His qualities are other than were mentioned; in reality he makes little appeal to the senses. His magic is almost purely verbal. He keeps a hundred bright words in the air at the same time, like one of his own harlequins juggling. For this purpose he likes words which have been worn smooth, words which slip through the fingers and leave no impression. In opposition to the Georgians he avoids too-definite phrases: he will mention ripe field, but never rye fields; tall trees, but never ash trees or sycamores. And he runs interminably on, piling one faint image over another till they cease to convey any image whatever, and never once abrading the wall of sense.
"And so, while smaller men may make
the soft singing and the golden shake
with which the ripe fields greet the sun,
into the joys for which they run
tired lives into a broken mould,
and then renounce the joy and fold . . ."
And so for 268 lines, and this in a poem which is far from being his longest. The Neptune Hotel has twice this bulk. He writes with a fatal ease which leads him to dilate the matter of fifty or sixty lines into the three or four hundred verses of a poem as vast and as cluttered as an afternoon in a department store. His epics are crumbly and diffuse. There is only one of them—The Hochzeit of Hercules—which is held tightly together by the vigour of its fantasy. And good as this poem is, it lacks the qualities of his shorter pieces.
Here, where he confines himself to a page or two, there is no question of glibness or being diffuse. Week-end, Fables, Mrs H… the Lady from Babel. His poems like these are so frugal and so complete that it is impossible to dissect them into quotations. Their metres and images are fresh, their movement vigorous; they have a strangeness which is not according to the formula of Mr X, and hence they are more effective weapons against the Georgians than a dozen volumes of polemic.
However, these latter are unaware of the attack. Having finished their act they quit the stage in a dignified manner. Mr Sitwell rushes in to make a great bundle of their properties: moons, trees, rivers in spate, a cage of nightingales, with all of which he
