A HALF PLEIADE
Let St Beuve's avowal justify this title: "All these Academies, between you and me, are pieces of childishness, at any rate the French Academy is. Our least quarter of an hour of solitary reveries or of serious talk, yours and mine, in our youth, was better employed; but as one gets old one falls back into the power of these nothings; only it is well to know what nothings they are." So the significance of serious thought and discussion about art is apt to hold an inverse ratio to the number and age of those who think and discuss; for the future is always invisible. Robert Nichols, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, friends by their own avowal, have possibly had this importance in intimate conclave. Who can be sure that they have not deserved my title? They make no claim to be reformers or a movement, but such announcements are perhaps a fashionable foible, a trait which will disparage and date our period a hundred years hence. "The political virus even infected literature; writers and artists called themselves impressionists, symbolists, futurists, imagists and cubists; they published programmes and manifestoes, the charlatans!" as some unborn Taine may phrase it.
Rupert Brooke's verse had a conscious elegance that diverse judges attribute either to his treasuring a meagre vein or to a wary nature's perception that there had only yet been time to polish one of its many facets. In Robert Nichols' work variety and abundance are more evident than artistry and selectness. As if to make up for this he has prefaced his volume[1] with two quotations from An Introduction to the Scientific Study of English Poetry, by Mark Liddell. These passages, though neither new nor perfectly expressed, suggest that Nichols' attention has been absorbed by the rehearsal of passionate experience
- ↑ Ardours and Endurances. By Robert Nichols. Chatto & Windus.
