theory which would attach poetry definitely to the childhood of the race and the individual. Too much of contemporary verse expresses the emotions of a girl of twelve in words of one syllable. It throbs too insistently, and seems intended for recitation over a guitar, or in accompaniment with the querulous allegro of an automatic piano. Work of this sort was confined for a long time to the popular magazines; one accepted it without a murmur. But when the Georgians erected this throbbing naïveté into a sacrosanct school, they were striking at the fundamentals of their art. Accept their premise, and poetry takes rank as a medium of expression somewhere between the movies and fancy needlework.
The virtues of the Georgians are manifold, and for the most part negative. They are not unmelodious, not awkward, and never, never improper. Sassoon is an alien among them; he started with one poetic virtue—honesty—and that was unqualifiedly positive.
It was not a promising equipment for the early days of 1914. He tried his hand at the usual echoes of Keats and Wordsworth, his imitations always impressing one as being a little more ungainly than those of his contemporaries. Through them he was struggling to express his own ideas, not the imaginings of his models, but the fact was not apparent at the time. Sincerity is a cheap virtue in a contented world.
Yet to-day Sassoon is the most successful of his group. One searches for what he writes; reads it with respect; turns to him first in the biennial anthology. One makes all sorts of qualifications, and yet he remains a great poet—as poets go in these days. He arrived at this position fortuitously. Perhaps he will continue in it; there is a certain momentum in success.
One regrets that the collection of his war poems is not arranged chronologically, with separate dates for beginning and middle and end. For one thing, such an arrangement would determine whether he wrote before Barbusse or afterwards. Probably Le Feu and The Old Huntsman were in process of composition at the same time. It is certain, at any rate, that he only said what whole regiments were thinking. To do that is a trick that may be learned like any other trick. His early war poems include not one that could not have been better written by Julian Grenfell or Robert Graves, or half a dozen other men. However, they did not choose to lead the way; the honours of the pioneer remained for Sassoon.
