and to speak of "Christ, the beggar," is inexact since it has never been said of Christ that he begged; he did without. One questions the cogency of Mr Lindsay's thought when he says in alluding to the San Francisco earthquake, "Here where her God has scourged her." Not that San Francisco was or is a godly city, but many another city has gone unscourged.
As a visionary, as an interpreter of America, and as a modern primitive—in what are regarded as the three provinces of his power, Mr Lindsay is hampered to the point of self-destruction by his imperviousness to the need for aesthetic self-discipline. Many poets have thoughts that are similar, in which case, only heedlessness prevents the author of the less perfect product from giving place to the author of the stronger, and much of Mr Lindsay's collected work is unfortunate in thus provoking comparison with attested greatness. Unfortunate also, is the conscious altering of great familiar expressions:
"The times are out of joint! O cursed spite!
The noble jester Yorick comes no more"
"What Nations sow, they must expect to reap"
"Within the many mansions,
[the hosts] . . .
Slept long by crooning springs."
"Did you waste much money
To deck a leper's feast"
and the context, provoke comparison with The Vision of Sir Launfal. In The Mysterious Cat, the line repeated three times, "Did you ever hear of a thing like that," recalls The Three Blind Mice; Eden in Winter recalls Ralph Hodgson's Eve. Star of My Heart, At Mass, and Foreign Missions in Battle Array, recall such classics as We Three Kings of Orient Are and Onward Christian Soldiers, and The Last Song of Lucifer seems like a mild transcript of Paradise Lost.
"In that strange curling of her lips,
That happy curling of her lips,"
