew, Nigel Sinclair, a handsome young man of twentysix, with a very ardent, naive way of talking that stirs her strangely. Finally, two young people come to visit her, one of whom, Cherry Mant, a girl of twenty, is of the very nature of Spring. She is not gentle May, but rather early April, or even late March-for there are moments when she is wild and treacherous-a little savage, trying to destroy her own flowers, a little fury, with a needle of ice unmelted in her heart. But there are other moments when she is Beauty, untouched and unbroken, smiling at the sun and at Marion and Marion's husband. The ideas, emotions and suggestions that she evokes in Marion seem inexhaustible; she might be the first young woman whom the older woman had ever encountered. Every glance of hers is a surprise and a wonder, and when Marion discovers her locked in her husband's arms, her astonishment is not particular; it is all a part of her endless astonishment. Cherry, on her side, is drawn to Marion. She has a longing to confide in the older woman, to try and explain her puzzling self, to try and find out why she is Cherry, but nothing comes out of these intense, emotional dialogues; Cherry is still baffling, and Marion is still wise : " Aren't I funny!" whispered Cherry. "You're not funny." These words occur at the close of one of their most poignant On the very day that Cherry and Howard are discovered together, to comfort Marion's pride comes Nigel Sinclair. He is young, he is twenty-six, and he admires her. He never thinks of her as old-only as "wonderful "--and so September defies Spring. Love comes to Marion, ardent, burning love; her quiet untroubled summer is over. The leaves are touched with gold, but it is not yet Autumn; there is a brilliance in these late flowers that mocks the after Tchehov? K. M. WITH the September number, the Anglo-Italian Review will appear in an enlarged form under the auspices of the British Italian Commercial Association. Mr. Edward Hutton remains editor, and Messrs. Constable will continue to publish as heretofore. The object of the Review, namely, the support of Anglo-Italian relations, will of course remain the same; but it is natural, now that the war is over, that greater space should be devoted to economic than to political subjects, and this, we understand, will be the programme of the Anglo Italian Review. M Phases of A NEW Series of eight Hibbert lectures on Theism in Medieval India" will be given this autumn at Essex Hall, Essex Street, Strand, at 5.30 on Wednesday afternoons, beginning on the 22nd inst. Like many of his predecessors, the lecturer, Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter, of Oxford, is a distinguished authority on comparative religion. Admis sion is free without ticket. O " NE of the most interesting of the more obscure literary The result has been, as in most such cases, two-natured: it has made Mr. Kreymborg tolerably well known, but on the other hand the reputation it has bestowed on him is in a sense a speckled one, the colour of which is questionable. "Mushrooms," in fact, was a book of which experiment and uncertainty were ruling motives. It was something new in poetry that Mr. Kreymborg desired, but of what nature this should be was not quite clear to him. Rhyme, one imagines him saying to himself, can, and perhaps should, be largely dispensed with; stanza patterns certainly are not desirable when they are not inevitable; one's personality should, in the full sense of its immediate moment, be free and colloquial; and are capital letters at the beginnings of lines any longer necessary? Into the psychological value of the latter custom one need not go; nor need one here discuss the sheer propulsive force, or value for emphasis, or for beauty of sound, of rhyme. One is more interested in Mr. Kreymborg's effort to give full rein to his personality, and have it none the less, as it were, pace. Mr. For the fact is that if we approach his work first from the technical side we find it to be something quite different from what is commonly called free verse or cadenced verse. Kreymborg is in reality a melodist: a melodist perhaps more exactly in the musical than in the metrical sense, though the result is, or should be, in the upshot, the same. The poems in Mushrooms are constantly approaching the condition of having a tune, and Mr. Kreymborg has himself told us that it is often with a definite musical tempo in mindthree-four time, for example-that he writes them. It is not remarkable, therefore, that one feels more precision and gusto of movement in many of these poems than one does in most free verse. What is remarkable is that on the whole one feels this so seldom, relatively; or perhaps it would be fairer to say--that one so seldom feels it strongly. Certain of the shorter lyrics fall clearly and deliciously enough into a piercing Mozartian pattern, a pattern which loses perceptibly nothing through the absence of rhyme. In such cases one feels that the addition of piano accompaniment and melody for the voice would be extremely simple. This is true also of many of the brief lyric movements in the Plays for Poem-Mimes." Observe, for example, from "Mushrooms the opening lines of " To Circe": When the Willow Nods": the metrical or rhythmical clue. What is the difficulty? Mr. Kreymborg is, as it happens, exceptionally sensitive to music, exceptionally perceptive of its values. But of this sensitiveness and perceptiveness he carries over to the other art, the art of word-arrangement, only so much of music as relates to the distribution of ictus and pause. This alone, unfortunately, will not wholly serve. Ictus is lame, or actually functionless and vestigial, if it does not fall on the right syllable, the syllable suited to the occasion by its sound; and pause, if it be distributed without regard for the kindred pauses of idea and orotundity, is merely unobservable. A beautiful or rich or subtle movement in poetry derives about equally from sound-values and rhythm-values: the skilful poet knows how to synthesize them in such a way as at one moment to produce harmony, when they fall smoothly in unison, and at another to produce dissonance, when they slightly clash. Mr. Kreymborg could manage the rhythmic part of this synthesis, but his sense of sound-values is deficient. He appears to be unaware of the variability of effect producible by syllabic arrangement, the felicitous alternation or repetition of deep or shallow vowels, dull or sharp consonants, or consonants richly sheathed. The result of Mr. Kreymborg's deficiency in the sense of sound-values is that his verse has about it always-whether the melodic movement is marked or slight, grave or capriciousa kind of thinness, a thinness as evident to the eye as to the ear-evident to the eye, perhaps, as too slight a filament might be when dedicated to a task too severe, audible to the ear as the thin obstructed voice of a flute, a voice which one might conceive as being embodied, above the flute, in a waver of finest gossamer. The medium is, it is true, individual : one could not mistake a poem by Mr. Kreymborg. It has its delicate charm, whimsical or sharp; and it has also its absurdities, when the childlike candour which is the poet's favourite mood leads him to extravagances of naive repetition. Mr. Kreymborg has, it is possible, been a little too much encouraged by admiration in this regard. His charm for us has been, always, so largely a personal charm, a charm of the colloquial voice, of the intimate gesture seen through the printed page, the whimsical, shy, defensive twinkle or grimace, that perhaps it has become difficult for him not to overdo it. A responsive audience is demoralizing. If one can so captivate with a penny whistle's droll capricious tendernesses and innuendoes, why concern oneself with an orchestra? Well, why indeed? "" It is Mr. Kreymborg himself who shows us why. The fact is that he is by way of being a philosophical poet, one who is never completely happy unless he is teasing himself or his reader with the insoluble hieroglyphs of the universe-hieroglyphs which he employs, as an artist should, half for their own sakes and half for their value as sheer decoration. But it is curious to observe how step by step with Mr. Kreymborg's development of the philosophical attitude has developed also one of its important germinal components, a component which had its value and charm during the earlier phases, but which now threatens to become an incubus. This component is Mr. Kreymborg's fondness for the attitude of childlike wonder, for the exclamation of round-eyed astonishment, a lyricism a trifle too consciously sheer; a note which even at the outset in Mushrooms,' for those who do not wish in poetry merely a saturated solution of tender personality, manifested a disposition to become, whenever the framework of thought was too slight, a poetic paraphrase of the lisp and coo. wonder is itself of course impeccable: one cannot possibly The attitude of quarrel with anything so profoundly and beautifully human, or so productive, as it has been, of the finest note in poetry. What one resents somewhat is Mr. Kreymborg's reduction of it at times to a sort of babblement, as if he were determined to hear the world only when it spoke to him in monosyllablesand not in the. primal and thundering monosyllables, the superb monoliths by which we measure our bewildered insecurity, but in those rather which suggest the pinafore. This one forgave in the earlier volume, for there it had about it a pleasant irresponsibility and gusto; but in the later volume, where Mr. Kreymborg abandons his free forms" for plays in free verse, one's forgiveness is not unmixed. For what indeed has occurred here but that Mr. Kreymborg has made precisely a convention of this attitude of childlike wonder, |