diated but long and well known certainties, sharply and utterly clear to him. His dexterity of thinking is such as to establish extempore more or less rational bases for all his impressions, and to enable him in spite of the complexities of his material to arrive quickly at unity of apprehension. Yet his apprehensions do not appear too easily arrived at, except in a few cases, such as his discussion of Miss Lowell as a critic, which in approximately a thousand rather pointed words disposes of her somewhat offhandedly as amateurish. Though he has still a busy hand and is quick with black and white, he is more considered when the matter is her Can Grande's Castle, and his censures carry with more conviction.
It is difficult to determine how much share Mr. Aiken's qualities as a practitioner have in his points of competence and incompetence as a critic. In characteristic consonance with his pan-skeptical attitude he apparently regards such qualities as having little beyond a vitiating effect on his impartiality; one comes to the feeling that he uses more space than is needed in lamenting his fallibility. But there can certainly be no doubt as to his being more aware of present poetry and with far more edge in his attention than the somewhat fluffy Mr. Braithwaite, whom one does not recall as a practitioner. Perhaps some of Mr. Aiken's rapidity of treatment, some of his prized casualness is possible through his technical familiarity, on which he builds no pretensions, by the way, with the work of his fellows. His awards and condemnations do not carry the impression of having been long o'erwatched, yet as far as their author will permit them, they carry conviction. His method and terms of expression are intellectual, on the whole, rather than poetic; his prose is primarily articulate. As there is in his thinking, while it is thoroughly skilful and sophisticated, nothing sinuous or elusive (except as to total point of view), there is in his sentences chiefly a nervous, quick, candid, and economical effectiveness sometimes complicated but never blighted with qualification. His writing has the colloquially rapid beat and the small variety of middle tones which are ordinarily used for rational discussion. His phrases are distinct and show command of the sources of expression, but he displays none of the elaborated phrasal craft, the attempt at profound expressiveness which a poet with so many volumes of poetry to his credit as Mr. Aiken might try in his prose, were he not too clever. One comes to feel that Mr. Aiken's poetic experience, on its positive side, is a
