for assurance that this was nothing but art.

One cannot help feeling, while reading this product of the modern mind,
that we are all a little mad, and that the cleverest of us know it, and
indulge the vagaries and instability of insanity. In an advertisement to
Mr. Aiken's poetry we are told that it is based on the Freudian
psychology. We are not seldom reminded to-day of that base to the New
Art. We are even beginning to look on each other's simplest acts with a
new and grave suspicion. It causes a man to wonder what obscure motive,
probably hellish, prompted his wife to brush his clothes, though when he
caught her at it she was doing it in apparent kindness. Instead of the
truth making us free, its dread countenance, when we glimpse it, only
startles us into a pallid mimicry of its sinister aspect. It is like the
sardonic grin I have seen on the face of an intelligent soldier as he
strode over filth and corpses towards shell-fire. Soldiers, when they are
home again, delight in watching the faces and the ways of children. They
want to play with the youngsters, eat buns in the street, and join the
haymakers. They do not want the truth. Without knowing anything of Freud,
they can add to their new and dreadful knowledge of this world all they
want of the subconscious by reading the warlike speeches of the aged, one
of the most obscene and shocking features of the War. The soldiers who
are home on leave turn in revolt from that to hop-scotch. Yes, the truth
about our own day will hardly bear looking at, whether it is reflected
from common speech, or from the minds of artists like Mr. Conrad Aiken.

VIII. Magazines

JULY 16, 1918. I was looking in a hurry for something to read. One
magazine on the bookstall told me it was exactly what I wanted for a
railway journey. It had a picture of a large gun to make its cover
attractive. The next advertised its claims in another way. A girl's face
was the decorative feature of its wrapper, and you could not imagine eyes
and a simper more likely to make a man feel holier than Bernard of Cluny
till your gaze wandered to the face of the girl smirking from the
magazine beyond. Is it possible that nobody reads current English
literature, as the magazines give it, except the sort of men who collect
golf balls and eat green gooseberries? It seems like it. One wonders what
the editors of those magazines read when they are on a railway journey.
For it would be interesting to know wh