BOOKS OF THE MOMENT.

THE VAGARIOUS POLE STAR.

The Pilgrimage of Festus. By Conrad Aiken. (Martin Seeker.

5s. net.)

The Sleeping Beauty. By Edith Sitwell. (Duckworth. 5s.

net.)

Ma. D. H. LAWRENCE, mighty-mouthed inventor of fallacies, explained a short time ago that the pole star had shifted ;

from which it plainly followed that God had left the judgment seat and Christ was no longer the ideal of humanity ; there is no universal absolute now, there is no authority for the spirit, no eternal truth. If we control our disgust at Mr. Lawrence's pertness and grant for a moment, dialectically, that analogy is a perfect ground for deduction and this a perfect analogy, we can still on his own terms prove Mr. Lawrence muddled. The pole star has never been constant to one place : on no two successive days has it maintained its position relative to the earth : if we allowed that the analogy was valid, it would show that there never has been a God, a Christ, a judgment seat, an ideal, an absolute. And this is by no means to Mr. Lawrence's purpose ; for he was advising us to scurry round with him in search of new, contem- porary gods.

The fact is, of course, that, while a perfect analogy is a perfect ground for deduction, Mr. Lawrence's analogy is false. The shifting of the pole star bears witness that the conditions of the earth, its structure and its life, inevitably change ; and if we knew how this and Ursae Minoris influenced the earth,

we could tell its contribution to the change and in part prophesy for times to come. It is an absurdity to pretend that this star or that, the precession of the equinoxes, or the whole movement of the visible universe conditions the ex hypothesi unconditioned. Cleared of its inconsistencies, Mr. Lawrence's contention is that there is not, and never has been, an absolute, and it should be interesting to examine how he arrives at so unprofitable a view.

The reality of the absolute is a pure logical necessity. This means only that if there is no absolute there is no reason.

Logical processes, the categories of the mind, the forms in which reason works demand, if they are to have any validity, an undifferentiated, groundless, objective truth, a first reason otherwise the most illuminating, most closely reasoned exercise

of thought will be indistinguishable from the most casual and meaningless flatus vocis. There will, indeed, be no reason.

And, to complete the proof, if there is no reason, it is impos- sible, by this very admission, to argue whether there is an absolute or not. The reality of the absolute is also a pure

emotional certainty. If there is no absolute there is no experience. In the highest plenitude of emotion we have no room for doubting, there is no possibility of doubting, that there is a ground in the abyss, an eternity, a value, a reality in our emotions. And, if it were not so, every emotion would be a dead thing, a hoax and a pretence. There would be no emotion.

In their very natures reason and emotion witness to the !absolute. Then how can Mr. Lawrence, or Mr. Conrad Aiken, ror anyone deny it ? It is because they mingle and confuse `the two ; they take a first step in reason and emotionalize it ; they feel a slight assault upon their emotions and rational- ize it. Though both functions witness to the same thing, they proceed by contrary paths and neither can hail the other till they reach the end. Impurity and lack of thoroughness in either misleads and blinds. It is, for example, implicit in the conception of the absolute that it is independent of existence, that it is not manifest in this thing or that, that we !cannot say of it, " Lo here, lo there ! " But Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Aiken, finding that no woman is perfect in beauty, and no statement complete in truth, conclude against all reason that there is no absolute. Mr. Lawrence with hysterical effrontery bawls out his errors. Mr. Aiken, more humble and more mannerly, suggests-that nothing in the universe is worth while.

This entangling of reason and emotion is the cause of Mr. Aiken's weakness. He has now published nine books, an

'excellent record for a poet in these days of spiritual costiveness. -The greatest writers have been prodigal of their talents, but ) many of our contemporaries whom we should like to see giving

themselves rein and continually exhibiting the quality of their thought, seem to be the victims of aphasia and can only struggle into print once in a twelvemonth. Mr. Aiken should be a pattern to all self-obstructors ; for he writes freely and profusely, and with each book his abilities increase. He possesses, moreover, the virtue of lunar imagination, or fantasy ; he wanders through a dream-country of glades and gorges, cold winds, black rocks, towers, and huge works of metal. From beginning to end The Pilgrimage of Festus is placed among such haunting lands. He has a gift of bright phrasing and smooth rhythm. Why, then, with nine books behind him and all these virtues to his credit has he set no one's spirit dancing I Why are his poems fiat ?

He fails because his emotion is tainted with reason, for poetry is the approach to the absolute by means of the pro- founder emotions. The very scheme of Mr. Aiken's latest poem shows his uneasy cleverness. Festus is a man in search of an ideal. He conceives himself emperor of the world, but he finds that power can give no satisfaction. He conceives himself planting beans, living a pastoral life of seclusion and meditation, but he sees that by this he would be cutting himself off from experience. He converses in imagination with Confucius and Buddha and Christ. But " the remarks of these sages throw little light into the darkness that is himself." No wonder it is so. For here, in the crucial point of the poem, Mr. Aiken most signally fails. He strips their words of meaning, he takes away their dignity, he reduces them to unimportance. The counsel he puts into the mouth of Christ is this Heed not the absolute,

Love what is little, turn not your thoughts above So much as here and round you—mostly, love ! "

Love what is little I Seek the kingdom, love the Lord your God, love your neighbour, love your enemy, to be diminished to that ! Where are Mr. Aiken's emotions ? Where is his intuition ? Festus has never travelled even as far as Hyde Park Corner. He returns from his amble with a pleasant disillusionment. In Mr. Aiken's words : " Beauty is in- separably bound up with ugliness. Does one, perhaps, in one's regret for this, hold the key ? . . . No answer is provided, but Festus finds himself, at the end as at the beginning, charmed by the prospect of self-exploration."

Mr. Aiken thus contentedly proves that he has never seen beauty face to face.

Not only in the scheme but also in the detail of the poem, his half-heartedness emerges. Never a phrase, for all his seeming vitality, has a perfect cleanliness of appeal. lit can assimilate rhythms and use them effectively. He almost attains a grandeur of manner in some passages :-

" Let the gross mind love elephants in torchlight Trampling the plashy flesh, or tossing entrails

Under the moon. For me, more subtle pleasures. . ."

But again he lets himself down by a forced and over-dramatic word, plashy : only a schoolboy would respond with the invited tremor. It is a pity that Mr. Aiken should so waste his ability, for, after all, his gorges and glades were very impressive.

Miss Edith Sitwell's reason is tainted with emotion ; but that is much less of a fault in a poet ; scarcely a fault at all. The theme of The Sleeping Beauty is regret for the passing of the age of innocence, for the heaviness and stupidity of adult life. It is, in fact, a nostalgia for the absolute, and a passionate despair that in common life the absolute is nowhere mani- fested. Therefore it is illogical : Miss Sitwell cannot bear the cold fact that this world is the devil ; she is in agony that spirit should ever have descended into matter. But Miss Sitwell's emotion is not tainted, and she has a much better theme for poetry than Mr. Aiken. The princess is shown as a child, happy, uncorrupted and thoughtless. But the evil fairy Laidronette, the embodiment of malice and worldliness, casts her into a sleep, a deadness, from which no prince frees her. The story is told with a great wealth of interlude and description ; at times it is hard to remember what point the progress of the story has reached, and it would have been simpler to read if Miss Sitwell had written marginal comments like those to The Ancient Mariner. But a second reading will dispel such difficulties.

The Sleeping Beauty is still more of an omen than of an accomplishment. For the first time Miss Sitwell is broadening and trusting herself : she does not fall back so frequently upon the elaborate system of stays and braces, mental and technical tricks, which she built up for herself ; she has invented new images and has often written as though her idea, her impulse mattered more than her expression. It is probable that some of her readers will be dissatisfied at the abandonment of her old intensity and originality of phrase ; they will wish again to be disturbed by her bright and violent pictures ; but for our part we welcome this evidence that Miss Sitwell can risk being " ordinary " without losing personality. She has not yet completely freed herself ; the old machinery rises out of the poem here and there. It is an admirable machinery, too, in its way ; it has all the virtues of poetry except immediacy of appeal, and, if Miss Sitwell had taken no step further, she would have remained an exciting and stimulating poet. She was in danger of being a " poet's po: t," 'a writer whose beauties are technical and whose influence is chiefly to originate and foreshadow methods of speech and habits of mind, to give an impetus to greater poets. It should prove our faith, not in Miss Sitwell's abilities only, but also in her spirit, that we hope she will forget her self- imposed limitations and have enough confidence in herself